2
25
87
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1963/41315/BLazenbyHJLazenbyHJv1.2.pdf
35022f62bb4527b9a7da34bd424ec42f
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
Lazenby, Harold Jack
H J Lazenby
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
2017-10-10
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lazenby, HJ
Description
An account of the resource
11 items. The collection concerns Warrant Officer Harold Jack Lazenby DFC (b. 1917, 652033 Royal Air Force) and contains his memoir, documents and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 57, 97 and 7 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Daniel, H Jack Lazenby and 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
H Jack Lazenby DFC
Description
An account of the resource
Harold Jack Lazenby's autobiography.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Warrington
England--Wolverhampton
England--Shifnal (Shropshire)
England--London
England--Bampton (Oxfordshire)
England--Witney
England--Oxford
England--Cambridge
France--Paris
England--Portsmouth
England--Oxfordshire
England--Southrop (Oxfordshire)
England--Cirencester
England--Skegness
England--Worcestershire
England--Birmingham
England--Kidderminster
England--Gosport
England--Fareham
England--Southsea
Wales--Margam
Wales--Port Talbot
Wales--Bridgend
Wales--Porthcawl
England--Urmston
England--Stockport
Wales--Cardiff
Wales--Barry
United States
New York (State)--Long Island
Illinois--Chicago
England--Gloucester
Scotland--Kilmarnock
England--Surrey
England--Liverpool
England--Lincolnshire
England--Lincoln
Denmark--Anholt
Poland--Gdańsk
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Essen
Germany--Kiel
Europe--Mont Blanc
Denmark
England--Hull
Czech Republic--Plzeň
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Mablethorpe
Germany--Cologne
Italy--Turin
France--Bordeaux (Nouvelle-Aquitaine)
England--Land's End Peninsula
Italy--San Polo d'Enza
Italy--Genoa
Italy--Milan
Algeria
Algeria--Blida
Algeria--Atlas de Blida Mountains
England--Cambridge
England--Surrey
England--Ramsey (Cambridgeshire)
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Munich
France--Montluçon
Germany--Darmstadt
Scotland--Elgin
England--York
Scotland--Aberdeen
England--Grimsby
Germany--Saarbrücken
Germany--Zeitz
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Wanne-Eickel
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Kleve (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Heide (Schleswig-Holstein)
Germany--Wuppertal
Germany--Homberg (Kassel)
Netherlands--Westerschelde
Germany--Rheine
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Bremen
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Belgium
England--Southend-on-Sea
England--Morecambe
England--Kineton
England--Worcester
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Mülheim an der Ruhr
England--London
Italy--La Spezia
France--Dunkerque
Poland--Szczecin
Poland
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Recklinghausen (Münster)
Netherlands
England--Sheringham
England--Redbridge
France--Saint-Nazaire
Atlantic Ocean--Kattegat (Baltic Sea)
Germany
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 Canadian Air Force
United States Army Air Force
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
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
99 printed sheets
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BLazenbyHJLazenbyHJv1
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Lazenby, Harold Jack
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 text-based transcription
1654 HCU
20 OTU
207 Squadron
4 Group
5 Group
57 Squadron
617 Squadron
7 Squadron
97 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
B-17
B-24
Bennett, Donald Clifford Tyndall (1910-1986)
bomb aimer
bombing
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
briefing
Catalina
Chamberlain, Neville (1869-1940)
crewing up
debriefing
demobilisation
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
Distinguished Service Order
Eder Möhne and Sorpe operation (16–17 May 1943)
entertainment
flight engineer
flight mechanic
Flying Training School
George VI, King of Great Britain (1895-1952)
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
ground crew
ground personnel
H2S
Halifax
Hampden
hangar
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hudson
Hurricane
Ju 88
killed in action
Lancaster
love and romance
Manchester
Master Bomber
Me 110
Me 262
mechanics engine
mess
military living conditions
military service conditions
mine laying
Mosquito
navigator
Navy, Army and Air Force Institute
Nissen hut
Oboe
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
pilot
radar
RAF Barkstone Heath
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Benson
RAF Bourn
RAF Brize Norton
RAF Colerne
RAF Cosford
RAF Cranwell
RAF Dunkeswell
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Elvington
RAF Fairford
RAF Halton
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Melton Mowbray
RAF Mepal
RAF Oakington
RAF Padgate
RAF Pershore
RAF Scampton
RAF Silverstone
RAF St Athan
RAF Stormy Down
RAF Swinderby
RAF Talbenny
RAF Tangmere
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Upwood
RAF Uxbridge
RAF Valley
RAF Warboys
RAF Wigsley
RAF Wing
recruitment
Resistance
Spitfire
sport
Stirling
target indicator
training
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Victoria Cross
Wellington
Whitley
Window
wireless operator
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/559/42906/BBlacklockGBBlacklockGBv1.2.pdf
1141bb2ce07d176fdab70288e3d24b89
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
Stephenson, Stuart
Stuart Stephenson MBE
S Stephenson
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Stephenson, S
Description
An account of the resource
20 items. An oral history interview with Stuart Stephenson MBE, Chairman of the Lincs-Lancaster Association, and issues of 5 Group News.
The collection was catalogued by Barry Hunter.
In accordance with the conditions stipulated by the donor, some items are available only at the International Bomber Command Centre / University of Lincoln.
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.
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
Half a Life, Half Remembered
An Autobiography by Group Captain GB Blacklock
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BBlacklockGBBlacklockGBv1
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
GB Blacklock
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Skipton
Scotland--Bedrule
England--Northumberland
England--Yorkshire
England--London
England--Appleby-in-Westmorland
Egypt--Alexandria
Egypt--Aboukir Bay
England--Chester
England--Newmarket (Suffolk)
Great Britain Miscellaneous Island Dependencies--Guernsey
France--Marseille
Northern Ireland
Scotland--Montrose
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Wangerooge Island
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Borkum
England--Wisbeach
England--Weybridge
Norway--Bergen
Norway--Stavanger
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Netherlands--Rotterdam
France--Givet
Belgium
France--Saint-Omer (Pas-de-Calais)
France--Hazebrouck
France--Dunkerque
France--Socx
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Karlsruhe
France--Salon-de-Provence
Italy--Genoa
Germany--Essen
Germany--Lünen
Wales--Hawarden
Germany--Baden-Baden
England--Eastleigh
Scotland--Stranraer
England--Doncaster
France--Brest
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Lingen (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Magdeburg
France--La Pallice
Germany--Karlsruhe
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
Description
An account of the resource
From his youth to the award of his DFC by the King.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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
87 printed sheets
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
101 Squadron
115 Squadron
12 Squadron
142 Squadron
148 Squadron
149 Squadron
15 Squadron
2 Group
3 Group
311 Squadron
4 Group
5 Group
7 Squadron
9 Squadron
99 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
Blenheim
bomb aimer
bombing
Boston
Chamberlain, Neville (1869-1940)
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
entertainment
fitter airframe
flight engineer
Flying Training School
George VI, King of Great Britain (1895-1952)
Gneisenau
ground personnel
Halifax
Hampden
hangar
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Harrow
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Hudson
Hurricane
incendiary device
Lancaster
love and romance
Magister
Manchester
Me 109
Me 110
mess
military living conditions
military service conditions
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Mosquito
navigator
Navy, Army and Air Force Institute
observer
Operational Training Unit
Photographic Reconnaissance Unit
pilot
radar
RAF Benson
RAF Boscombe Down
RAF Catterick
RAF Cosford
RAF Cranwell
RAF Debden
RAF Duxford
RAF Finningley
RAF Grantham
RAF Halton
RAF Hendon
RAF Henlow
RAF Honington
RAF Leeming
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Manston
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Netheravon
RAF Newmarket
RAF Oakington
RAF Sealand
RAF Silloth
RAF South Cerney
RAF St Eval
RAF Stradishall
RAF Tangmere
RAF Upavon
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Uxbridge
RAF Waddington
RAF Warmwell
RAF Waterbeach
RAF West Freugh
RAF West Raynham
RAF Wittering
RAF Wyton
Scharnhorst
shot down
Spitfire
sport
Stirling
Tiger Moth
training
Wallis, Barnes Neville (1887-1979)
Wellington
Whitley
wireless operator
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1970/33701/LWakefieldHE174040v1.1.pdf
6abf5d017113b82dd6d95a604f4f8667
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
Wakefield, Harold Ernest
H E Wakefield
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
2017-10-16
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
Wakefield, HE
Description
An account of the resource
93 items. The collection concerns Harold Ernest Wakefield DFC (1923 - 1986, 1582185 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, documents, training publications, decorations and badges, training notebooks, correspondence, newspaper cuttings, photographs and parachute D ring.
He flew operations as a flight engineer with 51 and 617 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Jeremy Wakefield and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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
Harrold Wakefield's navigator's, air bombers and air gunner's flying log 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
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
LWakefieldHE174040v1
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Harold Wakefield's RAF Navigator's, Air Bomber’s and Air Gunner's Flying Log Book, from 16th August 1943 to 16th August 1946, recording training, operations, instructional duties and Transport Command duties to India and the Far East as a flight engineer. Based at RAF Marston Moor (1652 Conversion Unit), RAF Snaith (51 Squadron), RAF North Luffenham (Heavy Glider Conversion Unit), RAF Syerston (5 Lancaster Finishing School), RAF Woodhall Spa (617 Squadron), RAF Riccall (1332 Heavy Conversion Unit), RAF Holmsley South (246 Squadron) and RAF Lyneham (511 Squadron). Aircraft in which flown: Halifax, Oxford, Whitley, Lancaster, Horsa Glider, York. Records a total of 59 operations in two tours (23 day, 36 night) including 10 returned early or did not drop bombs. Targets in France, Germany, Netherlands and Norway are: Alencon, Amiens, Arnsburg, Augsburg, Berlin, Bielfeld, Bochum, Bremen, Chateau Dun, Colline Beaumont, Dortmund Ems Canal, Dusseldorf, Essen, Farge, Fouillard, Frankfurt-Main, Hamburg, Hanover, Heligoland, Herquelingue, Ijmuiden, Kassel, Leipzig, Leverkusen, Lille, Ludwigshafen, Mannheim, Mont Fleury, Morsalines, Nienburg, Orleans, Oslo Fiord (German cruisers “Emden” and “Koln”), Politz, Poortershafen, Rotterdam, Stuttgart, Trappes and Urft Dam. His pilots on operations were Squadron Leader Johnson and Squadron Leader Calder. Also includes notes of dates of promotion and award of DFC, lists of crews and a picture of a Halifax Mk III. Some detailed notes on ops with 617 Squadron.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-09-22
1943-09-23
1943-09-24
1943-09-27
1943-09-28
1943-09-29
1943-10-03
1943-10-04
1943-10-05
1943-10-08
1943-10-09
1943-11-03
1943-11-18
1943-11-19
1943-11-22
1943-11-23
1943-11-25
1943-11-26
1943-12-03
1943-12-04
1943-12-29
1943-12-30
1944-01-28
1944-01-29
1944-01-30
1944-01-31
1944-02-19
1944-02-20
1944-02-21
1944-02-25
1944-02-26
1944-03-01
1944-03-02
1944-03-06
1944-03-15
1944-03-16
1944-03-18
1944-03-19
1944-03-26
1944-03-27
1944-04-09
1944-05-10
1944-05-11
1944-05-12
1944-05-22
1944-05-23
1944-06-05
1944-06-06
1944-06-07
1944-06-08
1944-06-09
1944-06-12
1944-06-13
1944-06-15
1944-06-16
1944-12-08
1944-12-11
1944-12-15
1944-12-15
1944-12-21
1944-12-29
1944-12-30
1944-12-31
1945-01-01
1945-02-03
1945-02-06
1945-02-08
1945-02-14
1945-02-22
1945-02-24
1945-03-13
1945-03-14
1945-03-15
1945-03-19
1945-03-21
1945-03-22
1945-03-23
1945-03-27
1945-04-06
1945-04-07
1945-04-09
1945-04-19
1946
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
France
Germany
Great Britain
India
Middle East
Netherlands
Norway
England--Hampshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Rutland
England--Wiltshire
England--Yorkshire
France--Alençon
France--Amiens
France--Boulogne-sur-Mer
France--Brittany
France--Châteaudun
France--Lille
France--Normandy
France--Orléans
France--Pas-de-Calais
France--Yvelines
Germany--Augsburg
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bielefeld
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Leverkusen
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Nienburg (Lower Saxony)
Poland--Szczecin
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Urft Dam
Netherlands--Hoek van Holland
Netherlands--Ijmuiden
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Poland
Germany--Herne (Arnsberg)
Germany--Hannover
Atlantic Ocean--Oslofjorden
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
France--Herquelingue
France--Morsalines
France--Ver-Sur-Mer
France--Manche
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
David Leitch
1652 HCU
51 Squadron
617 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
bombing of the Normandy coastal batteries (5/6 June 1944)
Distinguished Flying Cross
flight engineer
Grand Slam
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
Horsa
Ju 88
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Me 262
mid-air collision
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Oxford
promotion
RAF Lyneham
RAF Marston Moor
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Riccall
RAF Snaith
RAF Syerston
RAF Woodhall Spa
Tallboy
training
Whitley
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/934/36456/BLovattPHastieRv1.2.pdf
9b3858b8c21f871c9674fb0bb2df1994
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
An incomplete biography of Roy Hastie. Only pages 1 to 46, 104 to 106, 128 to 133 and 34 additional unnumbered pages are included.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter Lovatt
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
England--Harrogate
Scotland--Perth
Scotland--Glasgow
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
Québec--Montréal
Washington (D.C.)
Newfoundland and Labrador
Trinidad and Tobago--Trinidad
North America--Saint Lawrence River
Newfoundland and Labrador--Happy Valley-Goose Bay
Bahamas
Florida
New York (State)
Great Britain
Ontario
Québec
Germany
Russia (Federation)
Trinidad and Tobago
North America--Niagara Falls
Europe--Frisian Islands
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Devon
England--Kent
England--Lancashire
England--Lincolnshire
Atlantic Ocean--Kattegat (Baltic Sea)
Russia (Federation)--Arkhangelʹskai︠a︡ oblastʹ
Virginia--Hampton Roads (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. Coastal Command
Royal Air Force. Bomber 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
88 printed sheets
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
BLovattPHastieRv1
8 Group
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
B-24
B-25
Beaufighter
Bismarck
C-47
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
crash
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
evacuation
Flying Training School
Gee
Gneisenau
Goldfish Club
ground personnel
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Harvard
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Hudson
Initial Training Wing
navigator
Nissen hut
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
pilot
radar
RAF Bircham Newton
RAF Catterick
RAF Cranwell
RAF Kinloss
RAF Leuchars
RAF North Coates
RAF Odiham
RAF Oulton
RAF Padgate
RAF Prestwick
RAF South Cerney
RAF St Eval
RAF Thornaby
RAF Thorney Island
RAF Windrush
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882-1945)
Scharnhorst
Spitfire
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/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
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
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
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/1300/17898/PGreenJ1901.2.jpg
b14602c2b2a5a0d0f474ee6b3099f4cf
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1300/17898/AGreenJ190307.2.mp3
c4c66aa1cf8bc65f3c03434e1d4d9290
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Green, John
J Green
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with John Green (b.1921, 1213252 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as an air gunner with 100 and 12 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
2019-03-07
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
Green, J
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
GT: This is Thursday the 7th of March 2019 and I am at the home of Mr John Green, born 22nd September 1921 in Penge, South East London, England. John’s home is in Auckland, New Zealand. John joined the RAF in June 1942 as a drogue operator on the Isle of Man. Later, John volunteered for bomb disposal, and after fourteen months he volunteered for aircrew and trained as an air gunner in early 1944. From June 1944, John crewed up with pilot Flight Sergeant Leslie Flooder, or Podge, an Australian, at 30 Operational Training Unit, Hixon and then 1667 Conversion Unit at Sandtoft, Lancaster Finishing School at Hemswell and then on to operations with 100 Squadron at Grimsby late October, completing sixteen operations and posted to 12 Squadron at RAF Wickenby for fifteen operations. All on Lancaster Mark III aircraft. John completed his RAF operational flying in May 1945 with a total of one hundred and eighty four hours, day and night flying. John, thank you for allowing me to interview you for the IBCC Archives, so please tell me why, and how, you joined the Royal Air Force.
JG: Right. Well, when war broke out, I, all your mates were joining up, and I think I was eighteen at the time and I thought myself well if I wait till I get called up they’ll put me in the Army, and I didn’t want to go in the bloody Army I said! So I went down to the recruiting centre and joined in the RAF just as an ordinary airmen, nothing special. They said okay, we will call you when we need you. I think it was another year gone by before they called me up.
GT: And what were you doing while you were waiting?
JG: I was working in engineering factory and when I got the call up I was posted to Blackpool for six weeks training, you know, fitness training and education and all that.
GT: But that was a far cry from you riding a bicycle wasn’t it?
JG: Yeah!
GT: What was the bicycle thing about?
JG: Oh, the bicycle, that was in one of me jobs, was, I was, what d’you call them, errand boy! That was when I left school at fourteen, I went as errand boy riding a bike with a big basket on the front delivering all the goods and that to people who’d bought them from the shops.
GT: And whereabouts did you grow up there, and born?
JG: In Penge. Grew up in Penge, joined, volunteered in Penge, and then I got posted from Blackpool, I got posted to the Isle of Man; a General Duties airman. And when I got the Isle of Man they wanted drogue operators, people to volunteer to fly, which you got an extra shilling a week by doing that which I was interested in, cause a shilling was a lot of money in those days!
GT: What was the role of a drogue operator?
JG: He dropped the drogue. In the bottom of the aircraft, mainly Lysanders, or whichever one I was in, you had a trapdoor. You open the trapdoor and in front of you, you had like a drum, a big drum with three metal drums on it, filled with wire and you used to clip one of these wire onto one of the drogues and try and drop ‘em out the aircraft, then you stood up and controlled the speed of the drum with a handbrake until you got near enough all you want out, you lock it up and then the aircraft used to fly around, towing the drogue, training all aircrew to fire at it.
GT: So the other aircraft would bead on to you and -
JG: On to the drogue and fire.
GT: Your log book states you flew Lysander, Fairey Battle, Anson and Blenheim aircraft and that was all with the drogue operations.
JG: No, Lysander and Fairey Battle, and what was the other one?
GT: Anson and Blenheims.
JG: No, Anson, Anson they done, I flew doing me camera work. Instead of guns, instead of having bullets, you had a camera and you used a camera firing. and the Blenheim, Blenheim was just a trip you wanted and I think it flew me, flew me I was going on leave.
GT: So that were the gunners flying, aircraft, to shoot at the drogues, the Defiants or aircraft like that?
JG: Yeah, any, could be even the Anson used to fly along the side, and they used to open the window and poke their cine camera out, or the guns out and if you had usually three gunners in your aircraft they had different colour bullets so when they got the drogue back, dropped back, into a, had a special field you should drop the drogue back then fetched it back to headquarters then they could count the bullet holes whether they were red, blue, black, or yellow, they knew how many hits you had.
GT: They just dipped the bullets into paint, didn’t they.
JG: Yeah, to get the colour bullet and that’s how they knew, and course with the camera, they had a cine camera. Because one day I was up there doing camera and I saw, I think it was an Anson coming along, towing, towing a drogue so I took a photo of me shooting this Anson down! I got a right bollocking for it! [Laugh] But good laugh, but it was such a good target, I said, it’s there. And I didn’t use a lot of film!
GTL Any close calls? Did any of the aircraft nearly shoot you down instead of the drogue?
JG: I think it happened once on our station, drogue operator got killed like that. Whoever was using it, instead of firing at the drogue away from the towing aircraft they fired while they were coming in and the bullets carried on and hit the towing aircraft.
GT: They were all three nought three machine guns, yes.
JG: Yes, 303s.
GT: So you liked that, is that something you wanted to carry on with or you went to volunteer for something else?
JG: No, I liked that, getting paid and then it came up they wanted volunteers, you get fed up with it as a youngster, wanted volunteers on this Bomb Disposal Unit so I thought oh, that’ll be a change, so joined that and I was posted to Bath, Barford Manor, that’s a country village outside of Bath in this big manor house what the RAF had commandeered. I spent I don’t know how long, quite a long time there, and from there I joined up from, into aircrew training.
GT: What explosives disposal training did you have?
JG: Bom disposal, oh just the lessons on the fuses and how defuse and listen, if they were ticking and that.
GT: So the bombs could have been ticking and did you have something to tell you?
JG: Oh yeah, you had like an instrument you got here, stuck on there and if it was ticking, if the fuse was ticking that meant it was alive, ready to go off. It’s timed.
GT: So what did you do?
JG: Run! [chuckles] Yeah.
GT: And if they wanted to dispose of them, how did they dispose of them?
JG: They had a disposal officer who used to go, get down a hole, and it was surprising, the bomb, could unscrew the cap which allowed him to get to the fuse and he could undo the fuse and slowly [emphasis] get it out to defuse the bomb.
GT: It was the officer doing that?
JG: Yes, that was the officer’s job.
GT: And these were mainly German bombs you were training on?
JG: They were practically all German bombs. A few of them were English ones where the plane, English planes had crashed.
GT: So did they send you out on daily, or night?
JG: Yeah, whatever it was needed. I mean when we wasn’t out digging up, or digging after the bombs, we were in the schools training, what to do, you know, learning all about it.
GT: Did you lose any men?
JG: No, not on bomb disposal.
GT: That’s good. So from bomb disposal you looked at aircrew and they obviously accepted you. Was it difficult to do?
JG: Yes, took a long time to get accepted. You had to go to school, you had to pass exams and that, for education purposes, and once you pass all them exams then you start your bomber training, your air gunner training.
GT: So when you were doing your training though, did they look back at what you did at school?
JG: No, no.
GT: Was it open to everybody? Everybody had to do that training. School.
JG: Well everybody who was going to be a gunner like, it might be my turn to go to the aircraft to take the guns out and take them to the armoury and then strip the guns and clean it all and check the barrel, cause on one occasion, that was I think after I shot down that Ju, when I clean and checked it, the barrel had no rifling left, was smooth, and the other three was okay, so that meant the barrel was useless, you had to put a new barrel in the gun..
GT: So did they choose you to be an air gunner or did you ask them that you wanted to be one?
JG: I chose, I chose to be an air gunner.
GT: And you had good eyesight, good health.
JG Yeah, I had good eyesight, hearing, everything was good and I didn’t, well I wasn’t intelligent enough to be a navigator, and wireless operator, I couldn’t stand that dat dat dat dat dat Morse code and of course the engineer you had to study specific engineer, studied all the instruments and the engines, navigator, that was the main job in the Air Force, was navigator. I think he was the most important man in the aircraft. I think he was more important than the pilot. He was the one who got you there and got you back, or told you, to get there and get back.
GT: Did you end up back on the Isle of Man in the aircraft doing the drogue shooting or did you do that at another place?
JG: No, I think we might, I’m not sure, no, didn’t land on the Isle of Man again. Once I left there I went to Waltham like the training stations, the different ones. The main two was Waltham and then Wickenby and then when I, that was it and when I was and waiting for demob I was at a RAF training unit for all new people coming in, joining in; I was in charge of the stores.
GT: So how long was your gunnery course?
JG: I don’t know, only by looking, offhand, you know, quite a long time, cause you used to start off wearing a cap with a white bit in.
GT: As a cadet.
JG: That signifies you’re a cadet for an air crew.
GT: Once you were, graduated and completed, that was what, late 1943?
JG: Yeah, the training.
GT: And you moved on to crew up somewhere?
JG: Yeah, Hixon, should be, should be 30 OTU, Hixon.
GT: And your log book shows that to be the 9th of June 1944 when you met there, on Wellingtons, so you met your future crew there.
JG: On Wellingtons, yes.
GT: So tell me about your skipper and your crew.
JG: He was, well what they used to do to crew you up, all the aircrew are posted to this aerodrome and when you come out, or in the mess for a meal, you meet all the other airmen. You get friendly with one, or they get friendly with you, and then by the time, I think it was only about, only about a week, I got friendly with the rear gunner, he wanted to be a rear gunner, I wanted to be mid upper, so then we met Barney, he’s the navigator, oh we met Podge walking round and we said, you go up to him and hi, you know, and have you got a crew, no I’m just getting crewed up. Did you want a couple of gunners? Yeah, he said, right, that was me and Jack and a pilot, carried on walking, we picked up the bomb aimer, navigator and a wireless operator, he was Australian, that was six of us and we done a lot of training there before we got posted to another station where all the engineers had been posted to and we made up our seventh member of the crew.
GT: What was the aircraft types that you did your OTU work with? Wellingtons?
JG: Wellington and Halifaxes, Halifax. It shows you there in the book how many Halifax, and then from that, Halifax, we went to er -
GT: Well your Conversion Unit was 1667 and you flew in Halifaxes there for about two weeks.
JG: Yeah. That’s right, that was coming off the Wellington onto that Conversion Unit and we flew Halifaxes and then from there we went to another station, Lancaster Finishing School.
GT: You only did five days flying for that!
JG: That’s all! Yeah, then that was it, then you were posted to your, you know, whatever squadron you were going to be; got posted to 100 Squadron
GT: You were 100 Squadron at Waltham and did your first operation on Cologne on the 31st of October, 1944.
JG: That was something I always remember about that first trip. We wasn’t, we wasn’t scared to start with, but we was once we was up there, but being in the mid upper gunner that had a three hundred and sixty degree turn, where you turned all the way round and when your guns got round and it was your own aircraft, they had something there where you couldn’t fire ‘em. But as I was turning round, I looked up the front the way we were going and all I could see was one big mass of red, where Cologne was alight, and the flashes of the flak and that exploding and all the FE, all, it frightened the bloody life out of me. I never, ever [emphasis] looked again where we were going to go, until after we left. That once, I only looked that once, and that was enough. I looked a couple of times, Heligoland is in there, that was towards the end, that was with the other pilot. And that was, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and there wasn’t a German fighter in the sky either. We could fly round there as if we owned it, you know, they just didn’t have the fighters left, not the Germans.
GT: Well John, I’ve just got a list of your crew and if you’ll allow me I’ll just quickly read them out, for the record here. Flying Officer Flooder, Australian Air Force pilot; Sergeant Barnes, RAF navigator; Sergeant Williams, RAF flight engineer; Flight Sergeant Maslin, Australian Air Force, wireless operator and Flight Sergeant Armstrong, RAF bomb aimer. And yourself Sergeant John Green, as RAF mid upper gunner, [dog barking] and the rear gunner was Sergeant Everly. So you stayed together for your first part of your flying, on 100 Squadron.
JG: The first fifteen ops, yeah.
GY: And for those fifteen ops.
JG: Until he got grounded.
GT: It was your skipper that was grounded, was that right. What was the story with him?
JG: After the Dresden raid there, it’ll be in the log book, after the Dresden raid we got back all right. Next night, next day they sent us down out Chemnitz after we’d done canals flying, we were put on, and the navigator, we’d been flying about an hour, and said I’ve had enough of this skipper, I can’t do my job, I’m too tired. So he come back, he told the pilot to come back and the pilot got the rollocking for it, for not carrying on, you know, regardless, dropping the bomb sort of thing.
GT: So he brought the bombs back to base.
JG: Yeah, and then what happened we got back to base you’ve still got all your bombs on, go out somewhere the North Sea and drop the cookie and we had to go and drop the cookie to get rid of it.
GT: Did you drop them armed? Were they armed when you dropped them? Did you make them explode or just?
JG: The cookie? No, we just dropped it. No, what the, there’s one op there, that, we dropped the bombs, and I’ve got it in, got: ‘Dropped cookie manually on spare’. That it? What happened there -
GT: It was the 15th of December 1944.
JG: Yeah. We got out and bombs away the pilot said, and then as we went away, he said, “Bluey,” that was the bomb aimer, Bluey, “are you sure all the bombs have gone, he said it feels heavy, the way it’s flying, so he said, “all right I’ll press all these switches, John will you get down and have a look?” So I get out the turret and look through a window in the floor of the aircraft and I could see the bomb. I said no, the bloody bomb’s still here! So they said right what we going to do? I’m sure it was the bomb aimer: let’s go round and drop it. And all of us: no you f-ing well don’t! We, no, we’re not going round there again! So I said to ‘em look, we’ve got to fly back, we’re gonna fly over, somewhere over Germany, you notify when we’re getting near where to the bomb aimer and skipper, when he gets out, I’ll drop it, I’ll pull the lever and drop it manually. And that’s what we done. We suddenly come up, there’s a town ahead, John, place called Spau in Germany, and then I’m talking to the bomb aimer and he’s saying, “right John get ready, get ready, when I tell you go, pull that lever, get ready, go!” Pulled the lever and the bomb dropped, and we just carried on. We just saw a big flash on the ground and that was it.
GT: What height would you have been at to do that?
JG: About fourteen, fifteen thousand feet. Cause we all, all [emphasis] of you kept above ten thousand.
GT: You’d have been on oxygen at the time.
JG: Yeah, yeah. Though when I, actually, what I done, get out my turret, and then at the side of your turret’s a small oxygen bottle, pull that out, clip it on to your oxygen mask so you’re on oxygen from the bottle, not from the aircraft. Yeah. That’s how they done it.
GT: And that was an eight thousand pound cookie.
JG: Yeah, er, four thousand pound cookie, but they finished up making them twelve thousand, that one they built, imitation up at MOTET haven’t they. They built that one. Must’ve made a bloody big ‘ole!
GT: So that was on the 15th of December, you did a further three operations there, 24th Christmas Eve, 1944.
JG: That’s when we landed at Rattlesden.
GT: Ooh! So tell me about that. What happened there?
JG: When we got back, I believe our engine caught fire.
GT: Ah, okay, was that from enemy damage, or did it?
JG: I don’t know, just so, put the fire out [cough] and when we get back it’s a bit foggy and that, and we didn’t have, only three engines, we didn’t have the mucking about, so we got ordered to land at Rattlesden. Rattlesden was American drome, and that’s when they pinched me bloody gloves, thieving bastards!
GT: Did the Americans not have much kit?
JG: No, they, Americans, course everything with the Americans was souvenirs. Course when we landed, we’d taken one, two, four pairs of gloves, the gunners had, and they were all left in the turret and of course we went you know, for a meal and briefing and for a meal, and then bed. When went up the next morning to fly back, we get to the aircraft and me gloves and that were gone and we couldn’t fly back cause our plane was unserviceable. I can’t, I believe it says there, come back as a passenger.
GT: So you lost all four pairs of gloves, to the Americans?
JG: Yes.
GT: Did they grab anything else?
JG: No, and they, I know when I come back and reported it, the CO, oh, I was put on a charge because losing your kit, and the officer who interviewed me over it was a New Zealander and he said, look he said, you couldn’t lock up. I said no, we had no locks on the door, he said so how the bloody hell can you, either take all your kit with you, how can you stop if you can’t lock the aircraft up? And he made a verdict of not, well, I wasn’t charged, it was dismissed and I was issued a new set of gloves. Through this officer, Wheatley.
GT: Your log book states that was about the 18th of November that that particular incident happened. You managed to get back to your home base. So what happened then with your skipper? You were telling me that your skipper -
JG: Yeah, well when we got back from the Chemnitz raid, you’ve got Chemnitz there, haven’t you, Dresden ten hours.
GT: Yup, what happened after that?
JG: We were flying, next day we flew to Chemnitz, and that’s when we returned, the pilot, the navigator said he was ill, that’s when they grounded the pilot, said his eyesight is not good enough to fly a four engined bomber, and he’d already done seventeen trips.
GT: So the pilot took the rap for the navigator’s -
JG: Yeah, more or less, yeah. He wasn’t, obviously, that was when the Station Officer, was a real cocky sod, but he come unstuck cause Podge, being Australian, imagine coming, going to Australia and saying this is what they’re gonna to do to me, because they kicked up a hell of a bloody stink.
GT: But the station officer’s accused your pilot of being -
JG: Lack of morale fibre, that’s what he was going to do, to stop him flying, but then I heard it was six months after, he was sent back to Australia.
GT: Did he fly again?
JG: In Australia he did, but I don’t know what though.
GT: But what happened when he went to London, to the Australian Consul?
JG: He went to Australia House, and course Australian, as they said, that’s the RAAF, it’s got nothing to do with you, and you’re on loan to him, he can’t make you lack of moral fibre and not only that you’ve done seventeen bloody ops, and course their, whoever’s in charge up there, he kicked a hell of a stink up. It’s getting to know the people who to kick up the stink with, and said this bastard’s not going to do this to one of my men, Australian. Next thing we knew, I think it was about, must have been about the second day, that next, we saw him, one of the crew saw Podge, he said oh he’s had to apologise to me, the CO, he’s had to apologise for what he said and done. It made him look a real right fool, cause everybody, all of it, all the news went round the squadron, about it.
GT: So that was coming up into mid February 1945 in your old log book, you’ve noted that your pilot was grounded. Was that the end of your time on 100 Squadron?
JG: Yeah, cause then, we wanted another pilot and they said no, we, other station was short of gunners and they posted me straight away to that gunnery, to RAF Wickenby.
GT: So your crew, incidentally disintegrated.
JG: Crew was finished, yes. Oh, they give no thought, for you or anything, you know, not when you’ve got an officer like that in charge of you.
GT: So there’s about two or three weeks in between the squadrons in your log book here, so on the 7th of March, is your first flight with 12 Squadron. So how did it work then, did you join another crew straight away or did you have a choice?
JG: No, that was when, as I said to you, when I got there they posted me to, I gets in the squadron, you have to call in the guard hut, as you go through the gates, and they said right go to the Gunnery Leader and send you over there. I went there and that, he said to me well John look, I can’t see you now, and I told you, we’ve got ops on, so I’m busy, come back and see me tomorrow morning. That was when they posted me to this crew that got killed. And that’s when I went back to him.
GT: Tell me about that, what happened there, you visited another crew that night?
JG: They were getting dressed and we were talking and they said how many you done John? I said I’ve done sixteen, they said oh, we’re lucky then, I said why and they said we’ve done twenty nine, we’re doing our last one tonight. Never got back.
GT: You were in their nissen hut were you?
JG: In the nissen hut. I woke up at six o’clock in the morning with the noise, it was all the Special Police coming to collect all their gear, collect all their belongings and everything; it’s all taken away. Then when I went back to see the Gunnery Leader he said, that’s when he said right we’ve got three crews all want gunners, you fly with all the three and choose one of them. And you can see the three there through, one of them was Castle was it?
GT: You’ve got Raymond, Dickie and Granham.
JG: That’s it.
GT: So why were they short of gunners? What happened to the other gunners?
JG: Well one of ‘em, I asked that question. One of them had a bomb, what you call ‘em, little bombs, incendiary bombs, drop through the mid upper turret.
GT: From above, another aircraft.
JG: Yeah. That killed him. Another one, he was sick, in the oxygen mask, and obviously the pilot, his pilot hadn’t kept in touch with him enough, got lack of air, and I don’t know about the third one. But anyway, I chose one of the three and the other two got shot down on the next time we all went on a raid. So I was lucky. That’s when I got with Granham, but you know I can’t remember any of the names, except Granham of that second crew. There wasn’t the same feeling between the first crew and the second crew. I mean the first crew we was all mates, always out together at night and that, and the second crew, I know you’re friends and that, speak and everything, it’s not the same what you call it, camaraderie there, I can’t even, all I know is one was named George, I can’t remember the names of all, any the others, and the pilot.
GT: And you did fifteen ops with that new crew.
JG: Sixteen with ‘em, yeah. Or fifteen.
GT: On your log book, mid March you’ve got one thousand bomber raid on Dortmund.
JG: Yeah, I think we, I went on three or four, that was when, towards that time of the war, they had all these aircraft, used to send everything up, Bomber Harris.
GT: That’s March 45 that was Dortmund and Essen, so what was that like, you were mid upper at that time?
JG: No, I was rear gunner then. It should say there.
GT: Rear gunner. Oh yes, it does. So what was it like with all these aircraft around you, and above you, and below?
JG: Well, during the day it was all right, but at night you didn’t see, only when you nearly had a smash with one, we crossed like that, that’s how close we were and you know, nobody, he didn’t see us, we didn’t see him, and, was something else to do with flying.
GT: But you were able to warn the skipper of any aircraft above you.
JG: Oh yeah, I remember, oh with Granham, oh that was when this Ju88, perhaps that’s why I didn’t get sighted, because we’re flying along and next minute tracer bullets come up, come up underneath [emphasis] the tail plane and over the top of the wing, big long stream of tracer and the pilot - what the hell’s that, and I said it’s all right skipper, it’s only tracer bullet, just like that, not even thinking, and then I gave the order corkscrew starboard go, and he dived down.
GT: So that was on your twentieth operation to Nuremburg, on the 16th of March 1945, eight hours thirty at night and your log book states: ‘combat with Junkers 88, fired five hundred rounds, fighter destroyed, crashed in flames, exploded on ground, brackets: confirmed.’
JG: Yeah. That’s what, it was confirmed by this other man from another station but they said, I mean there was a lot of talk about Granham getting the DFC and me getting nothing. But.
GT: So your skipper at the time was Flying Officer Granham.
JG: Granham. Yeah.
GT: Granham is his surname there. So he already had the DFC.
JG: Yeah, already had the DFC. He got the bar to it.
GT: And he was awarded a second with a Bar directly for shooting down.
JG: Yeah. Shooting down.
GT: And you shot it down and you weren’t awarded anything.
JG: That’s what a lot of ‘em were saying on the station. How is it that he got a Bar to his bloody DFC and the gunner got nothing and he shot the plane down.
GT: You were a sergeant at the time? Flight Sergeant.
JG: Not sure, probably Flight Sergeant. Then.
GT: So you don’t know if you’d been accredited with the kill.
JG: No, never bothered about, you know.
GT: There was distinction there that you should have been awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal for your action.
JG: Yeah.
GT: And that never happened.
JG: That never happened. And then that’s how that came about, Paul.
GT: But in this case though your DFM, that others had been awarded for the same thing, you found out later that there was great disparity between -
JG: Oh yeah, between officers and airmen, non-commissioned officers and commissioned officers, big [emphasis] disparity, you try and get, and check out how many DFCs were awarded and how many DFMs were awarded.
GT: Did you find out the quantities of that?
JG: Yes, I’m almost sure it was what I said: twenty thousand DFCs and six thousand DFMs.
GT: And the shooting down of that Junkers that night for you saved your crew, and your aircraft.
JG: Well yeah, and if I’d have shot us down, I mean it’s lucky that the tracer bullets, if that’s your aircraft, come up under, underneath the tail plane, over the wing. That’s how.
GT: Normally every one tracer you see is another is four or five of rounds that are.
JG: All depends what they do, I think we had five, sometimes six, sometimes seven and then one tracer put in, you know, there.
GT: That’s pretty good shooting with three nought threes, to be able to get a Junkers.
JG: Yeah, but, that’s another thing what made me smile. On the training they’re telling you about your gunsight, your gun ring, you got a fifty, fifty percent crossing speed by half the gun sight, against a full gun sight, how you do this and that, and I said to ‘em, when they spoke to me about it after, some of the men, I said it’s biggest load of bullshit. What do you mean? I said I’ve ordered the pilot, I said, he’s corkscrewing like that, I said, all you’re supposed to aim at fifteen degree part I said all you’re doing is you’re firing a gun, the bullets are flying around and you hit lucky enough, hit a part of the engine what caught fire. And how the hell when I read sometimes on there or I read they got air gunners shot five or six, dunno, how the bloody hell, you couldn’t aim your gun, aircraft going like that. That was that you know, corkscrew come up the same way and then it went down again, till you ordered it, the captain, to stop. I know when we come up and the pilot, on one occasion, we’d just come out above the cloud, we’d dropped the bombs, flying back and he come above the clouds and it was beautiful [emphasis] clear and the pilot said Johnny, it’s pretty clear up here and we can be seen, what do you want me to do? I said can you go just in the cloud, just in the cloud so, and that’s what he done, for probably ten mile or so, flying just in the cloud. Made it a bit awkward, bit bumpy and that, wasn’t very good, but at least they couldn’t see us. Cause when you’re up, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, probably you haven’t but, if you’re about the cloud like that, that looks like sea above it, nothing there, just your lot, just looking at the cloud, yeah.
GT: On 75 New Zealand Squadron there was little documentation, but I’ve interviewed one chap who was an under [emphasis] gunner. Did you have any experience on 12 and 100 Squadron of Lancasters having under gunners?
JG: I know towards the end that’s when they found out the Junkers, instead of, he was firing upwards.
GT: Schrage musik. Upward firing cannons.
JG: Upward firing cannon. That’s why we lost so many aircraft before anybody knew about it! Then after that, when we’re searching, the mid upper gunner, the pilot every so often had to turn the plane down so he could look below and that way make sure there’s nothing underneath it.
GT: So the squadrons didn’t employ under gunners in any of the aircraft.
JG: No, not like the Americans, Americans had gunners in their Flying Fortresses. They had ten, ten gunners in their Flying Fortresses.
GT: For the gunnery side of things for you John, did you, that Junkers 88 you shot down did you have any other chance, or any other shooting opportunities with other attacking aircraft?
JG: Duren, we dropped, the Master Bomber called us down from seventeen thousand, called us down to five thousand feet, in Duren, dropped the bombs from five thousand, that was almost as if you’re on the ground, he called us down: it’s lovely down here. And we answered back and joked, yeah it’s f-ing lovely up here an all! We’re staying here! Of course, the Master Bomber couldn’t do nothing, he had no idea who it was!
GT: So you did all joined him?
JG: Yeah, so we slowly went down and joined him. You know, you’re talking amongst the crew, what do you reckon? Well look. if we go down, there’s a lot gone down, we’ve got more chance being in the crowd than staying up here on our own.
GT: But you risked being, having bombs dropped from those still above.
JG: Yeah, well that was my argument, but after this, seeing this plane dop bombs on another plane, how the hell, we were supposed to be the highest crew, usually round about sixteen, sixteen five, seventeen, seventeen five, eighteen. All depends how, I think on that particular night we were, our height was eighteen five hundred and yet there’s aircraft above us, and course we were talking, we’re supposed to be up the top, and the pilot saying what do you think they want these aircraft with these propellors for! They can go up higher! So long as the navigator knows, that if it’s, if he’s due to bomb at say sixteen thousand, then the instruments all set, but if we’re flying at seventeen, as long as the navigator knows, he can work it out, fiddle it out, that we’re a thousand feet higher than we should be.
GT: So by your twenty sixth operation which was Heligoland, in your log book you’ve stated: very good prang. Why was that a very good prang?
JG: Oh, l there wasn’t, well there was no cloud, it was a perfect sky like you get here, there wasn’t a cloud or anything in sight, not a fighter, no flak, you just flew round Heligoland. It was a u-boat place where all the u-boats dock, at Heligoland. That’s when they, they couldn’t, our bombs and that what we had, wouldn’t go through until they built the twelve thousand.
GT: Tallboy and the Grand Slam.
JG: That went through the bloody –
GT: Concrete.
JG: Concrete.
GT: So on the 29th of April, you started doing something different - Operation Manna. Tell us about Operation Manna, please.
JG: Yeah well, now we were given, [pause] first of all we were all told at a meeting that Holland is starving and that they’ve done a deal with the Germans that we won’t load our guns or fire on anything in Holland and we can drop the food, which we did do, the first time at six hundred feet I think it was. Was it, the first time?
GT: You’ve three entries in your log book for Valkenburg.
JG: Yeah, that’s Valkenburg was the first one.
GT: End of April beginning of May.
JG: So, and what happened, when we saw, it’s all in sacks, all stacked in the bomb bay, had a hell of a job with the bomb bay just opening like that a little bit to get the stuff in and course when it dropped, hit the ground we saw flour bursting and that, and we said, got back and reported it’s too high. They said right, go lower and the pilot said yeah, we can go lower, there’s nothing in the way at Valkenburg, and I always remember the second op Valkenburg, we’re going along, looking back and everybody’s running round the field and you’re dropping all these bloody great big sacks of food, and then we flew up the High Street and when I looked out the window, the church steeple’s up there! [emphasis] And we’re up the High Street and all the kids waving and that, to you, and you’re down flying up the Hight Street like a car and the church bloody steeple, I think Christ skipper, I said I want to go to Heaven but I don’t want to go this way yet! You know, and laughing and joking and all that, and then what we done then, on our particular, and evidently it was done. We used to fill up milk bottles and you know razor blades, how thin they are, you could bend it, bend it enough to put in the top and it used to open up, the blade used to open up jammed in the bottle and when they, you threw them out the turret it made a screaming noise, we used that a lot to frighten ‘em and what we done on our third trip to Holland, everybody on the station either had rag or handkerchief and cotton, you know the cotton, you know, parachute, you make your parachute, you tied it four corners and tied it round the choc bars. We all threw out we could see all the kids running with these little parachutes with the chocolate bars. Because that’s why, that’s why in the letters some of what Jack wrote, he went to Holland for two years running, they invited him over on the day they celebrate us dropping the food to ‘em, and the last time was Rotterdam, racecourse, flying along the racecourse about fifty, sixty foot high. Of course the pilots used to love it. So did we, flying like that! See when you’re young and that you never thought of danger, how dangerous it was. I think from what I was told, we only lost one aircraft on that and that was a Flying Fortress, on the way back, or something.
GT: Did you see any of the American aircraft doing the food drops as well, which was their Operation Chow Hound?
JG: No I never saw them, it was different timing and different places, you know.
GT: How many Lancasters would have been involved with the food drops that you saw?
JG: A few hundred, and then a lot of them, while that was carrying on, they went to pick up the prisoners of war.
GT: Juvencourt.
JG: Yeah, pick up all our prisoners of war, I wasn’t on that.
GT: Would you have wanted to be?
JG: One of me mates who was on it, he said we had twenty on the way back, prisoners of war, in our plane. Picked up twenty of ’em. Yeah.
GT: So you didn’t manage to do any more Operation Manna trips after that lot?
JG: No, I only done the four.
GT: That was your thirty one trips all together.
JG: Yeah. They posted me out.
GT: And you found out later why.
JG: He wanted to do some flying! I don’t blame him, I mean.
GT: Was that your gunnery leader?
JG: I went home on leave, they, I met the wife, and fourteen weeks I was home, fourteen weeks leave and while I was home on leave, I was a Flight Sergeant, I got a letter, on the, I got a letter on me demob leave promoting me to Warrant Officer which was another hundred and twenty pound!
GT: Good grief! That would buy a house, wouldn’t it! Now there were a couple of funny things that happened, funny when you look on them now, and one was when you were a mid upper on your first tour and the Lancaster above you was about to drop its bombs. They missed you but they got an aircraft below you.
JG: Missed us but got another one.
GT: What happened to the other aircraft?
JG: That’s what I said, the bombs had all dropped, we’d dropped our bombs and all, and the smoke cleared and the rear gunner, that was Jack, we’re on fire! I said shut up you silly sod, I said it’s not, I said it’s some poor sod’s had bomb’s dropped on ‘im! As the smoke cleared away, this other Lancaster bomber was turning like that, slowly turning to get back on course, with a bomb jammed in the wing. Told the skipper, and the skipper, we were going round, we went near enough to see it all and then skipper just carried on, you know, to get back himself, and we found out afterwards he landed, he made it, kept asking the people involved in our station and he said oh yeah, he landed okay, he landed in France on the emergency drome.
GT: The bomb hadn’t had time to arm itself before it hit the wing. Must have been so fortunate. That’s amazing. Now there was also a bit of an own goal, you were telling me about seven pound jam tins!
JG: That was the time I emptied it out the side.
GT: Tell me the story, come on, from the beginning!
JG: All the gunners had a big empty jam tin from the mess to use as their pee bucket cause we couldn’t get out our turrets to use the Elsan and this particular night I filled it up and I thought well what am I going to do? Am I going to empty on the floor, which it can go out through the bottom of the turret. I thought well, if I do that, the ground crew won’t be very happy that they’ve got to wash that out, and I slid the window at the side of me, in the turret.
GT: And what height would you have been at?
JG: Probably around eighteen thousand feet, I slid that open, and emptied the jam tin out. Within one second it had all gone round, straight back through the front of the turret – cause we had no windows, we took ‘em all out – all over me. We had no windows in our turrets, all the gunners took their windows out in front of ‘em, just had the guns there.
GT: So that would have been minus twenty, minus forty, is it?
JG: Sometimes it were really cold. We were cold, the rest of the crew were bloody ‘ot!. But the two gunners were nearly always cold. We had electric heated suits in the end, and I was colder still. Course when I told ‘em I looked like a bloody ice block, all they done was laugh. So did all at the station.
GT: So it all came back at you.
JG: Yeah, they couldn’t stop, they all thought how funny it was.
GT: And the jam tins there you said they were seven pound jam tins and the WAAFs managed to save these for you.
JG: Yeah. That’s what they used to have as their food: seven pounds of jam, in tins. That’s what all the RAF stations had, and I suppose the Army, Navy, and everything.
GT: Gee, you were lucky to not to have something frozen off.
JG: Yeah!
GT: So, the other thing was that during Operation Manna you’ve seen a photograph with the tulips and there was -
JG: Yeah, ‘Thank you boys.’
GT: There’s a photograph in one of the IBCCs books showing that and you remember seeing that.
JG: Yeah, I remember it was red tulips and ‘Thank You Boys’, probably from where we were about six foot long, so they must have had dozens and dozens of workmen overnight, planted all these in the middle of this field of tulips: ‘Thank You Boys.’
GT: You saw action with your, active bombing operations and then you did the Operation Manna and they classified that as an operation too.
JG: Oh yeah, we didn’t think they were going to, but they did in the end. Cause, and I remember at, what they done with the aircrew finished, they posted all the officers to one station and as many men to another one, filled up and they, let me tell you now, they got us on parade and said right, we’ll call your names out, just repeat your last number, your last three numbers and go and stand over there. They were calling all the names and this great big crowd got smaller and that one got bigger, and bigger and bigger, and in then end there was only about six of us left here, and we wasn’t in it. They were all going, being sent to Japan, against Japanese, Japan, we were too close to being demobbed, so they said it’s just a waste sending you out there, you’ll be sent back, and that’s when we got demobbed, you know. When we got our log book back, our pay book, there.
GT: The difference between the two, did it strike you then, that from doing the bombing operations that finally you were saving lives, of our allies?
JG: Oh yeah, with the food dropping, cause where we dropped, where we dropped the food at Valkenburg, it was surrounded by Germans. Actually I saw one German standing in the corner of the field, but, they had done a deal with the RAF not to take pictures and all that, and load the guns – like hell! We had our guns loaded, we weren’t going to take that chance with ‘em, but nobody got fired on.
GT: And nobody fired their guns.
JG: No, because, I found out afterwards by talking to somebody, of course they wouldn’t, cause they were starving as well. They wanted some of the food you were dropping: they were starving as well. Cause it was like, like a field, this part surrounded, all the rest is, a different, this part of Holland was surrounded by the Germans.
GT: You know there’s an Operation Manna Memorial in Rotterdam?
JG: I didn’t know.
GT: They hold a service every year and they thank you for your service to save them. It’s very special for the Dutch.
JG: I believe they’ve got to the last one or something, yeah. I know Jack used to go.
GT: Jack was your ex?
JG: Ex gunner. He used to go. Had a wonderful time he said. Said you never spent a ha’penny, you never spent anything. You wasn’t allowed to pay for anything.
GT: All the streets around the area are named after the commanders that organised everything in respect.
JG: What, actually what did annoy me, was this Dresden business, you know. Over the years they had meetings, cause they said there was three hundred thousand killed, in Dresden. Well it wasn’t all that long ago, only a few months ago, they had their last meeting over Dresden and they, all the people involved in the meeting are settled on nineteen thousand killed; well we had that in London! And they settled on nineteen thousand, killed in Dresden and not the three hundred thousand what they tried to say, you know, and that was only people over here, not over here, over in England. A lot of the do gooders, you know, you’re terror bombing, dropping bombs like that on Dresden and what annoyed me was Churchill blamed Bomber Harris for bombing Dresden, he said he had no need to do it! He went on the, yeah, he did, something there somewhere, I don’t know where I got it from, but he had no need to bomb Dresden. Well Bomber Harris had a letter from Churchill, ordering [emphasis] him, and he said I can prove how, I call him fat guts Churchill, whisky drinking gut, do you know if anybody speaks to me of Churchill, I say don’t talk to me about that fat gut! I said he put the blame on Bomber Harris for all these people being killed, I said, and he was the one who gave the order: him, Stalin, Roosevelt, at a meeting.
GT: And the very reason Bomber Harris was never given a peerage.
JG: That’s why though, when he finally come back here, they did do didn’t they, Memorial, they got the shock of their lives the way the people supported it.
GT: The Bomber Command Memorial in the Green Park. Now in 2011 and 2012 when New Zealanders went across, you being a British person.
JG: Couldn’t go.
GT: You were not involved, or not allowed to be involved with that. Have you been, yet, back to England?
JG: No, I’ve never been back; I won’t go back. I’ve never wanted to go back to England.
GT: Now if we can just move a little bit back from there. You emigrated to New Zealand in?
JG: 1979.
GT: And you followed your sons then, because you and Beatrice, or Betty, you had two sons.
JG: Yeah, and one of ‘em who’d already been back once to England, he went back home again and this time, he broke up with his wife.
GT: So you’ve got Mike who’s aged seventy two, living in Kent.
JG: In Kent.
GT: And you’ve got Paul here, living in New Zealand.
JG: Just over there.
GT: Who is fifty five, so you have your son close, and obviously you had a great time, Betty and yourself, here in New Zealand.
JG: You can go and see his garden, Paul’s gardens, see his swimming pool and all that.
GT: Fabulous, so Betty, she was, what did she do when you came to New Zealand?
JG: She was a dress maker, machinist, and in the end she had, we had a big machine up in that garage there, we made it into a, like a workshop for her.
GT: Fabulous. Now, at the, when you demobbed from the RAF, you went back as an engineer and then into the fishing tackle game, selling in London there. So you became a store owner, was that right?
JG: See, in England fishing tackle is a lot different to New Zealand. In New Zealand, I hate to say this, but all they think about is trout. Trout, trout. Can you eat it? If you can’t eat it they don’t want to catch it! Whereas the poms, we do it for the fun of catching the fish.
GT: You do the coarse fishing.
JG: Coarse fishing. And course, so therefore, the shop in England was selling ten times the amount of stuff than what they do in New Zealand, cause there’s so much, such a bigger range.
GT: And where was your shop?
JG: Down, opposite, opposite Penge Police Station funnily enough.
GT: And you sold that up to come out to New Zealand in the early seventies.
JG: Yes.
GT: You’ve already said you didn’t want to go back. Did you get homesick for England?
JG: I didn’t. The wife’s been back, twice, but I didn’t. Never been homesick and wanted to go back. And I told me son, when he left here and went back home, I said that’s the second time, don’t expect me to follow you, I won’t be following you, which I didn’t do, I didn’t want to chase after him. He’s happy enough, he’s married a Russian woman, got divorced. His wife was one of these moaning types, always got something to moan about! [Chuckle]
GT: Fabulous. So you’ve managed to keep your home that you purchased as soon as you arrived here. And so, when did you lose Betty?
JG: Eleven years ago.
GT: You’ve been very active here with the New Zealand Bomber Command Association.
JG: Yeah, I used to go there every Wednesday.
GT: So you were part of the, now in New Zealand we have a Lancaster that’s been rebuilt and is on display at the MOTET, which is the Museum of Transport and Technology.
JG: That’s right. We used to clean that.
GT: Right, so you were part of the Wednesday Bomber Boys. Was a group of you veterans over the years.
JG: Every Wednesday up there, and why I stopped in the end, driving here to there took nearly an hour, driving back was under half hour and driving on that motorway with all that, everybody going into Auckland, I couldn’t take it any longer and I had to pack it in. The Wednesday Boys.
GT: So for those who are unaware of our Lancaster here in New Zealand, it was donated by the French Navy and it was not an aircraft that had served during World War Two but was just after. But it sat for many years here and finally a group was put together to get it back to display status, and it’s a magnificent aircraft at the Museum of Transport Technology and at the current time it has 75 Squadron markings on it. But for your factor John, did you spend much time inside the aircraft when you were fixing it up?
JG: No, we, one of the jobs I had was, every week., four of us used to sit round the table with all log books, reading out what this one done, oh this one he flew so and so, so and so, and somebody like yourself is making a note of it, and all that was reduced to a disc, so that if you wanted, if you had a father or grandfather who was one of the aircrew got lost, you wanted to know what happened. Instead of you searching through all the records: it’s on the disc.
GT: Under that guy’s name.
JG: Under that guy’s name, and that would tell you everything. And that’s what we done. We used to sit there for hour, or couple of hours then it was tea time, cup of tea and a bun, and then some of us used to have a duster and clean the aircraft up. We, I took me mates up there once and they were, they had to pay to get in! [Laugh] They said no lads, sorry, but. I said they’re my mates, and he said yeah I know, he said but if we let them in then others will want it. I mean I didn’t have to pay, I could go in there any time: One of the Wednesday Boys.
GT: How many Wednesday boys were there all together? A dozen?
JG: Oh, couple of dozen. Yeah.
GT: Any left, besides yourself?
JG: Yeah, oh yeah, there’s still, still two or three left – like Peter Wheeler, I’m sure he was one of the Wednesday Boys.
GT: Peter’s not a veteran though, but he’s the executive of the New Zealand Bomber Command Association. He looks after the aircraft for MOTET, the aircraft’s not the MOTET particularly, it’s part of the Bomber Command Association.
JG: The last time, which is years ago, they had a Sunderland flying boat, outside.
GT: It’s inside now.
JG: That’s inside is it.
GT: It’s all been painted up.
JG: I know they were doing this Lancaster up, somebody said these two brothers got together and paying it out, paying for it out their pocket.
GT: You’re talking about the Panton brothers at East Kirkby, Lincoln. It’s Just Jane.
JG: They reckon there’ll be a couple of Lancasters flying.
GT: They’re looking at that. And this is where the International Bomber Command Centre has come about, now it’s not far, and this is where this recording will end up, with them in their archives and it’s been fascinating. Now what you have on your wall here is a huge framed effort with your rank slides, your medals and some photographs, and some badges of the squadrons you flew with, which is fascinating. Your son built that for you?
JG: No, he had it built by the chap owns the bed and breakfast at Russell, you know Russell? He owns the bed and breakfast [cough] right on the front of Russell. I don’t know, I think it cost a couple of thousand to do that. What he was charging.
GT: Awesome. That’s pretty neat there.
JG: Paul paid for all that.
GT: To have your information up on the wall.
JG: And then trouble is, one of the cards has slipped down and it’s too much bother to undo the back, because it’s sealed, so we just left it.
GT: So we see that you managed to secure the Bomber Command Clasp at least. So that’s good to see. Now John, you’re now coming up, in September it was your birthday, you were ninety -
JG: Seven.
GT: Ninety seven. You’re feeling good about yourself?
JG: Well, I’ve got all this problem now what’s going to happen about when they start knocking down my wall and pulling up me carpets.
GT: Bit of a flood in the laundry yesterday.
JG: I don’t.
GT: But the other thing too, John, you’ve just survived an accident on the road! Gosh, what happened there?
JG: Well that, on that mobility scooter, I’ll show you if you like before you go. Well coming down Buckman’s beach road you’re supposed to stay on the pavement, well I’ve been using the road, but on this particular time there was a lot of traffic so I went on the pavement. Coming down Buckman’s each but you know the houses’ driveways are slanted up like that, going along and we got to house and it was quite steep so I went to move over to the right to get nearer the wall of the house, and what I didn’t know, in front of me, the pavement ended, it was mud. And the wheel, ruddy wheel went down and threw me over the top.
GT: Were you hurt?
JG: I’ve done all this, out gardening more or less stopped now.
GTL And you also attend a lot of the Bomber Command services.
JG: Well I shall, I’m going this one June 9th at ten thirty. I’m going to phone up Kerry and Don, Paul said he would take the four of us there, you know, to the service. Well if he does, if they come, and we stop in the restaurant there, I’ll tell ‘em I’ll treat ‘em to breakfast. I know Carrie and Don won’t eat much - Paul will! [Laughter]
GT: So, the service is all about the Bomber Command stuff, right.
JG: Yeah.
GT: So, and you’ve been doing this every year?
JG: Every year, yeah, and Peter met, Peter said I haven’t seen you, was last year you saw me, cause he came here, Peter, to interview me over something. I will have to find his phone number and phone him up.
GT: The other thing John you mentioned to me, was that during your operational tours, you had a white scarf.
JG: Yeah, a white silk scarf.
GT: Tell me about that please.
JG: It was about eighteen inches wide and over six foot long, and every op when I come back, I used to take it with me on ops, when I come back, I had this WAAF used to embroider the name of the town we’d been to bomb. Even when we shot down that Ju 88, she embroidered a swastika on it. So I had sixteen names at the top and fifteen names, and fifteen names at the bottom with a swastika and I gave them to John Bannon to put on show.
GT: Well we’ll find out more about that.
JG: See if you can.
GT: It’s fascinating that you actually had that done.
JG: He died. When he suddenly died, I thought meself I wonder what happened to my scarf?
GT: We’ll have a look for that. So have you been up to see the Lancaster lately?
JG: No I don’t get out there now. You know, I mean I’ve got the address, 9th of June, Paul’s already, I can make a note, yeah, we’ll take you dad, him and his partner and I’m going to phone up Carrie or she’ll come over, and Don, see if they want come with us.
GT: Well you have got a amazing amount of your historical documents here: your log book is safe and is being scanned and copied. You have a folder full of all of the New Zealand Bomber Command Association newsletters for quite some years, you have some from the 100 Squadron in England.
JG: There’s two there.
GT: There’s two that you have managed to secure, and see what they have been doing and been up to, I have now given you have some IBCC material I brought back from England last year with me so you have some material there to check on, and when I arrived here to visit you today you were looking at your photographs on your big tv which is fascinating to see.
JG: I fetched the flying, the Lancaster flying with it, with it the Hurricane and Spitfire flying along there and then I fetch them flying over, practicing on that dam, all on my, but I’m not so good now with the computer, getting it, you know, cause I play poker a bit on it, on the computer.
GT: What did you do when you came to New Zealand? What was your career, job? What did you get up to?
JG: Er, [pause] I had a job with Shatlocks. You know, Shatlocks, I worked for them.
GT: The company that made stoves.
JG: They made all the stoves down Dunedin. All the electric ones and that, and Fisher and Paykel got their name on one of them.
GT: Fischer and Paykel are a very famous brand here in New Zealand aren’t they, John, making cooker tops and such.
JG: Well they done, well they didn’t actually make the cook tops, it was Jack Shatlock, Shatlocks made ‘em, made all the cookers.
GT: And you were a technician or a salesman?
JG: Technician. I’ve got, actually, see that red tin there, up there, there’s a red tin up the garden, there’s about twelve up there, that was what they used to enclose the dishwashers in and all the aluminium sheets up there, was all part of the plate what came out your cooker.
GT: You’re in a very large house here, with a large back yard which is not the same as what many English households have.
JG: I used to do a lot [emphasis] of gardening, but now, half hour and that’s me lot. I’ve realised now, when I start getting tired, I just come and sit down, read.
GT: And you’re the last man of your crew that you know of, John?
JG: Yeah, Jack was the, Jack was, he died a year ago now, and some of the others have been dead a few years you know, slowly getting less and less.
GT: You were involved with two different crews though. Did you keep in contact much with any of the other chaps?
JG: No, none at all.
GT: Once you demobbed.
JG: No, none at all, not even.
GT: Other than Jack of course.
JG: Jack and, talking to Podge cause he used to come over from Australia to stay at Jack’s place and he invited me, I spoke to him on the phone one day when he was visiting England, he said John, if you’d like to come to Australia and pay for half the petrol, I’ll take you all around Australia, flying, he had is own aircraft, type like Tiger Moth. And I never did go, but I could have flown all the way round Australia.
GT: You stlll can.
JG: All you got to do he said was pay for half the petrol.
GT: That’s amazing. You are amazing for the New Zealand Bomber Command Association to be one of the few left here in New Zealand, so, John, I am very honoured to be able to interview you today for the IBCC especially. You and I have crossed paths for many years at the services, this is my first time to sit and chat to you so I’m quite honoured to spend time with you today. I think is there anything else you would like to speak to with your interview here?
JG: No not really I think I’m quite surprised, you know that, I’m glad Peter Wheeler’s still there. I can have a chat with him, when I go. I will phone him up though.
GT: But this is your story, this is about your -
JG: If you remember, try and have a look for that scarf.
GT: I can do that too. But for your history and your remembrance of your time, serving with the Bomber Command itself, long before you were in New Zealand. I know I certainly can be proud to thank you for your service and you obviously served with distinction and pride.
JG: Thank you.
GT: And memories of those days: good, bad?
JG: Yes. Some good, some bad. I can think to myself, I must have been bloody mad volunteering for this when I was up there flying at times, when we was in trouble, you know, but then I realise, now, how lucky I was to be one [emphasis] of the men who got back. Like all, evidently, all [emphasis] that crew who you saw there, every one of them, survived. I don’t know how many ops Jack done, but I know he done a lot less than me, cause he done six food, no seven food drops, he told me, he done seven there so, if he done seven of them he didn’t do many, that’d been seven ops left. Can’t get, I’m lucky to have a son like Paul over there.
GT: Well John, I’m going to finish our interview here now, sadly, because I’d love to keep talking with you, but thank you very much for your time here, and I’ll make sure the IBCC have the recording from this, sent to them and I hope you enjoy reading their cards I’ve left with you.
JG: I will read all that. I’ll sort it all out and read it.
GT: They will have now your contact details and I’ll make sure they’ll send some to you. From me, from Glen Turner, of 75 Squadron Association, the secretary of the Association and my friendship with the Bomber Command gentlemen, I thank you and I thank you on behalf of the IBCC.
JG: I think thank you for taking the trouble to, you know, do this sort of thing. There.
GT: My pleasure for you. Thank you, John. Goodbye.
JG: Bye-by.
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Interview with John Green
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Glen Turner
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2019-03-07
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Sound
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AGreenJ190307, PGreenJ1901
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01:28:12 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
John Green was born on the 22nd of September 1921 in Penge, South East London. He registered for the Royal Air Force to prevent being called up by the Army and was drafted in 1942. He was posted to the Isle of Man, where he volunteered as a drogue operator during training operations, before transferring to bomb disposal in Bathford. In 1944, Green volunteered for aircrew and opted to train as an air gunner. He formed a crew at 30 Operational Training Unit, RAF Hixon, converted from Wellingtons to Halifaxes at RAF Sandoft, and attended the Lancaster Finishing School at RAF Hemswell. The crew joined 100 Squadron, RAF Grimsby, in October 1944. He recalls the conditions inside the mid-upper gunner turret, manually releasing their bombs over Speyer, and failing to complete their sixteenth to Kemnitz, which resulted in a Lack of Moral Fibre accusation to ground the pilot and disband the crew. In March 1945, Green was posted to 12 Squadron, RAF Wickenby, and completed fifteen further operations. He describes the lack of camaraderie with his new crew and shooting down a Ju 88 on an operation to Nuremberg, for which the pilot received recognition but he did not. For Operation Manna, he undertook three trips to Valkenburg, and one to Rotterdam, and recalls dropping chocolate bars for children and viewing a message of thanks written in tulips. Green describes his career after demobilisation, his opinion regarding the treatment of Bomber Command, emigrating to New Zealand in the 1970s, and his active membership with the New Zealand Bomber Command Association.
Contributor
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Tilly Foster
Anne-Marie Watson
Language
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eng
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
New Zealand
England--Bath
England--Lincolnshire
England--Somerset
England--Staffordshire
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Speyer
Great Britain Miscellaneous Island Dependencies--Isle of Man
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Netherlands--Valkenburg (South Holland)
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. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1944-06-09
1944-10-31
1944-12-15
1945-02
1945-04
1945-03-16
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
100 Squadron
12 Squadron
1667 HCU
30 OTU
air gunner
aircrew
bomb disposal
bombing
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Ju 88
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
military service conditions
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
RAF Grimsby
RAF Hemswell
RAF Hixon
RAF Sandtoft
RAF Wickenby
recruitment
shot down
training
Wellington
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/631/8901/PQuineJW1603.2.jpg
d8bf456c899eddf94849e34a0fb71c7b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/631/8901/AQuineJW160805.2.mp3
150ac30c9c6d3baa4f6bacf9b4d9923b
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
Quine, John Wakeford
J W Quine
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Quine, JW
Description
An account of the resource
Seven Items. Collection concerns Pilot officer John Wakeford Quine (b. 1923, 1576065, 185297 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 170 and 582 Squadrons. The collection consists of his logbook, official documents, a course photograph and an oral history interview. also includes a sub-collection of a photograph album of his time training in the United States as well as some target photographs.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by John Quine and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
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2016-08-05
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.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1945
1946
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is Friday the 5th of August 2016. I’m in Lickey with John Quine who was a pilot and he’s going to tell us all about his life and times particularly in the RAF. So what are your earliest recollections of life, John?
JQ: Well my very earliest recollection in life is living in Wales in Penarth. My father was a civil servant and he was working in Cardiff, if I remember rightly and my grandparents were living in Penarth where [pause] where my grandfather had a printing company which was in Tiger Bay. It was only a small company but apparently quite successful. In those days I remember seeing the odd aircraft go across the sky and everybody looked at it because there weren’t many there and they were little bigger than the average light aircraft of these days. Usually with two wings but sometimes one would say, ‘Look, there’s a monoplane.’ And then I remember seeing an airship on a couple of times. It would either be the R100 or the 101, I can’t remember now. Or it could have been both. And they looked absolutely huge in the sky. They weren’t, obviously but seeing a lump like that in the sky was most unusual. At an early age my father interested me in the Schneider Trophy. I missed the first one but the second one I got sort of got interested, and I listened to the commentary on the radio where of course history tells us that we, we won and on the third year we won again and we had won the first one so that gave us the Schneider Trophy permanently and the Schneider Trophy being a race for seaplanes which we won it was a sort of a basis for the Spitfire when Mitchell came to design it. So at that early age I was interested in flying and I used to have model planes which I used to fly around in my hand making the appropriate noises and whatnot as a kid of about five and later on I went on to the extremely technical one of a rubber band being used as a propellant. So that’s how my interest in planes started. And so it went on. I was, remained interested in planes. I used to see Alan Cobham and his air circus. By now we’d moved to Lickey near Birmingham and Alan Cobham used to come once a year to the aerodrome which was at the Austin motor works. The aerodrome now has gone and so has the Austin motor works for that matter but I used to be able to see them doing all the stunts from the house where we lived at the time. I did, on one occasion, go and actually view the circus on, on the aerodrome itself but I didn’t have a flight because in those days it was, if I remember rightly, five shillings for a quick trip and five shillings was quite a lot of money in those days. I well remember one trick which, wing walking and this really was wing walking because they got an aeroplane, something like a Tiger Moth, might have been a Tiger Moth and the chap got out of the seat that he was in, two in the aircraft of course, he got out of the seat and walked around the outside of the aircraft, got on to the wing and walked up and down a bit and waved to the crowd and then he got underneath the underneath wing and sat on the axle that held the landing wheels and they landed the aircraft with him sitting there and I think an extremely dangerous thing to do and certainly wouldn’t be allowed today. So later on when the war started I did a short period in the, in the Home Guard and then I volunteered for, to join the air force. Having decided to volunteer I was walking down a road in Nottingham, my father now having been moved to Nottingham because of the war and I went in and saw the recruiting sergeant and he said, ‘Well what do you want to do in the air force?’ And I said, ‘Well, I think I’d like to be a mechanic.’ I had thought at that time that it, when I came out of the air force it could be useful. Never dreaming that we might of course, lose the war at the time but he said well you, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t, now I’m overrunning the story a bit. Yeah. I said, ‘Right. Well I’ll go away and think about it. I’ll come back next week,’ which I did. During the week I thought well if I’m going into the air force I might as well be a pilot. So I went back and I said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to be a pilot.’ And the recruiting sergeant said, ‘You wouldn’t be any good as a pilot.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ And he said, ‘You didn’t have a secondary school education.’ Secondary schools in those days were, you know almost equal to a grammar school and I said, ‘Well, what makes you think I haven’t had a secondary school education?’ He said, ‘Well have you.’ And I said, ‘Yes. I have. I went to Bromsgrove County High School.’ So he said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘. Well, alright, well I’ll put you forward.’ So I didn’t hear anything for three weeks or so as far as I remember and then I was called again and I had to go for an RAF interview and a test which I found extremely easy at the time and went away again and the next thing I knew was I had my discharge papers so I queried this why I’d been discharged when I hadn’t even been in and they said, ‘You’re in a reserved occupation,’ which was quite ridiculous because it wasn’t so very long since I left school but I was working at the Brush Electrical Company in Loughborough and so, anyway they didn’t have any objection to my going. Probably, probably glad I did [laughs] So in the end the matter was resolved and I was taken back into the air force with a different number and so I got in. Now, the sequel to that story is that after I’d been in the air force and got trained and had pilot’s wings and was an officer I was walking down the same road in Nottingham and I thought, I wonder if that recruiting sergeant is still in the recruiting office so I went in and he was. So he still being a sergeant and me an officer he of course jumped to his feet and saluted and I kept him going for about five minutes and then, then I told him and we both had a laugh together.
[machine paused]
CB: Ok.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: Right.
JQ: So having joined the RAF I went to St Johns Wood and the first place I went to was Lord’s Cricket Ground where we had an FFI and I’ve, I’ve had many a laugh with people telling them that I, I’ve been in the famous long room in the pavilion with my trousers down and they say, ‘How on earth did you manage that?’ But that was the reason. Then I went to ITW at Scarborough for a bit. I was quite amazed at the fact that there was quite a few people there that couldn’t swim because that was one of the things that happened there that if you couldn’t swim they taught you to swim there in the local baths and then from there we went out to Carlisle for ten hours attitude training on Tiger Moths and the instructor made a big mistake with me because after I’d been flying for about five hours he said, ‘Oh you’re quite a natural. If you go on like this, in another couple of hours you’ll solo.’ And we weren’t really required to solo there. It was just an attitude test. Well of course having told me that of course I went right off but I did actually solo after nine hours and so that was quite, quite a boost for me and then after a short time in Manchester at Heaton Park we were sent off to Canada in the Andes ship that had been a cruise liner which had been taken over as a troop ship and when we got to Canada we went to Moncton. It was Christmas Day I remember. We got there. We didn’t actually have our Christmas dinner and whatnot until a fortnight later. But then they had us all in a hangar and separated us out and about ninety percent of the people went to Canada but some of us were sent to America. To various places in America but we went to Oklahoma. When we got there they kitted us out with American uniforms which was a sort of summery uniform because it was quite hot at the time but we were, we had our own hats which we wore and our own insignia on the arm but apart from that it was more or less like a summer dress, and we were there for about six months doing ordinary, learning to fly and aerobatics and all that sort of thing and it was on one of these flights that was in a Harvard at the time which was the more advanced trainer that we used and I met, I had, I made a pal of a chap who lived in Redditch which wasn’t very from where I lived at home and we went on a cross country. We were sent on a cross country and we got lost or partly lost. Anyway, we weren’t quite sure where we were and I spotted this town so I thought, and there was a railway there and I thought I wonder if they’ve got the station name written up so I thought I’d go down and have a look and I went down. They hadn’t got the name on the station but they had got it written around a water tower so we knew exactly where we were then. Now the sequel to that story is that when the war had finished with Germany we were sent out to do what we called Cooks Tours over the, over the Germany, over Germany and we took ground crew with us and showed them what they had helped to do and coming back on, from one of these things on a very hot day and flying at about two hundred feet which we were allowed to do everybody was, it was, it was a bit boring and we were, and I think the bomb aimer was getting a bit bored with his life so he, and so was, so was the navigator and so the navigator said, ‘Would you mind skip if I come out and have a look around?’ And I said, ‘No you can’t do that because we shan’t know where we are if you,’ And the bomb aimer said, ‘Well, I’ll map read.’ So I said, ‘Alright then. Well the navigator can come out.’ So he came out and we flew happily along for about another half hour and it was all quiet and so forth apart from the noise of the engines of course and I said to, ‘Where are we Jimmy?’ Jimmy being the bomb aimer. No reply. And so I asked him again. Still no reply. So I said to the engineer, ‘Have a look down and see what’s happened to Jimmy,’ and Jimmy was fast asleep. So we then didn’t know where we were so I thought, right. So I saw this town. I thought I wonder whether they’ve got the name written around a water tower and they had so we were able to use that. So that was fine.
[pause]
CB: I’ll just stop for a mo.
[machine paused]
CB: So when you were in the States were they military or civilian instructors?
JQ: Oh civilians.
CB: Ok. What sort of people?
JQ: Young, youngish chaps. Quite good flyers they were but some of the seniors were, you know, sort, sort of bosses over them but none of them were that old.
CB: And they hadn’t been called up for the American military and were flying training you.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: And still civilians.
JQ: Yeah. I don’t know how old they were.
CB: Well that’s ok.
JQ: Yeah. Just let me find myself again.
CB: Ok. The intriguing thing here John is that you’re being trained in America by civilians with the war having started and you’re not being trained in Canada so how did they treat you and what were the conditions like?
JQ: Well, we were, we were extremely surprised actually because if you take the food for instance. Here we were coming from a very strictly rationed country to one who although they said they were rationed was not really rationed by our standards at all and the bread was white for a start. Our bread was anything but white and there was plenty of this and plenty of that and the natives were extremely friendly, you did find the odd one but what used to annoy us although I can’t think now why it did annoy us but they used to call us limeys, the people that annoyed us. But we called them yanks so, you know, tit for tat really but most people didn’t call us limeys and they were extremely friendly, extremely hospitable and the girls were very hospitable and I remember on the first night we were a bit staggered because we’d hardly arrived and we were invited to, to a roller skating party which was quite something really. Fortunately, I could roller skate so I wasn’t too bad at that and many of the students, us that is, formed relationships with the girls that lasted for years. Sometimes some married them but I’m not sure how many but certainly there were, friendships were made and I couldn’t praise them too highly really. People would say, ‘How did you find them?’ And I’ve always said they were absolutely magnificent to us. They couldn’t have been better, Hospitable to the point of being over generous.
CB: How many of you were there on each course?
JQ: Oh now that’s difficult. I would have guessed at about fifty but I am guessing now and from memory so -
CB: And so you were in American uniform but with British insignia.
JQ: That’s right.
CB: And you had a structure with some, there was an officer, an RAF officer running it was there or what?
JQ: Yes the RAF officer was the chief of the whole lot. The CO and the ground instructors were RAF and British but the flying was done because we were at the Spartan School of Aeronautics in America and other schools were similar and I presumed that they were instructors who were instructing at the school before we arrived. Of course nobody else was there of course at the time other than RAF people except a sprinkling and I do mean a sprinkling of about six, something like that, of Americans. One of the things that did slightly annoy us, not too much really but the Americans went through exactly the same training as we did and they were awarded with the American flying badge and the RAF flying badge and we were not awarded the American flying badge. We just got the RAF one and we expected to get them both but we didn’t get them. I think on one of the things that I’ve got they do say that certain courses did get them both but whether that’s true or they just said it I don’t, I’ve no idea.
CB: So how many hours would you have done when you finished there after six months, to get your wings?
JQ: Now that’s, I shall have to have notice of that.
CB: Yeah. Well it doesn’t matter. So you’ve got your wings -
JQ: Yeah.
CB: And then -
JQ: Well we got our wings. Well in getting those wings we, at one point we’d done advanced training and we were halfway through that and they split us in to two then. They assessed people as being fighter pilots or bomber pilots and fighter pilots went on to air to ground gunnery and the bomber pilots did something else. I’m not sure what they did but presumably bombing but I’m not sure. I was put on the fighter pilots lot.
CB: Oh.
JQ: But when I got back to England they didn’t want any fighter pilots so I automatically went on to bombers.
CB: Right.
JQ: We had an aside on this one is that we had, we did have reunions after the war and I went on one and it involved us doing an internal flight. We went into Dallas, flew into Dallas from Britain and then from there we’d got to go fly to Tulsa. I think I’m right and from there we got a ground thing to Oklahoma. I think that’s the way it worked. Anyway, you had to do this internal flight, wherever it was and I noticed while we were waiting to board the aircraft, a civilian aircraft, I noticed the pilot go around the back of the desk and disappear and I thought, I wondered why has he gone around there? So I sort of wandered around while we were waiting for boarding and he was there coming out of a little sort of cubby hole thing and I said, ‘What are you doing around here?’ And he said, ‘Oh I’m just checking up on the weather,’ he said, ‘We’ve got a computer in here, comes out on the weather,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I’m doing it here actually,’ he said, ‘We get it out on the aircraft anyway but,’ he said, ‘I thought I’d just have a look.’ I said, ‘Well you’d better do a good landing when you get,’ and he said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘You’ve got forty five pilots in the back.’ And he said, ‘We haven’t have we?’ He said, ‘I’ll give it to the second pilot. He lands it better than I do’ [laughs] So off we went and during the course of the flight he wandered back and he was saying hello and whatnot and, and when we’d landed and it was quite a reasonable landing he was there waiting and he saw me and he said, ‘Well? What did you think of the landing?’ And I said, ‘Nine out of ten.’ [laughs]. So anyway he laughed too. So that was that.
CB: Yeah. When. when you were in the States doing your training to what extent was the, how rigorous was the training? They examined you, tested you all the way did they?
JQ: All the way through.
CB: Or did you lose quite a few people because they didn’t pass.
JQ: Didn’t lose many people, no. And of course while up to that point sixteen people had been killed.
CB: Of the fifty or -
JQ: No. I mean -
CB: No. In general.
JQ: Since the thing started.
CB: Oh right. Ok.
JQ: And certainly one of my friends doing this air to ground gunnery had not pulled up early enough and had tipped his wing on the target which was a fairly a big target, half the size of this room and landed, well not landed but crashed about two fields away and of course he didn’t do himself any good so he disappeared. I don’t think he died or anything like that but so people, people left for one reason or another. Either they, very few fortunately got killed. Some, some just couldn’t complete the course because they were injured or their health wasn’t good or they had to stay there in hospital and whatnot and wait until they got better and then complete the course and presumably did something else so -
CB: I ask the question because over a course of training, period of training for RAF pilots there’s a continuous chop going on and I just wondered how the chop rate was there.
JQ: No. Well I would have said it was quite good actually.
CB: And then when you’d finished the training did they run a party for you or what did they do?
JQ: I remember the party very painfully actually.
CB: Oh. She was as nice as that was she?
JQ: Well we had, they told us they were going to give us this party at the end. Either they told us or we assumed it from somebody else who had it for us and we knew we were going to get one. In the, in the restaurant, what do they call it? What do they call the PA.
CB: The PX.
JQ: And so what we decided to do was to pay every week while we were training. We put in so many dollars. I can’t remember how much it was now each and then that would give us a free night. The night came and it was due to start say at 8 o’clock. I don’t remember quite now but all I’d got to do was walk from my billet, across about a hundred yards to the restaurant, PA or whatever and there I was so at five to eight I went across and there was a lot of blokes there and one bloke came up and said, ‘Hello John what are you having?’ That was only, I mean he wasn’t paying anyway but you know I said, ‘Oh I’ll have a beer, yes.’ Well he brought me this beer back and he said, ‘Cheers.’ ‘Cheers.’ And it was neat Scotch he’d got in this thing.
CB: Jeez.
JQ: I’d got, it wasn’t half a pint but it was I didn’t query it because we were in America not England. I’d have queried it if it was a beer in England because you should be up the top you see but it was three quarters of a glass, half a pint glass of this thing and it was neat Scotch so I thought well I’ll stick on this. I gently got a way through this. It was in, blokes were coming in and so forth and so I finished this thing and we still hadn’t started dinner so I don’t want to drink a pint of beer on the top of this half a pint, I don’t think they had pint glasses, I can’t remember now so I thought I’d have another of these so I had another of these Scotches. Big one. And we settled down to the dinner which, if I remember rightly was very nice and I finished this thing and all around me blokes were getting tight, you know, really really tight and I thought I’m blinking well doing well here on this Scotch. I’d better have another. So I had another. And I was still alright when I finished it and I thought, I don’t know how I managed this you see. So I thought well that’s over, finished, so I went outside you see and well the cold air hit me so I thought I’d better get off to bed so I started to walk this hundred yards to my bed and I got as far as the flagpole in the middle of this lawn where they ran up the RAF flag ceremoniously at 7 o’clock every morning. And I thought, oh I do feel tight. So I sat down and I don’t remember another thing until I woke up at half past five in the morning with the dew on me and I thought blimey I’d better get out of here or I’m going to be in trouble if they come to ceremoniously put [pause] so I staggered, I staggered to my bed, got into bed and of course I’d got to get up about an hour later or something like that and I felt like death for about three days, you know. So I won’t do that again. I don’t know how I managed it to be quite honest.
CB: So what was the accommodation like? Were you in individual -
JQ: Well the accom -
CB: Rooms or dormitories?
JQ: Well the set up was a, was a hotel. It had been a hotel. It was a chain. A bit, a bit like Premier Inn or something like that and they’d got a chain all around America of these things and they’d taken one of these over as the administrative building and it had got a fair amount of land around it or they’d, either that or they’d cornered it and they’d built these wooden huts you see which wasn’t terribly out of the ordinary ‘cause of course, particularly in Oklahoma a lot of their, or most of their houses are wooden anyway and they were very comfortable and of course being in the RAF the lino was polished, sort of thing, by us and all the beds were all tidy and done up officially when not being slept in and all this sort of thing and it was all very nice. When we went back on the thing, the, I forget what had happened to the administrative building. It wasn’t RAF. Whether it had gone back to being a hotel I don’t know but they let us go into the huts that we were in which had been taken over by Wrangler’s Jeans and they looked a right shambles. They really did. Absolute dump. And so that was it but while we were there it was very good.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: I was a bit bothered about the fact that they’d built some, for the junior people, you know, the new intake they, I think they were stepping it up or something but they’d built another set of dormitories in wood and they also put some loos with them and the loos were just a series of WC’s about a yard apart all the way down. No, no shielding around them -
CB: No.
JQ: At all. I didn’t, I thought I couldn’t do that but fortunately I didn’t have to use those because I was a senior by that time.
CB: So what rank were you under training?
JQ: Under training I was an AC2 and as soon as we got our wings they made us sergeants and then from then on it was up to them how you got on and what you did and all that sort of thing.
CB: So you got your wings. You’re a sergeant. What happened to come back? How did you come back?
JQ: We came back on the Queen Mary, no Queen Elizabeth the first which I think was made to carry about three thousand. It was a cruise ship but it hadn’t been finished. It had been started before the war and it, and it was a ship which would go but it hadn’t got, the cabins were all inside but that was about it you know. Well, as a troop ship you don’t need all the comforts and what not so in a room which was supposed to be for two there would be six blokes and they could only sleep in it one night and the next night they’d have to sleep wherever and somebody else moved in and then the next night you were back in it and so you alternated but I mean the crossing was only about four days anyway so, but they’d got, on a ship that was supposed to take three thousand they’d got about ten thousand on it and it went at full speed and zigzagged all the way and if you didn’t lie down on the floor, if it wasn’t your turn to be in bed, in a bunk if you didn’t lie down on the floor somewhere by about half past six, at night you didn’t lie down because there were so many bodies all over the corridors and what not it was just practically impossible to find enough room to lie down so everybody was sort of certainly sitting down and marking their space very early on in the time. Nobody shaved, or very few people shaved. You couldn’t in actual fact have a decent shave because they didn’t, didn’t, if you turned a the tap on sea water came out which, which is alright for having a swill around but if you try and make a lather with, in salt water you’re struggling. You just don’t get one. So a lot of people thought blow it, you know, they just four days and just began to look -
JB: Stubby.
JQ: More unkempt every day.
CB: Where did that go in to?
JQ: That went in to, it went in to, Greenock.
CB: And from there where did you go?
JQ: From there we went to Heaton Park in, in Manchester. And from there, after we were at Heaton Park for a while, [pause] No I’m telling you wrong I’m sorry. We went in to Harrogate. Yes. That’s where we went. We went into Harrogate and then we were allocated places from there. I went to Oxford. To, up a little field and I mean a field at a place called Windrush.
CB: I know it.
JQ: And there we learned to fly on Oxfords.
CB: That’s at Witney.
JQ: Pardon?
CB: Windrush is at Witney.
JQ: Is it?
[Pause].
JQ: And -
[pause]
CB: So this was for your twin engine training.
JQ: That’s right and I remember going off, they sent us, they sent us off on a cross country. A solo cross country it was and I started off on this solo cross country and I ran into cloud which didn’t bother me because we could fly on instruments but unfortunately I came out of this cloud after I was supposed to have turned because I thought I would and I did come out but I couldn’t find myself and we got a system going, Darkie. I don’t know whether you’ve come across that.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: It was an emergency system and I thought well I’ll call up Darkie. So I said, ‘Hello Darkie. Hello Darkie.’ And the nearest aerodrome was supposed to reply. This is whoever. And then you knew where you were. Well one did reply and Snitterfield it was I was supposed to get to. I was now supposed to have landed at Snitterfield and so I said, ‘Hello Darkie. Hello Darkie. And they came back, they said, ‘Hello Darkie. This is Snitterfield.’ And I thought well I must be here and I was looking around and I thought well I can’t see Snitterfield here. You’d see an aerodrome. It was right underneath me. That’s why I couldn’t see it. [laughs]. Anyway I eventually spotted that and landed there and that was fine. And then another time I was doing something in this Oxford and I was flying low, minding my own business as it were and I smelled roast beef. At least I thought it was roast beef and it didn’t strike me for a bit and then I thought what am I doing smelling roast beef up here? So I thought what is it and I looked down and the batteries are there in an Oxford.
CB: Right next to you.
JQ: And it was sort of boiling over, this battery so I got, got down a bit sharpish after that but anyway it was alright. From there I was sent to Peplow which is, is up near Wellington in Shropshire and there we flew Wellingtons which I thought was quite a nice aircraft actually because of course by that time it was getting a but outdated and I think it was there that they put us all in a room and said pick yourself a crew.
CB: So this was an OTU.
JQ: Now, wait a minute.
CB: Based where did you say?
JQ: Yeah. Yes. Peplow. A place called Peplow.
CB: Yeah. Ok.
JQ: And put us all in this room and I finished up without a crew. Couldn’t make up my mind or they couldn’t make up, because everybody was supposed to have a go, you know. So they said, ‘You’ll have to wait ‘til next week.’ Anyway, I didn’t wait for next week ‘cause they got in touch with me in in the afternoon. I think we did the thing in the morning and they got in touch with me would I report somewhere which I did and oh by this time I was a flight sergeant and I reported and they said, ‘One of the pilots has gone missing,’ not missing, ‘sick. So we’re not holding the crew up,’ he said, ‘We’ve got two pilots and one crew so what we’re going to do is we’re going to let you meet the crew and the crew’s going to pick the pilot.’ So we met them and they picked me which was a bit fortunate for them because while we were still there the other pilot, the one that wasn’t picked, got a crew and he was flying this Wellington around still doing his training with the crew and the wing fell off and they all got killed. The initial finding was that it was pilot error but they did actually prove in the end that it wasn’t. That apparently, so I was told at that time, that the wing on a Wellington is only held on by two, albeit heavy bolts, one of which had rusted through or something [pause] and, and that that brings me to another tale of the same thing because a ground crew member when we were on ops, after we’d finished on operations, a ground crew member told me that one of the faults with the Lancaster was that they tended to get cracks in the main spar right near the fuselage and what what they used to do to cure it was to drop a piece of channel over the top of the main spar underneath the outer skin and pop rivet it on and put the main skin on and that was it and he said, ‘If you’d known that’s what we were doing you would never have flown it.’ I don’t think that’s quite right because we wouldn’t have had any, any say in the matter but how true that is I don’t know but that’s what a ground crew member told me.
CB: So you finished your OTU.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: With the crew who picked you.
JQ: That’s right.
CB: And how, where did you go after that?
JQ: Went to Lindholme.
CB: Right.
JQ: Which is now a prison I think up at Yorkshire and then we -
CB: And what happened at Lindholme? What was that?
JQ: Well Lindholme was four engines. Getting on to four, training on to four engines.
CB: So you got extra crew members there. Was this the HCU?
JQ: Yeah.
CB: Heavy Conversion Unit.
JQ: Yes. I think that’s what it was called. I just got one, one crew member there, the engineer.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: I can’t. I flew a Halifax but I can’t remember whether it was, yeah, it must have been before we went on to the Wellingtons. I had some time on a Halifax and I remember learning all about the complicated fuel system on a Halifax because you’ve got to be careful because if you do it in the wrong order it can cut petrol off to all engines.
CB: Right.
JQ: But I’ve [pause] and I went on to Lancasters. Now I hadn’t got an engineer at the time and I was flying a Lancaster around without an engineer.
CB: At the HCU.
JQ: Yeah, but it wasn’t long before they gave me one and he was, he was an ex lorry driver. Nice chap. Anyway, he, he turned out to be a first class engineer in actual fact but at this time the, if you’re putting the flaps down on a Lancaster the lever is just there and you -
CB: On your right side.
JQ: Yes and you push, you push it down and wait for the flaps indicator to go around to whatever flaps you want and then you pull it back up again to the right position, to the sort of neutral position but its hydraulically done and if it, if it doesn’t work the trick is you push it down and if nothing works so you pull it up and push it down again and nine times out of ten it works ok. So we were practicing circuits and bumps with the engineer and I called for fifteen degrees of flap on the downwind legs so he gives me fifteen degrees of flap having slowed the aircraft so that it would take it. Now I’ve then got to slow the aircraft down a bit more so I can put thirty degrees of flap on and I’m now coming in on the final approach so I call for thirty degrees of flap and he pushes it down and nothing happens so he obviously does the right thing he pulls it back up again but he didn’t push it down again so, what fifteen degrees of flap or whatever how much he’s got down comes up rather smartly and we went down extremely smartly because we’d slowed down, half stalling really. So I rammed the, all the throttles wide open and we missed a tree by about a foot and everybody swore like the clappers and the engineer never did it again [laughs].
CB: Ok. We’ll stop there a mo.
[machine paused]
CB: So on the question of the engineer and the use of flaps and throttles who would normally run the flaps?
JQ: Normally the engineer would do the flaps.
CB: On your command.
JQ: On my command.
CB: Right.
JQ: That’s right and as I said before he made a mistake the first time but -
CB: Yeah.
JQ: He never made it again.
CB: No.
JQ: On, with regard to the throttles he followed me up. I always did the throttles.
CB: On take-off.
JQ: On take-off.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: In every way but he was there just in case something happened, I took my hand off for some reason or whatever, his hand was always there so that he could just push, push them up. He also looked after the petrol of course and switched all the tanks and so forth and after an initial period of time I trusted him enough to not even tell him to do it. He just did it. And there was a point where that came extremely useful because getting back to the war and why we were there and so forth we were hit by anti-aircraft fire on occasion and I never noticed to be quite honest because I was still on the bombing run and on a bombing you’ve got to fly extremely accurately straight and level and keeping the height and the speed and the attitude of the aircraft absolutely [thing?] There’s only way of doing that particularly at night is on instruments, so you’d be there on instruments trying to be as accurate as you can and the engineer er the bomb aimer would be saying, ‘Left. Left. Right. Right,’ and so forth and you’d be following his instructions and so I was doing that when the upper mid, mid-upper gunner said, ‘Skip, we’re on fire,’ and I looked and the port tank was on fire and going quite, quite well but it hadn’t exploded.
CB: Which tank is this? Is this number one on the in board?
JQ: I don’t, no it’s -
CB: Close to the fuselage
JQ: It was, I can’t remember. I think it was between the two engines I thought.
CB: Right.
JQ: Anyway. I can’t remember to be exact. Anyway, I was still on the bombing run because I thought well we’ve got to finish this bombing run so keeping a quick eye on that or trying to and doing the bombing run at the same time. I was trying to decide what to do and I thought well the thing to do is we’ve probably got to bale out but I was determined to finish this bombing run because we were so near so I said, ‘Prepare to abandon the aircraft,’ but I still continued the bombing run and the bomb aimer still continued to give me instruction and then when we’d finished, when he said, ‘Bombs gone,’ we’d still got to carry on that little bit longer for the photograph you see and by this time I’d come to the conclusion that if we were going to bale out, over the target was not a good idea, because apart from the fact that you’d be getting into a whole lot of anti- aircraft fire because the Germans weren’t aiming at any particular aircraft they were just pumping as much stuff up there as they could possibly get and so and if you managed to avoid all that the natives below wouldn’t be very pleased to see you and indeed they had been known to be extremely annoyed. So I thought well we’ve got a short dog leg to do which is going to take us about five minutes I wonder if we could, we shall have to risk it so as soon as, soon as the time was up I’d turned and it was then I said, ‘Prepare to abandon ship,’ which they all did. Before we got to the end of the thing, the end of this dog leg the fire went out, much to everybody’s amazement including me and we, I’d then got another problem. Have we got enough petrol to get back? Now, quite by chance, the engineer hadn’t got much petrol in that tank which is why it went out but how much was in it we’ll never know because, I’ll tell you in a minute. So I said, ‘Well have we got enough petrol to get home?’ And he sort of calculated up what we’d got in the other tanks and so forth. Fortunately it was a Ruhr thing so it was a short trip. He said, ‘If we’re careful we’ve got enough to get home.’ So he was able to give me an assurance so we were careful and we had to come back at a slow rate and you know, not too use much petrol and that sort of thing. When we got back we found, oh, on the way back the mid-upper gunner said, ‘Skip, I can’t move my turret.’ So I said, ‘Oh. Do you know the reason?’ He said, ‘No. I’ve no idea.’ He said, ‘Could I come down then?’ You know, because he was a bit cold up there and it was a bit warmer in the cockpit and I said, ‘No, you can’t. You stop up there and keep a good lookout,’ So he stopped up there. Anyway, when we got back and down and safe we found that the jettison tube which, I don’t know whether you know, a bit about that diameter and if you want to jettison petrol you pull a lever or push a button, or pull a lever I think it was and this thing drops down and all the petrol goes whoosh down and what had happened was that where we were hit it it had set the thing on fire but at the same time it had dropped this petrol jettison tank down and all the petrol went down very quickly out of the aircraft and what was burning but quite fiercely, instead of exploding it was sort of burning and there wasn’t a lot of it so it didn’t last more than about five minutes or something like that. Well the sequel to that is that it must have been about forty, forty five years later my rear gunner had a sixty fifth birthday party, a surprise party given to him by his wife and she invited all the crew and we all went up and of course he was very surprised and we all got chatting and what not and it was then that he told us this tale. He said, oh no I’m over running the thing, I’m sorry. I’ll go back again. When I’d said, ‘Prepare to abandon ship.’
CB: Yeah.
JQ: He opened his doors, got his parachute out of the thing and clipped it on himself or got it ready to clip on himself, I don’t know whether he’d got room, yes he did. And he sat there waiting for the instruction to bail out in which case he would have probably turned this thing and gone out backwards.
CB: Rolled out backwards. Yeah.
JQ: Now, me in the front there when everything had, when the fire had gone out and I decided that we weren’t going to abandon ship after all I I gave the order not to abandon ship you see and I called everybody in turn and said, ‘Are you alright?’ And one by one they answered and said, ‘yes,’ they are but I didn’t get any reply from the rear gunner so I sent the engineer back to see if he was alright and after a minute or two he came back and he said. ‘Oh, he’s alright. He’s ok,’ he said. I said, ‘Well why didn’t he reply?’ And he said, ‘Well when he got his parachute pack out,’ he said, ‘He inadvertently pulled his plug out of his thing.’ He said, ‘he never got the message not to abandon ship,’ you see. So at this party forty five years later he told, he said he was sitting there waiting for the abandon ship thing and it never came so he thought we’d all gone and he was in there on his own and he was there for ages. Well until the engineer went back. What a thing for a chap to sit in there thinking he’s flying in an aircraft which is flying on its own which of course it could well have been.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
JQ: And I think that’s absolutely amazing.
[pause]
CB: Right. So we’ve got to the stage earlier where the engineer pulled up, didn’t use the flaps right.
JQ: Right.
CB: And we’re getting to the end of being at the HCU and then we went on to the operational flight.
JQ: Yeah. That of course was -
CB: That you were talking about.
JQ: That of course was an operational flight.
CB: Exactly. Yeah. But we haven’t finished the earlier bit which was when you were at the HCU. So how did you finish at the HCU?
JQ: Well the thing I remember about that is that, also was that I was at the HCU I’d fixed to get married and they sent a message through saying would I attend a commissioning interview, on my wedding day. Not that they knew it was my wedding day.
CB: Right.
JQ: So I thought I can’t put my wedding off you see so I went to the CO and said would it be possible for me to, thing, and he said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘No,’ he said, ‘You can’t do that,’ he said. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘You can,’ he said. ‘But,’ he said, ‘The chances are you won’t get a commission if you don’t.’ And so I thought, ‘Well I won’t then,’ you see. Anyway, my crew, crew persuaded me that that wasn’t a very good idea so I requested another interview with the CO and he gave me one and he said, ‘Well Quine,’ he said, ‘It’s not my decision,’ he said, ‘It comes from group this has.’ And there was a sergeant in the room at the time and the sergeant said, ‘What’s the problem sir?’ So he told him. He said, ‘Would you excuse me a moment,’ and off he went and he came back again and he said, ‘It’s alright sir. I’ve fixed it quite good.’ He said, ‘If he could get there for 2 o’clock in the afternoon instead of 9 o’clock in the morning it’ll be ok.’ And I thought the CO couldn’t do it and that sergeant had done it. Well it appeared that the sergeant worked in the office and he was in touch with with his counterpart at group and he got through and this chap had said it would be alright, you know.
CB: So what time was the wedding?
JQ: Well the wedding was supposed to be at some reasonable sort of time but you know 9 o’clock in the morning there’s no reasonable time you can get married about 6 o’clock in the morning or something like so I would have had to have cancelled it but what I did do was to got married at half past nine in the morning and then I’d got to get from here, well not this house, but, you know, a similar one.
CB: Lickey.
JQ: Lickey. Well it wasn’t Lickey actually. It was a place called [Linkbery?]
CB: Oh yes I know.
JQ: Where we’d gone to live by that time. No. It wasn’t. No. I beg your pardon it was here. It was here, Lickey. And I had to get, get there without any public transport or cars. Well public transport but certainly no cars so I managed to get myself on a train. It must have been about 11 o’clock or something like that ‘cause I got married. Had a quick wedding breakfast. Got on a train, went, that’s right it was a train. I went into Birmingham, and then I had to change trains in Birmingham and get up to Derby, Burton on Trent, get off at Burton on Trent and there was a taxi outside. There weren’t many taxis but I went up to this taxi and I can remember I said, ‘Could you take me to Eckington Hall?’ I remember the name of the place. It had been taken over by the RAF and I said to him, ‘Could you take me to Eckington Hall?’ He said, ‘I’m engaged.’ So I said, ‘I’ve just been married.’ And he said, ‘Oh. Well I’ll take you then.’ [laughs] Not only that. He not only took me but he also took my wife and we were going on honeymoon. You couldn’t go out of the country of course, you couldn’t even go to the seaside in those days. Not within ten miles of the coast so we had to go to Shrewsbury and so when we got to Eckington Hall in this taxi I went up to the guardroom at the, which was at a lodge at the front of this big hall and saw the thing in the guardroom and the chap said, I said I’ve got my wife outside. We just got married. Could she come in as well? He said, ‘Oh no you can’t bring her in.’ You see. So I had to say, ‘You’ll have to stop out here,’ you see, so leaving a rather a large case and what not with my wife I said, ‘Well which way do I go?’ and they said, ‘It’s that nissen hut over there,’ ‘cause they’d put some huts in the thing. So leaving my wife there I went and it’s now about 2 o’clock in the afternoon or something like that and I went to this nissen hut and I opened the door to find myself immediately in the interview room with an interview going on and a sergeant rushed over and he said, ‘You must be Quine.’ And I said, ‘Yes I am.’ He said, ‘Go around the other side.’ So I went around the other side and the place was full of people.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: All waiting for commissioning interviews so somebody I knew there, and I said, ‘How, how long is it?’ They said, ‘Well we’ve been here since 9 o’clock this morning,’ And I said, ‘Well what’s the order?’ And they said, ‘Well, you know, did they take your name on the way in?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well that’s it. You have to wait for it.’ He said, ‘You’re in the back of the queue.’ I thought, blimey, what’s my wife going to do out there? So there wasn’t anything I could do about it. So took my hat off and sat down talking to these chaps and I hadn’t been there two or three minutes and they shouted out, ‘Quine.’ And so I got up and they said, ‘Your hat. Put your hat on,’ you see [laughs] so put my hat on. I went in and they knew all about it and they said, ‘You got married.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well we hope you have a nice honeymoon and good luck,’ and so forth and off I went to find my wife and she’d been standing outside there and of course all the guards were looking at her all the time so she thought she couldn’t stop. So she wandered off down the road and got herself in the telephone box and she was sitting on her case in the telephone box.
CB: Now which date was this?
JQ: Pardon?
CB: What date was this?
JQ: It was September the 28th 1944.
CB: Right. So when did you know that you’d got your commission?
JQ: It wasn’t long. It wasn’t long. It was quite quick actually because I was still at Lindholme and I knew I’d got it and they gave me some leave, a few days leave so I could go and get myself kitted out and I came to Birmingham. I got kitted, kitted out in a shop that knew all about what they were doing and they’d done it so many times before.
CB: So you’ve got married, you got the interview, you went on honeymoon to, where did you say?
JQ: We went to -
CB: Shrewsbury.
JQ: Well it was near Shrewsbury.
CB: Right.
JQ: It wasn’t in Shrewsbury.
CB: Ok.
JQ: I can’t remember now.
CB: Ok. So you’re at the HCU at that stage at Lindholme.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: When did you finish there and where did you go?
JQ: I think I went straight from there to the, to Hemswell I think. I can’t remember now.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: Yeah.
[machine paused]
JQ: So you’re finished at Eckington Hall. What did you do then? You’ve got your wife there waiting for you.
CB: Yeah. So we’d got to go on honeymoon from there.
JQ: Yeah. So we’d got to go back to Birmingham and then catch a train to Shrewsbury so we got back to Birmingham along with three friends that I knew that, who had also been at the interview and we were standing on the station at Snow Hill and my wife decided that, you know, it was men’s talk and what not so she’d gone and sat in the train that was there and one of the other chaps, a chap with red hair so we called him Ginger quite obviously, he’d gone to keep my wife company and have a chat to her and so forth when the train started moving with Ginger and my wife in the thing and me on the platform so there was quite a scramble to change over but we managed it.
CB: Crikey. Where did you meet your wife?
JQ: I used to go to school with her at Bromsgrove High School and we went on the same school bus and in the end we were married for sixty three years.
CB: Brilliant.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: Fantastic.
JQ: She died in 2006.
CB: Right.
JQ: So -
CB: Ok.
[machine paused]
CB: So you left the, at the HCU. You had Lancasters, you had Halifax to begin with. Then what happened?
JQ: We went on, got converted onto Lancasters.
CB: Right. And so you left there and went to which -
JQ: We left there on the29th of the 11th
CB: Yeah.
JQ: ’46. No.
CB: ‘45. ‘44
JQ: ’44.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: And -
CB: And went, went to your squadron.
JQ: I went to the squadron on December the 2nd.
CB: Yeah. Which was -
JQ: 1944.
CB: Which squadron?
JQ: 170.
CB: Right. At -
JQ: Hemswell.
CB: At Hemswell. Ok.
JQ: And then I went on my first operation on December the 4th
CB: Yes.
JQ: But it was only me that went on that. My crew didn’t. They just, they had the thing of sending you as second pilot for your first time to give you the idea.
CB: Where did you go?
JQ: Karlsruhe.
[pause]
CB: So then you picked up your crew for the next ones. What was the next raid?
JQ: The next one was Koblenz. December the 22nd
CB: Ok. What were the most notable ops? Do you remember?
JQ: Well I remember, well obviously we went on fire was the one -
CB: Yeah.
JQ: I remember most.
CB: When was that [pause] ‘cause that was caused by flak.
JQ: That was caused by flak. Yeah.
[pause]
CB: I’ll stop for a mo. while you look.
[machine pause]
CB: So one of your notable events was when you got hit. So what was that?
JQ: That was on Feb -
CB: And when was that?
JQ: That was on February the 3rd 1945.
CB: Ok. What happened there?
JQ: Well we were flying at Bottrop. There was intense searchlight activity with a heavy and light barrage and predicted flak and we were hit by flak and the port wing caught fire.
CB: And how did you know that you’d been hit?
JQ: Well the mid-upper gunner spotted it and -
CB: So if you’re hit in the fuel tank what normally happens?
JQ: Well it normally explodes.
CB: Right. What did the crew do?
JQ: The mid-upper gunner spotted it because I was flying on instruments at the time, on the bombing run and I had to make up my mind what to do and I decided to finish the bombing run which was only a short time afterwards and then decide whether to abandon the aircraft or what to do and I decided that baling out over the target with all that flak and everything else wasn’t a very good idea and so I decided we’d do a short dog leg which we had to do and then bale out so I warned the crew to get ready to bale out but the short dog leg, which was going to take about five minutes, after a couple of minutes the fire went out. For what reason we didn’t know at the time and our biggest problem was would we have enough fuel to get back again. We did in actual fact find out that when we got back to the aircraft, to the aerodrome at home that the discharge tube from the tank for quickly discharging petrol had been hit, it had set what petrol there was in the tank, not a lot fortunately, on fire and the rest had gone straight out of the dumping, discharge tube and, which had then wound itself around the mid-upper turret stopping it from movement.
CB: Blimey. Yes. So the gunner was lucky not to be dowsed in fuel.
JQ: Well he was. Yes. Yes.
CB: Oh he was dowsed in fuel.
JQ: No he wasn’t. He was lucky.
CB: He was lucky yeah. In the circumstance of a tank being ruptured what would the flight engineer normally do?
JQ: Well there wasn’t a lot he could do. There was a, there was a lever to pull which, if I remember rightly, it was nitrogen which would go in and dowse the flames but I can’t remember where it was now but that was, that was the procedure but it all happened so quickly and what with everything going on one -
CB: Sure.
JQ: One wonders.
CB: I’m just wondering whether they would, the flight engineer would normally try to pump fuel out.
JQ: No. he wouldn’t do.
CB: Or was that a dangerous thing to do?
JQ: Well he wouldn’t do it fast enough. I mean fuel normally ignited, explodes doesn’t it? I mean why it didn’t explode, my own theory is that it was so fast coming out of this discharge tube because it was about a foot in diameter this thing.
CB: Oh.
JQ: And so it would really go out and what was left was just burning plus the fact that there was a fair airstream coming over the top of the wing which would keep it from sort of flaming upwards. It was all flaming backwards. It was flaming quite a lot but, enough to be quite frightening.
CB: What speed would you be flying -
JQ: Oh we’d be doing -
CB: On your run in to the bombing?
JQ: We’d be doing roughly two hundred and twenty five miles an hour, er knots, knots or miles and hour I can’t remember now.
CB: Did the gauges read in knots, or miles an hour?
JQ: Do you know I can’t remember?
CB: It doesn’t matter. I’m just curious.
JQ: I pretty sure it’s knots but -
CB: Yeah.
JQ: I wouldn’t put my shirt on it now to be honest although I’ve got a thing here which, cruising speed two hundred and ten.
CB: Right.
JQ: Miles per hour that is.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: A hundred and ninety knots.
JQ: And on today’s thing you’d think this was low but the service ceiling of a Lancaster is twenty four thousand five hundred and I took one up to twenty four thousand on one occasion and it was getting extremely slow to get any higher and you know you, you couldn’t get any -
CB: Staggering.
JQ: Headway at all really.
CB: What, what height were you on that day you had the flak fire?
JQ: No. I haven’t -
CB: Would your engines be running at normal cruise all the same all the time then? It didn’t, the fire didn’t affect the engine, either of the engines on that side.
JQ: No. No it didn’t. No. I did actually, when we got back into safer areas I did actually slow the aircraft right down. At night, it’s a bit, it all seems to be a bit hairy sort of doing odd manoeuvres at night but I thought I thought I’d better do it and I warned the crew I was going to do it and I slowed right down to almost a stall. In fact it was beginning to judder and I thought well that’s alright. So -
CB: So your stall clean, that’s with the flaps up, would be what? Roughly. A hundred and forty. A hundred and thirty miles an hour.
JQ: Something like that. I’m just wondering if I’ve got it here. Some people could remember these things straight off and I’m blowed if I can.
CB: Anyway -
JQ: Maximum speed is two hundred and eighty seven at fifteen thousand feet.
CB: For the Lancaster yeah.
JQ: For the Lancaster.
CB: So the other part of your tour you did how many, how many ops did you do in total in that tour with 170?
[machine pause]
CB: So with 170 squadron then how many ops did you do for, it wasn’t a tour but before you moved? You did how many ops? You did eight did you?
JQ: Eight.
CB: Right. Then why did you only do eight?
JQ: Because we moved. We volunteered for, a notice came up they wanted volunteers for, the thing, now there’s a little story about that because we decided that we’d have a go at this.
CB: At what? Volunteering for what?
JQ: Volunteered for -
CB: For Pathfinder.
JQ: Pathfinders.
CB: Right.
JQ: Yeah. And this was something from our point of view I suppose was a little bit new in actual fact because most Pathfinders were Mosquitos but they decided, I don’t know whether they decided then or it just happened to come up but anyway they had this thing and on the 170 squadron we had A crews and B crews and A crews were judged by the practice bombing that we did as to how accurate they were. We had to do, if I remember rightly, drop smoke bombs, we only dropped smoke bombs for practice within about ten yards of the target and it, it might have been a bit more than that but I’m not quite sure and we got, dropped ten within that thing. Well we were a B crew so we decided to try and prove we were an A crew so we did actually, and they said well you know prove to us that we, you can do it so we went up in Lancaster and we went down to the bombing range near Southampton to do this and if I remember rightly it was from about fifteen thousand feet we were dropping eleven pound smoke bombs. The first one we dropped alright as far as I remember. The next one coming up and of course I’m trying to fly very accurately and the bomb aimer says, ‘Overshoot.’ So we overshot and went around again and do a sort of circuit you see and sometimes we dropped them and sometimes we overshot and in the end we dropped them all and the bomb aimer said, ‘I think we’ve done it.’ So in exuberance of the fact that I’d been flying very accurately and you know really trying hard with this thing I decided that I’d [?] like this knowing exactly what would happen of course by pushing the control columns but I was a bit too exuberant about it so the rear gunner had the ride of his life and the navigator lost a pair of compasses down the side of the aircraft never to be found again. So anyway we had a good laugh about that.
CB: So you put the nose down. How long did you run it with the nose down?
JQ: Oh only just down and then back again.
CB: Oh right.
JQ: But of course the tail comes up you see.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: The nose goes down, the bomb aimer was wondering, I should think, where he was going.
CB: Bumped his nose. Yeah.
JQ: Anyway, that was alright. We had a good laugh about it. I said, ‘I’m sorry blokes I didn’t mean to do it quite that hard,’ you know. They said, ‘Oh that’s alright.’ That’s when I learned the navigator had lost his compasses or his dividers or whatever they were so we go back to the squadron and and land and the pilot is usually the last one out because you know, the rear gunners usually get out pretty smartly and then the wireless operator. The navigator has got to put his maps away in his bag and he’s got to get himself out and then the pilot’s got to see that the controls are locked and the petrol’s switched off and all this and the engineer might beat him by a short head sort of thing and so I’m just switched everything off and seen everything’s alright and walking down this thing and I could hear this row going on. I said, ‘What’s the row about?’ You see. And I looked and I thought I know what the row’s about. It was this high tech bit of equipment that we’d got in the back of the Lancaster namely an elsan toilet. You see, I wasn’t to know that the elastic band over the top had broken so of course as we, as I’d pushed the stick forward all the contents had come out of this toilet and of course it’s blue. I could see. I mean it’s not a thing you can wipe down just like that because the inside of a military aircraft is full of struts and wires and all sorts of things.
CB: Christ.
JQ: And this, this flight sergeant was going on to my crew despite of the fact that two of them were officers and going on about, ‘bloody mess’ so I thought that’s a bit much. I shall have to apologise so I get to the top of the steps and he’s down there and I said, ‘I’m sorry chiefy,’ I said, ‘It’s, it’s my fault. I was a bit too enthusiastic.’ ‘That’s alright sir. We’ll soon get it cleaned up.’ [laughs] So that was a tale.
CB: Brilliant. What, who were the other officers, what, in the aircraft?
JQ: Well there was Mike Seaton who was navigator. And I’ll tell you a tale about him in a minute and then there was Alf Thompson, rear gunner. Eddie Howell, mid-upper gunner.
CB: All officers.
JQ: Oh no. Beg your pardon. You only wanted officers didn’t you? No.
CB: I want to know all the others but -
JQ: Yeah. Well they were -
CB: I’m just curious about the officers.
JQ: Yeah. Well the navigator was an officer.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: Jimmy Green, I haven’t told you. He was an officer.
CB: This is the bomb aimer was he?
JQ: He was the bomb aimer. And then there was Jack Bassington. He wasn’t an officer. How many have you got?
CB: Wait a minute. Yeah. Sorry. So Jimmy Green. Mike Seaton, Ralph Thompson was the rear gunner.
JQ: No. Alf.
CB: Alf Thompson. Sorry. Ok, who was the mid-upper?
JQ: No. No. He was the rear -
CB: Yeah, but who was the mid-upper?
JQ: Eddie Howell. How many have you got?
CB: Wireless operator?
JQ: Jack Bressington. Bressington.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: And me. That should be seven.
[pause]
CB: Engineer?
JQ: Engineer.
[machine paused]
CB: Just ask you the question. So John just going back to the time the plane’s on fire the mid-upper tells you that the plane’s on fire. What’s your immediate reaction? How do you feel about that?
JQ: Well it’s difficult to, difficult to say really. If you’re one of these people who can make an instant reaction and it happens to be the right reaction then that’s what you must do but the average person it takes a second or two to sink in and I was doing a job on a bombing run and so I knew that I’d got to do something and the thing I was doing was the nearest thing to do. Having done that I was able to think that getting out of a plane over a target in an area full of anti-aircraft fire with a lot of hostile natives below wasn’t a very good idea. The chances of, of the petrol tank blowing up were diminished slightly, I realised quite quickly because if it was going to blow up it would have been blown up before then and so I thought with a bit of luck I could get to the end of a dogleg which was going to take me about five minutes and then bale out and that was my intention and fortunately the fire went out for whatever reason. We didn’t know at the time but we found out when we got back what had happened.
CB: So you said already you slowed the aircraft down but when you landed, how did you feel?
JQ: Relieved [laughs] yes because I was relieved because it was a fact that we, the fire went out was a relief to start with but we were then faced by the fact that we might not have enough petrol to get back so we might still have to bale out at some stage but at least we might be able to get to somewhere where it was a little bit more friendly then there. So when I slowed the aircraft down and let it almost stall and put the wheels down and I got the indication that they were down and then pulled them back up again of course then I was more relieved at that but we still couldn’t be quite sure whether the aircraft wheels would stay locked down when we got there so I tried to put it down as gently as I could but we were quite relieved to get back.
CB: So your concern there was whether the hydraulics had been damaged. Was it?
JQ: Yes it was. Or anything, any other reason.
CB: Yeah. So what I’m thinking is you taxi to dispersal.
JQ: I wasn’t bothered about taxi.
CB: Then what do you do?
JQ: Yeah. I think we, I don’t think we whooped with joy or anything like that you know I think we just sort of accepted it as being jolly good fortune and next stop the -
CB: The fry up.
JQ: The coffee. Coffee.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: Coffee and rum.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: And the interrogation as to what had happened.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: And, and then eventually to get to bed because we were usually pretty tired by that time.
CB: But you were a bit more tired with that one.
JQ: Yeah.
[machine paused]
JQ: To the dispersal that you know we’d be, we’d be briefed in the briefing room as to what we’d got to do, where we were going and get all our maps, or the navigator would get all his maps together and you’d put all your kit on and you’d get in the wagon and they had to take you out to dispersal and dump you there and you wouldn’t get in the aircraft because you were going to be in there long enough so you’d stop outside the aircraft and chat or do whatever and the CO used to come around, always came around and said, ‘Good luck everybody,’ and then off he’d go again in his car and you’d laugh and joke and whatnot and I’ve often wondered why we did it and everybody did it you know. And I think, thinking back, I think it was bravado. You know. We all, we all knew why we were going and we all knew the chances that we, but nobody said it and I think you just joked. The Americans used to play baseball or something or other.
CB: Antidote to the stress.
JQ: Yeah. I think so. I think that’s what it must have been.
CB: So you’ve got, you’ve got out of the wagon. You’ve peed against the rear wheel. You -
JQ: No. I never did that.
CB: Oh. You didn’t. Right.
JQ: No. Some of them did.
CB: But when you, as soon as, the joking is outside, but as soon as you get in the aircraft.
JQ: No. There wasn’t any joking there.
CB: Right [pause]. How did the crew get on?
JQ: Oh fine. We never had any, any bother about anything. Yes. We were ok.
[machine pause]
JQ: Bomb aimer had been in the air force a little bit longer so he tended to be the one that knew about things. We didn’t get on with him to start with and tried to get rid of him but the CO wasn’t having it. I think if we’d pressed him really hard I think he would have done it.
CB: Was it because -
JQ: Because you were supposed to be able to do it.
CB: Was it his second tour?
JQ: No. No. No. I think he’d been on the ground. He was always a bit, could never quite understand him really. A bit of a line shoot you know. But you know having got over the initial thing we all understood him and you know, he used to joke about the fact, because we had batwomen you know and he always used to say, ‘No batwoman has ever, ever beaten me to the door,’ sort of thing and things like that he used to say. Nobody believed him of course.
CB: This is because you had a mixed crew in terms of rank so you had officers and he was one and you had NCOs so -
JQ: There was one, one on somewhere. I think it was one of the heavy conversion units we were on, he was a wing commander and he used to make his crew line up and salute him as they got in.
CB: And he was serious.
JQ: Oh yes. He was dead serious.
CB: And he was the squadron commander was he?
JQ: No. No. He was just one of us really but his rank was wing commander. Quite how he got there, he was probably re-mustered from some other thing.
CB: Just on that topic did you ever get people who came on an ad hoc basis from OTUs? So they would just come to a station because there was always a shortage of somebody sometime and would just fly with a crew. Did you get any of those?
JQ: Never had that.
CB: In term, we’ve talked about a number of aspects but in terms of your gunners you have a mid-upper and a tail gunner.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: To what extent -
JQ: And of course the bomb aimer had guns up front.
CB: And a bomb aimer at the front. So how often did they, did you get attacked and fire the guns?
JQ: Well never is the answer to that. They did fire the guns but not in anger only to, you know see where we were going and we had to do something to fire at something for some reason or other in the sea. I can’t remember quite why it was now but we never, and I’ve often wondered why we never got attacked and I have a feeling that it may be you read these stories about blokes going on the raids, I’ve read one or two actually and they seem to choose their own height. They might, might attack the target at the right height but in between they’ve gone down low or whatnot. They always used to give us a height to fly and I always flew it and the reason I always flew it is was that I reckoned the higher you go the less petrol you used because the air’s thinner so you don’t need quite so much so that’s what I did. I did what I was told really.
CB: What heights would they be?
JQ: Well it varied. I mean, it, I think the lowest in anger would be about fifteen thousand and the highest would be about twenty and of course the Germans knew this and that’s why they put their thing, they had a box and, but I think what some people must have done is to say right, ‘We’ve done that, dropped the bombs, right, stick the nose down and get home boys,’ you see and you can get that bit faster sticking their nose down and what not. Well you’d use more petrol doing it that way but you’d obviously have enough to get back but you know if you, if you were in trouble then perhaps you’d might miss that bit that you’ve got. But look at it from a fighter’s point of view. Chap’s there in a fighter and he’s churning around at night and there’s one nice and down low where he is and other than that he’s got to climb up to twenty thousand feet or something or other and do up there so he thinks I’ll stop down here and probably gets the pickings down there which wasn’t not the reason I stopped up there in actual fact. I stopped up there because that’s what they said so that’s what I did so -
CB: And when you’re in the bomber stream you need to be on some pre-agreed level don’t you?
JQ: Yes but I’ve read quite a few stories about people who didn’t and of course there must be a lot who didn’t or don’t admit it or didn’t admit it at the time and but I mean I had one time, is that on?
CB: Ahum.
JQ: One time we were told to get together, I can’t remember, rendezvous, that’s the word I was trying to think of, rendezvous at fifteen thousand feet above our airfield along with a lot of others and so we started off and we’d got I think three quarters of an hour, or an hour or something like that to do it and it took us more than that to get to fifteen thousand feet by which time everybody else had gone and it, I mean it was a night raid but it started off in daylight and I knew the reason that we, everybody else had gone was because we weren’t getting the power and I was looking around for a reason. Checked everything through. Checked everything I could think of. I couldn’t find the reason and they said, we did actually set course at the time we should have done but we set course at a lower level. We were still climbing, trying to get to this fifteen thousand feet. By the time we get, we got to the coast the darkness was closing in and we could see the Dutch coast and we could see flak coming up like mad there so we knew that that’s where the bomber stream was and we were on our own and so I thought we were in for it when we, you know, they’ll get us good and proper but anyway so on we went straight through Holland. Nothing. Every now and again on the way we could see these, this flak coming up and every time we got to somewhere near there, nothing. And then we get near the target, near it, it’s going to take us another quarter of an hour or so to get there but I could see over there at about two o’clock to my thing was this beautiful sight, it was amazing really and I thought what on earth is that? And I very quickly realised it was our raid going on and you got the fires that had been lit with the bombing, you’d got Window, do you know what I mean by Window?
CB: Absolutely. Yes.
JQ: Yeah. Trickling down, well you couldn’t actually see the Window but you could see the sparkles coming down. You could see the searchlights going up in to a cone over the top. You could see the markers green and red and what not there and the anti-aircraft fire and it was really was a beautiful sight and it took me a second or two to realise what the devil it was because I knew we’d got to go there, there and bomb on the way back. So I thought blimey. They were really going to be waiting for us when we get there so we did that, we came and we turned around and we were on the run in now. So this time I thought right I’m going to get out of here as quickly as we can so I put the throttles right up, and we went in and we did the bombing run, we went out, not a searchlight came up. Nothing. No ackack fire. Nothing. And it was only on the way out as one searchlight popped up and it wasn’t terribly near us and we got back and we never had a blind thing really and we were all on our own.
CB: Amazing. What height did you manage to achieve in the end?
JQ: Oh I think we, I think we -
CB: It doesn’t matter but I was just curious.
JQ: I can’t remember now. I’ll just see if I can spot it.
CB: Because in practical terms if you were low on power it would be pretty difficult loaded to get high wouldn’t it?
JQ: Yeah. Oh that wasn’t the reason. No, I found, we found out the reason afterwards when we got back because I went around the next morning and said to the mechanics, ‘What did you find?’ And it was stuck in hot air and there was a lever, hot and cold air and I checked that but the answer I got was when they loaded the bombs they, they’d bent a control rod. Now, why a control rod for hot air should go through a bomb bay I’ve no idea but that’s the answer I got so. But I did check, check that. That was the first thing I checked because I -
[pause]
CB: Well let’s pick up that up a bit later. Can we move to when you became a Pathfinder? So you moved from 170 because you did your practice bombing.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: You were so elated with that you put the nose down and –
JQ: Yes.
CB: The elsan -
JQ: Yeah.
CB: Decided to -
JQ: Yeah.
CB: Fly.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: But presumably you were re-graded on that.
JQ: We were. Yes. We were.
CB: So -
JQ: They made us an A crew.
CB: That made you an A crew so what happened then?
JQ: So then they posted us to -
CB: So 582 squadron.
JQ: 582 squadron.
CB: Little Staughton
JQ: Little Staughton. That’s right.
CB: Now this was a demanding experience was it?
JQ: Well they, yes, they didn’t put us straight onto ops because they don’t operate quite the same. They don’t operate the Lancasters quite the same either. They fly them a little bit faster and various other things I can’t quite remember them all now but it wasn’t that much different but they had their own way of doing things. We were expected to, if I remember rightly, we were expected to get to the target plus or minus. I can’t think whether it was a minute or four minutes plus or minus but whereas main force they give you each hour and you started off when you should get there at the time and when you arrived you bombed but you, with Pathfinders you started in good time and then the navigator worked out, he kept working out the eta and if you wanted to lose some time then he’d say, ‘Lose a couple of minutes Skip,’ you see, so I’d turn forty five degrees to the, to the route for two minutes. I’d turn ninety degrees back for two minutes and that puts you back on where you were but two minutes later and then you kept doing that and doing that and you could actually get there more or less smack on time doing that but of course it means that you’re there longer and then what you do then is you have, you have to drop Window which protects the people behind you. It doesn’t do anything for you. It just accentuates the view of you because they can see a line of Win, on the radar they could see a line of Window coming from you but nothing in front so they know that’s you. So we had a special radio which we switched on just before we got anywhere near the target and that sort of blurred everything in front so it gave us the protection that we were giving everybody behind. Having done that we’d go in and if you were new to the, to the Pathfinders you would go in as a supporter. They wouldn’t let you drop a flare or a marker or anything like that but you would go in with those blokes who were going to do that and the fact you were dropping Window and using your radio and all that sort of thing you were supporting them in that, in that respect. You would then, having supported them in that way you then did a circuit around, came back into the bomber stream again and came up to the target again.
CB: In the bomber stream.
JQ: In the bomber stream. And then drop bombs or whatever they’d put in, in the bomb bay. I always thought that was the most dangerous time to be quite honest because it was like doing a u-turn on the M1 at night, you know, without any lights because you didn’t know whether there was some of your own bombers.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: Would come and wipe you up you know. I mean I know they worked it all out so that you should all be separated but it doesn’t work like that you know.
CB: No.
JQ: Anyway we never did come to any harm. And then after you’ve done some of those then then they started giving you flares and markers to drop.
CB: How many sorties, ops, would you have to do before qualifying for that? Normally.
JQ: I, I think it was five.
CB: Ok.
JQ: No. No. Wait a minute. It could have been more than that.
CB: So after five you would then join the others straight in.
JQ: Straight in. Yeah.
CB: With flares.
JQ: Except the master, master bomber of course. He was floating around all the time.
CB: Right. So the master bomber would be there and then he would be, what height would he be at?
JQ: Oh he would go -
CB: Watching what was going on?
JQ: Anywhere. Usually quite low.
CB: Oh was he?
JQ: Yeah. And usually in a Mosquito.
CB: Ah.
JQ: In fact I would think probably always in a Mosquito.
CB: And would the master bomber be a pilot or would he be a navigator in a Mosquito?
JQ: Do you know I don’t know? We had, you see, on our squadron, on our thing at Little Staughton we had 582 which was Lancasters and 109 which was Mosquitos and it used to annoy us because we’d go in and we’d take off say at half past six and they’d take off about half past seven. We’d be back about twelve or whatever. They’d be back at ten.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: And in bed.
CB: Yeah. Really narking, yeah.
JQ: Yes.
CB: And they’d eaten all the fry up.
JQ: They didn’t do that.
CB: They didn’t get a fry up because it was before midnight.
JQ: What was the question you were asking?
CB: The question was how many ops you had to do before you qualified to go in on the main operation?
JQ: I’m not sure that there was, there was a particular time but -
CB: Because they monitored your progress did they, in the early stages, more than they would otherwise.
JQ: I don’t know.
[pause]
CB: We’re just looking at the logbook.
[pause]
CB: Let’s pick that up, that one up later John.
JQ: Yes. Ok.
CB: So how many, you joined the Pathfinders? They said after, say five that you would then go in on the main operations. So these were all at night were they?
JQ: Yeah. Yeah they were mainly.
CB: And a wide variety of -
JQ: No. No they weren’t, they weren’t all at night. There was the odd one or two as the war went on.
CB: Yes. And then so you did eight ops with 170. How many ops did you do with 582? That was more wasn’t it?
JQ: Yes it was.
CB: But while you’re looking that up when you joined 170 you had the first op was as second pilot.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: With Pathfinders did they do the same thing?
JQ: No. Straight in.
CB: Right. So when your Pathfinder activity came to an end, why was that?
JQ: The war finished.
CB: Right.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: And how did you feel at that point because it wasn’t the end of a complete tour of thirty ops was it?
JQ: No. It wasn’t. No.
CB: So did you feel short changed or what did you feel?
JQ: Glad the war was over. No. Didn’t worry too much really but, no. You’d got other things to think about and you’d come through. No. Sort of mixed feelings I suppose really. We were glad the war was won.
CB: Were there any major raids you went on as a Pathfinder?
JQ: Well it depends what you call a major raid.
CB: Well -
JQ: And I don’t know which one we could -
CB: On the really large cities. Berlin.
JQ: Oh I didn’t go to Berlin.
CB: Right.
JQ: The reason for that was they did actually try it before we joined Pathfinders and it wasn’t a success because they lost a lot of planes doing it because the fighters, their fighters were so much faster than the thing and you got all that time to get to Berlin.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: And back again.
CB: No.
JQ: And Berlin was really Mosquitoes all the time.
CB: Right.
JQ: Towards the end when I -
CB: For Pathfinding.
JQ: Well for anything really.
CB: Right.
JQ: I think they did the odd one or two to Birmingham but er to Berlin but I went to the major cities. Hanover. I think that, when we were on our own, was Hanover.
CB: And the Ruhr.
JQ: Ruhr all the time because that’s near, that was near that was an easy one.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: I think the longest one I ever went on was a nine hour trip but I can’t remember where that was too. Somewhere in the north of Italy somewhere.
CB: Ah right. So it was Turin was it? The raids in Italy.
JQ: If I could spot it I would know.
CB: In the Lancaster you could fly over the Alps could you? Or did you have to fly around them?
JQ: I don’t think, I don’t think we flew anything direct. We usually went around things you know because if you were direct they knew you were coming.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: Yeah. I’ve got one there. Seven and a half. That was Dessau, wherever that is. [pause] Mannheim. [pause] Essen of course [pause] Bremen. Dahlen. Hanover [?] Lutzendorf, wherever that is.
[pause]
CB: Oh a bit of variety. So now the war is finished. It’s the 8th of May 1945. What happened to the squadron and your flying?
JQ: Now wait a minute. Did you say the 8th of May 1945?
CB: The Europe, the war in Europe is finished.
[long pause]
JQ: Yes. That’s right. Well -
[long pause]
JQ: On the 4th of April we did an op to Lutzendorf.
CB: And you did some raids, some ops after that for the month because May, we’re talking about 8th of May and what you did after that?
JQ: Well on May the 3rd
CB: Yeah.
JQ: Much to our surprise because the war hadn’t finished they said, ‘You’re going food dropping.’
CB: Oh yes. Right. So you did Operation Manna in Holland.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: Ok.
JQ: Nobody’d done it. Certainly not to our knowledge anyway. Two hundred feet. Which is low.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: To drop food at Rotterdam.
CB: Is this over the city or in the countryside?
JQ: In the countryside. Well near enough Rotterdam you know and -
CB: Is that in the bomb bay or was it chucking it out of the door?
JQ: No. No. What they, they sprung it on us really. We’d. I think the negotiations had begun before that but we didn’t know anything about it and we were still in in a bombing mode.
CB: Right.
JQ: You know, and we were still practicing for it as we always did and they said, ‘Right, you’re food dropping at two hundred feet and the Germans have promised not to fire.’ And we thought a likely story. So we set off on this thing. What they did was they had done a few tests and they’d found that it wasn’t really a practical proposition to sort of take a load of parachutes and have it dropping down by parachute. What they’d do would stick it in paper bags like a concrete bag that you’d have concrete powder in and stick stuff like powdered egg and grain and that sort of stuff you know. Flour and, in this bag and drop it from two hundred feet. Well of course the bag burst immediately so then they had a bright idea and they thought what if we put another paper bag around it what would happen and it didn’t. I presume if it went on top of a pole or something it would do.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
JQ: You know. So then they got something like a football net behind a goal and they attached that to the bomb hooks or some of the bomb hooks in the bomb bay and then that gave something they could put all these bags in and then and we were able to close the bomb doors and then from then on it’s a bombing raid.
CB: Right.
JQ: You see, so it was done exactly the same. It was marked.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: And from two hundred feet so we went over and did this and I was careful to put my altimeter, to put pressure on my altimeter highly correctly and off we went. When we got there, obviously being daylight, we could see all the aircraft and I was here and there was two or three aircraft in front of me, you know, only about a hundred yards away. There was one there and one there, one there, one there but slightly higher than me and I remember looking at my altimeter and thinking well they’re a bit high. I’m at two hundred feet. But of course your instruments vary a bit you know so I didn’t bother because I thought well I’m within twenty five, thirty feet of two hundred feet or they’re too high. One or the other you know. We’d come up to, up to the point and they released their bags. Well I had a hundred weight bags of this, that and the other flying past me like, you know I thought, God, you know I thought if one of those hits us we’re in for trouble.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
JQ: You know there was nothing I could do about it.
CB: Yeah. You had to pull it back did you?
JQ: No. I didn’t. I just, we just kept going. I thought well even if I’d pulled back I couldn’t have missed one.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
JQ: So anyway it all went down and it was, the Germans didn’t fire and it was highly interesting to see what the Dutch had done because there were Union Jacks all over the place.
CB: Oh were there?
JQ: Where they got them I’ve no idea. You’d see kids in a school, what looked like a school playground and on the ground in the playground there’d be this flat on the floor and they were all waving like the clappers and all out in the, a right reception they gave us.
CB: Yeah. Fantastic.
JQ: But all the time we wondered whether the Germans would fire but they didn’t so so that was that and I think there were one or two. We only did one but there were one or two like that.
CB: So you only had one sortie. You didn’t have to fly at low level to get there did you? You just had to let down -
JQ: Yeah.
CB: At the last minute.
JQ: If I remember rightly. Yes. In fact I’m sure that’s right. My common sense tells me that. Not my memory.
CB: Yeah. And for the drop you don’t want too much speed so what did you haul back to?
JQ: I can’t remember.
CB: But you did, you did throttle back.
JQ: A thousand probably because I mean we were so used to flying up, up high.
CB: No. I didn’t mean that I meant the speed. So you don’t want to be going at two hundred miles an hour dropping bags do you? You -
JQ: Oh yeah we did.
CB: Did you pull it back?
JQ: Yeah. We did.
CB: And just keep it at -
JQ: No we well -
CB: A hundred and fifty or something.
JQ: No. I didn’t pull it back.
CB: Right.
JQ: In fact we got, I don’t remember any instructions to pull it back. I don’t think it would make any difference anyway.
CB: I was thinking about the impact.
JQ: Well, they got from two hundred feet anyway so -
CB: Yeah.
JQ: It would have slowed a bit by then wouldn’t they?
CB: Yeah.
JQ: It seemed to work anyway.
CB: So after that the war ends.
JQ: After that we got sent, I got sent to Dunkeswell.
CB: Oh yes.
JQ: Which is in Devon.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: And, oh I did do some, on May 15th I fetched some prisoners of war back from Juvincourt. Then I got sent to Dunkeswell.
CB: How many times, how many trips did you do? That was Operation Exodus wasn’t it? Bringing back POWs.
JQ: Yes it was. I’d forgotten that. Yes.
CB: How many trips of that did you do?
JQ: Only one.
CB: That was from Holland. Was it from Holland?
JQ: No. Well, Juvincourt. I can’t remember where Juvincourt is.
CB: Belgium.
JQ: Either France or Belgium I think.
CB: So you did one of those. So you went to Dunkeswell. What happened there?
JQ: Well we were supposed to be transferring on to Lincolns for the Japanese war.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: But it never happened. I did a bit of test flying there of Lancasters where I flew the Lancaster completely on my own. Usually with a couple of ground engineers or even one ground engineer because -
CB: What were you testing then?
JQ: The pilots had reported faults with -
CB: Ah.
JQ: With the thing and -
CB: Yeah.
JQ: It was either before they’d been put right or after or both, you know. I remember taking off in one thing and I checked all around outside and as soon, as soon as I took off one of the wings dropped so I immediately corrected it and I found instead of being like that, straight and level, I was flying like that and it worked perfectly well. The only thing about it was that I couldn’t get any farther that way I’d really got to go this way and go all the way around and -
CB: What did that turn out to be?
JQ: Well –
CB: A spanner left in the plane?
JQ: No. A trimming tab on the aileron.
CB: Right.
JQ: Was bent up too much or down too much. I can’t remember which way now. Something quite simple really but I mean you know unless you knew quite what, what you were doing.
CB: Right.
JQ: And if you panicked and tried turning even faster you might get yourself into trouble. I realised you couldn’t get that way anymore so I went this way.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: But of course when you’re coming in to land it doesn’t help you know you’re coming in to land -
CB: Of course.
JQ: Like this. Well if I want to go that way I’m going to use my rudders or something.
CB: I’ve had an elevator trimmer go myself and run out of stick movement.
JQ: Yes.
CB: When you don’t know what it is it’s disconcerting.
JQ: Yes.
CB: So after Dunkeswell then what? Did you have to, how long did you stay in the RAF before you were demobbed.
JQ: No longer than I could help after that, you know. Having made -
CB: Right. Was that the end of flying? Dunkeswell.
JQ: Decided that was it. That wasn’t the end of flying for me but -
CB: No. No. But in the RAF.
JQ: In the RAF.
CB: When was your last sortie with the RAF?
[long pause, turning pages]
JQ: It appears to be January the 18th 1946.
CB: Ok.
JQ: And I was actually, what happened then, after that, I was taken off flying. I got sent back to my old Little Staughton.
CB: Oh.
JQ: Which rather surprised me and I had an even, even bigger surprise when I got there because when I’d left it it was a thriving bomber station and when I came back there were about no more than a dozen people in the sergeant’s mess and about three of us in the officer’s mess and two of them had been there quite a while and wanted to go on leave and so one of them said, ‘Well, here’s the key to the bar. You’re in charge. Goodbye.’ [laughs]. So although I never had the title I was virtually CO. Only for a short time. Only about a fortnight, something like that and then, then I was demobbed.
CB: From Little Staughton.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: What did you do after that? Because you’d done engineering before you joined the RAF. So what did you do when you left the RAF?
JQ: Well I thought I didn’t want to go back to the job I was in because I’d started wrong anyway because I went into the drawing office and although I did alright in it and understood what I was doing I’d really started wrong because to go in to a drawing office you really ought to start on the floor, not in the drawing office, on the floor doing engineering stuff and I realised that that was the way I ought to have done it so I thought, no, I didn’t want to go back there. So I cast around for a bit and the Ministry of Labour, as it was in those days, wanted, they ran, ran a course. They realised there were a lot of people in the services, particularly officers who had gone in at a young age as I had and hadn’t got any experience of business. So they thought well if we give them some experience of business perhaps we can slot them in to the employment lot and they’ll know what they’re doing you see and they’ll have caught up a bit so I thought well that’s a good idea so I applied. They didn’t take everybody but I applied and they accepted me and I went down to Worcester and it was a three week course if I remember rightly. They taught us, well, quite a lot of stuff. Accountancy. You know, a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of the other and quite good. And then if you wanted to you could apply then for a speciality course which was another three weeks and that you could be put out with a firm and they could teach you about what went on at their firm and if they liked you or wanted you and what not they could take you on and possibly would take you on. So I thought I’ll have a go at that so I had a go at that and went through all that and, and then said, ‘I’d like to,’ oh apart from the people who you were with for the speciality, no wait a minute, yes, apart from the people you were with on the speciality course the ministry, if they didn’t want you the Ministry of Labour would find you a thing. And the chap, chaps that I was with didn’t, didn’t want me so I applied to the Ministry of Labour for them to find me. So they said, ‘Oh yes. We’ll find you somewhere.’ Nothing happened. And then I queried it a bit and they sent me to someplace that, you know, I thought blimey if I come here I’m really going down you know. You know. Real Dickensian stuff you know.
CB: Oh. Sweatshop.
JQ: So I thought well this is a right thing so I said, I had a bright idea and I went around and I said, ‘Can you give me a pile of your leaflets?’ And they said, ‘What do you want a pile of leaflets for?’ And I said, ‘I’ll find my own.’ Well they thought that was a jolly good idea. Saved them a lot of bother you see. So they gave me a pile of these leaflets and I went around to people I thought might be likely and asked to see somebody and most of the time they didn’t because they didn’t, you know didn’t know what I was about so I’d leave a leaflet and what not and one of them turned up. It was in printing and my grandfather as I told you was in printing.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: So I I went there and I did quite well.
CB: Locally.
JQ: I did, I went into the office, I didn’t go to the actual printing. I went into the office and I took up, doing a night course on costing which I did. Printers had a costing system so I did that and the people who were running this who were the British Master Printers Federation they, when I’d finished they said, ‘Well we’re short of a teacher in Birmingham. You wouldn’t like to do it would you?’ Because I’d, it was three certificates you got and I’d got all three so I said yes. So I taught that for three years until I got tired of it. And then one day I called on, oh I got on to the sales side of that, for that thing then and they gave me a car, a small car and then I called on a customer one day and it was a woman customer and she said, ‘My managing director wants to know if you know anybody that’s interested in a job in printing.’ So I said, ‘Well I’m in printing.’ She said. ‘Yes. That’s why I said it.’ So I said, ‘Who is it?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know he hasn’t told me.’ So I applied for it and got it and it was for a big printing company Sir Joseph Causton.
CB: Oh right.
JQ: And so I applied for that and I got that and the rest is history. I did, did quite well and they gave me a car, and then a bigger car, and a bigger car and then I thought well I’m driving a lot around in this car I could fly around. So I said, I said to the sales director, ‘What about it?’ He said, ‘Good idea. Yeah. Why not.’ So I did that a bit and then, and I’d got my own aeroplane by then.
CB: Oh had you?
JQ: So I thought well if I did use it for business they paid the expenses. I thought well they might as well own it why don’t I sell it to them? So I sold it to them the aeroplane.
CB: Oh did you?
JQ: And used it on the proviso I could use it for private means if necessary provided I paid the costs so they agreed to that and then we were taken over and I ran into trouble then because we were, we got in to a sort of recession and they said, ‘Well we’ll have to cut the aeroplane down,’ So I bought it back off them and used it privately and in the end I found that I wasn’t using it as much as I was paying. It was costing me in those days three thousand pounds a year if I never moved it out of the hangar.
CB: Really. Crikey.
JQ: So if I moved it out the hangar but I did quite a lot of things like I found that flying for business was a lot more demanding than flying for the RAF apart, you know, in the war of course.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: Because the RAF I mean they’re sensible. I mean I can remember being up in the, being up in my aircraft over Norfolk way on one occasion flying on business and I looked down and there was all these highly specialised aircraft and I can’t think what they were now.
CB: RAF ones.
JQ: RAF ones. Lightnings.
CB: Oh yes.
JQ: I don’t mean the old Lightning that they had.
CB: Right.
JQ: I mean the new ones.
CB: P1 yeah.
JQ: And they were all on the ground. I was up in the blinking air tossing around like mad and things like that you know and I found that you had to be, you had to be a lot more smart as well because in the RAF you got things like defrosting and that sort of thing and you can’t afford to buy that sort of thing in the light aircraft. Apart from the weight. So in the end I found that I wasn’t using it as much as I’d think so I thought I’d better give it up so I did. And in a sense, in a sense I’m still a pilot because although I haven’t got a licence -
CB: Yeah.
JQ: You know in all this post that comes through your door, all these catalogues I get, I get it all the time or when it comes to the door I pile it here and I pile it there.
CB: Nice one. Nice one. Nicely said. So when did you retire eventually from the printing world?
JQ: I think I was about oh I did, I have left a bit out which I forgot for a minute because I went, this Sir Joseph Causton and the aeroplane whatnot I retired from Sir Joseph Causton, buying my car off them as I, as I went, at a cheap rate.
CB: Right.
JQ: And I hadn’t been retired that long and a chap rang me and he said, ‘John,’ he said, ‘I’ve got somebody who wants me as, as a salesman,’ he said, ‘But I don’t want it. I wondered if you’d like to start up again,’ you see. So I thought I’d investigate this. So I did and I thought I don’t want to be employed any more. I’ve had my time but anyway I went to see them. They were in [pause] what’s that new town down south? Down your way.
CB: What, Milton Keynes.
JQ: Milton Keynes. They were in Milton Keynes or near it. Yeah. It was Milton Keynes. I went down and I said, ‘Well,’ you know, ‘I am interested but I don’t really want to be employed by you. I’ll employ myself and you can pay me a –
CB: They could pay you a fee.
JQ: A fee for it.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: So that’s what I did for some years and did alright at that too. So that’s it really.
CB: When did you eventually -
JQ: So I must have been about –
CB: Retire?
[pause]
JQ: Seventy, seventy, seventy two. Something like that.
CB: I’ve just got two extra questions that you prompted me with earlier.
JQ: Oh yes. Yes.
CB: One was to do with baked bean tins.
JQ: Baked bean tins. Yes. Yes. We had a thing apart from the elsan toilet that we’d got in the back like every other Lancaster.
CB: In the Lancaster. Yes.
JQ: We didn’t actually use it to be quite honest. But then we never had the same Lancaster anyway. You could get one or the other or whatnot. But, but people did use it but we we had that the engineer organised this. He always used to have a baked bean tin and where he got them from or why we could get baked beans during the war I’ve no idea, but this used to be passed around. You know, anyone who wanted a pee you didn’t have to get up. He’d come along with the baked bean tin you see but of course it gets full so he had to, and so if possible it was kept until we were over the target and then tipped down the window chute.
CB: Just as a bonus for the target. Yeah.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: And the other was the cracked -
JQ: Oh well that was, that was -
CB: Bomb.
JQ: After the war while everything was still going but even though the war had finished, you know, this was at Little Staughton and we still did, you know, practicing because we, I mean the war with Japan was still going and we were sort of getting ready for that but you know everybody was still flying and that sort of thing but not in anger and the CO called me to see him one day so I went and saw him and he said, ‘Quine,’ he said, ‘We have a bomb in our bomb dump which has got a crack in it,’ he said, ‘And when the,’ he said, ‘It’s got a crack in it and the explosive is seeping out through the crack and crystallising,’ he said, ‘And when it gets into a crystallised state it gets a bit unstable and the bomb’s liable to go off,’ he said, ‘And we’d rather not a bomb go off in our bomb dump if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘So what we’re going to do is we’re doing to load it into a Lancaster and ask you to fly it and drop it in the sea in the appropriate place,’ because there was an appropriate place for everybody to drop stuff if they had to so you know wondering why he’d picked on me for this job you know so I went around and I think it was something like a Sunday morning and there wasn’t a fat lot going on, I went around to see the crew half of whom were still in bed cause they didn’t want to do much on a Sunday and they they were highly delighted to get out of bed for this thing you see. So for some reason or other which I can’t remember I had to go up to the guardroom so I went up to the guardroom and the military policeman there who everybody loves as you know said, ‘Morning sir. Lovely morning.’ So I said, ‘Yes it is a nice morning.’ He said, ‘Nice night, nice day for a flight. Are you going for a flight sir?’ I said, ‘Yes, I am as a matter of fact.’ ‘I’d love to come with you.’ So without telling him why we were going I said, ‘Yes certainly. You can come with me if you want to.’ And he said, ‘Well I shall have to ask my superior.’ I said, ‘Well go and ask him then.’ So he disappeared in the back and he came back about a minute later and he said, ‘Yes that’s alright. He said I can come.’ I said, ‘Right 2 o’clock at dispersal.’ I told him where. So off we go and just before two the bomb’s been duly loaded. We could see that because the bomb doors were still open. You didn’t close them until, until you were about to taxi off. I didn’t tell him why and he didn’t ask why either or where we were going. I told the crew not to tell him and we took off and as soon as we’d taken off we told him and he went white. And so we flew out and dropped it without any trouble at all really. Quite gently we did it, I flew it out ‘cause I didn’t -
CB: I bet. ‘Cause none of you wanted to join your maker did you?
JQ: And of course I hadn’t inspected it and in any case I wouldn’t have known what sort of state it was in by looking at it, not being an expert on these things. So anyway, we dropped it and of course then he got his own back.
CB: Oh.
JQ: ‘Cause he’s a hero now you see. So, I mean, ‘I’ve been in an aircraft with a wonky bomb,’ you see.
CB: Amazing. Final question really and that is after the war a lot of people, air crew were sent on tours of Germany they called the Cooks Tours.
JQ: Cooks Tours.
CB: Did you do any Cooks Tours?
JQ: Yes. Did those.
CB: So who were the people who went? What was a Cook’s Tour and who went on it?
JQ: We flew out to the Ruhr as a rule. In fact it might have been all the time to the Krupp’s works at Essen which was a right sight. You should have seen it. It was a tangled mass. We really clobbered it. No doubt about that. And we were cleared to fly at two hundred feet and we’d get there and usually what I did was do steep turns around it because when you do a steep turn you can look down and got a really good view of it and most people seemed to enjoy that and having done that we just came back again.
CB: Yeah. But who were the people you took?
JQ: Now, the people we took were in the main were ground crew and they enjoyed it but we ran out of ordinary ground crew. I don’t know how many I did. I didn’t do that many but I did do some so we took some WAAFs. They decided they’d let the WAAFs come. We didn’t organise it so they were provided with sick bags and we did exactly the same as we always did. We went around, steep turns, around, out comes the sick bags whoo [laughs] and then we came back again and I think, I think if I remember rightly I think I think it was one of those, this business I’ve told you of the bomb aimer going to sleep when he was supposed to be map reading I think that was why we were at -
CB: Right.
JQ: Two hundred feet.
CB: Did you, how many did you take at a time and how did they actually get the experience of looking?
JQ: I think they enjoyed it and they all -
CB: But how many would you take at a time?
JQ: Oh it wouldn’t be, it wasn’t many. Four or five. And they’d be up, standing beside me and I’ve got a feeling some of them went down.
CB: And behind you. Yeah.
JQ: You’d get two at the side I think, to watch. To watch. I think you might get two in the bomb aimer’s position. I can’t remember exactly but I know we had some at the side and I think that’s where the others must have gone but we never had more than four or five.
CB: And they just sat on the floor.
JQ: Oh they sat on the floor on the way to and from.
CB: But your full crew was there was it?
JQ: Oh yeah.
CB: Yeah.
JQ: We had a full crew.
CB: Right. Ok. What was the most memorable part of your career in the RAF?
JQ: Blimey what a question [pause]. I can’t tell you. It’s all pretty memorable actually.
CB: Well you’ve done really well. So, John Quine thank you.
[machine paused]
JQ: The war. They didn’t look out we just -
JB: You just packed them in did you?
CB: How many could you carry in a -
JQ: They just sat on the floor in the back.
JB: Yeah.
JQ: And we gave them blankets.
JB: Right.
JQ: Which we took with us. I think it was about thirty or something like that.
JB: Really.
JQ: Because we hadn’t got, we hadn’t got any bombs on of course.
JB: No. No.
JQ: That’s why we were able to take a weight like that but I think, I don’t think they were in much comfort.
JB: No.
CB: But they just wanted to get back.
JQ: Yeah.
JB: So why were they special that they got -
JQ: Oh we never found out why.
JB: No.
JQ: Never heard.
CB: No. If you take the Buckingham, the airfields at Westcott and Oakley received fifty seven thousand POWs.
JQ: That’s amazing isn’t it?
CB: Yeah. In that operation.
JQ: Yeah.
CB: Operation Exodus.
JQ: Yes. I remember the name Exodus.
CB: Yeah. Normally a Lancaster could take twenty five but that was really pushing it.
JQ: Well it could have been twenty five. It could have been. I said thirty but, you know I’m guessing a bit but I thought of something just now that I hadn’t told you. What question did you ask John?
JB: How many prisoners of war could you get -
JQ: Oh that’s right, you did.
JB: In a Lancaster.
JQ: Yeah. Now, I can’t just think. If I think in the next few moments I’ll -
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 John Wakeford Quine
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
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
2016-08-05
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AQuineJW160805, PQuineJW1603
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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02:48:07 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
John volunteered for the Royal Air Force as a pilot. He went to Lord’s cricket ground, followed by the Initial Training Wing at Scarborough. He spent 10 hours on Tiger Moths in Carlisle. After a short time at RAF Heaton Park in Manchester, John went to Moncton in Canada, subsequently training for six months in various places in America. He returned to RAF Harrogate, followed by RAF Windrush where John learnt to fly on Oxfords. At RAF Peplow, he flew Wellingtons and was picked by a crew to be their pilot. RAF Lindholme followed, where John spent some time on Halifaxes, Wellingtons, and then Lancasters.
John had his commissioning interview on the same day as his wedding and joined 170 Squadron at RAF Hemswell in December 1944 where he carried out eight operations. He describes one of the eight operations to Bottrop when they were hit by anti-aircraft fire but managed to return safely.
John volunteered for the Pathfinders and was posted to 582 Squadron at RAF Little Staughton, flying Lancasters. He explains how they initially acted in a supporter role before progressing to dropping flares and markers.
John took part in Operation Manna in Rotterdam and fetched some prisoners of war from Juvincourt in France. He then went to RAF Dunkeswell where he test flew some Lancasters before returning to RAF Little Staughton from where he was demobbed. He describes the Cook’s tours he did for groundcrew and WAAFs.
Contributor
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Sally Coulter
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Devon
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Manchester
England--Scarborough
England--Shropshire
England--Yorkshire
Canada
United States
New Brunswick
New Brunswick--Moncton
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Bottrop
Netherlands
Netherlands--Rotterdam
170 Squadron
582 Squadron
anti-aircraft fire
bomb dump
bombing
Cook’s tour
coping mechanism
crewing up
Halifax
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
love and romance
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
RAF Dunkeswell
RAF Harrogate
RAF Hemswell
RAF Lindholme
RAF Little Staughton
RAF Peplow
sanitation
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1155/11713/AThompsonKE160419.2.mp3
58bc6610c59b8ca35052da667c084ed2
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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Thompson, Katherine
Katherine Ellen Thompson
K E Thompson
Katherine Ellen Kolff
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Katherine Ellen Thompson (b. 1936). She grew up in Rotterdam and remembers life under occupation and the Hunger Winter and Operation Manna.
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
2016-04-19
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
Thompson, KE
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the eighth, nineteenth of April 2016 and I am in Hemel Hempstead with Mrs. Ellen Thompson and we are going to talk about her experiences in Holland during the war and particularly her experiences with Operation Manna. So, Ellen, what I’d like to do is start from the earliest days, what is the earliest recollections you have of life and then just talk through.
KT: I remember when we lived in Rotterdam, I remember walking a long, long way to school every day. I used to go to Montessori School and we had no leather shoes, we had wooden shoes to walk on, so we walked with my brother a long way to this Montessori school and walked all the way home again. This was probably in 1942, but there was a time when we were evacuated, we couldn’t go to school anymore because it was too dangerous to go, so we went to a Roman Catholic school just up the road, a few, well maybe about two hundred yards, so we went there for a while, we were evacuated from the Montessori school and there, I don’t really remember very much what we did there, we must have done sums, we must have done Dutch but all I remember is having to learn to knit and it was very, it wasn’t easy because the nuns were very strict, I had to hold my thumb on the needle all the time while I was moving the wool across. So, that’s all I remember from this school. Now, we lived in a house in Rotterdam which was, there was a pond in front of it, a lot of Dutch streets have got singels, they’re called, and they’re water, there’s a lot of water there and it was just, it was a bolver house, so there was somebody living downstairs and we were upstairs on the first floor and the second floor. And I remember during the war we were quite hungry most of the time but we managed fine because we had a housekeeper who every half year would go with a pram and took linen from my mother’s cupboard and took silver from the cupboards and used to walk all the way to the east of the country, so that would be easily a hundred miles with a pram and she wasn’t the only person who did it, a lot of people went because there were rich farmers in the East and there she would get eggs, she would get rice, I don’t know why she got rice but I remember that she brought back rice, cause the rice wouldn’t have grown in Holland so why she had rice? And potatoes she brought back and other foods, that you could get there, they didn’t want money, they wanted linen, they wanted silver. And I said, well, what did you do? What did you eat then on the way back? Oh, she said, I just had an egg, a raw egg and I just ate this egg and then walked on again. How she guarded these possessions during the night, when she slept, I don’t know because people would have wanted to steal those I think, you know, it was precious stuff, the food in particular. So I remember that and then she would come back and we had some food again. There was a central kitchen where we got, I remember getting pea soup there, you could go and collect this pea soup there. I don’t remember being hungry but my father had this hunger oedema, his belly swelled up and his legs swelled up, he would have died if the war have gone on much longer, but we were fed like you would, you would feed your children other than yourself. We had in the attic some tins of evaporated milk and we were quite naughty, we opened some of these tins when we were really hungry and we were told off, my parents told us off, they had to be kept just in case we were really dying of hunger. So we stopped eating this evaporated milk. How we opened it I don’t remember but we did open it. My brother was born in 1944, which was not a good time to have a baby and my mother fed my brother Walter himself, herself, but she must have also got some milk from a sort of central depot, I don’t know because I remember we had a little stove in the sitting room and my mother would heat up this milk and there was one day when one drop of this milk fell on the stove and my father scraped this burnt milk off to eat it, that’s how hungry he was, one burnt drop of milk. We ate tulip bulbs, very nice, you know, if they were cheaper here I would buy it and eat them. That was really quite nice. We ate sugar beets, my mother used to boil the sugar beets and then she made pancakes with the fibre and the syrup, the sugar syrup came out of that and we had that draped over the sugar beet pancakes, which was fine, was alright. Now, one day I do remember, the aeroplanes coming over and my brother and I were upstairs and we’ve seen it, it was all meant to fall on the cattle market, but of course not everything fell on the cattle market and we knew that it was coming because there’d been an edict from the police station and we lived next door to the police station that if you had any food that fell in your garden or on your little front garden or wherever you lived, you had to give it to the police station and they would then distribute it. So we looked and it looked really as if little bits of paper fluttered down but maybe there were bits of paper that fluttered down as well, that’s what I remember. But there was flour that fell down, big bags of flour, one of these bags of flour was seen to fall in the water in front of the house and one bag of flour fell in a tree and people of course climbed up the tree and tried to get this bag of flour out and even weeks later there were still people climbing into the tree to get little bits of flour, scraped them off this tree and people were also trying to get, they must have seen this flour coming into this water and trying with a hook and a piece of rope, trying to get it out, I don’t think they got it. Now on this little street we had in front of us a bag of chocolate fell, a chocolate was I think in tins, and my father brought it into the house and said yes, here, look, this is chocolate, we must give it to the police station, my father was a very honourable man, who always did as he was told, my mother said, no, we are going to keep that. My father, no, no, no, we must give it to the police station. So we never had any of this chocolate. Not even one tin we kept. And my mother is, thought of, to seeing policemen eating chocolate of course. Did we ever get any of this chocolate? No. It was, they could have distributed one bar along the road but they didn’t. So we never had any of that chocolate [laughs]. End.
CB: Ok. So, we are just restarting on the basis that Ellen remembers the drops, the drop of food and flour and chocolate. What food did you get from the police as a family?
KT: None at all. No, we were never, it was never distributed. My mother said that she saw the police eating chocolate, well, it’s quite possible they did because how would they have distributed it? And my father didn’t even keep one tin of chocolate out of this big bag which fell in our garden really, right in front of the house. So, no, we didn’t get any. But a lot of people must have had food and we didn’t, we weren’t actually dying of hunger, so, it was alright. My grandmother had a garden and I think we got potatoes probably from this garden, I can’t remember, we did have potatoes and that may well have come from my grandmother’s garden. But we didn’t have a car so how any food from my grandmother, who lived a long way away about, well, about forty, fifty miles away, how that would have arrived in Rotterdam I’m not sure, because all we had was a bicycle and trains weren’t really running and you couldn’t get petrol anyway. So we didn’t get, we personally didn’t get any food but I am sure that other people kept a chocolate and good luck to them and had flour and were able to make pancakes or bread or something but we personally did not.
CB: So you talked earlier about the housekeeper going to collect food from a long way but that wasn’t that often so where did your food as a family come from, most of the time?
ET: Yes, things were rationed, you could get certain things so, well, yeah, there were very basic things, there were potatoes, I remember potatoes and there were sugar beets and that’s what we ate most of the time, sugar beet, I remember, almost every day. Potatoes we ate and there was a central kitchen where you, once a day you could get soup and we had somebody who collected this soup and we ate this soup. We had some bread but not very much.
CB: What was your father’s job?
ET: My father worked in the harbour in Rotterdam. I think, he wasn’t a harbour master but he was sort of one below the harbour master, so he went to work every day in the harbour, which was quite dangerous as well because they were bombing the harbour. But, yes.
CB: He always worked in the harbour, did he?
ET: Yes. He did.
CB: Ok. And that carried on after the war as well?
ET: No, he, then he left, he left, in 1946 we went and lived in Flushing, Vlissingen, used to have a Sheerness ferry from Flushing to Sheerness and he went to work there. And that’s where we lived on till he retired in 1967.
CB: So where you were in Rotterdam was in the middle, on the edge or where was it?
ET: Right in the centre.
CB: Right.
ET: Yeah.
CB: And so you knew other people in the area?
ET: Yes, yes.
CB: And were there other children? Because you went to school, so were you playing with other children?
ET: Yes, we were playing with other children and we had quite a large garden at the back and I remember this playing with my brother and my sister there a lot, just in the garden really. We didn’t go out, we didn’t play much with other children, I don’t remember. I did have some other friends who lived near the Montessori school and, but locally I don’t think there were many children living there at all. No, I don’t remember playing with children in the neighbourhood. Near the Montessori school I had friends there and went to their house but we, I don’t we had children coming to our house, not really.
CB: What do you remember about other families and how they were fed?
ET: I don’t remember.
CB: Ok.
ET: I must have been very self-centred.
CB: Well, as a
ET: As a child, yes.
CB: As children you have other things.
ET: Yeah.
CB: How old, was your sister older than you?
ET: No, she is younger, she was born in 1940.
CB: Younger, right.
ET: My brother was born in 1938.
CB: ’38?
ET: Yeah.
CB: Right, ok. So, what did he do? Did he go to the same school or?
ET: Yeah, yeah, he went to the same school, we walked together to the school. Yeah.
CB: Ok.
ET: Every day. And I remember picking up, I don’t really know why, cigarette ends, I think I gave those to somebody, they were just lying on the street and he was very pleased to have all these cigarette ends, so he must have rolled another cigarette from all these leftover bits.
CB: Could he have then sold them to people for pocket money?
ET: Maybe he did, I gave them to this old man and he was always very pleased to have all these bits of cigarettes.
CB: Right.
ET: It’s all I remember.
CB: The Montessori school you were evacuated from, why was that? Where was it?
ET: It was in Rotterdam.
CB: Yes, but where? Was it close to the docks? I wonder why
ET: I don’t think it was.
CB: Why they evacuated from?
ET: No, we couldn’t go there. I don’t think it was bombed. I don’t remember, maybe it was too dangerous to go there for a while. We weren’t in this Roman Catholic school for very long. Maybe for a while we couldn’t go there, I don’t’ remember why we couldn’t go there. No, I don’t remember.
CB: So, what we are talking about is this experience of the delivery by air of food, was the end of April 1945 and the beginning of May.
ET: Yes, yes.
CB: What did you know about other drops? Did you get to know about air drops of food?
ET: I think we saw a picture in the newspaper that other people in other areas in the country had also had drops, yes. Yes, we did know about that, yeah, definitely.
CB: What did you know about why the food was being dropped?
ET: Oh well, because, you know, we were hungry and people were helping us. And we were very pleased, it was really exciting to see this food coming down, definitely. Yeah, yeah.
CB: And what was the Germans reactions, because there must have been Germans around?
ET: Yeah, there were Germans, I really don’t know, we did have Germans come to the house sometimes because we had Jews living in the house. We did know and they searched houses because other people had Jews in the house. We didn’t, we had Jews for not very long but we had them for a while. And they searched the house, they were right in the attic and they didn’t find them thank goodness sake. So that’s the only thing I remember these Germans coming in and we didn’t know any German at the time so If they’d asked us something we couldn’t have answered so that was just as well. And so, that’s all I remember about the Germans. I remember after the war, is that interesting? After the war there were people who collaborated with the Germans and they, and we lived right next to the police station and we remember sitting there, day after day, right next to the entrance of the police station, because the people who collaborated with the German, NSBos they were called, they had to walk down the street with an orange ribbon in between their thumbs and they had to have their heads shaved and they were a sort of, I can’t remember, I can’t think of the word now, but they were put down, you know, they were all [unclear] and they had done a bad job during the war and they shouldn’t have done that. And then they were just let go again. I don’t think they were put in prison or anything. Later on my mother went to a hairdresser who was called [unclear], after the war when we lived in Flushing, and my father said she was not allowed to go there because he was one of these people who had collaborated with the Germans, but she still went. But he said, no, he didn’t like it that she went there.
CB: So, just as a question on that, they were effectively with a ribbon between their thumbs, they were paraded around the street.
ET: Yes, they were paraded around the streets, yes.
CB: Yes.
ET: And you could throw things at them.
CB: And who did that? So the police organised [unclear] or someone else?
ET: The police organised, yeah, they were taken to the police station, so, who organised that I don’t know, maybe the police or maybe the people who felt, I think the police probably organised that.
CB: So, as they walk around, then what did the population do?
ET: They booed and things and then people felt better about themselves, people that were put down.
CB: Did they throw some things?
ET: They did throw things, I
CB: What did they throw at them?
ET: Tomatoes, I remember. Yeah, there wasn’t much food to throw, of course. They wouldn’t have thrown eggs at them, they would have eaten the eggs, but, I remember I was quite excited sitting there watching these people going into the police station, what happened there I don’t know. They weren’t put in prison or anything but they were just shown that they shouldn’t have done what they did.
CB: Men and women?
ET: Mostly men. There were some women, but mostly men, yeah. They thought they were onto a good thing. But of course the hairdresser, I remember, he was called [unclear], so that’s rather a German word, the German name, so maybe he had relations in Germany, I don’t know.
CB: Right. Ok, we’ll stop for a minute.
ET: Ok.
CB: Now the origin of the interview with Ellen Thompson is that Roy Briggs, an RAF veteran introduced, did the introduction in the first place and he’s got his logbook open, so we are going to talk about how he was involved in Operation Manna. So, Roy, you were on the first of the sorties? What day was that?
RB: It was the 29th of April 1945.
CB: Yeah.
RB: Prior to that we did know that they were trying to get food into Holland, they were talking to the Germans about getting ships in and they wouldn’t play ball. We didn’t, we went on a cross country before that and we went round Norfolk looking for windmills [laughs], but of course I had no idea why we were going around looking for windmills. On the 29th we got called into the briefing room and we were told that we were not gonna drop bombs, we were gonna drop food from a pretty low altitude and a pretty low speed. We had, they had not got permission from the Germans, they had been trying to but they were gonna announce over the BBC to the Dutch people that we were gonna go over, they were hoping the Germans wouldn’t fire at us. We were told there was various foods which the Dutch people needed and we took off as normal and kept low over Holland and dropped the food.
CB: Your first sortie was where? Your first drop?
RB: Yeah. Sorry, I lost the pages, coming over.
CB: Just checking the pages.
RB: Yes, on the 29th we dropped food on Valkenburg airfield, that was a three hour trip. The next day, on the 30th we got called to the briefing room again and they told us that we had to drop food and there’d be no firing at us so they’d gonna have to send more aircraft over on the next day and we dropped food on Delft, that was a three hour trip. I’m not too sure of this, whether or not it was after we came back from the second or when we came back from the third but they said that they had agreed with the Germans that they, we could do it and they weren’t gonna fire at us. The third one was on the 5th of May, on the first of May and that was on Rotterdam. That was a two hour forty five trip. When we were going over, we were low enough to see people waving to us and with flags and anything out of tall buildings and that, yes, so after that we carried on and on the 2nd we went to Rotterdam again and that was the same time, two hours forty five and on the 3rd we went back to Valkenburg airfield, which is a two hour fifty trip and I know on the 7th we went to Rotterdam again, that was a three hour forty trip, so, yeah, that was it. At the time, I think we all enjoyed it afterwards because it was a, felt we are doing something good. Afterwards, we did get some feedback and they said that there were about eighteen to twenty thousand extra deaths in Holland during the winter of ’44-’45 which in the main they put down to peoples being shorted of food. A little while afterwards, there was also an article [unclear] but they learned a lot about food and feeding babies as they came, got born because people were forced, you know, being short of food, but they, they had information of what, when babies got back to normal depending on when they conceived and the food become back again.
CB: What was your reaction as a crew to what you were seeing as you made the passes to make the delivery?
RB: Yeah, we were pleased that we were doing something and people were giving us a great welcome. I don’t, I can’t remember this but it was a, in my mind that about the last there was a field marked thank you RAF in flowers. They had done it, I can’t say we saw it but this is the stories that were going round anyway. I believe there was just an odd German fighter, the odd bullied up but I don’t think we lost any aircraft on Operation Manna at all.
CB: And what speed and height, so when you were at Valkenburg, that’s an airfield, so what height and speed did you operate?
RB: I think it was about two hundred and fifty feet, if I remember rightly. Yeah.
CB: Right. What was the significance of that height, did you know?
RB: Well, They’d only done in nets the food, there was no parachutes, and they worked out that they thought that would probably do less damage at that sort of height.
CB: I was wondering why they didn’t put it down lower, if it was on an airfield, you see.
RB: Well, I think it was the same height wherever you were, yeah.
CB: Yeah. Now, Rotterdam you got some tall buildings there, so what height?
RB: I think as far as I can remember, it was all about two hundred and fifty feet, yeah.
CB: Yeah. And how did you know where to drop?
RB: I believe there was smoke markers dropped by Mosquitos, I believe, but you know it was daylight and that we, we could do map reading and get there fairly good, yes. And the aircraft in front of you were dropping, so, you just, yeah.
CB: So the RAF bomber system was to fly a stream rather than in formation.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So, here we are, that’s normally at night so he we are in daytime, so how did the stream work? How close were you?
RB: I mean, not all that close to be dangerous, it’s, you would keep away from anybody in the day you could see where you couldn’t at night.
CB: A quarter of a mile apart or closer?
RB: Oh no, no, less than that.
CB: A few hundred yards?
RB: Oh yes, yeah, yes. Yeah, I mean, we would take off once every, less than a minute so if we were all going to the same, from our squadron, you know, we would all be following that and, yeah.
CB: So, where were you flying from?
RB: RAF Fiskerton.
CB: Right.
RB: Which was just about four or five miles from Lincoln Cathedral.
CB: Yeah. So what route did you take?
RB: We went down to [unclear], we crossed the coast at Southwold, I believe, and went across and then
CB: And it was always the same route, wherever you were dropping, was it?
RB: On that part yes, I believe, yeah.
CB: Ok. So, and the sorties were, the length varied according to how far you had to go or the speed you went at?
RB: Yeah, but, [unclear]
CB: And did you, in order to make sure the minimum impact damage occurred, did the pilot throttle back to a much lower speed than usual?
RB: No, I don’t think so, he just carried on in normal speed and then the bomb aimer just opened up.
CB: So that would be what speed?
RB: I think it was about, I think that was about two hundred miles [unclear] Yeah.
CB: Ok. And when in your position as the wireless operator you were looking out, where were you looking out from?
RB: I could, I don’t know, long [unclear], if I was on, I was in the, I could put me head in the astrodome and look round, yes.
CB: And you could see backwards what happened to the drop? What did you see?
RB: Yeah. Well, I remember, I think, you know, people kept out all the way because there was other coming down, you know, you just saw the other aircraft dropping.
CB: And then, the delivery was by net so it was [unclear]
RB: The nets opened uply and let it get all scattered
CB: Ah, right, the nets didn’t go on the ground.
RB: No. They only hold, I mean, in the aircraft.
CB: Ok. And then what about the impact, how many of the delivery items broke?
RB: We couldn’t really tell.
CB: [unclear] cause flour is a [unclear]
RB: There was, some broke but, yeah.
CB: Ok. Thank you. Yes, ask the questions.
ET: Did you drop the flour and the chocolate or did you drop other things?
RB: Yes [unclear], I think dried egg was one thing.
ET: Right.
RB: I believe salt and tin, it was a lot of tin stuff in it, I think, yeah.
CB: Cause that wouldn’t be damaged in the impact, would it?
RB: No, no, no. Yeah.
CB: And when you were loading up, before the sortie, did you see what was being loaded into the?
RB: No, not really. We were being briefed when [unclear]
CB: [unclear] dropped
RB: It was all in and the bomb doors were closed, the [unclear], yeah.
CB: Ok. Right, we are restarting now with Ellen. And having had the fill in from Roy about actually doing the delivery, we are back to Ellen on her being on the receiving end. So, in theory the deliveries would benefit everybody but from what you said just now, the family directly didn’t.
ET: No.
CB: But do you think that other people did?
ET: Definitely, yes. My father must have been the only person who gave his chocolate that fell in his front garden to the police and I don’t blame people for keeping their own bit that fell in their garden or in their street, maybe sharing it with the neighbours but my father didn’t, he was very sort of honourable man and he gave it to the police station and the police benefitted I’m sure. But nothing was later on distributed, we didn’t get anything, I’m quite sure we didn’t. But other people would have shared their load what fell in their garden with their neighbours and their family, so a lot of people did benefit, definitely, yes.
RB: I would think that yours was an odd drop, you know, because what I remember the airfield and that, it was a big area where it got dropped and, you know, there’s people round and collecting.
ET: Yeah, my brother said it was meant to fall on the cattle market and, which was quite near us, the cattle market, so that didn’t all fall exactly on the cattle market.
RB: I think the cattle market would be a very small drop.
ET: Yes.
RB: So, you can drop it on [unclear]
CB: And what about your neighbours, did they manage to get some of the supplies from elsewhere?
ET: I don’t remember that at all, I don’t remember that at all, so.
CB: So, at what stage did the food supplies start to get better?
ET: Quite quickly, quite quickly after the war because there was food imported from England, from America and you think that the Swedes gave us bread after the war but there must have been still quite a lot of scarcity of food because I remember we all got this little white loaf of bread, like half of white loaf you would have here and we ate it all, the children all, we had this loaf of bread disappeared and we all had our own bread and I think I ate it in two days but my father only had one slice every day and I remember after a week it had gone mouldy but he still ate it, you know, because he was still hungry. So even after the war people were still quite short of food. But it did get better quite quickly. And there was still rationing definitely after the war, you couldn’t get sweets or anything but we didn’t want sweets, we just wanted food really.
CB: But there was rationing in Britain until 1954.
ET: Yeah, of course there was, yes, yeah.
CB: Yeah, so, the end of the war was effectively the, I’m just getting that, oh!
RB: Oh, crikey, it broke!
CB: The end of the war was the 8th of May and what recollection do you have of the population at that time?
ET: Oh, we were all cheering out in the streets, I remember that, waving flags, yes, people went all out in the streets and they were happy and I didn’t go to school and we had a day off school, I think and orange flags were flying and, red, white and blue flags of course and everybody was singing and yeah, was a good time, definitely, I remember that quite well. Cause that’s over now.
CB: Do you recall that the authorities arranged parties, street parties or were they spontaneous?
ET: I don’t think so, people just spontaneously got together and did things. There may have been but I don’t remember that.
CB: And did, was there more food at that time?
ET: Yes, there was, there was definitely more food because we got Marshall Aid, did we get Marshall Aid from the Americans? That definitely did make a difference.
CB: So moving on after the celebrations, what are your recollections of the period after the war?
ET: Well, I think everybody felt much happier, of course my father had something to eat again, definitely, he was looking better and we cycled a lot, we went out and cycled a lot to my grandparents, we went there, I’m sure we went on the bicycle, it took quite a long time to get there with my little brother on the back and we stayed there quite a lot with my grandmother and it was safe to travel because it used not to be safe to travel. And that was in, yeah, that was in 1945 and then we left Rotterdam in 1946.
CB: Why was it not safe to travel during the war?
ET: Well, because there were Germans who could hold you up and they would ask what you were doing, grownups definitely, children was alright I think, but grownups would be stopped and asked where were they going and what were they doing, because there were a lot of, my aunt and uncle were in the Resistance, there were a lot of people in the Resistance, my father wasn’t but my father’s sister worked for the Resistance, which was very dangerous, she had friends who were killed by the Germans because they were found out to work for the Resistance. So you could be stopped any time and asked what you were doing and why you were there and you know, who you were and that sort of thing.
CB: And did other members of the family know who was in the Resistance?
ET: I think my father knew that his sister was in the Resistance, yes, yes. They did a lot, they did, [unclear], and she had, I remember later on she had photos of people on her desk, that were in the Resistance, who’d been shot at by the Germans and she kept all these photos on her desk, it’s quite sad. So
CB: So, after the war, how did the Resistance people come out in public or didn’t they?
ET: I don’t think they did, they just kept that quiet, I only found out later, I don’t think I knew during the war, definitely not, my father must have known but we didn’t know, no.
CB: So, what prompted your parents to leave Rotterdam?
ET: My father became burgomaster in Flushing, in Vlissingen, and he got an odd job and he went there. He was a good, he applied, you know, the Queen appoints the burgomaster and he was very happy there and he had a lot to do with people that had helped Flushing in the war, a lot of English people that he, they came to see him and he came to see them. I remember there was a colonel Dawson and I don’t remember there is a memorial in Flushing to two English people that helped Flushing to be liberated, because I think that was liberated before Rotterdam was. The South was liberated before the North was. And he did a lot of inviting English people to come over to, for this memorial. Bob and I went to Colonel Dawson, didn’t we? We lived in Rye and I don’t remember what division he was, in the English army he was, I think.
CB: Holland being on the way between Britain and Germany, got it more than its fair share of crashed, shot down aircraft. What understanding did you have about that?
ET: None at all, I think, I really didn’t, my parents didn’t really talk to us about these things, you know, you shelter your children from all these dangerous things, so, we just lived a sort of rather sheltered life and stayed totally innocent, I think. My parents wouldn’t have said anything about danger or about terrible things that were happening and we didn’t have television and of course there was no television and we did have a radio, you were allowed to listen to the radio, I think, but my parents didn’t tell us much.
CB: And after the war, what happened then? I mean, did people start talking about it? Or just get on with that?
ET: Yes, just, they just got on with normal things again.
CB: So you went to school in Flushing?
ET: Yes.
CB: What did you do after that? When did you leave school?
ET: I left school when I was eighteen and I went to Amsterdam to the university and then I came to England and I married, came to England.
CB: What prompted you to come to England?
ET: I married an Englishman.
CB: No, but, what in, did you meet him in Holland?
ET: Yes.
CB: Yeah, right.
ET: Yeah.
CB: At the university?
ET: No, no, he was in the navy and he, there was a [unclear] that was my first [unclear].
CB: Yeah.
ET: He was in the navy and he was an officer on a minesweeper and they came to Flushing and my father being the burgomaster invited the officers and that’s how I met him and I just happened to be at home. So
CB: So then he stayed in the navy, did he? So you moved
ET: No, no, he didn’t stay, he was in national, he did national service then.
CB: Ah, right.
ET: And then
CB: So when are we talking about?
ET: We are talking about 1957.
CB: Ok. And you met Bob later.
ET: Met Bob later, yes. I met Bob later in 1982, so much later.
CB: What were you doing then, Bob?
US: 1982.
ET: You worked at [unclear].
US: I had already started at [unclear].
ET: Yeah.
CB: Were you working there?
ET: Yeah, no, no, I was a teacher.
CB: Oh, were you? What did you specialise in teaching?
ET: I taught in a junior school, I went to a teacher’s training college.
CB: Over here?
ET: Yeah, over here.
CB: What’s your degree in?
ET: Psychology.
CB: Right. Are we being analysed at the moment? [laughs]
ET: No, everybody thinks so, but that’s total nonsense. [laughs]
CB: These are interesting things, you know, in the background. Right, and then you came to Hemel Hempstead when?
ET: 1984 I think, must have been 1984. So we’ve been here for like thirty two, thirty one years.
CB: In the time after the war, did you have any links with people who had experienced war activities and discussed those with them?
ET: No.
CB: So, your first husband was in the navy
ET: Yeah.
CB: So you met a lot of navy people. Did they discuss experiences or was it something they didn’t talk about?
ET: No, they didn’t, I don’t think they talked about it really. He, I only knew he was born in 1933 and he was born in Leeds but his mother as German, his father was German and they came, they had their children born in 1933 already in Leeds, because they had family in Leeds. His sister was born in 1938 in Oxford and they were still in Germany, in Berlin, but they fled Berlin in 1939, only just but their children [unclear] English because they knew
CB: Cause they were born here.
ET: They were born here, they knew they would have to leave, so. They were Jewish. Or they still are Jewish. So, it’s quite an interesting background.
CB: So what was the origin of your father’s and mother having Jewish people in their house? What prompted them to do that?
ET: They were, they must have known these Jewish people, and people, the Germans rounded up Jewish people, sent them to camps and we must have known these people and they came and they sheltered there, not for very long, I don’t know where they went afterwards but they definitely were there. Other people did as well, was dangerous because if you did, if they knew you did, you’d be shot.
CB: So when the Germans came to search the house, what did they, they were looking for Jewish people, were they?
ET: Yes. Yes.
CB: What did they do when they came in?
ET: I just, I remember being upstairs and they came into the room and they just, there was a cupboard behind, they looked in this cupboard and I think if they, there was an entrance to where the attic was through that cupboard but they didn’t look any further so. Then they left again. They searched a lot of houses, not just our house.
CB: Then the Jewish people in the loft, did they stay up there all the time or did they come down in the daytime?
ET: Oh, they never came down.
CB: They never?
ET: No, no, they didn’t come down. But they weren’t there for very long, maybe a month or so, they weren’t there for very long.
CB: Because you said other people in the street also sheltered
ET: Not other people in the street but other people there, that we knew or had heard of, had Jewish people as well, sheltered them. That’s what she did really, if you knew somebody like that [unclear]
CB: Yeah, absolutely. Ok. Thank you.
ET: Thank you.
CB: What was your recollection or the family’s experience early in the war?
ET: Yes, I was really too young to remember because I was only three and a half at the beginning of the war but I believed that my parents took us to a little cottage in the countryside, my father had a friend who had this little cottage and he lent it to my father when it was very bad the bombing at the beginning of the war. There, I remember there is a photo with me and my sister and my brother in a go-cart and we are being taken to the beach somewhere in this go-cart. And that was because it was safer to be there than to be in Rotterdam. So we were lucky that my father was able to take us there. My father stayed in Rotterdam and only came at the weekend, my mother looked after us in this little cottage.
CB: This is before the full invasion by the Germans took place?
ET: Yes, yes.
CB: So we are talking about
ET: 1941, probably. My sister was born in 1940 and she is very small still in this photo.
CB: 1940, yeah. Ok. Thank you.
ET: Thank you.
CB: Now, Ellen, bearing in mind that your husband is an ex-navy man, how did you come to be linked in with the Royal Air Force Reprobates?
ET: Well, Bob used to go to a keep fit class, for people that do keep fit sitting in a chair and it was run by a lady called Leslie and Roy was there as well and there were two other people from the charity shop, they joined in as well and I used to take Bob to this gym club and Roy was there as well and then Roy became friendly with Ines, Ines also was there doing her keep fit, and Roy and Ines used to come into the charity shop where I help out a few times a week and so then Roy and I got talking and then I realised that Roy used to be in the RAF and told me that he dropped food in Holland and I told him that I was probably one of these people who at least saw the food coming down, maybe we didn’t eat it but at least saw the food coming down and that’s how we got to know each other.
CB: Sounds really good. Yes. So he said he didn’t expect to be feeding you again?
ET: No, no.
CB: Sixty five years later.
ET: Yeah, that’s right.
RB: I like that.
CB: It’s good, isn’t it? A good [unclear], but it’s a serious one. Coincidence, it’s an extraordinary coincidence.
ET: Yes, it is, it is really, yeah, yeah. And we’d been to Roy’s Christmas dinner, haven’t we? We’ve been twice, I think, haven’t we? And you’ve had some other celebration.
CB: This is the aircrew association.
ET: Yeah, the aircrew association, yeah, which is a nice bunch of people, aren’t they? And you have had some of your grandchildren there as well, haven’t you?
US: Yes, yes.
ET: Yes, it was a very nice connection.
CB: What have your children done in the forces? Did they do anything in the forces?
ET: No, no, because conscription wasn’t relevant anymore, no. They have not.
US: [unclear]
CB: We are just going to run a video about Operation Manna that is taken from the telly a little while ago and we’ll want to link this with the interview. [file missing] After the war, occasionally you perhaps engaged in conversation about this, what other stories do you remember coming out that were appropriate about the time?
ET: Well, I do remember that after the war of course people, it was easier to get food and people after the war died of eating too quickly too many foods left over that are rich in nutrition [sic] and their bodies really couldn’t cope with it and people did die of overeating. So-called overeating at the time.
CB: So when the RAF and the Americans were dropping this food, was it all the same or did it come in stages in nutrition value? So was it more nutritional later so that people didn’t suffer from overeating?
ET: I think it was probably almost immediately after the food drops that people ate chocolate which is very rich food of course and people weren’t used to eating it. I think it was initially and then gradually people realised that they should only eat a little bit at a time and not overeat too much, cause their bodies really couldn’t cope with it.
CB: How many people did you ever meet who had been starving during the war? How many people did you meet later?
ET: Who actually died of starving?
CB: No.
ET: Who starved? Yes. Well, everybody, everybody had, was hungry. Just the neighbours and everybody, just round about. Definitely.
CB: Was there rationing of food in Holland after the war?
ET: Yes, there was, definitely, there was sweet rationing, you could only buy a little bit of sweet and there was rationing of eggs, I think, were rationed and I think also meat was rationed, till about 1948, ’49 and then I think you could get most things again.
CB: I asked the question because food rationing in Britain didn’t stop until 1954.
ET: No, I know, yes, yes. No, I don’t think it went on that long in Holland.
CB: Ok.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Katherine Thompson and Roy Briggs
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-04-19
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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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AThompsonKE160419
Conforms To
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Pending review
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00:55:23 audio recording
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eng
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Civilian
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Great Britain
Netherlands
England--Lincolnshire
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Netherlands--Vlissingen
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1944
1945
Description
An account of the resource
Katherine Ellen Thompson remembers her time in Rotterdam during the war and particularly during Operation Manna. Mentions various episodes: food shortage, bartering linen and silver for food, members of the Dutch fascist party paraded through the streets and publicly humiliated, police officers concealing rations from the people, German soldiers searching houses looking for Jews. Remembers seeing the food drops although she and her family didn’t benefit from them. Mentions her relatives being members of the Resistance. Tells of food rationing and people dying from overeating after the war. Roy Briggs, a RAF veteran, remembers his involvement in Operation Manna and gives a vivid and detailed account of how they carried out the food drops. Tells of how he met Ellen Thompson.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Peter Schulze
anti-Semitism
childhood in wartime
home front
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Resistance
round-up
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1260/17133/AGoodallOR190510.2.mp3
44539d1ad0c860a2e7faa7c8479c7fd0
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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Goodall, Oscar
Oscar Ronald Goodall
O R Goodall
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Sergeant Oscar Goodall (b. 1924, 1573376 Royal Air Force). He served as an air gunner.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2019-05-10
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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Goodall, OR
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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OG: Go on. Away you go.
JS: Ok. I’ll just start. This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewee is Jim Sheach. The interviewer is Jim Sheach. The interviewee is Oscar Goodall. The interview is taking place at Oscar’s home in Perthshire, Scotland on the 10th of May 2019. Oscar, can you tell me a little about your life before you joined the RAF?
OG: Yes. I was born in Australia and my father was a machine gunner in the 47th Regiment of South Australia and was wounded seven times. He was a machine gunner and he died through his wounds before I ever was born. Two months before I was born my father died. He had a bullet in his back which was beginning to move about and as he was employed by the South Australian government I suppose looking for water in the way back, and with a bullet in your back and your nearest doctor two hundred or three hundred miles away it wasn’t a good idea. However, he decided to have an operation to take it out before I was born. However, he died during the operation. And I lacked a father greatly and I would hang on every opportunity that I could find to try and find out from other relatives what sort of a person he was. And it appears that he was very well liked and very brave and I think this influenced my affairs when I decided to join the Air Force. I was the, one of three in Perth, up here the first three to be accepted for PNB. I was in the aircrew. I was in the Air Cadet Corps and I passed all the exams for pilot training. I was at Perth Academy and joined the Royal Air Force when I was twenty. No. When I was seventeen and, seventeen years and three months or something of that nature. I’d been playing cricket in Dundee and was knocked out rather early in the game and in a fit of rage I went away and joined up [laughs] I wasn’t taken immediately of course. I had to wait and eventually I went down to London and I was at Aberystwyth University for the beginning of my career. Passed all the exams. Got, was pushed forward into Elementary Flying Training School, EFTS near, don’t ask me the name of it, I can’t remember, near Liverpool and passed out with a strong recommendation for a possible promotion, commission and, and for pilot training. But nothing else. My maths weren’t up to the mark I don’t think for navigation. I didn’t want to be a navigator anyway. And then we all went up to Manchester waiting to be taken to Dallas and we waited and we waited and every so often fifty or so out of the two thousand of us waiting, now, I don’t know if that’s true, I don’t know the right number but that’s what I always think it was and I got fed up waiting so decided I would go and see the commanding officer and try and know. To find out how long we all were going to wait. I was told that it was, there was no way of telling. The Germans had U-boats following anything they thought might, might hold people going to America to learn. So he offered me [pause] I would be a glider pilot. He said, ‘I could get you on a course next week if you want to. But I must tell you the chances are you’ll get a commission but the chances are that you will [pause] you will be kept waiting there and having to do a military career thing for about eight, eight weeks.’ Or something of that nature for the military.
JS: Yeah.
OG: Because I had in actual fact had a go at doing a glider near Grimsby. It was more of a joke and I sat beside the man who was doing the job. The job. I didn’t fancy it very much. He said, ‘Well, it’s about all I’ve got for you but just a minute [pause] We’re short of gunners. Machine gunners. I could get you up in to a place in Inverness within two days of today and you’d be, if you’re any good that is you’d be on the job within three or four months. What would you like?’ ‘Well, I can’t make up my mind just now. I want to go back to the hut.’ It was raining. It always seemed to rain in that place you know. And one guy said, ‘What, what are you going to do then?’ I told him, ‘Become a rear gunner if possible. I don’t fancy the mid-upper turrets much. I don’t know why.’ He said, ‘Don’t you understand it’s a, it’s a dangerous thing. A lot of people get killed doing it in the rear turret. Are you still going to do it?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’ And I must tell you that at the time I thought this was a gorgeous opportunity to prove to everyone that I’m as good a man as my father was. And that’s how I become a gunner. I went to Aberdeen. Went to Inverness. But first we had three days in London. Our reactions were being taken but evidently my reactions were pretty good and still are if I may say so [laughs] So I went up there and Ansons. There were only Ansons and to get an Anson on to the ground someone had to do this. And the guy that was flying the thing wore this thing on his tie and I asked him, ‘What is that? That looks like a German tie.’ And he said, ‘Yeah. It is. I was. I flew briefly as a Polish pilot in Baron von Richthofen’s place. And then when the war came on I escaped from Poland and offered my services as a pilot and here am I.’ He said, ‘It’s not much of a job but —’ he said, ‘I like it. I like it in many ways. I got the Iron Cross for being with Richthofen.’ And he blathered for a while, He said, ‘I’ll tell you but don’t you tell any of the others.’ He said, ‘I tell them all that they have got to be ready to, when I come in to circuit, and circuit one and in that circuit you’ve got to put that things down —
JS: The undercarriage.
OG: ‘And you’ve got to count them. Sixty five turns and if you don’t get it we’ll crash.’ I sort of believed him but not really [laughs] but the rest were all terrified and he had them all counting. Every so often he would look over his shoulder at me and wink. Finished. Got up. Got away down to Market Harborough OTU. Operational Training Unit in Wellingtons. And that wasn’t a good time. We lost two or three people and one in particular we were counting them coming in after we’d been over the North Sea somewhere and we heard heard the last one coming in. Everyone was standing counting. Just one more to come and here he comes. Here he comes. Here he comes. Then there was a noise as if there was tearing canvas. Like that. And we think that it was a German had followed him in until the landing lights went on and the thing went over the top of us and went some distance away and then we heard it hit the ground. I don’t know whether it was a German that hit it. No one. We weren’t allowed to go near it. About four of five of us the next night went out to try and find out more about it but the RAF had a police force of its own and they’d got hold of us and said, ‘You’re not to go any further forward.’ However, we got leave after that and went down to, went down to four. Four. Four engine job. That was [unclear] One phrase which I will never forget. I taught it my, I taught my son what the words were and it kept him in good form. I was worried about getting lost and I, we were all choosing each other as to, and I went to my pilot and asked him, ‘What do you do if you get lost?’ He said, ‘Keep your eyes open. Look at the horizon. If you see any flashing going on and possibly searchlights go there because there you will find your friends.’ And that has been in my mind at various times in my life. I’ve said that to myself. But all the time I had somehow in the back of my mind it came up every so often my father being a machine gunner in 1917 where he was very badly wounded and I was determined I would follow in his footsteps. I did my best. I didn’t have a wonderful career. The war was beginning to teeter to an end. But I was in a most horrendous crash. We were asked to take a plane, a Lancaster up about eighty miles away to an airfield which was mostly grass and it would be, the aircraft would be taken to bits and anything which was worth keeping would be worth keeping and it would be put to some other aircraft or whatever. So away we went and went around and I was conscious at the far end there was a lot of pretty rotten looking aeroplanes. Bits off them off and bits of them on and we did the circuit and he said, ‘Right. We’re going now.’ When the flight engineer who was a Welshman, no he wasn’t, he was a Yorkshireman, said to the skipper that there was a flashing red light on this, on the landing front of the roundel area. So we went around again and it was still there and there was only one thing to do. The skipper just said, ‘Look, hang on everybody. We’re going to have a go.’ Well, it was, I was, I was in the rear turret and I undid the, undid all my straps because I had been told that there were more people burned from petrol because they couldn’t get their straps on in time. So, I took that in mind and down we came and there was a hell of a crash and I couldn’t tell you anything about it. Not one. Not a thing could I tell you about it. I was lying in a, in a, I think that the [pause] the propeller had been cutting a trench as it went along and I had to stay for a while in this hole. In a hole. I just stayed where I was and did all the things I was supposed to do and tried my feet and hands and could I do this and whatever and then I heard a voice saying, ‘There’s another one here. There’s another one here.’ And then two heads appeared over, looked down and they said, ‘This, don’t go near. Don’t. Wait. We’ll do something here. This guy’s covered with petrol. He’ll go off like an incendiary bomb. Tell the ambulance to, to, not to come near this place.’ So, he did and sooner or later I was hauled out and the doctor at this place was away playing golf [laughs] And sooner or later we, none of us were seriously ill but we didn’t fly for a week or two during which time the war went on its way and we did some things. But I was in the mess one day and Jock said, ‘Hey Jock. It’s you again. You’re on the battle order.’ ‘Oh, ok.’ So, we went in. Had this briefing room. It was filling up and then the door opened and we all sprang to attention. Then he, ‘Sit down gentlemen.’ So, the gentlemen sat down. He said, ‘Now, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do it. You’re all volunteers. You’re going to go to Rotterdam and the target is a football pitch with things around about it and you’re going to, you’re not going to bomb anything but our men there think that you may be allowed to go by the German troops. But as yet our men on the ground up there we haven’t heard from him since. There’s a chance that you’ll get off but we’ve got to do it now.’ So, I think we did it, I can’t remember how many times we did it but there was a happening which changed my life. We got over the sand dunes and there were German troops rushing to get in to the safety but we weren’t having any and away we went and I began to notice in farms, “God bless the RAF.” And then we came to the outskirts and Germans were thick on the ground. They had a lot of anti-aircraft. Twenty millimetres on lorries. And the men were keeping us in their sights. So we got to there and it wasn’t to the pilot’s liking. ‘We’ll do another one.’ Meanwhile they were piling up. I don’t know how many of us were there. I didn’t see any, any Halifaxes or German or Americans. They joined later on. And the bomb aimer who was a Welshman anyway, he said, I think I was right, there was a lorry. We were going to go right on top of this lorry and they’ve got a twenty millimetre on top and they were loading. However, there was no way we could stop going. But I hung myself out of the back of the turret because we didn’t have any Perspex at the back and I got hanging in between the guns and twisting my legs over them and then suddenly remembered that my feet could come out of the boots and, ‘Watch it, Jock. Watch it.’ So, Jock stopped worrying about his boots and looked down and this was a woman, climbed up on this lorry and it was, she was fast and she had a baby and was holding the baby in front, in front of the gun. And I can’t forget it. Some of the guys the first time around got fired on but we didn’t get fired on but some did. I don’t think anyone was downed but if any of them had one of the engines hit there would have been a sudden drop and we were doing a hundred and fifty feet up. Every church we went past I was looking up at this still. And that changed my life. That changed my life. I got, my daughter had a film and I think that I was being shown in the film but she wasn’t very sure and she phoned them up to see if she could get a better film, I think. I think this is what happened. She works in Paris. And I got a medal about two months ago for the people. The people. That’s more of a value to me than anything.
JS: I think, I think everyone I’ve spoken to.
OG: Hmmn?
JS: I think everyone I’ve spoken to who took part in Operation Manna —
OG: Yeah.
JS: The dropping food.
OG: That’s right.
JS: Was really really proud of what they did then.
OG: Well, the first time around was a disaster. Not for casualties but, but for the food in that I was fortunate enough hanging out this turret at the back. I saw the big bags of flour, stuff for children, just add water and whatever and had vitamins in it but every one that we dropped burst on landing. And there was a guy with an empty pram and he was, he was running out and I think he got hit with one of the bags but I saw him getting up again before we disappeared around because we were coming in very very close together. We had a skipper, an Australian and we had to go over this and keep flying in to German territory. The reason why we had to do it was the German Army. They had a huge German army still there. A huge number amount of tanks and whatever. The lot. And they had eaten all the food. So I think we went back quite often because the next time we went around they had a smaller bag put in a big bag and the smaller bag burst but it didn’t burst the big bag and we all cheered when we saw our bags go down on the football pitch. Now, my, my mother had given me a silk scarf to wear in the turret. Former pupil of Perth Academy scarf. And I think the third time we went I had chocolate and I wrapped it in my scarf and I put my name on it and heaved it out the back. I never saw it landing. We were away by that time. Someone in Holland has an old boy’s scarf. I’ve tried to find out something about it because I used to take a lot of adults over to Holland to Remembrance and all the rest of it and when I was there I used to ask, ‘Does anyone know —’ or whatever. But no one, no one knew so I just let it fly. When I went back once and had a look at the football pitch but by that time football was making a lot of money and I couldn’t see the one which we dropped food on at all. No. There was a big thing for people watching. But I don’t know. To anything after that [pause] was just a waste of time. But I did see, I don’t know what we were going, where we were going or why we were doing it or, I can’t remember but it’s seventy seven years ago or something of that nature. But what I remembered was that there was, there was a lot of us and in daylight and it was wonderful for me to see it in the daylight. It was a very sunny day and we were letting out Perspex those things that shimmered in the light.
JS: Window.
OG: What did they call it?
JS: Window.
OG: Window. That’s right.
JS: The radar deflecting —
OG: That’s right.
JS: Aluminium.
OG: I was busy looking at this. It was so beautiful and we were coming up to the coast and suddenly I had to shout out, and I don’t know, there was a, a rocket. A rocket number two I think it must have been. It came right through where we were and very fast and I tried to say to, ‘Did you see the rocket?’ But I don’t think anyone did. And I can’t remember what we were doing. I think we were going to Flensburg to give the Russians a fright. We weren’t bombing but Flensburg Canal and this was one of the first. I’m sure this was one of the first rockets that hit London or something because it was the way it went and when it got really high it left a vapour trail. And by which time we were well away. We could just see it And I think that’s my history, aye.
JS: Good. How did you —
OG: I’ve got a, the war was coming to an end and we were getting new aircraft because the Japanese war was not at an end and 100 Squadron had a lot of Canadians, Australians and, what was the name of the extra special daylight job? It was bigger than the normal bomber. They were practicing and practicing and practicing and none of those people got away. But I remember there was a hell of a noise coming from the sergeant’s mess and the officer’s mess. I went up to the officer’s mess because Nick, our navigator was a New Zealander and very fond of the bottle. So I went up to see if we could get a bottle of whisky because everyone was shouting and hip hip and all the rest of it. I got in but already there were no whiskies in the sergeant’s mess. A gang of officers had bought the lot. But what, what were we crying? What were we shouting? I wanted to know. They’ve dropped a bomb but I can’t remember whether it was Nagasaki or the other one and they’ll never beat it. No. No, we won’t have to go to Japan after all. And then I didn’t know enough about it so I went in to the dining area where it was quieter and got hold of someone asking a whole load of, and we were convinced but I think they dropped another one. That was the same. And I was like the rest. I got drunk. It wasn’t until a good month after that when someone, some American newspaper had it that there had been forty thousand people killed by two bombs. And they were expecting thousands in the next two or three years. Babies and everything. And I felt sorry. I felt wrong. There was no good saying look at all the soldier’s lives that they saved because the history of weaponry. My father what became a soldier because men in lorries were going around in Australia saying, ‘This is a war to end wars.’ And we were having the same thing going on here and I knew they were going to be wrong. I was sure they were going to release something worse than that and they have done. And I never, I felt that I should never have got drunk and cheered and jeered. You see the [pause] we had gone on to .5 machine guns because there were six hundred young men in Tokyo who had trained with a fighting aircraft that was designed not to land again and we had to get something that would knock them out of the sky but, and we did this. We were asked to test and we went away over the North Sea and when I moved the rear turret with the .5s on them around. The plane went on the running in for the dropping and we never flew in that plane again. They didn’t make any more. I’m sure of it. And we didn’t, we didn’t have to go to Japan after all. But there was two things. The dropping of food and the dropping of the atom bomb have influenced just about everything which I’ve done. I became a teacher and I taught more than just my subject [pause] and I was lauded by some and sneered at by others. Will that do?
JS: Well, I hope it was more of the former than the latter.
OG: When I, when the war ended we had a most interesting time and especially when we went to Italy and there was a place to land not far from Naples and we landed. But it was finished. Nothing there. There was something wrong with our aircraft and we were put on to this place and before we went some of the ground crew said, ‘Hey Jock, you’ll be alright if you take chocolate with you. The girls will lie on their backs and kick their legs in the air if you give them chocolate.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t care about that but I’ll take chocolate.’ So I did and I put it, and we had, we had special uniforms. Lightweight stuff. And I saw three females coming up and one male and I had a good look at them but they were children and I put, they said something to me and I didn’t know what they were saying. So by this time some engineers were coming up to see what was wrong and one of them said, ‘You’ve got chocolate? Give it to these children.’ He said it in English. I think he was a military, Army man. He’d been in the desert as well. ‘Yes. Yes. You give them. Give them this chocolate.’ And I said, and I took it out and the heat from the sun it was dripping all down me and I said to a little girl with fair hair, beautiful fair hair, I said, ‘No. No chocolate. No chocolate.’ She looked at me and said, ‘You goddam son of a bitch,’ in broad American [laughs] That’s another one I remember.
Other: Why don’t you tell Jim about the time you got frozen in to the turret?
OG: Eh?
Other: Tell Jim about the time you got frozen in to the turret.
OG: Oh yeah. That was awful. That was the coldest. It was the same, same time as the Germans, the Germans loosed their super tanks. What was it?
Other: Tiger tanks.
OG: It had the Russian, the Americans running for it.
Other: Oh, the Ardennes?
OG: Ah and evidently on the ground everything was frozen stiff and they’d chosen that time to put their big heavy tanks on the ground and they would break this. Well, for some reason we were, went there and it was very very cold and I don’t know how we did it and how anyone did it, I really don’t know. We came home and it was terribly cold and my oxygen thing got frozen up with wetness coming from my breath and then freezing on and I was terribly cold. And I believe it was the coldest year. Coldest of that, of the war and when we landed it was a hell of a job landing evidently. But we landed and everyone was getting out and someone, I heard a voice saying, ‘Where’s Jock? Where’s Jock?’ So I shouted out that Jock was in the turret but the turret wouldn’t move. So they got me out of it and there was a little thing you could get in to the aircraft at the back. You went out there. And a guy came along and, ‘How are you doing, Jock? How are you doing?’ Well, Jock was doing fine. ‘Here. Here you are,’ and he put a cigarette in my mouth but I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t hold it at all and so he went and got another one. I had a cigarette here in my mouth and there, and sooner or later it was beginning to go up my nose and it was very cold. No. I believe that that night caused more rear turrets and men freezing. There was just, put to a standstill for two or three days I believe with people getting frostbite. And I was always very wary about it after that but never did I experience the cold of that night ever and it was the only night when I was given a big glass of rum by someone from the officer’s mess. I don’t know. Then the war ended and we’d been away somewhere. We came back and oh the WAAFs were out on the run, on the runway and some of them had white sheets and others from the officer’s mess and the sergeant’s mess. White stuff off the dining tables and everyone was shaking. Shaking it as we went through. The war was over. And there was a long time, I took Andrew and his mother we were going to a wedding and I noticed that it was pretty close to airfields and we found one of them that I knew of and we were in a car and we went there. And they did something I was, I’d never had before and will never have again. It wasn’t the same place. I can remember going in and out but there was a Lancaster. It was an airfield but there was a Lancaster outside and I asked if I could take them in the rear turret to see it. ‘No. But I’ll do better than that.’ And he put the, put the, put the put the guard salute [pause] and it wasn’t for me. It was for the fifty two thousand. Now, there’s something that happened and I don’t mind anyone knowing about it but I, I, I’m frightened maybe that some people are still alive or of this thing. That my sister was a little girl three years old when I was born and she had a wee friend who was five. A man, a wee boy in the house next door. His, their father had been a soldier as well. And we came home and life went on and then my sister got a letter from Ian. It was, “Do you remember me? We played together. Well, I’m over in Britain. I’m a pilot. And it’s not just [pause] I get leave —” As we all did, “I get leave every six weeks. I’ve got a week’s leave. I’ve no place to go. I can’t go back to Australia and back again in that time. Could I come and visit you?” Yes. So, he appeared and I have photographs of them sitting on the beach at St Andrews. I’m not giving you the second name but Ian, on the 12th of February, at twenty one thousand feet the plane blew up outside Frankfurt. All, the pilot and the other crew, and the rest of the crew could never have survived. And my sister never married. She was in love with children which she never had herself and she was a very good teacher. When I was in hospital not long ago there was a woman and her son, ‘Is your name Goodall?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Was your sister the head of the children at the school? Because if she’s still alive will you tell her I learned more from her in a year than anyone else.’ We went to Australia, my wife and myself and we went to see the house and I really wanted to go and see the house next door. Their father, the people in that house were the same as my own people. They were one of the first of the people to land in Australia and I perhaps, perhaps it’s a different people there. Perhaps they didn’t know what happened to their son. I chickened out. If it was they’d done their, I felt their done their sadness times. It was not, it wouldn’t be nice to bring it back on again.
Other: Do you remember telling me the story of the thermos flask that fell out the aeroplane?
OG: I’ve forgotten it, Andrew. I’ve forgotten a hell of a lot. I can’t remember.
Other: And it hit the propeller. When it got sucked in to the propeller?
OG: Well, you tell it then.
Other: No. No.
OG: I’ve forgotten it.
Other: If you’ve forgotten it you’ve forgotten it.
OG: I’ve forgotten it.
Other: That’s ok.
OG: Those are the ones which I’m telling you are things which have influenced my life.
JS: Could you, could you tell me something about the rest of your crew?
OG: We decided that [pause] ok, right, the Australian, the Australians got away straight away. There was no more fighting to be done. Straight away the Australians. The Canadians straight away. The New Zealanders straight away. There was only us and we were terrified that the same thing would happen as happened in the ‘14/18 war and after the Napoleonic wars. You had a huge number of young men coming on to and the only thing they were good at was killing other young men. So we were let loose in dribs and drabs. Not before we’d gone down to the local and we told the man in charge of it that we wouldn’t be seeing each other again. We won’t going to be coming in here again. We’re going to be say tonight goodbye. I’m not, I’ll go back to Perth, to Scotland when the time comes, the Welshman will go his way and none of us will try and follow each other about because [pause] because we have put up with something to which no sane people would want to happen again and we had a good night’s drinking and goodbye. I certainly wasn’t going to go in to Wales. It was maybe a great disappointment or, you know. So, we did. We never got in touch with each other. Some, some did and got highly disappointed. But the solitary bit, seven people in a fuselage is one thing. Seven people spread out from Perth to Wales. No. No. No. [pause] I haven’t, I’ve had no trouble going on any aeroplanes. I know some people have or had. Or had. I was in one aeroplane which wasn’t too happy for a while in the air but I’ve had no problem at all. But I’ve no real interest in trying to, ‘Do you remember the time when —' No. Because I think it was unique. Absolutely unique. It will never never happen like that again. To start off with the aeroplane was never going, is never going to need a crew. It’s going to be done all with someone in a nice warm house doing it. So, you’ll excuse me if I —
JS: Thank you very much.
OG: I nearly cry sometimes.
JS: That’s absolutely ok. Thank you very much for sharing that with us.
OG: I went to Germany and I chickened out. I just came, I just came straight back. I haven’t been to Germany. I’ve been to every place in Europe. What I saw in that six months after the war was over in Brussels. I went to prison. I went to places where they burned people alive. But since then, no. I’m quite certain that had I gone I would be able for it but I would say that I would probably get on better now with a man who’s been a pilot in a German night fighter than anything else. I would understand him and he would understand me but the chances are that wasn’t going happen so, and then it was too late. The Germans don’t want to be reminded of it all and I think that [pause] sorry. That’s why I gave away to my grandson. Give it to him and they have framed it each. Let it stand at that.
JS: That’s good.
Other: Do you want to take a break or get some —
OG: You see, there’s a thing that happens to people like me and I’m feeling it when my wife died. When I first met her. When I knew this was going to last longer than just an evening I have a feeling of guilt. Terrible guilt. When she died two or three months ago I still have it. That I hadn’t done enough when she was alive. And that started [pause] a long time ago. I shouldn’t —
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Oscar Goodall
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2019-05-10
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AGoodallOR190510
Format
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01:05:22 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Oscar was born in Australia. His father was a machine gunner - he was wounded seven times and died from his wounds two months before Oscar was born. His example influenced him to join the Royal Air Force. As an Air Cadet Corps member, he went to the Elementary Training School near Liverpool, passed the exams for pilot training, and joined when he was 20. They he was posted to Manchester waiting to go to Dallas. Due to the long delay Oscar was offered a course to be a fighter pilot or a gunner, he chose the latter and was sent to RAF Dalcross near Inverness to train on Ansons. He then went to RAF Market Harborough for training on Wellingtons. Later in his career, Oscar’s crew were asked to take a Lancaster to an airfield where it would be dismantled and parts reused. The aircraft crash landed, and Oscar was covered in petrol. No one was seriously injured but they didn’t fly for a week or so. He mentions an operation to Rotterdam and an instance when it was so cold that he was frozen in the turret. His crew only met once after the war.
Contributor
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Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Netherlands
England--Leicestershire
Scotland--Inverness-shire
England--Manchester
Netherlands--Rotterdam
England--Lancashire
Creator
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James Sheach
Temporal Coverage
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1945
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
100 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
bombing
crash
Lancaster
mess
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Dalcross
RAF Market Harborough
recruitment
sport
training
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/746/10747/AColemanTE170914.2.mp3
98c259c76f1de8123bd63c1d8a07a448
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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Coleman, Thea
Theadora Erna Coleman
T E Coleman
Theadore Tielrooy
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Theadora Coleman (b. 1933) and a memoir. She grew up in The Hague and was a recipient of Operation Manna.
The collection was catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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
2017-09-14
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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Coleman, TE
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
TC: To be awkward.
CB: That’s ok.
TC: Because I’m going to start with that one.
CB: Ok. That’s fine.
TC: I’ve already —
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 14th of September 2017 and I’m in Rugby with Thea Coleman. And she was in Holland during the war because she’s Dutch and she’s going to tell us her story. So, what are your earliest recollections of life, Thea?
TC: Very very happy childhood with a fantastic family around me. And we were so close it was really super. I had already a brother and a sister. They were already born. One was born in ’22 and the other in ’24. So they were quite a bit older. So that was for me rather nice. But to them I was a pest [laughs] you know. I pinched their roller skates and their things but when I was a bit older. But we had a very happy family. Yeah.
CB: And what did your father do?
TC: He was an accountant. Eventually.
CB: And where did you live? Where did the family live?
TC: In the Hague.
CB: Yes. Ok. And what sort of house was that?
TC: Well, first of all there was this house and then before long when I was a bit older, about four maybe we moved to the place that I’ve just shown you here with the beautiful view.
CB: That was on the outskirts was it?
TC: That was on the edge. Well, it was overlooking the park. As far as you could see it was a park and eventually when Rotterdam was bombed we could see it burn at the horizon. So, yeah. It was quite, quite a place.
CB: So moving house meant moving school, did it?
TC: Well, I didn’t go to school before.
CB: At all.
TC: No. Because I had to go from this place. Find school. Now and again I got a lift on a bike because it was quite a way to walk but for the rest that was.
CB: And you enjoyed your schooldays.
TC: Yes. I think I, from what I can remember but there was so much going around or going on around me that, well school was just taken as a matter of whatever.
CB: So, you were born in 1933.
TC: Yeah.
CB: The war started in 1939.
TC: ’40 in Holland.
CB: Yeah. Ok.
TC: That was, that has a story actually.
CB: Ok.
TC: That is very interesting because that is, if I may I would like to start with the story about a Peace Palace that was Alexander the 2nd’s, Czar Alexander. He was so fed up with all the money waste on the wars that took place in the beginning of the century that he wanted to do something about it and had the idea of building a palace. A Peace Palace. And Carnegie, this started I think in 1907. His idea. And Carnegie said, ‘Right. I’ll, I’ll finance it.’ He chose Holland because Holland was a peaceful country. And the, all the countries contributed something towards it. Like Britain contributed the gardens. Switzerland. Italy, I think it was the marble. And so every country got together with bits and pieces. Then eventually then it was opened exactly the date it says there. What was it? The —
Other: Here you are.
TC: Yeah. August the 28th 1913 the Palace was opened. International Court of Justice. Everything was in there. And what happens? Within a year we had the Second World War. Wasn’t that ironic? So, this is really not a very good start for the peace. But nevertheless, then let me get my story back.
CB: I’ll just stop for a mo.
TC: Yeah.
[recording paused]
TC: Now, then we get in 1933 we get Hitler. So that is, he was very war minded and of course in those days you had better weapons. There were aircraft and what have you. So then there was war coming up on, in 1940. But Holland, and I forgot to just mention that before during the First World War Holland was neutral. And they didn’t want anything to do with the war. So the second time Holland said no. We want to be neutral again. Not in the German’s point of view because they said that they wanted Holland to capitulate and Holland refused. So that went on and on and on. And then you get here fortunately later on document of my sister where she describes the time between the two wars. How socially it was hard work although Holland was, had been neutral they had a difficult time of making ends meet. There were no social services or anything like that. So what we had that is very important. We had to have a lodger. And this lodger eventually appeared to be Nazi minded. Because that was another thing that was happening all around. You see the Dutch were a bit afraid from, you know, what is Hitler up to? And we better be on the winning side than on the losing side. So, therefore this fellow who happened to be a lodger that was Nazi minded also we had neighbours who were. It was called NSP. You know. National Socialists. So we were already from knee high told, ‘Keep your mouth shut. Don’t say anything and be very very careful. And be aware. Never tell them anything.’ Because you couldn’t trust them. So that was the situation that happened in the beginning of 1940 when Germany said, ‘Right. We want you to capitulate.’ And the Dutch said no. So what they did was they threatened with bombing Rotterdam. And they flattened Rotterdam, you know. Pretty severely. You can see here [pause] you see. And then the Germans said, ‘Ok. We’ll give you two hours. You capitulate or else all the other cities in Holland will go like this.’ So they were, unfortunately they were blackmailed and they had to capitulate. There was no way out. So that was a rather a shame because in the meantime they were also very busy. You know, like we had them on the coast a beautiful pier where you could visit. That was an obstacle. So that had to go. They built bunkers. Well, they were absolutely amazing you know. And then on also outside. No. There’s not a picture here. Where they had mines. Oh, it was so, although we always went lovely you know to the beaches and we had the super youth it was all gone for a burton because it was all mined. And as I say there was Rotterdam was here. We could see it burn. This was rather nice because this is a park where kids could have a plot of land where they could grow vegetables. It was rather nice. But as I say, but oh gosh and that was really my first reaction. My first memory. Looking out on the balcony and then these aircrafts. German aircrafts. Because it was still not officially capitulated. Capitulated. They would dive bomb and drop parachutes. It was really a frightening situation where people were getting frightened to such an extent that some thought that we had better be on their side. Which was not very favourable was it? So, there you are. Then, as I say I had Willie’s memories how she then describes. It’s in Dutch unfortunately. I think I will go and translate it. Where she describes the situation of fear. Short of money. You didn’t really know what was going to happen. You saw all these aircrafts. So that was really physically the frightening bit but also as fun because if there was a bomb thrown then the windows would shatter. So we taped them with Sellotape or whatever and it was quite an exercise because it was artistic. You know, to try and preserve the windows that you wouldn’t sit in the cold. Yeah. Now, let me just —
CB: What you might call practical artistic solutions.
TC: That was definitely it. Yeah.
CB: We’ll pause for a moment.
[recording paused]
CB: Ok. Fire away.
TC: Hitler.
CB: The invasion. Yeah.
TC: Yeah. Hitler, in ’33 he was very war minded. And then you get the invasion in 1940. Incidents with mines. Complaints. Spies. And then in April, oh God the fear. You know. You were so scared. And then on the 10th of May Germany attacked Rotterdam. That was on the 10th of May. Without a warning. Nobody knew about it. And then they were given two hours to give in but the problem was when they sent the letter they didn’t just accept it. They said, ‘Hey, hang on. Who wrote this letter? Where does come from?’ So that was delay. And although the two hours were given they didn’t give the two hours. They took less to just flatten Rotterdam completely. Yeah. So, Rotterdam destroyed and Holland had to capitulate. In other words, other words the other cities would have the same fate. Not very nice. So, life goes on. My brother goes to school. He is ten years older than I am so he had a job given when he was about seventeen eighteen. And then of course they said, the Germans said, ‘Hang on. We want you in the army.’ So he had to be signed up. So he did go to have the interview and he came back in a uniform. One of these little [unclear] things with a little tassel I thought was wonderful. And then of course he would be called up and go to Germany which of course was the last thing he wanted. And that petrified my mother. Willie, she was two years younger than he was. She studied hard at school, you know. She went to the Grammar School and eventually she got a job at the factory that belonged to the Jews but then was taken over by the Germans and, so she worked there as a secretary which was useful. Not Germans because later on as the war goes on my father finds there a place to hide. So that was useful. My brother meantime, well, you know he had his uniform and he was called up. We took him to the tram and he said goodbye. My mother cried her eyes out and off he went. And nobody knew he didn’t go. He went into hiding. Nobody knew except my father and Willie. Willie knew as well. I didn’t. So later on, during as time goes on they said, ‘Well, we have a surprise for you,’ and I saw him [laughs] He was hiding not so very far from where I, where I then was living. Yeah. So that was — I’m sorry. I’m getting a little bit of a muddled story I reckon.
CB: That’s alright.
TC: Can you select?
CB: We will stop just a mo.
TC: Yeah.
[recording paused]
CB: What was your brother doing do you think? Or do you remember? When he was in hiding.
TC: I can’t remember. He had, he was with a family with two other chaps of his age. And maybe they did some farming or whatever. But I know that at one stage the house was encircled by Germans and he escaped through a toilet window. Fortunately there was a cornfield so he disappeared in the corn field. But the two other chaps they were arrested. Whether they survived I don’t know. You see that was another thing that you had to get used to. Sometimes you would go on a walk. One day we went on a walk near the prison and suddenly we were stopped and five young chaps came out. And they were executed. And we had to watch it. I mean those sort of things is unimaginable. What you had to as a kid had to absorb really.
CB: This is an important point. And could you just describe how that happened? So, you were stopped. Then what? How did they do this execution?
TC: They just set them against the wall and shot them. And we had to watch. We had to stand there and watch. There was no way of hiding or running away. No. Otherwise you would be the next.
CB: So after they shot them then what happened?
TC: I don’t know whether I can remember that one because you were so absolutely numbed by the occasion. That they were just picked up and taken inside.
CB: And when you got home what did you do?
TC: Cry. And try to forget. And my parents were very good because they were trying to, you know distract your attention and, with other things. Play a game or whatever. Yeah. And, and this was all physical. This had nothing to do with food yet. Because there was another thing. The Dutch are very very careful because they were always thinking well, you never know. You never know. So they started to preserve food. Bottle it and what have you. We were always trying to save the food for, for whenever. And the same with clothing and so on. And even in the, from the government point of view you know they were trying to store. It was really store. And then of course the Germans said you are not allowed to store any more. So it had to be done secretly. So, you know then this ideal if you need it that it is there. But we had to hide so you know we lost all the stuff that we had preserved. Somebody else ate it [laughs] Yeah. So, I don’t know.
CB: We’ll stop there for a mo.
TC: Yeah. Yeah.
[recording paused]
TC: Do you want food or what?
CB: Yeah. No. We’ll just carry on more with the living at the time.
TC: Ok.
CB: Once you —
[recording paused]
TC: When this particularly pro-Nazi lodger left the house was open for people come and go. So we always had visitors. The beauty of it was that people didn’t think it was unusual that we had lodgers and that was a fantastic cover. So now, this particular time we are getting Willie she has been very busy getting, because we have rations to supply these people with rations. To find accommodation for them or you know really generally looking after them and finding places for them to stay. And so we were virtually called a through house. Well, then also people above us, you know, going up the stairs. The flat above they, he was a policeman and they also got involved. So it was our family and those two and we had just coming and goings. Comings and goings. And then one day we got a family with three boys. One was about my age. One was my brother’s age. Three boys. They were Jews. Because then suddenly the whole war started to change because it became anti-Jew. And that was one of the worst decisions that ever could have made. Been made. Anyway, Willie was very very busy with, you know trying to find them. Anyway, this particular couple came with their three boys. Fred, the eldest, was my age. He stayed with us permanently. The middle brother he went to my aunt. And the youngest went to my grandfather. Unfortunately, and Willie was always on the, on her bike and finding things and she has an awful lot of information. And one day she heard that the younger boy, Fritz with my grandfather that the Germans were after him or whatever. You know, they, they had the German attention was on that house. So Willie went to my grandfather and said get him in to cloister. He said, ‘Ok. Tomorrow.’ But that was too late because at lunchtime this four year old, he was kidnapped out of my grandfather’s garden. Taken to Auschwitz. Never came back. So you can imagine that was what my grandfather must have felt. Absolutely horrendous. So, yeah. That, that went on and as we say the other boys, you know. That is Fred. He is with us. He went on a holiday in a cow’s stables. The cows were outside and we got fresh straw. So that was rather quiet and, and a treat. And then here somewhere we have [pause] Oh, there’s my father with, I’ve got that there. His false passport. Oh, and here’s Wim. My brother. We didn’t know and I was told, ‘You’re going to see a visitor today.’ Somehow. And that was him. The first time after all those years that I actually met him when he was hiding there. Then he told the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. I can still remember that one. And this, I have to go to a Children’s Home. This is coming later. First, see if I can find the boys. Sorry about that [pause – pages turning] There’s Wim. Oh, yeah. Here we are. Here is the middle boy on the lap of a German. Fancy that. That was, but that is again. I hope you stay another week.
CB: It’s interesting that these pictures were taken in the war.
TC: Yeah.
CB: So there was no restriction on picture taking at that time if the German is in that picture.
TC: No. No. That is very true. No. Because, well this is [pause] yeah. Now, I I think I’m now going to skip to — is it a bit higgledy piggledy or not?
CB: I’ll just stop for a mo.
TC: This is —
CB: At the back we’ve got a drawing.
TC: Yeah.
CB: Right.
TC: That is the bug tug. The tug bug that is the German. And where you look at his picture his arms and legs are like a swastika.
CB: Oh right.
TC: And he is emptying Holland of all the goodies that Holland, that the Dutch had tried to preserve and hide for just in case for a rainy day.
CB: So in this cartoon he’s got hanging on him all sorts of things that he has requisitioned.
TC: Yeah. Exactly.
CB: Yes. Right.
TC: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Ok. Stopping again.
TC: Right.
[recording paused]
CB: We’re just looking at a candlestick.
TC: Yeah. That was from one of the Jews who hide, hid in to our, in our house as well.
CB: Yes.
TC: And she said to my father, ‘Look, you know I have hidden the Menorah in the garden. I’ll show you where it is. If anything happens can you dig it up?’ She never came back from Auschwitz. So my father dug it up and I’ve got it. So —
CB: An amazing bit of history.
TC: Yeah. And very [pause] and you look at it and you think not everybody was as lucky as I was. That is the thought that goes behind it, isn’t it? Yeah. Now, and then of course we get the [pause] Yeah. Before anything else can I just have quickly then we can put this one away.
CB: Ok. We’re looking at a photo album.
TC: Yeah.
CB: Yes.
TC: And then just to show, this was the house I was born and this was just to show the love that comes out of the photos and the absolute fantastic childhood I had with a lot of fun.
CB: Yes.
TC: My father put me in a waste paper basket and things, you know [laughs] But yeah, I, when you look back this is so important that you see how happy. This is an uncle of mine. He was a fantastic piano player. And this is just to reminisce of a happy childhood. This is again the balcony with that house there. Here I go to school. Very happy at school.
CB: This is the green album we’re looking at.
TC: Yeah. That is me getting a bit —
CB: Dressed up.
TC: Dressed. I’m a bit older. Going out on a holiday camp. That was possible.
CB: Where were the holiday camps?
TC: That was central Holland.
CB: Right.
TC: Yeah. Yeah. And then my brother is born in 1939. And then we are getting here a series of photos of the war. Here is my mother. You can see how old she looks. Attacks from the Germans. There again. The pier. You’ve just seen that one and the other one. And going on holiday in, at the farm. But still —
CB: And where was the farm that you went on holiday?
TC: Barneveld.
CB: How far is that?
TC: That is near Arnhem.
CB: Right.
TC: Yeah. And then you see we had beach walks. We could go and walk on the beaches.
CB: Yeah. This is all before the war.
TC: All before, well at the beginning of the war.
CB: Yeah.
TC: Because now we are getting to, that’s why I wanted to get rid of this album.
CB: Yes.
TC: To [pause] Oh, this is me a bit.
CB: I think, just to clarify the point Holland was neutral when the war started. In the early stages. And it wasn’t until the Germans invaded it in May 1940 that it became, that the war started in Holland.
TC: Yeah.
CB: Although in other, in Britain it had started in September 1939.
TC: Oh yeah. No. No. This was the 10th of May wasn’t it?
CB: Yeah.
TC: That I said.
CB: Yeah.
TC: The 10th of May.
CB: Yeah. So, we’ll stop there for a mo.
TC: Yeah.
[recording paused]
TC: The government. You know, once Holland had capitulated the Queen went to England. Her family went to Canada. So this. And then you get the Atlantic Wall. That was in 1942. Now, that was completely haywire because you could hear the story. We had already people hiding and then we get here the family. He was a Jew. I forgot to say that. Wait a minute. She was a Jew and that were a couple visiting and then there’s my father. It was just a family gathering. Because what had happened with the Atlantic Wall. All the people within this [pause] where is it? Yellow line.
CB: Yes.
TC: They had to vacate their houses. The yellow line was about two or three miles wide.
CB: This is a map of Scandinavia and the continent showing the yellow line being the Atlantic Wall.
TC: That’s it. Yeah. That was the Atlantic Wall. The Germans hadn’t done that. Spain was neutral so that didn’t have to have a wall. But now you can see why Germany was so extremely keen for Holland to capitulate.
CB: Yeah.
TC: Because when they were neutral there was a gap. And the British and the Americans could enter.
CB: Yeah.
TC: And that was the one thing that Hitler was against. He wanted it hermetically closed.
CB: Yeah.
TC: So therefore it was essential that Holland had to be conquered. So that the line was continued. Now, within these two lines I had my grandfather and my aunt who lived near the coast in a beautiful place. And what happens? They had to get out of their house.
CB: Because of the exclusion zone that was the Berlin wall err the Atlantic Wall.
TC: The Atlantic Wall.
CB: Yes.
TC: Everybody had to be out.
CB: Yes.
TC: All the civilians —
CB: Right.
TC: Were not allowed to live there anymore. So you had your house and you had to go. Leave everything behind or, well what would you do with it? You know. It’s very difficult. Now, my aunt was very lucky. That’s another story. My aunt, and there’s my aunt and my grandfather. That’s not the best place.
CB: I’ll just stop a mo.
TC: Yeah.
[recording paused]
TC: We were so lucky. Is that the word? She was so lucky. To the west of Amsterdam, in the middle of nowhere she found this place.
CB: A house.
TC: The house, built in about 1934. Empty. So, obviously in you go. There was, there was nothing there. Later on we get a little bridge to get there over the ditch and so on. And yeah, that was fantastic. So then the Germans thought now that is nice. Let us have a few rooms in this house for us. And they said, ‘You must be bloody joking,’ [laughs] You see, eventually they get a little bridge there and they, they wanted in the house. And they said, ‘No. We have a shed. Listen. If you want accommodation you go stay in the shed and leave us alone.’ And we had a little terrace built and it was great. So, what did the Germans do? On this tree they hung a steel bar and that steel bar was an indication that if there was a raid they say, ‘Don’t worry about here. We are here. Nothing there. So you can carry on.’ So, we were safe in the lion’s den weren’t we?
CB: Yeah.
TC: So, yeah. That was, that was great. And the boys, my brothers amongst them this is middle boy of these three boys that —
CB: This is a picture with a German soldier.
TC: Yeah.
CB: With his arm around him.
TC: Yeah. Ironic. And the boys were, you know, given the helmet to play with and what have you. Yeah. But as I say they were in the shed and the shed was full of rats so it was just the right place for them. Yeah. This is just the by the by one.
CB: Right.
TC: That this, where you had the bicycle. Don’t have tyres on your bicycle because if you have the Germans confiscate it. Any bike with a tyre was a loss. So for miles and miles and miles even my mother had to travel by bike without tyres. That was [unclear] Yeah. So anyway that’s [ ] I thought I had a picture. If you give me one second. Can you manage?
CB: Now, one of the ways as I read it the Germans kept control was to have raids.
TC: Oh yeah.
CB: So, how did that work?
TC: Well, they would close the road. Nobody was to go in or out of their houses. They would enter your houses with the guns and they would go through every room. I can remember having to spend a couple of hours in between floorboards and being as quiet as possible because the Germans were walking on the, on the floor above you. So, do you see what I mean? The fright that was almost second nature. So eventually when I felt that I needed to write it down I wanted to get it off my chest really.
CB: So, just putting this in to context of your age. You were born in 1933. So by ’42, you were talking about earlier you were nine.
TC: Yeah.
CB: So in ’43 you were ten. So when the —
TC: Very aware of what went on. Yeah. Sorry.
CB: That’s ok. Yeah.
TC: Yeah.
CB: So, what was the reaction of families to these German raids?
TC: Fear. [laughs] And they would march through the streets. And then they would you know sing. They had songs. And one of the song was “Und wir fahren gegen Engeland.” “And we sail to England.” And then the people on the pavements watching them, they said, ‘Glug. Glug. Glug. Glug,’ in answer to that. In other words, ‘If you are going to England, drown.’
CB: Oh, I see. Right.
TC: And they were furious when people said that. You know, ‘Glug. Glug. Glug. Glug.’ You know, when they were singing that they were going to England. Marching up to England.
CB: And did they have a threatening approach to the public? The public in general?
TC: No. Not that I can —
CB: Or were they trying to be friendly?
TC: No. No. They were not friendly. It was just a different race. You know, this — we were told to stay away. Not say anything. We had to really be so careful, you know not to upset them because that was life threatening. So we were under very very high discipline not to say anything. Not to do anything. So, well, you had to abide by that.
CB: And when they did the searches of the houses did they confiscate people belongings? Or did they just —
TC: Themselves. People themselves. Oh, they would be marched out of the house if they thought you know were not you were of the wrong age or — oh yeah. People would. And that was also a sign. You saw these vans outside in the streets. And then I can still visualise it now where people were dragged into those vehicles and never be, in many cases never heard of again.
CB: What sort of people were they arresting?
TC: Anybody.
CB: And taking away.
TC: The wrong age.
CB: The wrong age being what?
TC: Military age, you know.
CB: Right.
TC: Old people they were not interested in. Unless you had an association with their enemy if you like. Or if you were a Jew. Oh, you were, then you were definitely out. Yeah. And, and that was very very difficult for me to to absorb really until I went to to Lincoln and I was teaching in Dogdyke. No. Tattershall. Was it Tattershall? Well, where ever it was and somebody said he was a veteran. They had a meeting with somebody who was going to give a talk and unfortunate they were let down. He heard my accent and he said, ‘Do you think you have a story to tell?’ I said, ‘By Jove, have I got a story to tell.’ And I was invited and it was a thundering success. And after that they wanted more and more and more. ‘Can you come to us?’ ‘Can you come to us?’ [unclear] You know how that goes. And then somebody said, ‘Do you know what? Why don’t you write it down?’ So when I moved here I thought, ‘Yeah. I’ll do that. I don’t know anybody so this is the ideal opportunity. I’ll start writing it down.’ That is, you know this one. And then a colleague of mine read it and he said, ‘Thea, that’s far too good. That has to be published.’ And they published it literally the same as this. So that’s how it came about.
CB: That’s what the book is.
TC: That’s what the book is.
CB: And what’s the title of the book?
TC: “Evading the Gestapo in Holland.” But here I just called it, “My story.”
CB: Yes.
TC: But it’s the same one.
CB: What was the — going back to your comment about people being carted out of houses. What was the reaction of the population to the Germans arresting and deporting people?
TC: Very little because they were so scared that if they would say anything they would go and join them. So you couldn’t say anything. But there must be so many people with still those memories in the back of their minds. Because there’s nothing worse than seeing somebody thrown in a van for [pause] well you couldn’t ask for law or rights could you? That was it. And often they were Jews. Yeah.
CB: You mentioned that up in the upstairs flat was a policeman. How did he manage his life working with Germans?
TC: Very carefully. Yeah. Very carefully. Yeah.
CB: Now, all occupied countries had their collaborators. In Norway they were called quislings. What was the title given to Dutch collaborators?
TC: I can’t think at the moment. That will come back.
CB: Ok.
TC: NSPer’s. Well, NSPer’s I suppose. National Socialists.
CB: Yes.
TC: He is an NSPer. Yeah. NSPer.
CB: Right. And did they have something distinctive that they wore so that the Germans didn’t worry them?
TC: Well, that was with one of the lodgers we had. He suddenly came with an NSP pin thing on his, so we knew that he was from the wrong side. Can you just stop it a minute?
CB: Yes.
TC: Because —
[recording paused]
TC: Do you want to read it? No. Do you want —
CB: So, now we’re —
TC: You —
CB: You tell us what we’ve got there.
TC: What the Hunger Winter —
CB: Yes.
TC: Was like.
CB: So when was that? When was the Hunger Winter? In 1944.
TC: Yeah. 1944.
CB: The end of ’44 was it?
TC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
TC: Well, there was [pause] yeah ’44. Here we are.
CB: Ok.
TC: What we didn’t have. No radio.
CB: Right.
TC: No electricity. No more gas. The first hunger fatalities. Twenty thousand people died.
CB: Of?
TC: Of hunger.
CB: Right.
TC: And ninety eight thousand were starvations. Or was it that? Yeah. Then what is to say?
CB: The bread.
TC: The bread rations. Yeah. No bread. Oh God, it was just gloop. No electricity at all. No gas.
CB: So, there were beggars on the streets.
TC: Oh yeah. I can remember when I was in a Children’s Home there was a dog. It had the dog bowl. And I had to look after the dining area. That was when I was in the Children’s Home. And the dog had better food than me. So I licked his food as if it was a dog. So they couldn’t see that I had eaten it. Can you imagine?
CB: Extraordinary.
TC: Yeah.
CB: And the dog belonged to who? The Germans or to the owner?
TC: No. No. That was from the house. But they were pro Germans anyway so.
CB: Right.
TC: Well, they had the German religion.
CB: So what type of Children’s Home was that? What sort of [pause] Were they orphans or what were they?
TC: Usually of parents who were missionaries in Africa and the kids couldn’t go with them. So they stayed in that home. So that was eventually where my brother found me a place. Ah, because now you can really get to the story about my father’s —
CB: Right.
TC: Go back to —
CB: Keep going.
TC: Yeah. Go back to the lodgers. We had a lodger and his name was Mr Somners. And Mr Somners was fantastic. We used to call him Mr Ringaling. He had gold rimmed glasses. And he had a secretary. She was a beauty. And she stayed with that policeman upstairs. And then suddenly they decided they loved one another and they would like to live together. So they decided then that he would move with the girl but the Germans got hold of that and they arrested her mother. And they said to her, ‘If you play,’ Mr Ringaling, ‘Mr Somners, into our hands we’ll free your mother.’ So they made an appointment, these two at the Square in the Hague. And she said, ‘Well, the one I kiss is the man, and — ’ Because she had to choose between her mother and her lover. So she, the moment that she kissed him he got arrested there and then. And so did she. And then they were taken to the Gestapo headquarters and then Mr Somners walked in. They got a fright because amongst the Germans were Resistance workers undercover. They jumped on their bike and they went to all the houses they could remember and when it was 9 o’clock in the morning there was my mother. I was at school and she said, they said to my mother, ‘You get that child and out of the house now. You haven’t got time to pack or anything like that. Five minutes. Out.’ So she did. When I came back from school at lunchtime, because in Holland you don’t stay at school you always go home, there was nobody in. The house was already then confiscated. And then what I found out from Willie here what Mr Somners did and also consequently my father. They were involved in smuggling Jews to Spain. Or for that matter to Norway. I think. Yeah. Those two. So, and they recognised him by his teeth afterwards and she was [unclear] to death. And her mother never heard of any more. Also died. So you can imagine that was for us suddenly the end. You know. I come from school. Then what do you do with a girl of my age? So Willie took me by the hand and she had just been confirmed by a vicar so she went to him and she said, ‘I’m stuck with her. What do I do?’ So he said, ‘Well, leave her with us for a fortnight and then we’ll see what we can do.’ But the problem was when we went to church people would say, ‘Who’s that kid?’ And then I overheard somebody saying, ‘This is a child of a family on the run.’ Well, I was adult there and then. I matured. There was no childhood for me anymore. That was it. So I, and then I went from the vicar. He had two girls who ran a farm so he took me to them. One was a teacher and one was a nurse so at least I got eventually a little bit of education. And then of course they had the mill next door with seven kids but I was not allowed to play with them. Then they got diphtheria so that was danger. Out. So then I went to an egg farmer and I’ve never seen so many eggs being processed. Processed. And I didn’t stay there for very long either and then eventually I, Wim, my brother he was then discovered as being about and he said, ‘Well, I am here. Very close to a Children’s Home. Try it.’ So that is where I went. And thanks to my brother, you know. As I say, you know he just carried on. And I went to the Children’s Home. But then of course my brother, my father was then also being spotted, you know through this arrest of this Mr Somners. So he had to find [pause] Can you just switch it off a minute?
[recording paused]
CB: We’re talking about your father.
TC: Talk about my father. My father had then been given a new name. [unclear] . My brother, my little brother lived with my mother. Sometimes they met with my father as well. Not very often. And then Hans had to say, ‘I’m not Hans Tielrooy. I’m Hans [unclear].’ He said, ‘That’s not my name.’ So he became a danger and had to go. So, but then my father had a new passport. Where again the RAF came in useful with the Peace Palace because behind the Peace Palace was a huge villa with all the ins and outs of the population of Holland. You know. Register Centre. And they were asked to flatten it and they did. And that is where people like my father finally had now a chance to have a new passport. And that’s it. And the beauty of it is you see he puts a pair of specs on. His hair is slightly different. And then he, yeah he was well you can see he was really very scared but the beauty is his date of birth could not be traced because they made him a false passport with his birth on. Birthplace Surabaya in Indonesia. Because we were at war with Japan and they couldn’t check it. So at least he had a little bit of freedom of moving about. Very precious this. Yeah.
CB: We’ll just stop there a mo.
[recording paused]
TC: Heavily involved.
CB: So your sister Willie was ten years older than you.
TC: Yes.
CB: So her perspective was quite different and she was more mature. So what was her position?
TC: She was very very heavily involved in the Resistance. Together with my father as well. I didn’t know. Neither did anybody else in the house know that in this Mr Somner’s room was a German uniform. Yeah. But it has, but Willie has used it and she got somebody out of prison in that uniform. So a young chap that otherwise would have probably been executed or whatever. But in the end, as I say she was so heavily involved that Queen Wilhelmina invited her with about twenty other Resistance youngsters and she was invited to stay in her palace for about nine months to recuperate. And I can remember going through the gardens saying, ‘Oh, Willie, that’s your room.’ [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. That was quite a crown on the [pause] jewel on the crown or whatever you call it and, yeah.
CB: How did she come to be in a position where the Queen invited her to do this?
TC: Oh, that’s a difficult question actually. I haven’t thought about that. That must have been from the group that she was working with for the Resistance that they recommended her. Or that there must have been something like that.
CB: So, what sort of recuperation? She would have been short of food but mentally was she exhausted?
TC: I think that that was the case. Yeah. Yeah. She was a very intensive person. Yeah. And Queen Wilhelmina obviously. Even though she lived in England she decided with the Arnhem business to go on to make sure that the Dutch went on strike with the railway. And that made the Germans so angry that they’d made the worse, the war worse. But they weren’t. Oh, here it is. Look. Here. They, she invited and strike and they said, ‘If you strike it will only bring horror to yourselves.’ But they carried on because again with this army lot, Arnhem lot, she because there was so much Resistance that the Germans didn’t get through to drop the food because they said, ‘Is it really food you’re going to drop or is it bombs and people?’ And then eventually, very late in the day did they get permission. I think it is the 29th of April. Well, you can imagine.
CB: Let me just stop you a mo. Just to put this in to context we’re now talking about later. At the end of the war.
TC: Yeah.
CB: What is termed over here Operation Manna.
TC: Yeah.
CB: And so the RAF and the Americans dropping food. And that’s what you’re talking about now.
TC: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So —
TC: And there was also —
CB: What was the date it started? 28th of April 1945.
TC: It could be. Yeah.
CB: Right.
TC: I don’t know. I have —
CB: But you were saying about the German’s reaction.
TC: Yeah. Because they were dead against the RAF flying over to drop food and they said we will give you a channel and this is the channel that they were allowed. If they were slightly out they would be shot dead. Shot down. And here are the areas where the food drops would take place. The red is from America and the other ones are with the RAF.
CB: So what were they dropping? What sort of things were they dropping?
TC: Gee whizz. This you saw. You sort it out. Look.
CB: Yeah.
TC: This is one drop.
CB: Right. So that. This is a photograph of a field.
TC: Yeah. Near Rotterdam.
CB: And it’s bags. And so the challenge with the bags was whether they would burst.
TC: Some did.
CB: On landing.
TC: Some didn’t. And then of course they needed so many people to collect it all. And do you know nobody stole. Everybody was starving hungry. Nobody. It was all centred at the place where then it was properly distributed. Which I think is admirable because if you were starving hungry well — you eat. Well, like me eating the dog food.
CB: How was the food distributed after it was collected? Was your father involved with that?
TC: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t think so but it was all done from a central area. You had to queue. Oh God. When, for the Swedish bread the Germans stopped that. We sometimes queued for two and a half hours. Two or three hours for one loaf of bread.
Other: God.
TC: And it was worth it because you were so, so hungry. And as I say I was so underfed that they had to spoon feed me with a teaspoon. Hans, when we came out of the Children’s Home, Hans, my brother, he had frozen feet. And I was, well near death really. So as I said then and that was [unclear] where Willie had her first job. But originally it was from a Jewish barrel maker and that is where my father then found refuge when he needed it after, obviously he was looked for. When he was more or less after this incident of the [pause] Yeah.
CB: So what we’re talking about here is the western part of Holland.
TC: Yeah.
CB: Which had been bypassed by the allies as they moved — North Holland and into Germany and the population was starving. At what stage did they shortage food really start to bite?
TC: That started already quite early. Here, you see this is the last bit that was still being occupied that because this of Holland was already liberated.
CB: Yes. The eastern side and the south.
TC: And then of course you get Arnhem.
CB: Yeah.
TC: The big battle of Arnhem with the disasters of that one. And then. Yeah.
CB: As they pushed past that.
TC: Twenty two. Twenty two thousand people died. And nine hundred and eighty thousand were classed as malnutrition and I was one of them.
CB: Yeah.
[pause]
CB: So this is September 1944 that the Arnhem experience took place. But this drop of food is six months after that in April.
TC: Yeah. Indeed. Yeah. There’s the battle of Arnhem. Twenty two thousand dead. Back to [pause] why did I? Oh, I don’t know what that is. Obviously, you read that too.
CB: So my question really is that the distribution of food had already become difficult.
TC: Oh yeah.
CB: But when did it become extremely serious? Do you remember?
TC: That must have been, oh [pause] the year before, I reckon. Yeah. Because when did I leave the Children’s Home? [pause] September ’44. Yeah. That is when it really started to bite.
CB: As the west of Holland was isolated by the allied forces pressing on past the western part of Holland.
TC: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: We’ll stop there just for a mo.
[recording paused]
CB: The cooking.
TC: On this tin.
CB: Doing the cooking.
TC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So what’s the tin?
TC: The home-made tin. A plaster tin. You know, the plaster was inside. You just —
CB: Yes. But what did you put in it to cook to create the heat?
TC: A bit of wood.
CB: Yes. But where did you get the wood from?
TC: Find it everywhere. Tiny little bits of wood in [pause] well anywhere. Maybe in the shed or — but they were no bigger than so.
CB: Yeah. And did you increasingly then have to forage around for wood to burn because it must have run out in the local area?
TC: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So what did you do then?
TC: We looked for it. Go for walks.
CB: Did you go out in parties of walking?
TC: Yeah. Or look in the sheds. Anything that would burn you made to size and then burned it in that.
CB: Yes.
TC: I wish that I had bought one. A cousin of mine has got a real one.
CB: Oh right.
TC: Yeah.
CB: And then no electricity so how did you see in the night?
TC: You didn’t.
CB: In the evenings.
TC: You didn’t. No radio. Nothing.
CB: No candles.
TC: No. No. No. Candles were very scarce. Begging for food.
CB: So, tell us about the food. How did you get hold of food?
TC: You didn’t. You, you queued for hours if there was any in the shops. But there were no more potatoes. The only one was stinging nettles, tulip bulbs and sugar beets.
CB: So, how did you cook those stinging nettles?
TC: Well, they were mostly raw. You know. You put it in hot water and then it softened it a bit.
CB: Yes.
TC: And, and then in the end well you just didn’t eat. Nothing to eat.
CB: You mentioned begging. So how did that work?
TC: Knock on the door. ‘I’m hungry.’
CB: So children did the begging or did —
TC: No.
CB: Adults did it as well.
TC: Adults did. Children didn’t come in to this at all. No. Yeah. Even first food aid from Sweden. That was white bread.
CB: So this was the beginning of 1945.
TC: That was February. Yeah. Yeah. Because that bread, I’ve never seen white bread like the Swedish bread. It was whiter than white. Amazing. And then of course the Germans stopped that one.
CB: So where did that come in from? How did that come to Holland? Did it —
TC: By train or —
CB: Somehow through the German lines did it? Or did it —
TC: It must be —
CB: Come in by sea.
TC: No. No. Certainly not by sea. No. First aid from Sweden must have come by road.
CB: Through Germany.
TC: Through Germany. Yeah.
CB: Right.
TC: Because the Germans had to agree to that and they did.
CB: Right.
TC: And then the Germans were food dropped because they were afraid that they could be combined with bombs. Which is logical.
CB: This is the RAF.
TC: Yeah.
CB: Supplying. Yeah.
TC: And the Operation Manna starts there. Oh God, that was — I can still see them. Oh, you could see the, they flew that low you could see the pilot’s face. Oh, that was a miracle. Absolutely fantastic. Yeah. And that was so interesting when we met last year or the year before when you could say, ‘Well, this was our reaction what was your reaction?’ And they all cried.
CB: This was in Lincoln when some of the aircrew were there.
TC: Yeah. Yeah. They were so impressed and like we didn’t know in how far they would, the Holland has so many flat roofs so we could spread the flag. And the flag was forbidden but we put flag on. Thank you, Tommies. Or we just waved. Oh gosh. Yeah.
CB: The man I interviewed the other day said how the Germans were shaking their fists at his aircraft flying at a hundred and fifty feet.
TC: I can well imagine. But we were kissing.
CB: Exactly. And he then went on to the Dutch people waving. Yes.
TC: Really? Oh yeah. And sometimes you really took a risk. Yeah. And that was the same when we had the Liberation in Amsterdam. I’m going a bit —
CB: That’s alright.
TC: Higgledy piggledy. And so when the war was declared finished they thought hooray. So the heart of Holland is the Dam in Amsterdam. But everybody gathered together and they were all standing there, you know, pale and hungry and very tightly together because the air force err now the allies were coming in their tanks. And when they came around the corner full of flowers and girls and what have you and the whole of the mass of people went berserk with hooray. We had all dyed some pieces of material in orange or whatever. But the big buildings around this square there were still German soldiers on there.
CB: On the roof.
TC: On the roof. And what did they buggers do? They shot on the main, on the people. Absolutely. When we asked, ‘What did you do? Why did you do it?’ And they said, ‘Well, why didn’t you cheer like this when we arrived?’ Can you imagine? The nerve. And the tanks were immediately closed and, oh that was horrendous and we all had to fled, flee down side roads. And there were nineteen people killed. Yeah. And that was Liberation. ‘Why didn’t you cheer like this for when we arrived?’ How big headed can you get? You never learn do you?
CB: What happened to them? So clearly they survived. So they weren’t killed by the Dutch.
TC: I wouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t happened on the quiet. Yeah. Because they, they, well they couldn’t stay there could they?
CB: No.
TC: They were still the enemy. And we had the liberators coming in. Oh, I can still remember this. That was frightening. And we were standing all like this because it was packed. Absolutely overpacked. Amazing how little flares of —
CB: Memory.
TC: Memories come back.
CB: So you were still starving effectively.
TC: Oh yes. Yeah.
CB: How did the food get distributed then? At the time of the celebration was there, were there food trucks with the tanks or did you get the food later?
TC: Later. Yeah. It was, it was a slow coming of food. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And that was distributed by the local authorities.
TC: Shops. Yeah. Shops.
CB: Through the shops.
TC: Through the shops. And you all had issues. You know. What do you call them?
Other 2: Ration.
CB: Ration cards.
TC: Ration cards. Yeah. Yeah. And with, and then you stand there queuing. Not just for ten minutes. Hours. Yeah.
CB: And how did society return to normal after that? If ever.
TC: With great difficulty. Yeah. But you know then once it was done and over with you know you all got together and put your shoulders on it and made the best of it.
CB: So, your family returned to your house.
TC: No.
CB: Right.
TC: No. Because our house there, that house there that was completely occupied because you very rarely owned a house. So it was always rented. So when we came back to the Hague my father was allocated this house through the Resistance. And that was a whacking big house. Fantastic. Until about six months after. There was a ring of the bell and she said, ‘This is my house. I’ve survived and I want my house back. So, we want you out.’ So that was another problem. So then the Resistance was still very very much active in that work and they found us this house that we lived in where you have been. And yeah, that was in [pause] that had been in an area that was evacuated for a long long time so there were no roads. No pavements. You know. That was all very, well pre-historic as it were.
CB: In the countryside this was.
TC: No. That was a part of the Hague.
CB: Oh, it was.
TC: Yeah. And that is of course where I went to school and so on. And that’s another thing. Talk about going to school. When we lived in that nice house there and this was still pre, after I had just been about five or six years of age.
CB: Before the war started.
TC: Yeah. Well, no. Yeah. But there was an awful lot of water. You know that house with the beautiful view? There was a lot of water about and Hans my brother he almost drowned in it. So, and Willie and Wim, my brother they had to take me before school to the park where there was a swimming pool because I had to learn to swim. And that was their task. To take me to the swimming pool regularly during the week. Every other day or so. To teach me how to swim. And I can still remember the lady who had ginger hair and her body was purple with cold because it was an open air one and but I learned to swim and once I could swim that was it. That was them finished. That’s another flare of —
CB: That’s alright. We’ll just stop for a mo.
[recording paused]
CB: So, thinking of the drops in Operation Manna. The dropping of the food and what was it? What — did you see that or did you just hear about it in other ways?
TC: Maybe in the distance but that was a, that is a little bit vague memory at the moment.
Other: Yeah.
TC: But I can remember once it was put to the central areas where it was distributed. There was the egg powder. Oh God the egg powder. Milk powder. Bread. All sorts of vegetables and, yeah stuff really to go into the larder. That is the stuff that was generally in the bags.
CB: So it was flour but was there baked bread as well?
TC: There was also baked bread. Yeah.
CB: Right.
TC: But very rare.
CB: Yes. Because it’s very bulky.
TC: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And how did the population hear about the deliveries of these?
TC: Well, they either saw it or they knew where the Centres were and then you could go to the Centres. On your bike of course.
CB: Yes.
TC: Or walking. To collect your goodies.
CB: Yes. Yeah. Absolutely.
TC: And as I say sometimes there were little parcels, but from the pilots themselves who had wrapped it up for the kids.
CB: Really? Yeah.
TC: You know. Chocolate or sweets.
CB: So the delivery was in bags or was it in other items as well?
TC: All sorts. All sorts. It was in containers and bags and —
CB: Containers so it wouldn’t break.
TC: Yeah.
CB: Large.
TC: Yeah. Large. About that size. Yeah.
CB: Good. I think we’ll stop there for a mo. Thank you very much.
[recording paused]
TC: Even that’s true, and how much is still to think about. To remember.
CB: Yes. It’s an extra.
TC: At that time you just took it, well as a surprise. You couldn’t get over it. I mean, if you look at this you can see what sort of baggage.
CB: This is the picture of the dropping area.
Other: This is the drops. Yeah.
TC: That’s near Rotterdam. And they needed hundreds of people to collect it all. And they didn’t leave a scrap. They picked it all up. Nothing was wasted.
CB: And the Germans didn’t come and confiscate any of it.
TC: No. I don’t think they dared. Because by that time they knew that the game was up.
CB: Yeah. We’ll stop there. Thank you very much.
[recording paused]
CB: We can —
Other: We still want to record this don’t we?
CB: Now, we talked about a lot of things to do with the Operation Manna drops. We then went on to how the food was distributed.
TC: Yeah.
CB: We haven’t really talked about how it was consumed. Because people are not just undernourished. They’re actually starving. So there’s a danger in that. So how did you start eating when the food came?
TC: Because usually there was somebody in charge of a person who is that underfed that they, like for instance myself. When I came out of the Children’s Home they sent me to this place where my father originally hid and where Willie originally had her job where they made these barrels. You know, the Jewish firm that was taken over. Anyway, so they sent me there for about a fortnight before I was then joining the rest of the family in Amsterdam and she, the farmer’s wife next door she said, ‘Thea, come in the morning. I’ll feed you up.’ And then she would feed me on cream and things. And I stayed there a fortnight and was fine. So that was ok. And then we went to Amsterdam where of course again we were at a loss because you saw how busy that house of my aunt was in, outside Amsterdam. Willie, in the meantime hired a room in the middle of Amsterdam South with a Jewish family. And she hired a room because sometimes there was an opportunity, no a necessity for getting your breath back. So, and that was of course also in the Hunger Winter when you were outside trying to collect little bits of wood and things like that. So that is where we were then. In that room. And that was very very nice indeed because it was peaceful. We all got away from each other for a while because otherwise you were getting on each other’s nerves. Especially with my aunt falling ill. She could be course in her legs and in her neck and so on. It was just tubercular disease. So we were a little bit in the way then. And so now and again as I say we needed a breather. And Willie had particularly access to that. To that room. And yeah. I, that was, that was very nice and the people downstairs were fantastic, you know. She was a Jewish. And we had yeah happy times there. From there, well, then of course the Liberation that we went to the dam with all these people. Squashed together. There was no other way to call it but squashed together. Yeah.
CB: And how were the people feeling at that time?
TC: What did the people we hired from?
CB: No. The people that went together to Amsterdam. What did they actually feel about what was going on?
TC: They wanted to celebrate. There was liberty you know. And they, they wanted to well share the condemnation for the Germans. And then of course these. I can still them on the rooftop you know. With their guns still. That they didn’t prevent this by getting to them and saying, ‘Hey, give me your gun.’ That they just opened fire on them. Must have been a mad moment in their lives. Of frustration, or what I know, whatever. But it was and then of course as I say Liberation. Freedom. Yeah.
CB: You talked about some families being half Jewish. So, how were they handled during the war?
TC: They kept it quiet. You know. Not — and that was another thing. You see in the beginning they wanted everything up in the open. So the Jews were persuaded to wear a star with the word Jew on it. And they said, ‘If you wear that you’re safe from prosecution.’ That is an indication. Forget me. Isn’t it? Stupid. And people fell for things like that. Anything for easy going, you know. Getting out of awkward situations. And it was —
CB: It was the beginning of the learning curve about the German reaction to Jews.
TC: Yeah. And why would the Germans be so anti-Jewish? Maybe because of business because the Jews were better off than they were. You don’t know what’s behind it all because nobody would open up. But that, that’s the only thing you can do. That is to speculate as it were.
CB: You mentioned earlier about right at the end there were people eating. But there were some Jewish people there. How had they survived all that time?
TC: Just like everybody else.
CB: In hiding.
TC: Yeah. And hungry. Because there was nothing else. All you wanted to do was not to be arrested. Not to be shot. You know. Save your life.
CB: On a lighter note you were cycling without tyres. So —
TC: Oh, my numb bum [laughs] Oh God. At the end sometimes they had a little pillow to sit on but that, Oh God, I can still feel it [laughs]
CB: What did you carry on the bikes? Was it adults and children with shopping or clothes? Or what did you carry on bikes?
TC: Usually it was just to go from A to B. You know, to get somewhere because that was the only transport. There were no trams or buses or anything, trains. So the only way was a bike and if it had tyres you knew that would be confiscated and for the rest you didn’t go anywhere. And if you had to do some shopping I presume you would go walking because you wouldn’t dare. Well, like my mother you know she was laden and then the Germans said, ‘Thanks very much. Now you can go. We’ve got your stuff.’ It is unbelievable isn’t it? That they got away with it. Yeah.
CB: You mentioned school.
TC: Yeah.
CB: So how, how long did school continue?
TC: Oh God. Not very long because then there were days that they didn’t open. There were maybe one or two hours. And in the end, and then of course was the heating. So they had to close the schools. Oh, and that was another thing. You had staff. Suddenly some members of the staff disappeared. Why? Some of the kids disappeared. Why? Because they were hiding. You know they were obviously [pause] and then school was a dangerous place.
CB: So it wasn’t that the authorities had closed down the school.
TC: They did in the end.
CB: They did.
TC: They did in the end. They said, ‘Look. This can’t go on. We haven’t got the amenities. The money.’ And so then the schools closed and that is why the people in America admired me so for having worked the hours available. That I took so much advantage and courage out of them that they thought I needed a treat. And that was my husband.
CB: So you, you went to America to stay with friends.
TC: Yeah.
CB: How long did you stay there?
TC: About nine months.
CB: That’s in Texas.
TC: Yeah. Dallas —
CB: And then you went to Washington. Was it?
TC: Washington and New York. Because that lady amongst that lot living she had a nephew living there. So she went there. So she was there and I could visit her.
CB: What made you return to Holland from America?
TC: Well, because I needed a future for a job and I was not there for a permanent holiday. It was just a holiday and nothing else. And I was very grateful. Especially because they loved me so much for my courage.
CB: Indeed.
TC: Yeah.
CB: So you travelled back by ship.
TC: Yeah. The Nieuw Amsterdam.
CB: Right. And where did that go from and to?
TC: New York to Amsterdam.
CB: And who was on the ship? What? What —
TC: There was a contingent of RAF chaps who had just been to a course and they were dropped in England somewhere. The south.
CB: Which year are we talking about now?
TC: ’59. Thereabouts.
CB: Right.
TC: Yeah.
CB: Ok.
TC: And then I came to England. Got married in Hull in ’61. So that was about high speed I suppose.
CB: What was the significance of Hull?
TC: It was the only place where I could travel to easily from Holland.
CB: To see your boyfriend, then fiancé.
TC: Yeah. He was then in Lincolnshire somewhere. So, and then I taught in Hull and that is where we got married. And oh, I lived on the top floor somewhere in a — downstairs was the doctor’s surgery. And I lived upstairs in, in the room above.
CB: Yes.
TC: And, yeah.
CB: Then when you were married, where? Then when you were married where was your husband stationed?
TC: Driffield.
CB: Right.
TC: Yeah.
CB: And what accommodation did you have there?
TC: Quarters. Yeah. And then eventually, you know we moved and put a deposit on a house and so on. So —
CB: What other places did you get posted? Did he get posted to.
TC: St Athan. Oh God.
CB: You were in Coningsby or a while.
TC: Coningsby. St Athan. Where have I got that little envelope with all the ins and outs?
CB: I’ll just stop for a mo.
TC: Yeah.
[recording paused]
TC: Heathcote Road.
CB: Where? Where’s that?
TC: That is in [pause] oh God.
CB: Where? Where did you buy the house?
TC: The first house we bought. Fortescue Close in ’68. And we left there ’78.
CB: But was that in Lincolnshire?
TC: Yeah. It’s all Lincolnshire.
CB: Oh. It is. Right. And did you get, did he get a posting abroad?
TC: Yeah. Germany of all places. That is where she came from.
CB: What was that like?
TC: To start with a little apprehensive to say the least. But I spoke the language because obviously in Holland you learn French and German and English. So I could communicate. And we lived amongst the Germans and that was actually a very good therapy for realising they were not all bad. That was, that was usually —
CB: What was their reaction to the British? Because we’re talking about the 60s now are we? Or 70s?
TC: Well, as long as they paid. They were after money. It didn’t matter what they did. And they were not particularly so anti-British. Hey. Would you like this?
CB: Yes please. Thank you.
[pause]
CB: And so, when you were in Germany how long were you there and what did you do?
TC: Three years.
CB: Yes.
TC: And I also taught there.
CB: You did.
TC: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: On the school in the station.
TC: Yeah.
CB: Which station? Where were you stationed?
TC: Gütersloh.
CB: Right
TC: Yeah. That was a nice place. Yeah.
CB: And from there —
TC: England. Wales.
CB: Oh, St Athan.
TC: Speak Welsh.
CB: Yeah. That’s really well done, I thought. Yeah. And then your husband retired. What age did he retire from the RAF?
TC: Normal age.
CB: Yeah.
TC: Yeah.
CB: And then what job did he do after that?
TC: Then we got divorced.
CB: Oh.
TC: Yeah.
CB: Right.
TC: In fact, in between I married him twice.
CB: Right.
TC: [laughs] I’m an idiot. My sense of humour is wicked.
CB: It is but it’s good. Entertaining and generally admirable.
TC: Yeah. But it didn’t work.
CB: No.
TC: No. So —
CB: But you kept on teaching.
TC: Yeah. Right until ’94.
CB: So when you were divorced you were at Coningsby, were you? And then you —
TC: Yeah.
CB: Did you carry on teaching there?
TC: Yes. I have got here. That is the headmaster who said the school has rules.
CB: Oh yes.
TC: And I said, ‘Yes Nigel. I believe you.’
CB: But?
TC: I had my own way [laughs] But when you hear. When you read this I’m in seventh heaven. They couldn’t have praised me higher than this. This is the [pause] he says —
CB: This is the headmaster’s report.
TC: Yeah. I was a headmistress as well for a while [pause] Oh here. “I want you to picture a scene. A dark cold stormy night. The fierce wind was lashing the waves over the top of the dyke. The sails on the windmill were rushing around at a tremendous speed. Suddenly a piercing cry was heard and all went quiet. In England, across the water explosions and bright lights shot into the night to celebrate. Thea Coleman had been born [laughs] Ever since, in England fireworks have been lit off to celebrate her birthday on November the 5th. Little is known about Thea before she went to school but we do know she had a happy childhood.” Can’t have better than that can you? Yeah. So it goes on and on. And even the kids now they are still talking to me. They still phone me.
CB: Is that right?
TC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Even after all these years.
TC: Yeah.
CB: Where did you become your own headteacher?
TC: Just before he left. Before he came. I was replaced by him. And then in between I had [pause] it was only in here we were standing as it were.
CB: Yeah.
TC: And then there was this one. There’s Jim. Now, he took it from a different point. First, I thought I should begin in true Coleman’s style by side tracking because that’s what I like to do. A friend of mine is a jeweller. When buying an old item, discussing gem stones with him he explained the reason for cutting stones in the ways that they do. One reason is to make a stone catch the light and sparkle. Another reason, rather more subtle is to reflect light into the stone. Anyway, so he compares my person with a gemstone.
CB: Right.
TC: And then he sees me as a friend. And then as a teacher. And then as a colleague. Which is rather nice way of describing me.
CB: Yeah.
TC: And then —
CB: And this is your school report as a teacher.
TC: Yeah. As a pupil.
CB: Appreciation.
TC: Yeah. Which is, which I appreciate.
CB: Where was your last teaching post?
TC: Gee whizz. That was in [pause] Hell’s bells, that was here [pause] Because this one was written of my retirement. Where the hell was it? See, now that’s sometimes my memory goes a bit. How come [pause] gee whizz.
CB: I’ll stop just for a mo.
[recording paused]
CB: So your last post in teaching was at Coningsby.
TC: Yeah.
CB: And you retired at what age?
TC: ’94. ’33. What was it? Work it out.
CB: Yeah. Quite a few years. Sixty.
TC: Sixty.
CB: One.
TC: Sixty one.
CB: Yeah.
TC: That’s just about right.
CB: Yeah.
TC: Yeah.
CB: That’s very good. And you’ve got a couple of anecdotes there have you?
TC: Well, this is just a postscript out of my book.
CB: Yes.
TC: You know, afterwards you think like one memory that has been suppressed all this time is now ready to be put into words and to add to my story. On one of my many walks in Amsterdam with my father all pedestrians were stopped by soldiers. We were near a, near a prison. In retaliation of an assassinated German five young men came out and were lined up and executed and we had to watch. A vicar who looked at it from his window and praying for them was killed by a stray bullet. So that is one of the [pause] And then there is another one. I should have elaborated on a train journey to Hellouw, that’s where my grandfather lived, with my father. Fancy my fear when he told me, ‘Look, when soldiers enter the train and if I get arrested pretend you don’t know me. But make sure you take that suitcase with you.’ So those were, you know you were only little. Nine. Whatever. And then there is Fritz. I’ve told you about Fritz. The four year old taken by the Gestapo from my grandfather’s house. Devastated. The parents were so grateful for their safety for the other two boys and so that they planted a tree for my family in Jerusalem near the Holocaust Museum. And when I mentioned the crowd on the Dam with the Germans opening fire. Twenty nine people were killed. One soldier was asked, ‘Why did you do it?’ His answer was, ‘Why didn’t you cheer like this when we arrived?’ And then the house we were allocated that had been confiscated by the Germans from a Jewish family had been used as a prison. That’s the first house we came back to after the war. And when we lived in it a man came to the door to ask if his shoes were still there. He had escaped out of the window with the help of a sheet. There’s are just a couple of thoughts that I thought needed remembering.
CB: Yes. Thea —
TC: Especially with my memory going.
CB: Thea Coleman, thank you for a fascinating conversation.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Thea Coleman
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-09-14
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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01:47:23 audio recording
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AColemanRE170914
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Pending review
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Language
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eng
Coverage
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Civilian
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Netherlands
Netherlands--Amsterdam
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1940
1942
1944
1945
Description
An account of the resource
Thea Coleman was born in 1933 in Holland. She experienced the invasion of her country and the increasing restrictions. When walking once with her father they were forced to stand and wait while prisoners were brought out of prison and executed while they were forced to watch. Thea’s family were involved with the Resistance and she was forced to go into hiding with various people until she finally went to live in a Children’s Home. The RAF bombed the Registry in the town and so her father and others were able to change their identities and obtain new documents. The family hid Jewish people. One Jewish woman who was hidden by the family told them she had hidden the Menorah in her garden and to please dig it up if she did not return. She did not return and Thea still has this in her possession as a reminder of horrors of that time. Thea was so hungry that she ate the food from the dog’s bowl in the Children’s Home where she was living. Operation Manna saved her life because she was severely malnourished. When the people thought that Liberation had arrived they gathered at the Dam Square in Amsterdam. German soldiers were hiding on the rooftops and opened fire on the crowd killing and injuring a large number of civilians.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
anti-Semitism
childhood in wartime
faith
fear
heirloom
Holocaust
home front
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Resistance
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/346/3514/AWarwickT170322.1.mp3
66e6c6203dd7a036ea9519f720f4f66c
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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Warwick, Thea
T Warwick
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Thea Warwick.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-03-21
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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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Warwick, T
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
RP: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Rod Pickles. The interviewee is Thea Warwick. The interview is taking place in Mrs Warwick’s home in Portesham, Dorset on the 22nd of March 2017. Max Warwick is also present. Good morning Thea. Could you start by telling us where you were born and your early childhood experiences please?
TW: I was born in Rotterdam on the 13th of August 1937 and the war didn’t start until 1940 as we all know. My father was called up in 1939 to help with the, with the army although he didn’t have any experience. He was stationed at a small airfield in [unclear] and because I was only more or less a baby my mother wanted to see my father so we went over there and stayed in a farmhouse. While we were staying there I got the measles so that meant we couldn’t go home. During that week when, when we were stuck there they bombed Rotterdam. And we didn’t know whether our house was still standing so luckily it was OK when we came back. So that was my earliest memory of the war. My father came back, I don’t know exactly when, but when he came back out of the blue he was very thin and he had dysentery so quite an ill man. And after that, after the bombing there, there wasn’t much going on to be, to be honest. The war or the hardship started before the Hongerwinter that is where I remember most and also there were things going on. There was a lot that year on the 10th of November 1944 all men were called up in Rotterdam and, and you had to be between seventeen and fourteen, forty. You had a days notice, so my father packed his little suitcase and went with our neighbour to the park behind our house where they were supposed to go. When they were inspected they told my father, even though he was forty, you’re too old you can go home. The neighbour was thirty-eight years old but he, he had a visible goitre so the Germans said “you can go home”. So luckily he came home after hours and I remember the joy we had. Thank goodness my father came home because my mother would’ve never coped with what was going to happen next. While, while this was going on with regard to [unclear] there was a little Jewish chap who lived in our street and he hid but the Germans found him because after the time — after the [unclear] that particular afternoon when all the men were supposed to be in the park the Germans came to every house to see if there were any men hiding. Luckily they got so fed up with going up and down the stairs they didn’t go up stairs they just went to the front door and asked my mother if there were any men, of course there wasn’t. Now, later on in the war when some — most, most of the men came back who were picked up in our street except for two who found another lady while they were in Germany and that was very sad and caused a bit of a scandal [laughs] I remember that all because it — then, then of course things got really bad. My father, there was no more food and we moved into the smallest room in our house. He had bought a dustbin lined with concrete which was put up in the corner of the room with a pipe going through the window outside we had a table and four chairs in there and that’s where we lived. I used to go to the park and try to find wood and also had a sieve with me and some tools because the path in park were made with a sort of coal like an anthracite and I used to scrape it off in bits and put them in the sieve, you know and then take them off home.
RP: This was for fuel obviously?
TW: Yeah, yeah because — well we had to burn whatever we could find in the dustbin, you know. We had no electricity, no gas. Luckily we had water. That was all we had left. Then one day I found a great big branch, branch of a tree and it was very heavy and walking home, carrying this tree and there was a man that lived there who I happened to know. He came up to me he said “I’ll have that”. He took it off me, I ran home crying and my father said he would — I will get it back and he called his neighbour up and the two men went up to his house and he gave it back without any problem. I mean, you know, we were all so desperate [laughs] it’s all become basics hasn’t it. In the morning my mother had to look through all the blankets for fleas because when you have no proper food the bugs come and there were a lot of fleas in the blankets every morning. Not only that we had lice on our heads. We were taken somewhere to some sort of hospital and I remember they cut my hair very very short. I was almost bald because of the lice and was given some sort of stuff, you know. These are all the things I remember and of course we had to walk everywhere, you know. Then my father went to, to the harbour to see if he could find anything to eat and then there was— in the winter and there was snow and ice and he had a bicycle and he fell, fell over on the ice and broke his arm. Anyway he managed to get home, had his arm in a sling and he rigged up some sort of contraption in that little room we were in in the corner to exercise his arm. Anyway that got better. Then he decided to go away for a few days at a time to go to the farmers to try and see if he could get food from them, but you see money was not worth a penny, you know. It was worth nothing, so all we had of value was then used to buy food in exchange and I tell you some of the farms got very rich during the war. We also had an allotment and that was fine and helped us out in the years before 1940 to the Hongerwinter. Of course when people got very hungry they went to the allotment and stole all the food and even the little summer house that was on there was completely gone. People took it home for burning, you know. And also every tree in the park went it was bare, it was totally bare.
RP: Goodness.
TW: Then the government tried to grow some food in open public places like corn and potatoes to try and feed the population, you know. Well that helped a little bit but it wasn’t really good err I will have to stop for a minute [pause] err yes and also we had to learn soup kitchen and I always had to get [unclear] and we found the biggest saucepan we could find, it was about that big, and I had to walk for about two miles with the pan to the soup kitchen and I was about six then. I think my mother let me — the things I did when I was six in those — she didn’t care anymore because after the war she was extremely strict with me, I couldn’t do this that and the other but in the war I think mentally she had, she had given up, you know. So I went to this [laughs] soup kitchen and one day we had a soup so called, it was a grey mass, you know and of course then I had to carry that all home and another day I went with my little neighbour who was the same age as me and we heard there was another — we could get a meal in a church somewhere we walked for miles to that church and on the way we found a great big bundle of money laying in the street so we started to count it and then because we were so young and naive we asked a passer by what we should do with it [laughs] and he said don’t worry I will bring it to the police station, yes, you know. Never to be seen again [laughs]. Oh we were so innocent.
RP: Did you not keep one note?
TW: No, nothing I mean we — [laughs]. Then of course, I didn’t have shoes anymore that was a thing so my father repaired the shoes as much as he could. Instead of soles he put rubber underneath from tyres, you know.
RP: Oh yes.
TW: And in the end he couldn’t repair them anymore so he bought me a pair of wooden clogs, you know, the Dutch clogs so that was in the Hongerwinter and there was a lot of snow and we still had to go to school. Yes [laughs] and I remember and they didn’t fit very well so he put some straw in them, you know and every fifteen yards or so I had to stop because snow used to pile up underneath because it was wood you see so I would struggle to school.
RP: They would become heavier?
TW: Yes, yeah you could walk and I had to take the snow off. And then of course when we went to school in the end there was no coal because each classroom had a huge burner in the corner and it was enormous and there was nothing. So we used to sit there with our coats on and every time when the sirens went we had to rush out of the school straight into the — what’s it called, the — underground what’s it called?
RP: The subway?
TW: No, no.
RP: Cellar?
TW: A cellar, no, no they were specially built for everybody to hide in. You had them in this country. Anyway.
RP: So while all this all this was going on obviously you were only six so you would not be aware of why you were cut off. Were you aware of the fact that the allies had advanced past, past Holland?
TW: No I wasn’t [unclear] to that. This was my — what I personally — my experience my memory, you know.
RP: So I wonder all this time that obviously the population looking for food what were the Germans doing were they starving or were they —
TW: No they were well fed. And of course, you know, in the street where we lived we had a Jewish family living who was a Rabi and one day he disappeared and the following day he had [unclear] that went in there which were called christenings[?] and we had another two sisters living further in the road who were fraternising with the German Officers they were collected by cars every time but I tell you a bit more about them later. Then my next door, we had four, eight families living in my — where I lived and my other neighbour he was in the resistance and also the one that lived on top and one day the Germans had a tip off that he was home I don’t know which one they were after the first neighbour or the one that lived on the top. The one that lived below luckily wasn’t home the other one that lived at the top was able to escape over the roofs and those Germans came in our house and stood on the balcony for hours on end pointing a gun down the gardens because they thought he would escape through the gardens but no he escaped over the roof. Anyway my first neighbour who lived below he — they did find him and they killed him. You know, with all these — although it was only a little street a lot happened there so can you imagine, you know.
RP: It must’ve been terrifying.
TW: Yeah. Right I’ll stop. [rustling of papers] That was in the summer it was before the Hongerwinter and we had quite a nice warm summer and my father somehow had secured a load of potatoes but we had to collect them ourselves. So from where he worked he got up a hand cart with a lid on it so my mother who was pregnant, so that must have been in the summer of forty-three, we, we left very early and walked for five hours to get to the river where this boat was supposed to be. So we had to wait a long time there and in the end we were able to fill the hand cart with potatoes and then we had to get home because there was curfew. We had to be home before dark. We just made it in time and of course I got very tired and I was able to sit in the cart, you know, because my mother didn’t want me, to leave me at home in case there was a bombardment [coughs] back so it was almost dark when we got home and we unloaded the potatoes. We threw them in the hallway until it was all finished and then locked the door and lights out and then we went two flights up. We had another room at the top of the house which wasn’t used and had a wooden floor and all the potatoes were spread out over the floor so they would keep you see, didn’t go rotten and then my father said “Make sure you don’t tell anybody we’ve got those potatoes.” I remember my mother boiling a big pan full of potatoes that night that’s all we had to eat [laughs]
RP: Do you still like potatoes?
TW: oh yes, yes [laughs] yeah, yeah.
RP: [laughs] it’s just that I thought with eating so many you might have decided that you were never going to eat them again.
TW: No. I have to stop here a minute [rustling of paper]
RP: OK.
TW: We, we woke up about seven o’clock with an almighty explosion and my mother had a sort of very large bed called an Alisa Bowl, French word for it, it is so four people could sleep in it and for safety we all slept in that room, anyway there was this explosion and my father went straight out of the house to find out [coughs] excuse me, what happened and a V-1 had gone wrong in about maybe half a mile away from us and it landed on block of houses, you know. So he came back and he collected us and we all went to have a look and it was so sad. I remember it so well because people did have nothing left, they just sat in a field nearby with nothing, you know and apparently according to this book here this
V-1 was fired from [unclear] and was supposed to go to Antwerp. We thought it was going to England because most of them were, you know. We had V-1s and V-2s and we could tell the difference because of the sound they make. So that was all very sad. I’ll stop here a minute. My father during the war worked for the electricity supplier in Rotterdam near our house a huge building and it was the highest building at the time apart from a church about sixteen stories high and of course it was near the harbour. So the Germans took charge of that so there was [unclear] as well and my father was a night porter there during the war and they used to give it [unclear] with string and annoy him just for their own pleasure ,you know, ‘cause there was nothing else to do and when he was at the end of his shift they’d give him a huge plate of food to take home but he had to go on his bicycle but how he got home every time I really don’t know. We’ve still got the plates. My sisters still got the iron plates. They’re about that round and that high [coughs] Let’s stop for a minute. [long pause] Yeah, on the 9th of April 1945 somehow we knew about a food drop. My parents knew I don’t know how they got to know this but we went to the top of our house which had a flat roof and we waited for the planes to come and when they did come they flew very low and we saw the parcels being thrown out of the planes and we had a sheet there and we used to wave, we waved, at the pilots it was extremely emotional. Unfortunately whatever we got from the food drop wasn’t very much in the end because the distribution was very difficult. There was no petrol everything had to be delivered by horse and cart to the shops and we didn’t — and on the 13th of May that was after the war we actually got some tins of corned beef, corned beef and some biscuits. That’s all we got from the drop I suppose the rest had already disappeared, you know, somewhere.
RP: I suppose the Germans helped themselves as well did they?
TW: Of course, of course.
RP: So what — do you know what they were dropping beside the corned beef and biscuits? Do you know what they were dropping?
TW: We don’t know what was in it but according to the book here there were chocolates in it and everything but we never got it.
RP: You never saw any chocolate?
TW: No all the good things had gone. So only biscuits and tins were left but the Swedish Government sent us white bread. That was one loaf for every family and it tasted like cake.
RP: So how did they supply that the Swedes?
TW: Well we were told — it comes in the local shops the food shops we had they always sell food. The problem was we had to queue for hours on end. The way we used to queue I used to queue an hour then my mother and then my father because it was only a bag and we went home.
RP: So on shifts then? That’s something new, shift queuing but I suppose because Sweden was neutral they could sail in couldn’t they?
TW: Of course.
RP: They could sail in to Rotterdam?
TW: Well I think, well I don’t know how they actually managed to —
RP: Well whatever way they —
TW: Well it was after the war so they could have come by ship.
RP: They could have come by ship.
TW: Or by plane even, yeah.
RP: But, but you actually saw the aircraft come in when you were on the roofs then?
TW: Oh yes, oh yes never forget it. Makes me cry every time.
RP: So I mean — I suppose somebody somewhere got the food I guess so —
TW: Yes I think.
RP: What about your neighbours were they, were they able to get some?
TW: Well we, we all went to the same shops so I suppose, you know, they got the same as we did. I’ve got some more about food talk. The distribution was very slow and between the 1st of May and the 13th of May four hundred and eighteen people died from starvation and we were liberated from the 5th of May so can you imagine so they didn’t just — nearly at the end of the war lots of people were dying of starvation. You saw people drop in the streets it was awful. [coughs] Do you want to know about the liberation?
RP: Yes, yes please. So at what point did the Germans surrender in Holland then? Was it the same day as —
TW: Well it’s all a little bit vague but the official day actually they say was the 6th of May when they did it, liberated, not the fifth. I don’t know why they are saying this and then the Canadians, the Canadians came in. I’ll never forget that day. They came in their tanks row after rows, rows all afternoon rolling in with tanks then went to the centre of the town and of course everybody went out to celebrate and of course the Germans just disappeared. Then when the liberation came well the people had street parties everywhere, flags were hung out, bunting everywhere I don’t know where they got the flags from. My neighbour who was a pianist his piano was carried out of the house in the street and we learnt to dance the hokey pokey and this went on for days on end.
RP: I can imagine.
TW: And every now — after that everybody must have been too exhausted to party anymore. And then came the revenge. The two sisters that lived in our street and were friendly with the German Officers were dragged out of their house, their head shaven, tarred and feathered then put on a horse and cart and driven through the neighbourhood collecting others on the way. The Quizlings[?] living opposite us disappeared overnight. Then after that I can’t remember very much. I think it came back to normal.
RP: So at what point did the food supply return to normal do you think? Did it take a couple of years or —
TW: Oh well, we, it was the same of everybody else we had rations.
RP: So you had ration books same as this country?
TW: And err [coughs] I believe the rations in England lasted longer than ours.
RP: Yeah, I think it was about 1953 in England the rations stopped.
TW: Yes because coffee was always rationed wasn’t it?
RP: Yes and strangely enough bananas.
TW: Bananas ,God, I remember seeing a banana and an orange I’d never seen one before.
RP: I think I saw one about 1953 but yeah, yeah. So do you know how many drops were made in Holland then because —
TW: I think it was a one off. It was a very dangerous exercise. They couldn’t have done —
RP: Because the Americans also came by as well didn’t they? They had an operation to supply as well. Probably two different parts I think. They called theirs, they called theirs Chowhound , Operation Chowhound but I think that might have been to different cities not to Rotterdam.
TW: Well Rotterdam was the worse and then next came the Hague and then [unclear]
RP: Yeah, so they might have been dropping elsewhere. I know the one I showed you he did one drop on the Hague I know that.
TW: Yeah, Yeah.
RP: But the Americans also came in afterwards and I think they may —
TW: Well I was too young to actually know the ins and outs, you know. If I’d been older I probably would’ve known.
RP: So did you — so ten years later after the war did your parents talk about it or was it forgotten?
TW: Never
RP: No.
TW: Obviously, I mean we never asked somehow. We should’ve done because, you know, they could’ve answered a lot of questions. No we never talked about it. It’s only my sister two years ago wanted to know because she didn’t know anything [coughs]
RP: Is your sister still in Holland?
TW: No.
RP: No. So is there anything I should need to tell them because that’s been fascinating but — I mean when you said about the four hundred that wasn’t the total [unclear] was there more over time than the four hundred do you think?
TW: Well it was the highest in one week.
RP: In one week? So it was a weekly thing so —
TW: Oh yes.
RP: So it could’ve been thousands?
TW: Oh. If it hadn’t been for my father I don’t see we would’ve made it. My mother was useless. She was suffering a [unclear] which is very — your legs swell up and —
RP: Oh yes.
TW: You know, and she just mentally was out of it completely.
RP: Well that’s been fascinating and really, thank you for telling us all that. It’s been a pleasure listening.
TW: I think that’s it.
RP: It’s been fascinating and thank you very much indeed because it’s a little known story and I think it will be valuable information. So thank you very much for that. You did twenty-eight minutes. There you go.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AWarwickT170322
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Thea Warwick
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:28:56 audio recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rod Pickles
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-03-22
Description
An account of the resource
Thea Warwick was seven years old and living in Rotterdam during the war. She recounts what is was like during the Hongerwinter. Walking for miles to soup kitchens and talks about other examples of how they obtained food. They moved into the smallest room of their house to try and keep warm and had to go out searching for wood to burn. She recalls waiting on their roof for planes to drop food parcels and remembers being woken up by an explosion which was a V-1 landing on a block of houses about half a mile away from them. She remembers the Germans searching for their neighbour and standing on the balcony of their house pointing guns down the gardens for hours on end. She recalls the day of liberation and when the Canadian tanks rolled into her town. An explanation is given how everyone in the street celebrated.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Netherlands
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-04
1945-05
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tracy Johnson
anti-Semitism
bombing
childhood in wartime
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
round-up
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2056/33788/LDoxseyJA630441v1.1.pdf
fc12441228a525cb4f9bb0f0103af7e6
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
Doxsey, JA
Description
An account of the resource
Nine items. The collection concerns Warrant Officer John Alfred Doxsey (b. 1921, 630441 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, photographs and documents.
He flew operations as an air gunner with 149 Squadron before serving with No.3 aircraft Delivery Unit in North Africa.
A sub-collection photograph album contains pictures of aircraft, people and places in Europe and Africa during and after the Second World War.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Nigel Doxsey and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-20
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
Doxsey, JA
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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J A Doxsey RAF observer's and air gunner's flying log book. One
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Language
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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 with b/w photographs
Identifier
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LDoxseyJA630441v1
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Description
An account of the resource
J A Doxsey’s RAF Observer’s and Air Gunner’s Flying Log Book from 5th October 1939 to 25th January 1944, recording training and operations as a Wireless Operator/Air Gunner, and Transport Command ferry duties across Africa, Brazil and USA. Aircraft in which flown: Heyford, Wellington, Blenheim, Wellesley, Martin Maryland, Liberator, B-17E, DC-2, DC-3, Boston, Bisley, Beaufighter, Baltimore, Sunderland, Hudson, Anson, plus others as a passenger. Based at: RAF Yatesbury, RAF West Freugh (No. 4 Air Observer School), RAF Mildenhall (149 Squadron), RAF Bassingbourn (11 OTU), RAF Station Takoradi (Ferry Pool, No. 1 Aircraft Delivery Unit (ME), No 3 Aircraft Delivery Unit). Records a total of 27 operations (20 night, 7 day). Numerous operations are only recorded vaguely, for example: “Sweep”, “Norway” or “Raid as detailed/authorised”. Named targets in Germany, Netherlands and Norway are: Hamburg, Hamm, Heligoland Island, Kolleda, Rotterdam, Stavanger, Sylt and Wilhelmshaven. His pilots on operations were Squadron Leader Harris, Pilot Officer Innes, Flying Officer Robertson and Pilot Officer Whitakar. Also includes photographs of aircraft and crew, cuttings and maps.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939-12-03
1939-12-18
1940-01-02
1940-03-15
1940-04-06
1940-04-07
1940-04-12
1940-04-17
1940-04-25
1940-04-26
1940-05-05
1940-05-06
1940-05-10
1940-05-11
1940-05-14
1940-05-15
1940-05-19
1940-05-20
1940-06-13
1940-06-14
1940-06-17
1940-06-18
1940-06-19
1940-06-20
1940-06-29
1940-06-30
1940-07-11
1940-07-12
1940-07-13
1940-07-14
1940-07-23
1940-07-24
1940-07-25
1940-07-26
1940-08-01
1940-08-02
1940-08-07
1940-08-08
1940-08-09
1940-08-10
1940-08-11
1940-08-12
1940-08-16
1940-08-17
1940-08-25
1940-08-26
1941
1942
1943
1944
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Africa
Brazil
Denmark
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Norway
Puerto Rico
United States
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Suffolk
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hamm (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Kölleda
Germany--Sylt
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Ghana--Takoradi
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Norway--Stavanger
Scotland--Wigtownshire
Ghana
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
David Leitch
11 OTU
149 Squadron
Air Observers School
aircrew
Anson
B-17
B-24
Beaufighter
Blenheim
bombing
Boston
C-47
Hudson
Ju 52
Me 109
Me 110
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Mildenhall
RAF West Freugh
RAF Yatesbury
Sunderland
training
Wellington
wireless operator
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/631/24935/LQuineJW185297v1.1.pdf
eab1145dccb0b5e8771ded41d76a1a59
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
Quine, John Wakeford
J W Quine
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Quine, JW
Description
An account of the resource
Seven Items. Collection concerns Pilot officer John Wakeford Quine (b. 1923, 1576065, 185297 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 170 and 582 Squadrons. The collection consists of his logbook, official documents, a course photograph and an oral history interview. also includes a sub-collection of a photograph album of his time training in the United States as well as some target photographs.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by John Quine and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-08-05
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1945
1946
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
J W Quine’s Royal Canadian Air Force pilots flying log book
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LQuineJW185297v1
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Description
An account of the resource
Royal Canadian Air Force pilots flying log book for J W Quine, covering the period from August 1942 to 18 January 1946. Detailing his flying training, operations flown and post war flying with 582 squadron. He was stationed at Miami, RCAF Edmonton, RAF Talbenny, RAF Little Rissington, RAF Desborough, RAF Lindholme, RAF Hemswell, RAF Warboys, RAF Little Staughton and RAF Dunkeswell. Aicraft flown were Tiger Moth, Cornell, Texan, Wellington, Anson, Oxford, Halifax, Lancaster, Mosquito and Dakota. He flew a total of 20 operations, 8 night with 170 squadron, 7 daylight and 5 night with 582 squadron. He also flew one Operation Manna, one Operation Exodus and two Operation Dodge flights. Targets were, Karlsruhe, Koblenz, Bonn, Hannover, Merseburg, Duisburg, Wiesbaden, Bottrop, Mannheim, Kamen, Chemnitz, Dessau, Kassel, Essen, Bremen, Dulmen, Sterkrade, Paderborn, Lutzkendorf, Rotterdam, Juvincourt and Bari. His pilot for his first 'second dickie' operation was Flying Officer Whyte.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
United States
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Alberta--Edmonton
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Devon
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Northamptonshire
England--Yorkshire
Florida--Miami
France--Guignicourt
Germany--Bonn
Germany--Bottrop
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Dessau (Dessau)
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Dülmen
Germany--Essen
Germany--Halle an der Saale
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Kamen
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Koblenz
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Merseburg
Germany--Paderborn
Germany--Wiesbaden
Italy--Bari
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Wales--Pembrokeshire
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Florida
Alberta
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
France--Juvincourt-et-Damary
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1944-12-04
1944-12-05
1944-12-22
1944-12-23
1944-12-28
1944-12-29
1945-01-05
1945-01-06
1945-01-14
1945-01-15
1945-01-22
1945-01-23
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-02-04
1945-03-01
1945-03-03
1945-03-04
1945-03-05
1945-03-06
1945-03-07
1945-03-08
1945-03-09
1945-03-11
1945-03-21
1945-03-22
1945-03-24
1945-03-25
1945-03-27
1945-04-04
1945-04-05
1945-05-03
1945-05-15
1945-06-16
1945-06-20
1945-06-30
1945-07-06
1945-08-11
1945-08-13
1945-08-20
1945-08-22
1945-08-27
1656 HCU
170 Squadron
582 Squadron
83 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
C-47
Cook’s tour
Cornell
Flying Training School
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Mosquito
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
pilot
RAF Desborough
RAF Dunkeswell
RAF Hemswell
RAF Lindholme
RAF Little Rissington
RAF Little Staughton
RAF Talbenny
RAF Warboys
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1898/35375/LPenswickJ[Ser -DoB]v1.pdf
a2b5f946091570f95e5cfc73e2e49f7f
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
Penswick, Jack
J Penswick
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-09
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Penswick, J
Description
An account of the resource
19 items. The collection concerns Jack Penswick (1497486 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book and photographs. He flew operations as an air gunner with 61 and 617 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by John Penswick and 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
Jack Penswick’s observer’s and air gunner’s flying log book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LPenswickJ[Ser#-DoB]v1
Description
An account of the resource
Observer’s and air gunner’s flying log book for J Penswick, air gunner, covering the period from 25 October 1942 to 19 May 1945. Detailing his flying training, operation flown and instructor duties. He was stationed at RAF Morpeth, RAF North Luffenham, RAF Swinderby, RAF Syerston, RAF Scampton, RAF Woodhall Spa and RAF Upper Heyford. Aircraft flown in were Botha, Wellington, Manchester, Lancaster, Oxford, and Martinet. He flew a total of 30 operations, 16 with 61 Squadron (surviving a bale out) and 14 with 617 Squadron. Targets were Dusseldorf, Bochum, Oberhausen, Cologne, Krefeld, Mulheim, Wuppertal, Gelsenkirchen, Milan, Munchengladbach, Berlin, Mannheim, Munich, Hannover, Flixecourt, Liege, Tromso, Urft Dam, Ijmuiden, Politz, Rotterdam, Oslo Fjord, Dortmund-Ems Canal, the Tirpitz, Bielefeld and Arnsberg viaducts. His pilots on operations were Sergeant Pearce, Pilot Officer Willsher and Flight Lieutenant Gumbley.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943-06-11
1943-06-12
1943-06-13
1943-06-14
1943-06-15
1943-06-16
1943-06-17
1943-06-21
1943-06-22
1943-06-23
1943-06-24
1943-06-25
1943-06-26
1943-08-14
1943-08-15
1943-08-30
1943-08-31
1943-09-01
1943-09-03
1943-09-04
1943-09-05
1943-09-06
1943-09-07
1943-09-23
1943-09-24
1943-12-16
1943-12-17
1943-12-20
1943-12-21
1944-11-11
1944-12-08
1944-12-11
1944-12-15
1944-12-21
1944-12-22
1944-12-29
1944-12-30
1944-12-31
1945-01-01
1945-02-24
1945-03-13
1945-03-14
1945-03-19
1944-11-12
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Belgium
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Norway
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Atlantic Ocean--Oslofjorden
Belgium--Liège
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Northumberland
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
France--Abbeville Region
Germany--Arnsberg
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bielefeld
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Euskirchen Region
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Mönchengladbach
Germany--Mülheim an der Ruhr
Germany--Munich
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Schleswig-Holstein
Germany--Wuppertal
Italy--Milan
Netherlands--IJmuiden
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Norway--Tromsø
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Poland
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
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
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
Mike Connock
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1942
1943
1944
1945
16 OTU
1660 HCU
29 OTU
61 Squadron
617 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
bale out
bombing
Botha
Grand Slam
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Manchester
Martinet
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Morpeth
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Scampton
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Woodhall Spa
Tallboy
Tirpitz
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1224/16230/LBrownJ2205595v1.1.pdf
68f04a9ac0e97a321619e6e864c46ad3
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
Brown, Jeff
Jeffrey Brown
J Brown
Description
An account of the resource
35 items. One oral history interview with Flying Officer Jeff Brown (b. 1925, 2205595, Royal Air Force), his log book, service material and photographs including 16 pictures of B-29s. He flew operations as a Flight Sergeant air gunner with 576 Squadron from RAF Fiskerton towards the end of the war and took part in Operation Manna.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Jeff Brown and catalogued by Peter Adams.
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
2017-01-18
2017-01-31
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
Brown, J-3
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
Jeff Brown's flying log book for navigators, air bombers, air gunners, flight engineers
Description
An account of the resource
Flying log book for navigators, air bombers, air gunners, flight engineers for Jeff Brown, air gunner, covering the period from 18 August 1944 to 31 December 1951. Detailing his flying training, operations flown and post war flying. He was stationed at RAF Dalcross, RAF Oakley, RAF Westcott, RAF Bottesford, RAF Fiskerton, RAF Wellesbourne Mountford, RAF Marham and RAF Coningsby. Aircraft flown in were, Anson, Martinet, Wellington, Lancaster, B-29, Oxford and Tiger Moth. He flew 5 Operation Manna sorties to Rotterdam and Hague, and one Operation Exodus to Brussels with 576 Squadron. His pilot on operations was Flight Sergeant Fleming. Post war flying was with 149 Squadron.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LBrownJ2205595v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Belgium
Great Britain
Netherlands
Belgium--Brussels
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Warwickshire
Netherlands--Hague
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Scotland--Inverness
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1945-05-01
1945-05-02
1945-05-03
1945-05-05
1945-05-08
1945-05-26
1945-06-19
11 OTU
149 Squadron
1668 HCU
576 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
B-29
Cook’s tour
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Martinet
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Bottesford
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Bridlington
RAF Burn
RAF Coningsby
RAF Dalcross
RAF Driffield
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Hartford Bridge
RAF Marham
RAF Oakley
RAF Sturgate
RAF Wellesbourne Mountford
RAF Westcott
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/551/23213/LLancasterJO103509v1.2.pdf
56bf3c9cc310d03cf9f44312ba2ba698
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
Lancaster, Jo
John Oliver Lancaster
J O Lancaster
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lancaster, JO
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. Two oral history interviews with John Oliver 'Jo' Lancaster DFC (1919 - 2019, 948392, 103509 Royal Air Force), photographs and six of his log books. Jo Lancaster completed 54 operations as a pilot with in Wellingtons with 40 Squadron, and after a period of instructing, in Lancasters with 12 Squadron from RAF Wickenby. He became test pilot after the war and was the first person to use a Martin-Baker ejection seat in an emergency.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Jo Lancaster and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-18
2017-03-08
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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
Jo Lancaster’s pilots flying log book. One
Description
An account of the resource
Pilots flying log book for J O Lancaster covering the period from 6 July 1937 to 15 September 1943. Detailing his flying training, operations flown and instructor duties. He was stationed at RAF Sywell, RAF Ansty, RAF Desford, RAF Sealand, RAF Ternhill, RAF Lossiemouth, RAF Wyton, RAF Wellesbourne Mountford, RAF Upavon, RAF Wymeswold, RAF Kirmington, RAF Wickenby and RAF Binbrook. Aircraft flown were Tiger Moth, Cadet, Hart, Audax, Master, Wellington, Bombay, Oxford, Stirling, Magister, Lancaster, Whitley, Halifax, Martinet, Skua and Spitfire. He flew a total of 54 operations, 31 with 40 squadron 1 daylight and 30 night, 2 night operations with 22 Operational Training Unit and 21 night operations with 12 Squadron. Targets were Calais, Hamburg, Hannover, Atlantic, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Cherbourg, Brest, Munster, Osnabruck, Mannheim, Duisburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, Turin, Stettin, Rotterdam, Emden, Nurnberg, Essen, St Nazaire, Terschelling, Haugesund Fijord, Lorient, Wilhelmshaven, Bremen, Munich and Spezia. His pilot for his first 'second dickie' operations was Sergeant Taylor.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LLancasterJO103509v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Norway
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Northamptonshire
England--Shropshire
England--Warwickshire
England--Wiltshire
England--Worcestershire
France--Brest
France--Calais
France--Cherbourg
France--Lorient
France--Saint-Nazaire
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Italy--La Spezia
Italy--Turin
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Netherlands--Terschelling
Norway--Haugesund
Poland--Szczecin
Scotland--Moray
Wales--Flintshire
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Poland
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1941-05-09
1941-05-10
1941-05-11
1941-05-12
1941-05-15
1941-05-16
1941-05-27
1941-06-02
1941-06-03
1941-06-11
1941-06-12
1941-06-23
1941-06-24
1941-06-26
1941-06-27
1941-07-02
1941-07-03
1941-07-04
1941-07-05
1941-07-06
1941-07-07
1941-07-09
1941-07-10
1941-07-22
1941-07-23
1941-07-24
1941-07-30
1941-07-31
1941-08-12
1941-08-13
1941-08-16
1941-08-17
1941-08-18
1941-08-19
1941-08-25
1941-08-28
1941-08-29
1941-08-31
1941-09-01
1941-09-02
1941-09-03
1941-09-07
1941-09-08
1941-09-10
1941-09-11
1941-09-12
1941-09-13
1941-09-15
1941-09-16
1941-09-29
1941-09-30
1941-10-03
1941-10-04
1941-10-11
1941-10-12
1941-10-14
1941-10-15
1941-10-16
1941-10-17
1942-06-01
1942-06-02
1942-11-03
1942-11-04
1942-11-07
1942-11-08
1942-11-09
1942-11-10
1943-01-04
1943-01-05
1943-01-08
1943-01-09
1943-01-23
1943-01-24
1943-01-30
1943-01-31
1943-02-02
1943-02-03
1943-02-07
1943-02-08
1943-02-11
1943-02-12
1943-02-13
1943-02-14
1943-02-15
1943-02-16
1943-02-17
1943-02-18
1943-02-19
1943-02-21
1943-02-22
1943-03-03
1943-03-04
1943-03-05
1943-03-06
1943-03-08
1943-03-09
1943-03-10
1943-03-12
1943-03-13
1943-03-22
1943-03-23
1943-03-27
1943-03-28
1943-04-03
1943-04-04
1943-04-05
1943-04-18
1943-04-19
12 Squadron
20 OTU
22 OTU
28 OTU
40 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
Flying Training School
Halifax
Lancaster
Magister
Martinet
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Ansty
RAF Binbrook
RAF Desford
RAF Kirmington
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Sealand
RAF Sywell
RAF Ternhill
RAF Upavon
RAF Wellesbourne Mountford
RAF Wickenby
RAF Wymeswold
RAF Wyton
Spitfire
Stirling
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/776/9971/LBrittainJT2227748v1.1.pdf
fe533e91cb625c3200e59506715352f3
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
Brittain, John Taylor
J T Brittain
Description
An account of the resource
42 items. The collection concerns Sergeant John Taylor Brittain (2227748, Royal Air Force). After training as an air gunner at Morpeth and conversion and training at Silverston, North Luffenham and Feltwell, he was posted to 195 Squadron at RAF Wratting Common in February 1945 and flew on operations as a mid upper gunner on Lancaster. The collection consists of his flying logbook; official documents; letters to colleagues and his mother; photographs of people, events, places and aircraft; as well as an album concerning his boat.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Andrew Whitehouse and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-25
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
Brittain, JT
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
John Brittain's flying log book
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Description
An account of the resource
Flying log book for J T Brittain, air gunner, covering the period from 20 may 1944 to 14 July 1945. Detailing his flying training and operations flown. He was stationed at RAF Morpeth, RAF Silverstone, RAF Turweston, RAF Chedburgh, RAF North Luffenham, RAF Feltwell and RAF Wratting Common. Aircraft flown in were, Anson, Wellington, Stirling and Lancaster. He flew a total of 13 operations, 8 Daylight and 5 night, Targets were, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Kamen, Wesel, Datteln, Kiel, Heligoland, Bremen. His pilot on operations was Flying Officer Brown. He also flew 4 operation Manna to Rotterdam and The Hague, and 3 operation Exodus to Juvincourt.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LBrittainJT2227748v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Northumberland
England--Northamptonshire
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Suffolk
England--Rutland
England--Norfolk
England--Cambridgeshire
France--Aisne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Kamen
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Bremen
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Netherlands--Hague
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
France--Juvincourt-et-Damary
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
1945-02-03
1945-02-04
1945-02-20
1945-02-21
1945-02-22
1945-02-25
1945-02-27
1945-02-28
1945-03-05
1945-03-07
1945-03-08
1945-03-14
1945-04-04
1945-04-05
1945-04-09
1945-04-10
1945-04-18
1945-04-22
1945-04-29
1945-04-30
1945-05-02
1945-05-05
1945-05-17
1945-05-19
1945-05-23
1945-05-25
1945-06-02
1945-06-18
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.
1653 HCU
17 OTU
195 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
Cook’s tour
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Chedburgh
RAF Feltwell
RAF Morpeth
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Silverstone
RAF Turweston
RAF Wratting Common
Stirling
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1950/39396/SWhittakerH186316v20001.2.pdf
20668e9a2588d473e96013050d8c980d
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
Whittaker, Harry
H Whittaker
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
2017-09-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Whittacker, H
Description
An account of the resource
26 items. The collection concerns Sergeant Harry Whittaker (Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, documents and photographs. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 158 and 635 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Simon Whittaker and 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 Calton’s navigator’s, air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SWhittakerH186316v20001
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
Navigator’s, air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book for Ken Calton, flight engineer, covering the period from 27 March 1943 to 4 October 1946. Detailing his flying training, operations flown, instructor duties and post war flying duties. He was stationed at 1662 Conversion Unit RAF Blyton, 12 Squadron RAF Wickenby, 156 squadron RAF Warboys, 7 Squadron and 242 Squadron RAF Oakington, 3 Lancaster Finishing School RAF Feltwell, 635 Squadron RAF Downham Market, 35 Squadron RAF Graveley, Lancastrian Conversion Unit RAF Full Sutton and 51 Squadron RAF Stradishall. Aircraft flown in were Lancaster, Lancastrian, Oxford, York, Anson, Mosquito, Botha, and Manchester. He flew a total of 45 operations, 3 night operations with 12 Squadron, 23 Night operations with 156 Squadron, 5 Night operations with 7 Squadron and 7 Daylight and 7 Night operations with 635 Squadron. His pilots on operations were Squadron Leader Young and Squadron Leader Ashworth and Flight Lieutenant Hitchcock. He also flew on 4 operation Exodus, 2 Operation Dodge and one operation Manna. He also completed 5 Cooks tours. Targets were Essen, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Wuppertal, Munster, Bochum, Cologne, Montchanin, Krefeld, Mulheim, Turin, Hamburg, Milan, Peenemunde, Berlin, Mannheim, Munich, Montlucon, Hannover, Leipzig, Dresden, Dessau, Kassel, Zweibrucken, Nurnberg, Bremen, Bottrop, Osnabruck, Kiel, Potsdam, Berchtesgaden, The Hague, Rotterdam, Brussels, Lubeck, Juvincourt and Bari.
This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form. No better quality copies are available.
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 photocopied booklet
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-04-28
1943-04-29
1943-04-30
1943-05-01
1943-05-04
1943-05-05
1943-05-23
1943-05-24
1943-05-25
1943-05-26
1943-05-27
1943-05-28
1943-05-29
1943-05-30
1943-06-11
1943-06-12
1943-06-13
1943-06-16
1943-06-17
1943-06-19
1943-06-20
1943-06-21
1943-06-22
1943-06-23
1943-06-24
1943-06-25
1943-07-08
1943-07-09
1943-07-12
1943-07-13
1943-07-24
1943-07-25
1943-07-26
1943-07-27
1943-07-28
1943-07-29
1943-07-30
1943-08-02
1943-08-03
1943-08-15
1943-08-16
1943-08-17
1943-08-18
1943-09-03
1943-09-04
1943-09-05
1943-09-06
1943-09-07
1943-09-15
1943-09-16
1943-09-22
1943-09-23
1943-09-24
1943-10-18
1943-10-20
1943-10-21
1945-02-13
1945-02-14
1945-03-07
1945-03-08
1945-03-09
1945-03-12
1945-03-13
1945-03-14
1945-03-15
1945-03-16
1945-03-17
1945-03-21
1945-03-24
1945-03-26
1945-04-13
1945-04-14
1945-04-15
1945-04-22
1945-04-25
1945-04-30
1945-05-05
1945-05-07
1945-05-08
1945-05-10
1945-05-15
1945-05-23
1945-06-08
1945-06-12
1945-06-14
1945-06-25
1945-07-03
1945-07-09
1945-08-03
1945-08-05
1945-08-22
1945-08-24
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Belgium
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Belgium--Brussels
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Suffolk
England--Yorkshire
France--Montchanin
France--Montluçon
Germany--Berchtesgaden
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Bottrop
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dessau (Dessau)
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Essen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Lübeck
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Mülheim an der Ruhr
Germany--Munich
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Peenemünde
Germany--Potsdam
Germany--Wuppertal
Germany--Zweibrücken
Italy--Bari
Italy--Milan
Italy--Turin
Netherlands--Hague
Netherlands--Rotterdam
France--Juvincourt-et-Damary
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
115 Squadron
12 Squadron
156 Squadron
1662 HCU
242 Squadron
3 Group
35 Squadron
51 Squadron
635 Squadron
7 Squadron
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
Cook’s tour
flight engineer
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Lancastrian
mine laying
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Pathfinders
RAF Blyton
RAF Downham Market
RAF Feltwell
RAF Full Sutton
RAF Graveley
RAF Oakington
RAF Pembrey
RAF Stradishall
RAF Warboys
RAF Wickenby
RAF Witchford
training
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1895/35931/SGillK1438901v40007.1.pdf
23a7b10d190492c9547f73b0dfb1562c
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
Gill, Kenneth
K Gill
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-09
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Gill, K
Description
An account of the resource
One hundred and sixty-four items plus another one hundred and fifteen in two sub-ciollections. The collection concerns Flying Officer Kenneth Gill DFC (1922 - 1945, 1438901, 155097 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, documents, photographs and family and other correspondence. <br />He flew operations as a navigator with 9 Squadron before starting a second tour with 617 Squadron. He was killed 21 March 1945 having completed 45 operations.<br /><br />The collection also contains two albums. <br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2114">Kenneth Gill. Album One</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2117">Kenneth Gill. Album Two</a><br /><br />Additional information on Kenneth Gill is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/108654/">IBCC Losses Database.</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Derek Gill and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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
Kenneth Gill - service history
Description
An account of the resource
Joined 18 June 1941. Trained as navigator in Canada. After operational and conversions training in England during which he flew two operations. He was posted to 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney where he flew 25 operations which are listed. After a tour as a navigator instructor, he went to 617 Squadron and flew 19 further operations and was killed along with his crew on the last. Operations on 617 listed.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-06-18
1943-02-25
1943-03
1943-04-18
1943-04-20
1943-05-04
1943-05-11
1943-05-23
1943-05-25
1943-05-29
1943-06-11
1943-06-12
1943-06-14
1943-06-21
1943-06-25
1943-06-28
1943-07-07
1943-07-25
1943-08-07
1943-08-10
1943-08-27
1943-08-30
1943-09-03
1943-09-06
1943-10-03
1943-10-04
1943-10-20
1943-11-03
1943-11-18
1943-12-14
1944-09-27
1944-09-29
1944-10-29
1944-10-30
1944-11-04
1944-11-11
1944-11-12
1944-11-13
1944-12-08
1944-12-11
1944-12-15
1944-12-21
1944-12-29
1944-12-30
1944-12-31
1945-01-02
1945-01-30
1945-02-03
1945-02-06
1945-02-14
1945-02-22
1945-02-24
1945-03-13
1945-03-14
1945-03-19
1945-03-21
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Great Britain
England--Rutland
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Lincolnshire
Scotland--Moray
France
France--Clermont-Ferrand
Italy
Italy--La Spezia
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Essen
Germany--Wuppertal
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Cologne
Italy--Milan
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Rheydt
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Munich
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Leipzig
Norway
Norway--Tromsø
Germany--Euskirchen (Kreis)
Netherlands
Netherlands--IJmuiden
Poland
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Atlantic Ocean--Oslofjorden
Norway--Horten
Netherlands--Hoek van Holland
Germany--Bielefeld
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Arnsberg
Germany--Bremen
Germany
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
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
Five page printed document
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription. Allocated
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SGillK1438901v40007
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
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
crash
Grand Slam
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
killed in action
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
mine laying
navigator
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bardney
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Woodhall Spa
Tallboy
Tirpitz
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1895/35680/LGillK1438901v1.1.pdf
1fcaf9a0c545538c4700852b3da1bf4c
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
Gill, Kenneth
K Gill
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-09
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Gill, K
Description
An account of the resource
One hundred and sixty-four items plus another one hundred and fifteen in two sub-ciollections. The collection concerns Flying Officer Kenneth Gill DFC (1922 - 1945, 1438901, 155097 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, documents, photographs and family and other correspondence. <br />He flew operations as a navigator with 9 Squadron before starting a second tour with 617 Squadron. He was killed 21 March 1945 having completed 45 operations.<br /><br />The collection also contains two albums. <br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2114">Kenneth Gill. Album One</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2117">Kenneth Gill. Album Two</a><br /><br />Additional information on Kenneth Gill is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/108654/">IBCC Losses Database.</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Derek Gill and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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
Kenneth Gill’s observer’s and air gunner’s flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Observer’s and air gunner’s flying log book for K Gill, navigator, covering the period from 17 May 1942 to 21 March 1945 when he was missing on operations. Detailing his flying training, operations flown and instructor duties. He was stationed at RCAF Chatham, RAF North Luffenham, RAF Swinderby, RAF Bardney, RAF Syerston and RAF Woodhall Spa. Aircraft flown in were Anson, Wellington, Halifax, Lancaster, Hudson, Tiger Moth and Stearman. He flew a total of 46 operations, one with 29 operational training unit, one with 1660 conversion unit, 26 with 9 squadron and 18 with 617 squadron. His pilots on operations were Flight Lieutenant Evans, Flight Lieutenant Derbyshire, and Fl;ight Lieutenant Gumbley. Targets were Clermont Ferrand, Spezia, Dortmund, Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Essen, Wuppertal, Bochum, Oberhausen, Krefeld, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne, Milan, Nurnberg, Rheydt, Berlin, Munich, Kassel, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Tromso - Tirpitz, Urft Dam, IJmuiden, Politz, Rotterdam, Horten, Pootershaven, Bielefeld, Ladbergen, Arnsberg and Arbergen.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943-02-25
1943-02-26
1943-04-18
1943-04-19
1943-05-04
1943-05-05
1943-05-11
1943-05-12
1943-05-23
1943-05-24
1943-05-25
1943-05-26
1943-05-27
1943-05-28
1943-05-29
1943-05-30
1943-06-11
1943-06-12
1943-06-13
1943-06-14
1943-06-15
1943-06-21
1943-06-22
1943-06-25
1943-06-26
1943-06-28
1943-06-29
1943-07-08
1943-07-09
1943-07-25
1943-07-26
1943-08-07
1943-08-08
1943-08-10
1943-08-11
1943-08-27
1943-08-28
1943-08-30
1943-08-31
1943-09-03
1943-09-04
1943-09-06
1943-09-07
1943-10-03
1943-10-04
1943-10-05
1943-10-20
1943-10-21
1943-11-03
1943-11-04
1943-11-18
1943-11-19
1944-10-29
1944-11-11
1944-12-11
1944-12-15
1944-12-21
1944-12-22
1944-12-29
1944-12-30
1944-12-31
1945-01-01
1945-02-03
1945-02-06
1945-02-14
1945-02-22
1945-02-24
1945-03-13
1945-03-14
1945-03-19
1945-03-21
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Poland
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Rutland
New Brunswick--Chatham
France--Clermont-Ferrand
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Arnsberg
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bielefeld
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Euskirchen Region
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Rheydt
Germany--Wuppertal
Italy--La Spezia
Italy--Milan
Netherlands--Hoek van Holland
Netherlands--IJmuiden
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Norway--Horten
Norway--Tromsø
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Germany--Bielefeld
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Arnsberg
Germany--Bremen
New Brunswick
Norway
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
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
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
Mike Connock
Cara Walmsley
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LGillK1438901v1
1660 HCU
29 OTU
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
Air Observers School
aircrew
Anson
bombing
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hudson
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
mine laying
missing in action
navigator
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bardney
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Woodhall Spa
Stearman
Tallboy
Tiger Moth
Tirpitz
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1406/36729/YRosserLV745193v1.1.pdf
97264448a19f7397991c068cc8021daf
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
Rosser, Lewis Victor
L V Rosser
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
2019-05-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Rosser, LV
Description
An account of the resource
154 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Lewis Victor Rosser (b. 1919, 745193 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, a diary of his operations, notebooks, documents, correspondence and an album. He flew operations as a pilot with 35, 58, 51 and 115 Squadrons. <br /><br />The collection includes a <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2133">Photograph album</a> with photographs of people and aircraft, artwork cards, newspaper cuttings and documents. <br /><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Ann Godard and Joy Shirley and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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
L V Rosser - private diary operations
Description
An account of the resource
Written in RAF pilot's flying log book by Sergeant, pilot Rosser, Lewis Victor, RAFVR - diary of night bombing operations. Gives date, aircraft, crew, target and description of each operation. Also included are extracts from the Bomber Command war diaries concerning the overall operation numbers and losses. Covers 23 operations on first tour from 11 May 1941 to 15 November 1941 and then 14 operations on second tour from 5 March 1945 until 24 April 1945. Aircraft flown Whitley, Halifax and Lancaster. Includes some newspaper cuttings concerning particular operations. Operations on first tour to Bremen, Cologne, Schleswig Holstein, Duisburg, Hannover, Kiel, Rotterdam, Emden, Bremen again, Rotterdam again (crashed after undercarriage problems), Dunkirk, Le Havre, Mannheim, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Brest, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Nuremburg, Wilhelmshaven, Calais, Frankfurt again, Kiel (cancelled crashed). Operations on second tour (some in daylight) to Gelsenkirchen, Salzbergen, Dessau, Datteln, Dortmund, Hattingen (Heinrichshutte), Recklinghausen, Hamm, Münster, Hallendorf (Salzgitter), Leviva (near Leipzig), Kiel, Bremen, Bad Oldesloe.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
L V Rosser
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1941-05-11
1941-05-16
1941-05-28
1941-06-11
1941-06-15
1941-06-17
1941-06-20
1941-06-25
1941-06-27
1941-06-29
1941-08-14
1941-08-18
1941-08-22
1941-08-27
1941-08-29
1941-09-07
1941-09-13
1941-09-29
1941-10-01
1941-10-12
1941-10-20
1941-10-22
1941-10-24
1941-11-15
1945-03-05
1945-03-06
1945-03-07
1945-03-06
1945-03-12
1945-03-14
1945-03-17
1945-03-20
1945-03-21
1945-03-29
1945-04-04
1945-04-09
1945-04-22
1945-04-22
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-05-11
1941-05-16
1941-05-28
1941-06-11
1941-06-15
1941-06-17
1941-06-20
1941-06-25
1941-06-27
1941-06-29
1941-08-14
1941-08-18
1941-08-22
1941-08-27
1941-08-29
1941-09-07
1941-09-13
1941-09-29
1941-10-01
1941-10-12
1941-10-20
1941-10-22
1941-10-24
1941-11-15
1945-03-05
1945-03-06
1945-03-07
1945-03-09
1945-03-12
1945-03-14
1945-03-17
1945-03-20
1945-03-21
1945-03-29
1945-04-04
1945-04-09
1945-04-22
1945-04-24
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Schleswig-Holstein
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Hannover
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Germany--Kiel
Netherlands
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
France
France--Dunkerque
France--Le Havre
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Berlin
France--Brest
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
France--Calais
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Salzbergen
Germany--Dessau (Dessau)
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Recklinghausen (Münster)
Germany--Hamm (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Germany--Salzgitter
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Bad Oldesloe
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Text. Diary
Text. Personal research
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Multi-page printed book with handwritten entries
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
YRosserLV745193v1
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
115 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
Halifax
Halifax Mk 1
Lancaster
pilot
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1406/36693/LRosserLV745193v1.2.pdf
84ee2e9b8c47d7d10b2df11be8b9c907
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
Rosser, Lewis Victor
L V Rosser
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
2019-05-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Rosser, LV
Description
An account of the resource
154 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Lewis Victor Rosser (b. 1919, 745193 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, a diary of his operations, notebooks, documents, correspondence and an album. He flew operations as a pilot with 35, 58, 51 and 115 Squadrons. <br /><br />The collection includes a <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2133">Photograph album</a> with photographs of people and aircraft, artwork cards, newspaper cuttings and documents. <br /><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Ann Godard and Joy Shirley and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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
L V Rosser’s pilots flying log book. One
Description
An account of the resource
Pilots flying log book one for L V Rosser, covering the period from 4 March 1939 to 19 July 1943. Detailing his flying training, operations flown and instructor duties. He was stationed at RAF Kidlington, RAF Woodley, RAF Grantham, RAF Kinloss, RAF Topcliffe, RAF Linton-on-Ouse, RAF Dishforth, RAF Abingdon, and RAF Chipping Warden. Aircraft flown were Magister, Anson, Hind, Whitley, Halifax, Wellington, Martinet, Lysander, Defiant, Wellington, Hind and Hurricane. He flew a total of 24 night time operations, 6 with 35 Squadron, 11 with 58 Squadron and 7 with 51 Squadron. Targets were Bremen, Cologne, Schleswig, Duisburg, Hannover, Kiel, Rotterdam, Emden, Le Havre, Mannheim, Dunkirk, Frankfurt, Berlin, Brest, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, and Wilhelmshaven. He flew as a second pilot on operations with Pilot Officer Ogilvie, Flight Sergeant Holden, Flying Officer James, Sergeant Hammond and Sergeant Goodwin.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940
1941
1941-05-11
1941-05-12
1941-05-16
1941-05-17
1941-05-19
1941-05-20
1941-06-11
1941-06-12
1941-06-15
1941-06-16
1941-06-17
1941-06-18
1941-06-20
1941-06-21
1941-06-25
1941-06-26
1941-06-27
1941-06-28
1941-06-29
1941-06-30
1941-08-14
1941-08-22
1941-08-23
1941-08-27
1941-08-28
1941-08-29
1941-08-30
1941-09-07
1941-09-08
1941-09-13
1941-09-14
1941-09-29
1941-09-30
1941-10-01
1941-10-02
1941-10-12
1941-10-13
1941-10-20
1941-10-21
1941-10-22
1941-10-23
1941-10-24
1941-10-25
1941-11-15
1941-11-16
1942
1943
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Berkshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Northamptonshire
England--Oxfordshire
England--Yorkshire
France--Brest
France--Dunkerque
France--Le Havre
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Schleswig-Holstein
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Scotland--Moray Firth
England--Kidlington
England--Woodley (Wokingham)
England--Grantham
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
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
LRosserLV745193v1
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
Mike Connock
10 OTU
12 OTU
1668 HCU
19 OTU
26 OTU
35 Squadron
51 Squadron
58 Squadron
77 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
bombing
Defiant
Flying Training School
Halifax
Halifax Mk 1
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hurricane
Initial Training Wing
Lysander
Magister
Martinet
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Abingdon
RAF Chipping Warden
RAF Dishforth
RAF Gamston
RAF Grantham
RAF Kinloss
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Shenington
RAF Topcliffe
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1406/36694/LRosserLV745193v2.2.pdf
8eb2a783ab8e318b77eddf3a3c483a16
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
Rosser, Lewis Victor
L V Rosser
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
2019-05-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Rosser, LV
Description
An account of the resource
154 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Lewis Victor Rosser (b. 1919, 745193 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, a diary of his operations, notebooks, documents, correspondence and an album. He flew operations as a pilot with 35, 58, 51 and 115 Squadrons. <br /><br />The collection includes a <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2133">Photograph album</a> with photographs of people and aircraft, artwork cards, newspaper cuttings and documents. <br /><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Ann Godard and Joy Shirley and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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
L V Rosser’s pilots flying log book. Two
Description
An account of the resource
Pilots flying log book 2 for L V Rosser, covering the period from 22 July 1943 to 6 August 1945. Detailing his instructor duties, flying training and operations flown. He was stationed at RAF Edgehill (aka RAF Shenington), RAF Wing, RAF Little Horwood, RAF Gamston, RAF Bottesford, RAF Witchford, RAF Blyton and RAF Abingdon. Aircraft flown were Wellington, Martinet, Hurricane and Lancaster. He flew a total of 14 operations with 115 Squadron, 10 Daylight and 4 night. Targets were Gelsenkirchen, Saltzbergen, Dessau, Datteln, Dortmund, Heinrichshutt, Huls, Hamm, Munster, Hallendorf, Merseburg, Kiel, Bremen and Bad Oldesloe. He also flew 4 Operation Manna to Rotterdam and The Hague, plus 6 Operation Exodus to Juvincourt and Brussells and one Operation Dodge trip. His pilots on his first ‘second dickie’ operations were Flight Lieutenant Dowling and Flight Lieutenant Sherwood.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1945-03-05
1945-03-06
1945-03-07
1945-03-08
1945-03-09
1945-03-12
1945-03-14
1945-03-17
1945-03-20
1945-03-21
1945-03-29
1945-04-04
1945-04-09
1945-04-22
1945-04-24
1945-04-30
1945-05-01
1945-05-03
1945-05-07
1945-05-09
1945-05-10
1945-05-12
1945-05-15
1945-05-16
1945-05-18
1945-06-05
1945-06-10
1945-06-25
1945-07-29
1945-08-04
1945-08-06
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Belgium
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Belgium--Brussels
England--Berkshire
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
France--Aisne
Germany--Bad Oldesloe
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Dessau (Dessau)
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hamm (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Merseburg
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Germany--Recklinghausen (Kreis)
Germany--Salzbergen
Germany--Salzgitter Region
Netherlands--Hague
Netherlands--Hulst (Zeeland)
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
France--Juvincourt-et-Damary
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
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LRosserLV745193v2
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 temporal coverage. Allocated
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
10 OTU
115 Squadron
12 OTU
1668 HCU
19 OTU
26 OTU
35 Squadron
58 Squadron
77 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
Cook’s tour
Flying Training School
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hurricane
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 2
Lancaster Mk 3
Martinet
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Abingdon
RAF Blyton
RAF Bottesford
RAF Chipping Warden
RAF Gamston
RAF Little Horwood
RAF Shenington
RAF Shepherds Grove
RAF Wing
RAF Witchford
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2133/36583/PRosserLV19010043.2.jpg
321a95e10bc025acf36e7d70865ad463
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
Rosser, Lewis Victor. Photograph album
Description
An account of the resource
48 items. Covers and 47 page photograph album with photographs of people and aircraft, artwork cards, newspaper cuttings and documents.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-05-17
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
Rosser, LV
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
Lancaster and list of operations
Description
An account of the resource
Top centre - rear quarter view of an airborne Lancaster with squadron letters 'KO-B' Captioned 'Blighty Bound, Bari' (Operation Dodge). Text lists 18 targets/operations, nine either side.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Dessau (Dessau)
Germany--Recklinghausen (Münster)
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Hamm (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Germany--Salzgitter
Germany--Merseburg
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Bad Oldesloe
Netherlands
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Netherlands--Hague
France
France--Reims Region
Belgium
Belgium--Brussels
Italy
Italy--Bari
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
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PRosserLV19010043
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
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
115 Squadron
Lancaster
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)