1
25
7
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/934/36536/MLovattP1821369-190903-75.2.pdf
51c3fbced3b1e3bd9c7237f2cb79c94a
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
A Reminiscence of the Flying Characteristics of Many Old Type Aircraft
Description
An account of the resource
A detailed analysis of very early aircraft and their flying characteristics.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Air Marshall Sir Ralph Sorley
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Felixstowe
England--Eastbourne (East Sussex)
England--Calshot
England--Bembridge
Atlantic Ocean--Spithead Channel
England--Cowes
England--Stroud
Scotland--Montrose
England--Sunbury
England--London
Monaco
Egypt--Cairo
Iraq--Baghdad
England--Felixstowe
England--Aldeburgh
Iraq
Middle East--Kurdistan
Middle East--Palestine
Jordan
Iran
Middle East--Euphrates River
Syria
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
Singapore
Australia
Borneo
China--Hong Kong
England--Kent
United States
New York (State)--New York
France--Paris
Nigeria
South Africa--Cape Town
Yugoslavia
Norway
Portugal
Spain
Denmark
Japan
Belgium
Argentina
Austria
Brazil
Canada
Chile
Greece
China
Lithuania
Estonia
England--Weybridge
Scotland--Island of Arran
England--Kingston upon Thames
France--Dunkerque
England--Hatfield (Hertfordshire)
Newfoundland and Labrador
New Brunswick
Maine
Maine--Presque Isle
Washington (D.C.)
Massachusetts--Boston
Pennsylvania--Philadelphia
Maryland--Baltimore
Washington (D.C.)--Anacostia
Tennessee--Nashville
Arkansas--Little Rock
Texas--Dallas
Texas--Fort Worth
Texas--Midland
Arizona--Tucson
California--Burbank (Los Angeles County)
California--Palm Springs
California--Los Angeles
California--Beverly Hills
California--San Diego
Arizona--Winslow
New Mexico--Albuquerque
Kansas--Wichita
Missouri--Saint Louis
Ohio--Dayton
New York (State)--Buffalo
Ontario--Toronto
Québec--Montréal
Newfoundland and Labrador--Gander
Netherlands--Eindhoven
Germany--Rheine
Germany--Osnabrück
India
Switzerland--Zurich
Lebanon--Beirut
Pakistan--Karachi
India--Kolkata
Singapore
Indonesia--Jakarta
Australia
Northern Territory--Darwin
New South Wales--Sydney
South Australia--Woomera
South Australia--Adelaide
Victoria--Melbourne
Sri Lanka--Colombo
Spain--Madrid
South Africa--Johannesburg
Kenya--Nairobi
Sudan--Khartoum
Greece--Athens
Italy--Rome
Zambia--Lusaka
Zambia--Ndola
Zambia--Mbala
Heathrow Airport (London, England)
Turkey--Istanbul
France--Nice
Utah--Salt Lake City
Italy--Genoa
Atlantic Ocean--Firth of Clyde
Italy
France
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Kansas
Maryland
Massachusetts
Missouri
New Mexico
New York (State)
Ohio
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
New South Wales
South Australia
Victoria
Northern Territory
Egypt
Sudan
North Africa
Ontario
Québec
Germany
Indonesia
Iraq
Kenya
Lebanon
Netherlands
South Africa
Switzerland
Pakistan
Sri Lanka
Turkey
Yemen (Republic)
Czech Republic
Slovakia
England--Gloucestershire
England--Hampshire
England--Herefordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Suffolk
England--Surrey
England--Sussex
England--Great Yarmouth
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 Navy
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
82 typewritten sheets
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1971-08-16
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.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MLovattP1821369-190903-75
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
aircrew
Anson
B-17
B-24
Battle
Blenheim
C-47
Chadwick, Roy (1893-1947)
Defiant
Dominie
Fw 190
ground crew
Halifax
Harvard
Hudson
Hurricane
Lancaster
Lincoln
Lysander
Magister
Manchester
Me 109
Mosquito
Oxford
Photographic Reconnaissance Unit
pilot
Proctor
RAF Boscombe Down
RAF Eastchurch
RAF Hendon
RAF Henlow
RAF Martlesham Heath
RAF North Killingholme
RAF Pembrey
RAF Prestwick
RAF West Freugh
Spitfire
Stirling
Swordfish
Tiger Moth
training
Wallis, Barnes Neville (1887-1979)
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2294/41605/NKellettR191219-010001.2.jpg
07e19a6cf1084db4b1e954f9867acf92
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2294/41605/NKellettR191219-010002.2.jpg
932d2e11368b3d8a844ddef10f3e52e7
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Kellett, Richard
Kellett, R
Description
An account of the resource
31 items. The collection concerns Air Commodore Richard Kellett (Royal Air Force) and contains correspondence, photographs and prisoner of war diaries. In 1938 he flew a Wellesley from Egypt to Australia and later flew operations as a pilot and the commanding officer of 149 Squadron. He was captured near Tobruk in 1942 and was Senior British Officer at Stalag Luft 3 at the time of the Wooden Horse escape.
The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Rachel Kellett and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-12-19
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Kellett, R
Dublin Core
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
Air Commodore Richard Kellet's Obituary
Description
An account of the resource
An obituary published in the Times with a second cutting with a correction from an air vice-marshal.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1990-01-20
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Egypt
Australia
Northern Territory--Darwin
Germany
Iraq
Japan
Germany
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Libya--Tobruk
Africa--Rhodesia and Nyasaland
North Africa
Egypt--Ismailia (Province)
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two newspaper cuttings
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
NKellettR191219-010001, NKellettR191219-010002
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1938
1939-09-04
1939-12-18
1942
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
149 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
Distinguished Flying Cross
pilot
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Wellington
-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Northern Territory--Darwin
Title
A name given to the resource
Darwin [place]
Description
An account of the resource
This page is an entry point for a place. Please use the links below to see all relevant documents available in the Archive.
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/735/10735/ACayhillE180208.2.mp3
fae5c508c5967105b298ae8a271038de
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
Cayhill, Edward
E Cayhill
Edward Cahill
E Cahill
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Edward Cayhill (1921 -2021, 157619 Royal Air Force) He worked as a civilian Meteorological officer at RAF Scampton before joining the RAF and flying as an observer on Meteorological flights with 519 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-08
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.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Cayhill, E
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Julian Maslin. The interviewee is Mr Edward Cayhill. The interview is taking place at Mr Cayhill’s home in North Wales on the 8th of February 2018.
EC: Correct.
JM: Mr Cayhill, Edward, please would you tell us a little bit about your family background first of all?
EC: I was born in Scotland in, near Motherwell. Motherwell, on the 11th of August 1921. A big family. A family of eight of us and I was the eldest son. Therefore, in Scotland the idea was that the eldest son would be encouraged financially and otherwise to further his education and so I was, my father said, ‘We’re going to try and get you in to university.’ So I worked hard at my studies and [pause] in 1938 my father died in Scotland. A big family. 1938. So my, and I applied for a place at Glasgow University and I was accepted for a place. However, it all came to fruition that there was no way in my family set up that I could continue with university. The war was imminent. We had advisors, advisories, advisors coming around the schools suggesting jobs for future careers and so on and I went up to the Civil Service place in Edinburgh and had a, take up there and I was accepted as a technical assistant grade three in the Meteorological Office. Now, as the days went by things were heating up. The war was about to start. I [pause] stop here. Can it be stopped?
JM: Yeah.
[recording paused]
EC: I was sent to the Royal Air Force Abbotsinch as an observer.
JM: Yeah.
EC: A weather observer, and worked there for a couple of years. And this is, I’ve got, I was very keen on getting airborne so I was flying with any chance I could get. And that went on for a couple of years. For instance I went up to Scone Airport, Perth as an observer teaching newly entrants and aircrew lectures. And then I spent about probably three years doing various jobs around Scotland and then from that stage on I [pause] my next move was to Aldergrove in Northern Ireland, and in Northern Ireland I trained [pause] Oh, I’m sorry about this.
[recording paused]
EC: 1674 Heavy Conversion Unit, Aldergrove in July [unclear]. Now, that was when I’d left the Meteorological Office in Scampton where I was. Posted there. I was still a civilian and my job was to brief the crews who at that stage, 1674, at that stage Guy Gibson who was the CO of the Dambusting squadron they had been recently, on my arrival they had just recently done the bouncing bomb. So I was a civilian still then and, but the Squadron, 617 Squadron continued similar training. That is about the bouncing bomb, and that meant low level. When I say low level I mean low level. So, I would come in each day and brief the crews. And now, the bouncing bomb having done, Guy Gibson was still there and the squadron which included Flight Lieutenant Allsebrook continued doing similar training when the training area was [pause] we would take off from Scampton and we would fly low level. When I say low level, low level up across Yorkshire into Scotland and then on the road to the Isles. That’s by Tummel and Loch Rannoch, out there and I had cadged a trip and my position was the one that the pilot was Allsebrook, Flight Lieutenant Allsebrook, but he said, ‘Well, my mid-upper gunner won’t be coming so you can have the mid-upper seat.’ So I, low level all the way up there and it was really low level and we came through the valleys with the idea of a drop then. However, down at very low level over Scotland there was a God almighty bang and wind came through the aircraft all over the place and silence for a while and full bore climbing and we were on our way back home. And then eventually, this is your, ‘This is your captain speaking. I want you to [pause] what happened back there, we hit a rabbit. We hit a rabbit. And what did we hit? I want all the crew to answer this,’ [laughs] So everyone sitting up there, ‘You hit a rabbit.’ ‘That’s right.’ So, on the way back, now the idea of this rabbit business was, what he had said, we were not on intercom with them, he had said to the bomb aimer who was down there and was covered in blood and feathers and a bird strike, it was a bird strike and so the skipper said to the bomb aimer, ‘Take up all those big feathers and get rid of them. And all that gory mushy messy stuff put in our sandwich bag.’ In those days it was brown paper bags. ‘Put them in there and who knows. That could well be a rabbit.’ And so anyway [laughs] now every squadron I believe, bomber squadron had a line. They called them line books, and the line book was tall stories usually, and this story went into the, I’m sure this is still in the book [laughs] And so I cadged as many trips as I could while I was there. And then I was transferred on to other things and I went on to the flying side of it.
JM: That’s lovely. Could I just ask you a little bit to go back a little bit in that sense? You were saying that you were doing the meteorological briefing for the crews.
EC: Correct.
JM: Where did you get the information, the technical information from? Was it from the station or did it go through a network?
EC: A network. It all came in on the printer. Various sources.
JM: Right.
EC: We had, well information was short but we got a lot of stuff on the teleprinter.
JM: And did you have to make your own synoptic charts up, or did you simply have the job of relaying what somebody else had done somewhere else?
EC: No. We would automatically draw the charts up.
JM: You would.
EC: Yes. That was something I was also trained in.
JM: Yes. Yes. Yes. So you were strong in maths and science at university level to do that work.
EC: Not, not really. No. Most of the basic stuff came through on the printer.
JM: Right.
EC: You plotted the charts.
JM: Right. Right.
EC: You analysed the charts, you know and —
JM: Yes. I mean the information that you were being given. The pressure, winds, whatever. Where was that coming from because you need information from all over the place but you didn’t have it from Europe? You only had it from the Atlantic.
EC: Well, from Bracknell.
JM: From Bracknell.
EC: From Bracknell. It was Meteorological Office Headquarters.
JM: At Bracknell. Still is. Or was.
EC: What information they had.
JM: Yeah.
EC: And who, the out stations had received it.
JM: Yeah.
EC: Used it to their best advantage.
JM: Yes. Yes. That’s very interesting. So you do, you do your, you make up the weather forecast based on the information that you were given.
EC: Correct.
JM: And then you go in to the briefing room to brief the crews before the sortie.
EC: That’s right.
JM: Did you, were you there for the whole of the briefing or simply for your bit of it?
EC: Oh no, we stayed on there and the others did their bit. Bomb aimer and —
JM: Yes. Yeah.
EC: The CO and all the rest of it.
JM: What was the atmosphere like if they were going out on a bombing sortie? Do you remember the atmosphere in the, in the briefing room?
EC: They were very [pause] they didn’t make any, there was no fuss. It was a job to be done. That was my understanding of it. We all did our bit. The wireless operator. The bomb aimer would say his bit. Each expert as it were to be known would say his bit and then the CO would then say, ‘Well, ok boys. That’s it now. Off we go.’ Da, da, da, da, you know.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And when they came back after the sortie it was quite likely that the weather forecast over the target wasn’t very accurate.
EC: Well, quite right.
JM: How did you react to that?
EC: Well, it was you debriefed and you’d, there was a lot of jocularity, you know, ‘I’m back Jocky,’ [laughs] you know, but we took that as part, part of the job.
JM: Right. Right. So we have you there at Scampton in the summer of 1943 after the dams raid. Gibson —
EC: Immediately after. Yes.
JM: Yeah. Gibson was still around. Did you speak to him? Did you meet him at all?
EC: Yes, well I briefed him.
JM: You did.
EC: He’d be at the briefing. He was always at the briefing.
JM: Right. Yes.
EC: He’d kind of retire, you know but he was there.
JM: Yes. Did you form any impressions of, of Wing Commander Gibson? He has had so much publicity, I wondered if having met him if you had a view of him.
EC: He was a cool, cool, cool, cool customer.
JM: Was he?
EC: He didn’t seem to get excited about anything. ‘Oh yes. Is that so?’ You know.
JM: Just like that, yes.
EC: Yeah.
JM: Yes. Yes. When he, when he left the squadron he was replaced by Squadron Leader George Holden who had come down from 4 Group. I wonder if you remember Holden at all?
EC: No. That doesn’t ring a bell.
JM: No. No. Are there any of the other 617 crews that you do remember as characters, or did you have much to do with them?
EC: Not really. Well, I was a civilian, you know. I lived out and travelled in.
JM: Right.
EC: To do my briefings.
JM: Yes.
EC: Plot my charts and do my job and envying them. I wanted to be a flyer. Be a flyer, as well.
JM: You did.
EC: Yes.
JM: Yes. Yes.
EC: So —
JM: But so there’s none of them that stand out.
EC: There’s no. I —
JM: As people you particularly knew, knew well.
EC: No. My memory doesn’t recall.
JM: No. Do you remember if they actually talked about the dams raid in the summer after the raid had taken place? Did they talk about it at all? What they had done. The crews.
EC: Well, each one had a debrief. You were debriefed. They were debriefed.
JM: Yes. I meant more informally. Did they chat about it? Was it something that they knew what they’d done informally? You can’t remember.
EC: I can’t remember. No. Sorry.
JM: No. That’s ok. No. Ok. Were you there in September of 1943? Had you, were you still on the station then?
[pause]
EC: I’ve got my flight with Allsebrook was in May ’43. I’ve got that. And then I’ve got the 18th [pause] Well, I don’t know where, the 18th ’43 [unclear] Flight Lieutenant Sanders and then September ’43 the Ventura, [unclear]
[pause]
EC: So, all I’ve got here is that on the 5th 1943.
JM: 5th of —
EC: 5th of, that was when the [pause] sorry, sorry May ’43. Fifth. It was the fifth month.
JM: Yes.
EC: I don’t know about the date. That was the Lancaster with Allsebrook.
JM: Yes.
EC: Ok.
JM: Yes.
EC: And that was described here as low level training. Scampton, Fort William, Stranraer, back. That’s the one I‘ve just talked to you about.
JM: Yes. Yes. Yes.
EC: Now, in August I would be, would not have been in that area.
JM: Right.
EC: Would not have. In August. September [pause] I was posted up to Northern Ireland.
JM: Right.
EC: And then in, here’s something specific. Posted to Number 2 Observer’s AFU Millom. Ah. This was for the training to become an air met observer.
JM: Yeah. Millom is —
EC: That’s a jump.
JM: Millom is in Cumbria, isn’t it?
EC: Yes. In Cumbria.
JM: Yes.
EC: And it was on that one that we did the nav course. Air gunning — there was a gunnery range over on the Isle of Man. And we did a navigation course which we did in the, flying on Ansons.
JM: Yes. Can I just —
EC: And just come back.
JM: Can I just take you back a little while there. I’m interested to find out what it was that persuaded you to join the RAF. You were already making a major contribution to the war effort as a, as a meteorological officer. Why did you join up?
EC: Because I wanted to go on flying. I particularly, I was surrounded by these in uniform and flying. I wanted to fly. And the only way I was going to get into flying, they’d started the Meteorological Reconnaissance Flights and the training was, the initial one was Millom. We went up to Millom and, well I would go, that’s when I went back, went into uniform at that change. But the base was Millom and we were trained in navigation, air gunnery, quite a few of the essential things.
JM: Yes.
EC: Training then from Millom.
JM: Yes.
EC: I don’t know if that’s any help to you.
JM: It is. Do you remember very much about the training that you were given in terms of navigation and observations? Do you remember that at all?
EC: Yes. We had lectures on the navigation.
JM: Yes.
EC: And we had when we were airborne in the Anson we were given tasks like fly from here to [pause] it was almost invariably you would fly over ‘til you saw the, the tower at Liverpool and you would then go up to Scotland. Down to Stranraer.
JM: Yeah.
EC: In to the Stranraer area.
JM: Yes. Yes.
EC: And there would be a qualified navigator with you, you know to [unclear]
JM: Yes.
EC: And so on. But it’s becoming vague now. It’s very complicated. Not vague but complicated.
JM: So how long was the training that you went through at that stage?
EC: [pause] the whole thing probably lasted about six weeks.
JM: Really? Yes.
EC: That was to four to six weeks.
JM: Yes.
EC: I would think.
JM: Yes.
EC: It was a kind of crash course.
JM: Right.
EC: A crash course.
JM: And where were you sent after that, please?
EC: There is something here [pause] I’ve got my glasses [pause] Posted to Number 2 Observers AFU, Millom in June 1944. That’s, that’s a fact. Training flights were in Ansons for air experience and map reading. Second navigator to first navigator and the area’s bounded by Bardsey Island, Inishtrahull, Isla, Millom and down to Birmingham. And then I was posted to 1674 Heavy Conversion Unit, Aldergrove. Ok.
JM: Northern Ireland.
EC: In July 1944.
JM: Right.
EC: So, I was then in to flying.
JM: So you —
EC: I told you I was probably not much help.
JM: It’s wonderful. It’s very valuable. So you were at the Heavy Conversion Unit.
EC: Yes.
JM: And were you training to fly Halifaxes or Lancasters?
EC: We were then in Halifaxes.
JM: Halifaxes. Right.
EC: Not Lancasters.
JM: No. No. So where did you, where were you posted after you’d finished at the Heavy Conversion Unit?
EC: I think I was posted to 1674 Heavy Conversion Unit, Aldergrove in 1944. Training. These were the training flights. Halifax air observer flights in the base area. Stornoway. Rockall. Climbs to eighteen thousand feet. And then I was, in September ‘44 I was posted to 519 Squadron at Skitten. So I’d done all my training.
JM: Yes.
EC: And then they had opened up these weather flights.
JM: Right.
EC: Weather reconnaissance.
JM: Right.
EC: And I got on to the weather reconnaissance. And that was, that’s my life since that date. September ’44. I’ve been mostly on weather reconnaissance. I’ve got, this is all small stuff which is you don’t mind me just opening that.
JM: No. Please.
EC: There’s my log book which I kept up to date just to [pause] back to [pause] The research flight, Farnborough, that’s it. [unclear] What we did at the Met Research Flight, Farnborough, I flew, we flew Halifaxes and Mosquitoes.
JM: Right.
EC: On a bit of research.
JM: Yes.
EC: Flying as high as we could go.
JM: So the high altitude meteorological research.
EC: Yes.
JM: Yes.
EC: Met research. It was called Met Research Flight, Farnborough.
JM: Right.
EC: So I was on that. What we had was, we had Halifaxes and Mosquitoes. Two pilots, one engineer. The pilots took alternate Mosquito. I was, every Mosquito flight I would be on that and we would fly as high as we could until we stalled. You know, you’d think [unclear] so and like and there were two pilots [Thomason] Thorne. Thorne. [Thomason]. These are all the 1st 2nd 5th 9th 12th 15th 20th at Farnborough. So on and so on and then it was all authenticated by the, signed by the officer commanding M RAF. So this was all authenticated and then still at Farnborough in January 1950.
JM: So you were staying, stayed on in the RAF after the war was over.
EC: No. I was flying as a civilian then.
JM: You were back as a civilian.
EC: Back as a civilian.
JM: Yes. Yes.
EC: And I used to, like with [Thomason] and Thorne I used to fly with them on the Met research flights in uniform. But then I was demobbed.
JM: Yes. I see. Tell me about flying in the Mosquito.
EC: Beautiful. Beautiful. My position, it was naturally a two seater. Pilot on the left, met observer on the right with my judgement on all the weather and then when we came down from, we’d go as high as possible. You can see by the heights. I always put the heights in. The Halifaxes went up to ten thousand feet. The Mosquito to forty thousand feet. A fifteen thousand foot descent. There’s mostly, like in February 1950 I had, on the 2nd I was airborne on a Mosquito. On the 7th I was airborne in a Mosquito. On the 8th, on the 13th on the 14th 15th 16th 21st 21st 22nd. Climbed to, well climbed to forty thousand feet or as high as you could go. Thirty eight thousand five hundred. And then when we came down to fifteen thousand feet my job was then finished and the pilot, I knew him, we were great pals, pilots. He said, ‘Do you know, I’ve always thought this, the Mosquito could do a loop.’ So at fifteen thousand I had finished with the meteorological stuff so I just strapped myself down and said, ‘Ok.’ So he said, he put the nose down, [unclear] feet and he flew it back and came from out there and stalled out.
JM: Oh, it stalled at the top did it? Yes.
EC: But oh, but that I told you I was not —
JM: No. It’s wonderful. It’s absolutely wonderful. I’m interested, when you were making the observations on these weather research flights were you making them with symbols in a notebook of [pause] What was it that you were actually recording?
EC: We had the, a special form actually.
JM: Right.
EC: A meteorological form.
JM: Right.
EC: For each position.
JM: Yes.
EC: I don’t think I’ve got one. But anyway yeah there were special forms.
JM: And were you, were you looking at instruments that were giving you recordings of outside air temperature or whatever it happened to be?
EC: Both. Instruments and weather and visual.
JM: Right. Instruments and visual observations.
EC: And visual.
JM: Were being made by you.
EC: Stratocumulus, cirrus.
JM: Yes. Yes.
EC: Above us or below us.
JM: Yes. Yes. Operating at that height, forty thousand feet. That was quite exceptional in those days.
EC: Oh, yes. Well, the highest —
JM: Did you have any special kit or special training for operating at that altitude?
EC: No.
JM: No.
EC: No. No special training.
JM: No special —
EC: No special pressure suits.
JM: Nothing like that at all.
EC: No. No.
JM: So just normal RAF flying equipment.
EC: That’s right. Come out in the morning, go to the parachute section, draw your parachute out, and the truck would be there to take you out. Then you would go to the met office and have a briefing and then off you go.
JM: Off you go. Was it cold at that height?
EC: Well, you had heating in there.
JM: You had eating in the aircraft.
EC: Oh yeah. Yeah.
JM: Good.
EC: Oh, very cold. Very cold.
JM: Yes.
EC: Just trying to get something that might help you [pause] No. I’d just be repeating myself. So, what I did, I was in the met office. A civilian until the Scampton episode. And from then on I was going in to uniform.
JM: Yes.
EC: And they had started these meteorological reconnaissance flights.
JM: Yes.
EC: And I got in to them.
JM: Right. So you operated in Halifaxes and Mosquitoes in a meteorological —
EC: In a meteorological. What happened there was, when did the Mosquitoes come in? [pause] Well, of course the war ended. Where does that put us?
JM: ‘45.
EC: ’45, the war ended. So, what did I do then? Oh, the war ended and I thought, ah this is going to confuse still further but this is my memory. Ok. The war ended and I thought, oh no. I want to emigrate to America. Get away from all this. Get over to America. So I thought where’s the money? You’ve got no money. So I attended a Civil Service Commission and anyway, I got in to the Met Office as a technical assistant grade 2, I think it was. Whatever it was. And they said, ‘Now, what we want you to do now is they’re [pause] they’re going to, we have discovered we have a jet stream in the northern latitudes but there has been some suspicion on some very high flying aircraft that there’s one in the Middle East somewhere.’ That was it. ‘So what we’re doing we’re sending you out there,’ And there was, the war ended boom boom and there were pilots by the hundred. No jobs. Aircraft by the hundred. No purpose. So they said. ‘What we’ll do is we’ll send you out to Habbaniya in Iraq and we’ll send [pause] — the RAF have promised a squadron of —’ [pause] that was it, ‘Of Mosquitoes for this investigation.’
JM: Right.
EC: For the Middle East.
JM: Right.
EC: Jet. And you’ll be the kind of organiser and so on.
JM: Yes.
EC: So I said, ‘Ok, that’s fine.’ Maybe I’ll save some money while I’m out there. So, I went out there and, you know I was told to report to a Squadron Leader Shellard who was the officer in charge of RAF Habbaniya which is on the Euphrates about fifty miles from Bagdad. And so I got off the aircraft, went into the flight lieutenant. He said, ‘Oh, you’re, you’re Cayhill, are you?’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’ve got good news for you and bad news for you.’ He said, ‘First of all your flight won’t, you’re flying won’t come to anything because the Mosquitoes that came out, there was no hangar space for them so they were moored on the airfield on the bund. Open air.’ June July temperatures. The aircraft wood warped.
JM: Warped. Yes.
EC: And they were declared unfit for flying.
JM: Oh.
EC: So, I was [pause] but so Shellard said, ‘Well, look we’ve got problems here. We’ve got a war going on in the Far East and the French are getting kicked right, left and centre and they are flying the evacuees, injured back home and they’re coming up through one of my wee stations down in Shaibah.’ The north end of the Persian Gulf, and so, ‘There’s no forecaster down there. There’s just the assistant and passing stuff. It would be better if we had a forecaster down there so you’re going down to — ’ That’s when I, that’s before I went out on this job I had sent all my gear including my logbook out to, and it was as the ship came around to come up to Basra it ran aground in the Persian Gulf.
JM: And that’s when —
EC: Five hundred, so the papers said, five hundred armed natives rushed on board and pilfered all they could except things like bulldozers and things like that.
JM: Right. Yes.
EC: And so I went down to Shaibah and then I had to spend my time there. And anyway, sorry we’re diversing and we don’t —
JM: We are but that’s fine. Again, if I may I’d like to take you a little bit back because you were telling us about operating the Halifax on the weather reconnaissance flight.
EC: Oh course.
JM: Could you tell us a little bit more about how that would, how often you’d go up? Where you’d go to? How did that actually work please?
EC: We had fixed routes which you would select on, the meteorologist would select on the day and then the routine would be, you’d got the full crew, the met observer, depending what kind of aircraft. I started off on Hudsons. Twin engine. Now, the twin engine we don’t, that was from Wick. When I was at Wick. But before that it was the Halifaxes. Now, in the Halifaxes there were fixed routes which were there in black and white.
JM: Yes.
EC: So you would fly out and do low level for part of the way. Every fifty nautical miles you would make a weather report. You would climb, clamber through bomb bays and whatever up to the wireless operator and he would send that message back to base.
JM: Right.
EC: And then after so many miles out you would do a climb to five hundred millibars. That’s about eighteen thousand feet. Now, we were very primitive in those days. The idea was you would climb to maybe, it was in millibars but call it two thousand feet and you would then circle there to allow the temperatures to regularise. Steady up. And then you would take the temperatures, the dry bulb, and wet bulb, and put that in. Always in code for that part of the war you know and so on. So you had to then encrypt it and then you climb another roughly eighteen hundred feet, level off, allow the temperatures to level off, take the readings, code them up, go up to the wireless operator to send them out, and then up to five hundred odd. Now you do two climbs to five hundred millibars, eighteen thousand feet and then you’re coming back home doing a kind of triangular somewhat penetration. A long way out. A long way back.
JM: That’s very interesting and there’s a couple of things that you’ve said that I want to clarify for the, for the recording. You were climbing to heights in millibars where there would be a certain known pressure.
EC: That’s right.
JM: So you weren’t climbing in feet. You were climbing to a pressure level.
EC: You had the altimeter beside you as well.
JM: Yes. Yes. That’s good. The second thing is that the information was sent back as you were recording it via the wireless operator in code so that if the Germans were listening they wouldn’t be given —
EC: That’s right.
JM: A free weather forecast.
EC: That’s right there was a decode book. You know it was book. Decode book.
JM: Yes.
EC: Number so and so, page so and so line so and so.
JM: Yes. Yes. Yes. Were your, were your crews, the pilots and the other members of the crew were they perhaps men who had done a tour of duty on bombing operations or had then been specially selected for that sort of work?
EC: They weren’t specially selected. No.
JM: No.
EC: No. They all had so many flying hours in, on different jobs.
JM: Yes. Yes. So they might have been men resting between tours of duty.
EC: Could be. Yes.
JM: For them that would have been a fairly easy task I imagine.
EC: No problems for them. Yeah.
JM: No. Was there any risk of you being intercepted by long range enemy fighters?
EC: There was always that risk on, on all these flights were given names. Code names. The one I started talking about, the one over the Atlantic that was Business.
JM: Right.
EC: The one over the North Sea starting was Rhombus. The one that went straight north out into the Arctic —
JM: Yeah.
EC: Was Recipe. The one down from Cornwall was Epicure. Epicure. They all had. The one, the one from Gibraltar. I didn’t do the Gibraltar one. The one at Gibraltar was, what was the one down there? Just missing for the moment.
JM: Yeah. That’s fascinating. So we had these separate routes identified by code names.
EC: That’s right.
JM: Taking weather aircraft north, south, east and west and you could, you could be ordered to fly on any of those depending on your duties.
EC: That was done at briefing.
JM: That was done at briefing.
EC: Yeah. The weather forecast. They’d see the weather forecast. They’d see that was a pretty blank area now. We need some information. Do that route.
JM: Yes. Yes.
EC: On the, on the Recipe which was taking off from Wick originally and then we moved to a wee place further north, would you believe it? To Skitten. Took us far north because at that time you had the Germans at the Dutch coast err the —
JM: Norwegian.
EC: The Norwegian coast, and they would come out and of course you had the convoys coming from Liverpool. The sea convoys from Liverpool going all the way around there to Murmansk to feed the Russians.
JM: Yes.
EC: And they were open targets. The Jerries used to come out there and —
JM: Yes. Yes, yes. You mentioned the Jetstream earlier on. I think I’m right in saying that’s a narrow band of high velocity air.
EC: That’s correct.
JM: When did you first get to hear about the presence of the Jetstream?
EC: Well, it was, you mean the second one? The one down in —
JM: No. The concept of the Jetstream. The fact that it existed over, over north west Europe.
EC: I wouldn’t like to say then, I did give you a date I think. I would suggest that like airlines flying to America and so on the, it was very rarely. They wouldn’t, at one time they wouldn’t allow a two engine aircraft to fly direct to America like I did, a long time at London airport briefing crews there, and they, and they’d come in and what are the winds? Ah. Then we’ll do the polar route depending on the winds and whatever winds we had then they’d probably, I don’t know. I don’t know exactly when they said jet, that’s a Jetstream.
JM: Yeah. The reason I ask, Edward is that I had it in my mind that it was the United States Army Air Force with their very high flying B17s and B24s leaving the contrails. I had it in my mind that it was they who first of all identified the Jetstream, and I wondered if that was you believed to be the case.
EC: I would believe that is the case.
JM: Yes.
EC: I’m not sure but I would believe. They always had the higher flying aircraft over their own country.
JM: Yes.
EC: And certainly the Jetstreams over there.
JM: Yes. It must have been fascinating to be a part of the science of meteorology at a time when with computers, balloons, rockets so much more information was coming through and you saw this. Perhaps after the war was over.
EC: Oh yes. Did. Did. We, clearly the details which are probably not too relevant, but my position I would say with flying with what we were flying but we had to be started using B17s eventually.
JM: You did. B17s as well.
EC: Oh aye. Towards the end of the war.
JM: Yes.
EC: We had Hudsons which [laughs]
JM: Yes.
EC: Twin engine things got no distance at all and then we got B, the B17.
JM: Yeah.
EC: That was fabulous. Up to thirty thousand feet. But what would I say was special about it? Well, they changed our job totally from being just getting north of the Orkney Islands or the Shetlands with a Hudson to a much longer range. We used to go way, way up there. But I remember my, as a Met observer my position would be in the nose of the Fortress. I would do my weather and then I had to take, and then I put it in to code and then crawl, push on a trap door to get up there, through there, through the wireless cabin and give him my message and he would then transmit. It was all in code, you know. And then, however in the meantime there was aircraft [laughs] Jerries were coming out across our path looking for ships to torpedo.
JM: Right. Yes.
EC: And the [pause] it’s like suddenly there would be an aircraft showing up and he’d say, ‘Ok. What’s the colour of the day?’ Now, the colour of the day might be two, two red cartridges and a green or something, or whatever and that was, so that was then my job. So everything black as pitch, you know most of the time in the winter time, ‘What’s the colour of the day?’ Get your torch out. We could have been shot down before you could work out the colour of the day. I’m rambling on. The old memory’s beginning to —
JM: Well, we’re having a lovely conversation. I hope I’m not tiring you too much.
EC: No. But —
JM: It’s fascinating.
EC: But I’m sorry not to be so specific.
JM: No. No. So, after you’d served as a civilian in the, in the Middle East.
EC: Yes.
JM: What did you do with the rest of your working life? Did you stay in meteorology?
EC: Yes, I, when I came back from those two years in the, and I told you I was going to go.
JM: Yes.
EC: I had been writing to the American Consulate and you needed in those days a sponsor to get, to emigrate to America. And so I, one of my friend’s uncle was a solicitor over in Detroit. Lafayette Buildings. Memories, it’s weird isn’t it? Lafayette Buildings, Detroit. And I thought, ok so I saved up a fair bit of money. I had been corresponding with the Americans and the last one read my letter. I got a letter from them, from their Consulate in Baghdad. So when I got home to Scotland there was no letter. I thought, you know what? So I thought, well I said, I know I’ll emigrate to Canada and then go across from Canada. So I booked a flight over on TC or something, and landed at Montreal and then came down to Winnipeg was it? No. It wasn’t. Anyway, at the junction where you go across they said, ‘Sorry, you can’t come through. You’ve got to have a working permit that you’re working in Canada.’ ‘I’ve got to have a job in Canada?’ ‘Yes.’ So I took a job emptying a grain ship, you know. And then out of a job. The second job was more popular on an assembly line in the car industry making body parts and so on. So once I had that I went across and I thought ok here I am in Detroit. I’m in Detroit but I’ve got to go back there and I went to the Lafayette Buildings where he was and I said, ‘I’d like to speak to [pause] anyway there it goes again. ‘Oh, he died three weeks ago.’
JM: Oh dear. Oh dear.
EC: He died three weeks ago.’ So I thought that’s it. So I thought, ok. I’ll go back in to the Met Office in the UK and just to make the best of it. See what they can offer me. So I booked from New York. Sailed from New York. It was mostly boats in those days. So I got on a bus around there and somewhere enroute the bus driver, we stopped for refreshments, he said, ‘Mr Cayhill?’ I said, ‘That’s me.’ He said, ‘Oh, there’s a message here from the place you booked your ticket.’ So it was to say that there’s a strike in New York and the ship has been diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Oh no. So I pretended I couldn’t hear and hung up. So I went on to New York and stormed on to it [laughs] I stormed into their offices. ‘Don’t panic. Don’t panic. We’re laying on a special train from New York for us and you’ll go all the way around up to Nova Scotia here.’ So [unclear]
JM: Marvellous. Marvellous. I’d like —
EC: You’ve got nothing out of me.
JM: I’ve got a lot of out of you, but I would like to take you back if I, if I may to the, that time, the summer of 1943 when you were a civilian working at RAF Scampton with the 617 Squadron. In the period of time after the dams raid.
EC: Yes.
JM: What, what do you remember about Scampton in those days? Do you remember the base? Do you remember where you had your office?
EC: Yes. I do. Yes. A very small office there. Briefings, we always went to the briefing centre for all the briefing.
JM: Yes.
EC: Operations. I presume it was operations for, the next briefing is from so and so and so and so to so and so. So you prepared all the documentation you could.
JM: Yes.
EC: And you went over and you gave your spiel.
JM: And some of the briefings that you gave to 617 Squadron were part of the operations that they took part in in the summer of 1943.
EC: Yes.
JM: Do you remember any of those operations at all?
EC: No. The only ones were associated once the low level training part subsided and that was with Allsebrook.
JM: Yes.
EC: That was the last time that I flew with them.
JM: Yes.
EC: Or probably the last time I briefed any of them.
JM: Was it? Yes.
EC: Yeah.
JM: Right. Because I was keen to find out something about the atmosphere on RAF Scampton in those weeks after the dams raid. They had trained so hard. They had achieved so much. To find out what it was like to be there in the aftermath of that. That’s —
EC: That’s right. In actual fact Gibson himself, I think it was a fact was shot down by one of the RAF, a Lancaster.
JM: That’s, that’s one of the stories. It is. Yes.
EC: Oh, it’s a story.
JM: Yes. Yes. I tend to not to agree with that but it is one of the stories that we have heard. But that was two years later wasn’t it?
EC: Yeah.
JM: That was, one year later 1944.
EC: You don’t believe that.
JM: I tend to go with the view that it was an accident as a result of his relative unfamiliarity with the Mosquito.
EC: That’s right.
JM: And the fact that they didn’t transfer the fuel as they should have done.
EC: And they ran out fuel.
JM: And they ran out of fuel. I have been to —
EC: I accept that.
JM: I’ve been to the crash site in, in Holland and his grave, and Squadron Leader Warwick was the navigator who was killed with him. I’ve been to that. I have looked into it but it’s quite right that recently a rear gunner came out and he said that he had shot it down. A two engine aircraft.
EC: Yeah.
JM: Not knowing what it was.
EC: Yeah.
JM: So, we’ll never know. We’ll never know. But that was 1944. In the summer of 1943, you know you were there and 617 Squadron was operating against targets in Italy and elsewhere. I wondered if you’d remember that but perhaps you’d moved on at that stage.
EC: No. I can’t. No.
JM: No.
EC: Sorry.
JM: No, that’s ok. That’s fine. I have to ask. Shall we have a rest there for the moment?
EC: Ok.
JM: Yeah.
[recording paused]
EC: Have you had, the squadron was based in Darwin with daily flights. They made long period daily flights until the bomb itself went off.
JM: What year was that roughly?
EC: The year was exactly [pause] Darwin. Darwin. This was the period [pause]
JM: So, for the, for the record Edward is telling us about the time when he was operating in Australia, in the Pacific Ocean in support of nuclear weapons testing on the Caicos Islands and you were doing weather reconnaissance to ensure that the winds did not bring radiation on to the mainland of Australia.
EC: I think [pause] Yeah. That was 18th of February 1956. Shackleton, 818. Wing commander flying. That was our crewmen. I was air met observer. Ballykelly via Bordeaux. The Carcassonne Gap to Idris. This was on, out —
JM: Right.
EC: And then again Idris to Habbaniya and then [pause] No. I’ll start again and then Habbaniya. Shaibah. Sharjah. Do you know all these?
JM: Yes. I do. Yes.
EC: Sharjah, and then Mauripur. And then on to Mauripur. Mauripur to Negombo. Negombo via Subang to Changi, Singapore island. And then Changi to Darwin. Darwin, Pearce Field, Perth down to Perth, this is setting it all up.
JM: Yeah.
EC: Pearce back to Darwin and then I set up tracks which we were flying so we were flying but the —
JM: So this was 19 —
EC: Conditions were, those ones there were twelve and a half hours.
JM: This was 1956. You just gave us that date. 1956.
EC: 1956, yeah.
JM: And this was in support of the nuclear testing.
EC: That’s right.
JM: That was taking place at that time.
EC: That’s right. That was the atomic bomb.
JM: Yeah.
EC: Test that.
JM: Yeah.
EC: Still at Darwin and that was [pause] so the summary of flying hours as an air met observer on 269 Squadron for the period 5th of Jan ‘56 to the 16th of May, da di di da, on Shackletons. The two hundred and eighty five hours and then there was still a Shack and then because I was the top man, you know [unclear] with the wing commander we went down to different, to Alice Springs and Alice Springs back to Darwin, you know. And then we did our trips in the [pause] we were flying regularly 5th 8th the 11th, 14th of June, 17th of June, Shackleton to [pages turning] still in Australia. Darwin. Then transit Darwin to Essendon. Laverton, Richmond, Sydney, Richmond, Darwin, Darwin, then go Darwin to Changi. Changi to Negombo which was Ceylon. Negombo, Sharjah. Sharjah. Habbaniya. Habbaniya. Idris. And Idris back to Ballykelly. That was all in, the last of those flights was the 10th of July 1956. And then we have a transit to the Christmas Island for the whole set up. That was in, the 19th of January 1957. Flight Lieutenant Kerr. Air obs, acting air observer, St Eval to Lurgans. That’s going out the long way around. Lurgans to Kenley Field. Kenley Field to Charleston. That’s South Carolina. Charleston to Moisant. Moisant to Biggs Airfield in El Paso. Biggs to Travis Air Force base up in California and then a big long one across the Pacific to Travis which is California to Hickam Air Force base Honolulu. And then Hickam down to Christmas Island and so on and so on.
JM: And of course Christmas island was the H-bomb tests, wasn’t it?
EC: That’s right.
JM: I have a —
EC: Well, I’ve done, I’ve seen and experienced three personally and I’m very closely associated for the rest of them. I set up the Met set up for that. On the day of the decision — have you been to Christmas island?
JM: No. I haven’t.
EC: It’s a very large coral island, about the middle of the Pacific full of little waterways and so on and there was an airfield. They made, the army made an airfield. Rolled coral in the north end of it there and then the ships would, could come into the fjord, the waterways. And on the day of the, if I say the first bomb they would say, they would wake us all up about three o’clock in the morning, those who weren’t flying. I would have all the time twelve hour meteorological flights going on. I had a team of six. One flight sergeant and five sergeants and myself who used to fly twelve hour flights. Reconnaissance all around. Anyway, my job was, I would go aboard as the weatherman to the target and then the [pause] I would report when I’m on the target back to headquarters, it’s satisfactory or its not satisfactory for a drop and then in my aircraft which would stay on site the weatherman, we had all the cameramen. Ok. With their cameras. And then the target was four hundred miles south of Christmas Island. A little island called [pause] anyway a tiny little island which was mostly unoccupied and we’d use that to bomb. A Valiant would come on top at forty five plus thousand feet. He would come across and if it was decided it was on, drop from that height. And then the Navy had a ship over to the east of the target and they were monitoring everything, the bomb all the way down and they would call, ‘Forty five seconds. Forty seconds. Close eyes everybody.’ [laughs] And then, my position in the nose there would be a bright flash. You’ve got no goggles on, gloves on, curtains pulled past the, around all that, would, would be again a funny light through all the sounds, and then, ‘Ok. Eyes open everybody. Forty five seconds,’ and then would be the countdown. And then the first thing would be apart from the light, was an attack. The aircraft really shook [pause] and then it stopped, and then there was another smaller one. And in the meantime then the cameras were turning and photographing it all.
JM: And that shock was the shockwave hitting the aircraft.
EC: That was the first one which was direct to the aircraft was the shockwave from up there, and the second one was a reflection off the sea.
JM: Right.
EC: And that was a minor one. Now, the British are fantastic, I think. Now, the, from then on I’d say it was all being controlled by the Navy over there who were at sea. The aircraft, Canberra aircraft were sent off and they timed it beautifully, and they were timed to go through at different levels into the stack, you know and they were called Sniffer, their call sign. Sniffer One. Sniffer Two. Sniffer Three. Go through the cloud at different levels taking samples. Back to Christmas island. There was an RAF York on the ground there and all those samples were on there. The route, the usual route was up to Honolulu, or to San Francisco and they were in Aldermaston the following morning at 9 o’clock. Incredible.
JM: Were you ever concerned after that about the health issues of operating there? A number of servicemen —
EC: Oh, I was told about it. They said, you know. I had no [pause] we became so good at dropping this bomb.
JM: Yeah.
EC: All our accommodation on Christmas Island was tented.
JM: Yeah.
EC: There was only one kind of wooden hut and that was the CO, but because we knew exactly what was happening we used our own island, the southern tip of our island as a delayed drop from our own island and we were all at the top end of our island, you know. And really fantastic.
JM: And how long were you there for in total?
EC: Oh, exactly I’ll tell you [laughs] [pages turning] [pause] Christmas Island. Transit Christmas Island, down this area.
[pause]
EC: I was there all of the 19th [pause] These are the days I flew — 19, 20, 21st reconnaissance flights [pause – pages turning] I did, I finished with it [pause] for the period of 10th of January ‘57 to the 28th February ‘57 I did a hundred and twelve hours ten, ten minutes of flying time. And then it went on and on and on [pause — pages turning] The last entry in my book [pause — pages turning] I went back to training. Air met observer from then. So you can then, my grand total of flying was two thousand six hundred and four hours. Mostly meteorologically associated.
JM: Yeah. That’s a wonderful record.
EC: But again, I haven’t —
JM: Yeah. Just to complete the story when you came back I gather you spent your career as a meteorologist with, with airports. Is that correct? Were you doing weather forecasting? Did you say earlier you were doing weather forecasting?
EC: Yeah.
JM: For airlines. It doesn’t matter, Edward. It doesn’t matter.
EC: No.
JM: We can leave it there. Edward, thank you so much for allowing me to go back with you into your story and you are a unique individual and your stories are very valuable. Thank you very much.
EC: I know I haven’t answered you, what you, specific points you wanted me to raise with you.
JM: Well, you have answered as best as you can and that’s all I can ask for.
EC: Ok.
JM: On behalf of the IBCC thank you very much indeed.
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 Edward Cayhill
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Julian Maslin
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-08
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ACayhillE180208
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:03:35 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Christmas Island
Great Britain
Iraq
England--Cumbria
England--Lincolnshire
England--Hampshire
Northern Territory--Darwin
Scotland--Stranraer
Northern Territory
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944-06
1944-09
1950
1956-02-18
1956-07-10
1957-01-19
Description
An account of the resource
Edward Cayhill was the eldest of eight children and with his father’s encouragement was hoping to go to university. His father died in 1938 which meant that the university dream was cancelled and Edward went to work as a Civil Servant in the Meteorological Office. He began his work as a Met observer with the RAF at RAF Abbotsinch before being posted to 617 Squadron at RAF Scampton. Edward desperately wanted to join the RAF as aircrew which he finally did. He joined the RAF and was attached to the Meteorological Reconnaissance Flights at RAF Farnborough where he flew on Halifaxes and Mosquitoes. When he was demobbed he continued to fly with the Met Research Flight as a civilian. He eventually joined 269 Squadron and took part in the Met research flights in relation to the nuclear testing in the Pacific.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
1674 HCU
617 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
briefing
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
ground personnel
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
meteorological officer
Mosquito
observer
RAF Farnborough
RAF Millom
RAF Scampton
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1253/16651/PHarrisJ1901.1.jpg
37f8e76c3007a5907c8d5e5767aac5ec
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1253/16651/AHarrisJ190314.1.mp3
47150c2d47e01befd35a1a902ad76672
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
Harris, Jack
John Harris
J Harris
Description
An account of the resource
Three oral history interviews with Jack Harris (b. 1920). He served as a navigation instructor before flying operations with 550 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-01-17
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
Harris, J
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PS: I’ve got that one. Right. Right. Are you ok?
JH: Yes. Ok.
PS: Right. We’re starting again on the 13th of March.
JH: Yeah.
PS: And I believe we got as far as the beginning of 1949.
JH: That’s right. Yes. Yes.
PS: Yes.
JH: Well, in February 1949 I was posted to Singapore in the Far East and I went up on a troop ship called HMS, HM transport Devonshire. We sailed from Gourock near Glasgow in Scotland, and I suppose there were probably a couple of thousand troops on board and we sailed up stopping at Suez, Aden, Columbo in what is now Sri Lanka and then on to Singapore. And that voyage took just under four weeks but that was the British Empire in all its glory, you know, taking troops to far flung outposts and so on. And when I got to Singapore in March 1949, I joined one of three Dakota transport squadrons which were then based in Changi in Singapore. The Dakota was a twin engine transport aircraft developed from the civil version of the DC3 which did all the airline work in the United States from the early ‘30s onwards. The Dakota had a crew of three. A pilot, a navigator and a wireless operator and it could carry twenty five passengers on sort of bucket seats down each side of the fuselage or it could carry about three or four thousand pounds of freight including, you could load a jeep up a ramp through big side doors.
[telephone ringing]
JH: Excuse me.
JH: It’s Jack Harris. That’s another call from British Telecom. We’re getting a lot and I’m not with British Telecom. I’m with Virgin Cable so why are they ringing me up? They’ve phoned us five or six times.
PS: Yeah. Well, probably, I’m not with Virgin I know if you’re on BT you can take the number and dial a special number and they’ll put it on a blacklist and not let it through.
JH: Yes.
PS: Whether Virgin would do that for you I don’t know. They might.
JH: Yeah.
PS: They might. It might be worth getting in touch with them.
JH: Yeah.
PS: It is annoying because they’re only, they’re not really British Telecom. You get something. We’ve got BT for broadband.
JH: Yeah.
PS: And we get these phone call saying, ‘It’s going off in a minute,’ and it’s not. It’s for you to give them all your information, you know.
JH: Oh, I see. Yeah.
PS: A right con. And that’s the same thing. So, are you, are you ok?
JH: Yes. I’m ok. Yeah. Yes. Well, there were three Dakota squadrons at Changi Airfield in Singapore and they carried out a number of duties which would be flying troops or police around Malaysia or freight for supplies and in, there were regular services flown from Changi, Singapore to Kuala Lumpur which was the capital of Malaya as it was then to Butterworth, an airfield near Penang, to Kota Bharu on the east coast of Malaya and up to Kuantan on the east coast and to two airfields further up north Ipoh and Taiping. So outside of Malaya there were regular services to Hong Kong via Saigon to Labuan and Borneo in Sarrawak, and to a little island base in the middle of the Indian ocean called Car Nicoba where the Japanese had built a runway. And we were operating it as a staging post between Singapore and Sri Lanka and it had a small garrison of fifty or sixty people and we just took in their essential supplies every week. There was a weekly courier. There were special ops to be flown from Singapore. We sent, I joined Number 48 Squadron which was one of the three Dakota squadrons at Changi and in March ’49 we had to send six Dakotas up to an airfield called Mingaladon on the edge of Rangoon in Burma which is now Myanmar. And at that time there was a civil war going on between the Karen tribe and the Burmese government so the Karen’s were fighting the Burmese Army. And about three or four hundred miles north of Rangoon at a place called Maymyo there was a British military mission in Burma to help Burma set up armies and so on. And there were with wives and children probably about a hundred and fifty or two hundred people there and the fighting got so close to their camp that they had to be evacuated. So our six Dakotas went up there and used a strip the Japanese had built which was all hastily, and the strip was a bit overgrown with jungle so we had to clear that and lengthen it at both ends and we, we took all these hundred and fifty or two hundred people on board and flew them down to Rangoon and safety.
[pause]
JH: On another occasion when the Dakota aircraft were due for a major service after perhaps eight hundred hours flying they had to go down to a special base where there was a factory and they could strip the aircraft down. And we had to fly them down to an airfield near Adelaide in Australia where there was an aircraft company that did all this major inspection work. So I went out there, took a Dakota, flying down from Singapore to Batavia and Surabaya, and Kupang in Indonesia, then to Darwin in Northern Australia. And when we, we had to take off from Darwin about 4 o’clock in the morning when it was dark and as I got clearance from the control tower to take off they said to me: ‘Watch out for kangaroos on the runway.’ [laughs]
PS: Well they are big enough to see.
JH: We flew down from Darwin to a landing strip in the middle of Australia called Alice Springs. And there were very limited facilities there and the refuelling of the aircraft had to be done manhandling five gallon tins of petrol. So if you wanted two hundred gallons of petrol that was what [pause] forty or fifty tins of —
PS: Yes.
JH: Petrol, you had to unlock and climb up on the wing and with using a funnel pour into the tanks. So very primitive facilities. Well we got down to Parafield in, near Adelaide alright. That was fine. Coming back we came back first of all through Sydney where we had to spend a couple of nights. And then the return trip was following the same route but in reverse. But to get to Darwin which was a very long flight we had to land at another remote desert airfield called Cloncurry and they drove us in to what they called town for a mid-day lunch meal. We went to this café and we were attacked by hordes of flies. And when you were bringing your knife and your fork from the plate to your mouth, the flies would get on the fork before they could get to your mouth. Just terrible but that dry, you know was a paradise for flies you see. Anyway, we got to Darwin and did the return trip all right. That was an epic trip for me. Now the other —
PS: I don’t know what’s going on here.
JH: The other job we had to do in Malaya.
PS: Can you hang on a minute?
JH: Yes.
PS: I’ve got a fault come up here.
JH: Oh, have you? Ok.
PS: Oh God. Press play. What’s that? Let’s try that. No. It’s still playing up. This is what happened before you know.
JH: Yes.
PS: Are you still recording?
[recording paused]
PS: I will turn it off and try again. Is that alright with you?
JH: Yes. Yes.
PS: Can’t save the data. Oh great. What is the matter with this machine? Now, this is not my doing or anything is it?
[pause]
PS: Well, let’s try it. It seems to be working alright now.
JH: Yes. Yes.
PS: Right. Ok. Keep going because I’ve got it on that one.
JH: Now, the other job we had to do in Malaya —
PS: No. It’s not working.
JH: Was, was dropping supplies. It’s not working. Ok.
PS: No. I don’t. You know —
JH: I’ll put the kettle on. Ok.
PS: I’m sorry.
JH: Not to worry. Yes. Yes. Yes.
[pause]
[recording paused]
PS: Yeah.
JH: A job we had to do with our Dakotas was dropping supplies to British Army patrols who were in the jungle in Malaya.
PS: Yes.
JH: Fighting the bandits. And in July 1948 the communists had started an offensive against the west in South East Asia and they brought in a lot of communist bandits who were quite well armed because previously they’d been part of the Malayan people’s anti-Japanese army and provided with weapons by the west to fight the Japanese. But now they were using the weapons to attack rubber and tin planters on their estates in Malaya and shoot up families and so on and they derailed trains at night and so on. And they were just a flaming nuisance and the only way they could be tackled was to send up Army patrols into the jungle and find their camps and destroy the camps or shoot up the bandits you see. But to keep the patrols going in the jungle we had to air drop supplies to them. And the troops would settle in a clearing in the jungle, a date and time would be arranged for the supply drop and the troops would light a bonfire or set off flares that gave off a lot of smoke and when the smoke came through the top of the trees you knew where they were. And we had to fly in at very low speeds for the parachutes to open, and drop the supplies safely you had to keep the speed down to about ninety or ninety five knots which wasn’t very much above the stalling speed. And when you were right, just over the tree tops and flying into valleys and so on, quite awkward places it needed a bit of skill in handling the aircraft and come around for a resupply run. I mean often to drop all your supplies you just dropped them off one parachute at a time.
PS: Oh yes.
JH: We had two army air despatch people at the back of the aircraft alongside the big door and they just pushed these packs out and a static cord automatically opened the parachute. And but often to supply one patrol you might have to make six or seven runs and, you know get it right each time. So it was quite a skilful business. And that, that went on all the time, and we were often doing as individual crews you might be doing two or three supply drops a week, you see. So, yes. So that was a constant business. Also, they had Spitfire and Beaufighter squadrons in Malaya to attack these bandits and they used to use little Auster reconnaissance planes to find out where the bandit camps were and sometimes little clues gave the bandits away. They could be lighting a fire or, or they could be going to and fro to the jungle toilet [laughs] and they would mark where they thought the camp was with smoke indicators and then the Spitfires and the Beaufighters would come along with cannon and bombs and try and get the bandits. But it was a pretty hit or miss operation, you know. Not, not terribly successful but of course it kept the bandits on edge and so on, and they, they had to keep on the move all the time. Yes. Yes. And then in January 1950 I was promoted to squadron leader and I was sent up to the Advanced Air Headquarters in Kuala Lumpur working alongside the Army Headquarters in Kuala Lumpur. And we had to arrange all the air strikes against the bandits and all the supply drops to keep the British Army patrols going in the jungle. So that was quite a, quite a big job. And then in April ’51 I was selected to attend the RAF Staff College at Andover. And the Staff College at Andover was special because the course was about twenty five people and you’d have ten from the Royal Air Force and fifteen from foreign Air Forces all learning to be staff officers. And we had people in from the United States of America, from India, Pakistan, Canada, Israel, Burma, Iraq, Iran and France. So it was quite a mixed gathering of the students on this Staff College course. And then I finished that in March 1952, and in April 1952 I was posted to Headquarters Transport Command at Upavon as air plans to work out all the plans for the Hastings squadrons and Dakota squadrons in Transport Command to meet various emergencies that might come up. It was thought that there might be another Berlin Airlift required if the Russians sealed off approaches to Berlin again. You had to plan for certain emergency operations which might involve the British Army being involved in West Africa or East Africa. And also if the postmen in Britain went on strike we had to fly the mail from London to all regional centres so it could be distributed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you had to prepare for a lot of emergency things like that.
PS: A big complicated job.
JH: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
[pause]
PS: Ok.
JH: Yeah. Ok. Well, shall we have a rest again?
PS: Yeah.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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 Jack Harris. Two
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Patricia Selby
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
2019-03-14
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHarrisJ190314
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:26:23 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
After completing thirty-seven Bomber Command operations during the war, Jack Harris remained in the RAF. In February 1949, he was posted to Singapore, where he joined 48 Squadron and undertook transport command services on C-47s. He describes evacuating military personnel from Maymyo during the Burmese civil war and dropping supplies to the British army fighting guerrilla forces in the Malayan jungle. He also describes flying to Darwin in Northern Australia and his experience at Cloncurry airport. In April 1951 he was selected to attend the RAF Staff College at Andover which he finished in March 1952. In April 1952 he was posted to the Transport Command headquarters at RAF Upavon and worked on planning emergency operations, including potential postal strikes.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tilly Foster
Julie Williams
Steph Jackson
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Singapore
Burma
Burma--Maymyo
England--Wiltshire
Singapore
Australia
Northern Territory--Darwin
Malaysia
Northern Territory
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1949-02
1952-04
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
British Army
48 Squadron
C-47
promotion
RAF Upavon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/332/3492/PSpenceMA1502.2.jpg
5a6657b4575a6396f0860cd494be921e
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/332/3492/ASpenceMA151005.1.mp3
98a0fa42e0ca70873f8ca52ae247e6df
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
Spence, Max
Maxwell Alexander Spence
Maxwell A Spence
Maxwell Spence
M A Spence
M Spence
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Maxwell Alexander "Max" Spence (437564 Royal Australian Air Force), his log book and a photograph. He flew operations as a navigator with 460 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Max Spence and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-05
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.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Spence, MA
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: This interview for the International Bomber Command Digital, International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive, is with Max Spence, who is a 460 Squadron navigator. My name is Adam Purcell, we are at Max home in Montmorency in Melbourne, it’s the 5th of October 2015. So Max, we’ll start with an easy one. Uhm, can you tell me something of your early life, growing up, uhm, your family and what you did before the war?
MS: Well, uhm, we here, [pauses] uhm, I grew up in Briar Hill, which is quite close to Montmorency. I’m an only child, I went to, I was an original pupil of the Briar Hill primary school and then I went to Elton High, eh, secondary royal Elton higher elementary and then I went to Melbourne High and I finished at year eleven, which was pretty, eh, substantial in those days, that was in 19, uh, 30, or 34 or 5, I think. And then I went to work at Briscoes Limited, which was a wholesale hardware firm, and there were two office boys, I was the outside boy, and the other was the inside boy and we knew in 1938 that there was a war going to start soon, so, we both opted, we were going to join the Victorian Scottish Regiment. But when we found that the uniform was gonna cost us twelve pound, or twenty-four dollars which is about a three months, uh, wages that went out the door, so [laughs]. So, as I said, my dad, being a Gallipoli veteran, and he was an only son with eight sisters, and I’m an only child and no way was he gonna let me go, so, uh. Then, suddenly in May 1940, he changed his mind and said the Air Force would be alright and I applied for ground staff and the recruiting sergeant said: ‘You could apply for air crew’, so, which I did and got up to the selection board and one said: ‘You’re left-handed’, I said: ‘Yes’. He said: ‘You’re no good to us’, I said: ‘Ah, why?’. I was only just eighteen, so, and he said: ‘You couldn’t handle a Morse key’, uh, so I said, ‘but we will send you Morse lessons’, which they didn’t. So, I lost interest in the war altogether like they [unclear] run it without me and but in 1941 I was called up and I went to, it was I believe a signal, uh, the signals organisation, that took [unclear] , well it was a signal operation and then, uhm, [unclear] was separated and joined the 19th Machine Gun Regiment as a [unclear] and we went off to Darwin and were there at pretty close proximity to a lot of the raids there, which was a bit, you know, ordinary, uhm. And about October it settled off and the RAF came recruiting again and I applied, and they accepted me, they didn’t have any of this nonsense about left-handedness. And there was fifty-four of us I think, and only eighteen passed and they were mainly, uhm, excluded because of the colour blind test which was not the red, yellow and blue thing but it was a complicated business where you looked into this pattern and if you’re colour blind you just saw a colour and if you weren’t, you didn’t see it, and vice versa and funnily enough it was developed by the Japs. So, we came down in February and to Corfield [?]and eventually started ITS, the initial training stream, uh, which was a three months thing, and, uh, I think it finished around about May 1941 and I was lucky enough to get what I wanted, a navigators course, and I went to Edmonton in Canada and that was a five months course, so I spent eight months in Canada. And then I, following that, went through and eventually came to England, where I went to a British (or badge) flying unit which was navigation in a [unclear] Ansett, uhm, was largely visual and uh, where you took a visual line of sight and guessed what the distance was. Well, having finished that I went to operational training unit, uh, where you formed crews and very scientifically there’d be one hundred and fifty blokes in a room and they just said, sort yourselves out, so, I got, I saw this big black [unclear], I said: ‘Do you look like you could handle a big plane, could I be a navigator?’. So, we did operational training unit at Syreford, that’s in Midland England and then we went to conversion unit, we’re on Wellingtons at the operational training unit and then we went to the Lancasters at the conversion unit and then we finally joined the 460 Squadron in about, I think, early February, forget what the date was now. Uhm, and I flew eighteen operations in pretty quick succession, including the Dresden raid which has brought so much, misinformation [unclear]. We were then posted to Pathfinders, the war ended and the squadron, we all set off to another squadron that was, uhm, breaking up and then I went down to Brighton, which was the forwarding station, up to Liverpool we got the Andes, this ship I got on, I had been on this before and was the same ship I came from Canada to Britain on. And then I came home, and the war ended in Japan, I was discharged and I went back to work. That was about it.
AP: I only had to ask one question there and we just [unclear] covered the lot. Uhm, anyway, we will go back in a little bit more detail, if you don’t mind. Uhm, what, you said, you went back to work, what were you doing, as work, before you enlisted?
MS: What? What?
AP: What were you doing as work before you enlisted?
MS: I was, uhm, a clerk at, in a wholesale hardware, Briscoes, which is a very old, uh, is still operating in New Zealand but it followed up [unclear] about 1970. I was warehouse manager then.
AP: Before or between, between enlisting, as in between the air force coming to Darwin and then you signing the paper, and you started the ITS, uhm, can you remember roughly how long there was between the two and what did you do in the middle there?
MS: Ah, well, the recruiting mob came up about October in 1942 and but we didn’t leave Darwin until February 1943 and then we spend a few weeks down Laverton and then I suppose it will be, around about April 1942, 1943 that I had gone to, uhm, initial training school Summers [?] and that was a three-months course. There was no flying in that one there. It was just, uh, a number of subjects that, uh, which were, [unclear], was quite a lot of subjects, I recall meteorology, navigation, signals, I forget the other ones, been quite a number of. And then we got our postings and I was posted to Edmonton in Canada and so to do that we went up to Bradfield Park in Sidney, were there for about a fortnight and this big ship arrived and next thing we were on our way, uhm, to San Francisco actually. Uhm, it was the Mount Washington, Mount Vernon, they called it, uh, it was a big ship, 35000 tons I think and it went on a sound, so. And then we travelled up to, uh, Edmonton, we were stayed in the manning [unclear] for about a fortnight and then we started there a five months course, which was pretty intensive. Uhm, and then I was onto Britain on the same ship as I came home on, and as I said we were in Brighton at manning [unclear] and then we went up to a place called West Freugh in Scotland which was just near Stranraer and that’s where we did our advanced flying unit, which was pretty much the same as what we did at Edmonton. And then I was down to Syreford, there was a place called [coughs] I forget now but Syreford was where we did our operational training as a crew. Seven, it was six of them to stay on a Wellington [coughs] and then we transferred to Lancasters at the conversion unit and then onto 460 Squadron, uhm, I think it was just before New Year’s Eve in 1944 and we did one, I think a couple of, trains country [coughs] or cross countries [coughs] and, may I get a glass of water? And we started there operations and as I say, after the 18th we were posted to Pathfinders, but we never flew there. So, that was it and I came home [coughs].
AP: Can you tell me a bit about the first time you ever went in an airplane? Was that in Edmonton?
MS: Ever went in a?
AP: In airplane. The first time you went flying.
MS: Ah, yes.
AP: What memories, if any, do you have of that flight?
MS: What?
AP: What memories, if any, do you have of that flight?
MS: [coughs] Nothing but enjoyment. Edmonton was [coughs], I put in me memoires, [coughs] leaving Edmonton was like leaving home, I just accepted it as so. Well, we spent time in their homes and. But as I say, it was largely visual navigation we didn’t have much in a way, we had things to look at the stars with, [unclear]?
AP: Sexton.
MS: Sexton, but our aviation sexton was different from the normal and we used to take star shots and [coughs] that was about on Polaris, which was the north star. We saw the constellations align and everything. [coughs] And that was, as I say, was a five months course. So we left there in February ’44, uh, I travelled across Canada, my mate and I went, we had eleven days leave actually and we went to Chicago and then there to Halifax and boarded [coughs] the Andes [coughs] to Britain and then on up to say, advanced flying unit which was [coughs], [unclear], pretty much the same as Canada and that was only [coughs], uhm, when we got to Syreford that we got into the more sophisticated, uhm, navigation, machines [coughs].
AP: You’re alright?
MS: Yes.
AP: Yeah, ok. Uhm, what were your first impressions of wartime Europe, of wartime Britain, was there any, anything at all?
MS: Funnily enough was that the women smoked, although I never smoked. And, uh, I had an aunt in Scotland, so I used to go up there a lot, uh, but that was pretty frugal, we were alright on the stations we got fed well [unclear] [phone rings] excuse me. Yeah, go on.
AP: [unclear] England you were talking about. The women smoked?
MS: Yeah [coughs].
AP: And something about you were treated pretty well on the squadron, you got plenty of food on the squadron.
MS: What?
AP: You were saying you got plenty of food on the squadron. Where else [unclear]?
MS: Yeah, well. Was pretty ordinary food [coughs] but was food [coughs] a lot more of it than the general public got.
AP: What, uhm, so, we will go back or forward a bit now to OTU. You’ve picked your crew, you’ve crewed up?
MS: Well, we were picked out by ourselves.
AP: Yeah, so you now have the six people before you get your flight engineer.
MS: Yeah.
AP: With which you get to fly with. What did you do at operational training unit? What sort of exercises did you do? What sort of [unclear] did you do?
MS: Cross country, uhm, mostly in Britain but we did go to the coast of Holland once, uhm, which was a pretty long trip [coughs]. Uhm, yeah, was mostly cross country using the Gee which is, [coughs] was the, you can find it on the internet, was the, they used to send their signals and you saw the cross reference and that’s where you were and then hopefully.
AP: Hopefully you got it right. Where, uhm, where on the airplane was the Gee set?
MS: Uh well, it was beside the navigator’s table.
AP: The navigator’s table.
MS: On the Wellingtons sort of facing forward, behind the pilot from memory but on the Lancaster was the, there was the, uhm, bomb aimer used to take his place as front gunner, then the bomb, operating [unclear], and the flight engineer, he sat beside the pilot, then there was the pilot and then there was me and then the wireless operator and then we had the mid-upper gunner and the, uh, rear gunner.
AP: That was in the Wellington?
MS: There was seven.
AP: Oh, seven. So, we are in the Lancaster at this point?
MS: Ay?
AP: That’s a Lancaster you are talking?
MS: Yes, yes.
AP: Ok, that’s the other crew then. Uhm, I guess, what, when you’re in England, obviously you would have got periods of leave in between your, well, while your training [unclear].
MS: [unclear]
AP: You would have had periods of leave while you were training?
MS: Ah, yeah, we had six days every six weeks.
AP: Oh, this is when you were on operations.
MS: Yeah, yeah.
AP: What did you do?
MS: Well, they had a couple of schemes. There was the lady Rider[?] scheme, which, uhm, you could book a place and go to the land of the state or, I went to with a friend to a retired army major and his wife up in the, uhm, up sort of north of, east of England, that was, when you got there, that was the first sort of scheme. And then they had the Lord Nuffield, Nuffield was the, the Morris, he owned Morris cars and he used to [coughs], uhm [unclear] of various places [coughs] and if, and if you eventually met up with someone who got married, he would pay for the wedding and the, uhm, sort of honeymoon, he was very good [coughs].
AP: That’s what you did on leave. Uhm, what about the pubs?
MS: Eh? The what?
AP: The pubs in England and
MS: Yeah, well, they were a bit of a, the first time I went to Tommy Farr’s bar, he was the [coughs] British empire heavyweight champion. Now I ordered a beer, that tasted like tar and water, it was mild beer and so I [coughs] talked to a couple of other blokes who’d been here for a while, they said, oh no, start off on bottled beer and then gradually, uhm, move over to bitter, which we did, yeah.
AP: Next one. We’ll jump onto the, your operational aircraft. The first time you saw a Lancaster, what did you think?
MS: Was another aircraft, didn’t really have any thoughts about it. It was a lumbersome, or cumbersome aircraft [coughs] and that was a difficult one to get into, you had to climb up eight steps with all your gear, all your navigation gear and parachute and what. [coughs] Ah, bloody cough, and I don’t know whether is any [unclear], I don’t there are, couldn’t find any, uhm, and then you, fairly narrow near the, walk right up to the front and had a huge spar across the, that held the airframe together and you had to climb over that and then I had a little office, uh, and then I had to pull the cloth around me, cause we weren’t allowed to show any light.
AP: Can you describe that office? What was it like?
MS: Well, [laughs] it was only just, a curtain drawn around, just had a table and had the Gee-set and the Y set there and, uhm, I had the various instruments up to, you know, [unclear] the dividers and all those sorts of things but they weren’t very big, [unclear] wouldn’t have been any bigger than that, yeah.
AP: You said then the Y set? What’s the Y set?
MS: Well, that was a primitive Radar set, uh, which when it was put on, it picked up the outlines of towns by the people, intelligence people know that sort of, they gave a chart with the major towns as you were passing, [coughs] outlined and this picked that up and then you could give a bearing and a distance by the [coughs], by machine and you just plotted the thing.
AP: Navigation? Alright. Uhm, might as well go onto the squadron. Where and how did you live at Binbrook?
MS: Well, this is another thing. For an organisation [coughs] fighting for democracy, the services weren’t very democratic. When we got to the squadron, our pilot got a commission immediately and he went off to the officer’s mess and we actually had [coughs] pretty comfortable, uhm, we lived in a house actually, all in a unit, uh, but we were all together in one big room, we had comfortable, uhm, we had comfortable beds and then we used to go to the Sergeants’ Mess for meals. And then incidentally on the, uhm, conversion unit they were real snotty people, they. The permanent staff here had their own mess, uh, we weren’t allowed to go there, we had to go to our mess, they regarded us as second-class amateurs. But, yeah, the conditions were quite comfortable.
AP: What, uhm, what sort of things happened in the mess, in the sergeant’s mess in Binbrook?
MS: singing and drinking, and the [unclear]
AP: [unclear] [laughs]
MS: Writing letters and that sort of thing.
AP: Flying for Bomber Command would have been fairly stressful, I imagine.
MS: I can’t hear you.
AP: Sorry, flying for Bomber Command would have been fairly stressful, I imagine. How did you cope with it?
MS: Well, they keep, all the documentaries they do sort of emphasise the drama but largely it was just hard work. Cause I had to fix my position every six minutes and then dead reckon ahead another six minutes so, I was like an one-armed paper hanger actually, I was. So, the navigators probably had the best job, cause they were working, the rest were largely in a watching role all the time. And that’s another thing you said, they used to offer Benzedrine tablets, uhm, ‘wakey-wakey tablets’, we, I never took them, I had no problems staying awake. But sometimes a bloke would take them and then they’d call the op off, and of course we couldn’t sleep all night. And, yeah, it was, mostly hard work, I didn’t really, some of me mates did but I really didn’t feel any stress much.
AP: You say: ‘Every six minutes you are getting a fix and did reckoning again’. What can you remember much of the actual process, the actual method that you were doing?
MS: Well, it was, if we used the Gee machine as [unclear] sort of, uhm, things that flicked along and you got them together and you sort of isolate and that gave you where you were and with the, uh, Y, the radar which we were only allowed to use for a minute because the, uhm, enemy fighters could home in on us, uhm, we just operated it and got a bearing and a distance from where we [unclear] onto.
AP: There is something from that, uhm. Ok, so, you had eighteen trips.
MS: Yeah.
AP: Uhm, we will get to Dresden in a minute. Uhm, do any of those trips stand out particularly in [unclear]?
MS: Well, two of them do. We did Nuremberg, where we lost, I think, uh, nearly eight percent of the force. And a place called Pforzheim, which didn’t have any particular merit but they put it off twice and when they put them off, they always used to have to change the route [unclear] but they didn’t and the Germans had just reduced their jet fighter Me 262 and they got into a [unclear] on the way in, so obviously they’d been informed of where we were going and the route.
AP: When you said they got into [unclear] was that your crew in particular or [unclear] general?
MS: No, no, no, just general, we were pretty fortunate, I don’t remember, we only had one episode with a fighter and that’s right up near the back and we got hit by flak once but that was pretty much all of it.
AP: So, fairly, fairly uneventful tour.
MS: Yeah.
AP: Ok, so, the inevitable question comes up then, of Dresden. Uhm, what was your personal experience on the Dresden trip?
MS: Well, it was the longest trip we did, was nine and three-quarter hours in the air. I believe I didn’t have any particular, uh, memories of it, uh, as it was just another flight but funny, after the war we didn’t go home, we had a lecture from one of the education groups and he was talking about the phoney aspects of war and one of them was that the British shareholders in the Krupp ironworks at Essen were saving dividends up till the end of 1942. And then he got onto Dresden, now the major reason was given for Dresden that was to help the Russians, you know, but he actually [unclear] was to hinder the Russians, because they were getting into Berlin before the Americans and in fact we went to Dresden once, the Yanks went there six times. Twice before us and four times after us. The last one was about, was only three weeks before the end of the war so, there could be some truth in the hinder thing, because you know, they had to get to Berlin and cut it up, so, we’ll never know.
AP: You mentioned earlier about misinformation about Dresden. What [unclear]?
MS: Well, they were, they kept saying, well one [unclear] that the press council didn’t win, he said it was a war crime, you know, and because it was the biggest loss of life I think in any other raids were about 35000, it varies, 35000 seems to be the [unclear] death rate. It was just another raid to us but they kept hammer every year, [unclear] on February the 13th they were hammering this Dresden raid so [unclear]. So, I actually got a couple interviews, I think, in the [unclear], not sure which paper it was, about it, you know because it was all lies, [unclear] the historians giving the wrong story. There was the, a major historian in the Australian war memorial. Uhm, he wrote a book, he wrote a [unclear] book, Australia at war, was about Bomber Command. Well, his first mistake when he had a diagram or a sort of illustration, he had the navigator and the wireless operator in the wrong place and [coughs] he also had said that Dresden had not been bombed before. So, I wrote to him and pointed out his error in the book and I said that the Americans had actually bombed Dresden before we did and he wrote back and admitted his error in the illustration but he said that it was only a small bombing, but it was still a bombing you know, [coughs] and they were all, when I really got into it, they actually bombed a lot more, or dropped a lot more bombs than we did on Dresden but, cause Dresden had been virtually destroyed anyhow but they kept on doing it. Yeah.
AP: Why do you think that misinformation is out there, why [unclear]?
MS: Well, it happened with Darwin, they said that the Japs were never going to invade, the same bloke actually, and we, well, we will never know but I tell you what, we were pretty sure they were when we were there and they kept hammering this one raid all the time, as I say, they gave the Americans no press coverage at all. And yet, they actually did more to Dresden we did. It was just another, I mean, probably weren’t, were doing what they were just done, Harris didn’t want to go to Dresden but they overruled him. It was some sort of between Churchill and Roosevelt and Stalin, I think, in ’44, late ’44, they had a conference.
AP: So, uhm, we’ll step back to a more general question. Your sitting there doing your every six-minute thing at your navigation table, and you hear over the interview, over the intercom, uhm, I got one of your gunners saying, fighter corkscrew port go. What happens next?
MS: Uh, what, say it again.
AP: You’re sitting at your table doing your navigation stuff and over your intercom you hear one of your gunners saying, corkscrew port go.
MS: Ah, yes, well that was, uhm, they had an evading process called corkscrewing, where the gunner who picked up the, uhm, alleged fighter would say that the pilot, uhm, enemy fighter, well he did this time, enemy fighter skip, skip, he was a bit, he said, prepare to corkscrew left, na na na, prepare to corkscrew right, na na na, he said, doesn’t matter, he’s gone past [laughs]. Well, that was one and I had another one where I was, oh, I think I had done five trips or something and one of me mates came to the squadron, he was on his first trip and he was coughing and splattering, I said: ‘That’s a bad cough you got there Butch’, he said: ‘As long as I still got it in the morning I’ll be happy’. [laughs] Ah, that was two sort of, [coughs] lighter moment.
AP: Excellent. Uhm, so, your tour ended, well your tour as such as it was, and eighteen trips it ended with the end of the war? Is that correct or is that before?
MS: [unclear]
AP: When you got to eighteen trips, you stopped?
MS: Yes, we went to the Pathfinder.
AP: So, you were posted to the Pathfinders, the, uhm.
MS: But we never flew there because the war ended.
AP: You said something in one of your emails to me about a disagreement about navigation methods. Can you expand on that?
MS: Don’t know whether, I, I’ve been operating quite happily on my own, the eighteenth trip, when we got there they set the bomb aimer behind me and he was having very little experience of the Gee and the Y. He was taking the information and passing it on to me which, I thought, lends itself for error for a start [clears throat] and took him away from his proper role of watching, you know, being the front [unclear] gunner and I, all I said, I am not too happy about it. Next thing they pulled me and the bomb aimer out of the crew and they sent us off on a forty-eight, two days leave or as we thought. When we came back, we were called up, or I was, called up before the stuffy pompous CO who wanted nothing but to stand to our attention and he said you’d be an AWL, I said no sir. Anyhow he obviously wasn’t sure, he checked us. If you’re charged with being AWL, it’s either a confined to barracks or it can a mandatory penalty. And if it was to mandatory penalty, you’re gonna ask for court martial, which is all, uh, bells and whistles and you get a defending lawyer and all that stuff. And he obviously wasn’t sure of his ground, so he sent us to a shorter tour of Sheffield that was and it’s, it was called an Aircrew Retraining Centre, there was lads, they were slobs of a military type, you know, probably never been out [unclear] a drill, but it was, so was quite interesting, it was. I did air force law and one bloke [unclear], I’ve seen it anyway together, this bloke was gonna go back and he put his CO [unclear] when he went back because of the information he got from the military law. But that was a three week course and actually the war ended while we were there and as I say, we were then posted to a squadron that was breaking up and I went to Brighton and, uhm, I was home in, uhm, August, just before the Pacific war finished, I was out on September the 2nd or 3rd or something I forget and I was back at work at 20th of September ’45, most of them didn’t get back till 1946. So that all worked out well.
AP: How did you find the readjustment to civilian life?
MS: Couldn’t cause me any problems.
AP: Just got straight back in, straight back where you left off.
MS: Yes, more or less, yeah. No, I got a, I was given a hired job, so. [coughs] But, now I, a lot of my mates had a break down and a few of them have suffered a post-traumatic stress as they call [unclear] they got [unclear] I used to drink too much, that was the main problem.
AP: Ok, uhm, this is usually my last question. How is Bomber Command remembered and what legacy do you think it left?
MS: Uhm, without a say, it was just a job and we had a job to do, we did it to the best of our ability, it was. There weren’t any special sort of. I get annoyed at the documentaries cause they emphasise the dramatic side all the time, you know, [unclear]. When we flew we flew long, this the other thing, people refer to what we did as missions and missions were what the Yanks flew. We flew operations, so, it’s only mine I think, but I get annoyed about that at. I lost the train of thought, [pauses]. As I say, these air flights were long but basically the last raid was the same because we were sending more planes at night and a lot of them banging into one another rather than and then the issue of the Me 262. They reckoned that if the war got another three months Germany would have had aerial supremacy but they didn’t have any fuel of course and but they certainly [phone rings] excuse me. Ok.
AP: So, how, yeah, how is Bomber Command remembered for you personally, I suppose and in the wider part?
MS: I don’t think about it [unclear] at all really, no. It’s, it just little, sort of personal episodes. As I said, it was just a job and I did it as best I could. Don’t have any special place in my memories.
AP: Did you ever fly again, apart from just getting on a passenger plane and going somewhere?
MS: No, no.
AP: No, that was it. Did the air force [unclear]?
MS: I got a , well, even then, now, when [laughs], when we were being discharged, uhm, they’d take your shirt in and they give another one and I noticed all these blokes going around the back picking up all our shirts, I got four shirts out of that lot and they, uhm, you know, bureaucracy is never far behind. I, uhm, first thing that happened was, uh, the WO there wanted to put us on guard at the Melbourne [unclear] guard so we didn’t turn up and he got us out on Monday, he said, if you’re not out [unclear] in half an hour I’ll put you on the charge so, but we managed that alright, that was our final episode there. And I went up, my cousin was royal [unclear] in the army and he said to me, I met him in town and he said, oh, he said to me, we got a good mess come up and you know we will have lunch together. So, I walked through the guard there and the next thing this WO came out and he said: ‘Where are you going, staff, I was a flight sergeant then, I said I’m going up to meet me with my cousin up at the mess, he said: ‘You are not allowed in there’, he said, I said: ‘I thought we were on the same side, you know.’ And then he started blustering, carry on and this Lieutenant came down, he said: ‘What’s the trouble, [unclear] he’s so bloody stupid, he said, carry on staff. You know, that was [unclear], you gotta try the other side of bureaucracy, anyhow.
AP: You said WO there?
MS: Yeah, warrant officer.
AP: Warrant officer, yeah, just for the tape. I’ll write that down. Uhm, what can I say, I guess just the one question that I skipped over earlier, when you heard, you said, I think you said that by about 1938 you sort of had the feeling [unclear] that war was coming.
MS: Yeah, you know, Hitler was flexing his muscles and we’d had Chamberlain saying no war in the near time and that sort of thing. I was just [unclear] and we could see it coming and we decided we’d be part of it but when it was gonna cost us 12 pound we decided we won’t [unclear].
AP: Can you remember when you heard that war had actually been declared and what were your thoughts?
MS: No, not particularly.
AP: Not particularly. Uhm, what else do I have here. I think, ok, the final question, is there anything else that you would like to ad, any other stories that [unclear]?
MS: I think I covered it pretty well.
AP: Covered it pretty well. [laughs] Covered it pretty well with one question. You’re off for ten minutes and that was the end. Alright, we might end the interview there, thank you very much.
MS: Ok, good thank you. [file missing] We got a special medal and they actually had one [unclear] guide but I never, my issues were the clasp in a little, piddly little thing [unclear] read the views of some of the British airmen on that, a sort of a second prize, you know. [file missing]
MS: [file missing] And yet, the aircrew Europe star were given to, uh, people who finished their operations in seventy or eighty hours, they did a tour of thirty. We had done eighteen, we [unclear] about one hundred and forty hours, so, well, I think that was unfair [unclear].
AP: Good.
MS: And that’s it.
AP. That’s it. Can I turn it off now? [laughs]
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
ASpenceMA151005, PSpenceMA1502
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Max Spence
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:47:51 audio recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending OH summary
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adam Purcell
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-05
Description
An account of the resource
Max Spence grew up in Australia and worked in a hardware store before he volunteered for the Air Force. He recounts his training in Canada and in England and life on an operational station. He flew 18 operations as a navigator with 460 Squadron.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Canada
Great Britain
Germany
Alberta--Edmonton
Germany--Dresden
Northern Territory--Darwin
United States
Northern Territory
Alberta
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Peter Schulze
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
460 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
crewing up
Gee
Lancaster
mess
military living conditions
military service conditions
navigator
perception of bombing war
RAF Binbrook
RAF Syerston
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/793/10774/ADavisRC170818.2.mp3
c4befcc1ee6cc65ed4942642ccee5142
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
Davis, Ronald Charles
R C Davis
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Ronald Davis (b. 1922, 1603009 Royal Air Force) and a photograph of his crew. He was a flight engineer on Halifax with 78 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Ronald Davis 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
2016-06-10
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
Davis, RC
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DB: This interview is Ronald, with Ronald ‘Ron’ Davis and his son Derek Davis on the 18th of August 2017 at 10.50 hours. Ron, can you tell me a little bit about your life before you joined the RAF?
RD: Yes. What happened was that when the war broke out I was a solicitor’s clerk and I thought to myself I’ll find some other job because that wasn’t very interesting at the time. So, I went to Hants and Sussex, Hampshire err in Portsmouth and I went there as a metallurgy to look after checking the gluing of the wood and the metal and the softening of the metal for the fitters to work on. Then I went on to the floor and did fitting on the floor. And while I was there I volunteered for aircrew and I went to London in December, no, in September of ’41 and I joined the Air Force there. But because I was working in an aircraft factory I was deferred for six to seven months. Then they called me up in June or July, I can’t remember exactly what date and I went to Blackpool and I got fitted out in uniform and did my square bashing as it is along Blackpool front in in the glorious sunshine of the weather there at Blackpool. Houses. The like lodgings. We went to, yes I think I can, wait a minute let me get my mind around this [pause] There was probably four or five of us in lodgings in houses all the way around Blackpool and and they supplied the bed. You know the sleeping quarters and the food. And every morning we’d go out on parade and in the evening we’d go back the our house and have our meals. And that’s about it really. I don’t think there’s anything else. We went dancing at Blackpool Tower. Is that Blackpool Tower?
DD: Yeah. Yeah.
RD: Yeah. Blackpool Tower. Yeah. So, there’s nothing really. When we finished that I went on a fitter’s course. Oh, do you want me to continue? Went on a fitter’s course and I I went from there to Scotland on, I worked on night fighters there and while I was up there they, they wanted some engineers for Bomber Command and I applied. Went on a course. Passed that. And we went to Operational Training Unit and crewed up. The way that you were crewed up was, there was a dozen or more in a room of engineers, flight engineers and the officer came in with a list of pilots. Now, he said, ‘Does anyone prefer a pilot you know?’ Nobody knew. So, he said, ‘What I’ll do, I’ve got a list of the engineers and a list of the pilots. I’ll call out the engineer and I’ll call out the pilot first and the first one for the engineer.’ And that’s how we went through it. Then all of a sudden I got, ‘Sergeant Fraser. Ron Davis.’ So, we met and shook hands and I thought, and I went around, along to see the rest of the crew which was the two gunners, a navigator, a bomb aimer, wireless operator and that was it and we got crewed up. And then from there we did our training on a Mark 2 Halifax. While we were there the invasion plans started and as a training we went to, a lot of us, a lot of the aircraft went to, flew across the south coast to the north, North Sea around Calais way and Kiel to divert the diversion of the D-Day invasion. And when we came back we realised that that was what was happening at that particular time. And then when we finished there I went home, we had a five days leave and then I was, was sent a letter saying you’re, you’re required at RAF Breighton and, on a certain day and I went there with the rest of the crew.
[recording paused]
DD: Where you stayed. Where you were billeted. You told me the story about when you [pause] just mention what year this is as well. It’s 1944 now, isn’t it?
RD: Yeah. It must have been. Yeah. ’44. Yeah. Just after D Day.
DD: That’s right, yeah.
RD: Yeah. Just after D-Day.
DD: Because you skip from the beginning of the war, ’42 straight to ’44.
RD: Yeah. When I was working on the —
DD: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Ok.
RD: Yeah.
DD: Ok. Just so the listener knows what what part of the year we’re, what we’re talking about. That’s great. You’re doing really good.
[recording paused]
RD: Yes. Then we had the letter to say we had to go to RAF Breighton, which is in Yorkshire, to 78 Squadron and Mark 3 Halifaxes. I went there, met the rest of the crew and we were in a Nissen hut which wasn’t very warm. We had these coke fires or whatever it was we could find and there was two crews in there. The other crew we talked to but mostly we kept to ourselves. And the crew I got together with in the OCU were Canadians. I forgot to mention that. All Canadians except the signaller, the wireless operator who was come from London. And we got together down there in there in the hut and the first thing we realised that the, Jack Fraser who was our pilot he had to go on a mission with an experienced crew. Now, we did a bit of worry over that because we saw the aircraft go off and the six of us was on the airfield and watched them go off and we thought, ‘Oh my God,’ you know, ‘Is he going to come back?’ Anyway, he came back and of course we, we walked around him saying, ‘What was it like?’ ‘What was it?’ You know. What did you do? What did you do? What did —’ You know, ‘Did you, did you see any aircraft go down?’ I can remember it now, and he couldn’t get it out quick enough, everything that happened. So, our first op was we went out to the dispersal unit and we saw this aircraft that we were going to go on because we had different aircraft each time we went. We didn’t have a particular aircraft we went to and we looked up at the nose and we saw about fifty or sixty little bombs on there so it had done a few ops. So, we got there. We were going to the other side. We went to Calais just inside France. I can’t remember the place we went to but I can look it up in the logbook and we set off with the rest of the crew, with the rest of the aircraft. But the thing was it was such an old aircraft that we had a job to maintain height and speed to keep up with the rest of the aircraft so I was using a lot of fuel and the idea of when you got to the target you had to see the target to bomb it. That was essential. So off we went trailing behind everything. We got to France. Going over to France we saw that the rest of the aircraft in our squadron was coming back. We were on our own. We went over to the target. We couldn’t find it so we turned around and came back. And looking out all the time we had flak coming up as we came in and we had flak going out. Got over the Channel and I said to the captain, I said, ‘We’re getting a bit short here.’ So, he said, ‘Well, what do you think? So, I said, ‘Well, let’s land somewhere else.’ So we got in touch with where was the place? [pause] Newmarket. And we asked if we could land and he said, ‘Yes. Have you got a full bomb load?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll get rid of it.’ So, we dropped it in the sea and we landed and we had our interview in a room there and there were people all around us. They knew that the bomb, the aircraft had done a few ops and they said, ‘Which op were you on? And we said, ‘The first one.’ So their faces dropped as much as to say, ‘Oh gawd,’ you know, ‘Sprog crew.’ So, we told what happened and everything else and then we landed up in the pub. But anyway, that was as far as, I’ll tell you there was one particular thing while we were in the pub. Our bomb aimer was about five foot tall and a lot of people said, ‘Were you an ex-jockey?’ Being Newmarket they would say that I suppose. And he said, ‘No. I’m from Canada. I don’t race any horses.’ So anyway, we had a bit of a laugh over that. Then we got back to Breighton in the end and the engineering officer says, ‘You did all right.’ And he said, ‘Can I have a look at your —’ Oh what was it? I had to make a programme about how different temperatures of what things was going on on the aircraft and I forgot to do it. I did the first line as we went going out there and I changed over from one tank to another but I forgot to write it down. So when I handed it to him he just picked it up, it was a bit mucky and he looked at it and he said, ‘Mmmm.’ I thought, hello. So he said, ‘Next time do a better job.’ He knew what was happening with a first time crew. So after that we settled down in our Nissen hut which had a shower, it wasn’t very warm, and basins along the front there so that the two crews could wash down and what have you and the toilets were available. Yes. It was, the food was good and the mess was excellent and like I say we were all sergeants at the time and then all of a sudden the pilot, the, good old Jack he got his flight sergeant and then we started our operation.
[recording paused]
One of the trips we went on was to Gelsenkirchen and it was a daylight one. And miles beforehand, before we got to the target we could sort of see this sort of cloud in the distance and it was ack ack fire. And I thought God, we’re going to go through that which is what we had to do. Well, we went through it all right but the bomb aimer missed his target and the captain said, ‘Do you want to go around again or do we carry on and drop the bombs somewhere else?’ And we had a call from all the other six saying, ‘Yes. Go around again.’ So we came out of the, out of the target, came in again and found the target and bombed it. I’ve never been so frightened in all my life. It was a, it was a real [unclear] or something or other. I don’t know what it was but it was, it was real frightening but we managed it and we came back and that was another thing that happened. Now, another time we went on the thousand bomber raid and the aircraft were so close together when we got over the Channel or over, or over France I suppose or Belgium. Wherever it was. I can’t remember. I know we went to Dresden. I think it was Dresden on a thousand bomber raid and there were so many aircraft close together that I must admit one or two went in to each other and went to the ground very quickly. And then we started to spread out and we spread out and spread out and spread out for a way way. You couldn’t see the other aircraft. And on that particular one I happened to see a Mark 5 Halifax get shot. Now, the mid-under on the Mark 5 was a, I think it was a .5 gunner underneath there. All the people as far as I can remember got out but what remarked me was what I could think of the gunner that was underneath went out with the gun. Hanging on to it. I can see him now and he let the, it seemed to fly away and then a chute come out so he must have grabbed hold of the gun to force himself out of the aircraft and had dragged him out and he [pause] well they got away with it, I think. Yeah, I’m sure of it. There was so much happened. Aircraft going down. People were saying oh somebody got out of there. Yeah. One, two, three, four and that was it see. We got them all out and that, that was it. One of my jobs was to make out a log which I eventually got off to a fine art. I didn’t have anywhere to sit. I just stood on oxygen bottles and put my backside against the, one of the sides and my knee against the other side and I could quite comfortably sit there and write down different things. My job was, I started with we had seven tanks in either wing and we started on one and three on either side. When we got airborne we’d go on to the outboard tanks. When we were over the target I’d try, I got on to one and three and then after the target I would go on to the other tanks to drain them so that when I come in to land at my home base I’m on one and three. Now that is more or less a sequel of what you had to do to keep the fuel equal in weight so the aircraft was steady. If for some reason you lose a lot of fuel because of ack ack fire or whatever one of my jobs is to try and even out the fuel in both wings. It wasn’t all that complicated. You got used to it, you know. You knew what you had to do. You were trained to that, what you had to do and, and that was it. Now, also on a flight engineer’s part he is the, he was the bloke that had to keep, everything was going alright with the engines and changing the fuel as you, as I’ve just said. But also, I got a, after the bomb, as the bombs had gone the bomb aimer said, ‘All the bombs gone.’ and I would go along the aircraft and we had little canopies, little holes that I could lift up and have a look. Put my head through and make sure that the bombs had gone. And then I’d go back and do the necessary on my paperwork. Keep an eye on the captain. See that the controls were done and what have you. And then it was a question of keep an eye, an eye out for any aircraft that was near. And the two gunners were very very good. They were always on the chatter saying, ‘You’re too near —’ so and so. Or, ‘You’re too near this aircraft,’ Or, ‘There’s a fighter floating around. And there was always a question of what’s going to happen? If we, if we got caught in searchlights which we did two or three times the rear gunner would say, ‘Port dive,’ or, ‘Starboard dive.’ Whichever the case might be and the old captain would whip it over to one side, dive and try and get out of the way of it. We still had to watch other aircraft that was nearby but nevertheless it was one of those things. On, on most of the occasions I was with the captain and on one occasion as I say was, I was standing up by the, by the, behind the captain just watching, keeping an eye on everything and one of the windows was hit by shrapnel and it whistled through. It must have missed the captain because it hit my oxygen mask and knocked it off and I didn’t think anything of it really. I just put the mask back again. Then I realised there was a hole in the glass in front of the captain so I bunged some paper in there as well as more than oh there was two or three marks and I bunged some paper in there. And then I realised afterwards that it could have hit the captain, it could have hit me and probably done a lot of damage but nevertheless that’s all that seemed to happen in, in the thirty seven ops I did.
[recording paused]
RD: Superstition on, on the crew’s side was very, it was always there. I mean I can remember once the wireless operator went sick and we had to have another one on our one op only and and we were a little bit worried about it. Now, you could tense it in the, in the air. Everybody was the same but we got over that. But there was one particular, well there was quite a number of things. Now, I, on the, on the flights they used to give you a packet of Wrigleys Chewing Gum and some boiled sweets. No one ate the boiled sweets. They chewed the gum sometimes and with me when I chewed the gum there was four pieces in a Wrigleys thing and I had the habit of chewing one at a time and then sticking it underneath the red lights of the four warning lights just to say if I don’t do it the light will come on. So I did it. And that was one of the things that happened. I don’t know what happened with [pause] Oh, I’ll tell you my mother bless her she decided to keep me warm to make a scarf of all the colours she could find of wool and goodness knows what. I was very proud of that and I wore it and the rear gunner said, ‘Cor, that looks nice.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ We had a bit of trouble. I don’t know exactly what it was now. I can’t remember. But the rear gunner, he said, ‘That’s the scarf that did that.’ This is how it is when you’re superstitious or whatever it was and he said, ‘Get rid of that.’ So I says, Oh no.’ So the next day, the next time I didn’t wear it. Now, everything was alright. Wore the scarf again and we seemed to be there was something wrong with the aircraft and it wasn’t working right so we got rid of the scarf completely after that. The other thing was the navigator after the bombing raid always hummed. Now, what was it he used to hum then? Don’t, “Don’t sweetheart me because you’re —” he was humming. Hmmn hmmm hmmm hmmmn da da da da de da da. Always hummed the same thing. The first two or three bars and then he’d shut up as much to say he’d done it. He’d got over there and that was it. Yeah. Oh yes, every so often, I think it was every, every number of ops you went home for five, five days and sometimes I used to take the rear gunner. Sometimes I took the captain home with me. And yeah, we had a nice time but most of the time the Canadians had their own thing in London. They had the Canadian Club. The Canadians, when they finished their ops they really, the Canadians they came over, the bomb aimers, or the bomber force came over and when they finished I think they went back to Canada again afterwards. It was just a question of doing their ops and going back again. I got in contact with the rear gunner about five years, six years ago. I phoned him up and but I’m afraid that the rest of the crew have passed away. I think the, I think the rear gunner is still with us although I’m not too sure. I haven’t heard from him at all. The wireless operator who was from London I think he became a wing commander after the, during the war and after the war, I think. I wasn’t too sure. But yeah, I was, I was looking forward to, when I phoned up the rear gunner and asked him about the rest of the crew and he said they’re so and so and so and so. They’d died at a certain time. Apparently, they, they knew about it and I didn’t know and it was through [pause] I don’t know exactly what it was through. I found out his his phone number and like I said I phoned him and he was quite pleasant. He’s married and living in a flat and that was it. He was, he says, ‘I’m ninety.’ I said, ‘Oh well, that’s it then.’ You know, sort of thing. He was quite happy about it but I don’t think he was really interested in what I wanted to do. I’d liked to have gone to see him but at the time I wasn’t in that position to go there to see him.
[recording paused]
RD: One day there was the two gunners, the wireless operator and myself. Now, at the time the captain, old Jack Fraser he got his commission so he wasn’t really in, in the hut with us. He was in the mess. So the four of us went down to this pub for a drink. Now, the pub is a, is a long walk down either side, or one side of the river and the pub was there all on its own. It started to rain and when it rained there it rained heavy. We didn’t realise that until they said, ‘Time gentlemen. Off you go.’ And the bloke said, ‘You’d better hang on. I’ve got my wet suit on. Half a wet suit.’ He said, ‘I’m going down the road and see if it’s, see what the weather is like.’ And apparently the river overflowed and went into the chicken run. It was about four foot. So he said, ‘You’d better stay the night.’ So we stayed the night and the next morning he said it’s about, it’s gone down a lot but it’s still about two foot. So we said, ‘Oh well, we’d better back just in case something’s happened.’ So we went back and we had, there was a WAAF there. She was about four foot nothing I think. I thought, ‘Gosh, she’ll drown.’ So, what we did I think two of them picked her up and walked through the water with her but I think in the end she got fed up with hanging there. She just dropped down and walked through. We came out and the captain and the navigator and the bomb aimer were waiting for us and they said, ‘Where the [pause] where have you been?’ Not so much words but, ‘Where have you been?’ I said, ‘Well, we had to go down for a pub and that.’ He said, ‘We’re on ops. Get yourself ready.’ So we went back and changed, washed ourselves down and we went off on ops. And that was one of the occasions when the captain wasn’t with us. If he would have been with us we wouldn’t have been on ops. But as it was he, he was running around trying to find us and he didn’t know where we were. So, that was it. I don’t know why the navigator or the bomb aimer didn’t say we had gone down to the pub. They were in the same room as us. So anyway, that was one of the things that happened but, Yeah. It was. That was quite interesting sometimes. The things you’d get up to in regards to if you wanted to drink at another pub you’d borrow a bike and ride down. And you go and have a drink with a couple of the lads. And that’s by the way when when the ops were finished I was surprised that none of us, the captain wasn’t all that sure. But that was our last flight and we didn’t realise that until all the, his mates, his Canadian mates, pilots and crew of other aircraft came in the aircraft before we’d even shut down I think, with a crate of beer and we sat there and we thought, ‘Oh what’s, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘This is your last op.’ And we was quite surprised that it was, you know. That we was. Quite chuffed and we had a drink and then we went in to the debriefing and that was it and we thought, ‘Cor blimey. Thirty seven ops and that’s it.’ So, we thought, ‘Well, we got through that lot.’ It was, it was, it was surprising. It was a surprise. We were so keyed up on, on what we’d do, you know it was one of those things. It’s I mean, when [pause] when, when we first started flying the captain would say to us, ‘Everybody in the rest position first.’ We’d take off and then we’d go. Well, I did that first of all and I thought no. That’s not [pause] No, I’m not going to do that. So, I said to the captain, ‘No. I’ll stand by you and do the undercarriage up, do your flaps and what have you. Hold on to the throttles for you while you do it up and ease it back for you when you’re ready.’ Which is what I did afterwards. But most of the crew, the rest of the crew were in a rest position which was between two spars and we took off and we landed like that. I was by the side of the captain and, and that was it. It was one of those things. Obviously different people had their own ideas but we got on very well. The captain was absolutely first class. There was never any effort as regards to flying, landing or what. He was first class. The two gunners were there as well. They were all first class. Everybody. And I think that’s why we came through.
[recording paused]
RD: Freda was working in the Co-op as a cashier. She was in the middle of the Co-op, up high and they had when anybody came in and the money was handed over it was put in a cup and you pulled a handle and the cup would go to the cashier. She would recognise how much it was and then the change would come back. That’s what it was like in the Coop then, and that was in the early part of the war sort of thing. You know. End of the war. And mum, my mother used to work as an assistant in there. You know, a shop assistant. When we were living in Bognor and obviously Freda was in Bognor and Freda said to her, ‘Why don’t you come and have a meal with us? I’ll get my son to come around and pick you up.’ Which I did. And we, what we had there was the family of, let me think, were there three or four boys? It was all boys in the family and mums and dads and that and while we were there having our meal she wanted some sauce. I’ll never forget this. We had some sauce and Freda wanted some sauce. I said, ‘You’ve got to shake it first.’ And I shook it and the lid was off and it went all over her dress, her blouse so she had to go in the bedroom of mum, change her blouse, put one of mum’s blouses on. Mum was a bit bigger than Freda. And that was it. So, I took her home. I took her back home and I didn’t kiss her goodnight because I wasn’t, I don’t know what was wrong. I shook her hand. I said, ‘Did you enjoy herself?’ I don’t know what she said. She went in and that was it. So, later on, I, oh yeah, that was it, I said to her, I said, ‘I’ll come around again some time. We’ll go out.’ She said, ‘Ok.’ And we made a date. I don’t know what it was at that particular time and I went around there and the sister was there who was just turned, no she wasn’t, she wasn’t fourteen. Yeah. She was just fourteen, I think. Freda was just under seventeen. And I said, ‘Is she ready?’ ‘Yeah.’ Off we went and went out and had a meal. I don’t know whether we had a cup of coffee. Went along the front in Bognor and met her mum when I came back. Her father was still in India. He was an officer in the, in the Army. The two girls were born in India. One was born in Bombay which was Freda. The sister was born in Doolally. And I got in with the family and I used to go out with Freda quite a lot. I thought she was a nice girl. And then dad came home and in the front room we had a little natter as father would do about his daughter. I said, ‘That’s alright.’ So one thing led to another and I said, ‘Right.’ So, we got engaged and then I said, ‘Let’s go to Jersey for a holiday. A weeks holiday. ‘Yeah. That’s alright.’ In the front room I went with father again. They’d, ‘I know what you RAF boys are like. Behave yourself.’ So I said, ‘Well, it’s alright.’ You know. Anyway, we went to Jersey. Had a weeks holiday. Very nice. Came home. And then in ’49 we got married and that was very nice. And that’s it, I think. Nothing else really happened. In ’49, like I said we got married. In ’50 I got posted to Rhodesia and Freda came out and we spent two years in Rhodesia. Or two and a half years I did but Freda spent a couple of years in Rhodesia. And while we was there we had our, our son was born. And then in ’52 in the summer, no in September of ’52 came home with a son. Everybody wanted to get hold of the son.
[recording paused]
RD: After we came back from Rhodesia it was amazing really. In Rhodesia we stayed in a hotel first of all before I went to accommodation. While we was in the hotel in 1950 when we were still on ration in England I could sit down to a whacking great meat meal that I’d never seen before in all my life. Not during the war anyway. But after we came back from Rhodesia we went to Duxford and I went on Meteors there. Working on Meteors. And while we were there my daughter was born and then where did we go? Oh, we went somewhere else I think in [pause] As they grew up they went to school. I went on to Shackletons. Big aircraft. And while we were there a bloke said to me, ‘They’re crying out for engineers to work on Hastings.’ So I applied. Went on a course again and they said ok so I was, took the family with me to Singapore where we had 48 Squadron Hastings. While I was there two and a half years. While I was there I flew everywhere I think. We had the Malaysian uprising which I attended. The Borneo Uprising which I attended. Bringing the troops in. The places I went to was Darwin, Sydney in Australia. Suva in Fiji. Christmas Island. Hawaii. Guam. And back again and do the same route again in six weeks time. Keep the flag flying. We went to new [pause] where was that? Newfoundland? No. I can’t remember exactly where we went but different places all around the, around the Indian Ocean there. It was quite some, we went to Gan on one trip and when we’d landed there, they said, ‘You’re going to take some of the people back to Pakistan.’ While we were driving up India to Pakistan you could hear the Indian fighters because there was a bit of a skirmish between Pakistan and India at the time and they were saying, ‘Keep out the way. Keep out the way.’ And eventually we landed in the, in I think it was Pakistan. I don’t know. Anyway, we landed and unloaded the labourers and we picked up another load of labourers to go to Gan to work. So as we came back they, when we landed at this place you could bring your own beer. And bringing your own beer means to say you’ve got to take the empties back so that you haven’t sold it. So this is what we did. We had a load of empties and the captain said, ‘How are that —' you know. He said to the queue, ‘What’s with the queue? What are they doing down there? Are they happy enough?’ Because they’d never flown before. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I think they are.’ ‘Right.’ He said, ‘What we’ll do is throw some empties down the passageway and I’ll rock the aircraft.’ [laughs] And they started to panic. They thought all the crew were drunk. But it was just a little bit of a joke. It was laughable afterwards. But there was, it was great fun. It was good fun. I can remember one time. We were taking, and I cannot remember where but he was, he was an officer but I think he was a [pause] , I’m not too sure what. What he was doing. I think he was a priest I think or something like that and he came with us and we, we went to Honolulu. And he came up to the front and he said he wanted to fly. You know, ‘Can I go up there?’ And we said, ‘Yeah. Go on.’ He had a look, oh yeah and he came back again and he said, ‘Oh, that was quite interesting.’ He said, ‘I’ve heard about this George.’ Automatic pilot. ‘Oh yeah.’ ‘I didn’t see it.’ Oh, you come up here and we’ll show you.’ In the meantime, the captain got one of his gloves, silk gloves wrapped around the oxygen mask and put it on the controls. The oxygen blew the gloves out every so often. Every so often. This officer came up and he said, ‘That is George isn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ we said. ‘I’ve often wondered what George was like. Now I know.’ And he was quite happy to go back and sit down.
[recording paused]
RD: What other trips we had. There was popping into Christmas Island and we had a look at the atomic bomb or the bomb that they blew up on the island and it was all dead around there. Absolutely dead. And while we were there the aircraft, the flight to go off to Honolulu or where ever we went to went u/s and we stayed on the base for another week or so. And while we were there we witnessed or I witnessed thirteen of these atomic bombs being dropped from the aircraft. And what it was it was 4 o’clock in the morning, it was just about sunrise and what you had to do was sit outside and the person in charge would count how many there were. See that you were all there. Anybody in the boat going fishing would be back by then and they were sitting on the beach and you had to face the other way while the aircraft. You could hear the aircraft come over or you could see it sometimes come over and then the loudspeaker would say bombs, bombs would go off one, two, three and count right the way down and then it would, it would explode and then it was, it was just like daylight then. Complete daylight and then you would feel the wind and then the heat afterwards. And I saw thirteen of those and each time they had to make sure you were sitting outside of your hut on a beach which was on the side there and away, with your back turned from where you dropped your bomb and the aircraft would scream off. As soon as he dropped it you could hear the aircraft scream off and yeah we were lucky enough to be there. While we were there we went to the different messes for drinks and entertainment and whatever and one of the places we went to was American. Well, there was only two there really. I don’t know about the, we never went to the Navy mess. I don’t know whether they had a Navy mess. Anyway, when we were there the Americans put on a show for us and that was very nice. That was a real men’s show and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Then we, after we said, ‘Well, why don’t you come back to our mess?’ So, they did and on this particular time there was three airmen roughly about five ten or six foot, slim and they’d dressed up in beautiful clothes, wigs, make up was perfect and they did the Andrew’s sisters. Miming the Andrews sisters. And when they arrived in our mess, the sergeant’s mess the Americans were there and they were agog with it obviously. They went barmy. And then as they were singing this song one of them sat on the knee of one of the Americans and he went bonkers. He did. He went bloody mad. And it went down very well but I’ve often wondered how those, these three lads they did a marvellous job. How they got on after, after the, after they went back home I’ve often wondered. They were a good show. A good show indeed.
[recording paused]
DD: Detail. Just —
RD: Yeah, I was doing fitting in one of the, one of the stations, I can’t remember exactly where and I wore my engineer’s brevet on my uniform and one day there was a Lancaster had landed and there was a squadron leader there and he wanted to take this Lancaster up for a trip just to keep him. He’d flown during the war. This was after the war by the way and he just happened to spot me and he said, ‘Were you an engineer?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘On Lancs?’ I said, ‘No. On Halifaxes.’ ‘Well, that’s just the same, isn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yeah. I suppose so. If you want me to go with you, you know. Yeah, alright then.’ Well, I stood up there by the side of him, watched the clock. He started the engine and we flew around for about three quarters of an hour, I suppose. Chasing the cows over the field as you do and it was, it was quite pleasant and afterwards he shook hands. He said, ‘Thanks very much. I just wanted to get my hand in again.’ And that was it. I was quite surprised. Now, I can say I flew in a Lanc as well.
[recording paused]
RD: One of my exercises was to fly the aircraft when we were on a cross country trip. The captain would say, ‘Get in,’ and, ‘Straight and level.’ And I think the first time I did that he said, ‘You did very well but you were going around in a bloody circle.’ And I said, ‘No, I wasn’t.’ He said, ‘You were going around and around and around and around and gradually dropping down.’ I said, ‘Oh, I know what to do next time.’ So I did it about, it was only two or three times just to get the hang of it and the last time I did it he said, ‘That’s better.’ I was only in there a matter of what? Ten minutes at a time but anyway I knew what I had to do in case but I think the navigator because when they were in Canada it was a question of the navigator would do a bit of flying as well as navigate. So, if I couldn’t do it a navigator I think would have hopped in and done something. You know. But I think I would have, I think I would have coped. I think I would. I don’t know. But that’s what we used to do. We used to make sure that everybody knew we couldn’t do everybody’s job but as I was next to the captain anyway, or the pilot, the boss I I had a go and that was all right. When I joined the Air Force I was working at Airspeed Oxfords at, it was Airspeed Oxfords then and they were making Oxford aircraft, twin engine training aircraft. While I was there they were making gliders which I didn’t understand. This was 1940, you know when, the start of the war, you know, ’39/40. When I finished my training, when I finished in the Air Force I did thirty two years and it was ‘73. I had to, I came out because in ’72 my son was killed in a car accident and I stayed on another year and I just couldn’t cope really so I came out. And obviously before I came out I applied for a job to see if, if Airspeed Oxfords were still working and they said it was Hants and Sussex. And what they were doing was re, old engines, when their time was expired which was the Pratt and Whitney engines. We’d take them apart, clean them and check them, see for wear and tear and do them up again and what I used to do was build. I used to take them down, they’d go for inspection and then back they’d come and I would build them which was either seven pots, fourteen or double fourteen. A double seven. Which was a four, yeah, a fourteen or two fourteens, yeah and it was quite interesting. I stayed there until I was [pause] eleven, eleven years or thirteen years. Thirteen years I think it was. And they didn’t want me anymore because I was sixty five. So, I thought alright. So then I did driving for Vauxhall Motors which was in Chichester and I did that for five years until I was seventy. I had taken spare parts all over Portsmouth, Brighton. You name it. All over the place and when I finished at that I settled down at home in Bognor. And when the time came that we were both getting on towards ninety plus my daughter said, ‘About time you downloaded.’ So, we moved three years ago into this very charming flat in Chichester and we left our three bedroom house with a nice garden, a lovely garage, motor car and everything else behind because I’m partially sighted now and not allowed to drive.
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 Ronald Charles Davis
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Denise Boneham
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ADavisRC170818
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:59:44 audio recording
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
England--Lancashire
France
France--Calais
Germany
Germany--Dresden
Australia
Borneo
Christmas Island
Fiji
Hawaii
Malaysia
New South Wales
New South Wales--Sydney
Northern Territory
Northern Territory--Darwin
Singapore
United States
Zimbabwe
Scotland
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1949
1950
1972
Description
An account of the resource
When the war broke out Ronald was a solicitor’s clerk, then got a job with in Portsmouth. Whilst there he volunteered for air crew and went to London to join the Air Force. After about six months he was called up for training. He went on a fitter’s course and then to Scotland, working on fighters. Ronald went to an operational training unit to become a flight engineer. Training was on a Mk 2 Halifax. In 1944 the squadron flew to Calais as part of the D-Day invasion. Following leave, they were posted to 78 Squadron at RAF Breighton. He remembered his first daylight operation and also an attack on Dresden. Ronald carried out 37 operations. Ronald married Freda in 1949 and in 1950 was posted to Rhodesia where they both spent about two years, during which their son was born. In 1952 they went home and Ronald worked on Meteors at Duxford. They had a daughter and Ronald later worked on Shackletons. He then went on a course for engineers to work on Hastings with 48 Squadron and he took the family with him to Singapore. He took part in the operations following the Malaysia and Borneo uprisings bringing the troops in. He also was posted to a number of places, including Darwin, Sydney, Fiji, Christmas Island and Hawaii. Their son died in a car accident in 1972. Ronald retired from work aged 65.
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
48 Squadron
78 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
flight engineer
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
love and romance
Meteor
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Breighton
Shackleton
superstition
training