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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1525/27443/ANewtonJL[Date]-01.mp3
325b72bbca36d854ce1a8b42c8dad8ec
Dublin Core
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Title
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Newton, Jack Lamport
J L Newton
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-07-15
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Newton, JL
Description
An account of the resource
83 items. Collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Jack Newton (742570 Royal Air Force) who was a Sergeant air gunner on Wellington of 12 Squadron. His aircraft was landed on fire at a German occupied airfield in Antwerp in August 1941. He was the first airman to escape back to England via the Comète escape line. The rest of his crew were captured and made prisoners of war. The collection contains accounts of his escape, letters of research from Belgium helper, other official correspondence from the Red Cross and the Royal Air Force, photographs of places and people, newspaper cuttings propaganda leaflets and maps of airfield and escape route. In addition there is an interview with Jack Newton about his experiences in the wartime RAF.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Jackie Bradford and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Other: Hello. And how nice it is to have our guest this evening and our guest this evening is Jack Newton. And I don’t know if you’re like me but often if I go to a bus station or a railway station or even an airport you look at all those masses of people walking about and you think to yourself I wonder who you are or what your name is or what you do. Or I wonder where you’re going. Perhaps I’m just nosey, I don’t know. And I had this feeling a little earlier when I went down into Reception to meet Jack because Jack was chatting to his lady wife and people were milling about but I don’t suppose any of them in their wildest dreams would have thought to themselves, sitting on that seat is one of the bravest men that you will ever meet and a man who has faced death and got away with it. Because Jack was an airman and he was, “escaped”, I should say, I think that’s the word because the Germans never caught him. But Jack will tell you his story himself. And, hello Jack.
JN: Hello.
Other: And thank you very much for coming in because yours is some story isn’t it? Because you start off before the war, don’t you? Flying aircraft.
JN: Yes. I started in 1938 as a Voluntary Reserve pilot but I was unfortunate or maybe lucky I never made pilot. I crashed an aircraft and I was taken off and I was a pilot no longer. They didn’t give you much option in those days but when war came along I was still recruited as a sergeant pilot. And people were looking at me and thinking well he must be darned good. He’s got three tapes up and the war hasn’t started yet. But during the second week I had another letter to say that I have now been sort of confirmed in the rank of AC2 which was the lowest form of airman in the Royal Air Force. And the only way to get back into aircrew was to do the job that nobody seemed to want to do. It was in a position where the Germans always had a go first. And that was what we used to call the rear gunner or a Tail-End Charlie. So I became a rear gunner and I started flying on Boulton on Paul Defiants as a night fighter squadron. Also on Fairey Battles out of France and also, eventually, on to Bomber Command on a Wellington Mark 2 from 12 Squadron.
Other: Now, we go back when you was a rear gunner because the rear gunner his actual service wasn’t very long, was it? They always said that they got killed the quickest of all of them. But we’re going back. What are we now? 1940 – 1939 – 1940?
JN: 19 — I joined the Reserve in 1938. I was conscripted into the Royal Air Force proper on the 3rd of September ‘39. And I joined an operational Squadron of Wellingtons in March of 1940.
Other: Now, on the night of the 5th of August now that wasn’t your first flight over Germany was it? Or —
JN: No. I had done a few trips before that on Wellingtons. I’d also done quite a number of operational sorties on night fighters. On Boulton and Paul Defiants. And a few leaflet raids on Fairey Battles which 12 Squadron were equipped when they left France.
Other: Now, on that night which must have imprinted itself on your memory what sort of night was it?
JN: When we took off it was about 11:30, quarter to twelve. Nearly midnight on the 5th of August, which was bank holiday ‘41. A normal night. A few clouds but by the time we left the Squadron and were over the North Sea approaching the target area it was what they called a real bomber’s night. It was a full moon.
Other: Now, you were off to Cologne weren’t you?
JN: The first primary target as they called it in those days was Cologne. We either could go Cologne or to Aachen. Aachen was the secondary target and this was the Michelin Tyre Company. And it so happened that with the speed we were attaining and the height we were at and the weather conditions this more or less dictated to the pilot that it should be Aachen. Or as the bomb aimer used to say, walking up and down the fuselage, ‘This is not Aachen. This is amen.’ And Aachen was the German name for Aix la Chapelle which was just over the borders between Belgium and Germany.
Other: And you know when you see these things on the films and that you see these young chaps laughing and shouting and all hyped up. You must have been very scared. Or were you actually hyped up and raring to go?
JN: Not really. We were doing a job. We were doing it for the love of our country. Although we put on a pretty brave face that you know here today and gone tomorrow and I think the, in those days, in 1941, the reasonable expectancy of life was about four trips. Well, I was lucky. I did more than four trips. But we just took it in our stride. We joined the Air Force to fly and this is what we did and we were happy to do it but there were moments when butterflies in your stomach really took over.
Other: And Jack, you took off on that night from where?
JN: We took off from 12 Squadron which was situated just outside Grimsby. At a Squadron called Binbrook.
Other: And how long would it have taken you to get over to Cologne?
JN: To Cologne would have taken about two and a half to three hours. But we reached the secondary target at Aachen in about two hours.
Other: Now, I’m going to let you take over this story because in actual fact it is, it is so true that it’s almost unreal isn’t it? Because there you are flying a lovely, I suppose you could see everything quite nicely. But were they shooting at you?
JN: There was a considerable amount of flak as you approached the French coast along a direct line from Binbrook or Grimsby down to the French coast. There was the normal flak but being on a Wellington Mark 2 we attained a pretty good height of about fifteen thousand feet and it didn’t seem to affect us at that height. It was a fairly light night and it appeared to be getting brighter as the hours wore on and it was a full bomber’s moon by the time we reached the target. Turned around. Successfully dropped our bombs and returned. But over the target I looked up and I saw some stars and I thought well can they be stars? They seemed to be sort of moving about pretty oddly. And in those days they had certain Messerschmitt night fighter squadrons which had a couple of searchlights on their wing tips and when these were coned at about thirty yards they gave the actual pinpoint for them, the Huns to press the buttons and they were on target for a rear turret or a part of a British aircraft. Well, these things, these stars were looming about and apparently one of them must have been a night fighter because suddenly the starboard engine, there was a ginormous great crunch and I looked away to the right and the starboard engine was on fire. So we’d been hit either by cannon shells or by flak. At that time we were at about twelve thousand feet leaving the target. The engines wouldn’t keep us up. We were losing height. We were throwing out things we didn’t need. Odd magazines, odd flares, odd bottles and things we collected. We were chucking out bottles over the target because with the stoppers out or the corks out, very large champagne bottles which we used to pinch from the Officer’s Mess. When they were thrown out they seemed to whistle like a five hundred pound bomb as they were descending. We chucked everything out that we didn’t need but we were losing height and by the time we were reaching the coast we could see the coast coming up which was the Belgian coast. There was this awful warning, ‘Get ready. Bale out.’ Well, I was up in the front turret when I realised that baling out wasn’t on because we were approaching a cathedral and the cathedral was on the starboard side. And unbeknown to us it was Antwerp Cathedral. And then we all realised after having received the message to bale out that the dinghy was behind the starboard engine and this was the engine that was on fire so when we pulled the rope to get the dinghy out there had have been nothing on the end of the rope but just molten rubber. But being up front, rotating turret and firing everything I had left in the ammunition pans I suddenly realised below us was concrete. I yelled out to the skipper, ‘Left, left, Skipper. Concrete.’ And in a marvellous rate four turn to the left he managed to turn the aircraft around, lined himself on the number one runway and we landed successfully. This was actually number one runway of Antwerp Deurne Airport which was fully operational with Dornier 217s and Messerschmitt fighters being assembled on the southern perimeter. The aircraft rumbled to a halt. Fire was on the starboard side approaching the leading edge of the wing. We all got out, pulled our parachutes, fired off four Verey cartridges, set fire to the aircraft and then decided to beat the hell out of it towards the perimeter defences. We all had leather suits on. We climbed the wire. All managed to get over. Three went one way. Three went the other. I was with the Skipper and the wireless op and we walked for a couple of hours until it started breaking daylight. This was about half past three on the 6th of August ’41 and we made for a field, got down behind a hedge and decided to sleep. We slept for about an hour. Still in full flying kit. We kept everything on. It was cold. And the wireless operator “Titch” Copley, he was a real small titch too, about four foot nothing suddenly stood up, stretched his arms and he was seen by a Belgian worker on a bicycle who was cycling on the way to his office or whatever. And he leant his bike up against the hedge, came back and said, ‘Are you English airmen?’ We said, ‘Yes’, he said, ‘Did you land up the road there?’ Up the road was about nine miles away so we’d covered nine miles quite happily in the small hours of the morning. And he said, ‘Stay where you are’ in perfect English. We thought this is funny. This is a reception committee. This is the way to do it. ‘And I’ll come back and help you later in the day’. Around about late evening. So he came back with a friend. Led us to a farmhouse. We stayed in the farmhouse overnight and the next morning there was food and clothes. We were kitted out and fed quite well. One or two questions asked. What aircraft we were flying. Who we were. What Squadron it was. So we had to say one or two things and not answer other questions. And we were led off to different houses. I didn’t see the Skipper or the wireless operator again. I was led on to very many farmhouses. Various people. And during the ensuing few months I was in Belgium and Holland and France I stayed with roughly forty different families. I eventually met the leader of escape line, Comète, which was an Andrée de Jongh. She was the leader of the Resistance movement escape line. One of the first escape lines and the most favourable one. The best one to join in Europe. And she personally led me from Brussels right the way down to Spain which meant crossing the Somme together, getting a train from Paris to Bordeaux which took fourteen hours. I had civilian clothes. I had false papers. I had a good photograph on my false identity card which she had obtained. We got out at Bordeaux and we took a train to Bayonne and then we walked from Bayonne, Biarritz, St John de Luz, Anglet, and then we were at the base of the Pyrenees. Here was the last safe house in France which was lived in and looked after by a Madam De Greef who also got the George Medal after the war for helping members. And also the leader of the Basque smuggling group. A chap by the name of Florentino.
Other: Jack, when you were because you make it sound so easy. But when you was on a train you must have been checked over by Germans. And surely there must have been times when you thought this is it.
JN: Quite, quite a number of times. The, we were in different compartments. There was myself and a Polish chappie. A Basque guide actually on the train from Paris to Bordeaux and Andrée de Jongh the leader of the escape line Comète. We were in particular separate compartments. I just was dressed with a black beret, a grey overcoat. I had a French paper and a bag of oranges and apparently people didn’t like other people eating oranges in compartments. They just kept well away from them. This was one of the things I was told to do. Eat and suck and make a lot of noise sucking oranges [chuckling].
Other: And what did, you spoke French?
JN: I only had schoolboy French. If a German had spoken to me —
Other: Yes.
JN: I’d have most likely got away with it. But most of the Germans who were patrolling the carriages —
Other: Yes.
JN: And asking for papers never spoke. They just came in and said, ‘Papieren’. You gave them the papers, they looked at it, they clipped your ticket and there was a Frenchman by the side looking at the ticket. He clipped it. Gave it to you back. They never spoke at all.
Other: Really?
JN: I had a, I had sideboards, I had a black moustache which I’ve still got. Getting a bit grey now. And I looked, possibly, a typical Frenchman. A bit scruffy, black beret on, a scarf, a dirty old coat, smelling a bit. Terrible bag of rotting sort of orange peels in the bag on the floor. They didn’t seem to want to know me at all.
Other: And when you went from one house to another did you, were there, did you meet other escapees?
JN: No. I never met anybody else at all. The person I met was always a stranger I’d never met before. I didn’t know his name. I knew him by either Paul, Jean, Pierre, Robert and never knew anything at all about them. Saw them once and never saw them again.
Other: Because they were incredibly brave because they would have shot the whole family wouldn’t they there?
JN: They were. There were notices up on the walls that if anybody had any information about any Frenchman, Belgian or Dutchman helping any RAF personnel they would immediately be shot and they were given, any information and they were given the equivalent of five hundred pounds.
Other: Really? Now, you’ve got, you’ve got right to the Pyrenees. Now, the job is to get over, isn’t it?
JN: Well, that was in the worst part of the year. That was in December 1941. It was cold. It was wet. It was snowing. It was slippery. They gave us four pairs of rope soled sandals which were called les espadrilles. We had a little bag which we tied on our back. There was a tin of British bully beef which they’d evacuated from the Dunkirk area. There was a bottle of whisky which was either John Haig or Vat 69. We each had a bottle of that. They had all these stores which they’d dug up that the Germans hadn’t got hold of, and all these stores were ferreted down the escape line for the likes of people getting over the Pyrenees. The Basque smugglers were smuggling nylon stockings and towards the back end of the year they were even smuggling perambulators. French built perambulators loaded with cognac and brandy, silk stockings, silk clothing, underwear. They were literally pushing perambulators up the Pyrenees, taking them over the top, over the bridge into Spain and selling them and coming back to pick up more perambulators loaded with brandy and what have you.
Other: And of course by now it’s 19 — what? Still 1941.
JN: This was still 1941.
Other: Yes. And Germany was doing very well, weren’t they?
JN: They were.
Other: Yes.
JN: They were exceptionally, exceptionally getting on with what they had to, what they had to do. And getting into Spain. If you were caught in Spain the Spaniards had their own concentration camp which was known as Miranda del Ebro and they could either put you in there, intern you just like the Germans would have done if they’d caught you, put you in one of their sort of concentration camps or POW camps. Or they could sling you back into France and hand you back to the Germans. So it was kept very, very quiet. If you get into Spain without being caught the Diplomatic Service or the British Foreign Office would take you by a car from wherever you were picked up to wherever you had to go. In my case it was from the Consulate St Sebastien in an old Daimler car with drawn blinds and an armed guard in the front took me down to Madrid. I was offloaded at the British Embassy and met Sir Samuel Hoare, the British Ambassador. I stayed there in the chapel which they called their internment camp in the Embassy grounds for three days. I was interrogated and then sent from Madrid down, again in a car with drawn blinds, to La Linea. Had diplomatic, it was a diplomatic car so there was no stopping. They just waved you through La Linea and then you were in Gibraltar.
Other: And of course we must remember, this hadn’t been done before had it?
JN: No. No.
Other: You couldn’t have had a trial run.
JN: No.
Other: So really you were, you were the guinea pigs weren’t you?
JN: Well —
Other: Well, you were.
JN: Well, I was lucky. I was, I have the honour of being the first British airman to be sort of used on that escape line and I was the first evader to have used it in 1941. One or two soldiers had got through the same route but they were not led by Andrée de Jongh. They just managed to get over themselves. They were from the British Expeditionary Force left behind at Dunkirk and just couldn’t get out by boat back to UK.
JN: Now, you actually got, you went over the Pyrenees. Now, where, where did you get the plane home? To put it, put it simply.
Other: Well, the ways of getting back from if you were lucky enough to have got to Gibraltar. Gibraltar was an RAF unit. They had two Squadrons of Short Sunderland Flying Boats. 200 and 202 Squadron. And you just waited there either for a tramp steamer back or a frigate, destroyer. I was fortunate enough, or unfortunate for the rear gunner of a Short Sunderland Flying Boat who’d come back from South Africa, had been shot at by a Focke Wulf Condor over the particular Atlantic and they’d killed the rear gunner. And there was two whacking great holes in the turret where a cannon shell had got him right through the head. They just hose piped the turret out, patched up the two holes and asking for a volunteer to go back as the gunner to the UK. So I said, ‘Yes, please’. So with a black beret on, part of my uniform I’d kept under my civilian disguise clothes, a pair of flying boots and a pair of woollen gloves I came back from Gibraltar to Pembroke Dock after doing a square search in the Bay of Biscay for submarines. And that took nearly sixteen and a half hours before we landed at Pembroke Dock. Having arrived at Pembroke Dock on the 13th of January ’42 I was interrogated again, given a pound note, a railway warrant and a packet of cheese sandwiches and told to go to St Marylebone Station to be interrogated by MI9. And that’s what happened. I got to Baker Street. I was handed over to MI9 and eventually managed to contact my wife and my family to let them know that I was back from the dead.
Other: Because you were missing, presumed killed I suppose, actually.
JN: Yes. She’d received. She’d been on the Squadron that weekend it happened to me. They saw me go. Waved me off. She came out the next morning to wave all the crews back but only six of the seven got back. My wife then sort of phoned the Squadron and was told that, ‘Well, he might be in the North Sea in a dinghy rowing back or they could have landed somewhere for petrol. I suggest you go home.’ She was home for five hours and then received the dreaded telegram, “Missing. Believed killed in action”.
Other: And it’s interesting actually when we were chatting before we went on air is that I asked you did you fly back and keep bombing again? And you told me that once you had escaped like that you weren’t allowed back over Germany or the place where you had escaped from. That was because if you had got caught they could have got all the secrets out of you.
JN: That is correct. They would have known that I’d been there before with a crew on a Wellington and the crew of a Wellington was normally six. They’d caught five of them so what had happened to the other one?
Other: Did you, I know you told me you were you went to the Middle East, wasn’t it?
JN: You had the option of not flying. You couldn’t fly over the same front again but you had the option of not flying at all or going on another Command which in my case appeared to be Transport Command in the Far East. Which I didn’t really like the sound of. Having only been married a couple of months beforehand I had been enough trouble to my wife. I’d always been a constant worry to her and I wanted that worry to stop. A Belgian had come through and had recommended that I would make a good operative on other sorts of duties. And after my Air Force I came out of uniform, went into civvies and let us say I joined Special Duties which I cannot say much about. That is the essence of another story.
Other: Yes. Of course, it’s like all incredibly brave people you always make it sound so easy and just as if it was sort of walking down to Tesco’s. But your colleagues in the aircraft here. Did you meet them again? Have you had like a reunion?
JN: Yes. I was fortunate enough to be able to go back after the war. I had to go back to Belgium to pay my respects at the various little village graveyards that have been made. The tombstones. I had to go back with an RAF band. Play the Last Post. And I was in uniform and I had to salute each grave in turn. I did this in quite a number of various places in Belgium. I then went to one place where I’d been looked after by a Belgian farmer, a [Monsieur Wagemans] whom, I met his son for the first time two years ago at the same farmhouse where I’d been sort of looked after. Who took me out to the shed under which our flying kit, my flying kit and one or two other bits and bobs had been buried and these were dug up and I managed to get them ferreted back to Tilbury. And my flying kit or part of it is now in the Bomber Command Museum at Hendon.
Other: Really. Incredible.
JN: One or two other bits and bobs I managed to hand over to the Skipper and also the wireless operator. They all came back eventually but the navigator had received a hell of a beating up in Stalag Luft or Dulag Luft 3 and he came back and unfortunately he committed suicide. His wife came down to the kitchen one morning and he’d tried out the gas oven and I’m afraid he committed suicide. He just couldn’t cope anymore. But the rest of the crew, I’m remaining with the wireless operator. The rest of the crew I’m afraid are no longer with us. The Skipper died about five years ago and I always phoned him up on the 5th of August ’41. He was always very grateful for a little talk. And he always respected that and said what a faithful friend I’d been and the best front gunner he’d ever had.
Other: Really?
JN: I was only a front gunner for that one night. The rest of the time I’d been a Tail-End Charlie. But I always remember that.
Other: Of course, I should also say that in Wellington Ward in our hospital here you’ll see a lovely watercolour picture which Jack presented to the ward. And it is of the Wellington coming down on fire and it’s Antwerp Cathedral and there’s a, as you say a bomber’s moon and there’s searchlights and I suppose every time you see that it brings a lump to your throat.
JN: It really does.
Other: Yes.
JN: Not only sort of that but always in remembrance and I think I’ve put on the plaque on the wall there that I hoped future generations will realise just what a little country like the Belgians did for the likes of the Royal Air Force.
Other: What did, you know you’ve had experiences which thank God I should say that not many of us will ever have. But what has that taught you? Has it taught you anything about life? Are you a religious man?
JN: I’m a, I wouldn’t say that I go to church every Sunday but I’m a very God-fearing man and I can never understand why fate has decreed that I should have been so lucky. Why the number thirteen always popped up. Why I was always lucky to get away with illnesses. To get away with my life. I never thought I’d ever reach the ripe old age of twenty years of age but I have.
Other: But Jack I’m going to just be rude and butt in because you did tell us, I’m ever so pleased you just said this, you’ve jolted my memory because you told me that everyone had a lucky mascot. Some had a rabbit’s paw, some had a horseshoe or whatever it is but you had always thirteen. Now, tell us Jack. Why thirteen?
JN: I had a badge which was an embroidered badge which a friend had embroidered and on the badge it was in the form of a red heart about three and a half to four inches deep. It had the initials M&J for Mary and Jack. It had an arrow through it with a lucky number thirteen. It had a black cat. It had a broken mirror and a ladder against a wall under which you never walked. Thirteen has always been my lucky number. And the night that the accident happened or the episode happened it was a rather cold night so the Sidcot flying suit that I normally wore on which this badge was stitched to the pocket was left behind and we wore a leather suit. The rest of the crew said that if I’d have been wearing my lucky Sidcot with my badge on it we would not have got shot down. So it was all my fault we got shot down that evening. But the lucky number thirteen always popped up because I joined a flying school before the war in 1938 which was number 13 Elementary and Reserve Flying Training School at Maidenhead. I was born in a house, number 13 Lancaster Mews in Hampstead. My wife was born on the 13th of May. I crossed from Holland into Belgium on the 13th of September. I got over the Pyrenees down to Spain and I arrived home ex-Gibraltar to Pembroke Dock in Wales on the 13th of January. And the first house that I ever had, a brand new house at Finnegan Drive at Orpington was as it was then known as plot number eleven. But when the numbers were allocated by the council it suddenly appeared that it was number thirteen. So that is why thirteen has always been my lucky number.
Other: Well, Jack as I say I’ve, it has been a great honour to chat to you and perhaps I hope later on we’ll be able to meet again and hear some more about the escape because it, it must have, we’ve missed out such a lot because it must have been a bit hairy especially at that time of year to go over the Pyrenees. But thank you Jack very much indeed for coming in. We very much appreciate it. And as I say if you want to see this lovely picture which Jack presented to the Wellington Ward go down because its down in the Wellington Ward and you can now say that you do know all the story. Jack Newton, thank you very much indeed.
JN: Thank you. I feel very honoured.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Conquest-Hospital Radio interview with Jack Newton
Description
An account of the resource
Jack Newton joined the RAF in 1938. He trained as an air gunner and was posted to 12 Squadron at RAF Binbrook. Just before midnight on the 5th of August 1941 Jack and his crew set off for Cologne. They were attacked by a night fighter. One engine was on fire and they were losing height. They jettisoned everything they could but were still losing height. When they thought they were finally going to have to abandon the aircraft they saw a cathedral to their side which they discovered later was Antwerp Cathedral. Jack looked out and saw concrete and alerted the pilot. The concrete was Antwerp’s Deurne Airport which was now an active station of the Luftwaffe. The pilot landed the aircraft on the runway and knowing that time was limited they managed to set fire to the aircraft before making their escape. The crew split up and Jack was accompanied by the skipper and wireless operator. They were spotted by a Belgian while they were hiding and he organised what would be the start of their escape through the Comète Line.
This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form. No better quality copies are available.
Type
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Sound
Conforms To
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Pending review
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
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00:32:42 audio recording
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Jean Massie
Identifier
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NewtonJL[Date}-01
Spatial Coverage
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Belgium
France
Germany
Great Britain
Gibraltar
Pyrenees
Belgium--Antwerp
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Aachen
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-08-05
air gunner
aircrew
Battle
de Jongh, Andree (1916 - 2007)
Defiant
evading
George Medal
RAF Binbrook
Sunderland
superstition
Wellington
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/176/2339/Frost, Bob.2.jpg
4a22fb6eb58e5c781be4f1ae44654285
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/176/2339/AFrostB150707.2.mp3
84e7a270c883b3ce4d4e13c188971538
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Frost, Bob
R Frost
Identifier
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Frost, B
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-07
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. Two oral history interviews with Robert Frost (1383682 Royal Air Force), and two photographs. Sergeant Bob frost flew as a rear gunner with 150 Squadron from RAF Snaith. Shot down on an operation to Essen, he was helped by the Resistance and evaded through the Netherlands and France to Spain. The story of his evasion is available in video form.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Bob Frost and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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GC: Right here we go. My name’s Gemma Clapton. I’m the interviewer. I’m here with Sergeant Bob Frost. We’re doing an interview for the International Bomber Command in Lincoln. How about we start with how you joined the RAF and why? Your reasoning.
BF: Well to begin the story. I am Bob Frost. I was born in Camden Town, London, 1st January 1923. I grew up there. Went to the [Lyal Stanley?] Technical School. Took German. Went to Germany before the war and saw Hermann Goering arriving at Cologne Railway Station and scuffles in the streets between Germans for the Nazi party and the few who were opposed. When I got home I told my parents that I thought there would be trouble ahead and there was. The Second World War.
At that time, around about 1937 there was recruiting going on for the air raid precautions and the Auxiliary Fire Service. I joined the Auxiliary Fire Service as a messenger boy and went through the London Blitz operating from Camden town and across Holborn and that part of London. Coming home off watch one morning around about 5 o’clock I saw a man at Mornington Crescent digging at what had been his house, his mother was buried inside. He only had his bare hands, and I thought to myself helping to put fires out is one thing but it’s not stopping them and so I went and joined the Royal Air Force. My father had been in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and was back in the RAF in the Second World War.
I passed for all grades of air crew but was told that pilot training I’d have to wait at least eighteen months before starting on pilot training. I thought the war would be well and truly over by then and so I took the offer of becoming an air gunner and went into the air force just immediately after my eighteenth birthday.
It took a year before I went on my gunnery course but I learned a great deal about what really happens to keep an aeroplane flying in the air force. It was a jolly good lesson. I went to Chipping Warden Operational Training Unit and was crewed up there with Bill Randle, the pilot, Scotty Brazill the navigator, Walter Dreschler, bomb aimer — Canadian, and Norman Graham — Canadian, the wireless operator. Whilst on that course we crashed an aircraft, destroyed a barn and knew from the way the crew reacted that we could instantly rely upon each other as a complete unit. It really welded us together.
We were posted to 150 Squadron, Bomber Command at a place – Snaith, near Doncaster in Yorkshire and there on our twenty second trip over Germany when we were carrying one passenger, the second pilot – Del Mounts a United States citizen who’d joined the Canadian Air Force before the United States came in to the shooting war and he was flying with us on his first op to gain experience before taking his own crew.
Going in to the target which was Essen we were hit by heavy anti-aircraft fire that put the port engine out of action. The aircraft relied on that port engine for all the hydraulics and this meant that the turrets no longer worked or anything at all but we pressed on and dropped our bomb, we only had one, a four thousand pounder cookie, on the target area and then headed straight for home. But over Belgium the starboard engine packed up at about thirteen thousand feet and we had to jump out, bail out, and came down by parachute.
I landed in a field which seemed to come up and hit me. When I’d collected myself and my parachute I hid the parachute as best I could and set off in a south-westerly direction using the Pole Star as a guide hoping to head for Gibraltar. We had worked out what you did when you were shot down, not if you were shot down but when and heading for Gibraltar seemed to be the best option available.
In the early light of the morning I came to the outskirts of a small village Kapellen by Glabbeek in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium, and I crept around the outside of the village, didn’t dare enter into the centre of it and I noticed a small farmhouse and for some reason that was the place for me. I went, knocked on the door hoping that an elderly lady would answer and I would be able to run away faster than she should she not prove friendly. But the door was opened by a burly young man. He spoke Flemish. It sounded to me something like the German I had learnt at school so I answered in my schoolboy German and the door was slammed in my face. I regarded that as a good sign, knocked again and eventually I’m in the kitchen of the house and there’s grandfather, grandmother, their daughter carrying a baby in her arms and this burly young man – her husband. They took me in and looked after me.
Whilst we were having a bit of a pantomime in their kitchen that morning a woman came along knocking at the door. This was round about 6 o’clock in the morning, to buy meat because the family were also the village butchers and she had seen me skulking around and made pretence of coming to buy meat at 6 o’clock in the morning. I discovered later that she was visited by the local resistance and told if she breathed any word of what had happened she would not breathe many more breaths. She kept quiet.
I stayed with that family for about a week and I was asked if I could ride a bicycle. Yes. And then I followed somebody on a bicycle to a small town Tienen or in French Tirlemont and was taken to the house of Manny and Marcel Renards [?]. Marcel was a stockbroker in Belgium and he gave me a suit. Now he was a big fellow and I was just a young lad of nineteen and the trousers came up under my armpits and I could easily look down and see [laughs] that the suit was really meant for a larger man but it served me well did that suit and I stayed with them for a while before being taken by train to, no it wasn’t a train it was tram to Brussels and lodged at a house of [Ashil Alieu] who lived on the outskirts of Brussels near to Laeken, near the royal palace there.
And whilst there I was taken into the centre of Brussels to the flat of two ladies, both Elisabeth and one of them came back from a shopping expedition and let her shopping bag fall across the table and out of that came a passport sized photograph and lo and behold it was Del Mounts - our passenger on that last trip. I recognised the photo and said ‘yes I know that fellow’, and the look of relief on the faces of those two girls was really good to see. They had queried Del’s story, they had queried my story. I was talking German. Del pretending, they thought, to be an American. The Germans knew that aircraft were coming down and crews were making escapes and so whenever an aircraft crashed they put in dummies on the ground pretending to be out of that aircraft. They would then enter into the underground network and when they got a list of names they would give them to the Germans and the whole line would be wiped out. That happened twice to the line I came through – the Comet Line, which succeeded in helping escape eight hundred and twenty allied air crew during the course of the war but at tremendous cost in lives to themselves.
From my [pause] safe house in Brussels I was taken to another place and there we met Bill Randle, our pilot who had succeeded also in finding his way in to the Comet Line and Del Mounts came along as well and we three were then taken from Paris to St Jean de Luz down in the south west corner of France by train in the company with three other escaping airmen by a young girl, Janine de Greef who was seventeen years of age. She made that journey from Paris to the south west corner of France twenty odd times during the war. So that meant forty trips in all. A real heroine that girl.
At St Jean de Luz I was taken with the other five members to a farmhouse on the outside of St Jean and there I met again Dedee de Jongh, the Belgian girl who had started the Comet Line going. She had been training as a nurse before the war. The war came she was doing her bit looking after the men who had not been able to escape at the time of Dunkirk. And they found that the cost of maintaining these men, because they had to buy all their rations and things on the black market, was prohibitive and they really needed to clear these men back to the United Kingdom and so they took a three Scottish highlanders down to the south west corner, got them over the Pyrenees through Spain, Gibraltar and back to England and that began the opening of the line to bring men back to this country.
From my position in Paris when Janine took us down to the southwest corner we travelled by train and the train was stopped at a frontier and we were taken into a hall, had to produce our identity papers which I had been provided with. I was now a Belgian seaman who had been stationed at Bordeaux and had travelled up to Brussels to his mother who lived there was elderly and not very well. Now I was now going back to re-join my ship down at Bordeaux so I had a reason for travelling. Had anybody examined the address on my papers the street existed but the number did not, so nobody would have had an unwelcome knock on their door from the German authorities seeking to know where this seaman Robert Seamoness [?] as I was known, had gone. They protected people from unnecessary adventure without any harm to anybody. They were a very thoughtful and well-arranged lot.
When I got to the Pyrenees I was taken with the six of us who had travelled from Paris over the Pyrenees by Florentino Goicoechea[?], a Spanish Basque smuggler. He was a professional smuggler and he guided men over the mountains to safe haven as we would thought in Spain. Whilst going over he led the group, Dedee de Jongh brought up the rear, I was the last of the six men and during the crossing I fell into a great pit, knocked all the wind out of me. Dedee saw what had happened and called Florentino back and he lifted me out of that pit like a drowned rat and dumped me on the ground at the side and all was well.
From time to time he would stop by a bush and bring out a bottle of Cognac which was passed around and how he knew one bush in all those hundreds I don’t know but he always found the right one. When we got to the other side of the frontier to cross the river Bidasoa we found that the river was in flood and we had to walk for another five hours to a bridge crossing in order to get on to the Spanish side. Climbing up towards the steep slopes on either side of that bridge there I was stopped looking at a little hut which had the Spanish Guard Seville members inside and one was outside smoking a cigarette. And I lay against the ground looking up at him in the darkness below thinking, ‘For goodness sake hurry up and finish your cigarette. I want to get to the other side.’ Well, eventually he moved off and I moved over and then we were greeted by a car with CD plates on the back and taken to St Sebastian and at that point Dedee left us and returned back to carry on her dangerous work through Belgium, France and up to the frontier. Florentino, he’d gone off and was then ready to bring the next group of airmen across.
In Spain we were taken to the British embassy in Madrid. It was the old Victorian building and the stables had been used there in the days of horse drawn traffic and that became the dormitory for we, the escapers, and there were quite a number of Poles there including the one who was in our group Teddy Frankowski. He wanted to get back to England and we thought he wanted to resume the fight against the enemy. It wasn’t really that. Back on station he had a motorbike and he didn’t want them to sell it before he returned. He thought a lot of that motorbike.
At Gibraltar we were housed quite comfortably but water was the great shortage. The lack of pure water was the great thing there and we were issued with soap. It would float in seawater and when you tried to wash with it was like using a piece of pumice stone. It scraped you clean.
But we were debriefed at Gib and then after almost a week there told to be ready to take off in an American Dakota of the United States 8th Army Air Corps and we were flown back to the United Kingdom. We flew right out over the Bay of Biscay to avoid the land and any fighter aircraft and landed at Portreath in Cornwall exactly five weeks and four days after taking off from Snaith in Yorkshire.
Nobody knew anything about us at all. We asked could we please have an overcoat because by now it was approaching Christmas time and it was jolly cold and we were provided with the proper air force winter uniform, given £5 which was a huge sum of money and a railway warrant up to London.
Bill went to his family. I went to see my mother who was working for the London Fire Brigade at that time at Shaftsbury Avenue and I walked into the place where she worked, she was a cook and said, ‘Hello mum,’ and we both stood and hugged each other. She hadn’t received anything other than the telegram saying that I was missing. She had called my father who was stationed at Chivenor in North Devon and they had both gone up to visit my brother David who was evacuated not far from Doncaster and then they went across to the squadron to see if there was any news of what had happened to me but there wasn’t any because I hadn’t been picked up by the Red Cross or anybody else. The shock of that telegram caused my father to become ill and he was admitted to Sheffield Military Hospital suffering phlebitis in his legs and unfortunately was not passed as medically fit for service anymore and was discharged from the air force. I’ve always regarded my father as one of the casualties of war.
I went back to where the squadron had, was or so I thought but when I got there I found it was no longer in this country. It was at [?] in North Africa. No, I didn’t want to go to North Africa thank you very much and so I was sent back to London and sent to RAF.
[pause]
And I was sent to RAF Uxbridge as a holding unit, I was put into a barrack room with a number of other aircrew NCOs of all aircrew trades and in the morning ordered on parade on the barrack square and was being marched up and down with these lads who I discovered had been sent to Uxbridge for court martial as lacking in moral fibre. They thought because I was wearing an air gunner’s brevet that I was one sent there for court martial. So I left the parade ground. A warrant officer standing on the side bellowed at me to get back on parade and I told him in two words what to do.
And then went to see the adjutant and explained to him that I had not returned back to this country in order to be marched about on his parade ground. He was most surprised and that evening I went home with an open leave pass in my pocket whilst they decided what on earth they were going to do with me. And the upshot of all that I was posted to the RAF Marine School at Coswall [?] in Scotland teaching the marine side of the air force what to do with such weaponry as they carried and tactics against enemy aircraft attacking them because a lot of them were engaged on air sea rescue in the North Sea and the best advice that could be given and the skippers of those north sea ASR boats agreed, was to leave the 303 machine guns wrapped up in oiled casings and not try firing them off against a Junkers 88 equipped with twenty millimetre canon. The best thing they could do was to shut down the engine, leave no wake and hope that the aircraft would start running out of fuel and leave them alone.
They did a jolly good job those chaps but I wanted to go back into the air force but not bombing this time but to go back supplying munitions to the underground movement and I succeeded in being posted to an operational training unit which would have led me on to 644 squadron flying Halifaxes, dropping supplies and also glider towing troops across the channel. But the air force stepped in and said no you’re not allowed back on ops anymore and none of our crew ever went back on operations again because if, we assumed we should come down again and were caught questions might be asked of us as to what had happened the first time around. Whether that be the case or not I’m not too sure but I finished my time in RAF Bridgnorth in Shropshire and there in the sergeant’s mess I met a young WAAF, a hospital steward, we were married two years later and we had fifty years and six months of happiness before eventually she succumbed to motor neurone disease.
Now I live in Sandwich. A daughter looks after me. She lives nearby and the friends I made during the war we’re on to the great-grandchildren. They have become our family. And to those people working in the resistance I really do accept them as the real heroes. If we were caught it was POW. If they were caught the whole family was caught and what happened to them I hate to think, in the concentration camps.
The stories I’ve heard from their relatives and the fact that when I went back to Paris to see Robert and Germaine who’d looked after me in ’42, Robert was no longer there. He’d been arrested in ’43 – executed in ’44. Germaine, they were going to send to forced labour for them. She refused to work for them and so was put in to Ravensbruck concentration camp. She survived, became aunt to my children and lived to be ninety years of age. Then she gave her body to the local hospital. I was given her two bibles. The old and new testaments in French and those bibles are now lodged in Canterbury Cathedral where they have a French chapel and a service in French every Sunday afternoon to the memory of a very brave person. That’s my story.
This is the Observer and Air Gunners Flying Log Book. And you had to get it signed every month as being accurate. This is to certify 1383682 LAC Frost R qualified as an air gunner with effect from the 23rd of January 1942. So I became an air gunner sergeant on the 23rd of January 1942. And that was Number 8 Air Gunnery School Evanton, Scotland, north of Inverness. Results of air gunnery course - exam mark ninety percent. Remarks – well above the average and then they made a ricket of the stamping here, well above the average. Should make an excellent air gunner. J Compton, Squadron Leader. I came top of the course.
That was why when I went eventually to the Operational Training Unit at Chipping Warden they put so many pilots, so many navigators, so many wireless operators and you were all in to a big hangar - sort yourselves out into crews. There were ten pilots, ten navigators and so on you see and that is what happened. This is my 12 OTU Operational Training Unit, the different flights, circuits and landings, circuits and landings, instrument flying, circuits and landings, cross country’s and all that kind of thing. That was the gunnery school and I came down from there as I say and they asked did I want to accept a commission or apply for a commission ‘cause I came top of the course and I said no thank you. I just want to be an air gunner. That’s all I’ve joined for.
And then we go to number, that was 12 OTU. That was in Oxfordshire and I’m crewed initially there. Let’s see if I can give you this. Evanton that’s there. Now here’s 12 OTU. Now look, date, hour, aircraft type, pilot and my first pilot and we’d sorted ourselves out in this big hangar – Sergeant Lock L O C K. I look down the list and his name never comes up again. What happened?
I’m near to Oxford at this Operational Training Unit. There’s a heavy air raid on London. I asked for a twenty four hour pass to go and see if my home was still ok. Remember I’d been through the London Blitz and knew what could happen. So they said yes you’ve got twenty four hours out and back so I took off, went home, everything was alright. I came back and one of the pilots there Sergeant Randle said to me, ‘Bob would you like to fly with me?’
I said, ‘No thank you I’m flying with Ginger. Ginger Lock.’ He said, ‘Ginger Lock’s not flying with anybody anymore.’ He had taken up a Wellington aircraft and sat in the back where I should have been sat was a chappy who was going to become a wireless operator air gunner. He’d done his wireless course and he was waiting for his gunnery course and the opportunity to fly in an aeroplane was too good to be missed. Ginger flew that aeroplane and the whole crew with him, a scratch crew, down to Henley on Thames where Ginger lived and they flew down over the River Thames up the hill on the other side straight into the trees at the top and he wrote the lot off. Had I not had that twenty four hour pass? And that was my introduction to what flying was all about? You see?
So I’m now flying with Sergeant Randle. And the first trip that we did together, you can’t imagine it, detail not carried out. Landed at Llanbedr. It was a cross country exercise. Navigation for the navigator. Remember we were an Operational Training Unit and the aircraft that were flying at these Operational Training Units, these OTUs, were all aircraft that were no longer fit for operational flying. They were clapped out. And so you got more crashes from these places than anywhere else because the aircraft as I say were clapped out. And the first trip that I did with Bill we landed because the aircraft was clapped out. That meant that it wasn’t working. Come home again.
That went on there and now I’ve got Randle, Randle, Randle, Randle, Randle all the way through until we come to the 21st of June 1942. We took off at 9:30 in the evening and we were going on a cross country navigational exercise. Crashed near Whitton, Whitton is in Lincolnshire, at 1:52 in the morning. We’re bowling along, I say bowling along in the air and the engines start playing up and Bill says get ready to bail out. Walter, our front gunner, bomb aimer said he didn’t think that was a good idea. We were too near the ground. So Bill said right take up crash positions and we crashed near Whitton. We hit a barn. I’ve got a picture of it somewhere.
[pause]
And when Bomber Command Museum was opened and we met together forty odd years after the war, the day after that we went to where we had crashed to see what it looked like and that was taken there and that’s was the farmer’s son who’s now grown and has replaced his father as farmer. They weren’t owner farmers they were tenant farmers and they’d had a new barn built – a brick one. The one we crashed into was a wooden one with a thatched roof and when Norman our wireless op, I’ll show you Norman [pause]. This one here, the Canadian wireless op. Now he would be sat about the middle of the aircraft and he came out through the thatched roof swearing what do the so and so British put on their houses ‘cause we didn’t know it was a barn at the time but he found Bill Randle the pilot unconscious in the crash so he dragged Bill out. I was in the rear turret and the gun sight that was right up in front of me came back, hit me on the head, I’ve still got the scar up there somewhere and it knocked me unconscious. Only for a little while, not for hours but just for a few seconds and I’ve got my turret turned sideways so that you could open the doors and drop out the back. That was how you got out of that particular one at that time and I opened the doors and there running alongside the aeroplane is this lad. Can you see the one right at the end, at this end, that’s it you’ve got this hand on it. That fella Scotty, the navigator. He was running down the side of the burning aircraft to get me out of the turret. When I say it was that crash that brought us together we realised that we would look after each other whatever happened and that really welded us together as a crew. If anybody in the crew said turn right we all turned right. You didn’t argue. The pilot was the one in charge but if anybody in the crew saw something that needed instant action and they said stand up, sit down, jump about, do anything, you did it. You didn’t say why, you just did it because you trusted each other. Now I’m the last one alive.
GC: Well we’ve got your voice on tape now.
BF: So -
GC: It won’t ever be lost again.
BF: You see, that’s these things. Now you’ve seen Daphne.
GC: Yes we have Daphne.
BF: As a young - when a fellow had seen her with her three stripes on -
GC: Ahum.
BF: Tell me when you’re ready. I met Daphne at RAF Bridgnorth in Shropshire in the sergeant’s mess. She had just been made a sergeant. She had a boyfriend before then who was an airman and she had been a corporal but when he saw Daphne with her three stripes on he turned tail and ran. But Daphne came into the mess and two years later we got married. Best thing I ever did.
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Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Bob Frost. One
Description
An account of the resource
Bob Frost recounts experiencing the London Blitz as a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service. He volunteered for the Royal Air Force and trained at the Air Gunnery School at Evanton, Scotland. He was then posted to the Operational Training Unit at RAF Chipping Warden. He describes an aircraft crash in Lincolnshire while at Chipping Warden. His operational posting was to 150 Squadron at RAF Snaith. On an operation to Essen, two of the Lancaster’s engines were damaged and the crew bailed out over Belgium. Frost describes being taken in by a farming family and sheltered by the resistance. Reunited with his crew, they were passed along the Comet Line through Belgium and France, being accompanied from Paris to St Jean de Luz by Janine de Greef. They met Dedee de Jongh who, together with a Basque smuggler, accompanied them across the Pyrenees into Spain. From Madrid they were driven to Gibraltar and flown to the United Kingdom. Bob Frost did not undertake any further operational flying. He was eventually posted to RAF Bridgnorth, where he met his wife Daphne, who was in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Gemma Clapton
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-16
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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00:43:03 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AFrostB150707
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England
France
Spain
England--Northamptonshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Essen
Pyrenees
Netherlands
Germany
Great Britain
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
12 OTU
150 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
air sea rescue
aircrew
bale out
bombing
civil defence
crash
crewing up
de Jongh, Andree (1916 - 2007)
evading
faith
ground personnel
heirloom
Lancaster
military ethos
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Chipping Warden
RAF Evanton
RAF Snaith
training
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force