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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1261/17134/AMacKenzieR190509.2.mp3
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Title
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MacKenzie, Roddy
R MacKenzie
Description
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An oral history interview with Roddy MacKenzie about his father, Ronald MacKenzie who served in 166 Squadron with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He is the author of 'Bomber Command: Churchill's Greatest Triumph' Pen and Sword, 2022.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Roddy MacKenzie and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2019-05-09
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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MacKenzie, R
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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DE: What is today? The 9th.
RM: It is. So —
DE: The day after VE Day.
RM: Yeah. So, my name is Dan Ellin from the International Bomber Command Centre. I’m here today to interview Roddy Mackenzie. It’s the 9th of May and we’re in Canwick, in Lincoln. So, Roddy could you tell me a little bit about your father’s service in Bomber Command please.
DE: Yes. My dad is Roland W Mackenzie, DFC and he flew thirty four combat sorties in World War Two with 1 Bomber Group, Squadron 166, based in Kirmington which is now the Humberside International Airport. He flew all thirty four combat sorties from that base and he was the pilot of Lancaster L for Love and his flights were from April to August of 1944. Now, I was born and raised in Calgary in Canada. I was born in 1948, three years after the war and I was born in a city that was really starting to move ahead in incredibly optimistic and major ways and I was raised in an environment in Calgary where we knew virtually nothing about the war. My Grade Twelve textbook at Queen Elizabeth High School was published in 1938. I got the trophy as the best person in Social Studies but the war was never really addressed as I was growing up and my dad spoke virtually never about the war so it was mainly a mystery. But I had three situations with my father. We were not emotionally connecting. He did have anger issues and unfortunately he also had perfectionism issues which were not helpful to me as an adult because burdened with this idea of perfectionism I steered away from areas that had high probability of failure. In other words perfectionism gave rise to a fear of failure. In recent years I’m discovering that a lot of people I’ve known also had a dad in Bomber Command and had exactly the same experience as I did. They can’t emotionally connect with their son. They have anger issues and they have perfectionism issues and that this is quite widespread. Now, my dad’s younger brother they were ten years apart, flew a Spitfire with Fighter Command and in the last year of, I’m sorry the last month of my uncle Bruce’s life which was January, June, June of 2017 I had four major meetings with my uncle because he knew he was dying. I wanted to learn everything I could possibly learn about my dad before the war. My uncle welcomed that opportunity to really search his memory from times past and also his love for his eldest brother. His children welcomed it as well because it really gave my uncle more of a sense of purpose and it was a really good experience for him as well as for me. And ultimately although he was ten years younger than my dad I got quite the picture of a very happy, a very humorous, a very generous person who did a lot of nice things. He was a young banker at that time in the Great Depression up in the Peace River District which for me as an urban Calgarian he might just as well have been at the North Pole. I mean, it was so isolated. Dad has often said to me those were his happiest years with the Royal Bank of Canada. Up north. But my uncle painted this picture that was just not consistent with my personal experiences with my dad and so in that I’m a lawyer I was forming the view that something extraordinary had happened in Europe while he was overseas. I have virtually nothing in the way of documentation. My dad died in 1991 and in his will he very clearly gave to me all of his war memorabilia including the model aeroplanes he had made of every plane he ever flew and they were all in correct size to one another. But I had an uncooperative stepmother and she simply ignored all of that. Worse still she discovered that my dad and my mum had written to each other quite a bit while dad was overseas. I had thought my parents didn’t even meet until he returned home from the war in January of ’45. It turns out they had been good friends for years prior to the war and they wrote to each other all the time during the war and the loss of that correspondence is just, I think a criminal tragedy of terrible proportions. It would have given me the clearest possible understanding of my dad’s evolution and his relationship with his wife, my mother. The other problem that our family experienced is that when I was about three years old my mother was struck with Polio which was an epidemic in Canada at that time in the early 1950s. So she was removed from Calgary, sent up to Edmonton, put in that dreadful iron lung at the University Hospital and was gone for quite a while. I was looked after by housekeepers when my dad was working. So now I have a father who I’m of the view was totally traumatised by Bomber Command, a mother who was totally traumatised by being completely paralysed by Polio living in a city which at that time was not good with anybody who was disabled. They were referred to as cripples. People really thought they should be kept out of sight, out of mind. It was a very unpleasant situation and neither of my parents got any kind of psychological help, any kind of emotional assistance of any kind whatsoever and ultimately I feel developed quite a strong dislike for one another. So I was raised by these two people in this situation that was emotionally a desert and where anger issues trained one not to ask much in the way of questions about anything that was in any way sensitive and that definitely included the war. Virtually nothing was said about the war. The one thing though that was interesting in Calgary at the time was Lancasters. The major city between Calgary and Edmonton is Red Deer and at the entrance to Red Deer there was a Lancaster I always looked forward to seeing as we’d go up to Edmonton to see my mother. And then in 1960 a Lancaster appeared in Nanton about an hour south of Calgary and also we had a Lancaster that flew in to Calgary which then spent thirty years on a spire right outside the main terminal of the Calgary International Airport such that it formed almost like a traffic circle. You had to go around the Lancaster to get in and out of Calgary’s airport terminal. So these Lancasters made quite an impression on me. They were obviously regarded as being very very important. The most powerful experience I ever had with my dad was quite a number of years after my mum had died, she died in 1970. In about 1985 my dad and I were driving alone from Calgary to Lethbridge and at that time Lethbridge was Alberta’s third largest city. My mother’s sister and her family lived in Lethbridge so we went there fairly often and I always looked forward to seeing this Lancaster that simply sat by the side of the road in Nanton. So we stopped there in 1985. I’m not sure we’d ever stopped before but we actually stopped and at that time I was a thirty seven year old lawyer living in Vancouver and raising, with my wife two young children. But I just happened to be in Alberta, happened to be with my dad and the two of us happened to be alone which was extremely unusual and there we were on our way to Lethbridge. So we stopped at this Lancaster. Now, the Lancaster Society in Nanton, it’s gone on to become the Canadian Bomber Command Museum etcetera with Carlsberg was not created until 1986. So this was a year before and the plane was simply sitting there. I proudly announced to the three or four people who were milling around looking at it that my dad flew one of these in Bomber Command and two of the men looked up in interest and one of them said to my dad, ‘Is that true?’ And they exchanged a few words and then this man said, ‘I’ve got the keys to the Lancaster. I’ll open it up and you and your son can spend as much time in there as you want.’ So we climbed in to this Lancaster and what makes it unique or one of very very few is it still had its World War Two interior configuration. A lot of Lancasters got reconfigured after the war for other purposes post-war but this one had the original World War Two configuration. So there we are inside this Lancaster. My dad made a few brief comments about where people sat and in particular where he, as pilot, sat. A few brief comments about flying the plane but he really didn’t say very much. Mainly we just sat there and I’m not sure how long we sat there. It could have been fifteen minutes. It could have been fifty minutes. We were there until my father suddenly said, ‘Time to leave.’ So out we go. One of those gentlemen was still there and we did the thank you’s, the goodbyes and we were back into the car and off to Lethbridge at which point as we were leaving Nanton my father started talking. It was in a very low, measured tone. He was strictly looking at the road. I don’t think we ever made eye contact and I simply sat there. Now, I tend to be the one that talks a lot. He tends to be very taciturn but in this situation for whatever reason I didn’t say a word, didn’t ask for any clarification on anything. I just simply sat there and my dad talked for the duration of the drive which I suspect was close to an hour and essentially he talked about flying Lancasters, and how you got one of those Lancasters into the target, how you managed to actually hit the target and how you managed to get yourself out again without getting killed. He’d had an extraordinary amount of experience flying. He was with the Royal Bank of Canada and of course Canada in all of its wars only fights with volunteers. For World War Two we had about nine and a half million people and so many people volunteered that we actually ended up putting one point two million who were accepted into our armed forces. One point two million volunteers and a lot of these were in the Air Force. My dad volunteered in late 1941 and I believe was accepted by the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1942. So he began his training but he was a thirty year old and he seemed to have a real gift for flying planes so he got the Gold Medal and was kept in Canada to train others to fly planes for an extended period. Another person that was there was actually James Middleton. The grandfather of the Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William’s wife was stationed in Calgary actually. James Middleton. And he was doing exactly the same thing. He was teaching people how to fly. My father told me that his greatest admiration within the Air Force in that war was for people who were instructing others how to fly. He said it was, he thought far more dangerous than anything that ever happened to him over Germany. In November of ’43 the Royal Canadian Air Force decided to send my dad over to England and by that point he had a staggering number of hours. I believe it was over a thousand and they started training him on the big heavy bombers. And then in the beginning of April 1944 he found himself in Kirmington as a member of 166 Squadron which interestingly is the Royal Air Force’s original bomber squadron. It was created in April 1918 only three weeks after the Air Force itself came into existence. So 166 was the original bomber squadron. It was in 1 Bomber Group and it was based in Kirmington in what we now call North Lincolnshire and it was abandoned for about thirty years after the war but ultimately re-emerged as Humberside International Airport. So the runway that my dad used for every sortie in World War Two is being used on a steady basis especially by KLM going to Amsterdam. So he arrived and flew his thirty four sorties with 166 squadron and got the Distinguished Flying Cross, the DFC for his work as a pilot and it’s a very glowing report on him. It also refers to him as being deputy flight commander. I don’t know what that is but it’s in the DFC citation and they talked about his tremendous ability to keep people’s morale up in that base. Which is interesting because I didn’t know that part of him when he was raising me but it was very consistent with what my Uncle Bruce had been telling me about him prior to the war. Squadron 166 had nine hundred and forty four young men killed. Nine hundred and forty four men killed. Average age twenty three. My dad when he arrived in England was thirty. When he flew his first combat mission he was thirty three. But the average age of those dead was twenty three and of those a hundred and thirty three were Canadians and approximately sixty five were Australians. My dad was part of the twenty eight percent that got out of that in one piece. The problem is he didn’t get out of it in one piece and something that I’m very very critical of is the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Air Force and their use of that dreadful concept lack of moral fibre. And it’s particularly annoying now that I discover that the United States Army 8th Air Force and even the Royal Australian Air Force were actually much more enlightened on that issue than the RAF or the RCAF. With the RAF and RCAF essentially if you were starting to fall apart you were simply out and it was LMF. The others had rest homes. They had psychological care. They had a number of things but this LMF was, I think a horrible thing and I think we’re really paying for it with the next couple of generations of people that returned from Bomber Command. My work in doing a book on what Bomber Command accomplished has been drawing a lot of attention in Canada. Particularly the Sir Winston Churchill Society, the Royal Commonwealth Society and the Royal Canadian Air Force at its ninety fifth anniversary where I became the guest of honour and the feature speaker and my remarks had a profound effect on all present at that dinner on the 30th of March 2019. So I’m now one of the newest members as of January 2019 of the Australian Bomber Command Association and as of April 2019 of the New Zealand Bomber Command Association. My RCAF paper has struck a major nerve cord in both of those nations and I’m learning a lot from them about Bomber Command. Now, Australia had twenty thousand fliers in Bomber Command and they now have the concept of the Bomber Command family which they say are the children, the grandchildren and the great grandchildren of Bomber Command aircrew. The Bomber Command Australia family is two hundred and fifty thousand Australians and these people have been angry about Australia’s reaction to Bomber Command and they have carried out a complete paradigm shift in how Australia regards Bomber Command. The first Sunday in June is now Bomber Command Sunday in Australia and New Zealand. It’s now, I’m told become the third biggest military event of the whole year in Australia. I think July 2017 one of the issues of the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the great newspapers of Australia the headline was essentially Bomber Command aircrew were not shameful. They were among our greatest heroes. And I think that captured the complete paradigm shift in Australia. A paradigm shift has not happened so far in Canada. Now in Canada one out of every four Canadians killed in World War Two was killed in Bomber Command and yet my experience, I was born in 1948 is that pretty much anybody younger than I am has literally never even heard of Bomber Command. Its absolutely unknown and most people who are older than I am in Canada what they know about Bomber Command is wrong. There’s been some spectacular sensationalist negative assertions about Bomber Command that were completely rebutted by credible sources but nobody seems to remember the reason of the rebuttles. They only remember the scandalous assertions. Two of the biggest, one was January of 1992 which thankfully was six months after my dad had died the CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, national TV network and the National Film Board hit their all-time low of irresponsible journalism and broadcast, I believe it was on the 19th of January 1992 an episode of the, “Valour and the Horror,” about Bomber Command in which Brian Mckenna who was the producer of this travesty more or less said that Bomber Command spent the war bombing innocent civilians in cities of little or no military value and Bomber Command’s contribution to the war was minimal if any. Well, it created a huge stir at the time and it really shocked a lot of people. It totally shocked me. Bomber Command aircrew formed a class action to sue both the CBC and the National Film Board but the Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed the action saying they did not think Bomber Command aircrew constituted a class action. Well, if they’re not a class then they really have no action at all because for individuals what damages to that particular individual suffered it had to be a class action. And yet in March of 2019 that same appeal court ruled that Uber drivers get to be a class action but in 1992 Bomber Command aircrew did not. The Senate of Canada however did take a full look at this, a full examination and they said that that journalists are entitled to their point of view and should be able to express it. But in looking closely at what this documentary says there is nothing to support what they are saying. The whole situation was just an absolute travesty but nobody remembers the Senate’s full report. Everybody remembers that scandalous TV show. And likewise in 2007 I was in Ottawa and the National War Museum had just opened a Bomber Command exhibit in which they call Bomber Command aircrew war criminals. While I was in Ottawa I saw it as a headline in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper. So the first thing the next morning I was down there as soon as the place opened to see this exhibit and I got in to a very spirited discussion with museum staff members because I was absolutely furious. There was no truth to what they were saying. They were the worst imaginable defamatory statements and did they want the grandchildren of my dad to think that he was war criminal? It was infuriating. Now, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation happened to have a TV crew for other reasons there at the time and so they asked if I would like to speak to their television network and I welcomed the opportunity. Made my full speech. My understanding is they did broadcast it and my memory is people had mentioned that to me afterwards but I’m uncertain. I hope they broadcast it and I hope it influenced people. What I do know is I was one of quite a number of Canadians that were totally outraged so the war museum completely changed its presentation and I’m told two or three people lost their jobs. I hope that’s true. But again, most people just remember those incredible headlines. Bomber Command aircrew being war criminals. Nobody remembers how anything got sorted out thereafter. But what bothers me the most is I don’t think anybody has really properly focussed on what Bomber Command actually accomplished and that’s what bothers me the most. As I said one out of every four Canadians killed in World War Two were killed in Bomber Command but I think they were killed doing something that was incredibly important. In World War One we make a big fuss now that the last of the World War One veterans are dead, we make a big fuss nowadays about the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Militarily it was expertly carried out and every element of the Canadian Army for the only time in Canada’s history all fought together and it was a decisive Canadian victory and we took the Ridge. It turns out that taking the Ridge really didn’t make much of a difference one way or the other. The Germans said the battle was just a minor footnote but we had as many casualties in five days taking Vimy Ridge as we had fatalities in five years in Bomber Command and my submission is Vimy Ridge accomplished not much of anything other than to give us a sense of self confidence whereas Bomber Command I feel was decisive to the Allied victory in World War Two. But now I’m discovering that there is a great deal of difficulty getting accurate information on exactly what they accomplished because so much of what is written about Bomber Command is either criticising them or just heart-warming reminiscences of particular people in Bomber Command aircrew. Nobody is really focussing from what I can see on what they actually accomplished. Now it’s difficult to know exactly what they accomplished because even though photographs were taken by each aircraft as they were leaving bombing sights those photographs didn’t do a whole lot more than prove that the plane was actually at the bombing site and not unloading its bombs in the middle of the North Sea and then just heading home again because what could they actually tell you? And so increasingly I’m of the view that the people that have the most accurate knowledge of what Bomber Command accomplished are the Germans. And they have had a lot to say about Bomber Command. Most of their leading generals have said that Bomber Command was decisive to them losing the war. That losing control of the air and the endless bombing depriving them of their means of making war was decisive in World War Two. And the one person that has the most to say of course is Albert Speer because Albert Speer was the munitions minister that had to keep quickly rebuilding all of these places that were bombed. He was the one that was busily trying to move all the factories that were bombed in the countryside places which created all kinds of other issues of transporting stuff and people etcetera etcetera. But he was in very very deeply in this whole situation and what he said was Germany’s failure to defeat Bomber Command was Germany’s greatest lost battle of the whole war. The strategic bombing offensive did more damage to the German war effort than losing every battle in Russia including the surrender of Stalingrad because bombing continuously damaged with ever increasing ferocity and then ultimately destroyed Germany’s ability to produce the means necessary to make war. That’s Speer. Rommel is possibly the most famous of the generals and after D-day Rommel said to his superiors, ‘If you can’t stop the bombing we can’t win the war.’ And the other major German leaders also talked about the devastating, absolutely devastating impact of Bomber Command. It also condemned close to two million people many of whom could have been at the various fronts but nobody ever knew where Bomber Command was going to strike next. So they had to man these anti-aircraft guns all over Germany and maybe Bomber Command would only come to a particular place once or twice in the entire year and other than that these people are paralysed there but they can’t leave because they have to be there if Bomber Command does show up. And also probably the most valuable gun that Germany had in World War Two was the, I think eighty millimetre dual purpose anti-aircraft, anti-tank gun. That was their most useful gun in the war according to Albert Speer. They had forty thousand of them. They had to pull twenty thousand of those guns back from their Fronts and particularly the Russian front in order to shoot down Bomber Command aircraft. They did manage to destroy nine thousand Bomber Command aircraft. We lost nine thousand at any rate. Well, pulling those guns away from the fronts and especially the Russian Front really seriously hurt because those guns were the only ones that penetrated Russian tanks and yet fifty percent of them had to be brought back into Germany. Nine hundred thousand soldiers were manning these guns all over Germany when they all could have been fighting on the Fronts if they weren’t forced. And also just a fraction of those that were fighting Bomber Command could have actually destroyed Bomber Command if Bomber Command had restricted itself to a small number of clearly defined targets. It’s the fact that Bomber Command was bombing all over the place that paralysed the nation. And they say with the skilled and unskilled workers to keep rebuilding everything, with the soldiers that were doing various things in these cities to deal with Bomber Command bombing and then the nine hundred thousand that were locked in to the anti-aircraft equipment two million people were paralysed. Also, Lord Trenchard, Hugh Trenchard, the person that is called the father of the Royal Air Force says the number one role of any Air Force is to put the other air Fronts on the defence. Well in the early years of the war the Germans had a lot of easy victories all over Western Europe with the Luftwaffe in the air busily bombing everything and then the Armies just moving in and taking over. But Bomber Command forced the Luftwaffe off the offence and into an unsuccessful defence, forced the production of endless fighters when what they really wanted was bombers, forced everyone into producing pilots that could fly fighter planes etcetera. The Luftwaffe was withdrawn in large part from all three fronts, the Mediterranean, the Western and the Russian Fronts to cope with Bomber Command and that was absolutely enormous. Bomber Command also had a huge impact at sea. Whereas the Royal Navy sunk three of the seventeen major ships of the German Navy Bomber Command sunk eight and could have sunk two more except they were withdrawn by the Admiralty of the Royal Navy just before they did so. Bomber Command according to Albert Speer wiped out about three thousand U-boats in their bases and made the production of U-boats extraordinarily difficult. So the other area where Bomber Command was incredibly helpful was the helping the Armies. Very very helpful with the Canadian and British Armies in Normandy. Very helpful with getting the Americans across the Rhine River and very very helpful with the Russians at Dresden. Yalta of a dying franklin Roosevelt, a depressed Winston Churchill and a jubilant Joseph Stalin was only about four or five days before they bombed Dresden. Stalin asked point blank for the bombing of Dresden. It was a major marshalling yard. It was a major communication centre. The Deputy Supreme Commander of the Soviet Forces, Anatov had said they had to destroy those communications and Stalin did not want the Russian Army which was already hopelessly overextended, extremely vulnerable, lost in the swamp of a city the way in which Canada was in Ortona in Italy which we call Canada’s Stalingrad. Where we were fighting those Germans building by building and room by room. It’s called [unclear]. So Bomber Command bombed Dresden for the Soviet Red Army. Now, after the bombing of Dresden just two days later on the 17th of February 1945 the Associated Press of the United States which had incredible respect among Americans as being incredibly accurate started to speculate that Dresden looked like terror bombing. Immediately the most respected person in the entire United States Armed Forces, General George C Marshall issued a personal statement. Dresden was a military target and the bombing was requested by Joseph Stalin. There was not a word about Dresden from that day forward in America even though they had about five hundred and thirty bombers participating with our seven hundred and sixty odd bombers in the bombing of Dresden. But what we got in Britain was dead silence until Churchill issued a very unfortunate signal which he later reputed on the 25th of March. So the Americans instantly quashed any criticism of Dresden and we allowed Dresden to fester into something that bears no connection with reality. Two of the biggest lies the Nazi Germans told in World War Two concerned Dresden. The morning after the bombing the local authorities in Dresden signalled to Berlin that about twenty thousand people had been killed. The Americans, the United States Air Force, in their 1953 report says that there were fifty thousand war workers in about a hundred and twenty war related plants in Dresden. Also, a huge number of German soldiers in Dresden at the time of the bombing because that’s where they were marshalling them to defend themselves from the Red Army. Anyway, the signal to Berlin was that about twenty thousand were killed. Goebbels simply added a zero and said two hundred thousand were killed. All he did was add a zero. And I was one of the many that believed that outrageous lie until February of 2015 when German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the real number was less than twenty five thousand and she could hardly believe the west would actually swallow a Nazi lie of that magnitude. Well, I was one of those people that swallowed that lie of that magnitude. It got me wondering just how much else about Bomber Command that I was told wasn’t true. I think of Mark Twain. Mark Twain says, “It’s not what you don’t know that’s going to hurt you. It’s what you do know that aint so.” And overwhelmingly what Canadians know about Bomber Command aint so. The second lie that they told, Goebbels told was that it was just a quaint medieval town with beautiful architecture but no military value. In fact, as I say it had fifty thousand war workers, it had about a hundred and twenty factories and other places that produced war material. It was a major marshalling yard of great importance for Germany’s defence of the homeland against the Red Army and it was a major communication centre. But those two absolutely appalling German lies on who was killed and the military value of the city are still believed today and all of this is very very very disturbing. So getting back to my dad he comes back to a Canada where an awful lot was not properly understood about Bomber Command, where Churchill’s appalling failure to even mention Bomber Command in his VE Day speech kind of opened the works for all kinds of people publishing books saying the most sensationalist things imaginable all of which gave a really erroneous, erroneous impression of Bomber Command. Now, Churchill did to some extent come to his senses by 1951 when he was doing his histories of the Second World War and he does conclude there in “Volume Five, the Closing the Ring,” Churchill does in that book say, “But it would be wrong to end without paying our tribute of respect and admiration to the officers and men who fought and died in the fearful battle of the air the like of which had never before been known or even with any precision imagined. The moral test to which the crew of a bomber were subjected reached the extreme limits of human valour and sacrifice. Here chance was carried to its most extreme and violent degree above all else. They never flinched or failed. It is to their devotion that in no small measure we owe our victory. Let us give them our salute.” And I think that is so true but that is not what is happening. Bomber Command has been badly defamed. It is not understood. My submission is Churchill was vital to Bomber Command and Bomber Command was vital to victory in World War Two. My father was part of all that but it was never really discussed after the war and it wasn’t until 2017, my dad had died in 1991, 2017 somehow on my computer I penetrated a wall in the Royal Air Force and like magic all this information came flowing forward about my father. Right from the day he was born in Westfield, Nova Scotia in 1912. All this information came flowing forward and it gave me the two things I needed to know. I needed to know Kirmington, that’s the Air Force base he flew from and I needed to know the squadron that was 166 Squadron and 1 Bomber Group. So in the summer of ’17 I showed up at Kirmington, I saw things there and they had a guest book for 166 Squadron. They’d stopped having their annual reunions in 2014 which was a tragedy for me but I took pictures of the pages because they left a lot of email addresses and I emailed everybody and people started contacting me. Then in the spring of 2018 CTV, the other national television network in Canada, the private network, Canadian Television network wanted me to come to the Prince Harry’s wedding in Windsor to explain that CTV was not just covering the marriage of some celebrities, they were covering a marriage that was part of the constitutional monarchy which was the basis of both the law and the governance of Canada. And of course, Queen Elizabeth is the Queen of Canada. So there I was in Windsor to comment on this wedding and to make these speeches about the constitutional importance of the event but my half month got completely hijacked by the Royal Air Force and I found myself being introduced to all manner of people and seeing all manner of things. And that led to my being summoned back to the United Kingdom in August of 2017, I’m sorry 2018 to participate with my sons as the official representatives of Canada at the ceremonies honouring 166 Squadron. Ceremonies that were taken sufficiently seriously that the Royal Air Force was represented by Air Marshall Sir Christopher Coville and Air Vice Marshall Paul Robinson and they were extremely interesting people for me to meet. And Air Vice Marshall Paul Robinson has evolved into a major part of my life and is the key reason that I am now back in the United Kingdom for a month researching Bomber Command because I feel I must write a book about what Bomber Command accomplished and how our failure of remembrance is wrong and how these aircrew, a hundred and twenty five thousand air crew, eighty thousand of which became casualties, fifty seven, fifty five thousand seven hundred and some odd were killed are some of the greatest heroes in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the four countries that constituted Bomber Command. That the truth needs to be told about this and I feel a strong compelling thing to do that. My concluding remarks are what I have learned from 2017 has caused me to have a complete paradigm shift on my father, on his life and what he had to cope with etcetera. He and so many of his colleagues, these people were men of extraordinary character, bravery, determination and what they did was absolutely essential to our winning the war. They need to be remembered with gratitude. Thank you.
DE: Thank you, Roddy. Well, I had a list of things and I’ve ticked them all. Could you talk a little bit more about the conversation you had with your father in the car? What sort of things did he tell you about?
RM: Well, I understood from what he was telling me that perfectionism was essential to survival when you’re in the process of bombing heavily defended German targets. That the slightest error generally tended to mean death and so therefore you had to do things essentially perfectly and even then of course there was a high risk you were going to be killed. But he told me that Lancasters were remarkable aircraft and if a person knew enough about how to fly them which evidently took a tremendous amount of physical strength and sometimes the flight engineer had to actually assist in the flying just because of the enormous strength it took to move some of the levers that needed to be moved, especially in evasive actions that the Lancaster was an absolutely extraordinary aircraft for doing that. He explained how the night fighters functioned and where they came from and how they tried to be invisible until you were dead and they liked shooting pilots because that was a good way of shooting down the aircraft at the same time. He talked about their guns. Those incredible anti-aircraft, anti-tank guns that were incredibly effective. It was extremely difficult once you got locked into the cones of the spotlights. The floodlights that they had. But corkscrew manoeuvres of various types could save the day if you were incredibly lucky. He talked about the extreme difficulty of actually hitting the target and sometimes you had to fly over more than once. In his citation for the DFC what they say in this this citation is, “This Canadian officer has now completed thirty four faultless attacks on enemy targets ranging from Germany to occupied Europe. He has consistently shown himself to be a pilot of great skill and has displayed high leadership qualities of courage and has been determined to press home his attack regardless of the opposition and has always been successful. His tenacity of purpose was magnificently displayed on his last sortie in August 1944 when on proceeding to the target an engine failed. He made no less than three runs over the target despite heavy flak to ensure that his bombs fell in the target area.” They go on to say, “On the ground as deputy flight commander he has shown willingness and enthusiasm which had been an inspiration to the whole squadron. For his determination and devotion to duty he is strongly recommended for the award of the DFC.” So he was explaining how all of this had to be perfect and he also explained this lack of moral fibre which he thought was part of the insanity of the Royal Air Force High Command most of whom had never actually flown in Bomber Command situations so they had no idea what was being experienced in these horrendous casualties of Bomber Command aircrew. He said that once a young pilot on one of his first sorties got out of that Lancaster totally traumatised, totally shaken to the core and the next night virtually at gunpoint he was put back into the cockpit of a Lancaster. The insanity was just overwhelming and of course for huge flights they flew in tight formation. This youngster completely lost his nerve, pulled forward his joystick, the Lancaster shot upwards and ripped out the belly of the one on top of it and in the ensuing chaos six Lancasters crashed because the Royal Air Force High Command had this insane policy of lack of moral fibre. He also talked about approaching the targets. The long flights into Germany. Some of these places were a long way away. It was freezing cold in the Lancaster except for the navigator who was sitting next to the heater and was at risk of being burned. He talked about how difficult it was to get out of a Lancaster if you are being shot down. He talked about how you had to be aware of all the other planes that you were flying with, of these night fighters, of the flak, of the guns. He had enormous respect for those 88 centimetre, millimetre anti-aircraft, anti-tank, he said those guns were incredibly effective. And how difficult it was to get into that target, to have your perfect timing and to make darned sure those bombs fell exactly where they were supposed to fall and not anywhere else. He talked about the incredible pressure that was on people within an aircrew and the camaraderie and he was one of those that agreed with Canada. A huge conflict between Canada and the United Kingdom and Bomber Command is Canada felt very strongly every person in that aircrew should be a commissioned officer. It was ridiculous that half of them were non-commissioned, and they were treated totally differently back at base and my father felt that very very strongly. That everything about that was wrong. He essentially said you had to keep total focus. You couldn’t let anything distract you because there were so many things happening at once you had to rely so heavily on the other people within your aircraft for what they saw, for how they described it in order to take evasive actions that would actually work and how the entire exercise was absolutely extraordinary. A nightmare that was virtually unimaginable.
DE: Thank you. I’m just struck. You just mentioned that that Canada was very keen on all aircrew being officers. So there was obviously strong support for the Royal Canadian Air Force and Bomber Command during the war. When, when did that support ebb away in your opinion?
RM: Well, that’s a really good question of how support fell away and by who and by where. Part of the problem was after the war we seemed to have this culture of not talking about the war very much. Canada is an unusual country because it’s both French and English and this country almost split in half in the First World War on the whole issue when conscription came up in World War One. They had a referendum where English Canadians were about ninety percent in favour and French Canadians were about ninety percent opposed and it was catastrophic. Our Prime Minister in World War Two, William Lyon Mackenzie King was really determined that was not going to happen a second time. Now, if somebody was conscripted they never had to leave Canada. They were actually called zombies but in both wars they did have to get into some element of conscription towards the end of the war to at least free up volunteers that were doing things in Canada to get them over to the front. But it raises a very very important point that isn’t well understood and that is William Lyon Mackenzie King, the longest serving Canadian Prime Minister first got elected Prime Minister in 1921, was out of office for five years during the Great Depression so he never had to take responsibility for it and then resigned in November of 1948 after becoming very sick at a Commonwealth Conference in London where King George the 6th, Nehru, Smuts, Jan Smuts from South Africa and other people came to his bedside to say their farewells. Mackenzie King had known Churchill since 1900 when they had more or less equivalent positions in their respective governments. So he had known Churchill for forty years before Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940. They were born just three weeks apart so these men were essentially exactly the same age. They were both great leaders in their own way but Mackenzie King was a virtually invisible leader whereas Churchill was the exact reverse. He loved the limelight. He loved the spotlight. So they functioned well together in that regard. But Mackenzie King entered the Second World War absolutely determined this was not going to be a rerun of the First World War and slaughters over battles like Vimy Ridge. That this was not going to happen. And he recognised the only way we could avoid a rerun of World War One is we had to take control of the air. Mackenzie King was absolutely definite we had to take control of the air and his theory was the only way we’re going to take control of the air is by having the world’s finest aircrew. And so in December of 1939 Australia, Canada, Britain and New Zealand signed an agreement in Ottawa creating the Commonwealth Air Training Plan which trained about a hundred and thirty one thousand of the world’s finest aircrew. The United Kingdom put fifty four million dollars in to that and also about a hundred and sixty million dollars in used equipment that was used for training purposes. Australia which only had about five and a half million people put in sixty eight million and New Zealand which probably only had about a million people put in forty five million dollars. Canada with nine and a half million people put in one point six billion dollars into that training programme to create the world’s finest aircrew and it was very much that way in the war itself as well. Canada’s support of the Bomber Command was rock solid. From January 1st 1943, we got our own bomber group. Bomber Group 6 but the majority of Canadians were flying in the other squadrons like my dad. They were all seconded by the Royal Canadian Air Force to the Royal Air Force. Now, two things happened after the war. The first one is of course that Mackenzie King resigned in November of 1948 and was dead in July of 1950. But he never was one to rally the flag much anyway. He never made speeches people could remember except maybe his most famous speech because it was the most decisive issue in Canada and that was the possibility of conscription. Mackenzie King’s position on conscription was conscription if necessary but not necessarily conscription. And that was probably the most famous speech he ever made but it held the whole country together. But he died and he was replaced by Louis St Laurent from Quebec City, a French Canadian and the French had a very different attitude towards the war. And then he was defeated by 1957 by John Diefenbaker, the first Prime Minister of Canada that was neither English nor French but he was regarded by the establishment as very outsider. Heavily heavily criticized. He may be the only honorary member of Bomber Command Association. He was definitely that. But then after that we got into Pearson who got the Nobel Peace Prize and then we got into Trudeau who amalgamated the armed forces and virtually destroyed them in the process. So other than Diefenbaker right from the end of the war there was nobody in Canada to speak up for Bomber Command. And in 1968 they actually amalgamated the Army, the Navy and the Air Force into one unit. We’re the only Navy in the world that didn’t even have the word Navy in its name. So there was never anyone to kind of speak up for Bomber Command. It was never talked about much and then we get this scandalous CBC and National Film Board January 1992 deal which just ripped Bomber Command to shreds. But we didn’t have any national leader that really spoke up for it and it just sort of fell into the mists of confusion and misinformation.
DE: Thanks. I mean, you said about your father’s role in, as an instructor and you’ve hinted at the importance of Canada to aircrew training. What happened to all the heritage? I mean there are hundreds of old airfields where training took place. Are they, are they not remembered or are they not memorialised?
RM: Most of them just went into total disrepair. Just got completely grown over. The whole situation in Nanton, Alberta it’s a little tiny town of three thousand people it is almost unique. Everything just sort of, just somehow ceased to exist. There was no effort really to maintain anything other than the fact that the Lancaster somehow had a very distinctive hold on the Canadian population. And now the city of Toronto last Fall has given its Lancaster to the city of Victoria in British Columbia and I’m in continuous communication with the people there who are rebuilding it. British Columbia finally has a Lancaster again after decades. The Lancaster has been the one reminder of the war that resonates very very powerfully with Canadians. But virtually everything else just simply evaporated. I mean our National Bomber Command should not be in Nanton, Alberta. It should be on Wellington Street in Ottawa across from the Parliament Buildings. That’s where it should be. Our remembrance is terrible. Now, to its credit the government of Canada at least on its website, if anybody ever actually looks at the website, the Governor, this is what Canada says on the internet. The heading is, “Canadians in Bomber Command.” Canada states, “The efforts of the approximately fifty thousand Canadians who served with the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Air Force in Bomber Command operations over occupied Europe was one of our country’s most significant contributions during the Second World War. The men who served in Bomber Command faced some of the most difficult odds of anyone fighting in the war. For much of the conflict the regular duration for a tour of duty was thirty combat sorties. The risk was so high however that almost half of all aircrew never made it to the end of their tour. Despite the heavy losses Bomber Command was able to maintain a steady stream of aircraft flying over U-boat bases, docks, railways and industrial cities in Germany as well as enemy targets in occupied Europe.” That’s what the government of Canada says.
DE: That’s pretty good I think.
RM: But nobody knows they say that on the internet but even I was astonished when I saw it there. And then the Canada Bomber Command Memorial says, “The bomber offensive mounted by the Commonwealth countries during the Second World War,’ notice they’re actually focussed on the Commonwealth countries and whatever monuments you do find in Canada it’s always talking about the Commonwealth countries has been described as, “The most gruelling and continuous operation of war ever waged. It lasted for some two thousand days. Bomber Command until the tide turned offered the only weapon capable of waging war against Hitler’s European fortress and then it concludes saying Bomber Command’s successes were purchased at a terrible cost. Of the volunteers who flew,” over fifty five thousand were Canadian err, “Fifty five thousand were killed and almost eleven thousand of these were Canadians.” And that’s in Nanton, Alberta. So yeah, the official statement of the government of Canada actually catches people by surprise. I’ve done a number of major speeches now in the last few months in Canada and every time I read that everyone is very surprised. But essentially our government since the war have not been supportive of the military. Most of them are totally focussed on electoral situations in Quebec. Quebec does not like being reminded of the war. And we have just been sitting ducks for things such as that documentary and that War Museum. I think in a single sentence my friend, Brother Maximus said, ‘Regarding Bomber Command Canadians have become a people who are forgetful, ungrateful and easily deceived.’ And I think that’s precisely what’s happened.
DE: Ok. I think Roddy unless you have anything else to add we’ll leave that there. That was just over an hour. Thank you very much.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Roddy MacKenzie
Creator
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Dan Ellin
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2019-05-09
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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AMacKenzieR190509
Type
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Sound
Format
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01:01:31 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Roddy MacKenzie’s father, Roland, joined the Canadian Royal Air Force in 1942. He trained as a pilot and worked as an instructor in Canada before being posted to RAF Kirmington, where he joined 166 Squadron and received the Distinguished Flying Cross for completing thirty-four operations between April and August 1944. Born in 1948, Roddy grew up with little knowledge of his father’s wartime role. He describes a rare encounter in 1985 when, after sitting in a Lancaster together, Roland opened up about his time as a pilot. He conveyed his respect for flight instructors, the difficulties aircrew faced during operations, and the dangerous consequences that lack of moral fibre caused. In 2017, Roddy met with his uncle to learn more about his father, who died in 1991. Upon hearing a pre-war description that was inconsistent with his own experiences, he postulates that Roland had been traumatised by his service in Bomber Command, thereby explaining Roddy’s struggle to connect with his father. Roddy expresses his opinion regarding the mistreatment of Bomber Command in Canada, compares this to remembrance in Australia, and cites the negative media portrayals that have tainted national memory. He suggests that as discussions are either heavily critical or romanticised, society lacks an understanding of Bomber Command’s contribution to the outcome of the war. In 2018, Roddy visited RAF Kirmington to attended a ceremony to honour 166 Squadron as the official representative for Canada, which introduced several new contacts that allowed him to conduct further research.
Contributor
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Tilly Foster
Julie Williams
Coverage
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Second generation
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Canada
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1943
1944
2017
1991
2018
Language
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eng
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
166 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
Distinguished Flying Cross
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
military service conditions
perception of bombing war
pilot
RAF Kirmington
training
-
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1302/17900/AMayhillRD190307.1.mp3
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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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Mayhill, Ron
Ronald Desmond Mayhill
R D Mayhill
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interviews with Ron Mayhill (b. 1924). He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 75 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-03-07
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Mayhill, RD
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
GT: This is Thursday the 7th of March 2019 and I am at the apartment home of Mr Ron Desmond Mayhill, DFC in Auckland, New Zealand, born 6 February 1924 in Auckland, New Zealand. Ron joined the Air Training Corps in 1941 and the RNZAF in 1942. He began his training in the Manucau and Rotorua area, then off to Canada and then the United Kingdom by the end of 1943. After several UK bases, he arrived at Westcott 11 OTU then Chedburgh at 1653 Occupational Conversion Unit, flying Stirlings and then to Feltwell number three Lancaster Finishing School, before his operational posting to 75 New Zealand Squadron RAF, at Mepal, Cambridgeshire flying Lancaster Mark 3s. Ron completed twenty seven wartime operations before being severely wounded on the twenty seventh trip and was awarded an immediate DFC, Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions on that day. Ron, thank you for allowing me to interview you for the IBCC Archives, so please begin by telling me why and how you joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force.
RM: Yes, I was at school before the war broke out. This war broke out in my first few years at school, at the at the secondary school and of course we were all thinking about war, especially as the headmaster would read out the names of old boys who had just died, some I knew, prefects. 1941, Air Training Corps started up and I was attracted to that, I liked the idea of flying. Of course in those days people were still thinking of trenches and marching in World War One: that was in the minds of many, many people. The air force was new and also there were opportunities, as we found out as we started training. Left school in ’41 and automatically went into the air force ‘42. We were called Blue Awkwards by the army particularly, because we were “precious” they thought, we had a very smooth run in to the air force, a fast track. So, at the age of eighteen, I went into the cab at Seagrove ADU, Aerodrome Defence Unit on the Manucau harbour. It was glorious fun for us. We were school kids, well I was, although some had left school a few years. We had assignments to do at night, I found them easy having just left school and I had to admire a lot of those chaps who had left school quite a few years and they really had to work, and work, and work to get through, and we helped them. We moved on Rotorua ITW, Initial Training Wing. We were really put through it, physically, psychologically, they tried to persuade me not to join the aircrew. And we were in decompression chambers, we had a lot of tests, quite severe tests and a lot of the guys missed out, a lot of my friends missed out of aircrew. Even things like colour-blindness, you’d miss out. From ITW we went off to overseas, I was on the Matsonia, one of the Matson Lines of course. Going up the gang plank with a kitbag on my shoulder we were welcomed by tough looking Yanks, lining the rails: ‘you’ll be sorry, you’ll be sorry, you’ll be sorry!’ I can still hear those shouts, and they were tough boys. They had knives on their belts, we were warned not to go on the upper decks at night. And they were pretty tough. They had boxing, in those days the blacks, they weren’t called blacks in those days, they tied their legs, two of them together, put them in the ring and they just swung blindly to hit each other. The crowd thought it was great fun. But there were some lovely things too on the ship. I can always remember one of our boys playing lovely songs on the clarinet and I still remember the flying fish. Mind you, crossing the line was rather tough too, those Yanks had their money’s worth. After beating us up with hoses and brooms, we slithered up and down the decks. We had to meet the King Neptune and had to choose the physician or the surgeon. Now I didn’t like the surgeon much because the chaps had their hair cut on the centre shaved one side and the hair long on the other side, so I took my medicine and then I wondered whether I should have. It was a tumbler full of ink and vinegar and it had a physical effect on me which was coloured green for one or two months afterwards. I don’t think my kidneys liked it very much. Then to Canada. That was, that was a wonderful experience. We went ice skating, never ice skating in my life, but we fell over all the time and every time you fell over a pretty girl would pick us up: we fell over lots of times. Canada was great. We were flying on Boligbrokes, which were Blenheims, Ansons and you couldn’t go wrong in Canada, because all the roads went east/west or north/south, grid fashion and the railways went east/west. Every railway station had its name on the place [unclear] it was very hard to get lost and the weather was great. It was pretty cold in Winnipeg, it was fifteen degrees below zero one day and your ears would freeze in about three minutes and very painful getting the, the skin come off and new skin growing. But we enjoyed Canada. We had leave and I thought I was quite rich having a hundred dollars, going across to New York my final leave before I went across the Atlantic. I ran out of money one day, but I was lucky enough to know where to go and I was put up with a millionaire in New Jersey and that was an experience too. We went from Halifax on the Queen Mary. The Queen Mary went alone, not in convoy because it was so fast. But apparently a cruiser, American cruiser, got in its road and went over the top of the cruiser which sank of course. So the Queen Mary had a list, I mentioned that in my letter home, but the censors cut out the bits. We arrived at Greenock on the Clyde after a big dash across the Atlantic - Hitler had offered Iron Crosses to anybody who could sink that ship - and it lasted the whole war, it was very fast. We were in blackout trains, on our way south to Brighton, our holding station, and luckily for us, we thought, there was an air raid so we were stuck in London peeping at the blackout blinds in the carriage, looking at the searchlights, hearing the bangs of bombs, we thought it was great fun, very exciting: mind you we were only eighteen, nineteen. We were kept in Brighton for a while, in hotels, wating for our turn to go to a station. Occasionally a daring Me110 would come in, use machine guns on the windows of the hotels, we had to duck down. The beaches were full of land mines and a few of those exploded and pebbles shot through our windows. We were sent to AFU West Freugh which was near Stranraer, the port for Ireland. We were flying Ansons and we were bombing using infra-red camera, and a white spot would appear on the photograph at Conwy in Wales, Ronaldsway in Isle of Man and so on.
GT: Ron, just for the record, that you sir, you joined the RNZAF as an air bomber.
RM: I joined, I don’t know what I was going to be, as a pilot, I thought we’d all be fighter pilots cause those were the days of Battle of Britain. It wasn’t to be, they didn’t want fighter pilots, they wanted bombers, bomber crews and I was on a composite course, even though I said I wanted to be a pilot in the Bomber Command, they didn’t want me as a pilot, and I was put as an observer, a new category. In those days the bombing was not accurate. Mind you the navigation aids were very, very poor and bombs were spread round the country, and a lot of us were put as bomb aimers. In Canada we didn’t get a B for bomb aimer, we got an O observer because we’d done navigation courses.
GT: That was your brevet you’re talking. You’re talking about your brevet.
RM: I was on the Milton Ontario navigation course and we flew Ansons up the Lawrence river to St John and we couldn’t understand what was going on, everybody spoke French, everything was written in French, the shops all spoke French - we were in France and that was exciting too. Anyway, jumping across to Britain, we finished our course at AFU and then we were sent to Number 11 OTU Westcott where a lot of New Zealanders had gone through. We were on Wellingtons at that stage, they were great little planes, well fairly big we thought too. We had ten new crews and we crewed up which was an amazing business. We were put in a hangar and after a little speech we were told we had a couple of hours to crew up. Anybody not crewed up in two hours would be put in a crew. Our crew was young. I knew the navigator from Seagrove, way back in New Zealand. He was just turned nineteen, and I was just turned nineteen so we got a pilot who was just turned nineteen, or was he twenty. We had a, an air gunner who was very good, but after a while he said I think you’re too young for me, I want a bit of a lark on leave, I don’t have a lark with you, so he pulled out and we lost our other gunner as well. Next we were moved on to HCU Chedburgh on Stirlings and there we had to pick up two gunners and the two we were given were identical twins which was most unusual because even brothers were not supposed to fly together, they’d separate them. They were so identical we couldn’t tell them apart, although the navigator could because he was going to be a dentist and he could tell by their teeth, so we made one wear a pocket knife on his belt. So there’s Willy and Henry and they came from San Paulo, Brazil, which again was most unusual. They were of Scottish background though, their father had worked in San Paulo. From Stirlings, which are huge aircraft we moved on to LFS Lanc Finishing School on to Lancasters: they were beautiful aircraft. Everybody liked the Lancaster, they were so easy to fly. There were no problems with the Lancaster: they reckoned they could overshoot on two engines and land on one engine if they had to, I don’t know that’s right or not, but that’s what they told us. After a short course there and lots of fun on the Lancaster we moved on to 75 New Zealand Squadron. We were asked whether we wanted to join that squadron, I wanted to I think most of the rest of the crew wanted to join as well. Was some beginning, was about two days after D-Day and three crews had finished their tour of thirty ops and I think it was the first time crews had finished a tour at that stage of the war for about three months so we were realising that the war was really on and not just as much fun as we thought it was. We trained, we were accepted. One interesting thing, our pilot is supposed to do a second dickie, that is a trip in the right hand seat before he takes his crew on an operation, but we were called off to pick up a new aircraft at our headquarter station at Westbridge, which we did and then to our horror we found the crew that Jake was supposed to fly with were missing, so he would have been missing.
GT: Who was your skipper? What was his name?
RM: John Aitken. His initials were JK so he was always Jake. Our wireless operator had been best man at a wedding and that poor feller went missing on that trip too, he’d only been married about three weeks so the war was real. We did our first operation, which was a learning experience. Everything went very well until we got close to the target, then everything started to happen at once. There was a jolting of the aircraft, so close to us at night time of course, no lights, dodging aircraft, dodging shells, taking your turn to bomb, the flak, the searchlights, quite a memorable experience. A lot of crews went missing on their first five operations through lack of experience. So we did our best. Our crew by the way, seven of us, the oldest was twenty, lots of people were eighteen, nineteen and twenty, lots of aircrew, but we were the only crew I’ve ever heard of, all seven were under twenty, were under twenty one.
GT: Ron, you had already had a crash before you arrived on squadron. What was that about?
RM: Yes, OTU Westcott, we found that pretty tough going. We lost four crews by the way, through inexperience and through bad luck. In fact we had a very dicey one. We took off from Oakley, which is a satellite, flew towards Brill Hill and I saw John place his feet on the wheel and press. I yelled, ‘what are you doing?’ He said, ‘put your feet up too!’ So we both pushed on the wheel to try and get the nose down, but the nose was up too high and the airspeed was coming down. We staggered and this red light of Brill Hill got closer and closer, we couldn’t go any faster cause we were, the angle of attack was too high, then John suddenly realised he had to put the wheel, put us nose heavy and we staggered across very, very low and he said to me later on, the trim wheel, there’s a knob at the top, that shows as right, and he had, on checks, he touched the knob at the top, was right, he didn’t know it had been turned three sixty degrees putting it tail heavy. That’s the sort of thing that happened. I can remember another incident where oil pressures and temperatures were all wrong, so our screen engineer or screen pilot just got a screwdriver out and altered the clock and said that’ll be right, so some poor chaps in the aircraft after us’d also have oil and pressure problems. I don’t know, but at squadron level things were very efficient and we got into the routine: going down for breakfast in the mess. And I was an officer and so was John and so was the navigator Dunc, we had a wonderful time in the officers mess, there were so many young ones, there was a competitive spirit: there was table tennis, there was shove ha’penny and so on, darts. We also had mess parties when nothing was doing, always led by the Wing Commander, jackets inside out so no rank, trousers rolled up to the knees, all singing air force songs, the words were pretty shocking but we didn’t worry about the words, in out the windows, over the top of the piano, thumping on the floor under the tables, all doing follow the leader, all singing. There was a wonderful spirit on the squadron. And of course on ops people go missing and when you’d come back from a trip, you’re being debriefed, you look up at the board, can see the words overdue, landed was good, landed, landed, overdue and if you’re one of the last to be finished with the intelligence officers it could be missing. Actually we were reported missing once, because we were overdue. Ten and a half hours, across Denmark, across Sweden – which was neutral - to Gydinia which is near Danzig, laying mines. We had to go over Hell. Hell was the naval base, and they gave us hell. We were coned with searchlights, there was flak – a lot of it - and John, the pilot, thought we must have been holed by the flak, we couldn’t have lasted that long, so he and the engineer organised, they cut down the speed, they were a bit worried about the motors, didn’t do much good to them at our speed, so we came home slower and that’s why the trip was ten hours thirty and we were a bit overdue. Well, I still remember some of those ops, vividly, Do you want me to go on Glen? Russelsheim, which is on the Main river, we were going after submarine parts, delicate instruments, gyroscopes and so on. We were in the second wave, so ten minutes from the target which is about thirty three miles - we dealt in miles in those days - there was a glow, a yellow glow ahead, had to be the target, so for ten minutes we were flying along this eerie, you know, corridor, there were planes up high dropping parachute flares which fluttered down slowly, turning everything yellow, ever so many slim black blips around us, they were the bombers, keeping the same height, same speed, same direction. The little black dots which were darted all over the place, they’d be enemy fighters, there were lots of exchanges of fire, I could see necklaces of tracer, the red flashes amongst the fight as the fighters sprayed the bombers and the bombers returned the fire. As we got closer and closer, we got into the searchlights, forest of them waving very deadly and then they would catch on to a plane, cone it, especially the master cone which would be a pale colour by radar and the poor aircraft would flutter all over the place up and down and sideways, try to get escape. Very often it caught fire and went down slowly, occasionally there was a bang in the sky, a bright light and then nothing. By this time the flak was pretty heavy too. The flak was our height, they had us on radar. The black grey parts with reddish bits in it, they were really [emphasis] dangerous, red hot metal was flying – shrapnel. The bigger white clouds, they were nothing to worry about, they were spent, just flak clouds. That was thick, the searchlights were heavy, the fighters were there, on the ground already there were pools of fire, and the pools were getting bigger and bigger, lakes of fire: the city was burning. Flak, the flak was flashing in all directions, no pattern to it, they were sparks. The lines of white lights they were the sticks of bombs dropping. Then there was the photoflashes. All the aircraft dropped a photoflash, and you had to do a straight and level, say, we had to do thirty five seconds after the bombing straight and level which was not very good because the fighters were active, and then our flash would go off, to record our aiming point. We could see buildings, the shapes of buildings in those flashes, and black lines which were streets. It was a kaleidoscope of, of action and colour. Meanwhile the Pathfinders were dropping TIs – Target Indicators – the whole world would go red and then the Master Bomber might say, we are all bombing five miles short, next wave drop your greens two seconds later. So the greens would come on, the whole world would go green. There was certainly action, things I will just never forget. I was fascinated at this kaleidoscope, I stuck my eyes on the window after doing my own bombing, waiting for the photoflash, I couldn’t leave it alone, I just watched and watched. It was awesome. A lot of a death and destruction, mind you we couldn’t see anybody dying, we couldn’t see anybody getting hurt or buildings getting destroyed. We were remote up here and it was fascinating, I’d never seen anything like it. And finally, we could turn away the camera told me that the photoflash had gone off, we turned off and I was still watching out of the side window at the target and we got into friendly darkness, which was relief in a way I suppose. Fear, fright, of course fear is natural, but we had to do our duty, we couldn’t let our crew down and we had to suppress fear and duty would win. I suppose you could call that courage if you like, but we got used to it and we were young, we were so lucky. I never lost a night’s sleep over worrying, actually not, in my later years again I‘ve never lost a night’s sleep my whole life about bombing cities. These days there are lots of critics because we were aerial bombing, we were bombing the coloured Pathfinder flares. Industries of course were scattered right through a city, and around industries there were lots of workers’ homes. And a lot of workers would be working in transport centres and we bombed transport centres. Yes, war is horrifying, but once you’re in to a war, you’ve got to win it, and that was one war which had to be fought. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t politics. Hitler and his gang of Nazis, you know, very, very horrifying story, concentration camps, the Jewish camps. These memories are quite vivid still. I could tell you about Kiel, the naval base, again I remember that. Our skipper, John Aitken was a very conscientious pilot, one trip, it was Beauvoir, I remember that because was, in French a good look, there’s a lot of cloud around so the Master Bomber over the mic would tell us to orbit port, which we did, and then bomb by any means possible. And that to John was the dive spiralling down to the ground. We went tail back, nose first, right down and the cloud broke at about two thousand feet above the ground and I had only seconds to give some instructions. We bombed the target but a stick of bombs crossed us as we’re trying to bomb, and it’s true, I could see the writing on the bomb, the number. I was too shocked with fright to record it, and the stick of bombs missed both engines, crossed the wing; the crew were shouting by this the time, the two gunners and the wireless operator who was in the astrodome. We got out fast, we were very, very lucky. It made us think that aircraft below the bombers were very vulnerable. We had many, many things to think about. At Villiers-Bocage, at Normandy, again, there was cloud cover, we knew our own troops were very close, we had to be very accurate. We were told to orbit port - this was a daylight by the way - the Americans had immaculate formations; we were a shambles, we did night flying at daytime so the planes wobbling about all over the place, above us, below us, ever so close and we did this big whirl of shambles, I’ll never forget that. Then the clouds opened up a wee bit and we bombed very carefully so we wouldn’t bomb our troops, and my photograph showed two planes way down below that obviously been the Master Bomber and his deputy, they also took huge risks. Yes, we had frights, but being young, I think excitement took over from being scared and we were very busy. We were very busy from take off to when we came back; we never relaxed. Our crew had decided that getting through a tour was near impossible, that almost half were killed, went missing. We were doing our best to survive, by obeying our orders absolutely, not taking any unnecessary risks, by doing our duty as well as we could and if we were to go down, we would take a lot of Germans with us. By that time there was supreme realism, we just knew what the odds were. People had rituals, lucky charms, we had nothing like that. In fact one chap gave me a last letter to send home, I tried to say well I’m doing the same trips as you are! And I always felt fatalism like that leads to carelessness, you make your mind up you won’t survive. He went missing shortly after giving me the letter. We had no rituals except of course by the tail wheel before we got on to the aircraft to relieve ourselves: that was the only ritual we had. Bomber Command was a great life really: the chaps were wonderful, the food in the officers mess was wonderful, our leaves were wonderful. Lord Nuffield had paid for us to go to one of the top hotels and we went to St Ives, Cornwall. People in the streets would look at you, see your New Zealand flash, and the British are pretty reticent and conservative – ‘good on you, good on you, give them hell, give them hell!’ And every day in the newspapers, the headlines would be we bombed Berlin, we bombed Hamburg, we bombed Nuremburg, and so on and that brought the British morale up. There’s certainly no faint hearts in those days The British people were right behind us and we couldn’t understand after the war when there were so many critics of what we had done. We had the highest losses of any Allied military force. That only two per cent of bomber crew of the military forces, two per cent, we were given forty percent of Britain’s resources because Churchill, as part of his “few speech” had said looking around: the Navy can’t hit Germany, the Army which had now been evacuated, certainly couldn’t hit Germany, the fighters couldn’t hit Germany, the only way through must be Bomber Command bombing Germany. And that’s what we did and we, our bombing trips from the first day, September ‘39 to the end of the war in May 1945, people bring up names like Dresden. Yes, Dresden was awful, a lot of things about Dresden we don’t know, were never made public, but I think the people in charge knew a lot more than we did, we were just told it was going to be Dresden I wasn’t on that trip, I’d finished long before, but people tell me they’d never heard of Dresden china, they never heard of Dresden arts, it was just another trip, and that unfortunately tainted Bomber Command. People forgot that Japan had got far more Dresdens. They had a hundred Dresdens in Japan. Name a city: it was a Dresden. They firebombed, the superforts from Taiwan, and they did a great job, as we did in Bomber Command.
GT: Ron, 75 Squadron had a reputation. They had a very high loss rate across the five years of their bombing operations and 75 Squadron was nicknamed the chop squadron. Did you see or know of that on the squadron at the time you were there?
RM: Yes. A lot of people, lot of New Zealanders didn’t want to come on 75. They also felt if they went on an English squadron they’d be spoilt [unclear] and as a New Zealander – we were never called Kiwis by the way, you were Newzies, Aussies and Newzies - that’d be something unusual on an squadron they’d be invited to English homes. But I wanted to go to the 75. We were called the chop squadron, we knew that. Our Wing Commander pushed press on regardless and he himself lost an engine on take off and flew a whole trip on three engines, he certainly wasn’t a come back. And anybody who returned early through failures were really put on the mat, so we were almost scared to come back if intercom had gone, or a motor had gone, and that contributed, yes, to being a chop squadron.
GT: And you were on the squadron at the time 75 lost seven aircraft on one night.
RM: Correct, that was Hamburg, oil refinery in the Ruhr. We didn’t fly on that trip because John had a bad cold. We woke in the morning and there were about five beds missing from our hut. So we went outside, and there were the chaps coming outside from the next door neighbour’s hut and we’ve got five missing too and so on, right down the lines of our nissen huts. We knew something bad had happened. Seven aircraft went missing that night and some of them were very senior pilots, almost finished their tours. It was the highest loss any squadron during the war.
GT: From one sortie, from one raid.
RM: Yes. Now you think about the Battle of Britain, which lasted four or five months, they lost a lot of pilots, but Bomber Command lost on one night, Nuremburg actually, they lost about a hundred aircraft and it was about seven hundred people. A few escaped with parachute. There were second dickies on that trip. Yes Bomber Command lost in one night enormous number of people. 75, Hamburg was our bad night.
GT: Now towards, well, on your twenty seventh trip you, you were wounded. Can you describe and tell us about your experience there please?
RM: Yes, was an easy trip and we’d had some tough ones, in Normandy, flying bomb, we were coming in beautifully, bit of cloud around and I noticed flak on our port, coming towards us. I said to the pilot: ‘skipper there’s flak coming, our height, it’s probably radar, it’s coming closer, can you see it?’ He said, ‘yes, I see it.’ He didn’t move an inch, he kept on going towards the target, and inevitably we were engulfed [pause] and my eyes were pretty sore and I couldn’t see too well and I rubbed my face and it was prickly and blood, but nothing to do, I didn’t say anything, but the engineer caught an eye on me and he said I think the bomb aimer’s been hit and John immediately called, ‘are you all right?’ I said, ‘yes I’m okay.’ And we bombed the target but the bomb release wouldn’t work. I pressed and pressed, it wouldn’t work. So I said jettison bars across and of course the whole bomb load went at once, we’d overshot by that time and the plane of course lurched like anything, it jumped up with all the bombs releasing at once and then I looked over at my controls on the right hand side: [cough] it was smashed. No wonder the bomb sight wasn’t working. Later on I was given some of those broken parts of the bomb sight. I was lucky because my windows had been smashed of course and shrapnel had missed my face and destroyed the bomb sight [cough] and I was lying over my bomb sight, so that’s what happened and then the crew came to see me in hospital, and I think one of them said, a bit embarrassed, I think you’ve won the prize of the races, I said what’s that? He said you’ve got the DFC which was a big surprise to me.
GT: And the award for your DFC was an immediate?
RM: Yes, immediate for the action, from carrying on, 75 pressing on regardless. We had a song about pressing on regardless. We had songs about most things.
GT: So your, your eyes were affected by the splinters of the Perspex, and they still are?
RM: I couldn’t hear that.
GT: The Perspex had splintered into your eyes and you are still affected by that today.
RM: Yep. I had many operations in the Littleport hospital, and yes, I’ve got the dust of Perspex in my eyes still. It doesn’t seem to worry me. And a strange thing, they realised that Perspex was compatible with eyes, hence lenses, contact lenses fitted into eyes, they were Perspex.
GT: Were you a bit of guinea pig for these operations?
RM: Not meaning to. And they gave me penicillin, which was pretty scarce in those days, only just been discovered. My face was full of splinters, eyes unfortunately. I didn’t wear goggles. Perhaps I should have. I could tell you lots more about Dave Moriarty and so on.
GT: Your time then, so, John Aitken was your skipper.
RM: Yes.
GT: Where did Dave Moriarty come into the picture?
RM: It was the Caligny raid. Dave Moriarty was John Aitken’s best friend, on course, both pilots and during the raid on Caligny - it was a fantastic raid - we went over the Normandy beachhead, and I just couldn’t believe it, there was no water, just ship, ship, ship, ship, no enemy fighters, the Mulberry harbours, which were artificial harbours put out for bigger ships to come in. But boats were going to and fro, you couldn’t see much water, and we flew low level over the front and there were the Germans, there were tanks, things were flying at us, we saw the German helmets, they were ducking for cover, and a few seconds later we were over the British front line, with their tin hats. It was so thrilling, but unfortunately John Aitken said, something’s happened to so-and-so aircraft, that’s Dave, Dave Moriarty’s aircraft. So he’s most anxious to find out what happened to that aircraft. Speaking to the crew later on - and I was I was in the hospital with Dave – so I knew him pretty well at Littleport, he was, a bit of flak had gone through his eye and come out his head, but he was still able to see a little bit out of the one, the other eye, although it was weeping in sympathy. Ian Ward, the bomb aimer who was one of my best friends, he said they knew that Dave had been hit and Dave had said don’t tell the crew: they’ll get worried. So Ian and the engineer between them called airspeeds and heights and Dave more or less flew on the seat of his pants, without instruments. They talked, they didn’t want the crew to know, but Dave Moriarty was absolutely convinced he was going to try and land it. His eye was dangling out of, out of his head and somehow he landed it. Wasn’t a good landing they tell me, but it came down and the crew were safe. The crew idolised Dave, I met Dave Fox and so on, Bluey Montgom, we knew the crew very well, and they always called him skipper all the way through life until they died, till about eighty something.
GT: Dave Moriarty only died recently and Dave Fox is still alive, so.
RM: Great fellow. He got a conspicuously gallant medal which is the NCO equivalent of the DSO, would have got a VC for what he did.
GT: Only three were awarded that award, GSM, on 75 Squadron: he was one.
RM: That’s right and I knew all three. One was the bomb aimer who landed his plane, at Marsham Downs, that’s right, in Salisbury. He’d never done any pilot training but he got his crew down. Oh yes, the other was Sillwood.
GT: On D-Day Ron, when you flew over the beachheads, 75 Squadron did two raids that day. Were you on both of them or just one?
RM: Just one raid.
GT: Okay. Now did the RAF bombers bomb all of the beachheads or just some?
RM: We didn’t bomb the beachheads. In fact we were not allowed near the beachheads because the, they’d fire any plane that came close. Like navy, navy’d fire at everything in the air. We were allowed on the beachheads this time and they were told below, the Lancasters were coming across. No we never bombed the beachheads, but we bombed the fighting inland. Sad, but Villers-Bocage.
GT: There is a movie out shows B17s bombing the beachheads.
RM: I wouldn’t go much on the movies. They did Dambusters and the guy who took the part, he was about fifty. Richard Todd I think.
GT: So once you were wounded you obviously couldn’t go back on to operations so how long did you spend in hospital.
RM: NO. My eyes were still damaged, and I’d promised the doctor at Littleport I wouldn’t fly on ops again until he said it was okay. I went back several times to Littleport because I had pains in the eyes and had more operations. That happened several times.
GT: Did your crew carry on without you or did they finish?
RM: They carried on, and they said it was pretty tough going too. They only had three to go and the three of them were tough. Yes, I would have been very worried if anything happened to them on those three. I knew my crew very well. I knew them after the war. Of course John and Duncan and I, John lived in Gisborne, Duncan lived in Opunake the three of us would go and cray fishing on the coast, pig hunting, trout fishing. We had a glorious time until those two got married and it changed things. And then the others: I went to Britain ever so many times, I think about eighteen times I went to Britain after the war and I stayed with the twins in Norfolk quite often.
GT: Now what was their names again, Ron?
RM: Monk, William and Henry Monk. And then I, Gordon Grindley, I stayed with him. He was north of London, at St Albans and then at Watford. I knew them, they were all great chaps.
GT: So how did you come home from England after the war? By ship? And what ship?
RM: On the Andes. We took off from Southampton, we had Lincolns flying across to say goodbye to us. They were training for J Force at that time. We broke the record to Freemantle, Australia and then on to Melbourne, still a record for any ship, and then we broke the record across the Tasman for the slowest journey ever. It was Labour weekend and the races were on and the watersiders had refused to land us. So the boys had big signs up “Welcome Home, Except on Labour Day”. And the Minister of Defence - Jones was his name - the guys pelted him with eggs when he was making his speech of welcome. The captain was roaring: ‘stop that, stop that!’ We polite officers did nothing, just watched. And then we came into Littleton and the ship was too big to get into the harbour but somehow it got in, and then we went to Wellington and we were quite amazed at Britain, at the New Zealand shops: tin verandas, tin iron roofs, so different from Britain and we were a wee bit disappointed. Now, some people had great trouble settling down after the war. I had no trouble whatsoever: the war was over, I got on with life.
GT: Some have commented that, a lot of the ladies that were left back in New Zealand, and families, didn’t want to know what you did.
RM: That’s right.
GT: And when you guys came home, you just closed up in little boxes and just kept it all.
RM: Apparently some of the early guys who came home, some great fellows, [cough] started to say things like: oh, you don’t know what flak is, you don’t know what defence is, this is just easy, you should have seen what we went through in Europe. That was not at all [emphasis] popular, these guys were demoted; there was no place for them in RNZAF. You had to be very, very tactful but it was true, we lost more planes one night than all [emphasis] the planes, all the deaths in the air war, in the Pacific, but we didn’t want to remind people at home about that. One of the great guys was Dick Bolt, Dick was patron of the Bomber Command Association, I knew Dick very, very well, he was a modest guy. He knew what went on.
GT: Well the Ohakea air base has a very beautiful new building named in his honour.
RM: Have they?
GT: Yep, they’ve kept his name alive of the Royal New Zealand Air Force because he became Air Marshall.
RM: On our trip in 2012, I was president of the Bomber Command Association leading them our fellows, there were thirty one of us and we had a wonderful time. We saw the Queen open the, the statues at Green Park, the Bomber Command Memorial. We were in the front rows and we saw all the Royal Party arrive - there ever so many of them. There were very few RAF because the government still [emphasis] would not support Bomber Command. Churchill put his back to us. I was in the air, illegally by the way. I’d gone back to 75 Squadron as an instructor on the link trainer. I got a trip, a Manna trip dropping flour at Rotterdam because the Dutch were starving and we flew very low level across the water, across Holland, dropping our flour and I heard a broadcast, the wireless op had turned on the radio and Churchill, [in Churchill tine] ‘we must thank the boys of the fighter command, we must thank the boys of the navy,’ and they mentioned the Graf Spey. ‘We must thank our paratroops’ – think of the poor red devils, and so on and so on. He thanked the fighter for the Battle of Britain. He did not mention Bomber Command. It was official speech and apparently Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command, was angry and questioned him on this and Churchill was just evasive, a new election was coming up and there’s a whole civilian sympathy for the dead in the cities and Bomber Command, much to our amazement was in disgrace, after all we had done. We just couldn’t understand it. I can remember some, such wonderful fellows saying to me was it all in vain? I only wish they had lived long enough to see the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park. Strangely there was a pop singer, one of the Bee Gees, Robin somebody.
GT: Gibb.
RM: Started it all – he had a relative in Bomber Command, and then the Daily Express got on of it and another couple of newspapers, and millions went in. Now I went back, as I told you, in 2012 to see the wonderful memorial.
GT: I was there with you.
RM: And next day we went back, have a look and it was covered in flowers and covered in little notes pinned on it and the government says don’t do this, we’ve got to clean it up but it still happens. There are so many out there. Fifty five, fifty six thousand aircrew died in Bomber Command and there are so many uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, children, grandchildren still remember what happened. And every day, even today, they put notes and crosses on the Bomber Command Memorial. So despite politics, what those in charge condemned Bomber Command, we feel what we did was very, very important. I always remember an intelligence officer on our squadron, 75. Some of the boys were being disturbed, look we’re bombing cities, women and children. In fact one of the navigator’s hair was black; it turned white in two weeks. I’ll never forget that. The intelligence Officer had us all together and he said you boys are doing more than your share to end this war as quickly as possible and every day you shorten that war, you’re saving hundreds of lives. You will win respect in the end, you’re doing far more than your share. And that was very helpful. Years later after the war, I met, I’m trying to think of his name, the VC.
GT: Les Munro?
RM: The one who had the homes for the cancer society, he did a hundred ops, it’ll come to me, that’s silly. I heard him speak and he said - in New Zealand - I don’t want any questions about the war, I want to tell you about what we’re trying to do with these homes for incurable cancer people, but of course inevitably somebody did say, do you regret bombing cities? And I’ll always remember his words. Of course I do, I regret, I regret very much having to bomb the cities, But, he said, imagine if a gangster ever, terrorist came in the wings of this theatre now with a machine gun started spraying you with machine guns, what should I do? Just let you die? What we did was, I’d take out that gangster as quickly as possible, by any means possible, and that’s exactly what Bomber Command did. That was very impressive.
GT: It was the understanding of air power.
RM: Yeah. It’s very hard for people in post war to understand war. War is horrible, but you avoid it wherever possible. This is a war that could not be avoided: had to be fought.
GT:: One major thing that has consumed the Bomber Command and its history from World War Two story is that of the issuing, or the non issue, of medallic recognition for you chaps. You’ve been very vocal on that in the last while. What’s your feeling in reference to the Bomber Command Clasp and the lack of a medal for you guys.
RM: The Bomber Clasp was an insult. We deserved our own medal. Forty percent of resources went onto that. By the way, the VC was Leonard Cheshire. [Pause] Yes. I’ve lost my train of thought.
GT: Bomber Command Clasp and a medal for Bomber Command.
RM: Oh, the clasp. It wasn’t enough. We didn’t get our own war medal; just two percent doing all this to win the war. You know Bomber Command sank more submarines than the navy and right through they did so much, [pause] and the sacrifice was so big. They gave us a clasp after so many years, most of the chaps never got one of course. The French were better, they gave Legion of Honour, but that was a long time later too.
GT: And that’s been a big struggle, Legion of Honour too.
RM: Say slowly.
GT: The Legion of Honour has been a big struggle, and I have put up for six medals for six gentlemen and only three have received theirs, so that too is distinct, but for the Bomber Command Medal that should have been there are still people that are fighting that fight for you.
RM: I agree entirely. The Legion of Honour was narrow, for those who helped liberate France after D-Day and liberate Paris. But all those boys who died before D-Day, they were fighting to liberate France in a way too. That was a very narrow business. I was one of the lucky ones to get one but so many better ones than me missed out.
GT: Your Presidency as the Bomber Command New Zealand Association - how long were you President for and what was one of the good things that you come, that came from that?
RM: I was President for seven years. This 2012 trip to see the Memorial opened by the Queen, I had a ring on the telephone from Bunny Burrows who was the President, he said I’m getting old and I need some help and this is coming up would you help me? I said of course Bunny, I’ll help you any way I can. Next thing I knew Peter Wheeler had announced I was the vice-president and straight after that it was announced that I was now President.
GT: And for the record Mr Peter Wheeler is the Executive Officer for the New Zealand Bomber Command Association. He is not a veteran.
RM: Bunny thanked me, and I found that I was brand new at the job, and every time we did anything on that trip - and we went for two weeks - I had to make a speech and it had to be different things each time of course. That was quite a strain on me from enjoying the trip, but I struggled through. After that I found making speeches quite easy; I was well-practiced. As our Museum Commemoration services and then our newsletters, I always try to make my President’s remarks sincere and original.
GT: For the record there, the 2012 unveiling of the Green Park Memorial New Zealand, Australia and Canada supplied aircraft and there were veterans that were included to attend that memorial service. I assisted from the New Zealand Air Force side of things and the 75 Squadron way and Ron, you were part of a team of thirty one who went over, with the Chief of the New Zealand Air Force, Mr Peter Stockwell.
RM: Yes, Canadians treated them very well. They’d handfuls of little badges to give away for example, handfuls of them. I came home with I don’t know how many Canadian badges. The Australians didn’t do much until New Zealand moved, but fortunately for us our Prime Minister decided to help and I think Peter Jackson was also busy there too, the film maker. Yes. The Australians followed because New Zealand was doing something, we had a special aircraft to take us across. We had five stops, overnight stops, which I don’t know if that was good or not - we used to take off in the dark, early morning. That was wonderful in a way Darwin, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai and so on.
GT: It’s okay, you were flown by the New Zealand Air Force in its 757 with a VIP fit, and that was very fitting too.
RM: Yes, John Key the Prime Minister, I thanked him personally for that. Aussie followed us, the Canadians were in force and I said earlier, the poor Brits had to make their own way to London, pay their own fees, pay their own board because the Conservative Government didn’t like Bomber Command; that all came after Churchill. I know there’s lots of controversial things, but I think this International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln is on the right lines. The University at Lincoln only came into on the understanding it’ll be wide open to all points of view, not just supporting Bomber Command. Critics of Bomber Command are just as welcome and they of course are full of latest technical resources, recording resources and they put their hearts into it as well. It’s a wonderful business and I am lucky to have this chance to say something about my little part in the war and many, many others having the chance to say something and what a shame that majority will never get this chance.
GT: Ron, you are amongst some the few that produced your own story and you have named it “Bombs on Target”.
RM: Yes, I didn’t name it that. I had great trouble getting that done. I offered the manuscript to New Zealand. they wouldn’t touch it, but it was bombing cities so I went to Britain and unfortunately the firm that I had a contract with lost money and decided not to print so I had lawyers threatening them, to sue, it passed through about four or five hands until it was printed and it met a very good reception.
GT: So it was first published in 1991.
RM: Yes.
GT: By Patrick Stephens Limited and on the dust jacket it shows as Sixteen quid is the price.
RM: It took many years of research. People wondered where I got all the detail of each trip. I used the navigation logs from my navigator. I used my own Bomber Command H2S logs because I used to work H2S and I did a lot of interviews and a lot of reading research and I tried to make the book original, a bit different. I tried to break in every slang word we had, once only, not too often. I didn’t want wizard prang all the way through it, I didn’t want wilco out all the way through it. But they’re all in there, just glimpses these, and many people have written to me about it and I now know how Uncle Peter lived. It’s the first time I realised. My wife and I, Kath and I, went to the station many years later and we went to the local pub.
GT: Yes, this is RAF Mepal?
RM: No, was Witchford, no, it was Sutton, was Sutton, on the boundary, a lovely stocky church, Norman church and we met an old lady, when I say old, about my age, arranging flowers on the pews and I happened to mention that I was here in wartime and she said, ‘oh you were naughty boys,’ and I said, ‘naughty? I know my wife’s eyes rose with that, ‘yes, those songs you sang in the pub!’ And when I came to think of it, those songs, some of them weren’t very nice, but we just didn’t think of the words, we were just singing together, morale. I went to the Sutton pub another time. I said where’s all the guys’ black ties we had up there? We used to dip it into beer, suck his tie, try to chew it off, then cut it with scissors and put it up. We had about three or four hundred ties up there, most of the chaps dead. Oh, we got rid of that stuff years ago, when we took over the pub. Didn’t mean anything.
GT: Was that Chequers?
RM: Chequers pub, Sutton, you know the pub.
GT: Yes, been there. And then you had the Three Pickerels.
RM: That’s Mepal, that’s on the river. I still remember the pubs. Funny thing, I never drank my early days, even my wings party in Canada I never had a drink. It was at Westcott and the CFI – Chief Flying Instructor - was a chap called Fraser Baron, he looked as young as we were. And he’s sitting at the top table, got bit bored, and he saw us about same age and he came and sat with us and we thought this is wonderful and Fraser said what are you drinking, I said oh this orange. He said I’ll get you another orange and there’s a Wing Commander getting a lowly Pilot Officer an orange drink. And I liked it and said but what was in it, something else? Oh just a double gin! That was after about three trips for more oranges, and I realised that all these double gins hadn’t hurt me at all and quite liked them!
GT: Well, your book’s “Bombs On Target” and the dust jacket has the words “a compelling eyewitness account of Bomber Command operations” by Ron Mayhill, DFC and the front cover picture of a Lancaster which is a painting which you have hanging here in your apartment.
RM: It’s in my aisle there, yes.
GT: You and I have taken photographs in front of it before and it’s a fascinating painting.
RM: It’s a painting by an artist in Gisborne for John Aitken. He did several and John Aitken didn’t want them all and gave me one.
GT: And the number on the aircraft’s AA-U for Uncle.
RM: AA U Uncle, yes.
GT: And U Uncle was your aircraft?
RM: That was our aircraft.
GT: Fascinating.
RM: Crews don’t get their own aircraft until they’ve done a few ops. You know, gen crews. So you’ve got to earn your, and be lucky enough to do, say a dozen ops and then it’s your aircraft.
GT: Keep the same one, yeah. For the record here the ISBN number for those who will look for your book Ron, is 1-85260-274-0 published in 1991 and it is certainly a fantastic, fabulous read and I thoroughly recommend if someone can find a copy of that, of Ron’s book. Now Ron, you have been talking to me now for nearly an hour and a half and it’s been a fascinating discussion. You, is there anything else that you recall that you would like to tell about, your time after the war, what you did in New Zealand after?
RM: Yeah, I told you I settled down, no problem, I went to University, did a BA, then went overseas. Friday night the boys used to meet at a pubs in Auckland and suddenly one said let’s go to England. Yeah, we’ve not enough money to go to England, because in those days no airlines, just shipping and somebody said I think Shaw Saville got an office up here somewhere, lets go and have a chat. So I went up to Shaw Saville on the Friday night and the person in charge just said ah yes, so many people want to go, I’ve got a list of a couple of hundred want to have a trip, work their way, there’s not much chance. Anyway we insisted, he said, give me your addresses, your phone number and he said you got passports and actually we had passports because we had been talking about going across anyway, saving enough money. That was Friday. The next day, Saturday, urgent call we’ve got the Temeraire leaving and we’re three short and we can’t find the crew. He said come down, I can’t get people from all over the country, you’re just here locally, come down and you probably won’t sail because the police will round them up, they know where to look, Mark Leeson for example, a certain pub, they’ve probably found a girlfriend. And even when we’re out in the channel on the pilot boat we’re told he’ll probably take us off and the crew the police have found put back in. But no, we sailed! So I had to send a urgent telegram to my school saying I wouldn’t be there next day [cough] and -
GT: And you ended up in England a couple of weeks later.
RM: And then when we got there, Shaw Saville said by law we’ve got to repatriate you to where you came from, but I know you want to stay in the country a while, don’t you, but if you leave your name, we’ll take you home, we won’t pay you, you’ll work for nothing, ah, we’ll give you a shilling or something so you won’t be slave and we’ll take you home more or less when you want to go home. So I stayed almost two years! I did three marvellous trips, this is 1950, 51, 52. Three marvellous trips, one to Scandinavia: Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, north Germany, each, that was an amazing trip – by car by the way - and then another trip but unfortunately I had gone to hospital cause I’d been working below water line in the heat, I was scrubbing floors with net that was very inflammable in front of the furnaces, the bakehouse. I was a bakehouse scullion, unfortunately I lost the toss and everybody got up one so the bakehouse scullion became a cabin boy and the cabin boy became steward, I had signed on as a steward and I went through as a bakehouse scullion. Then went another trip, Norway, I went to Portugal, North Africa, Tangier, Spain of course, France [cough] and then a third trip east, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia. In those days Yugoslavia had lost more people per population than any country except Russia. Everything was upside down in Yugoslavia. Tito was in charge. And we took our car in. Some places there were no roads across a river, we had to go across the railway bridge, bumping over the sleepers, inevitably a train came, so we were half way across, we met the train, the train backed off for us so we could go bump across. The all the train people got out and produced some wine: we had a bit of a party. This sort of things happened. I’d sent for my maps. There was one big city on the way to Belgrade, so we stopped there, it was muddy, looking for petrol station. There’s no petrol station in the big city. The only vehicles around were army vehicles, so we followed one army vehicle to the military camp, stopped by the sentries and I said petrol, cause I couldn’t speak Yugoslav. I could say dobra, dobradan. Churchilliski, petrol, petrol. No petrol, no petrol. Touristi, touristi, englishki, englishki, touristi, petrol No petrol. Ring ring ring, telephono Tito, telephono Tito. That got them buzzing round! So they gave me some petrol - in kilogrammes. I don’t know what I paid for it. They weighed it out for me. But telephono Tito did the job. I would haved have rung him up too if I could have, and we got to Belgrade where we did find some petrol. We were stopped by military police long before we got there, time after time because they were difficult days. The Serbs hated the Croats, they hated the Muslims of Herzegovina, there were seven different parts to Yugoslavia, they hated each other. No wonder they, it fell apart. I go on and on, lots of things.
GT: Yes. Fascinating stories, Ron.
RM: That was one trip after the war. I went back so many times because my son had gone over there, married over there, had a grandson over there: was a good excuse to go across.
GT: Well Ron, you’ve explained, you’ve discussed, you have told me some fascinating information: your history, your time on, through Bomber Command, and it has been a fascinating listen and I hope and I am sure that many people who now listen to your interview with the IBCC they have now a first hand account from what you experienced over the target and from your injuries and from your training. So, and I have one memory of you, you and I have been friends for ten or twelve years now, and it was at John Aitken’s funeral, and the family very kindly put me up and we managed to drive across to Gisborne and I arrived ten minutes before the funeral and I went up on stage to give my eulogy for him and then you came in behind me to give your eulogy for John, and we shared a room that night at their family.
RM: That’s right.
GT: And you remember you said to me Sarge, if I snore, I was out of there. And I had to admit, yes sir!
RM: You remember.
GT: I remember and I have very much appreciated your friendship over the years, and Ron, it’s been an honour and a pleasure to record your service and history now for the IBBC for you. So I think we should wrap it up now, and we’ve done the paperwork, I’ve listened to your fascinating story and I hope that others can now read your story in “Bombs On Target”, and is there any last words, I’ll leave you to do the last word on the recording. Thank you Ron.
RM: Looking back on a long life, I’m now ninety five. I lost a lot of friends in the war, I still think of them and war is horrible, but it did a lot for me. I was made an officer, I realise I had responsibilities. The things, the discipline never hurt me, I think it made me philosophical about life. I think I gained a lot from my experiences which has lasted me all this life: try to see the funny side of things, putting up with things without complaining and meeting any ups and downs, vicissitudes of life, equally. Life’s not always smooth but you can face these things and I think the air force taught me that; the death of my friends taught me that. That’s all.
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 Ron Mayhill
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Glen Turner
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-03-07
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AMayhillRD190307, PMayhillRD1901
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:35:34 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Ron Mayhill was born in Auckland, New Zealand. He joined the Air Training Corp in 1941, automatically entered the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1942, trained as a bomb aimer in Canada, and travelled on the Queen Mary to the UK in 1943. While flying Wellingtons at the Operational Training Unit, RAF Westcott, Mayhill formed a crew with pilot Jake Aitken, but the gunners pulled out due to the youth of the other members. Despite the rarity of brothers flying together, identical twins, William and Henry Monk, joined them at RAF Chedburgh, where they flew Stirlings before converting to Lancasters at No.3 Lancaster Finishing School, RAF Feltwell. The crew joined 75 Squadron based at RAF Mepal, undertaking operations between September 1944 and May 1945. He recalls the fascinating view of yellow flares, anti-aircraft fire, and searchlights from his window over Russelsheim, narrowly avoiding bombs dropped from an aircraft above at Kiel, and a daylight operation to Villers-Bocage. On his twenty-seventh trip, Mayhill's eyes were wounded by perspex splinters and he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for successfully completing the operation. Despite the squadron’s reputation for heavy losses, he recalls rarely feeling nervous and enjoying downtime with his crew, whom he remained friendly with after the war. Finally, Mayhill describes his opinions regarding the poor treatment of Bomber Command and the process of writing his eye-witness account, 'Bombs on Target', published in 1991. He also expresses his approval of recent recognition and describes attending the Hyde Park memorial in 2012, as the President of New Zealand’s Bomber Command Association.
Contributor
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Tilly Foster
Anne-Marie Watson
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Suffolk
England--Norfolk
England--Cambridgeshire
Germany
Germany--Rüsselsheim
Germany--Kiel
France
France--Villers-Bocage (Calvados)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1991
2012
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
11 OTU
1653 HCU
75 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
Blenheim
bomb aimer
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
memorial
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
RAF Chedburgh
RAF Feltwell
RAF Mepal
RAF Westcott
searchlight
Stirling
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1414/28036/PWareingR16120001.2.jpg
6165a2c09a1e80cf9e4b460a5b138410
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1414/28036/PWareingR16120002.2.jpg
5fbdfac9e39f1d2c666adc9d17bc82b1
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
Wareing, Robert
R Wareing
Description
An account of the resource
258 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Robert Wareing DFC* (86325 Royal Air Force) and contains his flying logbooks, prisoner of war log book, memoirs, photographs, extensive personal and official correspondence, official documents, pilots/handling notes, decorations, mementos, uniform badges and buttons. He flew operations as a pilot with 106 Squadron. After a period of instructing he returned to operations on 582 Squadron but was shot down and became a prisoner of war.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Andrew Wareing 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
2016-10-05
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
Wareing, 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
Porcelain thimble
Description
An account of the resource
Thimble with '1941-1991, 50 years of Lancaster' on one side and painting of aircraft on the other.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Porcelain thimble
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Physical object
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PWareingR1612
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
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1991
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
Lancaster