1
25
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1253/16652/AHarrisJ190321.1.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
A name given to the resource
Harris, Jack
John Harris
J Harris
Description
An account of the resource
Three oral history interviews with Jack Harris (b. 1920). He served as a navigation instructor before flying operations with 550 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-01-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Harris, J
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PS: OK doke.
JH: In [pause] in October 1955 I became the commanding officer of 542 Squadron which was first based at Wyton, and then we moved to Weston Zoyland near Bridgwater in Somerset. And 542 Squadron was a special duty squadron. And during 1955 and 1956 both the Americans and the Russians were testing their atom and hydrogen bombs and the job of 542 Squadron was to fly in the areas of greatest radioactive fallout from these nuclear explosions and bring back samples to be sent to Harwell, the atomic weapons establishment where they could help determine the yield of the weapon and the trigger mechanism. We did the sampling by flying in the areas of greatest radioactive fallout, and when the Russians were testing their weapons up in Siberia we had to fly into the Arctic Circle, and fly in the area of fallout for about one hour at a time. And we used to have to, when the Russians were testing we were moved up to airfields in Scotland. Kinloss and Leuchars and we used to fly right up north of Iceland and into the arctic circle and spend about an hour sampling. We had to fly at forty seven thousand feet which is the upper limit of the earth’s atmosphere. Beyond forty seven thousand feet you get into the stratosphere. We had to sample in two ways. We had some metal gas bottles in the bomb bay, and there was a pumping mechanism to pump in air from the atmosphere outside into these gas bottles. The second way of sampling was on each wing tip of the Canberra we had a fitting which looked like a wing tip fuel tank. It was cylindrical but it was different. It had a nose opening which you could open which let the air into this container and inside we had metal baskets which contained special filter papers, and these filter papers trapped all the radioactive particles that, that were the result of the atom and hydrogen bomb explosions. So flying at forty seven thousand feet the air was very thin and you had to be very careful with your throttle movements, and very careful how you handled the aircraft. If you’d got an engine flame out we had to drop down to ten thousand feet before you could relight the engine. So it was quite a tricky job flying. Now, when the Americans were testing their nuclear weapons they were using a test site in the Nevada desert close to the Mexican border. When they were testing we sent a detachment of Canberras down to Gibraltar and they flew off south west and we monitored on a, on a latitude which was the same as, as Mexico really. So we brought all those samples back for Harwell. We used to have a Geiger counter in my office and the filter papers in the metal grid containers. When we put those on the scanner counter sometimes the reading would go off the clock, and we had to rush them up to Harwell and we had no protective clothing. We, we were handling them with our bare hands. We had no protective breathing apparatus so we, the cockpit was full of air from the outside. It was compressed to give a special altitude but it was still contaminated air you see. So I did these flights for fifteen months until the end of 1956 when I was promoted to wing commander and took another posting. But it caught up with me in 1991 when I had some problems passing blood in the urine and they did an ultrasound investigation on my kidneys and found a tumour in the left kidney. The National Health Service was extremely good. Within a fortnight of the ultrasound investigation I was having the operation in the Kent and Sussex Hospital. I walked into the hospital and walked out at the end [laughs] But Air Ministry admitted responsibility and they gave me a disability pension for the loss of that kidney and I’m still drawing that pension. And the other kidney has grown in size by twenty to twenty five percent to take up the load. Yeah. But I have to be careful not overload the kidney with a lot of alcohol, drink plenty of water and try and lead a fairly simple life you see. But there haven’t been any other problems since. The surviving kidney has kept me going. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: Yeah. Very good. You’re doing well.
JH: So that is 542 Squadron. Now, when the Americans were testing their atom and hydrogen bombs in South Pacific islands, 542 Squadron sent a detachment of four Canberras out to Australia to sample the fallout from those weapons. Yeah. So, so it was quite, quite a special job. So we’ll have a cup of tea now. Yeah.
PS: Yeah.
JH: A cup of coffee.
[recording paused]
JH: Well, on the 1st of January 1957 I was promoted to the rank of wing commander so I had to leave 542 Squadron, and I was posted to Air Ministry to head up a section in the Operational Requirements Branch and I was the head of R 2 which was responsible for writing the specifications for new transport aircraft and helicopters that were then about to come into the Royal Air Force. Up ‘til then the Royal Air Force had been mainly a fighter or bomber force with some resources devoted to Coastal Command, but now there was quite a big change and Transport Command was formed to fly the British Army to trouble spots where ever they might occur. Mainly in Africa but possibly in the Far East. And the requirement was to fly two thousand troops with their light vehicles like jeeps to air bases in Africa or the Far East where there might be some trouble erupting and so on. So I was responsible for writing the specifications for the Britannia which was a long range transport aircraft and could fly ninety or a hundred troops in, in one go and could transport about four jeeps, you see. And we also wrote specifications for the Argosy which was a medium range transport which would fly troops and equipment about, inside a theatre in Africa or in the Far East. We also wrote specifications for the twin Pioneer which was a very small aircraft that could move about fifteen or twenty people and we brought it. And then later we wrote the specification for the Short and Harland Belfast which was a strategic transport that could fly very long distances with lots of troops. Then we also wrote specifications for the Wessex and Belvedere helicopters. So the RAF was moving from a bomber and fighter force to a transport force. So that was quite an important change. In early 1960 I was posted to Germany where I became Wing Commander Operations at an airfield called Wildenrath, just west of the Rhine, and Wildenrath was a master diversion airfield which was open twenty four hours a day seven days a week. Always flying. It had two resident Canberra squadrons. One was a Canberra strike squadron which had the task of providing a quick reaction aircraft which was bombed up with a nuclear bomb and at ten minutes notice could take off and go to east Germany or Russia and bomb a pre-determined target. The bomb was provided by the Americans. So there were two American officers at Wildenrath and they had code words which authorised them to make the bomb live and, and, and let it go. We had code words to actually despatch the aircraft but the crew were pre-briefed on their targets. They sat in flying clothing with their helmets and everything else ready with them and when the alarm bell went they had to sprint out to the aircraft which was about a hundred yards away, start the engines, check everything, take off and go on this raid. And that was, that was the Cold War.
PS: Did they have to sit all the time? Every time they were on duty?
JH: No. They were pre-briefed on their targets but they, they could do other duties in the squadron but they couldn’t go away. They had to be handy to the aircraft, you see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: Right.
JH: The other squadron was a photographic reconnaissance squadron with Canberra PR7s. We had a communications squadron which was equipped with Pembrokes, a small transport aircraft and we had an Army Air Corps helicopter squadron on the airfield as well so it was quite a busy airfield. So I was at Wildenrath from about May 1960 to the end of ’62. And then I was posted to NATO Air Headquarters at Fontainebleau which was Allied Air Forces Central Europe and I was responsible for the photo reconnaissance squadrons flown by all RAF, Americans, Canadians, French, Belgian And Dutch. They were the tactical air forces and they had the job of, you know, doing reconnaissance of whatever was required. Battlefields or airfields or anything. So I was at Wildenrath, I was at Fontainebleau until July 1965 when I was posted back to Air Ministry to join the Manning Directorate and I was in charge of a branch which looked after the ground crew for all, all the ground trades in the RAF and we had to make sure that recruiting targets were set which would keep each speciality fully manned and make sure that the training facilities for them were there. And I was at Air Ministry until August 1967 when I finally retired from the Royal Air Force. So there we are.
PS: Right.
JH: So that’s it.
PS: Lovely.
JH: So 1940 to 1967.
PS: Yes.
JH: Twenty seven years of undetected crime. Yeah [laughs] So that’s it. That’s my story.
PS: That’s lovely.
JH: Yeah.
PS: It’s very very interesting.
JH: Yeah.
PS: And you must be very proud of it.
JH: Well, we were just doing a job. There were plenty of pilots, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it was a good life. There’s no doubt about it. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: You enjoyed it. That’s the main thing.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: When we originally started all this I found out that you were the secretary to the 550 Squadron Association.
JH: Yes.
PS: And you did tell me a little bit about that. Can you do that again for me so I’ve got it on this one?
JH: Yes. Well —
PS: You’ve got to click in haven’t you?
JH: After I’d retired you start a new —
PS: Life.
JH: Civilian job. And I didn’t spend any time going back to the wartime airfield or contacting other members of the squadron and then somebody in the Golf Club told me to join the Bomber Command Association and the RAF Aircrew Association. And they produced quarterly magazines and in these magazines there was quite a lot of talk about squadron reunions and it triggered off something in me, and in 1991 I contacted two or three former members of my Lancaster bomber squadron. 550 Squadron. They had a list of fifty or sixty contacts and their addresses, and in the Autumn of ’91 I set about forming the 550 Squadron and RAF North Killingholme Association. North Killingholme was our airfield. And it was very well received and in June 1992 I organised and presided over our first annual reunion which was at the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon.
PS: Yeah.
JH: And that went very well and the Association grew stronger and stronger, and it grew to a membership of about two hundred and fifty people. And even today grandchildren and children are joining. It’s amazing.
PS: Good. Yeah.
JH: Now, we had reunions at the old airfield North Killingholme. The first reunion North Killingholme was 1993 and the reunions are still going now. I shall go up there in July this year. I don’t run things or give the speeches now. I’ve handed over all that to other people. But the Association is still going very strongly.
PS: That’s good. Well done.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve written about eighty, eighty newsletters or something. Sent them around to the members. We used to do two or three newsletters a year. Yeah. So I’ve done all that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: You’ve done very well. Yeah.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: Because it’s not easy setting up something like that is it?
JH: Well —
PS: You had the start with a list but —
JH: You’ve got no idea how it’s going to go. And then when it takes off you just have to live with it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: Yeah. So —
JH: Yeah.
PS: So, did you do anything after you came out? You did some work, some charity work didn’t you after you came out of the Air Force?
JH: I joined a civilian industry based organisation called the British Hospitals Export Council which had been set up a couple of years before I joined by a chap who was a very able hospital administrator and he had done a two year job in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf setting up their health services.
PS: Gosh.
JH: And while he was there he found it very difficult to get the information he wanted about hospital equipment, and also hospital design and building and running and manning and everything. He found it very difficult. And when he came back to England, as a part time job he set this up and he ran it as honorary secretary for about eighteen months and then I came in to take over from him. Well, when I started, we had about twenty member companies and I built it up to over two hundred and fifty member companies and it, it flourished quite well. Yes.
PS: Good.
JH: We used to do [pause] British medical seminars and conferences abroad where a group of top English specialists would go out and talk, and alongside them there would be an exhibition.
PS: Yes.
JH: Of hospital and medical equipment and all the other services. Architects who designed hospitals, contractors who built hospitals, some companies just ran hospitals and could man them and so on. So that was all done alongside these British medical seminars and it was quite a successful formula. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: That was your expertise from sorting out transport.
JH: Yes.
PS: And things over the years in the Air Force.
JH: We did have some government help from the Board of Trade who were running export drives.
PS: Yes.
JH: And they could help us quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: So you —
JH: So that was my career. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: Yeah. So it all sort of slots in really doesn’t it?
JH: Yeah.
PS: Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
PS: Did you enjoy doing that as well?
JH: That’s right.
PS: Yeah.
JH: So when I left the RAF first of all I formed and expanded the British Hospitals Export Council, and then later it was the 550 Squadron Association. Yeah. So that’s two projects I started from scratch that came off. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: Well done. Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
PS: Well, thank you so much —
JH: Yeah. Well —
PS: For being so patient with me.
JH: It was a pleasure.
PS: It’s been really.
JH: Well, this is probably the last time.
PS: It is. Yes.
JH: We’ve got to the end. Yeah.
PS: We got to the end at last.
JH: Well, it’s lovely. I do admire you for doing the work. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
PS: Well, thank you very —
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Jack Harris. Three
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Patricia Selby
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-03-21
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHarrisJ190321
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:29:25 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Jack Harris resumes describing his post-war career in the Royal Air Force. In October 1955, he became the commanding officer of 542 Squadron, a special duties squadron responsible for sampling radioactive fallout produced by American and Soviet atom and hydrogen bomb tests. He describes the sampling process and the impact on his health in later life. In 1957 he was promoted to wing commander and produced specifications for new aircraft until he was posted to RAF Wildenrath in 1960. In 1962, he transferred to the NATO headquarters at Fontainebleau where he was responsible for the photo reconnaissance squadrons. He was posted back to the Air Ministry in July 1965 to join the Manning Directorate, where he remained until he retired in 1967 after twenty-seven years of service. Finally, he describes his role in the formation of the 550 Squadron Association and RAF North Killingholme Association and the organisation of their annual reunions. He also details his involvement in a civilian industry based organisation called the British Hospitals Export Council.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tilly Foster
Julie Williams
Steph Jackson
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Germany
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Somerset
Germany--Wassenberg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1955
1956
542 Squadron
550 Squadron
RAF North Killingholme
RAF Weston Zoyland
RAF Wyton
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1253/16650/PHarrisJ1901.2.jpg
37f8e76c3007a5907c8d5e5767aac5ec
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1253/16650/AHarrisJ190131.2.mp3
f2e60b853eb7f0eb7e4f2d66a84fd858
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Harris, Jack
John Harris
J Harris
Description
An account of the resource
Three oral history interviews with Jack Harris (b. 1920). He served as a navigation instructor before flying operations with 550 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-01-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Harris, J
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PS: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Patricia Selby. The interviewee is John Harris. The interview is taking place at [buzz] Tunbridge Wells [buzz] and the date is the 31st of January 2019 and it’s 10am. When were you born, John?
JH: I was born on the 21st of September 1920. I was born in Gillingham, Kent which at that time was the largest borough in Kent with a population of sixty thousand people who depended heavily on the Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham which was a very big employer, and there were also other army units at Old Brompton and other places in Chatham. I was born in very modest circumstances, I suppose. It was a traditional family residence with a front room which was kept under wraps Monday to Saturday and opened up on Sunday when relatives or friends came for tea and that was the big social point of the week. Yes. Very, very modest beginnings. And then when I was aged about four, my parents who had both been shop assistants decided to open up their own shop which was a confectionist and tobacco shop. And we moved to 465 Canterbury Street say when I was about three or four. I was still on a little tricycle and the garden path had to be widened slightly to take my tricycle. I remember that. Living as a small boy in a sweetshop was a mixed blessing [laughs] and it was easy to overdo the pleasures particularly as I soon found my way around the sweet shop. Where the best chocolates were kept and such. So I was brought up with a pretty sweet tooth. Yes. But anyway I went to Napier Road Elementary School at the age of five and stayed there until the age of ten when I got a scholarship to go to Gillingham County School for Boys in Third Avenue Gillingham, which was a fairly new school. It had probably been built four or five years before, and it had a school of about four hundred pupils. It had very big playing grounds with cricket pitches, rugby pitches and a hockey pitch and unusually it had its own swimming baths which was pretty small. About twenty yards. Twenty five yards long or so. But it was quite unusual for schools to have their own swimming pool. Yeah. So I [pause] stayed at the County School and took two exams in about 1935, and I was then aged fifteen. And at that time the government was very worried about the spread of venereal disease and they decided that students in the fifth form, who would be aged about fifteen, would be given talks or lectures on the dangers of venereal disease. And we were the first class to start this new instruction. The physics master gave the lesson. It was unfortunate because he had a slight stammer which was a legacy of the Great War. But his lecture was built around a series of photographs which he passed around for all the boys to see and these boys, these photographs showed up in considerable detail what could happen to your private parts if you caught gonorrhoea or syphilis and it wasn’t a terribly happy experience. And it had a very, very daunting effect on, on my life and I was a slow beginner. So that affected me quite a bit really. That you didn’t want to, to get involved with that sort of thing you see.
PS: Yeah.
JH: So it put a considerable break on my social activities with the other sex [laughs] But there we are. That was what the government wanted to do. And of course in a way their lesson got home because we were all pretty scared about the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. So when I was sixteen I passed the matriculation exam with quite good results. Distinction in maths and French. And I then sat the entrance exam for the Civil Service to become a Civil Service clerk. And there were exams held in every big city and I had to go up to London to the Civil Service premises at Burlington Gardens. And there in a big hall they’d assembled about two or three hundred desks and we all had to sit down and take this exam. They came around, put the question paper on your desk and then they said: ‘You can turn the paper over and you’ve got two hours to complete the paper.’ [laughs] Quite, quite, quite a stiff test. I mean you know it was pretty important and you could see the other two hundred and ninety nine you were competing with [laughs] Yes. But I managed to pass that exam. I also took the exam for the London County Council to be a clerk with them and passed that as well so I got jobs offered with both. But I accepted the job with the Civil Service as a clerk and started off in the Intelligence Department of the Air Ministry in, I think it was June or July 1936. You see. Yeah. Yeah. Because I, I had to wait for the inter-house cricket competition to be finished because I was the best batsman in our house cricket team. [laughs] So how little things influence things. But anyway I started work and they started me off in a section in air intelligence which dealt with security. Well, the word intelligence was pretty, sounded pretty well to a young boy, you know. And we were responsible for security in the Royal Air Force and we had contacts with MI5, the counter intelligence agency that rounded up foreign spies. The RAF liaison officer with the Secret Service was a friend of my boss in, in our department and he was always coming in once a week for a chat and so on. Not, not that he said anything of importance. It was just social chat, you know. But anyway [pause] I started that job, I think in 1937, and then when war broke out [pause] one Friday we were told to pack everything up and tie it up and label it and put it in desks, filing cabinets and cupboards. All these cupboards, cabinets and desks were labelled and so on. And war was declared on the Sunday morning and on the Friday afternoon we, we cleared up everything and put it in the cupboards and filing cabinets and we were given railway warrants to go on the Saturday to a school at Harrow and Willesden. This school had been evacuated. The children were all sent away to Devon, Cornwall, Wales and so on. That was a mass evacuation. So we arrived at this school. Our desks, cupboards and filing cabinets were in a classroom. Well, we were provided with a telephone. We were all there on the Sunday morning. We heard Neville Chamberlain declare war and about fifteen minutes later the air raid warden siren sounded and we trooped off into air raid shelters built in the playing fields. But of course nothing happened. It was a false alarm. So the Air Intelligence Department from Kingsway London had been evacuated to a school at Harrow in North London. Yeah. It was, it was, just a Grammar School. A secondary school like, like ours in Gillingham, you know. But I mean it was quite amazing how the move was done and the telephones were connected and working all, all within a twenty four or a thirty six hour period. In some ways it says quite a lot for the planning that was involved. Yeah. Yeah. We, we stayed at Harrow for about a month. And this was the period of the Phoney War. Nothing was happening and then they moved us back to central London. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I remember that, and although young men were conscripted for military service on their eighteenth birthday, I was exempt from conscription because I was in what was called a Reserved Occupation and if, if they thought the job you were doing there and then was more important to the war office, war effort then being in the army or the other services you got exemption from the call up. So I carried on as a Civil Service clerk. But then when Dunkirk came along in May and June 1940, the Civil Service bosses relaxed the rules and they said that young men like me could be released to join the services if you wanted to be aircrew or a glider pilot or a parachutist. So I applied to be aircrew straightaway and I went before an Aircrew Selection Board at Uxbridge and got through all that and they accepted me as a trainee pilot. This would be about July or August. [pause] Oh God, my memory’s failing me. God.
PS: Don’t worry.
JH: Yes. This would be about July 1940 but the RAF training machine was so overwhelmed with new people coming in, that they couldn’t accept me for two or three months and I had to wait until mid-October 1940 when I was sent down to Babbacombe on the outskirts of Torquay which was the Receiving Centre for new trainee pilots. And we went to Babbacombe. It was a Receiving Wing it was called and you were attested. You took the Oath of Allegiance and you got a service number and then we drew a uniform, an RAF uniform and we started introduction to RAF drill and early lectures on Royal Air Force law and so on. And we were only there for a fortnight when I was posted to Number 5 Initial Training Wing at Torquay where we were in a requisitioned hotel called the Elfordleigh. And there were three flights of students with fifty student pilots in each flight and we started off our pilot training with lectures in air navigation, meteorology, the principles of flight and beginning to be introduced to machine guns and how they worked and so on. And of course there was lots of drill involved and a certain amount of sport. That course lasted eight weeks and we finished just before Christmas 1940 and we were due to go on to an Elementary Flying Training School to start to learn flying Tiger Moths. But first of all it was winter time and all the RAF airfields then were grass airfields and in the winter they got too soft and boggy and couldn’t be used for flying. Also, the training machine was being overwhelmed by this new influx of would be pilots and there was no flying unit we could go to and they sent us to Paignton just to mark time, and waste time for two months until we could be sent away to start flying training. So I didn’t start my flying training until February 1941 when I was sent to Fairoaks near Woking to start to learn to fly on Tiger Moths. Fairoaks was a grass airfield. It was also belong to an aircraft factory in the corner of the airfield which was making certain planes. I can’t remember what they were, but anyway, anyway we started flying training in Tiger Moths. The instructor sat at the front. No. Sorry. The pupils sat in the front cockpit. The instructor was behind and the instructor gave you instructions with a gosport tube. He spoke down a tube which came in to your earphones and of course you started off with circuits and landings, learning to fly the thing and land it. To do local flying and then a little bit of cross country flying and that was it. We did about forty or fifty hours on Tiger Moths and then we were ready to go on to the next stage of flying training and I went up to a service flying training school at Grantham in May 1941 to learn to fly Oxfords which were a twin engine trainer. And again you did circuits and landings, local flying, you did formation flying, you did some cross country, you did some bombing exercises on a bombing range and you finished up by doing night flying. Grantham wasn’t a good airfield for night flying because the airfield was shaped like an inverted saucer and you couldn’t see the far end of the airfield. Also it was alongside a main road with telegraph poles and telegraph wires so it wasn’t good. So the night flying was meant to be done from a World War One grass airfield on the other side of Grantham which was called Harlaxton. But at the end of the runway, the end of the flare path at Harlaxton, there was a factory making twenty millimetre cannon for Spitfires and Hurricanes and it was a priority job to get these British fighters equipped with this twenty millimetre cannon and they were scared that if the flare path was laid out at Harlaxton it would attract German intruder bombers and the bombs could fall on the factory. So they stopped us flying from Harlaxton at night and we were sent up to Ingham just north of Lincoln which was not a proper airfield. There were no buildings of any sort. Just tents, telephone and slit trenches. But it was a grass airfield of course. A farmer’s field converted to an airfield, but you could lay out a portable flare path which gave you eight or nine hundred yard take-off and landing strip. So we went up to Ingham and my instructor did three or four dual circuits and landings with me at night. And then he got out and he said: ‘You’re on your own. Go and do your first solo night take-off and landing.’ So I taxied to the end of the flare path, got the green light and the Aldis lamp from the flare path controller who was at our end of the flare path and he gave me a steady green, so I opened the throttles and took off down this flare path. I’d got about two thirds of the way down this flare path when I noticed in the corner of my windscreen there was a reflection of five or six bright yellow flashes behind me. Well, I knew what they were. A German intruder bomber was dropping a stick of bombs along our flare path chasing me up the flare path. Well, I saw the flashes from the first five or six bombs. When the last two bombs burst, I heard the crump of the burst and got the push of the blast so it sort of helped me down the flare path. Anyway, I got into the air, climbed up to about forty or fifty feet, retracted the undercarriage, put out my navigation lights because I didn’t want the German bomber to pick me up and shoot me down. And I turned cross wind and looked back and our flare path had been turned out you see. It had been turned off. They had turned it off. In those days each RAF airfield, when flying at night, had a red beacon which was portable and it was located within a mile or two of the airfield and it flashed two Morse Code letters. So for Ingham our pundit was flashing I and, I for India and N for nuts you see. So I went to this portable flashing beacon at a height of about a thousand feet and circled it for a minute or so and then I thought well this isn’t a good place to be because the German will come to the beacon anyway and look for me. So I mean I turned off my navigation lights so I had no contact with the ground. No radio. So I didn’t know what to do. My own flare path had been put out. I, I had to find another flare path. I’d, I’d got about three hours fuel left to fly but dawn was still four or five hours away so somewhere I’d got to find a flare path and make a landing at night and I’d never done a solo night landing before. So I formed a little plan and I flew south for five minutes looking for a flare path. Came back to our beacon. Nothing. I flew east for five minutes, came back, nothing. I couldn’t fly west because we were getting near the hills. Getting near the Pennine Hills. So then I flew north for five minutes and I was flying now at about two thousand feet and I was just looking for a flare path and suddenly I saw what was called a hooded flare path. It was a proper flare path with two lines of lights you see, but there was a hood over the lights so you could only see the lights from low level. You couldn’t see them from high up. So I lined up on this flare path, set my gyro to make sure I’d got the right heading, did a circuit and landing, dropped my wheels down, down downwind. Came around, put my flaps down and landed. I’d had no radio contract with the airfield and I landed on this flare path which was actually a runway and it was an airfield being used by a night fighter squadron flying Defiants and they had a couple of aircraft up looking for the German bomber that had bombed my flare path you see. Well, of course I was a big surprise to them. It was, they had no warning of my arrival. As I came over the end of the runway, the runway controller in a caravan at the end of the runway told his ops room that he’d got a stranger. An Oxford had just landed. Well, they shepherded me to a dispersal and I switched off. So both I and the aircraft had got down in one piece safely albeit to a completely strange airfield. But it had a happy ending you see [laughs] So that was quite an introduction to night flying.
PS: Yes.
JH: Yeah. We’ll have a cup of coffee. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
PS: Right. Ok.
JH: Yeah.
[recording paused]
PS: You’re on.
JH: Well, [pause] about ten days after that incident where the Germans bombed my flare path I finished my flying course on Oxfords. And I received my wings on the 2nd of August 1941 and I was commissioned on that day. And then all the big tailors; Gieves, Orchid and so on had representatives that they sent to officer’s messes and you could be measured for your uniform and it would be made up and then you’d have a fitting. And you could get your uniform within oh two or three weeks. It was quite well organised. Unfortunately, I had come top in my navigation exam. And when I finished this course on twin engine Oxfords and got my wings, they made me a navigation instructor and I was sent away to a navigation instructor’s school at Cranage in Cheshire and we spent six or eight weeks learning a bit more about navigation in general but specialising in astro navigation using sextants to take shots of the stars, the moon and the sun. And you could get position lines from your sextant readings and plot these on the chart and get a fix. If you had taken shots on three stars you could get a fix which should give you your position at night to an accuracy of about ten miles which was a lot better than they’d had up ‘til then. So there was all this emphasis on astro navigation and particularly on the various star constellations and we had to get out and identify these at night when, when the sky was clear enough and so on. But the RAF had great hopes of astro navigation but it was overtaken by other better means of navigation soon after so it didn’t catch on as a mainstream of navigation. It was always a back up aid if you needed it. Yes. Yes. So [pause] I did about a six or eight week course at Cranage and I was then qualified to teach navigation. And you’ve got to remember I was only twenty one. Still pretty young. Yeah. So they sent me down to Number 3 Service Flying Training School at South Cerney near Cirencester and I taught navigation to each group of student pilots that came along. And they had to get enough in to, to pass navigation exams and so on. Each course consisted of fifty student pilots and they were learning to fly Oxfords and we were teaching them navigation. Each course of fifty students included eight or ten Polish pilots. And these had been perhaps members of the Polish Air Force or young Polish men wanting to fly who’d used an escape route to get out of Poland and be passed down through five or six countries. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania into Turkey and finally they’d reached the RAF in Palestine and there they’d be vetted to make sure that they weren’t German spies. But then they would be accepted into the Polish Air Force and sent to England for training. So that’s why we had a lot of Poles on each course. Now, the training included some exercise learning how to drop bombs from two points of view. One being the pilot accepting instructions from the bomb aimer about getting on to the aiming point and the other being the actual bomb aimer who was guiding the pilot and giving instruction to the pilot to make sure that he lined up properly on the aiming point. And a bombing detail consisted of two pilots in an aircraft flying to the practice bombing range which was on mud flats in the Severn Estuary and took about ten or twelve minutes to fly to the bombing range. And then one pilot would go down to the nose where the bombsight was and he would guide his pilot friend to drop six practice bombs on this bombing range and they would change over and the other would do the bombing and the other would do the flying in the pilot’s cockpit. So the actual dropping of the bombs took about fifty minutes and with flying back to base the whole flying detail would be about an hour and twenty minutes or an hour and a half. [pause] One day, two Polish pilots took off to do this practice bombing exercise but they took a long time to come back and the Oxford only had fuel for about four hours flying but these two Poles didn’t come back to South Cerney and enquiries were made as to whether anybody had reported an Oxford crashing somewhere. They, they thought they’d crashed you see. Well, after about four hours these two Polish pilots returned. They hadn’t got any practice bombs on board. They’d dropped them all. They’d flown out over the English Channel at low level to get below the German radar screen. They got to the French coast. They flew up and down the French coast until they came to a German barracks flying a swastika flag and they dropped their twelve practice bombs on the German barracks. [laughs] Now, these practice bombs were very small. Only about eleven or twelve pounds each. They were just filled with magnesium powder so that you could plot them to give a cloud of dust. But they had a small explosive charge that gave a flash. That was all. But anyway, after about four hours these two Poles returned and they said what they’d done and of course everybody was a bit upset because they completely ruined a day’s flying programme. Apart from causing concerns about a missing aircraft, they’d ruined the next couple of day hours that aircraft was due to fly. So the chief instructor had to tear them off quite a large strip but at the same time he had to admire their aggression. [laughs] They weren’t going to waste any practice bombs. So I carried on instructing at South Cerney until May 1942 when I was posted to Canada to become a navigation instructor at a new Operational Training Unit that was being set up in Canada. But we ran into some problems straight away. The Operational Training Unit we were going to was meant to fly Hampden twin engine bombers and the crews were meant to be trained for night operations in Bomber Command. And that is where astro-navigation still played some considerable part. But unfortunately, the airframes for the Hampden bombers were made in Canada so the airframes were available but the engines were Mercury engines made by the Bristol Aircraft at Bristol in England. Well, the engines for the Hampdens never arrived. They’d been put on a ship to cross the Atlantic and the U-boats had got it and sent the ship to the bottom. So we had no engines. And of course you can’t do anything with a bare airframe. So for four or five weeks we were in limbo with virtually nothing to fly. So they made an emergency decision. The Air Ministry had ordered from Lockheed Aircraft Company at Burbank in California a number of day twin engine bombers called the Ventura which was an adapted version of the Hudson maritime patrol aircraft. Well, the Ventura used the Hudson wings and the Hudson wings were built for flying for long periods at low level, at low speed on maritime patrols you see, and the wings weren’t suitable for a day bomber which had to be a high speed bomber. So the concept of making the Ventura a day bomber never worked out. We, the RAF did order a small number. Perhaps seventy or eighty aircraft. They equipped three squadrons in Bomber Command but the casualty rate was too high and they couldn’t get away from German fighters. They couldn’t defend themselves and the casualty rate was just too high so the Ventura was never a success as a day bomber as it was meant to be, but it was quite an interesting aircraft to fly. It had very modern systems. The Americans were very good with instruments, electrics and auto pilot. Much, much better than actually the RAF equivalent and it was still an interesting aircraft to fly. So I carried on flying Venturas at Pennfield Ridge in New Brunswick, Canada which was one of the Maritime Provinces and heavily dependent on forestry, agriculture, orchards and fishing and so on and generally a rather poorer part of Canada. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I stayed on teaching navigation and then they made me a staff pilot on Venturas and I could lead students on formation flying and certain air firing exercises and so on. So I did quite a number of hours on Ventura aircraft. So then in January ’44, I was sent back to England on a troop ship from Halifax in Nova Scotia, and I came back on a troop ship called HMS Andes which when war broke out had been under construction. So it was a fairly new ship and they were able to finish it as a troop ship and it could take, you know, several hundred RAF people. So we were, I think I was on one of the top decks. A deck it was, and a cabin with six bunks in it. Three double tiered bunks occupied seven officers. The seventh had to sleep on the floor so we took it in turns to sleep on the floor. But we didn’t come back in a convoy. The Andes was fast enough to make the Atlantic crossing unescorted and if you could cruise along at seventeen or eighteen knots you were probably going fast enough to avoid the U-boats and so on. So we came back to Gourock in the Firth of Clyde at Glasgow. That was our landing point. Yeah. Yeah. I’m sorry, I’m wrong there. We came back to Liverpool. We landed at Liverpool. We landed at Liverpool, yeah. Sorry. And then I started my training with Bomber Command and I went to Number 30 OTU at Hixon, near Stafford, flying Wellington bombers. I was the pilot and I acquired a crew of; navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator and one air gunner. So we became a crew of five and we did all our circuits and landings, local flying, cross country, bombing exercises, air firing exercises, formation flying, fighter affiliation and night flying and so on. And then after about eighty or ninety hours on Wellingtons, we finished that course and we were ready to go on to the next step on the Bomber Command training ladder, and we went to a Heavy Conversion Unit at Sandtoft near Doncaster to learn to fly the Halifax four engine bomber. And there I added on a flight engineer and a mid-upper gunner to my crew. So at that point we became a crew of seven and we did the same sort of exercises; circuits and landings, local flying, cross countries, bombing, air firing, fighter affiliation and night flying. So we did forty hours flying on Halifaxes and then we were sent to Number 1 Lancaster Finishing School at Hemswell where we all did a quick conversion course on to the Lancaster and it was just circuits and landings, day and night flying and I think one cross country. We were only there for about two, two and a half weeks and then we were qualified Lancaster crew and I was posted to Number 550 Squadron flying Lancasters based at North Killingholme near Grimsby. We arrived about teatime on the 30th of August 1944 and there was an air of gloom everywhere because that day the squadron commander, a wing commander had been shot down on a daylight raid on a French target but unfortunately he didn’t come back. So we did a couple of cross country exercises on the squadron, particularly getting used to a navigation aid called H2S which was a downward looking radar which gave you a picture of the ground and you could identify towns and water features which helped a lot with the navigation. So we did two or three training exercises with the squadron and I had to start my tour by doing a second pilot trip with an experienced crew which I did on the 10th of September 1944 and the target was Le Havre port. And we attacked it in daylight so the whole sortie was very short and we were only over the target for two or three minutes and we hardly saw any flak. Just a few puffs of smoke. A few. But it wasn’t much good from the point of view of getting me used to enemy defences. So our first raid as a complete crew was a night sortie on the 10th of September to Frankfurt and we went on a totally clear night with no cloud. But Frankfurt and Mainz it’s twin city had about two hundred searchlights and they were all alight as we came over this target and you could see three or four aircraft had been coned by, you know twenty or thirty searchlights each, and they were being plastered with flak. So that didn’t do the morale a lot of good. But anyway, we, we got through all that alright. That was a flight of just over seven hours. And then we started to do three or four daylight raids on targets in or near Calais. There was a gun site that was firing shells into Dover and southern England. There were a lot of German troops in Calais which were trying to stop the allies capturing the port because we wanted to get the port for the port facilities it offered you see. Loading supplies and so on. Yeah. So we did three or four day sorties and then we [pause] we were sent on one daylight raid in October, early October, to an inland port on the River Rhine at Emmerich which was being used to bring German reinforcements in. And they sent us in in daylight at a height of eleven thousand feet which was pretty low and the German flak gunners had no trouble in picking you up as target. And suddenly a flak shell burst about thirty or forty feet in front of me. Fortunately just below me. Just a few feet below. I saw the red flash as the shell burst. I jumped out of my skin. I knew I was going to be severely tested in the next few minutes. There was one very loud bang which we found out when we landed was because a blind landing aerial on the outside of the fuselage just below, just by my left knee had been shot clean away. And we took a lot of flak fragments in the port wing and one fragment punctured one fuel tank and the mid-upper gunner reported fuel streaming back from this tank and I could tell from the petrol gauge that it was leaking pretty badly. The needle was going down. So we had to run all four engines off that one tank to make best use of what fuel was remaining in it. And I checked around with the crew. Nobody was hurt. We were all unharmed. That was a bit of a surprise in a way. And when we landed we found we’d got over seventy holes in the port wing in the bomb bay doors of the fuselage and so on. So we’d taken quite a pasting from this flak shell. But anyway, we got back alright and then we set out to do a lot of night raids on mostly targets in southern Germany like Stuttgart, Munich, Leipzig, Nuremberg and so on, interspersed with raids on Ruhr Targets like Essen and Dusseldorf and then three raids on Cologne we did as well. On one of the Cologne raids we were hit by flak again but that time minor. We only got ten or twenty holes. Yes. Yes. So there was one particular episode during my tour with 550 Squadron. About halfway through our tour, our flight engineer fell off his motorbike and broke his wrist and he was out of action for five or six weeks, in which period we carried on flying doing six raids with a replacement flight engineer. So when my crew had finished their thirty raids, the flight engineer had only done twenty four because he’d missed six of them. So I got the whole crew to volunteer to fly six extra raids to finish off the flight engineer which meant that I as a pilot did thirty seven raids all together, because I’d started with the second pilot trip you see. So I, there weren’t, there weren’t many people on the squadron that had flown more raids than that. Yeah. And we, we got through the tour alright. As long as you were in the middle of the bomber stream you were relatively safe from night fighters. The night fighters were the biggest danger because with their twenty millimetre cannon firing upwards they came underneath you and you couldn’t see them and they fired up in to your fuel tanks and engines and so on, and usually the first burst was pretty fatal. But the night fighters were looking first for bombers on the edge of the bomber stream where they would be easier to pick up you see. But I had a good navigator and he kept me in the middle of the bomber stream and we were never attacked by a night fighter. So I take my hat off to my navigator there. He was really responsible for the crew coming, coming back unharmed from all these raids. Yeah. Yeah. We finished up. Our next to last raid was the Dresden raid where we, we flew for ten hours twenty minutes. And unfortunately when I started up my own aircraft, the brake pressure was too low and we couldn’t taxi out and take off. We had to switch quickly to the reserve aircraft which was already bombed and fuelled up. So we were taken to the reserve aircraft and we flew the sortie in the reserve aircraft. But not surprisingly the reserve aircraft was a very tired out aircraft and possibly had a twisted fuselage. It didn’t fly too well and I had to use much more fuel than usual in climbing up to altitude and we started to get a bit short of fuel and coming back across France we realised we didn’t have enough fuel to get to North Killingholme, so we landed at an emergency airstrip at Manston in Kent. Just next to Ramsgate. And we landed there about ten past seven in the morning just as it was getting light. Yeah. So, that, that was that was a long, long sortie. Ten hours twenty minutes was our longest sortie. That’s ten hours twenty minutes from take-off to landing. But that means, what with starting the engines during the early take off checks, taxiing to the take off point, taxiing back after you land, I’d been strapped to that seat for over eleven hours you see. Quite a long time isn’t it? [laughs]
PS: A very long time.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Ok. So shall we have a rest now?
PS: Yes.
JH: Yes. Yes. Yes.
[recording paused]
JH: I’d finished my tour and I was posted in early March 1945 to a Halifax Heavy Conversion Unit at Sandtoft where I was an instructor and deputy flight commander. And of course we were training crews on the Halifax first and then they would go on to the Lancaster. And the war with Japan was still on and they were due to go up to the Pacific Islands to bomb Japan but Japan came out of the war in, I think it was August 1945, and obviously there was no need to carry on training crews. So we had a very awkward period where they didn’t really know what to do with all the aircrew they’d got, and holding units were set up just to [laughs] just to sleep and feed them but not, not really knowing what to do with them. So it was a rather awkward time. And I had a stroke of luck. I took some leave and my home was in Gillingham in Kent so I went up to London quite a lot. And I was walking the streets of London and I met a squadron leader who I knew and we started chatting and he, he was in charge of pilot postings in the Air Ministry and he said to me: ‘You know, pilots and aircrew are going to have a difficult time for the next few months until everything gets sorted out, but — ’ he said, ‘If you like I could get you a job in the Air Ministry.’ Well, I leapt at it you see. So I was posted to the Air Ministry on the 1st of October 1945. And first of all I was a flight lieutenant but fortunately in about March ’46 they made me an acting squadron leader and I was pretty pleased with that at the age of twenty five. Life was looking pretty good. And then a month or two later about April or June, April or May ’45, they gave me a permanent commission which I accepted as quick as I could and I was going to stay in the RAF permanently you see. So that was a lucky break for me. Yeah. So then in March 1948, I went back to flying duties and had to take a refresher course flying Oxfords at Finningley near Doncaster for six or seven weeks. And then I was posted to an Operational Conversion Unit flying Dakotas at North Luffenham near Oakham in Rutland and I acquired a pilot and a wireless operator, so we were just a crew of three and we learned to fly a Dakota transport aircraft and the Dakota could transport about thirty or forty troops. It could drop paratroops. It could tow gliders, and you could also drop containers as supply dropping to troops on the ground. So we had to practice all those exercises. But the main thing was doing a long cross countries to get the navigator exercised and so on. So that was fine. And I carried on until March 1948. No, sorry. [pause] I carried on ‘til February ’49. That’s right. February ’49 when I was posted out to the Far East and we went up on a troop ship the Devonshire which was the services troop ship, you know. Yeah. Now, we’ve got —
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Jack Harris. One
Creator
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Patricia Selby
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2019-01-31
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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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AHarrisJ190131, PHarrisJ1901
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Pending review
Format
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01:15:33 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Jack Harris was born in Gillingham, Kent. At sixteen, he undertook employment as a clerk in the intelligence department of the Air Ministry. He describes the brief evacuation of his department to Harrow in 1939 and receiving permission to leave his reserved occupation and volunteer for aircrew in 1940, when he was sent down to Babbacombe. Harris began training as a pilot on Tiger Moths in February 1941 at RAF Fairoaks, followed by Oxfords at RAF Grantham and RAF Ingham. Harris describes night flying at Harlaxton before going to Ingham. He describes his first solo night flight, when a German intruder bomber caused the landing flares to be turned off, forcing him to find an alternative airfield to land. In 1941, Harris was made a navigation instructor and was sent away to a navigation instructor’s school at RAF Cranage in Cheshire. He then served as a navigation instructor for pilots at RAF South Cerney until May 1942, when he was posted to an Operational Training Unit in Canada as a staff pilot leading Ventura training exercises. In January 1944, Harris returned to England and trained on Wellingtons at RAF Hixon, Halifaxes at RAF Sandtoft, and converted to Lancasters at RAF Hemswell. In August 1944, he joined 550 Squadron based at RAF North Killingholme and completed thirty-seven operations. He compares his first daylight operation accompanying an experienced crew to Le Havre with his first solo pilot operation at night to Frankfurt. He also recounts anti-aircraft fire puncturing a fuel tank and seventy holes into their wing during a daylight operation over the Rhine River, and his penultimate operation to Dresden. In March 1945, Harris was posted to a Halifax Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Sandtoft. Finally, Harris describes receiving a permanent position in the RAF in 1946 and training to fly C-47s before being posted to the Far East in 1949.
Contributor
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Tilly Foster
Julie Williams
Steph Jackson
Language
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eng
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Surrey
England--Lincolnshire
England--Gloucestershire
England--Staffordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Harrow
Canada
France
France--Le Havre
Germany
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Dresden
Rhine River
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1940
1941-02
1942-05
1944-01
1944-08
1946
1949
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
30 OTU
550 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
C-47
Flying Training School
H2S
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Cranage
RAF Fairoaks
RAF Grantham
RAF Harlaxton
RAF Hemswell
RAF Hixon
RAF Ingham
RAF North Killingholme
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Sandtoft
RAF South Cerney
RAF Torquay
recruitment
Tiger Moth
training
Ventura
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1058/11437/PPackhamG1610.2.jpg
58c4a9d2c6787baca9a3a0abe04e24a8
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1058/11437/APackhamGH160825.1.mp3
a83e7a7090890f9795d36e04d3cb1040
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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Packham, Geoff
G Packham
Description
An account of the resource
Nine items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer Geoff Packham (b. 1922, 161076, 1214349 Royal Air Force), photographs and documents. He flew operations as a pilot with 550 Squadron from RAF North Killingholme and became a prisoner of war after being shot down in June 1944.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Geoff Packham and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-08-25
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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Packham, G
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AM: We’ll ignore that then. OK, so today is Thursday 25th of August 2016. I’m in Hersham in Surrey with Geoff Packham. And also with us is Gary Rushbrooke who we’ll also hear on the tape in a bit and I’m just going to talk to Geoff generally about his life and the RAF and Bomber Command in particular. So, what I’d like to start off with, Geoff, if you will, is just a little bit about your childhood and your background and your parents, just to give a bit of context about your early life, if you like. Where were you born?
GP: Well, I was born in Sheffield, which isn’t far from here of course.
AM: No.
GP: And my father was in the RFC. I have his cap badge still. He was a Lieutenant in the RFC and then they became the RAF of course later on and he actually was posted to an airfield near Canterbury on the London defence and he was flying Sopwith Camels and SE5s, that type of thing. And one day, he was up on patrol when he got shot down, well we think he was shot down by the flak because there was activity in the air and he’d been sent up to patrol, and the big guns of Kent there, used to just fire off. Anyway, poor old Pop’s aeroplane was, err, err, his engine was set on fire and of course they didn’t have parachutes in those days, so poor old Pop had to come down with his aeroplane and crashed very, very badly. Unfortunately, they had just one little seat belt in those days and he got — that broke. It was tied to the tail or something. Anyway, he shot out over of the top and hit his head on the Lewis gun, that was on the top, and was unconscious when he hit the ground about forty feet away. Well his aeroplane of course was still blazing, of course, and some villagers from nearby were looking for the pilot and couldn’t find him. Anyway, he was in the bushes and he finished his flying in the hospital for Officers at Blackpool.
AM: Right. What year are we talking about here?
GP: Pardon?
AM: What year are we talking about here?
GP: Oh, that was 1918.
AM: 1918.
GP: Just towards the end of the War. But they had this squadron there. He was in 50 Squadron. So of course, I was brought up in the aviation world and when the War came of course, I was in Sheffield. I left my Grammar School in 1938. Firth Park Grammar School. And I took a job with the Town Hall, in the audit department. Anyway, this lasted for a couple of years and during that time, we had the Blitz and a couple of Blitzes on Sheffield and by this time, my father was an ARP Warden and I went out to help him with the incendiary bombs and things that were running around the place, and of course this decided me that I’d, I was eighteen at the time, I’d join up in the RAF and [coughs] and go and help out with the War.
AM: Just before we get to the RAF bit then. What was it actually like being in the Blitz?
GP: Oh, it was quite amazing ‘cause they used to drop these mines and things and incendiary bombs, and all we had was a stirrup pump and a bucket of water or some sand to get these things out and even in Broomhill, where, at the south west of the city.
AM: I know it, I know it.
GP: It was bad but of course the main part was the factories and the centre which got bombed.
AM: ‘cause it was armaments. Quite a lot of Sheffield was armaments wasn’t it.
GP: Oh yes. And there were quite a lot of casualties and things. So I joined up and just after the Blitz and my first posting was to Cardington for registering and uniform and things and that was the blue sheds at Cardington and from there on they kept posting me to various stations because they were waiting to get me in to the Training Scheme in Canada, for flying.
AM: So what year was this? Forty —
GP: This was nineteen forty —
GR: Early 1941.
GP: One. Yeah. And all 1941 was taken up with ITW, the training section and you see the stations in there [sound of pages turning], and I was posted up to a station in Acklington, just north of Newcastle, to do odd duties, and eventually I got on to a boat which took me to Halifax in Canada and from there —
AM: What was that like? What was it actually like on the boat? Where did you sail from?
GP: Oh, that was a big boat and there were a lot of submarines and things around, so it was zigzagging all the way across the Atlantic and it was bad weather of course. It was —
GR: Of course this would have been August 1941.
GP: Yeah, that was —
GR: Which was the height of the Atlantic U-boat war and everything so —
GP: Right, yeah.
GR: Yes, it would have been a very dangerous crossing.
GP: Yes, anyway we got there and they took us across to Calgary and in Calgary of course, we got a fine reception because a lot of the people out there were English people who’d emigrated after the First World War and they wanted to know what was happening back home etcetera. So I made lots of friends there and eventually passed the — there were two stages – the Tiger Moth stage and the Oxford.
AM: Had it been decided what you were actually going to be, at this point?
GP: Well they put me on the twin engine ones for the second part of the training. So I was obviously going on Bombers.
AM: So had it already been decided you were going to be a pilot at this stage?
GP: Well that's decided after the first stage of training.
AM: Right, OK.
GP: In the Tiger Moths. I was lucky there because I always seemed to be dubbed with difficulties and I went up on my first solo and the — It was a lovely day, no problem, and the instructor just sort of said, ‘Well, off you go then.’ We'd been doing a bit of drill and spinning and things and he said, ‘OK, well, straight out and go around and come in and do a few landings.’ You see. So I did this. Anyway, in between that time — Oh, the last flight, the wind had blown up the Rockies. It used to produce a strange sort of change of winds and things and the wind had changed and I didn't even look at the wind sock [laughs] and I wondered why I was going a bit fast, but fortunately, it was on the approach. It seemed fast, but I couldn't understand why. But there was a nice long concrete runway, because Air Canada used to use it for civil purposes, you see. And so I managed to stop, and then they came out and started grabbing the wings because the wind was blowing up and they were frightened it would turn over.
GR: Terrible, isn't it.
GP: I got through the test anyway and with a good result and then went on to Oxfords and it got very cold in the winter time and eventually, I think it was January '42 by this time, and I — They gave me a railway ticket and said, ‘You've got a boat going back to England.’ As they did to all the course, and we were one of the first courses out there you see. They said, ‘Go to Halifax and report there.’ And you got three weeks to do it. It takes about four days for the journey and by train, of course, all the way from Medicine Hat there, by that time and to —
AM: Yeah, I'm just visualising.
GP: Nova Scotia, and some of the boys stayed if they had girlfriends. I just went and had a look round Winnipeg and Montreal.
AM: On your own, or with friends?
GP: On the way. Pardon?
AM: Were you on your own or with friends? With other chaps?
GP: No, I was on my own by that time.
AM: Right.
GP: We were allowed to do what we liked so long as we got to Halifax by a certain time, you see.
AM: By the right date.
GP: It was all very informal. So, we — I got across and we went back to the UK where I was shuffled round all over the place. And you'll find most of these stations here and the most I did was as a Staff Pilot at, err, in South Wales. I was flying Whitleys then. I've done most of my time on Whitleys.
GR: Was that while you were still training, or had you done your training?
GP: No, no. I was [pauses] what happened was that they wanted pilots to fly the Whitleys with gunners in the back and we had a Lysander coming upon us with a drogue on the end that they shot at and they did that over the Bristol Channel. So, this was, um, err, let’s see. Porthcawl.
GR: Yeah.
GP: Is the nearest place. Stormy Down was the station and I was there for a year all together because in between, they'd already posted me twice to Brize Norton which had Whitleys towing gliders.
GR: Right.
GP: And for a very short period, I went twice to Brize Norton and came back to my little place in —
GR: So you'd been sent to do, not training, but you were flying as a Pilot Instructor for the other people.
GP: Yes but I didn’t do many hours at all and I don't know why they sent me there. And from there —
GR: 'cause you'd have been expecting to go to an Operational Base.
GP: That's right.
GR: Sure. Yeah.
GP: And at Brize Norton, of course, they were training the Army Pilots to fly the gliders.
AM: Right.
GP: The Horsa gliders. So, um, yeah. I was there for a little while. And then of course, finally to my great pleasure, I got posted to Bomber Command. And I was very lucky because I got the Doncaster set of airfields where I went through the Operational Training Unit. But by this time, I’d got sort of, I should think something like eight hundred hours flying Whitleys.
AM: Flying Whitleys.
GP: And things like that, you know. And it was a piece of cake.
AM: You must have been far more experienced than a lot of the others at that stage.
GP: Yes. I went to one place, by the way, in there and it was on the Wash.
GR: Yeah.
GP: It was an experimental Unit and we had the old Battle of Britain pilots with their Spitfires and we had Wellingtons and we — All fitted with camera guns and it was a station where they were experimenting with tactics to get away from and shoot the other bod down, you know, but I think that’s —
GR: That was Herne, wasn't it?
GP: But — No, no. That's at Bournemouth. It's Kings Lynn, you know.
AM: Yes.
GR: Sutton Bridge.
GP: Sutton Bridge. Yes.
GR: That's it. Yeah. Just before you went to Stormy Down.
GP: Yes. Anyway, yes, it was Finningley, of course, for the Bomber training and I did some time on Wellingtons. In fact, it was a Wellington where we — we used, for dropping. They were dummy raids. When a big wave went out, we went on a decoy and dropped some information, you know, leaflets and things.
AM: Leaflets, yes.
GP: To the French. And also, some, the aluminium foil that we used to use as a diversion to make the Germans think that they were —
GR: Window.
GP: Window. So, there were a few things on the way which were interesting.
GR: Which was quite good because Finningley, Worksop, Windholme.
GP: That's right.
GR: Was all near Sheffield, so you were based near home.
GP: And I was very fortunate because I got a motorbike and my brother and I — I had a brother who also was a pilot. He'd been to America but on the way [telephone rings] he'd burst an eardrum.
AM: OK, we've just paused for the telephone, but we're back. So, we've been talking about the fact that for almost two years, before you went to your Operational Training Unit, you'd been effectively piloting for other trainees learning to shoot and all the rest of it.
GP: Over two years. Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
GP: So, yes, it took a long time to get there but we finally made it and I had this motorcycle of course.
AM: That’s right.
GP: So with my brother who’d been across to America, but because he’d bust his eardrum, he was put back. He was going to be a fighter pilot and he would have made a very good one but he had to come down quickly because there was a tornado coming along and he burst an eardrum and they put him off and he finished up supplying [coughs] food to the Chindits in Burma etcetera, on DC3s. But, so there were three pilots in the family of course. Anyway, he rode motorbikes as well and we did that after the war, but yes, um —
AM: Were you — so all these two years when you were doing piloting, were you anxious to go on Operations? Or were you happy where you were?
GP: Oh yeah. I’d been wanting this right from the very start.
AM: Right.
GP: I was a bit unlucky in that respect. Or lucky.
GR: Or lucky.
GP: But anyway, in the end, I managed it and I got decent reports and I got a crew that selected me actually.
AM: How did that work?
GP: [Laughs].
AM: How did that happen?
GP: And they’d heard that I’d had a lot of experience etcetera and I’ve got the Bomb Aimer’s little letter here that suggested that they chose me because, you know, because of my experience they thought it was better than none. [Laughs]. So, I got a very good crew with me but of course I was spending a lot of my time riding back to Sheffield to see my parents because they’d got two sons, one out in Batavia and places like that. Burma. And me. I’d been out for a year longer of course. Brother Pete was just a little bit younger than I was. So. Anyway we got on well and eventually, I was very fortunate in being just in time to do the first D-Day raid.
GR: ‘Cause you ended up going to 550 Squadron.
GP: Yeah, that’s it.
GR: At Killingholme. And you arrived there on the 24th May 1944.
GP: That’s right.
GR: Yeah.
GP: And it was just in time to — Normally, they gave a couple of flights with the Flight Commander, just to get you experienced on the raid itself but I was lucky that, but unlucky in one way but I went with the Flight Commander. Yeah. And it was the first raid and we raided a coastal battery on the Cherbourg peninsula there.
GR: And I’ll just interrupt to say —
GP: So I had a sort of supervision there.
GR: That your first Operation was on the night of D-Day.
GP: It was.
GR: Because on the night of the 5th of June going into the 6th of June — So your first ever Operation was on the eve.
GP: Yeah.
GR: And then your next Operation was you flew to Paris – was actually on the 6th of June.
AM: Was on D-Day.
GP: That’s right. Well we’ve got some information on there [turns pages] Now wait a minute.
AM: I’ll take copies of this after, if I may.
GP: Yes. Oh yes.
AM: Were you aware, then, so it’s the 5th of June – how aware were you of —
GR: D-Day.
AM: What was actually happening? And you know, that it was —
GP: Oh, we saw them going across actually as we crossed our coast. We saw the fleet and yeah, we have actually a certificate here [sound of pages turning].
GR: So what was the first Operation like? Did it all go smoothly?
GP: Err, it was, yes. Oh, here we are.
AM: Here we are.
GP: That was the original copy.
AM: I’ll take a copy of that, if I may, afterwards.
GR: Yeah.
AM: What was it actually like then on — You’re an experienced pilot, but here you are on your first Operation. Describe it to me.
GP: Well. I was under supervision there you see, of course, which was a little bit of bad luck I think. But, no, I was excited. I’ve always liked danger. [sound of pages turning] You know, we used to race motorbikes and things eventually. No problems as far as that is concerned. But that was the first raid. Incidentally, that bloke, eventually, when I got shot down —
AM: When you say ‘that bloke’ you’re talking about the Com—
GP: Yeah. My Squadron Leader.
AM: Yes.
GR: Yep.
AM: Yep.
GP: He gave me his old aeroplane. And he took a new one and it made quite a difference actually. Because we were both shot down on the same raid, ten days later actually. You can’t believe it, can you? There were three of us shot down out of eighteen that took part. But, yes, it was the same Peter that, I got blasted on Sterkrade.
AM: Yes. We’ll come back to that.
GP: Oh yes. Here we are. We’ve got all these. [sound of pages turning] This is the first raid on D-Day.
You can have a look at all these.
AM: OK.
GR: Yes. There’s a certificate’s given to you for —
AM: Yes. So I’m looking here at a Diploma. La Croix de Guerre. A citation certificate. The — a Valeur Militaire, which hopefully I’ll be able to copy afterwards.
Other 1: Certainly.
AM: What was it actually — I need you to describe to me what it actually felt like.
GP: Well that was an easy raid.
AM: Um.
GP: But —
AM: By ‘easy’ —
GP: Very vital.
AM: Why do you say it was easy?
GP: Well there wasn’t too much flak, ‘cause —
AM: OK.
GP: It was in France.
AM: Umm.
GP: Germany was the worst place to go, of course. And I only did two more. The second one I got shot down on Germany, you see, another [unclear].
AM: So how many Operations all together?
GR: There were seven Operations all together and the first [counting] one, two, three, four, were all over the Normandy coast. But within the space of eleven days, after three years of being in the RAF, in the space of eleven days, seven Operations and shot down on your seventh.
GP: That’s it. Yeah.
AM: Tell me about that then.
GP: Well. It was — night flying was very difficult because the Germans by that time had got a very intense flak system going and they had a very good radar system. Not only on the ground, but in the air. And all these night fighters, some of whom got up to two or three hundred victories, because they were guided on to the aircraft, and they were put in a position where they could see us, but we couldn’t see them ‘cause we were just looking out with our eyeballs, of course. So. And this is what happened to me on the way back from this thing. Anyway, the flak hit us on that last raid and we’ve got — There is a description of that.
AM: I’ll find that.
GR: Yeah.
AM: Let’s find that afterwards. You tell me in your words.
GP: OK. That isn’t quite accurate, but —
AM: Put it down for a minute. Tell me in your own words.
GP: Yes. What happened was that, on that raid, again it was night time and it was about 2 o’clock in the morning on Sterkrade and that again was in the Ruhr which is a heavily defended place. And we got hit something like about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour before we actually got to the target. So, one engine went out and then the second one followed it. Both on the same side. And there was a hole in the nose of the aeroplane. There was a little fire started which went out fortunately. And some of my instruments were missing. And all the hydraulics had gone.
AM: Right.
GP: So we — Oh, the first thing was, we were flying at eighteen thousand feet and everybody else was up at twenty, because we were using an old aeroplane. And there again you’ve got the details of that in the papers. But the Squadron Leader had been using previously etcetera and he got the new one. Anyway, we’d been two thousand feet lower than everybody else all the way of course, which is —
AM: Sitting duck.
GP: And I staggered along with the — I had my bomb aimer, the navigator was helping ‘cause by this time we could see markers going down over the target. The navigator and the radio operator. And they’re all working on this problem down below.
AM: On the hydraulics.
GP: On the hydraulics and such like.
AM: What was the flight engineer doing?
GP: The flight engineer was down below.
AM: He was down there as well.
GP: Yeah, there was a crowd down there and I didn’t know what was going to — because I was having to fly the thing manually of course. And keep it in the air on two engines. So, anyway we were flat out on the other two and we got to the target eventually and we’d lost height obviously but when we circled round we couldn’t open the bomb bays. So we’d got six and a half tons, I think it was, on the aircraft and still quite a bit of fuel so it wasn’t a nice situation and after about five minutes we decided we’d better leave the area ‘cause it was getting too hot. And I set course for — tried to miss the big towns in Holland and we’d only just passed over the — oh, we were still in Germany when we had two fighter attacks on us [laughs] which — At least the gunners shouted. And I did my corkscrewing to evade him.
GR: On two engines.
AM: Even though you’ve only got two engines.
GP: Oh yes. And they could see him at two o’clock in the morning so it was obviously fairly close, and yeah, so we lost more height and more height and what I’d intended was to try and get to the English coast, drop the crew off and then head out to sea.
AM: When you say ‘drop the crew off’, you mean —
GP: Do what I could do with my dingy and my —
AM: Abandon.
GP: Mae West and hope somebody would rescue me, but there was no chance of that after the fighter attack, you see. Anyway.
AM: So where did the fighter get you? You’ve already lost two engines, your hydraulics aren’t working, your bomb bay won’t open.
GP: Yeah. That’s it.
AM: And then the fighter, where did the fighter get you?
GP: And actually, the gunners tried to fire but the gun turrets wouldn’t turn ‘cause they’re on the hydraulics.
GR: ‘Cause of the hydraulics.
GP: So everything was against us. I don’t know why they bothered firing. You know. Anyway. The fighter disappeared, fortunately and we were just over the Dutch border by that time so I bailed the crew out. And they went off and the last thing the bomber mentioned as he went, he was the last one out, he should have been the first. But he’d lost a boot. Tried to kick the — There was a little panel down below that they dropped through and I checked them all out through the front, you see, I got time to do that, and then I left of course and I had to close the throttle on the other two engines to keep the aircraft, well, flying really but I had to take off my mask and helmet and all the communication cables and things like that and the seat belt and things. When I left the controls, I’d been fighting those for a long time then, the aircraft started going down in a spin and the tendency is for you to be thrown around and pulled towards the back of the aircraft so I had a job trying to get down into the little hole that they’d left in the bottom. Anyway, eventually I pulled my parachute cord as soon as I got out and I must have been, well, I hadn’t tightened up my straps. I couldn’t do that. They’re uncomfortable to sit at the tension that you’d normally fly, you know, [background aircraft noise] so they were on but they weren’t tight enough and as I fell through this hole, I fell through the harness and I was left sticking head downwards on my parachute when it opened you see. Anyway, all the others got out ok. But, oh, I’ll continue with my story anyway. But, yes, I managed to pull myself, I was very fit in those days, and I managed to pull myself and hold on to the straps which of course swings the parachute, you know, when you’re pulling on one side and that was fortunate because when I hit the ground, it was right on my backside. The old coccyx took it, and of all things, I landed — It was pouring with rain. Absolutely pouring with rain. It was June and it was a wheat field that I landed in and it was June when all the crop was up.
AM: Yep.
GP: And not only that —
AM: Slightly softer landing.
GP: They explained that to me afterwards that I would have killed myself ‘cause it’s like jumping off the ceiling with those sorts of parachutes. It’s quite a hard landing. And as I was on my backside, it must have been on the upswing of the parachute when I touched down, because I didn’t feel any shock.
AM: You didn’t damage your back. You know, so as you’re coming down, you probably had too much to think about but you’ve left the plane, that’s still —
GP: It’s all very dark.
AM: Could you see what happened to the plane, or was it – Had it gone too far by then?
GP: Well no. It landed fairly close to me.
AM: Right.
GP: So I wasn’t very far away from it.
AM: ‘Cause it’s still got a full bomb load on it and lots of fuel.
GP: And it all went up. Yeah.
AM: Right.
GP: And it landed on a farm in [unclear] and killed seven people unfortunately. I’ve got a picture of the memorial there.
AM: But you wouldn’t have known that at the time. You knew that afterwards.
GP: Well I couldn’t do anything about it.
AM: No, no. And you wouldn’t –presumably you wouldn’t have known anyway at the time.
GP: It was an area where there wasn’t any big buildings but there was a village and this was the interesting thing, that as I’d landed, I just screwed up my parachute and it was in the wheat field and nothing else I could do. But I saw by the glow of the fire that — a church steeple and it was the village steeple, so I made my way. I knew that the War would be over fairly shortly after. We thought in about six months. So, I went to the church to find help which was our briefing as Bomber pilots, of course. If you wanted to get help, you normally went to a church. And I went and sat in a graveyard for the rest of the night and it was only about three hours because it was June and it was about two o’clock I think when I got out of the aeroplane.
AM: Can you remember how you actually felt at this point?
GP: Yeah. [laughs]
AM: Are you really scared? Were you —
GP: Well no, no. It all happens very slowly. I think when you race motorbikes, it’s the same sort of thing, you know.
AM: It’s like slow motion.
GP: Everything seems to slow down. Yeah. And your decisions – I’ve had a lot of experiences in civil flying when I’ve had engine troubles and all sorts of things happen. I’ve been flying passengers around with one engine gone on a twin.
AM: But not with a full bomb load.
GP: And I didn’t tell them either. [laughs]
AM: So you’re sat in the graveyard. Then what?
GP: It’s funny but there was no fear at all.
AM: No.
GP: But I was feeling miserable because it was pouring down with rain still and I was sitting on this — somebody’s resting place and it was a bit hard, so in the morning, I peeped over the wall to the vicarage when I heard a noise and it was the vicar’s wife. I’ve even got the name of the vicar who helped me actually. But it was the start of an Underground movement. This is where the story gets interesting because they got me into the Underground movement and —
AM: What did the vicar’s wife say when she saw you?
GP: [laughs] Well, she looked at me, and you know, well I was in uniform of course so she knew what had happened ‘cause —
AM: Seen the plane.
GP: Things going bang just beside of me [laughs] and yes, I was given a civvy suit and a cardboard collar [laughs] as a tie and a little green Carte d’Identité which said I was deaf and dumb, with a picture on. Yeah, a picture of me. Eventually. And, so I started off down the KLM Line. The Dutch KLM Line.
AM: Dutch KLM Line. What does that stand for?
GP: Well, that was the name they gave it.
AM: Ok.
GP: It was —
GR: All the escape lines had different names.
GP: Yeah, they had different names for all these escape routes.
AM: So, like the Comet Line and things like that.
GP: Yeah. Anyway, you went from safe house to safe house etcetera and amazingly enough, at one of them, they said, ‘You’re going to be joined by another aviator.’ And guess who it was. It was my mid- upper gunner, old Jackson. And he was a bus driver from Salford and he’d joined right on the limit for them. He was thirty-four years of age when he joined and I was only twenty-two by that time, you see, and he looked like Methuselah to me because he’d – They’d dressed him up, you know, in civvies and from there on, we went down this Underground line together. Well, we always walked separately, you know, about thirty metres behind each other and we always had a guide. An armed guide. Who would take us to the next place, you see. Anyway, I got some pictures of one of the helpers. ‘Cause a lot of them were shot after the War. Well, during that time of course, when they were caught. But anyway, we went all the way through and we went through Brader which was a Leave Centre for the Germans during that time and it was full of Germans and there was me, you know, fresh-faced little bloke with a thing.
AM: Deaf and dumb.
GP: And if anybody had asked me for my passport, or even shouted, I would’ve turned round, you know. [laughs]
AM: You couldn’t speak. You were dumb. Or supposed to be.
GP: [laughs] I’d have said I was Russian or — it wouldn’t matter, you know. But, I was deaf and dumb. It was as sophisticated as that. And I’ve got a full report on the KLM line until it got to the border in there, which is interesting. Anyway, we finally came to Antwerp in Belgium and we were put in a flat with — And I’ve got a picture of the lady who was there, and the rest of it. We stayed for three days and we ate beautifully.
AM: Still just the two of you or had other people —
GP: There were two of us, yeah.
AM: Still just the two of you.
GP: Oh, all the rest had been picked up except for the bomb aimer who went a different route down the escape things. He was caught eventually. But they were sent off to the NCO Camps and I was an Officer of course, so I got sent to a different camp.
AM: Oh, hang on. You’d not been caught yet.
GP: Yes, so we finished up in this flat and we were fed well and a very nice woman there and of course we chatted and the Front was advancing, of course, towards Belgium by that time. And then they said, ‘Well, we’re going to go and try and get through to the lines,’ you know, ‘We’re going West.’ And they were going to put us in an ambulance and bandage us up and take us. [laughs] Anyway, we went out to this place and we got into a car to take us out to the ambulance and all of a sudden — Oh, we were being escorted by a great big bloke who was supposed to be the girlfriend of this, the one in the flat, you see. Er, sorry, her boyfriend.
AM: Her boyfriend.
GP: And yeah, we thought we were on the way and all of a sudden he pulls out a gun and said, ‘OK. So for you, the War is over.’ And this is the fascinating thing, he turned out to be — [laughs] It’s all in here and it really should be read because it’s a lovely, lovely story. [sound of pages being turned]
GR: Which we will do, but tell us who he was.
AM: We will do. Carry on telling me. We’ll come to the [unclear]
GP: A character called René Van Muylem. And he was a Belgian who had Nazi sympathies.
AM: Right.
GP: And what had happened was that he’d got hold of the papers from one of our SOE agents who were being landed in France to help set up these lines, you see. And they’d captured this bloke, taken his papers off. Oh, René had them. And then he started organising the thing. Of course, instead of running up the line and picking everybody up, he just stayed there.
AM: Waited at the end of it.
GP: And a hundred and seventy-seven airmen were caught with the same system. And they used a flat, the flat that I was in, and a café for the two places in Antwerp were —
AM: They were all picked up.
GP: They were put. Yeah.
AM: It’s like drawing you to the centre of a spider’s web.
GP: Yeah.
AM: Just drawing you in.
GP: That’s right.
AM: Did the woman in the flat know about — Was she an infiltrator as well or was she a goodie?
GP: This is what worried me, because I didn’t know whether she was one of them or one of us. So, nothing happened actually because the papers weren’t allowed to be released until fifty years afterwards. And that was to avoid —
AM: Reprisals.
GP: Revenge attacks and things like that. So it wasn’t until 1995 that they were released and I’ve got a picture of, I’ve got another paper from the Escapers Society which explains all this, about it.
AM: Right. In the meanwhile, so for you, the War is over, then what happened?
GP: Oh, that was it. Well of course we went off to the place where they interrogated us. Still in Belgium. And then we were taken to Frankfurt.
AM: What was interrogation like?
GP: Well it wasn’t tough. I think the Germans were beginning to realise that they were losing the War and they were afraid of, you know, retribution afterwards, of course. So, they interrogated. It wasn’t pleasant. They threatened you, but, that sort of thing, but they obviously weren’t going to beat you up and things, so it wasn’t bad. And while I was in Frankfurt, this is another interesting thing, we had an air raid and it was night time of course. Another RAF one. And we were all sent down to an enormous underground shelter and there were all these Germans in there and there was thirty of us.
AM: Were you still in uniform? No, you weren’t in uniform by this time, were you? ‘Cause you were in disguises.
GP: No, I’d got civvies. And old Jack had too. Anyway they, yeah, they put us down there and put us in a little corner but I expected to be, you know, strung up from the roof because Frankfurt had been absolutely battered for a long time and in the morning, we came out and all I could remember seeing was the cathedral spire. Everything was as flat as a pancake, you know, it had all been bombed. I’m amazed that the Germans were so, you know, controlled. You know. Yes. Anyway, so there we were. Oh, I missed out just one little bit. We were put into Antwerp prison first and waited until there was thirty people there and then they took them all down for interrogation together.
AM: Together.
GP: Frankfurt thing. So. And we were the first ones in, so they were picking out one a day, I calculate, because it took about a month before we were shifted from Antwerp jail. From where we watched the fighter bombers attacking the local airfield at Evère. And it was — it wasn’t a very pleasant place. We used to have to amuse ourselves by killing the bugs, you know. They were full of blood and things. [laughs]
AM: What about food? Did they feed you ok?
GP: Yeah, oh, the — In Frankfurt, that was the second time I’d been Blitzed, you see. A third time. We’d had two by the Luftwaffe and then this one by the [unclear]. You can’t believe it can you? Anyway, from there I was taken up to Bath. It was an Officers’ place. So we didn’t have to work or anything like that. And the others were taken over to — I don’t know whether it was Sagen [?] or — but anyway, they had one of these — that was the navigator and well, all the rest had these marches when the Germans —
AM: Long march, yes.
GP: Were trying to get them West to keep them out of the Russians’ way.
GR: Just backtracking, did all the crew get out? Did all —
GP: They all got out, yes. And we met again at the squadron afterwards. You know, after the War. But they had this long walk to do and — nasty for them. And I was all the way up near Lübeck and it was so far that they decided that they’d send us Flying Fortresses to get back home. Which was rather nice. We were right by a Luftwaffe airfield. A fighter airfield which had been mined etcetera so we were delayed while the —
AM: How long were you there though, before the end of the War? How long were you there when —
GP: Well I wasn’t long there. I was in the prison camp by August and we came out in May.
AM: So, for nine months.
GP: ’45.
AM: Nine months.
GP: Nine months, yeah.
AM: What was that like?
GP: The prison camp, it was fine and it was run by an ex Luftwaffe pilot from the First World War so he was very good and he was very strictly according to the rules and things. The only trouble was, of course, that we’d bombed all the railway lines and all the junctions and things and they couldn’t get Red Cross parcels through, except on a very small scale and so we got very thin and also of course, we were writing letters but they never got home.
AM: No way of getting them.
GP: Because there was no, even the Red Cross couldn’t get them through, so my parents of course, all this time, had got the message that I was missing but no news, and of course, as time went on, with brother Pete still fighting the Japanese, it wasn’t a happy position.
AM: No.
GP: And this is another thing, of course, that very fortunately, one of those letters that I wrote home, which didn’t get there, was read out by Lord Haw-Haw. The whole thing. I’ve got a copy there. Over the radio. Well my parents didn’t listen to the broadcast, but we got letters. Well, Mum and Pop got letters from all over the place.
AM: We’ve heard —
GP: ‘Did you hear that your son was alive?’ You know. ‘He’s in the prison camp.’ You know, sort of thing. And I was asking them if my motorbike had been sent back from the squadron, and things like that. You know, [laughs] so, yeah, old Haw-Haw.
AM: Fame.
GP: He was a friend to me.
[laughter]
GP: I’ve got a wonderful, wonderful thing here. You must reproduce that.
AM: I will do.
GR: Oh, we will do.
GP: It’s an explanation of why he was actually — It’s a whole thing of why he was hung.
GR: Hung. Yeah.
GP: Hanged.
GR: Hanged after the war.
AM: Yes.
GP: But that is a real gem of a thing because — I think it’s written by the son of the lawyer who actually was taking the trials at Nuremberg.
AM: Right.
GP: But yes, so, you can photograph all these things, yeah.
AM: I will do. I’ll look at that after. So you’ve been there nine months. Were you able to — Did you know how the war was progressing? Had you got any news of that?
GP: Oh yeah, well, a little bit, yeah. We had a radio etcetera in the thing. And in fact, apart from getting very thin, we used to entertain ourselves. And one of the big entertainments was the arrival weekly — Our toilet facilities were very basic there. It was a long trench with a pole and you sat on the pole and that was it. But they had to empty it you see. Every week.
AM: When you say ‘they’, who’s ‘they’?
[laughter]
GR: The prisoners.
AM: The prisoners had to empty it?
GP: Yeah. [laughs loudly] Anyway, there’s six horses pulling a tank, you see, with a cap on it. A sprung cap. And what they used to do, oh, and a pipe which used to down into the Mess. And we’d all stand around. There was about two thousand of us in this camp. We’d all stand around and the bloke would throw in some petrol or something, and it lit. And it blew the top off and of course all the air went out and produced suction in the pipe. [laughs] And the old six horses would go off and that was the job done. It used to amuse us, you know. We had little — We had, from the Red Cross, who’d been able to operate previously, we had twelve chess sets and the, er, we had the Canadian champion chess set man and he used to lie on a bunk. We used to have bunks, three deep, you see, in these wooden huts with about a hundred and forty people in them. The huts were built off the ground so you couldn’t dig a tunnel or anything. And in any case, it was so far from anywhere, it wasn’t worth trying, you know. But he used to lie on his thing and he’d say, ‘OK, well, you move your things and tell me what you’ve done on your chess sets.’ And he’d play eleven people and he’d win every time. And he’d got a memory of everybody’s move.
GR: So he was playing eleven different people at once.
GP: And we used to have little shows and things, but time went very quickly because we knew the War was finishing. And then the Russians came, of course. And that was a tricky moment because we were let out of the camp. Well, the Germans disappeared.
AM: So the Germans just went.
GP: And we got out of the camp. And then the Russian — It was the people behind the front, they weren’t the actual soldiers, came charging in and we’d commandeered bicycles [aircraft noise] from anybody we saw, and things like that, and we were killing anything we could find to eat, you know, and things like that. Anyway, the Germans had let us keep our ordinary watches on. Our private watches. Perhaps somebody was riding a bicycle, or they’d got a watch on and these Russians would just, you know, say, ‘I want that.’ Sort of business. And if anybody refused, they shot them. Or killed them. You know. We had three or four people actually killed. So what we did was, to lock everybody back into the [unclear] camp again. It was an amazing situation. Only for a short while. But it also took in the time when we were de-mining the airfield of booby traps and things like that.
AM: Again, when you say ‘we’.
GP: Well, I was one of the bods who was given — about a hundred of us, you know, stayed out. Well, we had our bunks still. And we got out of the place.
AM: Okay. But who did the de-mining?
GP: Pardon?
AM: Who did the de-mining? Who actually did it?
GP: De-mining, yeah. And booby trap, looking for, you see and things like that.
AM: But who?
GP: And that took — No, I didn’t do that.
AM: No, ok.
GP: But anyway, yeah, after about, oh, it’d be a couple of weeks, in which time, I’d already sat in a Focke- Wulf 190, one of their airplanes! And been hauled out by a Russian actually. Yeah. Because he thought it was going to be mined and if I touched anything it might blow up, you know. But anyway, it was all good fun and eventually we were taken off by Flying Fortress and flew back into England. Yeah. So it was quite a trip and all very exciting, but when you go through a place like Breda, and you’re sitting in a tram or a bus, we used to use bicycles and all sorts of things to travel, and people are looking, you know, opposite you, and looking at you and you wonder whether they’re German, or, you know, ‘cause there was a lot of [unclear] intelligence people floating round, Gestapo and things. And even the bods with tin helmets on and things, you wonder whether they’re going to stop you, and things. And with this little green pass it would have been hopeless. If they’d talked to me, I would have involuntarily, sort of, [laughs] responded to them and turned my head or something like that.
AM: When the Flying Fort— There were two thousand, did you say, there? Did you say there were two thousand of you in the camp?
GP: Yes, yeah.
AM: So when the Flying Fortresses turned up, how long did that take then to actually get you all out?
GP: Oh, I don’t know, but, oh, and I went in the hangar you see, and pinched a whole load of tools, ‘cause I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to get something out of these bods.’ [laughs] And I got this little bag of tools, well it was quite a heavy one, and tried to get on the Fortress and they said, ‘We won’t get airborne with that lot.’ And I had to throw half of them away and I’ve still got some millimetre spanners in there. And I had an electric drill and all sorts of things.
GR: Oh God.
GP: That I’d pinched from the Luftwaffe.
[laughter]
AM: So where did you — What was it like when you landed back then? Where did you land back in the Flying Fortress?
GP: Well, um, I don’t know where we landed actually.
AM: In England or —
GP: Then, what happened was that Princess Elizabeth, before she was Queen, had a house in Ascot.
AM: Yes.
GP: And the first thing they did was send the Officers, some of the Officers, there to just generally feed them up and get them back to a decent weight and things and give them time. They could go to lectures if the wanted to and we had a little WAAF to look after us and things like that.
AM: Did you have to be de-loused?
GP: Yeah. And we used her house in Ascot there. It’s now a big administrative building, but, in Sunning—
AM: Sunningdale?
GP: Not in Ascot. It was Sunning—. Sunningdale. Sunningdale. Yeah. So. And we had a little time there and then I was posted off to Ely as an Assistant Air Traffic Controller.
AM: At what point did you get to go home and see your parents?
GP: Oh, I was able to go home.
AM: More or less straight away.
GP: Yep. So, but, yeah. So that was a little bonus. But I stayed in the RAFVR because they weren’t quite sure about whether we were going to fight the Russians and things like that, so I stayed there and eventually I got my green ticket, you know, that allowed me the commercial pilot’s licence and then started looking for a job. But I didn’t get a job for six years. Yes, BEA, of course what had happened was that I’d been in the prison camp without flying for, you know, um —
AM: Nine months.
GP: Nine months at least, so — And all the jobs had gone by that time and they were mostly transport aircraft pilots who were given the jobs, so — And it wasn’t until 1952 and I was on my honeymoon.
Other 1: Yes.
AM: I was going to ask you where you met your wife.
[unclear background conversation]
GP: Taken there. She’s sixty years of age there, do you know.
AM: Gosh.
GP: We were retired and that’s just at the bottom of the road there.
AM: Yeah.
GP: Anyway.
GR: Did you meet your wife after the war? Or had you already known her?
GP: No, I met her after the war because what I’d done was to go back to my audit department, you see.
AM: I was going to ask what you did in those years before you actually got your job in flying again then.
GP: Yes, so, it was a good time because brother Pete came back from Japan and we raced motorbikes. These sort of things.
AM: When you say you raced motorbikes. What level? [sound of aircraft]
[sound of pages being turned]
AM: What? Where? Gosh.
GP: That’s us. [laughs]
AM: I’ve got some wonderful pictures here, for the tape.
GP: Oh, yeah, but I —
AM: Of Geoff and his brother on motorbikes.
GP: Don’t take that. This sepia, I tried to wipe something off and it’s —
AM: And it’s —
GP: Those are my nephews and things.
AM: Gosh.
GP: But there’s some lovely pictures there.
AM: I’m sure I can scan one of them.
GP: Yeah.
GR: So would that have been speedway? Was that —
AM: With motorbikes.
GP: We used to do grass tracks, trials, hill climbs and even the road racing at Cadwell Park and things.
GR: Oh yeah, I’ve heard of Cadwell.
AM: Yeah. So, but, so —
GP: Those were in Belgium, I took those.
AM: So you went back to the audit department at the town hall.
GP: So I went back to the audit department.
AM: But had the time of your life on motorbikes.
GP: And there, I met my fate, you see because I was an auditor and my wife was a cashier in the education department and by chance, I happened to be given that. We used to swap over these departments to audit, you see. I was given the education and there was a great big conference room with a mahogany table and a whole load of busts and things around the side looking at you. And I used to sit there and the cashiers’ office was right by. There was Stella and a good friend. She’s still living. As two little girls in the cashiers’ office, you see, and she used to bring me ledgers and journals and things to look at, you see. So, we had a six — we had a five-year courtship because she was looking out for an old Mum who had a very violent husband and she wasn’t in a hurry to get married and of course I was racing motorbikes with my brother, so we were both in the same boat really.
AM: Well, not quite.
[laughter]
AM: You were enjoying yourself on motorbikes.
GP: [laughs] That’s right, yeah. Well eventually, yeah, we decided that this was it and by sheer chance I met — oh, no, an advert came up from Sabena and they were short of pilots, you see, and they wanted a dozen to make up their fleet and I wrote in to them and I’d got my commercial by this [unclear] from the RAF really. Anyway, yeah, I was one of those selected, so I threw up my job and it was a bit of a gamble because I had to go over there and my English licence wasn’t good enough for the Belgians.
AM: ‘Cause what was — I was going to say, what was Sabena? That was Belgian.
GP: Commercial, yeah. So I had to take all my exams. There were about twelve different subjects and things in it and I also had to pass a medical every six months and things and flying tests and the rest of it. So I took a chance and they put me in Brussels of course. Well, you know, Brussels, and I could have gone and seen this woman of course but I didn’t because I still wasn’t sure.
AM: Still wasn’t sure whether she was a goodie or a baddie.
GP: Anyway, I passed the exam. I think partly because I took one or two of them in French which I could speak anyway and they were laughing at my accent [laughs]. Always used to do that. Yes. And from there on, I did ten years with them and then Stella had little chicos and we had to evacuate the Congo. And that was quite a thing. It was war-time footing and I was without sleep for two consecutive nights occasionally and still flying the aeroplane.
AM: Was this commercial aircraft then or passenger or —
GP: Sabena did it, yeah. We had our internal lines in the Congo.
GR: Because the Congo at the time was Belgian wasn’t it.
AM: Oh, of course, Belgian Congo. Of course.
GR: And that’s why the Belgians would have used their civil aircraft to evacuate.
GP: That’s right.
AM: I understand. I’m with you.
GP: There was two blacks fighting it out too. Tshombe and Lumumba. And they were trying to get the Belgians out. There were a lot of Belgians used to work down there, of course. It was a very good place. Especially Katanga, the — And Elizabeth. They were very, very wealthy places ‘cause they had the gold mines, the copper mines and all that sort of thing and Léopoldville was the centre of the place. Anyway, we had to go and get all these people out from their places and it was a question of twice as many people, on occasions, than there were seats for them. And they were sitting in the aisle and in the toilet and they were in the cockpit with us and everything. And the aircraft were overloaded and things and we were having to — on the return journey, and we were so overloaded that we could only take a little bit of fuel so we’d have to land in all these odd places in Africa on the way back. My job was the captain, you see, was in those days, getting the women and children out first, was to put on — there wasn’t a lot of steps to our aircraft and stand at the top and stop anybody else coming in. We used to get some people saying, ‘I’m the Ambassador to so-and-so. And I need to get —’ [laughs] And you’d say, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t get on here.’ And while the First Officer used to — the only people who were left in the Congo really were the Air Traffic Controllers who were usually English. Amazing isn’t it. But it was a time when my wife had just had the babies and of course I could get home and sleep for twenty-four hours, take her out to lunch and back on the job.
AM: Where was she —? Where were you living? Where was she living?
GP: We were in — She was in Brussels.
AM: In Brussels.
GP: We used to live just outside and we had this little — a dozen of us. The other pilots and their wives, if they weren’t flying, would look after the one whose wasn’t there. But we used to fly — one of the reasons why Sabena was good was because they used to pay twice as much as BOAC but of course we used to work twice as hard, you see, so, but in the end, it was the children that decided me to pack up the flying and by sheer chance, here again you know, someone’s looked after me, they were starting up the Flight Ops Inspectorate in the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation. They’d had an accident at Hounslow, where an aircraft had piled in to a load of council houses and killed a few people and they found out it was overloaded and under-serviced and things for repairs and things and they needed some check and they were looking for airline pilots of course, because when you check a company out, you’ve got to check the pilots as well. As the cruises will. So, we used to look at the ops manuals and training manuals, look at the standard of things and then give a certificate to fly certain type of aircraft in a certain part of the world depending at the facilities at the — you know, what sort of training they have and that. And it turned out then the most interesting job I’ve ever had because they gave me all-weather operations so I flew the Trident, before the pilots did of course, with the manufacturer, and I flew that right to the very end of my career, in 1982. There’s a lovely picture I think of my last — [pages turning] oh, that was the one with the Concorde and that’s before there was a Concorde aircraft available. They hadn’t got one then.
AM: So you flew — Did you fly Concorde?
GP: And that’s a mock-up for the —
AM: Did you fly Concorde?
GP: No, no, I — Unfortunately. That’s a bloke from Stansted, our —
AM: We’re looking at a photo in the album now.
GP: And that’s me at the other end.
AM: Right.
GP: And I’m with the Inspector you see.
AM: Got you.
GP: And they made him into — When I retired, this is —
AM: He became you, yeah.
GP: I only did about five years on this. So I used to do the simulator. Oh that’s old [unclear].
AM: No, I’ll look at that. I’ll look at these afterwards. Can I ask you one last, one last thing. So the — going back to the escape line, and the flats and the lady who you didn’t know whether she was a goodie or a baddie, but you eventually did find out.
GP: Yeah.
AM: So how did you find out? When the papers were released, I think you said.
GP: Um, well, it was, hang on.
AM: Did she turn out to be a goodie or a baddie? A goodie I assume.
GP: She was a goodie.
AM: Good.
GP: Yeah. And yes, she was clean and I felt so sad but by this time it was fifty years later.
AM: Did you meet her? Did you go and meet her?
GP: No, I didn’t, no.
AM: No.
GP: I don’t know whether she was alive or not. But anyway, we can — whatever you want to talk about.
AM: OK. I’ll —
GP: We’ll go through these in a bit.
AM: We’ve got lots of papers to look at, so I’m going to switch off now and start looking at these.
GP: Ok.
AM: And get my scanner out.
GP: Well there we are. That’s the hill where my aircraft was —
AM: OK. Who put the memorial up?
GP: Well, now of course, the whole place is built up.
AM: Yes.
GP: And by sheer chance, my mid-upper gunner, old Jack Jackson has a daughter who’s married a Dutchman and they took these pictures.
AM: Who actually erected the memorial though?
GP: Um?
AM: Who actually erected it? The Dutch people?
GP: Oh yeah. And that’s the — the thing on there, that’s part of the aircraft. That’s the aluminium that’s come off the aircraft.
GR: Just before you go on, that Dutch escape line was actually — The whole thing was turned by the Germans in 1942. From 1942 onwards, the Germans controlled all the SOE coming into Holland. They knew what was happening and everything.
GP: Yeah.
GR: And, as I understand it, ‘cos I spoke to a couple of other chaps who were turned over, exactly the same as you. And I believe after the war, the big bloke who got his gun out to you, he was hung.
GP: He was. No, he was shot.
GR: Shot. Yeah, I know he was —
GP: In a baker’s yard. And the story is here.
AM: We’ve got the story of that as well.
GP: Oh, I see.
AM: Ok.
GR: But I do believe all —
AM: So the bloke who actually turned Geoff in, [reading aloud] ‘Robert René Van Muylem is a very interesting and complex character. He was finally arrested in Paris in 1945 whilst working as a bartender at Camp Lucky Strike. It was one of the US Army Air Force Repatriation Centres and was where, unfortunately for him, he was recognised by Second Lieutenant Robert Hoke of the 388 BG, one of the airmen he betrayed. He was sent back to Belgium and thoroughly de-briefed and he was executed in 1947.’
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 Geoff Packham
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Annie Moody
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
2016-08-25
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
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
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APackhamGH160825, PPackhamG1610
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:21:22 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1944-05
1944-06
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Alberta--Medicine Hat
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Nova Scotia--Halifax
Alberta
Alberta
Canada
Nova Scotia
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Description
An account of the resource
Geoff’s father had been in the Royal Flying Corps and Geoff joined the Royal Air Force at RAF Cardington. He was posted to various stations before going to Halifax in Canada to train as a pilot on Tiger Moths and then Oxfords.
On his return, Geoff was posted to RAF Stormy Down on Whitleys and RAF Brize Norton where he trained army pilots to fly Horsa gliders. He was also posted to fly Wellingtons at the RAF Sutton Bridge experimental unit.
Geoff was eventually posted to Bomber Command and trained on Wellingtons at RAF Finningley. They did dummy raids, and dropped leaflets and Window. Geoff went to 550 Squadron at RAF North Killingholme in May 1944. He completed seven operations within 11 days and was shot down on the seventh. The first four operations were over the Normandy coast, starting on 5 June 1944 around D-Day.
Geoff describes how his plane was shot on its way to Sterkrade in the Ruhr. They baled out just over the Dutch border. Geoff landed in a wheat field whilst the aircraft hit a farm, killing seven people. Geoff found the church and was given clothing and a false identity card. He went down the escape line with his mid-upper gunner to Antwerp. They were betrayed by the Flemish collaborator, René van Muylem, who had set up a false escape line.
Geoff was interrogated and taken to Frankfurt. He was then sent to Stalag Luft I prisoner of war camp in Barth for nine months. There was little food but it was otherwise acceptable. His parents learnt he was a prisoner when his letter to them was read out by Lord Haw-Haw. The Germans left before the Russians arrived. Geoff was returned on a B-17.
Geoff was posted to Ely as Assistant Air Traffic Controller and stayed in the RAF volunteer reserve until his commercial pilot licence was granted.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sally Coulter
550 Squadron
Air Raid Precautions
B-17
bale out
bombing
civil defence
Dulag Luft
evading
Horsa
memorial
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
prisoner of war
RAF North Killingholme
RAF Stormy Down
RAF Sutton Bridge
sanitation
shot down
Stalag Luft 1
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Whitley
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/806/10787/ADowardLA171026.2.mp3
158fdd349ac6ae339dce19c3e81889de
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
Doward, Len
Len Alfred Doward
L A Doward
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Len Doward (1920 - 2022, 182242 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 625 and 550 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-20
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
Doward, LA
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is David Meanwell. The interviewee is Len Doward. The interview is taking home, at Mr Doward’s home at South Nutfield in Surrey on the 26th of October 2017. Ok. Well, Len if you could perhaps say a little bit about where and when you were born and how you came to end up in the forces.
LD: Yes. I was born in London, along Westminster Bridge Road. Not far from Westminster Bridge. And we went from there when I was quite young to Sutton, off Sutton Common Road, Woodstock Rise. And from there I went, in 1938 when Chamberlain came back waving a piece of paper saying. ‘Peace in our time.’ It was just before he returned from Munich. I went over and I joined the Territorial Army in the Drill Hall that was on Stonecot Hill in Sutton. And that was the 31st, it was the 325 Company Royal Engineers, the 31st Battalion, Royal Engineers and the CO was Colonel Jones who was the PPS of the Prime Minister at that time. So, Jonesie was our boss. And we were mobilised on the, I think the 15th of August 1939. So, we went from there. We had to go to the Drill Hall. And then we were taken in buses down to what they called our Battle Stations which were outside Horsham, Broadbridge Heath. And when we got there, there was some squaddies already there in the course of erecting big tents. They were like marquees. And we were, the different companies that were there, they were given a number of marquees. And also the squaddies, they were handed linen covers and then we were told to go over to a corner of the field where there was a great stack of bales of hay and we had to fill these linen baskets with the hay. That was our bed and that was what we slept on. And then we were there [pause] I’m forgetting ‘til when [pause] Oh, I volunteered for the RAF, flying duties because we had a notice in Company Orders that came around that the Air Force, they were seeking volunteers for aircrew duties, so I put my name down. And I had a cousin at that time. He was in the Royal Engineers and he was a member of the bomb disposal squad. And he was older than me, but I’d applied for Johnny, that was my cousin to claim me. That I could go and join him in the bomb disposal squadron which was still the Royal Engineers. But anyway, as luck would have it the transfer came through into the Air Force. But before I got the ok I had to go up to what was known as arcy tarcy which was ACRC. Air Crew Reception Centre. Known fondly as arcy tarcy which was in a large block of flats. St Johns Wood. And we had to go, for our meals we had to go in our different flights over to London Zoo, in the London Zoo Restaurant for our meals. That was breakfast, lunch and tea. So that is what we had to do and you had to march over there and you would go as a flight. Also to go over there to have your jabs and so on, and medicals. Well, it just so happened that a number of us had transferred from the Army but we also had in the flight, we also had complete newcomers in to the services. They were as green as grass and — alright?
Other: Withheld.
LD: Ok. And what happened was that these youngsters who never experienced any form of service life they were that green as grass that when we were due to go and have our jabs, inoculations and some brought up to date well coming from the army most people had had all their jabs. We had a notification in our pay books. So, all we had to do was just flash our pay books and it was showing there the jabs that we’d had. Well, the youngsters straight out of Civvy Street [pause] the people who transferred and we were rotten devils at that time. We would tip each other the wink and we would say how terrible it was with these jabs, and it was surprising the number of people that died from them. They would have the jab and they would collapse and that was it [laughs] And there was one fellow, ginger haired character and he looked as green as grass and he was. And we were discussing this with another fellow from the army and we said. ‘Yeah. No, that was terrible to think that you’re having your jobs that are going to keep you alive and instead of that it killed you.’ And this poor ginger haired fellow he just collapsed [laughs] Yeah, but it was all good experience. I went from there, from arcy tarcy up to Scarborough, and Scarborough, that was [pause] I’ve got a photograph. The CO there was a Squadron Leader [Ailing?] in the middle. And this, he was the training wing warrant officer. He was a clever devil. He was a regular air force man and he was a warrant officer first class. And I’ve forgotten, I’ve got the blighter’s name down here somewhere. We got all their names and Nodder Locke, he was, we called him Nodder because he had this problem with his collar and he would do this from time to time. So, he was called Nodder. So, Nodder, he was Surrey County Cricket Club groundsman. and where is he now? Oh, here we are. Thorn. That was his name. Thorn. He was a London police constable and he was awarded a George Medal for rescuing a number of people from a bomb demolished building. And he got his GM. That’s Thorn. And also, I’ve got there’s some other blighter on here as well. Quite a well-known character. I’m old, I forget. But that was our CO. Squadron Leader [Elwin?] And that’s the warrant officer. And what was his name now? I’ve forgotten his blooming name. [pause] Anyway, he was a regular Air Force man and he was a clever devil. He was claiming four marriage allowances. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. But they eventually caught up with him. Long after I’d left there. And he was demoted down to an AC plonk and he was put in the slammer. I don’t know for how long but he served time in the Clink and he came out, down to an AC plonk because he was a regular serving fellow. So, that was that. And got quite a number of people on here who one way and another they became quite well known. And one of them. Scottie Cochrane. His name was Alex really but we called him Scottie and Scottie, he was the company secretary of the brewers Ind Coope and Allsopp, yes. So he had a fair wack of booze frequently delivered. Yeah. So, we were alright there. And it’s rather strange because I, I got an email. I was checking my emails this morning and there was one that had been put out by a great friend of mine. We were on the same squadron and his name is Jack Ball. Well, Jack Ball he’s got it on the internet, email. He’s got down a history of the experience from being green as grass until you got up and found yourself as a skipper on an aircraft. And he’d got it set out absolutely superbly, and he’s got in the language that the man in the street could understand. But very good. That was Jack Ball. But one way and another all these characters —
DM: So, that was, was that September 1941?
LD: Yeah.
DM: Yeah. That was Scarborough.
LD: September ‘41. Yeah. And that was the initial, 11 Initial Training Wing up in Scarborough. That hasn’t got Scarborough on there but that’s where it was.
DM: Yeah.
LD: And these are the signature of the people up in there. So that’s that.
DM: Put that over here so it’s safe.
LD: Ok. Thanks.
DM: So, where did you go from Scarborough? Where was the next training?
LD: Where did I go from Scarborough? I went from Scarborough to Hixon. Hixon. That was an Elementary Flying School. But at Scarborough you had to do all the ground lectures and you had to pass the exams following the lectures on the different subjects. You would have navigation, meteorology, a number of other subjects. Oh, Morse code. And they had semaphore to a degree but they didn’t go up into that very much because the instructors didn’t know what they were teaching [laughs] So, that was it. But that was Scarborough. Then from there went to Hixon. Oh, here we are. Arcy tarcy, Scarborough. Oh no. I went to Brough. Not Hixon. I went to Brough. That was elementary flying. And from Brough I went to Heaton Park in Manchester which was kicking off point before we were shipped out to Canada for flying training. Then I went from, went out to Canada. To Moncton. Then from there I went to elementary flying in a [unclear] Then I went to service flying in Swift Current but I didn’t like Swift Current because they were on multi-engine. Twin engine. It was a Service Flying School but the aircraft they had there, they were Airspeed Oxfords. Twin-engined. But I wanted to go on to fighters so I got a transfer from there into Swift Current which was a Service Flying Training School for singles. And I went from there to Calgary. Calgary back to Moncton on the way home. Then HM troop ship Andes. But it’s all down there, yeah.
DM: What did you think of Canada?
LD: Sorry?
DM: What did you think of Canada? Did you —
LD: Canada?
DM: Yeah.
LD: It was very good. The people there they were very very kind. They really were. And they couldn’t do enough for you. And we came, because we packed up training on the Friday evening but from the Friday evening you would be invited to spend a weekend. Different families. Canadian families. And they would come and collect you, take you to their homes and deliver you back on Sunday evening. And they were very very nice. Very very kind. They really were kind people. And that was that. Then I went from there, Swift Current up to Calgary. Yeah. Then I went up to, got back England. Up to Harrogate. And then from there to give us something to do they sent us up to Whitley Bay on what they called an RAF Regiment Course. So, although you were in the Air Force to fly they sent you up there to understand what the RAF Regiment did on the ground. And you had to take part in some of their manoeuvres. So, that was that. And it was that cold up in Whitley Bay that you received — you had, it was a coke stove in the middle of what you would term a sitting room or a lounge. And it would be in the middle of the room with a stack going up through the roof. And you were given a ration of coke but wintertime you soon got through that. So, what we did, because it had a garden at the back of the house where we were billeted it had a wooden fence. So we started burning the fence [laughs] And we worked our way along one side. And as luck would have it before anyone came around to check out we were shipped out. So [laughs] So, that was an experience that was. But that was up in, that was in up in Harrogate, I think.
DM: When you were going —
LD: That was at Whitley Bay.
DM: Whitley Bay, yeah. When you were going to Canada and came back from Canada were you seasick? Did you have a good passage, or —
LD: No. We were on the ship. HMS Andes. And where was I? I can’t remember. I went out to Canada on the troop ship Letitia. And I came back from Canada on the troopship, the Andes. And these two ships, they were both cruise liners in peacetime. And conditions weren’t the same on those because they’d converted them in to troop ships. And under the decks where they’d had cabins and so on for paying passengers they’d all been ripped out and you had a clear deck space for the whole of the deck. And you were allocated a hammock. And the hammocks they were so close together that they couldn’t even move with the movement of the ship. They were solid and as the ship moved you all went with the ship like this. Yeah. So that was, and that was going out on the Letitia and coming back on the Andes. And from there I went up to Harrogate which was called Number 7 Pilot’s Recruiting Centre. And from there I went on the RAF Regiment course at Whitley Bay. That lasted what? Five weeks. Then I went to the, what they called GR School which although you were a pilot, qualified pilot you had to go on the GR course which was Ground Recognition course. You had to go on that to learn the duties of the other crew members, and you also had to become conversant there with your Morse code. So, do you know Morse code?
DM: Not really, no.
LD: Oh.
DM: Only three dots and three dashes.
LD: [laughs] Well [pause] if someone says to you nine dits and a da you know they’re being rude.
DM: Fair enough.
LD: Because nine dits, it goes, it starts off with nine dits in Morse code is a dit a dit three dits.
DM: Right.
LD: Now, I’ll tell you the second letter and you can judge for yourself the last two. So, the first one is S. Dit de dit. The second one is four dit dit dit dit which is H. Now I’ll leave your imagination to the other two [laughs]
DM: I think I’ve got it, think I’ve got it. So, by this time from what you say you knew you weren’t going to be a fighter pilot, did you?
LD: Yes. And I trained on what they called Harvards, they were. They were used as fighters but then they became defunct as operational and they put them in to what they called Service School. That was Fighter Training School. And I was training on fighters. On the Harvard. Now, on the Harvard, oh that’s, I don’t know whether that bloke’s on that list. He could be somewhere. [pause] Oh, he’s probably on there somewhere. But he’s a tall guy and what happened was that the Harvard was a twin seater training aircraft although it had been used in fighter service but they put it down to training. What they called, not elementary but service flying, and the Harvard it was quite a good aircraft. You could do all kinds of things in it but when you were training you went to Service School. You thought that you were the king’s pin. You were mustered. And although you would be booked out for certain things [pause] I wonder if I’ve got it in here.
[pause]
LD: Ah. Here we are. The [unclear] Tiger. Tiger. Tiger. Tiger. Harvards. Here we are. That was at Swift Current. And you had to go and understand before they turned you loose. You had to understand and you had to certify that you were fully aware and understood the different aspects relating to the aircraft you were flying. So, although you signed this it was a means whereby if you ballsed up any of these actions you would be held responsible. And particularly if you killed yourself [laughs] They would say it was his own fault. So you wouldn’t, or your survivors wouldn’t get a pension. So, that was that. But I’ve got it down here. Yeah, here it is. Harvards. Started here [pause] And also you had to do link training. And I think the link training is at the back of the book.
DM: So, link training if I’m right was a bit like a flight simulator. An early form of flight simulator.
LD: Yeah. I’m babbling on.
DM: No. You carry on. That’s fine. But that’s what a link trainer was. It wasn’t, you weren’t in an actual plane, you were on the ground.
LD: Yeah.
DM: Yeah.
LD: So, these are the different things that — there you are, link trainer as well. You had to be proficient in the link trainer and you were certified by the link trainer instructor as to whether you were competent in his various exercises. And see, I’ve got it down here. Link, link trainer. And you had to do different things such as if you were flying an aircraft but you would be completely enclosed and you would have to do it on instruments. And through the earphones they would tell you to fly a certain course and you had, it was just the same as in a cockpit. You had to fly a certain course. They would tell you, ‘Right. You’ve reached a certain point. Now, you’ve got to find your way back and land at your home base.’ And this is where it comes out and you had to do different things which was timing on the beam. You had to time yourself on the beam and if you did that when you had to turn, turn off the beam on to certain heading, fighter heading. Then do a specific turn at a given rate. You could do rate ones up to four, four or six turns. Well, rate one was a nice gentle turn. Four or six would be as if you were bloody Top Gun [laughs] And that’s it. And this is what you had to do. You would be under the hood and you would be given directions what to do and you had to do this. And then we’ve got here you had to do homing, timing. Then they would give you an unknown course to fly. You didn’t know. And you had to go so far and then you had to judge from the sounds you were getting through as to what you would do next. And it was quite interesting that because you then had to find out how you were going to get back. Although you weren’t in the air to get back to base but you still had to go through the motions. And I’ve got it here, you see. Then you had to form what was known as figures of eight and you had to allow as if you were up in the air for drift and so on. And that was all down here. So, that was that. That was the link. And then I’ve got the list of my crew here. [laughs] I’ve got the list of when they passed on.
DM: Really?
LD: Yeah, Flash, we called him Flash Gall because he was the navigator and he would masticate his food a minimum of sixty chomps. And he would chomp. And you would sit down there with a pre-flight meal before we went off on ops and we called him Flash as a result. And Flash would sit there and you’d say. ‘Bloody hell, hurry up.’ And you would be the last on the crew bus to get out. Yeah. That was Flash. And he snuffed it on the 9th of December ’44. And Doug Jackman, the narrow gutted fellow. He — which one was he? [pause] Oh, here we are [pause] That was my, that’s my wireless operator, that was his job in Civvy Street.
DM: Senior investigations engineer.
LD: Yeah.
DM: With the Zinc Corporation.
LD: Yeah.
DM: Southern Power Corporation. That was in Australia. Broken Hill.
LD: Yeah.
DM: New South Wales.
LD: Yeah. He was quite a big noise in that company. And also I’ve got, that’s a Halifax. I’ve flown those. And this is us.
DM: That’s the crew. So, when —
LD: And —
DM: When — can you —
LD: You had to, you had to recognise ships as well. So that if you saw a ship when you were coming back from a trip, North Sea or Channel, whatever, from the recognition you’d either try and bomb them out of the water or just report back what you’d seen. So they would know they were friendly. But that’s the crew. And George Buckman. He was a senior engineer for Esso Petroleum in Southern Australia. And he was responsible for the whole of South Australia for Esso. He was the young one, Stan, seventeen. Roy had his own business. He was an electrician. This narrow gutted so and so [laughs] he, he just couldn’t adhere to being regimented. We were all sensibly shod but not Douglas, no. He had to be different.
DM: Wearing his wellies.
LD: Yeah.
DM: Yeah.
LD: In his welligogs.
DM: And you say he used to take all his brass buttons off.
LD: Eh?
DM: You said he took all his brass buttons off.
LD: Yeah.
DM: And put black buttons on. Did he get caught? Did he get put on a charge for that or —
LD: Well, he was, he finished as a headmaster of a school. And his wife Kate, she was a headmistress. So they were both in the teaching profession. But that’s those two and its surprising really.
DM: When — where did you all crew up?
LD: Sorry?
DM: Where did you, where were you when you all crewed up? Where were you?
LD: What, our base?
DM: Yes.
LD: We were based up in [pause] Wireless op — that’s his place. That’s the navigator [pause] And I stayed in the Reserve until ’59. On the last aircraft I flew was [pause] I was given the opportunity, not that I was booked out as the pilot but I was like a second-Joe with a fellow. This was 1954. And he allowed me to fly the Meteor. Yeah. For a short space. That was interesting. And I did an hour at that. Yeah.
DM: So, going back. Going back to you’d finished your training.
LD: Yeah.
DM: You crewed up.
LD: Yeah.
DM: With all your crew that we’ve just been talking about.
LD: Yeah.
DM: Were you in Halifaxes then? Did you go on ops in Halifaxes?
LD: Yes. There we are. Halifax. Flew Halifax at what they called a Conversion Unit. So, we did this [pause] this was in August ’44. We converted to four engines. And I got on very well with my instructor from two to four. He was an Australian and because I had Australians in my crew, two, we got along like a house on fire. He was an Australian. And I had two. So, that was quite good. And his name was Pickles. And that was on the Halifax. That’s when we did a Conversion Unit on to Halifaxes, and before that I flew Wellingtons. And it was then when I went to OTU [pause] Where the hell would that be? Oh, I know. I was at Haverford West, and that was where I received my intro to the Wellingtons. And that was down Haverford West. That’s the west coast of Wales. And we had a runway that we took off over Cardigan Bay. And one of the commanders there, his name was named Donati. Flight Lieutenant Donati. And he’d been in the Middle East on what they called a Met flight. Meteorological flight. He’d been doing flights up to certain heights and recording the weather and so on. Well, Donati, he brought back from the Middle East he brought back with him which was [unclear] a dingo dog. A little dog. And this little dog, he used to go out on the rampage looking for bitches and he would disappear for a couple of days. And in what we called the crew room where you were waiting to be signed out and so on and you took an aeroplane. He had, in the corner he had a cushion where he could come and sleep. And if he’d been out on the rampage for a couple of days he’d come back and he’d sleep for about a day and a half in the corner, this dingo. Yeah. And Donati. He was as bad as the dog. And Donati used to go, used to go in to Cardiff. And I remember one occasion I got a telephone call from Donati. He was in Cardiff and he said, because he was a flight commander and I was just a member of the flight. So, he telephoned, he said, ‘Book yourself out an aircraft,’ he said, ‘And come and pick me up at Cardiff.’ Anyway, I booked myself out. So, I got a navigator and I said, ‘Right. We’re going to Cardiff.’ So, we went to Cardiff. Landed. Went to the crew room there and there was Donati. He looked absolutely, if you don’t mind the term, absolutely shagged out. It was unbelievable. And there was the dog fast asleep as well. So, that was Donati. But he was a nice fellow was Donati. And I went from Haverford West to [pause] I’ve got it all in here. At the back. It’s incredible. And I went from there. I finished, I finished a tour, a Bomber Command tour and because I fell out with my CO, because at one time in Bomber Command when they first started doing what they called daylights they equated three daylight trips because it was just across the Channel and back again. You had to do three daylights to count for one night. Well, because it got so bad with the fighter dominating the coast, the ME 110 and also the ack-ack they quickly changed that to one on one. So, that was, that was when I was down in [pause] oh I’ve forgotten. Somewhere.
[pause]
LD: Whitley Bay. Little Rissington, Rissington, Haverford West, Haverford West. Then did conversion to Wellingtons. Wellington. Then did another conversion to Halifaxes. Then I did another conversion to Lancasters. And then did a conversion to [pause] Oxfords. Twin engine, and it was there, yeah I flew Tiger Moths, Harvards, Anson. I flew Oxfords with a Cheetah engine. Wellingtons. Different class Wellingtons — 3, 10, 12, 13 and 14. Halifax with a Michelin engine, Lancaster. Argus, now, the Argus. That was when I was out. And for my cheek with my CO I fell out with him because I told him that he was chicken and he chose short trips. I said, ‘It’s about time you bloody well did a long night trip instead of these short ones.’ Anyway, he had his own back because when I finished I found myself on the banana boat out to India. He got his own back. But the bugger is still alive and we keep in contact. He lives up Harrogate way. And he lost his wife of a considerable number of years. Bobby his wife’s name. They’d been married, oh thirty odd years but she passed away about four or five years ago and he’s since remarried. But that was — then I did Argus. Went out to, I did a communication squadron out at Alipore, which is the outside of Calcutta. And there had to fly, first of all because they didn’t have pukka aerodromes and airstrips the engineers they would dig out a strip in the jungle and you were give a map reference. So, you had a map and you had [pause] what the hell? A Dalton. A Dalton. It was a Dalton [pause] it was a computer. And from that you could work out from the atlas points you’d been given, you could work out with your computer, you could work out the course you had to fly. But more importantly not necessarily a course but the track that you had to find because the course is what you will fly on the compass but the track is what you had to cover over the ground. So you had to make certain that you were tracking over the ground. Going in the right direction despite the fact you were probably, your nose was an entirely different direction. So you had to do that and you would be given a map reference. And you had to find this by yourself in an Argus because you had no navigator. You were given a map, a compass, and you were given a map reference point and you were told, ‘Right. You’ve got to be there at a certain time,’ because the Army brass of course they were going through, the 14th Army, through the jungle and they were holding conferences as the 14th advanced. And they would pick an atlas point that you had to be there at a certain time so they could conduct this conference before they in turn upped and moved on. So, you had to be there before they moved on. And that was interesting because you in turn would, on occasion you would take senior brass to either conduct a conference or be part and parcel. And that was quite interesting because I flew some interesting people on some of these trips. And one of them was [pause] I forget where. Yeah. I used to go up to [pause] I flew a Brigadier Haynes on one occasion. We had to go up to Sylhet which was at the foot of the Himalayas and take him up there to a conference. And we had a colonel who was going up there at the same time. Mellor. And I had Air Commodore Hardman who eventually became Marshal of the Royal Air Force. Hardman. And I flew him up to Sylhet which again was at the base of the Himalayas. And Brigadier Weston, I took him a couple of times. And a Colonel Dutfield, and that was going up. That was up, going up into Burma. And they were, they were interesting trips because one of the people I took was a Mrs Metcalfe, and I had to take her up to Alipore which was an airstrip outside Calcutta. I had to take her there. And Mrs Metcalfe, she was the senior nursing officer out in India. Australian lady. And she was that down to earth she was unimaginable really. She really was, talk about a spade a spade. But I had some very interesting people. I met quite a lot of them. Plus the fact that in Calcutta you had what was known as the Grand Hotel where you could go there. And if you were taking someone, if they were going to a conference and it would last more than twenty four hours you would book into the Grand Hotel. And you would have to meet the expenses but what you did you claimed your expenses when you got back. And that was a very very swish hotel the Grand. It really was swish. Where they had these very tall Sikh soldiers all dressed in white. Bandoliers and so on. They were the guards with the Sikh plumes. They were the guards at the entrances and so on and they had one on each landing. And they also had a lady guarding each landing. A member of the Indian Army guarding each landing with a table and she had a register of who they should allow on the landings. And you had to be in that book or you weren’t allowed on the landing. But that was all very interesting. Plus the fact that they had what was known as a Senior Officer’s Club there and you had to be squadron leader and above. That meant that you’d attained your majority in the army. Anyway, I was a flight lieutenant so I hadn’t attained my majority — squadron leader. But I was very fortunate because I was invited as a guest to enjoy the facilities of the Officer Club and it was a beautiful. You wouldn’t have thought there was a war on. Absolutely spotless. You could go like that. Not a speck of dust. Absolutely fantastic. And all the servants they were all dressed in their pukka garb with their white long breeches, their hats. They were absolutely immaculate really. And that was an experience in itself. But needless to say I went on one occasion, Bob Hart, he was a Northern Rhodesian fellow and he’d done a tour of operations over here as I had done and he in turn, we were very much alike. Very [pause] we seemed, we didn’t think twice about what we said. Yeah. And Bob, he was the same. Bob, he was the senior engineering officer, Northern Rhodesian mines. He was a very very tall guy. About six foot four. And they had East African troops out there in Calcutta and on more than one occasion walking along the pavement in Calcutta and they had a battalion of black East African soldiers out there. They were all black. And if two of them were on the same pavement as you and they were coming towards you he would yell out in their tongue, ‘Get off the bloody pavement in the gutter.’ And they would all jump on the side and get in the gutter. Yeah. But that was, and his name was Robert Kitson Hart. RK Hart. Yeah. He was a character he was. And I remember one occasion we’d been out. We’d been out drinking to a club and we were going back to our digs at the Grand and they had what they called garreys. In other words it was like a Hansom cab. Some had two horses. Some had four. Anyway, we rented, hired a garrey, a Hansom cab and Robert Kitson, he said to the garrey wallah, the driver, ‘Grand hotel.’ Well, dependent upon the time you were in the garrey so you paid accordingly for the time you hired it. Well, this garrey wallah, he was going so slow it was surprising that the horse didn’t fall over. Anyway, Robert Kitson said to him, [unclear] which means hurry up. Anyway, he got the horse getting to not exactly a gallop but a reasonable trot. That wasn’t good enough for Robert Kitson. So, Rob was sitting with me in the back. He got up and he got hold of the garrey wallah, threw him off. Climbed up into the seat and he shouted out to the garrey. ‘Run you bastard. Run.’ He whipped the garrey, the horse into quite a bit of a gallop and he was shouting out to the garrey wallah, ‘Run. Run you bastard, run.’ And he took us to the Grand. Drove all the way to the Grand. And when we got there and he said to the garrey wallah, ‘I drove. You get no tip. I drove. I did the driving.’ So, yeah. Yeah. Six foot four. Robert Kitson. I’ve been so lucky in life. I’ve really been so lucky. Talk about lucky.
DM: So, you decided to stay in the Air Force after the war.
LD: Sorry?
DM: Did you stay in after the war? You didn’t come out and go back in. You stayed in the Air Force.
LD: No. I stayed on for what they called VR training. And I went to various aerodromes. Pukka aerodrome squadrons on. I went to a number. I’ve got them in the book. And I did my fifteen days annual training with them in different types of aircraft. But in my last, last year, I think in my sixth or seventh year VR training I opted to do that over there in Redhill because in Redhill they had a Wing Commander Scott. He was the head of the Training Unit there. Now, Wing Commander Scott only got the job because he married into the family. His wife, their family, they owned the aerodrome. So, he got the job running the aerodrome. Well, anyway Scott, he employed what they called civilian instructors. They hadn’t been in the Air Force but all they’d done, they’d just, they had instructed in civilian life. Well, there were two that he had civilian instructors and what they did they would take you up and they would give you different exercises to do. Come down and sign you out and so on and that was it. But when the weather was what we called clamped, in other words you couldn’t fly what they would do they would get you to do, Scott would get you to do different ground exercises. One of them happened to be swinging the compass. Well, with swinging a compass what you had to do you had to get what they called a DR, Dead Reckoning compass. You had to get a dead reckoning reading so that you got due north. And then you went through the various compass points to ensure that the compasses, they had little lead rods through them and you would adjust the rod to get the thing reading correctly. Anyway, it was what they called clampers. So, Scott said, ‘Right. You’ll have to swing compasses.’ Anyway, he said, ‘Right. Two aircraft out there.’ So there was a pal of mine, he was on the VR but he lived on the same road as me. John [unclear] Well, John he had some highfalutin job in the city. I forget what it was now. But John and I, we used to travel up together and we were given the two aircraft to swing. Anyway, Scott said, ‘Right. The two aircraft. One each. Swing the compass.’ Well, he outranked me. He was a wing commander so I had to do as he said. As I was told. Anyway, I got out there and there were two civilians and they said, ‘Right. You swing that compass,’ and they said to John, ‘You swing that compass in the other aeroplane.’ Yes, please. I don’t know if you want to use the room at all.
DM: No.
LD: Alright.
[recording paused]
DM: Right. So swinging the compass.
LD: I went out there and there were two civilians there, ‘Right. You swing that aircraft. You swing that.’ So, I said, ‘Hold on.’ So, I went back to Scott who was in the flight office. I said, ‘Tell me, sir,’ because he was my superior, ‘Tell me, sir. Is it right that a commissioned officer in the RAF VR, is he supposed to take orders from a civilian?’ ‘Good lord, no. Of course not.’ I said, ‘Well then, tell those two to swing the aircraft themselves.’ [laughs] So, that was it. Got away with it. Yeah. But they tried it. But having said all of that I’ve been so fortunate in life. I’ve really been so fortunate.
DM: What job did you do in Civvy Street?
LD: Banking. Yeah. And again, I was very very fortunate. I got a job. I got a job in 431 Oxford Street. It was when I first became aware of girls. Because in 431 Oxford Street I was there as the junior. Well, the junior, you were the dogsbody. You ran all the errands. And you took what they called returns. In other words cheques that came back to your customer unpaid. What we called bounced cheques. You had to deliver them back to the customer and you got their signature for the return, indicated that it had been returned and in turn their account was debited because of the return. Well, I went there to 431 Oxford Street. And as luck would have it at that time Mr Gordon Selfridge who used to call, what they used to call it walking the floor and he would walk every floor in Selfridges every morning starting at 9 o’clock spot on. And he would walk around with two after him and he would make various comments. And the earthlings, they had to make a note of what he was on about. But it was that time that he used to get the lift girls and they had lifts and they had a lever in the side of the cabin that they would pull for up or down. And these girls, they had skirts just above the knees which was quite something in those days. Quite above the knees. And they were all exquisitely turned out because they had to go through the beauty parlour before they were allowed anywhere near a lift. So, they had to get in early, beauty parlour, all the make-up and so on. Everything neat and clean. Tidy. Wear kid gloves before they were allowed near a lift. And then they would all stand at the entrance to the lifts and Mr Gordon, he would go around looking at each one, particularly at their knees. ‘Ok.’ ‘Yes, ok,’ and he would go around with his retinue looking at all the lifts before they got in and operated the lifts. So, it was there that I really became aware of girls. And I really appreciated the manner in which Mr Gordon hired the girls. That was an experience in itself. And over there, being a junior at 431 I would take the returns. In other words, the return cheques that had bounced. I would take them back to what Selfridges had, it was called an accounting office, it was like a cashier’s office. And in there the head cashier he was a very staid gentleman. Always wore grey single breasted suits with a waistcoat and with a halberd across here with the bar on there, strapped across his waist. And he always had the pocket watch in his pocket. And you’d go up there and before you handed them over he would always look at his watch, which was a gold Hunter and he would put it back in his pocket again. And he would make a note as to the time you turned up with them in case you skived off somewhere. But he was a very meticulous gentleman and he always wore stiff white bow collars with a bow tie. Always. And he was absolutely immaculate. Shoes as well. And he was a tall guy, very tall. But I learned a lot from going over there at 431. I really did. And from there at 431 it was a ritual. We used to close at, I think it was half past twelve on a Saturday. Half past twelve everything would be what we called bagged up. Go downstairs in to the strong room. All the money would be on the trolley to go to the strong room and and then you had to take all the ledgers down which would be on a separate trolley. Well, being the dogsbody junior that was your problem. You had to get all the ledgers down in the book room. Then after that you would lock up and you would have to hand the keys to the book room to the chief clerk whose name was Goodrich. Same as the tyres. I’ve never forgotten it. And his name was Henry, and he lived at Haywards Heath and he used to travel up each day. But Henry, he was a nice fellow and I remember that 15th of August 1939, he called me up to his desk which was, he had a raised bench type desk on a platform so he could overlook the whole of the office including the cashiers. And he called me up there and I thought, ‘Oh hell, what’s wrong?’ Anyway, I got there and he said, he was very nice, he said, ‘I’m very sorry to tell you but you’ve been mobilised and you’ve got to report to your Drill Hall as soon as you can. So, you can leave now, get home, explain to your parents what you have got to do and get to the Drill Hall as soon as you can.’ I went home. My dad was home. And I’ve never put all my webbing together then. Being what they called, I was a sapper then in the REs and I never put my webbing together. And I said to my dad, ‘I’ve got to put my webbing together because I’ve got to go and report,’ I said, ‘Could you help me?’ He said, ‘No, it’s no good me giving you a hand,’ he said, ‘The only way to learn is to do it yourself.’ So, that was how I learned how to put the webbing together. Over to the Drill Hall and I had to go upstairs. Cliff Ford was up on the balcony with his red sash on. So, he said, oh he said, ‘You’d better go in to the office.’ He was a lieutenant. And he was a member of a stockbroking firm.
Other: There we are. There we are. One for you. One for you.
LD: Thank you dear. I think his name was, I think it was Hammond.
Other: Do you think, I mean is he alright? Because he seems to be going on, not so much about —
LD: I’m dribbling on. I was quite keen on swimming then. I used to go with my friend Ken Shepherd up to the swimming pool up at North Cheam, and I heard that someone told me there was a swimming pool at the Drill Hall. So, I said to Cliff Ford at the Drill Hall [pause] I asked him, ‘Is it true you’ve got a swimming pool here? If so I wouldn’t mind signing on so I could use the pool.’ Which meant that I could save, I think it was sixpence to go in the pool up at North Cheam.
DM: Right.
LD: So, he said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘You’d be surprised what we’ve got here. Go and have a word with the officer and he’ll explain to you what we’ve got.’ Anyway, I went upstairs. Went in. Saw the officer. And I said, ‘I understand you’ve got a lot of sport facilities here including a swimming pool.’ He didn’t say, ‘No we haven’t.’ He said, ‘Oh, you’d be surprised at what sports facilities we’ve got here.’ He said, ‘I’m sure you’ll enjoy it if you would like to come along and join us.’ So, I said, ‘Well, that sounds interesting.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s right, ‘he said, ‘If you’re interested would you like to sign along here?’ [laughs] Sheep to the slaughter. Signed. So, he said, ‘Right. That’s it. And he called, they didn’t call them sergeants in those days they were sarnts, ‘Sarnt major’
DM: Another lamb to the slaughter.
LD: In came Cliff Ford. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘Take the sacrificial, he signed on.’ So, that was it. That’s how I came to sign, to volunteer. Yeah.
DM: When you —
LD: Yeah.
DM: On ops in Bomber Command.
LD: Yeah.
DM: Did you have any hairy moments?
LD: What, in bombers?
DM: Yeah.
LD: Yeah. A number. We were, we were attacked on a number of occasions but I think I put it down on the first but it got so that you were used to seeing things. You didn’t bother. And the navigator would it put it the nav, in his nav log. Attacked or whatever. We had a number of near misses. There was one poor blighter, he was flying alongside us and there we went out in what they called a gaggle. And a gaggle meant that you flew out, not in any type of formation but you flew out as a mob. And what happened was that — have you got someone picking you up?
[recording paused]
DM: In a moment. You were saying the navigator, the navigator would make a note in his log that you’d been attacked and that it happened quite a lot.
LD: Right. Where was I?
DM: You were talking about when you were, when you were attacked. By fighters, I assume. From time to time.
LD: Oh yes. JU88.
DM: You said something about when you all went out in a gaggle.
LD: A JU88. And then we were going out in a gaggle on one trip and the fellow alongside me because we were scattered all over different altitudes one fellow above him released a bomb, went through his wing and that was it. Yeah. So, although you thought that the dangerous aspect of it all was on the bombing run it could be quite a bit hairy if you had some idiot above you. But I’ve been very, very lucky. I worked my way. I told you I was shipped out for not keeping my tongue between my teeth.
DM: Yes.
LD: Shipped out to Calcutta. And from there because I wanted to know what was going on what they called the TO, Transport Officer who was stationed in the Grand I bothered him to know where I was going. ‘Where the hell am I going? What am I doing here?’ Well, that’s another story but to cut that short, I finished. I found myself out in Calcutta. From Calcutta I went to [pause] Calcutta. I went to Burma. And Burma, again I was very lucky because this time I was on, I mentioned the communication flight where you took brass and high ranking officers down to conferences. And it was there, and it’s been in the news recently, one place in Burma which they called Myanmar.
DM: Myanmar or something. Yeah.
LD: Which is a place called Cox’s Bazaar. Well, I’ve been there. And Cox’s Bazaar was the first place that I landed in Burma which had been evacuated by the Japanese. And we were following, following the Japanese down that coast and we went into Cox’s Bazaar. And you had to be careful because they were laying booby traps. In addition to which, due to the humidity there, the temperature a lot of the furniture was made of bamboo canes. But because they were fraught with the humidity you could look at a table and chair which would be like that and you would touch it and it would collapse due to humidity. And the, what the hell did they call it? [pause] They turned into [pause] I’ve forgotten the blasted name. But anyway furniture was like that. You would touch it if the Japs had been there and it would collapse. Also, you had to be bloody careful that you didn’t touch something that the Japs had left behind that had been booby trapped. And it was there that we worked our way down. I was still on the communication flight and we got down to Mingaladon which was the landing strip for Rangoon. And it was there that we were called to attend the surrender of the Japanese, the general, Japanese general of that area. We were called by Mountbatten to attend and watch the surrender of the Japanese general to Mountbatten himself on the Mingaladon airstrip. Well, we had to attend there and Mountbatten, well he was an absolute s o d. He really was. And he made the 14th Army members who were attending they’d sweated their guts out through the jungle these squaddies and he made them, they only had one set of khaki, he made them scrub their khaki. And they were issued with white blanco to do their webbing. They were issued by Mountbatten this stuff and they were told that they had to launder their kit. Be absolutely spot on. Khaki green and all their webbing including spats had to be white. And they had to parade absolutely spot on to be in attendance when this Japanese general surrendered. And I was there at the time when the Japanese surrendered his samurai sword to Mountbatten and Mountbatten accepted his surrender. The Japanese general, he bowed out all the way, virtually on knees which was a terrible humiliation for him. And later that day because he was so humiliated he committed hara-kiri. And that was Mountbatten. But the surprising thing is before all this happened my father was a Royal Marine. And during WW1 my dad was on Lord Mountbatten’s staff. But at that time, because he was known as [pause] it’s the German name for Mountbatten anyway. He was known as, he was Chief of the Naval staff, despite being a German because Victoria had German descendants. But he was chief of the Naval staff and he had to resign, and my dad was in his office as Royal Marine. And my dad said that it was the first time that dad had seen a man cry. And he said it was at the time that Earl Mountbatten, as he was then he wrote his resignation letter. Signed it. And he said, dad said, ‘The man was in tears when he handed me the letter.’ And he always addressed dad as John. And dad said, ‘He said to me, ‘John, you know who you’ve got to deliver this to.’ And my dad had to deliver it to what was then, despite Mountbatten resigning as First Lord dad knew who he had to take it to his successor. And dad did that. But he said the first time he’d seen a man cry. So, that was the Mountbattens. But having said all that, dad, being a Marine and being on Mountbatten’s staff, dad was billeted with him as his batman. As a batman living in Mountbatten’s quarters at Number One London. That, that’s the accommodation at Marble Arch and it’s still known as Number One London. And dad was billeted at Number One London [laughs] Yeah.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Len Doward
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David Meanwell
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-10-26
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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
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ADowardLA171026
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Pending review
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01:30:21 audio recording
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
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Len Doward was in the army when he saw an advertisement for aircrew so he volunteered. He trained as a pilot. On one operation he saw a Lancaster alongside hit by bombs from a Lancaster above. After his operational tour Len was posted to India and then Burma where he witnessed the Japanese surrender at Mingaladon airfield.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Burma
Canada
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
England--London
Temporal Coverage
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1941-09
550 Squadron
625 Squadron
aircrew
animal
bomb struck
bombing
Halifax
Harvard
Lancaster
pilot
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/642/8912/ASnowballM150626.2.mp3
bbd766624aaad1dc3f596be446f736f9
Dublin Core
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Snowball, Maurice
M Snowball
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Snowball, M
Description
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14 items. An oral history interview with Sergeant Maurice Snowball (1922 - 2020, 1595147 Royal Air Force) his log book, documents, notebooks and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 550 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Maurice Snowball and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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2015-06-26
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Maurice Snowball was born in Sunderland, England in 1922, after apprenticing at a brewery in Sunderland, whilst also playing football as an amateur and having spent time in the local Home Guard, Maurice chose to join the RAF as a volunteer. After passing his medical and joining full time in December 1944, he underwent training at RAF Bridlington. Technical training was undertaken at Locking and then at RAF St. Athan as a Flight Engineer. Starting out in Halifax Mk. II & V he then switched to the Lancaster Mk.I & III. Once training was over, he had a short tour at 12 Squadron at RAF Wickenby, Lincolnshire and was sent, to 550 Squadron, based at North Killingholme, Lincolnshire. Here he undertook four bombing operations as well as taking part in Operation Manna, the dropping of food parcels in the Netherlands, After the end of hostilities he also took part in operation Post Mortem, the testing of German Radar systems and operation Dodge, the repatriation of British troops from Italy. He was demobilised December 1947.
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/34648 Log Book
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/8912 Interview
Andrew St. Denis
Maurice was born and brought up in Sunderland, when he left school he was apprenticed to a small company manufacturing equipment for the brewery industry and had become a keen amateur footballer. Although in a reserved occupation he volunteered for aircrew and eventually did his basic training at Bridlington in January 1944. He continued his training at RAF Locking and RAF St Athan and arrived at No 1662 Heavy Conversion Unit (HCU) at RAF Blyton to fly the Halifax in September 1944. Part way through the course the HCU became a Lancaster Finishing School (LFS) and the crew converted to the Lancaster. With his crew he was posted to No 12 Squadron at RAF Wickenby. He did one flight with them there and then he returned to the LFS and by January 1945 he had re-crewed and in late March the crew were posted to No 550 Squadron at RAF North Killingholme. He did four bombing operations and one Operation Manna flight before the war in Europe ended. He continued to fly with the squadron doing the usual Post War flying, operations Post Mortem, Dodge and Cooks Tours until late March 1946. He retrained as a Mechanical Transport (MT) driver and was for a time posted to the Middle East specifically RAF El Adam.
Having been demobilised Maurice returned to Sunderland and resumed his career with the brewery equipment manufacturer. He relocated several times within the UK and at one time was the mechanical foreman maintaining the Tornado at RAF North Luffenham. He remained a keen amateur footballer never making the elevation to professional player.
He maintained his links with his No 550 Squadron crew members and Operation Manna, visiting Holland in 1985 and he also met a Dutch woman who was eight years old in 1945.
Trevor Hardcastle
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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David Kavanagh interviewing Maurice Snowball, David Kavanagh for the International Bomber Command Centre.
DK: Were you with 550 Squadron?
MS: 550 Squadron yes
DK : Were you with another squadron before then?
MS: No I was [chit chat not relevant to interview] well, we, I did my training and then I had a problem with the first crew I was in and had to go back to heavy con unit and get another crew and that was the crew I flew with afterwards.
DK: Was your training all in the United kingdom?
MS: Yes, flight engineer, all the flight engineers were trained in England and down at St Athan but when we, when I, went it was busy at St Athan and we had six weeks previously at RAF Locking and then went to St Athan and the engineers did all that training and qualified and got their wing before we even saw a four engine aeroplane, and you were posted up to heavy con unit. We went, I, was sent to Blyton near Gainsborough, and I did it there then I had to go back there to do it again with the new crew and it knocked me back 3 months, so I didn’t get to the squadron with this crew until January 45.
DK: So the crew that you were with in the heavy conversion unit were the same crew that you joined the operational unit?
MS: Yes, the second, the second visit to Blyton was the crew that I flew with and I couldn’t have got a better crew, it was a really good crew I got with, and there is only me and the navigator left now, he is a retired police superintendant that lives at Boston, and he is not very well, he had to drop out of the going to Holland this year, it would have been his first visit to Holland, and he had to drop out, and he’s now cancelled his reunion next weekend at Killingholme, he’s not well enough, so he’s, I don’t know what his problem is, I think its something to do with heart because I know he had a –
DK: Pacemaker ?
MS: Pacemakers the word, yes, he had a pacemaker fitted a while, several years ago, but, its a shame really because we get on ever so well together, he originated from Gateshead and I was from Sunderland so we were two north country, and the rest of the crew, the skipper lived down in Dorset, yes Dorset, and our bomb aimer was from London, and he was a keen golfer he used to give officers lessons at golfing, and when we split up he said ‘keep’, ‘if we lose touch with each other keep a look at the world cup team every year because I am going to play for them one day’ and it was [unclear] Laddie lucas, this is your life was on, that Ken was on that he was on that team then, and he died, about three or four years ago now might even be more. We used to meet up, the skipper the navigator and me. We used to meet at Banbury every year because it was, the hotel we went to was a mile difference between the skippers home and the navigators home, we couldn’t have got more central, and I contacted the bomb aimer and he said he would come the next year, and I rang up in the August and his wife answered the phone, and I said ‘Ken did promise to come to Banbury this year for the lunch and I’ve now got the dates, September’ and she said ‘just a minute I’m very sorry I’ve got some bad news and I’ve got some good news’ and I knew what the bad news would be, she said ‘he died in July just a month ago and the good news he always wanted to play golf to his dying day and he collapsed and died on the golf course’ so he got that - and the mid upper he lived at Nottingham I managed to contact him, he had a couple of lunches with us before he died, and the radio operator was the only one we couldn’t trace and I put a letter in the Hull papers and I got two back one from a lady and one from a man that were teenagers with him and they both said the same, although one lived - they never met each other since they were youngsters but they both said the same Geoff had died in his early 30’s from a kind of a blood disease so I don’t know whether it was leukaemia or what so that was why I wasn‘t able to trace him and it was funny when I put the letter in the Hull Echo I got nothing back from his family, so I don’t know whether there was any family left. Anyhow I finished training with the crew, and got posted up to North kilingholm 550 squadron, and we had done our first two training trips and early April we started operations.
DK: Did 550 have Lancaster’s at the time then?
MS: I trained on Halifax’s at the first one and midway through the course we switched to what we called Lancaster school but the second time they were all Lancaster’s the Halifax’s had gone, so I did training on the Halifax and we flew on the Halifax and did the whole course practically on the Halifax, the first one.
DK: What was you impression of the two aircraft, the Halifax and the Lancaster?
MS: I liked the Halifax, and it was, it was a good aircraft for the engineer, well for the crew because there was more room in it, you are not cramped like you are in the Lancaster and it was a pretty reliable aircraft with the radial engines but it didn’t get the height or anything, so the Lancaster was the better one being on operations, it was the safer one to fly, the Lancaster, but at the same time if anything happened it was a difficult one to get out of because it was so cramped so there was a lot of crew members lost by not bailing out quick enough, whereas with the Halifax it was easy to get out you see, so when you learnt about it you think well I am better on the Lancaster but once you start flying with the Lancaster that was the plane for you, you know, it was a terrific aircraft , but I never sat down as flight engineer, because it was a little tip up seat, and if I sat on that I was facing the skipper, you couldn’t see the dials properly and my panel was over here so I stood all the time and I’ve not found an engineer yet that I’ve met that did sit down much the only time you sat was when you were doing your calculations of fuel use and stuff like that, but mostly when flying plus the fact when you went on operations you were asked to, you were helping the skipper all the time but at the same time they asked you to keep a lookout and help the gunners in case you saw anything, well if you sat on your seat with your back to window you couldn’t so you had to stand. And our first two operations were both within 5 mins of 9 hours, 8 hours and 55, and people have said you didn’t stand all that time I said ‘well I was young enough then not to be worried about standing all that’, I never used to think that was a long time to stand and being an engineer in civilian life and working on heavy machinery it was a lighter job when you’re flying, and standing hours we used to work, before I went in, in 1943 I was 17 doing 12 hours shifts at work where you’re on your feet 12 hours a day anyway so -
DK: Where was that you were working?
MS: Up in Sunderland I served me apprenticeship, funnily enough it was, served in brewery machinery bottle washers, conveyers, fillers and everything like that, but we got a good engineering - because it was a family firm, you learnt electrics and plumbing all sorts of work that when you went in a ship yard you were maybe trained in one thing, or you were on one lathe, we got a bit of work done planeing, on lathes, all sorts of things and it turned out in my life afterwards, I went back to the same firm when I came out of the air force and I had altogether 25 years with them, and good experience, and then I left 1960 I left Sunderland and moved down to Northamptonshire and I worked down there for northern dairies for 5 or 6 years, then we moved up to Oakham and when I was in Oakham I finished my working life, working, first of all, I started at Ashwood prison and then when the tornados came to Cottismore I got started there as a fitter and ended up as a mechanical foreman, and retired at 65 from there. My apprenticeship came in very handy because it covered so many things you know -
DK: Do you remember now why it was the air force that you chose I understand [unclear] you volunteered?
MS: Its funny how it happened I was in a reserve job so I couldn’t, you could only volunteer for one thing that was aircrew, and I never thought about it when I was doing my apprenticeship but when I got up, I was a keen amateur footballer, and I played every Saturday afternoon and the foreman used to say to me’ wait until you’re a man out of time and you’ll have to work Saturday afternoon I can’t stop you playing football now, but once you’re a man your job will be here’ and jokingly I said ‘well if that’s the case I might as well join the air force or somewhere at least they get leaves every so often’ and that was, I just said it as a joke, but then the last year towards the time when I was 21 and out of my time, he said that ‘I’ll have you working on Saturdays next year’ and I said ‘will you?’ and I didn’t think anything else about it, but as soon as I finished my apprenticeship I thought I am not going to be working here 12 hours a day for the rest of the war, I am going to volunteer after all, and aircrew was the only one you could volunteer for, I thought, I was keen on hearing and reading about the Sunderland flying boat, being a Sunderland born man and I thought I wonder if I could join the air force and become a flight engineer on Sunderland’s so that’s what I did. I hadn’t really thought about until actually I was 21, and I volunteered straight away in the January, my birthday was January, I had my aircrew medical in the July, 3 days, and then put on deferred service, and I wasn’t called up until December of that year, so I was 12 months between volunteering and, and by then I hadn’t changed my mind, but I had settled in to the fact that well if I’m not going to get called up, I hope I can make the grade as a goalkeeper, professional, and I had a pretty good amateur life as a footballer you know, and I played untill i was 34, but when the time came to 21 I thought, I must try and get on Sunderland flying boats. We went down to be typed[?] At St Athan and when you did training you were all in the hanger, and they would say right we want so many at[?] for this and so many for that, and the first thing he said ‘how many of you chaps want to be a flight engineer on Sunderland flying boats?’, and half of us put their hands up, he says ‘well I’m sorry we’re not training flight engineers for Sunderland flying boats until they get the new Centaurus engine’, so I said ‘oh’, and then they asked for so many volunteers for Stirling’s and when they didn’t get enough what they wanted, the Sergeant said, right anybody whose last figure is so and so you’re on Stirling’s and then they did the same for Halifax’s and by then I’d done them both, I wanted to be on Lancaster’s so I thought well I’m not going to volunteer I hope he doesn’t call my number out next time and he called out whose last two numbers are so and so and fortunately it didn’t come? So he said right the rest of you are all Lancaster boys, so that’s how it came about the end of the [unclear] And we went to Bridlington and we did all our marching and that at Bridlington, and that was prior to going to St Athan, I’ve jumped the gun a bit there, I was posted up to Bridlington and I’d been in the home guard while I was apprentice up home, lance corporal, and we had a demonstration team and we never lost a competition we went in, we were drilling at Bridlington and sergeant, there was two lads couldn’t march properly their hands went with the foot when they shouldn’t have done and he came to me and he said ‘I’ve been watching you, you’ve done this business before haven’t you?’ I said ‘yes’ I said ‘I was in the home guard in a demonstration platoon’, he said ‘well take these two lads along there and see if you can get them marching properly’, and I was with them 20 minutes and by the time that 20 minutes was up when I said quick march, they marched properly, and the sergeant said ‘how you going on?’ I said ‘good’ so he said ‘bring them back’, and he got them to stand in front of him and he said quick march and they went back to what they had been, and he said ‘oh just join the ranks’ he said ‘they’ll learn eventually’ but it was just they were nervous you see in front of the sergeant. And from Bridlington you were posted to heavy con unit where you meet the crew. And,When you formed your crew. I skipped the early one to talk about the one I flew with because that’s where me memories are. I was in the hanger and I was told to find the crew of pilot officer James, just altogether you know, and you used to just, if you saw somebody that you liked you say could I be in your crew? Well, I was told to ask for pilot officer James’s crew, and I thought well I don’t know any of them so I just waited until I saw practically everybody was teamed up, and then I saw these two lads, navigator and bomb aimer walking round, and I went up and said ‘excuse me are you with pilot officer James’s crew’, they said ‘yes’, so I said ‘well I’m sergeant Snowball, I’m going to be your flight engineer’ and the navigator who come from Gateshead said ‘oh dear, we thought with a name like that you must come from the West Indies, we’ve been looking for the wrong colour’. And it was, when we met up after the war 40 years afterwards, I reminded them about this and he says ‘Maurice’ he said, ‘I should have known’ he said,’ I told you I never heard the name Snowball before’, and he said ‘the biggest department store in Gateshead was Snowball’, he said ‘so why I thought I’d never heard the name before’ and I used to really rib them about that because [pause] they didn’t actually say West Indian [laughter] they said another word.
DK: [unclear]
MS: Yes. But we got on ever so well together the crew, I couldn’t’ have got a better crew, the skipper was very good with us. It was winter of course when we got to Killingholme, by that was a cold camp, we were in Nissan huts and you had a coal, just one coal fire in the middle, you know a stove, and the coal was rationed you could never get enough to keep it -, and at one stage the coal heap outside was whitewashed so far up so that if anybody went out at night and got coal they knew somebody had been because they had whitewashed was disturbed, so anybody that did that they had to be very careful because if they saw it happen they would come into the billets and look at any coal that was in buckets or anything to see if there was any whitewash on the top. [laughter] You see it was rationed and it was unfair to pinch it and make somebody else short of it, but when you did, when you did have a good fire going you could boil a kettle on it and make yourself a cup of tea, all used to bring tea, it was loose tea in them days of course, but we always managed to have a cup of tea, didn’t always have milk, because you had to go off camp to get the milk or scrounge it off the naafi girls in the naafi, but it turned out to be a good camp. I used to go in, I had a cycle and I used to cycle up to Immingham and catch the night tram into Grimsby, especially on a Saturday night when we wasn’t flying anywhere, because I liked dancing I did a lot of ballroom dancing, and the skipper and the bomb aimer both had little cars, and you had a ration you know, and they used to go, and it wasn’t until 40 years afterwards we were talking at one of these reunions [checks if its alright to continue] we were talking at one of these reunions, and they were talking about George the navigator, he got engaged to a girl there, which he later married, and they were talking about going to his wife’s, then his girl, we used to go to your girlfriends, mothers for dinner [unclear] we always used to have egg and chips or something, and I said ‘when did that happen?’ they says ‘well you always used the bike because it was only a two seater car, you couldn’t go in the car with us and when you left the dance we went to the car you got on your bike [corrects self] ‘and got on the tram’, rather ‘to go and get your bike at Immingham, and we used to call in to Georges, girlfriend’s, and had a good supper off her mother’ so I missed all that by using the bike [gentle laughing]. Well the skipper, he was a pilot officer and our rear gunner was a flying officer, two good gunners because the two gunners had been gunnery instructors and when the gunnery school closed they were posted to heavy con to do some ops, they’d never flown on ops they had been training, so we had two experienced gunners really, which was a good thing, fortunately we never had have any bother there. I can’t remember ever whether they did ever do open up fire? The rear gunner said at one time his gunnery where he was, was lit up by a searchlight and he said fortunately it went out straight away otherwise they would have quickly gone onto us with the rest of them, but we didn’t know anything about that he told us afterwards, so we had no real problems at all, we were very fortunate we never had a fault with an engine or a plane, and we got through the four bombing operations we did safely, and then we did the food drop one.
DK: So you did four operations before that?
MS: We did four bombing, We did two night ones, and the first one Plzen[?], was near the Czech border that one was eight hours 55 minutes the next one was at Potsdam just 30 miles south of Berlin, so that was eight hours and so many minutes after, and then we did Helgoland that was about a four hour trip, 2 hour you know -, trip, and that was bombing of course, and Breman we went to Breman, oh Bremen was our first daylight one because it was the first time we had seen anti-aircraft shells. And we went through Wilhelmshaven and we could see all the flak then, and think well we’ve got to go through that, well we got through it safely, and then we got to Breman, because the cloud hadn’t properly cleared and the Canadian army was waiting to attack Breman after we’d bombed, the master bomber was cancelling it, and so we got all the way to Bremen and brought the bombs all the way back again, and landed with them, I, a little task that I had to do then was on the way back the Skipper said ‘you had better work out what fuel we’re going to use and whether we will be on our landing weight’ and I said ‘oh you will be by the time we get back there’, because I said ‘we’re nearly home, its been well down’ and, we landed with the full bomb load on but the skipper was told he should have jettisoned the 1,000 pound one because they said it wouldn’t have exploded but if you landed heavily and it had come off the hooks any of the bomb armourers that were underneath them doors could have it drop on them, so they said if it happens again you must get rid of your cookie.
DK: Was he in any trouble for that?
MS: No no
DK: Or was he just advised next time?
MS: Just advised because we were a new crew and we had never had that experience of bringing bombs back before. We knew that planes had come back when it had an engine missing or something like that, and had to turn back and they had got rid of their bomb load you see, but we were, we had no fault to get rid of the bombs, other than the fact the safety of them, we didn’t think of that, as far as we were concerned we were bringing them back safely. [gentle laughter] [pause] Then when the squadron closed in 47 no 46, October 46, I was re-trained as a MT driver until my de-mob came up and I was posted to El Adem at Tobruk. While there, actually, I had developed an injury when I was playing in goal, I couldn’t take goal kicks with my right foot my back used to be too painful and when I used to sit down any length of time, I would walk about 40 or 50 yards before I could straighten up properly, and eventually I went to the MO at North Killingholme, and he said ‘that’s [unclear] but you’ve got a bit of arthritis or rheumatism’ he said, and I said ‘well I’ve now got a posting to the Middle East’, I said ‘should I have something looked at before’, and he said ‘oh if you’re going to the middle east its nice and warm there you’ll be alright’ and I went there and I was there 12 months nearly still having this problem and then they said we’re going to send you back home now to Cosford hospital and they’ll offer you a back injury, an operation for your injury, don’t have it put up with the pain for as long as you can, don’t have that operation, and I came back to Cosford by sea, I had to get myself on the ship, in a hammock with a bad back was a problem, and when I approached the navel steward about it, I said ‘I’m coming home with an injury to my back, I’m going to hospital, I can’t get up in one of them’ he said ‘well according to this sheet you’re not bed bound or anything, so I can’t give you a bed in the hospital, when its not on your sheet’ so I had to manage, I got back alright, and I got examined at RAF Cosford, and the surgeon, two surgeons there was, they did some tests with me and then got me sitting on a chair to drop my head onto my chest, and they kept saying no you’re putting your head down, I want you to drop it, let it drop off, and eventually I did drop it, and I jumped off the chair with this pain down my leg and they said now right what it is, you’ve got a slipped disc we can put that right with an operation. Straight away I thought of what I’d been told, so I said ‘well have you got an alternative?’ He said ‘yes you can have a plaster jacket on for up to 3 months if its not right by then, well you’ve got no other -, you’ll have to have the operation’ and I got that jacket on, and sent home a month, and two days every month back to have the jacket checked, but them 3 months I was dancing 3 or 4 nights a week with no problem with the jacket on, and within two days of getting that jacket off the pain was back, and by then I knew about the operation, and I said straightaway ‘I’ll have the operation’ and they did operate on it, and they discharged me from the hospital A1, and I said ‘I’ve gone passed my date when I should have been home’ I said ‘I was in hospital when my de-mob date came up’ i said ‘and I am going back to the job where I was, its heavy engineering and lifting’ they said there is no problem with that but you won’t ever be able to touch your toes no matter how fit you get. So I came home and I did, I went back to the job, as soon as I was fit I was playing football and I played till I was 34, and it was only in later life when I started getting back problems which I have now more or less permanently, but I don’t thinks its, well I’m told its nothing to do with the disc that I had, they just said, what they’ve told me is all the discs have crunched a bit up with age and if one of them touches the nerve that’s when you get the back ache, but I don’t have the pain down my leg like I used to have but as soon as I walk, I don’t walk very far before I’ve got back ache, so my limit is I walk up the street 5 minutes and there is a fire hydrant and I sit down there for two minutes and then I walk back again so my limit is about 10 minutes walk.
MK: But you were still playing football until your mid thirties?
MS: Sorry?
MK: You were still playing football until your mid thirties?
MS: Yes, yes.
MK: You never went professional then?
MS: No. I was, I played at Locking [inaudible] we had a good wing team, and there was another wing team there that was also good, and their team was all physical instructors except the centre forward was an amateur, and we had all amateur [unclear] we didn’t have any physical instructors, our own physical instructor, he was our trainer but he never played, and when we did the tests, I played in goal in the trials and the CO that was in charge of us, Wing Commander, he said ‘well’ he said ‘you’re quite a good goal keeper’ but he said, ‘but I must put you in team Haley because’ he said, ‘he’s a professional he plays for west ham so he’s got to go in this team’ and he played in the first game we played and they put me on the forward line which I’d never played out in my life and I said ‘oh this is no good for me’ and we lost two, one, and the Wing Commander was annoyed because he said ‘Haley should have stopped them’ so he said ‘in future I’m having you in goal for my wing team he can go to the station team and play for them as he’s been doing’ so, and I played in that wing team, and Tim gave me tips and coached me a bit, he was ever so good about it, and we played in the competition for the best wing team and we met the other team in the semi-final and they wanted us to meet really in the final, but we got drawn in the semi-final, so the officers, both officers said we’re going to make this like the final ‘we’ll have some chairs round and we’ll have officers come in from other places, you’re going to be playing in front of a crowd’ and we did, and we drew nil, nil, after 90 minutes, and we were still nil, nil, after extra time, and they said right now then we’re playing, no penalties in them days, we’ll play till a team scores, and we played another half hour, and I had the game of my life [emphasis on the game of my life] they could not beat me, and then this, after half an hour, we knew we had been playing a long time, it turned out to be half an hour extra, the centre forward came through and I had been out one to one with him several times and got the ball, you know, managed to stop what he did, but this last time he didn’t wait for me going out he shot straight away and I was just moving off the line to go and meet him, and I dove and I touched the ball and it went in off the post and the next minute I was on their shoulders, I was crying my eyes out, but they carried me off, what a great game I had. My PTI came to me and he said, ‘would you like to come off the aircrew course? and become a PTI’ he said ‘you’d make a good PTI’ and I said ‘if I come off the aircrew course I’ll have to go back to my reserve job in Sunderland, he said ‘well its a great pity because this chap here’ and he had a chap who was dressed in a suit and everything, he said’ he’s a scout for Cardiff City and [unclear] Athletic and he thinks you can make the grade as a professional, and he would get you into one of them clubs’ and I said, ‘well no’, I said, if I make the grade as a professional I want to play for Sunderland where I was born and that was it, and then two of the PTI’s off the other team when we had the meal afterwards they came not together one came up and said, ‘have you thought about playing professional after the war?’ I said ‘well if I’m good enough I would, always dreamed about being professional’ he said ‘well I’m with South end’ he said ‘if you survive the war and you’re still playing football contact Southend and I’ll give you my name and you’ll get a trial’ and then this other one came up and he said he was a professional with Tottenham Hotspur and he said the same after the war if you’re still playing and you’re fit contact Tottenham and mention my name and you’ll get a trial, so that was as near as I could get to being professional, until after the war when I came home with the plaster jacket on, I met the secretary of the local team I played for before I went in the air force [unclear] it was, the next village to where I lived and he said, ‘oh Maurice are you de-mobbed?’ Because was in civvies you see, I said ‘no’ he said ‘oh what a pity’ he said ‘I’ve had the coach from Sheffield Wednesday on, they are looking for a young goalkeeper to play in the reserve team and they’ve signed a professional from Scotland but they want another goalkeeper for the second team’ and I said ‘oh’ I said ‘I’m in a plaster jacket I can’t play football, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to play again’ and he said ‘what a pity’ he said, ‘because I thought, when I saw you I thought straight away Maurice you’re going to Sheffield’ [gentle laughter] so that was as near as I ever got. But I did have a good amateur career.
DK: So how many years were you actually in the Air force for?
MS: Four, four years, I joined in 43 as I say, I volunteered in 43 and joined in the September 43 so I had been on deferred service for 6 months, because after your aircrew medical they told you that you’d passed the medical and that you were accepted but you had to go on deferred service until there was vacancies on the training [pause]
DK: Just going back a bit, how many Manna operations did you do?
MS: We just did the one, because we, being a new crew the CO shared the aircraft, you see, they didn’t get your own aircraft until you had done a few operations, and although we had done four, we still hadn’t got our own aircraft so it was a case of we did that one and then, I don’t know whether, there was one particular time when the skipper was grounded a bit with a perforated ear drum and I don’t know whether that was why we only did one or whether the fact there wasn’t an aircraft available so -
DK: And can, do you have memories of the Dutch people down looking up?
MS: Yes the, oh yes the [pause] we went on the second day which was before the truce was signed and we knew the first lot had come back alright, but they warned us that the navigators must get the course right and you must be no higher than 500 feet or they can shot at, and I since learned after the war that some crews were told if you went off the track or too high the Germans would fire a red markers telling you to get back and then if, once you got back they would fire a green one to let you know, stay where you are but we didn’t know anything about that, we just knew that ours, with the skipper keeping the speed that we wanted, 160, because it was a low speed you see, and the navigator had to be dead right to keep on the track, and we went over the north sea at 300 feet, and then as we approached the coast the navigator come and said you’d better get up to 500 now because we will be crossing the coast shortly, so we crossed the coast and we all aware of the anti-aircraft guns following the aircraft round and hoping nothing would happen which thankfully it didn’t but one or two aircraft did have small arms fire, but they put that down to the fact flying over from the coast some outlying post would see an aircraft and just fire at it without realising that they shouldn’t, but we didn’t have any damage at all, and we got our food dropped at the racecourse Duindigt racecourse and it was. [slight pause] My memories myself of crossing the coast and getting it going in, was the flooded houses and everything, water everywhere and that, that’s my main memory of approaching, I can’t remember looking out and seeing crowds of people while we were flown in, but as soon as the navigator [corrects self] the bomb aimer said he’d got the racecourse in his sight then we were able to look out and I saw the crowds round the racecourse then all waving. You couldn’t believe it, how did they all know we were coming? But you see they’d got the word through the radio and they’d seen them the first day, so there was I suppose when we went on the second day, there would be more people out who had missed the first day.
DK: How did that make you feel dropping humanitarian supplies? [pause] How did that make you feel dropping humanitarian supplies?
MS: Oh its, well again we just knew that we had been told that people were starving and we were going to drop some food because the fact they had no food, they had no electric, they had no fuel to light fires, and most of the trees had been cut down, and any damaged houses all the woodwork was gone, so we knew it was pretty desperate, but my recollection at that time was that the biggest thing was all the houses were flooded, where they living? And they’d all gone into Rotterdam and Amsterdam you see, on to the higher grounds. But when we went over in 85 and met the people, who were at that time there, then we found out what life was like for them, where they had nothing to eat and no heating, the men were taken away to work in Germany, and so the people at home were the ladies, old men, and young children, and the young children we made friends with, one lady in particular she used to go with her bike 5 days or 6 days, and come back with what food they could, but she told us money was no good then, they took out maybe a spare pair of shoes or some clothing, anything you could barter with the farmers to get something, a few potatoes off them or something, whatever they’ve got spare, but she did tell us about one time, she’d been away 5 days, and they were told when they were cycling, cycles had no tyres they were just on the rims, when they were riding, if they heard aircraft they had to get in a ditch and stop riding, because the aircraft would shoot up anybody on the roads. So they had that to contend with, and then on the way back they had to make sure that the Germans didn’t see them coming back because they would take the food off them, because they were short of food you see, and she said this particular time, ‘I’d been 5 days away and was coming back and I’d not managed to pick anything up at all, I’d got no food other than one farmers wife said well he’s got nothing to offer you this time so I can’t trade you with anything, but we have some cracknel left off some pork that we’ve had you can take that’ and she said, ‘that was all’ and when she got home, she said ‘I went in and crying my eyes out and said to my mum, mum all I’ve got is this bit of cracknel I’ve not been able to get any more food and her mam said well I’ve still got some bread left and Mrs so and so next door they’ve got nothing, so take that into them and give them the’ [unclear] so what she brought back for her family was given to the next family. And she gave us, we had her over here to England one year and she gave us a list she’s done in that winter a thousand miles going out different places for 5 days at a time and back, and she mentioned the place and how many miles and so on and so and so, and it totalled up to a thousand miles, as a young girl going out and that’s the sort of thing they had to do. But it was then in 85 that we got to know what it was really like for them, and in the video that I’ve got that was made in 2010 general, forget his name, the general that was a boy at the time tells a story him and his mates, they were out looking for wood and they went on to a, [hesitation] to get some wood off some houses in the banned area, and he said the Germans turned up, and he said, unfortunately on that particular occasion the German, one of the German soldiers fired his gun and it hit his pal in the throat, he touches that when he tells you, and it hit him in the throat and he collapsed on me, and he said he died in my arms, so that was, it was after 85 that we got to know these things and it really brought it home to you then what we didn’t know when we actually dropped the food.
DK: Terrible conditions they were living in, [pause]terrible conditions?
MS: Oh yes, yes, you see they had nothing the photographs, you probably, you might have seen them [rustling] one old chap is stratting about and he comes up with a bottle, looks like sauce and he dipping his finger and eating that, but the children were allowed to go into the churns that the soup was brought in and rake the food out you see, because they had to give coupons and it was a measured like ladle, what they brought out and that was just one in every family, and of course they couldn’t get the rest, they would get as much as they could and as far as they were concerned it was empty, and the kids were allowed to go in and, dive in and eat it.
DK: I’ll just finish, I‘ll just ask you one final question, how do you look back now on your time with the RAF because it was only, I say only, it was four years, it was actually a small part of your life, how do you look back on it all these years later?
MS: I am pleased that I volunteered and went into the air force into aircrew but my main memory is operation Manna that one operation has brought so much into my life with friends that we’ve met in Holland since 85, and I met this Dutch lady at Lincoln when we were interviewed, she was an eight year old girl at the time, and she lives at Cambridge, and I’ve already spoken, and she’s spoken to me on the phone since and she wants to keep in touch because, I don’t know whether you’ve seen the video, what was, Songs of Praise, how she greeted me then we had met and talked in the room before we went out to there, and then the interviewer, a girl went, well, she was talking about what life was like for her in the war, the BBC girl was in tears you know, she didn’t know exactly what it had been like and then we went outside and she was told, the Dutch lady was told now we want you to meet Maurice for the first time when we go down there we’ll decide what’s the best place to do, and then they tried two or three places round where the flowers were and then eventually got me to stand on the corner and her to go across and then come in and greet me, and oh she did, it was a proper greeting, she really hugged me and everything, afterwards we had to go back to the hotel, they wanted to do a bit more filming, and my daughter [unclear] where we’d been watching she got hold of my arm, the daughter to help me, and the Dutch lady said ‘he doesn’t need you now he’s got me to help him’ and she cared and helped me back up into the hotel, and they asked us to wait in the lounge, we’re just going to prepare the room, we wanted to do a chat and when we went in, there was two chairs like we are now and a round table, two cups of tea and two tea cakes, two small cakes on two -, and the interviewer said ‘now then, we want you to sit there and we want you to have a conversation just as like friends now’ she said ‘we’ve got the full story from you, so just if there’s anything you want to talk about to here or you want to talk to Maurice you can have a little bit of private conversation but you must not eat those cakes’ and we thought well dear me [slight laughter] you know and we had the cups of tea and she, well we talked to each other while they were doing this extra filming and then when they’d finished, they said ‘right that’s the end of the filming you can now eat your cakes, I didn’t want you eating cakes while I was filming you’ so that was why, and I said ‘well while we’ve been talking to you we’ve neither of us has had a cup of tea to drink, its gone cold’ and she said ‘don’t worry put the kettle on make them some fresh tea’ so we had fresh tea and ours cakes afterwards. The husband of the Dutch lady came to me and he said ‘while you were talking about my wife’ he said ‘I hear that you play organ?’ I said ‘yes I’ve got an organ at home’ I said, ‘and I play every other week at the chapel down in Colsterworth’ I said, ‘take my turn at, its every other week I play now’ and he said, ‘well, you said chapel’ so he said ‘if it was chapel it means your a Methodist’ I said ‘yes’ he said, ‘well, I’m a Methodist and I’m a local preacher down in Cambridge and I go to places that have got an organ but haven’t got organists’ and he said ‘I have to play the hymns’ so he said ‘I not only preach, I play the hymns at them places’ and he said, ‘it would be nice some mornings, Sunday morning’ to his wife he said, ‘it would be nice if Sunday morning we could come up when Maurice is on the organ and go to the service there’ so whether they will or not I don’t know, but I told the steward down the chapel, but he says ‘oh’ he said ‘we’ll make them welcome if they want to come’.
DK: Hopefully they’ll come
MS: Yeah, but -
DK: Ok well I’ll stop that there
MS: Yes
DK: Thats great, thanks you very much.
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Interview with Maurice Snowball
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David Kavanagh
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2015-06-26
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ASnowballM150626
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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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00:56:14 audio recording
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Maurice Snowball was born and educated in Sunderland. After school, he served an engineering apprenticeship with a local family firm and was a member of the Home Guard. Maurice was a keen amateur footballer and had hopes of turning professional, but aged 21, he volunteered to join the RAF as a flight engineer and was called forward for initial training at RAF Bridlington in December 1944.
He discusses his time in flight engineer training at RAF St Athan and subsequent duties as a flight engineer on Halifax and Lancaster aircraft with 1662 Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Blyton. He recalls the operational duties with 550 Squadron, North Killingholme where he took part in four bombing operations - 2 of them at night raids (close to 9 hour round trips), and operations over Heligoland and Bremen.
He reflects on the differences he encountered as a flight engineer between the Halifax and Lancaster, how the Halifax was spacious and comfortable; the Lancaster cramped and only a small tip-up seat for his flight engineer position.
He talks about the main memory of his time in the RAF, Operational Mana, and his later conversations with a lady from Holland who was 8 years old at the time. He retrained as an MT driver when his Squadron was disbanded and was demobilised in October 1947.
Maurice later reaffirmed his affiliation with the RAF. In later years, he moved to Rutland and retired from his last job as a mechanical foreman at RAF Cottesmore in the 1980s.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Wales--Glamorgan
Contributor
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Chris Cann
550 Squadron
aircrew
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
flight engineer
Halifax
Home Guard
Lancaster
military service conditions
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Blyton
RAF North Killingholme
RAF St Athan
sport
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/251/3399/PEppelJW1702.2.jpg
676ab85feb086f60ab5bb03591b7fcd3
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/251/3399/AEppelJ170419.1.mp3
fab97d40c50ec49de2b2caad2fad9464
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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Eppel, John
John Eppel
J Eppel
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. An oral history interview with John Eppel (b. 1923, 433156 Royal Australian Air Force), his log book, documents and photographs. He flew a tour of operations as a navigator with 550 Squadron.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by John Eppel and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-04-19
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Eppel, JW
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jean MacCartney and the interviewee is John Eppel. The interview is taking place at Mr Eppel’s home in Eastwood, New South Wales, on the 19th of April 2017. Now, John, I said that we would just have a bit of an informal chat and we’ll start way back in, um, when you were born in 1923 in, I believe, in Marrickville ?
JE: Marrickville.
JM: Does that mean you were born at home or —
JE: No. It was a,a local health centre, private hospital.
JM: Right OK. And was your family there all living around Marrickville?
JE: We were living in just one street right from grandma Blake who is as you see just up there by the fire place. She bought property in just one street in Marrickville right from the man who first settled there, or one of the early settlers was a Frenchmen, Du Ponte [?], so of course it was ang— anglicised to Despointe, later to D E S P O I N T E S. Anyway, grandma Blake took, er, took, er, bought the first property in 1902 and from then, er, well, her son and her grandson extended the prop— the other properties. So, I was then grew up in number 56 Despointes Street which she bequeathed to my father and it stayed in the family until my mother died. My father died, er, just after we married in 1949 and then my mother was there until she died in 1972 or thereabouts and the property — she moved up to her sisters at Earlwood — and the property was then sold so we had landholdings in Marrickville for a long time.
JM: Over fifty years. Well over fifty years. Yes, that is a long time for — very — I believe so and, er, obviously in that case you did your schooling around Marrickville. So primary school —
JE: Primary school was in Despointes Street at one time. This was a British school. The Good Samaritan nuns ran that, and from there we went up to the Duracel [?] brothers up on Livingstone Road [background noise] and finished up there, in a secondary school up there.
JM: And what sort of things were you doing in your youth around Marrickville. Were you playing in sporting teams, in, um, in clubs or —
JE: I played football, I played football at school, you know, for the school teams. Never much good at cricket but, er, football I was, I was reasonable at and my father — well, when I was young I was joining the cubs, a local scout group, and just about that time the loc— scoutmaster that had been there by name of Catch [?] he retired and my father, being an ex-navy man so he took it on. He became the scoutmaster for a while. So, he did the, er, the scoutmaster’s course at Bennet [?] Hill, Bennet Hills and so he took that on for a while. Then finally he retired from that also and the time he retired from it, well, I gave up too, but —
JM: You gave up too. Did you go through and do your King’s Scout badge or didn’t you go as high as that?
JE: No, I got one or two badges I think at the time but I didn’t go in the scouts. I just stayed in the cubs.
JM: Oh, OK. Right. Right.
JE: But, er, one of my sons, my son Peter later in the piece he went right through the Sea Scouts at Lewis Point.
JM: OK. OK. And, of course in, in your sort of — about twelve or so, um, would have been the start of about the Depression years so how, how did that impact on your immediate area?
JE: A great deal. I remember the, the difficult situation in the early ‘30s when Governments were falling and so on. Jack [unclear] was, er, taken out as State Governor and all that sort of thing. I had a small bank account in the New South Wales which was taken over by the Cobalt and my little bank account became a Cobalt bank account which I’ve been with ever since, since 1932, so that’s just by the way. But, er, my father, he’d been something of a motorbike enthusiast. He got himself a brand new Harley Davidson, right, in ‘29, which was his pride and joy. But come the Depression had to sell it and he was out of work for two years and he got a little, little Douglas that ran on the smell of an oil rag. He put his tools on the back, back of the bike and went for looking for work. But he was still basically out of work for two years. So the Depression affected us all. We all knew what was going on. We had patches in our pants and so on and even at school we, we knew we were poor little boys and our fathers were out of work and, you know, it was a bad time and I feel that’s influenced our attitudes for the rest of our lives. My attitude to investments these days is still influenced by what happened then.
JC: That’s right. That’s’ exactly right. And did — when you went through schooling did — sorry I meant to just check — and so what sort of — you mentioned your father had tools — what sort of — was he sort of —
JE: He was a carpenter, carpenter in general —
JM: Carpenter in general but probably turning his hand to anything.
JE: Carpenter and joiner. He had been in the Navy and that was his basic trade. He worked on many of the major cities and the theatres of Sydney city. He, you know, in fact he’s part of the building of Sydney city. On the Regent, the Capital and all, and State theatre. All those theatres he worked on.
JM: That would, that would give you a very interesting insight when you would have gone and visited them in later years to be able to hear about the work what he did so —
JE: Being and ex-Navy man, he was very proud of that, and he had his ex-Navy friends and we went to inter-State gatherings and so that First World War background I was very much aware of it.
JM: Very much part, very much part of your DNA, so yes. And you went — you mentioned the schools you went through. Did you finish school at the end of the intermediate certificate or, er did you go through the —
JE: No, I finished but I didn’t do particularly well but [unclear] improved at Tech after I left school at the beginning of ’39 and I was trying to get in — I had been interested in drawing and interesting building model aeroplanes and making drawings of model aeroplanes out of a magazine I used to buy. So I was buying Flying Aitchison [?] and popular aviation magazines with my little pocket money I managed to get from 1934,’35 onwards. And then about 1937, er, my schoolteacher at the time, a Duracel [?] brother, he encouraged me to re-join the Sydney Municipal Library and I have been in, in, a library member for, oh, ever since. So, primarily it was for geography and a lot of other school subjects but I started to read aeroplane books and a bit about aircraft because I was still interested, and I started to build little balsa model aeroplanes and finally went into Berstex [?] but so I‘ve been building aeroplanes for many, many years so that was — I was interested in the aeronautics so that’s how I got then to where I finally ended up.
JM: You didn’t join the Air Training Corps?
JE: No. No. I don’t think there was an Air Training Corps then. I’m not certain now whether they were they in existence then, the ATC?
JM: But, er, but nevertheless you developed this interest in, in planes and —
JE: So, so I was interested and, of course, I wanted to get, being interested in drawing, I wanted to do engineering drawing and, of course, and while about August of 1940, 1940 I managed to work a couple of — through my mother’s brother I was introduced to Wormald Brothers, which became Wormald International finally, finally an international, before becoming an Australian international company, and I stayed with Wormald International for, then, for forty-eight years, from 1940 until I retired in 1948 [?].
JM: Goodness me.
JE: So — but starting, er, in that industry, in August 1940, the war had started, jobs were still difficult to get and there might be about a hundred kids lining up trying to get a job in a drawing office. I was lucky I got sort of assistance from my mother’s brother so that helped. So, I got in and I was there 1941,’42. I was still in the drawing office but then, in those years, fire certificate passed in the fire protection of Australia’s liquid fuel storage. I’d been there for twelve months in, by 1941, and I took my first annual leave and I went up to Katoomba for a holiday and while I was away the company contacted my father and said, ‘We want your permission to send him to New Guinea,’ and my father agreed. We had the contract for the naval fuel oil depot in Port Moresby. We also had contracts for fuel depots in, naval fuel depots, in [unclear] Sydney and Brisbane so August 1941 I was sent to New Guinea to Port Moresby. I got to the, of course, we were bound by contract to get site details. That’s why they picked me to go and get it and I went up there and at that time did one of the silliest things I’ve ever done. I was the only one made to go the site sentry at the gate, with my arrival ticket to explain it, and, er, I was up on top a hundred and eighty foot diameter, about forty foot high navy fuel tank, about three quarters full, and I wanted to check some fittings see if we could work with them. They were already installed fittings. And I opened the roof and climbed down the ladder inside and with the fumes of the fuel oil and the tropics I could have slipped on that ladder and ended up in fuel oil and drowned and never been found. But anyway I got out of that, overcome that. But also I remember at Port Moresby, while I was in Port Moresby, the flight of the US flying fortress came from the United States, er, across via New, via New Guinea, up to the Solomon Islands and they landed in Port Moresby for the day and I met two members of the crew of the USA Air Force and had a chat with them so that was interesting.
JM: So did you get to look at the planes themselves or just chat to the servicemen?
JE: That’s in here, the record of that flight and I didn’t close to the aeroplanes but I talked to two of the crewmen and that was interesting. So, of course, from then on I had this important information in my brain and by September 1941 I was called up for military service [unclear] 53a and of course the company gave me a letter to take with me and I slipped into in my birthday suit for a medical examination and I hear the area officer’s voice raised, ‘Where is this fella? Let’s have a look at him,’ after he’d read the letter. So I was exempted from military service on account of my information, the fact that I was working on a naval oil tanks, I was working on other, other work for all these oil companies and improving their, their fire protection and so on. So, we were doing important work, and came the start of 1942 the company was declared a protected industry so that made me even more stuck. So, I was, by that time I was going into the Air Force depots that were being built for the Air Force Empire Training Scheme but their, their fuel storages, we were doing fire protection for them also. So I was getting into a uniformed environment in [unclear] Isle, places like the [unclear] Air Force depots and so on, as an apparently physically fit civilian, in this uniformed environment. And knowing my father being in the Navy and the fact that my grandfather had been an Army man in two wars I was getting a bit sensitive about my position so at the start ‘42 I applied to join the Air Force. After I applied to join the Air Force I went to, er, what are they called? The, er, Women’s Emergency Signals Services, for learning, how to learn Morse code. So I was learning Morse code as a civilian on the side. So, all of ’42 I was fighting the company, ‘Are you going to release me?’ They said, ‘No, no, no.’ They sent one other executive sent to the Air Force and said, you know, ‘Can he be released?’ They said, ‘No, no, no.’ So, anyway after that the Air Force made me release the reservist badges, the books rather, the books I had for study. They said, ‘You have to give them back because you haven’t been released.’ So, I had to give them back so I wrote four letters to the manpower authorities at Kingston, Kensington and ended up at state power director in New South Wales in Martin’s Place and the upshot was I was released for the Air Force in 1943 and at that time I was finally released from the company and became an AC2 and I started as an Air Force Courier so the Air Force correspondence with the, with the manpower authorities is appended to this.
JM: Right. OK. We’ll —
JE: At the back of this is my correspondence, correspondence with them.
JM: OK. So, John’s documented a lot of his, um, experiences in a — which also incorporates his family’s military experiences in a, in a book called “Footprints on the Sands” and, um, it’s a very thick document and very well augmented by lots of photographs and other subsidiary documents so it’s a very interesting compilation that he’s created. So, um, so you finally, as you say, got your release to go and enlist and so you, um, did your ITS at Kingaroy I see from your log book?
JE: Kingaroy. Yes, so I enlisted at Woolloomooloo and then on the day we had to turn, turn up we all had to line up at Central Station and the man who had been sent by Wormald Brothers who had been sent down to get me out he saw me that night and didn’t admit to it until many years later [laugh] that he had seen me there. So we were posted off to Kingaroy. There was about thirty of us and on a troop train with a lot of RAF and other people on it was waylaid on the way because an RAF man had an argument with an American and broke a window on the train and the train was stopped and so it was late getting to Brisbane. We get to Brisbane and there we are in civilian clothes and we were late. We lost, missed the train to go to Kingaroy so we bunked up at an army camp on boards overnight with a blanket between four. That’s all they could find for us and the Air Force came and got us the next day, took us to an Air Force base at Sandgate and then we got our selves cleaned up from our trip on the train and had a shave and so on and the next day we got posted off to Kingaroy. So we ended up in Kingaroy. So that was ITS and, of course, we were then stripped of our civilian clothes and we got our Air Force issue and so on, and then we were now in the semi tropics, and we started off in shirts and shorts but they were somewhat ill-fitting so the CO said, ‘No. That’s no good. You look terrible.’ So he made us wear the [unclear] skins, the blue winter overalls, and they were better so we got to wear them. So again we went through the RAAF course then of course, learning all about the new regime. We had to be certain we had read the daily regiment orders and all that sort of thing otherwise we’d be on a charge and swing our arms up, up there otherwise our names would be taken and, oh, all the things that happened to us and [emphasis] got our first flight in a service aircraft. 5 Squadron were there at Kingaroy at the time, flying Wirraways, and they were practicing dive-bombing the tanks of the [unclear] Division out on the [unclear] so they gave us aircrew trainees a flight in a Wirraway, and that was the first service aircraft. Then they converted to Boomerangs and they went to New Guinea. So that was the start.
JM: So, that was the first time you’d actually been in a plane so —
JE: Oh no, I’d flown to, um, Port Moresby.
JM: Oh yes, yes. Of course.
JE: That was Delta Airlines. They were flying Lockheed 14s, which became the Hudsons. Up in Port Moresby was the base for the Lockheed 14s, which became Hudsons. So that was the first flight I had, up to Port Moresby.
JM: But — so that those two planes would be slightly different though, a very different experience. So from Kingaroy, um, you then went to Cootamundra.
JE: Cootamundra. Yes. We were stuck in Kingaroy for a while. We finished our basic ITS course. Anyway, we were in a pool, going out digging in the roads and doing all sorts of silly things and it was just filling time but it was still useful things. But Cootamundra for navigation skills were being flooded by sub pilots and Cootamundra was being killed with sub pilots from Temora and Bundaberg and other places like that. They were, weren’t not good enough to be pilots so became navigators so we had to wait until they were processed through so we were delayed. We were 38 Course at Kingaroy then became 39 Course at, er, at Cootamundra. So, er, that was the situation.
JM: Right. So that’s when you started your navigator training? And so that was —
JE: So by the time we got to Cootamundra it was getting the middle of winter. It was quite cold.
JM: Oh yes, that’s right. It would have been quite cold in June, June and July and August —
JE: You’d put your feet on the ground and they would ring, you know?
JM: Yes. Yes. So hopefully you had slightly heavier clothing by that stage?
JE: Oh, yes. The only time you were warm was when you’d got your flying gear on.
JM: So what, um, flying — did you do flying down in Cootamundra at all?
JE: Yeah we flew mostly over the towns of, er, southern New South Wales and learning all the basic things we had to do, with square searches and, er, taking pictures [background noise] of, er, of silos and railway stations and things like that. It, er, was introducing us to, to basic navigation at that stage.
JM: Well. We’ll come back to the book later a bit later on so that —
JE: We’ll come back to it later. Yeah. Yeah. Righto.
JM: Yeah. If that’s OK. And, um, so that, that’s all good sort of introduction stuff to, for you, and so —
JE: Yes. It was. We did one long cross country to Adelaide and stayed over. The pilot was on instructions ‘Don’t stay over and don’t be delayed.’ Unfortunately during the [unclear] drop on the way across [unclear] like watching a weather balloon going up and I just missed a few readings and so he called me then everything. Anyway, things that happened [slight laugh].
JM: Yes, that’s right. So from there was off to Evans Head for your gunnery training I would assume?
JE: Oh, from Cootamundra we got a little bit of leave in Sydney on the way back to then and I was posted to bombing and gunnery at Evans Head. One of our mates who’d been with us Cootamundra — he was from Queensland, named Alf Dess [?] — he wrote a little poem and — which I’ve got in there about the — and, er, about the, the mistreated men, clock watching, mugs of foaming ale, we got various little bits. There was our sorry little flight at Cootamundra. And, er, he didn’t turn up at bombing and gunnery school at Evans Head. So anyway, ‘What’s happened to Alf Dess?’ Anyway Alf turned up a week or two later and told us his tale. He was a little bit older than the rest of us and he was a man, red faced, reddish faced man, and he liked the strong, strong liquors and he’d been imbibing his latest favourite tipple in Sydney and, er, unfortunately that affected him internally and he had to go to the hospital, hospital at Bankstown, and at that time was a VD hospital. And he turned up there and of course they said, ‘Where did you get it?’ He said, ‘I haven’t got it.’ They wouldn’t believe him. So, anyway, that was his trouble, you know, the strong alcohol affected him down, down below and, er, so he was telling us his tale and had us in fits about the situation, you know, about what could happen, you know [laugh]. And out at Evans head, you know, while we’re on the subject, the huts at Evans Head they were full of lurid places [?] and other things about the more sordid parts of service life, you know, warning us what could happen. In later times, when we went to Britain, we found that Scunthorpe at one time was out of bounds by Bomber Command because it was called the red light of the north for the same reason. So we were warned.
JM: You were warned. That’s right. So any particular, um, memories from that bombing and gunnery training at Evans Head? Any near misses or —
JE: The main thing was we had contend with as bombers and navigators we, we had to fly in the back cockpit of the Fairey Battle and these were Fairey Battles that had been given to Australia. There were hundreds of them sent to Australia and Canada and other places because they were, they were obsolete and they’d been shot down, well, dozens over France in the early days of 1940 and, of course, they were vulnerable in that way but for training they were quite good. But they had Merlin engines [background noise of drilling] and they were glycol cooled and for us as well, and for me particularly, we had to lie down and drop bombs through the hatch under, under the aircraft, and we got the fumes, the glycol fumes from the engine, from the radiator sometimes back to us. It was a sickening thing, you know, when you were trying to concentrate on dropping a bomb.
JM: Yes. Not, not easy.
JE: Breathing glycol fumes wasn’t very good. Then the staff pilots of course were getting, were bored with this job they had and after they’d finished the job they’d go down the beach and fly along the beach at North Victor [?]. They’d go and have fun and games, yeah, yeah. Well, the pilots at Cootamundra used to do the same thing in Ansons at Cootamundra, they used to get fun and games too. They’d get to North Victor [?] farmers’ fences [laugh]. The things that happened.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. So then you went to Parkes for —
JE: Well, Parkes was more pleasant. That was our final astro navigation. We were basically trained as general navigators at Cootamundra and astro navigators at Parkes and that, that was reasonable. My main memories there was, again a staff pilot, who was so short he had a cushion on his seat to, apart from his parachute, to see up over the cockpit cone to fly the aircraft. And then one night we were up because of course we were flying mostly at night to Esso [?] and there had been a dust storm and the ground was consumed but the stars were quite bright so we managed, we managed to do what we had to do. That’s my memories of Parkes. That was reasonable but by that time, um, we had the final sort of send-off after each place, Cootamundra and Parkes and so on. My colleagues had, we all got to know each other, our foibles and so on, given each other nicknames and so on, so I was given the nickname of “Keeper of the Good Guts Book” because right from the beginning from Kingaroy onwards we were given ordinary exercise books to make notes in. That was alright. It was a reasonable thing it was to do for us but I thought I had a better idea. I’ll use the foolscap size spring-back binder they used to use as a text book. My father sent it to me. So, from there on, I used this spring-back binder, foolscap size [unclear] binder and with loose leafs my father sent me and I started putting all my notes in that. So the other fellas said, “The Good Guts Book” so at the bottom there the name now is “The Good Guts Book” as it I today. It finally broke the back of the spring-back binder after I’d got my Bomber Command and Transport Command notes in it but it’s still alive.
JM: Still alive. Goodness me. All these, all these years, ninety-odd years later. Yes. Amazing. And so then off to embarkation and, um, so December ’43 you were on a boat to —
JE: Now that was interesting also because, er, there were eighty, eighty-nine navigators now were being posted to Britain. Some of them were coming from where we’d been, at Cootamundra, Evans Head and Parkes. Some were coming from Nhill in Victoria, and we were all gathering at 2 ED [?] at that little park in Sydney but we were to sail from Brisbane. So, the eighty-nine of us were again put on a train and sent to Brisbane to join the American Army transport, The President Grant. The President Grant at that time, er, had been a peace-time liner and the US Army had taken over and it had become US transport, The President Grant, and it was taking wounded from the battles and so on back to the United States. So it was crewed by the US Navy of course and with some Army nurses to look after the wounded. We were, of course, the eighty-nine of us were the main able people otherwise on board and so we were given a job. We had to man the gun tops, gun tubs, on a rostered basis and watch for submarines and be hypnotised by flying fish and things like that, using our imaginations. Er, we never, never met any submarines but flying down the, going down the Brisbane river on that day (it was a week day when we joined the ship) we were floating down the Brisbane river, the PA system on the ship was playing “California, here I come”. There were submarines off the coast, for goodness sake. We thought, you know, where’s security? So, anyway, eventually we got to sea and it was a little bit rough for a start and — but we got our sea legs and that was good for the time we crossed the Atlantic. So, anyway, we crossed the Pacific, we crossed the date line, the equator over the Marianas and of course [unclear] for that, and they fired the rear gun one time and that shook the ship a bit but they didn’t do it anymore. But we were in steel bunks in the hold and sort of thing and I got one all to myself, to sleep there and put my gear in. We had to shave of course and we only got one bottle of cold water every day to sue to drink and to shave and everything else you needed it for. So the alternative was shaving in cold water, cold sea water. That wasn’t very nice. So, eventually some of us woke up to the bright idea, if we go up to the forward winch, to the forward deck, we can drain the winches. There’s hot condensed steam in the winches, nice hot water to shave with. That was good, so use your head.
JM: Use your head. Well, it was what was needed.
JE: Also on the forward deck were the gamblers that played poker and games like that and took the money from the others that were not so good. Oh, the things that happened on that ship. Then, of course, the mess was in the forward hold and going down on the companion way into the forward hold was very tight, you know, and stuff like that and not our cup of tea but still we put up with it. So, eventually we got to San Francisco and, of course, sailing under Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. That was delightful for the wounded men and of course on the way over they were old school. While we were doing our duty in the gun tubs and if we got bored and started to sing or whistle the [unclear] officer would come down on us. And we had to ignore the American Naval officers and the Army nurses on the deck down below, sort of doing what comes naturally, and we had to ignore all that sort of thing [laugh]. Still that was [unclear]. So at San Francisco we were taken to Angel Island, a US Army base of course, and lectured and my US Army officer he said that, ‘I know you fellas don’t bother about saluting your own officers,’ because some of our officers were pilot officers even then and the rest were sergeants, and of course we didn’t salute each other, and he said, ‘Would you please salute the fella with the eagle on his shoulder. He’s the commander of this post.’ [laugh] So we had to salute the colonel. Anyway that was alright. So anyway, a day and a half in San Francisco, another, Ted Cook and I went, went to the movies, sat all night through a movie, and one of the favourite movies of at that time — no, its name won’t come at the moment. Anyway that was enjoyable.
JM: Yeah. So then on to the troop train?
JE: Onto a troop train across the United States. There was a little bit of snow there on the ground at that time. But the trains were so hot we wore our socks, our shirts and shorts, you know, as the trains were hot. And that shocked the Americans a little bit. And then they got a porter of course came around that we used to tip every so often and the flying officer in charge of us said, ‘Now cut this out.’ He said, ‘You’re only getting five dollars just to keep you going so you can’t afford to give a tip to somebody.’ So we had to stop doing that. We got into, er, middle of the United States and stopped there somewhere in Carolina, er, Carolina. Anyway, somewhere in the middle of the United States and got off the train for a milk shake and so on, and looking around, and a couple of us went and asked the girl for a milk shake and she said, ‘Oh, I can’t understand you.’ Typical southern accent, so anyway [unclear] we got by but the same was in Chicago. You know, the usual interest in Chicago, the stories of the — Al Capone and all the things that had happened in those days we’d seen in the movies and so on. That was our interest in Chicago. Then, of course, eventually we arrived in New York and, er, to another camp and that — we weren’t there long. That, that was alright. So we got into New York as soon as we could and a few of us went to Jack Dempsey’s Bar and did various other things, went to Sonia Heeney’s ice show and so on. So then me [emphasis] since my mother was a soprano and I’d been brought up on operatic arias and all sort of things, since she used to take me to the concert parties, to Long May gaol and veterans home at Upper [unclear] and various old peoples’ homes, I’d grown up with a singing background. I’d grown up on operatic arias, so I took myself to the Metropolitan Opera. I went to the Magnifica [?] and Metropolitan Opera and stayed and sat, stayed for supper on that for ever afterwards and sent, sent the programme back to my mother and made her green with envy [laugh]. Anyway, I got to the Metropolitan Opera. So that was good.
JM: Very good.
JE: So then one cold night we were loaded on to trucks with motorbikes with screaming sirens and so on, and we were taken to the side of a great ship and into the side of a great ship. We didn’t know what it was until we got inside and we found the names of the RAF carved into the railings and all over the place. It was the Queen Elizabeth. And she’d been taking the RAF from the city to the Middle East and now she was taking us to Britain and some thousand American troops bound for what became D Day finally, and they were with us, and again we were one of the smaller groups. There were some French Canadian girls that some of us got pally with and the purser on the ship was telling us what we would need in Britain, like lipsticks to give to the girls. We found we didn’t need lipsticks anyway. He was doing a deal. So, things came. On the Queen Elizabeth there were so many people on it, so many thousands of troops with their arms, and with the ship itself being armed and the gouting [?] cables around the ship and, with so many people using the water that was normally used for so many number of passengers laid down, the ship was unstable. So it was sailing across the Atlantic unescorted, on its own, and depending on the speed to beat the submarines and, as the captain said later, we ended up with a roll, with a high speed roll, and at one stage of the game, they had ropes across all the big open areas, and people had to give up going for meals. There was two meals a day and the PA system was going all day, ‘This is the second call for the third sitting in the sergeants’ mess. Fall in for chow.’ And this would go on all day. So we only got two meals but when this high speed roll was on a lot of people didn’t turn up for meals so that helped us to.
JM: It was impossible.
JE: And of course we were all given a big disk with a number, a coloured disk, with a number and it would say, ‘Stay in our part of the ship. Don’t go wandering about.’ If you wander out of your own area the MPs will be after you so you were under control.
JM: Yes, so you then get to Glasgow?
JE: So we ended up in Glasgow, in Gallowgate, in, up in, oh, in Finch [?] in Greenock, and
JM: On the train down to Brighton?
JE: We were let loose in there for, oh, half a day. And that was in Gallowgate and so we went strolling round the town and we encountered groups of girls. That was a cultural shock. These groups of girls singing, ‘Roll me over in the clover, roll me over in the da da da.’ So, I spoke to the MPO, I said, ‘Are all the girls like that? Do you know that song or what?’ But that was our next cultural shock. When we got back to the RAF base we were based at that time I went for the train and told the NCO about it and he said, ‘You were lucky you didn’t meet some of the fellas with razor blades in the backs of their caps.’ So that was no go, no go at that time. Had no idea.
JM: That’s right. So on the train down to Brighton?
JE: On the train down to Brighton and we met some of the French girls we’d met on the ship. And Don Patten was bloody, ‘Oh, fancy seeing you again.’ Oh yeah, Don Patten was loud [?]. Oh yeah, so down to Brighton and — via London of course — and transferring through London and a quick, quick view of some of the sights, and then down to Brighton and the two hotels in Brighton, The Metropole and The Grand. We were NCOs in the Grand. The officers were in The Metropole and, er, near the famous pier. We were out on the pier for lectures and things like that and sighting new and newer aircraft that used to go over the [background noise] and some others that we’d never heard of before. They were flying over Brighton.
JM: OK, John. Hold on a minute. I think we have a bit of competition here. So — OK, we’ve shut the door now so we won’t have that tree mulcher, the mulching and, er, chain saw going on. So, sorry we were just talking about Brighton and —
JE: We had lectures on the pier and so on and I found out looking after us at that time was our local post man. He was now a warrant officer disciplinary in Brighton and, of course, I knew him and he warned us that there’s six hundred pubs in Brighton but there’s one you shall not go into. Of course, there’s been a fight between the Canadian, Canadian soldiers and Australian airmen so this pub you shall not go into. Of course we all wanted to know the name of it. So, anyway that was that. But we went dancing at the Dome, you know, the famous Dome, the Prince Regent’s house in Brighton. And that was nice. You could ask a girl for a dance and, of course, you’d be favoured. They were nice girls. So that was nice, dancing at the Dome.
JM: And from there you moved on to your advanced flying?
JE: All the way back to Scotland again.
JM: Back to Scotland.
JE: Back to West Freugh on the Mull of Galloway. Well, that again was a nice place to be and we met new friends and a group of us there, there hadn’t been Australians, Australians there for some time so we were, we were welcomed nicely. And we got buddy buddy with the photographic WAAF, Joan Shaw, and she leant us an iron to iron our shirts and I had some starch with me and I offered the starch to starch our collars and so we got a good relationship with Joan. Later in the piece she got friendly with one of my mates, Kevin Curtin. He became an architect in the city. He — and his twin brother Pat was finally lost on ops but, er, she asked me later what had occurred to Pat and Kevin Curtin and she got some of my ops photos but she was to fly from West Freugh to the RAF Interpretation Centre, Interpretation Centre at Metheringham. So I met her later, some years later, sometime later in London. So that was our first friend in there. As I say, we flew up and down in Scotland, over Northern Island and up and down the Irish Sea and got to know about RAF procedures and local weather and so on and leant that they, if the enemy happens to be around they’ll shoot at you and don’t fly over any Royal Navy ships either. They’ll shoot at you. So things, things we had to learn.
JM: Kind of useful buy anyway, yes —
JE: Useful, yes.
JM: Yes, yes, yes. So, and being in March, basically most of March, early April, the weather was just early spring, should have been reasonable. Although, up in that part of Scotland was a little bit cool still at that stage but —
JE: Still a bit cool still but we used to wander around during our time off and even at one time we were down at, er, Oban and a couple of fellas said, ‘Oh, it’s time we had a pin-up.’ So we go past a ladies’ wear shop and there in the window is a hosiery advertisement with a blonde with the long socks on of the time and he said, ‘Oh we’ve got to have that as our pin-up.’ That became our pin-up.
JM: Well, there you go. So all you had to do was ask. So from there down, back, down to Finningley and then after Finningley, Worksop. Of course 18 OTU, um, started off at Finningley and then —
JE: Well, Finningley was the basic OTU, the permanent station, and Worksop was the satellite for it. Finningley was very much a spit and polish type of station and we had to behave ourselves there but the beauty of being now at Finningley was we crewed-up.
JM: That’s right, that what I was going to say. That was where you would have crewed-up.
JE: They got us all in the sergeant’s mess there one day and, er, some words from the CO and from the site padre about aspects of this marriage, which basically was what it was, and so we — they let us loose to crew ourselves up. So John Conway, er, he was also a navigator bomb aimer. He’d, he’d done, been trained in Canada and he’d done a coastal command course in Canada so I got to know him. I’d met him somewhere on a run and so John Conway as bomb aimer, he teamed up with me as navigator, and we looked around. We picked on a fair haired RAF pilot from Liverpool, John Harris, so there was now three of us. So the three of us approached Bob Bickford from Canberra as a wireless operator.
JM: Sorry, Big— Bigfoot?
JE: Bob Bickford.
JM: Bickford.
JE: He was from Canberra and so we picked on him so there were four of us. So we looked around again and here were two gunners, two RAF gunners, er, Jock, Bill Waddell from Dunfermline and Bryan Barby from Birmingham. They’d already got themselves together so we approached them to join us. And here we were in fairly a short space of time, there was six of as the enemy of the few [?].
JM: And so that was the way you came together. So how long had you known John Conway? Sort of —
JE: Oh, a little time. I can’t remember where I met him now. Whether I’d met him on a train somewhere or on leave somewhere but I, I had known him, had a fair acquaintance with him but I can’t recall now where I met him.
JM: Right but was it only in England or —
JE: Oh, no. In Britain. I knew him, met him in Britain.
JM: Only in Britain. Yep. OK. And, um, and you liked the cut of the cloth of the pilot but —
JE: Yes. We all got on well. That was the point then. We were all NCOs still and were bunked in together. We had to get to know each other and we got on well together. So when we, when we finally flew there was no nonsense about pilot and skipper and all this sort, sort of nonsense. It was, we had three Johns: John Harris, John Eppel, John Conway so the pilot became Johnny, I became Jack and John Conway, since he was John Cornelius, he became JC, so that became our terminology throughout. Bob being, er, being, being Robert, Bob, he became Bob. He was the wireless operator. The other gunner Bill, Bill Waddell from Dunfermline had a Scottish accent so he became known as Jock and Bryan in the rear turret he was just Bryan. So we called ourselves by our first names or by nicknames as appropriate and we got on well together from that day.
JM: That right. So then you —
JE: We went to Worksop. Well, Worksop we didn’t do any flying at that time. We were there for a few lectures, and, er, did some training lectures, and training, plotting, navigation plots and that sort of thing but no flying. We didn’t go to Worksop to fly. That was a pleasant place. It was near Retford in, in geography and the beauty of Worksop was we now got into Bomber Command rations and not only more in food and things like eggs and oranges and things that the others could enjoy. I was never an egg person. I couldn’t eat my eggs but the chocolate ration improved. We now got Mars Bars. Mars Bars were nice. So as that, that was England and the chocolate ration was Mars Bars. So Worksop was quite good but what happened at Worksop, of course, was the eve of D-Day. We were, we were there on the eve of D-Day and we had all been flying that day and that night and we were told to be down before midnight because the colours of the day were going to change. And when we got down we realised when we were going to bed and having a hot [unclear], well we couldn’t, mostly it was lukewarm, but flying overhead were the aircraft of the Eighth Air Force who were taking off from East Anglia, formatting overhead, on their way to Normandy. So we knew why the colours of the day were changing so we saw Normandy, saw Normandy starting. So that was that.
JM: And so, and you were flying —
JE: Flying Wellingtons at that time.
JM: At OTU, yes.
JE: And of course we had Wellingtons. We’d flown on Ansons before and Wellingtons were new and bigger aircraft and different things about them and, of course, things we had to be wary of then, things we had to learn, that the Wellingtons had their fuel tanks in the wings and also smaller fuel tanks in the engine themselves and the drill, the drill was that after we’d been out for some hours the pilot, prior to landing, would switch from wing tanks to the cell tanks so he would still have a half hours flying to land himself. He didn’t, wasn’t uncertain about how much he had left, what he had in the wing tanks. So the drill was that me as navigator and Bob Allsop as wireless operator, we were down in the middle of the aircraft and we had to reach past us, had to pull a toggle and pull the toggle for the port and starboard engines, turn the cell tanks on. That was alright. However, the stage where I was told to put the cell tanks on I reached the outer one, pulled it on. Bob puts, pulled it on. Each of us pulled that one. The engines going splutter, splutter, splutter. It was the same one. ‘Get your act together fellas.’ We were switching the engines on and off. One man one job. A very a good thing to learn. Whoever was going to turn the engine on, switch those tanks on, one fella does it and he does it in the correct sequence. You don’t get yourself [unclear] so we nearly got ourselves into trouble but anyway we got out of it alright. It’s just the engines started to splutter and Harris was very upset [laugh] anyway we survived that.
JM: You did. So that and that was —
JE: And of course the other thing we had there was the start of, er, corkscrews. You know about corkscrews do you? Yeah. Well, we learnt about corkscrews there and, you know, this sort of thing. Oh yes. Again the pilots were learning their trade also and they had to do various, various things.
JM: Well, of course, they were in a totally different train again and so they had to learn, adjust to a different plane and learn these manoeuvres at the same time so it was hard for them as well. But hard for everyone adjusting. So, so then having done that you went through and you then ended up with your heavy conversion at Blyton.
JE: Blyton. Well there we met our flight engineer. He didn’t chose him. He was appointed to us. Charles Simpkins was older than the rest of us. He was about twenty-nine and, er, he was basic, his basic training as a sheet metal working. He had been trained by Avro, apart from being ground staff man, he’d been trained for Avro at the Avro, Avro works and, er, so he came to us and, of course, being a married man and twenty-nine he was a steadying force for all of us. John Con— Conway, he smoked a great deal, and drank a, drank a reasonable amount. He’d often say, ‘Remind me to have a beer tonight.’ He didn’t need reminding really but it was one of his favourite statements. So he was a bit disap— disappointed with Charlie but Charlie wasn’t, wasn’t that sort of a fella but anyway Charlie blended in well with us. We all got along together and of course in our name calling he was Charlie.
JM: Yes. So you each had your own names and were able to continue on with that.
JE: Yes, that was just it.
JM: Yeah and so, um, so now you have got new experiences because by at this point you were on Lancasters —
JE: We moved on to Halifaxes.
JM: Oh, Halifaxes.
JE: It was nice from my point of view when I went on the Halifax as a navigator I’d fly right up in the nose. I could look out the clear nose and see where I was going. And John Conway, he used to always — he was born and bred in, er, Western Australia and he was there and he used to drool about the green fields of England so John Conway used to like to look out at such things. So we got on, on reasonably well on the Halifaxes and there were no real problems. The — he and I got buddy buddy with a couple of WAAFs, Nora and — Nora and — Nora and Vera, I think it was, a couple of WAAFs. And at that time it was high summer and long nights and twilight and the local hostelry near Blyton was very much favoured, and it was nice to sit and quaff the mugs of foaming ale in the, in the long twilights. That was a very pleasant place.
JM: Yes, I’d say, because his was late July, early August, so it was a very good time of the year, very pleasant time of the year and, um, yes, I could — well if it were not for the circumstances otherwise —
JE: Yes D-Day was coming up but you know —
JM: But, yeah, it certainly provided some sort of minor diversion or distraction from the other things at hand. So from, after then, um, so you went to Lancaster Flying School —
JE: Lancaster Finishing school.
JM: Finishing School.
JE: That was only a week or so at Hemswell.
JE: Hemswell.
JE: Oh, at Hemswell we weren’t exactly welcome because we, as NCOs (we weren’t sergeants or flight sergeants at that time), the sergeants’ at mess was largely inhabited by the local inhabitants of course and they seemed to resent our presence in their [emphasis] mess so we weren’t exactly welcomed. We didn’t feel happy exactly at Hemswell. We were there just to learn something about Lancasters and about flying them and the fixtures and fittings of them and so on. So we survived Hemswell. There was no real hassles there.
JM: No unsettling experiences with converting to the Lancasters having —
JE: Not really no, no, no.
JM: The adjustments was OK converting from Halifaxes to —
JE: No problems with converting to Lancasters at that stage.
JM: And then you got the news that you were going to be posted to 550 Squadron.
JE: 550 Squadron. So, from Hemswell we were put on a train of course with all our gear up to Market Harborough up towards Grimsby and, er, eventually we unloaded onto a truck and the railway truck was approaching towards North Killingholme and the first thing we were interested in, or all I was interested in, was all these Lancasters. Have they got a bump underneath them? Have they got H2S? H2S was still being fitted to the main force squadrons and did North Killingholme have H2S? Yes. Most of the aircraft did. Oh, good. So I was happy with that. Of course, at that time, from Worksop onwards, I’d been using GEE. GEE was a very accurate navigation system in Britain but as we approached over the continent it was jammed. All the little pusles on the ray tube disappeared into the grass so you couldn’t read them. So, in, in Britain it was very good but over the continent, of course, we was doing this sort of thing, diversions over the continent, astro just wasn’t a proposition. Apart from the clouds, there was more clouds, it was difficult to pick up a star, and changing course all the time astro was more difficult. So, er, with H2S, as a self-contained ground observation radar, which gave us a picture of the ground, a picture of coastline, a picture of the towns and such like, er, it was far better when GEE was jammed, GEE was unusable. So, I was happy that H2S was on the aircraft. Now approaching North Killingholme it was the feeling of exhilaration, apprehension if you like, but here we were, we were approaching the front line at last, after two years, one and a half years after I joined the Air Force in Woolloomooloo, eighteen months later here I am at the front line. That was the feeling.
JM: And so that’s when the operations started?
JE: That’s when the operations started. Well, as part of the operations, it’s something that comes into here that I’ll tell you about and show you about. We were, we were posted from, er, Hemswell, the Lancaster Finishing School, I think around about the end of August, and in early September we were at, we reached North Killingholme, and of course the pilots had to do a second — that was the routine — they had to do a second dickie, second dickie trip with another crew, with a more experienced crew, before they took their own crew out. So the pilots arrived, arrived from Hemswell, and they had to do this second dickie so the day Harris and others had to do it, er, Bob Allsop and Bryan Barby were down at the runway with the members of this other crew and some of the flight commanders and they were waving the aircraft off and it was photographed. The scene was photographed and it, the photograph came to be finally used falsely on a number of other occasions. The aircraft that has been shown that was taking off was BQ-F Fox, a well-known aircraft, which finally flew over a hundred operations, and the crew that normally flew that was a Scotsman, named ‘Jock’ Shaw, David Shaw, er, who made a name for himself in Normandy. It flew its hundredth operation later, about November, but this was now early September and the photographer of the station’s photography section took this photograph of part of our crew and part of another crew seeing our pilot off on their first trip to Le Havre, their first second dickie trip, and the photograph was finally used falsely to illustrate the supposed take-off of BQ-F Fox on its one hundredth operation in November. And it went into the 550 Squadron history. It went into RAF history. It’s an official Air Ministry photograph which I have and it went into other publications which I have down there, “Lancasters at War” and so on. It was used again, again and again, and it was only until last year that my bomb aimer’s, er, daughter in Uxbridge, whom I’ve been communication with for the last three years now, namely Bryan Barby’s daughter. She saw — I sent her a copy, a copy of this which has that photo in it and she said, ‘Oh, look at this photo. Is that, is that you in this photo?’ It was Bob Bickford. She thought it might have been me. She said, ‘That looks like my father, Bryan.’ So, anyway, she start asking questions so I replied. I said, ‘Yes, I had the same questions when I saw that photograph purporting show the hundredth take-off of BQ-F Fox on its hundredth operation.’ It wasn’t. It wasn’t taken in November. It was taken in September. So I got the Squadron records changed and Peter Kildare [?] who looks after Squadron records these days he acknowledged the errors I gave and he changed Squadron records there but that was what happened. The station photographer cheated. He used that photograph he’d taken in, er, September for a purported take-off in November because he had the photographs. The light in November was too dark to take a reasonable photograph so he said, ‘Oh look I’ve got this photograph. I’ll use it.’ So he cheated and so that photograph was then changed. So that was, that was early in our career at North Killingholme.
JM: Quite early in your career, um, on 16th of September by the looks of it. Yeah, so, um, yes, so then this, that and then your career stretched for the full tour, right through then —
JE: Into January.
JM: Into January. But —
JE: Including the period of Battle of the Bulge. It was Christmas and there was an icy fog right across Europe and, er, the Tactical Air Force just couldn’t operate. We operated to, er, the marshalling, marshalling yards of Cologne and we couldn’t get back to Killingholme. We were diverted to an American Air Force base down in East Anglia and remarkably it was one of the stations, er, basing the aircraft that we’d seen from Worksop so that’s how it turned out. We were stuck with them for four days, helped them to drink their whisky, eat their Christmas dinner and so on. They gave us Christmas dinner then we came back to North Killingholme and had a New Year dinner and, of course, in the meantime North Killingholme people had been drinking to absent friends and, er, so at North Killingholme we had a New Year dance and I brought my Ulceby girlfriend to the dance and we won the spot waltz and the spot waltz but, er, apart from that dance at North Killingholme I went to a village dance at nearby Ulceby and met the girl, a Lincolnshire girl, who became my girlfriend for the next five months and she was a tower of strength for my morale during that time.
JM: Did — they often were. They provide the understanding.
JE: That is the point. The women of Britain stood by us. Our girlfriends, the others that we met, appended to other things here, er nostalgic memories of the, of her, a WAAF girlfriend that I had (that was a more, became a more serious affair), to ATS girls I celebrated VE day with in London, er, a girl on Transport Command who was a secretary to one of the directors of Dunbolts [?] and others that we met. There was the feeling of the times that — what was happening at Worksop that I hadn’t mentioned was a movie was being made at Carnforth at that time, er, we didn’t know about it. It was ninety miles north of us at the time. It became an iconic movie based on, based on Noel Coward’s play, er, what’s its name? “Brief Encounters” “Brief Encounter” and so all, all these meetings with our girlfriends and others, they were brief encounters, but no less memorable for being brief. We still remember them [clears throat].
JM: Absolutely and [clears throat] with, um, the flying and with the various ops that you did right through. I mean, I can see just very quickly scanning through your log book here that, that you’d —
JE: Well, being navigator I gave the full — lots of people just wrote duty so and so, op so and so [unclear] — but I wrote the full details of the route.
JM: I can see that and it’s very, very interesting that you had done that because —
JE: I gave the full details of what I did as navigator.
JM: Yes, yes. And, and — but also I can see, you know, obviously part of all the raids that I’ve seen before in terms of, you know, the destination of Essen and Stuttgart and, er, Dusseldorf and, and all the rest of it, it’s, um, yes, what of all of these ops, which ones perhaps stand out for you? I mean, I know they are all significant in various ways but which ones do you think? What, what sort of —
JE: The main point was, I mean, the fact is today that we survived. We had a safe tour and, as the now secretary of 550 Squadron Association, the wing commander, said the navigator had a great responsibility in this. The navigator had to keep everybody safe and twice during our tours all our logs and charts were collected and taken away, where they were analysed and plotted and the plot was put up in the library of the Squadron and there was BQ-D of 550 Squadron on track, on time, in the middle of a crowd, in the middle of the bomber stream. That was the safest place to be. If you were out there the night fighters could pick you off. That’s what happened. But twice during, during our tour that was done and my crew were, er, impressed. They said, ‘We’ve got a [unclear] navigator.’ It was good for their morale, good for my confidence and finally good for our survival. Our gunners Bob, Bob and, er, Bryan and Jock never had to fire in anger. They reported seeing fighters and so on. They reported other aircraft around us but they did not shoot at them. The basic principal was you don’t shoot they wouldn’t shoot at you. You know, don’t draw attention to yourself. That was, that was their instruction. So they didn’t draw attention so we stayed safe. But the only time we nearly got in trouble — we got flak holes, we got flak holes continually and they were patched up and so on and the ground crew were happy that we brought back their aircraft intact, time after time. We flew, we flew twenty-three operations on BQ-D. We flew on, briefly on Fox I’d mentioned. We flew on that and we flew on a few other aircraft —
JM: Fox and V for Victor a couple of times. Victor as well.
JE: While BQ-D was being serviced, but that was, basically BQ-D was our aircraft when we got it and it was our aircraft from there onwards. But when the British Army were, were crossing the Rhine, um, Montgomery tells in his, in his book “Normandy to the Baltic” that the Germans thought there might be an airborne operation for crossing the Rhine and the area around Emmerich, that area, and other towns in that area were heavily fortified with anti-aircraft to counter an airborne operation. So we were sent to — Bomber Command was sent — to three towns around there and we were went to Emmerich at eleven thousand feet, on a bright Sunday morning. Mostly we flew up around the nineteen or twenty thousand, even higher sometimes if we had to get over a front, but on this day we were at eleven thousand feet, and one of the few times — most of my time I spent under my black curtain. Of course there I can use the light and of course outside no lights are supposed to be visible. So I stayed under that curtain most of the time. I took it to be my duty to tell John Harris what the next course was and so on. But it was far more, far better for me to stay cool, calm and collected under there and not get out and gawk at what was going on and what the others can see. I depended on what, what was happening outside by John Conway’s reaction. He was the bomb aimer. He can see exactly what was going on. Yes, as we were approaching a target if he said, ‘Shit.’ It was just average. If he said, ‘Shit!’ It was a little bit worse and if he said, ‘Shit!’ [more emphasis] it was really going to be difficult. So, I knew from that reaction what things were like outside. So that was good enough for me. So anyway, on this particular day, at eleven thousand feet, Conway had already got himself an aiming point photo at, at Calais earlier in the piece, and an hour later he was thinking this was a nice fine bright day and no cloud for an aiming point so he said, ‘Can we go round again Johnny. I wasn’t aiming for it.’ Meanwhile up in the turret when he looked round a quarter of a mile behind us the Lancaster behind us went poof and disappeared in a pall of black smoke. The flak had probably hit it, the enemy bomb aimer hit the, hit the “cookie” the four thousand pound bomb and blown the thing apart. Bryan in the rear turret inside, had warned us, ‘The flak’s following us.’ And we all heard bang, bang, bang up our tail. We all heard it and here’s Conway saying, ‘Oh, let’s go. I want to go round again.’ We all said, ‘Drop them, JC and let’s get out of here.’ So he dropped them, Harris put the throttle through the gate, he changed course and changed altitude and got us out of there. Now, that was our closest incident. The flak could have got us that day. So anyway, that was the worst. But otherwise, as I say, we had a safe tour. So, this I feel is sort of another side of what Bomber Command experience was about. We know that many fellas, like the Bomber Command losses over there and [unclear] over there, many fellas had far worse confrontation with the enemy. We didn’t have a close confrontation with the enemy apart from that day but this is my story, our story, we survived.
JM: But that’s it. Every, every story is different.
JE: Every story puts another face onto what service with Bomber Command was about. The very fact of serving in Bomber Command was a risk to be borne I feel. The fact that you took it on was a risk and the fact that I was exempted from military service so I didn’t end up on the Kokoda like the other fellas did who’d been called up at the same time as me. They ended up on the Kokoda. I could have been on the Kokoda but I ended up in Bomber Command. Which was more dangerous? Anyway, survived that.
JM: Well, I mean, I guess the point is though that the statistics are there to show that the Bomber Command was —
JE: Was very dangerous, yeah, fifty-five thousand or so lost out of hundred and fifty thousand as we know. We know it wasn’t exactly a picnic.
JM: No. That’s exactly right and so it’s —
JE: Well, you know, all of the fellas, of the eighty-nine of us that left Australia together, they are all listed here. I know exactly — now in that little black book over there records their names, ranks and serial numbers and what happened to them. The eighteen of the eighty-nine who didn’t come back, exactly what happened to them. Two particular mates, Pat, Kevin and Pat Curtin from Canberra, who were particular friends of mine. I went on leave with Pat Curtin from Brighton, from Brighton, on one of the [unclear] schemes and we went up to one of the farms, on leave, and Kevin Curtin went somewhere else. But Pat unfortunately, he was, they were both flying from Elsham Wolds (they were twins flying in the same squadron) and they, they, he was delayed, he and his crew were delayed due to some sickness and February 1945, since ‘44-‘45 had been a bad winter, the training stations like Finningley and Worksop at that time weren’t bringing on more crews because there’d been delays in training so the command came down, those that were on the squadrons were to stay there. If you’d done thirty ops you now got to do thirty-five ops. So, unfortunately Pat Curtin was caught on that. He was shot down, shot down over Pforzhiem, on that thirty-fourth op. Nasty. I meant he survived till that time. Only their wireless operator parachuted out. I met him, I used to meet him in later the years and Kevin on Anzac Day. He was the only one that survived. So, that was the way it was. And even, even later, even you see there, I went — after Bomber Command — I went to Transport Command.
JM: That’s right.
JE: I chose that because after Bomber Command I was posted to Catterick which was the Aircrew Allocation Centre to decide what are they going to do with you now? Are you going to training ATU to train for Bomber Command or do you become [unclear] dresser, all sorts of things? ‘You were a draughtsman. You can be a draughtsman again?’ Well, hang that for a lark. So, I was interested in India. My father in the Navy in the First War he’d spent two and half years on the HMS [unclear] sailing down the Bay of Bengal and he used to tell lots of tales. He used to — I’ve got the photos out here — he used to turn over these photos and telling tales and from that and from that. I regret having a tape recorder in those days. You know, I couldn’t record he used to tell, some of the tales he used to tell. From all these photos and from that and from that. And I thought India would be nice so I asked for Transport Command and I went to India with Transport Command OTU, which finally gave me civil navigator’s qualifications, er, but, while we were at Bitteswell, we did training at Ramsgate for basic intensive lectures and learning about civil navigation. Then flying from Bitteswell VE Day came. We knew VE Day was coming up and we were due to fly that night and we were standing around Flying Control, ‘Do we fly or don’t fly?’ The chatter of the [unclear]. Anyway, it came over the tele printer AFCAN [?], all flying’s cancelled. Back to the mess. There was an almighty mess party of course that night up with some of us up at the mess. We ate and drank everything that was available and sang all the songs we ever knew, all the rival’s songs and that kind of thing, and some of the officers came down to the sergeants’ mess from the officers’ mess and joined us. And somebody, somebody had got on the steam roller and started to drive the steamroller around the perimeter track and the CO says, ‘Tell the steamroller to come back to base.’ So all things, all sorts of nonsense went on that night. I, I went down to London. London was going mad of course. There were thousands in the streets and all sorts of people and I went into, into the Nuffield Centre. I managed to get to, into a Services Club to put my gear and, er, I went to the Nuffield Centre, which was near the town centre, for anything going on there and I started dancing with a Scots girl, Scots ATS girl, so I was dancing with her and going to her and so on, so eventually I asked if she wanted to go out to see what was going on. So she came along with her friend Mary and tagging along with her friend Mary was a sailor. So anyway, we started going down the round and I was turning to Mary, er, Ann, and anyhow Mary said, ‘Oh, I want to go back to camp.’ They were based in Chislehurst in Kent, Army Pay Corps. So, Ann wasn’t keen on that idea but Mary was insisting, ‘Oh, I’m fed up with this. I want to go back to camp.’ So right, we get to Charing Cross Station, so get into Charing Cross and the train was waiting for us there and Ann stood, stands, stands at the door of the train waving to me and Mary sits down in the train and ignores the sailor. The sailor stands by and he gets fed up after ten minutes and wandered away. As soon as he wandered away Mary’s out of the train, ‘Right, come on. What are we going to do now?’ So here I am stuck with two ATS girls for VE Day and so we had a whale of a time. So the other thing’s that’s in here now, as you can see, the famous movie that came about in recent times of the Queen and us, we were in — oh, never mind — [unclear]. We sang and we danced, danced the coca cola [?], the rhumba and oops-a-daisy, all those silly things, silly things all day, then finally at midnight we were down in front, in front of Buckingham Palace with all the crowd ‘We want the King. We want the King.’ So, eventually the King and the Queen came out on the balcony and waved to us. So that signed off that day. So, we were all so happy. There were bonfires in Green Park and so on. We wandered back to, er, to Trafalgar Square and we were all a bit tired so we sat down somewhere and the two girls, I had a girl on each shoulder, and curled up together we had a snooze. There were still lights and nonsense going on while we had a snooze. So anyhow the next morning we said we’d better get something to eat because all the pubs and things were closed. So, we wandered back up town all the way through to Fleet Street and we finally ran into a policeman and he said, ‘Oh, some of these places around Fleet Street might open in the morning.’ Oh, well, we said, ‘We don’t want to wait here. Let’s go back.’ So the girls then said they wanted to go back to town then, back to camp, so back to Charing Cross and, er, they went back to town and round the station there were inert bodies all over the place. There was dead tired people all over the place. So they got their train and they went back, back to camp, and I went back to Australia House and had a clean-up at Australia House and I went back to Bitteswell but the next morning Transport Commands, ‘You’ve had your holiday. Now you’ve got to do your flying again.’ So, I was on flying again. I didn’t fly that night, woke up the next morning and there’s the service police collecting the gear of the other three RAF fellas who were bunked in with us. Into Wellingtons again, into — it had failed on take-off. They crashed and everybody was dog tired. And the fact that they were dog tired wouldn’t have helped. Three of them were killed. They’d just come back from being with their families and they were killed. So it wasn’t only Bomber Command that had losses. So did Transport Command. So that was a sad end to VE Day really but apart from that VE Day was enjoyable and Ann, the Scots girl I was buddy buddy with and I was dancing with, I wrote to her later in Edinburgh and, er, she stayed in the ATS until after the war and so did Mary. She was a London girl and I don’t know what happened to her.
JM: And when — OK that was a very different experience because everyone was in such a celebratory mood but when you were in, um, during your ops, period of ops with 550, what leave did you have? What did you do in any of the leave that you had then?
JE: Basically, we had six days leave every six weeks. And I used to go down to London and at one stage of the game, albeit I think it was, might have been from Worksop, my first cousin, Len Froy [?] was on leave. He was a mid-upper gunner with 467 Squadron at Lincoln and I rode my bike (I had a bike at that time) I rode my bike down to Lincoln, saw him. He’d been, he’d been to Berlin and he was asleep in bed. I hadn’t seen him for two years and he looked terrible. As mid-upper gunner of course he saw everything and one particular night, the night of the strong winds, which he learnt about from his navigator. He looked terrible and, you know, I thought, ‘Geez, this is what Bomber Command does for you.’ You know, so you know anyway I met him at that time and, as I say, one of the things I did learn at that time again when I met him and met his navigator, and his navigator told me about the night of the strong winds, which from a navigator’s point of view was interesting information. The — what had Bomber Command been doing? Earlier in the piece when, as you probably know, they weren’t getting close to the targets for various reasons. Air— Aircraft were operating more or less individually, they weren’t operating as squadrons or in bomber streams. They were allowed to operate individually and not always finding their, the right place. So Command got the bright idea at one stage there, let’s get the skilled navigators to find the winds over the continent, broadcast them back, the Metrological Office Command will assess the situation and they’ll broadcast a wind for everybody to use and theoret— theoretically everybody using the same wind, they’ll all end up in the same place and everything will be lovely. It was a lovely idea in theory but it didn’t always work out in practice. This part night the jet stream wind came out of Sweden which was not forecast. Nobody knew about it. The Metrological Office didn’t know about it because, of course, they got most of their information out of Britain and they weren’t ready and didn’t know about this jet stream and the navigators, they detected it. They were detecting winds of about hundred and hundred and twenty miles an hour. They didn’t believe it. Can’t believe this so they were coming back, they were coming back with about a hundred or so. They broadcast back to Command and the Command’s Metrology Office didn’t believe it either, ‘That can’t be right. Let’s make it ninety something.’ The upshot was the stream went to Berlin. Instead of bombing the city of Berlin they bombed the southern suburbs and on their way back they went over the Ruhr, which they were not supposed to go over, and got a pasting. And my bomb aimer, he was in another aircraft, they lost an engine over the Ruhr, they got coned by the searchlights over the Ruhr and they lost one engine through flak over the Ruhr. So, it was a disastrous night, the night of the strong winds, and Len Froy’s [?] navigator, a Welshman, he told me about this and I thought that’s worth knowing, so — but after that disaster they got the [unclear] they didn’t do it anymore and, of course, H2S came into, into greater use and of course gave us all the facility to find our own winds with a bit more confidence and not depend on the broadcast winds, so the broadcast winds idea was scrubbed. Unfortunately not a good idea, no good at all. [cough]
JM: Yes, so —
JE: So, as I was saying, you were talking about leave from North Killingholme, well apart from, as I say, going down to London. I used to go down to the shows and I met another ATS girl at that time named Pam. I don’t know what — I lost her surname. I took her to three shows while I just met her occasionally and she introduced me to drinking gin which gave me a headache which I didn’t drink it any more [slight laugh]. Terrible stuff. So anyway, er, she was another nice girl but, as I say, I liked going to the shows, going the ballet and all that sort of thing. And, er, also I went to Edinburgh and the Victoria League. I used to stay at the Victoria League and they used to run parties and at one of the parties they had us named, all named after fish, and I was offered hake or something like that, and hake turned out to be Hazel. Hazel was a little, a little Edinburgh girl, and I got friendly with her. Every time I went back to Edinburgh several times I took Hazel to the movies, I took her to dances and all sort of things. She became my girlfriend in Edinburgh every time I went up there on leave and she got my watch repaired at one time. So she was another good friend. So, you know, as I say, the women of Britain stood by us.
JM: Yes, yes, and when you went to, er, Transport Command did the rest of the crew go with you or is that — you were all split up? You were all —
JE: No, we were all individuals. We were all individuals, ex, ex operational, and one of the other fellas John Lewis [unclear] he was another one who nearly died. He joined us at Ramsgate and Bitteswell. He was the only one I knew there but they were all ex operational people. There was an RAF fella who walked out of Germany. He’d been, er, parachuted down and walked back from Germany into Switzerland and eventually got home, got back. He still had worn boots and he’d walked out of Germany and now he’s on Transport Command. So, you know, an interesting group of people.
JM: And did you, was it possible to stay in touch with the rest of the, your other former crew at that point or you didn’t worry about that. You were too busy —
JE: Well, I tried to keep in touch with them. But, I learnt that — and all of us went to Catterick first on re-allocation. Conway and Bickford they were both posted home. They came home earlier than I did. I learnt the others, er, the other four RAF fellas, they were posted to things like Air Traffic Control and so on. I learnt where they went to. And Bryan, Bryan Barby, particularly (his daughter I’ve now been in contact with the last three years) he came back to my civilian life after he was finally discharged but he found that wasn’t very good so he went back to the RAF for the next thirty years. He stayed in the RAF for thirty years, in, er, in Egypt and Germany and then Singapore and such like. So, I know all about — I’ve got the complete history of — I’ve been in contact with her for the last three years now and he’s completed a history for the first thirty-odd years. So, you know, and as far as the others were concerned, finally back here in Australia — well before we get to that — John Conway, John Harris [emphasis] our pilot, er, I finally learnt in a letter from his mother, that, er, after he left us he went on fighter affiliation. He wanted to fly Spitfires so he was flying a Spitfire, on training bomber crews, on fighter affiliation. And he was flying from Hemswell to another place up in Yorkshire somewhere and he didn’t have his navigator [unclear] to help him anymore and so the story goes is that he got lost. He shouldn’t have got lost in South Yorkshire, after all it was a County we all knew well. He tried to do a forced landing in a Spitfire, he was in line with some power lines, turned the Spitfire over and killed himself. That was in January 1946. He was newly married. He’d only been married a few weeks. He married a Liverpool girl and here he was killed. His mother wrote to me later in great distress. That girl took all his entitlements, his pension and everything else and refused to contribute to his grave. I’ve got a photo of his grave in there and I’ve told all the others this what happened. You know, a horrible situation. So, anyway, then the others of course, back home Western Australia, John Conway, er, he became a leading light in the public service. He had been in the public service in Western Australia. He came to Canberra where he got an OBE, OBE and the higher [unclear] for public service in Canberra. And he was instrumental in Charles Simpkins’, sponsoring Charles Simpkins’ migrate, migrating to Perth and Charles Simpkins was set up in Perth. As far as Bryan Waddell, er, Bill Waddell was concerned, the Scotsman, he was another ten pound Brit. He migrated to South Australia. He had been an electrician in the mines in Dunfermline back home. He got onto, er, the work on the rocket range but being a Scotsman and very fair he got skin cancer on the rocket range and finally he got kidney trouble. He had ulcers there for a while and finally he died at a very young age. And Bob Bickford, er, he had a hobby farm. He was in the post office there for a while and he became an army, army reservist. He was a captain in the army reserve but, er, he had a hobby farm just out of Adelaide and we visited him there at one time. Of course I had a company car with Wormald and I used to work late at one time and I visited them all and, er, he had this hobby farm and we all had a great time there and all met in Adelaide. All our wives met together and they got on well together so, you know, we all kept in touch but I didn’t, er, I didn’t, I didn’t meet Charles Simpkins until many years later. I was doing fire protection work for the [unclear] gas wells which is now a controversy off the Western Australian coast and I had to go to Perth in connection with this so I looked up Charles and went to visited him at [unclear] so I met Charles later in the piece so, you know, we kept in touch. So it was good.
JM: And so when, er, you were discharged from — well, the official documentation says you were discharged in December ’45 — but I see it said from 105 but, I mean, December ’45 you were back at, you’d returned, you’d returned to, you were in Bradfield Park, back to Australia and Bradfield Park at that point so —
JE: The situation was I was on indefinite leave so after finishing the Transport Command course and getting the civil navigator’s certification I was loose. So I was, I had indicated I had friends and I had my various girlfriends, yes I had girlfriends, so I wasn’t interested on an early permanent posting back home so I was on indefinite leave. So I was based really at Cranfield which was some sort of, became a training base, a permanent base for test pilots at one time. Anyhow I left my gear there with a WAAF black woman and, er, the only time I had a black woman because, of course, at Bitteswell I got my commission. When I finished my tour at North Killingholme I applied for my commission and Group Captain MacIntyre, an RAF stuffed shirt type (I shouldn’t be saying that I suppose perhaps) he said, ‘You’re supposed to be going home. I don’t see why you should get a commission.’ So he wiped it. So I didn’t get my commission at North Killingholme but when I got to Transport Command six months later I applied again. Transport Command were kinder people, they gave me a commission. I thought I was possibly going to fly to the Far East and being a pukka sahib out there and I got my commission so anyway that was alright, that was nice. So, by that time I had a commission, so when I went, I went on indefinite leave and left my girl at Cranfield (a WAAF black lady to look after my gear) so I went on indefinite leave and went to London and did various things, and one night I was wandering around and I wandered into a pub in Convent Garden, “The Lamb and Flag”, and there were two WAAFs doing the Evening Standard crossword so I offered to help. So, anyway when we finished the crossword and I had to stand at the door of the convenience and — while the girls went to spend a penny and that sort of thing that happened in a small pub. Anyway we left and went outside and Ann was a Scots girls and the other girl was a Welsh girl called Rianne. Anyway, Rianne wandered off, knowing that I was attracted to Ann, the Scots girl, and I said to Ann when we got outside, ‘Have you ever been kissed under a lamp post?’ So, from that became an affair for the next four or five months. So she was — I had asked them while we were in the pub doing the crossword, ‘What do you girls do?’ ‘Oh, we’re in filter.’ I said, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ ‘We can’t tell you. It’s secret.’ They were the girls of filter in a fighter command filter room. They’d signed the Official Secret Act and they weren’t supposed, still in 1945, they weren’t supposed to tell me about what they did. So, of course, they’d signed the Official Secrets Act so it wasn’t until later that I really found out what it was all about. The story of filter was, er, was broadcast, was publicised, and knowing that those girls in filter were known as the ‘beauty chorus’ so I became, one of the beauty chorus became my girlfriend. She, she, er, then got posted from Fighter Command Headquarters to RAF Halton at Wendover, forty miles out of London, which was a pay training station. She was supposed to deliver pay accounts. So, I helped her move her gear and on that posting and so on and so we carried, carried on dating. So then came VE Day, VJ Day came. I was in London and she was out at Halton. She started to come to London and I started to go to Halton. We met near the clock tower in Wendover and flew into each other’s arms like a scene from a Hollywood movie. It was a romantic night. So we went to Halton and danced the night away at Halton. That was VE Day. So we celebrated VE Day. So that was that. That was an interesting time. So she came down, down to Brighton to see me off at the time I was finally posted on the Stir— when I came home on The Stirling Castle, and she came down to Brighton to see me off. I’d given her a ka— kangaroo badge which she wore on her tie but inside her coat, against her heart, were the wings of a New Zealand pilot, who was in Second Tactical Air Force. He was still serving on The Portsmouth [?]. So, after I came home and thinking I was more or less engaged, I told my mother and she wasn’t very happy, wasn’t too happy about the situation anyway. Then I get a ‘Dear John’ letter. Well, Leon [?] had come back from a conference and had come back to New Zealand. She met him, well, before he came home of course, and him feeling lonely he wrote from New Zealand and proposed to her. She went to New Zealand and married him and finally the letter I got from them, they’d left New Zealand. He got, he got a short term commission in the RAF, went back to the RAF, and they had a son by that time. And they went back to Britain via Panama so I never saw her again. So, another facet of life. Another facet of life. The things that happened to us all. So anyway, anyway —
JM: That’s right. So you get back home, come back on The Stirling Castle and you —
JE: Came back on The Stirling Castle —
JM: When you were discharged.
JE: There was a group of Dutch troops who were bound for the East Indies to re-establish the Dutch presence in the East Indies and we got on well with them. But when we arrived in Sydney the wharf labourers in Sydney put on a demonstration against the Dutchmen because, of course, they were seen as continuing colonialism in the Pacific so the wharf labourers gave them a poor reception. Of course we got a good reception but they didn’t. So, anyway that was an unfortunate incident that happened there. Then I got leave, disembarkation leave and I got home and so on. Then called up for discharge four days before I was would become a flying officer [thumping noise] which I’ve been unhappy about ever since. I’d got a commission at Bitteswell. Four days later and I would have been a flying officer. Such is life. Such is life. Ah well, never mind. Never mind.
JM: So then you went back into Wormald?
JE: That was now January 1946. Of course, as part of discharge procedure we were given instructions that our former employer was obliged to take us back. I’d entered the Air Force from Wormald Brothers and so they were obliged to take me back. So, I went back and my boss Frank Brook who had been the man who had been to the RAF in, RAAF in 1943 to try and get me out of the Air Force and take me, he finally took me back and was sympathetic and said to me, ‘If you like go out in the street and have a beer, look at the aeroplanes flying over and get it out of the system.’ So I said, ‘Yeah alright.’ So, I gradually melted into the, into the fire protection industry again. And in — the Queen’s Birthday weekend in 1946 I went on a holiday to, er, up at Katoomba. Stayed in Craglea [?] Guest House. There were three girls there, public service girls, and another ex-army man and I sort of acquired these girls, took them on a tour of the sights of Katoomba and I took a fancy to one of them, Eileen Dickson, and things started to get serious then, so in 1946 to ‘49 we courted, and married in ’49, January ‘49 but in the course of courting she said to me she wanted a husband who stayed at home. Of course, I was still, although I went back to Wormald, I thought that I maybe I’d like to go flying again. I put in for Pacific, into Pac— an application to Pacific Airlines to be a navigator to fly across the Pacific. Of course, another one of the Wormald fellas, he joined up before me, just before me in 1942, ‘43, Ray Clark [?], he was released and went to the Air Force. He became a pilot on, on Sunderlands in 10 Squadron in Britain and came back and became a Qantas captain on 747s and things like that. So, he had quite — he lived down, down here in Marrickville [?] so he and his wife Mary we knew him well in later years and he borrowed my navigation notes bring himself up on navigation when he was with Qantas so, you know, these associations carried on. But the fact that I met Eileen in ’46 and she said she wanted me to stay at home. So I stayed with Wormald and stayed with them for forty-eight years. And that, that, in due course, brought its benefits because, er, we were married in, as I say ’49. 1950 I was looking to buy a plot of land at Marraville where my grandfather lived. I was interested in that district. She was interested in this district. She saw this plot of land advertised in the Wednesday paper and well our elder daughter, Elizabeth, came up and had a look at it and said, ‘Oh yes. Looks good.’ I came up and had a look at it. It was a Wednesday and bought it by Saturday we owned it for three hundred pounds. The plot was seventy feet by a hundred, for three hundred pounds in 1950, and then I started to plan and build this house. So, in the 1950s so it about 1955 before we finally moved in. In the, in the meantime, initially, trying to get accommodation in those times was still difficult after the war. We stayed with her parents’ home at Russell Lea for a while and then a friend offered us a flat South Coogee so we lived in South Coogee for a while overlooking the sea at South Coogee. That’s where Peter arrived. So we had Peter and Elizabeth at South Coogee and taking them down to the rocks and that sort of thing and walking down the botanical garden and that was where that was taken. So that was our life in those years and then we got our first car at that time, a little 1932 Morris Minor Roadster which we drove from South Coogee to here and parked it outside here while we built here and, er, I planned this house and built it and I plied a trade, built it as a builder, and my wife wanted cupboards and we’ve got cupboards galore as you can see. There’s cupboards up the hallway there and I said at one stage I said, ‘Here we’ll have a power point for a TV.’ ‘We’ll never have TV,’ she says. And, of course, at the time we’d been living with her parents. It was the early days of TV and the people opposite had TV and we used to go across there and watch, hypnotised by this new thing and watch it till the kangaroo went to bed as we used to do in those days. So, anyway that was Wormald, staying there for forty-eight years, and the places we went to and the benefits we got, long service there, annual leave and long service leave, we started to travel. Eileen had always wanted to travel. Some of her friends used to travel so she wanted to travel to. So we did our first travel and we still had three children now. In 1967 we went on a [unclear] cruise to Japan on the holidays [?] and that was our first travel and that was good. We went to Japan and stayed in Hong Kong and Guam. We visited, we met the Wormald representative in Hong Kong and he showed us around. That was nice. So, from there on we did a lot of travelling. We travelled to Europe, three times on Euro rail. We went to China. We went to Japan twice. We went to India, to Greece, Israel, Egypt and finally to South America. Finally it was a company posting to [unclear] in San Paulo. We stayed in San Paulo, for the company’s association then in San Paulo. We crossed the pacific through, er, to Tahiti, Easter Island, [clears throat] Santiago, Chile into San Paulo. We were there for six weeks. It was fine living but bored with Portuguese TV. But once you finally got, got brave enough to down town. One of the Brits had warned us about how dangerous San Paulo can be down town but it was — they gave me a VW there to drive. But here I had a Holden [?] as a company car but when I got to San Paulo they gave me a VW. I’d never driven a VW, never driven on the other side of the street so here I am living in San Paulo, traffic on the other side of the street in the VW, which was exciting. So I survived that. Did that, reported to the company what I thought about the company’s association in San Paulo then to Wisconsin. There for eighteen months in the North American winter, wife all wrapped up to the nines in -27 Fahrenheit. That was another climate shock. Anyhow she got on well with the local people, the, er, wife of the one of the other engineers, went to shows there and she joined the local YMCA and went and joined their, er, aqua aerobics in the pool and so on so she, she enjoyed being there, and I generally enjoyed there. But the basic project there was to design and build hydraulics for fuel storage for the American companies, Anson Oil [?] and Baronet [?] in Wisconsin. Their exp— expertise was dry chemical and they had a training ground there for the local representatives and on the training ground the company decided we’ll getting into high pressure and long range water hydraulics, which I was an expert in, to get into the oil rigs and so on around the world. So, over and above my salary and the cost of getting me there I was five hundred dollars US to design and build this facility so I took that in ‘83 ‘84 but there again working the American winter, you know, was different. The fact of building there ,as the winter came on getting, getting straw put over what was to be the foundations to stop the ground being deeply frozen where we were going to build on and that sort of thing. Oh, you were learning new things and you got the ground water into Lake Michigan and sort of thing. There were various, various building operations, building regulations. That was a new sphere and, er, of course, as I say, as you saw out there, come Christmas ’84 we said, ‘We’re not sitting here at Christmas on our own. We’ve got to go somewhere. Let’s go on a Caribbean cruise.’ So we went to the Caribbean and got on another boat. So that was interesting too.
JM: That’s right.
JE: Went on another boat.
JM: Well that, as you say, afforded you lots of new opportunities right through and then I presume once you retired in the eighties, at the end of the eighties, you did some more travelling in your retirement or did you settle about after that?
JE: What did we do in the ’80s? [background noise]
JM: I just roughly, just interested in a couple of things but —
JE: [background noise] It might be here.
JM: You, you — you’ve obviously written down, got a time line of your various activities which is an interesting thing for your family to have further down the track.
JE: Yes, yes. [pause]
JM: So, that’s, um, so as I say I was just interested in a brief comment in terms of —
JE: After that, retirement.
JM: After your retirement.
JE: Retired ’88. I’d been in Brisbane for Exo ’88. I went to Brisbane for that. We went over to Canberra for the, er, dedication of the Bomber Command memorial down there. ’89 we did, went to, er, Europe again. Singapore, Switzerland, West Germany, Italy, Austria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. That was 1990. 1991 we went to New Zealand. ’92, er, we went to Victoria. We went to Victoria, and also went up the Skylon. ’93 [unclear] went to North Western New South wales, up to the corner there, up to Cameron’s Corner. ’94, well, ’94 we went to Singleton [?] was up there and then we went to one of the Eileen’s cousins called Oakland [?] who was marrying a girl in Norway and we were invited to the wedding so we decided to go and, in going to Norway for the wedding, we flew with Lufthansa and as one of the side benefits there we could have a side trip somewhere so we chose to fly to Malta. So we flew to, er, to Frankfurt and then down to Malta, toured Malta and up to, up to Norway, went to the wedding, toured Norway and across into Sweden, from Sweden across to Denmark, to Legoland and down from there, of course, all through and eventually home from there.
JM: So that was a big trip then and so obviously though you in these years you’ve obviously been able to get around so that’s, that’s really good and one other, I was going to say just to say one other thing, just by, I don’t know why because it’s not what we were talking about, but back to your squadron days the bombs you were using were they different to, um, the ones the other units, squadrons we using? No?
JE: No. I think generally we were had cookies and cans. Well, they were four thousand pound cookie and cans were incendiaries.
JM: Yes. So was everyone was using the — they weren’t using incendiaries though were they?
JE: Yes. We were using much the same thing. Yes. We were incendiaries.
JM: I know you [emphasis] were but I’m saying I don’t think, I’m not sure other squadrons were using incendiaries though. That’s what I meant.
JE: Oh, I’m certain others were using them on occasions but they varied at times. The only time we had a real humiliation was a delayed action from one of our armour piercing bombs. One occasion we went to, er, Urft Dam. The Urft was one of the dams in the Ruhr — you know about the three famous dams: the Eder, the Sorpe and the Möhne that were bombed by the famous dam busters and they had great success. At the time the American Army was heading into eastern France and trying to enter Germany, southern Germany and they were held up in that area in the Hürtgenwald Forest and the Urft Dam was threatening to be released and drown them so the Americans asked for that dam to be breached before they got there. So we were part of a small force of about seven or eight aircraft to attack the Urft, Urft Dam. We were, we were loaded with these delayed action armour, armour piercing bombs and we elected ourselves to do it and the code word was “Abandon” and “Home James” and we got, we got “Home James” because when we got there it was covered in cloud, the — what’s the name of it? Charles, the master bomber said, ‘You can’t bomb. Take it home.’ So we had to take our bombs home. We never, didn’t get to be bomb, dam busters, unfortunately, but we couldn’t take those bombs home. Surprise, surprise, surprise they diverted us back to Finningley, where we’d been originally, and Finningley didn’t like that. Here’s an, our Lancaster loaded up with a full load of delayed action armour piercing bombs. ‘Go over to the other side of the airport. Go and practice that over there.’ So we got out of their way over there, we stayed overnight and then we had to take home the next day. But now we had to take off with this full bomb load on the Finningley runway and Harris said to put the throttles through the gate, the emergency alarm on the Merlins that was supposed only to go for a minute, but full, full throttles through the gate to get it off this runway at Finningley to get out bomb load home again. So that was unfortunate but finally 617 Squadron had a go at it, they had a go at the Urft, knocked a few feet of it but it was never breached. So, finally the Americans gave up but at that time, around about that time, the Battle of the Bulge occurred. The Americans came out of the Ardennes heading for Antwerp and the Americans had to pay attention to that and instead of trying to get through the Hürtgenwald forest and gave up on the Urft Dam and went the other way. So the Urft was left alone for a while and eventually bypassed. So that was another adventure. [slight laugh]
JM: Well, you had quite a few and your recollections are incredibly detailed and I think it’s been very, er, amazing to hear, to hear so many instances given such great clarity. So, I think probably at that, at this point we might, um, wrap the interview up and —
JE: Have some morning tea.
JM: We shall have a quick look at some of the documents. So are you, you happy with that are you John?
JE: Reasonable. That’s reasonable enough.
JM: Nothing in particular that strikes you —
JE: There are just a few points I’d like to make about the support we had from the women of Britain and things like that and the people we met and things like that, you know, I’d like to point out, you know.
JM: Yes. No.
JE: But as you know, as you detected, I’d been interested in aeroplanes from way back. I mean, all these aeroplanes are beautiful things and a joy forever. I used to make model aeroplanes out of my mother’s clothes pegs even before I made them in balsa. And now I’ve got over a hundred made in plastic, books over there galore about Bomber Command, books out there about aeronautics generally and other references galore. I’m still interested and, you know, so —
JM: Yes. Oh, your collection of model aeroplanes is stunning and to think you’ve made all of them is just remarkable —
JE: This of course are our travels.
JM: These are all your travels which is a double A3 page, it’s a world map and on the other side.
JE: All my travels from 1941 at Port Moresby to Brisbane. And they’re the references to my other world war books.
JM: Yes, absolutely. Incredible detail. You’re obviously a very organised person and the attention to detail, it’s no wonder you stayed on track —
JE: On track and on time and survived.
JM: On track, on time and survived due to that attention to detail. So, I thank you very much John for that information and, er, so we’ll finish it there.
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AEppelJ170419
Title
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Interview with John Eppel
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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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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
Format
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02:02:26 audio recording
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Pending review
Creator
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Jean Macartney
Date
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2017-04-19
Description
An account of the resource
John Eppel grew up in Australia and joined the Royal Australian Air Force. After training, he completed 30 operations as a navigator with 550 Squadron. He describes initial training in Australia and the journey by sea via the United States, then further training in Britain before his posting as a navigator with 550 Squadron. He says he was fortunate in having a ‘safe tour’ and describes only one incident, at Emmerich, when the aircraft had a close confrontation with the enemy. He describes the crewing-up process at RAF Finningley and also provides details about H2S and GEE. He also describes many of his leisure-time activities, the personalities me met, the friendships he formed with his crew members and others he met during his years in Britain. He also gives an account of how he spent VE Day and VJ Day. After the war he returned to the same company where he’d worked before the war and retired after forty-eight years.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Germany
Germany--Urft Dam
Contributor
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Christine Kavanagh
Temporal Coverage
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1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
18 OTU
550 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
crash
crewing up
forced landing
Gee
H2S
Halifax
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
love and romance
navigator
Operational Training Unit
perimeter track
RAF Finningley
RAF Hemswell
RAF North Killingholme
RAF West Freugh
RAF Worksop
searchlight
Spitfire
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/212/3351/ABlackhamCP161023.1.mp3
41156d573a080b43ea5fb588daf52a1f
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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Blackham, Charles Philip
Charles Philip Blackham
Charles P Blackham
Charles Blackham
C P Blackham
C Blackham
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Charles Philip Blackham (1923 - 2019, 1624693 Royal Air Force). He flew operations with 550 Squadron.
The was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-10-23
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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Blackham, CP
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Julian Maslin, the interviewee is Mister Philip Blackham. The interview is taking place at [deleted] Cheshire, on the 23rd of October 2016. Philip, good afternoon.
PB: Good afternoon.
JM: Could I ask you to tell us a little bit about your family background, where you were born and brought up and where you went to school?
PB: Well, I went to Stockport School, which is a well-known secondary school in Stockport on the main Wellington road going south out of the town and I was there for four years and I rose from being seventeenth in the class to top of the class. Amazing because they decided to honour my parents who’d paid for me to go to the school, I hadn’t won a scholarship so I went on to be top of the class to my absolute amazement, sharing that top position with another young man in the class of twenty or thirty cadets and pupils and I got my school certificate with a distinction in art, believe it or not, and physics.
JM: So you have some science and maths in your background.
PB: Yes, I was a hopeless failure at chemistry. Otherwise I passed in everything.
JM: And what had you thought you would do with your life, had you got a choice of career in mind?
PB: I thought I was gonna be a priest at one stage but it didn’t happen, it didn’t go on in that direction. I became an apprentice in mechanical engineering at a very big and famous diesel engine company called Mirrlees, Bickerton & Day, a very, very wonderful firm which I had greatly admired and it’s just been dismantled in the last twelve months.
JM: And had you started your apprenticeship before the war began?
PB: No, the war was already starting, I think. I hope I’m right about that because I can’t be absolutely certain.
JM: Had you got any experience of flying? Had you ever thought of joining the Royal Air Force when you were at school?
PB: No, no, I hadn’t, no. I just wanted to get into the services cause there was a war on and my father had fought in the Great War and become very lame so I had to stand for [unclear] his good example, he was still alive and hobbling from war wounds in his legs.
JM: So you perhaps didn’t feel to join the Army but perhaps the RAF was a choice.
PB: Well, I had no interest in the Army whatsoever. The Air Force interested me because it was aeroplanes and petrol engines where of tremendous interest to me.
JM: So, your interest in engineering was really a factor of perhaps you becoming a flight engineer
PB: Oh yes, yes. I also became an engineer, I took the engineering qualifications at Barry, South Wales.
JM: Right. When you were in the RAF.
PB: Yeah, qualifying, after qualifying as a pilot, took the engineering degree as well.
JM: Right.
PB: And I still got the certificates.
JM: Let’s go back a bit. What age were you when you joined the RAF?
PB: About seventeen or eighteen.
JM: Seventeen or eighteen. Had you seen anything of the air raids against Manchester or Liverpool?
PB: Yes, yes, we had a bomb in our own garden in Stockport, a district known as Edgeley and this was a plane that was dumping its bombs I think and the neighbour tried to throw a sandbag on a firebomb and while he went to fetch another sandbag because the first one burst, a high explosive bomb dropped, about as near as that wall there.
JM: That must have done a lot of damage.
PB: And I had me motorbike, I was, I must have been seventeen cause the motorcycle at the time had been inverted so I could fit a bicycle dynamo to it, cause it wasn’t an electrical motorbike, it had an acetylene light, 1929 model, I was very fond of it, it was a lovely thing and I got it going extremely well, used to take people out on it, going horse riding in the country in Cheshire. All over the place on a 1929 Raleigh motorbike so I was fond of engines.
JM: Right.
PB: And I had totally rebuild that engine myself. So I was going to be an engineer and I was and in due course became the chief, something, the title for my position in Mirrlees, Bickerton & Day, [pauses] I’ve forgotten the title.
JM: Doesn’t matter.
PB: I had a big title for the whole of Europe at London office, they moved me from Hazel Grove, Stockport to the west side of London.
JM: I imagine you could probably have stayed in that company during the war as a reserved occupation.
PB: Yes, they were trying to reserve me and I wanted to get out to it and get into the services.
JM: Why did you think so strongly to, that you wanted to join up?
PB: I wanted to be in the action because the war was at its worst at the time, at the time of the Blitz and the bombing.
JM: So, we’re in 1940, the summer and the autumn of 1940.
PB: Yes, I can’t see you very clearly by the way, there is a very bright light behind you. I don’t know whether the curtains could be closed, could they, just to reduce the strength of the light, that’s a good idea, thank you.
JM: What did your family say when you told them that you were going to sign up?
PB: Nothing. They just, they accepted it, there was a war.
JM: Did you have brothers perhaps, at all, older brothers?
PB: Yes, my brother came with me into the Air Force, my older brother and he was recruited, conscripted, I volunteered, so I could be with him,that was how it happened.
JM: Right. Do you remember where you went to enrol?
PB: Oh, I’d been in the Home Guard already, by the way, I had no interest in the Army, I had been a Dad’s Army member, a very happy one too and I used to walk home down our road from the Headquarters of the Home Guard to my house carrying a rifle and ammunition. That wouldn’t be allowed now, would it?
JM: No, it wouldn’t.
PB: At my young age and I had the amazing experience of being told, if you don’t stop asking stupid questions you’re gonna be thrown out of this lecture room. That was what the Commanding Officer said to me.
JM: And what were the stupid questions you were asking?
PB: Oh, just quizzing him about things he was lecturing us on, I’m sorry, I can’t tell you exactly.
JM: Well, they weren’t stupid questions if you were, seeking clarification.
PB: They weren’t stupid questions, they were questions about six rounds, rapid fire between yonder bushy top trees,that was the sort of terminology. And I became a Home Guard driver eventually, that’s another thing that levered me towards being a motorist. I knew how to drive but hadn’t driven, so I got myself into headquarters where the, there’s an Armoury in Stockport, a major building for military purposes called the Armoury, and I got myself recruited there as a driver and took a party of Great War veterans with their respirators and tin hats to a village nearby, name was Marple, in snow and ice, and I’d never driven before ever [emphasises] on the roads, but I had a motorbike, so I knew what the rules of the roads were, this 1929 Raleigh which was my pride and joy incidentally and got myself to Marple which is a very, very hilly area and I was stupid enough to get the passengers to get out and push instead of bouncing as I should have done up the steep hill called Brabyns Brow.
JM: Let’s go on with your time with the Royal Air Force. Do you remember where you went to enrol and what happened to you once you joined?
PB: I went to Manchester to enrol, was immediately accepted, I was fit and well and very thrilled about going into the Air Force.
JM: And where did you receive your initial training?
PB: Cambridge University.
JM: Was it?
PB: Would you believe that? Wasn’t I lucky? In St John’s College, Cambridge, which is a very famous college
JM: It is.
PB: And had a very famous choir.
JM: It has.
PB: And I was there in the ancient buildings on the river Cam.
JM: And were you receiving basic military training there or was this aircrew?
PB: Yes, Air Force engineering and stars and sky and [glider]
JM: How long were you there for, do you remember?
PB: Twelve months.
JM: Twelve months.
PB: And I was living in the college building and even got, for some silly reason a friend & I decided we would sleep out in the quadrangle one night and we were, some students were also in the college, they carted us off into a far corner of the quadrangle where we couldn’t easily get back into our quarters and the rain came and the [unclear – could be “sirens”] went all at the same time.
JM: I imagine there were plenty of examinations, weren’t there, as you were being trained?
PB: Oh yes, they were.
JM: And how did you do with those examinations?
PB: Probably still got the books if the truth be known.
JM: Really? Yes?
PB: I’ve certainly got my brother’s books.
JM: Did you pass the examinations well?
PB: Oh yes, I had to do that.
JM: And what happened to you when that course of training was complete? Where did you go next?
PB: Uh, got to think about that. I can’t remember.
JM: Do you remember if you went for flying training?
PB: Not till I got to Cambridge.
JM: Right.
PB: That was my first flying where I went to Marshalls Airport, Cambridge.
JM: Yes, it’s still there.
PB: And eventually, much later still, I became the Manager of the Marshalls Airport.
JM: Right. How did you get on?
PB: [unclear]
JM: Do you remember what you flew first of all?
PB: Tiger Moths.
JM: Tiger Moths. How did you get on flying with Tiger Moths?
PB: I loved them, beautiful little plane. And I was not taught to look out behind me and look for trouble and I was criticised for that but that was the teacher’s fault, he hadn’t taught me to look round.
JM: Do you remember?
PB: There is a chimney there called Joe’s something or other, it a brickwork
JM: Yes.
PB: On the other edge of Cambridge Airport, do you know it?
JM: I don’t know.
PB: Cambridge Airport, Smokey Joe it was called
JM: Right.
PB: And we used that to tell the direction of the wind.
JM: And do you remember how many hours before you went solo?
PB: I didn’t actually succeed in going solo until I got to Canada.
JM: Right.
PB: In a plane very similar to a Chipmunk, it was a Canadian built two seater, [pauses] just like a Chipmunk to look at
JM: Yes.
PB: You wouldn’t even tell the difference but it was in fact a six cylinder engine, whereas the Tiger Moth and the Chipmunk had just four cylinder engines.
JM: So you were sent from Cambridge by sea to Canada to complete your training.
PB: That’s right.
JM: And that was in 1941, was it?
PB: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. And what was it like? What were your impressions of Canada, a young man arriving in Canada?
PB: Terribly impressed, was a big thing cause I’d crossed the Atlantic by sea in the submarine chase.
JM: Do you remember the ship that you travelled on?
PB: Yes, the Aquitania.
JM: Right.
PB: Let me think about this, yes. That’s it.
JM: Yes.
PB: I was hoping for the Queen Mary.
JM: [laughs]
PB: Cause it was in use in those days but I didn’t have the luck to go in the Queen Mary, I went in the Aquitania.
JM: Well that was a big ship, was it?
PB: Was a huge liner, built in 1914.
JM: And do you remember whereabouts in Canada you went to?
PB: Yes. First of all, De Winton near, what’s the big city in the far west?
JM: Vancouver?
PB: No, not as far as that.
JM: Calgary?
PB: Calgary.
JM: Right.
PB: De Winton is the airport for Calgary.
JM: So you went to Calgary.
PB: It’s straining my memory trying to remember these answers for you.
JM: Well, you’re doing very well but I mean, I think people will be interested in what it was like to be living in Canada and flying there
PB: Oh.
JM: So, anything you can remember,
PB: I can remember all that.
JM: Please tell us a bit.
PB: We had a first posting was the eastern part of Canada, a place I can’t remember the name of, where my cousin has just gone to live now to look for work in the building industry. I have not told you about that, have I? He’s gone to live there, looking for work as a builder.
JM: But what was it like for you in 1941 being in Canada? What was the food like?
PB: Oh, everything was perfect. It was very cold, I remember that, we had to be careful not to get frozen. And when we eventually got out to the prairies. And then we went from eastern Canada and I’m sorry I can’t name the exact spot, we were there for say a week or ten days and we went by rail right across Canada. And if you want a silly joke, the attendant in the steam train said that “you want to hurry up, if you hurry enough you’ll see Lake Winnipeg”. And we did, we hurried down for breakfast to make sure to being ready to see Lake Winnipeg and we were passing it for a day and a half.
JM: [laughs]
PB: That is a fact.
JM: So, that’s a big lake.
PB: A day and a half by a slow steam train, which was very dirty and dusty. And they had to come round with a brush all day long sweeping up the soot. And we eventually got via intermediate cities across Canada to Vancouver, no, sorry, not Vancouver, Calgary. And there I was for six months learning to fly a little plane, very similar to a Chipmunk.
JM: Yes. So, you were flying single engine aircraft at that stage.
PB: Yes.
JM: And did you want to continue as a fighter pilot on single engine aircraft or?
PB: Yes.
JM: You did.
PB: I did.
JM: And how come you were selected then to fly bombers?
PB: Well, I think they were short of bomber pilots and they had to convert me to a four engine pilot.
JM: Do you remember what, what large airplanes you flew first of all? Once you’d qualified.
PB: Just those. We flew Chipmunks of course, for 190 hours on Chipmunks learning to fly to get our wings.
JM: Yes. You must have been very proud when you got your wings.
PB: Oh, I was. Still got one.
JM: [laughs] Good for you.
PB: I’ve never worn them for [unclear] have I?
JM: No.
PB: I got a pair of Air Force wings which is my pride and joy. Best thing I’ve ever done in my life. And we were graduated in the middle of the Canadian desert, as it were, it was a wild and windy place with cold weather.
JM: I was wondering.
PB: It was the 21st of April, I can remember that too. I always remember the graduation date.
JM: I was wondering if you ever flew the Oxford out there.
PB: Only as a navigation exercise.
JM: Right.
PB: Just once or twice.
JM: Yes.
PB: Navigation with about three of us on board, taking turns to navigate it.
JM: Yeah.
PB: Yes.
JM: And how did you find navigation? Was that a skill you could master?
PB: Oh yeah. I was qualified as a navigator.
JM: Right.
PB: I got a certificate to say so.
JM: Did you do observation of the stars as part of your navigation?
PB: Yes, all that lot. And I frightened one of my instructors by doing a violent evasive action when what I was avoiding was Saturn.
JM: [laughs]
PB: This is a fact, it frightened me to death. I still dived out of the route I was supposed to be taking, when doing some low flying over the Bow River in Calgary area.
JM: Did you meet the Canadian people very much? Did you go to their homes?
PB: Yes, one or two were very good to us and kind and we got friends with the family, doctors and such like. And we even were allowed to drive their cars and we got petrol for them. They had English cars with American tyres on them that were below standard, they were some wartime grade of tyres they were allowed to use in wartime. And we had a “meatless Tuesday”, I’ve never forgotten, “meatless Tuesday”, as a feature of Canadian life.
JM: A number of airmen who trained there and came back to Britain remarked as how they’d grown when they were living in America and Canada and eating all the steaks and the fine food that wasn’t available in Britain. Do you have that sort of?
PB: No, I don’t recall that at all. Just had good food I know
JM: And exercise.
PB: Very satisfactory.
JM: Yeah. Where did you go when you were off duty?
PB: To the local cinema [laughs]. That’s all.
JM: Did you have dances or it was just the cinema?
PB: Oh yes, we had dances and invited the local villagers from another, yeah, the next aerodrome I went to after De Winton was another one which I have forgotten the name of, if you could switch off for a minute I could.
JM: Now, Phillip, I gather you have a story about a motorbike tyre.
PB: Well, I was running an Ariel Square Four motorbike by then and I’d graduated from the 1929 Raleigh 250 to a 1939 Ariel Square Four and it needed a tyre and I bought a tyre in Stockport, my local town. But it proved to have a fault, it was a crack in the side of the tyre or something undesirable, so I took it out to Italy because I knew they put up with any tyres they were short of anything at all that goes on their cars and motorbikes. They didn’t realise it was a tyre of an undesirable size, unsuitable for a Fiat or any other sort of small car. But they gladly gave me quite a lot of money for it and put it under the seat of the Lancaster [laughs], carried it to Italy and disposed of it there for a good price.
JM: [laughs]
PB: Was quite amazed. And what’s the other story?
JM: The other story is about the picture at the reunion at North Killingholme for Operation Manna and.
PB: Well, I can’t remember a reunion, there’s something that-
US: Each year the reunion that the Dutch come to [unclear]
PB: They come and join in our parties and the prayers at the memorial, there is a beautiful memorial being built at North Killingholme [sighs] probably before the end of this talk we shall remember where I was trained for the Lancaster, I’m sorry I can’t think of it.
JM: It’ll come to you. I’m interested to hear about the reunion and the story of the painting of the Lancaster. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
PB: I’ve got a print of it, that’s all, just a print of the Lancaster with a title on it, forgotten what the title is, it’s gone, I’m sorry.
JM: Now, Phillip, we are looking at a lovely copy of a painting of Lancasters flying over Holland dropping food. Can you tell us a little bit more about the story of this painting?
PB: Not of this painting, I’m sorry. Because I don’t remember ever seeing a windmill in Holland.
JM: That might be a bit of artist license, mind you.
PB: I think they substituted that. But it’s a lovely painting, isn’t it? These are the bankings around the water, I think. Here, drainage areas, but I can’t add anything to that except there are three, five Lancasters, I don’t remember seeing it, can I look at the other side of it for a minute? I don’t know why I wasn’t aware of this. There’s the Phantom of the Ruhr.
JM: Yes, there is another painting here showing the Phantom, the Lancaster PA474.
PB: I got a print of this.
JM: Yes. Wearing the colours of the Phantom of the Ruhr 550 Squadron aircraft.
PB: I’ve got a print of that one but that one is new to me.
JM: Philip, at the top of this print of the Lancaster there are a number of signatures. Do you see these here?
PB: Can I look? Cause I may have signed this, Jack Harris, who is a well-known organiser of the meetings.
US: He’s the other pilot.
PB: Can you see any other names? Can I bring it nearer to you? There I am. [unclear]
JM: [unclear].
PB: It’s very indistinct. Yes, I’m there. How did you get this? Cause I haven’t got one with my signature on it. Do you notice we have aerials spreading from the cockpit to the tops of the rudders?
JM: Yes.
PB: Spitfires had a rather similar arrangement with aerials trailing to the top of the rudder.
US: I think a couple of these chaps are now dead.
PB: I wouldn’t be surprised, Jack Harris was the organiser of our meetings at North Killingholme.
JM: Who is that, Philip, can you read that one?
PB: Let me try and see that. It’s not clear in my sight at all.
JM: Ok.
PB: He’s the navigator.
JM: It doesn’t matter-
PB: Chaz somebody. I might be able to recognise his name if time comes. By the way, I continued flying right up to the Squadron being closed down in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force.
JM: I was going to ask you about that.
PB: I will come to that later if you like.
JM: Well, please tell us now while it’s in your mind.
PB: Alright, well, I went and joined the Royal Auxiliary Air Force while I was earning my living in Manchester and working as an engineer and representative and I [pauses] what did I do?
JM: What was it like in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force?
PB: Wonderful, a real life and the CO used to organise motor rallies.
JM: Did you fly with the Royal Auxiliary Air Force?
PB: Oh yes.
JM: What did you fly?
PB: Meteor jets.
JM: Did you?
PB: Phew
JM: So you were a jet pilot as well as a Lancaster pilot.
PB: Yes, that was the big thing in my life. Every weekend I was zooming about in Meteor jets twin engine, at all levels and in all kinds of formation aerobatic and I survived it, two, three of my friends were killed.
JM: Very sad.
PB: Three of them,
JM: Yes.
PB: For various reasons. One who I’d just taken home on leave and he was killed the next weekend.
JM: And I believe you also had time with the Air Training Corps, I believe you were an officer with the Air Training Corps, will you tell us about that?
PB: Yes, I’ve been a civilian and
JM: Civilian.
PB: Everything in the committee that you can be,
JM: Yeah.
PB: All the small positions right, leading right up to the top position as the manager, civilian manager of the Air Training Corps.
JM: So I expect you flew with them.
PB: Two or three different squadrons in Manchester and Stockport area, so.
JM: I expect you must have flown an aircraft in the ATC.
PB: Yes, to this day I am still the Superintendent of an Air Training Corps squadron.
JM: Right.
PB: Still active although I’m immobilised as you will have noticed, I still do that work.
JM: When you look back now from where you are in your life now to your wartime experiences, what feelings do you have? What did it do for you?
PB: Well, it’s a long distant past now, it’s just the past and it’s gone by, that’s how I feel about it. The happiest days were at Cambridge, there’s no doubt about that, but I also continued in Cambridge as Manager of Marshalls Airport, on another job for the Air Force.
JM: Yes, yes. So when you left the Air Force, what year was it you left, do you remember?
PB: No, I couldn’t recall
JM: No, no. But you
PB: I’m sorry.
JM: Your life after leaving the airport was very much involved with engineering?
PB: I was a chief sales manager of the Marine Division of Mirrlees, Bickerton & Day and National Gas & Oil Engine Company which were associated with each other, they were related, two factories eight miles apart.
JM: And you were telling me that you had a job as a journalist working on a magazine to do with steam trains.
PB: Yeah. That’s right.
JM: Tell us about that, would you?
PB: Well, I, the publisher was, the name of the publisher, has just escaped me, who was right near the, [pauses] there was a famous cathedral.
JM: Here in Manchester or? No, in London?
PB: No, in London. Can you name a cathedral?
JM: St [unclear]
PB: A famous cathedral?
JM: Saint Paul’s Cathedral?
PB: No, no, further south than that.
JM: Uhm, Southwark Cathedral?
PB: No.
JM: Westminster?
PB: Westminster Cathedral.
JM: Right.
PB: We were just outside the doors of that.
JM: Were you? Yeah. And you were producing.
PB: I was writing and checking and working with them and I learnt the art of editing a railway gazette and writing nearly the whole of the articles sometimes, the whole of the magazine was my responsibility. I even went to the publishers, which was Odhams Press, to put it to bed as they call it.
JM: So, your whole life really had a theme of engineering in it from when you left school, through the flying and in your life after that, your working life after that was, engineering was a common thread, wasn’t it?
PB: Yes, absolutely. And I, huge engines in, were as tall as this room, massive marine engines
JM: yeah.
PB: And I’m very proud of one or two jobs I had to do. One was this City of Victoria, a huge passenger liner with four engines sailing from Vancouver to Victoria Island across the water
JM: Yes.
PB: Do you know that area at all?
JM: I’ve been there once, yeah. But I wanted to ask you about your, you told me that you had kept in touch with your crew members.
PB: Yeah.
JM: I gather you were quite involved with the veterans, the members of 550 Squadron.
PB: Oh yes, yes. Still go.
JM: Are there many left now?
PB: There’s dozens, but only a few go.
JM: Right.
PB: Cause a lot of ground staff go.
JM: Did you have much to do with the ground engineers when you were on the squadron?
PB: No, nothing.
JM: You just kept yourselves as a crew flying.
PB: We were flyers.
JM: Yeah.
PB: And we had, one of the nicest thing was one Sunday, I was minding my own business with my Ariel Square Four tucked away in safekeeping while I was overhauling the cylinder head, I was always working on these motorbikes, as well as using them to come to Stockport at the weekends and the Flight Commander arrived in my hut right across the fields from church parade where he had been. You know the church we go to? Well, I found myself sitting close to the Wing Commanders and people in charge of the squadron and one of them suddenly turned up at my, in my Nissen hut, and asked to see my Ariel Square Four, well, I think, get out of bed and take him out to the Gents toilet where I kept it [laughs] across a muddy field and he was in his best outfit, cause the church parade was medals, in all his fancy regalia in uniform and his flat hat on, a top man in the squadron, not the Commanding Officer but one of the very, very senior flight commanders. I used to fly in the RAFVR. RAFVR
JM: Yes.
PB: After the war, after my full-time service. Oh, I stayed on with the Air Force because I loved it and it meant everything to me. So what, did I say I’d done?
JM: In the African desert.
PB: I had a job of repairing the engine of a York, which is identical to the engine of a Lancaster by the way, but the wings are higher up the body, they’re down here in a Lancaster and they’re up there on a York and I had to be on the scaffolding doing the repairs myself cause I was qualified to do that sort of thing and repair the fuel feed pump, something that had to be changed and everyone else was having the afternoon in bed on a very, very hot sunny afternoon and I was working on the scaffolding on the aircraft, which was a terrific, terrific privilege to me to be allowed to tinker with the engine on a York aircraft. I’d never tinkered with one before by the way.
JM: And you were successful.
PB: Oh yes, it flew away to Singapore. And I should have been going with it but this delayed my departure so that I wouldn’t have been back in England in time to report back to work. So therefore I had to get off this York and then get me baggage and rubbish and go back with another plane back to England and guess what I came back in? A Sunderland flying boat.
JM: Tell us about that.
PB: That was a wonderful experience to me. This beautiful Sunderland flying boat was gently resting on the waves at Valletta harbour and they took me on board to give me a lift home and said, would I like to fly it? And apart from the act of take-off and the landing, I did all the flying all the way back to England.
JM: Was it an easy aeroplane to fly?
PB: Beautiful, amazing experience and something I’ve always remembered. And the crew went to bed in the back of the plane. Honestly.
JM: Oh yes, a big aeroplane.
PB: With little round windows all way along the side. And I’ve since met an Air Training Corps officer, very senior one called Cross, who was in charge of the whole of the Air Training Corps, and he said, his father was an Imperial Airways pilot that what set him up as a pilot in the first place. So he knew what I was talking about with regards to flying a Sunderland, huge plane but beautiful.
JM: And this would have been presumably in the late 1940s?
PB: They did the take off and the landing by the way, I didn’t do that but we found out where we were, we got lost over France cause we weren’t expecting to be very precise with our navigation over France. I’d done numerous jet’s trooping between England and Italy, England, Italy, England, Italy, Italy, England, from Milano to this aerodrome that I couldn’t name in Southampton area, I’m sorry I can’t remember the name of it, it’s a very well known, it’s where they fly American transport planes to this day.
JM: Well, we’ll come back to that. Are there any other stories that are in your mind from your RAF time either during the war or after that you’d like to tell us?
PB: Certain funny ones. One in particular was when I was driving back from Grimsby on a motorbike and only a 350 and we found an Australian crew of a Morris Minor, now I don’t mean the modern Morris Minor, I mean the wartime Morris Minor which is a very square [unclear] sort of, very sluggish sort of aeroplane, eh, car I mean sorry, and they’d broken down by the roadside so I offered to tow them back to the aerodrome, they were members of my crew. And we got going you know, slowly gathering speed up a very gradual incline up to the aerodrome about five miles and they had about five people in this tiny little car and they had to get out on the running boards to accommodate them all, including my crew member as well, my navigator in this case or my, uhm, not the bomb aimer, yes, it was the bomb aimer, a man whose name I could tell you later on, he may still be alive too. Uhm, he was an expert on Robbie Burns, and that was, he was, he loved reciting to me, taught me all about Robbie Burns, he was my bomb aimer and we carried on until I felt the back of the motor bike was squirming like this, and I looked round and it was going from curb to curb [laughs] we got up such speed and although it was only a 350 motorbike with all these Australian crew plus my bomb aimer hanging on the running boards not in it but on it, we got out of control so I had to slow down and I got them back to the aerodrome.
JM: It’s a story of young men enjoying themselves for the moment.
PB: Well, they’ve been out enjoying themselves in Grimsby and, or some pub on the way to Grimsby. I had the great joy of escorting them back on the end of a rope from a motorbike. It must have been their rope by the way.
JM: You wouldn’t have one of those on your bike, would you?
PB: I wouldn’t have had a rope on it, no. But this was only a little 350 Triumph. A powerful one by the way. Before I graduated onto an Ariel Square Four.
JM: Are there any other stories that you’d like to tell us? About your wartime service, your flying time?
PB: Well, only that we were chased by Spitfires for practice for them, that was quite an interesting experience.
JM: Tell us about that, please.
PB: Well, I just took photographs of the Spitfires that were honing in on us, homing in on us, to take photos I suppose.
JM: I think that was called fighter affiliation.
PB: That’s right, that’s exactly what it was called.
JM: And that was giving them a chance to practice intercepting and you a chance to practice evading.
PB: That’s right. And they were probably from an aerodrome which I subsequently flew at myself on Spitfires and the name’s escaped me just at the moment, uhm, [pauses] sorry, the name’s gone, it’ll come back, cause I used to be there for months after my demob, well, towards my demob and they were a nice crowd till the Flight Commander was killed while I was there.
JM: In a flying accident?
PB: Yes, he made a mistake doing a roll over the runway and just dived straight into the ground and he had just given me leave, was very sad about that. The name of the aerodrome I shall easily find in my memory because of having difficulty with remembering it in the past. I’m sorry it’s gone. You want to switch off while I’m thinking that name? I will do in a minute. I want to tell to them ‘cos it’s so funny.
JM: Tell us the story then.
PB: Well, I’ll tell you about Lyneham being a landing point back in the United Kingdom near Southampton and they now have American transport planes landing there.
JM: And this was when you were bringing the prisoners of war home.
PB: Troops, not prisoners.
JM: Well, ex-prisoners of war.
PB: Yes. Or servicemen who couldn’t wait for a boat.
JM: Ok. Oh, I see, so they were any servicemen.
PB: Not just prisoners.
JM: Right.
PB: A story about life on North Killingholme aerodrome, was near Grimsby, we had a Warrant Officer called Warrant Officer Yardley and he stopped my navigator and said to him, Warrant Officer, well, forgotten his surname at the minute, “what are you doing out on your motorbike without your hat on”? Which is how he expressed himself, he was a very brusque Warrant Officer in charge of the discipline on the Air Force bomber station, “what are you doing without, your, riding your motorbike without your hat on”? And “Warrant Officer” the man at fault said, “but Sir”, very polite to this Warrant Officer cause he was very firm, “you can’t ride a motorbike in a strong wind”. Forget exactly how he expressed it, “you can’t” and the Warrant Officer looked round at the sky and said, “but there ain’t no wind today” [laughs]. It was a calm day that particular day.
JM: Was a calm day.
PB: But he still had to wear his hat and of course he’d generated a certain amount of that wind himself.
JM: yeah.
PB: I had a nasty smash on that same motorbike and finished up in hospital for a week.
JM: Oh dear.
PB: When I should have been doing some bombing runs.
JM: Philip, you’ve told us many lovely stories, you’ve really described the life of a young man here in England and in Canada and on operations at the end of the war. Thank you very much for your interview. It’s very important, thank you.
PB: It’s been a pleasure- And I’ll tell you the name of.
JM: Just as an afterthought, you’ve told us that you were commissioned as a Flight Lieutenant and I’m going to conclude this interview by thanking Flight Lieutenant Blackham for his interview. Thank you very much.
PB: Thank you.
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ABlackhamCP161023
Title
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Interview with Charles Philip Blackham
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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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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:46:52 audio recording
Creator
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Julian Maslin
Date
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2016-10-23
Description
An account of the resource
Philip Blackham became an apprentice engineer at Diesel engine company Mirrlees, Bickerton & Day, of which he became a sales manager post war. He served in the Home Guard becoming a driver, then he enrolled in summer 1940 with initial training at Cambridge University, St John’s College, for engineering. After that he went to Marshalls Airport, Cambridge for flying training. Eventually he became a flight engineer at Barry, South Wales.
In 1941 Charles was posted to Canada to complete training at RAF De Winton, learning to fly a Chipmunk and then converted to four engine aircraft: 'I got a pair of Air Force wings which is my pride and joy. Best thing I’ve ever done in my life'. Canada was described as being nice, vast, and cold, inhabited by friendly people, with plenty of fine food that wasn’t available in Britain. Very few details are given about wartime service. After the end of war, he went on to serve in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force as an engineer and representative of Meteor jets, which he also flown. Charles also became an Air Training Corps superintendent. Describes his involvement in one of the 550 Squadron reunions at RAF North Killingholme where they discussed Operation Manna. Talks about PA474 Phantom, a 550 Squadron aircraft.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Cambridge
Canada
Alberta--Calgary
Alberta--De Winton
Alberta
Temporal Coverage
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1941
Contributor
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Jean Massie
550 Squadron
aircrew
civil defence
flight engineer
Home Guard
Lancaster
memorial
Meteor
military ethos
military living conditions
navigator
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
pilot
RAF North Killingholme
recruitment
Sunderland
Tiger Moth
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/6/12/PFarmerV1504.2.jpg
625375e7381c1ad8b2336cded3001eca
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/6/12/AFarmerV150730.2.mp3
f22333b64a7968ac6e2a03f690f60d8a
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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Farmer, Vic
Victor Farmer
V R Farmer
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.
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Vic Farmer (-2022), a navigator with 550 Squadron. The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-07-30
Identifier
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Farmer, V
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
VF: I’m now coming up to age ninety two. I am the last member of my crew, of the Bomber Command in Bomber Command Number 1 Group flying with 550 squadron flying out of North Killingholme.
MJ: And your name is?
VF: And of course my name is Vic Farmer and I flew, I joined the RAF as soon as I reasonably could. I wanted to join when I was seventeen but my parents would not give their consent. However, when I was eighteen, shortly after, I volunteered for aircrew. I wanted to be a pilot but I’m afraid when the, in the training that followed the ground course I just couldn’t fly a plane so not to waste, waste my abilities they put me to be a navigator. That meant going abroad for training and I trained in South Africa. At East London and Queenstown in South Africa. Came back to this country and did further training as a navigator in the, in our climate here in this country and eventually went on to be crewed up.
I remember shall we say being approached by an Australian pilot. A young Australian pilot. He was putting together a crew but to his own specific formula. He wanted two Australians, two Canadians and two Brits. So the two Canadians were gunners, a bomb aimer and the pilot they were Australians, the wireless operator and myself - we were the Brits. These are part of his formula – no officers. So we began our training together first on twin engine Wellingtons then on Halifaxes and on Lancasters.
But on the way we had problems. My pilot, because of the policy of the Australian government was commissioned and then of course he had what we call women, a woman problem and a pilot with a woman problem was dead. Was, shall we say, not a very good thing. So on our training he actually crash landed us in a Halifax. We were lucky the engines practically fell off red hot but fortunately we didn’t go up in flames. If we had I would probably not be here. So that was, we then refused to fly with him - the crew. And I had to speak up for the crew and eventually they, our plea was accepted and we waited to be taken over by another pilot.
Along came a Flying Officer Thomas. He was over thirty. He had a paunch and he had a sort of an eye twitch and I thought my goodness talk about, shall we say, out of the frying pan in to the fire. But however he proved to be an excellent Bomber Command pilot. He had been a flying instructor and he was the only commissioned person in the crew so he had us all organised together and to work as a crew and we went on to fly with him and we went to 550 squadron which had only been formed, in 19, late 1943 and we actually flew on D-Day itself. Well not quite on D-Day itself. It was twenty five minutes past midnight on the 7th of June.
And we were working extremely hard because we were flying day and, and night during our tour and we did a whole range of targets but many of them were to, how shall I put it, made travelling conditions for German support to the D-Day, for our front shall we say very difficult so they could not bring up their reinforcements. Our first attack was on, so they could not attack us, on [inaudible], shall we say - a railway marshalling yard, marshalling yard just outside Paris.
So we flew as I say at night at first and then by day and night so my actual flying operationally was only for just over three months from the 6th of June until about the, shall we say mid-September.
We always flew together. I flew thirty times with my pilot whose name, we always called the Skip. We never called him any other name. In fact I didn’t know his first name until just a couple of years ago. So he was always known as Skip and shall we say he, I am sure, saved us. I’m sure I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for his skill and to a certain extent our good fortune.
He, we were being stalked by a German night fighter and the manoeuvre at that time was for the gunners to call out ‘corkscrew’ port or maybe starboard depending on which way we were being stalked by a German night fighter. And we went down to port but of course the night, the German night fighter at that time knew of our manoeuvre and just hung there and waited until we went down and then turned and came up again and there we were, there they were waiting for us. But our pilot didn’t do that. Instead he went down to port and we kept going and we, if you like flew a circle which the plane at which was angled to the, to the ground below and about two minutes later he’d turned and gone down and came up again and two minutes or so later we were back where we started but the night fighter had been put off. We never saw him again. And we got back home.
I think on the next occasion which really sticks in my mind that we did a daylight raid lasting nearly eight hours down to Bordeaux to bomb oil installations to keep the German forces short of oil. But the, when we were first in and were flying at a height of eight or nine thousand feet and we were opposed by predicted flak. In other words the people had to work out where we were going to be and at what height and set their guns and such but our Skipper just took us on the same direction, the same speed and we dropped our bombs but what he had done he had slowly increased our height so from the prediction being made, the guns firing and the time taken for the shells to explode we were about, about a hundred feet higher. We got a lot of damage on the under surface of our plane but nothing serious. That took courage to do that. Most people would have tried to dive out of it and would, in so doing would probably dive into the flak and so and possibly be shot down.
But those are the two occasions. Another occasion we had lost a wing commander and a new man had come in and I think he wasn’t very well liked. He had the idea he gave that he came from a second class public school and shall we say rather talked down to people but he chose to fly with our crew to go Douai to bomb, once again, railway marshalling yards but at this time we had six Lancasters in formation and the wing commander flying in the lead of the first of three and shall we say there was I, a flight sergeant, with him sort of nagging at me cause he didn’t think I was doing a good job but we did get to Beachy Head on time, set off for France, arrived over the French coast in the right place, on time and when we came to do a turn it had to be a large turn because we were flying ahead of the, of the Bomber stream where they were expecting to follow us to well and make a well and truly coordinated attack but halfway through the turn the bomber, bomb aimer said, “I can see the target. “ But I said to the wing commander we haven’t completed our turn. He says, “Take over bomb aimer”. So the bomb aimer took over and guided us to another French town about thirty or forty miles away but the whole bomber stream took no notice of following us and went on to bomb the right target.
Once he’d found he’d bombed the wrong target the wing commander took this formation of six Lancasters to fly around North France, Northern France with a very, very high density of anti-aircraft guns and to look at the target we should have hit and to circle around and see what we should have done and took us then back home. And meanwhile I had logged everything. I had my chart but the, so I was quite happy that I had in a sense I’d done my job but had been ignored by the person making the decisions. So when we got landed, got home I went in to do for briefing I’d got my log and my chart which were taken from me but before we went in his hand went to my collar pulled me back and said this is what to say and to this day the squadron records record that the Pathfinders were late putting down their, their flares and that the visibility was not very, very good but it was good enough for the bomb aimer to see the wrong target so I don’t see how that really fits. However that’s, that’s what happened. So what does a flight sergeant say to a wing commander anyway when he knows he’s making a mess up. So I had to suffer that.
However, we went on and our pilot got us through our tour and immediately after the tour I was commissioned and I went from on from there and of course our crew broke up and went different ways. We had a strong link with each other. A very, very strong link because we were going to either, shall we say, die or live depending on our own particular skills in, in in the crew.
But the crew broke up and I was commissioned and went on to become a staff navigator. Being a staff navigator was one cent higher than being a normal ordinary navigator course. I went and took that course at Shawbury when they were, shall we say, were pioneering polar flying at the time. And after that I became a flying instructor and I had one rather particular task was, just after the war had finished prisoners of war were coming back. Many of them were part of the permanent RAF and they had to be brought up to date with navigation which had taken great strides during the war using radar equipment in particular. Generally speaking the people were very good because they were often a higher rank than me but there was one person, he was a squadron leader and he came in to my class and while I was lecturing he put his legs up and read a novel. I thought if this is what permanent people in the RAF are like I don’t want to know them so when the time came for me to leave the RAF I was offered to stay in a bit longer and consider a permanent commission. Remembering that person indeed certainly clouded my decision not to stay in the RAF.
So I came out to be a civilian with no job, no career of any note to, to, to go back into civilian life. So having been an instructor I thought it wasn’t much of a step to go along and become a school teacher. Instead of instructing shall we say adults I would probably teach young people to help form their lives for the future and so I did and after a very miserable start I became quite competent and eventually ended up as the last eighteen years of my teaching life as a head, Headmaster of a primary school. Now much of my success in that I always feel was my life in the RAF and my special time on operational flying because they had taught me as a young man not to be a middle class prig but to accept people as they are and that helped me in my career because I had an awful lot of contacts with teachers and parents as adults as well as with children. So I always look back upon my air force career and my time in Bomber Command as being, if you like the things that formed me as a person. I grew up very quickly joining the RAF at the age of eighteen.
And that’s virtually what I did. So I’ve been retired from teaching now for over thirty years. I still go back to my [?] school and the youngsters there questioned me about my life, shall we say as a child, in my wartime including my time in the RAF, my time teaching and retirement. And of course so many changes have taken place that this has become a part of their, if you like, history course to be able to talk to somebody. But I don’t just go along and talk to them and tell them. They ask me questions so I have to be prepared just to answer any questions they put to me.
Well here I am now living on my own. My wife died nearly eighteen years ago so I look back on my life in the RAF and Bomber Command with rather great satisfaction if you like. It has really made me as a person.
I do feel about Bomber Command which I am proud to have served my country flying in Bomber Command but I do feel it has had a sad history just after the war. It was influential in a very, very strong way of winning the war and it also it helped us not to lose the war ‘cause I don’t think, I think the bomb - shall we say the dam busters did a wonderful job but I think the most influential raid made by Bomber Command was to Peenemunde when they bombed the research for the German V weapons. V1 the buzz bombs to the V2, the rockets and equally they were shall we say pioneering a very long range gun but when the, shall we say this was the, the place, Peenemunde where the Germans were doing all their research and putting into practice what they thought would win the war. That did actually affect, but I think it so messed up the German, the German shall we say research that there was a delay in the V1s and the V2 weapons being used against this country and nor were they put in numbers that the Germans had anticipated they would use and as the flying bombs came, began to, to fly their unmanned bomb, flying bomb, I think about ten days after, about ten days if memory serves me after the, the invasion of Europe. The, if the German programme had gone as expected they would started four or five months earlier and then they could have put us out of the war before we, before we invaded in Normandy. That could have, that could really have happened. And once the bomb, once the V weapons were being used I can recall many of my operations were against V weapon bomb sites in storage centres. That was part of the programme of Bomber Command in June, July.
I also feel that the, whereas Fighter Command flew a wonderful defensive war and kept us from, shall we say, losing the war, they did it in a defensive way, in a sense I do feel Bomber Command by its aggressive wage of, waging of war did save us from defeat at, at the hands of the V weapons.
But when I go back to my old school and children ask me about what I did in the war. They ask the questions, I give the answers. And one of the questions which always comes up as different group of children I see, meet, each year is was it right for you to kill civilians? Well the answer to that? I did what I was told. I couldn’t choose what I, targets I would take on ‘cause civilians might be killed. That’s one thing. The second thing is they didn’t understand that all wars civilians always suffer anyway but also I wasn’t we were not intent on killing civilians as such. What we were doing at Bomber Command, we were helping to fight a war which we knew that the German people were being led astray to believe that they, they were the master race. That they were superior to everybody. Had, had we lost the war what would the German victors have done to us? Would they allow us as being quite closely related to you might say, in race, to Germany allow us to be also part of that attitude that we were superior to other races. And so that we were really fighting not the people but a very wrong idea of the way the world should be run.
And I say this to the youngsters who, very often I’m talking to a class which is about seventy eight percent children with a background from, from the, that is come from where we might perhaps have called them black children as against white and I would say to them, you are equal in our country and in the sight of God to anybody. You are not an inferior race which you would have been if the Germans had won the war. So you make up your own mind whether killing civilians on the way has ensured, if you like - your future. It’s very difficult to get over, over to the youngsters aged eleven that conception. But I don’t tell them whether I did right or wrong I tell them the circumstances and leave them to make up their own mind.
Now as, as after the war I didn’t, people knew that I had flown in the RAF but I would always hesitate to say I flew in Bomber Command. There were a whole, shall we say generation who grew up thinking that we were civilian killers. I think that has passed now and they realise that the numbers lost, the lives that were lost in Bomber Command, over fifty five thousand people. That was nearly half, nearly fifty percent of people who flew in Bomber Command what a great sacrifice that people flying in Bomber Command made for our victory and have been neglected for so many years.
I suppose I look upon myself - I did nothing heroic. Shall we say I didn’t have, have to bail out? I didn’t, I flew my time in much of the same aircraft on a very little known squadron but at last it has been our, our work and sacrifice has been acknowledged and it was the Bomber Command memorial in, near, it’s at Piccadilly. That is a wonderful memorial and I was there when the Queen opened it in the year of the Olympic Games wasn’t it? And I was privileged to be there and on that occasion the whole royal family were there as well and that was the time when, when final acknowledgement was of Bomber Command was really appreciated.
I’m proud that I flew in Bomber Command so I’m proud of my service in the RAF but just to think I served in the RAF for four and a half years and in just over three months I flew operationally. Makes you think doesn’t it? That the rest of the time I was either in training or helping to train others. But I flew in Bomber Command and I say, I look back, aged nearly ninety two with a great deal of satisfaction but I was one of the many. Now Bomber Command has been accepted for what it really was and did. So many people have died who have never known that Bomber Command was going to be, at last, accepted. I’m the last of my crew to, to be alive and some of those particularly the two Canadians they have died without ever knowing that what they did flying in Bomber Command was, shall we say, fully recognised. I think that’s rather sad but because I’m still alive today I have, I have a bit of notoriety personally for, because I’m still alive. So many other people did what I did and did it better in their time but they have died. I’m still alive. And because there is a scarcity of people who like me are still alive we now have a little bit of notoriety, shall we say, at last.
And I’m also glad that the new, the new Bomber Command in Lincolnshire, the Bomber Command memorial there which is being set up at this time, not yet completely functional. But I’m glad it’s that because whereas the, shall we say the monument there in London, Piccadilly is made of stone - is wonderful. It’s quite emotional to go and see it but it does nothing. It doesn’t move. It just helps the mind remember but to be able to be, help the new Lincolnshire project which is more than just is, is somewhere where people can go and do and take part and look at the archives and I’m so glad to be able to help in that in my own little way.
MJ: On behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre I’d like to thank Vic Farmers. Navigator?
VF: Navigator.
MJ: Navigator, for his interview at his home in Oxted, the date of the 13th of July 2015. Thank you very much.
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Vic Farmer
Subject
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World War (1939-1945)
Great Britain. Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Creator
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Heather Hughes
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-09-14
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Heather Hughes
Format
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00:34:46 audio recording
Language
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eng
Identifier
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AFarmerV150730
Description
An account of the resource
Vic Farmer volunteered for the Royal Air Force at eighteen and trained as a navigator in South Africa. He describes his experiences of crewing up and serving in 550 squadron, RAF North Killingholme. He saw action on D-Day, and participated in further operations to bomb Paris marshalling yards and Bordeaux. He recalls an incident on an operation when he was outranked and as a result the wrong target was hit. He was commissioned and after further navigator training at RAF Shawbury, became an instructor. After the war, he became a teacher and eventually the head of a primary school. He talks of his feelings about Bomber Command and how veterans have been treated.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France--Paris
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Oxfordshire
South Africa
France
France--Bordeaux (Nouvelle-Aquitaine)
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
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-06-07
550 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
crewing up
forced landing
Halifax
Lancaster
memorial
navigator
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
perception of bombing war
RAF North Killingholme
RAF Shawbury
Wellington