1
25
32
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/117/3379/PCookKHH1601.1.jpg
14944c26aa827cd2423b233d4d2ac572
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/117/3379/ACookKHH160725.2.mp3
199eff75afa2921f7b1278169d2c5ec3
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
Cook, Kenneth
Kenneth Cook
Kenneth H Cook
Ken Cook
K H Cook
K Cook
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Wing Commander Kenneth Howell Cook DFC (b. 1923, 151017 Royal Air Force). Kenneth Cook flew 45 operations with 97 Squadron, Pathfinders.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-08-04
2016-07-25
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Cook, KHH
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PJ: Right. Interviewers Peter Jones and Sandra Jones. Name of the interviewee Wing Commander, Wing Commander Kenneth Cook DFC. Attending with him is his son Jonathan Cook. The date is the 25th of the 7th 2016 and it’s just 5 o’clock pm. The place is Chadlington, Oxfordshire. Thank you, Ken for agreeing to be interviewed for the IBCC. Ken, tell me about what you did before the war?
KC: Okay. Well I attended grammar school at -
JC: Marling.
KC: Marling Grammar School near Stroud in Gloucestershire and I was one of the first to join the Air Training Corps Squadron that was set up in Stroud, number 1329 Squadron and that helped to focus my attention on joining the Royal Air Force and while I waited until I was old enough to apply and a couple of years later I found myself on the train going from Stroud up to Paddington with an appointment to go to Lords Cricket Ground to be a part of what turned out to be over five thousand budding air crew that were joining the RAF on the same day that I was and after a few weeks staying in local accommodation in that area I was then posted up to Scarborough to the ITW [name number?]. That was at Scarborough Grammar School. So I did my ITW and then I was posted up, back up to the north west of England to wait for a boat because I was going across to America to learn to fly in America as a pilot and going across the Atlantic we were chased by a U-boat which gave us a bit of a turn and we got away from it and got to the other side alright and then got on a train that took us three days to go along through Canada right down through the centre of America to Georgia. And so my opening days were down there in very high temperatures erm which I enjoyed very much and we were flying an aircraft called a Stearman, the biplane, and I’d gone solo but they decided that I and one or two others needed a lot more time than they could afford so they asked me to go back to Canada to carry on my training there which I did but when I got to Canada I was told the pilot training schools were all totally full so I’d have to hang around. So they then asked me if I wanted to be an air gunner and I said no. And they made me hang around a bit longer and then eventually they said, ‘We’re opening up a new air crew job called an air bomber. Would you be interested in that?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ I’d have a go at that and so I went on through a couple of courses spread over three or four months and I came out as the two guys that, I was commissioned as a young pilot officer off the course. There was two of us commissioned. I was one of them and so I came back home having gone out as an erk I came back to England as a pilot officer. Then having got back to England I found myself, believe it or not, posted to, what’s that airfield near High Wycombe, the grass over?
JC: Booker.
KC: Booker. Booker airfield, to fly Tiger Moths and so I carried on. Started my pilot training or continued my pilot training there and I’m lost now from where I go from there.
JC: Do you want to stop for a second Dad? Shall we stop for a sec? Can we just stop for a sec?
KC: Hmmn?
JC: Do you want to stop for a little break?
KC: Yeah.
JC: For a second.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So you -
[Pause]
SJ: Okay.
KC: So I was posted to the northwest England to fly. Can you stop it for a minute? I can’t think.
[Pause]
JC: Botha?
KC: Botha, yeah.
JC: Botha.
KC: Yeah. That was it.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Up there in Scotland. In the northwest. And then on to er what was I saying? Which one the -
JC?: Cottesmore.
KC: Cottesmore. That was the Wellingtons. Starting to learn night bombing and all that techniques. And from there I was posted to -
JC: Winthorpe.
KC: Winthorpe, was it? Yes.
JC: Heavy Conversation Unit.
KC: Yeah. HCU.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And then -
JC: And then Bardney after that for five [weeks?]
KC: And then to 9 Squadron at Bardney.
JC: Yeah.
KC: On Lancasters, yeah. Yeah. I did ten ops with 9 Squadron and a crew there and then we were invited to join them, they had just set up the Pathfinder force in Bomber Command and we were recommended as a crew that could join the Pathfinder force which I went on a course at Bourne in Cambridgeshire and then graduated on, as a Pathfinder crew in Lancasters [pause] and I did another thirty five ops with a Pathfinder crew. Altogether, I did forty five ops and I came out of that. Just after finishing ops I got awarded the DFC. And where did I go after ops?
JC: You went off to, where did you go then? You went off to Fiskerton didn’t you? To be the station radar nav officer. Was that right?
KC: Yes, I did. I was posted to RAF Fiskerton near Lincoln.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Having, I completed altogether forty five ops so I was now screened from any more ops but I then flew at Fiskerton. There were two Lancaster squadrons there and my job was to, as new crews came in from training I had to fly with each new crew to check them out, that they, that their navigators could operate the radar properly before they were allowed to go on ops. That was hairy because some of the pilots were new and they couldn’t land the Lancaster at night and we used to do what we called a few, what we called a few cannon balls going down the runway at night. Anyway, went through that period. The squadron then moved from, they closed the airfield and moved us to Fulbeck and so I went along although I was on the station and not with the squadrons I was instructed by Group Headquarters to go with them to Syerston on the Fosse Way and I stayed with them for about two years at Syerston flying with new crews when they came in. Checking them out on the radar and so on. Then what happened after Syerston?
JC: Okay. So you were getting ready for the Tiger Force. Is that right?
KC: Um.
JC: You went to back to the, posted back to Coningsby. Station radar nav officer.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you were part of the build-up for the Tiger Force when you were due to head out to the Far East weren’t you?
KC: They were going, they were going out there. Yeah.
JC: Yes but obviously it was cancelled because the Japanese surrendered. Didn’t they?
KC: Yeah. That’s it.
JC: Okay.
KC: [?]
JC: So that took you to the end of the war. Right?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And so what was your first posting post war was at HQ1 Group at Bawtry.
KC: Bawtry yes. I was the group radar nav, group navigation officer.
JC: Yeah.
KC: At headquarters of 1 Group at Bawtry.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then in 194 –
KC: I was a wingco then.
JC: That’s, okay, well you were then offered a permanent commission in, that was 1948.
KC: Yeah.
JC: You were offered permanent commission?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then you went on to Thirsk. Okay.
KC: Well, ‘cause I went to Topcliffe.
JC: Yes.
KC: ‘Cause that was, had been set up to, to train all wartime people like me in to being proper peacetime navigators [laughs].
JC: That’s right.
KC: And I was one of them. How to use Astro and all that stuff and to navigate the aeroplanes.
JC: What’s Astro?
KC: Astro and also with the radar, of course. All the latest stuff.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah. What happened after Topcliffe?
JC: And then you went to a conversion course on night all weather fighters and you then moved to Coltishall flying in Mosquitos.
KC: Yeah. I had to go on to learn the latest air borne radar for night fighter navigator radar people and then I was posted to Coltishall.
JC: That’s it.
KC: Where there was a night fighter squadron and I joined the squadron. I can’t remember how long. About a year or more and then I was posted – when? I took command.
JC: That squadron, that squadron converted didn’t it? To –
KC: To Javelins.
JC: That’s, no, to Meteors I think it was.
KC: Meteor night fighters. That’s right.
JC: That’s right. Yeah.
KC: Yeah. From Mosquito to Meteor night fighters.
JC: Yes.
KC: When did I take command?
JC: You, so that was, I don’t know when you took command but in 1953 you were group navigation officer at that point and in 1956/57 you went to West Malling didn’t you? And you were appointed as a flight commander. Is that right?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Which was unusual for a navigator wasn’t it?
KC: I was one of the first navigators to be a -
JC: Yes.
KC: A flight commander.
JC: Yes. Okay. And then in 1957 you went to 153 in West Malling.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you were appointed commanding officer there.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And given the rank of Wing Commander at that point.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yeah. And the aircraft you moved to then were Meteor.
KC: Meteor and, and yeah Meteor night fighters.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: They were 12s and 14s I think.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Were they?
KC: Yeah. Mark 12s and Mark 14s. Yeah.
JC: And later you converted to another aircraft.
KC: Yeah. Javelin.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: That’s right. Okay.
KC: Javelin. Night, all weather fighters.
JC: Okay. And then after that you were posted, you had an opportunity to improve your, your shocking education.
KC: Yeah. They sent me to the Staff College.
JC: That’s right.
KC: I went to the RAF Staff College for a year and they were obviously teaching me to read and write again you know.
JC: That’s right.
KC: I was at Bracknell in Berkshire.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Do you want to take another quick break? Just take a quick break dad?
KC: Yeah. Shall we do that? Yeah.
[Pause]
JC: So where did you go? You went off to the Middle East.
KC: Yeah. I went to Iran.
JC: No. No.
KC: No.
JC: That was post air force. You went to somewhere else. You went to Aden didn’t you?
KC: Oh I went to Aden, yes.
JC: That’s right.
KC: In the Middle East. Aden. And I used to have to tramp up in to the Persian Gulf from Aden.
JC: Yes.
KC: Visiting the air force bases and that all along the Gulf.
JC: Yes.
KC: And I was out there about two years wasn’t I?
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Until 1963.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then you were posted back to a training command I think. Is that right? For a couple of years. And then you moved on to Signals Command at Medmenham near Marlow.
KC: Yeah, it was, it was, was it a Group Headquarters or a Command Headquarters?
JC: It was, it was HQ Signals Command it says.
KC: Oh the Command Headquarters then.
JC: Yes.
KC: As a staff officer I was there.
JC: Yeah. And what was your role there?
KC: Signals Command, Medmenham.
JC: Is it related to personnel? Wasn’t it? It says here you were a senior personnel staff officer.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah. I think I was involved, yeah, in staffing matters there.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes you were. And then you took retirement in January 1968.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then started your civilian career.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah
JC: So is that as far as you want to take it? There we go. That’s that bit. Now, shall we start again and I’ll, I’ll ask you some questions around this different things that you just want to give me there as well.
SJ: Those.
JC: Okay alright. So dad, so going back to so when were you, first of all just give your birthdate, dad. When you were born.
KC: 9th of April 1923.
JC: 1923. Okay and where were you born?
KC: Randwick.
JC: Randwick in Gloucestershire.
KC: Near Stroud.
JC: Yeah. Near Stroud in Gloucestershire.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And just kind of describe what sort of a place Randwick was back in those, those days?
KC: Well, Randwick was a small Cotswold village. Everybody knew everybody.
JC: Yeah.
KC: I went to Randwick village school.
JC: How many kids were there in that school? Roughly. Can you remember?
KC: There was about a hundred and fifty altogether.
JC: Was there? Okay.
KC: There were about three or, yeah, three classes total.
JC: Yeah.
KC: In the school.
JC: Okay.
KC: And I passed the eleven plus.
JC: And you also had, did some things in the village as well didn’t you? Weren’t you sort of active in the choir as I remember? Is that right?
KC: I was in the church choir.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah. The C of E church choir.
JC: Yeah.
KC: I became the head choir boy ‘cause I was the guy that would always get pushed in the back by the choir master saying, ‘Sing up Ken.’
JC: Fantastic. Okay. Alright. And so then you went, you passed your exam and went to Randwick School and where was Randwick School?
KC: Well it -
JC: Sorry not Randwick School. You went to Marling School.
KC: Marling. Marling School.
JC: And where was Marling School?
KC: Marling School was on the outskirts of Stroud.
JC: Which was how far away from -
KC: About four miles.
JC: Right.
KC: I used to cycle there on a bike every morning.
JC: Right. Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And so you stayed there for a number of years until you were what? About sixteen were you?
KC: Yeah sixteen.
JC: Yeah. And then you left the -
KC: I then, I got a job with a company called Erinoid. It was in the early days when plastics were first being made in this country.
JC: Yes.
KC: And Erinoid were one of the early companies and I was invited to join their lab, their laboratory.
JC: Right.
KC: Where all the experiments was being done on the latest type of plastics.
JC: And so -
KC: I was an office boy if you like.
JC: Right.
KC: But in fact they made me look at everything that was going on with a view to picking it up.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So you were almost like an apprentice there?
KC: An apprentice. Yes.
JC: That’s what you were kind of doing.
KC: Yes.
JC: Doing. Okay. And, and so you did that job. So we were now in 1939 so there would have, that would have been presumably you were working there at the outbreak of the war. Were you?
KC: Yes I was. Yeah.
JC: Right. Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And what was, how did you feel about the outbreak of the war? What was, you know your initial thinking?
KC: Well one of the first things I did was to join the Air Training Corps in Stroud.
JC: Right okay.
KC: And from there -
JC: And what made you join that as opposed to joining the army or the navy? What was it about the Air Training Corps?
KC: It was about flying and I wanted to learn to fly.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: It seemed like a better option. Did it? Fair enough.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Fair enough. Okay. So you got to the age, I guess, of eighteen where you could potentially signup.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So were you conscripted or did you volunteer?
KC: I volunteered.
JC: You volunteered.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And where did you go to volunteer? At somewhere -
KC: I went to Weston Super Mare.
JC: Did you? Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Why did you have to go down there ‘cause that’s a bit of a way from Stroud?
KC: That was the sort of a holding centre.
JC: Right.
KC: Where you went down there and you’d find you were there with all sorts of guys and so on.
JC: Right I bet. Did any, did you go down there with anybody. Any friends go with you? Or?
KC: No.
JC: No you went off on your own did you?
KC: On my own. Yeah.
JC: And did you have to do anything before you went down there? Was there anything more local in Stroud that you had to do to -?
KC: Only that I was now an active member of the Air Training Corps in Stroud.
JC: So it was the Air Training Corps that helped you -
KC: That helped me.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Very much. Yeah.
JC: I see.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. And so what happened when you went to Weston Super Mare? What happened when you went down there?
KC: Oh crikey. What happened at Weston Super Mare? I think we were, we were every day marched out on to the top of the cliffs.
JC: Yes.
KC: And made to parade up and down doing all sorts of, learning to drill, you know -
JC: Right.
KC: All the drill stuff.
JC: That’s where your drill stuff happened?
KC: Yes.
JC: Right. Okay. Good. And, and of course you had your mum and dad were back at home.
KC: Yes.
JC: What was their reaction to your having signed up and volunteered? Do you remember?
KC: My dad was almost, sort of well, ‘I expected you to do something like that Ken.’
JC: Right.
KC: Sort of thing, you know.
JC: Yes.
KC: My mum said, ‘I don’t want you to go.’
JC: No. I bet.
KC: 'I don’t want you to go.’
JC: As mums do.
KC: But I did. But I used to, you know come home on breaks and -
JC: Yes.
KC: See them.
JC: And you had, you had several older brothers and a sister. What were they doing during all of this?
KC: Yeah. Harry was the eld– , well Mabel was the eldest wasn’t she?
JC: Your sister. Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: That’s right.
KC: And she’s the one who kept, if you like, the family running.
JC: Right.
KC: Although she lived a few miles away.
JC: Yeah.
KC: She kept an eye on my mum and dad.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And really kept the family running -
JC: Yeah.
KC: Smoothly. And I had brothers like Harry.
JC: Yes.
KC: He was –
JC: Did he sign up for any, any of the services?
KC: Sorry?
JC: Did he sign up for any of the services? Or was he a bit, he was a bit older wasn’t he?
KC: A bit older. Yeah. Walter. Walter did.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yes. He did.
JC: What did he sign up for? Did he sign up for, was one of them merchant navy? I can’t quite remember what he was.
KC: It was something like that.
JC: Yeah.
KC: I think it was. Yes.
JC: Yes.
KC: Merchant navy. Yeah.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: What about your nearest brother?
KC: Charlie.
JC: Charlie. What did he do?
KC: Well Charlie was in a reserved occupation ‘cause he worked for Newman Henders and he was a draughtsman.
JC: Right.
KC: And they were working on munitions and stuff.
JC: Oh right.
KC: And so he was screened. They wouldn’t let him go.
JC: Right.
KC: He had to get on with the war stuff that he was working on.
JC: Fine. Okay.
KC: On drawing boards and things.
JC: Okay. Alright. So -
KC: Yeah.
JC: So that’s what the family were doing and what they were thinking and you were off at Weston Super Mare and coming home at weekend, occasional weekends and things like that were you?
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: Okay. And how, and so you did that for a bit and then you said before that you had to go up to, to Lord’s to kind of muster up there did you? Is that, is that right?
KC: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I had to report to Lord’s.
JC: Yes.
KC: ‘Cause I wanted to fly aircrew.
JC: Yes. So that was where aircrew were sent.
KC: Aircrew. We all, literally I was absolutely shattered. Walked into the Lord’s Cricket Ground ‘cause I’d never been, even to London like that in my life.
JC: Right.
KC: And walked in and there with thousands -
JC: Yes.
KC: Guys like me and -
JC: And what was -
KC: We were there. They took over the expensive housing from, I’m not anti-Jews but a certain part near there a lot of Jew families, rich Jew families.
JC: That was St John’s Wood wasn’t it? Around the St John’s Wood.
KC: St John’s Wood.
JC: Yes.
KC: And the government kicked them all out.
JC: Yes.
KC: And took over all their sumptuous houses, I mean for me as village kid coming up there, going into their bathrooms and seeing all the ornate stuff they had in their bathrooms, you know.
JC: Quite something was it?
KC: It was. It was unbelievable, you know.
JC: And were you so you were sort of put into these, these kind of houses and apartments I guess in -
KC: Yeah.
JC: In London. And you were sharing with people from your part of the country or from around the country?
KC: All over the country. There were guys that could hardly add up to five.
JC: Right.
KC: Sort of thing.
JC: Yes.
KC: And there was, not cockneys but they had accents that you couldn’t understand half the things they said, you know.
JC: Right. I bet, I bet there were people that you hadn’t been exposed to many of those kinds of accents, had you?
KC: No. I hadn’t. No.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Fantastic. Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And so okay so you did, so you did that and then from there that’s where they sent you I think to Booker wasn’t it? To start the -
KC: Yeah.
JC: The training.
KC: FTS Booker.
JC: Yes.
KC: To start pilot training.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah. Yeah. That Booker was near High Wycombe.
JC: That’s it and that was for air experience wasn’t it? On, on -
KC: Yeah.
JC: What sort of aircraft? Those were on -
KC: Seeing if you were going to be airsick all the time.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Which, they would chuck you out of aircrew. Yeah.
JC: And that on what sort of planes were those you were flying?
KC: That was Tiger Moths.
JC: Tiger Moths.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. Gosh.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. And how did you take to the flying? What was your sort of initial memories of doing that?
KC: I felt quite comfortable about it. I think, I mean I wasn’t eliminated or anything like that.
JC: Right and could you have been eliminated at that point?
KC: You could have, yeah.
JC: Right.
KC: If you didn’t cope reasonably well they’d chuck you off the course.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay and so, so that was sort of April May 1942 and then in June 1942 they put you on board this ship the SS Leticia.
KC: Leticia.
JC: Leticia that’s right. And that was -
KC: And we went across the Atlantic -
JC: And that was from up in Scotland. You had to go up to Scotland to catch -
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: That didn’t you? From the Clyde.
KC: The Clyde.
JC: To go over to Halifax in Nova Scotia.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And –
KC: We were chased by U-boats going across the Atlantic.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then, and then from there you travelled down on the trains through to Georgia to -
KC: Albany, Georgia.
JC: Albany, Georgia. That’s right.
KC: Took about three days and nights on the train.
JC: That’s it.
KC: Thousand, hundreds of miles. It was a distance train trip.
JC: Okay. But you were flying from a place called Turner Field.
KC: Turner Field.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Albany, Georgia.
JC: That’s it. Okay. And then you were, what sort of planes were you flying down there? This was -
KC: PT17s. Stearman.
JC: Okay.
KC: A biplane.
JC: And this -
KC: The American version of the Tiger Moth sort of thing.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But it was a heavier airplane than the Tiger Moth.
JC: And why were you sent over to the States to do, to do this?
KC: Because they wanted air crew quickly.
JC: Right. But why not train them up here?
KC: The only schools we had were absolutely jam packed full.
JC: I see. Okay.
KC: And to, they needed to, they needed hundreds more.
JC: Right.
KC: So we were sent. I mean some were sent to South Africa.
JC: Yes.
KC: I was sent to Canada and America.
JC: Right. And America was still neutral at this time wasn’t it?
KC: Yes. Yeah.
JC: So, so, so but they were still happy for, for aircrew to be trained up in America on this -
KC: Yeah.
JC: There was -
KC: I don’t know how we got away with that but we did.
JC: Yeah. Okay and this was something called, there was a name for this scheme wasn’t it? What was it called?
KC: The Arnold Scheme.
JC: The Arnold Scheme. Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Alright. Alright. So, so you did some training on these Stearmans and then they decided that you needed to do more flying and they sent you back up to Canada.
KC: Yeah.
JC: But the -
KC: They said they hadn’t got enough hours.
JC: Yes.
KC: To keep me down there because it was such a concentrated course down in America.
JC: Yeah.
KC: So they sent me back to Canada and they said I could carry on up there. All the lot of guys had got up there at this holding unit and I found I was there with about five hundred other guys who were also were waiting to carry on with their training.
JC: Right.
KC: And so I was there, I can’t remember how long I was there.
JC: So this was in, this was Trenton.
KC: Trenton, Ontario.
JC: Trenton, Ontario.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. So -
KC: Yeah.
JC: This was in September 1942.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And I think you were there for some months by the looks of it.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Through until about January, I think.
KC: Yeah.
JC: In 1943.
KC: In the process they’d come every so often and say, ‘would you like to become an air gunner?’ And I’d say no.
JC: Why didn’t you want to be an air gunner?
KC: Well I didn’t, I thought that was an unskilled job.
JC: Right. Okay, Fair enough. Okay. And so, so then they offered you this thing called an air bomber.
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: And what, what was that?
KC: Well, the air bomber, that was coinciding with the four engined bombers coming in to the RAF.
JC: Right.
KC: And -
JC: Like what sort of, examples of those, like what?
KC: The aircrew in the Lancaster.
JC: Yes.
KC: You had the pilot and the flight engineer.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Then you had two navigators. One was what they called the navigator plotter.
JC: Yes.
KC: His job was to work out time, course and so on and the other one was a navigator observer which was me.
JC: Right.
KC: My job was to do all the, operate the radar that we carried to drop our bomb loads using my radar. If we had to do visual bombing I had to also operate the bomb site down in the nose.
JC: Right.
KC: Of the Lancaster and I also was trained to use guns in the turrets in case we were attacked and the gunners were killed.
JC: Yes.
KC: My job was to get them out of the, out of the turret and take his place.
JC: Right.
KC: That sort of thing, you see.
JC: And wasn’t there some forward guns as well that you were supposed -
KC: Yes. In the, right in the nose.
JC: Yes.
KC: There was a turret.
JC: Yes.
KC: Right at the front and the gun protruded out the front.
JC: Yes.
KC: And down the tail end there were four guns in the tail end turret.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And the mid-upper turret -
JC: Yes.
KC: Were two guns.
JC: Right. Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. Good okay. So you trained on this new job of air bomber for a period of several months. You came off and you were commissioned.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And coming out of the course. What rank was it again?
KC: I was a flight lieutenant.
JC: No. I think you were a pilot officer.
KC: Oh pilot officer, sorry.
JC: I think.
KC: Pilot officer. That’s right.
JC: That’s what you came out as didn’t you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then you were sent back to the UK at that time.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you went up to Wigtown to fly these Bothas. Bothas. What sort of aircraft was that?
KC: Botha was a twin engine.
JC: Yes.
KC: Aircraft, it had been an operational aircraft but they reckoned it was underpowered so they took it off ops.
JC: Right.
KC: And used it as advanced training for people like me going on to ops.
JC: And had you formed a crew at that time or were you just randomly -
KC: No.
JC: Assigned to -
KC: I was a random guy at that time.
JC: Right.
KC: Didn’t -
JC: Okay.
KC: Didn’t, get a crew until you got to the OTU.
JC: Okay so that was the next thing. You went to the OTU.
KC: Yeah.
JC: At Cottesmore.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you were flying Wellingtons.
KC: Wellingtons.
JC: So you got a crew there.
KC: There, yeah.
JC: And how did you, what was the process of choosing a crew. How did you -
KC: [Laugh] That’s a good question. We were -
JC: Were you carefully selected and matched up?
KC: We were a lump, a lump of aircrew there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: All sorts and sizes gunners and wireless operators and bomb aimers and navigators and pilots and so on and we used to wander around in a, you literally used to go up and say, ‘Have you got a crew yet mate?’ And whoever it was would say, ‘No I haven’t. Would you like to join with me? I’m a navigator.’ He’d say, ‘What are you?’ ‘I’m an air bomber.’ He’d say, ‘Yeah fine.’ And then we’d keep together and we’d go to somebody else, ‘Would you like to come in our crew.’
JC: So it was -
KC: And that’s how it was done.
JC: So obviously it was a scientific and carefully managed process so –
KC: Yeah.
JC: So that was good. So tell me a bit about the crew that you, that you ended up with. What was the skipper’s name?
KC: Jim Kermans[?] He was much older. I mean, we were, I was twenty one, twenty two and he was twenty nine. He was the dad of the crew.
JC: Right.
KC: Twenty nine.
JC: And where was he from?
KC: He was an Australian.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Very staid sort of person. Not much sense of humour.
JC: Yeah.
KC: On thinking back he must have been worried to hell on every flight he did. That sort of impression.
JC: Did he give you that impression while you were there or did you think he kind of took it in his stride quite a bit?
KC: He did it a bit when I was there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: ‘Cause I had to get very close to him.
JC: Yeah.
KC: The pilot. With some of the things I had to do -
JC: Yeah.
KC: Was directly on behalf of the pilot.
JC: Right.
KC: So I had to get to know him.
JC: Yes.
KC: I mean he had a flight engineer.
JC: Yes.
KC: But er -
JC: What was the flight engineer’s name?
KC: Ken Randall.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And where was he from?
KC: The other navigator, what was called the navigator plotter was Don Bowes.
JC: Where was he -
KC: Who was an out and out Yorkshireman.
JC: Oh was he?
KC: He could hardly speak English. It was all Yorkshire stuff [laughs].
JC: Alright. What about, what about Ken Randall. Where was he from?
KC: Ken Randall, he was a Birmingham, brummy.
JC: Was he? Right Okay.
KC: Yeah. Yes.
JC: So you were meeting people from around the country that you’d probably never met people from that part of the world before.
KC: Yeah. It’s amazing how we welded into such a good crew.
JC: Yeah and what so what made a good crew do you think? What was -
KC: I think -
JC: How’d that work?
KC: You were individuals. In a crew of seven you’d find two or three of you were buddies and then suddenly a fourth one in the crew would sort of latch on to us ‘cause we’d go to a pub and he’d be there on his own.
JC: Right.
KC: And you’d say, ‘Come on. Have a drink,’ Sort of thing, you know.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And that helped to bring them in, you know.
JC: Right. So the pub was important then?
KC: Yeah. Oh yeah.
JC: Yeah.
KC: The village pub.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And where was the village pub? So you were -
KC: Bourne. Well when doing ops from Bourne -
JC: Yeah.
KC: We used to go down in the village pub, literally was in the village of Bourne.
JC: Right. Yeah.
KC: And we used to brews[?] in there and have a few.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And then get back and get to bed ‘cause we probably had to get up early morning to do some flying the next day.
JC: So, so on a so you obviously with Wellingtons you found your crew now.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Who else on the crew? So let’s just finish the crew off. So you’ve got your flight engineer, you’ve got your navigator, you’ve got your skipper who’s the pilot.
KC: Yeah.
JC: What about the, so you’ve got two gunners haven’t you?
KC: Yeah. We had, the mid upper gunner was a Canadian.
JC: Yes.
KC: And the tail gunner was an out and out broad Scotsman.
JC: Right.
KC: He used to get excited when we were on ops and he’d talk about this thing coming in and he used to shout and scream but it was in broad Scots and none of us could understand [laughs].
JC: [laughs] Brilliant. Okay. Good. So, Okay, so you’ve got your crew and you’ve moved over to the, to Winthorpe and then on to Bardney where you started operations in Bardney.
KC: I did ten ops at Bardney, 9 Squadron.
JC: And that was on Lancasters.
KC: Yes.
JC: On number 9 Squadron.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay and, and what sort of place, what was, what was Bardney like as a place to kind of work from?
KC: Bardney was very much a new airfield with Nissen huts.
JC: Yes.
KC: Everything was Nissen hutted accommodation.
JC: Right.
KC: And it seemed that, you know, everything was sparse there but it was just about enough for human people to live and be fed.
JC: Right.
KC: And then, but you were going off on ops and that from there and you used to think coming back oh I’ve got to come back to that bloody den downstairs again sort of thing, you know.
JC: Right. Right. And what so if you had an op, when did you know when you were flying on an operation. Did you -
KC: We were all, all the aircrew had to go for the briefing which was always held on the night of ops. The briefing was at two o’clock in the afternoon.
JC: Right.
KC: So all the aircrew that were about on the station would go straight towards the briefing room which was -
JC: Yes.
KC: Quite a huge room.
JC: Right.
KC: And they had table after table in there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And they could pack a couple of hundred or three hundred aircrew -
JC: Right.
KC: In there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And you’d walk in and then the far you came always came in at the back door. You walked in and you looked straight ahead because there were the maps of Germany and the continent ahead of you and there was the route you were going to fly that night and [?] we’d say, ‘Oh not bloody Berlin again.’ This was after I’d done about eight ops to Berlin, you know.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: And so, you know, we used to talk to one another, ‘Oh bloody Berlin again,’ you know.
JC: Yeah. Alright. So, so had the briefing room there. And who ran the briefings?
KC: The squadron commander.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And his flight commanders.
JC: Right. Okay.
KC: And of course they had specialists. I mean they had the guy who looked after the wireless operator guys.
JC: Yes. Yeah.
KC: And he was the radio wireless op king sort of thing.
JC: Yes. Yeah.
KC: And I think that was about it. What other trade was there? Oh the engineer.
JC: Right.
KC: Station engineer.
JC: Yes.
KC: Was always there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And he would say something about what had happened to some of the aircraft. They had to do some modifications or.
JC: Right.
KC: And he also would cover anything wrong with the radar gear that we carried on board that had -
JC: Yes.
KC: Been modifications to it dadedadeda.
JC: Right.
KC: And all that stuff.
JC: Right. What other things came out of the briefings? I guess you would have some intelligence. There would be an intelligence officer there.
KC: They showed the route and they had a large scale map on the wall, the big wall at the end of briefing room but all they had shading areas showing where all the searchlight belts were -
JC: Yes.
KC: Over Germany.
JC: Yes.
KC: And where the night fighter air fields were -
JC: Yeah.
KC: In Germany.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And heavily populated areas. They were brought out to show you that -
JC: Yeah.
KC: You know don’t go flying over these on the way because they’ll shoot you down.
JC: Right.
KC: If you get mixed up with some of these other cities.
JC: Yes.
KC: On the way in to, in to your target in Germany.
JC: Yeah. Okay and so how long would a briefing typically take, would you say?
KC: Sorry.
JC: How long would a briefing typically take?
KC: I should say minimum of two hours.
JC: About two hours.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then would there be a break and you could go off or did you then go straight to -
KC: They would tell you what time briefing was going to be.
JC: Yeah.
KC: For the raid.
JC: Yeah.
KC: They would announce what time the night flying meal was arranged for.
JC: Right.
KC: So you had a good cooked meal before you went.
JC: What sort of things would you have before you go up?
KC: Eggs and bacon ‘cause eggs were rationed. Eggs and bacon and you know tomato and things like that.
JC: Right.
KC: Lovely.
JC: Lovely, yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. There’s got to be some pros to it I suppose. So, that’s good. Okay and so you have your meal and then what happens? You go to your dispersal do you?
KC: You went back to your room in dispersal and if it –
JC: How did you travel around the base did you –?
KC: Bike.
JC: On bike.
KC: [We were drove?] or bike.
JC: Right. Okay. So you would ride out and it could be a half a mile away or that kind of distance.
KC: Yeah.
JC: To your -
KC: A couple of miles.
JC: A couple of miles.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: Could be. Yeah.
JC: So it could be getting dark by this point and you’d be cycling off to –
KC: Yeah.
JC: And the plane would be there and there would be a building next to the plane that you would, you would sit in prior to -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Going off would you?
KC: Well remember we had to go back to briefing.
JC: Yes.
KC: For the raid.
JC: Yes. Okay. So that’s in addition to that. So you had a second meeting then -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Do you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Right. Okay and what was, what was the purpose of that? That second meeting.
KC: Sorry?
JC: Have a drink. Have a drink, dad.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Sorry. I’m getting you to do too much talking.
[pause]
JC: And what would, what would the purpose of that second meeting be dad? The briefing. What was different from that from the first, the first briefing in the afternoon?
KC: Any changes of timing.
JC: Ah I see. Okay.
KC: Something might come through from group head or command headquarters.
JC: Yeah.
KC: That they’d found out something about Jerry tactics or something was going to happen.
JC: Yes.
KC: So that might modify the way you were going in. They may even change the route.
JC: Right.
KC: ‘Cause they were ‘cause your original route would take you right into the middle where all the German night fighters were.
JC: I see.
KC: So they would re-route you.
JC: Right. So they’d have updates on intelligence.
KC: To try to avoid that.
JC: Okay. So they’d have updated information. Alright. So you’d have that second briefing and then you’d go off to your dispersal area. Right? Is that -
KC: Yes. Yeah.
JC: Yes. Okay and then would you go straight in to the plane or sit around in the dispersal area for a bit or how, how long a -
KC: We used to sit in our room.
JC: Yes.
KC: You know, I mean it was Nissen huts where I was. I probably had about four or five guys on beds in the same Nissen huts -
JC: Yes.
KC: That I was.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: So I we’d have a chinwag or you know you’d, you may have wanted to go and have a bath or something like that.
JC: Right.
KC: You know.
JC: What else did you do to kind of while away the time ‘cause obviously there was lots of sitting around waiting isn’t there? So -
KC: Yeah if this lady wasn’t here I’d tell you exactly what we were doing [laughs].
JC: Right okay fine I think we’ll leave that to the imagination there, dad. That’s fine. Okay. [laughs].
KC: Yeah.
JC: What about things, did you play cards or anything like that or -
KC: Some of the guys did. Yes.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And -
JC: Yeah.
KC: And card games or poker and things like that.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Well, you know, poker’s a card game.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Things like that.
JC: Chess and things like that?
KC: Chess, yeah.
JC: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, alright so then the time came and you had to get in, get in to the plane.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Presumably you had to suit up. Just describe what you had to wear before you -
KC: Well, you’d, you obviously would put your flying overalls on.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But we used to have odd pockets in these flying overalls and so each chap would decide whether he wanted to take a knife, bars of chocolate stuffed down the leg or something like that.
JC: Yeah.
KC: In case you bailed out and -
JC: Sure.
KC: You wanted, you know. That was the idea was to take something like bars of chocolate.
JC: Didn’t you have ration packs as well?
KC: Oh yes.
JC: Did you have emergency rations?
KC: Yeah. Had a -
JC: Or something.
KC: Ration pack, yes.
JC: Yeah. Yeah that you carried with you.
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: Right. Okay. So you had your overalls on and what else? What other things did you have to put on before you climbed in to the plane?
KC: Well, obviously the Mae West.
JC: Yes. What’s a Mae West for those that wouldn’t know?
KC: The Mae West was, was the, if you came down in the sea you wore it. You had your flying suit on and also your underclothing and anything like that and then this Mae West went over the top and it had a system of buoyancy.
JC: Right.
KC: But also you could inflate air. The little bottle -
JC: Right.
KC: With air and you could pull a plug plunger and that would shoot air and this thing would, from being close to you would suddenly you were in the middle of a floatation -
JC: Right.
KC: Gadget.
JC: Yes.
KC: Sort of thing, you see.
JC: Yes. So like a lifejacket almost. Yes.
KC: So if your aircraft came down in the sea and you had to get out of it whatever happened ‘cause it was going down with you on board –
JC: Yes.
KC: This was how you made your thing work so at least you.
[phone ringing]
JC: Yes. Yes. Okay so we’ve got that. And then what else? You presumably have a flying jacket would you, as well? That you would need to, to wear.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes.
KC: During the war they changed those quite a bit. I had one that was very woolly and fluffy.
JC: Yes.
KC: But it was also a nuisance ‘cause it was all padded in the wrong places and things like that for wear.
JC: Oh really.
KC: So it wasn’t, it wasn’t sensible.
JC: Oh right.
KC: So we chose not to wear that. We wore them in the middle of winter of course.
JC: Right. Yeah.
KC: But if we could get away without it we’d put an extra jumper on.
JC: Yes. Okay. Okay, alright so you put, put all that clothing. What about a parachute? Did you have to wear one of those?
KC: We all wore harness.
JC: Yes.
KC: What they called parachute harness.
JC: Yeah.
KC: With clips on the front and your parachute was a pack about that wide.
JC: Yes.
KC: Which was stored somewhere handy for where you sat.
JC: Right.
KC: In the aircraft.
JC: Right.
KC: And the idea was that if you had to get out the first thing you don’t enquire, ‘Where’s my bloody chute?’
JC: Yeah.
KC: You took it with you and as you went out of the aircraft you clipped it on.
JC: Yes.
KC: You pulled the thing so you come down alright, you know.
JC: I see. Okay.
KC: That was the drill that you were taught.
JC: That was the idea was it okay. And this was all -
KC: And I was pleased not to have to do that.
JC: Yes that’s good. Leaving a perfectly good plane. Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay so that’s how you dressed. So you climb into the plane and then presumably what happens then the kind of engines on and you’ve got sort of checks that you have to do before -
KC: Yeah and you had checks to do and you got in to the aircraft. Each of us had our pre-flight checks to do.
JC: Yeah.
KC: You know, I had to get all my equipment, bits of equipment that I carried.
JC: Yes.
KC: To do my job. And if I was using radar which I was had to set up the radar sets. [ ?]
JC: Have a drink. You’re not used to talking this much are you dad? Actually, you are used to talking this much. Yeah.
[Pause]
JC: So you’re getting your radar sets ready. Yes.
KC: Yeah. Getting it all set up and you know you’d obviously plug in your leads to make sure you were on the air with everybody else in the aircraft.
JC: Yes.
KC: And just check that out.
JC: What about oxygen and stuff like that?
KC: Oxygen. Yeah.
JC: Pre-test that?
KC: You each had your oxygen point where you sat.
JC: Yes.
KC: [Excuse me] and plug that in.
JC: Yes and did you have if you needed to move around the aircraft you had presumably a kind of mobile -
KC: Yes. A portable bottle that you could -
JC: Yeah.
KC: Pick up. They were stowed in two or three places in the aircraft.
JC: Right.
KC: So if you I mean for instance if you wanted to use the loo in the Lanc.
JC: Yes.
KC: You had to go right to the back of the bloody aircraft.
JC: Was that presumably where the rear gunner was, was it?
KC: You went right near to the rear.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Gunner.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But to get there you had to climb over what we called the main spar.
JC: Yes.
KC: Which went right through the middle of the main wing.
JC: Yes.
KC: But also went through the cockpit bit where we were.
JC: The fuselage. Yeah.
KC: So to get to that you had to literally climb over this thing.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: With all your garb on you know.
JC: Yeah. Yes. And -
KC: Not popular that.
JC: Yes and a slightly personal question but what was it like going to the loo on a Lancaster?
KC: Shall I tell you?
JC: Go on. Yes.
KC: Well on one occasion my bottom froze to the, to the pan.
JC: Did it? ‘Cause it was a metal toilet seat.
KC: We moaned about these things and then they changed this seat from metal to plastic because of that. Because not only me but some of the other guys had gone to the toilet and found they couldn’t get their bottom of the toilet. It was frozen on. It‘s absolutely true.
JC: Oh right okay. Alright.
KC: And -
JC: Yes. So -
KC: Yeah. I don’t think I’d better say any more about that.
JC: Okay dad. There’s enough detail there. Thank you dad. That’s good. Alright. So, so you’ve done your pre-flight checks, you’re in the plane and then you’re kind of taking off. Now that must have been quite a spectacle being there with lots of aircraft taking off at one time.
KC: Oh yeah.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah.
JC: What was that like? ‘Cause I guess you were able to, where you were sitting, look out and see -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Other aircraft around were you?
KC: See. Yeah, all the aircraft encroaching towards the beginning of the runway.
JC: Right.
KC: So they might have come right across the other side of the airfield. The airfields were pretty big.
JC: Yes.
KC: So they were taxiing around the peri track, they were.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: And suddenly all converge and all these aircraft were coming from all directions to -
JC: Yes.
KC: That one point.
JC: Yes.
KC: To get to the end of the runway.
JC: Right.
KC: That used to be a bit nightmarish at times because -
JC: You could have crashed into each other.
KC: Some of the guys used to get too bloody close and -
JC: Yeah.
KC: Bang the tips of their wings and things like that.
JC: Right okay so alright so can you, have a drink dad.
KC: Yeah.
JC: I was just going to ask you what your memories are of your early operations because that must have been quite, quite, you know, scary as a new crew.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Relatively new crew. Can you -
KC: It was, it was horrific.
JC: Yes.
KC: Is the fair way. In terms of there were these guys on the ground shooting up and trying to get you and you were flying along and suddenly there was a bloody great explosion out to the right and somebody’s been hit by ack ack and he’s exploded with all his bombs on board. The first time you see that is quite an eye opener I can tell you.
JC: I bet.
KC: And I used to see, we used to see it on almost every raid we went on. Some poor sod would get a direct hit from -
JC: Yeah.
KC: German ground ack ack stuff and what they, of course they had their night fighters up as well.
JC: And what sort of planes were those. Those were -
KC: They were –
JC: Messerschmitts, were they? Messerschmitt 109s.
KC: Messerschmitt and they were twin engine Messerschmitts.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And they had a tactic.
KC: The ME109 was single.
JC: Right.
KC: But they had ME110s.
JC: Right.
KC: Which was a two man crew.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah. And they were deadly.
JC: Yes. On what –
KC: ‘Cause they had the latest radar as we had the latest radar.
JC: Right.
KC: So they could pick us up.
JC: Right. And what was their tactic? You said about them using to try and fly up underneath.
KC: Yeah.
JC: I remember you saying about that.
KC: Their main tactic was to get A, to get themselves into the bomber stream.
JC: Yes.
KC: Our bomber stream.
JC: Yes.
KC: And then they had to use their own radar to pick us up.
JC: Yes.
KC: Bearing in mind we were going across twenty or twenty five thousand feet across coming up from the ground.
JC: Yes.
KC: From Germany and across the North Sea and so on.
JC: Yes.
KC: So they would suddenly find they were up among us.
JC: Right.
KC: And we soon knew they were there because suddenly, you’d be going along all nice and dark and suddenly boom an aircraft blew up just in front of you.
JC: Right.
KC: ‘Cause they, if they attacked us on the way to the target we all still had all our bombs on board.
JC: And was that the tactic that they used to try and shoot up into the bomb bays as well.
KC: Yes they used to fly. If that was me flying along with my crew along there they used to come up there.
JC: Yes.
KC: And they’d open up because they knew all your bombs were in the bomb bay.
JC: Yes.
KC: On the bottom side of the aircraft.
JC: Right.
KC: So their idea was to explode our bombs.
JC: Yes.
KC: To blow us up.
JC: Right. Right. I see.
KC: And the nearest I ever had in my crew was when they did that ‘cause they did it several times but this particular occasion the, they were so close they were too close when they opened fire.
JC: Right.
KC: So the cannon shells came through the bottom of the aircraft, missed all our bombs but they ended up some of them in the front cockpit just missing me and the pilot and the other navigator.
JC: Right.
KC: But it was so close, bearing in mind we were wearing oxygen masks, the bomber crew.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But it was the cordite when the shells exploded in the aircraft.
JC: Yes.
KC: Was so strong even with oxygen mask I could smell, smell the cordite.
JC: Right.
KC: From the cannon shells exploding -
JC: Right.
KC: Inside the aircraft.
JC: That’s amazing.
KC: But also of course they came through and didn’t just stop. They kept flying through and this particular case of the attack they broke our plexiglass nose.
JC: Right.
KC: It shattered.
JC: Yes.
KC: So we had a gale blowing in the front didn’t we ‘cause there was no blooming plexiglass to protect us.
JC: Right.
KC: I’ve never forgotten that one. Yeah.
JC: Because didn’t you have to go down there as well to do the bombing?
KC: Visual. If the radar didn’t work.
JC: Yes.
KC: You didn’t bring your bombs back. You went down. I had to be able to use the visual bomb sight.
JC: Yes.
KC: The Mark 14 bomb sight.
JC: Right. Right.
KC: Lying prone and looking through the actual bomb site and directing the pilot verbally over the intercom telling him which, to go left, right, up or down whatever the case might be.
JC: Yes.
KC: Because I was using my bomb sight.
JC: Yes.
KC: To aim at what I thought was the target we were going for.
JC: And, and so what stopped you from just dumping the bombs and heading off home? Why, why would that, you know.
KC: Well we weren’t going to do that. Fly all that bloody way and not drop our bombs were we?
JC: Yeah I know but why, why was it so important to, to kind of, you know, get, get them on target. Would you have been required -
KC: Well -
JC: To come back again if you -
KC: Because when you operated the bomb release.
JC: Yes.
KC: You set in motion a line overlap camera.
JC: Right.
KC: There was a camera built up in the bomb bay.
JC: Yes.
KC: And when your bomb doors was open and you pressed the bomb button to release the bombs, it operated this camera.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Which then took a line overlap the ground that you were flying over so when you got over that back to base the station photographic officer came in and took the camera thing out of the camera, whatever they called it, you know.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Part of the camera away.
JC: Yes.
KC: And developed it and could, they could plot and decide whether you’d bombed your target or you’d bombed ploughed fields or something.
JC: Yes and so if you hadn’t hit the target they’d send you back there again the next night basically.
KC: That wouldn’t have counted as an op.
JC: And wouldn’t counted it as an op. So you would have -
KC: And your crew would kill you.
JC: Yeah. Yes.
KC: ‘You didn’t do it properly Ken. You made us do another bloody op Ken.’
JC: So but I guess on the other side of that there would be occasions where you were over a target being shot at.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And searchlights going everywhere weren’t there?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you were trying to make sure you hit it and they probably wanted you to leave quick sharp didn’t they?
KC: The rest of the crew.
JC: Yeah.
KC: They’d say, ‘Ken drop the bloody thing. Drop it.’ [laughs]
JC: Yeah. Yeah okay. Alright.
KC: And I didn’t.
JC: No. No. No.
KC: And so when we came back I knew I had a good photograph of what we’d actually, where we’d bombed.
JC: Yeah.
KC: We had bombed the proper target.
JC: Okay so you did those early, those early operations in 9 Squadron and then you were moved to 97 Squadron as part of the Pathfinder force.
KC: Yes.
JC: Why, why were you selected to go to the Pathfinder force?
KC: I think we discussed as a crew because if you went there you got a promotion.
JC: Right.
KC: You got another rank.
JC: I see.
KC: Okay.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah. And we felt that we’d done ten ops on main force.
JC: Yeah.
KC: What we called main force. We felt we were ready to upgrade ourselves.
JC: Right.
KC: And so we volunteered and went through the, of course we had to learn all the latest radar which the main force -
JC: Did you automatically get put on to Pathfinders if you volunteered or is there a selection process that you had to go through. Did they, because presumably they wanted?
KC: There was a selection process.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: But they knew your record if you’d already done ten ops on. As I had.
JC: Yes.
KC: As we had on 9 Squadron.
JC: Yeah.
KC: They knew that you knew what was going on.
JC: Yes.
KC: Sort of thing.
JC: Yes.
KC: And they still put us through this course to learn the latest radar.
JC: Right.
KC: That the Pathfinders had that the main force didn’t have.
JC: So tell, what was the role of the Pathfinder force? What was that really about?
KC: The role of the Pathfinder force was obviously to find the target and mark it with pyrotech markers or whatever –
JC: Yeah.
KC: You were, had been told to use. It was also part of our job was to put down route markers because some of the main force would lose their radar on the way.
JC: Right.
KC: So we’d put markers down which were at their briefings they would be told that route markers would be dropped and look out for a red/yellow or whatever pyrotechnic coming down. That’s the one you aim for going towards the target and things like that you know.
JC: So it was like breadcrumbs was it?
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: Laid for you and you did they breadcrumbs.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Right. Okay. Okay and why, why did they need you to put markers down? Why couldn’t every, every crew just - what, what was the purpose of marking?
KC: They were not highly trained like we were.
JC: Right.
KC: We had been put through these special courses when we joined the Pathfinder force. We had special courses to try to get us to work to the odd minute.
JC: Yes.
KC: Of time.
JC: Yes.
KC: Bearing in mind we were going on a twelve to fifteen hour flight and to talk about getting within the minute or two or whatever was quite a tall order.
JC: Right.
KC: But we did it.
JC: Yeah.
KC: The guys who were, like me who were Pathfinders. That’s what we had to be able to do.
JC: Okay.
KC: That’s why I got a DFC at the end of it.
JC: Good. Yeah. Your timekeeping. That’s good.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Good. So you, so you did this role and you, you marked the targets. Were you also dropping live munitions as well or was it just markers that you were dropping?
KC: Oh every time we dropped bombs.
JC: Yeah. You dropped bombs as well.
KC: Well when I pressed the button to let go the markers.
JC: Yeah.
KC: On that stick of bombing that I was using.
JC: Yeah.
KC: We were getting rid of incendiaries, sometimes incendiaries.
JC: Yes.
KC: Would go down.
JC: Yeah.
KC: A shower of them or it could be incendiaries plus five hundred pound bombs were going down.
JC: Right.
KC: It could be a whole stick of all that stuff.
JC: Yes.
KC: And then in the middle of that we were dropping stuff called Window.
JC: And what is Window?
KC: Window was the code name given to stuff that we used to throw out, disperse out of the aircraft to try to muck about with the ground radar system so it would instead of just getting, picking up our aircraft this was a massive metalised thing that dropped out of our aircraft and it caused consternation to the Jerries on the ground because instead of getting one clear blip of a bomber suddenly there was a bloody great cloud of stuff and you couldn’t pick out the bombers.
JC: Right.
KC: Because of our, the stuff we dropped out of the aircraft.
JC: It sort of confused.
KC: One of the tactics we were doing things against them and they were doing things against us.
JC: Right.
KC: But this was the sort of thing that we were trained to do.
JC: Right. Right. Okay. Okay and so were the Pathfinders always ahead of the main force or did they, ‘cause they had to mark the target.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Or did they have to -
KC: They were always the primary markers.
JC: Yes.
KC: They were Pathfinder primary markers.
JC: Yes.
KC: And you did that when you were, had become very -
JC: Yes.
KC: Experienced Pathfinders.
JC: Right.
KC: But then because some of the raids we had seven or eight hundred aircraft on.
JC: Yes.
KC: There had to be marker crews coming in towards the end.
JC: Yes.
KC: To drop markers for the last lot of ordinary bomber boys that were coming in.
JC: Yes.
KC: They still needed to find and put their bombs down on the target.
JC: Right.
KC: So the Pathfinder guys, believe it or not, we used to hate that. If you were one of the unlucky sods to come at the end you know you would get everything shot out of you because -
JC: Yeah.
KC: By the time you got there the Jerries knew you were coming anyway.
JC: Right.
KC: And their night fighters were up amongst you.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But usually very experienced Pathfinder crews that came in towards the end.
JC: Right.
KC: To make sure that the rest of the main force had some markers to aim at.
JC: Right. Okay. Okay that’s good. Alright. So, any particular, so you obviously did quite a few operations. You did forty five in total didn’t you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And any, any, any of them stand out in your mind at all for any reason?
KC: Um -
JC: You mentioned Berlin as a difficult place to go to.
KC: I did ten ops to Berlin.
JC: Yes.
KC: I think what was the, there was, also we did trips to the Ruhr area.
JC: Yes.
KC: Which was full of anti-aircraft. That was a terrible lot to go over because they used to try to knock you out of the sky straight away. There were some trips. I’m trying to think. I’ll think of it in a minute.
JC: Well just while you’re thinking about that the other thing is obviously during your operational time was the, of, was preparations for D-Day wasn’t it? Going in to -
KC: Yeah.
JC: 1944.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And so you started to intersperse operations over Germany with operations over France.
KC: Absolutely.
JC: And so what was your role really in the kind of run up to D-Day?
KC: We, we were given targets, German targets on the beaches.
JC: Yes.
KC: The Normandy beaches.
JC: Yes.
KC: We were given targets for about three nights in a row.
JC: Yes.
KC: To cover the Germans.
JC: Yes.
KC: They had built quite hefty defence systems behind the beaches of Normandy and we went over, and we came down lowish to do it. We didn’t do it at twenty odd thousand. I think we were dropping stuff over, over the French coast about ten thousand feet.
JC: Right.
KC: And so the idea was to make sure that you clobbered all the German ‘cause they had tanks on the beaches.
JC: Yes.
KC: And they’d built in gun systems.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Into the rocks and so on the beaches and so we used to go and drop sticks of flares to have a look and then when we could see them we’d turn around and do a visual run over them and clobber them.
JC: Right. Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. So that was a, was a slightly different role then from what you’d been -
KC: From normal.
JC: Normal operations.
KC: The normal mass bombing.
JC: Yes. Yes.
KC: We did in places. The big cities in Germany.
JC: Yes. Okay. Alright. So you, so you did all that and that took you up to, to around the time of D-Day which is when I think you had your, your last operation. July 1944 in fact was your, no, sorry, April 1944 was your final operation I think.
KC: Where was that too?
JC: I don’t know. I haven’t got a note of that but your, certainly your latter ones you did, I think, ten or twelve operations over France.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Various parts of France.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Including the Normandy, the sort of, the immediate environment of the beaches.
KC: That’s why I got that gong.
JC: That’s right. Yeah so that was why you got the Legion d’honneur.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So yes you did that. Then you moved on to do sort of training type roles didn’t you? After -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Preparing other crews to go up.
KC: Yeah. That was one of the worrying things in my life.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Whenever I flew with people I’d say, I’d say to, when I got down I’d say that bloody Pardew[?] he can’t land it.
JC: Yes.
KC: He was doing what we called a kangaroo landing every time he landed.
JC: Oh really. Bouncing down the runway.
KC: Yeah.
JC: With inexperienced crews.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And your role with them was to prepare them on the radars and that sort of thing.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. Okay and how were you feeling at this kind of time? What was the sort of, ‘cause you’d done forty five operations so an experienced hand at doing all this so what was your sort of feeling about things? Do you recall how, how that was?
KC: Yes. I felt that I was due for a rest.
JC: Right.
KC: I felt I was happy to come back again.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But I felt we’d had some real tough ops.
JC: Yes.
KC: We’d been on Pathfinders.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And I thought enough is enough for a while.
JC: Yes.
KC: And that’s the way it went.
JC: Yes and you had, I think at least one or two operations where you come back and you’d lost engines.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes and so -
KC: Yes, that’s, yeah at its believe it or not I was never terribly worried about that as long as –
JC: Yeah.
KC: We had two or three engines left.
JC: Yes.
KC: The Lanc would fly on it alright.
JC: Yes.
KC: But if you lost two engines -
JC: Yes.
KC: Particularly on one side.
JC: Yes.
KC: That could be, that meant that meant the pilot really, it was it was really critical because he had to operate the pedals to offset the fact he hadn’t have any power on one side.
JC: Yes.
KC: He’s got all the power on the left side.
JC: Yes.
KC: Or the right side.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And it needed quite a bit of physical effort to control that.
JC: Right. Right. Okay -
KC: But we had this chap Jim Kermans [?] who was a bloody good pilot.
JC: Yes.
KC: He was mature. He was twenty nine years old and we were all about twenty one.
JC: Right.
KC: The rest of the crew.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And he was mature, he was a trained lawyer in Australia.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And you know he was, he was a great guy really.
JC: Right.
KC: I didn’t like him too much as a man.
JC: Right.
KC: ‘Cause he hadn’t got any sense of humour.
JC: Right.
KC: But as, as an aviator he was tops.
JC: Yes. Got you back safely all those -
KC: Yes.
JC: All those times.
KC: Yes.
JC: Yes. Yeah, so that’s good and what happened to the crew after you finished your forty five operations. Did you stay in touch with them or did you all disperse to do other things?
KC: We soon dispersed off.
JC: Yes.
KC: To do, you know, different members of the crew, whatever their job was, they were sent to training schools.
JC: Yes.
KC: To, like the wireless operator guy would go -
JC: Yeah.
KC: To help train new boys and so on and that sort of thing. Yeah.
JC: Yeah. Okay, alright. And at the end of the war you were you did this goodwill tour as well which we hadn’t spoken about so -
KC: To America.
JC: Yes. So, tell, tell us about that. That was with quite a famous squadron wasn’t it?
KC: 617.
JC: Yes with 617.
KC: The one that Guy Gibson when they did the -
JC: Yes.
KC: Eder dams and all that.
JC: Yes that’s right. The Dambusters.
KC: They were based at that time at Binbrook.
JC: Right.
KC: And the AOC asked me would I like to go along -
JC: Yes.
KC: And fly on that trip to America with 617.
JC: And what was the purpose of the trip? You said it was a goodwill tour.
KC: Goodwill.
JC: So it was to -
KC: We were going to first of all flew across the Atlantic to Washington DC.
JC: Yes.
KC: And whilst we there of course we, the public were invited to come and look at our aircraft because you know we had, we had operational bomber aircraft.
JC: Right.
KC: So the public were invited in, in their droves.
JC: Yeah.
KC: To see our Lancasters.
JC: Yeah.
KC: You know, and it was quite a sight.
JC: Yeah.
KC: To have the whole squadron of Lancaster lined up on their airfields.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And the crowds would come in literally in their hundreds and thousands.
JC: Right.
KC: To see them.
JC: Right.
KC: You know.
JC: And what’s your memories of America having gone from wartime Britain. You know, immediately after the war to what was your lasting memory of America?
KC: I thought they were lucky sods.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah because -
JC: I guess the food was slightly different wasn’t it?
KC: Oh yeah. Yeah, that was lovely you know ‘cause we were still on rationing back home.
JC: Yes.
KC: But there we had the best of everything.
JC: Yes.
KC: That we could lay our hands on.
JC: Yes.
KC: You know.
JC: Fantastic.
KC: Sorry that sounds awful but you know what I mean.
JC: Fantastic. Okay and, alright so, and so you toured around the States with this -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Good-will tour. Okay. Right -
KC: We were on Lincolns by the way.
JC: You flew on Lincolns. Not on -
KC: Not Lancasters.
JC: Right.
KC: They’d just brought the Lincoln in and we were, we took, was it twelve or fourteen Lincolns across to America? And of course everywhere we went, the first thing we would arrive we would do a flypast.
JC: Yes.
KC: Bloody great Lancs flying over the town.
JC: Or Lincolns, yeah.
KC: Or Lincolns rather.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: Flying over their towns.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Which they seemed to enjoy and we went right across. I mean we started off in Washington DC was our first port of call and then to Detroit. Across America to Detroit and from Detroit across to Kansas and Kansas to LA and from LA coming back more south. What was the place in the south? I’ve forgotten the big cities across the south.
JC: Was it Dallas or somewhere like that?
KC: Dallas, yeah.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Dallas was one of them.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah and then back up to Washington eventually.
JC: Right.
KC: And from there and then we took off and flew back to England.
JC: Right. Right.
KC: It was, to me it was an absolute education ‘cause I mean we saw the states you know all the time.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Seeing places we’d read about and never been to.
JC: Yes, fantastic alright. Good. Okay so you came back and then you had your post war career and you carried on flying Mosquitos and then you converted to some of the early jets didn’t you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And what was that like? Going from a sort of a propeller-driven plane to a, to a jet.
KC: That was an education.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yeah. So that was, that was the early Meteors and then on to Javelins wasn’t it?
KC: Javelins. Yeah.
JC: Yes. Yes, okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So, good -
KC: Super planes they were. I thought anyway.
JC: Okay and you took and you took some of these planes on overseas didn’t you? I remember seeing pictures of you in places like Cyprus.
KC: Yeah.
JC: You went on training.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Operations didn’t you? Down -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Down there.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Were you involved in any of the sort of post war, so there was obviously problems in Cyprus and then there was -
KC: Yeah, we were there.
JC: In Suez and things like that were you?
KC: What aircraft did we have to go there?
JC: It would have been either Meteors or, or Javelins I’m assuming. Was it?
KC: I think it was Javelins.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah ‘cause when we were there we were the air commander of Cyprus [billed us?] we were told quickly, ‘You are now part of my defence force.’
JC: Right.
KC: Sort of thing and I was going off at night in the dark. My crew and other members of the crew and so on ‘cause they were having problems with the, what are they called? The Jews. You know the -
JC: The Israelis.
KC: Israelis. Yeah.
JC: Yeah.
KC: They were being a nuisance and coming over Cyprus and things like that.
JC: Right.
KC: And into the Cyprus airspace.
JC: Yeah.
KC: So we’d get scrambled to go and chase them off.
JC: Yeah.
KC: At night.
JC: Okay.
KC: But they were also Turkey were reinforcing their own people because there were a lot of Turks on the island of Cyprus.
JC: Yes.
KC: And the Turks were bringing in, we found out through flying -
JC: Yeah.
KC: They were bringing it, dropping in at night on parachutes.
JC: Right.
KC: Down to their own people in the villages.
JC: Yes.
KC: So we, more than once I’d been up the backside of one of these guys dropping stuff to the Turks from Turkey.
JC: What? Transport planes -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Coming over.
KC: Yeah I used to hone in on them I used to tell our control downstairs, ‘Got one, I’m locked on to him. I’ve got one.’
JC: Right.
KC: And they used to say 'Monitor him. Keep an eye on him.'
JC: Yeah.
KC: For the -
JC: Right okay fantastic. And then you say you carried on and you actually moved. Did a permanent stint out in Aden. What was going on in Aden? Why, why was there an air force base in Aden?
KC: I’m trying to think what made me, what made us go there.
JC: It was a British protectorate really wasn’t it?
KC: It was a British protectorate and I think that, I can’t remember how I ended up going there, what made me go there but that was a very interesting part of my life because you know we were the forerunner of what later was going to be problems up in the Persian Gulf.
JC: Right.
KC: From Aden I used to jump on aeroplanes and go up to some of these towns, biggish towns and so on the Persian Gulf which later became real trouble spots.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. Okay so that was that and then you came back and I think you did sort of some MOD type roles until the end of your air force career in 1968. Moving around. Non-flying duties. Yes. Yeah, okay.
KC: I’d had my innings.
JC: You’d had your innings at that point. Had your innings at that point. Okay. Good.
KC: I was very lucky to get away with it, with what I did when I think when I look back at what I did and what could have gone wrong, you know things like that. Amazing.
JC: Amazing. Yeah absolutely.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Good. Alright.
KC: You’ve got a history book now.
SJ: We have [laughs]. So did you have any lucky charms or superstitions?
KC: No. I honestly didn’t. I didn’t believe in it.
SJ: Yeah.
KC: No. No.
PJ: They say a lot of crews are superstitious or they were weren’t they, you know and there was always this little teddy bear in their -
KC: Yeah. I don’t think I had anything like that.
PJ: Coat or something.
KC: No. No. No.
JC: No. You didn’t believe in all of that.
KC: No.
JC: Just a good square meal.
KC: That’s right.
JC: What happened, what happened when you got back from flying, as well? Presumably you got another, there was a debriefing.
KC: No.
JC: Was it a debriefing?
KC: We got a night flying supper.
JC: You got a – did you?
KC: That’s what it was called. The night flying supper.
JC: Oh right. So you had a good meal before you went and a good meal when you came back did you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Oh right.
KC: When we came back there would be plates of eggs and bacon.
JC: Again.
KC: Beans and things like that again you know.
JC: Yeah.
KC: We, well we’d been flying for the last ten hours.
PJ: Yeah.
KC: Things like that and we were a bit, bit ravenous.
JC: Yeah. Did you take presumably in addition to your kit could you take things up in the plane with you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: A flask of coffee and things like that, did you?
KC: Yeah Mars bars and things like that. Stick it down there.
JC: Yes.
KC: There was a zip pocket in your trouser leg.
JC: Yes.
KC: And so on to stick a couple of Mars bars in there and things like that.
JC: Keep you going yeah?
KC: Just in case you had to bail out.
JC: Yes.
KC: People used to try and think ahead and think well at least I’ve got a couple of Mars bars I can have something to eat for the next couple of hours or so.
JC: Yes. Yeah, okay.
PJ: Did you all used to go out for a drink together? ‘Cause there was always this thing isn’t there, they say, that good crews -
JC: Well I -
PJ: All stuck together, and they all went out together like family.
KC: Well we did a lot of it. The strange thing was that some of my crew were not terribly social. Only one or two of them and we were seven in the crew of course and there was probably three or four of us that did that and there were a couple who always had a reason for not coming. Yeah. But you know we used to get on and let them do with what they wanted to do.
JC: Was there anybody out of the crew you felt particularly friendly with compared to the others?
KC: Em, Ken Randall, our flight engineer was a lovely chap. Brummy. You know, Birmingham. He was almost naïve but he was absolutely a totally professional flight engineer. He knew everything about all the engines. He could hear noises nobody else could hear coming from the engines and things like that and nice boy, nice fella.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Our tail gunner was absolutely, absolutely, absolutely broad Scotch so if we were being shot at, being chased he would shout but he was shouting in Scot and we couldn’t understand [laughs].
JC: Okay was, he was from Glasgow or somewhere wasn’t he?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, yes. Fantastic. Good. Any other questions? I think I’ve got most of the ones from here.
SJ: Yeah. How do you feel that Bomber Command has been treated since the war?
KC: Pretty grim I think. Politicians I think are absolutely shysters. They want, you know they want things their own way and, but they don’t realise how people are doing trying to please them and I always felt that some of the things I’ve read that were going on around me were absolutely terrible. Politicians, on the whole, I have no time for them. They’re just there for the moment and they get what they can at the time and that’s it. But then that’s me. I could be quite different from anybody else on that.
PJ: What about a medal? A campaign medal?
KC: Yeah.
PJ: Do you think it’s, that you should have had a medal because they never had a medal did they? They had the bomber clasp they just brought in. A campaign medal.
KC: Well, I had medals.
PJ: Yeah but a campaign medal for, you know like for actual the bombing duties and -
JC: You had, you had a war medal.
KC: Yeah.
JC: You have an Aircrew Europe Medal, you had a defence medal and a Pathfinder Eagle.
KC: Yeah. And I got a DFC.
JC: And you got your DFC as well.
KC: Yeah.
JC: But yes there was, there were campaign medals for others weren’t there but not for Bomber Command?
KC: Bomber. We didn’t get anything special campaign for the -
JC: No.
KC: All the raids we did. No.
JC: No.
KC: You know we were going off night after night in the Lancasters with a bomb load. Not just bombs. We had bloody great loads of incendiaries we were taking to cart and drop down. It was, when you think back on it was a dirty war really but we did what the Germans tried to do to us didn’t we? I think we were a bit more successful.
PJ: Well, thank you Ken for letting us interview you for the IBCC.
KC: Okay.
PJ: It’s been a pleasure to hear your stories.
KC: You’ve got some notes.
PJ: Thank you.
KC: Yeah. Good.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ACookKHH160725, PCookKHH1601
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Kenneth Cook
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:20:59 audio recording
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter and Sandra Jones
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-07-25
Description
An account of the resource
Wing Commander Kenneth Cook was born in Randwick in Gloucestershire. At Marlings grammar school, he joined the Air Training Corps. On the outbreak of war he joined the Royal Air Force and went to America under the Arnold Scheme for pilot training. He continued training in Canada as a navigator/bomb aimer. He returned to Great Britain and continued training at RAF Cottesmore and the Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Winthorpe. His crew were posted to 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney. After ten operations, they joined 97 Squadron Pathfinders. Altogether he flew 45 operations, including several to Berlin. At the end of his tours, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Thereafter, he served at 1 Group Headquarters, and then RAF Fiskerton, RAF Fulbeck and RAF Syerston, tasked with checking the readiness of new crews, specifically the navigators. For a time he engaged in preparations for Tiger force. At the end of the war, he accompanied 617 Squadron on a goodwill tour of the United States. After the war, he remained in the Royal Air Force and was stationed in Aden and Cyprus. He was awarded the Legion d’honneur and rose to be a wing commander. He retired in 1968 and thereafter pursued a civilian career.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Janet McGreevy
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Cyprus
Great Britain
United States
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Rutland
Germany--Berlin
Yemen (Republic)
Germany
1 Group
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
97 Squadron
Botha
crewing up
dispersal
Distinguished Flying Cross
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lincoln
Meteor
military living conditions
military service conditions
Mosquito
Nissen hut
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Pathfinders
RAF Bardney
RAF Bawtry
RAF Coltishall
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Fulbeck
RAF Syerston
RAF Winthorpe
sanitation
Stearman
Tiger force
training
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/232/3409/GolledgeG.1.JPG
3eaabae8d3beba7a6b44941651e0f3e7
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/232/3409/AGolledgeG150511.1.mp3
28a517d650bbda702216fb03e4ebb847
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
Golledge, Geoff
G Golledge
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Geoffrey Golledge (- 2016). Geoff Golledge served as ground personnel with 44 Squadron at RAF Waddington before training as an air gunner and flying operations in Wellingtons with 205 Group in North Africa and Italy.
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
2015-05-11
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
Golledge, G
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DE: And that should be recording. So, this is an interview with Geoff Golledge by Daniel Ellin. It’s the 11th of May 2015 and it’s in Lincoln. Geoff if I can just start with some really sensible, silly questions like where were you born and brought up?
GG: I was born in Walthamstow.
DE: Ahum.
GG: In London.
DE: Yes.
GG: I lived a fairly ordinary life. Went to the local Church of England school and, I left school at fourteen and went into a factory doing engineering. There main job was supposed to be shop fronts and that all that sort of thing but I’d have been only about a year in business when the war broke out. So at fifteen immediately I was on war work. They started making parts of a tail plane of an aircraft that was supposed to be a super new bomber but in actual fact turned out to be a complete flop called the Albemarle and er I was sent round to a parent factory round the corner from the one I was working in and I became an AID inspector. I had to inspect parts, see they were ok and then get a hammer and er something and banged on a number on it to say that it had been inspected and the part number and everything and I did that. And er at seventeen and a quarter I volunteered for the Royal Air Force. Went for the test in Euston, was accepted as wireless operator / air gunner. At eighteen, or just after eighteen, I was called up, went to Blackpool and I did my preliminary training. All the usual stuff. Teach you how to use a rifle and drill and all the rest of it and giving public displays of drill in front of holiday makers who stood there clapping and cheering while we were learning to do drill. And er I got on quite well until I got to the wireless and like so many people there I got up to about twelve words a minute and that was about as fast as I could go. Well at that time the RAF wanted sixteen words a minute before you could go on to stage two of wireless training. Later on, after I’d turned off on to something else they brought it back to twelve but by that time I had been refused wireless so I was then put forward for a straight air gunner and of course there was a long waiting list for a gunnery training school so I was put on to RAF Waddington on the ground staff. That was at the beginning of 1943. Ah, my, I was allocated to 44 Rhodesia Squadron and I was put on the flare path. I was in a crew of four and our job was to look after the flare path, which in those days Waddington had grass runways not, they didn’t have the concrete runways of today and the lighting was gooseneck flares which is like a sort of low on the ground type watering can. It didn’t stand any height at all and there was a long piece of wick in it and some spirit, that was lit and you had a line, two lines of them and that was your runway lights.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And that was my job on a crew of four and I did that until about the end of March when they finally decided to open up the new aerodromes at Dunholme Lodge where my squadron went to and Bardney where 9 Squadron went to. They was the two squadrons at Waddington at the time and as I was waiting to go on a gunnery course they didn’t bother with sending me to Dunholme Lodge with the 44. So I was kept there to keep an eye on the Wimpey men who were the Irish labourers who were doing the runway. Waiting till they picked a few wild mushrooms and then I had to go out, confiscate them and bring them back so the squadron leader could have them for his tea [laughs]. And I stayed there until about the end of June when eventually of course I was posted on a gunnery course which meant going a couple of weeks at Bridlington.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And a couple of weeks at Bridgwater.
DE: Ok.
GG: [unclear] And um, then I went to County Down, Northern Ireland for my flying training and eventually I passed out and became a fully-fledged sergeant, air gunner after which of course I was sent home on leave for a week and then up to Morecambe where I had my yellow fever jabs and all the other jabs they wanted to give you and of course got all my tropical kit. Up to Glasgow on a troop ship and out to the Middle East.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: And I went out to Egypt first of all and eventually went to Palestine to Jerusalem where I was kept there for couple of weeks until finally we got posted to an airfield near the Egyptian border at a place called Aqir.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And we flew from there. We crewed up and that’s where I flew from.
DE: What were you flying?
GG: Wellingtons.
DE: Ok.
GG: Wellingtons Mark 1Cs
DE: Ahum.
GG: I had quite a good time there for a few weeks and um then we got posted to Italy to 205 Group which was part of the Central Mediterranean Air Force but we were given a week’s leave so the whole crew went to Alexandria for a week and er I didn’t feel too well towards the end of the week and in fact coming back to Cairo to the point where we were going to be informed about going to Italy and where we were sent off from there um, I didn’t feel too well and people had to carry some of my cases and, 'cause we had something like three kit bags, one for ordinary kit, one for flying kit and one for tropical kit. And I couldn’t carry anything, I felt so ill. The next morning we got there late at night um went into the tent and had a sleep and the next morning I was on parade there very early because the sun used to get up and get very hot and um I could feel myself swaying there while I was on parade so as soon as the parade finished and we’d been told what to do I went sick.
DE: Ahum.
GG: I went and saw the MOD, the MO rather, and um he immediately sent me off to the sick bay where I spent twenty four hours. They pushed M&B [?] I think it was. They said it had done wonders for Churchill. It was a new drug but unfortunately as fast as they put it in me it came out again. They tried it all ways and in the end, the next day, I was rushed to Number One RAF hospital in Cairo where I spent the next six weeks.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: And then from there of course eventually they said there’s a hospital ship coming in and so, to Port Said, so they took me on a hospital train down to Port Said, put me on a lovely hospital ship and we were brought back to England and eventually of course, after some months hanging about, um, I was discharged in February ’45.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: From the RAF. That was it.
DE: So you were demobbed before the end of the war in effect.
GG: Yeah.
DE: Yeah.
GG: And on VE Day of course I was actually working and I was in working at a job. We were doing er, burglar alarm just off er, Oxford Street.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And so we saw all the celebrations going on.
DE: But you didn’t get involved yourself?
GG: No I didn’t get involved myself because, you know I wasn’t a well man and of course eventually thanks to the inefficiency of a doctor at the chest clinic I was suddenly, the doctor suddenly realised I was dying and he rushed me into a sanatorium. In fact it's the same one that Jimmy Greaves has just been put into.
DE: Oh.
GG: Broomfield Hospital.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: It was a sanatorium in those days and I spent two and a quarter years there. I lost a lung as a result of it, had an operation, and er, eventually I came out and got back to normal life after about, I had what five years I wasn’t allowed to work.
DE: I see.
GG: They wouldn’t let me work.
DE: Ahum.
GG: So, eventually I did get to work and carried on civvy [?] life until I was in me forties when I found that I could get back into the RAF in a training branch where I became squadron warrant officer on a cadet squadron where I used to teach lads how to fly and everything and did a lot of flying myself of course.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And um, until I got to fifty eight when they said you’re too old. There’s your cap, go [laughter]. So I had to get out.
DE: I see.
GG: So unfortunately I didn’t want to go but I had to leave the RAF at fifty eight.
DE: What was it that made you want to get back in the RAF when you discovered that you could?
GG: Well I loved the RAF. I liked, I’m a service, I mean some people like service life.
DE: Ahum.
GG: All the ordering and all the rest of it. I, I’m not one of those that dislike it. I love it. You know, on parades and all that sort of thing. And of course as you see from the photograph up there on the desk, I’ll show it to you – under the birthday cards. Er, I was er, standard bearer for about thirty five years. This is my thirty fifth year as a standard bearer. I retired last Christmas but I’ve come out of retirement to do one or two jobs. So, I still wear a uniform of sorts.
DE: That’s smashing. And you still get involved in events like Where Were We.
GG: Yes.
DE: And that.
GG: I’ve, I've agreed. I’ve just come back from the Netherlands where I did, I went into training to make sure I could do the march 'cause I have to lead a parade in the Netherlands for their Liberation Day.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And I lead the parade you know. I were determined to do it one more time [laughter].
DE: Smashing.
GG: So I did it. And er, there’s 50/61 Squadron, they have a memorial service in June. I shall do that and if they want me for the ceremony of the memorial for Bomber Command I’ll be prepared to do that. I will also, if they would like it, to do what I’ve done for the last about four years do the Priory Academy. They have a ceremony on the 11th of December in the school hall.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And I have provided a standard to do the dip so I shall do that and after that of course we will probably lay out the standard in the school at Welton.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And that will be it.
DE: I see. Ok. So you think it’s important that, that stories like these are remembered then?
GG: Yeah, yeah, yeah I mean it's I think it’s extremely important because if you look at the way the Dutch look it, it’s hammered in to the children in Holland because we Brits are their liberators.
DE: Ahum.
GG: You know, because it was the Dutch, err it was the British Army and also the Canadians who cleared the Germans out of Holland and of course every night there was the RAF going over and of course there was Manna where we dropped food on them and they never forget.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And so they hammer it into the children, make sure the children don’t forget it. In fact, one ceremony we used to do, we've stopped doing it er, recently, er, in a wood in, um, near a town called er, or village called Vaassen where it was one of the first places involved in the war. There was, in the woods nearby there was an aircraft T Tommy of 15 Squadron, a Stirling bomber, crashed and all but one were killed and they have a memorial there, little pile of stones with a cross on it and that is looked after by the local children.
DE: Ahum.
GG: Yeah it's eh, they do this sort of thing and of course the children get involved in Drompton [?] where I go every year which is literally my second home now I’ve been going there so long. Um, there are various organisations, embassies and people like that as well as the services they all lay wreaths at the memorial in Drompton [?].
DE: Ahum.
GG: Which happens to be the propeller off of, or one of the propellers off of F for Freddie 12th Squadron stationed at Wickenby and that that’s been recovered, cleaned up.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And it’s in reasonable condition and that’s been stuck into the wall with some inscription and there’s er, one of these Olympic type flame bowls on one end and they have flag staffs everywhere and the children, there's a whole load of boy scouts and that, carry the wreaths and then when somebody is due to go forward to lay a wreath the scouts go up to it and then wait for the, whoever's going to lay it comes along, they hand it to them and they lay it.
DE: Ahum.
GG: So the children get involved in that way and it’s very, very good.
DE: Why do you think it’s different in this country?
GG: Well I don’t know. I suppose it’s the fact that we Brits don’t look at things in quite the same way as the Dutch do because you know we weren’t invaded. We didn’t suffer. Alright, we got bombed I know but we didn’t suffer the way the Dutch did. I mean, it’s a different thing.
DE: Ahum.
GG: To not be bombed but to be imprisoned the way they were. Starved and they were starving.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And they remember it all.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And they want the children to remember.
DE: Ahum. Smashing thank you. If we can, can I go back and ask a few more questions about your time when you were working on the flare path at Waddington.
GG: Yeah that was um, quite a good job. You had to lay out the flames, flame, well er, I suppose really they were like a watering can. That’s all they were. Virtually a watering can.
DE: Ahum.
GG: One of these low ones you know with the long spout and um, we used to have to lay them out and light them and of course sometimes you got a Dornier long range fighter would drone overhead waiting for the bombers to come back. When they were coming in to land and their speed had got down to about a hundred mile an hour, coming into land, they would shoot them up.
DE: Ahum.
GG: They never ever did while I was there fortunately although we had Dorniers buzzing around because it meant that we had a Bedford thirty [?] hundred weight truck with a canvas over the back and another chap and myself used to hang on the back, go down the middle of the runway, stop at each light, one would go one way one would go the other way just tip the thing and then put it in the lorry.
DE: Ahum.
GG: Well we went down doing this well of course when you tip it the spirit comes down and knocks the flame out. Not all the time though [laughter]. So it wasn’t long before we had swimming in, the back of the lorry was swimming in turps or paraffin whatever it was and you know one of these things on there caught light and we were in our old flying suits and welly boots and we used to have to try and stamp the flames out and there’s a Dornier circling and here you are trying to put out all the flames. Eventually we used to do it and manage it alright. And er, we got over it. But of course the worst one was er, one night we did what we’d always done which wasn’t strictly according the rules. The whole crew should have been in the chequered caravan at the end of the runway but what they’d done they took off[?]. We don’t need four of us so three used to go back downstairs in the control room and go to sleep in their beds and leave one in the caravan. Well this particular night they'd ordered a maximum effort and I, there was eighteen aircraft on 9 and eighteen on 44. Well I think that night there were about thirty five aircraft went off. They all came back and I was there[unclear]. It was my turn to be Joe Soap out there with a great big flagon of cocoa and some bread and sard — I think it was sardines or something you know and um about two o’clock in the morning when I knew they’d be coming back, I’m sitting there in the caravan when suddenly the, we had a — outside on the tractor we had a box. I don’t know what they call it. It was both microphone and loudspeaker combined and suddenly it woke up and said that they wanted to talk to me and so I went out there and apparently an aircraft had crossed the coast, the first one back had crossed the coast near Grimsby. It was G George 44 Squadron I think and he called up and asked for permission to join the circuit at Waddington. Well when the girl pressed the key to answer, the radio just died. They tried and couldn’t get it back so they called me up and said would I talk to him because we had a very ancient radio in the corner of this caravan which nobody had ever, we all knew how it worked but we'd never ever tried it. So, I went in there, fingers crossed and I tried, did the necessary and you know spoke to the G George 44 and to my utter amazement, 'cause I didn’t expect it, as though he was standing beside me I got this pilot calling me back and I, got over my surprise and told him to join the circuit at fifteen hundred feet. Well no sooner had he called back and I nipped outside and told them I’d put him on the circuit then somebody else came over the coast and called up and so I was in and out and, ‘cause with thirty five aircraft as it turned out they all came back that night. We didn’t lose one. We got a piece of paper, a pencilled column down there and a pencilled column down there with ABC.....XY and you know whatever aircraft had gone off and all I had time to do when one landed was to run a pencil through A 44 or B 9 Squadron you know whatever and er, you had no time then 'cause they were coming in thick and fast. The radio was going. I had to give them a running commentary and just to add to it all I had to take the coloured light off the Aldis lamp and do a cinema usherettes job and you know point them which way they had got to taxi to go to their dispersal. Well I’m running in and out, here [unclear] everywhere doing about five jobs all at once, I somehow, I managed at eighteen years old. I managed to bring in thirty five aircraft, put them all to bed and nobody ever found out that all their lives had been hanging on the reliance of an eighteen year old. How I did it I don’t know and I, somebody must have been sitting up there I think, on my shoulder and um, you know I often think about it and my blood runs cold when I think what could have happened because if I’d have made a mistake and brought the wrong, I had, ‘cause when an aircraft is at fifteen hundred feet when it’s clear you tell them to land. You’ve then got to bring the aircraft at two thousand feet down to fifteen hundred, the one at two and a half thousands got to come down to two thousand, and you’ve got to remember who is where and you’ve got two squadrons.
DE: Ahum.
GG: You know two As, two Bs, two Cs. I somehow got it all right. They all finished up in the right place and there was no accidents. You know my blood runs cold when I think about it, what could have happened. I mean if anybody had made a mistake.
DE: Ahum. But it did happen didn’t it? Yeah.
GG: Yeah because you don’t realise what it's like. To give you some idea. At night when they took off if it was still light and you could just see the light of the sky you’d look up and you know when you get these flocks of birds that go around you know. A whole, multitude of them just suddenly go off one way or another, well it’s like that looking at all these aircraft. There’s dozens of them. Well there’s hundreds of them up there all circling round and you think how on earth are they managing not to hit one another, you know. And you see all that going on you realise how easy it is you know with — 'cause there’s aerodromes all round Lincoln, you know. It could quite easily have an accident. Quite easy. And the fact that I got them all down and 'course I daren’t say anything because they’d have been court martials right, left and centre.
DE: Because you should have had three other people helping?
GG: There should have been four of us out there not one. I daren’t say anything ‘cause once I accepted the 44 G George that was it. I was — I was committed then.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: I couldn’t go back and.
DE: How long did it take do you think?
GG: I don’t know. It didn’t take long because they all came back fairly quickly. I mean you didn’t have time to look at the watch and see what the time was. You were too busy in and out, in and out, you know.
DE: So, so the, the tannoy thing to, for you to talk to the control tower was outside in a box and the radio for you.....
GG: Yeah.
DE: .... to talk to the aircraft was inside.
GG: Was inside in the caravan so I’m running in and out, in and out like a lunatic and then you had to get the light and you know you had to know which one went where you know ‘cause one lot were parked there and another lot were parked here. 44 were here and 9 were over there.
DE: So they had their separate dispersals?
GG: Yeah.
DE: Was there somebody waiting to meet them at their [unclear]?
GG: Oh yeah you could see men with little hand torches and they just used to go round and round and guide them, on to their spots, but I had to show them which way to, which road to take as it were.
DE: I see.
GG: And once they get on that road of course there's the airmen there to guide them.
DE: So correct me if I’m wrong where was the chequered caravan? It was at the end of the runway?
GG: Always at the end of the run — at the beginning.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: Yeah.
DE: Ok thank you.
GG: I did.
DE: Sorry?
GG: I did have one other incident there. It was funny. One night they were due to come back and they were circling and they were ready, the first one to come in and suddenly we noticed the leading light had gone out so the corporal said to me 'Oh nip over and get that one lit again'. So I ran across, got it alight. I came back the shortest way between the two lights. I got about halfway across the runway or the grass there, that served as a runway, and I got stuck in the mud. I couldn’t, and there was a plane coming in at me and I couldn’t get me feet out. Now these wellies we used to wear old flying suits and then the wellies on top and the only way you could get the wellies off was to sit on a bed, hang on to the frame and somebody grabbed two hands and pull it off, that's the only way you could get it off. And I’m there and there’s this Lanc coming in and fortunately he'd made a mistake. He was coming in too low and he’s coming straight at me at about a hundred odd mile an hour and I’m, can’t get my feet out and my pals are all going [unclear] like that, and um, there’s a little light at the side of the runway just before the lights start. It’s like a tool box. About that long and about that high but it’s, it’s not set level it’s set at an angle for aircraft coming in and in the end there’s a glass. Now if you’re coming in at the right height all you see is a little green light. It’s only a little green light, not very big, 'bout that — 'bout that round.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And if you’re coming in too low it shows red, if you’re coming in too high it’s white and this plane was coming in and the old Merlins were all spitting and coughing as they shut down and at the, what must have been literally the last second the pilot suddenly spotted the red light, realised he was too low, suddenly the four Merlins burst into life, the nose of the Lanc went up and it went over my head and the tailplane, which obviously came down, missed me by about ten feet I suppose and he went over the top of me and he went round. Course my pals all ran out and pulled me out the mud. So that, that’s another thing that could happen.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: So, you got a bit of life and excitement doing that.
DE: Yeah wow. So was it really very, very muddy or, or it must have been if you got stuck?
GG: No it wasn’t muddy. It was just an odd spot, just an odd spot where there was no grass.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: And it was muddy there and course you can’t get your feet out the wellies and you can’t get the welly out the mud you know. Just holding me.
DE: Crikey. You said when you were telling me the story about talking down the aircraft. The two squadrons. You called yourself something. You called yourself Joe Soap. Can you explain that?
GG: Oh I was the, it’s an old saying you know. You, you’re the mug.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: You’re the one that’s got lumbered with it. You know it could have been Cyril or Fred you know. It was me that night. I was Joe Soap.
DE: So it's a nickname.
GG: Yeah it’s a nickname. You’re the mug.
DE: Right.
GG: And the other thing of course after the two squadrons moved we built these four, well the builders put four towers up, scaffolding.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And a red light was hung on it. Well these lights they weren’t modern things they were old fashioned. They weighed half a ton. And these heavy things, and I used to have to, how — how my belt on my uniform stood the weight I don’t know, it’s a wonder it didn’t rip the belt off. Used to have to tie one on my belt, a fresh one and I used to have to go all the way up these scaffolding and it was you know you had gaps like that between bars and you had to somehow get up.
DE: Three or four foot gaps yeah.
GG: I had to climb all the way up the top, take the old one off, hang it up somewhere, get the other one off, hang the new one on, switch the light on and put the other one on my belt and then climb down and I had four of these things to do.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: And I had to do it morning and night.
DE: What were the towers for?
GG: Well you have to have to have a red light on any tall tower, you know.
DE: Yes.
GG: For aircraft.
DE: Yes.
GG: And any tall tower or a church steeple, anything got to have a red light on it.
DE: Ahum.
GG: So.
DE: Well the scaffolding you say they were scaffolding towers. What were the scaffolding, what was the scaffolding for?
GG: Well the scaffolding really was just to put the lights up really. They didn’t serve any other purpose.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: Because you couldn’t land on the airfield. You see if you got those four red lights people knew that the airfield wasn’t in use. Also of course there is a recognition, station recognition.
DE: Ahum.
GG: There’s a light in one corner of the airfield which flashes a letter. Every airfield's got its own letter and it kept flashing S or R or J or whatever, whatever the station one was.
DE: Yes. Oh so, so the towers with the lights on were to tell aircrew not to land because –
GG: Yes.
DE: New runways were being put in.
GG: Yeah.
DE: I see. Ok.
GG: That’s to warn them off.
DE: Yeah.
GG: And I used to have to go up there morning and night.
DE: So you were Joe Soap again.
GG: Talk about feeling like a mountaineer.
DE: How long did it take them to put the runways in?
GG: I don’t know because they were halfway through. Well I say halfway through. They were a fair way through before I got my posting and I went off to Bridgnorth for a couple of weeks then Bridlington for a couple of weeks and then off to Ireland for my flying training.
DE: So this was your air gunning, air gunnery posting?
GG: Air gunnery training yeah. We learned to fly you know went on the planes out there. Oh used to have fun out there you know. We used to go round 'cause all the pilots were all pilots who'd done a tour of ops. A lot of them were gun happy to be honest and they used to do the daftest things and we used to be flying around just off the coast where we were there was a lighthouse. And I’m in it one day, in the plane, and er we're flying around, round this lighthouse and the pilot said, ‘go on pepper ‘em’. And we were blazing away with the machine gun in the sea all around the lighthouse and the old lighthouse keeper was on the phone [laughs] mad. Then another time one of the planes — the local village had a very wide high street and down one side of it was a sort of big store with a bit of a tower in the middle with a clock in it and the pilot flew that low, it was so wide he could fly low just to see what the time was [laughs]. The phone [laughs]. Oh dear. They were mad as march hares. It was really funny. But um, I remember when we passed out we stood out there and we'd all got our stripes and our wings and the station commander made a speech. He called us all the showers he could name and we were the, we were the pits. We all standing there smiling. We couldn’t have cared less. Oh it was hilarious but I enjoyed the time in Ireland. It was good. Yeah lovely. And then of course we all went out to the Middle East.
DE: Ahuh yeah.
GG: Yeah.
DE: You mentioned before when we were talking just before the interview that you got your driving licence. Did they use you as a driver as well then?
GG: Well I used to drive ‘cause um, I did, I don’t think I had my driving licence with me but I, they expect you to drive. I used to have to drive a tractor pulling a four wheeled caravan, pulling a light, a great big like searchlight thing.
DE: Ahum.
GG: Which stood up on this trailer and then behind that was a flat trailer which we put our lamps and that on, so I used to have to drive this train around. I hadn’t got a licence, only this temporary thing. And then sometimes I’d have the van, we had a little Hillman ten hundred weight and I used to perhaps drive the CO down to the station if he was going on leave, you know and drive around the camp, you know.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: It was fun.
DE: Did you have a close group of friends at Waddington then?
GG: Well I didn’t have many friends there because I had a second home there. Some friends of mine, well some people I knew, they were related to people who lived a few doors from me in London, they had a newspaper shop in Bracebridge. Down in the town there.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And their son had gone in the army and he was their only son. Got nobody and they missed him and they said, 'Oh come and stay here when you’re off duty'. Well I used to do twenty four hours on. Twenty four hours off, so on my off time I had my bike there.
DE: Ahum.
GG: I used to ride down into Bracebridge, I used to stay at there so I spent a lot of time there so, and course being out in the airfield I never saw anybody much on the camp. Only my own crew.
DE: Right.
GG: So I didn’t have many friends there really in that respect.
DE: So you didn’t associate much with anyone else there?
GG: No ‘cause soon as I was off duty I was down to Bracebridge.
DE: Did you get into Lincoln much?
GG: Not a lot really because as I say it was Bracebridge and that was it.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: I went in a few times but not a lot. I didn’t really get to know Lincoln until I moved here.
DE: Ahuh ok. I’m just slightly curious about the three people who were asleep when you were doing your, your deeds and talking down the aircraft. Was it a thing you took in turns to do or um.
GG: Well we had, there’s a flying control tower up on the top obviously. There’s the officers and the girls with the radio. Down below was our restroom and that’s where we were, down there. We had half of it and the rescue squad, whose garage was just a few yards away, they had the other half of the thing.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: So, upstairs, they never ever came downstairs which is just as well [laughs] ‘cause they’d have been court martials right, left and centre.
DE: So the three people were actually in the control tower and it was just you on your own in the caravan.
GG: Yeah.
DE: Yeah. I see. Ok.
GG: It was alright if, if things went well, you know.
DE: Ahum.
GG: Had no problems. Occasionally, you, you’d see somebody making a mistake and you'd, you'd have to flash a red light at him, you know. You could see he was coming down too low. Keep up your, not your turn.
DE: Ahum.
GG: But otherwise it was fairly easy thing to do and all we did was to stand there and say G George landing, clear of runway and then, you know, wait for the next one to come in. That’s um, it was a fairly easy job it was just that, that one night it all went pear shaped.
DE: Yeah. Did they have, did you have any other duties that you had to do or was it just that job?
GG: Well that was your job. Flare path. And that's what, all you did was the flare path.
DE: And how long were you at Waddington doing that for?
GG: Er, six months from January to June in ’43.
DE: Ahuh. Did you ever get into trouble for anything? You say you got away with that, that night but did you ever get into trouble for –.
GG: No. No. I never got in any trouble. No. The only time I ever got in trouble I got my name taken in London by a SP, that’s the station police in the RAF, coming out of a tube station. I shouldn’t have been there. I got my name taken.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: But by the time it got to the office I’d moved. I’d been posted from London back up to, I think, Waddington or somewhere, so I never got into any [unclear].
DE: Oh that’s ok then. Yeah. Smashing. I think, I think that’s ok for me unless you have any other, other stories that suddenly spring to mind?
GG: Yeah a couple that, when we were flying out of Aqir in Palestine. We’re on a, we did a couple of air tests while I was there. Both of 'em turned out to be near disasters. On one, the first one we’re circling around and of course the first time I’d seen the place in daylight I’d only been flying at night so I’m looking all round and having a good look and I thought well that’s it we’ll be landing in a minute so I turned my turret on the beam which you do for landing.
DE: Ahum.
GG: So you can get out the back, you see. And I turned it on the beam and I crossed my arms and I leant back. I was going to rest on the doors behind me. What I didn’t know was there’s like a hook thing on the door and with the vibration it was loose and eventually it come up and so the doors had gone.
DE: It opened.
GG: I lean back and the next minute this from here to here is hanging out the aircraft.
DE: Oh.
GG: And of course parachute, you haven’t got a parachute. That’s inside the aircraft. So I’m hanging out there. I managed to get hold of the gun toggles[?] and pull myself back in.
DE: Crikey.
GG: But of course at that age, nineteen, it’s not danger. You laugh. You laugh at it ‘cause you don’t see danger when you’re nineteen you know. It’s all a laugh. And the next time I did an airlift err air test the plane had just come out from the workshops and the armourers hadn’t had time to put any guns in it so I thought well [unclear], so I grabbed hold of a couple of guns which were lying on top of the oil drums, they used to oil them and leave them on top of these oil drum to dry in the sun, so I grabbed a couple, just shoved them in, you know. For the look of the thing. Not for any, ’cause I just chucked them in, I didn’t even look to see what they were. It just looked two guns poking out.
DE: Ahum
GG: Fair enough. We took off and er, we’re circling around and I could see Haifa in the distance and there were a little black dot circling round and I thought I wonder what that aircraft is. And as I thought that, over the microphone, earphones came 'Bandit over Haifa'. I knew what it was, it was a Junkers 88 ‘cause there was a squadron of them on Rhodes which is not far away.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: So I knew what it was. I looked at the guns. Horror upon horror I’d got a left hand gun in a right hand hole and a right hand gun in the left hand hole. I thought, oh no, so I had to straighten the turret up, open the doors, get hold of the left hand one and of course a machine gun is a very heavy thing when you’re cramped in a turret it makes it heavier. You can’t, you haven’t got the strength to move it and there I am struggling to get the gun out of the hole to put it in the other side ’cause they sit in a flat tray with like a lip all round and there’s a bolt goes through one side.
DE: Ahum.
GG: So you’ve got to have a right hand gun in a right hand hole and a left in the left hand hole. Otherwise you can’t put the bolt through.
DE: I see, yes.
GG: There I’m struggling with one eye on what I’m doing and one eye on the black dot but fortunately I think the German pilot must have gone, ‘hmmn, time we were back to the mess for lunch lads’, 'cause he suddenly beetled off in the direction of Rhodes.
DE: That was fortunate.
GG: Phew hah. And then the other time, when you used to take off we were only what ten miles from the coast so you had no sooner took off then you were over the Med. And you always had to take a wind drift.
DE: Yes.
GG: The gunner has to, the rear gunner has to take a wind drift. So you pass it to the navigator so the navigator can set his course according to the drift of the wind. What degree of strength it is and whether it's starboard or port. Well I, you could guarantee, you could literally guarantee every penny you got it would be three degrees either starboard or port. Occasionally, very rarely it would go down to two or go up to four but it was nearly always three. Well I get up. We got in the plane and I’m sitting there waiting for the engine to start so I can test me guns. You know, the turret works. The engine started and immediately it shut down again and the pilot said, 'All out. Aircraft US'. So we all clambered out so the ground crew said well take the one next to it 'cause there was always more aircraft than there were crews.
DE: Yeah.
GG: So we got in this next aircraft and I’m, sitting there waiting. Eventually the first engine started so immediately I try and — ‘cause that operates the hydraulic system for the turret. Nothing. I knew what had happened. We’d got a hydraulic leak, so immediately I called up and said, 'Aircraft US' and we all pile out again. So the ground crew said oh well there’s one over there left. The only one left. Take that. So we walked across the dispersal to the other one and we got in and it worked alright. Well we took off a quarter of an hour or so after everybody else and as soon as we got airborne, we passed over the coast, so immediately I got out the turret and dropped a flame float down, got like a chute there.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: Hopped back in the turret to take. You see a little light bobbing about in the sea and I got my gun sight on it, took my first test. I looked down. Ten degrees. I thought - ten degrees? It can’t be. Not if I’ve done it right. So I did it again and I was ultra careful.
DE: Ahum.
GG: Nine. Did a third one ‘cause you have to do three and take the average and that was nine so I thought well I know it’s crazy but I’d done my job properly and I know what it is so I gave the navigator nine degrees. And you do what's known as a dog leg. You don’t go from there to there. You go - and then there.
DE: Yes.
GG: And you do the same coming back. So when we got to the dog leg, that’s what it’s known as, I took another one. Got an average of eight. When we got up to the Italian coast and coming back took another one - seven. And then halfway dogleg - six. Gradually getting down, down. And when we came back the light, a big light like a big searchlight it was. Like a lighthouse type of thing on the north end of the Gaza strip known as the Gaza light and it should have been dead in front of us and there it was dead in front of us. So we were absolutely –
DE: Ahuh spot on.
GG: – spot on. So it was Heathrow navigation. Heathrow, Heath Robinson rather.
DE: Yes.
GG: Navigation but it got us there.
DE: It worked. Yeah
GG: And we landed. We were the quarter of an hour after everybody taking off but we were the first ones back.
DE: Because you’d got the wind, wind.
GG: We’d got it right. I later found out when the others came back the gunners had all gone - can’t be that. No. And they squeezed it and squeezed it got the lowest figure they could and squeezed it all the time. Result was they were a few miles out.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And they had to keep changing course and that’s why they were all late. In fact one didn’t come back at all. That, from radio messages they got we reckon he crashed in the Qattara Depression which was the salt marsh on the Egyptian / Libyan border and they went in there. If you go in there, disappear. You’re never seen again. So we lost that one. But um, it was amazing. But when we taxied, when we taxied in incidentally, as we taxied in the two engines just cut.
DE: Really?
GG: They were dead. There weren’t a drop of petrol in them.
DE: Phew. Someone was looking after you that night.
GG: Apparently the thing should have been filled up.
DE: Topped up yeah.
GG: You're supposed to have about twenty five percent extra fuel to what you need well this one hadn’t been topped up so the fact that we got back really depended on my navigation with the navigator. So if I’d had made a mistake like the other gunners did and squeezed it, we’d have finished up in the Med.
DE: Yeah.
GG: And that would have been our lot but um, so that was a near squeak but that’s the sort of thing that could happen you know 'cause we used to have a saying in wartime - "we flew by the seat of our pants" which meant it was all hit and miss. That’s what it meant.
DE: Yeah.
GG: And we did and I mean you talk to anybody who flew during the war and they'll all tell you the same. You flew by the seat of your pants because you never knew what was going to happen 'cause aircraft weren’t as well serviced as they are today and of course they're not as perfect as they are today, you know so you never knew so you, you, to some extent you took your life in your hands a bit.
DE: Yeah.
GG: You didn’t think about it. You just got on with it you had a war to fight and that was it.
DE: So you didn’t feel particularly brave or?
GG: No, no, no, no I was just doing my job the same as everybody else. I didn’t feel I was being brave or anything. No bravery concerned. You were just doing your job.
DE: Smashing. That’s wonderful. Thank you ever so much.
GG: I think that’s about all I can tell you.
DE: No that’s great. Thank you very much. That’s bang on an hour.
GG: Oh. [laughs]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AGolledgeG150511
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Geoff Golledge
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
1:00:00 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Geoff Golledge volunteered for the Royal Air Force and trained as a wireless operator / air gunner. For a time he served as ground personnel with 44 Squadron at RAF Waddington, on the flare path. One night he brought thirty five aircraft safely in to land, on another occasion he found himself stuck in mud right in the path of a landing Lancaster. He then completed air gunnery training in County Down, Northern Ireland. He served in the Middle East, flying Wellingtons, until he was invalided out due to severe illness. After a time in civilian life, he rejoined the Royal Air Force as a warrant officer on a cadet squadron, where he spent the rest of his career. He also discusses the memorial work in which he has participated in the United Kingdom and in the Netherlands.
RAF Waddington, Middle East, County Down, Wellington, flare path, gooseneck flare, 44 Squadron, Broomfield Hospital, Operation Manna, Vaassen, 15 Squadron, Stirling, 12 Squadron, RAF Wickenby
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Dan Ellin
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-05-11
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Italy
Northern Ireland
Mediterranean Sea
Middle East
Northern Ireland--Down (County)
England--Lincolnshire
Great Britain
Great Britain
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
44 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
ground personnel
Lancaster
memorial
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Aqir
RAF Waddington
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/277/3430/PIronsH1501.2.jpg
62e8999adc6227a8e1dcf9d08e401fbc
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/277/3430/AIronsH160730.1.mp3
85d919719d33d75444cec9637cafc6f9
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
Irons, Harry
Harry Irons
H Irons
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Harry Irons (1924 - 2018). He was an apprentice tailor in London, but lied about his age and joined the RAF aged 16. He flew operations as a rear gunner with 158, 462 and 9 Squadrons.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-07-23
2016-07-30
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
Irons, H
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
TO: I just have to do a short introduction first as well.
HI: Yeah.
TO: Good morning. Good afternoon. Or good evening. Whatever the case is. This interview is being filmed for the International Bomber Command Centre and the gentleman I’m interviewing is Mr Harry Irons. My name’s Thomas Ozel and we’re recording this interview on the 30th of July. Could you please tell me what year you were born?
HI: 1924.
TO: And –
HI: January ’24.
TO: And where — were you interested in aircraft as a child?
HI: No. Not really. No. You never see no aircraft anyway [laughs] in those days. The reason why I joined the air force because we lived in a place called Stamford Hill which was on a hill in London. And we had a grandstand view of the bombing of the City of London which was well alight. And four or five of us said we’ll go and join the air force. I was only sixteen. I told them I was seventeen and a half and they, and they didn’t even query me age. And they said, ‘Alright. You’re in the air force.’ And that was it. I was just sixteen. They assessed me and they said, ‘What do you want to be?’ I said, ‘I want to be a pilot.’ And they said, ‘We’ve got a hell of a load of applications for pilots but we’ve got vacancies for wireless operator/air gunners.’ So I said, ‘Alright. I’ll have that,’ and I became a wireless operator/air gunner. And I joined the air force in nineteen — the end of 1940. And the following year — I had to wait for an application to become a wireless operator. Well, I was in the RAF and I went to Blackpool in August 1941 and while we was there we got to twelve words a minute and they got us out on a squadron and said, ‘You’re not going to be wireless operators you’re going to be what they call straight AG’s. Rear gunners. So that’s how I became a rear gunner. So I waited a few more months and then I was posted for gunnery school. A place called Manby. RAF Manby in Lincoln. And I done six weeks training there and we should do another three or four months training at OTU which I’d never done. They sent me straight from the six weeks gunnery school straight onto a squadron. Number 9 Squadron at Waddington. And when I arrived there I was sitting in the mess, because I was a sergeant then, I was sitting in the mess and when I came out the mess there was a flight lieutenant pilot there and he said, ‘You’re going to fly with me as a mid-upper gunner.’ Because what had happened the squadron had converted from Wellingtons on to Lancasters and Lancasters carried an extra gunner and a flight engineer. So there I was at 9 Squadron in May, no, June 1942 and we were just converting, just finished converting from Wellingtons, the twin engine bomber on to Lancasters. And that’s how it started and what we had to do was get used to flying a four engine bomber which we did do, and in September we were sitting in the crew room and they said, ‘Ops tomorrow night.’ And that was in September the 9th 1942. I got that right. And so what you have to do is take the aircraft up for half an hour. Test the engines, make sure they’re running right. The bomb bay opens and closes. The bomb sight’s working. The guns are working. The ailerons are working and the undercarriage is working. You do that in half hours flight. When we landed the bomb aimer had already done about seventeen trips on Wellingtons so he was an old sweat. To do seventeen bombing trips he was really a real veteran. And as we landed there was a big tractor come along pulling up a four thousand pounder and fourteen hundred incendiaries. So the bomb aimer said to me, ‘That load means that we’re going to Happy Valley.’ And I was pretty, well I didn’t know a lot anyway. So I thought well that doesn’t sound too bad. Happy Valley. And there you are. We got briefed. We went, we always had bacon and eggs before we went to the briefing. We had the briefing and that and when we went into the briefing room there was a huge curtain over the map and we were waiting there. The CO comes in, immediately pulls the curtain down and it shows you exactly what bombing raid was on. There’s a red tape running from England to the — and the town was Dusseldorf. So I still didn’t twig on a lot so the bomb aimer was there. He said, ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘We’re going to Happy Valley.’ And I thought well it don’t sound too bad. Happy Valley. And we went down to the crew room. Got dressed. And being gunners we have to be heavily heavily dressed. There was pure silk long johns and a vest. And your shirt, uniform and a huge fisherman’s pullover we used to put on. Then we put the electrically heated suit on. Is that alright?
TO: Do you mind if I just put this light on? Sorry.
HI: Put that light on.
TO: Yes. I’m very sorry but — sorry about that.
HI: How’s that?
TO: Yes. That’s better — sorry half your face is in shadow. Sorry. Ok. Sorry you were.
HI: Oh that’s only the, I’ll switch that one on as well.
TO: Switch that on.
HI: Yeah. Switch that on as well.
TO: Ok sorry about that.
HI: So we got dressed and then we had huge heavy furs. Fur jacket and fur trousers on top. The temperatures in those days was about thirty five, forty below zero. We had no heating whatsoever. And we went out to the aircraft and the ritual was we always pissed on the rear wheel for good luck. Anyway, we got in the aircraft and we was at Waddington. And they had no runways there. All they had was grass. And even on my first trip with this bomb load on we just managed to lift off over the, over the hedges to take off. And then we got, we, we flew around the aerodrome until we got up to six or seven thousand feet and then we headed east. We crossed the North Sea and then the bomb aimer who lays in the front, lays flat down at the front said, ‘Enemy coast ahead. Flak.’ So we was up about sixteen thousand feet then. Mind you this pilot was a very seasoned pilot. He was on his second tour so he knew all the tricks and he knew that to get over Holland you had to be above twelve thousand feet because of the light flak. There was hundreds of these light flak guns on the Frisian Islands what we had to pass over. Anyway, we was well above it and I looked down. I see these beautiful colours. Blues, greens, reds. Tracer coming up and dropping down and I thought to myself if that’s flak we’ve got nothing at all to worry about. We was well above it. We flew across Holland. We was up to about nineteen, twenty thousand feet then. We flew across Holland. We never see a lot. Only a few star shells and a few lights on the ground for the night fighters who used to circle around waiting to come after us. Anyway, we crossed over Holland into Germany and then the bomb aimer said, ‘Target ahead skipper.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, I’ll have a little see what this target’s like. And being the mid-upper you could swing the turret a hundred and twenty degrees all the way around. So I swung it around facing the forward position and I had a shock of my life. In front of us was one huge massive explosion of shells. And I thought to myself, ‘Cor blimey, surely we haven’t got to go through that.’ There was hundreds of shells exploding. You’d see aircraft blowing up in the sky, some on fire. And the skipper said to me, being on me first trip, he said, ‘Mid-upper make sure you look above you and there’s no aircraft flying above you ready to drop its bombs.’ Which did happen. And a lot of our aircraft were badly damaged through aircraft dropping their incendiaries and bombs from a different height. Anyway, we, I said to the skipper, as I looked up there was a Lancaster above us with its bomb bay open. The bomb bay was enormous. It’s about from that there to about here. That’s the length of the bomb bay. It was enormous. And I said to the skipper, ‘There’s a Lanc above us with its bomb bay open. Dive port.’ He dived port, straightened out and started flying again towards the huge barrage and the bomb aimer said, ‘We’re on the wrong course.’ He said, ‘We’ve got to go around again and make another approach to the target.’ Because the most important thing on a bombing raid was to bring back a photograph. If you didn’t bring a photograph back they never counted for it as a raid. The camera was enormous. Like that. Huge thing it was. Anyway, we run. We went right through that lot with our bomb bays shut. Turned around, made what they called a dog leg and come back on the rear of the formations that were flying in and by that time Jerry had cottoned on to us. And don’t forget, another terror of bombing was the searchlights. If one of those searchlights hit you it completely blinded you. They were so powerful. They had what they called a radar operated searchlight and that was blue. It wasn’t white like the ordinary searchlights. It was blue. And it never missed. It went bang, like that and it hit you straight away and once that hit you about ten or fifteen searchlights would come and cone you. And then all the guns would open up and the fighter would come straight in on top of you. So you had to very very wary of a searchlight. Anyway, we made the dogleg around. Came and we was at the back of the bomber formation then and we could see, I could see from where I was the town was getting a real hammering. At that time, that period, there was no Pathfinders. That’s why we had to go around again — because we had to select our own target and bring a photograph back, more or less on that area. It did, when the Pathfinders was formed it did make bombing, not easier, but we could get in and all we had to then with the Pathfinders was bomb the flare. We didn’t have to look for a specified target. We just bombed the flare. Go in, bomb the flare, slam your door shut, dive and get out quick. And you had to get out quick believe me. And we made our approach around and we made the bombing run and, once ‘cause this was my first trip and I was amazed. Directly we dropped the bombs we went up like a lift because the weight, the huge weight of the bombs being dropped suddenly the aircraft went up four or five hundred feet. Anyway, we slammed the, we slammed the bomb bay doors shut and then we, what we used to do was either go port or starboard, dive down and get enough speed as we could to get away from the target. Anyway, as we’re coming home, and this was on my first trip, as we were coming home the bomb aimer and the wireless operator said, ‘We can’t breathe. We’ve got no oxygen.’ Apparently the shrapnel had come through, which it always did and cut the leads from the oxygen bottles to the line to where they were breathing. Anyway, so we had to go to below ten thousand feet and then we could take our oxygen masks off and breathe normal. And as we passed over the Dutch coast which we’d seen coming in, beautiful coloured lights. I had the shock of my life. These shells were whipping past us. I’ve never seen anything like it. How they never hit us I don’t know. There was hundreds of them. All coming up. Anyway, we got over the Dutch coast, the Frisian Islands it was and made our way home, and landed. Had a look at the aircraft which always had shrapnel holes in the aircraft. Always. And we landed and I thought, that’s it, that’s one trip. I’ve got another twenty nine to do. And I mean by twenty nine means you had to bring back a picture. If you didn’t bring back a picture it didn’t count as a trip so you did it again. So instead of doing thirty you had to do did thirty one, thirty two or whatever. How many pictures you missed. And that was my first. First raid and it shook the life out of me. I never realised what it was to go all that way and the fantastic bombardment of German guns was incredible. And you had to be careful even then, coming home, because they had what they called radar operated guns on the way and they were so accurate. They never missed. Even at twenty thousand feet they could hit you as easy as anything. So you just used to do a little gentle weave to keep, well to help you to keep out of the radar. That was my first trip. We went down. We had the usual bacon and eggs, cup of coffee. Told them what we’d seen and went to kip. And the next morning we woke up and we was on bombing raid again. I should bring, I’d better bring my logbook down I think.
TO: If you want. Yeah.
HI: Yeah. Two seconds. How’s it going?
TO: Can you just sit back down again sorry. The lighting seems ok actually. Yeah. I think you’ll be alright.
HI: Alright.
TO: Yeah. Sure. You sure you don’t want me to help you get it?
HI: No. I’ll go and get it. Don’t worry.
[recording paused]
HI: I should have put exactly what was happening in my logbook but the reason why I never done that as you see. That was my first trip.
TO: Dusseldorf.
HI: Dusseldorf. And I put target found and bombed.
TO: Yeah.
HI: And the officer, he said, ‘Don’t start putting down what you done and what you didn’t.’ Just put down the target.
TO: Wilhelmshaven.
HI: Yeah. See.
TO: Bremen.
HI: And then two days later, which was the following day we went to Bremen. That was where they was building the submarines. How’s that? Is that alright?
TO: That’s a lot better. Thank you.
HI: Yeah. They was building the submarines there and we gave them the right goings. Mind the flak was absolutely horrendous there in Bremen. And believe it or not the following night we went to Wilhelmshaven. The other submarine base where they was building the submarines. And the biggest, the biggest thing at all about bombing was the flak. It was absolutely, and it was terrifying. I’ll tell you that. It was absolutely terrifying. The night fighters you never see until they hit you and we was useless really. We had only 303 calibre machine guns and the Germans had twenty millimetre cannons and we didn’t stand a chance. Never stood a chance. And the thing that done us, that the Germans brought out a simple, unique thing of placing two cannons behind the pilot on the JU88 and the M10 and all they used to do was pick you up on the radar. Drop down two or three hundred feet. Then come up underneath and go straight for the petrol tank. At first they used to go for the actual aircraft but a lot of those aircraft had bombs on board and they’d line up the fighter as well. So what they had done they used to come up underneath and they could see from the fire from the exhaust, the engines and they had a beautiful view of the petrol tank. They used to give it one quick squirt and the bomber would just used to literally blow up in the sky. I mean literally. Literally blow right up in the sky. That’s why we got thirty thousand names at Runnymede. We don’t know what happened to them.
TO: Did you ever actually see that happen on a Lancaster?
HI: I see it, yes. I see, well actually, didn’t actually see the fighter hitting the Lanc but we used to see the, see the bombers blowing up and we didn’t know why. There was no flak. All you used to see was a huge explosion and up it went. And that went on. We lost hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bombers. But the thing that annoyed me the RAF knew what was going on. They knew what was going on and not once did they ever warn us about this method of attack. Never. ‘Cause before all we expected was them to attack the rear. The rear turret. They always went for the rear turret and before they got this idea of coming up underneath. And they literally shot down hundreds and hundreds of our bombers and not once at any briefing did they warn us that we were being attacked from underneath and it went right on ‘til the end of the war when the Air Ministry admitted that’s what the Germans were doing. They never warned us. And the only reason that I think why they never warned us is because they wanted us to fly straight and level because if we’d had known what was happening we’d have weaved our way right the way through. We could have at least seen what was coming up underneath us. But we never knew. And we lost thousands of bombers over there, and that went right on till the end of the war. All those boys were lost. Yeah.
TO: Do you mind if we talk for a bit about your time before joining the RAF?
HI: Well I didn’t have a lot of time really. I was only a kid. I told you I joined when I was sixteen and I was an apprenticed tailor because living in the East End you had two jobs. You either became a tailor or a cabinet maker. You done your apprentice and that was the two main employers in the East End was tailoring and cabinet making. And I was just, I worked for a firm called Polikoff’s. A huge firm. I was apprentice there ‘til I got, till I was called up. Well, ‘til I joined the air force. And the reason I joined the air force really as well the firm I worked for got badly bombed. And one morning we went to work and there was hardly any bloody factory left. But it’s, it was a terrible, terrible time. When you think that in 1943 the average, average length of time for a bomber crew was five trips. But I carried on. I don’t know why I carried on. Why I seemed to miss it all but there you are. But I know that the RAF knew about this underneath attack because I finished my first tour. I done about, thirty — actually I done thirty nine trips on my first tour. That was because we couldn’t bring back the photograph on nine trips. So they didn’t count. And I went as an instructor instructing air crew coming back from Canada and America and Rhodesia. They was raw. Raw kids and they, you know, they had the shock of their life when they came back to England and had to fly on these terrible misty days and nights. We lost a lot of blokes killed through lack of experience. And we had to bloody well fly with them as well. Anyway, after a while they said you’re being posted back to operations and they posted me to 77 Squadron at Full Sutton in Yorkshire and when I arrived there the CO, when I arrived they said, ‘The CO wants to see you.’ So I thought, hello. I was a warrant officer then. And I went down to the office and he asked me to come in the car. We went out to the Halifax and the Halifax had a big hole in the fuselage underneath and there was a .5 been placed there. And the CO said, ‘When you go on the bombing raid you’ll be sitting there and if any aircraft come up underneath you’ll have a good view of the aircraft coming up underneath you. So therefore they knew what was going on. And we took it to a [pause] I think it was Duisburg I think.
[pause]
Yeah. Took it too Duisburg on a daylight. That was on the 14th. That was on my second tour. And I took it to Duisberg and it was so bloody cold. They made a great big hole in the bottom of the aircraft and the cold air was coming through. Not only us but the pilot, the navigator. They was frozen and they never used it no more. What they should have done was put a proper turret, enclosed turret underneath. All they had was a bloody big hole. All the slipstream used to come through the aircraft and it was impossible really enough to fly with it. Anyway, they never used it no more. Just carried on as we did. Anyway, that was on my second tour on Halifaxes. But where were we? Some very interesting raids here. Right. Went to Dusseldorf on the 13th of the 9th I think it was.
TO: Yeah.
HI: The 13th of the 9th and then on the 13th of the 9th we went to Bremen after submarines. And that was very heavily defended. And when we got back we went in bed. They said, ‘You’ve got to get up early because they’re a night flying test for tonight’s raid,’ which was on the 14th. We’d already been. We’d already just come back from Bremen. On the 14th we went to a place called Wilhelmshaven. And it was the same thing. They was producing all the submarines. And it was very important at that time because the submarines were sinking most of our ships. So they had to blast. And they did blast it. And on the 16th we went to the worst, worst place you could possibly go to. Essen. Essen was the worst place in Germany for flak and fighters and we lost literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bombers over Essen. There was a major Krupps factory there and that’s what we was after. We destroyed it eventually but it took a while. And we lost a hell of a hell of a lot of men.
[phone ringing]
TO: You can answer the phone. That’s fine.
HI: Ok. I won’t be –
[recording paused]
HI: That Memorial is exactly where we took off at Waddington. That was at the end of the runway but that Memorial was right bang in the middle where we took off from our aircraft’s runways. As we took off, right in front of us was the — right in front of us was the Cathedral and that is where the Memorial is now. Yeah.
TO: Sorry, you mentioned you’d been on raids to Bremen and Wilhelmshaven.
HI: Yeah.
TO: Did you actually find out the damage to the submarines you were causing?
HI: Yeah. We actually, we’d done a hell of a lot of damage there. Especially at Bremen. Apparently they really wrecked the submarine bays, well not the bases, where they was actually producing the submarines. And that’s why we went back the following night to hit Wilhelmshaven because they were sinking so many of our ships. It did slow them down a bit. How much I don’t know. But we did make two successful raids there. Because we could tell that by the photographs we brought back. Of the actual bombing. As the bombs went the camera ticks over and the photoflash was in the fuselage. It was a huge, like a huge drainpipe and that was released exactly the same time as the camera clicks over. And it was a big white burst of light that lit up the area where the camera was pointing. And you could see all these photoflashes going off on your bombing run. Apart from all the bloody aircraft that was on fire going down. Yeah. Which was many many many. Yeah. The thing that they used to kid us. They did used to kid us. We used to say we seen so many bombers going down. They said, ‘No you never.’ This was a bloke who’s never flown in his life said, ‘No, you never. What you see was Scarecrows.’ The Germans were firing up shells to mimic a bomber blowing up. And after the war they admitted there was no such thing as a Scarecrow. All those explosions were actually aircraft blowing up in the sky. And they did used to blow up as well. Yeah. Especially with a bomb load on. I think I was very very very fortunate to, to do one tour instead. And then I went on another tour. And I never, never really got myself in any trouble at all. We used to see them going down. And anyway we went to Essen and that was the worst. That is the worst place ever to go. Essen.
TO: Worse than Berlin?
HI: I think it was worse than Berlin. Yeah. Worse than Berlin. Yeah. The amount of guns there was incredible. And the amount of fighters. But that Berlin, when they done the Berlin raid they’d done, they lost nine hundred. Nine hundred bombers, didn’t they? In that period of about six weeks. They didn’t care. Anyway, on the 14th of the 9th we went to Munich. And what actually happened — on my squadron we was losing a lot of aircraft. Even at that period it was a hell of a lot of aircraft. And two fellas come down from Cambridge. They said they were scientists and said, ‘We’ve got a new device we’re going to put in the turret. And when a German night fighter approaches you from about six hundred yards away you’ll get a red light come up in your turret warning you there’s a fighter in the vicinity.’ Which was brilliant because what we could then was start weaving and not fly straight and level. Anyway, but what happened, the squadron on the raid previous to Munich two of our boys were shot down and apparently the Germans, they went for all these aircraft and must have found this instrument in the rear turret and they probably got the wavelength of it. And this is what happened. We went to Munich and we flew, ten tenths cloud all the way so we flew on top of the cloud. If a fighter came we just went straight in the cloud. We was pretty much safe. Not from flak but from the fighter. Anyway, we got to Munich and the cloud broke and there was Munich wide open. Beautiful moon and we did give it an hiding. Apparently Hitler was there giving a little talk. That’s why we went there. On the way back the skipper said, ‘We know our course back home so we’re going to fly ten tenths through the cloud all the way home so we won’t be interrupted by fighters.’ We went for about three quarters of an hour, an hour through ten tenths cloud and all of a sudden the cloud broke and I looked through the, I was in the rear turret then, I looked through the turret and there, from just where my car is was a JU88 had been following us through that cloud. And it must have been through their radar. And he opened fired and we was going, when you say flying straight and level you’re like going up and down as well. You know. Anyway, as we went down he opened fired and he just, his cannon shells went just over the top of us. We never hesitated and we couldn’t miss him. He was right bang — you could see his face even. We just opened fire. Me and the mid-upper opened fired. He swung over and down he went. That was one of my luckiest occasions I’d ever known. I’d only done about six trips and then we came back and that was it. But that’s how lucky you had to be. How he never, how he missed us I still don’t know. It was point blank range and his cannon shells went just over the top of us. Yeah.
TO: Do you think maybe he might have been low on fuel?
HI: No. I don’t think he was low on fuel. He was — I should imagine, when you say you’re flying straight and level you do but you’re going like that. Up and down like that sort of with the turbulence of the slipstream. And probably as we went down he opened fire and missed us. But we never missed. We hit him. We couldn’t miss him. He was right bang — oh he couldn’t have been no closer.
TO: So was he shot down?
HI: He went down, yeah. Yeah. We couldn’t claim it because we couldn’t verify whether he, whether he exploded on the ground or not because we went back in cloud again then. The cloud broke, we went back in to it again and came home.
TO: So you were in the mid-upper turret at this point.
HI: No. I was in the rear turret. And me and the mid-upper open fired. Yeah. I was only in the mid-upper for the first trip. Just to get used to the, to the, what the bombing raid was. The rear turret was manned by an Australian but he was very very tall and he had a bit of difficulty in the rear turret so he went into the mid-upper after the second raid and I took over in the rear turret. I wasn’t this size. I was only about nine stone then. And but he was a big tall Australian. He was too big for them. And that’s how we carried on. And after Munich we went to a place called Wismar. Am I alright?
TO: No. It’s just there’s a fly buzzing around. That’s all.
HI: A fly. I must have no flies in here, you know [pause] We went to a place called Wismar. They had a big Condor factory there and it was our job to attack this factory which was specified that it was a factory we had to bomb. There was still, you must remember there was no Pathfinders then. And we went in and I think we made a direct hit but unfortunately two of our aircraft that was with us were shot down over Wismar. So that was unfortunate. And then from Wismar there was September. 23rd of September [pause] The thing was with Bomber Command life was expendable. They didn’t care what the losses were. They’d just sent us out and sent us out and sent us out. Well, strangely enough this Wismar was a seven twenty hour trip. So we went there on the 23rd of the 9th and we had a little rest. And then on then on the 1st of the 10th we went back to Wismar again. They said go back and make sure it’s flattened. Which we did do. And then the following night, believe it or not, we’d already done a seven twenty hour trip. The following night we went to Essen. And on the way to Essen two of the engines on the starboard side shut off so, yeah the flight engineer changed the petrol tanks over to the outer tanks and immediately the two engines on the starboard side packed up. So he changed the petrol tanks over to the outer tanks and we were still flying and all of a sudden the four engines just cut. Just like that. And we just fell like that. Luckily enough the flight engineer was right on top of it all and managed to change the tanks over to the right. To the wing tip tanks and the four engines started off. And we couldn’t go to Essen because we didn’t have enough fuel. We couldn’t use all the tanks. So we turned back and we just managed to land at Waddington before all bloody four engines packed up through lack of fuel. So that’s how lucky I was. But what it was in the petrol tanks they had what they called the immersion pumps, electric immersion pumps and what was happening they was packing up on all the aircraft. So what they done they changed the immersion pumps to gravity fuel. So there was no pump there. The petrol was just dropped in gravity. And it solved a problem but before that we lost a lot of aircraft through these petrol pumps packing up. And then we went to — I think we had, I think we went on, yeah we must have gone on leave because [pause] yeah. Yeah we had, yeah we had NFT. We never done anything and then we, on the 15th of the 10th, in October we went to Cologne. And I always remember Cologne because the thing that always struck me in Cologne was the Cathedral. The huge Cathedral. And every time we went there we see that Cathedral. It never got bombed. The whole of Cologne got flattened apart from the Cathedral. There was damage but not too bad. But I don’t think through we were going to miss the Cathedral. It was just sheer luck that we did miss it. But we did hammer Cologne. It really took a terrible hiding. That was on the 15th of the 10th ‘42. October.
TO: Sorry.
HI: Yeah. Go on.
TO: Did you hear about the, what did you think of the thousand bomber raid on Cologne?
HI: That was just before we started. Actually speaking, all it was was a propaganda raid. They got every single aircraft. All from OTU and that’s where the losses were. They lost more bombers from the Operational Training Units on Wellingtons than what they did the main bomber force. They got every aircraft that could fly to make up the thousand. It was only a propaganda rout anyway because we’d done much much more damage with about two or three hundred Lancs then what that thousand bomber raid made. And most of the losses were with OTUs. The inexperienced crews training. And it was only, it was only a propaganda raid I think. They wanted, he’d only just come into office hadn’t he? Harris. And that was his first big raid and he got every bomber from OTU, Conversion Units. Anywhere he could find a bomber and as I say made up his total. But the big bombing raids started really when the Pathfinders moved in. Because what we was doing then we was bombing, not the target, we was bombing the flare. And if those flares were accurate a whole town got wiped out. Which happened quite often. At Hamburg, Dresden, Essen. The towns were open. Once they got the Pathfinders right. Perfect. All those towns were completely open. And I don’t think, I personally think this country would never have stood the bombing like the Germans did. When you think five or six hundred Lancasters each carrying one four thousand pounder and fourteen hundred incendiaries. Going over the target and out again within fifteen minutes. You imagine the hell that must have been there. Anyway, that was war. And then — this is a very interesting raid. On the 17th of the 10th — no, before that we was told. What actually happened was when we arrived at Waddington 44 Squadron was the first squadron to be issued with the Lancaster. What they called the Rhodesian squadron. It was all Rhodesians on it. So they decided to test out this Lancaster and they sent it to, on a bombing raid to Germany. Right into, six Lancasters and they sent right into Germany to bomb. What was the target? Anyway, on the way there the Messerschmitts jumped them and out of the six they shot five down. And only one returned. Nettleton. He got the VC. So when we was in the mess talking to the aircrew that, the one crew that come back they said never, no more will we do daylight, low level raids because it’s suicide. So in September [pause] October. Yeah — October. About the 15th they said we’re going to do some low level daylight flying and we was flying over Lincoln. Nineteen Lancasters. That’s all there was at the time at thirty or forty feet above ground. And we wondered. Surely they’re not going to have another daylight raid which did happen. On the 17th of October. The target was Le Creusot. The time, the time in the air was ten and a half hours. So you can see it was a big schlep. We went right across the North Sea. Right across France at a height of about the height of this house. Ninety Lancasters. Each carrying six one thousand pounders. We flew right across France. All the French people were out waving to us and throwing us kisses and whatnot. We were still looking for the fighters. We never see no fighters. We went right to Le Creusot. And the reason for the bombing of Le Creusot in daylight was that the whole factory was surrounded by workers dwellings and they were frightened if we bombed of a night time there’d be a heavy casualties amongst the civilians. So they decided to do it on daylight and we went right across France. Ninety two of us at about thirty feet off the ground carrying, each carrying six one thousand pounders. What actually happened at the briefing we had to — six aircraft, six Lancasters, had to break off as we reached the Le Creusot and bomb the power station just outside Le Creusot. And on our port side was the Dambuster — Gibson. And he took a picture of us, of our aircraft as we were going in to attack. And as we were going to attack this power station an aircraft on my starboard side just went straight in the deck and blew up. So there was only five of us left attacking the power station which we did attack. And we flattened, literally flatted it. And last year me and my friend was in France. I said, ‘Let’s go to Le Creusot and see what the damage was.’ And we went to the Le Creusot. There’s a huge factory there even now. And my friend approached the manager and said, ‘This bloke. I’ve a bloke out here who bombed you during the war.’ He said, ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘We want to see him.’ So they invited us in and they gave us lunch and we went around the factory and we explained what we’d done. I said, ‘But we didn’t bomb your factory. We bombed the power station,’ I said, ‘One of the aircraft was blown up on the on the approach to the power station.’ He said, ‘Yeah they’re buried. Not in a military airfield but just outside, in an ordinary field where they crashed.’ So I said, ‘Can we go and see?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ So we went out there and there were six graves and I said to the Frenchman, I said, ‘No There were seven men in the aircraft. There’s only six graves.’ He said, ‘Oh, no.’ He said, ‘The rear gunner survived and was taken.’ How? I don’t know. I’d seen the aircraft literally blowing up in the sky, no, blowing up as it hit the ground. And he survived and was taken prisoner of war. But we actually flattened the place. If you imagine ninety Lancs. Daylight. No opposition. So we come back and we were very relieved that we went all the way there and all the way back and never seen a night, never seen a day fighter. And there must have been hundreds of them there. So we were very relieved and we thought well that’s it. So we started having night flying tests to follow all that week. And then on the 22nd of October we went to Genoa. We went to Genoa in Italy which is a long long long schlep and we wondered why we went there. Because, you know, what was there? I know there was the big battle was going on in the Middle East — El Alemein, at the time because all the supplies were going from Germany through Italy. Anyway, on the Saturday, to our surprise, on Saturday morning said there’s a briefing. This was Saturday morning. So we thought that’s strange. When we went down to the briefing the biggest surprise of the lot. We was going to a do a daylight. A low level daylight raid on Milan in Italy. And that was on the, that was on the 24th of, 24th of October. Operation Milan. Ten and three quarter hours. A long schlep. And we went all the way to Italy at low level, you know, just like that until the Alps. We couldn’t go over the Alps because we were so low so we weaved our way through the Alps. Came out at Lake Como and went straight down to Milan. And I always to this day I think about it. As we approached Milan they never had no idea that there was going to be an air raid. There was no air raid siren. Nothing. So a beautiful Saturday afternoon and as we flew over Milan and made our approach to the target all the people were out in the streets walking about. In the restaurants. And then we opened up and if you imagine ninety Lancs with six one thousand pounders. We just dropped them in the town and we came home. We lost about four that day to German fighters on the way back. But I don’t know how we went all the way to Milan in daylight and come all the way back again. Incredible. And that raid was, that was a ten and three quarter hour trip. I tell you my arse was sore when I got out of that plane [laughs] We never flew no higher than about thirty or forty feet off the ground until we got to the Alps. We had to go a bit higher and then down on Lake Como right into Milan. And then there was no air raids sirens and no guns. We just literally took the whole town by surprise.
TO: Do you remember what the target was? Specifically. In Milan?
HI: No. We just, well there was no target really. We just bombed Milan. We just went in. From what I could see we just bombed the centre of the city. There was an aircraft factory that I think they were supposed to been after but they didn’t bother. They just, and actually I did see a few Lancs opening up their machine guns over the town. Yeah. I did see that. There you are. That was war. And I was, I was a veteran then. I was. We was the only crew left out the squadron. The original squadron. And then we had a little break for about [pause] that was on the 24th of the 10th . Yeah. We had about a week. Must have gone on leave. And then when we come back on the 18th of the 11th we went to Turin again just to liven them up. And believe it or not that was a seven, eight hour trip. And the following day we went back again. To Turin, and done the same again. It was a long long time. We only had about seven hour break between the two raids. And then we went to Stuttgart. Stuttgart. We never made it. You know, we had trouble with the engines and we had to come back. So it didn’t count as a raid. And then this is what happened there. Then we went to Mannheim. That was in the, oh look, you’ve got the bomb load here. One thousand, one four thousand pounder, nine hundred and eighty incendiaries and nickels. Nickels were pamphlets. You know. Propaganda. What we used to do was over the North Sea we used to throw the bleeding lot out. We didn’t want the bother of throwing them out when we got over [laughs] we were supposed to throw them out over the target. We just used to throw them in the sea. Then this, this was when the battle of Alemein was on so we went back to Turin. Nine hours. Next time we was iced up terrible with engine trouble as well. We only done three hours for that one but that didn’t count as a trip. And that was it. And then we went to — this. This, see this raid here.
TO: Is it Hasselunne?
HI: Yeah. What actually happened was we went for the briefing and we said, ‘Where the bleeding hell is Hasselunne.’ It was just a small town just outside the Ruhr valley. Even to this day I remember the briefing. He said, ‘Look’ he said, ‘You’re bombing in the Ruhr valley and none of the workers –’ am I alright?
TO: Yeah. You’re fine.
HI: ‘None of the workers are getting any rest.’ So what they’re doing is they’re sending all the workers out to the small towns so they can get a good night’s rest. You know, the factory workers. So he said, ‘What we’re going to do is liven them up.’ I couldn’t believe it. They said, ‘We’re going to liven them up.’ But they said the reason why there was no bombing that night — it was a full moon. And the full moon when you’re flying is like daylight. There was no cloud so there was going to be no bombing that night but this nuisance raid. There was seventeen Lancasters ok’d at this nuisance raid. That means we had to go in at, this is night time mind you, as low as we could and bomb, bomb the, each was given a small town, a village or small town just outside the Ruhr Valley. Seventeen of us and bomb these small towns and come back home. Just to disrupt the German workers night’s kip. Anyway, in the bomb bay was sixteen one thousand pounders. Delayed action. And then we went to Hasselunne. And it was a beautiful night. Beautiful moon. It was clear as day. We went in about four or five hundred feet with our delayed action bombs. Sixteen of them. And we dropped them right plump right down the middle of the High Street. And I still wonder today if, you know, there was about a fifty minute half hour delay action on the bombs and when we got back we thought it was an easy trip. We went there. Came all the way back at low level and landed. And, but the thing was out of the seventeen Lancasters only seven come back. And we lost ten that night. Well it was fifty percent. Over fifty percent. And that was what I call a terror raid. It was an ordinary open town sitting there like there was, as we flew over, we could see the town. The bombs went and that was it. But then again that was war. And then we went back to our old faithful — Duisburg. And I tell you what — it was getting a bit warm. It was getting a bit warm at Happy Valley. And we went there six hours fifteen minutes. I’ve got the bomb load here. We went one thousand, we went with one thousand one hundred and seventy four incendiaries and nickel. Plus nickels. Six hours fifteen. And then the following day, after we’d been there, as we came back they woke us up in the morning and said, ‘You’re on ops again.’ Munich. So all we had was about five or six hours trip, sleep and was back on the 21st. The 20th and the 21st was at Munich.
TO: Could you please elaborate on this. About training machine guns please.
HI: Yes. We did machine gun a train that night. In the station. It was puffing away in the station and the pilot said, ‘Give it a liven up,’ and we went right along the train. Me and the mid-upper. Blasting it. We see the bullets, the tracer bouncing off the train. Yeah. That was war I suppose. What happened then —
TO: Sorry, if you don’t mind, sir would be ok if you sit back so your head isn’t in the shade. Sorry.
HI: So what happened then? The pilot I was with — Stubbs — had finished his tour. And the crew and they’d finished their tour and I was left without a crew. I was sitting in the mess waiting for new crew and a bloke I knew named Doolan, Sergeant Doolan came up to me and said Harry our rear gunner’s just been killed. We’ve just brought him back dead. Would you like to take his place? So [laughs] I was rather. I knew the rear gunner because I’d have been called up with him in 1940. And his name was Robinson and he came from the other side of London. Brixton. And a night fighter got on their tail. Blasted him out the turret. Literally blasted the whole turret and the tail off. So he said, The aeroplane is being repaired,’ [laughs] Repaired. ‘In the maintenance unit. We’re going to pick it up now. It’s got a new turret on it. A new tail plane. Ready to fly again.’ He said, ‘Would you come as a rear gunner?’ I said, ‘I haven’t got a pilot. I’ll come.’ So, so I flew with this crew. They was all NCOs, and we finished. We finished a whole tour. And we was the only crew that finished a tour all the time I was at Waddington. The nine months I was at Waddington we was the only crew that finished a tour. And we was all NCOs. Where were we? So my first trip with Sergeant Doolan was Dusseldorf again. Look. Went there a few times didn’t we? Dusseldorf. And this was, this was a shaky one. Hamburg. We got to Hamburg and we was prepared to go in for the bombing raid. The flak was crashing about all over us and the plane started going like that. Literally dropping like a stone. So the pilot said, ‘We’re so iced up that we can’t fly the bloody aircraft.’ And I could hear somebody say, ‘Oh it’s coming off.’ Great big lumps of ice crashing against the aircraft. Anyway, he said we’ll have to abandon. So we dropped our bombs where we were. Just outside Hamburg and went down as low as we could and the ice started breaking away and we managed to fly again properly. But when I got back and told them that was a really dicey trip they said, ‘You didn’t you get no photograph then?’ We said, ‘No. We just approached Hamburg, we see Hamburg being bombed but we just couldn’t make it,’ They said, ‘Well, it’s unfortunate. That don’t count. That was another trip that didn’t count [laughs] You know, it was hard in those days I’m telling you. And us all being NCOs and the briefing officer probably being a flight lieutenant or a squadron leader we couldn’t argue with it. We was only bleeding poor old NCOs. And then this is a new year. No. This is the 13th of the 2nd 1943. This was in February ‘43. We went to Laurent in France which wasn’t bad. It was an easy trip that was. And then back to Milan which was a long, long. long slog. And then our favourite. As a rear gunner our favourite was operations to Wilhelmshaven. Back to Wilhelmshaven. And then again to Bremen. Which was unusual I started off there didn’t I? Wilhelmshaven and went the other way around. Bremen and Wilhelmshaven. This time it was Wilhelmshaven and Bremen and I tell you what. There was some flak there. There was some flak. We got badly damaged coming back from Bremen so we had to land at a place called Croft. And then we returned the next morning in another aircraft. And then we went to Nuremberg and that night, believe it or not, we lost fifty that night. Flying to Nuremberg. The next time they went there they lost a hundred and twenty. Yeah. They lost a hundred and twenty. They went back there again a couple of months later and lost a hundred and twenty Lancs in one night.
TO: Out of how many?
HI: About four hundred. Yeah. It was slaughter. And then again on the 26th of February I went to Cologne. Do you want to see it in here?
TO: Yeah.
HI: Have you seen Cologne?
TO: Yes. I’ve seen it. Thank you. Sorry. Is it ok if I ask what did you think of Arthur Harris?
HI: Well, to me personally speaking the man had plenty of guts because after the Nuremberg raid we’d lost a hundred and twenty bombers that night. The following night he sent out another huge force. Now, a man has got to have, you’ve got to have some guts in you to do that. You know. After that terrible loss. But he was the man to do the job. Nobody else could do it. He, only took orders from Churchill. Churchill was the governor and what Churchill said went. Unless it was a diabolical raid and Harris said, ‘No. I can’t manage that.’ But there was, he had an aide de camp, Harris. I forget his name now. And we was going on a bombing raid and the aide de camp said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘It’s too much. It’s too many losses. We’re losing too many people there. We shouldn’t go.’ And he resigned. But Harris still went and we still had the losses. So there was somebody you know up the top knew what was going on. Our losses were, well you can’t, you cannot believe it. You could say you’d go on leave, you’d go on leave and come back in the mess — there was all strangers in there. All the old crews had gone. Within a week. Had a heavy week all had gone. All new crews. Yeah. And the faces got younger and younger and younger.
TO: Did you look young for your age?
HI: Do you think so?
TO: No, did you? Did you look young for your age? Or did you look older?
HI: Here. There I am there. On the wall. You see me. There. Picture on the wall.
TO: Thank you.
HI: Can you see it?
TO: Yeah. I see it. Do you think, did anyone ever find out that you’d lied about your age?
HI: Yeah. They did after I’d — I went, I went in the air force under the name of my mother’s maiden name because I didn’t want — I was stupid. I went in the name of, the name of Galloway. And then when I’d been on 9 Squadron about two months the CO called me in and said, ‘We found out your name isn’t Galloway. It’s Irons.’ He said, ‘We’ve changed,’ he never said nothing, he said, ‘Your name’s been changed now to Irons.’ And I went from Galloway to Irons and nothing was said about it. But it was all kids, all joined . Loads and loads of sixteen and seventeen year olds. There’s me there. When I got married.
TO: Was that, was that during the war?
HI: Yeah. That was just before I went and bombed Dresden. That was about two weeks before I bombed Dresden. 1944. I don’t know what made me get married then. I don’t know. And this here [pause] this, they used to kid us, they used to kid us that was an easy trip.
TO: Gardening.
HI: And it was the most dangerous trip we ever been. Mining. We used to have six one thousand pound mines on parachutes. And the thing was you had to fly over the Baltic and drop these mines at about five hundred feet. Jerry knew this and he had loads of these little fast boats with light flak on them and they shot down loads and loads of our boys. On these mining trips. And they used to call it an easy trip. That’s because it wasn’t the Ruhr valley.
TO: Did they call it gardening?
HI: They called it. Yeah. That was the code name for it. Gardening, yeah. Because you was planting. Instead of fruit you were planting mines. Called it gardening. Yeah. Oh you know. And then believe it or not I was back, back on my old favourite. Oh I went to Munich on the 3rd. And on the 9th we had this gardening and on the 12th back on my old favourite. Essen. I went to the Ruhr valley twenty seven times and I survived. How I done it I don’t know. And then we went to St Nazaire. Went to St Nazaire and that was a dodgy trip. They had a hell of a load of flak. We was in France and had a lot of flak. The thing was we had a, we had a wireless operator and on one of our trips he wasn’t well and he couldn’t fly that night. So he, he was one trip behind us. Say we was on twenty eight he was on twenty seven so he had to make up a trip so what they used to do they used to find another crew who wanted a spare wireless operator and he’d go and make up his trip. He was one behind. Unfortunately, he went on this trip and he never come back. A bloke named Chapel. He was on about his twenty seventh trip. He only had three or four trips to do. And he went on this trip and never came back. Which happened all the time. And then [pause] we ended our tour. My last trip was Kiel Canal which is a shocking place that was. Shocking. Well they was all bad. And then I survived. I survived thirty seven trips and I’m still a sergeant. And they sent me to a OTU. Sent me to OTU as an instructor. And I done that for about six months and was in the mess one night and we’d had a load, I used to drink then. I don’t drink now. And we were already sozzled and we caused a little bit of damage. A little bit of mayhem in the mess. We went in front of the CO the next morning and he said, ‘I’m bloody fed up with you gunners.’ And he said, ‘I’m posting you.’ And I thought where the bloody hell are you going to post me? The two postings he’d already got out was to Scotland. I thought sod that. I’ve got to go up all way to Scotland. And my posting come up. Southend. Just down the road. How lucky could I be? And what I was doing I was flying in Martinets towing a drogue for the flak. And we used to go right from Dover, Ramsgate, Margate, Clacton, not Clacton. All the way along the south coast towing this drogue. And the British ack ack used to fire, but they were so bloody accurate they used to keep blowing the bloody drogues off. So they told the gunners to fire a couple of degrees further back. And you used to watch the flak. I used to watch the flak in a straight line, right coming right along, right. I hoped they’d stop firing before the [laughs] and you could see the puffs of smoke trailing the white, trailing the big white drogue we had. And I’d done that went on for a few months and they said you’re going to back on ops again. And that’s when I went back on Halifaxes. And that was in [pause] that was in — there was a little bit of a rest and I never expected to go back on ops again. These are all towing drogues. The co-op yeah.
TO: So how many ops did you do in total during the war?
HI: Sixty.
TO: Sixty.
HI: Yeah. And then this is when I was telling you about. The beginning, the beginning of my second tour.
TO: [unclear]. Another daylight one.
HI: Yeah. Well that’s when I, when the CO told me they’d put a .5. It was a big hole. A huge hole cut around underneath the belly of the Halifax. And they had the .5 there. And we went all the way to Duisburg. The flak was, the flak was just as bad as when, well it was worse than when I’d been there previous. In the previous months. And I never seen no fighters. And it was in daylight. When we come back the pilot was screaming his head off. He said, ‘I’m not going to fly any more planes with a bloody great hole in the bottom of the aircraft.’ He said, ‘It’s too cold.’ So they, they put a block on it. But the funny thing was as we were going in to Duisburg we was, we was approaching Duisburg the someone, the ones in front had already bombed Duisburg and they were coming back. Like in a U. Coming back. There was about a quarter of a mile. As we was going in like that they was coming out. And one of our aircrafts, I don’t know why he done it, he decided he wasn’t going to bomb Duisburg. He was going to join those that was already coming out. And as he went across from our, from our flight as he went across, right across to join those that were coming out, the flak — because we was on the protection of the silver paper. We was all dumping the silver paper out and the radar couldn’t do nothing about it. But he broke the protection of the silver paper to cut across to join the blokes that was coming out. The flak opened up. It went one — one, two, three. The third one hit him. Right dead centre. Just went like that. It’s a shame. And I’ve seen it at night time. But during the day I’d seen it. I couldn’t believe it. Just went in smithereens. He still had his bomb load on. He must have had. Yeah. Why he cut across I don’t know but he just blew up. Yeah.
TO: Could you please explain how the silver paper or Window worked?
HI: Well, what it was, each piece of silver paper made a blimp on their radar screen. Each piece. So if you imagine millions of pieces dropping down — the whole screen was absolutely flooded. And the guns just stood still because they didn’t know which, which blimp to follow. Instead of one blimp on the screen there was thousands of them and they didn’t — so the guns just stood like that. The searchlights stood like that. The fighters didn’t know what to do, and the fighters — what they’d done they’d put a separate radar in the fighters. Night fighters. Independently. And they could still attack us which they did do. But the silver paper definitely helped us. Really helped us with the flak and the searchlights. They couldn’t do anything. The searchlights just used to stand still like that. But one thing they used to do which let’s say there was cloud cover most of the way to the target. The searchlights used to light up under the cloud and the bombers that were flying above it were silhouetted out against the light of the cloud and the fighters used to go straight in there. You know. Loads and loads of fighters. You had to watch them all the time and directly you see one you went straight into a dive to try to get out of its way. But as you know we never flew in a formation and there was a lot of crashes with our bombers criss-crossing and diving about.
TO: Did you participate in the large raid on Hamburg in July 1943?
HI: No. I missed that one. I went to the one previous. The one previous what I went to. That one was the fire one wasn’t it? That was the first time they used silver paper. That was exactly the first time they used it. We’d never used it.
TO: Did people call it silver paper or did most people call it Window?
HI: Window. Window. It was called Window. Yeah. Yeah. They had that right from the war. They had it but they wouldn’t use in case. They were frightened the Jerries were going to use it.
TO: And ironically Germany had developed it at the same time and didn’t want to use it.
HI: They did. Yeah.
TO: In case Britain used it.
HI: Yeah. Yeah. We used it because we were getting very strong in the air at that time. And they had to use it because the night fighters were getting the upper. And do you know at one period they was going to pack up night bombing? Yeah. They were going to stop it because the losses were so heavy. Yeah.
TO: And what’s your opinion on the Halifax bomber?
HI: Good. The Halifax Mark 3 was a good bomber. It never got the credit it deserved. It was a very very good bomber. They changed the engines and the tail plane and it became a very very good bomber. It was reliable. Got a good speed. Good height. The Mark 2 was rubbish. I think the Germans shot most of them down, like the Stirling. But the Mark 3 Halifax was a good plane. They changed the engines to Bristol, Bristols, and it made a lot of difference. Yeah.
TO: And what did you think of the Wellington?
HI: The Wellington was a good plane but it wasn’t up to it when the war started. It was alright for a few months of the war. My first squadron, number 9, they made the first bombing raid of the war and they lost, I think they lost two or three on their first bombing raid. The Wellington was a good plane but it wasn’t up to the capability of bombing. Night bombing. It was too slow. Didn’t get the height. They did go up to the Mark 10 and we used to see them now and again but they didn’t use them a lot at the end of the war. The Stirling was useless. The Stirling one was a useless bomber. Couldn’t get no height. It was big. It was clumsy. Some of the blokes used to like it but not many.
TO: And the Lancaster. What did you think?
HI: The Lancaster was a good plane. Yeah. Was a good plane. Yeah. And they churned them out. The way they churned them out was unbelievable. Do you know what we’re going to do now? We’re going to stop for a bit. I’m going to make you a cup of tea.
TO: Yeah. Sure. Are we on course?
HI: Yeah.
TO: Yeah. Ok.
TO: Yeah. Are you ok? Yeah.
[pause] [doorbell rings]
TO: Ok.
HI: Right. What do you want? The second tour?
TO: Yes. Start on the second tour I think.
HI: What happened I was doing drogue towing with my Martinets and the CO called us in and said, ‘You’re back on ops.’ And they sent me to 77 Squadron, Full Sutton. October 1944. And when I arrived they said, ‘The CO wants to see you. So I said what’s he want to see me about.’ I bet he wants to borrow a few [laughs] Anyway, he came out to us and he said, ‘We’re just, this is a special Halifax,’ and he said, ‘It’s got a big hole been cut in the bottom of the Halifax.’ It was a big hole as well. And it was a .5. and they put a sort of, I don’t how they expected me to sit on that bloody seat all those hours. And it was a manual. It was a manual .5 and they said, ‘If a fighter, a night fighter comes up underneath you’ll be able to spot it and protect the aircraft.’ So I said, ‘Alright. Fair enough.’ And the strange thing was it wasn’t on a night bombing trip. They sent me on a day trip to Duisburg. And I never see no fighters come up. And we come back. But the crew, the crew was complaining terrible about the hole in the aircraft and the cold air coming through. Anyway, on the 22nd of the 10th ’44 I went up again in this Halifax with a .5 and done a little bit of air firing with it. And I come down. I said, ‘I don’t think it’s going to be very successful because it’s too bloody cold.’ So, so the CO said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do with you then. We’ve don’t need any gunners here.’ And they posted me to 462 Squadron at Driffield, Australian squadron. And there I started my, on the 29th of the 10th. 29th of the 10th [pause] where was I there. Yeah. On the 22nd I was at Full Sutton. On the 29th of the 10th I was on ops in 462 Squadron, Driffield. 1942. The pilot apparently had been shot down over France and he made this because it was occupied by the British troops then. And they managed to get back to England and of course he was looking for a new crew and I joined him. And believe it or not as a mid-upper. I don’t know why they put me as a mid-upper. Anyway, they put me as a mid-upper and we went to Happy Valley. A place called Dornburg It was a daylight on Dornburg. That was just outside Happy Valley. On the following day we went to Cologne. Operations — Cologne. That was as a night time. And I couldn’t see them I was beginning to find it was getting a bit easier. The ops were getting easier. The flak was just as bad but the fighters didn’t seem, the fighters didn’t seem such a pest like they used to be. And the thing was every trip I went on. Every trip I went on my second tour. Near enough every one, near every one, was to Happy Valley. The next trip was with Hourigan, an Australian, was to Dusseldorf. And on the 4th we went to Bochum. Bochum. That’s in the Ruhr valley as well. And then [pause] and then we went on a daylight raid. It just shows you. A daylight raid to Gelsenkirchen and — which was unbelievable. You’d never, the year before they would never have dared gone over the Ruhr valley in the daylight. And then we done a bit of air firing in a Halifax. And then we went back to Essen. Hourigan again. I was with Hourigan again and we went to Essen on the 29th of ‘44. And on the 30th believe it or not we was back in Duisburg. And every one of those trips was to the Ruhr Valley. And on the 21st of the 12th ‘44 I went to Cologne. And I was posted from there to the other Australian squadron 466 Squadron. Total operations — I thought it was nine. Then I was posted to the other Australian squadron at Driffield — 466. And I carried, and I went with, wait a minute, I carried on with Hourigan and we went to Saarbrucken in daylight. Which was unbelievable. And then we went to Magdeburg in the, in the Ruhr Valley. And then back to Gelsenkirchen again as a mid-upper. I went as a mid-upper then in a Halifax. But I found that things were a bit easier in the second tour. Wasn’t really because we were still losing a hell of a load of bloody aircraft but it seemed to me a bit, seemed to me to be a bit lighter. And then on the 2nd of the 2nd ‘45 I went to Wanne-Eickel. It’s another — I missed out a page here.
[pause]
And then I was posted to 158 Squadron at Lissett in Yorkshire. And the first trip we went to was to Dresden. That was on the 13th of the 2nd ‘44. We, we never actually bombed Dresden. We bombed the place just outside Dresden called [unclear ] or [unclear] or Bohlem or whatever. B O H L E M. We was told to go in before the 5. We were in 4 Group and were told to go in just before 5 Group and draw the fighters away from Dresden which we did do. We had bleeding swarms of bleeding fighters around us. And the Lancs went into Dresden unopposed and that’s why Dresden took such a hiding. There was no opposition whatsoever there. And then 5 Group just done what they liked. And we could see, well we was right next door to it. We could see the huge blaze at Dresden burning merrily away. And we was at, from this place just outside Dresden. We landed. We had trouble. I think we got hit that night and we landed back at Manston for a couple of hours. Then we went to, then funnily enough I started flying with a Canadian. A Canadian named Cooperman. And strangely enough that was, that was back, back at the Ruhr Valley again. Rohrsheim. And then the following, the following day I was with Cooperman and we was bombing a place called Worms in the Ruhr valley. And I always remember to this day, this Canadian, who was a Jew, was a Jewish bloke and he’d left Germany with his parents before the war. And he was, he was a flying officer in the Canadian Air Force. And as we approached Worms he said, ‘Chaps,’ he said, ‘This is where I was born.’ He said, ‘And now I’m going to bomb the bastards.’ And those were the exact words he said. And we did. We went and bombed it. And the next thing we knew and on the 23rd of the 2nd we went to Essen again and, the times I went to Essen, and the following day on the 24th of the 2nd I went back to the Ruhr Valley and done close quarter — Kamen. And then the following on the 27th — That was our last trip of the war we went to Mainz. And most of those trips were in the Ruhr valley. And unscathed. Unbelievable. And of course the war, the war finished soon after that didn’t it? 27th of the 2nd.
TO: And what are your thoughts on the bombing of Dresden?
HI: Well to be honest with you it was just well after all those trips it just came normal. You know. You just looked down and saw a huge huge fire below you which you normally see and that was it. Dresden was the same. We was, the place we bombed was more or less on the outskirts of Dresden. The idea of us was to draw the fighters away. Just go in about five or six minutes before the main force. Bring the fighters away and of course that’s what happened. And the Lancs from 5 Group went in and done their business. They did do the business. There was no flak there. No opposition whatsoever. There was no flak and no fighters. They just went in, done their bombing and went home. And of course it caught well alight.
TO: Did the fire that you could see at Dresden — did it look any bigger than what you had seen before?
HI: It looked big, yeah. We could see. All the crew said, ‘Blimey that’s a big one down there.’ But then again most, most bombing trips we always had looked down, those targets were well alight. Well alight. The amount of incendiaries we dropped was unbelievable. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them. Yeah.
TO: This is going to be an odd question and I don’t think you may even be able to answer it, but when you were flying over areas that were on fire could you, was there any noticeable change in the temperature when you were flying above it?
HI: No. I wouldn’t have thought so. You was only over the target, it looked like a lifetime but you was only over there minutes. Really minutes. Oh, you’re talking about the hot air coming up?
TO: Yeah. The [unclear] rising up.
HI: I don’t think — they never noticed. It didn’t seem no bloody warmer in the turret anyway [laughs] but all you was, I’d known from my personal opinion was we wanted to get in. Get out. Quick as possible. That’s what we done. But the thing that we never realised but the German fighters told us afterwards, the worst thing we ever done was after we’d dropped our bombs was to go into a dive. We should never have done that because that gave the advantage to the night fighters. They was above you then. Well above you to come in. What we should have done is kept the same height coming out of the target. But we all used to dive. Pick up speed to get away from the target. Yeah. But you used to see on the way home you always see bombers blowing up in the sky. All the time. Yeah. Over the target, yeah. And the thing was to get in and get out quick.
TO: Right. How do you feel about Churchill’s decision when he ordered the bombing of cities?
HI: Well, we never knew it was. We knew it was somebody higher up than Harris but of course it was, was Churchill. He demanded that we bombed the cities and Harris just took his word for it and he made sure we did bomb them. And of course he had the backing of a huge bomber force didn’t he? Lancs, Halifaxes. Probably, if we’d had them a year earlier the war would have finished earlier. But the bomb load was enormous. One four thousand pounder and fourteen hundred incendiaries. Imagine that lot dropping. Four or five hundred bombers dropping that lot on a small town. Yeah.
TO: When you went on missions were you part of a bomber stream?
HI: Well a stream. It was, literally was a stream. There was no formation flying or nothing. You just went over and you had to be in a certain point. More or less rendezvous at a certain point on the map. So that you were more or less was all collected together so you could make one rush to the target. Get in and get out quick. You never doodled about over the target. You went in and especially with the Pathfinders. You just, you just went for the flare. You’d see the flares. Went straight for the flares.
Other: Sorry to disturb you again Harry.
HI: Yes sir.
[recording paused]
TO: You think, you just mentioned to me something about the evasive manoeuvres. The night fighters said the wrong thing to do was to dive.
HI: Yeah. Leaving the target. We found out, well after the night fighters said it was the wrong thing to do was to dive away from the target because it gave them the advantage of height to come in after you. Which, when you think about it, was right. But what actually caused the much trouble for Bomber Command was the up and under. The Schrage musik. That was one that caused all the trouble. The flak you couldn’t, couldn’t avoid. The flak was there. If it hit you it hit you and if it didn’t hit you you was lucky. It was just sheer luck. You couldn’t avoid it. You had to go through it and if one of those shells hit you that was it. Yeah. We used to get huge lumps of shrapnel come through the aircraft. That was the danger. And if that hit you it caused terrible damage. So there you are.
TO: Could you see much on the ground other than fires and explosions?
HI: No. All you could see from about twenty thousand feet you didn’t keep looking at the target because you had to keep active with the fighters. Because they was all around you. All waiting for you. They was like sharks and you had to watch. You had to really watch the sky for fighters. They were the biggest danger. And when they come in they showed no mercy. They went straight in.
TO: Yeah.
HI: Yeah.
TO: Did night fighters take out more bombers than flak?
HI: Yeah. Definitely. Much much more. Especially with the up and under. That’s what done it. Yeah. I think they — I reckon — I don’t know, I’ve got no idea but I reckon seventy five per cent, eighty percent of the shot down were done by fighters. And you know when you think some had forty or fifty bombers to their credit. It was so easy for them. You could come and all they had to do was get underneath the aircraft, press the trigger, press the button, fire the guns and they wouldn’t, the shells that were explosive shells go into the petrol tank. Bang. Up it went. Just like that.
TO: And when you, can you explain to me a bit more how the briefings worked for the missions?
HI: Well, what it actually was we were two squadrons. We were told at the briefing in the briefing room was near enough down to your HQ you know where all the office buildings were. And with a crowd in the room there was always a military policeman on the, on the gate and we went in and sat down. A bit noisy. Everybody was noisy. Laughing and joking. Then all of a sudden — bang. The CO would come in with his adjutant and his armament officer, gunnery officer, bomb aimer officer and navigation officer used to follow the CO in. And they’d go on the platform and we’d wait for the curtain. There was a big curtain over the map. That was pulled down and then you’d see. And that’s when you used to get the ohs and ahs. See the Ruhr. See the Ruhr Valley up and say, ‘Oh blimey.’ But they didn’t, they used to love Italy. Going to Italy. But Munich was a bad target, Nuremburg was, Berlin was. But the Ruhr valley was the place where most of the flak was. The reason for it was because you didn’t have one town. You had about ten or fifteen towns near enough on top of each other. And if you missed one, one town, if you missed one town you had to go over another town and they’d give you a pasting as well. That’s why they used to call it Happy Valley. Yeah. You got a good reception going in and a better reception coming out. You used to see the bombs blowing upwards and the huge explosions down below. You still had to keep one eye out for the fighters. Especially the single engine fighters. They used to come in and they used to go right through the flak after you. Yeah. Messerschmitt. Used to come straight at you. And they had four cannons and if one of those hit you mate it was good night nurse.
TO: What kind of targets were you generally given at the briefings?
HI: Well, we was told an area where to bomb. We were never given an actual target. We was given an area to bomb because very very difficult of a night time picking out a target from twenty thousand feet. You got an area and we would bomb that area. If we could. If it was a clear moonlight night and at that time we were dropping our own flares. There was no Pathfinding at the beginning. And we used to drop our own flares to see where, you know, where the target was. And it got easier when they got the Pathfinders. Because all that meant there was — get to the target and see the flare. Bomb the flare. But the trouble was Jerry knew this was going on and so he used to concentrate all his, all his artillery on where the flares were. And a lot of places were literally burned to pieces. Because I didn’t realise how many houses in Germany were made of wood. It was amazing. Dresden was nearly all wood wasn’t it? Yeah. And there was another place. I forget where it was. Completely burned down. Near the Baltic. I can’t remember the name.
TO: Hamburg.
HI: No. Smaller place than that. They burned the whole town down. That was in about 1942.
TO: Lubeck.
HI: Ah, Lubeck. Yeah. Yeah. They burned Lubeck down completely. Yeah. Raised it to the ground. Incendiaries. They were fearsome things those incendiaries. I think they was about eighteen inches long. Shaped like a twenty piece coin. About four, I think it had four or five sides to it but they were pretty deadly. Imagine that. I mean we used to carry fourteen or fifteen hundred. You imagine a hundred Lancs all carrying that amount load. How many incendiaries were dropped in one night. And then we had the other incendiary with oil. That was a terrible one as well.
TO: And were you ever given, did you ever win any awards during the war?
HI: Yeah. I got the DFC. The reason I think I got that because after, as the war was finishing they asked me how many trips I’d done. I wrote them down. They took no notice of it and then a couple of weeks later they said, ‘Oh. You’ve been awarded the DFC.’ So that’s what I got, the DFC. It was a bit unique because I was a warrant officer. I wasn’t an officer and that’s an officer’s medal the DFC but being a warrant officer they gave it to the, gave us the DFC as well.
TO: Did it go to the rest of the crew as well?
HI: That I don’t know. The war had finished and most of the crews had dispersed, you know. What was left of them. Most of the blokes during the war was awarded the DFCs and DFMs. A lot of them got killed. A hell of a lot of them. Usually and this is what I don’t understand — when I finished my first tour everybody got the DFM except me. That I don’t understand. Then I realised what it might have been. Because I changed my name from Irons to Galloway when I was halfway through me tour. And I think they might have looked at it and just seen Galloway. And Irons was just so many trips. And Irons was so many trips and they never connected the two together. But all the crew got the DFM except me. Pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator, mid-upper except me.
TO: And what was your favourite aircraft of the war?
HI: Well, I think, myself the Halifax. I thought the Halifax Mark 3 was a better aircraft than the Lanc. It was a good bomber. It done its job. Same as the Lanc. I don’t think it carried the same heavy bomb load as a Lanc. It was a good plane. Had no problems with it. We had four machine guns in the mid-upper and four in the back so it was a bit better armed than the, than the Lanc. And right at the end of the war of course they brought out the other turret with the .5s in them. It was a bit late though. The war was more or less finished. We should have had them in ‘42. They made a hell of a lot of difference.
TO: And I know we mentioned this earlier but could you explain again what happened to people who refused to go on bombing missions?
HI: Well I know it happened. I know it happened. I’ve heard, you know, stories of what happened. I never come across it myself but it did happen. And especially not the officers so much which I still don’t understand that. But the NCOs were stripped. Stripped down to AC2 and put in the prison. I think it was in the Isle of Sheppey and they done about two or three months here. And when they came out on their record books, you know the big card box, book thing you all had was right at the top in red letters that they’d refuse to fly. LMF. Yeah. Which was wrong. Some blokes couldn’t take it. Just couldn’t take it. Probably had a couple of bad trips and that was it. And they were bad trips. Yeah. And after the war they just treated us like mud. Didn’t care. Gave us all the menial jobs there were about and that was it. We had to wait twelve months before we got demobbed. A lot of them got, a lot of them had their ranks cut right down to AC1 and AC2. I don’t know why. I never, but a lot of them did. Which was all wrong.
TO: And what’s your best memory of the war?
HI: My best memory of the war was my first bombing trip. To Duisburg. Not Duisburg.
TO: Dusseldorf.
HI: Dusseldorf. That was my first trip and that was the most frightening. It wasn’t the worst one I done but it was my first one and I never expected what I’d see. Never knew. And when we come back after a bombing raid we never discussed, never discussed a bombing trip anyway. We never said it was bad or anything like that. We just, just more or less kept quiet. Because we was all frightened what was going to be the next one I think. Which near enough always happened. The crews. You’d go on leave, you’d come back — all different faces. Yeah. And that went on time and time again. I think they could have treated bomber crews a little bit better than what they did for what they’d done but there you are.
TO: And what was probably the most difficult mission you ever had? If you don’t want to discuss don’t talk about it.
HI: No. The most difficult place to go to was Essen. It was terrible. The flak there was unbelievable. It was all difficult. Every one. You never knew. You never knew your luck. Some went on easy trips. They thought was an easy trip. Like the one who got the VC for the first daylight raid. Low level raid of the war in a Lancaster. He got the VC and he stayed on the squadron but he never done no trips until one came up for Italy which we used to say it was easy. He went on an Italian one and got shot down. So you never knew your luck. Nettleton. That was the VC. Yeah. He went on one of the easy Italian trips and got shot down.
TO: So you mentioned earlier that guy Gibson was with you on that one low level mission.
HI: Oh yeah. Yeah.
TO: Was he with a different squadron number at that time?
HI: Yeah. He was, he was 106 squadron. He was the CO of 106 Squadron. 106 Squadron. He was definitely on our port side. And he took the photograph of us and another crew as we were just going into Le Creusot and that is, and the actual picture now is in the big museum at Hendon. The big photograph of it. Yeah. Because he went on to become the Dambuster didn’t he?
TO: What do you think of Operation Chastise?
HI: Operation?
TO: Chastise. It was the Dambusters raid.
HI: Well I reckon myself, personally speaking they could have got near enough any crew could have done that. It was only just more or less flying low and dropping the bomb at the right height. But they just, they just picked the crews, he picked the crews he wanted. They were all his mates mostly from 106 Squadron. But it was a good raid that weren’t it? A good raid. There was worse ones than that but there you are. You can fly to Essen or on the Ruhr Valley was a much more dangerous target than the — than that.
TO: Did you ever have to attack railway yards?
HI: They did but we never attacked, I never attacked a railway yard. Only in Italy, Genoa. But we attacked the whole town and the railway yard was amongst it, you know. We attacked that because they was having a big huge battle at Alemain and the Germans were bringing supplies through to Genoa down to the Middle East. And we attacked it. The railway yards there. Yeah.
TO: And what do you think was the most important campaign of the war?
HI: Well actually — what? From the whole of —
TO: From the whole of the war.
HI: Bomber Command. I think if it hadn’t been for Bomber Command the war would have gone on for much much much longer. Much longer. So we — so you’ve been to Germany haven’t you? Seen the, did you see the state of the bombing? Oh you never did you?
TO: I saw, I saw the church that they left.
HI: Yeah. Yeah. But the flak, but the bombing terrorised Germany. Definitely. I don’t think we would have stood it anyway. I know we wouldn’t have done.
TO: And did you hear at all — when did you hear about the Holocaust?
HI: Nobody heard about that ‘til after the war. They must have known. They must have had, they must have had reports coming through from the Resistance about what was happening but we never heard about it. We never knew it was going on. The funny thing was I read after the war that the Jewish community in England asked us, asked Bomber Harris to bomb Auschwitz. Bomb it completely. And he refused. Good job he did because can you imagine what would have happened after the war when they found out that they said the RAF had bombed a concentration camp? The thing was the Jews reckon that it was better for them to be killed with a bomb than the suffering like they were. [pause – fly buzzing on recording] Got some flies in here haven’t we? Have you got it all written down have you?
TO: I have my questions on here. See which ones I’ve asked and which I haven’t because a lot of them you’ve answered already in your — in your —
HI: Yeah.
TO: Were clouds over the target ever a major problem?
HI: It was a big problem. Once, well once the cloud was over the target you couldn’t see it so you either had to bring your bombs back or drop them on a near enough target what you see. And once you, if you went over the target we shouldn’t have gone, we shouldn’t have gone on the raid. If the Met officer told us that there was full cloud over the target we shouldn’t go. We had a few cancellations like that. We were all ready to go sitting in the aircraft and then the red light would come up. No ops through, through bad weather. Icing was one of the worst most dangerous things. Flying through cloud with the ice.
TO: And before you joined the RAF can you, do you remember much about seeing the bombing of London?
HI: Oh I seen London. I was, I told you. We lived at Stamford Hill. It was a high, quite a high part of the ground and you had a first class picture of what was happening in the City of London. It was well alright. Really well alight. They caught the whole of the city alight. It was blazing. And that’s when we decided to join the RAF. A lot of the bombs were dropped scattered in London anyway. A hell of a lot of the bombs were dropped everywhere. Not in one area. Just dropped their bombs and went away. You know. It was over London. That was it.
TO: And do you remember seeing much of the Battle of Britain?
HI: Yeah we see a little bit of it. We were about fifteen sixteen then. Sixteen. And we was over the Lea. The big open open field by the River Lea and we had a grandstand view of the RAF Spitfires attacking the bombers and the fighters. We see them going down. Yeah. It was quite a battle. Yeah. And as I say they had a terrific disadvantage. The Germans. Because they had to come all the way over France before they got to England, and our Spitfires were waiting for them when they come here. They didn’t have that huge journey. They were more or less local. At Hendon they were at. Hornchurch. Yeah. Good job we beat them. But the Battle of Britain was no comparison. I’ll tell you now, no comparison to the Battle for the Ruhr. No comparison whatsoever. In terms of casualties anyway.
TO: And can you tell me a bit about the gunnery school course you went on?
HI: Yeah. When we arrived there we was told it was a six weeks course. I think we flew about — I’ve got it here. I know it wasn’t a lot.
[pause]
HI: In all I done nineteen hours flying. Nineteen hours. It’s frightening. And it was all firing at drogues. Two hundred rounds fired. All usual firing at a drogue being towed by an aircraft.
TO: Yes.
HI: Done six weeks there and I was straight on ops which was frightening really. You didn’t know what was happening [laughs] till, till you got there. Yeah.
TO: Is it ok if I close the door to the lounge? There seems to be a bit of birdsong coming through.
HI: Pardon?
TO: Is it ok if I close the door to the lounge?
HI: Yeah
TO: Sorry. It’s just a bit of —
HI: What? A bit of a reflection.
TO: No. There’s a bit of birdsong coming through. That’s all.
HI: Birdsong.
TO: Yeah.
HI: Yeah. Go on. Yeah. You don’t like birds.
TO: No. It’s just it might interfere on the film. That’s all. Sorry.
[pause]
TO: Nothing to do with birds it’s just it might be interfering in the background noise that’s all. I haven’t got a problem with birds. Sorry what was that. I couldn’t remember, what were saying earlier about the propaganda leaflets that you had with you?
HI: Nickel. Every time we took off there was a pack. A big parcel of nickels. Not on every raid but a lot of the raids and it was up to the engineer mostly to throw them through the bomb bay. He had a window at the side of him and he could open up and could throw the nickels into the bomb bay. So when the bomb bay, when the bomb doors opened all the nickels floated out. That was the idea of it. But our skipper say sod it and just used to ask one of the crew to go back and throw them out the bleeding aircraft. We don’t want to — ‘We’ve got enough on our plate without throwing out bloody leaflets.’ And it was a load of rubbish that the Jerry never took notice of. Just a waste of time.
TO: Harris said after the war he never engaged in pamphlet dropping for two reasons. One — it gave the defenders plenty of practice in getting ready for it.
HI: Yeah.
TO: And two it supplied a considerable quantity of toilet paper to the Germans.
HI: That’s right. Yeah [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Nickels they called them.
TO: And did you hear about Hitler’s invasion of Russia?
HI: Oh we heard about it. It was on the news. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It didn’t make no difference to us. We were still building our forces. That was in nineteen forty — in the nineteen forty wasn’t it? Russia.
TO: I think it was ’41. Or around that time.
HI: Yeah. It didn’t bother us but my squadron, number 9 and 617 went to Russia before they bombed the Tirpitz because it’s such a long distance they had to refuel and on the way back they bombed the Tirpitz. And they were successful. They sunk that anyway.
TO: Were your, did you ever see the Tallboy bombs they were using?
HI: No. I never see it. No. Because by the time I was on Halifaxes then. There was only two squadrons that had the tall bomb. There was 617 and my squadron — number 9. They didn’t started bombing, didn’t start using the tall boy until the end probably the end of ’43. They caused a lot of damage. Caused a hell of a lot of damage. But there was only two squadrons that dropped it anyway.
TO: And what were conditions like in general aboard a Halifax?
HI: Just the same as a Lanc I suppose. Bloody cold. And that was it. A little bit more room. You could get out the turret and get yourself, escape a bit quicker than the Lanc. It was a bit easier. You could open the doors and just more or less crouch down and get out. With the Lanc you had to slide yourself out about eight or nine feet before you could get to your feet. You had to slide down and slide out. Of course you know you was locked in the turret. You locked yourself with a clip at the back and just clipped it and that. And if you were probably badly wounded — if you couldn’t undo it you was buggered. You couldn’t get out the turret.
TO: Can you please explain to me the procedure for boarding the bomber and taking off for a mission?
HI: Well it wasn’t a lot in it actually. The crew. The WAAF driver used to drop you at your aircraft. And then the ground crew would be there. And all you would do was. It all depends how long you’ve got before take-off. If you had, if you were on one of the early crews you’d be on the outside of the aircraft. I think nearly everybody smoked them days. They was all puffing, puffing on fags until they got in. And set the fags out and climbed in the aircraft. And the bomb aimer would start checking the — yeah. The flight engineer would start checking his stuff. The two gunners would be make sure the guns are working well and the ammunition was coming up. And then we was just wait for the signal. I’d pull up the ladder. Slam the door and then trundle down to the starting point which was a big cabin. And you used to wait for the yellow light. The green light to go on and off you went. You’d circle the aerodrome till you got to a nice height and then off you went. You was on your own, on your Jack-Jones. We had to keep looking out for other aircraft in case they came too close to you. But there was never never never any formation flying of a night time. Never. Never.
TO: Did you ever do formation flying during the day?
HI: Never. Well, I told you we’d done two daylights. All we were — one big group of ninety Lancs just flying along at thirty foot. There was no formation flying or nothing. There were just one gaggle, what we called a gaggle. And if the fighters had got amongst us we’d have had it. But we were so lucky with that Le Creusot raid. To go all the way there and back without seeing a fighter was incredible. We were right across France. And there must have been hundreds of fighters there.
TO: Was there, I know you mentioned that you didn’t talk about missions but was there anyone who ever said that they thought that the bombing wasn’t - the bombing or the tactics weren’t working?
HI: No. I never heard that ever. Never. All I ever heard was we were going over to bomb the target and that was it. There was never any mention of tactics not working. Never. Only until after the war. And now they realise that bombing was very very important. It was through the bombing that really stopped the Germans. Stopped all their, stopped all their production. All their production.
TO: And what was the procedure for coming in to land at the end of a mission?
HI: That was, that was difficult because you was tired , you were bloody cold, and you were wanting to get down. You’d seen everything. You’d seen some terrible things happening in the air and the trouble was you’d all rush back to try to try to get, try to be the first to land. And the trouble was there would be about fifteen of you all circling the ‘drome at different heights waiting to come in and it was bloody tiring. Because you were tired anyway especially with an eight or nine hour flight. It’s not only the eight or nine hours flight it was the hours before preparing before you went. It could be a long long long day and when you come back everybody was trying to get back first. The first one back landed first and all the others had to queue up. Flying round and round and round until it was their turn. What we called pancake. And you just came down. Once you landed oh, take your mask off and just relax. Yeah. Some of those raids were terrible I’ll tell you. You never knew if you was coming back or not. Never.
TO: And were you ever scared?
HI: Always scared. You had to be. You weren’t human if you weren’t. With that amount of flak that was coming up. You can’t explain to people the amount of artilleries shells that were coming up. Hundreds of them over the target. Hundreds of them. And on top of that you had to watch out for the night fighters. You had to watch out for blokes dropping bombs on you. You had to watch out for collisions. And on top of that you had to find your way home [laughs] and that was a bit difficult sometimes. We’d be flying. Where the bloody hell are we? ‘Skipper I don’t know where we are.’
TO: Did you talk much with each other during a mission?
HI: No. No. All we talked about was the business. Nobody, there was no — I don’t know about other crews but most crews I suppose, everybody kept quiet until they had something to say. Which is most, which is most important. You don’t want a lot of chat in the aircraft while you’re flying on ops. You want to be as quiet as possible. You never know.
TO: And did you socialise a lot outside of missions?
HI: Only with, with the crew. We always went out. If we went out anywhere it was always with the crew on the beer. We was always drinking. Always. Most of the aircrew were drinkers. Except my pilot. Stubbs. He never drank, never smoked and he never went out with women. But by God could he swear when we was on ops. His language [laughs] his language was absolutely vile. What he didn’t call the bomb aimer. The flight engineer. He never swore at me though. And you couldn’t swear back at him — he was a flight lieu [laughs] yeah.
TO: Slight digression here. Bernie Harris the chap I mentioned to you earlier.
HI: Yeah.
TO: He said, I think he said there was a member of his crew who could swear for about thirty minutes without repeating the same word and once accidentally there was some kind of radio error.
HI: Yeah.
TO: Started swearing for thirty minutes straight in to it. When there was some senior officers on the radio or something. And apparently there was, oh sorry, also some young WAAF with them at the time. He nearly fainted when she made the call. Yeah. That’s —
HI: Yeah.
TO: And, sorry you mentioned on the first mission you had to make a second bomb run.
HI: Yeah.
TO: Was that common?
HI: Not really. But this pilot, he was a good pilot and he liked to, liked to have everything right. It had to be straight. And if we’d have gone in and he hadn’t got the aiming point and he took the photograph. We come back with no aiming point. The raid wouldn’t have counted anyway. That’s why we went around again. Second run. It was dangerous but there you are. I always said it was like doing two trips in one.
TO: This is more a speculative question but do you think anything could have been done during the war to reduce the losses Bomber Command were suffering?
HI: Yeah. Had the turret. Had the turret underneath the aircraft. If they’d had the turret underneath the aircraft they would have saved a hell of a lot of aircraft. A hell of a lot. Then again I don’t know where they could have put a turret underneath a Lanc. You had your bomb bay which took up say eight tenths of the area underneath. And then you had your H2S. There was no room for a turret. No room at all unless you took the H2S out or you made the bomb bay smaller. The Yanks had it because their bomb bay was — they never carried hardly any bombs anyway. They only had a small area for their bombs. And we had a huge, well you know, they had the huge room underneath. It was enormous.
TO: And what did you think of German aircraft of the war?
HI: The what?
TO: The German aircraft of the war.
HI: Well they were good. Yeah. They were very good. Yeah. The only thing is the Germans never had a heavy bomber did they? They never had a heavy bomber. The bombers, the JU88 and the Messerschmitt 110 they turned into night fighters because they could stay up in the air, you know. About six or seven hours cruising about. But they never had no, and actually there was only the two bombers they had, the JU88 and the 110. And they couldn’t carry no bomb load. They carried a thousand pounder and that was it. Not like the Lanc.
TO: And how was morale in general in the air force?
HI: It was alright. Yeah. It was alright. Yeah. No one ever moaned. They knew that they’d, most of them knew that they wasn’t going to come back. That’s the most amazing thing of the war I think. They all knew. Most of them knew they wasn’t going to come back. Which was incredible. Incredible. To prove that everyone used to write a last letter. I never. But most of them did. Used to write a last letter home. They knew they wasn’t going to survive. They had to do thirty trips. It wanted some doing and come back every time. Wanted some doing. Yeah.
TO: Did people ever talk about friends that they’d lost?
HI: No. Not really. No. No. I’ll tell you the word they used to use. I’ll tell you now, was, ‘Gone for a shit.’ That was it. Nothing else was said. ‘Oh, where’s so and so today?’ ‘Oh they went for a shit last night.’ And that was it. Or got the chop. That was it. Never discussed no more. Another crew would come in. Same thing.
TO: Did you ever go to the cinema much during the war?
HI: No. Very rarely went. Very rarely. The thing for bomber crews was going up the pub and getting drunk. I suppose a few went — oh I think I went once or twice but mostly we used to end up in the pub. In the pubs in Lincoln. Mostly Lincoln. The Saracens Head. It was packed. Packed with bomber crews. Packed every night.
TO: And the newspapers that you had during the war. Did you ever read what they were saying about bomber crews?
HI: No. There wasn’t much spoken about the bomber crews. Not a lot. Not a lot. There wasn’t a lot of information about them. There was no publicity about them anyway. Only now and again when one of them won the VC but that not a lot. The bombing just carried on quietly. The government knew what was going on that was it. They public didn’t know. Only around Lincoln when they used to see about three or four hundred Lancs circling Lincoln ready to go.
TO: Was it very cramped aboard the aircraft?
HI: Well in the rear turret it was yeah. In the rear turret. And the mid-upper was very cramped, very very cramped. No room. No room for movement at all — the time you got your clothing on. And you had a seat a hard seat. I think it was armour plated seat we had and it was as hard as anything. Apart from that it was only because we were so young that we took it. But the oxygen used to make your throat and mouth terrible dry. You was breathing through a rubber oxygen mask — the smell of the bloody rubber. Yeah. Yeah. How I managed it I don’t know but I did. Incredible.
TO: If you want to take another break we can.
HI: No. I think I’ll have another drink. You’re making me bloody thirsty. Do you want another tea? Yeah?
[recording paused]
TO: So where did you keep the parachutes aboard the planes?
HI: It was on a piece of elastic outside the rear turret. About six foot back. There was a holder there and you put it in there and put a elastic, a piece of elastic held it. Sometimes it held and sometimes it didn’t.
TO: And did you hear much about what the Germans were doing in Europe during the war?
HI: No. Nothing at all. Nothing at all. Never heard about the atrocities or anything. Never. There was never no publicity about it. None at all. Only after the war we realised that a few of them ended up in Auschwitz. A few of our prisoners of war ended up in Auschwitz. That’s about all I know.
TO: Have you ever visited any concentration camps?
HI: Yeah. I’ve been to Auschwitz. And after I’d come out from there I had a clear conscience. Honestly, I did. I had a bit of a conscience before about the bombing but when I went there and see what actually happened that was it. Last year I went there. Yeah.
TO: And were they, was it a 303 guns you were on?
HI: They were all 303s.
TO: And were they very effective?
HI: Useless. Bloody useless. Unless you got them like I did. About thirty — about twenty or thirty yards away. But apart from that they were useless. I think the gunners shot down a few but not a lot. They didn’t have to come in anyway. They had 20 millimetre cannon. And they could stand off and belt away at you and you just had to look at them.
TO: And did your plane ever actually get lost?
HI: Yeah. A couple of times we got lost. We sort of circled around and looked around until we see a, some sort of point that we could lock on to you know. The favourite point was a river or a, or the coastline. But you did get lost. A few times you did got lost. Especially after coming out the target you was bloody lost anyway. You had to set your course again from, from the target. And you were jumping and diving about. We had a good navigator. He was alright. And of course once we got H2S that helped us tremendously but they never, they never got that ‘til the later part of that war. It was brilliant. That showed you right, the outline of all the towns, coastline and rivers through dense fog. It was brilliant.
TO: And was that with equipment like Gee?
HI: Gee we had and that took us to the Dutch coast. And then the Germans blocked it. It was useless after that. We had to make our own way. And of course all we hoped for we could see the Ruhr Valley. When you got to the Dutch coast how far was the Ruhr Valley? Half an hour away by plane. It wasn’t far. And we just headed out on that direction and you were soon over the Ruhr Valley. And you knew when you was over the Ruhr Valley with the bleeding guns firing at you. But they never opened up properly until you started dropping the bombs on the target. They kept quiet. And of course they used to have the — I don’t know if you know it. They used to light huge fires outside the town. Huge fires. To make out it was a town burning so we’d bomb that. Which a few of them did.
TO: I didn’t know about that.
HI: It was open fields in the country. But it was mainly —
[Phone ringing]
HI: Is that me again?
TO: Yeah.
[recording paused
TO: Sorry, could you just —
HI: It’s five to two.
TO: I mean what time do you leave?
HI: Oh I’ve got to leave here at 4 o’clock.
TO: Ok. I’ll definitely be done long before that.
HI: Pardon?
TO: I’ll definitely be finished long before that.
HI: I hope so because I’ve got to get ready as well.
TO: Ok. Sorry. And did the accuracy of bombing improve during the war?
HI: Immensely. When we got radar and H2S and Pathfinding it improved immensely. Accurately. Yeah. Yeah. And there was no problem with — the targets always used to be well alight when we got there anyway. And it was just a matter of dropping your bombs and getting out without being shot down. That was the problem. Getting away without being shot down. Yeah.
TO: What, what missions specifically do you remember the most of the war?
HI: Well the, the most vivid mission of all was the daylight raid on Le Creusot. Which was fantastic. To go right across France in ’42. Bomb. Bomb the target and come all the way back without seeing a fighter was incredible. That’s the most impressive one I know, and the bombing was very very accurate.
TO: Did you ever bomb German ships in ports?
HI: Well only Wilhelmshaven and Bremen and the Kiel. We don’t know. We just bombed the ports. I don’t know. I don’t say we hit a ship or not. I know 9 Squadron sank the Tirpitz. I know that. But I wasn’t there at the time.
TO: So, can you tell me which squadrons were you in during the war?
HI: Number 9 Squadron. Still flying now. They’re out in Syria. Number 9. 466. 158 Squadron.
TO: And did you hear about the invasion of Normandy?
HI: Well I don’t know about heard about. We see it was, we knew it was happening because the amount of aircraft in the air. Huge armadas of aircraft going over. So we knew, we knew the war was on. I was in Kent at the moment. At the time. Flying drogues. And we see it all happening there yeah. But I wasn’t involved in it anyway. Not ‘til later on. When I went back on my second tour.
TO: Sorry what — can you tell me again? What was your rank in the air force?
HI: I was a warrant officer. I was offered a commission but I wouldn’t take it. I don’t know why. I was silly. I should have taken it. I’d have ended up at least a flight lieu. But I, I didn’t refuse it. I just didn’t — all my mates took it and they all became commissioned but I didn’t take it. I don’t know why. I was happy as I was so that was it. I should have done though.
TO: And what was probably the most dangerous of the German fighters?
HI: The night fighter? The most dangerous was the JU88. Definitely. That was equipped especially for night fighting. It had all the radar on it. Heavy cannons. They had the Messerschmitt 110. That was a good night fighter. And the Messerschitt 109 they used. And the Focke-Wulf 190. Single engine. They used that mostly over the target especially if a bloke was caught in the searchlights. They’d just go straight for him. Bang. Yeah.
TO: If you got caught in a searchlight was it possible to get out of it?
HI: Very very difficult. Very very difficult. The only way to get out of the searchlights which we’d done several times was put the nose down like that and go starboard or port and hoping you could clear it. Sometimes, sometimes you did and sometimes you couldn’t. We used to see them captured you know with about fifteen searchlights on one aircraft. And then all the guns would open up and all you’d see was a great big puff of explosion and the smoke and that was another one gone. Simple as that. So, best to keep away from it if you could. But the one radar, the one that was run by radar you couldn’t get away from. It just went bang like that. Straight on an aircraft. No messing about. And once that got you five or six of the ordinary searchlights would come — because the radar one was blue and all the searchlight ones were white. And they just used to group you like that. The flak would come up. An enormous amount of flak. Bang. You didn’t stand a chance.
TO: Did, was your aircraft ever caught in searchlights?
HI: Yeah. We was caught a couple of times but lucky enough we done the dive and the turn and got away with it. But sometimes that was very difficult because sometimes you had your bomb load on and you fell. You fell like a stone and you hoped it would bloody well pull out at the end.
TO: And do you remember what you were doing on the day that the war ended?
HI: Yeah. I’d finished flying and I was, they’d posted me up to, after I had done me second tour they posted me up to, up to Scotland as an instructor. And I didn’t fancy it and then they posted me down to Blackpool. I was at Blackpool when the war finished. Being trained. Being changed to another duty because they didn’t want us no more in Bomber Command and we had to do ground staff duties. And they said to me, ‘What was you?’ I said, ‘I’m a tailor.’ They said, ‘We’ve got a job for you.’ And they put in charge of about twenty WAAFs on sewing machines down at Newmarket. That’s how I finished the war. And they treated the aircrew, they treated bomber crews diabolical. Absolutely. A lot of them lost their rank. They just said you’re not a flight sergeant no more. You’re an AC2 or an LAC. I thought it was shocking. Anyhow. But it didn’t, they couldn’t do that with me because I had the DFC up and I couldn’t walk about with a DFC as an odd, as a flight sergeant. So I was left. I was left as a warrant officer.
TO: Why do you think Bomber Command were treated the way they were?
HI: That I don’t know. That I do not know. I’ll never, I can never understand it and I never will. We won the war. We definitely won the war for bomber, for Britain. With our losses were horrendous and yet after the war they absolutely [clap] on us. Yeah. I think it was terrible. They treated us terrible. All the bomber crews were walking about after the war doing menial jobs. Sweeping up. Driving vans. Anything. They didn’t know what to do with us. What they should have done was demobilise us straight away. Said, ‘Alright. You’re finished. Go home.’ No. They had to wait another year doing menial jobs. There you are. And they wouldn’t give us a medal. Can you understand it?
TO: Can I understand it?
HI: Pardon?
TO: Can I understand why they were treated that way?
HI: Yeah. Can you understand why they never gave us a medal?
TO: No.
HI: The barbers got medals. The man that swept the roads got medals. The one that cleaned the toilet got medals. Bomber Command got nothing. Never. I don’t understand it. I don’t know. We should have got a campaign medal. We never got one. Which was terrible when you think of the men we lost. The men we lost. So all them men we lost in the war — all they’ve given them is a thin brass bar. That’s all they got. No medal. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.
TO: And what do you think of the Memorial we’ve got in Green Park?
HI: Oh that’s brilliant. We made that ourselves. We made it. Not the government. We got no help at all from the government. I’ll tell you what happened. I was in the office and we got six and a half million pound collected easy. And who should walk in the office was two geezers from the VAT. They said, ‘We understand you’ve got six and a half million pound voluntary contributions.’ We said, ‘Yeah.’ They said, ‘A million of that is VAT,’ and they took it. There and then. And said, ‘We demand that you pay,’ and we made such a fuss of it and we got on to The Telegraph and we got the million pound back off the government — as a gift. They gave us our own money back as a gift. I think it’s disgraceful. All the money was for was for a Memorial. Nothing else. And they took a million pound off us. There you are. That’s the story.
TO: But what do you think of the Memorial itself?
HI: Oh it’s beautiful isn’t it? Fantastic. Yeah. And, and the Westminster Council said nobody will ever visit that memorial. It’s the most sought after memorial in the whole of London. More people visit that than any other memorial or, or museum. And the council said nobody — they didn’t want it. Didn’t want no memorial for Bomber Command. Can you understand it? Yeah. So that’s why I was so bitter.
TO: Did you ever — during the war did you ever feel any animosity towards Germany itself?
HI: No. Not really. No. No. Not really. No. No. We just went over. We knew what we were doing. We knew what we were doing. No. Not really. We couldn’t could we really? We were over there and back. We had nothing against the Germans. But after the war when we realised what they had got up to yeah but not before. Not during the war because we didn’t know anything about the camps. We felt sorry for the Germans being bombed like they were. Which we knew we was bombing. But we just carried on. Carried on ‘til the war finished and that was it.
TO: And how do you feel today about Germany?
HI: Well, they’re the same as us now aren’t they? No problem. They’re not going to be aggressive no more are they? We hope [laughs] What I’ve seen of the Germans they’re quite nice people. But there you are.
TO: What do you think of the atomic bombs being used against Japan?
HI: A good thing. A very good thing. In fact, in the long term — long and short term they saved millions and millions of lives. Because if they’d have invaded Japan there would have been millions of Japanese killed and many many thousands of Americans and British. They would have been slaughtered in an invasion. The bomb stopped it like that. Clear as that. Bang. Two bombs and the war was over. And the thing was what a lot of people don’t seem to realise — the Germans were on the verge of atomic bomb. And that’s why all the industrial places in Germany were being bombed. Because this government knew that they was on the doorstep of making the bombs themselves. They were nearly there. And they would have used it. Because they was desperate. They would have had one on Moscow and one on London. Definitely. Yeah.
[pause]
HI: You’re not killing the flies very well. I’m not having you around here no more.
TO: No. I got one. One.
HI: You got one. Yeah.
TO: Sorry. Now, how do you feel today about your wartime service?
HI: Not all that. All I know is I killed many many many people but as soon as I went to Auschwitz and that changed my view. Before that I had a guilty conscience of it because I knew I’d killed many many people but then I went to Auschwitz and seeing what was going on myself that was it. Finished. It was terrible. Have you been to Auschwitz aint you?
TO: No. No.
HI: You want to go there. You come out a different man I’ll tell you.
TO: I have however watched plenty of footage of all the camps when they were liberated.
HI: Yeah but you want to go there. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. What they done to those poor Jews. Babies, children, women. And we would have been the next ones on the list if they had got over the here. The Dutch suffered enough. I’ll tell you. They really suffered. The Dutch. And they’re more or less German and they suffered terrible.
TO: And did you — sorry, just keeping an eye on the time. Did you lose quite a few friends during the war?
HI: Pardon?
TO: I’m sorry to ask this but did you lose quite a few friends during the war?
HI: All of them. Yeah. All my friends. Yeah. All the people you knew on your squadron. By the time I’d left they’d all gone. All been killed or were prisoner of war. Mostly killed. We, we took off one night. I think we was going to Essen and we was up to six thousand feet and above us — no underneath us there was a huge explosion. Two Lancasters. One from our squadron — one from 44 Squadron hit head on with a full bomb load. And we was just above it and we went up like a bleeding lift with our bomb load. Right up we went. Enormous explosion. Yeah. And the thing was, the most amazing thing, the pilot said, ‘Alright. Set course for Essen.’ Just like that. And we could see what was happening below us yeah. But it happened a lot over Germany. Collisions. Can you imagine pitch darkness? Five or six hundred bombers in an area of about ten minutes. All ducking and diving about in pitch darkness. It had to happen didn’t it? Yeah.
TO: Did night fighters ever make head on attacks on a bomber?
HI: Never. Never made that. That’s why I don’t understand why they put a front turret in the Lancaster because it was useless. They never made a head on attack. Because the two speeds together was too fast. So won’t stretch at night time as well. They always come from, they used to come from port quarter, starboard quarter or dead astern. And of course once they got the up and under that was it. The up and under. The up and under. Schrage musik.
TO: And how do you feel today about Britain’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan?
HI: I think we ought to get out and leave them to it. Let them shoot their bloody selves because there’s going to be a problem. A big problem. Especially if they allow them all over here. I think so anyway. We shouldn’t allow them in this country. We should let them get on with it. They’re Moslems. Let them fight it out amongst themselves because they won’t give no thanks to the Christians for intervening. I can tell you that.
TO: And what do you think of the films that have been made about the war?
HI: Well, what I see of the films today they’re all American. That’s all you see is American films. What they done. The British never made many films. They should have made more films about Bomber Command which they never. Have you ever seen a film about Bomber Command ?
TO: I’ve seen one. The Dambusters.
HI: Well, I mean the actual bombing of Germany. No. They never made a film and they won’t because they’re gutless. The government will not accept what Bomber Command done. That’s why we are in so much trouble. They’re embarrassed. They was embarrassed with Bomber Command and yet they told us to go there. It wasn’t us. It was the government told us to go. Well they told Harris what to do anyway.
TO: As a matter of interest I do know there are, there is a team of people, though they are struggling to get funding, of independent film makers who are, they aren’t even paying the actors, who are making a film about a Lancaster bomber crew.
HI: Are they?
TO: Yeah. But they’re struggling with funding at the moment I think.
HI: Pardon?
TO: I think they’re struggling to get the money through although they are filming it.
HI: As I say what have they got? Old men. There’s no young men is there? Have Are they going to have veterans making it?
TO: Apparently I think but it might be stuck in the planning stage that they do plan to make a remake of The Dambusters.
HI: Well, that wasn’t, that wasn’t the bombing war was it? The Dambusters. That was just a one off wasn’t it and I’ll tell there there was far far more dangerous raids than the Dambusters. Berlin for instance you know what I mean. In six weeks I think we lost over nine hundred bombers over Berlin. Yeah. Essen. Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Mannheim. Hamburg. And we lost thousands.
TO: And have you visited Germany recently?
HI: Yeah. I was there last week, last year. Went to Essen. And in Essen there’s a building there. There’s a huge, what do you call it? A big huge photograph about as long as this room on a building and it shows you Essen after the war. Every building was flat. As far as you could see was flat. Except one building. The synagogue. Never got touched. And it’s still there now. It’s a museum now. Wasn’t touched. But every building in Essen was blown down except that one. Incredible.
TO: How did you actually feel when you heard the war was over?
HI: It didn’t make no difference to me. I was a youngster. I was only twenty. Twenty one when the war finished. Didn’t make no difference to me. Just the war was over and that was it. Let’s get out. And of course when I got out I had a wife and a kid and nowhere to live. Nowhere to live. I had to go and live with the in-laws for a year or so which was bleeding terrible. There you are. And the few bob they gave us and the terrible demob suits they gave us were shocking. I was a tailor and I said, ‘What’s this bloody rubbish they’ve given us?’ Yeah. I know I’m a bit cynical but there you are.
TO: Is there anything else that you want to add about your time in Bomber Command which you feel is very important?
HI: Yeah. There’s one very important thing. I survived [laughs] I survived and I mean I survived. The amount of blokes I see get the chop was unbelievable. A whole squadron. You’d lose a whole squadron in about three or four weeks. Complete squadron. It would be renewed. New Lancs. New crews. The faces got younger and we, we carried on. In fact, people, they used to come in, in the crew room and see us, and look at us, and say, ‘Have you done all those amount of trips?’ And we’d say, ‘Yeah.’ Yeah. And we survived. And I took the place of a rear gunner who got killed. And I took his place and I carried on. He was only twenty. Robinson his name was. I took his place and survived. But we lost — I’ll tell you what. That squadron I was on. Number 9 Squadron — we lost eleven hundred men killed. Eleven hundred men. And that was just one squadron. And there was only seven men in a crew. Fourteen aircraft on a squadron. Can you imagine the slaughter? Yeah.
TO: That’s almost all my questions. I’m just scanning through now. Sorry. This is going right back to the start of the war now. What did you think of Chamberlain and him appeasing Hitler?
HI: Weak man. A weak man. He was a weak man yeah. He come back with all his crappy bits of paper. Hitler was laughing his head off. We should have had a man like Hitler on our side. We could have stopped him before the war started. All the socialists and labour all they wanted to do was disarm. Don’t have no armaments. And Germany was building itself up incredibly. We had nothing. All we had was the territorial army when the war started. We just started conscription, yeah, for the twenties. We had nothing. Germany had a huge air force. Tanks. We had nothing. Anyway, we survived though didn’t we? We did survive.
TO: What did you think of Churchill?
HI: Well he done a job. He did do the job. No doubt about that. He done the job. He was the man for the job. Nobody else. But he was the man for it. But he’s — people would never forget his politics before the war when we had two or three million people unemployed. Everybody was bloody hungry. Everybody was half starving. And the rich people were living and he was one of them. But during the war he had Hitler like that. Yeah.
TO: You know the people who, I know I keep coming back to this but you know the people who refused to go on bombing missions? How do you think they should have been treated?
HI: Well personally speaking I think they should have gone to psychotic hospitals and find out exactly what was wrong with them. It was definitely a lot of them couldn’t help it. I’m telling you that the bombing raids were horrendous. I’m telling you. It was absolutely frightening. And some, as you know not everybody can take it. A few of them couldn’t take it and what they done was they stripped them down and put them in prison. Which was all wrong. LMF they called it. And when they came out of prison they put a great big stamp on their record papers — LMF. And the whole station where they was posted to knew what he was. And they couldn’t help it. They couldn’t help it. It’s a shame. So –
TO: This is going to be an odd question now. Is there anyone you know during the war who you think seemed to be losing their mind from the stress of the bombing?
HI: No. I don’t think so. I think what might have happened — some of them were very very very heavy drinkers and I think that was what was stopping them from saying they didn’t want to fly no more. There were some very very heavy drinkers. I mean heavy drinkers. If they weren’t flying they was knocking it back. But that was a thing that. They should never have punished them. They should have just said alright you don’t want to fly no more. Take you wings from you. Put you down to a lower rank. Finished. They had to humiliate them and make them as if they were a disgrace which they weren’t. They just, it was just that they couldn’t take it. They couldn’t take it. That was all there was to it. Went on a couple of raids and they see what was happening. Probably lost a few mates beforehand. That was it. Some were married with children. They said, ‘I don’t want to go over there and get killed I’ve got a wife and a kid,’ you know. There you are. But they punished them severely for it. in fact if it had been in the First World War they would have been shot. Yeah.
TO: Another slightly [pause] question from early on. Did you ever have to go in an air raid shelters during the bombing?
HI: Yeah before I — no. I never went. I never went in an air raid shelter. We lived in a block of flats. We was on the ground floor. And my mother and father said, ‘We’re alright there. We’re on the bottom floor of the flats.’ Which was ridiculous because some of the flats we blew up during the war during the war they blew the whole bleeding lot up. The time they went in an air raid shelter. A lot of people went in the air raid shelters. But the German bombing was nothing compared with what the British done. No comparison. No comparison whatsoever. We was dropping four thousand pound bombs. You know the cookie. Blast bombs. A blast bomb — it dropped. As it hit the ground it exploded. The reason for it was to blow the rooves off the houses so that the incendiaries had an easy entrance into the building which did happen. That’s why there was such huge fires. The rooves come off and then we dropped the incendiaries. And they went right through the buildings. It was a terrible war. The Germans suffered terrible. How many women and children were killed I do not know? Do not know. Shame. There you are. There you are. We had to do it. We was told to do it and that was it and we got punished after the war for it. Right. I’m afraid I’ve got to stop you because –
TO: You’re quite right because I’ve quite literally run out of questions.
HI: I’m pleased. Really pleased about that [laughs] yeah I’ll have to go.
TO: Thank you very much about your plain speaking.
HI: We’re going to drop you off at the station.
TO: Thank you.
HI: Alright.
TO: Thank you.
HI: I’ll drop you off at Romford Station. And all you do is go on the station and then take the train. I think it’s platform four. I’m not quite sure. I think it’s platform four. And that’ll take you right down to Stratford and you get out at Stratford and you get on the Tube there.
TO: Thank you. And thank you so much for your wartime service as well.
HI: That’s alright. Yeah. Pleased to help you. I’m sorry we’ve got to rush.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AIronsH160730
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Harry Irons. Two
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
02:44:50 audio recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending OH summary. Allocated S Coulter
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Tom Ozel
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-07-30
Description
An account of the resource
Harry Irons lied about his age and joined the RAF aged 16. He flew two tours of operations as a rear gunner and mid-under gunner.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Italy--Milan
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
158 Squadron
462 Squadron
466 Squadron
77 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
briefing
coping mechanism
Distinguished Flying Cross
fear
final resting place
Gee
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
H2S
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Ju 88
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Martinet
memorial
military living conditions
military service conditions
mine laying
perception of bombing war
RAF Driffield
RAF Full Sutton
RAF Lissett
RAF Waddington
Scarecrow
searchlight
Stirling
superstition
Wellington
Window
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/357/5519/PGrimesS1502.2.jpg
2f8c2b7688ba7d1fbece6737ceb4d3a8
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/357/5519/AGrimesS151121.2.mp3
3cd700983bd130668fad69444d64890e
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
Grimes, Syd
Syd Grimes
S V Grimes
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer Sydney Grimes (173865, 1271597 Royal Air Force) a photograph, and his logbook. After training as a wireless operator/ air gunner he completed a tour on 106 Squadron at RAF Syerston. After a period as an instructor he joined 617 Squadron for his second tour where he took part in the attacks on the Tirpitz.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Syd Grimes and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-11-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Grimes, SV
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SJ: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is myself Sue Johnstone and the interviewee is Sid Grimes. The interview is taking place at Mr Grimes’ home in Mildenhall in Suffolk on the 21st of November 2015.
AG: I was born in a little village called Great Wakering near Southend on Sea, five miles from Southend on Sea and I lived there until I joined the Air Force. I was educated at the village school and also for part of the time at Southend Municipal College. When war broke out I was seventeen and eh my father was a Thames bargeman. I didn’t particularly want to go in the Navy although he would have preferred me to. My my brother went in the Navy, I didn’t want to go in the Army and I thought if I go in the Air Force and volunteered as a wireless operator. At that time I was working for EK Cole Ltd,Echo Radio and I thought if I knew something about the technology of radio I would be doing a more interesting job than as a clerk. So I joined the Air Force. I wasn’t accepted for training immediately because there was a real backlog of training. But I volunteered for wireless operator aircrew and I was called up in 1940. I trained at Blackpool, Yatesbury, Eventon,Madeley and all sorts of places as wireless operator. Eventually I ended up as a sergeant wireless operator at Cottesmore in Rutland. ‘Is this alright?’
SJ: This is absolutely fine, this is fantastic.
AG: Eh, I then met my first pilot a man called Stevens, a Welshman always known as Steve eh and the four others of the crew, so. And eh we trained on Wellingtons until he was eh, he was,treated as a bomber pilot then. We then moved to a conversion unit where we flew Manchesters and Lancasters. Having passed out then we went to a place called Syerston near Newark. Now this 106 Squadron was Guy Gibsons’ Squadron, but he must have known that I was coming because he left the two days before. [laughs] No I don’t know if it was two days but a few days before. So I joined 617 Squadron [think he meant 106] and by that time we had picked up a mid upper gunner and a flight engineer, to the Wellington crew so we were now seven. And I did a tour with 106 Squadron until September 1943. Now that was almost entirely the Battle of the Ruhr. but it did include places like Hamburg and Berlin, one or two other places just outside the Ruhr. So having completed a tour of operations which was a real dodgy period. We had some very heavy losses in the Battle of the Ruhr. In fact my crew was only the second one to finish a tour while I was there. And a lot of people came and went fairly quickly so. I do not know how many losses 617, 106 Squadron had in that period. But we were only the second one to finish. I then went to a place called Balderton just outside Newark which was eh, the residue of the Five Lancaster Finishing School, Five Group Lancaster Finishing School. And eh an interesting thing happened to me there because we hadn’t got any pupils to train then, they were coming in a couple of weeks time and we were getting the place ready. A wing commander arrived, Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire and eh he had been operating in Four Group up in Yorkshire on Halifax’s. And when he came to take over 617 Squadron the AOC said, ‘you had better go and learn to fly a Lancaster.’ So he eh hummed and had and said. ‘Well I have been flying Halifaxs for two years.’ But he said ‘No you go and learn it.’ So he came, he hadn’t got a clue so I went with him and four others. And we became, and I am very proud to tell you, I have in my log book. Four times I flew with him while he learnt to fly a Lancaster. [laugh]. I then went from there to the permanent base for Five Lancaster School of eh, Lancaster Group, School at Syerston again. And I stayed there instructing until I done a foolish thing. I was engaged to be married and I saw in orders that there was a course for RT speech unit, at Stanmore. And I thought if I went to Stanmore, Iris was nursing at Leightonstone, Whipps Cross Hospital, Leightonstone. I would undoubtedly get a couple of days before I reported back. So I did this RT speech course, but I was quite good at it actually and of the six of us I got chosen to form this RT speech unit.
SJ: Brilliant.
AG: At Scampton, so I went there and very foolishly I had to do the same lecture four times a day seven days a week.
SJ: How’s that?
AG: And I met a man called Barney Gumbley, a New Zealander and we sat chat. Chatting in the mess one day and he said. ‘I am going back on ops, are you interested?’ I said. ‘Can we go tomorrow?’ [laugh]. So he said. ‘Well I have got an interview for Pathfinders and an interview for 617 have you any preference?’ I said was, Pathfinders was Eight Group and eh I quite like Five Group, I like the people in it. So I said ‘I’d rather go to 617.’ He said ‘It is a good job you said that, for the rest of us want to go there too.’ [laugh]. Anyway about ten days later I got a phone call to say. ‘There is a van picking you up at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’ I said. ‘Where are we going?’ He said. ‘We are going to Woodhall Spa to joing 617 Squadron.’ So of I went in this van and eh the mess, the Officers Mess, was eh ‘oh dear, oh dear’ I can’t think of it.
SJ: What Woodhall Spa?
AG: At Woodhall Spa, it was the Officers Mess eh.
SJ: Was it the Petwood?
AG: Petwood.
SJ: Petwood Hotel.
AG: Petwood hotel and eh it dropped me there and I reported at the desk which had, [unclear] which had got a WAAF on it. And she said ‘Oh yes we’ve got a room for you.’ So of I went to this room, Barney Gumley was told I was here but he was up at the flight which was about a mile and a half away. He came down and introduced me to the rest of the crew, but no one thought about booking me in.[laugh]. And I did the two ops to the Tirpitz at Tromso before they suddenly realised I wasn’t on the squadron. [laugh] By that time I had done two trips.
SJ: Then they checked you in.
AG: They checked me in they thought I had better be legitimate. So I, I was with 617 from the September ’44 through ‘til April 1945. We had been flying the Barnes Wallis Tall Boy bomb which was 12000 pounds. And then he came up with a much bigger invention, the Grand Slam which was 22000 pounds. In order to accommodate the big bomb they had to take the bomb doors off, and they took the mid upper turret off, and they took all the armour plating out. They really did a modified Lancaster which only took a crew of five. Took all the wireless equipment out except for a VHF transmitter,RT. So I was surplus so I said to the flight commander. ‘ I have only got three more trips to do can I fly in the astrodome as a fighter observer or something like that?’ He said. ‘Under no circumstances, we are trying to find reasons for loosing weight.’ And he said. ‘You want to go and fly.’ He wouldn’t let me and the crew got shot down on the very next trip. So they got hit by and anti aircraft shell on the port wing and it shot it completely away. So they were on the bombing run at that time which was the dicey part of the trip. Because eh, the special bomb sight that we had, we had to fly straight and level. It was gyroscopically controlled, so you had to fly very accurately with height, speed and all the outside temperatures. And all that kind of thing which you fed in to this computer. So they was, the squadron flew in what was called a gaggle. A geese gaggle you know? The way that they fly in the sky.
SJ: A formation.
AG: A formation, and that gaggle when you were stepped sideways and up and down in a very large box. It was designed so that the whole squadron, twenty of us could bomb without impeding each other, all on the same bombing run. You were actually converging you see, so all the bombs had gone before you actually hit each other. It was a very clever little devise and this anti aircraft shell shot their port wing off so that it. It just spiralled in [unclear], and it was spiralling so quickly, if anybody was still alive in the aircraft eh they couldn’t have got out anyway. And of course the bomb went off as soon as it hit the ground. Because as they were on the bombing run the bomb aimer had already fused it.
SJ: Eh, you don’t remember which aircraft it was?
AG: Yes it is in, I flew with them. ‘Just sit down my dear.’ You can put it off for a bit.
SJ: I was going to pause it for a second.
AG: YZL, PD117 The number of the aircraft was PD117.[pause]
SJ: That looks like a well looked through log book.
AG: Just to prove Wing Commander Cheshire.
SJ: Yes that’s where he had gone to. That is local flying that was part of his training. [laugh]
AG: That’s right, I always say that he was my pupil.
SJ: [laugh] that’s brilliant. So what happened next, you were moved to 617 you were there for a six months.
AG: Yes and I done seventeen trips.
SJ: Seventeen trips.
AG: I got three more to do.[pause] ‘I will just have a cough sweet.’
SJ: That is no problem, that’s fine.
AG: [pause while uwrapping sweet] ‘Will you stay for some lunch?’
SJ: Oh, might do if that’s all right, yeah.
AG: I have got a beef casserole.
SJ: Lovely, that sounds fantastic.
AG: Right, I will heat it up in a minute.
SJ: [Laughs]
AG: ‘Sorry, I was, what was I saying —.
SJ: You were saying about 617 Squadron when you left.
AG: Yes I went to 9 Squadron who was the other squadron that had the tallboys, they didn’t have the grand slam, so that they still needed wireless operators. So I went over to 9 Squadron about three weeks before the end of the war. After we, I then had to make a decision, I was asked did I want to go to the far east against Japan. By that time I was married.
SJ: When did you get married?
AG: I got married the month before I joined 617, Iris never knew I had volunteered to go back.
SJ: Did you ever tell her.
AG: I have since, she was indignant. [laugh]. But I always said she was in a more dangerous situation as a nurse in Whipps Cross Hospital near the docks.
SJ: Was she always a nurse then?
AG: I didn’t say how I met her, did I?
SJ: You didn’t no.
AG: Can I digress?
SJ: Yes that will be fantastic to know.
AG: She was born in Woodford. But before the war they moved down to a little village called Rochford just outside Southend. And she wanted to be a nurse but they wouldn’t take her until she was seventeen. So she came to Echo as a copy typist. I was one of the senior, not senior clerks but I was, I was fairly well up. I had been there three years. And I met her and I liked the look of her and so after I went in the Air Force I kept in touch with her. And you know, I’d spent about no more than about ten days in her company, up to the time we got married. Because when I came on leave we always went to see a London show but that was about the only time we could get of. ’Forgive me sucking the sweet.’
SJ: Oh no it’s fine, not to worry.
AG: And that is how I met her. So I decided I didn’t want to go to the Far East I thought that having done about forty six trips, I didn’t , the neck had gone out too far. So I got posted to 50 Squadron at a place called Sturgate which was up near, in North Lincolnshire. And we were then flying; first of all we were flying prisoners of war from Brussels to England, in the Lancasters. We used to take, I think it was twenty or twenty four depending on what kit they got in the Lancaster fuselage sitting on the floor But they didn’t mind that as long as they were coming to England. After we got all the POWs back we then started bringing people back from leave from Italy. And we used to fly to Naples and pick up about twenty Air Force or Army people at a place call Pernicano, which is just outside Naples. Eh after a time they decided that was going to stop because shipping was available to bring them back in larger quantities anyway. And the Mediterranean was open so they stopped doing it. So I then got posted to do a code and cipher course down at a place called Compton Bassett near Calne in Wiltshire. And having passed that course I got posted to Germany ostensibly to be the CO of a small mobile signals unit. Which was one officer, one sergeant, one corporal and about ten men. When I got there I was told it was based at a place called Stade[?] between Cookshaven and Haverg. So I arrived at Stade[?] and the CO said. ‘Oh I am glad to see you’ he said. ‘I lost my adjutant about two weeks ago you are my new adjutant.’ I said. ‘No I have a mobile signals regiment.’ He said. ‘No I closed that down yesterday and you are my new adjutant.’ But I said. ‘I know something about flying but I know nothing about anything else.’ He said. ‘I’ll teach you.’[laugh] and he became a very good friend of mine. We did all sorts of things together, we got up very early in the morning sometimes at dawn and went and shoot deer. Quite unofficial we hadn’t got a license from the Military Government or anything and it ended up in a very humorous story. We had this, there weren’t very many of us, these base signals on your radar unit, refurbished these units to be sent round to the aerodromes and various places including Berlin. So there were only about fifteen of us I suppose. And we were having dinner or preparing to have dinner one night and we had got deer for dinner. This happened, Military Government people and ourselves we didn’t mingle sociably ‘cause there was nothing else. So they arrived about four o’clock and didn’t look like moving. So the CO said to me ‘What do we do?’ I said ‘Well as they are the guests of our mess this evening you had better invite them to dinner. And as they are our guests they won’t be able to do anything about it.’ So they sat down to dinner with us and ate deer. And they did let us know that they were aware of it. I think they had been told off, they had a [unclear] [laugh]. Well that, I ended up demobilised in August 1946 and I got reinstatement rights if I went back to Echo, but I was offered a short service commission of two years. But if I had taken that it would have meant in all probability the Air Force would have been reducing in size so much that I would have then been demobilised. And I wouldn’t have had reinstatement rights, having been in what was the regular Air Force for two years. So eh I went back to Echo. And so as I say I didn’t know anything about being an adjutant and certainly nothing about earning my living in civvy street. But I was fortunate, the man who interviewed me was the deputy chief accountant of EK Cole Ltd. And he knew because I had told him that I was keen on cricket because he was interviewing me in depth. He said ‘That’s a good thing I am a life member of Lancashire.’ So he took me on his staff and he taught me accountancy. I did take a correspondence course was meeker compared with what he told me. So I was never able to be a chartered accountant because I didn’t take articles. I was earning my living, by that time I was increasing my family.
SJ: How many children have you got?
AG: I’ve got three, two of them became nurses and one, the boy went into insurance.
SJ: You had two girls and a boy.
AG: I am proud of them all.
SJ: Oh yeah I don’t blame you.
AG: So I was in the deputy chief accountants department. Then he got promoted to be the chief accountant and then he became promoted to eh; financial secretary and accountant to a number of subsidiaries. So as he went up my situation went up with him.
SJ: You went up as well, did you enjoy that?
AG: I couldn’t have been an accountant in a professional office because that would have been dull. That would have been checking, checking, checking, checking. What I liked about being in industry, I was always in a place that was making things and you could go there and see it all happening. It was accountancy, it was very important accountancy, but eh —.
SJ: Very different from your RAF days though?
AG: Yes very much so. I was an active member of the 617 Squadron Association and we went to a number of reunions in Canada, Australia, New Zealand eh France as a unit, we’ve gone and made friends wherever we went. I haven’t been to the last couple number of places because Iris became, eh unreliable, she was unsteady. I couldn’t take her onto aircraft and coaches and things like that. She came to, she came to Australia and New Zealand and to Canada but the —, When we went to France and Germany and the Netherlands we went by coach and ferry, she hates flying.
SJ: [laughs]
AG: ‘Now where have I got to?’ Eventually we got taken over, first by Pye from Cambridge and then Phillips who are Dutch of course. But the British office was at Croydon and eh I became the financial accountant, financial director in a number of subsidiaries around the group. But I ended up, I always wanted to be somewhere near Southend because my parents were still alive. And I owed a lot to my parents, I didn’t want to move right out of their orbit. And I then went to Canvey Island to a components factory. First of all as the financial director and then as the managing director. And from there I went back to Southend as the eh; managing director of Echo Instruments which made instrumentation for industry. Then I retired.
SJ: How long have you been retired now?
AG: I retired when I was, I retired finally when I was sixty three. I first retired at sixty one when I left Canvey. And I only had been retired for about three months when my boss at Cambridge rang me up and said. ‘I am in trouble, can you help me?’ I said. ‘Well, help you in what sense?’ He said. ‘Can you come back and do a job looking after a subsidiary until I find a, a permanent managing director?’ So I did and I stayed two years.
SJ: [laugh] Why not?
AG: But it was a good period for me because I was drawing full pension and then I was drawing full salary so it made a nest egg for me when I did retire.
SJ: So it was worth it then?
AG: Yes; well I stayed in Shoeburyness just outside Southend until twelve years ago. But one of my daughters lived in West Row which is just to the West of Milden Hall and another one lived in Barton Mills.
SJ: I was going to ask why you moved up this way?
AG: Well my son was in Kent and the journey from Shoeburyness up to here was one hundred and ten miles. And when I got to eighty I decided that that was too far. So we moved up here to a place just the other side of Mildenhall, Brickcone Hall[?] and eh, it was too large but we loved it. And then Iris had trouble keeping her balance, damaged her hip. So I decided we had to be on the same floor so we moved here. Which was a retirement bungalow which suited us down to the ground.
SJ: And it is a lovely complex, it really is nice.
AG: It is, I sit here and we have mallard ducks and swans on the river and I watch them and they come and look at me and squawk.
SJ: [laugh] And you sit and look at them?
AG: I try, I do, if Iris was here with me I’d love it. But she is only two miles away.
SJ: That is not far. How long has she been in the care home?
AG: Since January, so eleven months. But she is happy there and she is safe. You see I had her home here at first after she came out of hospital eh, but I couldn’t look after her during the day and the night. And I was getting totally exhausted because every time she moved I woke up. So we decided that my savings would go to the wall and I would put her in the care home. And she is in a lovely little care home. She is well cared for and she is safe, so —.
SJ: Does she like it there?
AG: At first she missed us all because she saw the family every day. Well now I go in about five days out of the seven and the two girls go once. Because Rosalind is a practice nurse in Bury so ,
SJ: That is not far away?
AG: No. And she is married to a Canadian who eh and they go backwards and forwards. I think they have a permanent passage booked on aircraft [laugh]. And eh Jill has got four sons and five grandsons, my great grandsons, so we are largely together. And my son comes up —.
SJ: He is the link end.
AG: Yes. He comes up for a week about every six weeks, because he has retired now.
SJ: Has he got any family?
AG: No; he married a lady who was seven years older than him and it never happened, so —.
SJ: That is quite a big family you got then, grandkids and great grandkids.
AG: Yes, I am a very lucky man. Having survived the war I look round and think, ‘This family wouldn’t have survived if I had bought it.’
SJ: I know, yeah.
AG: Well they might have done, Iris might have married someone else, but.
SJ: It would have been different though.
AG: They wouldn’t have had my genes.
SJ: No exactly [laugh]
AG: I’ll heat the —.
SJ: I shall put this on pause shall I?
AG: Since I retired, lived in Shoeburyness, Mildenhall and here there has been a resurgent of interest in 617. And also strangely in Pye Cambridge. And I have been recruited, to say to do this kind of interview for Pye Cambridge. Because they are making a record of the activities of Pye in Cambridge, because it has been there ever since it was formed.
SJ: So they are getting a history together of that part of Pye?
AG: There is a historical museum which is bringing all these records together. So they are doing what you are doing and making recordings and eh —.
SJ: It is great it needs doing. I mean how do you feel about the project? How do you feel about the Bomber Command Archive project?
AG: Lets say this. After I have had a session like this or with John Nichol . Or with other things the squadron seems to send to me. Eh, like the Cambridge stamp centre and signing things happened. Undoubtedly I have a disturbed couple of nights. Because it has brought it all back. But then the family encourage me and I totally accept the fact, if people like me didn’t say what this was like. The written word is not necessarily understood. But I think if they hear peoples voice as you are doing now, it might stop wars happening. I thank my lucky stars, that my son didn’t ever have to go through the trauma of a six years war. It was, don’t get me wrong. I think it was necessary. Hitler wouldn’t have got stopped in any other way. And I think in a way Hitler getting stopped, Mussolini and Stalin also got stopped. Because the consequences of the nuclear bomb was so dreadful that it stopped. And I don’t think there would have been a nuclear bomb if it hadn’t have been for the war, ‘cause the money would not have been found.
SJ: Yeah.
AG: Do I sound too serious?
SJ: No. I completely agree with you. Lessons need to be learnt from the past, don’t they?
AG: I think those of us who went through it. Have kind of a duty to make sure these subsequent generations knew what it was like.
SJ: Do you feel this generation and future generations will understand how it was?
AG: It’s difficult to say. But John Nichol tells me his book had a huge print and he has sold a lot of copies. So that if it get put into houses and families and people must have been buying it to read at home. It didn’t all go to libraries.
SJ: No not at all.
AG: The younger people eh, might well have learnt from it. And the BBC have done a number of programmes about the Air Force and the war in general. The Navy, all those aspects have been fired[?] some of it must have sunk in.
SJ: Yes you would like to think so.
AG: Yeah. And I think we have a duty to make sure that it became available. But it is not something that I enjoy.
SJ: Yes I completely understand, yeah.
AG: Because, well my family were fortunate. My brother was in the Navy, he was on the Arctic Convoys on HMS London, and eh —.
SJ: What was your brothers’ name?
AG: Kenneth, Kenneth George. And he, he went in the Navy. Largely because of my father I think. My father was Thames Bargeman. There’s Thames barges on the wall.
SJ: Yeah, I noticed them when I came in, yeah.
AG: My father was a Freeman of the River Thames. And he was on Thames barges and then on Thames tugs.
SJ: Did your father have military background?
AG: No, in the First World War he was a barge captain. And he, he used to load ammunition at Woolwich Arsenal, and take it over to France to a place called St Valerie.
SJ: He had a very important job.
AG: He used to take it across the channel. Through all those minefields and what have you.
SJ: Very risky.
AG: Yes it was. And at the end of the war he was presented with the Maritime Medal.
SJ: Oh brilliant.
AG: But you know the chances that he took as a civilian. He should have got much more than that.
SJ: I know. What was you fathers name?
AG: George, George David. He lived until he was ninety four, the last six years with us at Shoebury.
SJ: You mentioned your brother. Did you have any more brothers or sisters?
AG: No just the brother. My mother had twins which were still born, my brother and I —. They really were, they were extremely poor in a sense. Because in the shipping slump of 1931, 32 the barges were laid up all over the East Coast. And he just got on care and maintenance pay which was hardly anything. And with that he was trying to run himself on the barge, tied up to a buoy and the family at home. So his savings gradually went. So he had to, he had a break down eventually about 1934. And he stayed on the water in a sense because he became the hand in an oyster dredger on the river Roch at Rochford. And he did that eh, about eight months in the year. Then he was unemployed for the rest of the year. So he dispersed his savings looking after his family really. So I did have a very big moral obligation to my parents who were the salt of the earth.
SJ: Yes they sound like they were, which was great. I think that generation they were, weren’t they?
AG: They were family minded.
SJ: They were mm.
AG: They, [pause] I don’t think they bought themselves a Christmas present. Where my brother and I always had one.
SJ: Yeah, what were your family Christmases like?
AG: The family, my father had one, two, three. Three daughters, three sisters and two brothers. And one of the aunts was a school teacher and she took a fatherly interest. So silly isn’t it, she was an aunt, she couldn’t take a fatherly interest [laugh]. An aunt interest in my brother and I. And he won an open scholarship, a total scholarship to Clarks College when he was thirteen.
SJ: Oh brilliant.
AG: It was the only one on offer in the whole of the area, and he won it. He went to Clarks College. By the time I got to and I was four years younger. By the time I got to the age when I was sitting exams. They couldn’t afford for me to be another drain on the family finances. So eh, I went to work at Ecko.
SJ: How old were you when you started there?
AG: I was fourteen.
SJ: Fourteen mmm. How did you feel about working, starting work so young?
AG: It was the common thing.
SJ: It was mmm.
AG: I was on the, I was at the village and I stayed at the village. I was only at the municipal college for a short time and I was working and doing it evenings. But the village, I was almost. Hardly any of us did further education but my family believed in it. So I did further education and my brother was good example to me that he had won an open scholarship.
SJ: That was brilliant.
AG: But the village had a tradition of going to work at fourteen.
SJ: Yeah. But they did didn’t they? I mean they is eighteen now when they leave school. It is a big difference these days.
AG: But I would say this about the great working school; it was first class. And they had dedicated people. We had two Welshmen who were school masters there and they gave up their Saturdays for sport. They never let us go to a fixture without one of them being there. You know it was —. After school they’d, we would go into the playground and get a matting wicket and play cricket. And they always did it in a —. I look at teachers these days and I think to myself. ‘You should have lived with those people, you would have learned an awful lot.’ They believed in the welfare of their students. Where as now they seem to want —. [Interruption]. ‘Come in.’ [shout]
SJ: Shall I put this on?
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 Syd Grimes
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AGrimesS151121
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Sue Johnstone
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-11-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:54:01 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Sydney Grimes grew up near Southend and joined the RAF as a wireless operator in 1940. He flew a total of 41 operations - 24 operations with 106 Squadron and 17 operations with 617 Squadron. He then served on 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney for 2 months and 50 Squadron at RAF Sturgate for 3 months, where he assisted on the return of prisoners of war in Operation Dodge. After demobilisation he returned to his old company and retired as the managing director.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Rutland
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1943
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Hugh Donnelly
Richard James
106 Squadron
50 Squadron
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
crewing up
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Manchester
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
RAF Balderton
RAF Bardney
RAF Compton Bassett
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Scampton
RAF Sturgate
RAF Syerston
RAF Woodhall Spa
Tallboy
Tirpitz
training
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/277/7906/PIronsH1501.2.jpg
62e8999adc6227a8e1dcf9d08e401fbc
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/277/7906/AIronsH150723.1.mp3
113b2cff64ef934152b89828f1ea404f
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
Irons, Harry
Harry Irons
H Irons
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Harry Irons (1924 - 2018). He was an apprentice tailor in London, but lied about his age and joined the RAF aged 16. He flew operations as a rear gunner with 158, 462 and 9 Squadrons.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-07-23
2016-07-30
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
Irons, H
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AM: Okay so, this interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Annie Moodie and the interviewee is Harry Irons. The interview’s taking place at a hotel near Kings Lynn and we’re here for the 9 Squadron Association hundred year dinner.
HI: Yeah that’s right, yeah.
AM: And it’s the 23rd of July 2015. So, off you go Harry. Tell us –
HI: Er, actually I won a scholarship to go to a grammar school, but my father insisted that I left school at fourteen so I could go to work and earn a wage. So, being in the east end the only jobs you could get was either tailoring or cabinet making. There was a whole area that’s – it was a big Jewish area and the, most of the people were either tailors or cabinet makers, and they were good, very good, brilliant craftsmen. So I took a job on as a trainee tailor and I was doing that for two years until I was sixteen, nearly sixteen, and we lived in an area of London called Stamford Hill and one evening we, me and a few other chaps were on the hill, and we see the huge blitz on London, and we actually see the whole of the City of London literally ablaze. Enormous, as far as your eye could see was buildings all, all ablaze, that was the City of London. Actually, they weren’t after the City of London, what they was after was the Docks, and they just, their bombing, what we used to call creeping, crept back from the Docks into the City of London and once it hit the City of London course everything went up in flames so, two or three friends said ‘we’ll, we’re gonna join up.’ I was sixteen at the time, so we went up the recruiting office in Kings Cross, London, and I told ‘em I was seventeen and a quarter, how they believed me I don’t know but they said ‘alright you’re in,’ and that was at the end of 1941, and I was called up in January 1941 [unclear]. The blaze was – the bombing was in 1940 and we joined, we joined up at the end of 1940, and 1941 they called me up and I went to a place near where it was called Bridgnorth then six weeks square bashing [?] there and they said ‘you’ll have to wait to sele’ – they asked me what I wanted to be in the air force, I said ‘I wanna fly,’ they said ‘alright, we’ll put you down for either a pilot, navigator or an air gunner and we’ll sort that out later on.’ Anyway, I went to Bridgnorth, done my six weeks training, and they sent me to a RAF station, Wisbech in Cambridge and I had to do menial jobs there, in the cook house, in the stores, waiting for, to go on a course. In the mean while they told me I was gonna become a wireless operator air gunner, and I’ve got to wait for a course to come up, a vacancy for the course to come up, so I stayed at Wisbech ‘til August ’41, and then they posted me to Blackpool on a wireless course and everybody in the RAF went to Blackpool to do their wireless course, and you had to stay in a, all the border houses were commandeered, and all the aircrew used to live in these border houses and the thing was when you’re at Blackpool you got up to twelve words a minute which we all did, and then from there you’re posted to another sta, er, air force station to continue your study ‘til you become up to eighteen words a minute –
AM: When you say eighteen words a minute, doing what?
HI: Morse code.
AM: Morse code right, okay.
HI: Yeah, dit dah dit dah dit dah dit. Anyway, we was all queuing up to wait for postings and the sergeant came out just like that he said ‘you lot, over that side. You lot, that side,’ and fortunately or unfortunately I was in that lot on that side and we become airgunners. Not wireless operators, airgunners. Just airgunners. And the reason for that, I didn’t know at the time, was the heavy bombers, the Lancasters, were going on production, and there was, they were short of airgunners, because they had to carry another air gunner so they said ‘you lot over there, you become airgunners,’ and I went back to Wisbech – I was a bit cheesed off about it all anyway, couldn’t do much about it, and I waited another couple of months and then they sent me on a gunnery course, a place called Manby [emphasis] in Lincoln, it’s a big air force gunnery school there, and we done six weeks training there as gunners, gunnery, and I got the huge total flying hours of nineteen hours, that’s all I got, and they said – and from there you’re supposed to do a four month, five month operational training course, that’s getting accustomed to actually doing bombing raids on enemy territory. But then whatever happened they said to me ‘you’re being posted straight on a squadron’ and I tell you what, I was a greener than this.
AM: [Laughs] we’re sat on a green settee, for the record.
HI: Yeah, yeah. It was as green, I was as green as anything then. ‘Cause I got nineteen hours and I didn’t know what to expect. Anyway, I was posted to Waddington [emphasis] to Number 9 Squadron. And when I arrived there, as it was luck [exhale of breath] was in my favour because a flight lieutenant named Stubbs came up to me and said ‘you’re gonna fly with me as a mid-upper’ and I said ‘fair enough.’ They’d already, he was already on his second tour, he’d already done thirteen trips on Wellingtons [emphasis].
AM: So you didn’t do the usual crewing up thing?
HI: Never done anything like that, no.
AM: You just –
HI: No, no they just sent about ten of us to 9 Squadron, ‘cause I was just converting from Wellingtons onto Lancasters, and consequently they was one gunner short because the Lancaster carried a mid-upper. So he said to me, anyhow I didn’t know what it was all about actually, he said to me ‘the rear gunner I’ve got at the moment is a big Australian,’ he was about six foot three [unclear] ‘and he’s too tall for the turret’ he said ‘what we’re gonna do is you’re gonna do your first trip in the mid-upper and after that you’ll go in the rear turret, and the Australian will go’ –‘cause in the mid-upper you can pull your legs down, straighten you know, you’ve got plenty of room, so what we done then, we done – as time’s gone on, this was 1942, round about June 1942 and we started getting to used, well the crew getting used to flying a Wellington twin engine bomber onto a four engine bomber. And that, you use what they call conversion, and that’s pretty difficult ‘cause you learn how to fly an entirely different aircraft, land it, you got to find out all the different things, the different systems and the turrets, anyway we done about six weeks training, well not, training it was, well converting from the one engine to the Lancaster, and then September ’42 we was in a crew, we had a big crew and we used to lay and loll about smoking, swearing everything else [laughs] anyway, they said ‘ops tonight.’ So, before you went on operations you done what they call a night flying test [emphasis], you took the aircraft up, you tested the bomb site, you tested the, the bomb bays open and closing, you tested the turrets and you give a, you went outta sea and give the guns a little squirt, see everything was alright, the compass [emphasis], check the compass and the, the under carriage we’d dropped up and down a couple of time to make sure it was alright, and we landed, and as we landed, the bomb aimer had already done thirteen trips on Wellingtons, and this is vivid, and as we’d come out of the steps of the Lancaster, the bomb aimer’s behind me, and coming along the road was tractor carrying a four thousand pound bomb, and fourteen hundred incendiaries, and the bomb aimer said to me ‘oh, we’re going to Happy Valley tonight.’ He said ‘by that bomb load, we’re definitely going to Happy Valley,’ and I thought ‘well that don’t sound too bad, Happy Valley,’ I thought ‘well Happy Valley, that can’t be too bad,’ I didn’t know that that was a nickname for the Ruhr Valley. The whole of the Ruhr Valley was called Happy Valley, and I didn’t realise at the time but the Happy Valley, the Ruhr Valley, as you went in you got a brilliant [emphasis] reception and a better, a, what you say, a bye-bye on the way out, and I tell you what, right I’ll go on, anyway we – it was always ritual, always [emphasis] for bomber crews to have bacon and eggs before they went on ops, always. Didn’t matter where you were, all the time I was in the air force, I done sixty bombing trips, and every time we went on a bombing trip we got bacon and eggs [emphasis] and if we come back we got bacon and eggs. And that was a luxury in those, in wartime, and then of course the joke was, always the joke ‘if you don’t come back, can I have your bacon and eggs?’ you know. Anyway, we went to the, we got – there was a bit of a rigmarole getting ready, you had to, you had to have your bacon and eggs and you go down to – most, most aircrew wrote a last letter, most of ‘em. I think the majority of aircrew wrote a last letter home to their wives, and they used to put them on the bed, and I’m afraid to say, I seen many, many, many letters being collected by the padre, many, that’s why I never wrote one myself. Anyway, we had our food, our bacon and eggs, we were all laughing and joking, you know we were young blokes, and we went to the crew, to the briefing room and we all sat down to see who would come in, and the map [emphasis] had a huge sheet over it, and the CO always, always done it, come in, whipped the sheet off and there was the target. So the bomb aimer said to me ‘I told you.’ It was Dusseldorf, he said ‘there you are,’ he said ‘I knew we were going there’ he said, ‘we’re going to Happy Valley,’ and I still didn’t twig on, ‘oh well, that don’t sound too bad,’ thinking of German girls tryna start [?] kisses you know what I mean. Anyway, we went down to the crew room and the atmosphere changed completely [emphasis]. We went in the crew room and the whole squadron was in the crew room ‘cause we had cabinets for all our flying gear and used to get dressed in there, and as I walked in, all the crews were there, it was dead silence, and everybody was looking at each other, there was no jokes, no laughing, nothing. And there was simply a – the atmosphere was incredible [emphasis] to what it was in the mess having our egg and bacon. Anyway, we got dressed and it was – airgunners dressing was long underpants, pure silk, and a vest that was silk and then your shirt and then your pullover, and then a, over the shirt you put a, I think it was, no, before you put the shirt on, as we put the shirt on we put an electrical heated suit with gloves and electrical heated gloves and body and feet, which was really, really important. And over that we put our uniform ‘cause you had to wear a uniform, if you never wore a uniform, I never realised but at night if you’ve was parachuted out in civilian clothes you was likely to get executed, which many, quite a few boys did get executed, especially by the civilians. And over that we used to put a huge [emphasis] fur jacket and fur trousers, fur lined boots, and there we were –
AM: Fur trousers?
HI: Fur trousers, yeah [murmur from AM]. You know, thick, made of the same material as your jacket. Irvin jacket, you had Irvin trousers, thick Irvin trousers and they used to tuck them inside your boot, zip your boots up and there, you could hardly move by then, but – and I’ll tell you what, on a warm day you was walking out you was absolutely sweating [emphasis, laughs]. Anyway, we went out to the aircraft and everybody smoked, everybody smoked [emphasis] except the skipper, the skipper didn’t smoke, he never drunk, never went out with women, he was absolutely – they said in the officers mess that they couldn’t understand the man, he wouldn’t, he never swore, he never smoked. Anyway, he – a good pilot mind you. Anyway, we got in the aircraft and I was in the mid-upper, first time. And in the mid-upper turret of the Lancaster, I’ve got a picture of it, you had a fantastic [emphasis] view –
AM: Hmm, all round.
HI: All three hundred and eighty degree. You could see everything [emphasis]and I got in the mid-upper, and I never got, I was still raw, we done, only done six weeks training, and I plugged in the electricity for the heater ‘cause if we, even in the mid-upper the temperature was about forty-five, fifty below zero. Worse still in the turret, rear turret. Anyway, we got ready and then the crew room, nobody was talking, it was like that, nobody spoke, and off we went. We took off at Waddington, and the thing was at Waddington they had no runways at that time. There were two squadrons of Lancasters there and no runway. All we had was grass, and in the winter it was very, very difficult with full bomb loads to takeoff. Before that, when we arrived at Waddington there was a squadron there, 44 Squadron, a Rhodesian squadron, and apparently they was the first squadron in the RAF to be equipped with the Lancaster, in March, April, round about April. And what they’d done, they’d decided to do a daylight raid, a low level daylight raid on a town called Augsburg in Germany. They sent six Lancasters flying at zero feet right across France, right into Germany –
AM: At zero [emphasis] feet?
HI: Zero feet, I mean zero – well when I say zero feet, about half of these buildings.
AM: Right okay.
HI: Can you imagine six Lancasters –
AM: No [laughs] –
HI: At that height over, just ducking over the trees, going as low as low as they could, else they would have invade [?] the radar.
AM: Right.
HI: Anyway, what happened – unfortunately there was squadron of Messerschmitts flying, I don’t know if it was practicing or flying, and of course they see these six Lancasters, and they immediately they shot down five [noise of shock from AM]. So outta the six they sent, one come back badly, badly damaged, and his name was Nevillson [name unclear] and he got the VC. The other five that was shot down got nothing [emphasis] so, he was fortunate, he was leading the squadron from the front and they gradually cut the other five down and he managed to avoid and managed to get back badly damaged. So, I’m just telling you that because it deal with another operation I went on. Anyway, we all got ready to takeoff, and everything was quiet in the – nobody spoke, when we was on ops, very rarely we spoke. The only time we spoke is when we was being attacked, when the navigator was giving instructions to the pilot, or the bomb aimer or me or the mid-upper or the rear gunner could see something downstairs they could identify and then inform the navigator what we see, and that helped him to crack the course. ‘Cause in those days, 1942, we had no radar. We had what they called Gee-box up to the coast and once we hit the coast the Germans blocked it, so it was from then onwards it was the navigator used to have to go from one spot to another spot, estimate the time of arrival at the other spot before he made a correction to the course, and of course things improved later on in ’43, and the gunners helped a lot because they could, especially the rear gunner could see, or the mid-upper could see different –
AM: Rivers, train lines and stuff like that.
HI: -- objects, yeah. And sometimes that wasn’t possible, there’d be ten-Thames [?] cloud. And then navigation become very, very difficult. And don’t forget we didn’t have no radar help whatsoever, but we managed and we flew over, as we took off we flew over the Dutch coast and the bomb aimer, he used to lay pronged in the nose [very unsure about what was said here], he said ‘skipper, enemy air coast [?] ahead, flak, flak.’ Always gunfire was called flak [emphasis]. So I looked down and I see all these beautiful, indescribable [?] lights, every colour, reds, blues, greens, there all tracers [?] from what they call night flak. They went up to about eight or nine thousand feet and then it dropped down again. And that’s when flak –
AM: And how high were you at that point?
HI: We was about twelve thousand feet. So when I looked down from mid-upper and I see that flak below us and I thought to myself ‘if that’s flak, we’ve got nothing at all to worry about.’ So we flew over Holland, don’t forget this was the early phase of bombing. Before that the bombing was nothing ‘cause they had obsolete bombing, bombing aircraft and no idea whether they reached the target. It was only in beginning, half way through 1942 they was giving the apparatus so they didn’t really find the target. Anyway, you crossed the Dutch coast and I’m in the mid-upper, spinning it round, and for about, I should imagine it was about hour, hour and a quarter, then the bomb aimer said ‘target ahead skipper.’ So then I thought to myself ‘well I’ll have a look to see what this target is all about,’ and I swung the turret around and I had really [emphasis], really the shock of my life. In front of us, with no exaggeration, was one solid massive explosion of shells. Absolute whole area was full up of high explosive shell fire, and we gotta fly through that. And searchlights were creeping about, and they had one searchlight which was radar operated and it was a different colour, it was blue, very light blue. And that was a searchlight, never missed. It went up bang, like that, straight onto an aircraft. It was radar controlled [coughs] excuse me [pause to drink] so when I see this huge massive explosion ‘cause I had a beautiful view, so I thought to myself ‘cor blimey, surely we haven’t gotta go through all this.’ And I could hear it, and the plane was bumping up and down from the force of the explosions and the skipper said to me ‘mid-upper, keep an eye above you, because bombers above you will drop their bombs on you’ which happened many times. So I said ‘okay skipper,’ and – we called the pilot skipper, always called him a skipper. Doesn’t matter what rank he was, always a skipper. Anyway, we, I started looking up and there right above us was a Lanc, bomb bay open, ‘cause you know the bomb bays were enormous, I says ‘there’s a bomber above us skipper with his bomb bay open, dive port.’ We dived port, good job we did because he was ready to drop his load, so we slammed our bomb bay shut, because we was on a run as well and, and the bomb aimer said ‘we’ll have to make a correction on our way into the target.’ You must realise that all around us these huge [emphasis] explosions of shells, I’m telling you not few, hundreds [emphasis] of ‘em exploding into the sky. Anyway, as we were flying in, the skipper said ‘skipper, I’ve lost the target point,’ he said ‘we’ll have to round again.’ And I just told you, the skipper never swore. I’ll tell you what [laughs] he said to the bomb aimer ‘you are a silly chap’ [laughs]. There was a few more words. So we slammed the bomb bay shut, went right through that target, went all through that explosions and the plane was rocking about, could hear shrapnel hitting the bloody machine, in our machine, and we went round and we do a dogleg. We approached the target like that, and then we go like that, like that, in again. But you had to be very, very careful ‘cause when you left the target and you was gonna come in again, you was coming across the last of the bombers that was going in. And it was very, very, very dangerous. Anyway, when we went round, and by that time the German radar was on us and it was giving us a real, real shellacking [?] I’ll tell you. Anyway, we made our run round, opened the bomb bay, dropped our bombs, slammed the door, slammed the door shut and what we usually do then, you couldn’t – slammed the doors shut but you couldn’t get away, you had to stay straight and level for another forty seconds because the camera was turning around and at the same time you was dropping what they called a photo-flash [?]. That was in the fuselage. And as the photo-flash dropped down, the cameras turning over, and they took a picture, an actual picture, of you bombing the target, which was very, very important because if you didn’t bring back a picture the intelligence officers said to you ‘well it’s your word against mine that you went there,’ even if the aircraft was full of bloody holes, they still say ‘we don’t believe you,’ well, ‘not saying we don’t believe you but you’ve got no proof that you went to the target so it don’t count, so you can go all that way there and back for nothing,’ which happened several times. Anyway, we slammed the bomb bay down, we made a dived [emphasis] to the port, turned round and come back and that’s when your trouble started, the fighters. But that time they wasn’t so dangerous as what they were to be. They, we used to see the fighters flying about and straight away, I don’t know if it was instinct or not, when I see a fighter, I wouldn’t fire on him unless he was interfering with us, I let him go, because generally you’d find on a fighter he had huge [emphasis] canons and you had no chance, I tell you, you had no chance whatsoever.
AM: So you’re just causing trouble for yourself really –
HI: Yeah because they could stand off from two, three hundred yards and you couldn’t do nothing about it, ‘cause your 303 went about a hundred yards and started dropping what they called a gravity drop. They had canons and he could rake you [?] which happened a couple of times. Anyway, we slammed the bomb bay shut, and we started coming back, and the bomb aimer said to the skipper and the navigator, ‘skipper, we can’t breathe. We’ve got no oxygen.’ And what had happened, the shrapnel had cut through the oxygen lines, so the skipper said ‘alright, so what we have to do is dive down below ten thousand feet,’ which we did do, and coming home in the mid-upper I thought to myself, ‘if this is bloody Happy Valley, I hope we don’t go anywhere that’s miserable’[laughs]. And I’ll tell you what, it’s a terrible, terrible place. Anyway we got down to – we crossed the Dutch coast at about four thousand feet, and these beautiful lights we see were flashing past us like that, all over, and lucky enough we managed to get through a few bangs and we were damaged but not that bad. And we dropped down about two thousand feet and we headed home, and I thought to myself ‘dear oh dear, I got thirty of these, thirty trips to do like that before we get a rest.’ And we landed, and I was exhausted. Even at that age, at seventeen, I was exhausted. And we went into the briefing room and I stood there and we was asked a load of questions, and they said to me, it was only my first trip, they said to me ‘what do you think?’ And I said ‘I see four or five bombers exploding in the sky,’ I said ‘apart from that everything was alright.’ He said ‘you never seen no bombers’ – this was the officer, the briefing officer telling me that, he wasn’t even a flyer. He’s saying ‘you didn’t see no bombers blowing up, that was scarecrows.’ What the Germans were firing up shells to mimic a bomber exploding, and they kept this up right the way through the war.
AM: So it was true, you hadn’t, you’d seen the scarecrows, not a bomber blowing up.
HI: No, no they were actually aircraft blowing up in the sky. They did admit after the war there was no such thing as a scarecrow.
AM: Ah right.
HI: They admitted it, the Air Ministry, but they kept it a –
AM: So why did they say that?
HI: Well they – one of the reasons was they didn’t want us to duck and dive about. They wanted us to fly straight and level, ‘cause it was dangerous anyway, ducking and diving. But every time we went back we say we seen three or four, sometimes more than that, explosions, literally exploding in the sky. They said ‘no, that’s German scarecrows to demoralise you.’ Anyway, we got back and in the briefing room he said, he told me about the scarecrows so I thought ‘oh well, that’s it.’ Anyway, I didn’t know how exhausted I was, it was only a four and three-quarter hour trip. I went to bed and I felt absolutely exhausted. And I think the mental strain of the first trip. Anyway, we went back to the mess, we went to bed, and I think next morning we had a day off. The following day I think we went to Bremen, and the reason why went to Bremen, or Bremen [different pronunciation, shorter vowel sound] as they called it, they was building the submarines, the U-Boats there.
AM: Right.
HI: And we went across the Baltic that time. We didn’t see no flak until we hit Bremen, and the flak was unbelievable. It was worse than Dusseldorf.
AM: Were you in the rear gunner at this –
HI: I was in the rear turret, yeah.
AM: So you’d moved to the rear turret by this time?
HI: Yeah. And different position and the different visibility of the – when you’re in the rear turret you can see that way, see the bits you couldn’t see really above you or at the side of you –
AM: Or behind you.
HI: And at that time, the Germans were only attacking from dead astern, port over or starboard over . That was the method of attacking at that time [emphasis], things were getting much, much worse, but they had a little bit of a chance because if they come in close you had four guns here and you could – you had a bit of a chance, not a lot, but you had a bit of a chance. Anyway, I think it was after that trip, couple of trips, I complained to the engineering officer that the rear turret, that the oil for the Merlin engines was coating the Perspex in the rear turret, which obviously, the exhaust was coming out. So we was sitting in the crew room, the officer come in, he said ‘we solved the problem of the oil on the turrets,’ and I thought ‘well that’s good’ ‘cause after about two hours this oil used to go onto the Perspex, it was starting to be difficult to see outta it, and when we went out there [chuckles] what they had done, they had taken the whole Perspex out [chuckles]. So there we were in a rear turret with no bloody Perspex, and I tell you what, it was cold [emphasis].
AM: How did that – what so nothing between you –
HI: No, just – they took the whole of the front of the Perspex out. We used to look through, they took out because the oil.
AM: So it was just you [emphasis] and sky –
HI: Yeah, yeah.
AM: Nothing between you?
HI: No, no. Well the Perspex only stopped the slipstream but they took the Perspex out. Yeah, on all the Lancs, but they solved the problem [laughs]. Anyway, we –
AM: But the oil would just hit you in the face instead.
HI: Yeah, but it was, it wasn’t so bad because you could just wipe it with your glove with it [AM laughs]. But, we got rid of the – it wasn’t such a huge amount but it was enough oil to stop, to obscure your sight a bit, you know. And you had to be really, really on your toes all that time you was in that turret. It was bitterly cold in there, forty-five, fifty below zero, was nothing.
AM: Did you ever have an occasion when your suit didn’t work, or?
HI: Yes sometimes it, it didn’t work a couple of times. I burnt me foot ‘cause it was a new, new idea you know, they’d, after the war they made electric blankets [AM laughs] that was only through the electrical heated suits and it’s the short shirts – it’s like everything in the war, everything was crash, bang, wallop, get ready , but every gunner was issued with an electrical heated suit, and they were good when they worked. So I’d done my first op, and I thought I was proud of myself, but I had other twenty-nine to do. I mean, twenty-nine successful [emphasis] ones, so you can, you can go all the way there, and you get, you get engine trouble and you gotta come back, that don’t count. Even in respect of what you’ve gone through, it didn’t count.
AM: You had to drop your bombs on the target for it to count.
HI: Yeah, the gunner target, yeah. You see, what actually happened, I think at the beginning of the war, the few of them used to go to North Sea, drop their bombs and come back and say yeah they’ve, they’ve, and they – ‘cause they realised Germany wasn’t being bombed really, it was a, the most that we got to was five miles from the towns [?] so what they decide to put the camera in, and the photo-flash. And that stopped it all, ‘cause you had to bring back a picture. The first thing they asked for when you walked in, ‘have you got your picture?’ It was the first thing – [unclear] you’d land on the aircraft, there was a [unclear] photography unit come out and take the film out, and there’d be developed or they used to take it back to the crew, the, where we was being briefed, and they could see if we bombed the target or not. Anyway, so we went to Bremen, we gained a good shellacking [?] and we done a bit of damage there, and we come back, and I was blowing my chest out, I’d done two trips [laughs]. The following, following day, er day after that, we went to Wilhelmshaven, and that was worse. That’s where I was really in full, full strength of building submarines there, and we did – it was devastating the bombing we done there, it was very successful, they held up the submarine building for a long while, and then I’d done, I’d done three trips, and I was, you know, thinking to myself, well –
AM: Were you scared?
HI: Frightened outta my bloody life. The first one, I told you, that first one, Dusseldorf, I could not believe, I could not [emphasis] but everyone was the same –
AM: Did you talk about it?
HI: No, no we never talked about it, no. I’ll tell you one thing, we used to get crews coming straight from OTU into the squadron, ‘cause their losses were horrendous you know, we was losing so many aircraft, and they’d say ‘what’s the ops like?’ and we’d always used to say ‘you find out, you find out yourself.’ We never said ‘oh it’s terrible over there’ or nothing, never. And I don’t know if that helped them or not, but a lot of the crews only done one trip before they got shot down, hell of a lot of ‘em. Just one – in fact, what they used to do when a crew come from OTU, they used to let the pilot fly with an experienced crew on his first trip, so he’d understand what an actual raid was. Very often he never come back off his first trip, it happened time and time again. The crew used to be walking about the station with no, waiting for a new pilot. Yeah, happened many times. Anyway, after Wilhelmshaven we went back to Happy Valley again, and this time, I tell you what, I thought Dusseldorf was bad, we went to Essen [emphasis] and Essen was something out of this [noise of disbelief] something outta, I tell you what, it was absolutely ferocious. The flak was enormous, everywhere you look there was shells bursting, aircraft blowing up in the sky, aircraft going down in flames, and I had something with me because we just went through – we always got hit, always got hit with flak, big holes in the aircraft, but when we got back they used to bang ‘em and tap ‘em back and –
AM: Bodge [?] ‘em up.
HI: Yeah, that’s it [chuckles]. Anyway, we went to Essen, then we went to Munich, and I’ll tell you how my luck is, what happened, losses at Waddington on 9 Squadron, even those few weeks I was there, was horrendous. So they sent two scientists down from Cambridge with a new device to put into the rear turret so that when a fighter was five or six hundred yards away, which we couldn’t see, they could see us on their radar, this instrument was radar. It could pick up the fighter and warn us with a red light that there was a fighter in the close vicinity. Unfortunately the first time the squadron was equipped with them, we lost two aircraft and the Germans must have sorted the, must have examined the wreckage and seen this device in the rear turret and copied [unclear] a wavelength or whatever it was, anyway we went to Munich and that was a long trip, that was about eight and a half hours and we went over, and how the navigator found Munich I’ll never know ‘cause we went over in ten-tenths cloud, that means to say underneath you was solid cloud, but he found Munich as – before we reached Munich the cloud broke and there was Munich and we did, we did give it real good hiding.
AM: Is this day time or night?
HI: It’s night time –
AM: It’s night time isn’t it?
HI: Never, never done daylight.
AM: But you could still see it, so how come you could see it at night time?
HI: We could see it yeah because the – a couple of people had been bombing it and the searchlights –
AM: Right.
HI: And you could see the town anyway. You – but that’s why bombing – they, they said ‘well why did you bomb areas’ – the only way you can do night bombing was to, at that time was area bombing and in that area you probably got a load of factories you could destroy, but you couldn’t pick out – it was very, very difficult to pick out an individual target so you had to bomb an area, they used to pick an area out. This was before pathfinding [murmured agreement from AM] so we used to drop flares ourselves, we dropped a few flares as we was going in, or people before us would drop a few flares, and you’d sit and the bomb aimer would see the target.
AM: Who dropped the flares, the bomb aimer?
HI: The bomb aimer, yeah. Someone on the squadron [very unclear what was said here] would drop a few flares and then down they went, but that was the beginning, when we really first started bombing Germany, before that it was a joke. Anyway, we bombed Munich and we made a good frame [?] on it actually, and coming back the skipper said ‘I think we’ll fly through cloud’ because the fighter activity, we could see the fighter flares, and so he said ‘if we go through cloud we won’t meet any fighters,’ which we did do, so we was flying for about an hour in the cloud and all of a sudden the cloud broke clear, and believe it or not, right by my rear turret, as I looked outta my rear turret was a Ju-88. I tell you what he was no more than thirty yards [emphasis] behind us. And he opened fire with his cannons and the tracer went just above the aircraft, just missed us. The reason was that he was so close and we was up and down like that and I suppose as we went down he fired and he missed us. Anyway, we opened fire, me in the rear turret and the mid-upper ‘cause he was right close to us, and down he went, he spun over and down he went.
AM: So you got him?
HI: Yeah we got him, yeah.
AM: Which one of you got him, do you know?
HI: We don’t know, I think –
AM: Both of you?
HI: We both opened fire on him, and he was more surprised than what we were, he never expected it, and down he went. Lucky enough because usually once the night fighter got on your tail, it was very, very difficult. Anyway we, when we got back we told the intelligence officer that this night fighter had followed us through ten-tenths cloud for an hour ‘till the cloud broke. So they put two and two together and realised the apparatus they’d put in the turret was sending out a ray for the Germans to pick up and that’s what he was following us on. So what – immediately they took the radar thing out of the turret and I don’t know if it made any difference or not. After that we were talking and laughing about it and they said ‘you gonna do some low level formation flying in daylight,’ so we thought ‘well surely we’re not gonna have another daylight raid after the huge loss to 44 Squadron,’ and I mean we never even considered [emphasis] that they would do anymore daylight raids. So anyway, we done this practice formation, well it’s not formation flying – at that time there was over ninety Lancs in 5 Group, and there was ninety of us flying over Lincoln, around this area, right on the ground, well I don’t mean on the ground, as high as these buildings. Everyone was moaning down below because can you imagine ninety Lancasters flying about thirty or forty feet and they said ‘you’re gonna have to cut the squadron of Spitfires doing damning runs [?] on you.’ So I’m sitting in my turret, and the Spitfires come straight for me, and he was so close our slipstream hit his, hit his wings, and he turned like that, and being so low, he couldn’t, he couldn’t get outta the dive and he went straight in the deck. And I was ‘that don’t sound too bad, that’s gonna happen.’ Anyway –
AM: What happened to him? Crashed? Killed?
HI: Crashed, just crashed yeah. And when I looked along the road there was about three or four Spits on the deck, burning [emphasis] doing the same thing, come straight in –
AM: So they were killed?
HI: And the slipstream, they had no chance of correcting, correcting, ‘cause it’s too low on the ground. Anyway, on the Saturday they said ‘there’s gonna – report to your flights ‘cause there’s gonna be a daylight raid.’ So we went out to do the what they call a night flighting test, and when we landed there was the trailer, but all it had on it was six [emphasis] one thousand pounders. So we knew it was gonna be a long, long journey. We were – a bomb load like that was only a third of the weight of what we’d usually take to the Ruhr, so we were, obviously it was gonna be a long journey. We went to the briefing –
AM: Can I just ask, so why obviously, ‘cause that would conserve the fuel because you had a lighter load?
HI: Yeah we had to take more fuel and less bombs, so –
AM: Yep, okay.
HI: So actually we knew the distance when we see a big petrol load [emphasis] going in we knew we were on for a – we see a small bomb load we knew, the petrol, it was being loaded up for all the tanks and we knew we was on for a long trip. Anyway, we went and had our – even at that time, we’d already had breakfast, but they sent us out and said ‘we’re gonna have bleeding bacon and eggs’ [laughs]. That was always done, it don’t matter what time of the day it was bacon –
AM: Well what would happen if you didn’t like bacon?
HI: Well –
AM: What did they get, sausage?
HI: There were a few Jewish people who, they had to eat the bleeding bacon [laughs].
AM: Did they, they ate it?
HI: Yeah, well, by then I’d done five or six trips, and I thought ‘so I better eat the food, you never know what’s gonna happen.’ Anyway, we went to the briefing at about ten o’clock, Saturday morning, it was, in October, round about, I forget the date, about the tenth of October, and we went to the briefing, and the officer come in, pulled the blind down, and there it was. Place called Le Creusot. It was right on the other side of France, nearly on the Swiss border. It was a nearly ten and a half hour trip and we were looking at each other, and they said ‘you’re to fly as low as possible, even lower than that if you can,’ and they said ‘there’ll be two hundred Spitfires,’ or hundred, two or three hundred Spitfires ‘escorting you to the coast,’ but the trouble was the Spitfires went to the wrong bleeding place, we never see ‘em. So we crossed the French coast at about the height of these buildings, and then you imagine what a sight that must have been , ninety-two Lancasters flying –
AM: What a noise [emphasis] never mind a sight.
HI: Yeah, there was loads and loads of ‘em. And all we got was the French girls waving at us and I thought ‘that’s handy,’ and everybody was coming out and waving, it was a beautiful day, and we went right across France. I mean right across France, looking, wondering where the fighters was ‘cause there was thousands of by that time, ’42, there was hundreds and hundreds of fighters in France –
AM: German fighters?
HI: Yeah, German fighters in France. Anyway, we went right across France, there was no incidents, everybody was waving, and we approached the target [coughs] excuse me, and six of us had to break off and bomb the power station that was supplying the electricity to this huge armament factory in Le Creusot. It was a huge armament factory, nearly as big as what the Germans had, and they was producing armaments for the German army. So we broke off, telling you now there was six of us who broke off, Guy Gibson was with us, he was on our port side, and he was on 106 Squadron, Guy Gibson was on, and his second in command was flying the other Lanc, and on our starboard side was two Lancasters from 50 Squadron on the other side, we was in the centre and there was six of us. We broke off and went straight to this power station. Oh, and as we approached the power station, one of the Lancasters on our starboard side just went straight in the deck and exploded. We were – he had six one thousand pound bombs on it, and it literally went straight in the deck and exploded. What happened we don’t know.
AM: Don’t know.
HI: Anyway, the five of us carried on, Gibson was on our portside with his second in command and we was in the centre, and the last one of 50 Squadron was, was on our starboard side. Anyway, we bombed the power station and we absolutely flattened [emphasis] it. We was carrying six one thousand pounders, and we went and we climbed up a little bit and dropped ‘em, and we could see that the whole place was flattened. In fact, the factory was – actually I went back there last year, to the factory and it’s bombed, still bleeding bombed [unclear, laughs]. Anyway –
AM: Did you get your photo?
HI: Pardon?
AM: Did you get – not last year, I mean in 1942.
HI: No we didn’t, I don’t think we took a photo because it was daylight and everything –
AM: So they knew –
HI: Everyone was bombing the same target. Anyway, the ninety Lancs turned round, it was ninety-two ‘cause when we turned around there was only ninety-one, one had blown up in the sky, and we came back over the – by the time we’d got to the French coast it was getting dark –
AM: Still flying really low level?
HI: Yeah, and we started climbing when we got to the French coast, and as we passed the French coast it was getting dark, and we was flying for about another thirty or forty minutes, and all of a sudden the sky was smothered in bloody high explosive shells again. So the pilot said ‘where the bloody hell are we,’ so the skipper said ‘ I think we’ve, I’ve miscalculated and we’re flying over Jersey,’ and we were over Jersey with these huge explosions coming up, anyway the pilot called him a nice fella again, he said ‘stupid chap you are’ like that, and we branched out and come back, but that was a catch that, Jersey was very, very heavily armed, and anybody strayed off the course they wait for you. Shot down quite a few bombers over there. Anyway, we got back and went to the briefing, we were told exactly what had happened, and they confirmed that we done a good job there –
AM: Good.
HI: And I thought ‘there won’t be no more daylight raids after that.’ And we went to, in a week, we had a couple of days off and we went to Genoa [emphasis], and we couldn’t make out why we was going all the way to Italy, it was eleven hour trip to bomb Genoa, but we soon found out because on the Thursday [emphasis] they said, a briefing for Saturday, a daylight raid. So we said ‘surely we’re not having another daylight raid, we was lucky we got away with La Crusoe.’ Anyway, believe it or not, the target was Milan, and we was gonna bomb it, in daylight, taking it from a very, very low level ‘till we got to the Alps, we couldn’t go low level so we had to wander through the Alps, and there was ninety- two Lancasters, darting and diving through the Alps.
AM: Had the Spitfires turned up this time?
HI: No we never see no bloody Spitfires at all this time, and same again, we went right across France, no opposition whatsoever. We went through the Alps, and this is what I call a terror raid. We went across Lake Como about hundred feet then, we climbed to three hundred feet, and there was Milan waiting for us. No air raid shelter, no flak, they never expected British bombers to come all the way from England in daylight, never expected.
AM: Could you, were you low enough to actually see people in the –
HI: Pardon?
AM: Were you low enough to actually see people?
HI: It was, we was that low, we dropped down to about a hundred feet, hundred and fifty feet over Milan, we could see everybody in the streets, in the restaurants, we could see ‘em all. And we see ‘em started running about, there was no alarm given, and the city was completely open, and imagine ninety-two Lancs with six one thousand pounders on. We caused absolute havoc there, and a few of the boys I know were machine gunning, which I thought was wrong. Anyway, we climbed up again, came back, slid our way through the Alps, dropped down again to nought [?] feet and came right across France again.
AM: You missed Jersey that time.
HI: Yeah, we missed Jersey that time. We had our pullovers on [laughs].
AM: What did you feel about that then? The fact that you could actually see people?
HI: Oh we could see ‘em yeah, yeah because we –
AM: What did you, did you talk about it afterwards?
HI: No, we never talked about air raids, never mentioned it. Once you got back it was finished. No body, and same as the logbook, all we used to put in the logbook was the raid, the time, we never, what we should have done was put a little, exactly what happened, but when you put your books into the commanding officer to be signed once a month, [unclear] shooting, just put down what the raid was and that was it, that was what we used to do. But we should have done, we should have put the whole story of what exactly went on. And after that raid believe it or not the Ities [?] didn’t want to know anything more about the war, and there was huge – we had a big publicity the next day in the Daily Express, had a huge photo of Number 9 Squadron, coming back off the raid, and they reproduced it in Italy with, English Gangsters they called us, and there we are. I think we lost four aircraft that night, I don’t know where we lost them, might have been technical trouble, I don’t know, but, to go all that way in daylight and not see a German fighter was incredible. And after that we felt ourselves very, very, very lucky. It was about my ninth trip then, I was one of the top, experienced men then –
AM: And you’d shot somebody down by then.
HI: Yeah, yeah. But we’d, we were the top men in the squadron, we’d done about nine or ten trips.
AM: And you were seventeen.
HI: Yeah, yeah. And from then things got worse. Worse and worse and worse. The –
AM: In what way worse, Harry?
HI: The fighters got much more efficient, and their radar got much more efficient. Their guns got more efficient. Search lights got better, and more, and they had guns that fired with radar and they never missed. I remember later on in the year on my second tour we was bombing a place in the Ruhr Valley, and we was going in, our squadron, and as we was going in, there was people in front of us bombing, and they’d already turned starboard and coming out again, and for some reason, I don’t know, a Halifax [emphasis] I don’t know if it was in our squadron or the squadron beforehand, instead of going hitting the target, I don’t know what happened, he turned and joined the aircraft that was coming out of the, from the bombing run, which was in daylight, and there was a big gap between us going in and those coming out, and then he flew across, and as he flew across the flak went bang, bang, and the third shell hit him right underneath, and just exploded, yeah. Why he done that I don’t know, ‘cause we was all in the shadow of the silver paper we was dropping, and that helps with the – this one had got outta range with it going across and they shot him down straight away, yeah. And as it went on, we used to get leave every six weeks, and Lord [pause] what his name, Rank, Rank, wasn’t Rank, it was the er, the bloke that owned Morris, BMC, owned BMC, and he said, and he gave every aircrew bloke that was on ops, when he went on leave he doubled their pay, for a weeks leave yeah, he done that right through the war. Must have cost him a fortune.
AM: Every airman?
HI: Yeah, well it was in Bomber Command.
AM: In Bomber Command.
HI: Who was flying. He used to give ‘em – he used to, he used to double our pay, yeah.
AM: You know what, just going back to operations, you know the gaps between them, as in a day, a couple of days?
HI: All depending upon the weather. It was entirely dependent upon the weather. If the weather was, it was a bright – I’ll tell you one we went one, we went on one and I still think about it, it was a full light night, getting onto Christmas I think it was, and they said ‘there’ll be no ops tonight because there’s bright moonlight and no cloud,’ and it was suicide to go over there. Anyway, they said they’d picked out sixteen Lancasters, they’d picked out about eight from our squadron, four from 44 and I think four from another squadron, they said ‘we want you to do a low level night time raid on small towns just outside the Ruhr Valley.’ And the excuse they gave us was that the civilian population wasn’t getting any rest from the bombing raids on the Ruhr Valley and they was letting them come to these small towns to get rest. That’s why they wanted to go over there and liven ‘em up. So, it really was a terror raid and we carried sixteen one thousand pounders with a delayed charged of about half an hour, and we found this small town, we was after, just outside the Ruhr Valley, and we went right down, it was brilliant [emphasis] moonlight we were in, we went right down this village or small town and dropped the sixteen one thousand pounders right down the centre of the town. And I often wonder what happened about that, but I don’t, there was no need really to do that bombing really, but there you go, that was war.
AM: Well you called it a terror raid.
HI: Pardon?
AM: You called it a terror raid?
HI: Yeah, yeah, and that was Christmas, went home and had some leave, came back and we started again. And by that time, all the crews that I knew when I joined the squadron in June had all gone, they’d all gone. All been shot down.
AM: Every single one.
HI: Yeah, and they was all new recruits except us, and we was all NCOs.
AM: What do you think kept your plane – why your crew when all the rest of them got shot down? What can you say?
HI: I don’t know, I don’t know. I’ll tell you, shall I tell you?
AM: Go on.
HI: Well, what they used to do, before you went on a raid they used to give us a bag of sweets –
AM: Go on, keep going. I know the story, but keep going.
HI: Oh you know the story do you?
AM: You told me earlier on, but tell me again.
HI: And, we couldn’t undo the sweets with the cellophane, so we used to throw them out of the rear turret, and the Germans knew that and that’s why they never shot us down. ‘Cause they wanted the sweets [laughs]. That’s only a joke [both laugh]. I don’t know, I got no idea. Well, what actually happened, the crew I was with, I said they’d already done fourteen trips on Wellingtons when I joined them, they finished, and they finished, we finished our tour, was up to about sixteen, fifteen or sixteen trips, and I was left with no crew, and I was sitting in the mess, and a bloke walked in, I knew him as Sergeant Doolan, pilot, and he said ‘my rear gunner Robbie has just been killed, would you take his place?’ That was, that was luck really, so I said ‘alright, I’ll become your new rear gunner’ which I did do, and we was an NCO crew, and we was the only crew to, that I know of, all the time I was there, that finished the tour. And how many crews we lost, Lord knows.
AM: But you were the common denominator.
HI: Yeah, yeah –
AM: From the first sixteen and then fourteen and then the –
HI: Yeah, and then, we was all NCOs and we finished the tour, yeah. And I think the pilot got the DFM, and none of us got even a mention of a medal. And there was – but the thing was, what was happening by then was the Germans had come up with a new technique called Schräge Musik, that was what they’d come up with, they’d put two cannons at eighty degree, put the two cannons behind the cockpit at eight degrees so there was the aircraft, and these two guns stuck up like that –
AM: Okay.
HI: And all they had to do, they had radar, and all they had to do was coast [?] yourself underneath a bomber and just fly underneath him. You didn’t have to have no sight, no tracer, it just went underneath the aircraft, up to the petrol tanks, quick squirt, and we used to see ‘em blowing up but we couldn’t make out, we used to come back and tell ‘em that we seen aircraft blowing up in the sky, there was no flak and no fighters we could see, and the, and they literally shot down thousands [emphasis] of bombers, and not once did they ever mention what was going on at the briefing, not once. Never.
AM: Would there have been any way to avoid them if you’d have known about them?
HI: Well, if we knew and known about it, which they knew what we’d be doing, we’d start jiggling up and down, so they wouldn’t get a clean shot at us, but then when you think about it, you get five or six hundred bombers doing that in pitch darkness, you’re gonna get, gonna get a lot of problems. And that was it, but they were shooting them down, ah, unbelievable. Yeah, you had to be lucky really, because if you bowed out you had to be lucky, because if the civilians, you come out near a target and the civilians get hold of you they’d rip you to pieces. Yeah, and the Gestapo shot a few as well. If you was lucky the Luftwaffe got hold of you, was alright, but, or the army got you –
AM: But you never got shot down?
HI: No, I never got shot down, no.
AM: What happened at the end of your first tour, then?
HI: What happened then, finished my tour, didn’t get no bloody medal, don’t know why not –
AM: Even though you shot one down, ‘cause people got medals for that didn’t they?
HI: Yeah I know. Anyway, I went as an instructor, and then I realised how risky this business was, because all [emphasis] that was coming from OTUs were crews being trained in Canada. And when you think they were being trained on single engine aircraft in beautiful weather, all they had to do was follow the railway line from one point to another, everything was easy. Of course when they come to London, especially, and England, especially where, with the weather, and was OTU we had to train ‘em for three or four months before they went on operations, and hell of a lot of ‘em got killed on accidents, but they were very raw, they should have had much, much more training, but then again –
AM: And how old were you at this point? Eighteen?
HI: Yeah, eighteen, about eighteen and a half yeah. And I was an instructor, and apparently, I carried on for a little while and the, we had a bit of a go – oh they sent me up to a place up in Scotland to a gunnery school to do some – the instructors up there wanted to get on ops, don’t know why, but they said ‘you go up there and relieve them,’ about ten of us went up there, and we were in the mess one night, and we all got drunk and caused a bit of a havoc and we went in front of the CO next day, he said ‘I’ve had enough of you blokes, I’m posting you.’ So I thought ‘oh go on, I’ll be posted somewhere out in the Middle East’ or somewhere like that, and anyway I got posted to South End, about fifteen miles from where I lived, and I was thinking ‘be at home every night’ and while I was there, what we was doing there was flying drogues [?], the flak along the south coast, we had a big drogue pulled behind, and I tell you what, when I see that I knew we had no chance at all. They had these, we had to use a toeless drogue, and they used to fight, not at the drogue, a couple of degrees past the drogue, because they kept hitting the drogues and it was becoming expensive. So, but the flak [emphasis] to follow you, right, same height, would follow the drogue all the way along. Anyway, after a while they said ‘you’re posted,’ and this I knew was why the government knew what was going on in Germany with the fighters. They said ‘you’ve been posted to the 77 Squadron, Halifaxes.’ So I thought ‘alright,’ so and when I got up there –
AM: Where was that? Where was it?
HI: Er, Full Sutton I think, yeah Full Sutton. And when I got up there, the CO said he wanted to see me when I got up there, so I thought ‘that’s handy, the bloody warrant officer and the CO wants to see me, I must be important’ and he took me out to the, where the arment [?] officer, out to a Halifax, and what they had done they’d cut a big hole in the bottom of the Halifax and placed a point manual point five over the hole –
AM: Point five –
HI: Yeah, point five, point five machine gun.
AM: Okay.
HI: A much bigger shell than the 303. And they said ‘have you seen any German fighters coming, coming at you, you’ll be able to handle ‘em.’ So they knew what was going on. Anyway, we took off for Duisburg and I was sitting there – I was bleeding freezing, can you imagine there’s a big hole like that, about twenty thousand feet and –
AM: Hang on where’s this, is this in the middle of the plane?
HI: In the middle of the plane.
AM: Right, okay.
HI: A big hole.
AM: Where the bomb doors would have been?
HI: Er, it was different in the Halifax.
AM: Okay.
HI: It was different from the Lancaster. Most the bombs – up, further up and underneath the wings as well.
AM: Right.
HI: Anyway, they dug this hole, cut this hole in the Halifax and they had a point five there, and I sat there, and can you imagine it was about forty-five below, and it seemed the whole world was coming through that bloody hole. The pilot was moaning, the bomb aimer was moaning, and the – anyway, we’d done the bombing raid, come back and they complained bitterly about it, and that was the last that – and they said to me ‘we’re posting you to Driffield, to an Australian squadron’ and that’s where I went then, as a rear gunner at 462 Australian Squadron. I stayed there for a couple of months and I don’t know what happened there, I don’t know if I’d lost my logbook or – anyway, I done about eight or nine trips here and never even registered, and then they posted from there, from 64, er, 462 Squadron on Driffield to its other squadron which was at Driffield –
AM: Why did you keep, why did you keep getting posted to different ones?
HI: Well the pilot I went with in 462, bloke, Australian called Heurigen [unsure of spelling] – 462 they posted away completely [emphasis] but he, he stayed, he said ‘no I wanna stay here at Driffield’ and he went onto 466, and he took me with him. And when he finished, I was in, I didn’t know what to do, and they said ‘we want you to go to 158 Squadron at Lissett’ and that’s where I finished. I don about another ten trips there, and they said to me ‘you done enough, that’s it.’
AM: What was Lissett like?
HI: Nissan huts, terrible. Baking hot in the summer, freezing [emphasis] in the winter. And you come back off an op and you had to go in one of them bloody tin huts. The bedding was wet, yeah. But I survived.
AM: You did.
HI: Yeah, I really survived, yeah. All, most of them, all my friends went there, yeah, a lot.
AM: Was the DFC then for the number of operations you went on?
HI: Number of trips I done, sixty trips, yeah. Yeah, I done more now actually, but –
AM: Well the ones that didn’t yeah, didn’t get counted.
HI: Yeah.
AM: And then so from that point, when you did your last tour, sorry your last operation, then what happened, were you sent to demob?
HI: No, they said to me ‘what was your trade?’ The war had finished, and they said to me ‘what was your trade before the war? What did you do?’ and I said ‘I was an apprentice tailor,’ they said ‘we’ve got the job for you’ I thought – they sent me down to Newmarket on the racecourse, in charge of about eight or nine WAFs on sewing machines. I don’t know why they thought I was – they were making lorry covers on these machines, and they put me in charge of ‘em. Oh, when I was there.
AM: What was that like Harry?
HI: [Laughs] had a little giggle [laughter].
AM: So what, how old are you at this point you’re about twenty –
HI: About twenty, yes. Yeah, about, getting on for twenty.
AM: So go on, you had a little giggle [HI laughs], tell me [HI laughs] go on, tell me some stories.
HI: Yeah I was charge of them, that’s it [laughs].
AM: Right, alright then.
HI: Yeah and then I stayed in Newmarket – oh blimey, it’s, oh it’s only twenty past.
AM: No, we’re alright.
HI: Newmarket was a bombing station if you believe it or not. The Rowley Mile was a runway for 75 Squadron, a New Zealand squadron, and after the war they turned it into a Prussian [?] depot. They was dropping all the aircraft into Newmarket and crushing ‘em.
AM: Crushing them?
HI: Crushing ‘em. Hundreds of ‘em. Into this big machine they just went pfft like, just crushed ‘em up, piled ‘em up. As far as we could see was one huge pile of aluminium.
AM: Going back to you though, so you’ve had your giggle with your WAFs –
HI: Yeah.
AM: Then what? Did you get –
HI: I had a couple of giggles [laughter from both] but it was handy there because we could get up to London from Newmarket, they had a railway station –
AM: How long was it before you were demobbed then?
HI: Er, got demobbed in forty, 1946, August ’46.
AM: So quite early, a lot earlier than a lot of ‘em then? ‘Cause you’d been in the whole –
HI: I’d been in the whole, since [unclear] yeah. I come out, about to find a job, I couldn’t go back to tailoring, I’d missed it you know. Anyway, I tried, went back to tailoring and learnt a little bit. Things were very difficult when we come out, we had no houses, you can imagine London, there was all bloody roofs off the buildings, and then we had to wait for a house. I was married then.
AM: I was gonna say, where did, where did you meet your wife?
HI: I knew her from the, from the blackout. I was sitting on a seat in the blackout and she came along with her friend and we started talking and that’s how it started, and I, it was only when I [unclear] and we got married in forty, 1945, Christmas 1945, and I remember we, we done a couple of trips, and I remember I bombed Dresden, we bombed Dresden just after Christmas, February, but we got married on the Christmas, and I shouldn’t have got married ‘cause we had nowhere to bloody live, better than living with the mother-in-law for a little while, got fed up with that.
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/.
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
2015-07-23
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:15:35 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AIronsH150723
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
England--Lincolnshire
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Harry Irons. One
Description
An account of the resource
Harry Irons left a tailoring apprenticeship to join the Royal Air Force and trained as a wireless operator but actually became an air-gunner. He describes the uniform he wore and the unreliability of heated suits. Discusses the invention of scarecrows which crews believed were sent up by the Germans to distract and demoralise them. Also describes a number of operations including to the Ruhr Valley and a number of daylight operations including Le Creusot (17 October 1942) and Milan (24 October 1942). Goes on to discuss the removal of Perspex from Lancasters to prevent oil from exhausts from affecting visibility, the introduction of radar into the rear turret and it’s quick removal after it was found as used by Germany and Schrage Musik. He returned to tailoring following his retirement from the Royal Air Force.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Katie Gilbert
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-10-24
1942-10-17
158 Squadron
462 Squadron
5 Group
50 Squadron
77 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Bombing of Augsburg (17 April 1942)
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
briefing
Distinguished Flying Cross
fear
Gee
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
Halifax
In the event of my death letter
Ju 88
Lancaster
military living conditions
military service conditions
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Nissen hut
radar
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Driffield
RAF Full Sutton
RAF Lissett
RAF Manby
Scarecrow
Spitfire
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/505/8403/PDavisSL1501.1.jpg
6e4096e9e41fc641ba50790df8c92499
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/505/8403/ADavisSL151202.1.mp3
19415213e173ef5ffc6150fd7b822399
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Davis, Sidney Lawrence
S L Davis
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Davis, SL
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-12-02
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Sidney Davis. He flew operations as a wireless operator with 617, 619 and 9 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SLD: I’m Laurie Davis. I was a wireless operator in 619 squadron based at Strubby in Lincolnshire. I joined at Lords Cricket Ground at 10 o’clock in the morning on the 17th of May and found out that evening, when I went to St John’s Wood, the billet, that it was the morning that 617 returned from the Dambusters raid which brought back memories at the end of my squadron career but like all air crew we did our training. I was a wireless op and eventually I found myself at Silverstone and we went into a massive room and we were just told that you would come out the other end as a six man crew and this was somewhat flabbergasting but I wandered around and coming towards me was a chap, sergeant, we were all sergeants in those days, with wings up and we looked at one another and I said, ‘Are you with anyone?’ And he said, ‘No.’ And we introduced ourselves. Johnny Taylor from Bristol. And we wandered around and we found a chap, a navigator Jack [?] he came from Bath. We joined up. We thought, well, we’re halfway there and then we saw a chap with his B brevvy up. A bomb aimer. And he was Norman [?] a Londoner. Came from Potters Bar. So we were almost there. We thought we only wanted a couple of gunners now and we saw these two chaps coming along together. Compared with me being just twenty they were mature men to say the least but probably they were only in their mid-thirties but it turned out they were both married. Joe Crossland turned out to be the mid upper gunner. He was from Wakefield and Tommy [Klines] who was the rear gunner, he was from Warrington. So we all joined up finished up the other end of this room with a cup of tea or a coffee and it was then that the skipper as we called him, Johnny, John Taylor, said, ‘We’ll call you Red,’ because at that time I had bright red hair. So the rest of my time with that enjoyable crew was I called Red. We moved on there for a couple of weeks, three weeks I think, on Wellingtons. A noisy, rattly old thing and then we went on to Syerston on to Stirlings. Again, just familiarisation and that and that was then we picked up another member of the crew. An engineer and he came from St Helen’s and I must admit he’s the one fellow that I can’t recall a name all the time and to this day I still try to find out his surname and Christian name. Anyway, we then went on to Lancasters and to conversion and then finished going on to 619 squadron in Strubby at Lincolnshire and we did some flying around for a week and lo and behold we knew that to go on operations the pilot always went with an experienced crew and that caused a bit of sensitive humour because there was always some wit thrown in and Johnny Taylor came back from his office one morning and said, ‘I’m flying tonight with a crew,’ so we joked we’d sort out all his personal possessions and share them out if he didn’t come back because we knew that sometimes that’s what happened, unfortunately. So later in the afternoon I get a call to go to the wireless office to be told that I was flying with him and of course that caused more humour and we went off and with Flying Officer Whitely, a senior there and, believe it or not, it was the longest trip I did of the twelve raids. We went to Dresden. Nine hours twenty minutes and quite something in my memory to see the vastness of the fires as a first time on there because when you finished and the pilot and bomb aimer were doing a run up to the target, about a mile and a half or two miles away, my job was to stand up in the astrodome and keep a lookout above mainly because as I found out on the other raids you saw aircraft on other raids with their bomb doors open above you left and right so interrupting the bomb aimer who was calling to the pilot, ‘Steady. Left. Left. Steady. Left,’ I would say, ‘Johnny, there’s one at 11 o’clock’ or, ‘one at 2 o’clock,’ and he’d try and move over to save the bombs coming down through us. It was successful, that Dresden trip and we came back and we were very privileged and lucky to get through eleven more as a crew.
[machine paused]
MJ: It’s on.
SLD: Having, having experienced, pilot and I, our first raid which was horrendous as has proved over the years with Dresden we settled down to training flights and then successfully got through eleven more. One, one that again focusses in my mind of how lucky you are to be here today is we went to an oil refinery called Harburg just outside of Hamburg and as I experienced on the Dresden raid you flew in some two miles away with a straight course for the bomb aimer and the pilot but on this occasion all I could see over the target was a series of ten and fifteen searchlights and we were a mile or so away but I remember at least three aircraft were caught in the lights, hit by the barrage and exploded into a ball and down they went. And I can think, think now to myself thinking well I hope they don’t pick us up before we’ve got rid of ours but we managed to get through, drop the bombs and come out the other side and that’s the hairiest one I would think apart from the Dresden. The dramatic scenes of fire. But the raids, we were lucky and successful and as I say we did eleven as a crew. Twelve in all and they were great colleagues. When the European war finished we were switched to Waddington. 617. And we were involved in what they called Dodge and Exodus and that was flying POWs, our POWs from Italy, Naples and Bari back to England and we used to take twenty four soldiers out, sitting in the fuselage and fly them out and then do a return trip and the humorous part was, I suppose it’s humorous at our age of twenty, twenty one, I was still not twenty one but on the way back they wanted to go in to the mid upper turret so we used to say, I think we used to say, ‘Don’t go around one side more than twenty times otherwise it’ll unscrew,’ but they loved to and to see the patchwork quilt that was England really. They would go up forward by the navigator, the engineer or the bomb aimer and see it so the joy on their faces was worth every second of those flights, being POWs for years and came back. And then towards the end of ‘45 we’d been waiting to fly out to India as nine, with 9 squadron as part of the Tiger Force intending to bomb Japan from the isle of Okinawa where the Americans had made two runways. One for them and one for us. Anyway, it got postponed night after night. We went for a few drinks into Lincoln, came back and the whole station was alight. We said, ‘What’s happened?’ He said, ‘You’re taking off at 4 o’clock,’ and this was about 12 o’clock [laughs] so we packed all our gear, pouring with rain, and flew off to Tobruk then to Cairo and then Karachi and then down to a place called Digri just outside of Calcutta and we were there for a few months practicing different types of bombing and that with 9 squadron and of course the Japs surrendered so we came back. We landed at St Mawgan and we were given a rail pass and four days to get back to Waddington and that was the end of our crew as a unit flying. I was posted to Woodbridge in Suffolk where I found myself as a warrant officer looking after, with twelve men, three hundred polish chaps who were waiting to go home and I’d only stayed there about six months and I was posted to RAF in Germany, Bad Eilsen and stayed out there for just over a year at Signals Headquarters but to me the experiences that I had before and the company with friends was just a holiday really because I was very active in running and football and cricket and that’s what I toured around with the RAF team and we won the RAF Inter-Services, well the British Forces Inter-Services football match at Cologne stadium. Again, as a highlight because it was the army that was going to win the final. They had every army person there, senior level, we beat them and the whole reception afterwards went down like a lead balloon.
[machine pause]
SLD: Right. Laurie Davis, otherwise Red, from there, from the 619 squadron. When I left the Germany in November ‘47 I’ve kept in touch with various groups through my son and until this year I’ve done six marches at the cenotaph on Armistice Day but this year there was insufficient members to march so they didn’t lay a wreath on behalf of Bomber Command but on the 31st of October I meet up with the squadron and adjoining that group was a bomb aimer, Joe Dutton, he’s treasurer and secretary of 619 and we meet there and have a meal and go over and have a look at the statue and lay a wreath and it always amazes me that people that look at it and say, ‘Why are people raising their hand above their eyes?’ And I said to several, ‘When you came back off a raid three or 4 o’clock in the morning and left your aircraft and waiting in the layby waiting to be picked up to go for debriefing and then you hear in the darkness another flight coming in and you just automatically put your hand up to look, see, ‘Oh I wonder who this has made it back again with us?’ And that’s it and that is the feeling that goes on that you were lucky and you respect the fact that you’ve made it back and I was talking to Joe Dutton only in October that, I think I said to him that if we weren’t going on a raid tonight we’d probably go into the village and have a drink and I said here it is seventy one years ago and we’re lucky to be able to do that. Just mentioning something people often said, ‘Didn’t you feel anything of bombing the targets?’ And I go back to fifteen and a half years of age in Portsmouth when they had the biggest raid, the 10th of January 1941, fire watching with my dad outside the house and experience this whistle and continuous whistle and getting closer and closer. Little did I know that it was a bomb and then everything went black, covered in dust and our house had disappeared and that for me thinks, not apportioning blame but they did start it and Plymouth and London and Portsmouth and Southampton but it’s one of those and I’m very grateful and fortunate to have gone through the friendship and association throughout with that crew. Yeah.
MJ: On behalf of the International Bomber Command I’d like to thank Laurie Davis at his home in Portsmouth for his recording. Otherwise known as Red. May he travel on well. Thank you very much.
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 Sidney Lawrence Davis
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Mick Jeffery
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-12-02
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ADavisSL151202, PDavisSL1501
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.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:15:46 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Laurie Davis trained as a wireless operator and first went to RAF Silverstone where crews were formed. Because of his bright red hair, he was then known as ‘Red’. The crew worked on Wellingtons for a few weeks and then Stirlings at RAF Syerston. They then went on to Lancasters and to conversion and finished going on to 619 Squadron based at RAF Strubby in Lincolnshire. Their first operation was on Dresden, the next operation was to an oil refinery just outside Hamburg. At least three aircraft got caught in the searchlights, were hit by the barrage and exploded into a ball. The crew did twelve operations together. Towards the end of 1945 they flew out to India with 9 Squadron as part of the Tiger Force; with 617 Squadron (RAF Waddington) he took part in operations Dodge and Exodus. Laurie was posted to RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk as a warrant officer. After about six months he was posted in Germany. He then toured round with the RAF team for football and cricket, winning the British Forces Inter-Services football match at Cologne stadium. Since leaving Germany in November 1947 he has kept in touch with various groups and has done six marches at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day. He meets up with the squadron every October when they laid a wreath.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
India
Germany
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
1947-11
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
619 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
crewing up
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
RAF Silverstone
RAF Strubby
RAF Syerston
RAF Waddington
RAF Woodbridge
searchlight
sport
Stirling
Tiger force
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/8752/PLucasWE1501.2.jpg
dc00f6a0e3e1fc69c5c9cdae6c5e637c
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/8752/ALucasB150405.1.mp3
08574ac4f1191f6ee013bbf1624927f9
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
Lucas, Bill
William Ernest Lucas
W E Lucas
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lucas, WE
Description
An account of the resource
15 items. Two oral history interviews with Squadron Leader Bill Lucas DFC (1917 - 2018, 1255396 Royal Air Force), his log book, brief memoir and photographs. He served as a pilot with 9, 15, 139 and 162 Squadrons. After the war he ran in the 1948 Olympics.
The collection was catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
William (Bill) Ernest Lucas was born in Tooting Bec, London on the 16th January 1917, 3 years deep into World War One. Luckily for Bill he was not of age to endure with the fighting in the trenches. However, when Europe was engulfed into another worldwide conflict in 1939, this set way for Bill to become involved with the RAF and IBCC.
Growing up, Bill was an only child and left his school (Bec Grammar School) at the age of 15. He managed to get a job with a printers, which led to his second and only other job at an insurance company called the London and Lancashire. The company’s sports club enabled Bill to find his passion for athletics (especially running) and he was expected to participate in the 1940 Olympics until the war interfered. (https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/30884)
A photo of Bill in his running gear is shown in https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/30865 where he is running down 55 Graham Road in Surrey.
Bill instead competed in the 1948 Olympic Games as the games were also cancelled in 1944 due to World War Two. Luckily the games were hosted in London (https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/london-1948) and Bill had retired from IBCC meaning that he had time to participate.
As seen in ‘Bill Lucas and the 1948 London Olympics’ (1948) https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/30866 Bill managed to come 6th in the Second Heat meaning he was one position off of being in the final on the 2nd August 1948! This collection also includes Bill in his older prime wearing his 1948 Olympic Games jacket and the official Olympic Games programme from 1948.
When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1st 1939, Bill was 22 years old meaning that he was eligible to be part of Great Britain’s Army. Combining Bill’s hatred of the sea and his fathers recent experiences in the trenches, the RAF seemed to be the most compatible choice with Bill. (https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/30884/B[Author]LucasWEv10001.jpg)
Bill was not involved in Britain’s mightiest air conflict against Hitler’s Luftwaffe however, instead watching ‘The Few’ defeat the Nazi aircrafts and succeed. Being considered to be Nazi Germany’s first ‘major military defeat’, this allowed for Britain to continue fighting in the war (https://www.raf.mod.uk/our-organisation/our-history/anniversaries/battle-of-britain/ and to an extent, allowed Bill to continue his path of becoming an Squadron Leader.
It was November 1940 when Bill started his pilot training, but due to a bomber offensive being the only way to properly counter the Nazis, this was huge not just for Bill but Britain as a whole. There had never been a bomber offensive before in warfare. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/30884/B[Author]LucasWEv10001.jpg
As seen in Bill’s official Pilot’s Log Book: (https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/24264/LLucasWE122826v1.1.pdf) his training consisted of being part of 16 Elementary Flying School at RAF Derby from 1940 to 41 , 8 School of Flying Training at RAF Montrose in 1941 and 20 Operational Training Units at RAF Lossiemouth in 1941 . He flew three different types of aircraft during his training, Miles Magister, Miles Master and Wellington I’s.
Bill’s training finally finished in August 1941 and he was posted to his first official squadron, IX Squadron at Honington. Here he flew the Wellington Bomber.
Will Cragg
Record of Service:
4 November 1940- 4 January 1941: 16 Elementary Flying Training School at RAF Derby flying Miles Magisters
9 January- 4 May 1941: 8 School of Flying Training at RAF Montrose flying Miles Masters
31 May 1941- 13 August 1941: 20 Operational Training Units at RAF Lossiemouth flying Wellington I’s
14 August 1941- 4 November 1941: 9 Squadron at RAF Honington flying Wellington III’s
4 November 1941- 30 December 1941: 26 Conversion Fleet at RAF Waterbeach flying Stirling’s
30 December 1941- 1 August 1942: 15 Squadron at RAF Wyton flying Whitley V’s
1 August 1942- 3 August 1942: 218 Conversion Fleet at RAF Marham flying Airspeed Oxfords
4 August 1942- 18 August 1942: 19 Operational Training Units at RAF Kinloss flying Whitley IV’s
19 August 1942- 13 August 1942: 3 Fighter Instructor Schools at RAF Hullavington flying Ansons
17 September 1942- 18 September 1942: 19 Operational Training Units at RAF Kinloss flying Halifax II’s
18 September 1942- 24 October 1944: 19 Operational Training Units at RAF Forres flying Mosquito III’s
30 October 1942- 19 December 1944: 1655 Mosquito Training Unit at RAF Warboys flying Mosquito IV’s
30 October 1944- 19 December 1944: 1655 Squadron at RAF Bourn flying Mosquito XX’s
7 June 1945- 28 June 1945: 162 Squadron at RAF Blackbushe flying Mosquito XXV’S
28 June 1945- 29 January 1946: 139 Squadron at RAF Upwood flying Lancaster III’s
29 January 1946: Station Head Quarters at RAF Upwood flying Mosquito XVI’s
William Cragg
William (Bill) Lucas was born on January 16th, 1917 in Tooting Bec, London. He was educated at Bec Grammar School, and left at the age of 15 to work at a printing company before moving to the insurers London and Lancashire to work as an assessor. While working there, he developed his talent for athletics with the Belgrave Harriers, with his best discipline being the 5000 metres. His goal was to compete at the 1940 Olympic games. However, in 1940, Bill was called up to help the war effort and mindful of his father’s advice to avoid the army and his own dislike of the sea, he chose to join the RAF.
Initially he trained as a fighter pilot on Miles Magisters and Miles Masters, but by the time he had finished training, the Battle of Britain had been won and the need for bomber pilots was more urgent. So, he was reallocated to bombers and trained to fly the Wellington at RAF Lossiemouth. Bill Lucas · IBCC Digital Archive (lincoln.ac.uk)
Following completion of pilot training in August 1941, he was posted to RAF Honington and joined 9 Squadron flying Wellingtons. He flew 14 operational sorties – notably Cologne and Hamburg – before converting to Stirlings at RAF Waterbeach. He then joined 15 (Bomber) Squadron at RAF Wyton, flying the Short Stirling and, by August 1942, Bill had completed a full tour of 30 operational sorties (over 40 operations in total). Bill experienced tense encounters with German defences, having to take evasive action and also getting caught in a cone of five or six searchlights. To get out of the searchlight glare he had to do things with the aircraft which it was never meant to do. Returning from one mission they flew too close to Kiel and the airframe amassed a lot of bullet holes and an alarming loss of fuel. Crossing the North Sea, the tank indicators showed practically nothing and they had to divert into Woodbridge in Suffolk. The groundcrew estimated there was less than twenty-five gallons of fuel left (probably less than 6 minutes of flying time).
He was released from operational duties and was posted to RAF Lossiemouth as a flying instructor. Then in December 1944, he returned to operational flying and was posted to 162 Squadron, part of the Pathfinder force, to fly the Mosquito, an aircraft he described as “a bit quicker and more responsive; a nice aeroplane”. He completed a further 34 operational sorites with 162 Squadron, including missions over Kiel, Berlin, Hannover and Magdeburg. In recognition of his war services, Bill was awarded the DFC and was Mentioned in Despatches.
Squadron Leader Bill Lucas was released from the Service in January 1946 and returned to the insurance job he had left to join the RAF. Eventually, he left the company to become an insurance broker. He also returned to athletics and the Belgrave Harriers; he ran in various internationals and competed for Great Britain in the 5000m at the 1948 London Olympics. Athletics remained with him for the rest of his life and he gave his spare time freely, working in prominent roles in the administration of athletics. He remained a Belgrave Harrier committee member well into his 90s. He became known as “the golden voice of British Athletics” for his many years as stadium announcer at the White City .
In his later years, Bill remained prominent in RAF and Aircrew Associations. He, along with a small Band of Sussex veterans, was instrumental in helping to raise funds for the construction of the Bomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park and the International Bomber Command Centre.
Chris Cann
1940: Volunteered for the RAF
4 November 1940 – 4 January 1941: RAF Burnaston, No. 16 EFTS, flying Magister aircraft
9 January 1941 – 4 May 1941: RAF Montrose, No. 8 SFTS, flying Master aircraft
31 May 1941 – 13 August 1941: RAF Lossiemouth, No. 20 OTU, flying Wellington aircraft
14 August 1941 – 4 November 1941: RAF Honington, No. 9 Squadron, flying Wellington aircraft
1941: Commissioned into the officer ranks
4 November 1941 – 30 December 1941: RAF Waterbeach, No. 26 Conversion Flight, flying Stirling aircraft
30 December 1941 – 1 August 1942: RAF Wyton, No. 15 Squadron, flying Stirling aircraft
1 August 1942 – 3 August 1942: RAF Marham, 218 Conversion Flight
4 August 1942 – 18 August 1942: RAF Kinloss, No. 19 OTU, flying Whitley aircraft
19 August 1942 – 13 September 1942: RAF Hullavington, No. 3 FTS, flying Oxford aircraft
17 September 1942 – 18 September 1942: RAF Kinloss, No. 19 OTU, flying Whitley and Anson aircraft
18 September 1942 – 24 October 1944: RAF Foress, No. 19 OTU, flying Whitley and Anson aircraft
30 October 1944 – 19 December 1944: RAF Warboys, 1655 MTU, flying Mosquito and Oxford aircraft
19 December 1944 – 7 June 1945: RAF Bourn, 162 Squadron, flying Mosquito aircraft
7 June 1945 – 28 June 1945: RAF Blackbushe, 162 Squadron, flying Mosquito aircraft
28 June 1945 – 29 January 1946: RAF Upwood, 139 Squadron, flying Mosquito and Oxford aircraft
29 January 1946: Released from Service having attained the rank of Squadron Leader.
Chris Cann
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: The interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Andrew Panton, the Interviewee is Bill Lucas. Mr Lucas was a RAF pilot in various aircraft during World War Two. The interview is taking place at [redacted] Rustington, West Sussex on the 5th of April 2015.
WL: My name is W E (Bill) Lucas. I was called to the Forces in 1940, and my first introduction towards that was to be seen by a doctor in a Croydon school who, all intents and purposes, er, was to see which — whether I was capable of going in any of the services, that is, if I’d got flat feet or something like that. So we came to the point when he said, ‘Which service do you want to go in?’ So I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to go in the Army’, because my father put me off, had put me off going in to the trenches, et cetera. He himself had won a military medal saving his CO, he was a sergeant in the Northampton Regiment. So, I said, ‘no Army, I don’t like water, so I must go in the RAF’. ‘Oh, what do you want to do in the RAF?’ ‘Oh well,’ I said ‘what is there to do in the RAF other than fly?’ So he then wields his stethoscope and he then said, ‘you will never fly with the RAF’. So I said, ‘why not?’ He said, ‘you’ve got an enlarged heart’, I said, ‘I know that I’ve got an enlarged heart. I have been an athlete for a number of years and that developed the heart’. In fact, I was quite a good athlete, I was up to County standard at that stage, so he then said, ‘you’ve got an uneven heartbeat.’ Well, here I am, um, God knows how many years later, seventy-odd years later, and I’ve still got an enlarged heart and I’ve still got an uneven heartbeat. But anyway, he said, ‘well, I appreciate your enthusiasm. I’ll put you forward’. Well, having, um, escaped the doctor and, er, gone to Uxbridge and been interviewed again there for flying duties, they passed me without any bother at all, and then, having gone through all the introductory things, ground work et cetera, I was then trained as a fighter pilot, um, flying Miles Magisters and Miles Masters. That didn’t work, um, because they didn’t — well, the need for fighter pilots was over because we had won the Battle of Britain with the Spitfires, et cetera, et cetera, so I found myself at Lossiemouth, er, faced with flying a heavy bomber, the Wellington 1C.
AP: And what was it like to fly? How did you —
WL: Oh, the Wellington was a comparatively easy aircraft to fly. It was beautifully situated, it was low off the ground. You could do three-point landings in a Wellington, which you couldn’t do with some other aircraft, so it was quite enjoyable.
AP: And the kind of operations that you flew on?
WL: Operations were, at that time, were entirely over Germany, main cities and things in Germany but, but, er, if I had my log book here I could tell you where I went.
AP: What about —
WL: My first, my first one was, what happened was that when you, at Lossiemouth, you were trained and you finished up at a squadron, and I finished up at 9 Squadron, Honington, and did three trips, um, as a second pilot with a qualified pilot, and then you were given a crew of your own. So, er, I was sent off my first one as captain, they called it a making learner, and it was to Boulogne, so that wasn’t very far so we came back again. And from then onwards it was targets like Cologne and Magdeburg, all those sort of things.
AP: You said you were on thousand bomber raids.
WL: No, that was on the Stirling.
AP: The Stirling.
WL: So after a period of, of, you know, not very long, I completed fourteen operations with 9 Squadron, I was picked and given the honour, they called it the honour, of being one of the first pilots to fly a four engine aircraft, and that was the Stirling. Now, the Stirling was an entirely different aircraft to the Wellington, you’ve only got to see a Stirling to see how different it is. It had a very high undercarriage, you could not do three-point landings on a Stirling, you had to wheel them in. I soon learnt that, because otherwise you would be crashing aircraft all over the place. And then I was then moved to Wyton, W Y T O N, in, in Huntingdonshire, and I then did another full tour, of something like thirty-odd trips, with a crew and the Stirling. The main one of those that I can remember, is the first thousand bomber raid on the 30th of May 1942, er, when we went to Cologne. It was followed the following night with a similar raid on Essen. The Cologne one was quite successful, it was a beautiful clear night, moonlight night. Essen was a bit different, it was too cloudy, didn’t see the target very well, and then two more, two more nights later we did Essen again, still without a great deal of success.
AP: And did you encounter any fighters or —
WL: Oh well, that went without, thing that you either get flak or you get fighters, you know. They weren’t sort of buzzing around you all the time, but you would, you would get one at some time or other.
AP: Did you take evasive action, corkscrewing?
WL: Yes, and your, your rear gunner, if you’ve got a rear gunner coming to talk to you, oh [unclear], used his guns [slight laugh] his eight, eight 303’s.
AP: And was that the corkscrew?
WL: Oh, yes, you did evasive action and, of course, the other thing, which was even more terrifying, was getting caught in searchlights, because the German defences were all geared together that if, er, if a search, if a searchlight got you, then they could swing guns and other searchlights, and if you happened to get caught in a cone of five or six searchlights it was pretty grim. You could, then you started to do things with your aircraft which it was never meant to do, to get out. I had two experiences like that, but I recovered [slight laugh].
AP: And what about the blinding light [unclear]?
WL: Oh, of course, if you’re in the searchlights, you are blinded by them, but you, you hit back, because you got all your gunners to fire down the beam. We used to do a bit of destruction that way [slight laugh].
AP: When you’re coming up to the target now, coming up close to the target, the last couple of minutes, what’s that like?
WL: Well you had to do a straight and level, generally thought to be two minutes dead straight and level, but normally I used to, had a little pattern of my own, where I would weave, um, gently you know, never to be too long on any one thing, up a bit like that down a bit like that, and down a bit like that, still keeping the general thing and it seemed to work.
AP: And the bomb aimer, he’s in control?
WL: He takes over control in the last, um, last run in, yes. He’s the one that supposed to spot the target and set it up. Left, left, you know, right, right [slight laugh].
AP: And then once the bombs had gone, what happens then?
WL: Well, as soon as the bombs had gone, you moved away and headed home as quickly as you could and the thousand bomber raid on Cologne on 30th May, which was in a Stirling, I brought back a picture which, um, showed my stick of bombs going right across the front of the cathedral and the last one emanated at the bridge, the Hohen, the Hohenzollen bridge I think it’s called, in Cologne, so I claimed that. Now, whenever anybody goes to Cologne, I say, ‘stand in front of the cathedral and look at the front, and you’ll find it pockmarked. I claim those pockmarks’ [slight laugh]. Sort of bit of fun but probably quite true actually but, er, you know, I’ve not way of proving it.
AP: And that was a thousand bombers all targeting Cologne that one night?
WL: Well over a period of time, they weren’t all there at once [slight laugh] ‘cause it was done over, I don’t know, half an hour or so or more I should think.
AP: So you did Wellingtons, then Stirlings, and then —
WL: Oh we had Whitleys, and everything they could lay they hands on, so out of partly trained crews from OTUs, flown by qualified pilots, OTU instructors, um, but the crews were, you know, a bit dubious [slight laugh]. Well, you’d be lying if you said you weren’t scared to a degree, but, you know, being nervous and perhaps is something that helps you on your way, but if you gave in to it of course, you would never do it again, and some people did give in to it, and they got taken off, and it was called LMF, lack of moral fibre, so they got reduced to the ground, ground crews.
AP: And the support of the ground crews and all the other people?
WL: Oh terrific, they kept you in the air really. There’s no doubt about it.
AP: So can you say a little bit about all the people that supported you, the mechanics, the ground crew? What are your thoughts about that?
WL: Well I can’t praise them more you see, because it’s like when people say, ‘which aircraft do you like best?’ My answer to that is, ‘all of them, they brought me home’. So that’s what I say about the ground crew, you know, they got us there and back, they entered into the spirit of the thing as much as we did, you know. Their sort of hours were as queer like ours, they were there to see us off, they were there to see us back, see. Counting, you know, the aircraft as they come in. Was our aircraft going to come back in, see? They could be just as upset, I expect, with loss of the crew, their crew.
AP: Are there any memories in particular strike you from those years? You know, when you were flying, anything really vivid, or you feel you would like to relate to today, when you look back?
WL: What do you mean, things that happened to me?
AP: Yes.
WL: Oh, I had one or two scares. I had an engine failure on take-off on a Stirling, the engine went on fire. We had an, we had an engineer on board then and he dealt with it, but we were fully laden and gaining height was very, very difficult. This was out of Wyton, or Alconbury as we were flying from at that stage, um, so we had to get around and we had to lose some fuel, but we still had the bomb load on board, what to do with it? We weren’t getting any height at all so we decided, I decided that we were going to drop it. So it was a nice clear night so we managed to find fields, wide open fields, and we dropped the bomb load, et cetera, et cetera and thought nothing more about it, then came into land on three engines, which was no great problem. Later that, or a few days later, when we were all together, drinking in Huntingdon, we heard a bod way somewhere saying, ‘I was bombed by the Germans this week’, he said, ‘broke a lot of windows’. So we listened to this, and I thought that sounds very much like what we might have done, so we enlightened ourselves, we introduced ourselves to him and said it was us who, who broke his windows, so he was so delighted with that. We had free beer for the rest of the night.
AP: What was the Stirling like to fly in the air?
WL: In the air, I enjoyed flying in the air but it was a horror in the circuit with a big -, had an electric undercarriage too which was not a bad thing, but if the electrics failed, you lost your undercarriage. Well if you didn’t, there was a means of winding it down. Took about half an hour to do it.
AP: And, and this was night flying mainly was it?
WL: All night flying, yes, we did no daylight.
AP: Did you ever use the FIDO for, you know, fog?
WL: No but I might have done, but that was later in the war when I was on, on a Mosquito. I, I was first one back on my squadron and, unfortunately, we’d been sent out and been told we would be back long before weather came down, but we weren’t and when we came back fog was thick. It was really thick, so I made two or three approaches on, on, er, Bourn, which was by Cambridge, and, without effect, decided the last time that I would stay on the ground so we went on the ground, fairly well down the runway into a ditch, tail came over, and then we were upside down there. The ground crew arrived very, very quickly and turned it back up again, so we escaped that one.
AP: So you escaped that one.
WL: They’d been trained individually at various places, whether they were wireless operators, or gunners or navigators and in their own trade. I had a crew which I soon learnt to trust. I did not interfere with them, I let them get on with their job. When you were in the air you, you forbid chatter and you only contacted them if you thought need be, and that’s what the captain would do every so often, he’d say to the rear gunner, ‘are you still alive? Are you still awake’ even. The Met Office had no real means of knowing what was going on, other than outside the realms of the United Kingdom. They used to send an aircraft out sometimes before a raid took place to [unclear], it changed quickly and we had nights when we lost a lot of aircraft. I was on leave from my Stirling squadron, um, I was down in Epsom and I bought a paper, and we’d lost something like eighty-odd aircraft. When I got back to squadron, we’d lost three off my squadron and it was proved later that most of them were lost in weather. They went down in the Channel because wind changes, they weren’t able to, hadn’t got the equipment in those days. We flew with dead reckoning which means that, you know, it was what you could see —
AP: That was it. There was no —
WL: That was it. Then we started to get certain things like a Gee box, which was a sat nav I suppose in a way and —
AP: Did you fly with H2S?
WL: Well I flew with H2S in a Mosquito when my marking days were —
AP: Could you talk a bit about that, because I haven’t met anybody who used —
WL: Well having, let’s say having completed my main tour which consisted of forty, forty operations, um, I then went and spent two years with an OTU instructing others at Kinloss, instructing other people on Whitleys [slight laugh]. Two years later I was withdrawn, posted down south, to find myself allocated to a conversion unit on Mosquitos with a view to joining 8 Group, which materialised, um, I went to a squadron, 162 Squadron, which was a newly formed, newly formed squadron especially for the war-time only, flying Mosquitos. Half of us were markers and the other half did diversionaries and that sort of thing.
AP: So did you actually mark the targets?
WL: Yes, I marked. Not all the time but depending. Mosquitos could fly when the heavies couldn’t, see. We could compete with weather better than they did and in those last two years of the war, er, we did a lot of Baedeker raids. I think going out, we took four, five hundred pound bombs and did Hamburg, Magdeburg, Cologne and somewhere else, came back home, you know, having kept the Germans in their shelters all night [slight laugh]. We used to go out at quarter of an hour intervals you see.
AP: Where did you fly from?
WL: I flew from Wyton.
AP: Wyton? Okay. So —
WL: No, in Mosquitos, I flew from Bourn, Bourn without an ‘e’, just outside Cambridge.
AP: Could you talk a little about marking the targets with the Mosquitos?
WL: Well the basis was that we carried, er, flares which lasted quite a long time and varying colours. I never knew which colour I was going, going to be carrying but we were instructed to fly a course, which we were able to do using H2S, er, essentially to be perfectly accurate, and then at a nominated height, and at a certain point, we would drop these flares, which would burst near the ground if it was a clear night or quite high up if it was above cloud. The main force then comes in and bombs the flares and it’s all worked out that if they hit the flare, then their bombs would hit the target, see.
AP: And was there different colours of flares?
WL: Oh yes. Greens, reds, yellows, everything.
AP: And did they have different meanings?
WL: Well the bomber crew coming in behind knew what they had to do, which ones they shoot.
AP: So they could [unclear]
WL: Well they have some warning you see. They might have a yellow one as a warning, then a green one, that’s the one to bomb or something like that.
AP: Right. And H2S, is that the one you were using, that’s the —
WL: It was a forerunner, really, of television. We had a screen in the aircraft, we transmitted a beam or something like that, er, which picked up the ground. It didn’t pick up, er, sharpness but we could tell the difference between water, and built-up areas, and rivers, and all that sort of thing, and we were provided with a map in the aircraft so we were able to follow that by watching the screen. The screen should agree with the map and therefore we knew — it wasn’t until 1943, ‘44 that we began to get accuracy because of that. There was another means called Oboe, that was done by Mosquitos as well. That was arriving at a point, a cock, a cocked hat as they called it, three beams transmitting from this country, all crossing at one point. They used to have, they would have warnings and then they really did have to fly, er, two minutes straight and level. But Oboe, of course, was only useful, couldn’t be done at great distance. The Ruhr was about as far as we could do with Oboe. We used to drop from anything up to thirty thousand.
AP: Any kind of low level bombing?
WL: No, I didn’t do any of those.
AP: Right —
WL: Not, not in a Mosquito. I did some low level stuff in Stirlings, dropping, um, sea mines off the coast of France and Holland, in waterways.
AP: What kind of height would that be?
WL: Three hundred feet. Flying inside the islands off the coast of Holland and shot at. It was the same with Lorient, on the approach into Lorient we were dropping sea mines there. We used to treat these trips quite mundane really, you know. I was never on any sort of thing like Amiens or those specialised jobs. No, I would love to have done it, but I couldn’t. I mean they made a mess of that one so —
AP: Did you go as far as Berlin in the Mosquitos?
WL: Oh yes, fourteen times [slight laugh]. There’s a story about that because, um, we didn’t go to Berlin for a long time after the war, but off of a cruise, we were on in the Baltic, we stopped at Warnemünde and, and got taken into Berlin, see. Met by a young man who was to be our guide for the day, and I knew what he was going to say, he was going to say, at some time, had I been to Berlin before? So we left him to it. Eventually he got round to it, and I said, ‘Yes, yes. Fourteen times but never on the ground’. See, so he looks at me and he said, ‘I know all about that’, he said, ‘I commend you, you did exactly what you were told to do’, and we had a very good day together [laugh].
AP: There you go. As you look back, is there anything specific? Any memories of your wartime experience —
WL: Well yes, in a way. When you got a big crew on board, we used to have seven on a Stirling and I had the same crew from my Wellington and Stirling days, we got quite matey. We always went drinking together, see. Some were commissioned and others weren’t. I was commissioned during my period on 15 Squadron Stirlings and, er, but we always used to go out in the evenings, start off anyway [slight laugh] together what we got up to later was Legion. That crew was still left when I finished my tour of heavies, with three or four trips to do. The ruling when we first started bombing, was that you did thirty trips, then they changed it to two hundred operational hours, which meant that you probably did more than thirty. Anyway, they were left with, er, two or three to do and I departed up into Scotland, and I’m thinking I was never going to see them again, see. Then I heard that the first time out with a new captain, they’d been shot down. I was quite sorrowful about that, because I’d spent, oh, something like twelve months with them altogether and, er, that, you know, so I was sorrowful about it and nothing happened ‘till about four or five years ago. I was rung up by a young lad who said, ‘I’ve seen a picture of you with your crew in the Sunday Telegraph’, and he said, ‘I think one of them is my grandfather’. So I said, ‘which one?’ And he said, ‘Jack Tailor’. I said, ‘Yes, Jack Tailor was my engineer’. It then transpired that Jack Tailor had been withdrawn on the morning of that, of the time they were shot down. He was then a sergeant engineer. He finished the war as a warrant officer engineer, which was quite something. He won himself a DFC and he died in 1996 [slight laugh].
AP: That’s amazing.
WL: He obviously thought I hadn’t survived and I was absolutely certain that he hadn’t, see, but all the time he was living within a really close distance. I lived just outside Croydon for a time, he was there. I moved down and got remarried to a lady which you might meet later, um, in the Horsham area, he was there, and his daughter and the, and the young lad who rung me were at, um, a place about five miles along the road, on the 272 from us, at Shipley.
AP: Amazing.
WL: Coming home, we came a bit too near Kiel coming home, see, and got lots of holes. We lost a hell of a lot of fuel. There we were, crossing the North Sea, with the tank indicators showing practically nothing, down to nothing, and fortunately we made it, because in those days, they had a special airfield, Woodbridge was the one in Suffolk, where they had three runways. The left hand one was you could go in if there was nothing wrong with you, the middle one if you weren’t sure and the right hand one if you crash landed it, see, so I took the left hand one and the, and we stayed the night there. The ground crew there refuelled, and he came to me and said, ‘I hope you realise how short you were of fuel last night’. I said, ‘Yes sergeant. How much are you going to tell me was there?’ He said, ‘well, according to our estimation, you had twenty-five gallons’. Now a Hercules engine, which is in a Stirling, uses fifty gallons an hour, so that’s two hundred gallons in, you had four, how far would have I got on twenty-five? If I’d overshot at Woodbridge, we would not be here today. You see we never, you got called on, on the day and said, ‘well sir, there’s a crew meeting at 2 o’clock this afternoon’, and you would go to this. The navigators would be taken off, they went to learn the target and go through all their maps and things like that, which didn’t involve the captains and the bomb aimers and things. Well the bomb aimers, yes, he will tell you about or has told you about that, and then of course, you got a long period when you were taken off, 6 o’clock or 8 o’clock or 10 o’clock, and the worse ones were of course, were when, we had a, you know, abortive. All the nerves had built up, see, and then suddenly, oh no, back to the mess, see. Then we got a bit of relief then, so a few pints, we used to go down, and one station I was on, they had a piano like that and so, you know, we would spend most of the evening singing round the piano, so —
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 Bill Lucas. One
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Andrew Panton
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-04-05
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ALucasB150405
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.
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
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:29:21 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
W E (Bill) Lucas joined the Royal Air Force in 1940, where he trained as a fighter pilot flying Miles Magisters and Miles Masters, before being posted to RAF Lossiemouth and moving into Bomber Command, flying the Vickers Wellington 1C.
Flew 14 operations with No 9 Squadron at Honnington flying the Short Stirling, before being posted to Wyton in Huntingdonshire where he did a full tour of over 40 operations on Short Stirlings.
He took part in operations to Cologne, Magdeburg and Essen, including taking part in the first 1000 bomber raid on the 30th May 1942.
He then spent 2 years with a Operational Training Unit at Kinloss, instructing on Armstrong Whitworth Whitleys and then he moved to 162 Squadron, flying De Havilland Mosquitos where he marked targets, and did 14 trips to Berlin.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Vivienne Tincombe
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1942
1944
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Huntingdonshire
England--Suffolk
Scotland--Lossiemouth
Germany--Cologne
15 Squadron
162 Squadron
8 Group
9 Squadron
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
fear
grief
ground crew
H2S
lack of moral fibre
military ethos
mine laying
Mosquito
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Bourn
RAF Honington
RAF Kinloss
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Woodbridge
RAF Wyton
searchlight
Stirling
target indicator
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/8753/ALucasWE170208.1.mp3
80ab136990a1e6cd2bf66c7acb839ff1
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
Lucas, Bill
William Ernest Lucas
W E Lucas
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lucas, WE
Description
An account of the resource
15 items. Two oral history interviews with Squadron Leader Bill Lucas DFC (1917 - 2018, 1255396 Royal Air Force), his log book, brief memoir and photographs. He served as a pilot with 9, 15, 139 and 162 Squadrons. After the war he ran in the 1948 Olympics.
The collection was catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
William (Bill) Ernest Lucas was born in Tooting Bec, London on the 16th January 1917, 3 years deep into World War One. Luckily for Bill he was not of age to endure with the fighting in the trenches. However, when Europe was engulfed into another worldwide conflict in 1939, this set way for Bill to become involved with the RAF and IBCC.
Growing up, Bill was an only child and left his school (Bec Grammar School) at the age of 15. He managed to get a job with a printers, which led to his second and only other job at an insurance company called the London and Lancashire. The company’s sports club enabled Bill to find his passion for athletics (especially running) and he was expected to participate in the 1940 Olympics until the war interfered. (https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/30884)
A photo of Bill in his running gear is shown in https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/30865 where he is running down 55 Graham Road in Surrey.
Bill instead competed in the 1948 Olympic Games as the games were also cancelled in 1944 due to World War Two. Luckily the games were hosted in London (https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/london-1948) and Bill had retired from IBCC meaning that he had time to participate.
As seen in ‘Bill Lucas and the 1948 London Olympics’ (1948) https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/30866 Bill managed to come 6th in the Second Heat meaning he was one position off of being in the final on the 2nd August 1948! This collection also includes Bill in his older prime wearing his 1948 Olympic Games jacket and the official Olympic Games programme from 1948.
When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1st 1939, Bill was 22 years old meaning that he was eligible to be part of Great Britain’s Army. Combining Bill’s hatred of the sea and his fathers recent experiences in the trenches, the RAF seemed to be the most compatible choice with Bill. (https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/30884/B[Author]LucasWEv10001.jpg)
Bill was not involved in Britain’s mightiest air conflict against Hitler’s Luftwaffe however, instead watching ‘The Few’ defeat the Nazi aircrafts and succeed. Being considered to be Nazi Germany’s first ‘major military defeat’, this allowed for Britain to continue fighting in the war (https://www.raf.mod.uk/our-organisation/our-history/anniversaries/battle-of-britain/ and to an extent, allowed Bill to continue his path of becoming an Squadron Leader.
It was November 1940 when Bill started his pilot training, but due to a bomber offensive being the only way to properly counter the Nazis, this was huge not just for Bill but Britain as a whole. There had never been a bomber offensive before in warfare. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/30884/B[Author]LucasWEv10001.jpg
As seen in Bill’s official Pilot’s Log Book: (https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/24264/LLucasWE122826v1.1.pdf) his training consisted of being part of 16 Elementary Flying School at RAF Derby from 1940 to 41 , 8 School of Flying Training at RAF Montrose in 1941 and 20 Operational Training Units at RAF Lossiemouth in 1941 . He flew three different types of aircraft during his training, Miles Magister, Miles Master and Wellington I’s.
Bill’s training finally finished in August 1941 and he was posted to his first official squadron, IX Squadron at Honington. Here he flew the Wellington Bomber.
Will Cragg
Record of Service:
4 November 1940- 4 January 1941: 16 Elementary Flying Training School at RAF Derby flying Miles Magisters
9 January- 4 May 1941: 8 School of Flying Training at RAF Montrose flying Miles Masters
31 May 1941- 13 August 1941: 20 Operational Training Units at RAF Lossiemouth flying Wellington I’s
14 August 1941- 4 November 1941: 9 Squadron at RAF Honington flying Wellington III’s
4 November 1941- 30 December 1941: 26 Conversion Fleet at RAF Waterbeach flying Stirling’s
30 December 1941- 1 August 1942: 15 Squadron at RAF Wyton flying Whitley V’s
1 August 1942- 3 August 1942: 218 Conversion Fleet at RAF Marham flying Airspeed Oxfords
4 August 1942- 18 August 1942: 19 Operational Training Units at RAF Kinloss flying Whitley IV’s
19 August 1942- 13 August 1942: 3 Fighter Instructor Schools at RAF Hullavington flying Ansons
17 September 1942- 18 September 1942: 19 Operational Training Units at RAF Kinloss flying Halifax II’s
18 September 1942- 24 October 1944: 19 Operational Training Units at RAF Forres flying Mosquito III’s
30 October 1942- 19 December 1944: 1655 Mosquito Training Unit at RAF Warboys flying Mosquito IV’s
30 October 1944- 19 December 1944: 1655 Squadron at RAF Bourn flying Mosquito XX’s
7 June 1945- 28 June 1945: 162 Squadron at RAF Blackbushe flying Mosquito XXV’S
28 June 1945- 29 January 1946: 139 Squadron at RAF Upwood flying Lancaster III’s
29 January 1946: Station Head Quarters at RAF Upwood flying Mosquito XVI’s
William Cragg
William (Bill) Lucas was born on January 16th, 1917 in Tooting Bec, London. He was educated at Bec Grammar School, and left at the age of 15 to work at a printing company before moving to the insurers London and Lancashire to work as an assessor. While working there, he developed his talent for athletics with the Belgrave Harriers, with his best discipline being the 5000 metres. His goal was to compete at the 1940 Olympic games. However, in 1940, Bill was called up to help the war effort and mindful of his father’s advice to avoid the army and his own dislike of the sea, he chose to join the RAF.
Initially he trained as a fighter pilot on Miles Magisters and Miles Masters, but by the time he had finished training, the Battle of Britain had been won and the need for bomber pilots was more urgent. So, he was reallocated to bombers and trained to fly the Wellington at RAF Lossiemouth. Bill Lucas · IBCC Digital Archive (lincoln.ac.uk)
Following completion of pilot training in August 1941, he was posted to RAF Honington and joined 9 Squadron flying Wellingtons. He flew 14 operational sorties – notably Cologne and Hamburg – before converting to Stirlings at RAF Waterbeach. He then joined 15 (Bomber) Squadron at RAF Wyton, flying the Short Stirling and, by August 1942, Bill had completed a full tour of 30 operational sorties (over 40 operations in total). Bill experienced tense encounters with German defences, having to take evasive action and also getting caught in a cone of five or six searchlights. To get out of the searchlight glare he had to do things with the aircraft which it was never meant to do. Returning from one mission they flew too close to Kiel and the airframe amassed a lot of bullet holes and an alarming loss of fuel. Crossing the North Sea, the tank indicators showed practically nothing and they had to divert into Woodbridge in Suffolk. The groundcrew estimated there was less than twenty-five gallons of fuel left (probably less than 6 minutes of flying time).
He was released from operational duties and was posted to RAF Lossiemouth as a flying instructor. Then in December 1944, he returned to operational flying and was posted to 162 Squadron, part of the Pathfinder force, to fly the Mosquito, an aircraft he described as “a bit quicker and more responsive; a nice aeroplane”. He completed a further 34 operational sorites with 162 Squadron, including missions over Kiel, Berlin, Hannover and Magdeburg. In recognition of his war services, Bill was awarded the DFC and was Mentioned in Despatches.
Squadron Leader Bill Lucas was released from the Service in January 1946 and returned to the insurance job he had left to join the RAF. Eventually, he left the company to become an insurance broker. He also returned to athletics and the Belgrave Harriers; he ran in various internationals and competed for Great Britain in the 5000m at the 1948 London Olympics. Athletics remained with him for the rest of his life and he gave his spare time freely, working in prominent roles in the administration of athletics. He remained a Belgrave Harrier committee member well into his 90s. He became known as “the golden voice of British Athletics” for his many years as stadium announcer at the White City .
In his later years, Bill remained prominent in RAF and Aircrew Associations. He, along with a small Band of Sussex veterans, was instrumental in helping to raise funds for the construction of the Bomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park and the International Bomber Command Centre.
Chris Cann
1940: Volunteered for the RAF
4 November 1940 – 4 January 1941: RAF Burnaston, No. 16 EFTS, flying Magister aircraft
9 January 1941 – 4 May 1941: RAF Montrose, No. 8 SFTS, flying Master aircraft
31 May 1941 – 13 August 1941: RAF Lossiemouth, No. 20 OTU, flying Wellington aircraft
14 August 1941 – 4 November 1941: RAF Honington, No. 9 Squadron, flying Wellington aircraft
1941: Commissioned into the officer ranks
4 November 1941 – 30 December 1941: RAF Waterbeach, No. 26 Conversion Flight, flying Stirling aircraft
30 December 1941 – 1 August 1942: RAF Wyton, No. 15 Squadron, flying Stirling aircraft
1 August 1942 – 3 August 1942: RAF Marham, 218 Conversion Flight
4 August 1942 – 18 August 1942: RAF Kinloss, No. 19 OTU, flying Whitley aircraft
19 August 1942 – 13 September 1942: RAF Hullavington, No. 3 FTS, flying Oxford aircraft
17 September 1942 – 18 September 1942: RAF Kinloss, No. 19 OTU, flying Whitley and Anson aircraft
18 September 1942 – 24 October 1944: RAF Foress, No. 19 OTU, flying Whitley and Anson aircraft
30 October 1944 – 19 December 1944: RAF Warboys, 1655 MTU, flying Mosquito and Oxford aircraft
19 December 1944 – 7 June 1945: RAF Bourn, 162 Squadron, flying Mosquito aircraft
7 June 1945 – 28 June 1945: RAF Blackbushe, 162 Squadron, flying Mosquito aircraft
28 June 1945 – 29 January 1946: RAF Upwood, 139 Squadron, flying Mosquito and Oxford aircraft
29 January 1946: Released from Service having attained the rank of Squadron Leader.
Chris Cann
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 8th, Wednesday the 8th of February 2017, and I’m in Cowfold with Squadron Leader Bill Lucas DFC, and we’re gonna talk about his experiences of life, starting with what are your earliest recollections of life, Bill?
WL: Well, I was born on the 16th of January 1917 to poor parents and my father was a bricklayer, er, in Upper Tooting, er, we lived in Upper Tooting all the time. I went to a school, a primary school, and then I went to the Beck Grammar School, as it was then, in 1928 I think it was. I was there until 1942 and, er, that’s it [slight laugh].
CB: So, what age did you actually leave school?
WL: Oh, I was fifteen, was it?
CB: Okay.
WL: Fifteen.
CB: School leaving age was fourteen in those days.
WL: Yes.
CB: What did you do immediately after you left school?
WL: I, um, I worked for a firm down in Surrey somewhere and they were a printing firm, and I was there for about — oh, quite a few months, and then my mother, who had got me introduced to the insurance company, London Lancashire, um, Insurance Company, and I eventually joined them in — oh, don’t ask me the date but I, I did, yes.
CB: Yeah, and during that time you were quite an active, athletic youngster?
WL: Um, whilst I was in the insurance company yes. I was inured into athletics and became a good athlete with Belgrave Harriers, where I’ve just completed eighty-, eighty-one years.
CB: Brilliant. So, you were working for this insurance company and then doing your running in the evenings were you, and the weekends?
WL: Oh yes. Training at weekends.
CB: Training at the weekends.
WL: At weekends and the evenings. Yes.
CB: Yeah and, er, when the war started you were still with the insurance company, were you?
WL: Oh yes.
CB: Now, what made you choose to join the RAF rather than the Navy or the Army?
WL: Well, I was taken to a — or had to go to be seen by a doctor at some school in Croydon, and, er, he said to me, ‘which service do you want to go in?’ I said, ‘well, my father was in the Army and he said — he put me against that. I don’t like water so I’ve got to join the RAF’. So he said, ‘what do you want to do in the RAF?’ I said, ‘well, there’s only one thing to do in the RAF, that’s fly’ see. So he did a few probings around and said, ‘well, you’ll never fly’. I said, ‘oh, why not?’ He said, ‘well, you’ve got a large heart and you won’t pass the [unclear]’. So, you know, I persisted with, with this and said, ‘well, my large heart is because I’ve been an athlete and it doesn’t usually preclude anybody doing anything’. So — but, um, but eventually it worked out that I did.
CB: So, where did you report first?
WL: Oh, er, what first?
CB: For the RAF.
WL: Uxbridge I think it was.
CB: And what did you do there?
WL: Well, I was only just seen there, et cetera. Why did we go there? Now after that, we went down to Torquay.
CB: You didn’t go to Lord’s Cricket Ground?
WL: No, I don’t think so, no.
CB: Okay.
WL: I don’t remember that.
CB: And what happened at Torquay?
WL: We spent time doing ground work and that sort of thing.
CB: This was an ITW was it, Initial Training Wing?
WL: Yes, at Torquay and Babbacombe.
CB: What were the main activities there?
WL: Oh, it was going through ground work, weather, and all that sort of thing.
CB: And at what stage did you know that you were going to be trained as a pilot?
WL: What age was I then? Oh, you’ve got me on a bad day actually.
CB: Okay. Never mind. We can come back to that.
WL: What age was I? Could I have been?
CG: Twenty-one, twenty-two?
WL: Yes, something like that, yes.
CB: So, you joined up in ’39, did you?
CG: ’40.
WL: No.
CB: Not ’40?
WL: No, not ’39, no. I was dragged in in ’40.
CB: Okay. So, after Torquay, then where did you go?
WL: Where did I go?
CG: His log book will help.
WL: Oh, that’s what the log book’s for [slight laugh]. I went to, um, 16 EFTS at Derby.
CB: Right.
WL: That was flying little aeroplanes and then on to AFTS, Advanced Flying School, at Montrose, where we transferred onto a fighter type aircraft. That didn’t last long, and so we finished up at 20 OTU Lossiemouth on Wellingtons.
CB: So, what was your choice, really of — ideally would you have preferred to be in fighters or bombers?
WL: Well, seeing how I survived bombers, definitely that. I don’t think I’d have survived as a fighter pilot, I would probably kill myself.
CB: Too adventurous, were you?
WL: [slight laugh] Something like that.
CB: So, after you start, you did the OTU on Wellingtons. Where was that?
WL: That was in May ‘41.
CB: Yeah.
WL: Three months.
CB: Whereabouts?
WL: Mm?
CB: Whereabouts?
WL: Lossiemouth.
CB: Oh, that was Lossiemouth. Right. Which then took you to —
WL: 9 Squadron at Honington.
CB: What were the bombers there?
WL: We were there three months.
CB: What were you flying there?
WL: What was I flying? Um —
CG: The 1C.
WL: Wellington 1Cs, yeah, and 3s.
CB: But that was fairly short.
WL: Then to a conversion flight at Waterbeach, learning to fly the Stirling and then I went to 15 Squadron at Wyton.
CB: How did you like the Stirling?
WL: Oh, yes, I quite liked it. Bad on the ground, good in the air. Spending time with 15 Squadron at Wyton.
CB: Still on Stirlings, were you?
WL: I was on Stirlings, yes, and then with a conversion flight at Marham, onto Mosquitos.
CB: A bit different.
WL: Yeah. A bit quicker, a bit more responsive, nice aeroplane.
CB: And which role was the Mosquito operating in?
WL: Mm?
CB: Which role was the Mosquito operating in?
WL: Which role?
CB: Was it, was it as a bomber or was it as a anti-shipping or was it a night fighter or —
WL: Night fighter and a bomber, yes. Right. What next?
CB: Yes, I just wondered how you got on with the Mosquito and, er, what sort of raids?
WL: Oh, I got on very well with the Mosquito.
CB: What sort of ops did you do on them?
WL: I did marking for the main force and general, general bombing raids, yeah.
CB: This is before Pathfinders is it? Oh was it actually Pathfinders?
WL: During the Pathfinder period, yeah.
CB: Because Pathfinders gradually worked up, didn’t they?
WL: Oh yes. It was well run. It had a good leader and we did a lot of good work.
CB: On the Stirlings, were you on bombing raids with those or not?
WL: Mm?
CB: When you flew the Stirling —
WL: Yes.
CB: Were you — the raids? You went on ops with that did you?
WL: Oh yes.
CB: Bombing?
WL: Bombing raids.
CB: What sort of height?
WL: Night, night bombing raids.
CB: Yes. Was the Mosquito day and night or only night?
WL: Oh, only night. Yes.
CB: Okay.
Other: Apart from the three thousand bomber raid.
CB: In the thousand bomber raid.
CG: All three of them.
CB: Yes.
CG: In the Stirling.
CB: So what about — in the Stirling, did you go on the thousand bomber raid?
WL: Yes. 30th of May 1942.
CB: Mm. That was quite a busy —
WL: Cologne.
CB: Route.
WL: The thousand, yes. [slight laugh]
CB: To what extent could you see other aircraft when you were flying there?
WL: Oh, always.
CB: And then there were other large raids?
WL: Oh, yes. There were always more.
CB: What did you do after Mosquitos at Marham?
WL: What happened?
CB: Or, or was that a long tour?
WL: Well, it was only a two-day conversion course at Marham.
CB: Yes.
WL: I went to 19 OTU at Kinloss.
CB: Right.
WL: Oh my brain. It’s just not working.
CB: Do you want to have a break?
WL: I don’t think it will be any faster really.
CG: Have a break.
CB: We’ll just have a — stop there for a mo —
WL: I am a hundred years — [background noise] serving on two other four engine aircraft, squadrons, four of us, four squadrons up there doing that, and we were put in a newly built, um, building which was very damp et cetera and that’s where we slept. That was, that was —
CB: This was on operations?
WL: Well yes, yes.
CB: What were you flying then?
WL: I was flying — what was I flying? I was flying the Stirling, was I?
CB: You were flying the Stirling, yeah. And when the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau went through the Channel, what were you flying in order to —
WL: I wasn’t flying. I was just, um, I’d just joined 15 Squadron and on the same day that happened and the CO got everybody on board that could to look out —
CB: Look out for the ships?
WL: Yeah. As Cherry said, we —, I — we said that if we’d been — we did it from low down. If we’d emerged anywhere near them, we’d have been shot out, out of the sky.
CB: And what was the main attack? What aircraft were in the main attack?
WL: Er —
CB: So you were looking out but who was doing the bombing, supposedly?
WL: I was only just looking out, yes. The squadron were doing the bombing, if any.
CB: But this was with Stirlings?
WL: Mm?
CB: This was with Stirlings, was it?
WL: Yes.
CB: Right and the Navy were doing their bit as well.
WL: Oh yes, with what they call —
CB: Stringbags.
WL: Mm?
CB: Yeah. Stringbags, Swordfishes.
WL: Yes. Stringbags.
CB: Yes.
WL: Oh, you’re stretching my mind.
CB: Okay. We’ll stop again. So when you went to Kinloss, you were an instructor on the OTU?
WL: Oh yes, yes.
CB: So, how did that work? You —
WL: Well, you took crews out on night flights and all that sort of thing and cross country flights and, you know, trained them as, as bomber crews.
CB: Yes and, er, how, how dangerous was that?
WL: [slight laugh] Well, you were the passenger without any, any means of flying the aircraft.
CB: Where — so it had a full crew and the pilot, trainee pilot, was the captain —
WL: Well you trained the crew, you see?
CB: And so where would you be? Did it have dual controls?
WL: No, no, no.
CB: So you stood next to him did you?
WL: I sat next to him, yes.
CB: Oh, you sat next to him.
WL: Yes.
CB: Right.
WL: Well, on the step below the pilot’s seat. The pilot up, just up there and you sat down there.
CB: Could you see out, er, fairly well, or was it pretty difficult?
WL: Oh yes, yes. You’re stretching my mind.
CB: Yes. So did you have any hairy moments with the students?
WL: Not that I really recall, no.
CB: And those Wellingtons, were they new and up to date or —
WL: Oh, far from it.
CB: Were they old and knackered?
WL: Far from it. Old 1Cs.
CB: And could you fly on one engine with the, er, Wellington?
WL: Yeah, it flew on one engine. Yes. Most aircrew, most aircraft could fly on lesser engines. They were designed that way.
CB: How did you feel about being an instructor away from the front line?
WL: [slight laugh] I don’t know how I felt. I suppose, I suppose I was a good instructor and that was all they needed of you. [sigh]
CB: I’ll stop again.
CG: You had got a couple of ops more than the rest of your crew, hadn’t you?
WL: Oh yes, yes.
CG: And then his — the rest of his crew were taken on the next operation by another pilot and lost.
CB: This is on Stirlings?
CG: On Stirlings on 15 Squadron.
WL: All but one.
CG: But Bill didn’t know until about three years ago. He thought the whole crew had been lost and then through, um, Facebook and doing our Bomber Command things, somebody in the United States, somebody somewhere got to hear about it, and it transpired that —
WL: Well, I had a picture, I had a picture in one of the Sunday papers, Sunday Telegraph —
CB: Yes.
WL: And they picked it out and, and the boy, the boy said, ‘Oh, that was my father’, and, er, it followed from there.
CG: His — and his flight engineer had survived. He had been ill on this trip apparently and he’d survived and he —
WL: He did another trip. He was a sergeant as an engineer, he survived to do another tour and became a warrant officer and got a DFC.
CG: And Bill found out about three years ago and he was like a dog with two tails [laugh]. He was so thrilled and, and you had lunch with the grandson, didn’t you?
WL: Yes, we did.
CG: Bill, they’ll probably, they’ll want to record that so you’ll need to repeat it, but I just thought I’d jog it because, because this thing about losing your own, your crew. I mean, you was quite upset that another pilot had lost his life for him.
WL: Oh yes.
CG: That —
WL: I’d flown a number of trips with them so naturally to lose them was, was a great harrowing.
CB: What was it that caused you not to be on that particular op and another pilot had to do it?
WL: Because I’d done my stint. I’d, I’d come off, come off and left them to it.
CG: It was the stage when they did second dicky trips so he would do his — or he would do his dicky trips and those counted as ops, so the pilot was often two or three ops ahead of the rest of his crew, you see?
CB: Mm. Yes.
CG: Anyway, they will need to record that probably Bill, so —
WL: Mm?
CG: They’ll need to record it so you’ll have to say it all again [laugh].
WL: What exactly have I got to say?
CB: Okay. So the question — the point here I think is the trauma of —
WL: Of the loss of the crew?
CB: Losing a crew.
WL: Yes.
CB: And so if we could start, please, with why it happened. Is it, was it because you’d finished your tour of thirty ops?
WL: Yes.
CB: And then —
WL: Well bit more than thirty but —
CB: Okay. How many had you done by then, roughly? It doesn’t matter. You’d done your tour but the crew went on.
WL: That’s right.
CB: So what happened there?
WL: At the end of my period of —
CB: This is on Stirlings.
WL: Operational work on Stirlings, I finished my tour and, er, left the crew. The crew still had a few trips to do. Another captain took them over and, er, lost them, all but except the —
CB: The flight engineer.
WL: The — what is he?
CG: The flight engineer.
WL: Flight engineer, um, and lost them and, er, I was very sorry about that because, you know, we got very close together with a lot of trips behind us.
CB: Mm.
WL: Mm.
CB: How did the crew gel in general? So you did the full tour but how well did the crew gel during operations and —
WL: Oh very well, we went everywhere together.
CB: Yeah.
WL: Yeah.
CB: And what about on the social side?
WL: Yeah, and on social side. We all went drinking together.
CB: Yeah, and were — did you have a mixture of officers and NCOs or were, were all the crew at that point NCOs?
WL: No, no. I had a mixed lot, you know.
CB: What — when were you commissioned? Immediately you joined?
WL: When was I commissioned? I don’t know.
CG: May ’42.
CB: Some people were —
CG: May ’42.
WL: May ’42.
CB: Okay. Whilst you were on the squadron. That squadron?
WL: Must have been.
CB: Okay. Right, we’ll stop there.
WL: [background noise] Earlier in the war, um, he was there.
CB: Mahaddie?
WL: I didn’t know him well then but we got to know him very well later. And he remembered me, so he then put me forward to go onto Mosquitos.
CB: Mm. Right.
WL: That’s as how I see it anyway.
CB: And what was, what were, what were the main strengths that Mahaddie had? What was he particularly good at?
WL: He’d done God knows how many, um, bombing trips, early on. One hundred and twenty-odd of them.
CB: Mm and his role in Pathfinders was what?
WL: Mm?
CB: What was his role in the Pathfinders?
WL: Oh, I don’t know. I suppose he must have been second in command to the boss man, whose name I can’t think at the moment.
CB: But was his role to select suitable candidates for being Pathfinders?
WL: Oh, I think, I think he was, yes. That you’ll never know whether they were good, bad or indifferent.
CB: Right. So, in your OTU how did you grade some of these pilots because there must have been various different abilities? How did you find that?
WL: Well, they had to reach a standard before they could move on to go on to squadrons.
CB: Mm.
WL: That’s what we were teaching them to do.
CB: Yes and then you were required to grade between exceptional, good, average and below average.
WL: Was I? [slight laugh]
CB: [slight laugh] And I just wondered how you —
WL: I don’t think I did, I was. I think my, my CO did that. I certainly didn’t do it.
CB: No. I’m just intrigued to know whether you were consulted in that process in order for that assessment —
WL: Oh, no doubt I was but it was a long time back.
CB: Yeah, and some of the people didn’t complete the course, did they, or would you imagine?
WL: Oh, must have been plenty that didn’t. I can’t remember any of that.
CB: That’s okay. That’s okay. So after OTU where did you go then?
WL: Went to 3 FIS Hullavington. What did we do there? Oh, Hullavington was a training thing for, for, um, teaching and I had a course there on being able to fly and talk at the same time. [slight laugh] So —
CB: So was that before you went to OTU? Because you were learning to be an instructor?
WL: That’s right. That was learning to fly and talk.
CB: Yes.
WL: And then I went to 19 OTU Kinloss.
CB: Yeah. So after Kinloss?
WL: Oh, I had two years at 19 OTU Forres, part of Kinloss.
CB: Part of Kinloss, yeah, yeah. What was the accommodation like up there?
WL: It was quite good. We were in nice, nice huts. Yes, up the road from the mess really. We had to walk or we all had a bike and —.
CB: How were the instructors housed? Did you have two in a room or three or how did it work?
WL: Er, certainly more than one, two I think, yes.
CB: Wooden huts or Nissen huts?
WL: Oh, wooden huts.
CB: Suitable for officers.
WL: Now you put Nissen in? [slight laugh], it could, yeah, it could have been Nissen huts.
CB: I was thinking of the comfort.
WL: They were alright, yes, yes. We all had a stove in the middle of the floor et cetera, to keep you warm.
CB: Yeah, and what about the food? What was, what was the quality of the food like when you were at an OTU?
WL: It was acceptable, I suppose you could say.
CB: But on the operational stations it was different?
WL: Oh yes, they treated us well there. Had the expenses of giving you eggs and bacon before you went off and when you came back [slight laugh].
CB: Has that affected your long term interest in bacon and egg? [slight laugh]
WL: Hardly, I love bacon and egg.
CB: I do. Got to have fried bread though.
WL: Mm?
CB: You must have fried bread with it.
WL: Oh yes
CB: So after Kinloss, at the OTU for two years, and Forres where did you go?
WL: I went to an, the MTU at Warboys where I learnt to fly Mosquitos.
CB: Right [pause] and that was a fairly short course I imagine.
WL: Oh yes, a couple of days, that was all.
CB: Followed by?
WL: To be posted to 162 Squadron at Bourn, in Cambridgeshire.
CB: At where?
WL: Bourn.
CB: Oh, Bourn, yes.
WL: Bourn without an ‘e’.
CB: Yeah. Not to be confused with Lincolnshire. And what was your —
WL: And I was there for, er, six months.
CB: Right, and what was your role there?
WL: Oh, I was a bombing and marking pilot.
CB: Right.
CG: Pathfinder.
CB: So could you just talk us through a Pathfinder sortie? So the main force would be following, would be flying along and needing markers. Did you start — did you set off after the main force had already left because of your speed or did you integrate with it at the front? Or how did it work?
WL: Oh, we didn’t see the main force. We had to arrive at a time when we flew H2S on the Mosquito which —
CG: Did you have Oboe?
WL: Had Oboe, yes.
CB: You wouldn’t have had H2S on a Mosquito, would you?
CG: No, it was Oboe.
WL: H2S Mosquito. Yes. Yes.
CB: Oboe.
WL: Where you flew — where you flew — I forget what you did. You flew —
CB: Confluence of the lines.
WL: You flew a beam —
CB: Yes.
WL: Et cetera, and then photographs and et cetera, and you, you dropped the marker on that spot, yes.
CB: Did you have more than one colour marker so that you could go round again, or did you tend to just be in and out?
WL: Oh, in and out. Yes. I don’t think — I don’t remember any bombing raids where you went round a second time.
CB: Right. And I was think — yes. Okay. And was the — your sortie on its own or were there several Mosquitos together doing the marking on a single target?
WL: I can’t — I honestly wouldn’t know. It depended on what, what the bosses said.
CB: Mm. I was thinking —
WL: Funny question that.
CB: I was just thinking of the amount of flares that you’d be using, coloured markers I mean, um, whether your load would be enough?
WL: That’s all we had to do was fly the beam and then drop as instructed, so how many flares went Lord knows.
CB: Mm.
WL: Not within my remit.
CB: Okay. So you did that for six months.
WL: Yeah, something like that.
CB: How many ops were those roughly? Was it as many as when you were doing the —
CG: Forty.
WL: I haven’t a clue.
CG: It was forty Bill.
CB: Forty
WL: Forty-odd, yeah.
CB: Okay. So at the end of that six months, then what did you do after that? Did they think you needed a rest?
CG: It was the end of the war.
CB: Or did the war come to an end in Europe?
WL: Oh yes. It was finished and the, er, aircraft, we were flying did some trips round Europe dropping mail, um, where we landed at Blackbushe, and then I finished up at — you know, the squadron joined 139 Squadron at Upwood before being dismantled in January ’46.
CB: So this was all Mosquito flying was it?
WL: Yes.
CB: Yeah. So compared with the Stirling, which was clearly a different aeroplane, which one did you really prefer?
WL: When it comes to aircraft I love them all. They brought me home.
CB: Mm, people have different affections —
WL: Well —
CB: For different planes for different reasons.
WL: Well, you could hardly compare a Mosquito with a Stirling. So different aircrafts.
CB: Yes but my experience is that people have a huge allegiance to their aeroplanes.
WL: Oh we all loved them. [slight laugh]
CB: Yeah. Yes. Okay, we’ll stop for a mo.
Other: [unclear] Windows stuff.
CB: No, that’s different.
WL: Window was you’d have this strip stuff which —
CB: You didn’t drop Window —
WL: Big aircraft pumped down the chute.
CB: For jamming the radar, yes. You were with Pathfinders, but were you Pathfinding on every sortie, every op, or did you do other sorts of operations?
WL: Oh, I did plenty of others.
CB: And what would they be?
WL: Just dropping a — the cookie, yes.
CB: Yes, so could you describe the cookie?
WL: I can’t.
CB: It’s a four thousand pound barrel.
WL: Four — five thousand pound bomb.
CB: Yes. What’s in it?
WL: Something that explodes.
CB: [laugh] What about locations? What was the worst place to bomb?
WL: I suppose they all were because they were all, they were all protected, yes.
CB: Mm, and how many trips did you do to Berlin?
WL: Fourteen.
CB: What was your reaction to flying there compared with somewhere like Essen?
WL: It’s a target.
CB: The flak?
WL: Oh, well —
CB: The same everywhere, was it?
WL: Yes, it’s all —
CB: Or were they more organised?
WL: If you look at the picture there behind, that is what you see.
CB: Yeah.
WL: That is flak.
CB: Yeah. Were you pleased to move away from Wellingtons to bigger, more modern aircraft?
WL: Well, whether I was pleased or not, I was drawn off of Wellingtons and put on Stirlings, so that’s what the Bomber Command wanted, so that’s what they got.
CB: What were the limitations of the Stirling in your perception?
WL: Well, its speed wasn’t huge and it only had an operational height of about sort of twenty thousand.
CB: With the Mosquito, you could go —
WL: Oh well, you could go thirty-five thousand.
CB: So at what level would you normally fly on a typical Mosquito op?
WL: Oh, twenty thousand or something.
CB: And when you did the marking as a Pathfinder was there — how soon, how far ahead of the main stream were you to do the marking?
WL: Well, whatever the Bomber Command wanted.
CB: I was just thinking of —
WL: I didn’t have any say in it.
CB: No, no, but I wondered whether you could see them arriving almost immediately or there tended to be a, a lag.
WL: Well, it was flying home you could see the bombs dropping and well, you could see the explosions.
CB: Yeah and as the smoke got thicker, did another marker come along to re-set the target?
WL: I haven’t a clue.
CB: So you didn’t have to do that?
WL: No, no.
CB: No. I’m stopping for a mo. [Background noise]. So on a raid, as I understand it, there would be a master bomber. Would he be sometimes in a Mosquito, or always in a Lancaster or a Halifax?
WL: I couldn’t tell you.
CB: ‘Cause he was calling up what —
WL: Well, well you’d hear him but you wouldn’t see him.
CB: Yes. Right. What was your endurance on the Mosquito? Could you hold over the target if it was a long way away?
WL: Mm?
CB: Could you actually circle a target in a Mosquito if it was a long trip, or was the endurance not sufficient? ‘Cause the Lancaster master bomber would be circling, wouldn’t he?
WL: Well, you could. You are asking some impossible questions.
CB: That’s okay. I don’t mind if you can’t answer. I’m just curious because of some of the other bits that have come out. Yes. Thank you. Because we want to know what people’s perceptions were.
WL: It was a very long time ago.
CB: Yeah. I’m stopping again.
WL: [background noise] Scotland.
CB: Right.
WL: The Whitley was the aircraft at, er, Kinloss.
CB: Was it?
WL: Yes.
CB: Yes. So what was the Whitley like in terms of —
WL: Oh, a little worse than the Wellington. A slow aircraft.
CB: Yeah. They’d been all withdrawn from service some time before.
WL: Mm?
CB: They’d been withdrawn from frontline service.
WL: Oh yes. They were replaced by, by the Wellington I think, yes.
CB: Yes. What was the handling like because it was an old design?
WL: Very heavy.
CB: And, um, what about reliability?
WL: Of the Whitley?
CB: Of the Whitley, yeah.
WL: I haven’t a clue.
CB: It might have been its saving grace.
WL: The ground crews would look after them. They always seemed to be flying to me.
CB: Yeah. And on the topic of ground crew, what was your relationship on the — first of all on the Stirling squadrons, squadron, with the ground crew? How did that work?
WL: You had a ground crew, yes.
CB: Yes. How close did you — how closely did you liaise with them?
WL: Well you got quite friendly with the sergeant, yeah.
CB: Yeah, and you talked about the crew being very cohesive and social events as well as in the air. Did the sergeant, your chief, did he get involved in that or did the aircrew tend to —
WL: Not usually, no.
CB: No. Was he not invited or just not thought to be —
WL: Wasn’t protocol.
CB: Right. You also flew the Anson for a bit. Why was that?
WL: The Anson was only a transport aircraft, used when you wanted to transmit somebody or carry something, or, or go somewhere.
CB: Yeah. Now throughout the war people were supposed to be fit. You were a very fit person before you joined. How did you maintain your fitness during the war?
WL: Well, I tried to do a bit of running but I never really found time to do it.
CB: And your running was, um, well recognised before the war. What did the war do to it.
WL: [laugh] what did the war do to me? It deprived me of going to, er, two events 1940 and ‘44.
CG: The Olympics.
WL: The Olympics.
CB: Yeah, so what did you do instead?
WL: Mm?
CB: What did you do instead?
WL: I don’t know.
CB: Retribution.
CG: You bombed Hitler [laugh].
WL: I bombed Hitler instead, yeah. [slight laugh]
CB: So you missed those two Olympics, then what happened in ‘48?
WL: Well, I was in them.
CB: Were you in the Air Force at the time?
WL: No.
CB: Right. And what was it like at the Olympics in 1948?
WL: I don’t remember now.
CB: You — I mean it was a huge achievement to go there.
WL: Yes.
CB: But the winner that time was — in 1948?
WL: The what?
CB: Who was the winner?
WL: The winner?
CB: In your particular speciality in 1948?
WL: Oh —
CB: Emil Zatopek
WL: Zatopek. Yes.
CB: Did you meet him again afterwards? Or was that the end?
WL: Well, it was no good meeting him. He couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Czech so —
CB: Right. [slight laugh]
CG: Bill did actually run against Zapotek in his heat.
CB: Did he?
WL: Yes.
CB: Yes. And after those Olympics did you — you still kept up your running did you?
WL: Good Lord, yes. I did eighty-two years with Belgrave Harriers.
CB: Yeah. Right. And you were running the Harriers, weren’t you?
WL: Well, I wasn’t running all the time, but I was doing administrations.
CB: Yeah. Did you feel after the ’48 Olympics that you would have a go at the next one, or did you think that was one step too far?
WL: After?
CB: 1952 in other words.
WL: Have a go doing what?
CB: At the Olympics, enter the Olympics again in ’52.
WL: Oh, not to perform, no.
CB: No.
WL: I couldn’t possibly, could I? Think of the age I was.
CB: Well, some people go on and on, as you have.
WL: Well, it depends on your event.
CB: Yes.
WL: But you can’t do fifteen hundreds or five thousands unless you’re pretty fit. If you want to run a marathon, then you might do it.
CB: Yeah. And how did you fit in your running and all your activities with Belgrave Harriers with your job?
WL: Oh, it was all evenings and weekend work.
CB: Yes. And the company itself was sponsoring you, was it?
WL: I didn’t need sponsoring.
CB: Your employer? I was thinking for time off and —
WL: Oh no. I didn’t take any time off because of it.
CB: Everything was done in those days differently.
WL: They did indeed, yes.
CB: Yeah. How did you develop programmes with Belgrave Harriers for people in future? As time was moving on, did you run? Did you work out training programmes to improve people’s effectiveness?
WL: Oh no, no. They’d all do their own [pause], oh, um, Belgrave met up at Wimbledon on Saturdays and during the week if necessary. Otherwise you did your, did your work on your own from home, running round roads et cetera.
CB: Right. Changing back to, um, your occupation, you left the RAF at the end of the war or were they — did they keep you on for a while?
WL: You had your option of going on a short service commission, without any assurance that you would be kept at the end of that period so I didn’t.
CB: So your promotion had got you to where?
WL: My?
CB: Your promotions got you to what rank in the end?
WL: In the war?
CB: Yes.
WL: Squadron leader.
CB: Right, and what were your responsibilities as a squadron leader at that time?
CB: I looked after a flight, um, in the Pathfinder Force.
CB: Right. Okay. How many people —
WL: I was OC a Flight.
CB: Right. How many aircraft in the squadron? So how many in a flight?
WL: Twelve probably. There you are. So, twelve I think.
CB: In the squadron or the flight?
WL: The flight.
CB: Yeah. Right so three flights in the squadron or two.
WL: Two usually.
CB: Yeah. Right. So you left because you didn’t feel you wanted to continue your career, is that what you said?
WL: No guarantee to it.
CB: Yeah.
WL: I had a job to go to so I came back to the job.
CB: Mm, and took up where you left off, effectively?
WL: Yes, yes, exactly.
CB: How did it progress from there? Did you keep going with that or —
WL: Oh yeah, I did quite well in it.
CB: Yeah. Good. We’ll take a break. Thank you very much.
CG: What was the equipment you were given? A blazer?
WL: Blazer and, um, shorts.
CB: Who gave you those?
WL: And, er —
CG: A cap.
WL: A cap.
CB: What? The Olympic Committee did that, did they?
WL: Yes.
CG: Just minimal and he got the — didn’t you get the train from home to go and take part?
WL: Oh yes, yes.
CG: There was no Olympic village or anything.
CB: So how did this work then?
WL: I lived in Sanderstead, which is outside Croydon. I had to take a bus down to Croydon, a train to Victoria, Victoria to, to —
CG: White City, was it?
WL: No.
CB: Wembley?
CG: Wembley.
WL: Wembley. Walk in from there.
CB: This is all for the honour of serving your country in the Olympics.
WL: All for the honour of serving my country and what am I getting for it? Sweet —
CG: Carol enclosed those in an envelope [unclear]. [Background noise]
CB: Now just going back a bit. The first thousand bomber raid was an amazing achievement, however you look at it, but was there any significance about some of the aircraft? What about the one you flew? What was that?
WL: Stirling.
CB: Yeah. And did it have a significance in itself on — who had paid for it?
WL: Er, I don’t think so. We had a little bit better navigation equipment.
CG: MacRobert’s Reply. You flew MacRobert’s Reply.
WL: It might have been, yes.
CG: I think you said it was. It’s in your book.
WL: Yes.
CB: So, do you just want to describe that? What was it, the significance of MacRobert’s Reply?
WL: Well, Lady MacRoberts had two sons she lost during the war and in return for that, she bought replacement, um, aircraft.
CB: Right.
WL: That was the sig— significance.
CB: And they were Stirlings?
WL: Oh yes, yes.
CB: Appropriate. Scottish family, Scottish name of the aircraft.
WL: Yes. Bound to have been.
CB: And you flew one of them?
WL: I few one of them, yes.
CB: And it was on that raid was it?
WL: I think it was, yes.
CB: Yes. When you were on a squadron, did you tend to fly the same aircraft all the time or did you move around to different ones?
WL: Oh, you had your own aircraft and you flew it whenever you could, according to availability, you know, whether it was serviceable or not.
CB: Mm, and that would be checked out with you, er, you had to sign for the plane before you took off, did you?
WL: Well, that was part of the ground, um, operation, yes.
CB: Yes, with, and who was the person who handed over the aircraft?
WL: Sergeant.
CB: Of the ground crew?
CB: Yes.
CB: Right and if, if yours wasn’t serviceable they would rustle up another, is that it?
WL: They would try to but if they couldn’t then they couldn’t.
CB: And you didn’t go.
WL: Didn’t go.
CG: Are you sure you haven’t done enough though?
CB: Yes.
CB: This interview was cut short because Bill was clearly was getting too tired. He’s done an amazing job when one considers his recent car accident and also his hundredth birthday celebrations as well as all the media attention associated with that. The interview was in company with Cherry Greveson.
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 Bill Lucas. Two
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
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
2017-02-08
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ALucasWE170208
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.
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
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:49:45 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Bill Lucas DFC was born on the 16th January in 1917 and lived in Upper Tooting.
He left school at the age of 15 and went to work in an Insurance Company, before joining the Royal Air Force in 1939.
Bill was sent to 16 EFTS at Derby and then to an Advanced Flying School at Montrose, before finally ending up at 20 OTU Lossiemouth in 1941 flying Wellington Bombers.
He also spent time learning to fly the Short Stirling before being posted to 15 Squadron at Wyton, where he transferred to Mosquitos becoming a Pathfinder for Bomber Command.
Bill completed over 40 operations with Bomber Command flying various aircraft and after the war, competed in the 1948 Olympics where he competed against Emil Zatopek.
Bill spent time after the war with the Belgrave Harriers and took part and organised activities for over 80 years.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Vivienne Tincombe
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Cambridgeshire
Scotland--Moray
Germany--Cologne
139 Squadron
15 Squadron
162 Squadron
19 OTU
20 OTU
9 Squadron
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
Distinguished Flying Cross
Flying Training School
Initial Training Wing
Mosquito
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Bourn
RAF Kinloss
RAF Torquay
RAF Upwood
RAF Wyton
sport
Stirling
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/540/8780/AGilbertAC161013.2.mp3
d34798a44bdedb497b506541d0fc1232
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
Gilbert, Alexander Charles
A C Gilbert
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Gilbert, AC
Description
An account of the resource
21 items. An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Alexander Charles Gilbert DFC (b. 1921, 1336682, 186764 Royal Air Force) his log book, documents and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 9, 514 and 159 Squadrons. He was Awarded the Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 2020.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Alexander Gilbert and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-13
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.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 13th of October 2016 and we’re with Squadron Leader Alexander Gilbert DFC at Cheddington near Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire, and we’re going to talk about his career in the RAF, which was a long one. What do you remember in the earliest recollections then Alex?
AG: What do you mean? Going way, right back?
CB: Right from when you were really young.
AG: Ah, well, my father was a Hansom cab driver in London.
CB: Oh right.
AG: He joined the Army at the outbreak of World War One and served right through. And because he’d been a Hansom cab driver and knew all about horses they, he was assigned to what they called the Rough Riders, looking after horses, taking them across the Channel to France, and training horses and occasionally going down to Spain to purchase more horses and mules that were brought back for service in France. And at the end of the war, he was at this, this re-mount depot as it was called, at Swaythling in Southampton and he stayed there, and of course, he was married at the time. And from there, what could we say? I started school aged five, and I went to an elementary school and I left at fourteen, and then I was training or trying to become something in the art world, and I attended art school in Southampton. And then in November 1940, I volunteered to join the RAF and was called forward for service on the 7th of April 1941 and despatched to Uxbridge, where I spent three or four days being interviewed and processed, sworn in, all that sort of thing, and then assigned to a trade, and I was told I was to be trained as a Flight Mechanic Air Frames. From there, along with others, I proceeded to Blackpool where I carried out my recruit training on Blackpool sands, accommodated in one of the well-known Blackpool boarding houses. The training, as I remember it, lasted about four, four or five weeks. Recruit training and then we were moved to nearby Kirkham to, to carry out the trade training. The flight mechanics course lasted, as I remember, about eight, eight to ten weeks. At the end of the course, we had a final examination and the top third who passed out were retained to carry on to do a fitter’s course. I was in the top third so I stayed behind and completed the two courses, and at the end of it, I was a Group One Tradesman, Fitter 2A as they called them. I then had my, my first posting which was to what had been Exeter Airport, which was now a station that was occupied by a Spitfire squadron. I was only there about four weeks when the squadron was moved to an airfield near London. The air, the air, the ground crew were not required because the airfield that they’d gone to, already had ground crew, so we were dispersed and posted to various stations and I was posted to Calshot. Calshot was a very dreary place, it hadn’t changed, I don’t think, since World War One. The accommodation was pretty grim, I always remember the beds we had were iron plated, sort of, you know bedsteads. Very, very uncomfortable. The working hours, we worked, weekdays, every day, eight hours a day. We also worked weekends, Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings. We had the afternoons off at weekends, but because Calshot was rather isolated, there wasn’t anywhere to go anyway. So altogether it was a place that I, I really did not like at all. Anyway, apart from the work that we had to do, we also did guard duty at night along the Calshot foreshore, because there was the talk at the time about invasion and all this business, so we, we did these guard duties as well as our normal work. A very cold and uncomfortable place in winter time I can assure you, on the Calshot foreshore, very uncomfortable indeed. In early 1942, it was about March I suppose, a letter was pinned on the notice board. It said that the aircraft industry was expanding and there was a shortage of skilled tradesmen. RAF fitters were invited to volunteer for a short secondment to the aircraft industry. I thought to myself this is a way of getting away from Calshot so I volunteered. I didn’t really know what I was getting into actually. They told me I, yeah, I was to report to an office in Oxford, which I did. When I arrived there they said you will be working at the Cowley Motor Works. It was no longer a motor works of course, they were turning out parts for Lancaster aircraft, and they said, ‘You will work on permanent nightshift’. You start at 8 o’clock in the evening and you worked until 6 o’clock the next morning, with an hour’s break at night, and that was the routine. They gave me an address to go to where I would be accommodated. It was a house in the backstreets of Oxford that was owned by a young couple in their early thirties I suppose, and it was obvious from the start that they resented having a lodger, so there was no welcome at all. The woman took me up to what was to be my room, which had a bed, a table and a chair and that was it. It was a very depressing place altogether. I spent the night there, and the next morning, I had the same reception from this couple, not a friendly attitude at all, so I waited till they’d gone to work, packed my small bag and went back to the office I’d first reported to. The woman I saw, I explained to her about this place and I said, ‘I’m not going to stay there’, I said, ‘I am not going to stay in that place. Can you give me a new address? Another address to go to?’ So she said, ‘Yes, I’ll do that’. She said, ‘Here’s an address in Cowley’. I went there, a very nice street, the house very nice. Nice, nice couple, middle aged couple. The husband worked as a chef at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. She showed me to my room, very pleasant and comfortable, so that’s where I was whilst I worked at Cowley. The next day I reported to the Cowley Works to start work. The chap I saw said, ‘You will be working with a team of four’, there was already four there, ‘You’ll be, you’ll be number five, working with this team producing spars for the fuselage of Lancaster aircraft’. The four chaps turned out all to be Welshmen, they all came from the same place. They all knew one another well and I was taken into the team and we all got on quite well. That was it for the next five months or so. Then in early September, I received a letter to say that I was to be recalled and to report to Scampton, RAF Scampton, which I duly did, and on arrival at Scampton, I was told I was posted to 49 Bomber Squadron to work on Lancaster aircraft. I worked, I was on, on 49 Squadron through the winter of ’42/43, then in early ’43, I suppose it was about March time, a further letter appeared on a noticeboard to say that more and more four engine bomber squadrons were being formed, and there was a requirement for flight engineers, so I volunteered. At the time, there was no flight engineer training course and they said you would receive your training at the Rolls Royce works at Derby, and you would do a two week course on the Merlin engine and that would be it, which I did. After that, I was promoted to the rank of sergeant, given my flight engineer brevet, and then moved to Morton Hall where I would be crewed up. I got to Morton Hall and found that there were crews already there. There was the pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator and the two air gunners and now they wanted a flight engineer. The way we were crewed up was the other engineers and myself were put in to a hut and told to line up along one wall. The pilots then came in and lined themselves up on the opposite wall, and the procedure was that the pilot would look across at the engineers, look at one that he thought would, would be ok and ask him, and I was approached by a chap called Colin Payne who said to me, ‘How would you like to join my crew?’ And I said, ‘Yes please. I would’, because I liked the look of him, and then he took me outside to introduce me to the other crew members and that was it. We were then moved to Winthorpe to do our conversion course on the Lancaster, which we did, and from there, we had our first operational posting and we were posted to 9 Squadron at Bardney. While we were there, we did ten operations, including the three to Hamburg [pause]. At the time the squadrons, the Stirling squadrons in 3 Group were being converted to Lancasters, and new squadrons were starting to be formed. We were told that a new squadron was being formed at Foulsham, and was to be called 514 Squadron. It appears that they wanted two or three experienced crews to start the squadron off and then new crews would be added. So we duly reported to Foulsham where we did four operations with the newly formed 514 Squadron. The last of the four operations was to Berlin and when we were briefed, we were told that when we completed the operation, ‘You will not be returning to Foulsham. You will fly straight to Waterbeach’, which was to be the home of 514 Squadron, which was a rather odd thing to do because we had our belongings and all that sort of thing, and in, somebody wrote up afterwards what this was all about and there’s the letter there. Is that the one? The top one. “Get on your bike” or something, it says.
CB: “Posted via Berlin. Take [take] your bike”.
AG: That’s it. “Take your bike”, yeah. Yeah. I mean, this was the thing which you normally, they would never allow you to take anything.
CB: No.
AG: But we took all our stuff with us to Berlin and then to Waterbeach.
CB: Because you were moving airfield.
AG: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so that was that. So we arrived at Waterbeach, whilst we were at Waterbeach, we did another ten operations. So, so far we’d done ten at Bardney, ten at Waterbeach and I had done, and the four at Foulsham, a total of twenty four. The crew actually had done twenty five, there was one operation that I couldn’t go on because I had developed a nasty quinsy in my throat, and I couldn’t fly for three or four days, so I did one less operation than the rest of the crew. However, when they’d done twenty five and I’d done twenty four, we were then told that you had completed your first tour. Now this was five short of the normal thirty operations. The reason for this, I don’t know, whether it was because of the fourteen operations we’d done with 514 Squadron, ten of them had been to Berlin. Ten. Whether it was because of that, I don’t know but they said, ‘You have completed your first tour’ [pause]. The crew were then dispersed, of course, and posted to various training units. I stayed with Colin and we were posted as instructors to Number 3 LFS at Feltwell [pause], where we were until the, towards the end of the year. Well, we were, this was 1944, Colin said to me, ‘How would you like to go back on operations?’ I said, ‘Well I don’t mind’, so he said, ‘We will be posted to 149 Squadron at Methwold’, he said, ‘And I’ll try and contact some of the old crew members and ask them to join us’. He managed to contact the wireless operator and the rear gunner, and they duly arrived to join us at Methwold. We then picked up a new navigator, a new bomb aimer and a new gunner to replace the Australian. The Australian, by the way, was given a choice, having completed a tour of operations, either to stay in England or to go home to Australia, and he elected to go home. Now, among the operations we did with 149, we did the Dresden operation. We went to Dresden and we also did two Manna operations, dropping food. In our case, we dropped food to people in Rotterdam and The Hague [pause], and that was shortly before the war ended. At the end of the war, we started to get demobbed. I had been offered a four year extension, I didn’t know what I was going to do, by the way. I was married by that time, and my wife Dorothy had been a WAAF MT driver at Waterbeach. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and as I was offered this four year extension of service, I thought, I’ll take it and then make up my mind later about my future career or whatever. Anyway, I took the four year extension of service, stayed with the squadron until it was disbanded in January 1948, but during that time we did various exercises. We had a three, three, three or four day detachment to Trondheim in Norway, we did a trip to Juvincourt to bring back these chaps who’d been in the Army and been prisoners of war. We had an attachment to Gatow in Berlin, we did a tour of Germany by air, looking at some of the stations that we had bombed, some of the towns that we had bombed to see what it all looked like, and we had this trip to Pomigliano in Italy, and we had this two week detachment in the Canal Zone [pause]. And then, when the squadron was finally disbanded, there was no requirement, of course, for flight engineers, bomb aimers, air gunners or anything like that. The only aircrew they wanted to retain, were pilots and navigators, so I was transferred from the GD branch to the secretarial branch [pause]. I had two short, short postings, one to Watton and one to Bletchley Park which, at that time was the headquarters of Central Signals Area. You weren’t allowed in the house at that time, everything was all locked up and no one ever spoke about what, what was done at Bletchley during the war. No one ever said a word about it. One of the jobs I had to do whilst I was at Bletchley was opening the mail that came in, and one morning I opened the mail, opened this post gram, and found that I was posted to Hong Kong and I was posted to 367 Signals Unit, which was a Y station on Hong Kong Island. I travelled to Hong Kong by way of Singapore, on the troop ship Orbita, which took some five weeks to get to Singapore. I spent three of four days in Singapore and then boarded a Dakota aircraft to get to Hong Kong. We stopped on the way at Saigon to refuel and have something to eat, and the whole trip took eight and a half hours in this Dakota, and then arrived in Hong Kong. At the time, it was at the time that Chairman Mao was winning the war in China and people were flooding in to Hong Kong. Rich Chinese people who could afford anything, and any spare accommodation in Hong Kong was taken up by these people. So in our case, we were, I was occupied in the mess at Kai Tak, and it was a question of applying to get my wife to come and join me, which would take some time, and you just went on the married quarters waiting list, and again there were very few married quarters in Hong Kong, so you just had to wait a long time to get one. Anyway, my wife arrived in September with our newly born young girl, Janet, my daughter, and we were accommodated, like a lot of others, in one room in a hotel. Not, again, not very comfortable, waiting to be allocated a married quarter, but anyway, things in this hotel, it was hot, humid, again terribly uncomfortable, and every day I used to buy the China News, news, newspaper and see if there was any sort of accommodation being advertised. One day I bought the paper, and there was an advert in there which said there was an English family who worked in Hong Kong going home on leave, and their flat would be available. Offers were asked for, so I wrote, I sat down and wrote a letter which brought tears to the eyes of anyone who read it, and posted it off to this man called Alex MacLeod, who owned this flat. A couple of days later, he rang me up at the hotel and he said could I come over and have a chat with him and his wife, so Dorothy and I went across to the island, because our hotel was located in Kowloon on the mainland, and he took me up to the flat, introduced me to Joan, his wife, and after a short conversation they said, ‘We’re going to offer you the flat’. So we moved out of the hotel and into this flat, which we occupied for about two months whilst they were away in England. When they were due back, strangely enough, I rose to the top of the married quarters list and was offered a married quarter, so we moved in to the quarter and there we stayed until I completed my tour in Hong Kong in September 1953 [pause].
CB: We’ll just pause there for a mo.
AG: Do you want to go on there because we were now –?
CB: Yeah. Give you a –
[Recording paused]
CB: Ok.
AG: Right.
CB: So you’re in Hong Kong.
AG: In Hong Kong, completed nearly three years in Hong Kong, and when I came home, I was posted to 3513 FCU, Fighter Control Unit in Devonport as adjutant of the unit. We had an operational outstation at Hope Cove with a small staff at Hope Cove and [pause], I’m trying to get my thoughts right here. I completed a tour at 3513 and was then posted to 24 Group on the P staff. This was in Lincolnshire and –
CB: So what was P staff?
AG: P staff. P2 was Postings –
CB: Right.
AG: Postings of officers [pause]. I’d been there a short time and it was decided that the P staffs at Groups headquarters would be, would be closed down and they were no longer required, and so I was then posted to our headquarters, Technical Training Command at Brampton, again on the P staff [pause]. And whilst I was there my, I was then granted a permanent commission on the general list [pause]. From then I had various postings, I had two and a half years at SHAEF headquarters in Fontainebleau in France.
CB: What did you do there?
AG: I was the adjutant of the RAF support unit. Each of the nationalities at Fontainebleau, there were the British, the Americans, Canadians, French of course, they each had their own support staff and I was the adjutant of the RAF support staff [pause]. After that, my next posting was as recruiting officer at Brighton [pause], from there, I was posted to Headquarters Transport Command at Upavon, where I was the P1 staff officer responsible for courts martial boards of enquiry and all that sort of thing. I was there for only a few months when I was promoted to Squadron Leader and posted to the record office at Barnwood in Gloucester, where I was on the staff of the air commodore, the AOC [pause]. I did just over two years there and then I was posted to Aden on a twelve month unaccompanied tour of Aden. Whilst I was in Aden, they had a peculiar arrangement in Aden at the time. It was nearing the time when we were planning to get out of Aden anyway, to leave it and they had what they called continuity posts, which was a posting of two and a half years where you could be accompanied by your wife and family. A non-continuity post was a twelve month unaccompanied tour post which I, which I was in. Again, Aden, a dreadful place, we should have got out of Aden years ago but it wasn’t until 1967 that we finally left. I completed the twelve month unaccompanied tour, and on arrival back at the UK, was posted to Headquarters Strike Command at High Wycombe where I was on the aug staff [pause]. From there, I was posted to the Air Ministry on the staff of the director of manning. I did three and a half years at Adastral House in Holborn, which was part of the Air Ministry at the time. Nearing the end of my service, I had a final posting to Stanmore Park, where I was the deputy CO of Stanmore Park and that was my final posting, having then completed thirty five years in the service [pause]. Knowing that I was to be, leave the service in the October 1976, I had already started to formulate what I was going to do when I left the service, and I had applied for a job with the University of Buckingham, which I got. They had an offshoot of the University at Chalfont St Giles. By this time, of course, we’d bought this house in Cheddington, and the journey between here and Chalfont St Giles was twenty two miles. Anyway, which I had to do every day but I thought, well I’d got the job, and it seemed quite a good job looking after the admin side of the University of Buckingham at Chalfont. I had been interviewed for the job along with three others. They’d had a large number of applications to get this job, but anyway, there was three others and myself who were interviewed for this job. We spent a day at Chalfont, the morning we spent touring the place, and in the afternoon, the interviews were carried out, and the interview for each one of us lasted about three quarters of an hour or so, and we sat there then waiting to see who’d got the job, and at the end of the afternoon, the Vice Chancellor came in and said, ‘We’ve decided to give the job to Squadron Leader Gilbert’. So I thought, right. That was it. Now, this was before I had left the service. He said, ‘We will keep the job open for you until you leave the service in October’ [pause]. Shortly before I retired, I was in my office at, at Stanmore Park and I had a phone call from the Air Ministry, and they said, ‘We notice that you live near Halton’, they said, ‘Would you be interested in a retired officer job at Halton? The job would be for ten years after you leave the service and’, they said, ‘You’ll have to be interviewed of course, at Headquarters Air Cadets’. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll go there. I’m quite interested to find out what it’s all about’. So I, I went to Headquarters Air Cadets for this interview along, along with a number of others, and again at the end of the afternoon, the group captain, who was in charge of the interview board, came and said, ‘We’ve decided to offer the job to Squadron Leader Gilbert’. So I thought, right, I’ve got two jobs now. I’ve got the offer of a job at Halton and the job at Chalfont St Giles, and I thought, well to be very honest, Halton is quite close here, I would know all the routine of the service. I would still be in uniform as a squadron leader at Halton for ten years secure, secure employment, so I thought, well I will have to try, try and take this job. So I rang the Vice Chancellor at Chalfont and said, ‘Could I come down and see you?’ Which I did. I went down to him and explained what it was all about and I said, ‘To be quite honest, this job at Halton, I really know all about it. I know the routine of the service, it’s quite near my home and I feel that really, I ought to take this job’. He said, ‘I quite understand’, he said, ‘We will find somebody else’, and he said, ‘I wish you the best of luck’. So I started at Halton. I was the wing admin officer of Herts and Bucks Wing, Air Training Corps, and my job was taking care of all the ATC squadrons in Hertfordshire and in Bucks, and I completed that job for ten years. And that, I think, is the end of it.
CB: You decided to retire completely at age sixty five.
AG: At sixty five, I thought I have done enough. I have never been unemployed and I thought I’d, I’d done quite enough and that’s it.
CB: Very good. Let’s have a break.
[Recording paused]
CB: Geoff, thanks, sorry Alex. Thanks very much for all that stuff. What I want to do is run through some individual items. One of the things we touched on was Manna.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Now, this is quite important in a lot of ways, so could you just tell us how did you get involved in that and what, what happened and how did you feel?
AG: Well on the, towards the end of the war, we were told that the people in Holland were starving and a lot were dying. In fact, I was told eventually that twenty thousand Dutch people died of starvation, so we were told that we were to take part in what we was called Operation Manna. The word comes, you probably know –
CB: From heaven.
AG: The word comes from the bible, and when the Israelites and Moses were driven out of Egypt, they were starving and Moses prayed for them to get food, and it appears that a heavy dew descended on the land. This dew was sweet tasting and the Israelites were able to eat this stuff and so survive. And that is where, and Moses said, ‘This is Manna from heaven’, and that’s the way it came about. We did two food drops, one to Rotterdam, one to the Hague, flew to Holland with bomb bay laden with food and as we came in, in to the park at low level and dropped the food the people who’d gathered there all started shouting and cheering and all the rest of it. It was a sight that I will always remember, and it made us feel that we’d done something that was really worthwhile and that is the Manna story as far as I’m concerned.
CB: Then when you got back? So, you then got back and then what?
AG: Well got back and as I say, we did the two, two trips and then we just carried on with normal squadron duties.
CB: Right.
AG: But this happened, people don’t seem to realise that these drops took place while the war was still on. The Germans had agreed that they would not interfere with the Operation Manna.
CB: And what height and speed did you do this?
AG: We came in about five hundred feet, and the food was all in sacks on a wooden sort of arrangement. A pallet as they called it, a wooden pallet, and the food was all in sacks and the pallet was just dropped on to the park.
CB: A moving experience.
AG: Yeah. Very much so. Very much so. Never forget these people.
CB: No.
AG: Who were all so pleased to see us.
CB: And after the war did you ever go to Holland?
AG: No. No. No. Oh I went, when I was at Fontainebleau.
CB: Oh you did?
AG: I used to go, go up there occasionally. Oh yes. Yeah.
CB: Right.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Thank you.
[Recording paused]
CB: Now we’re just going on to your role as a flight engineer, because the flight engineer’s activities were actually quite busy. If we start with take-off, could you describe the take-off process and how the flight engineer gets involved in that, and what he does?
AG: Well at take-off, we go down the runway, the pilot takes the aircraft in to the air, and as he does so, the flight engineer gets the undercarriage up and adjusts the flaps, and that’s, that’s about it until you’re up. And er –
CB: But in fact, you take over the throttles at an early stage, so can you just describe that?
AG: And, and, yes, once you’re airborne at flying height, then you adjust the throttles to whatever speed, you know, the pilot wants, and the bombing height of course was between eighteen and twenty thousand feet each time. And that was it. Most of the trips took about four and a half to five hours, but of course, a trip like Dresden, we were airborne for eight and a half hours, and we went in across Germany but when we came out, we went north and flew over Denmark and came home, home that way.
CB: Right. So when you’re flying as an engineer, what do you do?
AG: Well, you’re doing really the log more than anything and anything else the pilots wants you to do, but normally, I mean, the whole crew would settle down really, and you were just airborne hoping you wouldn’t be attacked by a night fighter.
CB: Yeah. So when you fill in the log, what are you filling in and with what frequency?
AG: The frequency was about every half hour or so and you would put in what you thought was the fuel consumption at the time.
CB: So how –
AG: That sort of thing. Yes.
CB: How do you work out the transfer of fuel and what do you do?
AG: Yes. Well, you know that you’re on, say, a particular tank for a certain time and that it was time to transfer or refill that tank or whatever and you would do. It didn’t happen all that often of course, I forget now how many, how many petrol tanks there were on the Lancaster, I think it was two to three at each wing, something like that. I forget those details now, it’s too long ago and regrettably, all the booklets I had on the Lancaster I kept for many years, but with all my travels, eventually they were all discarded.
CB: I’ve got a pilot –
AG: Regrettably.
CB: I’ve got a –
AG: My daughter always swears at me, she says, ‘you should have kept all that stuff, Dad’.
CB: Yeah.
AG: You should have kept it all. Well I know that is true now but hindsight is all very well, isn’t it?
CB: Well perhaps it wasn’t so important then. I’ve got a –
AG: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: I’ve got a pilot’s notes, I’ll lend it to you.
AG: That’s right. Yeah. Well I had all the notes on the Lancaster, I could tell you all about it.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yes. Yeah.
CB: Now, why are you moving fuel?
AG: Because of weight, weight really, to get an evenly balanced aircraft.
CB: So you –
AG: That’s the only, only reason I can recall.
CB: So you’re moving it from the outer tanks to the inner ones, are you?
AG: That’s right, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So we finish the sortie and you’re coming in to land. What does the, what’s the tasks, the role of the flight engineer?
AG: Well once we’re on the circuit and we were called in, then it was undercarriage down and just standing by the pilot, and that was it really, making any engine adjustment as we came in. That was all. Yeah.
CB: So back on the stage of taking off, at what point and how do you balance the engines? Synchronise the engines.
AG: Once you’d got to a certain height.
CB: Right.
AG: Once you’d got to a certain height, yeah. Yeah.
CB: And the purpose of that is?
AG: Well you stayed on that, on that engine arrangement whilst, you know, whilst you were in flight. You could have been on that for some time.
CB: But –
AG: Some time without any change. You weren’t constantly changing. I mean, let’s be honest about it, with these operations, a lot of the time, a lot of the crew were doing nothing. Nothing. I mean the bomb aimer, he was doing nothing down in the front. The ones who were working the hardest were the pilot and the navigator. The wireless operator wasn’t allowed to transmit whilst you were over Germany, and the two gunners were just sat there, hoping that the aircraft wouldn’t be attacked. So there were long periods of inactivity let’s say, on the part of a lot of the crew.
CB: So you did a complete tour and other sorties as well.
AG: Yeah.
CB: How reliable was the aircraft and what sort of snags did you come up against?
AG: The aircraft was very reliable because your ground crew were the same people. You had the same engine fitter, the same air frame chap and the same armourer who looked after your aircraft. So after an operation, normally, you would go down to the flight lines, and they would say, ‘We’ve checked everything over. Will you give it an air test?’ So just Colin and I would clamber aboard the aircraft, go up for about twenty minutes, make sure that everything was working all right and land, and that was the air test after they’d serviced the aircraft, and that used to happen practically every time. Yeah.
CB: Now going back to the beginning of your career, in volunteering to join the forces, there was basically an option between the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. What prompted you to make the decision you did?
AG: I just didn’t want to join the Army or the Navy, and I thought I want to join, join the Air Force and that was it.
CB: To what extent did the Air Forces activities in the early part of the war, inspire people of your age? So, Battle of Britain, that sort of thing?
AG: Oh well, yes. You see our home was in Southampton, and out of interest, while I was training on that flight mechanics course at Kirkham, I had a phone call from my sister who said, ‘Last night, our house was destroyed’. It was bombed. She said, ‘We’re all alright, Dad and Mum because we were in an air raid shelter nearby, a service shelter and so we’re all alright’. And when I was in, told my flight commander, he said, ‘So you’re family are ok, are they? Nobody’s injured. No?’ I said, ‘No’. He said, ‘Then we can’t spare you any time off to go home’, so that was that. But in Southampton, before I joined the Air Force of course, the Battle of Britain was going on. The first RAF fighter pilot to get the VC got it over Southampton.
CB: Nicholson.
AG: Nicholson. And he was the first one and I saw him come down.
CB: Did you really?
AG: And he landed near where I lived, yeah, and it was all that sort of thing that inspired one. Oh yes, you know, join the RAF. That’s, that’s, that’s the place to join.
CB: Exciting.
AG: Exciting. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, just across the water, the Itchen, was the Supermarine Works.
CB: In the Isle of Wight.
AG: Was the first place to build the Spitfire aircraft, because the Spitfire, when the trials took place before the war, took place at Eastleigh Airport near Southampton.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah. So, and of course, the man who invented the Spitfire, RJ Mitchell, lived in Southampton at the time. In fact, there’s the plaque on the house now where he lived.
CB: What was the reaction of your parents to the destruction of their home?
AG: Ahh well, they, it was just one of the, I mean, this was happening all the time during the war and they rapidly found a place nearby. A house that they rented for the rest of the war.
CB: But they’d owned their own home before.
AG: No, it was a council house.
CB: Oh, was it? Right.
AG: It was a council, yes, it was a council house, and so that was that. So they rented this place whilst the war was on, and after the war, they rebuilt the council house where they’d lived and they went back to the same spot in a new house.
CB: Did they really?
AG: Yeah.
CB: And what about your sister’s reaction?
AG: [laughs] Well, well, you know it was all sorts of things. Strange things happening during the war and you just accepted it and, you see, you know in Southampton, I forget how many people were killed, between four and five hundred in air raids, and well this was what was going on. People, you know, in those days really didn’t complain as much as they complain today.
CB: Your sister is older than you or younger?
AG: Older.
CB: Older.
AG: Older. Yes.
CB: So did she have -?
AG: She, she, she, she, she was married and they lived in rooms in Southampton, because again, this question of accommodation, you know, wasn’t easy. Yes. And they lived in two rooms in Southampton.
CB: Was there a requirement by the government that people should give up space for people to live with them, because of the shortage of housing, or how did it work?
AG: I didn’t ever hear that was actually pressed all that much. No, no I didn’t, I didn’t. The only other thing I, I remember about the house being destroyed, was some of my belongings in it of course, and there was a compensation scheme and I got sixteen pounds compensation for the loss of my belongings in that.
CB: Right.
AG: When, when that happened.
CB: How did you feel about that?
AG: Sixteen. Well I thought, this isn’t much but in those days, again, sixteen pounds wasn’t bad.
CB: No.
AG: Wasn’t bad, no, so that was it.
CB: Changing now to when you joined the RAF and started your technical training.
AG: Yeah.
CB: How did that go? How was it set out, mapped out as a course and what did you do in the course?
AG: Well it, for each subject that you were taught, they had corporals as instructors, and you just attended this classroom and on a particular day or week they, you were, well they would talk about air frames or, or whatever. Yeah. I can’t, to be honest, I can’t remember a great deal about that.
CB: No.
AG: It was just that you attended class every day and that was it. Yes. Yeah.
CB: And then you went on to the more advanced operate, as a mechanics course.
AG: Yes. The –
CB: So how different was that?
AG: The fitter’s course was more advanced.
CB: Right.
AG: Yes, and again the detail, after seventy five years, I cannot remember.
CB: No.
AG: But we did this advanced fitter’s course and that lasted another six weeks or so, so altogether I was at Kirkham –
CB: Yeah.
AG: You know, for quite some time, doing the two courses.
CB: Yeah. Now when you were at Calshot then, on the board, a notice appeared saying they were looking for aircrew, what prompted you to –?
AG: No. At Calshot, they were looking for people to volunteer to work in the aircraft industry.
CB: Ah, that was the aircraft industry.
AG: That was the aircraft industry.
CB: Right. Ok.
AG: That’s right. Yes.
CB: So what prompted you to do that?
AG: Well I saw it as a way of getting out of Calshot.
CB: Yes.
AG: To be quite honest, I thought I’ll get away from this dreary place but I didn’t realise what I was getting in to, because the work in the aircraft industry was jolly hard. And long hours, long hours. I mean, 8 o’clock in the evening till 6 o’clock the next morning with an hour’s break in the middle of the night, and that was –
[phone ringing]
AG: Ah –
CB: Stop for a mo.
[Recording paused]
AG: Is that yours?
CB: No, it’s yours.
AG: That was, that was, that was as I said, I didn’t –
CB: This was at Cowley.
AG: I didn’t know what I‘d let myself in for.
CB: No.
AG: But if I’d, if I’d have known, I probably wouldn’t have volunteered.
CB: Yes.
AG: But however yeah, well it was because it was long hours.
CB: Yeah.
AG: And it was every night of the week except one. We had one night off at the end of the week.
CB: So, so what exactly were you making that was part of the Lancaster?
AG: These spars for the fuselage.
CB: Right.
AG: Yeah.
CB: So they’re effectively the circles of structure that hold the –
AG: That’s right.
CB: Skin together.
AG: Yeah. That hold the skin together. That’s it.
CB: Right.
AG: That was, yeah, yeah, along with these four Welshmen.
CB: But you got on well together so that was good.
AG: Oh we got along well together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So then you mentioned that you were recalled by the RAF to go back to a, to the front line as it were.
AG: Yeah.
CB: And you went to 49 Squadron. What did you do?
AG: Well I went to Scampton first.
CB: Scampton. What did you do there?
AG: Which was the base station.
CB: Yeah.
AG: As they called it.
CB: Ok.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Scampton so –
AG: One of the satellites was 49 Bomber Squadron.
CB: Right.
AG: And that’s where I went and –
CB: Doing what?
AG: Working on Lancasters.
CB: Right. What sort of things were you doing on the Lancaster?
AG: Well anything that needed doing to the fuselage or whatever, yeah, anything.
CB: How did the ground crews on the front line squadrons react to damage to the aircraft from flak and so on?
AG: Well, again, people just got on with it, you know. If there was damage, you just repaired it and that was it. Yeah.
CB: How did, how did you put patches on?
AG: Oh well with, with rivets or whatever, but again, getting into the detail of all this now, Chris, I’m afraid I can’t –
CB: That’s ok.
AG: I can’t remember it all.
CB: It’s ok. It’s simply that on some planes that had fabric.
AG: Oh yes, yeah, but certainly –
CB: So that I’m drawing a –
AG: But certainly not the –
CB: Differentiation.
AG: Lancaster.
CB: No.
AG: No.
CB: No.
AG: No.
CB: Ok. So there you are, working on the ground as a rigger.
AG: As a fitter.
CB: Fitter –
AG: Fitter.
CB: I should say.
AG: Fitter. Fitter Group 1 tradesman. Yes.
CB: Group 1 tradesman, and at that point, another letter appears inviting you to –
AG: At that point, another letter appears calling for volunteers.
CB: Yeah.
AG: To become flight engineers.
CB: What attracted you to that prospect?
AG: Well, I thought, well that sounds alright. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll give that a go. So I volunteered and as I say, after a very short interview, they said, ‘Right. There is no training course at the moment, at the present time for flight engineers, but you will do a two week training course at the Rolls Royce Works at Derby’, and that’s where I went.
CB: And that’s where you did your engine training.
AG: And I did on the Merlin engine. Price. Predominantly they talked about the Merlin engine.
CB: Yeah.
AG: And the engine handling characteristics and all this sort of thing. Yeah. That was quite good there, Derby, I mean two weeks wasn’t a long time really. It wasn’t a long training course, was it?
CB: No.
AG: But at the end of it, they said, ‘You’re now a sergeant, here’s your brevet’, and that’s it and, ‘You will be assigned to a crew’.
CB: So this officer selects you at the Heavy Conversion Unit did he?
AG: At, at the squadron.
CB: Yeah.
AG: At the squadron.
CB: At the squadron.
AG: You were just, you had this short interview.
CB: Straight to the squadron.
AG: A very short interview.
CB: ‘Cause they didn’t have a –
AG: Yes.
CB: Heavy Conversion Unit then.
AG: No. No.
CB: No.
AG: A short interview.
CB: Right.
AG: Whilst you were on the squadron
CB: Yeah.
AG: And then they said, ‘Right. You’re, yeah, we’ll take you as a flight engineer, and you’ll do your training at Derby’.
CB: Yeah.
AG: And that was it.
CB: So you join the squadron, you get in the aircraft. Now how do you feel about your situation?
AG: Once we’d started operations you mean?
CB: Yes.
AG: Ah. I think if you speak to anyone who’s done operations during the war, the first operation, you weren’t worried at all about it because you didn’t know anything about it, and off you went and you quickly, you quickly found out what it was all about, and it was thereafter that you felt a bit twingy at times. Yes. But not on the first operation because you didn’t know anything about it, about operations but thereafter, well. And of course, the whole thing about operations was luck. It was nothing to do with skill or anything else, it was pure luck if you got through a tour of operations. On 514, we were the first crew to complete a tour of operations. The first one.
CB: Right. Thank you.
[Recording paused]
AG: We were very lucky as I say.
CB: So, on, on operations then, these can last anything up to eight hours.
AG: Yeah.
CB: You did a whole tour and more.
AG: Yeah.
CB: So how would you describe the sort, the operations you went on? Were they eventful or quiet or what were they?
AG: No. The, to start with, the operations on Hamburg if you remember, there were three operations over a period of four days and we did three of the, we did all three of the four.
CB: Right.
AG: And after the first one, then a couple of days later, or perhaps it was the next night we went out again, but according to the logbook, you can see by the logbook, when you were a hundred miles away, you saw the light in the air, and that was Hamburg burning, and then you got near and you did your sortie and you did it. And then, as I say, we did three to Hamburg, three, three trips to Hamburg. Certainly you remember that well enough and –
CB: What was the reaction of the crew to that?
AG: Well, you know, they [laughs], we just thought, well there you are. In fact, in the logbook too, there’s the piece of paper which is a “News of the World” report who interviewed us. In the logbook.
CB: Yes.
AG: In the back there.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Somewhere. And that was after one of the Berlin trips, and I said to them, I said to this reporter at the time, ‘After the war, I’d like to go to Berlin and tour around to see what it looks like’, and it’s in the newspaper report.
CB: Right. So was it just a curiosity or –?
AG: Curiosity.
CB: Yeah.
CB: Yes. Yeah.
CB: To know how it had worked.
AG: That’s right.
CB: This, this article says, “Blood red pall –
AG: Yeah.
CB: Over the heart of Nazi Germany”. Right.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Ok.
AG: Yeah.
CB: And did you get attacked on any occasions or how did that work?
AG: No. No. Never, never got attacked. Never. No.
CB: So the gunners were keeping an eye out.
AG: The gunner was keeping an eye out, yeah, poor old Twinny in the, in the, the rear gunner, he often used to get off the aircraft with frost on his moustache. He was the only one who had a moustache and he had the frost on the moustache. It must have been pretty, pretty grim for him.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah. Especially when the flight was eight, eight, we, as I say, the longest flight was the Dresden one. That was eight and a half hours, but then there was the Nuremberg one which was quite a long flight, and the Munich one was a very long flight. So there were quite, quite a few long flights where poor old Twinny was freezing in the back.
CB: The Nurem –
AG: There was supposed to be some sort of heating but it’s quite often it wasn’t working. It didn’t work anyway. There you are.
CB: The Nuremberg one was clear weather and the loss rate was very high. What do you remember particularly about that?
AG: I remember that very, a great deal, the loss rate of aircraft was nearly a hundred. Nearly a hundred aircraft and so you’ll, you know, well there again, I thought, good God, you know. What are we doing, doing this? But there you are, but that was, that was the worst night of the war for the, for Bomber Command. Yeah.
CB: In what way did you feel –?
AG: Well because of the, the loss rate.
CB: Did you see bombers go down? Other bombers.
AG: At times, at times, at times you did, ‘cause over the target, you were sort of going in there about eighteen, eighteen to twenty thousand feet, but the German night fighters would fly above you and drop what they called candle flares, and these things slowly floated down and lit up the whole area.
CB: With a view to enabling them to see.
AG: With a view, with a view to them picking out the aircraft to attack.
CB: Right.
AG: And you were lucky that you weren’t attacked. Yeah. And again, the bombing run was the hair raising bit, because you came in and you had to go straight and level over the target so the bomb aimer could put his sights right and drop the bombs, but that again, was the hair raising bit, that bit where you had to go the same height for about three or four minutes.
CB: And then –
AG: Over the target.
CB: After the bomb release you still had to go straight and level.
AG: After the –
CB: To take the picture.
AG: Yeah. That’s right and then of course you got out as quickly as you could. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Always one way? Predictably always left or always right or what was it?
AG: Not always one way. Normally straight out and away, but I know the thought at the time was let’s get the hell out of here but again, you had to do your job.
CB: Yeah.
AG: And do that bombing run correctly.
CB: Yes. So you talked about Munich, what was partic, apart from the distance, what was particularly memorable about that.
AG: Again, I can’t, well, well no, I don’t. We just went to Munich, did the operation and that was it. Yeah.
CB: And then you mentioned Dresden. What’s memorable about Dresden?
AG: Dresden, I remember Dresden quite well because there was a lot of cloud over Dresden. A lot of cloud.
CB: At your height.
AG: At, at, at yes, well and below us, cloud below us. Yes, cloud below us. I do remember that quite, quite well, but again, we did the bombing run and of course, as you say, as you know with the bombing run, you were aiming your bombs at the Pathfinder markers.
CB: Yes.
AG: Yes. You know.
CB: Were they clearly visible?
AG: Yes. The red or the green markers and you were told at the briefing which ones to go for.
CB: Ah, right.
AG: To aim the bombs at.
CB: And on occasions did the, depending on where you were in the bombing stream, did the markers become obliterated by the fires and the smoke?
AG: Oh yes, yes, well they, yeah, that could happen quite easily. Yes, oh yes. The Pathfinders could drop the markers but then the fires would overcome them. Yes. That –
CB: And did they re-mark?
AG: No. Well, you heard of tales that they remarked, you know. You heard of Guy Gibson and how brave he was at doing this, and they used to hover around the target for some time but there you are. Yeah.
CB: So thinking of the war in total, what was the most memorable point in your perspective?
AG: Memorable points about the war. To start with getting away from Calshot was quite memorable I must say, working at the Cowley works was quite memorable. The Manna operation was, I suppose, one of the most memorable because to see the way that those people reacted when you dropped the food. I guess that was one of the most memorable.
CB: Their appreciation.
AG: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the way, the way they all responded when the thing hit the ground, you could tell. There was cheering and shouting and all waving their arms and all this business. Yeah.
CB: And –
AG: I remember that very well.
CB: Yes.
AG: Yeah.
CB: So when you got back from a sortie, there was always a de-brief. What was the de-brief after Manna flights?
AG: Well nothing very much, they just wanted to know whether the thing had gone, you know, because there wasn’t any hindrance as there would have been on an operation, a proper bombing operation. I mean, everything was there, quiet and you just came in to the park quietly and you did your drop. There was no interference from anybody. As I say the Germans had agreed that they would not interfere with Manna.
CB: And did you make the drop of the food at a reduced speed or the normal speed?
AG: No. At reduced speed, reduced speed. Yeah.
CB: To what?
AG: Yeah. Well I forget, but we reduced it so we were above stalling height, you know. To make the drop. If you were flying in too fast, you might, you might not drop it on the park, you might drop it on somebody’s house, so you reduced the speed coming in. Definitely, yes. Above stalling height.
CB: Good. Thank you.
[Recording paused]
AG: I forget where we’d been.
CB: Now one of the challenges in the bombing war was getting back to the airfield.
AG: That’s it.
CB: And the British weather with fog.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Was a pain.
AG: Yeah.
CB: So how did you deal with that?
AG: Yeah. Yeah. Well as I say, we were, we were, we were quite fortunate really but there was one time when we came back and there was this fog, and it was a question of, this fog was going to hang around for some time so FIDO came into operation each side of the runway, you know, these flames and things, so we landed that way. It only happened once.
CB: So it was a popular airfield that day.
AG: Yes [laughs]. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Because not many airfields had Fido, did they?
AG: No. No. No. No. FIDO.
CB: Right.
AG: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
CB: I forgot to ask you Alex, whether you had any links and what they were with the American Air Force or Army Air Force as it was.
AG: No.
CB: In those days.
AG: Nothing. Never. No.
CB: But their aircraft –
AG: No links whatsoever.
CB: No.
AG: No.
CB: But their aircraft, the Flying Fortress. What did you do there?
AG: What? Well he just took us up.
CB: So, so you went somewhere where you, what did you do? You flew somewhere.
AG: We flew to this base.
CB: Yeah.
AG: This American Flying Fortress base, met Colonel Jumper, the commanding officer and he, he gave us a flight in the Flying Fortress.
CB: So what was that like?
AG: Oh that, that was alright. Of course, he didn’t do anything drastic, we just went up and just flew, flew around for a while.
CB: Yes.
AG: Yeah. But we walked through, through the aircraft. Examined it, you know. Those, at the rear of the flying fortress each side, they had these machine guns, didn’t they?
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yes. Looked at all that and it was just a day out really.
CB: In terms of its sophistication and crew comfort compared with the RAF aircraft, what was that like?
AG: Oh I think that, I think we were slightly more comfortable than the flying fortress and the flying fortress crew, I forget how many there were, but I think –
CB: Eleven.
AG: There were about eight or nine of them.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah. In this what was regarded, compared to a Lancaster, was a smallish aircraft.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah but they had all these gunners on –
CB: Yeah.
AG: On the Fortress didn’t they?
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah.
CB: That’s why the bomb load wasn’t very big.
AG: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As I say, there we are.
CB: Right.
AG: I’m trying to think of any other highlights.
CB: Well.
[Recording paused]
CB: That’s it.
AG: In about April 1945, the rear gunner and I were called in and we were told that we had also been awarded the DFC because of the number of operations. The ten trips to Berlin and all this business.
CB: Yeah.
AG: So that’s the way we got it. It was regrettable I thought, that the wireless operator didn’t get it for some reason. I don’t know why.
CB: No.
AG: But it was just the rear gunner and myself.
CB: So the pilot and the navigator already had –
AG: The pilot –
CB: The DFC.
AG: They already had it, yeah. At the end of the tour.
CB: Yeah.
AG: They had got the DFC.
CB: Right.
AG: The pilot and the navigator only. But in the April ’45, the rear gunner and myself also got it.
CB: Right. Ok. And bomb aimer, nothing either.
AG: The bomb aimer. Well, the bomb aimer, at the end of the first tour, as I say, was regarded as the old man of the tour.
CB: Yeah.
AG: He was aged thirty two. Once he went off to this training unit, having completed the tour, we never heard of him again.
CB: No.
AG: Stan Young, his name was.
CB: Right.
AG: Stan Young. The pilot was called Colin Payne.
CB: Yeah.
AG: The navigator was Ken Armstrong. Now that’s another strange story about Ken Armstrong. At the end of our first tour of operations, Ken went off to a training unit, but then I don’t know if you know this, they started training people to work on British Airways after the war, but they already started recruiting them whilst the war was still on. And he, he applied for this and was recruited to go on the staff of British Airways before the war ended, and after the war, he ended up at Hurn Airport near Bournemouth where he operated from with British Airways. Ken then rose up in British Airways, and British Airways eventually did away with navigators and just kept pilots and, strangely enough, flight engineers. They were the only two crew members. And Ken, they kept two navigators back at British Airways headquarters at Heathrow, and he became quite a star navigator with British Airways, and whenever there was a royal flight, even though they had all the navigation aids, they always took a navigator with them, and he went on a number of royal flights and he ended up with the MVO, Member of the Victorian Order. And he became quite well known in British, they all knew Ken Armstrong because he was one of the two navigators left in British Airways, because they didn’t want navigators anymore with all, with all the navigation aids on board. But he, he did become quite well known. Yes. I mean my wife’s husband, Clive, ‘Oh yes’, he said, ‘Ken Armstrong. We all knew Ken Armstrong’.
CB: Your daughter’s husband.
AG: Yes.
CB: Ok.
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 Alexander Charles Gilbert
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-13
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AGilbertAC161013
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.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:22:03 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Alexander Gilbert, DFC, joined the Royal Air Force in November 1940, and was called forward for service on the 7th April 1941, rising to the rank of Squadron Leader. Alex had a very long and varied career for the Royal Air Force.
Upon his call up, he was trained as a Flight Engineer Air Frames where he passed in the top third of his class. He became a Group One Tradesman, Fitter 2A. He was posted to Calshot and then spent time working at Cowley Motor Works, manufacturing spars for the fuselage of Lancasters before being recalled and sent to Scampton.
He served with 49 Bomber Squadron before taking a Flight Engineers course and working on Merlin engines at Rolls Royce Works in Derby.
Alex was transferred to 9 Squadron at Bardney where he completed 10 operations, including 3 to Hamburg, then helped form 514 Squadron where he flew on missions to Berlin, and completed 14 operations. He became an instructor at No. 31 LFS at Feltwell, before returning to Operations at 149 Squadron in Methwold.
149 Squadron were involved in the Dresden operation and did 2 trips in Operation Manna, dropping supplies to Rotterdam and The Hague.
Alex had various other postings and completed 35 years’ service in the Royal Air Force, retiring at the age of 65.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Vivienne Tincombe
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
149 Squadron
49 Squadron
514 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
B-17
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
Cook’s tour
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
fitter airframe
flight engineer
ground crew
Lancaster
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Bardney
RAF Calshot
RAF Feltwell
RAF Foulsham
RAF Halton
RAF Kirkham
RAF Methwold
RAF Morton Hall
RAF Scampton
RAF Waterbeach
RAF Winthorpe
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/546/8786/PJohnsonKA1507.2.jpg
a4899a68c46a58711c699203c30b2867
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/546/8786/AJohnsonK150603.1.mp3
599f1a032c78b646d3f49ba1ee7a8e7b
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
Johnson, Ken
K A Johnson
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Johnson, KA
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. Two oral history interviews with Ken Johnson (b. 1924, 1595311 Royal Air Force) and one photograph. He flew operations as an air gunner with 61 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
2015-06-03
2017-04-03
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
KJ: My name’s Kenneth Alfred Johnson. I joined the RAF at nineteen, I had a trouble getting into the RAF because I was on making barrage balloon cables, so they classed that as – to keep you back. Anyway, I finally joined in 1943, I did my air gunner training which was the, what I was going for, at Dalcross in Scotland. I finally got to OTU, where we crewed up. Mostly, all the different pe – er, people joined together and sorted themselves out, but I didn’t have that opportunity because there was at – further ahead than myself, they was short of air gunners, so they gave us an exam on aircraft recognition and the top six were sent and the crews was picked out for them, they, we had no choice. Anyway, I was very lucky, I got a wonderful crew, an amazing pilot, he’d fought for the Finns against the Russians, an incredible fellow, he was. Anyway, we finally got to operationals. We’d gone through all OTU, which was on Wellingtons, we had a short spell on Stirlings, and then finally, onto Lancasters.
We was sent to Skellingthorpe, which is outskirts of Lincoln, on 61 Squadron. The air, the airfield was joined by, was made up of two squadrons, there were Number 51 – 50 Squadron, and Number 61, and I was on 61. We did – our first raid was a bit of a – well, it was all wrong, really. We were told when we set off that we were gonna bomb very close to our lines, and this was seven, seven days after D-Day, so consequently, we were given a call sign to not to bomb. I remember that after all these years, it were “Billy Bunter”, and we’d got even to the point of opening the bomb doors and this call came over - ‘Billy Bunter, Billy Bunter’, so we closed our bomb doors and set off back for home. Even a long, long way back, we were still hearing the master bomber calling out ‘Billy Bunter, Billy Bunter’ ‘til he finally rush, lost his temper and used a bit stronger language [laughs].
Anyway, that was number one, we finished bombing the North Sea. We did a few operations then, and then it came to the tenth operation, and this was to be a daylight one near Versailles at the V1 bomb installations, so as we got near the target at – I was a mid upper gunner, and I saw this Lancaster above me open his bomb doors and all I could see was two rusty rows, rows of rusty bombs glaring at me. I warned the skipper, but he said ‘Nothing I can do about it, we’re hemmed in, he’ll probably not drop ‘em’. That were wishful thinking, as our bomb aimer said ‘Bombs gone’, so this lot came down on top of us, three bombs hit us - [clears throat] ‘scuse me - one hit the starboard fin and rudder and sliced that off, one hit the starboard wing, knocked about four – it, well, originally it was dangling like, like a bird with a broken wing, about four foot of our wing, and the third one, unfortunately, hit the rear turret and took the rear gunner away with it.
Well, at this point, the intercom went dead, we bounced about the sky for a while ‘til he got it steadied again, but I didn’t know what was happening, they might have been jumping out as far as I knew, but I thought ‘Well, stick to it’, and I sat there, still looking ‘round in case any fighters were around, and it, a little while afterwards, I thought ‘Oh, I haven’t seen the rear turret moving’, that’s when the mid upper turret had no back to it, so by going for’ard, I could see between me legs, where the turret should have been, just a gaping hole. And, anyway, the skipper took us home, and when we got to, into the Skellingthorpe outer circuit, they wouldn’t let us land - [coughs] ‘scuse me, - because a plane had already crashed on one of the runways and they didn’t want to have to close the station down, so we were sent to another place, which happened to be an OTU.
Now, normally, you never carried the ladder that you got into the aircraft with, because o’ it altering the compass. Now, normally, we’d have just jumped out, but that day, I could not have jumped out, I should have landed flat on me face [laughs], so I had to wait ‘til one of the ground crew came and just got hold of me shoulder and helped me out. And the CO, this OTU, came flying out and we were all to – well, he was talking to my skipper that – giving him his condolences, and he said ‘Well, not much I can do for you, but I will give you a slap-up meal in the officers’ mess’. He’d hardly got the words out when a, a rider came out to say we’ve got to go back to Skellingthorpe immediately for the debriefing, so we never did get our slap-up meal. Anyway, the very next night, we were on ops again, and it was down to Bordeaux, South of France. We got over France and ran into an electrical storm, I’d never seen anything like that in me life before - St Elmo’s Fire. Each of the props had two foot of orange flame round them, the, all the aerials, there were little blue, well, it were like fairy lights running up and down the cable. The – oh, by the way, we’d got a new gunner on, of course, and he suddenly started screaming, and it were that bad, the skipper had told the engineer to go and pull his intercom out so we wouldn’t hear it. And, on top of all this fire, there were flashes going off the guns, as though you were firing but you weren’t, and every so often, you’d just drop about five hundred feet as though someone were chopping your legs under you. Anyway, this went on all the way to the target. When we got to the target, amazingly, there was a big gap in the clouds so we could see the target. Only thing is, we couldn’t see each other, so the bomber, the master bomber, said ‘Put all your lights on, and then you’re not, you’ll not gonna collide with each other’, only time we ever bombed with all the, all the lights in the aircraft on.
Anyway, we got to, we came back through the same, with the same carry on, and, as we got near to home, well, first of all, as we got near the Channel, the skipper had asked for a crash dome, there was two big crash domes near Ramsgate - [clears throat] ‘scuse me - and they – anyway, as we passed over the white cliffs, he said ‘Change to that, give me a route for home, I’m taking her home, I’ve brought her this far and I’m taking her home,’ and when we got home, we couldn’t land ‘cause of somebody else crashing, so we finished up at this other place. The very next night, no, I’ve already said that, they did a perfect landing, and that was the end of that one, that was the tenth raid. We had, at, as we got near the thirtieth, they, they altered the number of ops you’d got to do for a tour, so instead of thirty, we were supposed to gonna do thirty-six, but we did another three and the skipper said, the toad had been altered from thirty to thirty-six, so the skip, skipper suggested we do three and go on a ten-day holiday sort of thing, and then come back and do another three and we get another ten days, but it didn’t work out, they’d dropped it back to thirty when we came back [laughs]. So, we were Tour Expired. Well, four of us, the skipper said he were gonna go on with another tour straight away, you could have a rest but we didn’t, so four of us (that was the skipper, flight engineer, wireless operator and myself) said we’d go on this next tour, and the skipper had got a choice of where he wanted to go. One was on Pathfinders, one was on to 617 and the other one was Number 9 Squadron, which at that time was joining 617 on all special raids, carrying the twelve thousand pound Tallboy bomb, so really there was no argument about it because he was rather sweet on a, a WAAF officer at Bardney, which was 9 Squadron, so it was 9 Squadron.
And, as I say, we were only allowed to go on special ops and [pause] the first one, I unfortunately didn’t go on, because they, they took the mid upper turrets out to go and bomb the Tirpitz, and they put a Llewellyn 10 wind tank inside the fuselage, so to make room for that, they had to take the mid upper turret out. Well they, you might be interested in this, they bombed the Tirpitz and sank it and, a couple o’ days later, all those that were on the raid had to go into the briefing room, and ‘cause I would not been on it, I didn’t go in, I can only say what I was told. This, the CO came in with a bucketful of medals, now he, there weren’t no names on them because it was a – Churchill had said ‘The squadron must have these medals’, so first of all, they chose all those that had been on three raids for the Tirpitz, they all got a medal, then they found there were enough for those that had been on two, but there wasn’t enough for those that been on the last raid, so when it came to the last raid, they pulled names out of the hat - [coughs] ‘scuse me - rather annoyed my skipper because he thought it were demeaning, the, the idea of the medal. He’d already got DFC for bringing that damaged aircraft back. Anyway, that’s the way that was done.
After that, we did such targets as viaducts, we went to Bergen for the submarine pens, and they were all them sort of chosen targets. On the Bergen one, we were always Number One Wind Finder, because I had in my crew, I’d got the squadron bomb aimer and the squadron navigator, so we were always Number One Wind Finder. There were six aircraft, two had to be wind finders, and what we did, you had to go over a chosen, chosen point, set this machine going, fly around for so long, then come back over the same heading and then stop the machine, and then all the, the other five radioed in their – what they’d got, and it was up to our navigator, then, to sort out the wind from the chat. And on this Bergen raid, we, bomb aimer had chosen to go over a, a supposedly deserted airfield, and it chose the, where the runways crossed to do. Anyway, as we’re coming back for the second time, he were counting fighters coming up against us [slight laugh], and he got to forty-one when we, we’d got out of range then, so we knew they were gonna be in trouble, and we bombed the – I could never understand why the fighters didn’t attack ‘em before they bombed, they waited while we bombed, and we came out over a strip of land and then to the sea again. There was five fighters to one bomber, and there was one behind us, it -crew from our squadron, they got [unclear] got onto him, he put up a good fight, he shot one of them down, but they finally forced him into t’sea and it just disintegrated.
Now, I can’t think for a minute there’d be any of the crew alive, but one came to us and I thought ‘Oh, it’s our turn now’, but he suddenly realised he was alone. The other three were strafing the wreckage in the sea, and so he went and joined ‘em, lucky for us, and gave us chance to get away. But, after the war, and we went to these different reunions and that, there was very often a German fighter pilot come to these. I’m afraid I could never be friendly to ‘em, what I saw that day were – I was absolutely disgusted. Anyway, we, we finally finished up doing forty-four ops, so I consider myself a lucky person. I always felt there was guardian angel on me shoulder, but after the VE Day, they asked for volunteers for the Tiger Force, but I was getting married in three weeks’ time, so I thought ‘Well, I’ve done me share, I’m not gonna volunteer for it’. So, first of all, we went to a, another squadron that, that they’d formed, calling them North West Strike Force; the idea was, they thought the hardened Nazis would go up into the mountains and start a guerrilla warfare, but it never came to that, so after about three months, that was finished. And then I was put on ground staff and I was sent out to Egypt, I’d only been married three weeks [slight laugh], they sent me out to Egypt, driving. Well, I was in charge of a [unclear], a, not them, what d’you call it? A number of lorries, I’d got thirty lorries, it was on Alexandria docks, and I’d thirty lorries taking stuff down to the canal zone ‘cause the Brits then were starting to pull out of it, ah, Egypt altogether. But, apart from those lorries, at weekends I could have as many as a hundred lorries come from Cairo all wanting a load to take back.
Well, I were closing down, not only RAF but Navy and Army places, and at first, I made the mistake of ringing up and saying ‘What size lorries do you want for your…?’ and they’d all said ‘Ten tonners’. When the lorry came back, he’d have little crate on the back, so I thought ‘That’s no good’, so I had a little thirteen-hundredweight Dodge, and I used to go out to these places and estimate how many lorries I wanted and what size lorries and so on, and that worked wonderfully well. It were, one day, I got a phone call from a matron of a big hospital in Alex, the nurses want, some of the nurses wanted to go to Cairo for a week’s leave, would I, could I get some o’ t’lorry drivers to take ‘em? Well, they’re a lot better to go hundred and sixty-five mile wi’ a female companion than be on your own, so there plenty of volunteers for that, and that was still running when I left, that shuttle service [laughs]. Everybody seemed happy about it, so yeah, wonderful. And had ten mon – ten months in [pause] in Egypt, and, just before I came home, they dropped us all down from, well, myself were a warrant officer, dropped us down to sergeants, I thought ‘That’s a nice thank-you [slight laugh] for what you’ve done!’ And anyway, that were it, I came, I came home and immediately joined the, a Observer corps, we had quite some nice times, go out to this spot and we were spotting aircraft, but eventually, they, all they were interested in was nuclear, and the, the idea was that if there was a nuclear war and you’ve got to go to this station (mine was out at, near Finningley Airport, where we were), but you had to stay there ‘til the all clear. I thought, ‘No, that’s not for me, if I, if my family’s out there, then I’m gonna be out there as well, I’m not leaving t’family’. Anyway, thank God, it never materialised. So, oh, on one thing on this, while we were on the obs – air observers, the, our CO for the whole northern area was Pegler, that had the Flying Scotsman, and he arranged it for us to go to air show at – the big air show, anyway, and he took us down in his, in the Scotsman, and the, he’d got the observation car in, and each carriage got half an hour in ‘t observation car [laughs], but it was quite a, quite nice, yeah. Then, well, finally, we got back to civvies and got back to working again, and you’d be amazed how hard that was, settling down in civvy street again, even though I’d only been in the RAF four and a half year.
MJ: Battery change on Ken Johnson. On behalf of the International Bomber Command Archive Unit, I’d like to thank Ken Johnson for his recording on the date was the 3rd of June, June? Yeah, June 2015 at his home. Thank you very much.
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 Ken Johnson. One
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Mick Jeffery
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-03
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AJohnsonK150603
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
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.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:25:22 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Kenneth Alfred Johnson joined the Royal Air Force at the age of 19, after being in a reserved occupation making barrage balloon cables. He trained as an air gunner, serving as a mid-upper gunner.
He had a spell at the Operational Training Unit, flying Short Stirlings and Avro Lancasters before joining 61 Squadron at Skellingthorpe.
He tells of an incident on his 10th operation, when he was on a daylight trip near Versailles at the V1 bomb installations when his aircraft was directly below a Lancaster which opened it’s bomb doors. The Lancaster above dropped its bombs, which damaged Kenneth’s aircraft, including carrying away the rear gunner.
Kenneth completed 34 operations on his first tour, and then went straight onto another tour, being posted to 9 Squadron at Bardney.
After VE Day, Kenneth was posted to Egypt in charge of lorries returning from Cairo.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Vivienne Tincombe
61 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bomb struck
Lancaster
RAF Bardney
RAF Dalcross
RAF Skellingthorpe
service vehicle
strafing
Tirpitz
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/546/8787/PJohnsonKA1507.1.jpg
a4899a68c46a58711c699203c30b2867
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/546/8787/AJohnsonKA170403.2.mp3
eb18c023f71add18db542da2c8c7f140
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
Johnson, Ken
K A Johnson
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Johnson, KA
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. Two oral history interviews with Ken Johnson (b. 1924, 1595311 Royal Air Force) and one photograph. He flew operations as an air gunner with 61 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
2015-06-03
2017-04-03
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: We are now moving to another interview. My name is Chris Brockbank, and today is the 3rd of April 2017, and I’m in Doncaster with Ken Johnson who did two tours, and we’re going to talk about his life and times in the RAF. So, what’s your earliest recollection Ken? Of life.
KJ: In the RAF?
CB: No, in your family.
KJ: Oh, my family. Well, my father was a ironmonger, not an ironmonger, an iron moulder rather, by trade. So there was very little for that in Doncaster so he used to have to travel to Sheffield to work and he used to cycle there, do nine hours in the foundry and cycle home.
CB: Where were you living? In Doncaster?
KJ: Yeah. We lived, oh in that many parts of Doncaster it’s unbelievable. Hexthorpe, Doncaster, Balby, everywhere in Doncaster we’ve lived. I think he’d got a bit of gypsy in him, we never settled too far.
CB: Trying to be a moving target, was he?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Was he in the First World War?
KJ: No, no, he weren’t old enough.
CB: Right. And how many brothers and sisters did you have?
KJ: I had two brothers, no sisters. Both younger than myself and both have passed on.
CB: Right. Two brothers and two sisters.
KJ: No sisters.
CB: No sisters.
KJ: No.
CB: Just two brothers, yeah. And where did you go to school?
KJ: I started at Balby Infant’s School, I went to Hexthorpe, I went to Intake. I don’t think there’s many schools in Doncaster I haven’t been to.
CB: Why was that?
KJ: My dad, he’d got itchy feet. He could never settle at one place so we were always changing homes.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Aye. He’d brought a, he had it built, a bungalow at Finningley, a beautiful bungalow but my mother wouldn’t go to live there. She were a townie, she didn’t like countryside. Well we went, we lived there three days to be quite honest and that were it. She’d had enough.
CB: And what did you and your brothers think?
KJ: Pardon?
CB: What did you and your brothers think?
KJ: Well they were much younger than I. I was the eldest. There was one five years younger, and one ten years younger, so none of us really had any say in the matter. It was a bit unfortunate, keep having to change schools because you never got in to the ways of the school you were joining, but there you are. We had to knuckle under and put up with it.
CB: What did you do at school?
KJ: Just the ordinary schooling. No, er, I didn’t go to anything special you know, it was just the ordinary school.
CB: Yeah. And what did you do when you left school?
KJ: When I first left school we were living at Sheffield, which was just before the war, and I was a joiner’s apprentice, but when the war was, when the war started my dad said, ‘We’re going back to Doncaster. Sheffield will get bombed’, and he never said a truer word. It did. It got terribly bombed so we were back in Doncaster, and I was still in wood but it wasn’t a joiner’s apprentice, it were just a mundane. We were making clothes horses for people, for ladies to put their clothes to dry on. Clothes drier. And I stuck that for so long and then I went to work at British Ropes, down Carr Hill, in a reserved job which was making cables for barrage balloons. It was, it was a job that there were no joinings in the way. It had got to be a single wire and so it was classed as a reserved occupation. I only got in the RAF because I kept pestering them. I wanted to go and eventually they let me go. I always wanted to fly and I did plenty of that.
[pause]
CB: What type of flying did you want to do?
KJ: Anything. I were, I was prepared to do anything, and the quickest way — I mean a pilot and navigator and those sort of jobs, they were two or three years training and they had to go out to Canada and all like that. Well to be a gunner, it were only a matter of about eighteen months, so I chose the, oh at first it was like you said, wireless operator air gunner but that drove me mad that dit dit da dit dit da business, so I volunteered for a straight gunner and got away from it.
[pause]
CB: And what made you attracted to being a gunner particularly?
KJ: It was the easiest way of getting into aircrew. They needed two gunners to any other trade and I wouldn’t say my education were all that good anyway, so I chose the easy way, volunteered for a gunner.
CB: And when you started gunnery training, how did that go?
KJ: It went very well. I did that up at Dalcross in Scotland, so, yeah it went well. The flying part of it was exceptional ‘cause of the scenery, it was absolutely fantastic, the scenery we were flying over up in the north of Scotland. Aye. I never had any problems in that respect.
CB: What aircraft were you flying as training for that?
KJ: Originally Ansons, then we went on to Wellingtons and then finally Stirlings, and then finally Lancs, but I did all my operational flying on Lancs.
CB: So how did the gunnery course start? What did they do with you to begin with?
KJ: Well we used to go up in the aircraft. I think there were three, there might have been five, either three or five and your, your bullets that you would be firing had a different coloured paint on so they knew which, who had hit how many, and we flew up and then [pause], now I can’t remember the name of the aircraft. It was, it was originally supposed to be a fighter but it can’t have been fast enough so they used —
CB: And that was the Defiant.
KJ: Pardon?
CB: Defiant. With a turret on it.
KJ: No, these were the aircraft that towed the target.
CB: Oh right.
KJ: And I remember they were always Polish pilots, always Polish, which was a bit hectic at times.
CB: Did the tug ever get hit?
KJ: Oh yeah. It wasn’t as easy as you thought, but it, yeah, we, as I say these bullets had a different colour on so they could tell when the drogue came back who’d hit, how many times and so on.
CB: How well did you score?
KJ: Well I didn’t think it were very well. I usually averaged about .5, but there were some worse than me and some a heck of a lot better, so [pause], I mean when you got in a Lancaster and you were, you went into a corkscrew, it’s a wonder you hit anything because one minute you were upside down, the next minute you were stood on your toes. All over the place and you were supposed to — you’d sight. Gun sight was a coloured lit up small thing, and at certain points you were supposed to put the target, say a quarter of the way down or the other side of it, wherever you moved you were supposed to — well trying to remember that lot were impossible. All you could do were aim ahead of the enemy aircraft and just blaze away and let him come through your hail of bullets.
CB: But you had a means of targeting according to the type of aircraft. How did that work?
KJ: No, not really. No. You just had this —
CB: Based on wing span wasn’t it?
KJ: Pardon?
CB: Based on wing span.
KJ: Yeah, and as I say you just had this image, lit up image, and you were supposed, at any point where, same as if you saw the fighter coming from starboard, you’d, say, ‘Fighter starboard. Corkscrew starboard. Go’, and at that, he’d dive in toward the enemy fighter. Well you can imagine, the pilots used to really thrash the aircraft around to avoid being hit themselves and so it were very very difficult to go to the procedure that —
[banging noises]
Other: Sorry. I did that.
KJ: To go to the procedure that you were supposed to go through, but you just had to make, make the best of it as you went along.
CB: Yeah. So as you mentioned corkscrew.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: This was the way of evading an attacking fighter.
KJ: It’s what?
CB: So just talk us through. Who made the call for the corkscrew?
KJ: The gunner.
CB: Which one?
KJ: Which one? The one that saw the fighter coming first.
CB: Right.
KJ: He’d shout out, ‘Fighter starboard’, or port or upper or down, and you were supposed to wait ‘til they were two hundred yards away because if you did it too soon, they could follow you.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So you were, you judged when it were the right distance, and the, ‘Corkscrew starboard. Go’, and then the pilot would go towards the fighter that was after you.
CB: So that he would overshoot. Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So in the corkscrew, what exactly was the manoeuvre? He was pulling it round hard. Then what?
KJ: Well he dived.
CB: Right.
KJ: Then climbed.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Then climbed again, then down again, that’s where you got your corkscrew.
CB: Right.
KJ: It looked like a corkscrew going through the sky.
CB: Getting you back on track.
KJ: Yeah, and as soon as they broke away you stopped it and waited for them coming again and then started it all over again.
CB: How many times did you get attacked?
KJ: Oh quite a few times but we never, we got hit with bullets but we never got them in any vital places.
CB: Right. We’re ahead of ourselves in a way, but going back to training.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: In the first part of the training, you’re on the ground.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So how did they carry out that training? With what sort of weapon?
KJ: Well you had, you had the usual 303 Brownings that you’d be using in the aircraft, but there was a turret mounted on a railway track and you just went round this circuit, and the aircraft had come over with a drogue and you’d try to get as many shots in as you could. But they frowned on, there was some got, tried to be a bit crafty and waited till it was a dead shot and then you couldn’t miss, but they frowned on that. They wanted you to do it the hard way like.
CB: So what sort of height are these target tugs coming in at?
KJ: They’d be at same height as yourself but coming in from all different directions.
CB: I meant when you were on ground. You were on the railway tracks.
KJ: Oh.
CB: So, what height are they coming in?
KJ: Well the drogue was on the same track but ahead of you, and that’s where they didn’t like you waiting till they come to a corner, because then you could just bang away and ever hit, everyone had hit.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So they frowned on that, but it was tried to make it as realistic as possible, and then, on top of that, you’d got cameras in the ones that you were flying and you did the same thing with a camera.
CB: So how did they deal with deflection shooting training?
KJ: Well you were always in the, each position the plane was in, on your gun sight, there was a place you were supposed to put your, put your sight on this and then fire away there, but as you could imagine, when you were doing corkscrewing, you were up and down and one minute you was, your head was banging on the top of the turret. The next minute, you felt as though they’d put a tonne weight on your shoulders. It was very difficult to, to aim.
CB: Ok. Back at the training so after a certain amount of ground training, did you use shotguns for deflection training?
KJ: Yeah, yeah, did all that. Yeah.
CB: Right, and did you alternate between using the Browning 303?
KJ: Oh I did. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And the shotgun.
KJ: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So it was a clay pigeon.
KJ: Clay pigeon, yeah.
CB: Shot. Right. So then you come to the flying, so three of you in an Anson. Or five.
KJ: Aye. Yeah.
CB: How did that work?
KJ: And you took turns to climb in to the turret and do your, do your thing.
CB: Because it’s a mid-upper turret on the Anson.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Right.
KJ: Yeah, yeah, it was a twin engine. There were two very similar aircraft, Anson and Oxford, but I only ever heard of the Anson having the turret. Might have been Oxfords used for the same reason. There were no reason why not. They were almost alike aircraft [coughs] excuse me.
[pause]
CB: So in that aircraft, let’s say the Anson, you’ve got three or five students.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Who’s there guiding you?
KJ: Just the pilot.
CB: Was there another, an experienced air gunner?
KJ: Oh yeah, yeah, there would be, and he’d tell you when it was your turn to go in and come out.
CB: What sort of guidance did he give you?
KJ: Well he couldn’t do much at all except keep your eye on the target, and such tips as waiting while they were flying across you and getting ahead of them, and then really putting the bursts in. You were sure to hit something, but the thing that amused me — I thought these, when we got to that stage, I thought the people that were teaching us would have done operations but they hadn’t. They’d just, they’d been good in their training so they’d been held back as instructors.
CB: Was it actually a mix? Were there some people who were experienced?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Air gunners. Were there?
KJ: Well as I say there were, they’d done well in their training and they were held back.
CB: But there were people who’d been on operations there.
KJ: No. I thought there would be.
CB: But not at that time.
KJ: No.
CB: Ok. Right. And when you went up, how long was your go?
KJ: No more than half an hour. Yeah. From climbing in to climbing out of the turret. Yeah.
CB: Ok. And after Dalcross, then what happened?
KJ: After Dalcross, we were then went to OTU, our Operational Training Unit, and that was where you crewed up, but the normal thing was you’d get the same number of pilots, navigators etcetera, and they palled-up amongst themselves for a day or two, and then the pilot would say to one, navigators probably, ‘I want you as my navigator’. And that’s how it were crewed up, but I didn’t get that choice because when I went to OUT, there was so many crews ahead of us that hadn’t got gunners or they’d only got one gunner and needed another one, so we would, what would, what would you say, we were told which crew —
CB: Yeah.
KJ: We were going to be with.
CB: You didn’t get a choice.
KJ: I didn’t get a choice. I couldn’t have done better so. I remember we, we were, there’s Bruntinghorpe and Bitteswell. One was used for flying and the other was where you did your learning your other parts of the job, stripping guns down and all that sort of thing, and I remember I was told to go to the gatehouse where there was this navigator. He was going to be my navigator so he’d, I’d got to go see him and he would introduce me to the rest of the crew like. So we went, we went to the billets first the whole crew shared, well two crews shared a billet. There were fourteen beds in and he said, the navigator said, ‘Oh they’ll be going for lunch now to the sergeant’s mess so we’ll go meet the rest of the crew’. So we trooped off to the sergeant’s mess and there was a bit of a [pause] well I don’t know how to describe it, a bit of a hullaballoo going on. This pilot had gone in to the sergeant’s mess and he’d just picked out a gunner, a navigator and a wireless operator, ‘Come with me’, and he took them to a Wellington. They went off. He wanted to land at this aerodrome to meet a friend, but when they got there, they wouldn’t allow him, so he came back but he were in such a temper he tried to land without putting his wheels down. Made a mess of the undercarriage. Luckily, they all got away with it but he got put down in rank but lost about three ranks. And then we, we went into the mess and the navigator says, ‘Oh there’s the pilot’, and he were in a big armchair like this, with a sheet of newspaper over his face, away to the world, and this sheet of paper kept going up and down [laughs].
CB: As he puffed away.
KJ: As he were breathing. And he says, ‘There’s Harry’. His name was Harold really but he preferred being called Harry so, ‘There’s Harry there’, and I said, ‘Well don’t disturb him. He’s having a nice little nap there’. ‘Oh he’ll have to wake up for his lunch’, so he woke him up and introduced me. Shook hands with me, settled back down in his chair, pulled his paper down and went back to sleep [laughs], so that was my introduction to Harry Watkins.
CB: A flight sergeant.
KJ: Yeah. He’d, he was an amazing man he was. He was no bigger than me, no taller than me, maybe an inch but no more than that, but he’d got a chest on him like a barrel and he was strong as a bull. I’m sure he could have looped a Lancaster if he’d have wanted to, or if he’d been allowed to I should say, and he was a lot older than me. He’d gone to Finland to fight for the Fins against the Russians, and he were a fighter pilot and then when they signed a treaty, they sealed off the land borders so the only way they could get out, there was him and his friend, the only way they could get out was by sea, so they, they hired a trawler and they hit some very bad weather and almost drowned. A Russian gun boat picked them up, took them back to Russia and put them in a concentration camp. So he was ten, ten or eleven months in this concentration camp living on cabbage water. So by the time he got released, and the reason he’d got released was when the second front came, some of our soldiers that couldn’t get back to the beaches went to the Russians and they put them in this concentration camp, but the thing was, the British Consul had got a check on them. So they, as they were, they got them out, and these two other Britishers said, ‘When you get out, tell them there’s two more Englishmen in here wanting releasing’, and that’s how they got out. But he’d lost an amazing amount of weight, he’d, he had to go to Rhodesia to be built up before they’d let him sign up for the RAF. Aye. But he was an amazing man.
CB: But how did he come to go to Finland in the first place?
KJ: Well, you know, during the Spanish war.
CB: Ahh. The Spanish Civil War, yeah.
KJ: Some British were, well various —
CB: Yeah. The International Brigade.
KJ: That’s right.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Well, that’s how they did for Finland.
CB: Oh, did they?
KJ: Aye.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So, aye, anyway they got out and built him up and then let him join up.
CB: So how did the crew get together after they were, get on when they got together?
KJ: Well, at first you, all the different navigator, pilots etcetera, etcetera, they were all went in this big room and allowed to mingle and talk among themselves, and they palled up. That’s what it amounted to but as I say, I never had that choice.
CB: No.
KJ: Because I, they’d got, they were crewed up except for another gunner and they just said right, oh they gave us a test on aircraft recognition and the first ten I think it was, were allotted to crews that hadn’t got a gunner.
CB: Ok.
KJ: And I stayed with him. We did a tour. Well a lot just did the tour and then took a rest and probably they never got called on again, but we all volunteered to keep going.
CB: Oh. You all did? You all volunteered to keep going as a crew, did you?
KJ: All but two. One was the navigator and he’d got a wife and two kiddies and he didn’t think it were fair on them to just volunteer to keep going, and the other one was the wireless operator. He had a sick mother and there again, he thought it weren’t fair to her to, so, and as far as I know, they never did call them up again.
[pause].
KJ: I don’t know where any of the crew are. I know the pilot died ‘cause I got — it’s in the Midlands, his grave, but as far as I know, he just died of, well it wouldn’t be old age because he wouldn’t be all that old, but perhaps had some sort of illness.
CB: So we talked about the OTU and you’re getting together there.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: How long were you at the OTU and what were you doing?
KJ: We used to go on flights, cross country’s they called them, and you had, you were given a course that you had to take, and on the way, there’d be some bomb practice places and you’d call there and drop, drop a bomb. A four pound practice bomb on it and you got marks for that and you got marks for being at certain points at certain times. So we did very well at that because we’d got an excellent navigator and an excellent bomb aimer and an excellent skipper. And that, we went on these cross country’s, which could take ten or even twelve hours, and as I say, you’d had to call at it’d perhaps be a power station or something. It were a great big power station that became common afterwards, but it was the only one at the time in the Midlands somewhere and that was a favourite place for you to. Of course, you didn’t actually drop a bomb on there, it were just a case of photographing it as though you had bombed.
CB: So the OTU lasted?
KJ: Three months.
CB: Three months.
KJ: Yeah, perhaps more.
CB: And then you went to the HCU. So your OTU was at Bruntingthorpe.
KJ: Operationally, yeah.
CB: Then the Heavy Conversion Unit. The HCU.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Where was that?
KJ: That was at either Bruntingthorpe or Bitteswell, I can’t remember. The two B’s so I can’t remember which was which.
CB: But they were the OTUs weren’t they?
KJ: Yeah. Oh well we did us [pause], I can’t remember.
CB: Ok, but you said you moved to Stirling.
KJ: Yeah, we went on Stirlings. I hated them.
CB: Why didn’t you like that?
KJ: They weren’t very easy to fly in. They were, if you, if you had to, with a Lancaster, you drove towards the landing strip and then eased up so as you’d got a three point landing, but if you did that with a Stirling, it’d break it’s back and you’d be —
CB: Oh.
KJ: Yeah, and there was always plenty to let you know about it. Wreckage on the, on the airfield.
CB: Oh really. Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So how many, how long were you flying that before you changed to Lancaster?
KJ: Luckily it wasn’t too long. About six weeks that.
CB: And doing the same exercises or different?
KJ: Doing mostly the same things. Yeah.
CB: To what extent were you doing fighter affiliation?
KJ: Oh we were doing that. Every time we went up we’d have a bit of that in.
CB: Right.
KJ: You’d got to keep your eyes open in the gun turrets because they could come up on you anywhere, and you’d perhaps be like them cross country’s ten hours. Twelve hours in some cases.
CB: So that’s your HCU.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Then your first squadron you joined was?
KJ: 61.
CB: Where was that?
KJ: Skellingthorpe.
CB: Right.
KJ: Just outside Lincoln, and there were two squadrons shared the same airfield.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So when there was a bombing raid on, you’d get them coming from both sides but you used to take it in turns, 50, 61s and so on, until you’d got the two squadrons airborne. Yeah.
CB: And how many bombers in a squadron?
KJ: Eighteen. They’d usually aimed to have eighteen in the air.
CB: Oh in the air. Right. So not all of them flew, so how many aircraft were there?
KJ: Well no I mean, if there was anything serious like an engine change or anything like that, then one squadron or the other would be one down, but usually they aim for getting eighteen from each squadron on a raid.
CB: Ok. So when you got to the squadron then, when you got to the HCU, then the flight engineer and the rear gunner joined.
KJ: Yeah. Well only the flight engineer.
CB: Or the upper gunner which was you.
KJ: It was the upper gunner was the one that joined so far through.
CB: So you didn’t go to the OTU, or you did?
KJ: Yeah. Yeah. I joined them at —
CB: At the OTU.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And then —
CB: And at the HCU, then the flight engineer joined.
KJ: Joined us, yeah.
CB: Right.
KJ: And again, we didn’t have any choice, they just marched us on parade.
CB: Who was that?
KJ: They called him Fred Jowett.
CB: How did he gel? Bearing in mind you’d been together already?
KJ: It were, well he took up with the rear gunner, him and Fred were big friends, they used to go out.
CB: Carson Foy.
KJ: Yeah, used to go out drinking at night and all that sort of business, but he was married and I didn’t like the way he treated his wife, so I hadn’t got a lot of time for him.
CB: Oh.
KJ: He were good at this job but [pause] I always remember the parade when he was put in our crew, and he’d got a pair of trousers that he’d had widened like sailor’s trousers [laughs]. He got reprimanded for that and made to pay for them being put back to what they should be. And his, his cap, I think he must have cleaned engines with his cap, it were just one block of grease. He and his wife, whenever he got forty eight hour leave or anything like that, used to come home with me because his wife were in Army.
CB: Oh.
KJ: And she was stationed in Doncaster, she was a sergeant. And my mum and dad used to let them use their bedroom and I were kicked down to the sofa.
[long pause]
CB: So when you got to the squadron, what happened then?
KJ: Well not a lot of fuss made. All you, all you got at first, you did so many cross country’s to, with the aircraft affiliation also and bits thrown in to get used to what operational flying would be like. And then of course came the big day for the first op, and our first op was just after D-day and it was helping the Army. But they were so, the front lines were so close, we were given a signal to stop bombing, and I always remember it was “Billy Bunter” and we hadn’t bombed. We got to the target just ready to bomb, and this signal came. “Billy Bunter. Billy Bunter”, so we closed our bomb doors and changed back to go back home, but a lot of them kept bombing and the, the master bomber got fed up with them and he was really giving them a ticking off.
CB: For staying on.
KJ: For keep bombing.
CB: What was the target there?
KJ: Well, it were the enemy armoury. Tanks.
CB: Hitting Canadian troops were they?
KJ: Oh ours, yeah, a lot of ours were Canadian. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: No, I meant when the targets – they had, they had a friendly fire problem.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Was that why they stopped the bombing?
KJ: That’s right, yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Yeah, ‘cause when the two lines got too close, you couldn’t decide one from the other so. Aye.
[pause]
CB: What other, so in your first tour what other, what significant things happened there?
KJ: Well first tour, we were with the crowd, you know, with the main force, but our second tour, we carried the twelve thousand pound Tallboy bomb and it was chosen targets. The last one being Hitler’s guest house at Berchtesgaden.
CB: Right.
KJ: But he wasn’t there anyway so.
CB: Why were they bombing it then?
KJ: Well they didn’t know he weren’t. They thought he was there but apparently, he wasn’t when it —
CB: Still in Berlin.
KJ: Aye. In a bunker, underground bunker where he died anyway.
CB: So what significant events happened to you during the bombing raids? During the ops.
KJ: In what way do you mean?
CB: Well did you have any excitements or dangers? You got shot at a few times.
KJ: Oh we had some. I mean we got that time when aircraft above dropped his bombs on us.
CB: What happened there?
KJ: Three bombs hit us. One chopped off the starboard fin and rudder, one chopped off about five foot off the starboard wing, up to the starboard outer motor, and the third one hit the rear turret and took the rear turret away.
CB: And that’s why you needed a new rear gunner.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Did he get out?
KJ: Oh no. No. I’ve, I’ve been to his grave in Normandy.
CB: So this was a daylight operation was it?
KJ: Yeah. Yeah. I warned him about this, but the pilot says, ‘They’ll see us and they won’t drop them’, but almost as he said it, they were coming down on us.
CB: He couldn’t accelerate away.
KJ: No. He said, ‘There’s nothing I can do about it. We’re hemmed in’, so he just had to sit tight.
CB: So at night raids, you were in a stream. When you were bombing in daylight, how did you do that? Was it formation or still a stream?
KJ: Still a stream.
CB: Right.
KJ: You might get in a formation going backwards and forwards, but once you got near the target, you’re independent. You did as you want then.
CB: So without its turret, how did the plane behave? Rear turret.
KJ: Well we didn’t find any difference. In fact, he made a perfect landing when we got back, but it must have been, must have made a difference but he were a fantastic pilot so he dealt with it. When he got, when he got out the plane, his shirt was absolutely wet through. He must have fought it every inch of the way back.
CB: Because it had damaged the fin.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: One of them.
KJ: Well he’d only have part, part of his controls.
CB: And the wing. Which fin was hit?
KJ: Starboard fin.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And starboard wing.
CB: Oh it was, yeah.
KJ: So we were top heavy sort of thing.
CB: So you’re in the mid-upper turret.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: You’ve already warned the pilot about the plane above.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: What, what did you see when the bomb was coming down and the affect? How did this happen?
KJ: We’ll all I could see were these.
CB: A stick.
KJ: A full bomb bay full of bombs.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Coming down towards us and most of them slipping past on my left side.
CB: Right. You’re facing which way? Backwards?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Yeah. And I couldn’t help but see them because they were on top of me. It wasn’t a nice moment.
CB: So did some of them, they must have done, in a stick, some of them missed.
KJ: Yeah, quite a few of them went between the starboard wing.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And the starboard fin and rudder.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: More or less alongside me. Too close for comfort.
CB: So how much higher was this other plane?
KJ: It wasn’t too far above us because we were all supposed to be at the same height, but some used to go higher to avoid that happening to them, but the trouble is they did it to somebody else.
[pause]
CB: So you saw the bombs coming down.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: What, what was it like? Some were missing then. How many hit the turret?
KJ: There were three hit the aircraft.
CB: Right. Oh, three hit the aircraft. Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So one on the wing, one on the rudder.
KJ: And one on the rear turret.
CB: Yeah. So how did that come? That came straight down. Then how did you see it?
KJ: Well we got the, I’m getting mixed up with my starboard and, on the left hand side.
CB: On your left because you’re looking backwards.
KJ: They were all coming that side.
CB: Yes, the starboard side.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: And were you able to call out?
KJ: Well I did do, I warned him but he said, ‘Nothing I can do. We’re hemmed in’.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So we just had to sit there and hope for the best.
CB: So where did the bomb, where did it hit the turret? The one that hit the turret, where?
KJ: Straight on top.
CB: Straight in the middle.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: And the effect of that?
KJ: Tore it away from –.
CB: The whole of the turret.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Right.
KJ: There was just a gaping hole where the rear turret should have been.
CB: So what chances of survival were there for the rear gunner?
KJ: Zero.
CB: Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: And they didn’t explode because the primer.
KJ: No you wouldn’t.
CB: Hadn’t gone into action then.
KJ: You’d got that little.
CB: The delay.
KJ: Propeller that unscrewed as it dropped down.
CB: Right.
KJ: But it wouldn’t be, it wouldn’t be live until it was, say, a thousand feet.
CB: Right.
KJ: Above the ground and then it would slowly become alive.
CB: Right. So how many other members of the crew saw that?
KJ: Nobody apart from me.
CB: What effect did that have on you afterwards?
KJ: Well I were very, very upset because he were a friend of mine, the rear gunner.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: But I didn’t realise ‘till it were very late on in the war. We were coming back from a raid and it were a daylight, and as we crossed the Rhine, I saw these Typhoons going up and down and releasing rockets, and I’d never seen anything like that. At the gun emplacements along the Rhine. And I suddenly realised I was sweating and it were cold. There were no reason to be sweating, but that must have been nerves I should imagine.
CB: Yeah.
[pause]
CB: So after the raid did you, that particular one, where you lost your friend, did you fly the next day? Or was there –
KJ: Yeah. We were on ops the very next night, yeah.
CB: So was that better than having a rest or worse?
KJ: Well they told you it was for your own benefit if you —
CB: Yeah. Get up again.
KJ: So yeah, we were on another raid the following night.
CB: And how did that work for you?
KJ: It went pretty well really. A bit strange with getting a new voice from the rear turret but — [pause]. He were a farmer, he’d no need to be in the forces at all but he’d got two brothers that had adjoining farms, and they were looking after it for him.
CB: Which part of the country was that?
KJ: It was in the Midlands somewhere that they came from.
CB: Ok [pause], so apart from that one on the Rhine crossing, did you have any reaction on any other sorties?
KJ: Well er the Rhine, I didn’t know just how close it had come to that, but we got hit by shrapnel and one piece had gone through about two inches above my head, the top of my head and buried in the fuselage at the other side. The, one of the ground crew dug it out but he wouldn’t, I wanted him to give it to me but he wouldn’t. He hung on to it so —
CB: He wanted it did he?
KJ: Aye.
CB: Was it a bullet or shrapnel from flak?
KJ: Shrapnel from flak.
CB: Right.
KJ: A jagged piece about that.
CB: Yeah. About two inches, three inches.
KJ: It would have done enough damage anyway.
CB: Yeah. So when it hit your canopy, did it go through or did it shatter it?
KJ: It went through and then through the other side. The hole was pretty neat but there was a few cracks from it, you know.
CB: That was after the turret experience was it?
KJ: Yeah. We did, we did a tour and then instead of having a rest, we carried on with another tour.
CB: So those were both in the first tour.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Right. What caused you to do another go?
KJ: The pilot. He were a keen type and I wouldn’t have flown with anybody else if I could avoid it.
CB: That was 9 Squadron.
KJ: Yeah. He used to have his own way of taking off ‘til they stopped him doing it. They said, ‘We know you’re capable but somebody might try it and not be as successful as you’. You’re still, as we took off, he’d only just got airborne and he’d tilt over. It looked very spectacular from the ground but, well it looked spectacular from the gunner’s point of view as well, but he was warned off not to do it again.
CB: What did he do then? Bring the undercarriage up quickly or what?
KJ: Yeah. Quickly undercarriage up and he was already tilting his, er tilting the wing until it was, well it must have been pretty near the ground.
CB: He was turning his wing.
KJ: Anyway, he was ordered not to do it again.
CB: How did he feel about that?
KJ: Oh he took it all in good part. He were, he were a nice man was Harry Watkins.
CB: When you got your second rear gunner, because of the first one being lost, how did he get in with the crew or not?
KJ: Well he palled up straight. The engineer was a big drinker and so was this new gunner, so them two got on well together. I once counted that they had twenty two pints of beer.
CB: Each.
KJ: Each. They must have floated [laughs].
CB: Amazing. So how often did the crew go out together? These two clearly wanted to get ahead of the game.
KJ: When we were, if we were landing back at base very rare. If I wanted a drink, I’d have it in the sergeant’s mess but if you landed away from base, the officers could sub money from the officer’s funds so they’d sub so much money and treat us out for the night.
CB: How often did you find the pubs short of beer?
KJ: Did we find?
CB: The pubs short of beer. How often?
KJ: Oh, not very often, not very often [paused], but I used to like to stick to the sergeant’s mess.
CB: So how did you manage to keep in touch with Joan? Your future wife.
KJ: By mail, that were all, and get home as soon as soon, as often as possible. I used to, I were stationed quite close to Lincoln in both —
CB: In Bardney.
KJ: Both Bardney and Skellinghorpe.
CB: Skellingtorpe, yeah.
KJ: So it was an easy matter to get a train to Doncaster from them places. So if I’d got, if we weren’t flying that night, I’d take a chance on it and go home for the night. Only once did we nearly come adrift and that was, that was at Skellingthorpe, and from the bus stop to the camp was about a mile walk and all the way along, we could hear this tannoy saying myself and the engineer to report to the flights immediately. They’d come on an early morning raid they were going to do. Well they’d got reserves to go in our places, but the lad that were going to be the rear gunner, he said, ‘No. I’m not bothered. You go on’, so I got my raid in. But the engineer, this young man that were standing in for him had only got that one raid to finish his tour, so he said, ‘Oh no. I’m going on it’, so, but we both got the same punishment. Grounded for so many days and, not much like. A good telling off. It were a funny thing that, because the skipper always knew where we were, my home address, and he swore he’d sent a telegram but we never got it. So —
CB: That’s why you were late.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So what did they do to you?
KJ: We got a reprimand and confined to barracks for so long.
CB: How did the leave system work? How often did you get leave?
KJ: Oh with aircrew we were very lucky. We got a week’s leave every six weeks and you got a week’s pay from —
CB: Nuffield Fund.
KJ: Nuffield, aye. He also, when we went on leave, he gave us a week’s pay as well so a very popular man.
[pause]
CB: So you finished with 50 Squadron and went to 9.
KJ: Finished with 61.
CB: Finished with 61 Squadron and went to 9.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: How was the process and operation different from your previous experience?
KJ: Not a lot different really but we’d done more ops than others. We were senior crew like, ‘cause we’d done more than all the others, but it didn’t take long for somebody to overtake us, so —
CB: So here, you’re doing precision bombing.
KJ: Oh yeah.
CB: Tallboy, twelve thousand pounder.
KJ: Yeah
CB: So how did you do your training for that?
KJ: Well they did, I know the bomb aimers did have, we used to take up the bomb aimers to do this practice bombing and there were certain regulations laid down how they should treat this Tallboy bomb. ‘Course the Tallboy, you had to have special bomb doors. Normal bomb doors wouldn’t close over a Tallboy.
CB: How were the, what were these like?
KJ: They’d, they were shaped. Instead of just going around, they come down so far and then bellied out a bit and then came back in, so you could tell there was something different about them, and then, when them that carried the twenty two thousand pounder, they didn’t have any bomb doors on at all.
CB: The Grand Slam.
KJ: The Grand Slam. They just had a chain holding it up but I never carried that. We were, we stuck to Tallboys.
CB: How often did you have to, how often did you fail to drop the Tallboys or did you always drop them?
KJ: Well if we couldn’t be sure of the target, we’d orders to bring it back. Sometimes they changed their mind if conditions weren’t good and that, but as a rule, we brought them back because they cost so much to produce.
CB: And how did you feel about landing with such a heavy load on?
KJ: Well at first very tedious, very timid, but you got used to it like everything else.
CB: Your pilot was a good one so —
KJ: Oh a fantastic man, yeah.
CB: What sort of targets were you going for then?
KJ: With the Tallboy, they were chosen targets like dams or them viaducts.
CB: The U-Boat. Oh right.
KJ: And that type of thing. Things that you could knock down.
CB: So the Bielefeld Viaduct was brought down by a Grand Slam. Did you drop that?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Did that, was 9 Squadron involved in that?
KJ: Yeah. Always two squadrons. At first 617, like on the dam raid, there were only them.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: But subsequent raids they were losing more and more men, so they decided to lighten the load by putting two squadrons on these special targets rather than one, and the other squadron was Number 9, so it meant that 617 didn’t have to take it all.
CB: And how many ops did you do on your second tour?
KJ: Fifteen.
CB: And what, why did those stop?
KJ: Well, the war ended.
CB: It was the end of the war.
KJ: Yeah, thirty was a tour.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Well we did a tour but then we carried, agreed to carry straight on and we just carried on till the end of the war then, and the very last raid was Hitler’s guest house at Berchtesgaden.
[pause]
CB: So the war is over, now what did you do?
KJ: Well, they, they were getting ready to go to the Far East to carry the war to Japan, so I thought, well, I’ve done forty five ops, I’ve done my share. It wouldn’t be fair to the wife to carry on so I dropped out the race. But they never got there anyway, the war ended before they, they got to that point, so that was it.
CB: So the end of the war in Europe was the 8th of May, August was VJ day, so you were still in the RAF after that.
KJ: Oh yeah.
CB: What was going on? What were you doing then?
KJ: Well we were doing more or less the same things for so long, for about a year, and then we were put on ground staff jobs, and I got put on, well it were my choice, on driving. They were cook or drivers and I didn’t fancy cooking. I might have poisoned them all.
CB: Very likely. No, no, no. And what was, what determined the date of your demob?
KJ: It went on how old you were mainly ‘cause, and there was, the RAF for some reason was being held back ‘til last. So the Army and the Navy were getting demobbed, demobbed ahead of us but eventually the day came. But in that time, I’d been sent to Egypt and I was in charge of a lorry place which had forty five lorries, and I had to find loads for them going backwards and forwards. So, but eventually the day came when we came home [pause], and it was just a case of landing in Liverpool, going into this big hangar, big hangar and throwing my RAF kit into that, and walking out in a new suit. We got rigged out with civilian clothes.
CB: Right. What did they give you in civilian clothes?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: What did they give you?
KJ: A suit, shirt, tie, hat - which I never wore. I never wore a hat. The only time I wore a hat were in the RAF. And socks and shoes, the whole bag of tricks.
CB: So you came out of the RAF. Then what did you do?
KJ: Well my father had a little foundry and I went to work for him, but I did join the Observer Corps and I did another couple of years, part time of course, in the Observer Corps. We used to have exercises, mostly at weekends and we had a place out at Brampton.
CB: At Brampton.
KJ: Aye.
CB: Near Huntingdon.
KJ: Pardon?
CB: Brampton near Huntingdon [pause]. Where?
KJ: I thought it were Brampton. It was near Finningley.
CB: Ah.
KJ: Back side of Finningley. Actually we were in some gardens.
CB: Right.
KJ: There were like a hut there with a all glass top.
CB: Right.
KJ: So as you could see aircraft, and for a while it were interesting, ‘cause we did, we’d go on a weekend and we’d have to spot and record every aircraft we saw flying over. But then it got to nuclear business and the idea was you’d go out if there were a nuclear warning. We’d have to go out to the shelter and stay there till you got the all clear, but you were leaving your family behind. I said, ‘No. No. That’s not for me. If I go, we all go’, so I packed it in.
CB: In the Observer Corps, you were being paid as an employee were you?
KJ: In the Observer Corps? No. No, it were voluntary.
CB: So what was your job at the time?
KJ: I was working at er mining.
CB: In your father’s foundry.
KJ: Mining supplies. Engineering.
CB: Right. So you joined father’s foundry company.
KJ: Aye but –
CB: Then you changed from that.
KJ: I went to work for International Harvesters.
CB: Right. Oh right.
KJ: And learned more about machines, so I stayed at the Harvesters some years then. Twelve years I think.
CB: Did you? Right.
KJ: Aye, ‘cause my dad’s place – my mother was taken seriously ill. She died of cancer and my dad’s place had really gone to ruins. There was nobody knew how to run it like he did and he was at home all the time nursing mum, so I worked for Harvesters then for twelve year.
CB: And then what did you do? Did you do something after that?
KJ: I finished up at mining supplies.
CB: Right.
[phone ringing]
CB: We’ll stop it a mo.
[Recording paused]
CB: Where were the mining supplies? That was in Doncaster?
KJ: Carr Hill, yeah.
CB: In Carr Hill, yeah. And what were you doing there?
KJ: Engineering, running the machine.
CB: Oh right.
KJ: It was the, oh what did they call them?
CB: Milling.
KJ: Yeah. They were [pause]. Oh what did they call them? The machines that you put a programme in, and they —
CB: Yeah. CCN. Yeah
KJ: Yeah. So —
CB: CNC. CNC.
KJ: A lot of the young ones that were working there didn’t want to know, so I said I’d have a go at it, so I was taught how to run this machine and it fell in just natural, and that’s how I finished up working.
CB: How long were you with that one?
KJ: Oh a good, good, right to, after the war. I should say twelve, twelve years again.
CB: Right, and that brought you to retirement did it?
KJ: Yeah. Well I worked a long time after my retirement but eventually I had.
CB: Had to retire.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Right. I’m just going to pause.
[Recording paused]
CB: Right. So what would you say was the most memorable event in your time in the RAF?
KJ: I think obviously it would be I mean we’ve had some shaky dos as we used to call them, when we were being hit by flak and all that sort of thing, chased by fighters, but the worst experience was when we had the bombs dropped on us.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And we lost our rear gunner.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: That was the most memorable thing.
CB: Traumatic.
KJ: Traumatic, that’s a better word yeah. Yeah.
CB: Out of interest, what did the Air Force do about a memorial service after that? Did they do anything?
KJ: No.
CB: No, because it was just run of the mill.
KJ: That’s it, yeah, it was a risk you took.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: That were their thinking, yeah. I’ve been to, you know, the Spire in Lincoln.
CB: Yes.
KJ: Well I’ve been to that, and all the names of those that got killed are all on brass plaques around the Memorial, and where we used to call him Jack Foy, ‘cause his name was Carson Jack Foy, and if I stand up again at this particular plaque, his name just appears above my head.
CB: Does it really.
KJ: Aye.
CB: ‘Cause he’s one of the ones of the twenty six thousand two hundred in the rolls of honour. The three.
KJ: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: The three volumes.
KJ: His mother lost two sons within [pause] within a month anyway.
CB: Really.
KJ: We lost Jack and then a few days after it was D-day and his brother was in the Canadian Army and he was killed on D-day.
CB: Right.
KJ: So she lost two sons.
CB: Heartbreaking.
KJ: I used to write to his sister but I know, but, one time I weren’t well and I left it, and I thought oh it’s, I’ll leave it now so I didn’t bother after that.
CB: We didn’t really talk about the number of times you were actually attacked by fighters and your response to that in defence of the aircraft.
KJ: I should say at least a half a dozen times, and it depended which gunner spotted them first, because he would take over as the [pause], tell the skipper to go into a corkscrew, so you’d shout, ‘Corkscrew left. Corkscrew left. Go’, and off you would go.
CB: And everybody then held on.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: How many did you shoot down between you?
KJ: We only, we only claimed one but —
CB: Was that yours?
KJ: We, there were a few we discouraged shall we say.
CB: Yes. Did the, did the one you shot down, was that yours or was it Carson’s?
KJ: Well I said it was the rear gunner’s because he got better shots at it. I were only getting it as it whizzed by. Just get in front and blaze away and hope for the best, but the rear gunner was watching it from the time it started to come at us.
CB: What was it?
KJ: An ME109.
CB: Right. In the dark?
KJ: Yeah, it was dark. Yeah. We got chased with a ME101.
CB: 110.
KJ: 110. 110. But it were cloudy that day and we kept dodging into the clouds and losing him.
CB: Right.
KJ: But he persevered for a hell of a time. Every time we come out of the cloud, he were there.
CB: Yeah, because he’d got radar hadn’t he?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Yeah. Course we didn’t know that at that time.
CB: Was it possible for the mid-upper and the rear gunner to engage the target at the same time?
KJ: Oh yeah, yeah, no problem there. The rear turret as you were, you went on a duckboard from the, well it was the toilet there.
CB: At the back.
KJ: At the back, and from there to the turret, you’d got like a runway, thick plywood, and you walked along that to get into the rear turret. Well from there, right up to under my turret, the rear gunners had got four, well two each side, four rows of cartridges going on a conveyer belt.
CB: Twenty seven feet of them.
KJ: Pardon?
CB: Nine yards. Twenty seven feet.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Yeah, and mine were just in canisters either side of the guns.
CB: Right.
CB: So —
KJ: On the wall or on the floor?
CB: On the [pause] up, up same height as myself.
KJ: Right.
CB: So how many? You had obviously many less rounds. How many rounds did you have?
KJ: There were just a minute’s firing. One thousand something on each gun.
CB: Oh right.
KJ: So, but I mean the rear turret could go on for ages.
CB: How many rounds did the, that’s a lot of rounds on there stretched on the floor.
KJ: Oh yeah.
CB: For the rear gunner.
KJ: Yeah, yeah, coming right back from the rear turret to my turret and back again. Yeah, it was [pause] well it was about half way up the aircraft from the rear turret. Yeah. He’d a hell of a lot of cartridges, and you had incendiary bullets so you could see where you were, where your bullets were going.
CB: Tracer.
KJ: Tracer bullets.
CB: They were, they weren’t all tracer.
KJ: No.
CB: So it was, was one in how many?
KJ: One in every five, I think.
CB: Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: You needed that in the dark.
KJ: Yeah. Yeah. Then later on some of the rear turrets got .5s.
CB: Right at the end.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Just 2.5s. Yeah.
KJ: Two instead of four 303s, yeah.
CB: So how did you feel about your reduced fire power of only two guns in the mid-upper?
KJ: Well you’d have been happier with more, but you just had to make do. I mean the rear, rear gunner had got a lot more fire power than you.
CB: When you were zeroing in on the attacking fighter, which part of the fighter would you actually be aiming to hit?
KJ: Well the easiest way was get in front of him and fire and let him come through your hail of bullets.
CB: Right.
KJ: But they had a laid down plan. You’d got the gun sight which was about that big. A circle.
CB: Right.
KJ: With a dot in the middle.
CB: Three inches.
KJ: And you were supposed, at different points, when you were in the corkscrew, trying to escape, different points where you were supposed to put your gun, aim you gun, but it was impossible.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: I mean, one minute you were head were in the top.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: The next minute it felt as though somebody had put a tonne weight on your shoulders. So a lot of it was using your own judgement.
CB: The final question on this is, you and the rear gunner are in a section that is completely unheated.
KJ: Oh yeah. Yeah.
CB: So how did you feel during the flight?
KJ: Well we were issued with heated suits but the trouble was, nine times out of every ten, they weren’t tended for and one minute they were too hot and the next, when you turned them off they were too cold. So they weren’t a lot of good to be quite honest, but you had an electrically heated suit and then an overall suit over the top of that.
CB: There were two circuits were there in the heated suit? One each side.
KJ: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So did they always both work?
KJ: Oh some of them failed. Some of them had got, they were, they got that hot, within minutes you had to take them off. You couldn’t stand that. It were better to not get used to it.
CB: So what sort of lengths were the flights? They varied but, to the target but what length in hours was a typical flight.
KJ: I should say on an average about six, seven hours but I’ve done some up to twelve hours.
CB: What that would be? The longest ones.
KJ: Stettin.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Would be one of the longest ones. Right up in, well it were Russia at that time.
CB: Right out on the Baltic coast.
KJ: Yeah, that’s right.
CB: Did you, because you were getting to the end of the war, but you didn’t have, the Tallboy wasn’t used so you weren’t on the, some of the later raids to the cities.
KJ: No. Although I did Tallboy raids.
CB: Yes.
KJ: Some, some of my raids we carried the Tallboy.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: But a lot of it was, at the beginning in particular, you were going for German cities and you’d drop incendiaries and then the bangers after that, if you call them that. But you lit the target up with incendiaries first.
CB: But the four thousand pounder.
KJ: Yeah. Strangely enough, a lot of aircrew didn’t trust them. They were, they were very touchy if they got disturbed. They were likely to go off.
CB: Really.
KJ: After say, an hour, because they got an hour’s timing on them and probably when they’d been put up under, in to the bomb bays, somebody might catch them and that started the timing off.
CB: Oh.
KJ: But you didn’t know but you’d, after an hour, as you were crossing the channel, you’d see suddenly one in front of you blow up.
CB: And that was why was it?
KJ: That were why. Yeah. Yes very —
CB: What did they have in them then, that made them so sensitive?
KJ: Well it was the timer.
CB: I meant the explosives. It was a combination was it? Explosives and incendiary?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Was it?
KJ: No. High explosive bombs. No, I don’t think the incendiaries were as much to worry about.
CB: So you’re dropping Tallboys, and how accurate would you say you were doing that?
KJ: Well you’d got to be accurate because anybody that got outside the aiming point would get a real telling off. The bomb aimer would get, and of course the pilot wouldn’t be very pleased, so he’d put his two penneth in as well.
CB: And how well could you see the effect of those?
KJ: Oh on some raids you could see every bomb that dropped. See it hit the ground and see the explosion and everything, but, ‘cause the, with the Tallboy, when it hit the ground you’d get like throwing a pebble in water. You’d get them rings come up but they were pressure rings instead of —
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And if you got, if you were below eight thousand feet, they’d throw you all over the place if you got in that.
CB: Oh really.
CB: Oh yeah.
KJ: Yeah. Aye, ‘cause if we were dropping them, the rest of the force were told not to drop less than, not to go below eight thousand feet.
CB: But they didn’t explode on impact because they were designed for penetration weren’t they?
KJ: That’s right.
CB: So there was a delay?
KJ: Yeah. They’d an armour plating nose which buried in to the ground and then depending on the delay fuse, would depend on that when they went off.
CB: Now one of the targets for some time was U-boat pens. How well did they work on those?
KJ: With, I know we did U-boat, U-boat pens at Bergen in Norway and we’d got one hour timers on and they went through the top of the pen and they were half in the pen and the Germans thought they were duds but —
CB: Right.
KJ: On the hour they found out they weren’t.
CB: Right, but the hour delay was designed to get maximum effect of casualty.
KJ: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I say, they thought they were duds and by the time they found out they weren’t, it were too late.
CB: Viaducts. So you talked about those.
KJ: Pardon?
CB: With viaducts, were they effective on those?
KJ: Yeah. Oh yeah, because they used to bury under the, underneath and that caused them to crumble over.
CB: So how did you feel about it after you’d been on a raid?
KJ: [Laughs] Thankful that we’d come back. Yeah.
CB: I was thinking about your reaction to the result of your bombing.
KJ: Oh well, we were always pleased to see we, we’d made a mess of where we were bombing.
CB: Because unlike a normal raid, there wouldn’t be lots of smoke.
KJ: No. No. No.
CB: It would be clear cut, wouldn’t it? What you’d done.
KJ: Yeah. Yeah. As soon as a Tallboy hit the ground, you got those —
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Rings coming up.
CB: Shockwaves, yeah. And what about Grand Slams? Did you drop those as well?
KJ: We didn’t, no, there were only six. I think only three aircraft on 617 that were altered to carry them.
CB: Right.
KJ: Because they had no bomb doors on them.
CB: No.
KJ: Just they just went up, ‘cause the first time I saw them, I couldn’t believe my eyes. This damned great thing slung under an aircraft and no bomb doors. Aye.
CB: Did you do joint raids with 617, or were they all done separately?
KJ: No, the second tour, we were always with them, but the first tour was with general.
CB: Yeah, general bombing.
KJ: Bombing, yeah.
CB: Right. Thank you very much.
KJ: It’s a pleasure.
[Recording paused]
CB: Just one other thing, on the Tirpitz raids then, what happened there?
KJ: Well, they took the mid-upper turrets out altogether to lighten the load they were carrying, and they had a, they had a bigger bomb on, the twelve thousand pound bomb. But they were, they were special made bomb doors, they weren’t completely round, they’d got a dimple in them to go around the shape of the bomb.
CB: Right.
KJ: And every one of them bombs was turned in either Sheffield or Scotland, there were only two lathes big enough to do them. That’s why if we weren’t certain of the target, we had to bring them back.
CB: Expensive and scarce.
KJ: Oh yeah. Yeah.
CB: Right.
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 Ken Johnson. Two
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
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
2017-04-03
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AJohnsonKA170403
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.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:39:45 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Ken Johnson was born in Doncaster. At the start of the war the family was living in Sheffield but his father decided they should move back to Doncaster to avoid bombing. Ken started work as a joiner and later made cables for barrage balloons. Despite being in a reserved occupation, he volunteered to join the RAF and trained in Scotland as an air gunner. He describes gunnery practice against towed targets and corkscrewing the aircraft. He formed a crew in the Operational Training Unit at RAF Bruntingthorpe. He talks about his pilot, Flight Sergeant Harold “Harry” Watkins, who fought in the Finnish Army against the Russians at the start of the war. Ken joined 61 Squadron at RAF Skellingthorpe flying Lancasters. His first operation was just after D-Day to bomb German armour but as they were too close to allied troops, it was aborted. Ken’s most traumatic experience was during an operation in July 1944, when an aircraft above his dropped its bombs and three bombs hit the aircraft including the rear turret, carrying it away with the rear gunner. On another occasion, anti-aircraft shrapnel missed Ken’s head by two inches. After completing a tour of thirty operations, most of Ken’s crew volunteered for a second tour. Transferred to 9 Squadron, many of his fifteen operations involved dropping the 12,000 lb Tallboy bomb. Ken describes the differences between the rear and mid-upper turrets including their armament. After the war, he served as an RAF driver in Egypt before being demobilised and returning to civilian life. He volunteered with the Royal Observer Corps for a couple of years.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Nick Cornwell-Smith
Vivienne Tincombe
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
61 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bomb struck
Lancaster
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bardney
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Dalcross
RAF Skellingthorpe
service vehicle
Tallboy
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/583/8852/PHolmesGH1604.2.jpg
134f273cd93e015a7d789b8e877b159b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/583/8852/AHolmesGH161016.1.mp3
cc225552ec17450d62364d1a1b362db0
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
Holmes, George
George Henry Holmes
G H Holmes
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Holmes, GH
Description
An account of the resource
Nine items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer George Holmes (b. 1922, 1579658, 187788 Royal Air Force) his log book, records of operation, newspaper cuttings and photographs of personnel. He flew operations as a wireless operator / air gunner with 9, 50 and 83 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by George Holmes and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-21
2017-01-14
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AH: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Anna Hoyles. The interviewee is Mr George Henry Holmes. The interview is taking place at Mr Holmes’ home [deleted] Lincolnshire on the 16th of October 2016.
GH: Yes. I had some very lucky escapes. We had, we were going to [pause] I’ve written it down. I’ve got a terrible memory.
[pause]
GH: Stuttgart in Germany. And of course they originated in France thinking possibly that there wouldn’t be many, many night fighters there but we got caught and we got shot and it took off the bomb bay doors. They fractured the starboard wheel, ruptured the main spar and left us with cannon shells stuck in the fuel tanks which is actually really instantaneous. And we did a belly landing when we got back and I was one of the first out and running. Somebody said, ‘Are you frightened?’ I said, ‘Have you seen a Lanc go up in flames?’ And the bloke said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well. Well, when you do you’ll run faster than I do.’ And actually they took these cannon shells away by the, if you handled the armament, whatever and emptied them they found out that the cannon shells actually had been filled with sand instead of explosives. Otherwise we would have gone up in one. And that was once. And another night someone on a circuit when we were coming, of course I was at Skellingthorpe at the time and there were about five or six airfields all around. And we had a bump and nearly got tipped over by the windstream of another aircraft. And when we landed there was about five foot off the end of the pit, of the end of the aeroplane gone. That was, I think we could call a very near miss. And all through my career they used to say you’ve got to get it right. The good crews survive and the bad crews don’t. But when you’re dealing with an aeroplane that’s attacking you at about between five and six hundred mile an hour you don’t have time to work out all the superlatives. You just learn how to, well you have to try to get him in to four hundred yards for the ammo to be, do any damage whatsoever. And these would wait about a thousand yards and pump these things in to you, you know. But, yes we lost a lot of young men at the time. Look back sometimes and I think how the hell did we get through it?
AH: How did you come to join the RAF?
GH: Mixed feelings. I was living in Kettering at the time and I would be about six years of age. I’d only just joined school which was a joining age in those days of about six years I think and I saw the R100 or the R101 in the sky. A most amazing sight. And of course everybody was reading Biggles books so I wanted to be a Biggles man. And my father wouldn’t sign any papers for me so when I was eighteen I went down and joined the RAF as an air gunner. But there were so many enlisting at the time it was over twelve months I think before I was called. And they wanted me to be a pilot or navigator. I said, ‘No. I want to be an air gunner W/Op.’ Anyway, I finished up there. They made me a wireless operator / air gunner. Well, up to going into the air force I’d hoped to be a semi-professional musician because I played the violin from seven years of age to when I went in the air force, eighteen. And I played the violin, trumpet and a mandolin. And the man who was teaching me he used to make instruments and he was going to teach me how to make them. And, you know when I went in the air force I was in the air force for just over five years. I couldn’t get back to the standard that I was in and work for a living at the same time because you’ve got to put about two to three hours a day in you know, to it. So I abandoned the musical stuff. And actually I was at an old miner’s school. A corrugated tin hut thing and when we moved to Leicester and I was a top boy at the school. The teaching, they taught us in that stinking little old tin hut was beyond their, what they were teaching us in there. They told me I couldn’t do joined up writing. We’d got to go back to scroll, you know. But I went to a school that was attached to the College of Art and Technology and I was studying textiles and hosiery. And I earned a very good living through the entire working life producing socks, stockings, knee socks and things like that. Of course you got paid in on production in those days. You didn’t get a standing wage. The more you made the more you got paid. And you were allowed ten needles per week and if you broke more than that you had to pay for them. Six pence each I think they were then. The unions would go bloody mad now wouldn’t they? [laughs] I had a very good education really. I was very fortunate. I was almost fluent in French. The French master said, ‘I can’t understand you, Holmes. You’re the worst pupil I’ve ever had. You’re always talking, take no notice, I can’t understand how you’ve got top of the class in French.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s simple. You gave us a half an hour’s homework and I always got an hour. So I worked harder than anybody else.’ [laughs] But I had a very good — my parents were not wealthy. My dad was a manager of a, the management of a grocery shop. You know these, what they were before the war. Several strains of food, food retailers and I really thought I was going to be a semi-professional musician. But I abandoned that scheme altogether and I got my sleeves rolled up and got stuck in this hosiery thing. ‘Til the war of course and then I couldn’t get, I couldn’t wait to get in the air force. And I finished up as a wireless operator / air gunner due to the fact, I always presumed, I don’t know whether it’s true or not but the fact that I had learned music, got some dashes and all like that. Morse code came easy and I was a very good operator. But apart from that I had a very happy marriage. I’ve got one son. He’s sixty seven now. And a he’s a fourth [unclear] at Judo. But life is a wonderful thing. Not to be wasted. And when you look at the war and see the number of thousands of young people who were wasted in the war. And the building and the costs. At the end of the day you have to sit around a table and talk it over from the first day. Save a lot of trouble and strife. But of course in those days Bomber Command was the thing.
AH: So you wanted to join Bomber Command?
GH: Oh yes. But then when you say wanted to join Bomber Command I’d always worked shifts. Night shifts and three shifts and things. I thought if I go in to the air force I’d be alright. And what did they do? They stuck me on Bomber Command. It was night work. But it wasn’t altogether good so as you look in the book you’ll see I did quite a number of daylight operations.
AH: Where did you train?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Where did you train? Where did you do your training?
GH: Where did I do my training? It was wonderful really. I I went to Blackpool first of all. That was the Number 10 RS something it was called. Signals Reserve or something. And they were all radio personnel in the air force up there. And we had a bloke called corporal [pause] I forget his name now. Corporal. Used to take us to the arm drill and foot drill. And his stage name was Max Wall. Can you imagine a man like Max Wall teaching you? Amazing. And then I went down to Yatesbury for a radio course. And I was posted then to Manby in the ground wireless op ‘til they could fit me into an air gunner’s course. Well, Manby in those days was number 1 AS. Air Armaments School and they taught bomb aimers and air gunners. We kept going to see the groupie and saying, ‘Get us on the course for air gunners.’ ‘No. You have to wait until you come through officially.’ When it did come through we was at a place called Evanton. About forty mile north of Inverness. First time I’d been to Scotland. In June it was. And it was a wonderful summer. And it was the first time I’d seen the shaggy Highland cattle. And I was taken by Scotland ever after that. Then after that, the gunnery course, I was sent to Market Harborough which is now a prison. And I used to push off home every night. After being there about three weeks the CO said, ‘We’re getting rid of you. You’re never here.’ It used to take me an hour to get home from Market Harborough on the local bus through all these villages. Little villages. And I was posted to Silverstone. And at Silverstone if you went in and out by railway you could get a train called the Master Cutler which was a high speed train from Sheffield to London and back. It used to do that in forty five minutes. That was quicker than being in [laughs] And I got crewed up there then and joined the [unclear] so to speak but I suppose if you were young men you had to be in something. You had no objection. I mean, no one wanted you to be a conscientious objector or anything. There we were. I joined Bomber Command and I was very lucky because I got with some good crews and I must admit I was commissioned towards the end of the war as a wireless op and I got operational strain and one thing or another. I was a bit of a drunkard. The only way of overcoming some of the strenuous [pause] I mean the beer we were drinking in those days I think was 1.2 percent alcohol. The water you washed the glasses in was stronger than the beer.
AH: So did you drink mainly beer? Or did you drink other stuff?
GH: No. No. The doc said, our doc on the squadron, ‘Go out and get pissed. It’ll do you good. Don’t go on spirits.’ And I was based around here. Around Louth. One way or another. It’s so that when my wife and I decided to come and live here it was after I’d retired. It was a home away from home really.
AH: Where were you first based? Where were you based first?
GH: Where was —?
AH: Where were you first based? Which was your first base? Where were you sent first?
GH: Oh. At a place called Bardney. Just outside Louth. And we got there. The place was, looked vacant and we got out the transport and looked around and looked in the ditches and it was full of bodies. We said, ‘What are you doing down there?’ They said, ‘Bugger off, there’s a fire in the bomb dump.’ So we said, ‘Oh, we’ll leave you to it then.’ But anyway a guy put it out. And then we went from that place. I did six ops there. And then we went to Skellingthorpe where the pilot was made up to a squadron leader. And we were only allowed two or three operations a month due to the losses of experienced crews. And by the time we’d done twenty trips together he, the pilot and the navigator went over to Pathfinders as the rest of the crew did. And the, the crew got sort of crewed up but the wireless, he didn’t want a wireless. He brought one with him, the pilot. So I was a spare bod and I went with an Aussie crew. His name was Cassidy and he’d got it painted on the side of a Lancaster. “Hop Along Cassidy’s Flying Circus.’ And I finished up at the one near Boston. What is it?
AH: Coningsby?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Coningsby?
GH: Coningsby. Yes. Yes.
AH: What squadron were you in first?
GH: 9. And then I went on to 50 at Skellingthorpe and then I went on to 83 at Coningsby.
AH: And what planes?
GH: Lancs. Well, after the war, if you look in the book look I went on a tour to South America. They sent three what were called Lancaster Mark 21s I think. But in actual fact they renamed them to Lincolns. It was a bigger aircraft that the Lancaster. Especially built for the war against the Japanese. And we went right down the west coast of Africa and then across over the Atlantic to Brazil and then right down to Santiago. Flew over the second highest mountain in the world I think it is. Aconcagua. But by then I’d decided I would take a course, this course on radiography, radio operating and get on to the public airlines. And I’d met my lady who I married and I found out that to be on public airlines you were away for home for anything from six weeks to three months. I thought well that’s not right. So I docked that and as I say I stayed in the hosiery trade. Yeah. Had quite a varied existence one way or another.
AH: What did you do in South America?
GH: Demonstrated the aircraft. I think they’d got that many four engine aircraft they didn’t know what to do with them and they were trying to flog them to anybody who’d buy them. God knows where all the aeroplanes went to. They just suddenly disappeared.
AH: And what was it like there?
GH: Pardon?
AH: And what was it like? Were they interested?
GH: Interesting.
AH: Were they interested in the aircraft?
GH: Oh very much so. Yes. Yes. Whilst we were there there was an earthquake in Peru and they wished us to send someone who would take some supplies over to Peru for the earthquake. And the air force said they couldn’t be allowed to do that because although we’d get to Peru and land they hadn’t got an air force runway long enough to take off so we’d be stuck. But yeah. Funny thing was we all decided when we were going to Brazil we would get together and learn Spanish. And when we got to Brazil they didn’t speak Spanish. They spoke Portuguese [laughs]
AH: How long were you out there for?
GH: Oh not very long. I should think, well if you look in the book it’ll tell you how long. About four weeks I think. We did one leg of the journey per day. And —
AH: And when were you demobbed?
GH: When? I think it was June of 1945.
AH: And how long were you in 9 Squadron?
GH: Pardon?
AH: How long were you in 9 Squadron?
GH: Only a few weeks. Not very long.
AH: What was it like?
GH: Quite an eye opener really. Mainly we were supporting the invasion. In fact that was the first time I’d ever seen the white cliffs of Dover coming back from France on D-Day. As I say all the boats going over.
AH: How did that feel?
GH: Have I —?
AH: How did that feel?
GH: Satisfied I would think would be the only expression. That we were doing something. And of course that’s another point. I mean I don’t know whether you’ve watched it on telly but they give you films of the actual landings in France and they chuck the blokes out into the water that was about six foot deep. They were drowned. Never got to France at all. Instead of waiting for the tide to go out. Some damned idiots in this military attitude.
AH: What did you think of Bomber Command?
GH: Well organised. To a certain extent they were very well organised. Many actual Bomber Command crews packed up before they’d completed a tour of course because it was a great strain. I remember doing a daylight on, I think it was at one of the flying bomb sites when they were launching flying bombs. And of course Bomber Command never flew in the way the Yanks did. They had three people from leading in and everybody was sort of doing what they called a gaggle at the back. And we were close up behind this three Bomber Command [pause] well, leaders I suppose and I looked up and saw an aircraft above was opening his bomb doors. I thought it’s going to drop on him shortly. Anyway he did. He dropped them and then it just floated down. Hit the aircraft on the right hand side, the starboard, knocked his wing off and he spun over and tipped the wing of the other who went that way and he tipped the wing of the other and went that way. And there were bodies without parachutes floating around and everything. And it was Cheshire who was controlling the raid. Called the raid off because he said the chaps didn’t stand a chance if we bombed it. So we flew back to the North Sea and dumped the bombs and went home. But the things like that they were happening every day. You know, I mean I’m afraid you accepted it.
AH: Do you remember where you were going on that raid?
GH: Not completely. No. Because there were one or two launch sites for flying bombs. I mean at one time as far as I know they were, they were launching something like ten thousand pound. Ten thousand flying bombs in a matter of a month or whatever, you know. I mean they were really showering the south of England with them. And —
AH: And how did you feel when you saw the bombs coming?
GH: I hope to God it misses me. To be truthful. But it was a sight, you know. Their only, these aircraft which they hit and damaged were only about a hundred, hundred and fifty yards in front of us. A matter of three seconds or something isn’t it? The speed we were flying at it could have been us. But many of the young lads who joined up when I joined up never finished. They were killed. A great deal of loss of human youngsters. Many of them technicians and people we missed after the war finished because of their experiences. And if you take that you promise me I will get it back?
AH: Yeah.
GH: Because I applied for the Aircrew Europe Star which was allotted to everybody who did two or more operations before D-Day which I did and I was told I didn’t, I hadn’t done enough. So when they issued the Bomber Command medal at the end of the war they said I couldn’t have that either because I’d got the 1939-45 Star or something. I don’t know. I thought well that’s great. I did twenty one ops and I never got a bomber medal. It’s unbelievable some fairy in Whitehall who was domineering the life span of the one doing the work. But the main thing I need at the present moment is some backup somewhere to get, I mean I mentioned to you earlier how much it cost. I was only getting two hundred and ninety pound a month. That’s about seventy pound a week towards the cost of being here and it was costing [pause] what was it? Well, a monthly, the monthly cost here is three thousand and forty one which is quite expensive. I think it’s a very good. I get my monies worth. But I think the company, the government or whoever, the Department of Works and Pension allow me something to help me pay for it and they want [coughs] they just knocked off the pension credit. I’m about two and a half thousand pound a month worse off when I got a pay rise of two pounds and fifteen pence [pause] In other words hard luck isn’t it? You know I mean I’m not the sort of person who is laid back and you handed something but I’ve worked all, all my own life. What I’ve got I’ve chased the work of one kind or another. Whether it was in the air force or out. And I’m disgusted actually to think the money that gets wasted.
AH: Could I just ask you a few more questions about the war?
GH: Yes.
AH: What did you think of the way Bomber Harris was treated?
GH: Disgustingly. As I said earlier he was blamed for bombing the population whereas the targets were selected by the War Committee. And the two leaders of that were Lord Portal and Winston Churchill. Bomber Harris was behind his crews all the way. Next question.
AH: Where did you go after 9 Squadron?
GH: With 50 Squadron at Skellingthorpe. That was, it was so far to the sergeant’s mess from where we were displayed in Nissen huts we used to go into Lincoln for breakfast [laughs]
AH: What sort of squadron was it?
GH: What 83? Er 50?
AH: 50.
GH: Very very compatible actually. The man who was my pilot took his place as flight commander was Metham. He finished up deputy leader of some bomber group. Was it Metham? He’s a well-known, established leader of the Royal Air Force.
AH: Was that a Pathfinder squadron?
GH: No. No. They only had two Pathfinder squadrons. They were both at Coningsby. 83 and 97.
AH: Were you in them at all?
GH: I was on 83. I did, I think nine trips with 83 Squadron. They said that it was easy on Pathfinders of course. You, if you’re first flare leaders putting the flares down you went over and laid your flares and shot off home but they didn’t tell you when you started laying your flares you had to put it in automatic pilot and you couldn’t drift. So by the time you got to the end of laying the flares the Germans had got all the information of what you were doing [pause]
GH: And I have the greatest admiration of the German people and Germany itself. Moreso than any other European country. I have a great ideal, great ideals of them. They’re a wonderful people. We should never have gone to war against them. Well, should we?
AH: What do you think we should have done?
GH: Pardon?
AH: What could, what could Britain have done instead?
GH: Shot Adolf Hitler. It was a dictator. A man who believes beyond his experience. I think, well what’s happening in the world today? I mean we’re now fighting the, oh ethnic crowds that we were fighting in the days of Christ. For two thousand years we’ve been fighting. Still doing it and we’ll lose in the end. Of course people say they mean good. If you read the Koran as far as I remember the first rule is thou shalt now kill. And I think the fourth one is thou shalt kill all non-believers. So it leaves you in a sticky mess. And they’re gaining popularity all the while.
AH: When did you read the Koran?
GH: I haven’t read the Koran. I’ve read extracts from it. I’m quite interested in reading other people’s religions and of course in actual fact I believe in the bible which says when you die it’s ashes to ashes and dust to dust. I don’t think there’s a heaven up there. I don’t think there’s anything like that. I think it’s just, you’re just dead meat. Unfortunately. And many many people leave their readings, writings and paintings to be perused over and you get the benefit of their experience.
AH: Have you written anything?
GH: Written anything? Only rude things on the wall [laughs]. No. I wish I could have written things. I was too busy with music. As I said I went to a school where we had possibly an hour to two hours homework every night of various kinds and I didn’t really get out amongst other young fellas of my age because I was doing one to two hours music training as well. Now, the school I went to had started a school orchestra. Violin, banjo and drums. And I loved music. But as I say when I went in the air force I didn’t take a violin with me and I should have done I suppose. After being in five years my fingers were all stiffened up with, didn’t work. So I abandoned it straightaway and got on with earning a living
[knocking on door]
GH: Come in.
Other: Sorry to disturb you.
AH: I’ll just put this on pause.
[recording paused]
GH: They don’t look like reading my writing for a start. But there’s a cutting in there I think I mentioned it earlier on from Stalin who stated he wanted the Bomber Command to burn Dresden because they were using it to refuel the battlefield. And it wasn’t so because after the war I were working with some of the replacement Polish people and they said they’d been in Dresden and there were no army facilities there at all. There was no reason for them to bomb it.
[pause]
GH: And I have a younger sister who’s ninety in October. Laurie. So we’re quite a long lived family aren’t we?
AH: How old are you?
GH: Ninety four. Feel a hundred and four [laughs] some mornings. Yes.
AH: You’ve got a picture here of Squadron Leader Munro.
GH: Yes. He wanted to crew up with us. He’s just recently died you know. A New Zealander. That was when I was at gunnery school at Scotland.
AH: Which one’s you?
GH: How dare you say that [laughs] I haven’t changed that much at all surely. I’m the shortest one. Yes. And that’s my favourite photograph of myself.
AH: That’s nice.
[pause]
GH: Yes. It’s a wonderful world and I’ve met some wonderful people and I’ve had some wonderful friends and relatives. It’s been enjoyment. Mixing the good with the bad makes you appreciate it all the more. We came out of there as you go in.
AH: You talked about the strain of it. What was the worst strain?
GH: Being with Bomber Command? Well, naturally the, the operations themselves. They were well organised, I don’t mean like that but I mean they always taught us the best crews will get through. Did I mention to you before luck has a lot to do with it? And I mean a matter of seconds in some cases. I never flew as an air gunner though. I was in the Home Guard before I went in the air force. In Leicester. Well a little village outside Leicester called Narborough. And they used to send me out on a railway bridge defending the bridge at night time with a bayonet fastened to a broomstick with string. I don’t know what you were supposed to do with it. I had a few thoughts. But by the time I went into the air force I was fully trained and I’d got a Canadian Ross rifle that was in a cloth bag with about two inches of grease all around it. And I cleaned it up and the stock of it was beautiful. Lovely gun. And one of the chaps, he was a sergeant. I think he must have been a sniper. He said, ‘I’ll teach you how to fire a gun George.’ Because,’ he said, ‘Let’s face it. Who’s the last person that knows when you’re going to pull the trigger?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Well you don’t pull the trigger. You squeeze your hand. And you don’t jolt it.’ And I could hit an eight hundred target, a bull at eight hundred yards. Which is quite good shooting I think. But I never did fly as a air gunner. I flew once as a tail gunner. And the tail one was like that. You knew all I got it I knew I wouldn’t have that for long.
AH: Did you get bombed yourself?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Did you get bombed yourself? In Leicester.
GH: Well, Leicester got bombed while I lived there. But we lived on the outskirts. And of course like most targets they usually go for the city centre first where all the main multiples are. And I was, I was quite happy in the Home Guard because we got very very good training. Initially it was useless. For the first two years. But when they got organised they got organised. And I sit and watch “Dad’s Army,” you know. And I I don’t know who picked the cast but it’s amazing to think [laughs] they look like real people [laughs] Anything else?
AH: Did you meet your wife during the war?
GH: No. I met her after the war. One of the boys who’s died in the last two years from Leicester was in training with me all the way through and he finished up at Coningsby on 97 Squadron and I finished up on 83. And his wife and my wife or future wife or his future wife, they used to go dancing Saturday nights together. And I met this girl one night in the RAF club. And I can’t understand that, I can’t explain the feeling but she was wonderful. And I said, ‘Can I see you again?’ And she said, ‘Well, I can’t see you for two weeks because I’m going up to Lincolnshire. To a town that you’ve never heard of.’ Well, I’d done all my training and everything here so I said, ‘Well, try me then.’ She said, ‘Louth.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got news for you. I can’t go to Louth again [laughs] They’d shoot me.’ And she was always dying her hair. I think after the first two months I knew her she must have had about six or seven changes of colour. She was lovely though.
AH: What was her name?
GH: Barbara. And when we first got married we had to live in the front room of my mum and dad’s house until we could get somewhere. Everyone does I suppose. And her uncle was a butcher and he used to do all the joints of meat for Leicester. And this friend of his, a friend of his or someone in the trade he dealt with was the housing minister for Leicester. And in those days you couldn’t get housed if you hadn’t got a wood licence. You had to have a timber licence. And he mentioned to this gent that I was having trouble with my wife’s breathing because my mother and father had a dog and she was allergic to dog hair. And he said to this young gent, ‘He’s just come out the air force and he definitely wants a house but, and his wife is allergic to dog hairs and has to get out, you know of home and have his own place.’ And the fellow twiddled it a little bit and got me a timber licence and away we went. We bought a semi for nineteen hundred quid. And then after a while we bought, we bought a complete des res like, you know what do you call it? A house on its own at, in Oadby near to Leicester at the back of the racecourse and you got a full view of the racecourse. And I used to say to people, ‘I’ve got a nice place. There’s about four furlongs of grass at the back and they came and cut it, you know regularly,’ [laughs] But as I say we had this problem with this hooligan who was threatening her so that’s how we moved to Louth. But I mean moving to Louth was like going next door to the pair of us because we’d both been here so many times.
AH: Did you like Louth?
GH: I think it’s very nice. And I think once you get into Louth the people will do anything but they’re a little offish at the start. But it’s a lovely little town. I was born in Mansfield. In the Sherwood Forest. But I did like Louth there. Very much.
AH: What was your home like there?
GH: Where?
AH: In Mansfield.
GH: Well, I was brought up with my grandparents. I wasn’t brought up with my mother and father. They couldn’t get anywhere to live in, although my sister had been born. They wouldn’t accept anyone with two children so they farmed me off with my grandparents. My grandmother Holmes, when I was six or seven or eight years of age taught me how to sew and darn and knit.
AH: Did you have use of that later?
GH: Yes. Because I went into the hosiery trade and it was the machines that knit things make exactly the same loop as you do a knitting pin. And of course as I say I, I had a quite a few jobs. The job I had at Byfords. The other chap working next to me who was in his forties hadn’t been taken to the army. Hadn’t been called up. With a wife and two children. He always used to go down smoking in the toilets about once every hour and I used to run his machines as well as mine. And one day, you used to put your earnings under the table where they kept all the yarns and everything. He had a sneaky look and he found out I was earning more than him. So he went to the manager and he said he didn’t see any reason why someone’s underage that were in machinery should be earning more than he did. So they said, ‘Oh alright, we’ll give you two of his machines. They had me in the office and they said, ‘You’ve been bragging.’ I said, ‘What about?’ They said, ‘What you earn.’ I said, ‘I daren’t tell my father what earn. He’d go mad.’ I was earning as much or twice as much as my dad. And they said, ‘Well, we’re going to take two of your machines off you and you’ll run them for him.’ So I said, ‘I have an idea now. You can stick them up your arse.’ And they gave him the bloody lot. I got sacked for insolence. I got another job. I was never out of work. I got training that was necessary and I could go anywhere. I worked at Byfords. They sacked me three times after that incident and a very good job. The only snag is when I went into it before the war you were using cotton and well, wool and the machines were covered in like a white powder from the cotton in the wool, you know. And after the war when they started using synthetic fibres I think the synthetic fibres were so small you swallowed them. And I have a difficulty with breathing actually which is due to that I think. But nobody would say so because you then would jump then and say I want paid for being. I don’t think, I don’t think there’s more than one or two hosiery factories left in Leicester and it used to be the main city for hosiery. But that was all, that was all shift work. Night work and not very conducive for family life. I used to go to work because I mean you were busy. It didn’t bother you but my wife was stuck at home on her own you know and I didn’t realise until after I’d lost her that that’s what the problem was really. Basically. But we had a good life together. Yeah.
AH: Was your father or your grandfather in the First World War?
GH: Both my father and my wife’s father were in the First World War. My wife’s father was stationed at Louth here. In the Leicester, what did they call it? It was a mountain brigade. And he was only a little bloke. Smaller than me. And he looked like, well you just couldn’t imagine him sat on a horse.
AH: What he was called?
GH: Pardon?
AH: What he was called?
GH: His surname? Evans. Evans. Good Evans. I went to Edmonton for my gunnery course and we had a group captain called Group Captain Evans Evans and he got awarded the French medal. The Croix de Guerre. And he said, ‘Although I flew in World War One I’ve not flown in World War Two and I don’t think I deserved it. So I shall get a crew together and fly.’ So I went to my CO and I said, ‘Look, old Evans Evans is getting a crew together.’ We had a chance to get in because at that time I was a spare. And he said, ‘No, I don’t think so. My wireless op is covering that because he’s one behind everyone else in the crew and we all want to finish together.’ And off they went and they were shot down by the Americans before they got to the war. Before they got to the war line they were shot down by the Americans. And the only one that got out was the rear gunner. So that was another lucky escape. Just how the penny drops isn’t it? Am I boring you? Say so if I am. Anyway [pause] I am suffering really from the breathing quite badly.
AH: Shall we finish?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Do you want us to finish?
GH: Yes.
AH: Thank you very much.
GH: Quite all right. If it’s been of any —
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 George Holmes
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Anna Hoyles
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-16
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHolmesGH161016
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
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.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Cathie Hewitt
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Brazil
Chile
Germany
Great Britain
Peru
Chile--Santiago
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Stuttgart
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
1946
Description
An account of the resource
George was born in Mansfield and was bought up by his Grandparents until he was seven when he moved back to his parents in Leicester where his Father ran a coffee shop. He was a semi-professional musician playing violin, trumpet and mandolin. He studied hosiery at college and worked in hosiery production his entire working life. He joined the Home Guard in Narborough, and recalls how he defended the railway bridge at night time with a bayonet fastened to a broom stick with string. After volunteering for the Air Force he was sent to Blackpool for training. The corporal who taught him foot drill went on to be the comedian Max Wall. He was then sent to RAF Yatesbury for his radio course, and then forwarded to the Air Armourers school. After completing the course, he was posted to RAF Evanton for a gunner’s course. His next posting was to RAF Market Harborough, but was only there for three weeks before he was sent to RAF Silverstone for crewing up. His first station was RAF Bardney with 9 Squadron for a few weeks. He remembers that when they arrived at Bardney it was deserted and they found everyone lying on the floor in the kitchen as the bomb dump was on fire. The crew were then posted to RAF Skellingthorpe in 50 Squadron and they completed 20 operations. George recalls a daylight operation on a V-1 site, and he witnessed the Lancaster that was above them blown up and seeing the bodies of the crew falling past their aircraft. The crew were then split up when the pilot and navigator joined the Pathfinders and he became a spare bod. He eventually joined an Australian crew in 83 Squadron at RAF Coningsby and completed a further nine operations. His pilot was called Cassidy and the nose art on the Lancaster was “Hop along Cassidy’s Flying Circus.” After the war he took part in a tour of South America and discusses an earthquake in Peru. He discusses his religious beliefs and how the war, Bomber Command, and Arthur Harris have been remembered. He met his wife Barbara after the war at a dance in the RAF club and they had one son.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:08:02 audio recording
50 Squadron
83 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
bomb dump
bomb struck
bombing
civil defence
crewing up
faith
forced landing
Home Guard
Lancaster
mid-air collision
nose art
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
RAF Bardney
RAF Coningsby
RAF Evanton
RAF Market Harborough
RAF Silverstone
RAF Skellingthorpe
training
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/586/8855/PHorryMA1601.2.jpg
a3a6378973a7fbef9b4fe5ac6856674f
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/586/8855/AHorryM160819.2.mp3
0682cfe82dfdf58654793dcb33e77860
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
Horry, Margaret
M Horry
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Horry, MA
Description
An account of the resource
20 items. An oral history interview with Margaret Horry, and her brother, Gordon Prescott's log book (1582098 Royal Air Force), documents and family photographs. She discusses her brothers' and husband's service during the war. Gordon Prescott flew operations as a wireless operator / air gunner with 12 Squadron and was lost without trace 7 January 1945. <br /><br />Additional information on Gordon Prescott is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/119000/">IBCC Losses Database.</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Margaret Horry and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-08-19
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.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
RP: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre the interviewer is Rob Pickles the interviewee is Margaret Horry the interview is taking place in Mrs Horry’s home in Exmouth Devon on the 19th August 2016, Nina Pickles is also present. Good morning Margaret thank you for allowing me into your home for this interview could I start by asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself and your experiences in the Second World War.
MH: Well I was born in Spalding, parents had a sweet shop and Gordon lived at home, Bob left home when he was seventeen so I can’t really remember him at home, Gordon worked for Spalding Free Press desperate to get into the RAF in fact he had his own Morse Code Morse Sender Key and he used to send messages to the young man next door so obviously he wanted to be a wireless op so eventually he went off and my first memories are hearing wave after wave of Lancs, Wellingtons et cetera going across the back of our house out on ops one night mother said ‘I wonder how many will come back?’ and of course one night Gordon didn’t come back he flew with 12th Squadron from Wickenby next day eighth, ninth of January knock at the back door little telegram boy we had them in those days with a small envelope father took it in mother went to him they sat at the they sat at the dining table opened the envelope silence they told me and I left them I said ‘I’m going for a walk’ father said ‘don’t tell anybody’ [tearful] and so I left them to their silent tears and walked for miles tears streaming down my face I remember um the Wizard of Oz film Somewhere Over The Rainbow so I thought one day I’ll meet Gordon at the end of the rainbow so perhaps it won’t be so long [very emotional] we didn’t hear anything other than he was missing. Forty six I think presumed killed then all his aftermath came father didn’t reply got a reminder from Inland Revenue [laughs] so that was Gordon gone. Next RAF connection of course was my husband he was ten years nearly ten years older than I like all of them he didn’t talk really about what he’d done had a small connection with 9th Squadron although he didn’t do so many ops with them did an awful lot with 106 out of Metheringham had one bad raid he did say think it was St. Leu d’Esserent only two got back typical RAF he said ‘we had an enormous breakfast ‘cos they’d catered for more to get home’, he flew all the time with Bill Williams who was then flight lieutenant then squadron leader so they moved to Bardney lots of practice then off to Russia for Tirpitz their plane was US so they didn’t actually bomb the Tirpitz from there but that’s where he got his DFM for um helping the navigator because conditions weather were dreadful I had to smile to myself when I saw the citation because tell him to go somewhere two miles away and he’d get lost so [laughs] it was a bit odd seeing he spent such a long time helping to get to Russia, he was the only crew member to stay on for ops, Bill Williams had two children, the others were married and Bill was older, so he went to Singapore with 50 Squadron for tyber force [sic] they were going to bomb precision bomb Japan but of course they dropped the atom bomb so they didn’t but I think seeing the state of the POW’s which they were bringing home particularly those in Changi stayed with him really all his life we had a friend who had been a POW and they became great friends at the golf club each respected each other I think so what next. Arthur had another brother older than him who was a regular he joined in ‘35 having been a footman in London I can’t imagine Frank as a footman at all [laughs] but he joined up and was at Mildenhall and he was in 9 Squadron he was a gunner he won the DFM for in the citation shooting down two German aircraft took part in the Heligoland fiasco as it became known he did probably a whole tour with 9 before leaving, he used to come to see us after he’d left the RAF ‘cos he didn’t come home until 1954 he had been flying in Scotland towards the end of the war instructing ferrying naval people all around the place, took part in the Berlin airlift, friends with Freddie Laker but fortunately didn’t invest with him [laughs], came out of the RAF in ‘54 then took his civil pilot’s licence which is not bad going for somebody who left school when he was fourteen.
RP: That’s very [unclear] so who did he fly for as a civilian?
MH: I don’t know one time he was flying from Bournemouth to Paris didn’t like that ‘no sooner take off then you land’ he said.
RP: [Laughs]
MH: Then at one time he was carrying oil pipes in Iraq et cetera when they were laying oil then he was with Bahamas Airways and he stayed in the Bahamas.
RP: I wonder why [laughs].
MH: He got into property development and came back owned a house in the Isle of Man obviously for tax purposes ‘cos he died in ’80, 82.
RP: But?
MH: So left an awful lot of money [laughs].
RP: Yes so a long flying career though.
MH: Yes.
RP: So to go back to Frank on 9 Squadron you said he did the full tour which a lot of people never did did he ever feel himself lucky to have done the full tour did he ever talk about that?
MH: No, I think he had the same attitude as Arthur that’s not going to happen to them if you think it you will and Gordon was always doubtful I always remember Arthur saying ‘that’s no good if you think it you’ll go’.
RP: So what you said Gordon had always wanted to join the RAF what provoked the RAF was there no RAF history in the family?
MH: No no none at all.
RP: He just decided that was for him. Did Arthur ever say why he picked the RAF and not the army.
MH: I think he did because of Frank.
RP: He just followed in his brother’s footsteps?
MH: Yes he not idolised Frank but um huge connection between them they were very similar Frank never married but always had a bevy of model type girls [laughs] surround him we were very very fon fond of him he’d just turn up at the house I remember one day in Cambridge I’d cleaned the house from top to bottom everything dumped in the kitchen, I had a six month old and a four year old, and there was Frank he was very particular but he didn’t mind the kitchen being a mess, or Sheffield picks up the phone ‘I’m at the station Margaret think I’ll get a taxi’ he just arrived.
RP: But because you liked him you didn’t mind?
MH: No.
RP: So did he ever look back at his RAF career or was it something just in the past?
MH: No.
RP: He never.
MH: No.
RP: He never spoke about Bomber Command?
MH: No.
RP: I just wondered the two of them how they felt when they didn’t get did they ever mention not getting a medal at the end of the war ‘cos that’s always been a sticking point hasn’t it?
MH: Yes um Arthur thought it was very unfair fighter boys got recognised bombers were vilified and everybody brings Dresden but Hamburg got it first and what about bombing all the Germans bombing neutral Rotterdam um it was not fair and Harris took that’s what upset Arthur all the other navy army chiefs were recognised Harris wasn’t that hurt, he’d met Harris he never said what raid they were going on but Harris came and addressed the squadron finishing by saying ‘goodbye lads don’t suppose I shall see many of you again’ but I don’t know which which raid it was [laughs].
RP: Yes.
MH: And when they came back and oh another thing that annoyed him 9 bombed the salt pan which 617 didn’t ‘cos only one got through the captain of that one of 617 feels peeved ‘cos he’s never mentioned so did moan.
RP: Yes.
MH: And he was never mentioned and of course the programme on the radio um about the dams they never mention the salt that 617 didn’t damage and never mention 9 had to go with Tallboy but they dropped the level of water increased the width of the dam there were twenty four ack-ack guns and balloons the report was that it was simple raid but Arthur did talk about that and he thought it was a bit dicey take, no, no Winko had a hit, Arthur had a hit, and of course it wasn’t breached.
RP: No it’s a very solid dam unfortunately ‘cos it’s earth it’s earth and stone, so -
MH: Yes.
RP: It’s very hard to damage.
MH: They increased stones.
RP: You mentioned before that Arthur was injured on one raid what what happened there?
MH: Yes. Um it’s in one report from.
RP: He was hit by shrapnel?
MH: Shrapnel he was bombing well in bombing position shrapnel came through hit him in the chest so he called ‘skipper I’ve been hit’ so Pretty Johns the flight engineer came down to him pulled his jacket et cetera and pulled out this red hot piece of metal all my dear husband could say was ‘you clot I only got this shirt out of stores this morning’ [laughs].
RP: How badly was he injured? [laughs]
MH: Um oh a plaster the next night nothing happened he still did had the scar from it.
RP: So it wasn’t as deep as you imagine it was just a piercing rather than a a sort of.
MH: Yes hmm hmm
RP: Intrusion?
MH: Penetrated.
RP: Still it can’t have been very nice.
MH: But he swears having been in bombing position a voice called out ‘Chucky’ which was a schoolboy nickname the voice was Mr. Headman Hamilton a teacher so Arthur thought naturally he turned to see where this voice was coming from if he hadn’t have turned shrapnel would have hit him straight in the face and killed him.
RP: And he never really knew where the voice came from?
MH: No and nobody knew the nickname ‘Chucky’ when it left school that was it so very very strange.
RP: How strange is that.
MH: [laughs] very definite about that he was.
RP: Did Arthur ever sort of give you an opinion which he squadron he preferred that he was on did he have a favourite?
MH: Well I think 9 he
RP: Because the two of them served on 9 Squadron didn’t they at different times?
MH: Yes don’t know why so he said he did less with 9 then 106 but um didn’t say much apart from that time when only two got back and the whole village was in mourning he said, we’ve been to Metheringham um quite eerie.
RP: Was there is there a cemetery at Metheringham I think there is in the village a small cemetery?
MH: No there’s a little memorial garden there and if you come out go a mile down the road you get to the second runway.
RP: Oh right.
MH: At the side of that there’s a little garden and a plaque in the seat and there’s a runway straight in front of you and I sat there got a most peculiar feeling.
RP: Yes yes ‘cos people have taken off from there.
MH: Yes yes.
RP: The ghosts, but yes I think 9 Squadron has had quite a reputation, what did he think of the Lancaster did he ever give you his opinion of the aircraft as such?
MH: Devil to get in to down to where he had to go to his office as he called it but fantastic I mean they got home on two engines they got shot up lots of times as Ron Harvey said ‘it’s quite strange to see bullets going from through the fuselage from one side to the other’ [laughs].
RP: And not be in the way.
MH: It was yes, one raid they were chased by Messerschmitt and they’re being shot up Bill dived over the sea and a little Scottish voice came over ‘skipper if you don’t get up soon I’ll get wet feet’ [laughs] and that was um um Sandy rear gunner.
RP: Oh yes but I suppose Arthur was in the bomb aimer position he’d have the best view really of the ground?
MH: I I yes I think.
RP: He sort of was very close [laughs]?
MH: Well forgot [unclear] Harvey navigator who holds forth quite bit but as Arthur said he [emphasis] didn’t see anything I think that’s what got through to Arthur being a bomb aimer he saw more than anybody, skipper, he and rear gunner would see the most of the damage they were doing, what was coming at them, the flak, the fighters, so those two positions were I think the nastiest in terms of what they could see.
RP: But when he and Frank met up did they ever discuss their experience?
MH: No.
RP: They never sort of looked back at all?
MH: No.
RP: Did they go and see the Dambusters film [laughs].
MH: No! It was strange one night there was a film on not Dambusters ‘cos we didn’t watch that but another one and what else Danger by Moonlight?
RP: No, “Ill Met by Moonlight” it’s a different one is that.
MH: It was a black and white.
RP: An Elstree black and white probably.
MH: And it was on the television and it was a raid, bomb aimer featured, skipper, Arthur sat there and suddenly said ‘we don’t want to watch that do we?’ so no switched off it was getting to him.
RP: Yes yes ‘cos it’s taken a long long time to get people to talk about it.
MH: Yes.
RP: Because we didn’t understand the horror of it all and the feelings they had in losing so many of their friends.
MH: Yes.
RP: I think er that’s one thing. Can we go back to yourself then can you remember when the war finally ended where you were and what you were doing?
MH: Oh still in Spalding at High School um I think the day I took the entrance exam to Spalding High School went to a wedding reception held in the sergeants mess when RSM Lord of the Parachute Regiment got married to a Spalding girl that of course was before Arnhem because I don’t know which regiment John was in but they were confined to barracks so often before long it got to be a joke but eventually they went and of course it was a bit of a disaster, quite a lot had married Spalding girls, Spalding felt it dreadfully, John Lord went on he was very famous with the Parachute Regiment for organising the POW Camp even the Camp CO knocked on his door and he when he came home he was RSM at Sandhurst but I remember that because they were camped on playing fields at the Grammar School.
RP: Oh were they.
MH: But Spalding I did go out at night, mother and father didn’t, lots of people, lots of ATS girls, Polish officers and some men from somewhere all celebrating, but then of course there was still Japan several people still had sons, husbands who were hear it on the news if they were alive and of course the war having ended in ‘45 it just seemed to go on and on because of rationing, I don’t know when it was ’43, ‘44 we were bombed our wonderful department store which was all white and gilt and Father Christmas used to stand on the balcony that was totally demolished, and we did go in the shelter that night our shop was the end of what had been a row of cottages with a single roof right along a reed and slate roof and we were at the beginning another shop on the corner an incendiary dropped on right through the roof so course we would all have gone up but it landed in the toilet pan [laughs] and went out [laughs].
RP: Oh right [laughs] oh that’s a good place to go precision bombing.
MH: And fifty yards away um Penningtons Carpet window back entrance that was totally demolished so it got very near to whether we’d got a home to go to.
RP: How many times did you have actually go down into the shelter during the war then?
MH: Oh twice.
RP: Just the twice?
MH: It was it didn’t go down it was next door to the Police Station which is still there it looks like a castle two turrets and that was the Police Station and the air raid shelter down the side it was an oblong brick built flat roofed shelter [laughs].
RP: Not ideal then.
MH: No, just across the road from it was the Liberal Club built eighteen hundred something that was totally demolished, at school we had the rounded shelters so we had air raid drill and this would be beginning of the war when I was at infants it was smelly [laughs] I remember that and er I know once or twice perhaps they were perhaps they were trying to bomb the guns and searchlights stations because something must have got near because mother and I sat underneath the oak dining table, which I’ve now got, which had a bar across the middle underneath which one could sit on, and er no we did go in the shelter twice.
RP: So you mentioned about all the siblings and Arthur and Frank all the family did they all survive the ones that were in the various forces they all came home?
MH: Yes yes there was I mean Arthur was Bomber Command, Frank was Bomber Command, Fred was Coastal Command for a long time in the Azores he was a warrant officer and got the DFC, George the eldest joined the army in 1935 in tanks he was in Egypt when I think due for leave when war was declared.
RP: Oh dear.
MH: Went right through Alamein, Italy.
RP: And survived.
MH: And survived.
RP: He did well if he was in the Tank Regiment.
MH: Yes.
RP: He did very well.
MH: He was the well not glorified but the one the officers liked to have the eternal experienced sergeant.
RP: Yes [laughs].
MH: He you know he had a mention in dispatches because a tank what he called had a brew up hit so he got his crew out they were being machine gunned from the top of a dune and he told them all to crawl towards the machine gun ‘cos trajectory they were under it which took some thinking.
RP: Yes yes not the sort of thing you’d want to crawl to.
MH: He was a very very had a very dry sense of humour.
RP: It’s good that they all survived I think we’ve covered most of their careers um is there anything else you think we need to know about Bomber Command that you might have missed a quick recollection I think we’ve got a lot of we’ve certainly got a lot of um memorabilia to look at and er I think that’s been so interesting I’m sorry that the emotion of it got to you but I can understand how sad it must be the memories are still there for your brother but I think he would be pleased that we are still remembering him.
MH: Yes.
RP: And I think and this he would be pleased.
MH: This is it he felt neglected.
RP: And I think Frank and Arthur and all the others would be pleased that at last.
MH: Yes.
RP: Maybe too late for them but
MH: And it’s being passed on.
RP: That’s right.
MH: A friend said ‘oh but that was so long ago’ Arthur used to say that ‘oh that was in the past’ um but my friend said ‘oh but that’s history’ I said ‘yes and history must not be forgotten’.
RP: And must not be repeated even.
MH: No.
RP: Anyway Margaret I’d just like to say thank you for that and it’s been lovely talking to you.
MH: Thank you.
RP: Thank you for agreeing to invite us here thank you very much.
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 Margaret Horry
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rod Pickles
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
2016-08-19
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHorryM160819, PHorryMA1601
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:37:00 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Margaret Horry was born in Spalding. She remembers aircraft taking off going on operations, and retells wartime stories of her relatives. Arthur served in Bomber Command as a bomb aimer. Frank was also in Bomber Command. He joined the Royal Air Force as an air gunner at RAF Mildenhall (9 Squadron), gained a Distinguished Flying Medal, and served until 1954. After that he worked for Bahamas Airways. Fred served in Coastal Command, was stationed at the Azores as a warrant officer, and was eventually awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
George joined the Army in 1935 in a tank regiment, serving in Egypt at Al El-Alamein, and in Italy. He was also mentioned in dispatches.
Gordon worked for the Spalding Free Press, in his free time he was a keen radio amateur wishing to become wireless operator. He joined the Royal Air Force and served with 12 Squadron at RAF Wickenby. Margaret reminisces receiving a telegram claiming he was missing, the subsequent notification of death and the whole family grieving. Margaret’s husband Arthur, was ten years her senior - he served in the Royal Air Force with 9 Squadron and 106 Squadron from RAF Metheringham. He took part in an operation to Saint-Leu-d'Esserent with Flight Lieutenant Bill Williams, then was posted to RAF Bardney practising for Tirpitz operations. Gained his Distinguished Flying Medal, he went to Singapore with 50 Squadron as part of the Tiger Force. He married Margaret after the war. Margaret also elaborates on the bombing of Dresden and discusses lack of recognition for Bomber command veterans.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Suffolk
Azores
Norway
Singapore
Egypt
France
France--Creil
Italy
North Africa
Egypt--Alamayn
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Coastal Command
British Army
Civilian
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Carolyn Emery
106 Squadron
12 Squadron
50 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
grief
killed in action
memorial
perception of bombing war
RAF Bardney
RAF Metheringham
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Wickenby
Tirpitz
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/589/8858/AHughesWR150713.2.mp3
18e37bacec69f09e545be17b9d8cdabd
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
Hughes, Bob
William Robert Hughes
W R Hughes
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Hughes, WR
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Bob Hughes (751133, 137124 Royal Air Force). He flew operations with 149, 50 and 23 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
NM: So, this is now recording, and my name is Nigel Moore, I’m the interviewer, and I’m interviewing Flight Lieutenant Bob Hughes on the 13th of July. I’m in Mr Hughes’ home in North Hants. So, Mr Hughes, would you like to tell us something about your upbringing and your life before you joined the RAF?
BH: I was only a, a ordinary seniors school and I never went, never passed Eleven Plus, so I went to the, one of the senior productive schools and then I, I passed, I suppose, most things, you know, and when the opportunity came, I took [unclear] said we had a – I’d been working as a coachbuilder, or in, with a coachbuilding firm, and we were, were making Rolls Royce – taking Rolls Royce chassis in and making them into finished cars. And while I was there, we had a fellow named Serge Kalinsky, he was a Scandinavian diplomat and he started swearing and said ‘There’s gonna be a bloody war any time now! Within the next few months, I guarantee it, in the next few months!’ So, knowing that I – my father had had a rough time in the army, in the trenches, I thought ‘ Well, no army for me, I’m gonna join the air force now,’ because Sywell was a handy aerodrome, so I went and joined weekend air force. And, once I was in there and the war was declared, naturally I was transferred straight away into the main RAF. And, erm –
NM: So, you joined a reserve squadron, did you?
BH: That’s right, RAF Volunteer Reserves. And I don’t know the na – well, I think it was 23 Squadron that I went to, which was when – during the Battle of Britain.
NM: So, how – can you describe your training, your flying training?
BH: Flying training?
NM: What were you training on? What were you flying?
BH: Well, mostly, in Ansons and, well, you know, I, I’m terrible at trying to remember the names of these aircraft tonight, but the – oh dear, two, two, two engined, the planes that we flew in, and – oh, I can’t think of the, the names, have I got it in here at all? [sound of turning pages]
NM: Not to worry, what about the training itself?
BH: Well, this was to go in these aircraft and did a few bail-outs practices and in the, in the, oh dear, in the yards of some big firms where they, they’d got escape possibility there, so we tried, tried those out several times. [background noises, turning pages]
NM: So, you say you flew in the Battle of Britain?
BH: Yes.
NM: What –
BH: That was in Blenheims.
NM: Can you de – can you talk –
BH: Now, this is the thing: quite often, when the Battle of Britain is mentioned, it’s either – what’s the two [unclear] the two aircraft that were always noticed? I think every time they mention these two aircraft, I think, how about the Night Shifts? ‘Cause I flew in, in the, in the Night Shift, and the aircraft we flew in wasn’t – oh dear, I’m terrible at names, I’m a terrible, terrible person to interview, really, because my memory is absolutely shocking. Blenheim, yes, but [pause] these, these were the usual things that we flew in those days, Ansons and Blenheims.
NM: So, can you describe the role that you played in the Battle of Britain flying these Blenheims?
BH: Well, I was a wireless operator/air gunner, and of course, in the, in those aircraft, you could picture everything, what am I talking about? Got a picture here [background noises].
NM: Yep, there’s the Blenheim.
BH: That’s – do you rec – do you recognise the one?
NM: Mr Hughes is pointing out a Mark 1 Blenheim.
BH: Mark 1 Blenheim, yeah, that’s right, yeah.
NM: ‘S’ right, and you were –
BH: And we had a, we had a turret on the top.
NM: And that’s where you were.
BH: When I flew later, in, in the big aircraft, the four-engine aircraft – they’re all here [background noises] when I flew later in the Wellington – that one’s the Lancaster, that is the Dambuster, they’ve got no turret on there but we, where we flew in the Lancasters, we had a turret, you see but previously, during the Battle of Britain, it was on, on the twin-engine aircraft.
NM: So, when you flew the Blenheims during the Battle of Britain, were you on bombing missions, and what – if so, what were your targets?
BH: Well, it, we were on defence.
NM: On defence?
BH: Defence patrol, up and down from the south coast up to, up the Thames Estuary, most of the time. [pause, sound of turning pages]
NM: And this was – were you called the Night Shift?
BH: The Night Shift, yes. There we are, there’s the aircraft. And that’s the flew – the pilot I flew with most of the time, this is Alan Gowarth [?] and that was, yes, and all Blenheims.
NM: So, this was Number 23 Squadron, night –
BH: 23 Squadron, night fighter squadron, yes.
NM: And can you describe your operations flying for 23 Squadron?
BH: Well –
NM: In the Blenheim?
BH: It was a, a patrol, up and down from the south coast up the Thames, the Thames Estuary, keeping a guard on things to the starboard, you know, any incoming aircraft, and we, we had quite a few that we, we followed, and went and dived down with them but we didn’t actually have a contact. [Pause] This first one, yeah apart from anything else, we had anti-aircraft cooperation, searchlight cooperation, going backwards and forwards along the Thames Estuary. That’s what they were: night defensive patrols. And that was, that’s the fella, fella that I flew with most of the time.
NM: So, you encountered a few contacts but didn’t actually –
BH: We didn’t see anybody shot, shot down but we, we fired at them and we saw the bullets, you know, sort of going their direction but didn’t see anything falling down, not then.
NM: And what type of aircraft were you engaging?
BH: It was a Blenheim. Oh, I don’t know; well, they were twin, twin-engined aircraft, yeah. I can’t –
NM: Okay.
BH: Think of the name. [sound of turning pages] I’ve got a picture.
NM: So after the 23 Squadron, how did you move to – can you describe how you moved from Fighter Command to Bomber Command?
BH: Well, at the time, they were losing a lot of crews and aircraft and crews in, in Bomber Command, and so they were asking for volunteers and I volunteered to – went to Number 9 Bomber Squadron, which was at Honington, but I only did one air test with them, and then I was asked if I would volunteer and go to one, 149 Squadron, which was at Mildenhall, and that’s where I did most of the bombing trips that I did, up to, up to seventy-three, but they weren’t all to Germany. A lot – we had a spell over in the Middle East, and it was Benghazi that we were bombing then.
NM: So, the start of your operational life with 149 Squadron –
BH: 149, yes.
NM: Was that –
BH: Mildenhall.
NM: At Mildenhall.
BH: Yes.
NM: And –
BH: And we were –
NM: And how did you – can you describe how you met your crew and got a crew together?
BH: No, only a sort of friendly meeting and you like the look of somebody and who you think was, was genuine. This first fellow we went – I flew with was a Squadron Leader Heather, and we went to Wilhelmshaven, [unclear] class cruisers and we were, we were bombing all around it, when this – oh, we went there again another night, repeat, repeat. I tell you what, when we first, when we first went there, they, they took us to canal, canals, and we got to aim in the canal with the mines, and mind you, was such a narrow mine, margin, and having such a small tar – item, when we got back home, we told them how difficult it was, so we suggested ‘Why not bomb it instead of just putting mines there?’ So they sent us back the next night to, to do that. That was Wilhelmshaven.
NM: So, at this point, you were flying Wellingtons?
BH: Wellingtons, yes.
NM: And this was in nineteen-forty –
BH: 1949, February ’49.
NM: Forty – 1941?
BH: Ah, no, no, beg your pardon.
NM: Yes.
BH: Yes, ’41, yes.
NM: So, can you describe squadron life on 149 Bomber Command at Mil – Mildenhall?
BH: Well, it was just –
NM: What was life like?
BH: Just a friendly get-together, you know, I’m ninety, nearly ninety-five now and I was twenty, twenty then, nineteen or twenty. So, you know, to remember exactly what we did, we got friendly; whoever we met, we made friends with and wanted to know how we got on.
NM: Did you go out for nights out around Mildenhall? What was – what were they like?
BH: Yes, yes, but, you know, just a drink here and there and, but nothing to really note.
NM: And what about your crew? Do you have particular memories of your crew?
BH: Yes, I think I, quite honestly, having done so many and for such a long period, long number of ops, I reckon I was very lucky picking the, or matching up with a good set of wonderful pilots. You see, each of the pilots I flew with were absolutely wonderful; they seemed to go to the target and did the business and get back, no messing and no wandering about all over Germany.
NM: And how about the rest of the crew? Were you a close group?
BH: Yes, yes, I think, generally speaking it was with the naviga – with the observer, or navigator, as they were then, more than anything, and because with the navigator, it was a question of, when we got over the target, sort of the geography of the place. I remember one of the things, one of the worst op we went on was Essen, and the geography of that place was so – we could spot it out as easy as anything. [Pause] But then later on, we did a lot of coast, coastal things like Wilhelmshaven, bombing the cruisers there, they, they took [unclear] class cruisers up the, up the, the fjords.
NM: Why was Essen such a bad target?
BH: Well, being an ammunition manufacturing place, I believe it was very heavily defended because of that. I mean, it was a manufacturer of, manufacturer of explosives and suchlike, and we seemed to cruise around it quite a lot, and anyhow, I was always telling the skipper, ‘Such-and-such is at the, on the starboard side,’ or, you know, ‘We’ve got to turn a little bit to the port to get this thing.’ That was on a reserve flight, 149 Squadron, and then I went to a reserve flight at Stradishall where they were preparing to get crews to go out to the Middle East, and then I had a spell in the Middle East.
NM: So, just back on your bombing raids here, over Essen and other German targets, you were giving instructions to the pilot –
BH: Oh yes, yes!
NM: To help him to do what?
BH: Yes, notifying where the canals are shooting off, to the south or the, the west, you know, that sort of thing. On very sunny [?] nights, the, the water whether it was a river or a canal, you could spot it that much easier, and you would report, you know, what you could see.
NM: So, tell us a little bit how you then transferred out to the Middle East. Was this the same squadron, was the whole squadron go out to the Middle East?
BH: Oh, no, no, it was with a, a, I was with this, what, this one point one, this reserve flight to start with, wasn’t I? And then, then we heard that there’d been so many losses, crew losses, and there were appealing for people to, to go to transfer to the Middle East, and so I went to this reserve flight at Stradishall, and from there, via Malta, I went to, to 70 Squadron in Kabrit, which was in Egypt.
NM: That must have been quite a change. What – can you give us your memories of the change in going to the Middle East?
BH: Well, the thing was, we had, we had a turret to go to, and the preparations for, for raids and things were absolutely marvellous. We had an advanced base; we used to land in the desert and then take off again for the raid. Well, this one here, the first one we had, operations against enemy was Menida [?] Aerodrome, so actually, I liked the possibility of going into the front turret if we were going and attacking an aerodrome, so we can go ‘round and, you know, shooting up the, the, the arm – armoury points.
NM: So, you moved from the mid upper to the front for these raids?
BH: That’s right, yes, but most of the time, you know, we were, when you were in the rear turret, we were solely concerned about attacks by enemy aircraft, you know? So, most of our light was emphasised downwards. [Pause] We had one or two come up to us and nose – nosing towards us and managed to tell the pilot to do a dive and then we went down in, in a curve dive, you know, and got shot of them.
NM: So, you encountered enemy aircraft?
BH: Yes, yes.
NM: On many occasions?
BH: Oh, at least, oh, I’ll just think, at least a half a dozen times.
NM: So, tell us about squadron – your memories of squadron life in the desert. How different was it from the UK?
BH: Well, of course, water was the problem, sort of rationing out water, you know, and sort of having exercise, running and all the rest of it, but had to avoid having too much water. But then, in the desert, particularly, that was an even worse problem. [Pause] That was a thing that we did quite often while in the Middle East, was staffing the motor transport on the – between Cairo and Benghazi. The, the main road was, was used quite a lot by the enemy and we’d attack transport along there, and railway sidings, particularly, so they would try bringing the forces, German forces, into the desert via Benghazi and so we attacked the– oh, I can’t, I was trying to think of the, the general’s name: Rommel. Rommel was bringing all his replacement troops into Ben – Benghazi, so we went there and we – well, they called it the mailroom [?] because we hit it so many times, but it was where they were bringing the re – the new forces in.
NM: And were these daylight raids you were on, or night raids?
BH: Mostly night, but we did one or two; well, yes, I should think about a third of them were daylight, but mostly night. [Pause] Then it was a question of geography and remembering the shape of the, the land underneath you, whereabouts you’d got to. Location, on the main way up to Benghazi, we had to sort out Bardi – Bardiyah and Menidi [?] for erm, to locate us that we were hitting the right thing. Railway sidings were attacked an enormous amount, but we had to sort out our geography to make sure we were bombing, strafing the right things. [Pause, sound of turning pages]
NM: So how did, how did your war continue? Can you describe – were there any changes over this period, 1941, in terms of how the squadron life continued?
BH: Well, towards the end of my period, we did a lot of education of fresh crews.
NM: Who had come out to Egypt?
BH: Yes. [Sound of turning pages] Oh, this is Pershore.
NM: Is that –
BH: Pershore, that was the OTU there, Pershore, where I did a lot of bombing from there, and then on to 12 Squadron.
NM: So, tell me how you managed to get then transferred back from the desert, back to Bomber Command in England.
BH: [Sound of turning pages] 50 Squadron [more turning pages] It’s in –
NM: What happened between 70 Squadron and, and 50 Squadron?
BH: We – everything was going alright and we were bombing everything we were asked to, and, but then they were asking for volunteers to do – to go to, to England again.
NM: So, did you volunteer on your own or did the entire crew volunteer?
BH: Oh, I volunteered on my own, I think, but this was 50 Squadron, 5 Group, Skellingthorpe, it was a liaison visit we did there, and while we were there, they wanted us to go to, to – on Lancasters to Magdeburg. As a matter of fact, I’d been on seventy-two trips, missions, and I’d never once been to Berlin, somebody was talking about going to Berlin, so we went to Magdeburg, and after we’d bombed there, the skipper says ‘See on the starboard side, you’ll see Berlin, Bob, and that’s the nearest we shall get to it!’ [slight laugh] And of course we got ‘boo’s by the rest of the crew, and that’s where we finished up. That’s the seventy – that was my very last mission.
NM: So, we’ve jumped ahead into 1944 from 1941.
BH: 1944, January ’44, yeah.
NM: What – going back a little bit to coming out of Egypt into – back to England: you say you went to an OTU?
BH: Yes, yes.
NM: And you were still flying Wellingtons?
BH: Yes, as a trainee. No, not as a trainee, as a –
NM: So you, you became an instructor?
BH: Instructor, yes.
NM: What was it like being –
BH: Yes, was that ’43? January ’43.
NM: That’s ’43, yep.
BH: Yeah, that’s right, went to an OTU.
NM: So you became an instructor?
BH: Instructor, that’s right.
NM: What else –
BH: And we did an operation from there at – oh, to Essen, several times.
NM: Just what was it like converting from a Wellington to a Lancaster? Can you –
BH: Well, we were –
NM: - describe it from a crew’s point of view?
BH: Well, we had wonderful turrets on the Lancaster and, well, I think we were just pleased that it’s – that it was a new aircraft and we’d got four engines, you know? I don’t think we gave it much sort of consideration as to whether it was better or not, it just – we just accepted that it was [emphasis] better, and we were moved fa – we were flying faster. They, they were some of the worst planes [?] we did with Essen and mine laying, oh, we did a mine laying off Heligoland and that, that was a bit dicey; they seemed to have high defensive, the defences at these places. [Pause] While we were on OTU, of course, we did a lot of experience in cross-country, knowing our way about, you know, air-to-air fire, firing and air-to-sea firing, and that’s just for practice.
NM: Describe a little bit life as an instructor as opposed to operational air crew.
BH: Well, I was quite happy about that; I mean, I knew what I was talking about and the – I, I did see quite a lot, the fellers were coming to me for, you know, ‘Well, how do we, how do we sort out this?’ you know, the rear-see [?] retainer keeper, this was a familiar phrase, you know, ‘How do we deal with this when we’re still flying in the air?’ you know? You’ve got to do it with blinds – blindfold, and that was the case in some, sometimes, ‘cause there was machine, with machine guns. [Pause] That was the last trip we did, we were attacked by an ME-210, that was the target, and fired hundred and fifty rounds but there was no confirmed hits. [Pause] I’m sorry I’m not able to answer your questions quite as freely as I ought to, really.
NM: No, don’t worry about that, you’re doing wonderfully.
BH: Well, a few years ago, perhaps I should – I’m a bit more chatty, but – [pause, sound of moving papers] You’ve got a record of service here, you see: I joined in May the 12th 1939, I joined the RAFVR and received calling-up papers, then, into the regular air force in August of that year, August 27th.
NM: So, when you came to the end of your operations, why did you finish operations? Had you done, finished a tour, or –
BH: Yeah, well –
NM: What happened after your last operation?
BH: [Sound of turning pages] Oh yes, joined an AF – was an AFU, that was the training unit.
NM: So you became an instructor again?
BH: That’s right, yes, on gun, guns and armoury.
NM: And that took you to the end of the war, did it?
BH: Yes, well, February, February, no, Oct – no, October ’44. [Pause] Various aircraft that I flew in was a Blenheim Mark 1, a Fairey Battle, that was an early, early one that I flew in a lot, and then the Boulton Paul Defiant, which we did most of the shooting with on, on nights, and then the Avro Anson that, this was a transport aircraft most of the time, and then in the Wellingtons, I flew in the 1, 1C, 1A, Mark 2 and the 3, and then the Avro Lancasters, Marks 1 and 2, and 3. Oh, also, I flew in the Lysanders quite a few times, and Blackburn Bothas; Blackburn Botha, they were used to use for training quite a lot. I know they weren’t very popular for some reason, but they did the trick.
NM: So they were the training aircraft?
BH: Yes, Bothas.
NM: So, I’m interested in the Lysander, your role in flying in a Lysander; what was your role then?
BH: My role then was to, to, to take us into the desert for take-offs, they just, for operations, or to res – rescue from the desert after we’d landed. That’s when I used the Lysander a few times, was for – was rep – was actually saving, you know, escape. I flew also in Fairey Battle, Ansons, Bothas and Lysanders. Well, the Lysander, as I say, was a thing to save you, you know, sort of a –
NM: So, of your seventy-seven operations, either in the desert or across Germany, are any particularly memorable for you?
BH: Seven – seventy-three, it was.
NM: Oh, seventy-three missions.
BH: Yeah.
NM: Okay.
BH: Well, yeah, occasionally we got caught out with the ‘Un [?] defence plane catching catching up with us, but most of the time, we were wide awake to it and whenever we saw something on the starboard or the port side, we’d tell the skipper and we’d dive away. [Pause] Course, one of the main things, maintenance, was the machine, with the machine belts, belts of machines, you know, sort of making sure we didn’t get caught up on those. [Pause] Anyhow, there’s a – unless there a record of service in the whole, the whole lot, that I, you know, kept it down to a minimum there. I went recently to Clarence House; my wife’s been there to the Queen.
NM: When you look back on your time in Bomber Command, what are your main thoughts?
BH: Well, I was glad I was available to do it, and the friendship that you made with most of the people there was pretty good. [Pause] That was the thing; with the link trainer, I used to enjoy going in that, flying the various things through the link trainer.
NM: How do you think Bomber Command has been treated since the end of the war?
BH: What? Haven’t really, haven’t had any more to do with it or knowledge of it, really. No, I don’t think that we’ve – I think we’ve, we would have cottoned on to it a bit more if anything had gone wrong, but everything seemed to be right, we sort of sorted all the problems out.
NM: Do you think Bomber Command has had enough recognition since the end of the war for what they did, or what you did?
BH: Well, yes, I think so, I think we’ve been reason – reasonably recognised.
NM: Tell me about your life since the end of the war. Did you stay in the RAF long?
BH: Oh, no, when – I had been with a firm that repaired converted Rolls Royce from the chassis into a cars, you know, and it was a good firm to work for, and I, I did a lot of this, this work, and this is how I came to meet this Kalinsky, who came in with his Wellington, with his Rolls Royce, and so he told us that there was gonna be a war, so that’s what made me go into the fleet, into the reserve occupation, so that when I was called up, I was bound to be in the RAF.
NM: So, on leaving the RAF, you rejoined the same company?
BH: After – do you know, my memory, my memory’s terrible. Yes, I must, I must have done, went straight to Mulliner’s, who were coachbuilders, class coachbuilder, they were mainly, mostly London but we had a branch in Northampton, and then [pause] think I got the DFC for my last, last trips over Essen.
NM: So you were awarded the DFC?
BH: Yes, that was December the 12th, 12th of the 3rd, ’43, and then the other thing later, the RAF.
NM: What was the background to the award of the DFC?
BH: We were on – trying to see where this is. [Pause] Oh, it was on the second tour, I’d done a tour of ops already and volunteered for another, and it was during this that I was awarded the DFC on the secondary tour, tour.
NM: Was the reason for the DFC because of your –
BH: Length, length of service, service.
NM: Length of service, rather than a particular –
BH: Yes, volunteering for so mu – so much with the, with Flying Command, with Bomber Command. I went to another squadron, 950 Squadron, we went to, on operational liaison duties, did that quite a bit – it was nice to go to other squadrons and find out how they were getting on and tell them what we did.
NM: So that was between your tours?
BH: Yes, yeah.
NM: So, what was the role you played as a liaison officer, then?
BH: Oh! [laughs] I was to sort out the ammunition, and of course, in the early days, we had the pans to slap onto aircraft, onto the gun, but later on, of course, we had machine belt, belt machine, belt ammunition.
NM: Did you see much evolution in air gunnery between 1939 and 1945? Can you –
BH: Yes, well, we had a lot of new aircraft, new guns coming along, American, lot of new American guns that we were using, and also the, the loading, the belts, not just the belts, but ammunition belt, pan, pans. I don’t seem to be able to tell you anything more positive, really, you know, but –
NM: You received a commission during your service, didn’t you? Because you joined as a LAC and -
BH: LAC, yes.
NM: And moved up to flight lieutenant.
BH: Flight lieutenant, that’s right, yes.
NM: What was the history there?
BH: Well, I’d been, I’d been moved from one place to another and volunteered for so much, much, and there was a lot of training and did a lot of training with pupils coming along. [Pause] Show you this last one there; we had an enormous amount of people with us, we had somebody with seventy-two – oh, that was me with seventy two! So, if all the others had had twenty-four trips, then we were – this was a mission for, for training. It was a voluntary – well, it was while I was on a liaison trip to, to Skellingthorpe on training for, for measured score [?], I said that I’d, I’d done seventy, seventy-odd trips and I’d never been to Berlin, so this gunnery leader there said ‘Well, you’re alright, well go with us tonight,’ got to the end of the runway and this aircraft, this aircraft, yeah, this aircraft, and the target was changed to an alternative, and in the end, we went there and bombed that, and as we come away from it, the skipper says, ‘Well, you’ve seen Berlin on the right, on the starboard side,’ he says, but you know of course, the rest of the crew didn’t care too much for this, they wanted to get home, back home [slight laugh]!
NM: Do you keep in touch with Bomber Command through squadron associations or reunions?
BH: No, that’s – do you know, apart from our local reunions at Sywell, I haven’t gone back to any RAF squadrons at all.
NM: And what’s your association with Sywell?
BH: Well, our, our early training was there, we, we – it was the first aircraft we flew, flew in. We – every opportunity we had of getting a flight, we, we, we took it, you know?
NM: And you get – you go back there now for reunions?
BH: Oh, yes; well, we’ve got a Battle of Britain fighter association, and also, there’s a local – we’ve got a gunnery leader and – oh dear, what do we call the things now? We go to Sywell for the reunions for air, air gunners, all the air gunner, local air gunners, and we joined this local Battle of Britain – no, not Battle of Britain fighter association, it’s the – we joined this – oh dear [pause] gunnery association, really. Do you know, I – my mind’s really terrible.
NM: And do you still meet as a group?
BH: Oh yes; at Sywell, we’ve got a, quite a nice little bunch of fellers there, I think about, we’ve had as many as fourteen or fifteen, but it gradually faded, you know, died off a bit, and so we’re only getting about three or four of us go, once a month.
NM: And are these just socials, social get-togethers over lunch, or just to talk about old times?
BH: No, just at the, the aerodrome at Sywell, where there was a bar there, you see, that was the attraction amongst. There were various cross-country trips, you know, to renew our flying experience.
NM: When was the last time you flew? Was it at the end of the war, or have you flown since the end of the war?
BH: [unclear] [sound of turning pages] So, Uxbridge, we had a – was Bishop’s Court – was about ’44, February 44, it says.
NM: You haven’t flown since the war?
BH: No; oh, well, not air force. I, I, we’ve flown private, private flying ‘cause we’ve got some friends in, in France, we used to go nip across, you know, by ordinary aircraft.
NM: Okay. Shall we stop the recording there?
BH: Yes.
NM: I think.
[recording is stopped and restarted]
BH: Well, people had lost their logbook, or oil. So I managed to rescue mine and copy this from it. [Pause] Who was that?
NM: So your logbook doesn’t exist anymore but you’ve copied all this out from it?
BH: Oh, yes, that’s right, remember him.
NM: So, are you still in touch with any of your original air crew?
BH: Well, I was in touch with the skipper that I flew with most of the time, Alan Gowarth [?] of Monaco, Monaco, he was a night pilot, fighter pilot in 23 Squadron in - during the Battle of Britain, and this, this was illustrated with the seventieth anniversary of the Battle being commended.
NM: So you’re still in touch with him? Are you in touch with him now?
BH: No, no, not in the last – I think he might have pegged out since, but yes, I think it was quite late when I still, still in touch with him, March.
NM: So you were in touch by letter. Did you ever meet him again after the war?
BH: No, no, no, of course, he was New Zealand, he went to settle in his home in New Zealand. [Pause, sound of turning pages] Spires of Lincoln coming out of the mist as we got closer to home, a wonderful sight. As a matter of fact, we did have a situation where we were followed in to our own base, and we warned – we’d been warned about this, and anyhow, it was the last minute, really, before he was gonna fire at us, and we noticed that he was almost nose nose to tail with us, and so I told the skipper, you know, ‘We, we, we’re being followed, turn, turn starboard,’ you know, and he says ‘Okay, yes, fair enough,’ and we shook him off, but he got to within, oh, within a few hundred yards, I suppose, of shooting us down, and we got back home.
NM: So, you had a clear sight of this?
BH: Oh, yes, it was a, it was a Heinkel.
NM: And at this point, you were coming into which airfield?
BH: Hmm, not sure.
NM: Was that Wickenby or somewhere in Lincolnshire?
BH: Yes, somewhere, somewhere in Lincolnshire, but I can’t remember which. I should ought to remember because we were near, near to being shot down!
NM: Was that the closest you’ve, you came?
BH: I think so, to our demise, yes. [Pause] We’d been told about this: ‘Be careful, the blighter’s follow, following you in,’ and he almost on our nose, on our tail, you know, with his nose. [Pause] And then the skipper says, ‘Glad you kept your bloody eyes open, Bob!’ [laughs]
[recording is stopped and restarted]
BH: On the way back from the major target, we’d sort of go to various aerodromes, and the skipper’d ask me to go into the front turret so that we could go around the, the dispersal points shooting up all and setting fire to a lot of aircraft. We did this on quite a few occasions.
[recording is stopped and restarted]
BH: I was just wondering where to start, what, what was I talking about, now?
NM: You were talking about the geodetic construction.
BH: Oh, yes, yes, I was thankful and praised God for Barnes Wallis because of his aircraft design. We were over Benghazi, and we had a, a enormous hole inside of the fuselage (about six foot diameter), and the fact that it was geodetic construction of air, the pilot still flew the aircraft quite smoothly, and then we landed in the desert and checked up on what was what, and we took off again! And that was with a six foot diameter hole in the side of the, the fuselage, and of course, as I say, I thank God for Barnes Wallis and the fact that the geodetic construction was so, so wonderful.
NM: And the damage was caused by en –
BH: By flak, but that was bloody uncomfortable to sleep and we – ‘course, when we were in the desert, we, when we went up from Cairo up to the advanced base, we’d have to sleep in the aircraft, but the geodetic construction was as comfortable to sleep on! [laughs] You know, you’d have load of flying kit all on your hip, you know, to stop you from being scarred [?] ‘cause it was in – we slept in the co – oh, if we, if you laid out, you slept outside the aircraft in the desert, in, in the, oh dear, well, if, if you slept outside in the desert, on where there were lots of dried-up salt lakes, but you could have slept on there, and that was – but there were a lot of darn [unclear] about, and they were, actually, they sounded worse than they were, so it was a question sleeping inside the aircraft, but then, of course, you’ve got the geodetic construction, you know, made it uncomfortable, but having a lot of Irvine jackets and trousers, of course, to pad the sides.
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 Bob Hughes
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Nigel Moore
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-07-13
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHughesWR150713
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:58:38 audio recording
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Beth Ellin
Sally Coulter
Carolyn Emery
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Bob Hughes joined the RAF as war became likely to avoid repeating his father's First World War experience in the trenches and transferred to the RAF Volunteer Reserve when war was declared. He trained on Ansons and then flew in twin-engine Blenheims in the Battle of Britain as part of 23 Squadron. They carried out night defence patrols from the south coast up the Thames Estuary.
Bob volunteered for Bomber Command which had lost a lot of crews. After one air test for Number 9 Bomber Squadron, he went to 149 Squadron at RAF Mildenhall and flew in Wellingtons. He describes the difficulty of targeting well-defended Essen and bombing cruisers in coastal areas, such as Wilhelmshaven.
Bob then transferred to 70 Squadron in RAF Kabrit, Egypt and the Middle East. Water rationing was an issue. They would carry out raids on transport and railway sidings in response to Field Marshal Erich Rommel bringing German forces into the desert via Benghazi.
Bob had instructor stints at the Operational Training Unit at RAF Pershore and Advanced Flying Unit. He went on operational liaison duties to 950 Squadron. Other aircraft in which Bob flew included: Battle, Defiant, Lancasters, Lysanders and Bothas. Bob undertook 73 operations and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on 12th March 1943.
He describes the evolution in air gunnery during the war. He also praises Barnes Wallis’s geodetic construction.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Suffolk
England--Thames River
North Africa
Egypt
Egypt--Kibrit
Libya
Libya--Banghāzī
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Essen
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1943
1943-03-12
1944
1945
149 Squadron
23 Squadron
49 Squadron
50 Squadron
70 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
Battle
Blenheim
Botha
Defiant
Distinguished Flying Cross
Lancaster
Lysander
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
promotion
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Pershore
RAF Skellingthorpe
training
Wallis, Barnes Neville (1887-1979)
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/595/8864/PLashamB1501.2.jpg
da6d480d6a799fe46724652cc35229e9
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/595/8864/ALashamB150716.1.mp3
8a9d33f42649006ef03208c246e5f74a
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
Lasham, Bob
R L C Lasham
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lasham, RLC
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer R L C Lasham DFC and bar (1921 - 2017, 161609 Royal Air Force)and a photograph. After training in the United States and Canada he flew 53 operations as a pilot on 9 and 97 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Bob Lasham and catalogued by Nigel Huckins..
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AM: Okay, so this interview’s being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Annie Moody and the interviewee is Bob Lasham, and the interview’s taking place at Bob’s home in Wilmslow on today, the 16th of July 2015. So, thanks for agreeing, Bob, and if perhaps if we can start off and just tell me a little bit about early life, schooldays, et cetera?
BL: I’ll start at the beginning. I’m a Cockney; I came to be a Cockney because they say a Cockney’s someone who is, was born within the sound of Bow Bells, and I was born within two hundred yards of the Whittington Stone, where Dick is supposed to have heard the Bow Bells. Well, we had the Underground running underneath, tram running outside, I might not have done. But Laura and I [?] were on holiday to the Isle of Wight and the [unclear] Centre’s there, and I submitted their claim to them, they came to me [?] and they said ‘You’re trying to cheat, aren’t you?’ [slight laugh] So that was that. Elementary school, passed what they called a trade scholarship, so I went to a junior technical school in Kentish Town, travelling to and from on the Underground, penny return, yeah. [clock chimes]And – got my hearing aid in and it sounds so loud!
AM: And, as you can hear, it’s now eleven o’clock and the bells are chiming.
BL: Looking around for an apprenticeship, my parents said, ‘Look for a company which has a pension scheme.’ Went to three companies: Smiths, who used to make motorcars and instruments; a tool-making company in the middle of London, I would have liked to have gone there but they only had employed just over a hundred people, no pension scheme, so I went to British Thomson-Houston, very well-known company making heavy switchgear, electrical engineering. I realised later on I should have gone for mechanical engineering, but I wanted a reserved occupation. And, of course, the air raids started, and I realised ‘There’s a lot of work in this’. Whenever it was –
AM: [whispers] Sorry, carry on.
BL: Air raid one night, we all overlooked some playing fields, it was, like, a girls’ high school there, I used to look out of a window and watch them playing hockey, you know, dirty old, dirty old man, I was a young lad! [slight laugh] And the house directly opposite was bombed, we suffered some damage. If the bomb was at least a couple of seconds later, if it were coming from the east, it would probably hit our house. My parents were there, were in the Anderson shelter, I was asleep in the back bedroom, and I woke up covered with the ceiling. I think about that time I thought maybe it was safe to get out of London, and I think it was in about January or February ’41, signs were going up: people in reserved occupations can volunteer for flying duties in the Royal Air Force, the Fleet Air Arm, as part of [unclear]. So, couple of weeks later, I went down and volunteered, at somewhere near Euston it was, had an interview, very quick medical, and that was that. And three weeks later, had a letter from somebody or other saying would I go and report there again to register? I went in and saw the same people, said ‘Haven’t we seen you before?’ I said ‘Yes, you saw me about three weeks ago.’ ‘Oh, we’ve got all your details, you’d better go home.’ And I went home and waited, and finally called up in July, just after my twentieth birthday.
AM: So July 1940?
BL: 1941.
AM: ’41, sorry.
BL: ’41. By that time, well, production of air crew was like a Ford production line, it was running so smoothly. And [unclear] an Air Crew Reception Centre, AR – ACRC, known to everybody as Arsy Tarsy. Still to this days, you meet people, ‘Oh, were you at Arsy Tarsy?’ Yes. And er, there for, we were there for about ten days where we were kitted out, inoculations, FFI - Free From Infection. Look at the curly bits, make sure you’re not carrying livestock around. That continued as long I was an airman or an NCO, but once you were commissioned, they didn’t do it anymore; yeah, officers wouldn’t have to take their time with people [?], I suppose. While we were there – I can remember our first corporal – oh, we reported to Lord’s cricket ground, and there must have been an intake of, every week, about, I would say, three or four hundred, divided into flights of fifty, and the person in charge of our flight was Corporal Schubert. Whenever I hear a piece of grotty music, I always say ‘That sounds like Schubert’, and someone said ‘How’s that?’ I said ‘You’ve never met Corporal Schubert!’ But he was a good-hearted soul. A lot of the corporals had a grudge on their shoulder; they’d been in the Air Force for ten or fifteen years just being corporal, they knew we would be sergeants, you know, within no time at all. [Pause] Catering: we used to queue up in flights of fifty, eat in the London Zoo, and before we had a catering shed [?], knives and forks, as you walked out, you swirled about in a bucket of water and put them to dry; [stage whisper] I think the bucket of water was used for soup later on! But I seem to remember, we seemed to live mainly on kippers and sausages. Not many animals left in the zoo, but those that were, I’m sure, were fed a lot better than us. Still trying to think of the people I know; amongst the people I did know, a fellow called Harry Wilson, I’ll tell you about him later on. And we finally got our uniforms, and we used to have a little white flash in our caps to say you were a training air crew, and we all trooped off to, I think it was the Odeon in Leicester Square, to see “Target for Tonight”. I think we saw that and, when we came out, having made a big mistake. Anyway, next stop, Babbacombe Initial Training Wing: basic navigation, lots of keep-fit exercises, we had our own section on the beach, we could go swimming, were there for, I think it was about six weeks. Now, night train, next stop, Wilmslow [comical sotto voce] in the wild, woolly north, you know, and I can remember getting out of the station and walking through what is now Wilmslow Park – probably Wilmslow Park then– to the RAF camp, with carrying a kit bag very heavily loaded, and we were there for, again, for about couple of weeks. The second week there, we were all issued with civilian clothing, so we knew we were probably going to America. Two days later, they took them back again. I can - the only thing I can remember about it – the little belts children used to use with a sort of snake buckle on it, that was to keep the trousers up, yeah! Anyway, the Americans were not in the war, but they changed their laws so we could go into America in uniform – more of that later. And, once again, we travelled by night up to Gruddock /Grenock[?], all got on board the Louis Pasteur-it was a French cruise liner, French cruise liner. Some of us were sleeping on the floor, some on – stretching out on the tables with their heads up. I was a lucky one, I managed to get a hammock. We were there for about twenty-four hours, the boat was – in Gruddock [?], the boat was rocking up and down, and got up the next morning, there was a north westerly gale blowing, and a very small convoy, only about six, six vessels, and I was sick, practically everybody was sick, I should think. And then, that night, we left the convoy and sailed straight for Halifax. It was a fast boat like the Queen Mary, and we were there in eight, was it eight days, I think. Greeted at Halifax, a sort of [unclear] WVS, and they arranged to send telegrams to our folks in England saying that we’d arrived safely in Canada. Was a place called Malton in [pause] I’m not quite sure what the state was, except that it was a dry state, no alcohol for sale, and we were there not very long and, again, got on the train – four days. I couldn’t realise, no country could be that big, no! We had one stop in [pause] we stopped in Washington on the way down, that’s right, and we had some hours to spare, so some of us got hired a taxi, went to see the Washington Memorial and – Lincoln, sorry, the Lincoln Memorial –
AM: Lincoln Memorial.
BL: And then we arrived at Jacksonville in northern part of Florida. Again, we got off and we were taken out for dinner by the people of Jacksonville, I suppose, fifty of us by then. Was another night train and we arrived in Clewiston. I don’t know the geography of Clewi- Florida; at the bottom, there’s a very big lake-
AM: Yeah, I’m just working my way down.
BL: Lake Okeechobee, and we were just on the edge of Lake Okeechobee, in the middle of nowhere. Clewiston was a one-street town; they had a cinema, the Dixie Crystal – it’s funny how you remember these things – a bowling arrow – a bowling alley with a black boy to put the, ah, the skittles up afterwards, we did that. And they were surprised to see us in uniform because they had not been using it, and on the way down, someone enquired if we were an American football team ‘cause we were in uniform! [laughs] That’s beside the point. And we arrived overnight – seemed to have lost clothing overnight [?] – into breakfast, and there was this jug of light brown liquid to drink, it was cold tea! I never drink cold tea, but it was a great thirst-quencher. And we started flying on – it was called a Stearman, Stearman PT-17, and instructor was a chap called Tom Carpenter, and I was having trouble going solo – talk about luck! Half the course had gone solo and he hadn’t really told me what I was supposed to do, but on our desk – we had a big desk we used to use for swotting [?] – there was a book on flying training, and looked up landing. You – as you level out, you let the speed decay and finally your paces [?] down on three points; he didn’t tell me that I had to do that! Following day, I did three landings, he got out of the aeroplane and said ‘You can go solo’. [Unclear] he said ‘Look, Lasham, I was a bit bothered about seeing you doing that, sending you solo, but I’ve seen you recover from so many bad landings, I knew you’d recover from that.’ [laughs] And training proceeded. They had what they called a basic aeroplane then, a BT-13. My instructor was a Mr Dirigibus [?] - I think he had [unclear] – and he sent me solo very quickly; he didn’t like flying himself, I didn’t do much instruction with him. And then on to the Harvard afterwards, which was a nice aeroplane, and – remember the name of the – Charlie Miller was my instructor, he was a very nice fellow. Finally passed out, got my – we got our wings, I think it was in May.
AM: So how long had that taken?
BL: It took us about six months and quite a lot of the course failed. At that time, we were going out to America never, never having sat in an aeroplane at all, and usually about a dozen of the fifty would fail because they had no depth perception. And suddenly, someone in the UK realised we wasted a lot of money doing this, so they started getting people to start going solo in Tiger Moths over here before the sending them abroad, and the people in Canada, people in America, people in South Africa, people in Rhodesia, all over the world. And I finished me training, back to Canada, came back in a slower convoy, arrived in Liverpool. Liverpool was packed! [pause] I think that was the post, another charity appeal, I expect [sound of mail coming through the letterbox]. I’m sure you could have walked from Liverpool to Birkenhead just jumping from boat to boat. What a relief it was to get back in the UK! And down to Bournemouth, just two or three days in Bournemouth, we were sent on disembarkation leave, so I went home and saw my parents, saw my grandparents – they can bring you down – saw me granny, you know, sergeant’s, wing sergeant’s stripes, walked in, first thing she said: ‘Have you been up in an aeroplane by yourself yet?’ [laughs] Had no idea what was going on. Anyway, there’d be [unclear] an Advanced Flying Use, AFU, at Shorebury – you try saying ‘Shorebury, Shrewsbury, Shropshire’, which was the address, when you’ve had a couple of beers, you’re spitting over everybody! – and converted to Oxfords. And by that time, they’d ask you what you wanted to do, and, having been bombed in London, I thought ‘Oh, I’d like to be a night fighter pilot!’ So, came from there to RA – what was RAF Usworth, now, I think that’s the North East Air Museum now, just outside Sunderland. [Telephone rings] Forget it.
AM: You ignore the telephone, Bob?
BL: I, I do, yes; I can always pick it up later, see if there’s been a message. Err…Sunderland, near Sunderland. The, what they called the [unclear] side, the one hangar, was north of the Sunderland-Newcastle road. The southern part, which was the airfield, is now buried under the Nissan car factory.
AM: Right.
BL: Yes, yes. Anyway, they always had a medical when you arrived there, medical [?] inspection. I was in this chair, there was this beautiful, blue-eyed, young assistant, Joyce Farleigh [?] [pause, sounds of someone moving around the room]. Anyway, I saw her a couple of days later, we started going out together, and we were flying Avro Ansons, training radio observers. It was the airborne radar, preparation for going on to night fighters and, ah, [pause] were there for three or four months, so I got in quite a few more hours, which was useful later on, and then to Cranfield, for night fighter OTU, and enjoyed that, because we flew Blenheim 1’s, Blenheim 4’s, Blenheim 5’s, and then went on to Beaufighters. And taxied in one night, I put one beer on my Beaufighter whilst I was taxied [?] away onto the mud, put off the course [?] They were picky choosy, as my, as my grandchildren would say, and over half the course were failed. So I then went down to Brighton for what they called reselection, and [unclear] selection mark [?] ‘What would you like to go? Would you like to go to Air Transport Auxilliary, ATA?’ I said ‘No, I’d like to go to Bomber Command.’ So, finished up on Lancasters. Went to [pause] I – did I? No, I had to do another AFU on Oxfords, another few hours, and then finally to a place called Brigsley in Lincolnshire (that was really out in the sticks) and did my Lancaster conversion. One hour – two hours on Halifaxes and the rest on Lancasters, I’m glad I didn’t fly Halifaxes, I can’t remember the name of my instructor. Station commander there was a Group Captain Bonham-Carter. But basic radio receiver in the air force before that was called a TI-9 transmitter reception set, and he had a microphone in his battledress pocket ‘cause he was hard of hearing, and – I’m going aside a bit now – there was a museum at Winthorpe, just outside Newark; he founded it after the war.
AM: Oh, right.
BL: Back to where we were. He always made a point of [unclear] all the navigators, bomb aimers and pilots before they left. And I mentioned a chap called Harry, met up at ITW, he went to South Africa for his training, failed his pilot’s course, moved to old [?] Rhodesia and did his bomb aimer course. And we met up at Cottesmore when we were growing up; he said the first word he said to me was ‘Aren’t [?] you looking for a good pilot?’ and I said, you could [slight laugh] I said ‘Yes.’ He went in for an interview, Bonham-Carter, and got around that he’d failed his flying test, and Bonham-Carter said ‘What were you flying?’ He said ‘I was flying a Hawker Hart’ and that was the end of the conversation: Bonham-Carter deaf and a bloke who can’t fly a Hart. Switched off and Harry walked out! [laughs] What else happened there? Had a flight engineer - again, no flying experience. Waltzed through [?] his flight engineer’s course, airborne, and he was airsick every time he went up, so he had to be taken off-line. Now, a chap on the course with me was Mike Beetham [?].
AM: Oh, yes, yeah.
BL: Now, he’d gone off on a short course, I pinched his flight engineer, chap called Bill Gates [?], and he flew with me the rest of my operations. And then, from there to 9 Squadron, got there just before the Battle of Berlin. Not much happened there, oh, yeah, well, I suppose things did happen. Second, second dicky flight with a second pilot to fly it with – we didn’t, see, you just stood behind the chap who was flying – and it was the opening of the Berlin, Berlin and back, then, two or three nights later, going with my own crew, Berlin again, not, not a good start. And coming back – mind you, I was away [?] and new my first operation – Rear Gunner Eddie Clarke, now, he was an old man, he was in his thirties.
AM: Very old.
BL: Oh, ancient, yes, he’d been a driving instructor, and his oxygen had failed, and heating, obviously [?] had failed, and the net result was, he lost all the toes on his right foot, was taken off-line and we never communicated again, I think he pa – later on, when I was more experienced, I’d have come down to a lower altitude, but then they said ‘Stay with the stream’ and stay with the stream I did! [laughs] Great shame. I imagine, then, he probably had a job in the air force, he’d have kept his gunner’s badge, kept his sergeant’s stripes, possibly as a driving instructor. Incidentally, my wife did her driving at Liverpool – no, I’m sorry, Blackpool, yes, and passed her test there. [Pause] Anyway, 9 Squadron, again, luck. We used to do what was called bagging searches, so that I could look out my side and the flight engineer could look out his side, and we’d just started to roll and we were fired at, I don’t know, a [unclear], probably, so went into a corkscrew, and as we came up, I got another couple of bursts. If I’d have started that hanging search one second later, we’d have been shot out of the sky. My voice is going, isn’t it? [laughs] Anyway, we survived that. Again, rear gunner – from then on, we were getting any spare rear gunners – chap called Jack Swindlehurst, known as Jack Singleburst because he was a gunner, and a cannon shell hit the fire extinguisher behind his head and it peppered his shoulder with what was like gunshot wounds, but wasn’t seriously hurt, he was back flying again within a week. So, we carried on, and don’t think there were any other major, major instances there, and then Pathfinders.
AM: So this was 97 Squadron?
BL: 97 Squadron, yes, it was 9 Squadron before at Bardney. I wanted to go to Pathfinders, wireless operator said he’d be quite happy, so was my bomb aimer. Well, by that time, I’d collected another gunner, and a chap called Casson [?] (more on him later), and so off we went to Pathfinders. Now, a story goes around – I’m not sure this was my crew, which I suspect it was – three of them went to see Bennett and said ‘We don’t want to come to Pathfinders, we want to go back to your own squadron.’ He said ‘Well, I could post you back, but I’ll post every one of you to a different squadron.’ So they just decided to stick together. I made a promise, because people fell by the wayside, they’d be off flying, that I would carry on until everyone had finished his forty-five, which, that’s what took me up to fifty-three. So, off we went to Pathfinders. [Pause] Ah, luck again! I’ll come back to 9 Squadron: we were going to Leipzig, and I had a black navigator (my [unclear] chap was off with an appendix), Jamaican, the only black aircrew I ever met, very new, and they didn’t know anything about jet streams and so everyone arrived at the target early, apart from us, ‘cause he took us so far off track, we arrived there just as the raid was starting and came home, said there’ll be [unclear] there tonight, found out they’d lost sixty or seventy bombers that night. People were arriving early and circling, waiting for the Pathfinders to mark on time. They couldn’t mark early even if they arrived early, so again, luck came into it, yeah. Anyway, off to [pause] Warboys, that’s where we did three weeks’ Pathfinder training, including cross countries with an instructor, using the ground-marking equipment, H2S, and then to 97 Squadron at Bourn, and we were only at Bourn for three weeks, less than that, two weeks, didn’t operate from there, and we were posted back to 5 Group to do the marking for 5 Group, and Cochrane was CO, was Air Officer Commanding; it became known as Cochrane’s Private Air Force. Going back to Casson, my rear gunner. Just before leaving 9, I was allocated Casson, I think his crew had been killed, and he was unfortunate individual; he’d been a corporal physical training instructor, and I think he was rather keen to get the money of becoming a sergeant air gunner, but the only chap I’ve ever had had to have put on a charge. I felt he was – the crew used to go out to the aircraft every day, and the wireless operator was – wireless operator, rear gunner, [unclear] my upper gunner, and he never arrived on time and they had to clean his guns for him, so he was put on a charge that was modest and told not to do it again. But when we got to [pause] Warboys, doing our Pathfinder training, I was called to see Bennett himself, and my rear gunner had said he wasn’t going to – he was refusing to fly anymore, so Bennett said to me, ‘Well, when you get to squadron, don’t mention it to CO, because I think I’ve talked him out of it,’ but he hadn’t; when he got to Coningsby, he refused to fly, but I think he had more psychological problems. I gathered from my crew, amongst other things, he was incontinent, you know, he used to wet the bed, things like that, and he was taken off-line, what happened to him, I don’t know. Anyone who went – used to call it lack of moral fibre, anyone who had that disappeared quickly, because, in case it was catchy! Anyway, I was called in to see my CO, Wing Commander Carter, think it was, yes, and he told me what had happened, I said ‘Yes, I know.’ He said ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said ‘Well, Bennett told me not to,’ and I said ‘AOC tells you not to, you don’t,’ he understood that. And then I picked up a fellow called Edward Coke – Edward Cope, known as Joe to everybody, he was one of the fellows [?] before – he’d been on Sterlings, and he’d done with the [unclear] on Sterlings, and we flew together for the rest of the war. Not much happened at 97; we were very badly shot up over Bordeaux on one occasion in daylight, finished up diverting to Manston. Crew said they found over eighty holes in the aeroplane, mid upper gunner suffered some facial injuries; I think the Perspex surrounding us was shattered, bit went into his face, but even in later life, on certain days, you could just see the scars ‘round here, but he was very lucky, you know, all the rest of us got away with, without any problem at all. [Pause] Was that during the –
AM: How many operations did you do with –
BL: Fifty-three.
AM: Fifty-three.
BL: That was Bordeaux. [Pause] Collateral damage, we were bombing Munich, and I always used to make a point of going into the briefing room to find out where the latest searchlight belts were, used to do this at 9 Squadron. There was three of us used to be there: myself, Pilot Officer Blow and a chap called Bill Reid, we were the only three who ever did this and we all three survived our operations. So, we were over Munich, and we were coned by searchlights, you could see people weaving all over the sky to avoid it. I knew that it was clear to the near [?] south-east: full power, downhill as fast as we could go, and suddenly there was the most almighty clatter [coughs] we didn’t know what it was, and had to put one engine out of action, came back on three. We’d been hit by the small incendiary bombs, and they hadn’t burned; they made some holes in the wings, they knocked an engine out, and we came back –
AM: Came back on three engines.
BL: On three engines, they flew wonderfully well on three engines, and then [pause] I’m getting towards the end of my tour then. [Pause] D-Day; I remember D-Day very well. Wing Commander Carter, this target-if you can call it a target-we were over the French coast for about ten minutes, that was all, and we also had a Norwegian crew on board, chap called Jespersen. Lost two crews that night: Carter the CO and Jespersen. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, there was a Ju 88 patrolling there, got both of them. Everyone else thought it was a bit of a doddle, but on the way back, Harry was calling the H2S, he was, he’d become [?] my bomb aimer, there’s a set operator. Actually, because crews haven’t as a good a H2S, they just kind of scanned the channels; of course, it was full of ships, when we got back, we found it was D-Day.
AM: So you didn’t know it was D-Day, going to be D-Day?
BL: No, we were not told, we were – obviously, it was very important, because we always used to test our engines before we went to mix the magnesium – mag – magnetos were working, but the first time, there was a problem with two of the plugs, and the whole squadron, the squadron commander stationed and engineer were there, but – ground crew again: when the engine skipper ran the engine, switched it off, they knew which plugs it was, and we were on our way within five minutes and caught them up, so that was Operation D-Day. Operated again D-Day that night, I was rather pleased about that, and I think it went all fairly smoothly from there. I was off sick for a time, can’t remember what it was, and going back to a chap, Bill Reid, who’d driven across country, I said ‘Bill, do you think you could go up to Millfield, RAF Millfield?” That was where Joyce was stationed as an MT driver. I should say – go back again, when we – Joyce and I got engaged in 1941, and by nineteen-forty [pause] nineteen-forty – 1942, 1942, and then, when I went to Bomber Command, we decided to put it on hold – I mean, chances of surviving – so it was on hold. And we could [?] going up to Millfield, ‘Could you fly me up to Millfield?’ He said, ‘We could do that,’ he got the details there, he said ‘Well, I can get it, get it in, I think I can get it out’ – it was the middle of the, middle of the Cotswolds – not the Cotswolds, the, ah –
AM: Chilterns?
BL: No, meant up on Northumberland, the – ah, the Cotswolds, that’ll do, is it near Northumberland? No, the Cotswolds are lower.
AM: No, the –
BL: It’s the, ah [pause]
AM: Can’t remember.
BL: Should do it.
AM: It’s up above the Pennine Way.
BL: Oh, yes!
AM: It’s the – anyway, near Northumberland.
BL: And we arrived there. It was a fighter leaders’ school and they were training fighter leaders, and there was this great big aeroplane came in, and they were looking around at the great big bomb bay, and, sheer luck, Joyce was going on leave, so I waited for her. Went down to Newcastle, I spent the night in the YMCA, met her next day, went back to see her parents, and got [unclear] re-engaged. I only had two more to do, did the two ops, and then I finished. From the day going up to Millfield to see her to getting married, about three weeks went by. People now, saving up to get married, five thousand pounds, ten thousand. It cost me two pounds, three shillings and sixpence. And way I remember that, we had to – I went up with Joyce’s mother to arrange the wedding, saw the vicar, and he says, ‘That will be two pounds, three shillings and sixpence’, and two-three-six was also the phone box number of RAF Millfield where I used to talk to Joyce occasionally, and we spent the night in the same house; I slept with her father and Joyce slept with her mother.
AM: [laughs] This is the night before the wedding?
BL: The night before the wedding. We didn’t have a best man, but there was a, a relative who had a shoe shop, he was called in as best man; Joyce had an aunt, Aunt [pause] oh, I’ve forgotten her name now, her husband was in the air force but he was motor transport driver, he was a North hatter [?], she was Matron of Noffon [?], Matron of, ah, Honour. So, we walked down to the church, no taxis available – well, it was only just down the road, RAF Wooler – is it Wooler, in – what are those hills called, what would they be?
AM: Cheviots, it’s not the Cheviots?
BL: It is the Cheviots.
AM: Cheviots.
BL: Cheviots, of course, those are the big ones called the Cheviots.
AM: We got there between us!
BL: Yes! [slight laugh] And we walked back again and – where did we stay? It was an old lady we stayed with: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and she’d had Joyce a piece of lace done, and she wanted it back before we left, and we had our breakfast, caught the bus to Morpeth, stopped off and had tea, caught another bus to Newcastle, went to the cinema, the night train down to London packed like sardines. London – we, well, we were going to have our honeymoon in Exeter, the hotels were full, but Joyce’s parents knew someone who had a guest house down there, so booked us in there. So we had some – so I went up to see my mother, and she had met Joyce, and then down to Paddington Station, finally arrived in Torquay and met by somebody who took us to the house, absolutely shattered. Went to bed, we both fell fast asleep. [laughs] Anyway, I still remember the next day, I said to Joyce, ‘Well, what do you want to do now?’ She said ‘I’d like to buy a shopping basket, I won’t feel properly married ‘til I’ve got a shopping basket,’ and that was it, our honeymoon! Then back to the squadron, and they discovered I had a large spleen, so they were doing all sorts of investigations, I was at Coningsby for quite a long time; I thought I was on squadron strength and evidently I wasn’t, I was on station strength, so I finished [?] in October but I didn’t leave the squadron until beginning of January. They took me into Rawsby [?] Hospital. It had been what they used to call lunatic asylums, it was, yes, no privacy, all the doors opened both ways and the WCs, it was like the doors going into a Western saloon, know, they open both ways, so you – anyway, I had a, I still had a large spleen, so they gave me a temperate climate only better, ah, better category, which was just as well because it was about time they were thinking of going out to Japan and you would have had to go through tropical climates. Anyway, I was at Coningsby just doing nothing, you know, and eventually – oh, the commanding officer was a chap called Evans Evans, Tiny Evans, a Jimmy Edwards character - I’m going back, I’m going into reverse now. He decided he wanted to do some operations, so they said he could take my crew, and they did a couple of cross countries with him, so the first time, he put the aeroplane down and bounced over the [unclear] onto the aeroplane; the other time, he visited his brother, almost a twin, who was RAF commanding an American station, and he, he went down there with the crew and had a very liquid lunch, so he came back by taxi and the RAF took me down by transport to pick them up, and I met my crew outside the aeroplane, and the Americans were looking up at our bomb bay, their bomb bay was not as big as a sofa there, they could carry four thousand pounds, of course, we could carry eighteen thousand pounds, and to thrill them back [?]. One or two of them, they’d spent the night there, I think, had got these American woolly sheepskin hats on, one or two were smoking American cigars. Incidentally, people say that everybody smokes here, my crew didn’t smoke, I didn’t smoke.
AM: You didn’t smoke either?
BL: No, nope. And that was about the – oh [pause] Evans Evans, I got to know him quite well, very, very pleasant chap, and he wanted to sponsor me to go to Cranwell, he knew my background in engineering, to do an engineering course, and I said no, I wanted to carry on flying, so there was this vacancy going, Fighter [Unclear] Flight, flying Hurricanes. That was really good fun! Our CO was Les Munro –
AM: Oh, yes.
BL: Yes, he was New Zealander, wonderful character, and I remember when we were there, one night, we had a few drinks at the bar, and we knew we were operating, so we wouldn’t – the squadron was operating, we wouldn’t be working the next day, and I said ‘Would you mind if I took a Hurricane up to Millfield, to see my wife?’ and he said ‘Not at all.’ So, off, went off the next day, he’d forgotten: ‘Where have you been?’ ‘I’ve been to Millfield, you said I could go there!’ [disgruntled mutter-nonverbal]. One funny incident – well, funny for people who were watching it - at Metheringham was a FIDO station, you know, where they used to burn petrol and [pause] if you could imagine a triangle about so big with a metal pipe across, they used to pump petrol into it and that would clear the fog. I was waiting to take off in my little Hurricane, some other man [?] had a Spitfire: ‘Proceed to the end of the runway and use the taxiway.’ He started to turn off. ‘Proceed to the end of the runway and use the taxiway!’ Too late: there was the Spitfire standing on its tails [?]. Poor fellow, he spent the rest of his life trying to get, trying to explain why he did this, and everyone has heard that ‘cause he couldn’t say he couldn’t have heard the instruction. And then, about that time, maybe a bit earlier, an Air Ministry Order came out, an AMO: people who’d completed two operational tours and two non-operational tours could apply for secondment to BOAC or go to the Empire Test Pilots.
AM: So this is 1945.
BL: I’m in 1945 now, yes.
AM: Yeah.
BL: So, I applied for BOAC and got it and that was it, yeah. And I enjoyed it, I [pause] we did our training on Lanc – on Lancasters because we were going to fly Lancastrians, never came to anything-I had a Lancastrian on my pilot’s licence-and then we went down to Whitchurch, was a little aerodrome, it was the airport for Bristol in those days before they moved, and converted to Dakotas, and there was a couple of flights out as a second pilot to Cairo and back again and then they were, they were on a – just, what a lot of [unclear] – let’s say, anyway, I went to Northolt, where BEA – it was on land [?] BOAC, which was going to become-
AM: So they were just setting BOAC up at the time?
BL: Yes, but I was still in the air force on secondment and offered a contract with BOAC, and then BEA was formed, so I applied to fly for BEA and they offered me a contract, and they said, ‘You will never be worse off if you come to us instead of going to BOAC,’ flying out of Northolt. It was, it wasn’t no break going back to civvy life, it was like being on a squadron again, I knew half the people there, all second-tour people, and eventually, I got my command – Captain – and six hundred pounds a year. Six hundred pounds a year in 1946 was a lot of money; I remember when I was an apprentice, I was looking forward to the day when I’d be a rich man and earning five pounds a week! Six hundred pounds a year makes –
AM: In 1946!
BL: And, and then went into work one day and told I was going to Jersey. No choice in the matter, British Airways had nationalised Channel Island Airways and they wanted three Dakota crews out there, so myself, chap called Bill Hen, an ex-Battle of Britain pilot, and I can’t remember the third went out there with the three first officers, flying Dakotas and then flying de Havilland Rapid – de Havilland Rapide: [unclear] biplane, made of wood.
AM: Where were you flying to and who were the passengers? Were –
BL: Oh, this was civilians.
AM: So it’s a commercial airline by this time?
BL: Oh yeah, yeah, and became BEA, you see.
AM: But still on Dakotas, which had been flying in the war.
BL: Yes. Initially, BOAC would be carrying fifteen passengers and BEA were flying with eighteen passengers, and eventually they were modified, took the radio officer away, air officer away, and they called them Pioneers. We had thirty-two passengers, really squeezing them in in a Dakota.
AM: Thirty-two! So what was it like inside, then, for the passengers?
BL: Packed solid, yeah! The seats were about so wide –
AM: Bit like now, then, Ryanair.
BL: Yes, and flying Rapides, that was a – initially a seven-seater with a radio officer, and then a, and an eight-seater when you got rid of the radio officers. I must be one of the few people still living who flew Rapides into Croydon and into Gatwick, which was an, ah, a grass airfield.
AM: Oh, right! [laughs]
BL: A lot of grass airfields around at that time; Madrid, masses of runway, now, that used to be a grass airfield. And I carried on flying Dakotas in Jersey and –
AM: Did your - had your wife come over to live in Jersey?
BL: Oh, we’d all moved to Jersey.
AM: Okay.
BL: No NHS there; BEA paid my medical fees, I had to pay for Joyce and my son, quite expensive, ‘specially when you – antibiotics were a frightful price. We moved – we never bought anywhere in Jersey, we moved around in rented accommodation, and I quite enjoyed it there: come off a day’s flying, you know, and Joyce would meet me, have a swim before going home, and see so much more, know, you could swim from April through to September. I remember once, we come over on leave and up and gone to Druridge Bay in Northumberland, lovely summer’s day, I said ‘I’m gonna have a swim.’ I went off, I came back: ‘I thought you were gonna have a swim?’ I said ‘Yes, I got enough up to here, that was it!’
AM: So not cold up in Jersey?
BL: Well, yes. So, I think, in around Jersey, the tide doesn’t move in and out, it stays in the Gulf of Saint Malo, slowly, slowly warms up. My only accident occurred there; I stood a Rapide on its nose. No passengers on board, I put the brakes on too hard, it landed on its nose, bent propellers, and needless to say, there was a court of enquiry. But BEA was divided into two divisions then: British and Continental, and chief pilot of the British division was an old group captain I’d known in the air force, it was the old pals’ network.
AM: Old boys’ club.
BL: Yeah, he said ‘You can do’ – I spent the whole month doing [unclear], it was twelve flights a day, fifteen and twenty minutes, and nobody liked them because, it doesn’t sound very much, but twelve take-offs and landings, it was very tiring. [Pause] He was the chap – no, no, I was thinking of somebody else, at Northolt. There was one day, it had been snowing – this was nothing to do with me – and there was a Dakota took off and covered with snow and they’d had to clear the wings, and landed on top of a school and – sorry, landed on top of a house, just missed a school, and nobody was hurt, there was nobody in the house, all the crew got out. Needless to say, for the rest of his life, he was known as Rooftop Johnson, yeah, and he rose to great height and became a flight manager eventually. Viscounts, enjoyed flying those, and I – leaving Jersey, where did I want to go to? Well, my parents were living in London; Joyce’s mother, she was already by then in [unclear], so I chose Manchester, in the middle of nowhere, and –
AM: And that was Ringway Airport?
BL: Ringway Airport, yes, yes, little runways then, yes, passenger accommodation was in one of the hangars, and Smallman’s – was it Smallman’s – had the, had the restaurant there, the old RAF control tower, it was all very friendly. The crew hut was made of wood, you know.
AM: What year would – what year would that have been on now? Fifty -
BL: That would be 1953, yeah. And they booked me in at the Deanwater, Deanwater, just, just a room with a washbasin, no mod cons in those days, party on nearly every night, so getting to sleep was a bit difficult, and I was flying the next day, said to Joyce, ‘Go out and look for a house.’ Well, Joyce almost got lost, she picked me up, but we saw an advert, houses being built just the other side of Wilmslow, went to see one, saw the plot we liked and booked the house and [pause] by that time, I’d, was living in Baton [?] Road, Manchester, sharing a room with a wireless operator, he moved out and Joyce moved in with me, and we got the extra room, Michael was away at school, and we lived there ‘til we moved into the house, I quite enjoyed that. And then charge [?] came to convert to Tridents, which I did, yeah, lovely aeroplane, the Trident, and –
AM: How big is that, then? How big is the Trident?
BL: It was initially a ninety-seater with the –
AM: Ninety?
BL: Ninety.
AM: So much bigger.
BL: Much bigger, but the Viscount was about seventy or eighty, I think, I had the ninety-seater, and then there was the Trident 2 and the Trident 3, and the Trident 3 was – I think they’d gone up to about a hundred seats by then. They didn’t – it wasn’t really a commercial – they built a lot of them, though there’re many variants, I don’t think anybody made any money out of them, and [pause] back to Viscounts. Landing at Geneva, and, whilst I was with [unclear], and I was doing what we call a flapless landing ‘cause the [unclear] had been damaged, and landed, and as the nose wheel touched the runway, the whole back bit of the strut broke off, so we started to turn to the left and clear the runway, and there was a lot of smoke coming with the hot hydraulic oil. Passengers were evacuated, they didn’t use the chute, they got them out on the steps, and the fire was put out immediately. I’ve still got the headlines, was it ‘Bomber hero lands blazing aircraft [slight laugh] at Geneva’? And the reporters came ‘round to see Joyce, she knew nothing about it; well, she’d just had an airport – phone call from the airport saying ‘Bob, your husband, will be late coming home.’ The way they exaggerate these things!
AM: ‘Bomber Command hero’!
BL: Yeah, Bomber Command, oh, yes.
AM: Did they have air hostesses on the planes at this point? Did they have air hostesses and things like that on the planes at this point?
BL: No – oh yes, they did!
AM: Yeah.
BL: Yes, in Jersey, they were called flight clerks because they did all the paperwork as well.
AM: Okay.
BL: And all they did was hand out sick bags and barley, barley sugars, yes. [Pause] I’m trying to think of the funny incidents. When I was First Officer at Northolt, and I’d been flying – it was an unfurnished Dakota, the seats were there but nothing on the floor, and those days, the pilot had to brief the passengers, and chap called Panda Watson, he had a great big moustache, he was the skipper, and he went up to them all and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ and at that time, he slipped and fell on his –
AM: Oh, no!
BL: So, from then on, I – he kind of got me to do it. I remember doing briefing one day, just telling them where the escape exits were, where the life jackets were, I had one passenger say, ‘If I’d known it was so dangerous, I wouldn’t have, wouldn’t have flown!’ My parents used to come and see me in Jersey, but they wouldn’t fly; I would pay for their tickets, no, no, they came by boat, but Joyce’s mother came over several times and she was quite happy to fly. And, living in Jersey, we had a dear old neighbour, Mrs Brett, one of the old school, she lived next door, she was a widower for the second time, and she had some friends, and she used to go out, and going down to see her friends: hat on, folded umbrella or walking stick, upright, and she’d come back, hat on one side and a bit shaky on the stick. She liked – was it tonic red wine? I’ve forgotten what it was.
AM: Not, erm –
BL: It was – it wasn’t Sanatogen, it’s [pause] anyway, she was rather fond of it, and she was a dear old lady, she would knock on the door and say, ‘Are you at home?’ And we invited her in one day, we’d just got television in Jersey, and the Queen’s, Queen’s confrontation –
AM: Coronation, 1953.
BL: Queen’s coronation, not confrontation, she has many of those with her husband, I think! And she enjoyed that, and she used to talk about a wine she’d had in Italy called [stage whisper] Asti Spumante, a sparkling, sparkling, sweet, Italian wine, so we got a bottle of it and we had some sandwiches and she thoroughly enjoyed it. And when we moved from that house to another one, she gave Joyce a little silver napkin ring, and outside, this replica of sugar cane; her first husband was in trade, he was in sugar, yeah, and they lived in the Bahamas for many years, no children, but her second husband was a barrister, Mr Reginald Brett, so she always called herself Mrs Reginald Brett, never found out what her Christian name was, yeah. She died shortly before we left Jersey. Anyway, I wanted to get onto another type of aeroplane and we decided, like I tell you [?] to move to Manchester; people say ‘Why did you move?’ so I said ‘Well, we kept falling off the edge, so it was time to go.’ And that was almost the end, now: up to Manchester, converted to Tridents, and then on New Year’s Eve nineteen [pause] 1968, it must have been, Joyce had a – we were going out to a party, Joyce had a massive heart attack, went to Macclesfield. No – there was nothing there for heart attacks then, she was in a side room just receiving normal medical treatment, no, no resus units, no – what do they call them now?
AM: The – ah, the heart -
BL: Yes. Anyway, she survived, and that time, Manchester was converting to the Bac 1-11, the twin engine jet, and they were going to do a lot of, a lot of German internal flights, so I was going to be away for five or six days, or probably more than that, a month, five or six day tours in Germany, didn’t want to do that, so I stayed with the Trident and that did – I finished up going down to Heathrow for my last four years. [Pause] Nice little house in Windsor, it was a terraced house –
AM: In Windsor?
BL: In Windsor.
AM: Oh, very nice – oh well, so, sorry [?]
BL: Yes, it was, was nice, yes, we enjoyed it, Joy – but [unclear] Joyce never, apart from my working colleagues, she never got to know anybody there, they don’t speak to you there, we were living in Datchet initially, until we found somewhere to live. In Datchet, we were living in a 17th Century cottage, lovely old cottage, and it was run by two old dears next door, two ex-WAF who I think were both living together, if you know what I mean, yeah.
AM: I do.
BL: And then we got our own, own property, we saw a house in Datchet but decided against it; occasionally, the river would [?] slowly come into Datchet, then go out again, and we didn’t want a house that was going to be flooded.
AM: No.
BL: Whole thing, insurance premium would be very high, stayed in Windsor until I retired.
AM: So you flew all your working life?
BL: All my working life, yes, I retired in nineteen – retired from BEA in nineteen [pause] 1973, and moved back here, living in a very, very big house at Disley, almost a mansion, as someone called it, we were in, I think, four bedrooms, and, over the course of the year, made me bother [?] that they were used four, five times, so we cut our losses and moved here.
AM: And moved here. And it’s lovely, isn’t it?
BL: And got the Golden Wing [?], and then in nineteen-seventy – ’79 – through the old boy network, there was a job going, flying Viscounts up at Teesside, so I thought –
AM: So, after you’d retired –
BL: After I’d retired, the old boy network again, I knew the chap – it was a strange organisation, it was called Airbridge Carriers, so I was flying for Airbridge Carriers, being paid by Fields Aviation, and flying BenAir Viscounts, it was quite a mix-up. And so, we were flying out of Teesside, took the caravan up there, and that was it, we were quite enjoying that, ‘cause the people were friendly, Joyce wasn’t far from her mother, and then they decided we would have to go to Bristol. So, I decided I’d – I could have moved to Bristol, I couldn’t maintain my base where I was initially [?] at at Teesside, so I went down to Bristol, I was always accommodated in a hotel there, used to get [unclear] allowance, used to get so much an hour for being away from home, and flying the Viscount down to Bristol. Finally gave it all up and retired.
AM: And that’s it, you retired.
BL: I finally retired in nineteen – 1981, I finished flying, same year my father died, 1981, and that was it, end of flying career.
AM: Yeah. Blimey. The one thing I didn’t ask, go whizzing right back to the war years, was you’ve got the DFC?
BL: DFC and bar.
AM: And bar?
BL: Yes.
AM: So what did you get the DFC for?
BL: It was just end of, end of, end of tour.
AM: Okay, so doing a full tour.
BL: And the bar was end of second tour.
AM: And the bar was the second tour. Right.
BL: Yeah.
AM: Crikey.
BL: Yeah.
AM: There we are. I’m going to switch off now.
BL: Right, switch off now.
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 Bob Lasham
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
2015-07-16
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ALashamB150716
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:57:50 audio recording
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Richard Bracknall
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Bob Lasham began an electrical engineering apprenticeship with British Thomson-Houston before volunteering for the RAF in 1941, aged 20. He trained at Babbacombe and Wilmslow before continuing to Clewiston, Florida, to complete his training as a pilot. On return to the United Kingdom, he underwent further training before being transferred to Bomber Command where he converted to flying Lancasters. He joined 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney and participated in operations to Berlin and Leipzig. His aircraft was heavily attacked and his rear gunner lost the toes on one foot because of oxygen and heating problems. He transferred to 97 Squadron Pathfinders; his aircraft was badly damaged over Bordeaux, returning from an operation to Munich. He flew on D-Day and later joined a Bomber Defence Training Flight. After two tours, he became a civil pilot and flew with BOAC and BEA. He also relates his engagement and marriage; the role of luck in his survival; and the support of a veterans’ network after the war.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
United States
England--Lincolnshire
Florida--Lake Okeechobee
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Munich
France--Bordeaux (Nouvelle-Aquitaine)
Florida
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1944
5 BFTS
5 Group
9 Squadron
97 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
African heritage
aircrew
Beaufighter
Blenheim
bomb struck
bombing
British Flying Training School Program
C-47
Distinguished Flying Cross
Flying Training School
Harvard
Initial Training Wing
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
love and romance
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
pilot
RAF Bardney
RAF Cranfield
recruitment
searchlight
Stearman
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/733/9288/PCarswellA1702.1.jpg
6a021403a718f2d9ad8a17280e5548de
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/733/9288/ACarswellA170614.1.mp3
ea881ccab4c5a417073323e2bfde14f7
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
Carswell, Andrew
A Carswell
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Andrew Carswell AFC (b. 1923). He flew operations as a pilot with 9 Squadron but was shot down and became a prisoner of war.
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
2017-06-14
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Carswell, A
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DK: Ok. So, I’ll just introduce myself. This is David Kavanagh for the International Bomber Command Centre interviewing Andy Carswell on the 14th of June, I always get the dates wrong. 2017.
AC: 13th. Isn’t it March the 13th?
DC: 14th.
DK: Oh, it’s the 14th . Yeah.
AC: 14th eh?
DK: 14th. 14th of June 2017 at his home in Toronto. I’ll just make sure that I said Toronto. Make sure everybody knows I’m here. So, if I just put that there.
AC: Now, you have the address of the home in Toronto and all that.
DK: Yeah. I’ve got all the address. Yeah.
AC: That’s good.
DK: If I keep looking down I’m not being rude I’m just making sure it’s working. There’s been a couple of occasions when I’ve been beaten by the technology when the battery has just stopped or something.
AC: I see.
DK: Right. Yeah. I think we’re ok.
AC: Do I have to speak any louder than normal or —
DK: No. Just, just speak normally. Just sound like that.
AC: That’s good. That’s good.
DK: Firstly, what I wanted to ask you was what were you doing immediately before the war started?
AC: Ok. I was going to high school. I was, immediately before the war started I guess I would be about sixteen years old or so. And just before my eighteenth birthday the principal of the high school I was going to — I was in Grade 12 and in those days you needed twelve grades in order to graduate in to university.
DK: Right.
AC: But they changed it. The timing on the thing so that you had to have thirteen grades. So, I was at the end of my twelfth grade. I was just coming up to eighteen years old and the principal, in one of his lectures said, ‘Anybody who wants to do war work can get off early.’ And so of course I stuck my hand up and said, ‘Yes, I want to do war work.’ And so I got off early and the first thing I did was I went downtown to the RCAF Recruiting Unit.
DK: Right.
AC: On my eighteen birthday. I was eighteen years old and I walked in there and they said, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘I want to join the Air Force.’ They said, ‘Oh. What do you want to be?’ And of course everybody watched the movies. I said, ‘I want to be a pilot.’ So they said, ‘Ok.’ And they put me in and I went to, to the local unit in the Toronto International Exhibition there and, at Upper Avenue Road, and they sent me to, to Belleville. They had taken a school for the deaf and dumb and kicked everybody out.
DK: Right.
AC: And I don’t know what they did with them. And they put us in there and some of us were sort of dumb too [laughs] but anyway we were selected there on the basis of various tests to be pilots, air gunners, or navigators.
DK: Right.
AC: And you had to be smart to be a navigator. And you had to, you had to be, I guess a good shot to be an air gunner so I was trained as a pilot. So, they selected me as a pilot and they sent me to, right off the bat to what’s the name of the place?
DC: Goderich.
AC: Goderich. Yeah. A little town on the Lake Huron and where there was a civil airport operating and there were volunteer instructors at that time. And there I soloed. Learned to fly an aeroplane. And then they sent me a couple of hundred miles away. Down to a place called Bradford which is also in Ontario. And they, they were flying Avro Ansons.
DK: Yeah.
AC: The very first order of Avro Ansons where you had to crank the undercarriage up and down by hand. And so I graduated from there as a pilot and I got to wear a pair of wings and I was a sergeant pilot.
DK: Did you, did you find learning to fly easy? Is it something that came naturally to you?
AC: Oh yes. It was very easy for me because I had spent most of my time outdoors. I was in the Boys Scouts.
DK: Right.
AC: And I did a lot of hiking and that kind of thing. And so they gave me a couple of weeks leave and then they sent me to England. Here I was, still just a little over eighteen by then I guess. And, and in England I went to Bournemouth where all the Canadians went.
DK: Just, just going back a bit how did you come over to England? Were you on one of the —
AC: On a ship. A boat.
DK: Right. Yeah.
AC: I forget the name of it. It was a — had normally been a freighter, I think.
DK: Oh right.
AC: And I was not too, not too — my memory is kind of clogged there with all the other things that are in it. But anyhow I went over by ship, you know. Evading the German submarines and so forth.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And eventually we ended up in Bournemouth. And in Bournemouth they sent me to, on more training. And I took three or four different courses on different kinds of aircraft. Getting larger, larger and larger from the smallest multi-engine aircraft to, to things like the DC3 and whatnot. And finally they put me on the Lincoln. Which was the brother of the Lancaster but it had different engines in it and it would only fly on one engine if one engine quit.
DK: Was that the Manchester?
AC: The Manchester. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
AC: They put me on the Manchester.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And nobody liked the Manchester because they knew that if one engine quit the other one wasn’t enough to keep it going.
DK: Right.
AC: So, anyway and then they graduated me up to the Lancaster.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And I spent several weeks or a month or two flying the Lancaster and then they sent me up to number 9 Squadron.
DK: What did, what did you think of the Lancaster as an aircraft? Was it —
AC: Oh, great. The Lancaster itself was a very good aircraft and it was as easy to fly as the Avro Anson or any of the other aircraft. It wasn’t very cosy inside like the American aircraft. The Americans had lots of nice cushions in their front seats [laughs] And all kinds of good lighting and whatnot. And the Lancaster was just basically the controls that you needed and the — that was, that was basically all there was. You had your rudders. And there was no, no engine activated controls, you know. Everything was done.
DK: Manually.
AC: By force of —
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
AC: Force of habit.
DK: Had you, had you joined up with your crew at this point?
AC: No. No.
DK: Oh. Right then.
AC: They sent me to number 9 Squadron. And then they had a [pause] I’ve been trying to — that’s a good question. I’m trying to remember where they had the — I think we had the crew selection before I got to 9 Squadron.
DK: Right.
AC: And then people would go around saying, ‘Look. I’m a navigator. Do you want a navigator?’
DK: Was that then —
AC: ‘I’m a rear gunner,’ and all that.
DK: Right.
AC: So, anyway that was supposed to be my selection but I didn’t know any of the other people involved. I just picked people who looked like nice fellows [laughs] and we ended up with a crew of seven or so.
DK: And was the rest of your crew, were they Canadian or were they British?
AC: They were a mixture. The flight engineer was Scottish.
DK: Right.
AC: Jock Martin his name was and —
DC: Paddy Hipson.
AC: Paddy Hipson was Irish. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And what else have I got? I had a couple of English guys. My wife’s got a better memory than I have. She, she, we’ve been married seventy years and she can still remember every bad thing I ever did [laughs]
DC: There was three Canadians besides you.
AC: Who, who were they? Three Canadian besides me eh?
DC: [unclear] The fellow that froze to death.
AC: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DC: And —
AC: That was my navigator.
DC: And then there was —
AC: That navigator was a Canadian and he was just —
DC: Claude Clemens.
AC: Claude Clemens was a Canadian. He was a rear gunner. Yeah.
DC: West Ontario.
AC: That’s right.
DK: Was that — I’ve got your crew here as yourself. Sergeant Martin.
AC: Martin. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
AC: That’s Scottish.
DC: Martin.
DK: Scottish. And what was he then?
AC: He was the flight engineer.
DK: Flight engineer. Galbraith. Galbraith.
AC: Galbraith. Yeah.
DC: He’s the one that froze to death.
AC: Yeah. Galbraith was the navigator. He was a Canadian.
DK: He was the navigator. Hipson?
AC: Harry Hipson was English.
DC: Irish.
DK: English. Irish?
AC: Scottish.
DK: He was Scottish.
AC: Scottish. And what was he then? The wireless operator?
AC: Hipson [pause] Oh, I know. He was the, not the — bombardier.
DK: Ah bombardier. Yeah. And then Sergeant Phillips.
AC: Sergeant Phillips.
DK: Yeah.
AC: Sergeant Phillips.
DC: Eddy Phillips.
AC: Eddy Phillips.
DC: The one that got a leg broken on the march.
AC: Yeah. That was Eddy Phillips was, I’m glad you’re here Dot to remind me of these things. Eddy Phillips was a part of our crew and he broke his leg after we landed.
DK: Right.
AC: And he moved about in different hospitals. I never saw him again.
DK: Oh right.
AC: But he didn’t die. He got home ok apparently.
DC: What did he do in the aircraft?
AC: Eddie Phillips was a mid-upper gunner.
DK: Air gunner.
AC: I think that’s what he was.
DK: And I’ve got Sergeant De Silva.
AC: De Silva. Yeah.
DC: English fellow.
AC: Oh. He was a mid-upper gunner. Yeah. Sergeant De Silva.
DC: De Silva. Yes.
AC: De Silva. And —
DC: His parachute didn’t open.
AC: And he was killed because his parachute didn’t open.
DK: Right.
AC: With him improperly loaded up into the aircraft, I guess.
DK: And then Sergeant Clemens, I think it says.
AC: Claude.
DC: Yes.
AC: Claude Clemens was the rear gunner. Yeah.
DK: He was the rear gunner. Ok.
AC: And he was a Canadian.
DK: Right. Ok.
AC: He just died a while ago.
DK: Ok.
AC: Big talker.
DC: Twelve years ago.
AC: I’m surprised that they’re still sending people out because I’m one of the youngest of the whole lot and I’m ninety four and Dorothy is ninety five. We’ve been married seventy years.
DK: Years. Well, congratulations.
AC: She remembers every year of it [laughs] Sometimes that’s not a good thing.
DK: Don’t ask me how long I’ve been married. Twenty two years. There you are.
AC: Twenty two years eh. Well, there you go.
Other: We’ve got a long way to go.
DK: [unclear]
AC: Anyway, so that’s, that’s how we got crewed up.
DK: Right. So, you were —
AC: As you know, that they normally the captain of the aircraft was normally commissioned and he was —
DK: Yeah.
AC: Started off as flying officer and then went to flight lieutenant and so forth. Well, on my first trip I was a sergeant pilot. I was the only pilot on board a Lancaster and I was only a sergeant. And there was no other, no other officers in the crew of course.
DK: Right.
AC: And they sent me on a couple of trips with other people just to see how I did and I would take the flight engineer’s spot because they only had one pilot in those aeroplanes. And then they put me on operations fairly shortly after that. And the first trip was fairly normal, I think.
DK: Can you remember where that was too?
AC: To, to Berlin.
DK: So, your first trip was to Berlin.
AC: And the second trip was to Berlin.
DK: Right.
AC: And then they stopped it. They lost so many aircraft that they stopped it for a while. They had aircraft going down all over the place. In fact when we were shot down we were about half way between [pause] what’s the name of that little town? I can’t remember now.
DC: Well, John took you on that trip.
AC: Yeah.
DC: To retrace your steps.
AC: Yeah. I’m just thinking yeah. But anyway, it was about half way between the [pause]
DC: Do you have any? You can look.
No. No. I don’t have any notes.
DC: Yeah.
AC: We weren’t supposed to take notes.
DC: We went to the wrong place when we were in Germany.
AC: Yeah. We went down to that town.
DC: You sat opposite.
AC: Where I got shot down.
DK: So, so this was the fourth operation then was it? You were shot down.
AC: Yeah.
DK: Can, can you say a little about what actually happened on that particular operation?
AC: Well, we were, we were at twenty thousand feet or so and a, and a barrage of flak came up around us and the next thing I noticed the navigator was pointing at the right hand engine. And the right hand engine was on fire and the fire was creeping towards the gas tanks. It still had a thousand gallons or more gasoline in them. So, I, I gave the order to bale out and so the rear gunner baled out, and the mid-upper gunner baled out and the mid-upper gunner’s parachute didn’t open as you know. The rear gunner, he only died a few years ago. And the rest of the crew all got out but my navigator who had recently been married and he was so anxious to get home he didn’t care what was wrong with the aeroplane. He kept saying, ‘You should go. Take — ’ such and such a course. And so we had a bit of an argument and I said, ‘If you don’t go out I’ll go out ahead of you because we’re going straight down.’ The aeroplane was on fire by then. And so he finally went out and I went out and that was it. And then I found myself in a tree and I [pause] that’s all in that book anyway, I think.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And I decided I’d walk towards Switzerland [laughs] which was a stupid idea. But I was walking pretty well all night and eventually I realised that I had two choices. Either give myself up or just hide in the woods until I froze to death. And I didn’t think that was a very good thing to do so I walked a little farther and I saw a farmhouse in the distance, down a side road. And I went down there and I knocked on the door of the farmhouse. Some woman opened a, opened a window up above and yelled something at me. And I just said, ‘It’s pretty cold out here. Let me in.’ [laughs] The next thing I know I hear is a crunching noise in the side driveway and this little old guy with a gun almost as big as himself came out, pointed it at me. And I said, ‘Don’t shoot.’ And then the wife came out and yelled something at him. And they decided to take me in. And I went into their living room and they had a Chesterfield about that size there and they told me to sit down there. And I sat down there and fell asleep. When I woke up again there was a great crowd of people wandering around and looking at me. And a little boy was looking at my arm here. It said Canada on it. He said, ‘Oh, Canada.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And then everybody sort of thought that I understood German. Which I didn’t. And eventually a car pulled up with a couple of Nazi soldiers in it and they made sure that I didn’t have a weapon on me. And then they put me on the car. They took me down to the town hall which was — oh it’s in that book there anyway.
DK: That’s all right. Christine, can you have a look through there and see if you can find out the town he parachuted into? Just see if you can find it.
AC: I was trying to think of the name. I had a beer there too. Not after I got shot down but after.
DK: Yeah. When you went back.
AC: When I went back with me wife.
DK: You didn’t get a beer the day you were shot down then.
DC: He went back with John.
DK: Yeah.
DC: Our son took Andy back.
Oh yeah. That’s right. You weren’t with me on that one were you?
DC: And John has a very very good memory [unclear]
CK: Was it Zerbst?
AC: Pardon?
CK: Zerbst Town Hall. Z E R B S T.
AC: Zerbst.
CK: Zerbst.
AC: Yeah. Z E R B S T. Zerbst.
DK: Yeah.
AC: We were quite close to there when we got shot down. And so, I was, I was kept in a private room with a young fellow with a gun sitting there. And finally he went out to get something to eat and he came back and said something to me and he offered me some food too. So, he gave me something to eat. I had a sandwich along with him. And then I stayed there for a day. And the next day a bunch of soldiers came in and marched me out into the parade square where they had a crowd of people around. And they were all looking at this strange guy that had just got shot down nearby. And from there we went to a Luftwaffe station where they put us all in cells and various people came in and interviewed us and whatnot. And they were fairly decent, you know about the whole thing. And after that they put us all together except for the dead people. They couldn’t find the navigator. They didn’t know where he was. And neither did I. I suspected he was hiding in the woods, you know. Which would be not a very smart thing to do in sub-zero temperatures. But so they eventually found him. He’s buried near Berlin right now.
DK: Right.
AC: And —
DK: So, he had frozen to death then.
AC: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
AC: He just stayed out until he froze to death. It wasn’t a very smart thing to do either. But he was so much in love with this woman he’d just married that he figured he could get home. Sad eh? So, anyway that was, that was the beginning of my two years and three months in a POW camp. And they moved me to a place called Lamsdorf.
DK: Yeah.
AC: The rest of the crew was there and I spent the next [pause] And what did I do there? I figured I should do something useful so I escaped a couple of times and I got caught a couple of times. Let’s see. Three times I escaped, I think. Two. Must be. You’re right, Dot. Two times I escaped. Lucky I’ve got somebody to correct me. So, I escaped twice. I got caught twice. I spent time in three different prisons.
DK: ‘Cause reading your book what you seem to have done is exchange places with an army —
AC: Oh yeah.
DK: Was that how it was?
AC: Swapped over. Yeah. That was the, the theory that the people running the place you know. The RAF people decided that that was the way to go. We didn’t dig tunnels or anything like that. We swapped over. And I swapped over with a couple of different fellows.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And they went up into my barracks and wore my uniform. And I went down into their barracks and waited for my name to be called. My fake name. And then I got marched out with the rest of the people and —
DK: And the Germans never cottoned on to this then. That this was what was going on.
AC: Oh, I think they, they suspected. But I mean to them a POW was a POW. You know, they all looked the same.
DK: Yeah. Because I was very surprised when, when you were captured you were still that army person.
AC: That’s right.
DK: And even they took you back they still didn’t realise that you were —
AC: That’s right.
DK: Air Force.
AC: That’s right.
[background noise]
DK: Can, can I just stop?
[recording paused]
AC: I didn’t have much of a record as a bomber pilot.
DK: Yeah.
AC: I got shot down on my second trip really as captain. And it was all very sad. And after that I don’t remember anybody who ever flew a Lancaster who was below the rank of flying officer or flight lieutenant, you know. They automatically commissioned people to be captain of a huge aircraft like that. But anyway, that’s the basic. The rest of the story is in the book.
DK: I see with your second escape you were actually captured and held by the Gestapo.
AC: The Gestapo.
DK: It was the Gestapo?
AC: Yeah. We were, we were arrested [laughs] for eating lunch in a park. And you got —
DK: So, what was your plan of escape because you’re —
AC: We were going to Stettin and we were going to —
DK: Right.
AC: Get on to a Swedish ship to go to Sweden.
DK: Right.
AC: And that was, if I’d known more about it I would have gone to Denmark I guess because there they hated the Nazis.
DK: Yeah.
AC: They were driving people over to Sweden all the time.
DK: So, you’ve got false documentation now, presumably.
AC: Yeah.
DK: And you’re taking the part of, of foreign workers.
AC: That’s right.
DK: Is that the idea?
AC: That’s right. And they didn’t, nobody knew we weren’t foreign workers. We didn’t tell anybody.
DK: Yeah.
AC: The thing about the Gestapo was that they were just a mean bunch. I think they had to be mean to be selected. Our own guards were nice people, you know. Basically —
DK: Yeah.
AC: And some of the people, some of the Germans we met like you may remember a part where we had just got to Czechoslovakia and we were being taken back to our camp by a guard and he was quite friendly. And he, and he spoke to the other fellow a lot because the other fellow spoke German. You know. Had been a prisoner since Dunkirk. And any time an official looking German walked by, you know he’d change his story and be talking about something else. And, but he asked why we took a freight train. Because when we took a friend train all the way to, you know from where we jumped. Where we escaped the working party.
DK: Yeah.
AC: We jumped on a freight train. And I was pretty good at that because I used to do that as a kid. I had, when I went to high school you know. We went out to the freight yards. We’d jump on a freight train and go —
DK: Yeah.
AC: For a couple of miles and then jump off again. But anyway, so we came down in a freight train because we jumped on it. We were at a slight slope uphill and the freight train was going at a fairly slow rate, you know. And we’d run along beside it and jump on. And the guard said, ‘Well, why didn’t you jump on an ordinary train?’ And my friend who spoke German said, ‘Yeah. We, we took a freight train because the ordinary trains have got all these Gestapo people on them.’ And they, they said, ‘Oh, that’s, that’s not true,’ he said, ‘Most of our trains are full of people. Workers.’
DK: So the German guard was giving you advice on how to escape.
AC: Yeah. So, the German, the German guard was telling us how we, so, he said, ‘The next time you escape you should go on a passenger train.’ You know, this is a German guard.
DK: Yeah.
AC: Yet the Gestapo guys they were really mean. If you put your head out of line to look down you get hit on the back of the head with a rifle butt. You know. They just amused themselves and they’d take the women in there and march them around. Make them sing patriotic songs. And then they would take the men down there, march them around and make them go on their hands and knees. You know. Just —
DK: So, how long were you held by the Gestapo then?
AC: Oh, a couple of weeks.
DK: A couple of weeks.
AC: I think it was. I think it was more than a week anyway. Two weeks.
DK: Right.
AC: And, and then a guard came and rescued us you might say. He —
DK: So, had you, had you been trying to explain to the Gestapo that you were escaped prisoners then? Prisoners of War.
AC: Oh yeah. They — but they didn’t bother them.
DK: No.
AC: They, they didn’t give any particular respect to Prisoners of War or anybody else. But anyway the, the guard who came down who was very nice. As a matter of fact, on our way out the main, the main part of the prison I mentioned to the guard that they had taken my watch away from me. I had a Rolex Oyster. And that’s about a two thousand dollar watch, you know. And he said, ‘Oh. Ok.’ So, he went to the fellow on the desk and he started yelling at him in German and telling give me back my watch. The guy opened the drawer.
DK: Wow.
AC: And gave me back my watch.
DK: Wow.
AC: So there was, there was a guard. An ordinary, an ordinary soldier giving the Gestapo a hard time. And we had to give him advice on how to get back the best way because he didn’t know the railroads as well as we did.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And so we went back there. That was my last attempt at escape. And then after that I got back. And nobody ever caught us in the form of our, nobody ever proved it or even suspected that we had changed identities a couple of times.
DK: So you went back to the camp then as this army person.
AC: That’s right.
DK: And then you swapped over again.
AC: I swapped over again. I re-swapped over and I —
DK: I’m just amazed that the Germans never quite cottoned on to this.
AC: So am I but the like I said the average guard there would be a postman or something who would just as soon be a guard in a prison camp then fight the Russians. You know, the Russians were really mean. They were even meaner than the Germans. They still are I think but —
CK: Can I just ask which camp this was? Was this Stalag 8?
AC: Stalag 8B. And then they changed the name to 344, nearer the end for some reason.
CK: You mentioned in your book about a couple of coincidences. You met a couple of chums from Canada or something.
AC: Oh yeah. That’s right. I met a, I met a couple of chums who had gone to the same high school that I went to.
DC: When you first went in the camp.
AC: When I first went in the camp. Yeah. That was my first visit to the camp where they unloaded the train and then they marched us all down to the camp. And a couple of these fellows actually met us and said, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’ I said, ‘Same thing as you. What are you doing here?’ That camp had a maximum capacity of about twenty five thousand. There were a lot of people there. So, and you can imagine the guard’s problem.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
AC: You know. Keeping track of all these people. In fact they had a compound which, where they supposedly punished people who were trying to escape and what not. I’m trying to think of the name of the compound. Anyway, it’s in, it’s in my book. And, and we never saw the inside of that but we heard about it, you know. If you were caught climbing a fence or trying to beat up a guard or something then you go in to that camp and get punished. So, anyway that was my, my whole period there. And then the, the end came when the Russians were so close you could hear the guns firing and they decided to take us off out of the camp and they tipped the whole Air Force compound at once. They marched us out about 3 o’clock in the morning and we were going west on the, on the side roads. And we were sleeping in barns and so forth.
DK: Had you been expected to be evacuated as the Russians advanced?
AC: Well, we didn’t know. Nobody told us everything. And they decided they were going to take it because having a bunch of prisoners in fairly good condition was a good thing to do when the British were obviously winning the war.
DK: Yeah.
AC: I think most Germans knew that the war was pretty well lost by then. And they marched us all the way there. And the most interesting place we stopped at a train pulled over, stopped because there was going to be an air raid. And the name of the place was Halberstadt, which means half a town. Halbe is half and stadt is town. And the RAF came and bombed the place. Shot up the place quite, and some of our own people were killed there which was fairly normal for wartime you know.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And they and so the next morning they gathered up, they buried the people that were killed and they put the rest —
DK: So, you’ve been both. You’ve been both dropping bombs and on the receiving end of them.
AC: Oh yeah. That’s right. I was on the receiving end.
DK: Right.
AC: And so they put us back into another train and they took us all the way to West Germany. And, and in West Germany we were in a camp that had just been evacuated. They had taken a bunch of officers and people out of there that they wanted us to hang on to and they put us in the camp. And then we were in that camp when what was his name? Not Montgomery. Montgomery. Yeah. Montgomery and his army came by that area.
DK: Right.
AC: And they, they released us. I was quite disappointed because I met a couple of British soldiers that were telling us where we could go to steal things from houses. You know. How you can loot houses. They’d just walk into a place with the guns and start to look around.
DK: Really?
AC: And take stuff off the mantelpiece and whatever.
DK: And this is, this is —
AC: I was quite disappointed with that, you know.
DK: Yeah.
AC: After the way we had been treated. But you’ve got to remember we also knew that the Poles and the Jews and the Russians and a few other people like that were treated really terribly by the Germans.
DK: Yeah.
AC: The Germans. I guess we were the best treated, treated of the lot because we were connected with the Red Cross.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And you know what Germans are like. They go by the book and the book said the Red Cross was in charge of us. And so the Germans —
DK: So, just going back a bit to your time in the camp would you say you were fairly well treated then?
AC: Yes. I think we were fairly well treated and any, anybody who wrote a book saying we weren’t well treated I think they were probably stretching the truth a little bit.
DK: Do you think the Red Cross parcels made a big difference then?
AC: Oh yeah. They made a big difference because we would get an average of maybe one, one or two Red Cross parcels a month and one Red Cross parcel particularly the Canadian ones were full of butter and jam and all kinds of things that you didn’t get. Because our normal food, God only knows what was in but you know, dead horses and whatever. And that is why I’m so old, I think. I’ve eaten so much crappy stuff. I’m, I just had my eighty fourth birthday and Dorothy —
DC: Eighty fourth? Ninety.
AC: Oh, ninety fourth. Yeah.
DK: Ninety fourth. Yeah.
AC: Ninety fourth. Yeah. And Dorothy’s birthday is coming up. Her ninety fifth is coming up at the end of next month.
DC: Ninety six.
AC: Yeah. She’s going to be, she’s going to be ninety six. Well, she’s got a much better, better memory than I have. So, I didn’t meet Dorothy until after the war.
DK: Right.
AC: And she was working for a big oil company. Imperial Oil. And she was, had a pretty good job too. I didn’t marry her for her money of course but —
DC: Oh yes you did.
AC: So, but anyway and I was a starving student, you know. I had to go back to school and get my grade thirteen. And then I went to university and I got admitted in to university as an architectural student. And in the second year I realised that this would be a pretty boring occupation doing stairways and tall buildings and things like that after what I’d been through. So, on top of that I didn’t have a job or anything and didn’t have any money. Dorothy had some money. But anyway we got married and, and I re-joined the Air Force. Did I join the Air Force after we got married?
DC: [unclear]
AC: Yeah. And I re-joined the Air Force and that was about — 1945.
DC: 1949.
AC: ’49. Yeah. And I was in the Air Force for the next twenty odd years. And then I was too young to start over again then so I went to Transport Canada. And in the same capacity as a pilot.
DK: Right.
AC: And doing safety work. And my job there was to look after the safety programmes in the Province.
DK: Oh right.
AC: I was the head safety officer. Anyway, so, and that’s, so I’ve been a pilot all my life. From, from age nineteen to, to now.
DK: And could I just take you back a bit? When Montgomery’s armies turned up and you’d been liberated how did you then get back to England from there? Or Canada really?
AC: Well, actually they took us by truck down to the nearest airport and then they flew us back in Dakotas, you know.
DK: Right.
AC: You know what a Dakota looks like. And there they sorted us all out and like an idiot I said I want to go back to Canada when I should have stayed and looked around England a bit first. But anyway, so I went back to Canada pretty well —
DK: Right.
AC: Shortly after. Before the war was even over. And that was the end of, that was the end of my military experience. And I got a, I got a private pilots or a commercial pilot’s licence and I got an instructor’s job at the local airport.
DK: Right.
AC: Then I joined the Air Force, and —
DK: So, what were you flying between 1949 and the twenty years you were back in the Air Force.
AC: Well, they didn’t put me on Lancasters. They put me on Cansos.
DK: Right.
AC: I was flying Cansos and, and the first year I was flying as a co-pilot with another chap whose name was [pause] I can’t think of it right now. But he’s probably dead anyway. But anyway he was flying all over the Arctic and looking for the North Magnetic Pole and this and that.
DC: The [unclear] Magnetic Pole.
AC: Do you remember his name, Dot?
DC: Just a minute. [pause] I have to think about it for a minute.
AC: Yeah. Anyway, anyway, so his job was, you know relocating the North Magnetic Pole and a few things like that. And the following, the following year they decided to make me a captain so they moved me to Vancouver.
DK: Right.
AC: Where I took a course on the Canso. I thought I was going to be flying the Lancaster but no I went on to the Canso and I must have done fairly well on that because when I came back I was a captain on a Canso for the next couple of years. And then after that just to make things different they moved me on to Cansos in Vancouver. And I spent another five or how many years were we in Vancouver.
DC: Seven years.
AC: Seven years in Vancouver. There you go.
DK: Yeah.
AC: So, I was seven years in Vancouver. And most of our work was rescue work, you know.
DK: Yeah.
AC: Locating crashed aeroplanes and things like that and that’s where I got that medal from the Queen there.
DK: Oh right.
AC: See the picture of me and the Queen.
DK: Yeah. Oh yeah.
AC: I sent her a picture. I sent her a letter asking her if she would sign the picture. She said —
DC: Oh no.
AC: She said, I got a letter back from her assistant saying sorry but we can’t do things like that. You can imagine the problem we’d have writing to everybody who wanted our signature. So, she said, “I appreciate your enquiry,” and so forth and so on. It was the same as the Air Force Cross except it was a peacetime medal.
DK: Oh right.
AC: And it was for rescuing a guy who was having a, some kind of a heart attack in his head out on a weather ship. You know.
DK: Oh right.
AC: In those days they had weather ships way out.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
AC: In the middle of the ocean. And so I went out there and landed close by and they brought this sick guy over on a life boat and loaded him into the back of the aeroplane where there was a couple of nurses there. And then this guy was loaded in to the aircraft I’d got to take off in fairly rough water. But I had put two JATO bottles in the aeroplane.
DK: Right.
AC: One on each side. And do you know what a JATO bottle is?
DK: Is it a —
AC: It’s a rocket.
DK: Jet Assisted Take Off
AC: And it lasts for two or three minutes and so we managed to get off at about the second bounce. We got off and stayed in the air and flew this guy to Victoria where he was sent to a hospital and apparently lived to tell about it. So, anyway that was one of the more spectacular ones I did but I did lots of picking guys out of the water and flying them home and things like that. So, that was my job in Vancouver. And then they sent me to Toronto. A staff college again wasn’t it?
DC: You went to Goose Bay, Labrador first.
AC: Oh yeah. I went to Goose Bay, Labrador as a chief operations officer there. I was a squadron leader by then. And then I was told that there were so many people due for promotion that they were going to have to pass me over and start promoting some younger people otherwise everybody would be retiring at about the same time. Which was fair enough. So, I never got any higher than squadron leader.
DK: Yeah.
AC: But it was a pretty good job anyway doing that.
DK: So, so you never flew the Lancaster again post war.
AC: Oh, I flew the Lancaster again in Vancouver.
DK: Oh.
AC: Having been a Lancaster pilot they chose me to check people out in the Lancaster.
DK: Oh right.
AC: And so, I checked quite a few people out in the Lancaster. I flew a few tours myself looking for various crashed aircraft and whatnot.
DK: You didn’t, you didn’t fly the one that’s still flying did you?
AC: No. I didn’t.
DK: No.
AC: I didn’t fly that but no, I’m, I’m listed as a Canso pilot. I got thousands of hours in a Canso. And my son, one of my sons started a business which he called Canso. And he’s got the whole, and it’s doing pretty well.
DK: Yeah.
AC: So, and he’s got his whole office full of Canso pictures and parts and things like that. So, it’s quite flattering to see.
DK: Yeah.
AC: All these Canso things are out. So, anyway that’s my story. It’s not much of a story.
DK: Oh, it’s a great story. Just going, looking back now after all these years. How do you feel about your time, you know in the Air Force during the war and particularly as a POW? How do you look back on that now? Your feelings.
AC: Well, considering the fact that my father and mother both died in their 60s. My older brother died many years ago and he was a couple of years older than I was. My younger sister, who was quite a few years younger than me died just last year. I figure, and I may be wrong but I figure that the bad food that I got used to in the camp and the good treatment I got, pretty well, you know went together and made me sort of, I’m still, despite what my wife may think I’m still fairly healthy.
DC: I watch his diet.
AC: Just, my recent call to the doctor, he said, ‘You’re very slightly on the diabetic line.’
DK: Right. Yeah.
AC: And so I —
DK: So, you think it —
AC: I told Dot this and now she gives me hell every time I have a cup of sugar.
DK: So, you think it made you a stronger person. Is that what you’re saying?
DC: Yes.
AC: Yes. I think —
DK: Yeah.
AC: I think it, I think it made me stronger. The fact that, you know, some of the people like my rear gunner Claude Clemens he never went outside the camp once, you know. He just sat there and played bridge and played cards and had a good time and then got released. And I and a number of other people thought that we should be doing something useful like trying to escape.
DK: Did you see it as your duty then to escape?
AC: I thought so. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
AC: So, I mean I was a young fellow I’d believe anything in those days. But —
DK: Was it partly then to stop the boredom? You know. That you were doing something. This was —
AC: I was doing something yeah. And I was hoping to get to, to get out, you know. Actually have a successful escape. And they never did send the escapers back on operations. They used to send them back to Canada or someplace.
DK: Right.
AC: So they could propagandise the other people. So anyway, that was my reason for trying to escape but I think that it actually did me some good because I can eat almost any kind of food. Can’t I Dot?
DC: Yes. You don’t like certain kinds of green vegetables.
AC: So, anyway that’s, that’s my story.
DK: Ok.
CK: Did you keep in touch with some of your crew?
AC: They’re all dead.
CK: After the war.
CK: Ah.
DC: Well, we did keep in touch with them.
AC: We kept in touch with them. Yeah.
DC: But there’s none of them left.
AC: Claude Clemens was one of them.
DC: And Mac.
AC: And, yeah.
DC: And John Marchant, he’s dead.
AC: Yeah. They’re all dead now.
DC: And —
AC: And I’ll probably be dead in a couple of years. That’s why I wondered about you guys waiting ‘til, waiting so long to do this. There’s all kinds of —
DK: It’s taken a while. Yeah.
DC: De Silva’s grandson keeps in touch with us. Michael de Silva. His father got killed at [unclear]
AC: Who are you talking about?
DC: De Silva’s. You know the —
AC: Oh, the son of the fellow.
DC: That was the grandson.
AC: The grandson. Yeah.
DK: So, that’s de Silva’s grandson is still in touch with you.
AC: Can I make a cup of tea?
DK: Oh, I’d love one, I think. What I’ll do is —
AC: Let me make the tea, Dot. You just sit down.
DK: What I’ll do is I’ll just stop this now.
AC: Yeah.
DK: But thanks very much for that. That’s been —
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 Andrew Carswell
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Kavanagh
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
2017-06-14
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ACarswellA170614, PCarswellA1702
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:44:31 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Poland
England--Lincolnshire
Poland--Łambinowice
Germany--Berlin
Description
An account of the resource
Andrew Carswell volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force in his native Toronto. He trained as a pilot and on arrival in the UK and completion of his further training he was posted to 9 Squadron. His first operation was to Berlin. On their final operation they were attacked by a night fighter and in the subsequent departure from the aircraft one member of the crew broke his leg, one crew member’s parachute didn’t open and another had resisted all prompts to leave the aircraft. Andy was taken as a Prisoner of War and was sent to Stalag 8B which he escaped from twice before being recaptured.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
9 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
bombing
escaping
final resting place
Lancaster
Manchester
navigator
pilot
prisoner of war
Red Cross
shot down
Stalag 8B
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/730/10756/ACrozierH180216.1.mp3
88e4c998b4fef8844c1a1f0fa0dfe4c7
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
Burkitt, William Frederick
W F Burkitt
John Burkitt
Description
An account of the resource
16 items. A photograph album, photographs and documents concerning Sergeant William Frederick 'John' Burkitt (1922 - 1944, 1320846 Royal Air Force) He flew operations as a flight engineer with 9 Squadron from RAF Bardney. The collection also contains an oral history interview with Hilary Crozier about her uncle. <br /><br />Additional information on William Frederick Burkitt is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/103229/">IBCC Losses Database.</a><br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Hilary Crozier and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-26
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
Burkitt, WF
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
RP: This interview is being conducted on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Rob Pickles. The interviewee is Hilary Crozier. The interview is taking place at Mrs Crozier’s home in Cornwall on the 16th of February 2018. Also present is Trevor Crozier. Good afternoon, Hilary and thank you for inviting me to your home. We’re here to discuss your uncle, William Frederick Burkett. Perhaps you could start by telling us when and where he was born, some of his background and when he joined the RAF.
HC: Ok. Yes. Well, he was christened William Frederick but everybody in the family called him John. He called himself John so I will refer to him as John during the course of the interview if that’s ok.
RP: Yes. That’s fine.
HC: Right. He was, he was born in North London. He was the third child with two older sisters. Desperately need, wanted a son. My two grandparents desperately wanted a son and he came along quite quickly after the second daughter was born. My grandfather was a master carpenter and he’d been in the, sorry [pause] he’d been in the Royal Flying Corps during the war and not flying but I think he was there doing maintenance. But he was caught in a mustard attack, a mustard gas attack and he was never fully healthy after that and I think it was a bit of a problem within the family afterwards. But anyway, when the war broke out John was seventeen coming up eighteen. Engineer, mechanic or whatever by trade. I think he was in a Reserved Occupation but I don’t know what he was doing exactly. So he didn’t actually have to sign up and volunteer. My mother recalled some disagreements between him and his father because John was desperate to, to join up and sort of join the effort. Join the RAF. And his father was very very set against it and, you know they had quite a few debates I gather about this. But his, eventually his father said to him, ‘You will not join. You will not join up. Over my dead body will you join up.’ And sadly in March 1943 at the age of forty nine he died. My grandfather. And —
RP: Was that as a result of bombing or natural?
HC: No. No. He was ill. I mean, he never really fully recovered. He had a heart attack. He never, never really fully recovered from the mustard gas —
RP: Oh right.
HC: Attack. And so he just, he just sadly had a heart attack and died. That was in March 1943 and by October ’43 John was at Bardney. You know. Sort of preparing to fight the war. So sadly it was over his dead body really. John himself was a lovely chap actually from what I gather. He was very well, very popular, very well loved by everybody. My mother and her sister Irene, Rene we used to call her, they were very fond of him and it was a terrible terrible loss when he eventually died. To the whole family. But he loved tinkering around with mechanics, engineering, doing that sort of thing. He had the motorbike which he spent hours working on and just generally he was a happy, cheerful, nice man as I gather. So his, yeah their upbringing was quite comfortable really I think initially. My grandfather being a master carpenter he used to build pianos and somebody else did the work. He was in partnership. But then in the ‘20s the Depression came along and things got hard and he turned his carpentry skills to making coffins and he became an undertaker. Did both really. And my mother used to recall the children coming home from school in, in you know after school and they’d be sitting on half-finished coffins eating their tea in the kitchen.
RP: In the coff [laughs]
HC: It was. Yeah. So I mean they didn’t think anything of it really.
RP: No. No.
HC: I don’t think.
RP: Yeah.
HC: But it was just the life. The life that they knew.
RP: Yeah.
HC: But anyway I think he was a respected man, their father, in the community and he was quite popular as well. But sadly as I say his health never recovered from the war, the First World War and he died very young. And so that was, that was them really.
RP: So, when John had joined then do you know his sort of his history at Bardney? The numbers of sorties and —
HC: Well, I’m not entirely sure. He joined up in, he actually arrived at Bardney on the 11th of October in 1943 and his final mission was on the 22nd of March 1944.
RP: So when he arrived at Bardney he’d obviously been through training.
HC: Yes. Yes.
RP: So he must have joined quite, almost —
HC: Yes. Almost immediately after my grandfather died I imagine.
RP: Yes.
HC: He joined because yeah, they had the, they had their initial training, didn’t they?
RP: Yes.
HC: And then went on to another training —
RP: Yes. They trained.
HC: Centre.
RP: They trained as an airman.
HC: Yes.
RP: Then trained for the particular skill you have. Yeah.
HC: That’s right. And so he went to his, the second part of the training and that was when they selected, where the crews were selected.
RP: Yes. They have —
HC: Self-selected as I always think.
RP: That’s right. It is If you sort of liked —
HC: Yeah.
RP: The look of the guy who was a navigator you spoke to him and —
HC: Yes. Yes.
RP: If you gelled I think that that’s how they went about it.
HC: That’s right. And my understanding is is that Flying Officer Manning and Flying Officer Hearn, John and another sergeant called Peter Warywoda. Warywoda. He, the four of them formed the core of the crew. Other people came and went but those four were the initial sort of heart of the crew if you like. There was others joined them a little bit later. John Zammit who was possibly from America. We’re not entirely certain about that.
RP: I have heard it. Yes. He’s referred to as from the USA but —
HC: Yes. Yes.
RP: Someone might be guessing of course.
HC: Yes. I mean, I mean the only thing I’m saying is, or the thing that makes us wonder a little is Marcel who was, Marcel Dubois, the plane eventually fell in their in their little village really and he has been doing a lot of investigation to, in to the last flight of the LM4.
RP: So, Zammit is a Maltese name.
HC: Yes.
RP: Zammit is a Maltese name, isn’t it?
HC: Yes. That’s what Marcel was saying was that he’s gone to, he’s contacted many people in Malta. Many people in New York.
RP: Yeah.
HC: Where there are quite a lot of Zammits as well.
RP: Yes. Yeah. Because they would have emigrated of course.
HC: But he never had any response. He never had any reply so he doesn’t really know who, you know sort of where he came from.
RP: Has he tried the War Museums in Malta? Because they —
HC: I think he’s tried everywhere.
RP: Tried them all. Yeah.
HC: He’s been very extensive.
RP: Yeah.
HC: The interesting thing is that after they, after they died they were all buried in the, together in the cemetery in Brussels, Evere, and subsequently Zammit, John Zammit was actually, actually exhumed from that position and moved to the American War Cemetery. But after a while, I mean I don’t know why they did it but after a while he was re-removed from the American Cemetery and put back.
RP: Dear oh dear.
HC: In to Brussels. But unfortunately there’s now a complete crew between him and his crew. So, so they didn’t put, you know he wasn’t put back where he came from.
RP: I wonder if that was because they proved he wasn’t an American.
HC: It may be that they thought he wasn’t an American.
RP: Yeah.
HC: So, we don’t really know really.
RP: Ok. But tell me a little about your friend Marcel then. He seems to have been instrumental in finding out the information of John.
HC: Yes. Yes. It, I mean we didn’t know much more. We had a photograph in one of the bomber squadron books which had a picture of the crew including John out, behind the famous Johnny Walker Lancaster. We didn’t really know any more, too much more about what had happened. And then completely out of the blue in the mid-90s, around about ’94 ’95 I think it was we received a letter from the council, the North London Council where my, John’s family home had, well had been. And it was about, Marcel was trying to find people who were relatives of the crew of LM 430 which was the last mission for John and his crew. And the council were very good because by that time my mother had died, my aunt had died and the house had been sold. So somebody from the council went to the location and then they knocked on a few doors and fortunately they found a friend of my aunt who was still alive and still living there just a couple of doors down. And she happened to have our details and so they were able, the council were able to get us in contact with Marcel Dubois. Now, Marcel was thirteen years old as I understand it when, I may not have that exactly right but I think he was about thirteen when the plane came down in his small village in Belgium. And some of it fell in, it was broke into two big parts and a number of other parts and of course it fell into various gardens and some of it was in his aunt’s garden and some of it was, I think in his. I’m not entirely sure about that. But he just then became fascinated by the crew and what happened to them and their last mission. And in the ‘90s he very painstakingly tried to build up a view, or a picture of what happened, the last crew. Where they went. The last, sorry the last mission. Where they went and how the flight sort of came to its end really. And he was very successful.
RP: So I assume they, they’d bombed Frankfurt. They were on the return leg. Yeah?
HC: Yes.
RP: Yeah.
HC: Yes. Yeah. That’s right. They had. They left at, he had all the timings. I mean he was, and he’d actually worked out a little plan about their exact route and everything so we’ve got maps and things for that. So he did an awful lot of work. They, they left Bardney at ten past nine in the evening. Sorry. Sorry. Ten past seven, 19.10 in the evening and flew as though they were making for Hanover rather than Frankfurt and then, because I think they were trying to put the Germans off a little bit as to their route. And then they then diverted to Frankfurt as they got a bit closer but of course the Germans apparently already knew where they were going. By ten to ten they knew that. But they, they John’s plane was a little bit unfortunate that they’d sort of drifted slightly off course. So they were supposed to arrive for the bombing mission and I think the main bulk of them did arrive almost on time. I think Marcel said they were a minute late which was pretty good going for, for the main run. The main run. But John and his crew were a little bit later. They arrived a bit, a little bit afterwards so they were a little bit on their own which is not a good position to be in.
RP: No. No. Which is why you get picked off, I assume. Yeah.
HC: Yes. Yeah.
RP: Which is a very —
HC: Well —
RP: Just a twist of fate, isn’t it?
HC: Yeah.
RP: You’re a few minutes late and, but that’s you’re, that’s what happens.
HC: That, that’s right. Yes. Yes.
RP: Yeah.
HC: And they managed to, they managed to jettison all their bombs bar they had a crate of phosphorous bombs. Or a carrier of phosphorous bombs. They couldn’t, they couldn’t get them, get them to go. It was jammed or something. Now, under normal circumstances they, they would have just jettisoned the whole thing but there had been an order that very afternoon. That very day when they had had their briefing that they were getting short of these bomb carriers and that they should not unless they absolutely had to jettison them. They should bring them back.
RP: Oh right.
HC: Now, Marcel could never work out whether it was an order from the Bomber Command itself from higher up or whether it was just a local thing and Group Captain Pleasance had made that [pause] you know the station commander had made that order. So that subsequently was going to have some disastrous results for them.
RP: So they were carrying phosphorescent bombs. They’re hit. Which it just adds to the fire I guess.
HC: Yes. As far as I understand they had one crate. Just the one crate of these bombs but they didn’t, they did not jettison them. Together with the normal crew I haven’t mentioned that but the actual, the group captain on this particular occasion had joined them for their flight. I think it’s, and they weren’t really supposed to do that but anyway he was there. George Caines, who was the w/op the wireless operator in the crew he said that he actually didn’t really interfere with them. He sat behind the pilot and didn’t, was quietly spoken and didn’t really say anything or didn’t interfere with the actual mission really. So not, nobody sure why he went or what he went for or what the reason was. I understand he’d been two or three other times in different aircraft. So I —
RP: So do you know how many sorties John had done before that? The last one.
HC: No. I don’t. He, his first mission, he arrived on the 11th of October in Bardney. Their first mission was a few days later. I thought it was that same day but actually I realise now I’ve re-read it and it was a few days later and they got quite badly shot up on that first journey. And that first, their first mission and they lost their rear gunner and, who was, who was killed and another gunner, I think it’s the middle turret gunner, I think —
RP: Mid-upper. Yeah.
HC: Yeah.
RP: Yeah.
HC: He was quite badly injured. But they got the plane back safely. They then I believe and again this information from what Marcel found from George Caines when he interviewed George Caines. He, they were then shot up again sort of a day or two later. So they had a pretty sticky start really to their, their flight. The four original crew members who we originally mentioned were still together but they started to lose a couple of other. I mean obviously the rear gunner was killed and the other one was injured so they had to be replaced. And the wireless, the original wireless operator who was not George Caines he, well he sort of had a little bit of a breakdown. He’d had a tough time of it and so he was sort of quickly removed from the vicinity. I understand they didn’t like —
RP: No. They tended to —
HC: Lack of moral fibre I think they called it but —
RP: Yeah. Yes. They tended to be posted to a particular area in Scotland, I think.
HC: Yes. Yes. He was [pause] So, so the rest of the crew were coming and going and they said there were another, another ten missions before I think it was they [pause] I think that might have been before Zammit, John Zammit joined them. So I really don’t know how many missions he did. In the one archive it says possibly twenty but to my mind that doesn’t seem that many for an experienced crew in —
RP: It depends how, the frequency because they might fly the sortie and then have two days off and —
HC: Yes.
RP: Or if the aircraft had been damaged it could be another a week or so.
HC: Right. Yes.
RP: But you probably, you would expect probably maybe three or three or four a month at least I would have thought.
HC: Right.
RP: Possibly.
HC: About right then because it was five months.
RP: It depends on the serviceability of the aircraft.
HC: Yes.
RP: And as you say if there was a crew member had been injured and they can’t get another one.
HC: Yeah.
RP: Although towards 1944 yes they were starting to feel the pinch in getting crews I think.
HC: Yes.
RP: Because so many of them had died. I think that was the problem.
HC: Yeah, that was the thing I think. That’s, that was right.
RP: So training. They still kept to the same training regime so they still had a fairly lengthy training period.
HC: Yes. Yes. So that may well have been right then. Twenty in five months.
RP: It was a possibility. Yeah.
HC: It would be possible wouldn’t it?
RP: You mentioned someone actually survived the crash. Did they bale out?
HC: Yes. What happened, let me tell you what exactly happened.
RP: Yeah.
HC: And then —
RP: Please do. Yeah.
HC: And so, so they, they arrived at the, where they, at Frankfurt a little, a little bit behind the others but not much. They jettisoned all their bombs bar this crate of phosphorous bombs. They then decided, well obviously returned, wanted to return as quickly as they could and they thought that they could catch up with their other comrades really and the other, the other aircraft and they didn’t think there was that much time, that much gap between them. That they could make, make the time up. But unfortunately again they wiggled off course slightly. They just drifted again off course. It was quite bumpy I gather. It was a bit rough up there I think that, on that particular time. Night. Whether it had any difference, made any difference I don’t know but anyway they were still slightly off course. One aircraft on its own a little bit away from the others was fairly easily picked up really and they were flying back. They were just around about the Halle area of Belgium when they suddenly got hit by what they thought was flak. It got the bomb, the crate of bombs that they hadn’t jettisoned because of the instructions. Whether, they would have done had the group captain not been on board the plane. They may have done. We don’t know. But anyway, this what they thought was flak hit the plane. It then, the bombs exploded, caught fire. Immediately what they thought was flak had hit them the pilot, the skipper, Manning he said to them, put your, told the people to put their, put their parachutes on. Told all the crew which they did. And then before jettisoning oh before jumping out he thought he could try and put the flames out. So he did the —
RP: Yeah.
HC: Fast manoeuvre that they do but still thinking it was flak he didn’t, I don’t think he took evasive action. He just did the, I think he just did the, he flew fast to get the flames out. But unfortunately what he didn’t realise because it was the phosphorous bombs, that the air in the phosphorous it just made it worse and the flames then licked along the undercarriage of the aircraft, caught the fuel tank. But also, and the fuel tank exploded. Now, the assumption was it was either more flak or the, you know the fuel tank just got, just exploded because of the fire but what had happened in fact was that one of the German top night, well I think he was probably the top fighter, night fighter ace, Schnaufer was his name had actually come up underneath the aircraft and shot them. The first shot seemed to hit the phosphorous bombs. And then he hung around and then came in for the kill and he shot them a second time. So whether it was the flames that got the fuel tank or whether it was the, you know Schnaufer’s guns I don’t know. So, that was what, that was what happened. The plane then broke in half. Nobody obviously by that time, nobody could get out really. It was a bit too late. Perhaps they should have jumped immediately. I don’t know. But they didn’t. And as I understand from Marcel that because of the way the Lancasters were built, the very large bomb compartment it’s a weakness. It has a, as he called it a bit of a weak backbone. And so where the wireless operator which was George Caines sat was right at the beginning of the bomb bay. So the plane split open and George Caines fell out. Fortunately, he had, as I said they had their parachutes on and George, he was sort of semi-conscious but just enough to be able to pull his ripcord, and so he fell out. The parachute didn’t fully open but he landed in amongst the trees which broke his fall. And then he said by the time he got to the ground his parachute had gained sufficient air just to sort of not kill him really. He was injured but not critically badly as far as I understand it. I mean, I don’t know what his, the full extent of his injuries were but I do know he had a dislocated knee but I don’t know what else had happened to him. And he was picked up by a local chap from the village. A man called Mr Pissens and he took George into his house and he was able to eat a meal so he obviously was sort of sufficiently ok. And George stayed overnight with Mr Pissens in his house. Mr Pissens then went to look at the plane and all the other, the others were all were all dead. I’ve seen two accounts. Marcel mentioned that they were all still strapped in their seats.
RP: Yeah.
HC: And they had probably died very quickly. Lost consciousness with the oxygen depletion. But some other people, there was another report that their bodies were outside the plane. But I don’t know. I don’t know which is correct. But anyway all of the others died very quickly as I understand it. Anyway, the following, George stayed overnight in Mr Pissens’s house. The following morning a detachment of Germans arrived. They were billeted in a farmhouse fairly close by and had been searching and they picked up George Caines and he was then a prisoner of war for the rest of the war. And the rest of the crew were removed from the aircraft and taken to Brussels where they were buried on the 24th of [pause] it may have been the 25th but they were buried a couple of days later in Brussels.
RP: So, the chap who rescued George Caines. Did he get in trouble then for hiding him?
HC: Well, I don’t, I’m not, I don’t think so. There was, there was, I saw one report that said he had been arrested but I don’t think he, I don’t think so. He may have been temporarily. I don’t think he got into bad trouble. He just held him overnight. I mean he gave him up immediately in the morning when the Germans arrived. I don’t think it was in his mind to try and hide him but I don’t know. I can’t give you [any information] about —
RP: So George Caines survived the war as a prisoner.
HC: George Caines survived the war and he lived until 2011. So —
RP: Oh, that’s good.
HC: Yes. Marcel was able to track him down, trace him and he interviewed him on the 20th of, sorry not on the 20th, in the year 2000 and so he got a lot of his information —
RP: Oh, that’s good.
HC: From George Caines so it’s as accurate, I think as we can make it.
RP: Yeah. Yes.
HC: But interestingly enough nearly all the records say that the plane was shot down on the 23rd of March but it was, which was the following day but it was actually the 22nd of March. The day they flew out. It was shot, the plane was shot down at ten past eleven in the night. And we have evidence of that because of Schnaufer’s logbook. And there was somebody, I think he was called Rumpelhardt was his co — I don’t know. I don’t think they called him a co-pilot but the, the other person who was in the plane with him and perhaps he’d be a navigator. I’m not sure. But he, they both in their logbooks had recorded the shooting. The time that, they weren’t sure whether it was a Lancaster or a Halifax but subsequently it was obviously it’s the Lancaster. And there was some other correspondence, some other information as well that confirmed that from the radar I think. The German, sort of radar people. So it was, it was actually the 22nd that they were all shot down and not the 23rd. Which was a bit, a bit sad really.
RP: Yeah. It is.
HC: Yes.
RP: So it’s a fairly comprehensive report though because you don’t always get that when someone’s been shot down. It’s always hard to find out information.
HC: No. No. It’s just, you were just shot down. I mean, in a way you don’t want to know.
RP: That’s right. Yeah.
HC: I mean, you know it feels so tragic because there was, I mean there was, you know the drifting off course didn’t help.
RP: No.
HC: Not being able to release their phosphorous bombs clearly didn’t help. The pilot being a little unsure and trying to put out the fire with oxygen and air which would actually cause the phosphorous bombs to burn more. You know. It was just [pause] The group captain being on board the plane. Did that make any difference? You don’t know. I mean we just can’t. We just don’t know. And so it was yeah quite a —
RP: It would be interesting to read the form 540 of the squadron to see why the group captain went and what the explanation is in there.
HC: Yes. Nobody’s been able to find out. Marcel, I’ve seen a, because he writes, I’ve seen something he’s written on the internet as well and he says he’s got his theories but he’s not saying what he thinks his theory is. So, so we don’t really know what that is. But I mean how much impact it had or how much you know sort of him being there we just don’t know. We don’t have a clue really, do we?
RP: No.
HC: And it may have had no significance at all. I mean I wish to heavens they’d jettisoned their phosphorous bombs but, you know right at the scene. You know. But they didn’t.
RP: No.
HC: And that was that. Which was a shame but having said that Schnaufer was the top fighter ace and they probably wouldn’t have stood a chance regardless anyway. But, yeah which is a great shame really. Yes. I think Schnaufer ended up with a hundred and twenty one kills which it’s, it’s a lot of people.
RP: It is.
HC: Yeah. Yeah. They used to, it was a technique that he was very skilled at was actually sort of creeping up underneath the aircraft because they were blind in the middle.
RP: That’s right.
HC: Sort of in the belly of the aircraft. It was just a technique that he perfected. And he just was able to shoot down so many planes. And the other interesting thing is when Marcel interviewed George Caines even in 2000 he still believed that they got, that they were caught by flak. He didn’t believe that it was a night fighter ace until Marcel was able to provide him with the evidence and there was the information then that they were actually shot down by Schnaufer and not unluckily caught by flak. But my understanding is and George, I think George Caines sort of indicated it when he was speaking to Marcel was that the [pause] they mostly chose to think it was flak. I suppose they didn’t really like to think there were these aircraft because they were pretty lethal. It was a pretty lethal thing if they were got from underneath like that.
RP: I don’t think they ever solved the problem to be honest.
HC: No.
RP: Because it’s got such a large bomb bay you can’t have a really a mid-lower observation post.
HC: Yes.
RP: It’s just because that was the point of the Lancaster. It was one big bomb bay.
HC: Yes. Yes. So, so I think it was easier to think that you were randomly hit by flak than actually there’s people stalking you from underneath and coming up and shooting you dead. I mean it’s just a, yeah, it’s a, a terrible thing to have to think about each sort of when you go out.
RP: So have you been able to visit the cemetery to —
HC: Yes. Yes. We, we I mean Marcel has been fantastic and I think he, you know sort of so much credit should go to Marcel for everything that he’s done really, and yes I acknowledge what he’s done. He, he what he did in the end he found, you know he sort of that he got as much information as he could about as many of the crew as he could. There’s just one outstanding and that was somebody called Albert Finch who was the rear gunner on the night. He can’t find any information about him and, but he’s still trying. I mean Marcel must be you know sort of well into his eighties now I suppose but I still communicate with him occasionally on email and whatever so —
RP: Yes.
HC: He’s still —
RP: Yeah. Its unusual. Even if they’ve not registered interest or no one in the family.
HC: Yeah.
RP: Has researched him there won’t be any information about him that’s the thing.
HC: He’s still searching. Still searching. So, but anyway what he decided to do and it was a wonderful gesture they had a plaque made with all the names of all the individuals of the individual crew members who had died that night. And they they’ve fixed the plaque on to the side of the wall of one of the nearest house to the main part of the aircraft that crashed and we actually had a, just a wonderful visit there. Marcel had arranged it all. And it was like the grand opening of the plaque. Or the grand unveiling the plaque I should say and, but first of all though he organised a service in the Cathedral and there was many of the dignitaries from Halle in Belgium were there. 9 Squadron was represented by the squadron leader then who was a man called Watson. Squadron Leader Watson. And there was somebody from the Belgian, I think it was the military attaché I think from the Belgian [pause] government I suppose, isn’t it? Really.
RP: Yes. Must be. Yeah.
HC: Yes. And he attended. There was many local people and all the old veterans had turned out. Probably a little bit like our Royal British Legion, I think. And so we had a very moving service there. We went to the, to the cemetery and we spent time with the, at the coffin and you know accompanied by all these people. And then we went back to the village and there was the grand unveiling of the plaque and the local people had provided a really nice tea for everybody and it was just, it was just a wonderful occasion.
RP: That’s very good of them, wasn’t it?
HC: Yes. It was tremendous.
RP: Amazing.
HC: And they’ll be remembered now forever more.
RP: Oh yes. Well, thank you for that. I think we’ve probably covered everything there but it’s amazing that you’ve had, you’ve had so much research done.
HC: Yeah.
RP: It’s great.
HC: I think it’s Marcel really. Everything we know is down to him and his sort of just doggedness really. And yeah, we just, well we just you know sort of feel as though his contribution should be acknowledged but you want to acknowledge the contribution of the, the sort of the people who died. I mean they were so brave going out night after night, weren’t they?
RP: That’s right.
HC: Doing this job.
RP: Well, hopefully through this, you know the IBCC with the digital archive will have, you know many interviews like this you know about all the crew.
HC: Yes.
RP: Various people.
HC: Yes.
RP: And that’ll be there. So his name, John’s name will be remembered and we’ve obviously mentioned Marcel.
HC: Yes.
RP: In this interview so that will be —
HC: Yes.
RP: That will be remembered.
HC: That’s good. I’m pleased about that. So, yeah I mean there’s one other very, well a great irony. I always consider irony of life that on the, at the age of twenty two on the 22nd of March John’s life came to an end. For me at the age of twenty two on the 22nd of March —
[recording paused]
HC: For me on the 22nd of March my life started. I got married. It was, I mean what a coincidence.
RP: Twenty two.
HC: Yeah. I was aged twenty two. On the 22nd of March I got married.
RP: Goodness me.
HC: On the 22nd of March at the age of twenty two John died.
RP: Amazing.
HC: It’s terrible.
RP: It’s strange, isn’t it?
HC: Yeah. Dreadful irony.
RP: Well, thank you very much for talking to me Hilary, it’s been fascinating. I appreciate your time. Thank you.
HC: No. Thank you.
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 Hilary Crozier
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rod Pickles
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-16
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ACrozierH180216
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:34:31 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
Hilary’s uncle, William Frederick Burkitt (known as John), was born in North London. He joined up in October 1943 and after training as a flight engineer, was sent to RAF Bardney. During their first operation they were badly hit and the rear gunner was killed and another badly injured. On another operation the crew had to jettison the bombs, apart from one crate of incendiaries. Their aircraft, LM 430 was hit, and the incendiaries and fuel tank exploded: John and all the crew, except one, were killed on 22 March 1944 crashing into a house in Belgium.
Marcel Dubois was a child in Belgium at the time and because some wreckage of the aircraft landed in various gardens in his village he became fascinated with the crew and extensively researched them and the details of their last flight. The station commander had also been on the flight.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Belgium
France
Germany
Great Britain
Belgium--Brussels
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-10
1944-03-22
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
crash
flight engineer
incendiary device
killed in action
Lancaster
memorial
prisoner of war
RAF Bardney
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/820/10803/AFisherJ170124.2.mp3
af1ed094dce2d464caf521e9583889c4
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
Fisher, John
J Fisher
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with John Fisher. His father, Flight Sergeant George Bedwell, was a wireless operator with 9 Squadron. He was killed 1/2 January 1944. <br />The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.<br />Additional information on George Bedwell is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/101500/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">IBCC Losses Database.</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-01-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Fisher, J
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Julian Maslin. The interviewee is John Fisher. The interview is taking place at Julian’s home in Stafford. Also present is Ann Mullin, the subject of a separate interview. John, I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about your background. Where you were born and a little bit about your upbringing at that time.
JF: Yeah. I was brought up in Saxmundham in Suffolk. A little village on the A12. And that was seven weeks after my father was killed in the war. My first, I suppose early memory after that was probably only about a year later sitting in my pram and seeing tanks come across our driveway. And I often wondered what they were for but never actually at the time because I was only young and couldn’t ask it. I was brought up in a, obviously a house without a father. I’d never really asked why. Other children obviously had fathers. And children I played with and visited had fathers but I didn’t have one and I never asked why because I didn’t know what the question was. It must have just appeared natural and nobody ever told me why I didn’t have a father. And I suppose it was really, really only later in life, I suppose as late as late ‘50s early ‘60s when I really started to discover things about my father. Ann obviously knew. Ann Mullin, my sister obviously knew a little bit more about it because she was young when he was killed but I didn’t know anything at all. I think it was probably only when his medals arrived through the post unannounced that I started to wonder what that was all about. And of course I was probably, I don’t know, what was I? Thirteen, fourteen then. And started to ask questions of things like that. And then, I think about three or four years later his logbook suddenly turned up and it had obviously been in some water somewhere because it was very, very crinkled up. So I started looking at that. About that time there was going to be a pause of many many years because I’d met my wife [laughs] And that was in 1963. And three years later we were married and then we spent the next forty, thirty, forty years odd bringing up a family and making a living and all the other things you do which stop you doing the things you really want to do. So I suppose it was really about, just as the millennium turned really that I started to think what could we find out about my father. So I started asking a lot of questions. We have, had an Auntie Nancy who was really, who was my mother’s younger sister or middle sister. And she was able to fill me in a lot of things but she only knew so much and they only came out in little bits and pieces because they didn’t talk about such things and nobody talked about the war. My mother never talked about the war. And it was sort of a, not a blur but they obviously knew about it but I didn’t know where I fitted in. So just after the millennium we, my wife and I started to think because I’d got the logbook. And then we started to thinking about how can I find out a bit more about this. And that took then another two years. Because we’d still got a son at home who was heavily involved in the bank of mum and dad.
[recording paused]
JM: The pause was for a coffee break. John you were saying —
JF: Yes. So we, we started to think about what we could do to try and find out what, what really happened to my father. I knew he was buried in Hanover. And I think, I’m not sure, I think Ann may have visited the cemetery. Ann is sitting here by me so did you actually visit the cemetery? You didn’t did you?
AM: No.
JF: While you were in Germany.
AM: No. We were in the other end of Germany. Are you still on there?
JF: Yeah.
AM: Yeah. We were in [unclear] which was not, about forty miles from Munster. I think the next, I can’t remember what the next town was.
JF: Yeah.
AM: It was a long way away from Hanover. I know that. I didn’t really want to go.
JF: No.
AM: It would upset me too much.
JM: I think that’s an important point, Ann. When we met before you told me a little bit more about why you didn’t want to go.
AM: Yeah. I just —
JM: Could you say that again please?
AM: Yeah. I didn’t really want to go because I knew I’d get upset. And he wasn’t really there then wasn’t he?
JM: So, it was really —
AM: I always thought he was coming back. I used to say he’s just missing. He’s lost his memory. He’ll come back. All. Every time. Every time I had to had an argument with my step father I used to say he was coming back.
JM: I’m sure you must be speaking for many relatives of downed airmen. I’m sure you must. That’s a most important point.
JF: Yeah.
AM: I did remember him and, you know —
JM: Yeah.
AM: I remember going to tell Granny Bedwell that he’d gone missing. And I didn’t understand it all but she was upset so I thought this is something horrible but I couldn’t work out why. You know, you don’t think about it, do you? I was only about six. So —
JM: John, if you could carry on. Take on the story.
JF: Yeah. I’d talked before to my mother when we were on our own about visiting and suggested we ought to all go together to Hanover and she said she just didn’t want to go. And I assume it’s a similar reason to Ann really. She didn’t really believe it. I know she got married again and that, but that’s you know another story. But she just didn’t want to go. So I’m now sort of around 2000, 2002 and I thought we’re going to do something about this now. Try and find out. The first thing I did was to go to RAF Cosford which is just ten minutes away from us and ask people there what we could do. And they let me look at the book which said, yeah. They crashed. Missing over Weyhausen. And so my next logical step, being a nosy reporter was to find a newspaper in Weyhausen. The local newspaper. And try and find a journalist there who might be able to help me and they may have records or something. So, I found one in a place called, in near Weyhausen, in Gifhorn, which was the area. And it’s a guy called, sorry I phoned the number. I phoned the number of this newspaper and the first person who answered was a guy called Joachim [Gris] and, ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Hello Joachim, I hope that’s how I pronounce his name,’ because I couldn’t pronounce his name. I thought it was Joachim and he said, ‘What can I do for you?’ And I explained where I was and who I was and that. He said, ‘You’re most unfortunate,’ sorry, ‘You’re most fortunate because I’m known around here as something of a World War Two buff.’ And he said, ‘I’m sure you know what one of those are.’ I said, ‘Yeah. We’ve got several in England who are the same.’ ‘Well, I’ll be very interested in this because it’s, it’s the sort of thing I like to investigate.’ So from that we had a natter and that and I gave him details. I emailed him with details out of my father’s logbook and all the details of the plane and things and the records from the RAF. And he then set about, which I didn’t know at the time he set about looking through Luftwaffe records to see if he could actually find anything. One of the early things he came up with out of his own paper in fact, was a photograph of a crashed plane which had appeared in there. It had been issued by, by the Luftwaffe. Presumably by their press office to show, look what we’ve just shot down. The plane was a little bit mangled. It was on the front page of their paper. And he thought that might be it because it was actually shot down the same night that my father’s plane was shot down and over Weyhausen. So I took this to RAF Cosford where they identified it as a Hastings.
JM: Halifax.
JF: Hastings.
AM: Halifax.
JF: Hastings. And they actually said, ‘No. This is a Royal Canadian Air Force plane.’ And they, they contacted a group of people who had been looking for this particular plane because one of the crew was an international, I say international, a nationally known radio broadcaster in Canada and they’d been looking for what fifty, sixty years for this plane. Or news about it. So they sent all the details to them and we assume now they will do the same. Go through records and they will find out what happened. According to the cutting the, all the crew perished in that so there wasn’t going to be a survivor anywhere. But of course it was a Hastings. It was a bit of red herring but it helped somebody else out of a problem. Meanwhile, Joachim decided to go to the National Records which is some miles away apparently. It’s about a hundred and fifty kilometres away or somewhere where they kept all the microfiche records. And eventually by keying in some key dates he found out that in fact my father’s plane crashed in another Weyhausen some miles away from where he was. I didn’t know there were two Weyhausens. And it’s the Weyhausen near the big Volkswagen factory which is still there at Wolfsburg and of course have a famous football team nowadays. Once he’d found that out he was able then to triangulate that with all the Luftwaffe pilot reports and eventually he came up with a guy called Wittgenstein, Prince Wittgenstein who was the Red Baron of the day. And Prince Wittgenstein actually downed eighty three planes during his short career. He’s also, I should say prince, he was a member of the royal family of Germany. And in fact he was related to our queen through Queen Sophia of Spain I understand. That may not be totally accurate but he has a, he has a relationship somewhere along the line with our queen. But then again they probably all are. They’re all related. He found out anyway. He’s the guy who came out of the clouds and shot my father’s plane down. The nasty story for him is that two weeks later he came out of the clouds to try and get another plane and crashed into it and he was killed. So he only lasted two weeks. Lasted two weeks after shooting my father’s plane down.
JM: John, I think I should pause here and ask you a difficult question. You found this photograph and this record of the man who had taken your life and the lives of many other allied airmen. What were your feelings about that?
JF: Initially, I think I’d like to throw bricks through his window [laughs] but not really. In reality it was a war. He was fighting a war just like our people were. I mean, we have to say my father had just bombed the hell out of Dresden. You know. Or my father’s plane. He hadn’t. He was a radio operator so he didn’t actually press any buttons but he was part of that. But we were fighting for freedom. We were fighting for our country. The German people were not necessarily fighting for their country. The German people were fighting for peace. That’s what they wanted. And they wanted to be rid of the Nazis. Whatever anyone said they were a cruel nasty lot and this is why when eventually we turned up in Hanover to stop with some people the first thing they did was to apologise for the war. And these were only a young couple in their thirties who had no experience of that war. And they just said, ‘We’re sorry about the war and we’ll help you any way we can while you’re here.’ And that was nice.
JM: Thank you. Did you find out whether Wittgenstein had any surviving family members?
JF: He has many, many, many surviving families. In fact, I trawled recently through the internet just to try and find out who his families were and there are Wittgensteins everywhere. You’ll see them mentioned in the last few weeks doing things. Either going to visit our queen, going to weddings, funerals of other Wittgensteins. And there seems there’s a whole lot of them. A whole lot of them.
JM: And have there been histories or biographies written about Prince Wittgenstein’s war service or the service of —
JF: Yeah. Certainly. There is a whole website devoted to Prince Wittgenstein who shot my father down because he was the Red Baron of the day. Nobody else had downed eighty three aeroplanes. And he, he was a night fighter. He, he was the probably their top night, well he was their top night fighter. He was the top, top fighter pilot and probably a big loss to the German Luftwaffe. But the one thing we realised is that they were very efficient. So when Joachim, Joachim came to look for the Luftwaffe records he was able to get out of those records the very docket which was signed on the spot. Noted on the spot of what the Germans found when they visited the site. And he was able to copy that and send that to me. And that clearly showed they’d found four, it didn’t, it wasn’t specific I think, they’d found four or five bodies in the aeroplane. The plane itself was intact and with the rear gunner still in place. Two others apparently had baled out, and either killed or died and were found in the top of a tree. But just to take that now a little bit back a bit. So in 2002, after two years Joachim had come up with the story. He’d found it was Weyhausen. He then contacted the mayor of Weyhausen and the mayor instantly said to him, ‘I have memories of this and I think there are people in the village that will have memories of this.’ And he asked around and found two people who were in the local school at the time and remembered the crash. And, and they even heard it. They heard it coming down. They remembered being taken to the site by their teacher the next morning and they were all gathered around this plane. And the name of the guy was Frederick Tager who, a very, very nice guy and still very young outlook and he remembered everything. He said the plane was there. The tail gunner was still there. Most of the plane was buried four or five feet in the ground. It had come straight down nose and ended up against an oak tree. They were cleared off by the Luftwaffe people and the military guys who came because they said there may be unexploded bombs in it. In fact, there weren’t. As it turned out there weren’t any. They’d dropped them all over Dresden of course. But they were cleared off and the Germans apparently because a lot of them still crept up in the trees and watched and the German people apparently stripped the plane of any useful things and some of it was taken away and the rest was buried. And that’s, that’s that. We visited in 2004. We were helped. My brother in law came with us. And his wife. The four of us went. Went to Hanover. Rented a car and seventy kilometres to Weyhausen and Wolfsburg. And we were met by the mayor. Had a reception. A nice reception. The mayor and various other people. And because Joachim was a journalist there was an entourage of ten journalists with him [laughs] because he was obviously making a bit of money out of it as well. He said he would from the start. And we had a bit of reception in the mayor’s parlour and everything and some drinks and things and a chat and the German press took some photographs and things. We were then taken to the site by this man who, one of the two men who originally remembered it. And it was in middle of a forest. It had all grown up and been replanted since it happened but the oak tree where the plane was was still there so he was able to identify it very, very clearly. In fact, there were still some gouge marks in the oak tree which we saw and he said they were almost certainly caused by the plane. And so we laid, we basically, we laid a wreath. Sorry about this.
[recording paused]
JM: We just had a short pause there.
JF: Yeah. The mayor quite kindly said he would pledge to lay a wreath every year on Remembrance Day. We should have gone back the next year to, to the Remembrance Day but I was ill unfortunately and so we couldn’t go. But we will go soon. And I’ve been ill off and on since but we will be going. We’ve said we will come back again. Meanwhile, the next morning we appeared in, on the front pages of about, I don’t know it was ten, twelve German newspapers and there may be a lot more who I didn’t know about which Joachim was responsible for. He’d also contacted our local paper, the Stafford Newsletter and eventually they came out to see me as well and we did some things. And we went, we’d previously gone to the Hanover Cemetery to see the graves of all the men and one thing I learned then was that in fact, this was from the curator or manager of the cemetery in fact all the remains were buried there. They weren’t just nominal graves. Which I hadn’t known before. I thought they just put them in a collective nominal grave and they didn’t. They were, that was all the bodies, they recovered them. They were quite efficient like that. The cemetery beautifully laid out. In fact it was on, on the garden programme the following week as one of the best gardens in Europe. It was a moving experience but it’s something we had to do. I don’t know what will happen. The plane. There’s quite a large chunk of the plane still there that I would think, we were told by the mayor there will be a lots of planes in that area and probably the only reason the night fighter was patrolling that area was because of the factories nearby. And that would probably have been normally been a safe route out from a raid because taking a large sweep round the north and coming back over the side of Spain and stuff. But on this occasion it wasn’t. He would have been patrolling there at the same time. I haven’t actually done a lot more about this since and I’ve sort of, that’s the one thing that I set out to do. It’s probably which I would never have done in my younger days. Most people don’t have time to do this sort of thing. And there must be thousands and thousands of people in the same boat who have lost somebody but won’t know anything about it. I’ve since of course become an interviewer for the International Bomber Command Centre and interviewed some flight crew myself and I’ve found out their experiences. And that also has been an experience for me to hear out what they got up to and how they survived. Some of them flew many, many missions. It’s, it’s, I would do it again.
JM: John, you’ve given us a very vivid story of this particular research journey. There are one or two questions that are in my mind. One of them is I wondered whether you’d ever come across relatives or friends of any of the other crew members from your father’s crew?
JF: I have tried and tried to find them. The reason I probably can’t — my father was the only married member of the crew. The rest were just young and he was the oldest at twenty four. The rest were eighteen, nineteen and I suspect they were the son of somebody and those people have now died since and nobody after that has had any memory of them because they weren’t married. They didn’t have children themselves so there is no one to keep their memory alive. I have tried looking. I’ve put messages on websites. On, on sites that relate to the war and relate to Number 9 Squadron even. But I have not yet come across a single person and I suspect I won’t. I will try again when the Centre is open because that, the information which is going to be on the Centre will have so much information about other people and things that some of those, it may just strike a chord. But I think there has been a greater awareness lately of the World War Two and of the sacrifice that people gave up. My father was looking after barrage balloons in Hyde Park and needed more money. Ann was on the way. And he took that extra shilling a week to become, to become air crew. That was —
JM: How do you —
JF: A high cost.
JM: How do you know that that was his motivation for remustering?
JF: I was told by my auntie, my mother’s sister that that’s what he did. Now, whether that’s right or not but somebody must have told her and I presume he told her at some stage. ‘I’m going to do this and I can get an extra shilling a week for this.’
AM: John.
JF: Ann may have heard this story.
AM: Yeah. I was just going to say my mother said he should have gone to Canada to do something but she wouldn’t let him. And I think she felt guilty then because, you know —
JF: Yeah.
AM: He was going on some course which he’d probably be here now. Well, maybe not now but, you know.
JM: So we have one of these situations where —
AM: A decision was made.
JM: A decision like that.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Had such a profound —
AM: Yeah. Made a difference.
JM: It really did.
JF: Yeah.
AM: She always wanted to go to Canada after that but she never got there.
JF: No. No. No. One of the things I think which we both know. He played the piano, didn’t he?
AM: Yes. He did.
JF: And a brilliant pianist and played in a band.
AM: Yes, he did. He was in a band.
JF: At, doing Glen Miller stuff and he probably would have gone on to be quite good because musically he was quite, he was really good. And I think that’s where my mother and him met. Is that right?
AM: I’m not sure. I’m not sure.
JF: Once again it was my Auntie Nancy who said all this.
AM: Yeah. Granny Bedwell had a piano which I used to go bang on.
JF: Yeah.
AM: Because I wanted to be like my dad.
JF: Yeah.
AM: I couldn’t.
JF: Yeah. We think my mother and father met at the Market Hall in Saxmundham.
AM: They used to have dances in there.
JF: We know that they had a first date in 1937 at the Picture House in Saxmundham because I’ve got the ticket.
AM: A picture of it.
JF: Yeah. I’ve got the ticket and I’ve given that now to the local museum. And I think probably eventually we’ll hand over the logbook and medals and everything to the local museum.
JM: Super.
JF: That’s it.
AM: I think that’s the ticket.
JF: Yeah. That’s it. Yeah.
JM: So what age was your father when he lost his life?
JF: Twenty four.
AM: Twenty four I think. I’m not sure. I’m not sure.
JF: Yes. He was.
AM: Twenty three. Twenty four.
JF: He was twenty four. Yeah.
JM: So a picture is emerging of the young man with family responsibilities.
JF: Yeah.
JM: With a sense of national commitment. And commitment to the national cause.
JF: Yeah. He’s got one daughter.
JM: He’s got one —
JF: And another one on the way.
JM: Yes.
JF: Me.
JM: Yeah. And makes this step to, to remuster as aircrew and he does a number of operations and then he loses his life.
JF: I think he did twenty four.
AM: [unclear]
JF: I don’t know that for a fact but I think that’s another thing which I gleaned from somewhere.
JM: Yes.
JF: Probably out of some records somewhere.
JM: Yes.
JF: We know nothing of his thoughts at the time of course. We just don’t know them because there’s no records anywhere. I did, while I was in Lincolnshire on my last visit there was a pub near where he was stationed and one of the, I spoke to someone who said, ‘Yes. Number 9 Squadron. They used that pub. And that’s where your father played the piano.’
AM: Oh.
JM: Because 9 Squadron was based at —
JF: And I hadn’t heard that one before.
JM: No. 9 Squadron was based at Bardney.
JF: That’s right.
JM: And there were two pubs based in the local village.
JF: Yes.
JM: Both within walking distance.
JF: Yes. That’s right.
JM: So it could have been one of those. I think one’s called the Black Dog.
JF: I think it was the Dog and Duck or something.
JM: Black dog, I think. Something of that sort. Yes.
JF: Something like that.
JM: Yes.
JF: And, and I was told then and I think actually that’s when we [pause] yes that was on the last visit. That would be for, I forget where it was now. A training session or something.
JM: Yes.
JF: Yeah. And, yeah, he said, ‘That’s where your father played the piano,’ because that’s where they all gathered.
JM: That must have been very moving. To have seen that.
JF: It was. Yes. I don’t think I can go there because it’s not there anymore. Something like that. Or it’s closed. It’s now a house. Something like that. Yeah. That’s my story.
JM: Yeah.
JF: And I would really love to hear of other people who would like to go through that same measure because if they follow what I did they won’t get Joachim now because I think he’s retired and gone off somewhere else. But there are loads of people who would help them and they, they shouldn’t sort of think oh, I don’t know, I’ve no idea where it is and I don’t know where I’m going to find it. It’s easy. It did take two years but it’s fairly easy.
JM: Well, we know that there are quite a number of privately published books available where families have —
JF: Yeah.
JM: Made researches of this sort.
JF: Yeah.
JM: But I’d like to think that the interview that you are giving today will encourage people who perhaps haven’t gone that far to take those first steps.
JF: I hope they do and I hope the children of those people do it as well because that’s further memories for them and that will show them exactly what they fought for.
JM: Yes. Yes.
JF: And you have to always remember that RAF people were volunteers and they didn’t have to do it. Ok the alternative then was ground crew. Ground forces —
JM: Yeah.
JF: And things, but it was a volunteer organisation.
JM: Would you say that this family research that you’ve done has that significantly affected your view of what Bomber Command did during the Second World War? I had the impression when you started out telling us although you grew up as a young man after the Second World War that you hadn’t really been totally aware of what had been going on and that this story has actually increased that awareness. Is that fair?
JF: No. I hadn’t really. Because you’re so busy growing up, aren’t you?
JM: Yes.
JF: There was only one incident that really came back to me about what war is all about. That was when myself and two neighbours. I suppose we were only nine and ten then or something like that and we used to go fishing in Saxmundham in a particular pool which was up a big steep hill. Past the church up a big steep hill and we’d go fishing there. And one day, on our way back we decided to stop in a copse which was very, very overgrown with ivy and everything. And we came across a well and we thought this is lovely. This well was covered in ivy but we uncovered the top of it and it had got a thick concrete top on it. A really massively concrete top about a foot thick. And we thought that’s strange isn’t it? You don’t put that on a well. So we played around on the top for a while and lit a fire on top. You always light fires when you’re youngsters. And then we started exploring the sides of the well and could see that a lot of the bricks around it after we pulled the ivy away were actually crumbling. So we got our knives out and that’s the other the thing you always carried when you were young, a knife [laughs] and started scraping away. We scraped away one brick and pulled some others out and then some others. Lit some bits of paper, shoved them down the well and we could see by the light of that before the flames went out that there was a lot of metallic things down there and didn’t know what they were. So we all, by this time we’d got a hole about two foot wide and being careful we didn’t fall down we all picked up bricks and collectively threw one each down this well. There was a massive explosion. A fire ball whooshed straight up in the air and we fell backwards. I lost all my eyebrows and a bit off the hair. Julian, my friend lost his and Christopher, his brother lost his eyebrows. And we fell backwards and we ran like hell and while we were running away, ‘Don’t tell anybody. We mustn’t tell anybody. Don’t tell anybody. Don’t tell anybody.’ And this is the first time I’ve ever told anybody [laughs] including my mother. Anybody. We gather because we did creep back later, it and they were all, there was lots of iron things and things around. I assume that they were incendiaries. But they appeared to have been very unstable.
JM: Yes.
JF: Now, there were other shapes of things down there which wouldn’t have been set off by the incendiaries. I can only assume, I can link these probably with the tanks that I first saw sitting in my pram after, just after the war rumbling by. I think they dumped all their surplus in that well because they would have been heading down that hill from the coast and I think that’s what happened. The bad news is that after many, many years that well became the garden of, on a new estate of a house. I visited it a few years ago and we couldn’t really find it but we knew where it was and it was still covered up in ivy and stuff. We assumed it was filled in. Julian, my friend, you’re Julian, asked somebody about it. He said, ‘Oh yeah. That was filled in and it was — ’ such and such. Now, I think the house belongs to somebody who I used to know in Stafford but I’m not sure so I won’t talk about him because the poor devil is sitting on a bomb probably. We did, we met up at a reunion of Leiston Grammar School about four years ago and the first thing Julian said, ‘Have you told anybody?’ And I said, ‘No. No. We wouldn’t do that.’ He said, ‘Perhaps one day we should do.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but not yet.’ So my mother knew that we lit fires in the woods so we said we had a flare up in a fire. We’d lit it with a, we used, used to get tins of paint from a local builders and off their scrap yard and used them to start a fire with, you’d like to find out. So we said it flared up, and we all got burned. That’s how we explained that because nobody would even believe us —
JM: No. No.
JF: If we said a well blew up.
JM: Right. Now, John, if I could ask you another question here. These researches that you’ve told us about they more or less coincided with the time when the, the perception of Bomber Command in the national psyche was changing. Leading to the development of the Bomber Command Memorial in London and the award of the clasp to surviving Bomber Command aircrew.
JF: Yeah.
JM: I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your views as to how Bomber Command was, has been treated.
JF: Yeah. I think what it is which I’ve ascertained since of course the proper, there was a lot of anti-propaganda around. The war was also very political and there were people in the military who decided for one reason or another that you could only fight wars on the ground and that there was no other way. Tanks. Tanks and men. And that attitude I think remained. The other thing was bombing or carpet bombing which is what we were really involved in then caused a lot of, a lot of ordinary people to die. Thousands upon thousands. Especially if you look at Dresden and places like that. And even Berlin and Hanover. They all suffered. So it wasn’t really very nice or courteous to talk about it and people didn’t. They forget that we were on the receiving end of such things as well and, you know deadly V bombs and things. There was no stopping them. They just killed masses of people. Not military stuff. Just people. And the whole point of all of that was to, to turn people against war and to disillusion them and to dishearten them and say, ‘Let’s give up. Let’s talk to Hitler.’ And it was the other way around as well, you know [unclear] And it was only really later in years wasn’t it and we’re only talking now after the millennium that things really started to change and people suddenly said, ‘Hey, these people actually did a brave job. They died for this country. Why shouldn’t we honour them?’ And, and the Memorial in London was, I suppose really the start of this new feeling. And now the International Bomber Command Centre has, has enhanced that really. And I suppose, and also I think the military or the people at the top used the excuse that the RAF was a volunteer organisation. Therefore it couldn’t be officially recognised. And so they didn’t do anything really. They just volunteered and they went out and bombed people and that was it. That was wrong. That was wrong because without the RAF Hitler would never have given in that quick. Because the, the country was demoralised purely by the bombs. We couldn’t have done that with people on the ground. We would eventually have probably but we couldn’t have done it that quick. And we have to remember our country at the time was bankrupt. We’d borrowed so much money off America and other places that we hadn’t any money left. So you know it was essential to finish that war quickly. And I think it would have gone on and on and on had it not been for Bomber Command.
JM: Thank you. Could I ask you another question, please? You and your sister are obviously direct descendants of your father. You’ve done this research. What has been the effects of this research on younger generations and on the family as a whole? Is there a discernible reaction?
JF: Yes. I’ve spread this around my own family. My own children. The grandchildren are still a bit young to understand but one of them is nineteen. They’ve all seen this. They’ve all seen it and they’ve realised what went on. My grandchildren are all in America, and my children and so they’re a little bit out of the war they were. Although America were involved later on but they were still a bit out of it. The general population didn’t get involved. But they’ve all seen the information which I’ve got and the press. The press cuttings and things. And they understand now what went on. Which is quite good. And I think I’ve read recently that our children are now going to be told about World War Two more as part of their studies. That I think is essential because the future of the world really can be only peace. War achieves nothing and it never does in the end. It’s a temporary solution. It doesn’t achieve total peace. We’re now at verbal war with the, with the EU. You know. That’s ok. Verbal’s ok. That doesn’t matter.
JM: Jaw jaw.
JF: It’s war and fighting that destroys the world and could well do in the end. Terrorism is something we didn’t have then. It didn’t exist. You fought a war. Went in and fought it and came out and there was a victor. That doesn’t happen anymore and its made war worse I think. And I think the younger generation are getting to realise this. That if we continue to have wars involving people and nuclear bombs and all the rest of it there will be no war left. No world left. Because that’s the, that’s the state of war nowadays and weaponry. Its, its so disastrous whereas before it was very very very directional. I don’t know. I don’t think I’d like to be a younger generation now because the future I don’t think is particularly good.
JM: Perhaps I could turn to you Ann now as we’re drawing to the end here. We’ve met before.
AM: Yes.
JM: You gave me a very full interview. And now you’ve heard what your brother has to say.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Has this changed your views at all? Has it added to your knowledge? Do you see things in any way differently?
AM: No. I knew it pretty well. I knew Johnny went to Germany and all that. You know. I was there but I mean the people we stayed with, the lady was lovely. We went, the first three weeks we were there we didn’t have army quarters. And the man there never spoke to us once and he watched war films on the telly in just black and white obviously in those, it was the sixties but he was horrible. But the lady was lovely.
JM: Just a different experience.
AM: He hated us. I know. You could feel it. But you know. We hadn’t done anything had we?
JM: No.
AM: You know.
JM: It’s an interesting contrast.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Because your experience of meeting German people was quite different from yours at that —
AM: Yeah.
JM: But perhaps, was it at a different time?
AM: Yeah. Sixties.
JM: Would the proximity to the war? So that might explain the difference do you think?
AM: ’63, ’64. No, ‘64 because I had Andrew then.
JF: We’re talking just sixteen years.
AM: Yeah. Yeah.
JF: After the war and memories would still be very very much alive.
AM: I mean, you know —
JM: Yes.
AM: I got on quite well with the German people that I met. But not him.
JM: No.
AM: He was — and I’ve never lived anywhere like that before, you know. I’d only been married a few years then so —
JM: Do you think he might have served in the German forces?
AM: Oh. I think he had. Definitely.
JM: So that might explain his —
AM: Yeah.
JM: Reluctance.
AM: But he was just horrible.
JM: It’s been a fascinating, fascinating afternoon listening to you both. I realise that through my incompetence at the beginning of this interview I forgot to ask you to give your father’s full name and rank and where, where and when he was born. Could I ask you to do that now please just for the record?
JF: Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
JF: Over to Ann I think. George Kenneth.
AM: George Frederick Kenneth.
JF: Frederick Kenneth.
AM: Bedwell. And he was a flight sergeant. And I don’t know where. I think he was born in Kings Lynn.
JM: Right.
AM: Or it could have been —
JF: Oh, actually —
AM: I’m not sure.
JF: I’ve only just discovered this.
AM: Oh. Do you know where he was born?
JF: Yeah. He was born in Lewes. Sussex.
AM: Lewes? Where’s that?
JF: Lewes. That’s on his birth certificate.
AM: Oh. Oh. I never knew that.
JF: Yeah. Lewes. Sussex.
JM: Right.
JF: I don’t know why. We don’t know how.
AM: Oh.
JM: You don’t know anything about his parents.
JF: Oh, we know about his parents.
AM: Yeah. Granny Mabel. Granny Mabel.
JF: Yes.
AM: And Granddad Walter.
JF: His parents were living, we don’t know where. I presume they were living in Saxmundham somewhere. Or Leiston.
AM: I don’t know.
JF: But we don’t know. They may have come up from Lewes.
AM: Yeah. They were in Kings Lynn during the war.
JF: Yeah.
AM: Because we went.
JF: Yeah.
AM: We went there.
JF: They went off to Kings Lynn because his father was working. Got a job in a factory there for war munitions and then he was lodged up with our grandmother.
AM: Granny Bedwell.
JF: Yeah. Granny Bedwell. And that’s as far as —
AM: I think my dad lived with them.
JF: And the stepfather —
AM: Oh him. Yeah.
JF: Lived with them as well.
AM: Yeah.
JF: He came from a Dr Barnardo’s Home. That’s about —
AM: Emma’s still got all that on her phone ready to put, print out. Haven’t you Emma?
JM: But we don’t know, you don’t know where his musical talents originated from.
JF: We don’t.
JM: No.
JF: Absolutely. No. His job was a roundsman at the International Stores.
AM: Yeah. He used to drive, ride a bike didn’t he?
JF: Rode a bike.
JM: Yeah. We don’t know.
JF: He used to bike from Leiston every morning to Saxmundham which was five miles. And that was his job. But he —
AM: My eldest son’s inherited that. Andrew. He can. He just learned the organ and everything, didn’t he?
JF: Yeah. Yes.
AM: He still does it. He’s still in bands.
JF: Yeah. Ann’s son was a bandsman in the —
AM: The army. Yeah. He was in the army.
JF: What regiment was he in?
Other: The Queens Own.
AM: The Queen’s Own Highlanders.
JF: The Queens Own Highlanders. Yeah. And then he went on to form his own band in Sweden.
AM: He still goes. There’s a royal family in Sweden and everything. So yeah, he’s got it, I think.
JF: Yeah.
AM: I never got it.
JF: No. I tinker.
AM: I plonked away at a piano. I thought I can’t do this.
JF: No. We’ve no idea how he learned. We can only assume that his father and mother, one of them could play the piano.
JM: Yes. Yes.
JF: That’s the only thing.
JM: I know when I’ve met one or two other ex-wireless operators they have often told me that they, they were selected for that partly on the fact that they had been in the Air Training Corps. They’d learned the Morse Code. They had some interest. Some prior interest in radio. But I don’t get the impression that your father was like that.
JF: No. In fact, he —
AM: I thought he was rear gunner as well. Yeah.
JF: That’s right. He went in as a rear gunner.
JM: Right.
JF: He failed all the tests.
JM: Ah.
AM: He didn’t want to shoot people.
JF: No. He didn’t want to shoot. He failed them. Yeah. On the, they did a number of flypasts and shooting at targets and he failed. So he then went for training as a, as a radio operator.
JM: Right.
JF: And obviously picked that up quick.
JM: Yes. Had an aptitude for it.
JF: Yeah.
JM: You had to send and receive Morse at a certain level.
JF: Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
JF: Yeah.
JM: It wasn’t an easy task in any sense, was it?
JF: No. No. No.
JM: And the wireless operator was very often a sort of Jack of all trades in the crew because he would be needed to support other crew members as look outs or do whatever was needed as part of the team. But there’s no record really of your father leaving any evidence of that in his letters or —
AM: No.
JF: Nothing at all. No.
JM: No. No. No.
AM: No. I read all my mother’s letters at the time.
JF: Yeah. The last letter home we assume was the one where I was conceived.
JM: Good.
[recording paused]
JF: Just, just to end this, Julian. There are lots of unanswered questions I think. We’ve been able to piece together some of the answers but there are a lot which are not. But we’ve got enough to get a picture of my father and having been to the site where his plane crashed a lot of people have not been able to do that. They’ve just been told they were missing and that’s it. And of course those, rest of that crew were unmarried and over probably just a period of a few years they were probably forgotten about almost. There was nobody to remember them. But we’ve, we have answered a few questions between us. I hope it encourages more people to do the same.
JM: John and Ann, thank you very much indeed.
JF: Thank you.
AM: Thank you.
JM: Very good.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with John Fisher
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Julian Maslin
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-01-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AFisherJ170124
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:47:55 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
John Fisher was born six weeks after his father was killed on an operation over Germany. He became more and more curious about what had happened to his father and finding out more about him and the events leading up to his death as he got older. John’s father had been a wireless operator based with 9 Squadron. John began researching with the help of RAF Cosford and made contacts in Germany to help fill in the gaps of his knowledge. He also visited the crash site and the graves of his father and his crew.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Germany--Hannover
9 Squadron
aircrew
childhood in wartime
final resting place
killed in action
perception of bombing war
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/859/11101/AHarrisIR-SW180324.2.mp3
9079e793b890b29a429fceba459dd629
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, Pat and Frank
Pat Harris
Iris R Haris
I R Harris
Frank Harris
Stanley W Harris
S W Harris
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Iris 'Pat' Harris and Stanley 'Frank' Harris. Pat Harris's brother Flight Sergeant Jack Carter (576282 Royal air Force) was killed over Germany flying from RAF Bardney 22 March 1944.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Harris, IR-SW
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DB: Today, which is the 24th of March 2018 at 14.45 it’s Denise Boneham interviewing Pat and Stan Harris at their home in Diss. Pat, would you like to tell me a little bit about your brother’s service?
PH: Yes. He went in to the Air Force straight from school when he was almost seventeen. He went as a an apprentice, a toolmaker but the instruction was shortened because of the war and then immediately he’d qualified, he volunteered for aircrew and he became a navigator. And he was operating from Bardney in Lincolnshire.
SH: 9 Squadron.
PH: 9 Squadron, and he was with two Australians in the crew and one Canadian and one young man who was only eighteen. I didn’t know the other two at all. And then he was reported missing and unfortunately we didn’t know until after the war what had happened, which was a great strain on my mother who was home alone because I was already in the Wrens. And we finally found out that they had crashed in Germany and then they were buried after the war in Rheinberg and we have visited that cemetery which is beautifully kept. And it was great loss for my mum because there were three of us girls and one son so that was a bit sad.
SH: It was a long distance existence.
PH: My mother was living on her own. I didn’t have a father, and when I went in the Air Force err in to the Navy both my sisters were married so she was home alone. And I hadn’t been in, I was only seventeen and a half when I joined up so I’d only been in the Wrens about six months when he was reported missing which was a great shock being away from home and I really felt it greatly. My mum used to listen every evening on the wireless. They used to have a list when they heard about prisoners of war that, and she hoped that his name would come up but it didn’t. In fact, somebody of Jack’s age who had also been reported missing she heard his name which filled her with hope, but it wasn’t to be. So we didn’t know anything until the end which was pretty grim for my mum.
[recording paused]
PH: Yes. When Jack came on leave sometimes the Australians came, and in fact I have a treasured little photo of the pilot with my niece who at that time was a little tot of two, and I’ve got the snapshot here which is rather sweet. Yes, we knew them and sometimes I took Jack and the two Australians to the Kodak dances which I used to go to religiously [laughs] and, you know we loved having them. It was all very sad. I can remember, and he was a navigator, when we used to walk home from, if we’d been to a dance and he used to be pointing out the various star formations to one of the lads, Alan. And it was all very interesting to have them there and hear bits from their lives but they didn’t talk about a lot of what was going on of course. I didn’t realise it was 9 Squadron. They did talk about Bardney, and they were quite happy there and we have visited since. Since we’ve been up here we have been there but there’s more or less nothing to show which is a bit sad. But we went into the church there so it was nice to be able to point to where they’d been. Also of course his name is in the Cathedral, in the books there and they did, you know turn the page for us to see it which was rather nice.
[recording paused]
SH: Go on.
PH: Lincoln Cathedral. As a family we did visit Rheinberg quite often. My mother went until she was a bit too old. My eldest sister went regularly every year with the organised group until she was too old. So, we kept in contact and we were very very pleased with the condition of the cemetery which was beautifully kept.
[recording paused]
PH: Not the parents of one of the Australians that we knew, but a family friend in Australia who had also lost their son. And when I was back home having been discharged they came over because they wanted to see where he had trained. He was an only child, and where he had trained and that sort of thing. So they came to visit us on their travels on behalf of Alan’s parents. So that was interesting. It was nice to meet them.
[recording paused]
PH: The reason my brother went in to the Air Force in the first instance was because when he left school he had an idea that he would like to be a GPO engineer but he had to be eighteen, and he was only just seventeen. And my mother would not let him dawdle around for the next year and perhaps lose interest in things. So his second choice had been that he would like to go in to the Air Force so, and that’s why he became an apprentice toolmaker.
SH: You could say he was flying on Lancasters in 9 Group. In 9 Squadron.
PH: Oh, yes. He was flying on Lancasters in 9 Group. And I had only been in the Wrens about six months when we heard that he was missing, and quite a shock. He was then twenty one or twenty one and a half and it was rather sad that he had written to me a very long letter which I still have, when I went in to the Wrens telling me what to do and what not to do [laughs] and how to behave. I still have that letter. And I did get a letter from him after he was, just after he was missing. I’d just heard and this letter came and I had sent him a letter which was returned to me as well, which was sad. His name was John Carter but he was always called Jack, he always had been Jack and I have seen his name of course on the Memorial. And the Australians, the two Australians in Jack’s crew. One came from Melbourne, and one came from Broken Hill but I’m not sure which way around that was. But they fitted in very well when they came home with us and on the way home when we’d been to a dance my brother used to be pointing out the stars to the other two and what they meant which was quite interesting. Their names was Jimmy Jubb and Alan Johns.
[recording paused]
SH: When I joined the Air Force [pause] Oh God. In, in about, let’s see in about 1941 I joined the Air Training Corps in Harrow. And that was before there were several Air Training Corps squadrons around that area. And I stayed there, in there before going in to the Air Force. One of our civilian instructors took us and when I say us the football team, the cricket team and athletics to an airfield just outside London and he arranged for one of his colleagues who was stationed there to provide a Wellington for the day and to take us in twos. Fifteen of us. Fifteen others. So I put my hand up quickly with my friend Peter Robbins, he died just after the war in an air crash and we went up as the first two. We did one circuit and came in and landed because weather conditions. So out of all the people who went there for that day only two of us had a flight by a Polish pilot. And the civilian instructor had brought a fountain pen that he was going to give to the pilot at the end of the day and I always remember him saying, ‘What do I do with this now?’ [laughs] That was first flying. And from then on I went in to the Air Force under the category of PNB, pilot, navigator, bomb aimer. I got ten months deferred service, although I went in after six months with another course and it wasn’t long after that that all the training of pilot, navigators and bomb aimers was stopped. They’d got too many and all they wanted at that time were air gunners or wireless operator/air gunners. So I remustered as an air gunner and passed up, passed out in Dalcross in Scotland. From there I went in to a Wellington training course. I was a [pause] I’ve forgotten the name of the title anyway and we did a course at Silverstone and from there we posted. Oh, we converted on to Lancasters at Cottesmore, but by that time both the war had been ended and I did, so I didn’t, didn’t do any operational flying. And then after that, after the Jap war ended I went on to transport for about a year and a half and then was demobbed. Oh yeah. At, at Cottesmore we started flying on Lancasters, and there were two, there were ten, ten crews each of seven men in the course and one night in a circuits and bumps operation one of the Lancs crashed and they were all killed. But the crew that were killed there were seven, there were six officers in the crew and one rear gunner as a sergeant but that rear gunner because he was stationed with the officers and he had nowhere to go in the evening he always booked in with us. With my crew. And he went, he reported sick the day before that crash to go with my bomb aimer to meet a couple of WAAFs in, in Oakham, Rutland and he survived of course but the man that, or the crew that took his place, a warrant officer, he and the six officers were all killed. That’s just about a month after the Jap war ended. I remember that the pilot of that plane who was on our course he was getting married in two weeks time from that time. Yeah. That’s all. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. During our time at Cottesmore we were told that we were being trained for Tiger Force which was the British Government to send a force of RAF, Army and Navy out to the Far East to back up the Americans who they recognised had done so much for us in Europe. So that’s another point I never got to really [pause] To driving, yeah. When I came off flying I had another year and a half to do, to spend in the RAF, Air Force and we were able to choose the next, next part of the RAF training that we went in to. So I put down transport and I was sent up to a place called Dishforth, RAF Dishforth in Blackpool, and we trained on civilian cars. Austin 6s. And passed out there and was posted then to a place called Hinton in the Hedges, where they were preparing all sorts of vehicles. Every lorry you could think of was being serviced. And every day we would report there to drive them up to Manchester. Somewhere north of the Manchester and I think they were being issued to the French government. And then after that I was given the job of driving the army Matador with its trailer, eight wheel trailer, and we were clearing all the radar equipment all around Cornwall and Devon because it was being destroyed by the salt and the sea situation and I’d been sent out to there and collect them and bring them back to Welford near Reading. And then after that if course I was demobbed.
[recording paused]
SH: We went down to Sutton. Sutton Bridge. Do you know Sutton Bridge? I ended there. Yeah. And the other place we went to was an Army place up in Yorkshire. Now, I’ll just say, well it’s not much to say about demob really is there?
[recording paused]
SH: Oh, my goodness. When the war ended and my, one of my best friends who was, he had been a bomb aimer we, we more or less lost contact because he got married whereas I hadn’t been married. But somewhere six months to eight months after that that I met my wife Pat and it turned out that she had been in the Services. Demobbed a little earlier than me. She was in the Wrens and so we had quite a bit to talk about with the RAF and the Wrens. We were finances. Finances? Not finances.
PH: Fiancés.
SH: Fiancés [laughs] We were fiancés for about a year and now of course we’ve been married for seventy years. Our [pause] takes place in about —
PH: September.
SH: September this year. When I, when I first met Pat she gave up her dancing career and when I gave up I’d already, in order to meet people I’d joined a Cricket Club and I merely packed that in. So we then went on to live in a small little flat. From that flat we went in to her mother’s house because her mother had retired and gone down to Port Isaac in Cornwall. And from there we moved to North Harrow, another house. From there we moved to Ickenham, a much bigger house. And when I retired we came up to Diss in Norfolk, and we’ve made another move within Diss to get a smaller house to cut out the garden and the staircase and here we are in a small lovely little bungalow.
PH: My mum worked in an estate agents. She was a secretary and up came what we called the flat but actually it was the upstairs of somebody’s house. So we had the front room and a bedroom and the other bedroom had been turned in to a kitchen. But there was nothing at all in it except a cooker. We had no hot water. We used to go to my sisters to get bath once a week.
SH: I should have said all that actually, shouldn’t I? [laughs]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Pat and Frank Harris
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Denise Boneham
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHarrisIR-SW180324
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:19:54 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Navy
Description
An account of the resource
Pat Harris’ brother John ‘Jack’ Harris joined the RAF straight from school as an apprentice. During the war he volunteered for aircrew and trained as a navigator. He was reported missing when Pat was serving in the Wrens. His death was finally confirmed and he is buried in Rheinberg Cemetery.
Stan Harris joined the RAF and began training as an air gunner just as the war was ending. During his training at Cottesmore the gunner of another crew who was a sergeant reported sick in order to meet some WAAFs along with the bomb aimer in Stan’s crew. While he was absent his crew including the officer who had replaced him were all killed.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
ground personnel
killed in action
Lancaster
navigator
RAF Bardney
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/913/11155/AKnightD180117.2.mp3
a1c603db2ac36daa39476c25f6ee8d4f
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
Knight, Dave
David Knight
D Knight
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Warrant Officer David Knight (b. 1924, 433310 Royal New Zealand Air Force). He flew operations with 75 and 9 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
2018-01-17
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
Knight, D
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
GT: It’s Wednesday the 17th of January 2018 and I’m at the home of David Knight born 15 November 1924 in Matamata, New Zealand. RNZAF navigator, NZ 433310, warrant officer, in Nelson, New Zealand. David joined the RNZAF in 1943, trained in Canada and joined 75 New Zealand Squadron in March 1945 at RAF Mepal. Completed two war ops and numerous Exodus trips before moving to 9 Squadron in June for Tiger Force training. David returned to New Zealand in December 1945. David, thanks for welcoming me into your home. Can you give me a little bit of your, where you were born and grew up and why you wanted to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force please?
DK: Yes. Well, I was born in Matamata and raised in my early years in Hamilton. I joined the ATC prior to my joining the Air Force and was there for eighteen months. And I was on an intake into the Air Force and streamed to be aircrew via basic training and selection in Rotorua in the final stages and travelled overseas as a prospective navigator. We — can we just stop it there? Can I just —
[recording paused]
DK: We travelled to San Diego in the US Mooltan which was a second [unclear] American ship. Landed at San Diego. Trained to Vancouver, across to Hamilton Ontario. And it was two weeks before our course was due to start, and we as a group went to New York and explored the place there. Our course was in Winnipeg. It was, we arrived there just on Christmas. We had Christmas in, a Canadian Christmas at the station. And our training took six months, and of course took us into the winter months and we were flying in temperatures of something like forty below which was pretty hazardous in terms of fingers sticking to implements and one had to be pretty careful with, about one’s ears and noses too in that sort of temperature. Can I get —
GT: Yeah.
[recording paused]
DK: The course was somewhat uneventful but we learned a lot of course and we graduated with our wings there. The only piece of excitement you might say was the fact that in the Anson we had to wind up the undercarriage which was a terrible job in the cold and on one particular occasion we lost a propeller. It appears that it had an oil failure. An engine seized and flicked off the propeller. We were not too far from an adjoining airstrip and landed quite safely so that was the only real aspect worth mentioning. After graduation we trained to Montreal, and after that to Halifax and then across the Atlantic in one of the Empress liners. I think then [pause] at the landing we were transferred to West Freugh up near the Scottish border and once more we trained in Ansons. And from there we went to OTU which is Operational Training Unit on, at Oakley on Wellingtons. We did a long time on Wellingtons preparing for our role as aircrew and from time to [pause] stop.
[recording paused]
DK: Yes. While at the OTU flying Wellingtons, and we’d crewed up to some extent at that stage and we settled down as a crew and we did a lot of the training, cross countries and all that that was required as well as trips over the North Sea as diversionary flights to fool the Germans in terms of bomber raids that were happening in the south. From OTU we went to Conversion Unit on to Lancasters, and one of our, something that sticks in my mind is the fact that the first flight in a Lancaster was under an instructor and we flew up to something like twenty thousand feet and the pilot feathered one engine, two engines, three engines and we maintained height at twenty thousand feet on one engine on a Lancaster which gave us a lot of [pause] you know. Stop it again.
[recording paused]
DK: So that was the introduction to the Lancaster which gave us a lot of confidence. We finally crewed up with our number of seven people in the crew and started some training and preparing to go over to be posted to a squadron which happened to be number 75 New Zealand Squadron. In the time that I was there and that was towards the end of the war we were probably the last replacement intake that happened prior to the finish of the war. Which meant that our crew flew actually three operations of which I went on two. The first one was to Kiel when our commanding officer Wing Commander Cyril Baigent skippered the plane. And that was quite shattering to think that a budding navigator was responsible to the [laughs] to the flight commander. Now, then, then there was another one. The next one was to Potsdam which was a long trip and that took something like eight hours and twenty minutes. So it was the first introduction to flak and real, you know flak and the prospect of night fighters. However that was a successful. The crew, I understand, I know did one more trip to bomb a railyard but at that time I was down with mumps and in isolation in Ely Hospital. So that’s why I missed out on that one. And of course the war ended at that time and they rescheduled everyone in terms of volunteers to make up the Tiger Force and we did a lot of training there in preparation to flying apparently to Okinawa to support the American invasion of Japan. But of course they had something up their sleeve and they didn’t.
GT: That part of the war. So, Dave, I’m just looking at your logbook now. So I’ll just briefly give some idea to your, your entries which gives you the history of your training. So when you first arrived in England it was the 6th of July ’44 and you went on to 4 AFU in West Freugh in Scotland and you were there for pretty much for the month of July. You moved to 11 OTU at Westcott on the August ’44 and a mixture between Westcott and Oakley and that was pretty much from October ’44 right through to the, well January ’45. And, and then you moved to number 1651 Conversion Unit at Woolfox Lodge and that was from the beginning of March and completed that pretty much by the 21st of March as your conversion from Wellingtons to Lancasters. And your arrival on 75 New Zealand Squadron was the 30th of March ’45. And your completion of flying on 75 New Zealand Squadron was on the 17th of May. So, from there, after your total flying hours with 75 Squadron was eleven hours. Your total flying hours at the time, day a hundred and sixty eight. Total night one hundred and fifty one. And then you moved to Bardney at Waddington for 9 Squadron. June 18th you spent flying until the 18th of September which was pretty much your last Lancaster flight. So on 9 Squadron then can you remember anything of the things that you did and your skipper particularly?
DK: Yes. Our skipper was a married gentleman called [unclear] A well-seasoned pilot and you know, a great chap. Apart from training for the Far East we went out to Pomigliano on two occasions to pick up POWs and brought them back. I think number twenty four. The number was twenty four that packed into, into the plane. Apart from that we, I was transferred to Brighton awaiting repatriation back home. Arriving right on Christmas of ’46.
GT: So what ship did they take you back from England? Bring you back.
DK: Yeah.
GT: The Andes?
DK: No [pause] [laughs] No.
[recording paused]
DK: Yes. The ship that brought us home was the SS Mooltan. The one that we caught out of New Zealand to go to San Diego was the US —
GT: The Uruguay, was it?
DK: Uruguay.
GT: Yeah.
DK: That’s the one. Yeah.
GT: So when, when you joined the RNZAF was navigator your aim or was that just the one that they slotted you in and you accepted? Did the [unclear] for you.
DK: I didn’t want to be a pilot. That’s number one. And I was an engineering prospective student so I thought navigation was the one to do. Yeah.
GT: And that, that was easy for you? The navigation. You found it good to work for.
DK: Yes. And I had, my life had been study really up to that point in time, so there was no real effort to knuckle down and do the work necessary to qualify as a navigator.
GT: What was your background before the war that made if good for you to do the navigation?
DK: Well, I was only out of school actually.
GT: Ok.
DK: But I was, joined the Post Office as an engineering cadet and I was, worked for just a year before I was in the, when I joined the Air Force.
GT: And that was a total volunteer thing right? You weren’t called up.
DK: No. Not at eighteen. No.
GT: No.
DK: No.
GT: So the navigation role then how did it work for the crew? They, they all relied on you totally to make sure they got there and back. Did they have — [unclear]
DK: Yes. Well, there’s a back-up in terms of the wireless operator. He could get fixes. He could ask for assistance. And I don’t recall having to use that and I think the bomb aimer was somewhat conversant with the art of navigation. So there were back-ups. The only thing I felt was there were no one to back up the skipper.
GT: Flight engineer.
DK: Yeah. No. Well, they came later.
GT: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
GT: True. So, so when you did the, your daylight trips the difference between night and day did you guys notice a succinct difference? Was it, did you have to change your tactics?
DK: You mean operations? I didn’t fly any daylight trips so I can’t answer that one.
GT: Ok. Now, the aircraft you were flying in. Lancaster. A beautiful aircraft, it was. Other crews liked them. What was it?
DK: Well, yeah. People had faith in the aircraft but, well in retrospect when you think about it there was damn all chance of getting out of the thing in trouble because of the big spar across the centre of the fuselage. Gives you the willies to think that perhaps a lot of people, you know met they’re doom by the fact that they were restrained so much by the structure of the aircraft.
GT: High G forces [unclear]
DK: Yeah.
GT: But were there was any aircraft lost when you were on the squadron? It was right at the end of the war.
DK: Yes. Well, there was evidence of something lost by the time that we arrived there and I just don't recall any particular one on the time that I was there.
GT: You weren’t there that long at Mepal. But in this case did you enjoy any of the pubs? Do you remember any of the —
DK: I think we went out as a crew. Yes. There’s one thing you really didn’t, didn’t make a lot of friends as aircrew on the Air Force because you were confined to your crew mainly and you went as a crew and your, you became friendly with them. But different from being in the Army where you were living with people all the time, and you make up, you settled down in hierarchy and you feel comfortable within your group. Whereas this, you just participated as a group of seven and you lived as a group of seven, slept as a group of seven and that was about it.
GT: You mentioned your first operation was with Cyril Baigent.
DK: Yeah.
GT: Who was the wing commander of 75 New Zealand Squadron. A very young wing commander at that time.
DK: Yes.
GT: Very well respected. And you had that feeling when you were flying with him. He was, he was, respected. He was deserving of that respect.
DK: Absolutely. More so by the fact that he’d achieved that at a very young age. So there must have been something that he had going for him.
GT: Of note that Wing Commander Cyril Baigent returned to New Zealand post war. Took a reduction in rank but he became the commanding officer of the new 75 RNZAF Squadron flying Mosquitoes but sadly died of cancer in 1949.
DK: Yes.
GT: And he’s buried in the cemetery not far from where we are now here in Nelson and several years ago I found his collective grave with his brother. And he, I think also was awarded the Military Cross. So a very prestigious military family is the Baigents here in Nelson, New Zealand. Very good. So then when you moved to 9 Squadron did, what was the kind of work you were doing to work up to go to, well in this case Okinawa? This was where you were heading.
DK: Yes.
GT: So what kind of work were you doing for that?
DK: I think we were concentrating on long range navigation over the Pacific which is different from Europe of course. Was it LORAN that they had there? I just don’t recall in detail but we were doing a lot of cross country and we were in a holding situation because we were a trained crew and we could have been uplifted at any time. And we had different aircraft too. I think we were painted white underneath and black on top. I don’t recall. But some quite different.
GT: What was your main navigation tool on these aircraft? Did they change between 75 and the ones you went to 9 Squadron with or the same?
DK: Pretty much the same. We had H2S and Gee. Well, that’s mainly for navigating around where we were training. They’d have to, they had a different system there covering the Pacific. Yeah.
GT: Now, 75 New Zealand Squadron were heading, went to Spilsby for Tiger Force training and eventually you started to crew up with Lincolns and, and by VJ Day they had received three. Had 9 Squadron been moving towards Lincolns as well or were they just going to go out with Lancasters?
DK: I think it was Lancasters. Yeah.
GT: Yeah. I’d also heard from another veteran some years ago that they were doing engine trials for, for flying in the heat which obviously was something that Lancaster hadn’t done much of in Europe.
DK: No. No.
GT: So, was there any thought of the aircraft overheating? And did they do any training towards that?
DK: No. It didn’t filter down through the ranks.
GT: They were just going to get them there.
DK: Yeah.
GT: And hope for the best.
DK: Yeah.
GT: Hopefully, the Merlins coped. Fascinating. So, so alright, you came back to New Zealand after the war and you settled into a new role. What did you, what did you end up doing then?
DK: Well, I went back to the Post Office and with the intention of carrying on my engineering career. I wasn’t accepted back because in [pause]
[recording paused]
DK: Yes. When I got back I applied to continue my engineering study with a bursary from the Post Office, but at the time there was a lot of prospective engineers halfway through their courses when they were either called up or volunteered and the quota was over, over full. So being the youngest virtually and the last one to, the last one to [pause] being the last one to go and join the Air Force I stayed as a technician and I was, included in the work was night shift. And I’d started a family at that stage and I’d built a house and settled down to civilian life and I wasn’t going to do any night shifts at all. So I either was going to quit the job or get my qualification via the Institute of Electrical Engineers extramurally which after four years of study without, without a lot of assistance I achieved that and became a registered engineer. And I graduated through the hierarchy of the Post Office engineering to be an engineer, a senior engineer, a supervising engineer and a district engineer of Nelson. And I retired at age fifty seven after forty years of service.
[recording paused]
DK: Yes. To qualify as an engineer the way I did you had to pass, and be accepted by the Institute of Electrical Engineers based in London. And people who had engineering degrees could not get a practicing certificate or become a chartered engineer unless they passed a section B of the Institute’s recommendation. And then at the time that I graduated the nuclear engineering business was starting to appear and requiring engineers and rather than be under the auspices of the Institute of Electrical Engineers they decided that they would start their own institution and they advertised to recent graduates to be foundation members of the Institute of Atomic Engineering. And so I accepted that because there could be a likelihood that I may end up in the UK and I’d be qualified to accept a responsibility in that particular field. Although New Zealand was nuclear free and all that sort of thing and there’s nothing here of a practical work in that calling I was abreast of the situation through technical papers that I had access to at all times and I became a fellow of the Institute of Nuclear Engineers as time went by.
GT: Ok, Dave. That’s fascinating stuff. Dave, what about family? Yourself and with your lovely wife Margaret, you had how many children and how many great grandchildren?
DK: Well, we had three children. Two boys and a girl. They were all, have been self-employed. Two of them are pensioners now. They’re over sixty five and they’re doing better than I ever did. Each one of them. So there’s no worries there. There’s seven grandchildren and there’s, I think there’s going to be any time, any minute there’s going to be number thirteen of great grandchildren. So, they’re spread all over the world. There’s some in England, some in Sydney, some in, in Brisbane and certainly in Auckland. So, but they seem to like Nelson as a place to come and they certainly come and we enjoy them while they’re here. Unfortunately, I lost my wife eighteen months ago after sixty eight years which was a blow certainly, but I live alone in a four bedroom house. I can manage it. I’m capable of doing that and I intend to stay here until the end rather than go into care if I can possibly arrange it. So, and I’m socially active in terms of belonging to a [unclear] Club which gives any amount of social connection and that’s the saviour of, you know the, of our later retirement years I would say. Certainly after the death of Margaret. Yeah.
GT: Dave, in Nelson here there’s now six, six of you left, and amazingly three of you are ex-75 New Zealand Squadron Lancaster crew. And that, that number has diminished now which means that your local Bomber Command Association of Nelson’s get togethers every so often you’ve now had to kind of curtail that and disband so to speak. So, so it is fabulous to be able to come and enjoy your company. You and I have known each other now for ten years and its fabulous that you’re also very welcoming of my visits to you. So I thank you very much for allowing me to interview you for the IBCC Archives here. And you are accepting of your details being added to a very rich museum and archive status that they’re doing at Lincolnshire. So David lets sign off now. Thank you very much for your story, your life and thank you for your sacrifice and your service, sir.
DK: Well, thank you for the interview.
GT: Thank you.
DK: Yes.
GT: Good night.
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 Dave Knight
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Glen Turner
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-17
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AKnightD180117
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:26:45 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Great Britain
New Zealand
England--Cambridgeshire
New Zealand--Nelson
Description
An account of the resource
David Knight was a member of the ATC before volunteering for the Royal New Zealand Air Force and began training as a navigator. He travelled to Canada as part of his training before arriving in the UK and being posted to 75 Squadron at RAF Mepal. When they flew at twenty thousand feet in a Lancaster on one engine the crew gained a great confidence in the aircraft that would take them on operations. Dave was nervous when his first operational flight was with Wing Commander Cyril Baigent, the Commanding Officer of 75 Squadron. He was posted on to 9 Squadron for training in preparation for being engaged as Tiger Force. He returned to New Zealand after the war to continue his engineering training.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1945
11 OTU
1651 HCU
75 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lincoln
navigator
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Mepal
Tiger force
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/925/11168/ALenthallG160401.2.mp3
cec8de68d3c369542e86beed2c99b46b
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
Lenthall, Geoffrey
G Lenthall
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Sergeant Geoffrey Lenthall (1925 - 2018, 3040138, Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a wireless operator.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-04-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lenthall, G
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AH: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Anna Hoyles. The interviewee is Geoff Lenthall. The interview is taking place in Mr Lenthall’s home in Cleethorpes on the 1st April 2016. Could you tell me a bit about your background?
GL: Yes. I was, I was born in Langold in Nottinghamshire. Not many people have heard of that. Then moved to Brigg. And finished up at Scunthorpe where my father was a linotype operator. I went to school at the Henderson Avenue and then the Scunthorpe Grammar School. And I still in fact go to reunions there. They have them every two years and I am the oldest member there. And I still have my old school cap which is in great demand. People want to have their photographs taken in it. And we also have a get together at the Kingsway Hotel. Just a few of us of the local school boys or ex-schoolboys. I then, from the school I left when I was about sixteen as a, to get a job in a bank. I happened to know through my uncle who knew the bank manager said, ‘Oh, there’s a vacancy for a junior.’ So I went along there and they took me on but they said, ‘If you fail your school certificate you’re out.’ Well, fortunately I passed. And my uncle by the way was, he was the father of Joan Plowright who is now Lady Olivier. I did try to get her to come to the reunions because she was at the grammar school. But anyway I I worked in the bank for a while doing the usual boring jobs of answering the phone and fetching stamps from the post office and joined the Air Training Corps and I became sergeant there. We were doing continuity drill and studying aircraft recognition, Morse code, principle of flight. All the usual things. We were all eager to get in and have a go at the enemy and I volunteered around about seventeen and a quarter and, but unfortunately went on deferred service and I was gone eighteen by the time I joined up in July ’44. Went down to London, my first visit, to be greeted by bombs and flying bombs. Doodlebugs. V2s. And that was the Aircrew Receiving Centre and we lost quite a few casualties and so moved to Torquay which was much more peaceful. And from there I went to the Initial Training Wing of Bridlington. Another seaside resort where we did all sorts of continuity drill and exercises to toughen us up. Getting up early and all the rest of it. And from there I was misemployed unfortunately as a — in the pay accounts at Kirton Lindsey working on officer’s allowances. The funny thing was there I had a desk and the airmen used to come in and salute me thinking I was an officer but I was just a plain erk. Anyway, I then thought well I shall get on aircrew training soon. And I was then sent to Blackpool to learn to drive. They obviously thought that was a good idea. Anyway, I learned to drive in Blackpool and moved down to Melksham in Wiltshire to finish off the course and got my licence down there. And I was getting a bit fed up by this time. Frustrated. Disappointed at not getting in on to do aircrew training. And having read the papers and all this and seen all the raids that were taking place and thinking I should be up there instead of down here. But anyway I was sent to Sango which was way up in Scotland. At the top left hand corner and pretty isolated. I used to, to drive the mountain rescue people. And I remember seeing a German submarine which had been captured. It came in and we saw it in the bay down below. That was my first glimpse of anything of the enemy. And I was then, I volunteered to go overseas but they classified overseas as Northern Ireland which I suppose it was over a sea but [pause] there I was, I was billeted with an Irish family. He was a teacher. She was an excellent cook his wife. And they had two attractive daughters and there were two of us staying there with them. And we used to stay up into the early hours talking about religion. They were Catholics. And the father was very strict and you know there was, there was no hanky panky with the daughters or anything like that. He wouldn’t have that. But we got on very well. She was an excellent cook and we were living the life of Riley really. And it irked us a bit the fact that we were enjoying life while people were out there fighting. And anyway we duly carried on. I was driving the men to a radar camp about seven miles away. And this continued for a while and we got on well. I got to know, this was a bit of romance came then. I met a girl called Bernadette who was an Irish girl. Very attractive. We kept in touch even when I was sent, transferred to Manchester which was a transit camp. And that’s when things started to move and I actually moved from transit camp to radio school in Madley, near Hereford. From there we flew in Proctors which were just the pilot and radio operator doing these radio bearings etcetera. The usual stuff. And then we went into the De Havilland Dominies where they were, they were fitted with four or five positions for different radio operators. And eventually passed out and got my sergeant’s stripes as a qualified radio operator and then went to to Topcliffe in Yorkshire where, which was an air navigation school. Then the cadets, they were training to be navigators and the, most of the pilots were veteran. Polish veteran pilots. A lot of them were, were quite mad. I remember one. He, he had an excellent singing voice and he, he taught us a Polish song and he got us singing this and I got on well with him. Another one was [Zachiorski?] He was, he’d got a handlebar moustache and I went up with him for the first time. And on the way back there there was a Polish resettlement camp just near the airfield and he had a lot of friends there and he liked to do a bit of showing off. And so, I hadn’t realised this. Anyway, he got back to base and we got all the instructions for landing etcetera and then he put the, this was an Anson, put it in a steep climb and eventually the left wing dropped and it stalled. And this was deliberate apparently. Then it went spiralling down to near this Polish resettlement camp and eventually he landed at the airfield. Anyway, we got out, he said, ‘Did you enjoy that?’ I said, ‘Well, it was unexpected but I shall know next time.’ He did it every time apparently. He was an expert pilot. But I spent about four years, three or four years at Topcliffe and I know we lost a couple of planes. Wellingtons then. And one of them it stalled on take-off. And anyway the pilot — and he managed to survive. He baled out. The rest were killed. And the other one disappeared over the North Sea somewhere. Never found any wreckage anywhere. It even got in the local papers. And they never did find out what happened to it. So, and then we got to, I was then occasionally called on when there was no flying to drive the ambulance as I’d taken this MT course. And you had to be on call there and everything was timed to the minute. You had to get to, if there was an emergency you had to get there in a certain number of minutes. And I also had to drive a [pause] some airman had gone mad. We had to take him into a mental institution in York and this was quite interesting. He was in the back with with two other, two men. He was in handcuffs because he was quite violent. So, they got rid of him anyway. And we used to have nights out in York and I then, I became very friendly with with a Scotsman, Jock Campbell and a chap from Bournemouth. Bish we called him. He looked like a, he used to put a collar on back to front to look like a minister. We were great buddies and anyway they said, ‘Let’s, let’s go,’ he said, ‘I know a WAAF,’ he said, ‘Let’s meet up in York and get her to bring two friends.’ So off we went to York and I couldn’t believe that the one of the friends was one I’d met in York where, the transit centre there. Another Irish girl who lived in London. In Crouch End. And we became very friendly and retained that friendship until after I came out the RAF because she came to Cranwell and I went to see her down there. Anyway, I’m rambling on a bit am I? Anyway, from [pause] it became time for demob and we’d gone out on a usual demob party as we did, in Ripon. And we’d, we’d had a few drinks of course. A bit of a singsong. And on the way back to the station my friend Bish who was a bit mad, a very quiet man normally but if he had drink inside him he was a changed character, Jekyll and Hyde and he started to climb over a railway bridge on the way back to the station. Anyway, we managed to drag him down and then we got to the station. Got in the train. And it, as it was about to move off they [pause] Bish decided he wanted, he was going to get out on the wrong side. On the off side. So he climbed out. We yelled at him. I climbed out after him to bring him back. And he was trying of all things to try and unhitch the train so that it would go off with one carriage missing at the end. Anyway, he couldn’t unfasten it of course and so I dragged him out. Then the whistle went. Train started moving. There was my friend Jock peering out of the window shouting at us. We ran but we couldn’t get in and so the train went off. Left us on the track. And the, the guard, he was there, he was shouting at us so we set off walking down the track. It was only probably three or four miles to the station we wanted to be off at near the camp so we walked along the track. It’s a stupid thing to do but fortunately at that time of night there were no no trains. And we arrived exhausted back at this station getting on for midnight and there were celebrations going in the mess even at that time. Anyway, we found Jock and he said, ‘Oh, thank goodness you’re back. We wondered what had happened to you. We were going to send out a search party.’ Anyway, that was partly Bish was, was a strange man. He was a very good friend but he got this idea that one evening he he had this idea of getting on the phone because we had a station warrant officer who wasn’t very popular and anyway Bish got on the phone. He rang the fire brigade and he said, ‘Oh, the SWO’s house is on fire. Can you come immediately.’ We, anyway, put the phone down. We went off up to bed and we heard the fire engine going and the following morning two pilots had been arrested for ringing up the Fire Brigade. And anyway, we being gentlemen we confessed and said it wasn’t them it was us. And I was, I suppose aiding and abetting and so we finished up on a fizzer and went in jail for the weekend. We were escorted to the dining room by guards and of course all the other lads thought it great fun. You know. We, we, in fact I still have a card which they’d all signed and there was a fire on the front of it and it made some comment from all the lads there. And anyway we were, we were both duly not court martialled but we we had a good ticking off from the CO and said, ‘Don’t do it again.’ And so that went on our record. But on the final night of demob we decided to fly when we get back on that to base and for some reason we managed to persuade the three radio ops to take their places. And this would be about eleven or twelve in the evening and so I’m surprised that we were let on. We must have been reeking of beer. And we went in for briefing and we got all our gear and we went off. There were about a half a dozen planes went off and so my friends Bish and Jock they were in separate planes as they were both radio operators. And we went off on a six hour navigation trip somewhere over the North Sea and back again and with turning points. And eventually got back in the early hours. Back to Topcliffe. And there was thick fog. We couldn’t land. So we were redirected to Linton on Ouse and had a Polish pilot as most of them were. Anyway, we were heading for Yorkshire, this other aerodrome and all of a sudden I heard on the intercom, ‘Christ,’ or some, it might have been a Polish equivalent. The plane shot up like a lift. He pulled the stick back and apparently it was a place called Stanage Edge which was like an escarpment and he had been flying low and he had just spotted this. So he pulled the stick back and zoomed up. And anyway we were then redirected. Of course fog had come down at Linton on Ouse. We went down to Lakenheath in Suffolk and by then we were running short of fuel but anyway we made it to Lakenheath and fortunately there was no fog. We landed there and they found us accommodation in the hospital actually. Comfortable beds. And the following morning we woke up and would you believe it there was fog. So we couldn’t take off. And this, this we should have been at Demobilisaton Centre by this time. Anyway, we were detained there because of the weather for a week before we got back. So they weren’t very happy and they had to rearrange our demob. And we got another ticking off for that. And so we had about another three months where they seemed to punish us by making us fly every day but we didn’t mind that because we enjoyed it. And so eventually we we were properly demobbed and three of us we went down to London. Decided to celebrate and have a week there before we went back home. And we went, we’d had a few drinks as we’d normally do, went round the night clubs and did the usual things and we decided to visit the American Embassy and volunteered to join the US Army Air Force to fly in Korea. We thought we didn’t want to go back to Civvy Street, you know, it’s too boring. Anyway, we got all the information and forms to fill in. Went back home and all three of us decided we wouldn’t do that. We went back. I went back to banking. Jock went back on the railway. And Bish went back to the estate agent office. And I thought that was the end of that but poor old Bish. He [pause] he suffered from, he was a bit [pause] what shall I say? When he’d, I know when he’d had a few drinks he was a changed character. But the Morse code was affecting his mind and he eventually suffered from Morse Madness and which, which — you know the continuous noise on the brain of the dit dit dot and all this sort of thing. And anyway he, he had, he finished up in a mental institution and he died before he was thirty which, you know was very sad. We were great buddies and we’d been down to Bournemouth. Met his, met his family as well. And anyway, we [pause] we kept in touch for a while and we used to have reunions back at Topcliffe. Jock and I. And we managed to get a bed you know in the sergeant’s mess no problem. Meet the lads who were still there. And then as things happen we drifted apart. He went back, stayed with his job. I went back to banking. And it was only about three years ago that I I had a message. An email on Facebook saying, “Are you the Geoff Lenthall who was flying from Topcliffe in Wellingtons?” And I wrote back. I sent him an email. I said yes. And it was, it was my old friend Jock. And so we decided we got together and we, he came down. It didn’t cost him a penny because of his special rates on the railway, as he worked there. He came down to York and I travelled up there and we found a pub and we had a meal and well we had a few drinks but I couldn’t have many. I was driving. It was alright for him. He was on the train [laughs] He could have a dram or two on it. So it was good. You know. We talked. We had a lot to talk about of course and we met each year. But last year I had problems driving and so we didn’t meet up. But we’re still in touch. Which is great. So that was more or less the — oh I did join the Volunteer Reserve for five years. And this, it was, we used to get paid for it. And it didn’t go down very well with the bank because it took a fortnight. I’d still got my allowance from the bank for the holidays but I had to have two weeks at an RAF station. And that was when I went to Binbrook and flew in Avro Lincolns. Operation Bullseye I think they called it. Went out to practice bombing in Heligoland. And that was one of the trips. And other times, other times we went to Doncaster which is now a civil airport and we used to fly to Jersey. Went down for the Battle of the Flowers and things like that. We had a weekend in Germany. All on the RAF of course. And this was at a time when one of the English planes was shot down near the Russian border and I know there were emails flashing around saying, ‘Are you ok?’ You know. They thought it was that we were over there we’d been shot down. But anyway we, we were ok. And so five years with the Volunteer Reserve. And then, so I met my wife. So I was transferred to, from Scunthorpe to Grimsby and we, I know I joined this tennis club and there was this girl in bright red shorts. And anyway I got talking to her and we became friendly and I walked her home. And in due course we were married. And as I say she died nine years ago. We had a very happy marriage and when I retired we were able to do a bit of travelling around. And we went to Australia because the sort of friends who lived near us they decided to emigrate to Australia and said keep in touch. And so we went two or three times to stay in Melbourne and we were very fortunate really. And they had a big five bedroom house. They have four daughters. And anyway the daughters married out there and one went to live in Sydney so we called on the way down in Sydney to see them. And then we drove down in his car to Melbourne. And we had a great time because they had friends who had a boat on an island off the coast and we went down there and went on this boat around the islands. And they were, I know that they used to call us poms but we got on very well with the, with the Australians. And they tried to persuade us to go and live out there. And he said, oh, he said because I then was working on a magazine, Lincolnshire Life and they said, ‘You can start, start a magazine up out here. No problem. Come and join us.’ We never actually did but we went to see them. But I joined Lincolnshire Life after leaving the bank because I was getting nowhere. I finished up at Loughborough. I went to Leicester branch. Then they moved me to Loughborough. And I was getting a bit bored with banking. It didn’t seem to satisfy my yearnings at all and so I resigned. And I went of all places on the fish docks because my father had a fishing business. My father in law. And anyway, he said he could get me a job so I went back to Grimsby from Leicester and finished up at this this company owned by one of the trawler companies and I was going around visiting customers and getting new business for the company. It was a complete change from banking to fishing and I had to go down to the docks at seven in the morning to be amongst all the fish there to see what went on. And it was a real eye opener. And so I had to learn a bit about it before I went on my travels. And they gave me a car allowance and so it became, I used to leave Monday morning and come back Friday. My wife got used to it in due course and I worked, I did it for about two years. But I used to have a talk with the MD every Friday and he, I said to him, ‘Things are not really working out.’ He said — I said, ‘You know that there’s a resentment.’ Of course they’d made me a director of the company and this didn’t go down very well with the staff. They’d been in it probably from leaving school. Working their way up you know, and this this chap comes in, ex-banker, white collar worker and he’s there you know eighteen months they make him a director, you know it just wasn’t on. I could tell there was a resentment and I said this to the MD. And so I resigned. So at about forty then out of a job and so I looked around and saw this job advertised in Lincolnshire Life. Do you know Lincolnshire Life? And they wanted a sales representative or advertisement manager. Anyway, I applied and I got the job and I had one week with the previous ad man. And he said, ‘I don’t know whether you realise or not but not only will you be doing this but you’ll be also the motoring correspondent. And,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a car test lined up next week for you in Lincoln. An Alfa Romeo.’ I thought this sounds interesting. Anyway, he went off and I took over and I was given a car to run around the county in. I went to Lincoln. Picked up this Alfa Romeo and they just let me loose for a couple of hours on the roads. And that was fine. I enjoyed that. But then of course I had to write about it in the magazine which I’d never done before. So, this was a labour of love and I eventually got into it and enjoyed it. And from then on I got other motoring tests to do as well. But we were in, in Brewery Street I think it was there and we moved to Dudley Street. The magazine. And the owner Roy Faiers, he lived in Cheltenham and he’d started This England magazine which is a very worldwide and he would fly up from time to time. He had learned to fly in his forties and got his own plane and took me for a flight in it from Humberside. And anyway, this went on for a while and there were quite a few perks with working for a magazine and I I used to get invitations to [pause] I went to Sweden for the opening of a golf course by an Englishman and things like that. And I met a few celebrities. I don’t know whether you remember Crossroads. It was a television programme and two of the people on it, Meg and Benny, they were at this hotel that was newly opened and they were guests. So I met them. Had photographs taken. All the rest of it. But it was a totally different life from banking and fishing. And there was an end product every month when they, you looked at the magazine and you know you felt well we’ve helped to do something towards this. I used to go down with the editor at the end of every month to the printers to put it to bed so to speak. Do the proof reading. And it worked very well and I I was able to, I met a lot of interesting people and part of the driving part I mean I wasn’t an official motoring correspondent. I wasn’t even a member of the journalist’s Union. But they used to send me these invitations and we used to go to a place called, in Yorkshire called Sherburn in Elmet which was a testing ground for the Mintex people of the brake linings and things. And they had a track there on an old aerodrome circuit. And each year I used to go there and I used to take a friend of mine Brian Hammond who was in the choir. And we used to spend the night there in a hotel and then on the Sunday morning we’d go around the track. It was all very well organised. We had a pep talk before-hand saying, ‘This isn’t a racetrack,’ you know and all the rest of it. We had name tags with our photograph and all the rest of it. And so we used to drive around there. Test the cars and we, a second time I had a Rolls Royce and that was great fun because it wasn’t allowed on the track. There was a special ten mile course outside. And so we took the Rolls Royce. They briefly said this does that, that does that you know. The controls. So Brian and I used to drive this Rolls Royce waving to people you know like royalty and that was great fun. We got to test a lot of cars. The, the BMW, Mercedes and anything from Minis and things like that. That was an interesting part of the job. And I eventually decided to [pause] I’d had an offer. No. That’s right we took over because he wasn’t paying very well and I thought well am I going to leave again? Find another job. And I I mentioned about a rise but there was nothing forthcoming so I had a talk with my wife and my father in law and my banker. And in the end I made an offer to buy the magazine from, from him. And he accepted it. He wanted more than we wanted to pay but anyway we settled on a figure and got the first loan to organise and finished up as owning a magazine. And Joan used to do subscriptions. My father in law did the accounts. And I took on ladies in different parts of the county to sell advertising. You know, on a bonus basis part time, as I wasn’t able to get out and do it myself and I had a part time editor. David Rawlinson. He lived in Louth and he used to come in about two days a week and between us we put the magazine together and I’d get all the ads together and he would bring the editorial. And so we did that for a few years. And then I had an offer from one of the big companies. They owned Yorkshire Life and Lancashire Life and they wanted to buy Lincolnshire life. So they came up to Grimsby and took me out. Wined and dined me as they do. Made an offer. And I thought well I’m enjoying life really. I don’t want, I don’t want to give it up yet. So in the end I was reaching I think I was about sixty two when I had an offer from LSG. Lincolnshire Standard Group. And they made an offer and we decided to sell out and retire. And so we, we did that and that’s when we were able to travel around a bit more and enjoy life. I joined the Male Voice Choir. My father in law was in it. He was the one that persuaded me and so I had an audition and we [pause] a great bunch of lads. We had, at one time nearly seventy members and we travelled around. We went in various festivals and we also organised trips abroad. We went to Holland. Germany. Sweden. France. And they were very good. We had a week with the people. You know. The Swedes or Germans looked after us very well. Then they came back the following year and stayed with us. Then we’d have a joint concert and I’m still in touch with some of them which is good you know. We exchange cards at Christmas time and it worked out very well. And there was a tremendous spirit between singers of all nationalities because they organised at Cardiff Arms Park, a huge concert. Ten thousand male voices. There were about nine hundred and something in the end but actually there were choirs from all over and we were invited. It was a tremendous success and the feeling there singing at Cardiff Arms Park which is huge. We were alright. We were in the sheltered area. And I’ve got a video of it actually. And one year we had Tom Jones as the guest singer and the following year Shirley Bassey. And so I was able to put on my CV I have sung with Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey. And they were great occasions and there is a tremendous comradeship in the male voice of choirs. Of course there were people from all walks of life but you all get on well. They’ve all got this love of singing. And in due course I took over the, I’d started a newsletter for the choir and did that for about fifteen years and but I was finding I was having to write most of it as the contributions weren’t coming in very quickly. People seemed a bit reluctant to do this but I managed to get one or two in the choir to twist a few arms and I got some contributions coming in. And this used to come out once a quarter. And so I did this for a while and I enjoyed it. I was just paid the expenses of the, you know I used to do it on the computer and print it out. And had great fun. And then it got to the stage where I wasn’t getting enough in really to make a go of it. So by then I was getting on in years and I said well if no one else will take it over you know I’m calling it a day. And there weren’t any volunteers so it just stopped like that. Which was a pity. One man a year later said he’d take it over but he said, ‘I’ll come round to the house and we’ll talk about it.’ But that was it. No more was said. And I’m still in touch with the choir and still go to some of the concerts but unfortunately they’re down to oh about thirty from, you know. They’ve lost half their members. Old age. This is the, or they move away. I mean the average age must be well over sixty. Probably seventy. But you just can’t get youngsters to come and join. They don’t want, they don’t want to be with a lot of old fogeys you know. They’d rather be out enjoying themselves. It’s understandable. And so I gave that up and I joined the, or Joan and we both joined the U3A and I I decided to — she was interested in gardening, flower arranging. I went on a computing course and there are about thirty odd different groups in the U3A and you can choose whichever one appeals to you. It’s either a hobby or an educational thing. I went in computers and then learning German because I’d taken it at school and we’d had a refresher course when we went with the choir. And so I, there were only about a half dozen of us used to go every week to this house. She was a German. She’d come from near Cologne and lived in this country for many years. But then she, she’d done it for twenty odd years and she gave that up. And I joined armchair travel which was, we used to meet up and show films of where people had been and talked about the different places. Quite interesting. And, and there was a, I became interested in, we had our own website and anyway when the person who was doing it was retiring I offered my services. So, I took over the website which meant I had to join the committee as well which I wasn’t very happy about but I used to go to the meetings as well. I did that for a while. Are we ok? And —
[recording paused]
AH: So why did you want to join the RAF?
GL: Why? I always had a love of aircraft and obviously as a lad you know I’d read about the, and about the exploits not only of Bomber Command but fighter pilots as well. And its, I thought well this this is the one for me. I didn’t really fancy the army or the navy. The air force really was the only place and we all joined. All the friends of us. We got ourselves very fit. We used to go for morning runs at the Air Training Corps. And we had, went every week to classes for — well learning all about flying really. About the various navigation, Morse code, air craft recognition. I could recognise any of the German planes I thought at that time when our memories were good. And to me it was the only thing that I wanted to do was to get up and fly. And I did later on take a gliding course in Norfolk which was a great thrill but that was later on in life. But it was, I knew one by one we we either volunteered or were called up. All the aircrew were volunteers. And one of my friends he he went to the Fleet Air Arm and he got in before me. And also I met an air gunner who, about the same age as me and and he’d done about twelve operations and I thought how was that? Anyway, we talked about this and he said, ‘Well, I volunteered as tail gunner. Said I wanted to be in straight away.’ And had I known I would probably have done the same because as I say being the same age he got in quite quickly. They were short of air gunners because they were very vulnerable at the back end of the plane of course and so he he couldn’t understand this. He said, ‘Why don’t you do operations?’ he said. Of course that was so disappointing for me. I thought well had I known would I have done the same thing? Volunteered as a tail gunner? Probably not have even come back. I mean he was lucky. He managed to survive but I know there were fifty five thousand more than that who who never came back. Who just died. Which was a, you know was a tremendous casualty list. But even so you know it was the thought of getting up there and it’s, and the thing is, I know that people when they say when they bombed at Dresden. There was a lot of talk about that. And there were so many casualties but after all it was war. They were bombing us the same way as we were bombing them. They bombed Hull and London and all the big cities and so it was. I don’t know whether any, there was any Christianity came into that. I mean there were some people who’d say, ‘How could you possibly go up there and drop bombs on innocent people?’ But you were just, just doing your job. You thought no more about it than that. You couldn’t really do anything else. If, if you didn’t, I mean there was some on the training who, who refused to, to do the training. This was at Bridlington where they had to jump into this, off the edge into the quayside, about twenty foot and with a Mae West on. And they refused to do it. And so they, they wouldn’t do it so they, they were taken off aircrew training. That was all part of it. You had to jump down, swim to a dinghy and climb aboard. All part of the training. But you just had to do this if you wanted to be in aircrew and it was an ambition of mine. And I mean when I wrote the book eventually that was my — I wanted to be a pilot. I think which most youngsters did anyway. I did actually get behind the controls of a Wellington bomber with a pilot by my side. Dual control. And he said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘You can take over now,’ he said, ‘Piece of cake,’ he said, ‘Just get a compass bearing and hold the stick and keep it steady,’ and he said, ‘I will land it though when we get there.’ But he said, he said to me afterwards, ‘You can take off if you like.’ He said, ‘I’ll watch you.’ We managed to get off eventually. Not very, not an ideal take off but then he said, ‘Fly it up to Yorkshire and I’ll take over.’ But it was a great thrill and, and then the flying in the gliding course as well. And I did think when I retired that was another thing I will do. I will, I’ll learn to fly at the local flying school. But so many other things to do I never got around to it. So it was sad really. It was disappointing. I mean I’ve watched many films. I’ve read lots of books. And of course when Dambusters I mean which was a tremendous thing there. Incidentally, I’m having the Dambusters theme at my funeral. I’ve already got it planned and I’ve written all this out for my daughters and I said, ‘Play that when people are coming in and then we’ll have the hymns etcetera and then at the end I’m going to have Perry Como singing, “For the Good Times.” Which was one of my favourites. And it was one my wife’s as well. Anyway, I’m getting off the beaten track aren’t I?
AH: Could you tell me a bit more about the training? What you did.
GL: About the —?
AH: The training. The training.
GL: Trailer.
AH: The training.
GL: Training.
AH: Yeah.
GL: Oh yes. Well, most of that was well in London of course we were just avoiding the [pause] the V-1s. That was more or less Reception Centre but Bridlington was where we did the training. Where we, this was where we had to jump into the sea and swim to the dinghy. And you were, I think the expression was LMF. Lack of moral fibre if you refused to jump. But we had assault courses and things like that and of course we used to go into was it the, one of the big concert halls there to do the Morse training. And we had to pass out at eighteen words a minute. And at the radio school which was at Madley I remember there. This was when we first got into aircraft, you know. Until then I’d never seen an aircraft. And we, I know that several of us went to work at Hartleys Jam Factory which was quite nearby. We used to get paid for that. But I digress. The actual flying and learning the Morse code I I didn’t really have any great difficulty with. At the, as I say we passed out at eighteen words a minute and I still look back and if I’d go on short wave I’d try to take any Morse messages but some of them were very fast. But I remember we [pause] I got to know a chap who lived in Essex and he was a married man. One of the older ones. And he, I sort of, I looked I looked up to him because he’d been around and he was an older man and anyway sort of looked after the younger ones. But there were some who found out that when they went up flying they suffered from air sickness. That was another thing. Just unfortunate. They just couldn’t cope with it so they had to find a ground job then. But the, I was just trying to think of the [pause] from the Isle of Man when we were in Jurby we were on Ansons then and the wing commander he he lived in [pause] near Grimsby actually. And anyway I had a talk to him and I managed to get a flight. A flight back from Jurby to — we landed at Binbrook in this Anson and I got home from there. He went to his home and we had a weekend at home. I know my parents couldn’t believe it. But yeah there were perks like that in flying but I think, you know the sheer joy of being up there. I know that it wasn’t, it wasn’t so pleasant you know, having seen all these films. You know when you were on the air raids on Germany and the cities etcetera with all the flak coming up and anti-aircraft and the fighters attacking you it wasn’t a piece of cake at all, you know. They really went through it. I admire the — I look up to them. They were always my heroes really. I mean people like Alec whom you’ve met, you know. I mean he, he was flying a Spitfire with no armament at all. Just took photographs. But I mean people like that I’ve always looked up to. And in a way I suppose I thought well why wasn’t I one of them? You know. A sort of feeling of not inferiority but disappointment in the fact that I never made it there. But I know there were several of my own age who were, who were in the same position. You know they, because I have met them and they say, oh yeah, they felt the same way. It was just one of those things. So, so the next war I shall probably volunteer as a tail gunner to start with if there is such a thing. Of course times will have changed. They’ll all be jets now. And I mean this is one of the joys the reunions. I was an associate member of 9 Squadron because I’d met someone in Lincolnshire Life who came. We used to sell books. Aircraft books. That’s how I got an interest in it as well and he was a rear gunner and he put me on to the Aircrew Association in the first instance. And in fact he was a local man. I used to see him at Tesco. He’s gone now unfortunately. And this is it with, well they’re not all old aircrew at Aircrew Association. There are some younger ones that came in after the war of course. You know, the jet men. A different school. But we used to meet up at these 9 Squadron reunions. The older ones and the younger ones. It was interesting you know to have talks with the young jet men, you know. To see how different it was. But I’m just trying to think of anything else of interest which [pause] No. Better switch off now. I’ll have to have a think.
[recording paused]
AH: What was it like coming to London from Lincolnshire?
GL: It was quite different. I’d never been to London before and to be uprooted from the wilds of Lincolnshire to the big city was quite something and I remember going down on the train. And there were several servicemen there and I remember one saying to me, ‘Why aren’t you in the forces?’ I said, ‘I’m on the way to join.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Good for you mate.’ And I said I would join the RAF. And but approaching the city you could see all the ruined houses and everything there. I thought they’ve really, they’ve really had it pretty hard. And it was, it was so different. I mean in Lincolnshire we’d had the odd, the odd raid and I remember a Heinkel 111 shot down near the steel works and we went to see it as boys do. But in London the — everything was so different. And when we got out of the train the first thing I heard was an explosion. I thought well that’s the first one. And we had to, we had to be on every so often we’d be on duty to warn people of a coming raid or an approaching doodlebug. We used to have to go up on the roof. We were on St Johns Wood and we’d taken over a lot of the luxury flats and anyway if we saw a doodlebug coming we’d got a whistle with us and we used to go in. We were in pairs and anyway as soon as the engines stopped that’s when of course that’s when it went down. So we blew the whistle and run like mad to try to get down in the basement and all the others were there by then. But we used to march and we used to wear steel helmets when we went from place to place. Once we, we went to the zoo. We used to go to the zoo and I remember we, if we night watching, if we were watching the, we’d sleep on tables and the reason for that was when you got down you put your foot down you could hear the crunch of the beetles you know. Oh they were awful. There were so many of them there. And apart from that I mean we had raids pretty well every night. And we got used to the idea but we knew that you know eventually we’d have to move and this is why we went out to Torquay. But life in London was so much different. Rural Lincolnshire we, I suppose we were spoiled up here. We don’t, we don’t see a lot of it. we used to see the odd doodlebug. They used to launch them from planes apparently from the North Sea. But we never actually had any in Lincolnshire at all. As I say the, Hull used to get most of the bombing. We could tell. If we saw a red glow in the sky, ‘Hull’s getting it tonight.’ But considering we had two steelworks in Scunthorpe I’m surprised we didn’t get more raids really. My father was a warden, sector leader, and he used to come and see us you know in the shelter from time to time there. We had great fun building those. The old Anderson shelter with grass sods all over it and a stirrup pump if it got flooded and so cold we had these oil heaters. But we spent quite a bit of time in the shelters. And you could, there were Morrison shelters as well which were in the house. They were reinforced tables. Quite strong actually. Which I suppose were better than going out into a cold damp Anderson shelter. But it all seems such a long time ago now and you just wonder when the next one will be. I mean they’re talking World War Three with the Russians and all the rest of it, but it would be people like you and the grandchildren who are around. We shan’t be around that much longer. Well, I’m optimistic. I mean I hope to reach ninety one. We shall see. But yes I would, I tend to I say to my grandsons, you know ‘Whatever you do if the time comes, if you have to join up, join the RAF,’ I said, ‘It’s the only one.’ The Brylcreem boys as they used to call them. I know we did get a few comments about that. But it was a good life. I really was fortunate. I had about four years and I enjoyed my time which is more than a lot of people who’d been in the RAF. I mean they had a pretty tough time a lot of them. Some never came back. But I was very grateful for the fact that I, you know had served my country to some extent. Little though it was. But it was an enjoyable time and a good experience. And it broadens your mind certainly because you meet up with people from all walks of life and they all have different views etcetera. And I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Anything else you want to ask? No?
AH: What do you think about the way Bomber Command was treated after the war?
GL: Well, that was pretty awful I think. I mean Bomber Harris he took a lot of the brunt. I mean, partly because of Dresden. But they were only doing really what they had to do. They said they were, they were bombing civilians rather than bombing targets but I mean what happened in London or Birmingham or Hull? They weren’t just bombing targets. They were just indiscriminate. And I don’t really see why they was so much criticism of them. I mean after all they, they joined the air force. They joined Bomber Command to to go, take part in raids over Germany or wherever. Italy. And they, I know that the bomb aimer was the person responsible for dropping the bombs but I’m sure they didn’t have any, any feelings about what they were doing or what was happening down below. They had a job to do and it was, ‘Left. Left. Steady. Right a bit. Bombs gone.’ And that was it. They were just doing their job and I don’t really see how, how they can criticise. I know that they made a lot of Fighter Command. You know. Saving the country which, yeah but Bomber Command they certainly did their part and Bomber Harris was was respected by all the people who were in Bomber Command. Although he was heavily criticised afterwards but you’ll always find this. There will always be someone to criticise when its all happened. You know. Especially if they weren’t there and they don’t know what it was like. I mean it must be terrible when when you read of say ten thousand people killed in a raid on Dresden. Innocent people. You know, women, children. But that was war. And they were doing just the same to us and I see, I feel very strongly that there should be no criticism. What’s war is war and you do what you’re told to do and this is what they did. So [pause]
AH: What was your friend Bish’s name? Your friend Bish. What was his name?
GL: It was John Bartlett. Yes. We all called him Bish. He was always known as Bish but the poor devil he got the doolally tap I think they called it. Which was Morse Madness. But he was a great friend and as I say very quiet. Being a southerner I think you know we got on very well. He was rather reserved but he’d have a drink or two and he’d just be a changed character. He’d come back and he’d throw people out of their beds, you know. Tip the bed over. Things like that. I couldn’t believe the things he got up to but he got away with it because he’d got this smile and [pause] strange really. But it got to him in the end. You know. The Morse madness and it was so sad that he lived through the war and then just died like that. In such a way. But it did happen to quite a few people apparently. It didn’t affect me at all but I know some were badly affected. And one of these days I’m going to buy myself a Morse key and see if I haven’t lost the touch. No. I know that Jock he he was being a Scotsman he admitted to me once, he said, ‘I can get, I get a bit aggressive when I’ve had a drink or two.’ You know. Och aye tha noo and all that. And we did have one or two skirmishes I remember in London but he said, he apologised afterwards, you know. He said, oh he said, ‘We’re buddies,’ he said, ‘Don’t mind me. This is me. That’s how I am.’ Anyway, he’s now happily married with four, four sons. He’s way ahead of me. And he married the girl he was, he wasn’t a Catholic then but he took conversion lessons to be a Catholic and that’s what he wanted. We used to pull his leg about it of course as you do. When you’re out with the lads. Because I’d met this Irish girl and I said it’s love at first sight. Red hair and blue eyes. A beautiful girl and well I put in the book there you know we went on the balcony of this hotel we were in and I went to kiss her and would you believe it I asked her permission? You know. Would you find this these days? It’s straight in you know. But I was so naïve with, with girls particularly and it was so [pause] Anyway she put me at my ease and we had a kiss and that was it. But we did we did keep in touch. But she married her boyfriend. One she’d known from the Catholic from early days. Are you recording this as well? Oh dear. [laughs] I wonder if I’ve said anything I shouldn’t have said. Anyway, I haven’t sworn. But do you find this of interest really? Is this all going in the permanent thing at Lincoln? Is it? So who will listen to this then I wonder.
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 Geoffrey Lenthall
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Anna Hoyles
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-04-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ALenthallG160401
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Pending OH summary
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:19:10 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Geoffrey Lenthall was born in Nottinghamshire but spent most of his youth in Scunthorpe. He happily volunteered for aircrew but found himself working as ground personnel. He eventually trained as a wireless operator and was posted to 9 Squadron. He had a friend who suffered eventually from 'Morse madness' which led ultimately to a mental institution and an early death. After the war Geoffrey returned to banking and then to the fish markets and finally to the Lincolnshire Life magazine.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-07
9 Squadron
aircrew
demobilisation
Dominie
entertainment
ground personnel
military discipline
military service conditions
Proctor
RAF Madley
training
V-1
V-weapon
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/928/11171/ALinakerJ150924.1.mp3
3a460fac50d11fa36d2a5548c624bfeb
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
Linacker, Jack
Linacker, William John
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Jack Linacker (Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a rear gunner with 9 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
2015-09-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Linacker, J
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DK: Right. David Kavanagh, International Bomber Command Centre interviewing Jack Linaker. Put that there.
JL: Yeah but you’ll have Jack Linaker. The name is William John.
DK: Oh.
JL: But everybody calls me Jack.
DK: Sorry. William John known as Jack Linaker.
JL: Yeah.
DK: Ok. I wonder if we could just, do you mind if you just pull one of these tables up? One of these. Just put that there and put the microphone on. I’ll put that there. You won’t have to shout then. Ok. So, so you were saying about the militia then?
JL: Pardon?
DK: You were talking about the militia.
JL: Yeah well —
DK: And the Territorial Army.
JL: Before the war started the government had a plan to call up young blokes like me. And I was called up. I had a medical examination and all the rest of it. I went to, had the medical examination and we were interviewed and, by, by these big shots like. And I said I wouldn’t mind being in the Guards. And this chap said —
DK: Right.
JL: ‘Well, you can’t be in the Guards Jack because you’re not tall enough.’ He says, ‘Join the artillery.’ So, he put me down for the Artillery. WelI, I thought that was great you know. So, anyhow, I was called up to go up to Bishop Auckland. To the Artillery.
DK: Yeah.
JL: And I went. I took it down to the steelworks and they sent it back. They said, ‘You’re not going. You’re staying here for the simple reason we’ve got that and we’ve got women coming in and you’ll be able to teach the women.’ So I didn’t get called up. And then eventually the war started. And the women come in to the steel works and there was me teaching women little jobs that men did. And I wasn’t, I wasn’t quite on — I think I was about twenty. I wasn’t twenty one but anyhow whilst the women was there we had we had rationed the chocolates and things like that. We could get it. And then anyhow these women they was very good to us all and all the rest of it. And the next thing is they told me I have to be transferred and they transferred me to Kettering furnaces.
DK: Right.
JL: And it was the worst bloody job I ever had in my life. I’m not kidding you.
DK: So how old were you when you started in the steel works then? Sixteen?
JL: We, when we come to Corby from Northampton we had nothing. My father was out of work. And he got a job as a work chauffeur.
DK: Right.
JL: So I’ll be about sixteen or seventeen.
DK: Right.
JL: When we came to Corby.
DK: So you’d be about sixteen or seventeen working in the steel.
JL: Yeah.
DK: Corby. Yeah.
JL: And I did get a job straight away. Of course, the steel, the Germans were still building the steelworks. And I biked to Kettering, and I got a job in Kettering where they made furniture. And then when, round about Whitsun time the bloke says, ‘Jack, I’m sorry. We don’t want you anymore.’ So I went back to Corby. Went down to the local dole place. They said. ‘You’re just right. They’re taking young lads into the steel works.’ So, I got a job in the steel works. And I’ll tell you what. Men were teaching me and they was on, one or two blokes who knew all about it but most, most of the chaps had come down from Scotland.
DK: Right.
JL: Where they’d had it, had it rough. So I never picked up the wages like, like the beginning of the steel works. So the first thing I did, I had to, in them days you handed your money over. I handed my mum over and she give me ten shillings. The first thing I did with that ten shillings, I went straight into Kettering and put the ten shillings down on a fifty bob suit.
DK: Right.
JL: The fifty bob tailors. And then the fifty bob tailors was bloody good in them days. So, anyhow that was it. In that time I used to go into Kettering. I did a bit of dancing and all the rest of it and I picked up a young lady there. We got on alright together and all the rest of it but one night when I was taking her home in Kettering her old man come out and he said, ‘If that’s one of them buggers from Corby he can bugger off.’ So anyhow, I said, ‘I’m not from Corby. I’m from Northampton.’ So he took me in. We had a cup of coffee and all the rest of it. I said, ‘I’ve missed the bus.’ He said, ‘You can borrow my bike.’ But that was the end. The Kettering people didn’t like the blokes from Corby. So anyhow, eventually I did take, take the job in Kettering. But it was the worst job I ever had. In the meantime I got married.
DK: Right.
JL: And I had to live with her mother. She told me, ‘If you marry me you’ll have to,’ But she wanted me to marry her because she was only eighteen and I was twenty or twenty one. But anyhow we got married. And the job I had in that place was bloody horrible. So I went straight down to the Labour Exchange and I volunteered for the RAF.
DK: Right.
JL: So, they filled in all the forms and all the rest of it and they sent me to Cardington. They sent me to Cardington. I passed the exam and all the rest of it. They interviewed and they said, ‘Right. We’ll put you down as a flight engineer.’
DK: Can you remember what year this would have been? Had the war started by this time?
JL: The war had started by that time. It would be —
DK: 1940 sort of time.
JL: You stay there.
[pause]
DK: So it would have been 1942 then.
JL: Yeah. So anyhow, as I said I went and had the interview and I had to come home. And they put me down for a flight engineer. And I was married. I was living with, with the mother in law and all the rest of it. And I thought this was, it was alright but the money was no good. Eventually I wrote to the RAF to call me up. And they did. And they sent me down to the RAF Regiment. And I went over to the Isle of Man and did training with the RAF Regiment and all the rest of it. And then eventually I was in the RAF Regiment and then others, others was volunteering. They wanted aircrew and all the rest of it. But I don’t know why, I never bothered about it. Then all of a sudden it come to my head and I went to see the adjutant. I said, ‘Look, I’ve got a paper here.’ I’ve got it still in there. I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind going aircrew.’ So he said, ‘Why not?’ So, he sent me up to London. I had an interview and I think I stayed at one of the posh places up London and they says, ‘What did you — ’ I says, ‘Well,’ I says, ‘I didn’t know what to do.’ So anyhow, he says, ‘Right. We’ll send you down.’ And they sent me down to the RAF Regiment, and I was with them and then all of a sudden I went and saw the adjutant. I said, ‘Look, I’ve got this bloody paper here. Aircrew.’ So he said, ‘Right.’ He sent me up to London again and the next thing is I was training to be an air gunner and I trained at, over the Isle of Man.
DK: Right.
JL: And from that on I met a friend of mine, Bunny Rothwell. And when, when we’d passed our tests we were sent out to Desborough way to our IOU and then we went and trained on Wellingtons and things like that.
DK: Yeah.
JL: You know.
DK: So when was your training first of all in the air? Was the Isle of Man — ?
JL: Yes. Well, the first time we went training in the air it was on Ansons.
DK: Right.
JL: And they had turrets on the ground and all the rest of it and that’s how we, how we trained. And then —
DK: So you trained on the ground first of all.
JL: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: And then in the turret in the, on the Anson.
JL: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DK: So what were your targets in the air then?
JL: Pardon?
DK: What were your targets? Your training targets.
JL: What?
DK: What were you shooting at?
JL: Well, they used to put a plane in the air with a bloody great big trailer on the back of it.
DK: Yeah.
JL: Yeah. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
JL: We used to shoot at that.
DK: And try and avoid the plane.
JL: Yeah. Yeah. Of course the bullets was covered. All the rest of it.
DK: Right.
JL: And that would be on [pause] that would be Ansons.
DK: Right.
JL: That would be about 1944 on Ansons. And [pause] then they sent us to an OTU but we was on Wellingtons. And from Wellingtons, well we had the, I must admit we had the time of our lives because we used to bugger off when there weren’t anything else. And the next thing is, the next thing is —
DK: Is that where you met your crew?
JL: No.
DK: Oh you hadn’t met your crew yet.
JL: No. No. First of all they sent us to, we was on Wellingtons. And then they sent us to a Conversion Unit. And I don’t know why but I arrived a bit late. And they seemed to be all crewed. Crewed up. So when I walked down there the first bloke I met was Bunny Rothwell. And I was at air gunner’s school with him. So he says, ‘Just the man, Jack. You can come. You can be in our crew.’ He says, ‘We want a rear gunner.’ He said, ‘I don’t want [laughs] I don’t want to be the rear gunner,’ he said, ‘No. You. I’m the mid-upper.’ So, Curly Read was the pilot. And that’s how I got crewed up. And then —
DK: So this was on 9 Squadron was it? Or before? Before then?
JL: Just before then.
DK: Before. Ok.
JL: So we was in an OTU.
DK: OTU right.
JL: But we was training on Wellingtons.
DK: Right.
JL: Then we went on what they called Conversion Unit.
DK: Ok.
JL: And then we went over on Stirlings. The [pause] everybody hated flying in Stirlings. The aberration of the air force. So anyhow —
DK: You didn’t, you didn’t like the Stirlings then.
JL: No.
DK: No.
JL: So the next thing is we got called up they sent us to 9 Squadron.
DK: Ok.
JL: The best of it is when we got to 9 Squadron the bloody place was empty. So we went into the sergeant’s mess. So we said to said to the young, somebody in there, ‘Where are they?’ They said, ‘Shhhh top secret. They’re in Russia.’
DK: Right.
JL: So 9 Squadron was in Russia.
DK: The Tirpitz.
JL: We went, we went down to the local pub. The Jolly Sailor. And everybody in there, they knew, ‘Shhh top secret. They’re in Russia.’ And they, 9 squadron had flown out to Russia to get the Tirpitz because of that. But, ok. They was there. So, alright, they didn’t get it so when they did come back they brought a load of Russian money back which was worthless. So anyhow —
DK: No vodka.
JL: Yeah.
DK: No vodka.
JL: Anyhow, when we got back like, we got crewed up and all the rest of it.
DK: So which base was this then? Which RAF station? Was it Bardney?
JL: Yeah.
DK: Bardney. Yeah.
JL: And then we got crewed, we got a crew. Curly Read was my first pilot and we crewed up. And then [pause] right. We, we really, really enjoyed it at Bardney. That was around about 1944.
DK: Ok.
JL: And we’d already been [pause] we’d had already been to Munich.
DK: So where was your first?
JL: We’d been to, we’d been up to Norway.
DK: Right.
JL: To the fjords. The idea was to get hold of the boats that do that. So we had, whilst we was there me and my mate Bunny Rothwell we had, you know we really enjoyed ourselves. We used to go down to the local pub, The Jolly Sailor . Which ain’t there anymore and that. So when we, we carried on, we did a few flights and then we come back. It was very, oh we’d been up to Norway. We’d come back and it was very very foggy. He overshot the runway and he tried to get around again and he crashed. I fell out the rear turret. And the next thing is I was laid on the bloody floor in mud. The next person I saw was Bunny Rothwell. So we went over, saw Bunny. And as that one bloke stepped out of the plane and he fell down. And then another one come out. He fell down. I pulled the parachute cover up one of them and that was when the navigator and the bomb aimer, they was, they was killed. The pilot, we couldn’t find him. But he’d gone through the canopy. He was over, way over there but he was still alive but he had a [pause] skull. And the wireless operator he had a fractured skull. So that, that was him gone. 1944. Just before Christmas. So we moaned and moaned and moaned. They was, they was going to take them two lads back to where their parents was. And I managed to get home for Christmas, to Kettering. And that was on operation. We’d been to Stettin. Crashed on return to base. Then afterwards Ray Harris had these two air gunners and they got shot up well one day and he lost them. And then I joined Ray Harris and I flew, flew with Ray Harris right ‘til the end of the war. And he was the man who started the reunion. 9 Squadron. The first reunion we ever had was RAF Club Piccadilly. And he had a little bit in the News of the World about it. My mate Bunny Rothwell, he rung me and he said, ‘You’re going.’ So, we went down and we stayed the night at some hotel. We stayed at, went to RAF Club Piccadilly. When we, you’ll laugh at this bugger then. When we stayed the night we had the time of our life. We was going back to the hotel. When, when we got back to the hotel there was these women in the doorway and they said so and so and so and so, ‘You can have the night for us for thirty quid.’ And me and Bunny Rothwell bloody laughed our heads off. He said, ‘You’re a bit expensive.’ Anyway, we never had, we never took any notice of women. We just bloody went up. And we didn’t know half the stuff that went on in bloody London you see. So anyhow, we went, we went back to 9 Squadron and then well me, we had, any time we could get away we used to go down to Nottingham. Why we went to Nottingham it was always known that was the place for wine, women and song. This is true. One night we was down Nottingham. So we didn’t have to get back until the morning. So we booked a bed in, this is true, we booked a bed in at the YMCA. So, we went down to this pub, not a really nice pub. We’d become, I forget the name of it now. But anyhow, we was up the bar. We were having a drink. Now, this is a fact this lady come up to us. So she says, ‘Are you two boys in Nottingham for the night?’ We says, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well,’ she said, she was very nice, she said, ‘Well, my husband is in the Middle East and he’s a major. But it was always our intention if anybody was aircrew they could stay in our house for the night.’ We thanked her very much and all the rest of it. In the end we did go back to her place. So when we got to her place in Nottingham, lovely. Like that. The maid opened the bloody door and we sat down. We had a couple of drink and all the rest of it. So she said, ‘I’ll show you to your bedroom.’ She showed me to my bedroom. And then she showed Bunny to his bedroom. And we got up in the morning. We told her we had to be on Trent Bridge. We’d get the lorry back. So we went up. And we got up in the morning and there was the maid there. All that. And she come down and she said, ‘Don’t forget. Go back and tell your boys they could stay here anytime.’ So we went back and told the blokes about it.
DK: Yeah.
JL: And we had a laugh. Anyhow, when we got back we never bothered about going back to Nottingham. We’d go to anywhere. We’d jump and all the rest of it. And of course, I’d been married and my, and my wife had buggered off with the bloody Yanks.
DK: Oh no.
JL: So, that put the cap on married life. So anyhow, one day I went down to the mess. Picked up this letter and I read it. And I went straight down to the gunnery section. I says to Bunny Rothwell , you know the night we stayed at Nottingham?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Did you sleep with a woman?’ He says, ‘I did.’ I said, ‘And did you tell her your name was Jack Linaker?’ He said, ‘Yeah. I wasn’t going to tell her my own name.’ He says, ‘What’s the matter. I said, ‘She’s just died and left me all her money.’ [laughs] He tells the same story but the other way around.
DK: Yeah.
JL: So anyhow, we, I went. I started to fly with Ray Harris. He, he went out on the motorbike and he crashed the motorbike and hurt his leg. He never went flying again. And I flew with Ray Harris right until the war ended. We did a tour of all the places we —
DK: So how many operations did you do altogether?
JL: Pardon?
DK: How many operations all together?
JL: Counting leaflets I only did eighteen.
DK: Eighteen.
[pause]
DK: So how, how many were with the first crew and how many with the second crew?
JL: That, that was my second crew.
DK: Yeah.
JL: That would be 1945 would be the last time I flew on the squadron. Then I finished up in Singapore. Not flying but they sent me to Singapore and that, that was it.
DK: Were most of the flying night time? Was most of the flying during the night?
JL: Pardon?
DK: Were they daylight operations or during the night?
JL: During the night.
DK: During the night.
JL: I don’t, I don’t think [pause] I think I did one daylight raid.
DK: Right.
JL: Over in France.
DK: Did you, as an air gunner did you ever fire your guns while on operations?
JL: Once.
DK: Once.
JL: Once I fired them. Once. But the best of it is when you, when you went out with a squadron and that, the, the Germans could put up a Lanc, pull up a Lanc and they put it in the bomber stream. So, and also if anybody was tailing you you’d tell your pilot you were being tailed. He’d either dive to starboard or port you see. And one night a Mossie was there. And I said to him, ‘If that Mossie doesn’t get off our tails I’ll give him a shot.’ Anyhow, the Mossie, the Mossie buggered off and all the rest of it so that was it. And when I think about it and all the rest of it you know, I was a lucky bugger.
DK: The one time you did fire your guns can you remember what you were shooting at?
JL: Yeah. We saw this bloody Dornier come in but he was at quite a distance. So I told the pilot. I says, ‘I’ll give him a shot.’ And I did. And the next thing is he buggered off so we never saw him again. And the next time — I did fire once more. I’ll tell you what. We, we were going over. I think it was to Munich and they’d put the flood lights on. And I turned the guns down and threw a few shots at the —
DK: The searchlight.
JL: Searchlight.
DK: Searchlight. Yeah.
JL: And they went out and that was it.
DK: So, was, was your role then as an air gunner to be more of a lookout? To warn the pilot of dangers.
JL: Pardon?
DK: Is your role as an air gunner to warn the pilot of dangers?
JL: Well, the role of, the role — this is a fact. The role of a rear gunner. He had a life of four hours.
DK: Right.
JL: That’s what they said to that. So you’ve got to be lucky because many a time they get hold of the rear gunner and all they do is throw meat out. Now, one night, before, before we went on the squadron there was this pilot come in with a [pause] it was either a Hurricane or a Spitfire and he crashed. They couldn’t get him and he was screaming. Well, one of the blokes come out with his arm and he, he fired his gun straight into that because they couldn’t get the pilot out. And killed him.
DK: Oh dear. So how, as, as all these years later as you look back on your time in the RAF how do you feel about it now?
JL: The time I had in the RAF I did, I did try to stay on. Of course I was a warrant officer. And the bloke said to me, ‘You’ll drop a rank.’ And I said no. I’ll stay on but no drop. And that’s when I come out. Because I’d got to drop a rank. I wouldn’t have minded staying on if I didn’t have to drop a rank but I did. And I come home and I’d got, I’d got my job back in the steelworks and a bloody good job and all the rest of it. And then my father fell out of work. Me and my wife bought him a taxi and he run a, run a taxi. And then when that, I packed up the job when my dad died. I packed up my job at the steelworks which I shouldn’t have done and run the taxi business. And I should have bloody sold it out there then. So I didn’t.
DK: Do you look back on your time in the RAF as proud of that time or is it — ?
JL: I look back on my time in the RAF. I enjoyed every minute of it. I probably, I would have stayed on if I didn’t have to drop a rank.
DK: Yeah.
JL: But today you get different views. Now, we are always on about these migrants coming over and all that. When I think about it you see the little babies being pulled out. And I want, I look, I want to know, they would have been much better off staying in their own country. And I I look at children. Unfortunately, we never had any children what with one thing and another. It was something to do with the wife but we tried to have children and didn’t. But there was always kids in this house. And there’s that little girl up there. She would have stayed here. A relation of ours. This is me personally. Every child when they’re born should be baptised. Why they should be baptised? You never know what that child wants to grow up to be. So, like one of them who married in to royalty. He was baptised but he wasn’t confirmed. That. But he had to go and get, do it before he got married into royalty. But I still say I believe and sometimes I wonder why do I believe? But —
DK: Ok.
JL: It’s one of these things. I love to listen to Songs of Praise on Sunday and things like that. I do go in to church. I do say prayers. And sometimes it makes you wonder where was God?
DK: Yes. Very true. Ok. I’ll just pause.
[recording paused]
JL: Those electric clothes. You know, we was well looked after.
DK: So you had electrical —
JL: Yes.
DK: Overalls.
JL: What we used to do, we used to plug in before we got into the aircraft. In that. Got them warmed up and that and then we plugged ourselves in.
DK: So you felt very confident in the Lancaster then did you?
JL: Oh yeah. Never worried me, flying in the Lanc. I’ve seen one or two packed up flying. There was one bloke he’d done sixteen trips and he’d had enough. And they stripped him. Left his brevet on and stripped his tapes off of him because he refused to fly anymore.
DK: Right. So —
JL: And he’d done sixteen. And there, we used to go in to the mess sometimes and there was this bloody bloke he got his ticket. He was trying to feed the ducks on the bloody wall. And there was another bloke. He was in the, and he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t wash. And two of the blokes took him down to the showers. Washed him. Brought him back. He still refused to wash and we reckon he got his ticket in the end. He wouldn’t wash.
DK: So, the, the crash you were returning from Stettin?
JL: Stettin.
DK: Stettin when the aircraft crashed. And, and the crew, and the crew killed.
JL: Two of the crew was killed. That was Whitey and the bomb aimer. The other one was smashed in the head and all the rest of it but I, I was the first one to fly again. Bunny Rothwell, he started flying again. Then he went out on a motorbike and hurt his leg and crashed. He never flew again. So I was the only one that carried on flying until stopped. I had to go.
DK: What about —
JL: I had to go training somewhere and —
DK: So the bomb aimer was killed. And the pilot was killed.
JL: No. The pilot was —
DK: Bang on the head.
JL: Yeah.
DK: Oh. So was the flight engineer killed or —
JL: Yeah. The flight engineer was killed.
DK: The flight engineer and the bomb aimer were killed.
JL: Yeah.
DK: And the others all wounded.
JL: Yeah.
DK: Were you hurt yourself or —?
JL: The two was killed and I was alright. I managed to go home for that Christmas.
DK: Ok. It happened just before Christmas didn’t it?
JL: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DK: The 21st of December. So you were flying again back in March.
JL: Yeah.
DK: And that’s with Harris, I see. Yeah. So Flying Officer Read never flew again.
JL: No.
[pause]
DK: Ok.
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 Linaker
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Kavanagh
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ALinakerJ150924
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:36:08 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Jack Linaker was working in a reserved occupation as a steelworker before volunteering to join the RAF. He was originally told he would be trained as a flight engineer but as delays were frustrating he began training as a rear gunner. He joined 9 Squadron and crewed up with his friend who had been through the training with him. After one operation their aircraft crashed on return to base. The bomb aimer and navigator were killed and the pilot was wounded. Jack went on to fly with a new pilot who had lost his own gunners.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Kettering
England--Northamptonshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
crash
faith
Lancaster
Mosquito
RAF Bardney
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/975/11296/PMacIntoshD1501.1.jpg
d4139b0ba70a29563d2e00741335bb71
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/975/11296/PMacintoshD1701.2.jpg
aa4e1956aa46ea8d7055920193709d30
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
MacIntosh, Donald
D MacIntosh
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Donald MacIntosh DFC (1922 - 2019, Royal Air Force).
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Donald MacIntosh and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
In accordance with the conditions stipulated by the donor, this item is available only at the International Bomber Command Centre / University of Lincoln.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-27
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
MacIntosh, D
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 Donald MacIntosh
Description
An account of the resource
Don MacIntosh was working as a policeman until he volunteered for the RAF. This was a Reserved Occupation and volunteering for aircrew was the only option available to him. He was posted to 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney and took part of the raid on the Tirpitz. After the war he continued flying in the civilian industry.
In accordance with the conditions stipulated by the donor, this item is available only at the University of Lincoln.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alastair Montgomery
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AMacIntoshD170901, PMacIntoshD1501
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:32:57 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Norway
Russia (Federation)
England--Lincolnshire
Russia (Federation)--Arkhangelʹskai︠a︡ oblastʹ
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
9 Squadron
aircrew
Lancaster
pilot
RAF Bardney
Tirpitz
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1040/11413/AMullinA161208.2.mp3
2eca126a2d2bb6576780d3a6f5725d4d
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
Mullin, Ann
A Mullin
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Ann Mullin. Her father, Sergeant George Fredrick Bedwell served as a wireless operator on Lancasters. Additional information on George Fredrick Bedwell is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/101500/">IBCC Losses Database.</a> <br /><br />The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-12-08
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Mullin, A
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: This is Julian Maslin recording an interview with Mrs Ann Mullin as a second generation interview on the 6th of December 2016 at Ann’s home in Rugeley in Staffordshire. Ann, I wonder if you could start this interview by telling us a little bit about where and when you were born and something about your growing up memories.
AM: I was born in Aldeburgh in Suffolk but I lived at 2 Chapel Road Saxmundham with my nan. I’m stuck now.
JM: You were born in Saxmundham in Suffolk.
AM: I was born in, yeah. I was born in Aldeburgh Hospital but I went back to Saxmundham. 2 Chapel Road with my mum, my granddad and nan and my mother because my dad was already away. Yeah the war was already started and he volunteered. So he went first I think. I’m not sure when he started. It would have been then.
JM: And when you were born please?
AM: 6th of December 1939.
JM: Right. And so your father was in the RAF.
AM: Yes. He volunteered. So I think he, I can’t remember that because I was just born, you know.
JM: Yes.
AM: But I know he was at home when I was about four or five. And I used to walk up the road with him. And they brought me a little chair for a doll and I kept sitting on it. And he took me up to a Common somewhere when we moved to Knodishall not long after that, which is near Saxmundham. And he took me up on the moors and there was a dead rabbit and I climbed up on him and he had to carry me home because I was terrified of it.
JM: So it was a very affectionate relationship.
AM: Oh yeah. I can remember. I can remember him so well. Really, like it was yesterday. It’s weird because I can’t remember other things but I can remember him.
JM: You saw him in his uniform.
AM: Yeah. Oh yes. The photo was with, well I will get that back but the photo was with him in uniform and me with a beret on the top of my head.
JM: Wearing his beret.
AM: Yeah. No. It was mine.
JM: Yours. Oh right.
AM: It was his. He had one of those hats you know that they wear.
JM: Yes. The forage cap.
AM: The pointed ones. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. I remember that. And I’m trying to think what else. We went to meet the bus once and he didn’t turn up so I don’t know if that was when he was missing or a time before because I can’t remember seeing him after that. I just remember a few things you know. And —
JM: So were you, when you were a young woman and perhaps when you married and had a family were you aware of your father’s role in Bomber Command? Or was that something that only came back later on?
AM: No. I knew. My mother talked a lot about it.
JM: She did.
AM: She got married again but that wasn’t very good.
JM: Right.
AM: And I don’t want to talk about that.
JM: No. No.
AM: And she used to tell me he was, he had, you know he volunteered to go because he wanted to go in the RAF. He didn’t want to do anything else. And if they go, call for you you get in any old thing they want you to go in, don’t they? So he went in to the RAF. And my brother was born about, he was born, my dad was killed at New Year. I don’t know if it was the 1st or the 31st. It was in between. That was what it said wasn’t it? And my brother was born on the 23rd of February so it was only a few weeks after. And I remember him being born as well. And I can remember going on the bus to tell Granny Bedwell. That would be my dad’s grandmother. That George was missing and we had to fetch the lady next door. She, Granny Bedwell was in hysterics nearly. So we left there. But yeah I remember all that. And I used to ask, ‘When’s daddy coming home?’ All the time. For years and years. I can remember. And then I said, ‘Oh he’s missing but he’s not gone. He’s alive. He’s in a prisoner of war camp or something,’ you know. Make out I thought he was going to come back but he never did, did he? Yeah.
JM: No. We’ll come to his story in a moment.
AM: Yeah.
JM: But in terms of your life have you actually done any research on what your late father did? How he served?
AM: Well, my brother does a lot doesn’t he? And you know he’s sent me things and that. So I’ve had quite a lot of information.
JM: Yeah.
AM: About all that.
JM: And what can you tell us please about what your father did?
AM: He was in the rear. Rear turret. He was a, I think he was a bomb aimer. No. I don’t think he was a bomb aimer. I think he was a —
JM: Rear gunner.
AM: Rear gunner. Yeah. A rear gunner. Yeah. But he was something else. Navigator I think. That’s what it said in the list that Johnny got. Yeah.
JM: And he was on a Lancaster squadron.
AM: He was on the Lancasters. Yeah.
JM: Do you know which squadron it was?
AM: 9th. 9th Squadron.
JM: 9 Squadron.
AM: Volunteers. Yes.
JM: 9. Yes.
AM: Yeah. I do remember that.
JM: Yes. That was a very important squadron.
AM: Yeah. Johnnie found all that for me. My brother. So —
JM: Yeah. Do you know how many operations your, your late father completed?
AM: No. I don’t know. I mean It was towards the end of the war so, because it ended about six months after that.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
AM: So he must have gone through a lot mustn’t he?
JM: Yes. He must.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Yes. He must.
AM: He went down in Germany. The crash site.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Johnnie knew it. I don’t know where it is.
JM: Yeah.
AM: I’ve never been. I don’t think I could cope with that.
JM: No. No. So you don’t know what happened to the aircraft?
AM: I think it just crashed.
JM: Did it?
AM: They found the crash site. Yeah. Yeah.
JM: So perhaps mechanical failure rather than enemy action.
AM: I don’t know. I’m not sure. I don’t know. I don’t think John knows either.
JM: No. No.
AM: No. I just know it crashed.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Probably shot down.
JM: It’s possible. Of course it is.
AM: Yeah. It could have been, couldn’t it? Yeah.
JM: Of course it is. Yes. And is your late father buried in Germany?
AM: Yes he is. I’ve never been there either. Hanover.
JM: At Hanover. Over Hanover.
AM: Is that where it is? I always get mixed up with Hamburg and Hanover but I think its Hanover.
JM: Hanover. Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah. I did have a photo of that. I don’t know where that’s gone now.
JM: Well, perhaps we can find that and —
AM: Yeah. Johnnie might have got that one.
JM: And scan that in. Yes.
AM: Johnnie might have got one.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
AM: And he’s on the War Memorial in Saxmundham because we went to see that.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. So were you involved in creating that war memorial? Or was it simply a—
AM: No. It was happening in Saxmundham. It took them a long while to get it up I think.
JM: Yeah.
AM: His name was on it. And I saw his name in, in — where is it? Oh God. Where we’ve just been? Lincoln.
JM: Yeah.
AM: I saw his name on there.
JM: Right.
AM: That was a bit sad there.
JM: So you went you went to the Spire for the opening and saw his name.
AM: Yes. Yes. We went on the Spire. It was a bit sad sometimes.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Because they had these students and they were pretending to be in a plane. You know. In the air. You’ve probably, did you go to it?
JM: I did see it.
AM: Yeah.
JM: I was there.
AM: And it was a bit scary. It really made me cry.
JM: Yes. It was very —
AM: To think he went through that, you know.
JM: It was very very well produced I thought.
AM: It was really well done but it was sad wasn’t it?
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
AM: Yeah. I was upset over that.
JM: Yeah.
AM: So were several people I think.
JM: Do you know whether the squadron got in touch with your mother after your father was lost? Was there any contact?
AM: I don’t know. I’ve never, never thought about that. I knew he was missing but it must have been confirmed at some time but she didn’t tell me. Or I’ve forgotten. I don’t know. Because I kept asking for him but in the end I think I stopped. I must have done.
JM: Yeah. And it was a telegram was it? That notified your mother that he was missing.
AM: I’m not sure because the telegram he sent, the one that I’ve told you I’ve got a picture of which my grandson’s got at the moment that was, that just said he was coming home. And it was, it was 1943 but I can’t remember the number. The month now or anything. But I know he was killed. I’ve always hated New Year and I don’t know why. And then I realised when Johnnie found out that it was at that time. And I didn’t know but I might have known really you know.
JM: Yeah. So this is very interesting that even though you were really a very small person at that time. Really a child and —
AM: Yeah.
JM: The loss of your father had an impact on your life.
AM: It lasted all through it. You know. To think, why. Why? Right at the end of the war more or less.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Wasn’t it? Yeah. Yeah, it did. It really upset me. My nan worshipped him as well. She always talked about him.
JM: Yeah. I would have thought that possibly the squadron commander might have written to your mother. That often happened.
AM: It probably did. I haven’t seen anything.
JM: No.
AM: But I’ve got, I had a lot of stuff, you know off Johnnie but he might have something about it.
JM: Yes, well —
AM: I don’t know. I can imagine she would. They usually do, don’t they?
JM: They very often did.
AM: But they all knew he was missing because I went with my granddad to tell Granny Bedwell so, yeah.
JM: You wouldn’t know the name of the pilot who was your father’s pilot?
AM: No. I don’t know that. No. No.
JM: Right. Ok.
AM: His parents lived in Kings Lynn and we used to go there as well.
JM: So you grew up after the war coming to terms with the fact that your father had been lost.
AM: Yes.
JM: In action.
AM: Yes. Yes
JM: Is it possible to say what affect that had on your upbringing?
AM: I just, if my stepfather said anything to me I’d say, ‘My dad’s coming back.’ Things like that, you know. I didn’t want him replaced.
JM: Right.
AM: No.
JM: So I need to be clear about this. Your mother remarried. Was that soon after the war?
AM: Oh no. It was. No. I was about ten or eleven I think.
JM: Right.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
AM: It was quite a while after.
JM: Yeah. So your mother remarried.
AM: She knew already anyway.
JM: Right.
AM: You know, from family.
JM: But this, this new father figure coming into the family was something you had some difficulty in —
AM: A lot of difficulty.
JM: A lot of difficulty.
AM: Yes.
JM: And I know you don’t want to talk about that.
AM: No. I don’t want to talk.
JM: And I’m not going to press you.
AM: No. No.
JM: But it’s important for the record.
AM: Yeah. No.
JM: That we understand that.
AM: No. No. I didn’t, didn’t like him at all.
JM: No.
AM: I tried but —
JM: When, as you were going through your life and you were having your own family etcetera there would be, perhaps a film. The Dambusters or something of that sort.
AM: I watched it.
JM: Or something on the radio.
AM: Yes.
JM: How did you feel about that?
AM: I can tell you whenever I went to the pictures and there was, it was a war film I used to have a panic attack.
JM: Go on.
AM: You remember that don’t you? When I’ve said I’ve watched war films and had a panic attack watching them. Yeah. I forgot about that.
JM: So you’re saying that if you saw a film or perhaps a documentary.
AM: When they were all in — yeah. In an aeroplane.
JM: In an aeroplane.
AM: Then I used to get a panic attack. I couldn’t breathe.
JM: And how long would that go on for?
AM: Not long. It used to go off.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Someone told me to deep breathe.
JM: Right.
AM: And you’d get over it, you know. So —
JM: And you were looking to see if there was any evidence of your father.
AM: Well, if anything on the pictures and you know the documentaries that are on.
JM: Yes. Yes.
AM: On National Geographic.
JM: Yes.
AM: And everything. Aren’t they? Oh yeah. I always still look for him.
JM: Yeah. So you’re still looking for him.
AM: I’ve never seen him have I?
JM: No.
AM: I might do one day. He could be on one of them you know. Yeah.
JM: It’s possible.
AM: Yeah.
JM: What about reading? Did you, did you read of, about the bombing war at all?
AM: I read books all the time about the war. I’ve got a pile of them up that corner.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah. It’s always about that.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
JM: But —
AM: Because I remember, I remember the siren going off and my mother saying, saying to my mother, ‘Wake me up when the siren goes,’ but she never did. But we didn’t get much in Saxmundham anyway. But when we went to Kings Lynn we were always in an air raid shelter.
JM: Yeah.
AM: And there was a man there who showed me this watch. You know an old fashioned one.
JM: Yes.
AM: Yeah. And he used to sit and show me that. So, I remember the air raids a lot.
JM: Yes, because the East Anglian coast was quite a vulnerable place.
AM: Yes, it was.
JM: Wasn’t it?
AM: Well, we weren’t quite on the coast but they used to bomb the railway where we lived in, in Saxmundham. Always bomb holes all over that field. And then we had German prisoners after the war. Well, I think it must have been in the war. It wouldn’t have been after would it? All in a big pit digging. I don’t know what they were doing but we used to talk to them. One had a dog and it was the equivalent of snowy. And my mother went mad because we’d been talking to them. But they were young kids. They were young.
JM: So there was no resentment.
AM: No.
JM: Even though your father had been killed.
AM: We didn’t have resentment to the Germans. No. No. Not really. Didn’t like Hitler. I hate him. I still hate him. Yeah. But these they were young kids. They, some of them spoke English. But I never went to see them again.
JM: No.
AM: Because she told me off that much. You can understand can’t you? Yeah.
JM: And when you’d done the reading and and watching the programmes has that in any way — has that affected your view of what Bomber Command was doing because as you said earlier —
AM: Not really. No.
JM: They weren’t very popular.
AM: No. They weren’t.
JM: But how did you feel about it?
AM: Oh I thought they should be popular and it’s come around now. They’ve got, I wanted them to have some sort of memory and they did in the end didn’t they?
JM: Yes. Yes. The Bomber Command clasp.
AM: Because he didn’t even want to talk about it, Churchill. He just didn’t, didn’t notice them did he? Sort of thing.
JM: He forgot them.
AM: He forgot them. Yeah. That’s it. But somebody obviously didn’t because he’s, they’re all back on now.
JM: Yes.
AM: Which is good.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
JM: And you’ve never been to Germany at all.
AM: I lived there for a year. Two years. No. About a year. No I was there for two years. I had my daughter out there because I was married to a soldier.
JM: Right.
AM: Yeah. We’re divorced now.
JM: Yeah.
AM: You know. That was a long while ago.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah. I had my daughter out there. My other daughter.
JM: And what was it like? Living in this country which was associated with the loss of your father.
AM: We lodged for about four weeks before we got our own place but the woman was lovely who we were lodging with. But the husband, he never spoke to us at all. And all he did was watch war films. He was in his lounge. We were never allowed in there. We just stayed in our room and the kitchen and the bathroom and that. Never went in there. He used to sit on his own watching war films.
JM: Gosh. What — may I ask what —
AM: He never spoke to us once.
JM: What years were this please?
AM: In the 60’s.
JM: In the 1960’s.
AM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because I got married in ’62 and we went to Singapore and then after we’d been in Singapore for a year that was the time Kennedy died. And then we went to Germany and I was there about two years. Julie was two when we came back.
JM: Right.
AM: And Andrew was about three.
JM: Do you remember the base that you were on?
AM: Oh. Hang on. I’m trying to think. I can’t.
JM: No.
AM: I don’t remember very well. I do know where it is. It was oh dear. Hang on. [unclear ] the town [unclear]
JM: Right.
AM: And I think we were there.
JM: I just wondered.
AM: I can’t remember what it was called.
JM: Because some of those bases weren’t far from Hanover. And I wondered if —
AM: I think it was away from there.
JM: It was.
AM: I had Julie in Munster.
JM: Right.
AM: Which was the nearest hospital and that was about two hours away.
JM: Right.
AM: So, no. I’m trying to think. It was [unclear] the town we were in. But I can’t remember the name.
JM: No.
AM: I know, I remember the one in Singapore but I can’t remember that one.
JM: That’s quite ok I was just wondering whether when you had been living in that part of West Germany whether there had ever been any opportunity or feelings to go to see where your —
AM: No.
JM: Where your father was lost.
AM: I didn’t want to go and look at the grave at the time but I wish I had now. We were thinking about it but you know I was having a baby at the time and she was only a baby so, and then we came home anyway.
JM: So you had to —
AM: I would have liked to have gone. I would.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. Would it be fair to say that had you found his grave you would have then had to accept that your father was lost?
AM: Yeah. There wouldn’t have been any hope then would there? There wouldn’t have been any hope.
JM: So hope would have gone.
AM: And then I’d just have said it’s probably not him in there you see. Yeah. I still don’t want to accept it. I mean he’d be dead anyway probably now. Although a lot of the veterans aren’t, are they? They’re still around.
JM: Yeah. Have you ever been involved in any of the veteran’s organisations or had any help from any? Such as the Royal Air Force Association or SSAFA.
AM: No. Not really.
JM: Never. Ever asked for any support?
AM: SSAFA. We had SSAFA. The SSAFA was, everyone had SSAFA. We had SSAFA in Singapore. I can’t remember whether we did in Germany. But SSAFA was there.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah. But I was too young then I think to do anything like that.
JM: Yeah.
AM: You know. It’s affected me more as I’ve got older and I don’t know why. I mean when I was tiny obviously I was upset but it’s just I still look for him. Like Emma said, you know.
JM: Perhaps it was because you were busy looking after a family and work.
AM: Well, yeah that’s it. You haven’t got time to think about things have you? No. Yeah, I think so.
JM: Do you think this interview will help you?
AM: I think so.
JM: To make sense of it.
AM: Yes. Yes.
JM: Because you’ll know that you’re speaking to a family of people with similar experiences.
AM: That’s it. Yeah. That’s it.
JM: And speaking to the future.
AM: I expect there’s a lot like me are there?
JM: There will be.
AM: Yeah.
JM: There will be.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Yes.
AM: So, yeah.
JM: Yeah.
AM: I think so. I wanted you to come anyway. I kept on about it. Yeah.
JM: You did. You did. And I’m sorry I couldn’t get here any earlier.
AM: That’s alright. I know. I realise when you said.
JM: Circumstances. Yeah.
AM: Some of them are really old aren’t they? So —
JM: Well, we’re losing veterans every month.
AM: All the time. Yeah.
JM: Men in their nineties.
AM: Yeah.
JM: And as —
AM: They’ve done well though haven’t they?
JM: They have. They’ve done very well. And those who are mentally sharp are marvellous men. Unfortunately many of them aren’t mentally sharp.
AM: No.
JM: But their families know the stories.
AM: Their families know. Yeah.
JM: Yes. Yes.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Yes. Right. I’m going to stop there just for a moment.
[recording paused]
JM: Let me just. Now, there’s a topic that I’d like to raise with you if I may Ann and that concerns your views on the damage that was done to Germany in the bombing war. Have you got any feelings which you’d like to share with us?
AM: They were just people like us, weren’t they? They didn’t want Hitler towards the end did they? No. I think it’s horrible. I don’t, I don’t like that at all. There’s children there and old people and you know. No. I don’t like that. But we had it didn’t we? They did it to us so it was just tit for tat really but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t want to, I don’t know, think too much about it because loads I mean they were probably worse off than us.
JM: I’m sure they were in many ways.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Yes. Yeah.
AM: Because they didn’t have any decent government had they?
JM: No. Yeah.
AM: Yeah.
JM: Do you remember your mother ever saying anything about that because after all that had taken — ?
AM: No. I can’t remember her ever saying anything. She didn’t like Germans though. I know because the reaction I got when we were talking to those army men.
JM: Yeah.
AM: You know. The prisoners of war. No. She didn’t like them. But I don’t think she’d want them all to be bombed. Although we were as well. No.
JM: Have you ever been over to the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight at RAF Coningsby? Have you seen the Lancaster there?
AM: We went — where did we go?
[recording paused]
AM: We went —
JM: So you were saying that you haven’t been to Coningsby but you may have been somewhere else.
AM: We went to Duxford.
JM: Right.
AM: And we were looking at the, we went straight to the Lancaster obviously. And there was a nice man there and he said, ‘You can come up if you want and have a look,’ and he got me in. But then I thought oh he must have had awful claustrophobia when he was in there. There’s not room to move is there?
JM: No.
AM: Yeah. Yeah. I did go in it. I loved that.
JM: Did it make you feel closer to your father?
AM: Yes. It did. Yeah. But then I thought, well he must, it must have been horrible for him in there. He obviously didn’t mind. Yeah.
JM: And when the aeroplane went down were all the crew killed? Do you know?
AM: I think so. I think —
JM: Yeah.
AM: It was complete. Johnnie knows more about that than I do.
JM: Yes. Right. Ok. Well —
AM: Yeah.
JM: When I meet your brother that information will come out. Yeah.
AM: Definitely.
JM: Is there anything else that you’d like to tell us? You know. Feelings or reactions that we’ve not touched on this afternoon.
AM: Not really. No. No. I don’t think so.
JM: I hope you found it useful.
AM: Yes.
JM: It’s certainly been very interesting.
AM: Yes. Yes. Even though I keep losing my words now and again.
JM: That’s fine. You’ve done very well, Ann. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. That’s wonderful.
AM: Oh great.
JM: Thank you, Ann.
[pause]
JM: This is an additional piece of information that Ann wants to give us relating to her late father’s service in the war. Ann —
AM: So what you do you want me to —
JM: About the barrage balloons.
AM: Oh yeah. My mother wanted him, he wanted oh God he volunteered to go in the RAF as you know. And then my mother told me afterward that she’d stopped — she said she didn’t want him to go to Canada. And he didn’t go. And then he got killed so she always blamed herself for it. It wasn’t her fault was it?
JM: So he might have been going to train as a navigator.
AM: Yeah. As a navigator. I know he did rear gunning but I thought he was a navigator. But obviously if he couldn’t we got that wrong. But I must have heard it somewhere so I think probably my mother said he was going. You know, that’s what he was going to be trained to do.
JM: Right. Right.
AM: And if he had have done he would have been there a while wouldn’t he?
JM: And you were telling us that he’d worked on a barrage balloon.
AM: Yes. At the beginning. I think it was my Auntie Nancy that told me about the barrage balloons. I hadn’t heard about that. But they were in Kings Lynn. There were loads of them. I can remember them when I was tiny because we used to go to Kings Lynn a lot because his mum and dad lived there. Yeah.
JM: So it’s quite likely that your late father was —
AM: He started off. Yeah.
JM: Started off on barrage balloons.
AM: He did start off on barrage balloons. Yes.
JM: And then was trained for aircrew. Possibly for navigation.
AM: He got more money as well.
JM: Oh yeah. He would have done.
AM: That’s why.
JM: Yes.
AM: Yeah.
JM: And then if his training for navigation didn’t work for some reason then he becomes a —
AM: A rear gunner.
JM: A rear gunner.
AM: Yes.
JM: And I was telling you that 9 Squadron is one of the most respected and admired squadrons in Bomber Command.
AM: Yes. I like that.
JM: Yeah. Based at Bardney, near Lincoln.
AM: Yeah.
JM: And flew Lancasters. And was a part of some of the most important bombing raids in the last year of the war.
AM: That’s right.
JM: Including the raids against the German battleship Tirpitz.
AM: Yes.
JM: So it’s possible —
AM: Find out about that.
JM: It’s possible that your father was involved in that.
AM: Yes.
JM: So we’ll look that up.
AM: Yeah. That’s great.
JM: Thank you Ann. So I’ll just —
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 Ann Mullin
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Julian Maslin
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-12-08
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AMullinA161208
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:22:45 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Second generation
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Description
An account of the resource
Ann Mullin’s father, Sergeant George Fredrick Bedwell was killed in action. She found it difficult to come to terms with the loss. She found it impossible to visit his grave although she lived in Germany after the war.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944-01
9 Squadron
aircrew
childhood in wartime
killed in action
memorial
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1102/11561/ARogersH150409.1.mp3
dbd0ef512560ca7e34fc539235de3d90
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
Rogers, Hugh
H Rogers
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Hugh Rogers (Royal Air Force). He was a film cameraman with 463 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
2015-04-09
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.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
Rogers, H
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Andrew Panton. The interviewee is Hugh Rogers. Mr. Rogers was one of the film cameramen on board a specially modified Lancaster from 463 Squadron Royal Australian Air Force that filmed the sinking of the Tirpitz on November the 12th 1944. The interview is taking place at [file missing], Bristol on the 9th of April 2015.
HR: I recall two memorable days seventy years ago, the eleventh and the twelfth of November 1944. On the morning of the eleventh I was instructed to report to headquarters at Bomber Command at High Wycombe. That surprised me because people like me didn’t go to the headquarters at Bomber Command and also I’d only recently been posted to the film production unit which I now served. In the event two cameramen reported at headquarters, the first Flight Lieutenant Loftus as a Canadian Airforce and secondly myself Flying Officer Rogers RAF of the film unit. We were briefed standing at a small, very small table in a very large room. We were both members of the number one film production unit RAF at that time. We were told at this briefing that we were to bomb the giant German battleship Tirpitz moored in the Arctic and that we were to join the main force of Lancasters at the RAF base in Lossiemouth, Scotland. We were briefed on the very precise route to be taken to reach the Arctic base of the Tirpitz. It was explained to us that following the bombing, the main force would fly west and return to Scotland. The camera Lancaster, which we should be flying, would fly south and return directly to Waddington. So the film could be transported to London by road, processed and as soon as possible, the pictures distributed. The propaganda value was important to the Allies and it was thought would be devastating to the German population morale. Late on the ninth or the eleventh, our Australian pilot, Flight Lieutenant Buckham completed the first part of the operation, flying Lancaster HD399 to RAF Lossiemouth, which is near Inverness, Scotland. HD399 was a Lancaster of the Australian Squadron 463 manned by an all-Australian crew and [unclear] us two cameramen. The aircraft had been modified for our special requirement, the first turret had, the front turret had the guns removed which were replaced with a mounted IMO 200-foot camera. In the fuselage area the mid upper turret with guns had been removed and the fuselage repaired so that the two areas in the fuselage were then available for the second cameraman. The opened panel at the rear of the bomb bay gave a vertical sighting and the second sight on the door edge to the starboard side of the fuselage, the top half of which opened at the time of filming hence required an electrical heated inner suit, I learned that the temperature at my station was minus nineteen ten Centigrade and confirmed my view that I had drawn the short straw. To sustain our fifteen hour flight we did not have a Tallboy bomb loaded but there was a large red fuel tank fitted in the space above the bomb bay. It contained about eighty tons of fuel which I rested on during the flight, my abiding [unclear] memory of the short time in Lossiemouth was to, was being in a badly-lit barnlike room with Wing Commander Tait giving his last remarks to the nineteen pilots on 617 Squadron. We were all standing in the group around Tait, I was standing at the back, he emphasized the importance of the prescribed course which had been designed to avoid detection by the enemy. Over the North Sea the course was to be at fifteen hundred feet and this was to be maintained until the Norwegian coast was approached. So in the early hours of Sunday the eleventh of November, there was a shattering noise as the engine started up in preparation for the three [unclear] take off. The course was to be across, north-east across the North Sea. Round about seven o’clock in the morning we changed course directly east, when we approached the snow covered mountains of Norway. We had been flying at about eight, fifteen hundred feet across the North Sea but the height was then maintained to cover the mountains and we flew direct west into Sweden. Where we turned north so that we could follow the boundary between Norway and Sweden at an altitude which would not expose us to the German radar. We, once we had crossed the mountains, we then reduced the altitude to a reasonably low level. We then had to fly north all along the route between Norway and Sweden until we reached the assembly point at Lake Tornea Trask east of Narvik, some one hundred miles from Tromso. In those Northern latitudes the daylight comes late and I remember, as it got daylight, climbing over the central spire of the aircraft and going into the cockpit. Now, I was very impressed looking out of the cockpit but even at that early hour I could see the path that we were to take, all the lakes were covered by small, lenticular clouds, these saucer like clouds could have been used by the observer to mark his route north to Narvik, that was another of my abiding memories, when all the aircraft had reached the lake Tait fired vary lights at which point all the aircraft then assembled into a battle station and followed Tait on the route to Tromso. As all the aircraft were assembling into position over the lake, we had all gained height to twelve thousand feet, at this height we were able to cross the mountain into the fjord where the Tirpitz was moored. Now, as we crossed the mountain, we were some twenty miles from the Tirpitz, it was a mere small speck at that distance, and of course it was in reverse, we were small specks to the Tirpitz. Now, we know later that it caused consternation on the Tirpitz, not expecting us they suddenly realised that they should call for help and this they immediately did apparently, so I learned later but there was no response to their call, to the call for help from the Messerschmitts. Soon after we were spotted by the Tirpitz they assembled their gun positions and their enormous guns, fifteen inch guns which fired shells of one ton, took a few seconds to get to elevation but in that time they realised that we were too high for the big guns firing one ton shells could reach us but the shells were fall exploding ahead of us and slightly below us. Now in our film Lancaster they were close enough to cause some vibration and movement to the plane, now we had to hold the camera steady in spite of that movement, I think we achieved this, as we got closer to the Tirpitz the ack-ack, small ack-ack guns started and actually it got presumed, because of the panic on board the ship they were not too accurate. As the operation developed John Loftus, lucky chap, was in the front turret and he was able from the front turret to swing the turret round and track the first Tallboys being delivered, being dropped from the aircraft. I couldn’t see that but I was able then to go from the side position and film the first, first few bombs exploding around the ship. As I was working through that open space over the door, I could feel myself getting colder but I wasn’t distracted from what I was doing but I could see the ship being hit, I could see the steam and the smoke coming up and I could see especially I remember at the time it impressed me, that what had happened to the guns on the island when Tallboy landed on the island on the starboard side of the operation. After the last aircraft had gone, I remember walking up or crawling up to the cockpit and looking out of the cockpit and the pilot had dived to the starboard to the right and he was about five thousand feet at the time he’d finished and we could see all the smoke and steam and then he immediately turned on a course which we left because we were going back to Waddington and the rest of the force had gone west of Scotland, but much to our surprise, as we started our course to Waddington, the rear gunner shouted out to the skipper, that he could see the Tirpitz turning over so we turned, the skipper, the pilot turned the aircraft to the starboard so we could see but the pilot was on the other side, sitting on the other side, he couldn’t see it so in order to see it, he dipped the starboard wing and again lowered his altitude and we could see in the distance that by that time [unclear] the smoke and the steam seemed to have gone or there was a haze over the aircraft and you could see that it was upside down. Now, I can’t remember how quickly it was done but the pilot knew that as a squadron Messerschmitts we didn’t know the Germans had been informed by radar but it was time to get out so from that time on we kept on our course back to Waddington. So after that unforgettable operation we headed south across the seas, Norwegian sea, The North Sea and down to Waddington. After a flight of close on fifteen hours where we were met by General [unclear] who collected the film as soon as possible but he was taking it to London to be processed and that was on the Prime Minister, I believe on the Prime Minister’s instruction to get the film out developed as soon as possible for propaganda reasons and also he thought the Prime Minister expected it to devastate the morale of the German people because Hitler had always told them that the Tirpitz was unsinkable. And once again 617 Squadron and 9 Squadron had proved Hitler wrong.
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 Hugh Rogers
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Andrew Panton
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-04-09
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ARogersH150409
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:13:45 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Hugh Rogers was a cameraman during the war and remembers filming the sinking of the Tirpitz in November 1944. Gives a vivid and detailed account of the operation, describing the briefing, the technical modifications to the aircraft and the unfolding of the events.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Peter Schulze
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Norway
England--Lincolnshire
Norway--Tromsø
Scotland--Moray
Scotland--Lossiemouth
Norway--Narvik
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-11-12
463 Squadron
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
Lancaster
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Waddington
Tallboy
Tirpitz