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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1875/46440/SHarriganD[Ser -DoB]v090002.mp3
8598a787d9cade4d126b750d930ea0c2
Dublin Core
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Title
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Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-06-19
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire
Description
An account of the resource
34 items. Interviews with veterans recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.<br /><br />Interview with Bertie Salvage <br />Three part interview with Dougie Marsh <br />Interview with Terry Hodson <br />Interview with Stan Waite Interview with John Langston<br />Interview with Nelson Nix <br />Two part interview with Bob Panton <br />Interview with Basil Fish <br />Interview with Ernest Groeger <br />Interview with Wilf Keyte <br />Interview with Reginald John Herring <br />Interview with Kathleen Reid <br />Interview with Allan Holmes <br />Interview with John Tomlinson <br />Interview with Cliff Thorpe and Roy Smith <br />Interview with Peter Scoley <br />Interview with Kenneth Ivan Duddell <br />Interview with Christopher Francis Allison <br />Interview with Bernard Bell <br />Interview with George Arthur Bell <br />Interview with George William Taplin <br />Interview with Richard Moore <br />Interview with Kenneth Edgar Neve <br />Interview with Annie Mary Blood <br />Interview with Dennis Brader <br />Interview with Les Stedman <br />Interview with Anthony Edward Mason <br />Interview with Anne Morgan Rose Harcombe<br />
<p>The following interviews have been moved to the relevant collections.<br /><span>Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46454">Kathleen Reid</a></span><br />Interview with Wing Commander <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46467">Kenneth Cook DFC</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46456">Colin Cole</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/46464">Charles Avey</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46470">John Bell</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46459">Les Rutherford</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46460">James Douglas Hudson</a></p>
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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Interviewer: This is an interview with Mr Richard Moore at his home in Lincoln talking about his wartime career as ground crew in the Lincoln area.
RM: Ok. We’ll go from there. Well, I joined up when I was eighteen and my first port of call was Weston Super Mare which as you know is not very far from home and I did six weeks square bashing there. We lived in private houses and we were well looked after. When that six weeks was up I was posted to Locking which is just outside of Weston and I was there for seven months learning my course. After we passed out, some of us passed out, some didn’t and my first squadron was Squires Gate at Blackpool. Boulton Paul Defiants they were. Something new to the Germans because not only did they have a pilot they had a mid-upper turret as well, a gunner so it could fire front and back. But Jerry soon got, soon got wise to it. A very clever race the Germans. I went on leave and when I came back we’d moved to Woodvale in Southport and those planes were call Beaufighters. They were twin engine light bomber. And one day our chief came to us and said, ‘I’ve got to post six of you to a place called Swinderby.’ Oh, we were going to Sicily. The squadron was going to Sicily. I said, ‘Well, I know where Sicily is but where’s Swinderby?’ He said, ‘I believe it’s in Lincolnshire.’ ‘Alright,’ I said, ‘I’ll be one to go to Swinderby then.’ Good job I did. They took a pasting in Sicily. And we get to Swinderby and it was, ‘Oh, we don’t want you here. You’ve got to go to Wigsley.’ So we go to Wigsley. ‘Oh, we don’t want you here.’ Back to Swinderby. In the end, in the finish we were at Wigsley and we were working with AV Roe men doing crossed aircraft and our chiefy turns up and says, ‘Drop everything. Get all your toolboxes and kit. We’ve got a bit of a job on.’ He didn’t say where but he took us back to Scampton and I see these Lancs. There was one in a hangar. No bomb doors just two arms down you see. I thought these are queer Lancasters.
Interviewer: This would be early 1943.
RM: Yes. Yes. And so, a chap and I worked all night on one of them. God, it was damned cold in that hangar. It was in May, wasn’t it? It was May time and all of them had been flying low over the water and all the plates underneath towards the rear gunner were all mashed in. We had to change all them. And I lived in Saxilby at the time. I could live out because my wife in Saxilby and I wasn’t far away and as I was cycling down Tillbridge Lane they were taking off on this raid. Didn’t know anything about it. I know the chap’s dog had got killed. Nigger. It was killed the day before they went and Gibson said, ‘Bury it at 12 o’clock. That’s when we’ll be over the target.’
Interviewer: Did you see anything of Guy Gibson or —
RM: Oh, I saw him in the distance. I’ve met Micky Martin.
Interviewer: Oh yes.
RM: He was a nice bloke. Australian he was. He was a good pilot. So and off I went home and the next day we knew all about it.
Interviewer: So you saw these aircraft obviously different to the normal Lancasters.
RM: There were no bomb doors you see.
Interviewer: Did you wonder what was, you know happening?
RM: No. Nobody said anything. I said, ‘Well their just two arms now. Then we realised it was for the swimming, the swimming bomb you see. Yeah. And we lost what seven did we? Or was their eight I think we lost.
Interviewer: Yes. It was eight. Yes.
RM: Fifty six men. And Martin and Gibson, they kept flying each side of the dam to give the other chaps to get in and draw the flak off. But it took the last bomber to break the dam.
Interviewer: That’s right. Les Knight.
RM: And then they went to the other one but they couldn’t get to the third one. That was impossible I think. They’d run out of time. Yes, it was quite a great occasion. But as I say within a few days we were off. We went to Bardney.
Interviewer: How many of you were there working on the —
RM: Well, there would be about maybe a group of us. About fourteen I should think because there was fitters, engine men, riggers. There were air frames, wireless operators, electricians and what else did we have? We wouldn’t have the bomb people because people, special people put the bombs on the planes. But you know —
Interviewer: Did you actually see the bombs that were going to be put on these?
RM: No. I did not see them.
Interviewer: They were all —
RM: No. Because once we finished at night we went to bed. Us two, then the rest took over in the morning. And then they said, ‘You can’t go out of camp.’ And I wanted to go home you see. Anyway, they let me out. I got on my bike and I said I was going down Tillbridge Lane as they were taking off. A wonderful sight.
Interviewer: Three of them together in waves weren’t there?
RM: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. A bit of a noise but it was great.
Interviewer: And you saw the bombs. The different bombs.
RM: No.
Interviewer: Rather than the —
RM: Yes.
Interviewer: The usual. Hanging below —
RM: That’s right.
Interviewer: Below the –
RM: These sort of bombs and then of course the next thing was the Tallboys. weren’t they?
Interviewer: Yes.
RM: Terrific they were sized. Yeah, so when I came back the next day he said. ‘We’re off again.’ So we went to Bardney. M for Mother had crashed and we wanted to get it up in the air again.
Interviewer: So you were repairing the crashed aircraft.
RM: Yes. Yes.
Interviewer: And getting them ready for —
RM: Yeah.
Interviewer: Flying again.
RM: That’s right. Got them in the air because we were losing a lot of planes you see.
Interviewer: Right.
RM: And also, when a plane had done a big, we had to do a major inspection on them and when they had done so many flying hours just to make sure they were alright for because I mean it’s like a car isn’t it you do so many miles and you have an MOT or whatever they call it. And so we worked on M for Mother. First night on ops she never came back.
Interviewer: Oh dear.
RM: That was a bad job that was. Then blimey the lorry rolls up again. ‘Come on. Get in.’ Syerston in Nottingham. Just at the border that was and we had twelve major inspections to do on Lancs there. And after that then we were disbanded because the war was nearly over.
Interviewer: Right.
RM: So, 5 Group, Bomber Command was disbanded and we ended up, some of us on a BABs flight testing this new radar on a Oxford, Airspeed Oxfords two engine planes. Sent down somewhere in the south. I can’t tell you the name of the place and I met Micky Martin. We had a good old chat about the old days and —
Interviewer: Did he talk about the Dams raid?
RM: Yeah. He didn’t say a lot. He just, you know sort of, ‘Lucky to be alive,’ sort of thing. But he was a good pilot.
Interviewer: He was a bit on the eccentric side, wasn’t he?
RM: Oh yes. Yes. He didn’t say a lot I don’t think. But Australians are either or. You know. Got plenty to say for themselves.
Interviewer: They usually have. Yes.
RM: But yes. It was, it was good years. We, oh we went off. We went, before that I missed something out. We went to East Kirkby to do some jobs there and as our bombers came into land one, early one morning the German fighters followed them in and shot the camp up. There were cannon shells all over the place. We were diving for cover everywhere. One poor WAAF got killed.
Interviewer: Oh dear.
RM: But I don’t know what was the matter with our radar to let the Jerries get in so close to our bombers as they were landing. And there was one took off one night when they were going on a raid and it blew up. Went down the runway and the only man who survived was the rear gunner. He was blown out so he survived. He was lucky. I don’t know why it blew up like that.
Interviewer: No. What were your feelings during this time? I mean, did you, did you realise you know the important job you were doing?
RM: Oh yes. Yes.
Interviewer: And —
RM: It was a really worthwhile job. I mean I know we were only ground crew but they couldn’t have done without us could they?
Interviewer: Couldn’t have got off the ground without you.
RM: No.
Interviewer: Literally.
RM: I mean sometimes we had to refuel the planes you know. It was good.
Interviewer: And it was good camaraderie between you.
RM: Yes. Yes.
Interviewer: You all.
RM: Oh yes. We never —
Interviewer: Did you get to know many of the aircrew?
RM: Not a lot. No. Because I mean I didn’t [pause] when we did an inspection every morning, you’d do a DI every morning on the planes, a Daily Inspection in other words that was about all you saw of them. It was you know the only time perhaps you saw them, when they got an eye on you and you pulled the chocs away. That was it you know. They didn’t sort of mix a lot with ground crew.
Interviewer: No. Did you, you worked on Lancasters?
RM: Oh, I started off as I told you on Boulton Paul Defiants.
Interviewer: Yes.
RM: Beaufighters.
Interviewer: Manchesters.
RM: Yes, I —
Interviewer: Did you work on those?
RM: To be honest, yeah. I flew a Manchester.
Interviewer: Oh really.
RM: Not very far mind you.
Interviewer: No. No. I think —
RM: I was —
Interviewer: That was the trouble with them.
RM: We were at Swinderby and I went up with this pilot and he said, ‘Would you like to fly it?’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Go on. Take the controls but I’ll keep my feet on the rudders. But don’t turn it left or that way or we’ll flip over and we’ll be gonners.’ I didn’t do it for long but it was, it was an experience.
Interviewer: How fantastic.
RM: Yeah.
Interviewer: They were.
RM: Oh, those engines were too big for those planes. Vulcan engines. I knew one crossed up near the tree in Saxilby village one day. My misses said, ‘I thought you might have been on that.’ I said, ‘No. I wasn’t.’ But she did play hell with me one day because when we were at, when I was at Swinderby before all this we [pause] I was picked to go with this group we had a little section as you turn off the Newark Road to go to Swinderby camp there’s a bit of a corner of a field. We had a little section in there we had a Spitfire in. We were working on an Halifax bomber and all that sort of thing and one day chiefy said, ‘I want a rigger and an engine man to go down to the Percival Gull works in Luton. I said, ‘Oh, I’ll go.’ Daft like. And my friend, a chap called Saul he said, ‘I’ll go as well.’ So we gets on this Airspeed Oxford and off we set off and we were going over London and nearly run into a barrage balloon because we were flying into the sun. He saw it at the last minute and we got down there. Landed in a field and came back safely. When I told her about it she went bananas. She said, ‘You stupid idiot.’ Sort of thing. ‘Because you have a daughter,’ she said, ‘Remember.’ I said, ‘Well, there you are.’
Interviewer: You’re here to tell the tale anyway.
RM: Yeah. Yes. And then as I say we got on this radar business at [unclear] and then well we kept flying different places. Dakotas we used a lot to fly about in. And then we went down to St Mawgan in Newquay and worked a bit on there. Different planes because a lot of them were obsolete then, weren’t they? The Wellington and the Hampden and the Stirling they’d all got, well they weren’t much cop really were they? To be honest. They did their job but they were very vulnerable.
Interviewer: Yes.
RM: Especially the Wellington because it was only fabric. And I was going to be a flight engineer but my wife said, ‘No, you’re not.’ Because they used to get their head shot off you know, the poor old flight engineers because they stood beside the pilot watching all the dials.
Interviewer: That’s right.
RM: So I didn’t do that. I said, ‘Well, I survived the war so I should have been alright.’ Anyway, as I said as we went down and we stayed down at Newquay for a bit at St Mawgan and then they come to me one day and said, ‘You’re going to Leconfield.’ I said, ‘Leconfield? Where’s that?’ he said, ‘In Yorkshire.’ I said, ‘That’s a hell of a long way to go to be demobbed.’ I was going to get demobbed you see and so I get to Leconfield and we stopped there working on Wellingtons of all things. And then a load of RAF, these young ATC cadets turned up and were going for a flight on one of these Wellies. That crashed.
Interviewer: Oh dear.
RM: Terrible. Lost. Lost all these kids. Just couldn’t understand it because I mean they were, we all thought they were in tip top condition. Anyway, I got on a charge there because what was he called? He was a mad man our engineering officer. He came around and he found some water on the bed in the, in the Wellington and he asked me, ‘Why didn’t you see that?’ I said, ‘Well, it wasn’t there when I did the DI.’ But he wouldn’t have it so he put me on a charge.
Interviewer: And what was the outcome of that?
RM: Oh, I got seven days, I think. Confined to barracks. That’s all.
Interviewer: Right.
RM: Nothing, it wasn’t serious.
Interviewer: And what, what had been the problem?
RM: Well, there was —
Interviewer: Did you find out? Was there a leak.
RM: Well, there was a hatch.
Interviewer: Yes.
RM: There was a leak and it must have rained or something and dropped through on to the bed.
Interviewer: Right.
RM: Because it wasn’t there when I did it or I’d have mopped it up. But these things happen, don’t they?
Interviewer: Yes.
RM: Got to find a scapegoat you know for some, some of these jobs. Yes. So when I was at Leconfield and then we were on the bus next morning to Uxbridge getting your demob suit and then home.
Interviewer: Right.
RM: My daughter didn’t, didn’t want nothing to do with me. Didn’t know who I was.
Interviewer: What do you feel about your war years?
RM: Very good. Very good. A lot of camaraderie. Whatever you call that word. Camaraderie is it? I can’t remember.
Interviewer: Camaraderie.
RM: That’s the word. Yeah. Yes. Everybody looking our for each other. That was one thing about it. And the NAAFI were good. They came around every morning. Tea and a wad you know. Great.
Interviewer: You didn’t get a chance to have a flight in a Lancaster.
RM: No.
Interviewer: No. Would you have liked one?
RM: Yes. I could have done but I don’t know why I turned it down. I don’t know why. And I wish I had now. I missed that. You never know. I might get a chance.
Interviewer: Yes, indeed.
RM: Go to Coningsby and say, ‘I want to come up with you, mate.’ Yeah. So there we are. But very good years. Good crowd. I don’t think we had many troublemakers you know. You do get some but not a lot. I only ended up LAC so I was nothing. Leading aircraftsman. That’s all. I didn’t get my stripes.
Interviewer: Well, you were doing a wonderful job like all the ground crew.
RM: Yeah. All these different aircraft. I can’t believe how they started from a Boulton Paul Defiant and ended up on a Lancaster. The Halifax wasn’t a bad bomber either.
Interviewer: No.
RM: That was quite good. The Halifax.
Interviewer: I think each crew was very fond of its own aircraft.
RM: Oh yes. Oh yes. Yes.
Interviewer: Anybody who flew in the Halifax.
RM: With this Just Jane. Who was that? Which was that? Was that a Lancaster?
Interviewer: That’s a Lancaster.
RM: Yeah.
Interviewer: That’s the Lanc well it’s a Lancaster that’s at —
RM: Coningsby.
Interviewer: East Kirkby now.
RM: East Kirkby. That goes up and down.
Interviewer: Yes.
RM: Up and down the runways.
Interviewer: That’s right.
RM: You can taxi in it. Yeah.
Interviewer: Yes.
RM: Well that that did a lot of raids didn’t it? A lot of raids, Just Jane, I think. They’ve all got their bombs on the side of the cockpit.
Interviewer: That’s right. Yes.
RM: Yeah. Happy days. But really. Was it worthwhile?
Interviewer: I think, I think we’ve got to think that it was.
RM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Interviewer: We don’t want to think that fifty five thousand lost.
RM: Men plus.
Interviewer: Died for nothing. I mean.
RM: No. That’s what I think. Sometimes I wonder was it worth it and then I think well we had to keep them away, didn’t we?
Interviewer: We did indeed. Yes.
RM: We were alone, weren’t we? I mean the Americans wouldn’t have come into it if it hadn’t been for Pearl Harbour.
Interviewer: No. No.
RM: They were selling fuel to the Japs. Then the Japs go and bomb Pearl Harbour just to say thank you. Oh dear. Oh dear. I don’t know. It’s [pause] I don’t know what to make of this. What’s going to happen, do you?
Interviewer: I don’t. It’s been absolutely fascinating, Mr Moore.
RM: Was that alright?
Interviewer: That’s fine.
RM: That’s about as much as I can tell you.
Interviewer: Yes, that’s —
RM: There’s bits I’ve missed out because I lost my memory a bit you know.
Interviewer: No, it’s been really interesting. 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 Richard Moore
1004-Moore, Richard
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SHarriganD[Ser#-DoB]v09
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Claire Bennett
This Interview was recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Format
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00:16:49 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
Pending OH summary. Allocated C Campbell
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Somerset
England--Yorkshire
Description
An account of the resource
Richard Moore served as ground crew at RAF Locking, RAF Squires Gate and RAF Wickenby.
Beaufighter
crash
Defiant
ground crew
ground personnel
Lancaster
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Leconfield
RAF Locking
RAF Swinderby
RAF Wickenby
strafing
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1875/46436/SHarriganD[Ser -DoB]v050002.mp3
e9728327c043e8bc37697bf6ed020027
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
Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire
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
2017-06-19
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.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire
Description
An account of the resource
34 items. Interviews with veterans recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.<br /><br />Interview with Bertie Salvage <br />Three part interview with Dougie Marsh <br />Interview with Terry Hodson <br />Interview with Stan Waite Interview with John Langston<br />Interview with Nelson Nix <br />Two part interview with Bob Panton <br />Interview with Basil Fish <br />Interview with Ernest Groeger <br />Interview with Wilf Keyte <br />Interview with Reginald John Herring <br />Interview with Kathleen Reid <br />Interview with Allan Holmes <br />Interview with John Tomlinson <br />Interview with Cliff Thorpe and Roy Smith <br />Interview with Peter Scoley <br />Interview with Kenneth Ivan Duddell <br />Interview with Christopher Francis Allison <br />Interview with Bernard Bell <br />Interview with George Arthur Bell <br />Interview with George William Taplin <br />Interview with Richard Moore <br />Interview with Kenneth Edgar Neve <br />Interview with Annie Mary Blood <br />Interview with Dennis Brader <br />Interview with Les Stedman <br />Interview with Anthony Edward Mason <br />Interview with Anne Morgan Rose Harcombe<br />
<p>The following interviews have been moved to the relevant collections.<br /><span>Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46454">Kathleen Reid</a></span><br />Interview with Wing Commander <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46467">Kenneth Cook DFC</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46456">Colin Cole</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/46464">Charles Avey</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46470">John Bell</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46459">Les Rutherford</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46460">James Douglas Hudson</a></p>
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Interviewer: Good morning. Would you like to just give me your name please and your date of birth.
DB: Dennis Windsor Brader [unclear]
Interviewer: And your date of birth was?
DB: 20th of July 1927.
Interviewer: 1927. Right. Thanks very much Dennis. Right. We’re here this morning obviously to talk about your experiences as a young schoolboy when war broke out but also as well your time as the, one of the groundsmen at Wickenby. I’d like to start please do you have any memories then when you were at school of when war broke out and what the feeling was at school?
DB: Well just the same. Didn’t seem to bother anybody.
Interviewer: No.
DB: No.
Interviewer: There was no –
DB: I can’t remember being frightened or anything like that.
Interviewer: Did you have any practices for air raids?
DB: No, I can’t remember that. No. I could have had but I can’t remember. We had air raid shelters but I can’t, never remember going into it.
Interviewer: Right.
DB: Sorry about my voice.
Interviewer: Yeah. What, what was the village that you lived in at the time then?
DB: I lived here at East Barkwith.
Interviewer: So you’ve always lived here all your life.
DB: Yeah. Oh, I’ve been around a bit.
Interviewer: Yeah. Ok. So by the time then you got to the age of sixteen obviously it was time to find a job and so where did you first go?
DB: Yeah. I left school at fourteen.
Interviewer: So you left school at fourteen.
DB: Yes.
Interviewer: Where did you go looking for a job then?
DB: I went to Holmes Woodyard.
Interviewer: Which is in the village.
DB: No, it was at Wragby.
Interviewer: Ok.
DB: They’ve all gone. Woodyard’s are gone. There was a plastics factory there and it’s gone. I started working in the woodyard and finished working at the plastics factory in 1986. Something like that.
Interviewer: Ok. Right. So from there then obviously by 1943 you were looking then for another job.
DB: That’s correct.
Interviewer: And so how did you end up working then at Wickenby?
DB: Well, I’ll tell you. This [Elwick] company interviewed. Got me there and I got my job straightaway.
Interviewer: Ok. So when you arrived at Wickenby then what did you have to do?
DB: Well, I was often cutting. Cutting all the site, cutting the grass and all that. Sometimes with a hook and sometimes with a [hammer] and scythe.
Interviewer: Ok. Yeah.
DB: I can’t remember. Oh, I cleaned the dykes out. I can remember one night and in one of our offices there was more oil than water in it. They’d been, the ground crew had been dumping oil in the dyke.
Interviewer: Yeah. Were there a lot of aircraft at Wickenby then? What?
DB: There were two squadrons. 12 Squadron, 606.
Interviewer: Right.
DB: But I couldn’t tell you. When they were in the air they made a lot of noise.
Interviewer: What were the aircraft they had there?
DB: And there was one what special [bod] just to get to our offices like. Three each end. N for Nanna. Oh, we used to watch that nose but then as soon as it disappeared oh it’s gone. Anyway, it later came back and all needed refurbishing. All the bombs on it.
Interviewer: Right. And these were all Lancaster aircraft were they?
DB: Yes, that’s right.
Interviewer: Yeah. Ok. So when you were cutting the grass then obviously you must have been near to the aircrew as they were getting on and off the aircraft.
DB: Oh no. No. When I went around there were more ground crew than air crew and the same with the WAAFs. Didn’t see much of the aircrew. Only when they went to the breifing room and all that business.
Interviewer: Ok. Yeah. So do you have any memories of watching the crew get on to their aircraft then?
DB: Not, I see them going around in the bus. I saw the bus. I can’t say I could see them but when they were doing circuits and some bumps and that. They used to change crews at the end of the runway. Coming around [unclear] training like with that.
Interviewer: Oh, is it?
DB: Yeah.
Interviewer: Ok. Right.
DB: Called it circuits [pause]
Interviewer: Been, were things like aircraft returning from raids. Did you manage to see those in the morning? Were they badly damaged?
DB: No. no. They’d be back before we got there because I wonder how the fog and then aeroplanes were all over. Aircraft all over the place. And I arranged it and went to hospital site. It’s in a valley the hospital, [unclear] and outside the morgue I saw what looked like a dead sheep and of course I knew what it was later. It was flying aircrew that had been killed in their plane. I came back. Did I see that or didn’t I because they’d gone.
Interviewer: Right. Yeah.
DB: It wasn’t a very pretty sight.
Interviewer: No. No. I mean that’s, that’s really what we were looking for. Something, I mean we talk here about when you’re watching the Lancaster crash, well it nearly crashed didn’t it on take-off?
DB: That’s right. Oh yes. I remember that well.
Interviewer: Yeah. So what was that?
DB: Because we were at the end of the runway waiting for it to go past and I must have been near there helping arrangements myself. Peeked out and have a look and it just made it port if you see like and this [unclear] out there is the runway. Well, they shot. These people shot out like a lot of rats out of this runway. They had a warning. But it cleared it and its still standing today.
Interviewer: Really.
DB: Yeah. But it nearly got burned down because somebody what do you call it [pause] There’s a firm at Rasen. Race something. They’ve got lorries and all at Wickenby now. It got on fire one day when I was there and they still lived to tell the tale.
Interviewer: Right.
DB: But I can’t tell you what year that was.
Interviewer: Yeah. There was a famous Lancaster at Wickenby. It did a hundred missions.
DB: Yes. PH N. N for Nan. Of course, [unclear] I always thought it was N for Norman maybe but no. It was N for Nan.
Interviewer: N for Nan. Yeah. So you saw this aircraft.
DB: Oh, I definitely. It was like that house there except for when it went missing. I thought oh its gone. And it came back all refurbished. She wasn’t what do you call it?
Interviewer: Yeah.
DB: Looking like a brand new one.
Interviewer: Right.
DB: It finished the war and of course they broke it up.
Interviewer: They did. That’s right. It was a shame really.
DB: Yeah.
Interviewer: It was a famous aircraft. Yeah. Right. What I would then like to talk about is that it was time for you to join the Royal Air Force and would you like to tell me when you joined and —
DB: September the 3rd 1945.
Interviewer: Right. And what, you were conscripted into the Air Force.
DB: Oh aye. Yeah. Definitely.
Interviewer: Yeah. And what —
DB: Aye.
Interviewer: What trade did they put you into?
DB: Eight weeks training to start with. Square bashing at Padgate.
Interviewer: Right.
DB: And I remember that one. The first night out bed and the next night I was sleeping on three biscuits and lying on the floor but it was cold.
Interviewer: Yeah. So when you finished there then you went and did your training where?
DB: That’s right. At Padgate. Padgate. Yes.
Interviewer: You did all your training at Padgate?
DB: That’s correct. Yeah.
Interviewer: Right.
DB: Eight weeks training.
Interviewer: Yeah. And then where were you posted to?
DB: That was ‘42. I just said then the number. Locking at Weston Super Mare.
Interviewer: Right. Ok.
DB: ACAC [unclear]
Interviewer: Right.
DB: [unclear]
Interviewer: So what did you there then when you were at Locking?
DB: I was in the cookhouse peeling potatoes and all them sort of things. I used to see the aircrew. ‘Who are them.’ But I didn’t have a conversation with them.
Interviewer: Ok. Right. And then when were finally demobbed then? When did they finally let you leave the Air Force.
DB: May 1948.
Interviewer: Oh, so you were in for quite some time after the war.
DB: I had a couple with sick leave. I got a patch on my lungs. I don’t know whether it was smoking or what. I don’t know.
Interviewer: Right. Obviously, you were poorly for some time then.
DB: Yeah. Only a couple, I came home for a couple of weeks and had my treatments. Went back and I was alright.
Interviewer: Right.
DB: They did x-rays on me like.
Interviewer: Right.
DB: The first time I’d had an x-ray.
Interviewer: Right.
DB: 1948.
Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. Ok. So, when we look back then on your time at Wickenby did you feel then that, could you feel what it was like? The urgency that was there with the ground crew and the —
DB: Oh yeah.
Interviewer: And the bomber crews. Did, did you see how they reacted with each other? You know, did you ever —
DB: You know, the ground crews were all about and they must have had a oh like a briefing because all of a sudden they come two of them on pushbikes wanting jobs doing. They wouldn’t go, they must have known where they were going wouldn’t they?
Interviewer: Right.
DB: Always on bikes.
Interviewer: Yeah.
DB: But how come then at the end of the war they were marching. Or sort of —
Interviewer: Right. Yeah. Ok. Well, that’s, that’s great thanks very much Dennis. A wonderful small view of what your particular bit of the war was like there. Especially at Wickenby and thank you very much for helping us along.
DB: Very good.
[recording paused]
Interviewer: When it came to cutting the grass obviously we’ll talk about the type of equipment you’d got but it must have been a huge area.
DB: Yes.
Interviewer: Would you like to talk about that?
DB: It was definitely. Definitely a big area. I remember half an hour or three quarters cutting it like. I was better on my feet then than I am now. And then when I finished I’d go to another site but the rest of your gang had gone. [ ] and a chap for one he’s giving me a hand. [unclear] that’s the word I’m looking for and I’ve got a few of them myself.
Interviewer: Right.
DB: And while I was going the Americans were going over in formation. I couldn’t tell you whether they were Fortresses, Flying Fortresses or Liberators. It was obvious that someone was there like.
Interviewer: Yeah. We’ll just —
DB: Especially when you get to [unclear]
Interviewer: And what type of equipment was the lawn mower, was the mower then? What, what was it? A push one or did you sit on it?
DB: Oh different every. No. It was what’s the word, propelled drove you could get on and push it on.
Interviewer: Right.
DB: It was just van drived.
Interviewer: Right.
DB: If that’s the word. Self-propelled.
Interviewer: Self-propelled. Ok. Right. Thank you.
DB: Is all that lot on there?
Interviewer: So how many of you were there at the start?
DB: Oh, I can’t really tell you now.
[pause]
Interviewer: At least a dozen.
DB: There was Harry Vaughan and Henry. Henry Hunter and I can’t remember his name.
Interviewer: Yeah. That’s ok.
DB: Harold [unclear] that’s five isn’t it?
Interviewer: So there was five of you anyway. Yeah.
DB: That’s right and of course there’s Tom, Tom Greenfield was our head groundsman.
Interviewer: Okey dokey. Right. Ok, that’s great. I mean thanks very much. That’s to be added to serial Number 1001 previous to this recording. That’s for your information Neil. Thanks 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 Dennis Brader
1002,1003-Brader, Dennis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SHarriganD[Ser#-DoB]v05
Creator
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Dave Harrigan
This Interview was recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Coverage
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Civilian
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
Pending OH summary. Allocated C Campbell
Format
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00:10:35 audio recording
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Description
An account of the resource
Dennis Brader worked at the site of RAF Wickenby where he did ground maintenance.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
childhood in wartime
RAF Wickenby
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1875/46435/SHarriganD[Ser -DoB]v040002.mp3
eb88e8d56b277387d0be4dff5f7547f4
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
Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire
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
2017-06-19
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire
Description
An account of the resource
34 items. Interviews with veterans recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.<br /><br />Interview with Bertie Salvage <br />Three part interview with Dougie Marsh <br />Interview with Terry Hodson <br />Interview with Stan Waite Interview with John Langston<br />Interview with Nelson Nix <br />Two part interview with Bob Panton <br />Interview with Basil Fish <br />Interview with Ernest Groeger <br />Interview with Wilf Keyte <br />Interview with Reginald John Herring <br />Interview with Kathleen Reid <br />Interview with Allan Holmes <br />Interview with John Tomlinson <br />Interview with Cliff Thorpe and Roy Smith <br />Interview with Peter Scoley <br />Interview with Kenneth Ivan Duddell <br />Interview with Christopher Francis Allison <br />Interview with Bernard Bell <br />Interview with George Arthur Bell <br />Interview with George William Taplin <br />Interview with Richard Moore <br />Interview with Kenneth Edgar Neve <br />Interview with Annie Mary Blood <br />Interview with Dennis Brader <br />Interview with Les Stedman <br />Interview with Anthony Edward Mason <br />Interview with Anne Morgan Rose Harcombe<br />
<p>The following interviews have been moved to the relevant collections.<br /><span>Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46454">Kathleen Reid</a></span><br />Interview with Wing Commander <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46467">Kenneth Cook DFC</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46456">Colin Cole</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/46464">Charles Avey</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46470">John Bell</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46459">Les Rutherford</a><br />Interview with <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/46460">James Douglas Hudson</a></p>
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Interviewer: Good morning, I’m Dawn Oakley recording Mr Les Stedman for our project “Shouting the Odds.” Hello Les, thanks for doing this.
LS: Good morning, Dawn. It’s a pleasure to meet you again. Date of birth 20th of January 1923 and I was born in London. In Hammersmith in West London. My father had built Sopwith Camels in the First World War. My mother came from Ireland and my grandmother came from America and my grandmother treated me as her son. She was the most wonderful lady, took me all around and showed me everything that was going on. Now, in 1938 I was aged fifteen and I I, normally, they normally left school at fourteen in those days but because I wanted to join the Royal Air Force the headmaster said, ‘Les, you’ve got to do one more year at school and three evenings Night School. To get the necessary qualifications. So on the 27th of October 1938 I reported to Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey to train as an armourer and I finished the course in August 1939. On the 3rd of September ’39 came the Second World War. I was posted from Eastchurch to Cosford. And then from Cosford I went to Abingdon in Oxfordshire for four weeks and then on to Benson in Oxfordshire where I stayed for over a year. An aircraft I worked on was an aircraft called a Fairey Battle and one of the men I taught the service revolver to was none other than Pilot Officer Richard Shuttleworth who sadly was killed flying in a Fairey Battle a month later.
[recording paused]
Interviewer: Ok. Right. We’ll just continue then, Les.
LS: We got to Shuttleworth?
Interviewer: Ahum.
LS: Ok. Well, after the Fairey Battle we became Number 12 Operational Training Unit and we then converted to the Mark 1, Wellington which I flew in on one occasion around Oxfordshire. Now, after that I was posted to Chivenor in North Devon in 1941. The aircraft then were the Bristol Beaufort. And after a spell there I was posted overseas to Sierra Leone and I sailed from Liverpool at the end of the 1941 and went to an airfield near Freetown called Hastings. The aircraft there were Hawker Hurricanes of Number 128 Squadron commanded by Squadron Leader Billy Drake who appeared on TV last year at the age of ninety four. The only enemy in west, in Sierra Leone were the Vichy French and they flew American bombers I believe called a Maryland. And eventually the commanding officer and chief of the Vichys flew over in an aircraft to look at Freetown and one of the Hurricanes shot him down and after that the Vichy French capitulated. I then was posted to an airfield called Waterloo where we flew Wellingtons on anti-submarine patrols. I flew all around Sierra Leone in a Wellington. Then I returned to England and was posted to Wickenby in Lincolnshire to Number 12 Squadron that were flying Lancasters. I on one occasion flew from Cranwell into the [pause] I beg your pardon, Wickenby into Cranwell because in those days the Rauceby Hospital treated burnt airmen. We flew down at one hundred feet and returned to Wickenby at fifty feet. I was sitting in the rear turret at the time and it was quite an experience. After Wickenby I got posted to Lindholme to a Conversion Unit. And from there I was posted to Number 502 Ulster Squadron at Holmsley South who were flying Halifax anti-submarine aircraft and we had a man called Flying Officer Van Rossum, a Dutchman who actually sunk a U-boat when I was on the squadron. We then moved from Holmsley South to St David’s in South Wales and then from there I went to Perranporth in North Cornwall around about the time of D-Day. And then after that I was posted to Limavady in Northern Ireland, again with the Wellington aircraft and they flew anti-submarine patrols from Limavady, Northern Ireland and we were there at the end of World War Two and the Germans had twenty eight days to surrender their U-boats. As a result of that the Irish port ended up with about twenty U-boats and I actually went in one of those U-boats to have a look around. And after that I got posted up to Scotland to a Sunderland unit at Alness near Invergordon. On from there I was posted to Egypt for two and a half years to work on an explosive dump near Suez. And in 1949 I returned back to the UK and was posted to RAF Tangmere which was my last RAF station and the aircraft there were the Gloster Meteor and the Vampires. I then retired from the RAF. In civilian life I spent four years making shotguns for a company called Cogswell and Harrison’s in London.
Interviewer: What year was that, Les? That you retired.
LS: 1949.
Interviewer: Alright.
LS: 1950. I spent four years about 1954 ’55 then I saw an advert for Farnborough asking for armament personnel. So I went to Farnborough in 1956 and my aircraft there were the Vulcan, Valiant and Victor bombers and also, the Hawker Hunter fighter. I was then posted to another unit within Farnborough and I worked on nuclear weapons which I’ve never told, talked about. But later on in, many years later I found a magazine with all the details of all those in there. And I worked at Farnborough until I was aged sixty on armament. Then after that I spent five years as a messenger at Farnborough and the aircraft that I flew in was a Dakota that now flies in the Battle of Britain Flight. My retirement present unofficially was that I was allowed to fly that Dakota and that was my retirement present. I then retired at the age of sixty five and relaxed as a civilian. And in nineteen, somewhere in the 1990s I came across an advert about this Heritage Centre. I came along here as a volunteer and I’ve been working here two days a week ever since. And that’s my story. Thank you.
[recording paused]
Interviewer: Ok. I’m talking to Les Stedman again. “Shouting the Odds” – Part three.
LS: Now, I have a memory of the Battle of Britain. When I was at Benson in 1940 a Hawker Hurricane flew into Benson and landed and the pilot got out and said, ‘Rearm and refill me. I want to get back at those German —’ so and so’s. The whole of the tail was full of bullet, had been lots of bullet holes in the fabric. So the riggers came along with dope and fabric and filled in all the bullet holes. We rearmed the Hurricane and off he went. Now, a week or two later I went on leave to Kent where I lived, where my parents lived and I was quite amazed one morning when a man marched up to me and he said, ‘You are the Royal Air Force?’ ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Who are you?’ he said, ‘I’m Gunter [unclear] Schulz of the Luftwaffe.’ I said, ‘Schultz, how did you get here?’ He said, ‘I was shot down by one of your Hurricanes.’ And he bowed and marched off. Now, what had happened all the German prisoners were employed to work on the farms to help the farmers. And that’s what the German prisoners were doing. That’s the only time I met the enemy until after the war and when I was in Egypt. All the, we had lots of German prisoners in Egypt and I got on very well with them because there were no Nazis among them at all. They were professional fighting men. Ok.
Interviewer: 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 Les Stedman
1002,1003,1004-Stedman, Les-Cranwell Aviation
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SHarriganD[Ser#-DoB]v04
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Dawn Oakley
This Interview was recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.
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
Language
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eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Format
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00:09:33 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
Pending OH summary. Allocated C Campbell
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Description
An account of the resource
Les Stedman served as an armourer.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Devon
England--Lincolnshire
England--Hampshire
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
12 Squadron
128 Squadron
Battle
ground personnel
Hurricane
RAF Chivenor
RAF Holmsley South
RAF Wickenby
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1356/22525/PCoombesHS2043.2.jpg
eea433f2d4d40119b197388673169478
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1356/22525/ACoombesDC200306.2.mp3
a287977d72c3f7937dae30d1a2487d18
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
Coombes, Horace
Horace S Coombes
H S Coombes
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Group Captain Claive Coombes about his father Squadron Leader Horace 'Ken' Coombes (1921, 148799 Royal Air Force).
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Clive Coombes and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-01-13
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Coombes, HS
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JS: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jim Sheach. The interviewee is Clive Coombs. The interview is taking place at Clive’s home in Edinburgh, Scotland on the 6th of March 2020. Clive, maybe we could start if you could tell us a little about your father’s life before the war.
CC: My father was born in Birkenhead in 1921. Went to, went to the local school which was the same one that John Lennon ended up going to a few weeks afterwards. They, the family lived in Garston in Liverpool, and my grandfather was a merchant seaman. My grandmother was obviously what’s the official term now, a homemaker? She had six kids that survived, and a couple that didn’t. My father was the eldest and he, following his secondary education joined the Mersey Dock Board with his brother, Alf. And in 1942, if my memory serves he decided that notwithstanding being in a protected employment that he would join up and he joined the RAF as a pilot, and went to training in America. Did all his training at, in Alabama and Florida as a sergeant pilot. Returned to the United Kingdom in ’43. Was immediately commissioned on a VRT commission as a flight lieutenant and joined 582 Squadron Pathfinder Force straight away.
JS: Ok. So —
CC: So that’s his career prior to, you know that takes him up to his first operational mission with 582.
JS: Ok. Spinning a bit in time your, your uncle also has a connection with Bomber Command. Can you, can you tell us a little about him?
CC: Yeah. This is, this is on the maternal side and my Uncle Jack, Jack Hanne or John Henry Hanne was from Llandrindod Wells in, in Mid-Wales but interestingly of German extraction. And he was the husband of my mother’s sister Nancy Vera Morgan as she eventually died, but it was actually Nancy Vera Guildford then. She married Jack and Jack was in the Air Force when they married. He’d actually joined very early. ’34 ’35. Served in Iraq, and was originally a mechanic. I’m not sure if it, I’m not sure exactly what his official trade was but he was a mechanic and having been a boy entrant, so he really was, you know a very young joiner and then was, then converted to pilot and ended up flying in Iraq on 13 Squadron if again memory serves. Came back to UK prior to the war. Still flying. Converted to Blenheims, flew some very early missions in the war and was killed on the 10th of January 1940 flying a 109 Squadron Blenheim from Wattisham on an air raid over Germany. And he was shot down by a Messerschmitt and crashed in the, in the North Sea. So one of the very early casualties and interestingly the first casualty of World War Two from Radnorshire, in Wales. He’s commemorated both at Runnymede, at the IBCC and on his family, sorry, and on the War Memorial in Llandrindod Wells and a couple of months ago on the 10th of January 2020 my wife and I went down and laid a wreath. Sorry.
JS: No. You’re ok. You’re ok —
CC: So, clearly I never knew Jack but I’ve got his medals, I’ve got a lot of his history and I’m quite proud of him.
JS: As you would be. As you would be.
CC: Yeah. Holder of the, he’s got his, probably one of the few of Aircrew Europe Crosses so he’s got the Star. He gave a lot to the Air Force, you know. Joined in ’35 and trained right through and I’ve got some wonderful photographs of his time as a trainer. As an airman. You know. Some wonderful pictures of air crashes and things like that. And then his time in Iraq as well. What I don’t have sadly is any details of his, of his flying time. I don’t have his logbook. I’ve no idea where that went. And strangely, you know Jack is, I mean he died what twenty years before I was born. I think the sad part is that Nancy, my aunt was pregnant when he was killed, and she gave birth to Jacqueline who, who survived for two days. And that was ultimately the only child that Nancy ever had. She remarried a stoker from HMS Belfast interestingly, and I obviously knew him as my uncle. Predominantly not Jack. And he died very suddenly many, many years ago. Strangely at a funeral for one of his friends. He died in the church at the funeral which was a bit tragic.
JS: Yeah.
CC: But Nancy was always I think actually very much in love with Jack and I’ve got some wonderful poetry written by Jack to Nancy and it’s, it’s quite evocative the memories that go with that. So I probably have a strangely close relationship with Jack albeit that he’d been dead for twenty years before, before I was born but I followed it up and, yeah he did some very good things. He did some very good things and sadly lost his life very early in the war.
JS: Early on.
CC: I hope he would have probably gone on to do a few more things but you know it’s, it’s life and death in that environment. But it was a privilege to do the [unclear] which garnered quite a lot of publicity in Wales. It made the front page of three local papers which I was quite surprised about, but, but quite nice. Quite nice. So his legacy lives on and, you know strangely Runnymede and IBCC, it’s nice to have his name on both and I’ve seen both and I’ve visited both and paid my respects there as well. So, no it’s good. Very good.
JS: The memorialisation thing obviously means a lot to you.
CC: Yeah. I think [pause] I guess it’s probably because, you know I’m very proud of what I did. I did thirty seven years in the Air Force. Got to a pretty senior rank. Been decorated. But there’s no legacy because I have no children. I was an only child and when I die my family name dies and so memorialisation as you get older has become slightly more, slightly more relevant I think and I don’t know what to do to commemorate that. I think, you know one of the things I am going to do is contribute to the ribbon at IBCC. And probably ultimately I would be very surprised if the IBCC didn’t benefit from a considerable legacy from the Coombes family. If there’s only some way of the Coombes family, when I say Coombes family, me and my wife of, of memorialising my father, my uncle, and you know in a, could I say entirely altruistic way myself as well because you know I believe that you know over thirty seven years I’ve, I had a pretty good career. I broke a few, a few glass ceilings in what I ended up doing and it would be nice if that was remembered. But there’s, there’s very little legacy in terms of human kind that will remember that because you know I have a half-brother and a half sister who were dad’s kids but they have they have, they have no kids and they’re much older than me. I have no kids. My wife’s sister has one child and they’ve gone different, different, different line. And so there’s nothing, you know. When Coombes, Coombes, this one dies, Coombes name dies which is really sad. So I just feel as I’ve, you know just hit sixty I think I need to do something about it. And this is probably a way of doing it so also —
JS: But, but there is a, the interesting part in this is, if you like long, very long ribbon of service through the RAF from, from your uncle through your father, through yourself.
CC: Yeah. I mean, I think if we, if we look at it between 1942 and 2014 there was only fifteen months that either my father or I were not serving because at the end of the war dad was demobbed. Went back to the Mersey Dock Board, and albeit that I never actually got around to asking him I’m not sure whether it was him who got fed up with the Mersey Dock Board or whether it was the RAF needed QFIs, but he was, he was dragged back in after about fifteen months on a, on a full term normal commission, and re-joined the Air Force as a flight lieutenant and was posted immediately as a qualified flying instructor. And then when he retired it was only a matter of months between him retiring and me joining. So, I think, you know we could probably stretch it to maybe eighteen, twenty months between early 1942 and late 2014 that there wasn’t either my dad or me in the Air Force which, which is interesting. If you then stretch it further back you know with Jack as a family connection, you know it goes back to sort of 1934, 1935. That, that is, you know that is quite a long time serving for three people alone and bearing in mind that Jack’s service was brought, brought to a very sharp end after only five years.
JS: Yeah.
CC: Having been killed. But dad did a full career. Retired at fifty five as a squadron leader. And I did a full career, thirty seven and a half years retiring in 2014 as a group captain. So, you know it’s, it’s something that we’ve given to blue suits. Yeah.
JS: Yeah. Yeah.
CC: I’m proud of —
JS: Yeah. Absolutely. You, you spoke earlier about your, your dad doing the training in the US which was very common.
CC: Yeah.
JS: And then coming back and going on a squadron. So, with the [pause] how, what sort of operations was he doing then?
CC: Well, it’s, it’s strange that I mean looking in his logbooks which I’m still privileged to have he, he went, his first operational squadron was a Pathfinder Squadron which I think was probably quite unusual because obviously they, they, you know Don Bennett indicated that what he wanted was the best of the best for the Pathfinder Force and 8 Group. But I’ve no idea why dad went on to that. I’m looking at his logbook, looking at his flight assessments from Gunther Field and various bits and pieces. And interestingly I used to serve in the States and I actually went to Gunther Field fifty years virtually to the day that he graduated from there. Which was purely serendipity but I was, I actually visited the base on duty that, very close to fifty years. But I didn’t know that until I checked it. So he was assessed as above the average in pretty much everything so one would assume that he went back and was sent straight to 582. I go through his, his logbooks and they are standard bombing missions, you know, full time. Dusseldorf on the Ruhr. And they were, you know genuine front line Pathfinder operations. Subsequent to that 582 at Little Staughton, he then transferred to 626 Squadron at Wickenby. Still Pathfinder Force, with the same crew which I have no idea why they, why they transferred squadrons. I know that they used to do that and you know maybe 582’s losses were not high whereas 626’s were and they just transferred crews to 626. But he had the same crew throughout pretty much. One Brit, a couple of Aussies and a Canadian. I don’t know where the others were from. I could check, I think. But, but he flew through. He did twenty four, twenty five missions. I only ever once asked him why he didn’t do the thirty or how he felt not having got to thirty and to get his automatic DFC, and his quote to me was, ‘Had I son, you may not be, you may not have been here.’ But I look at what happened after that, and you know now things come out. You don’t know what, you don’t know the true meaning of it all but he went off to be a test pilot and whether that was because he was suffering from what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder or whether they needed highly skilled pilots to be test pilots I have no idea. But you look at some of the stuff that he did and it’s quite remarkable, you know. I mean, one day in his logbook he’s got I think Lancaster, Spitfire, Hurricane, Wellington, Mosquito. Pretty much on the same day. If not the same day sort of three days. And you go wow. Hang on a minute. What aircraft am I in today? You know it’s quite remarkable to do that. And yet you talk to friends of mine who I’ve served with over thirty seven years and, you know they have gone through careers commanding squadrons only ever having flown a Bulldog, a Jet Provost and a Tornado. Or a Hawk and a Tornado so you had four types of aircraft. He had five in two days. So, remarkable different world. I guess, I suppose when again I haven’t checked the dates entirely it could well have been that operations had pretty much finished. Formal operations had finished. I know, having checked his logbook very recently that he flew on Op Manna.
JS: Yeah.
CC: So that probably would indicate that formal operations over Germany had ceased by that time. Hence the reason he didn’t do the thirty. But quite surprising Manna didn’t count as an operational sortie. So, you know, that’s, that’s probably why. I don’t know but —
JS: Although, it wasn’t, it wasn’t without it’s dangers either you know.
CC: Correct. Absolutely right.
JS: Many, many aircrew I’ve spoken to flew on Operation Manna and they all talk about that doubt in their minds as to whether they were likely to be shot at.
JS: Yeah. Yeah.
CC: You know.
JS: So, you know he went off and did that and then he did, he flew Mosquitoes in the PRU role before he was demobbed. And then when he re-joined QFI flying Vampires and Meteors from Shawbury, where he met my mum having divorced from his first wife. So yeah, an interesting career and then ended up for the [unclear] he converted to, to what we now call, is it aircrew spine or something like that? But he was spec aircrew but in those days you had to be dual qualified, so he was an air traffic controller as well and on his down, on his ground tours he was deputy SATCO at Wildenrath in the late ‘50s. And then in the early 70s was SATCO at Lyneham. So, you know that must have been an interesting time when you’ve got a SATCO with, with two wings. And then he went back to flying and finished as ops officer on, his last flying tour was ops officer on 10 Squadron. VC10s. So, you know, he had a pretty varied career in, in what he actually did. So it was, there’s lots of flying hours. There’s forty seven different types of aircraft in his logbook which is quite remarkable really when you think about it.
JS: And a very thick logbook I’m sure.
CC: Five of them.
JS: Five [laughs]
CC: Yeah. Five of them. Five different ones. Yeah. So, yeah pretty much ranging from sort of link trainer through to Harvard, through to Spitfire, Hurricane, Lancaster, Wellington, Mosquito.
JS: Yeah.
CC: A Varsity. VC10.
JS: Yeah. That’s not a logbook. That’s a library.
CC: Yes. It is a library. That’s what it is actually.
JS: Very much. Very much.
CC: It’s a very, you know they are quite important documents to me to see what he did. So, yeah. It’s very interesting.
JS: Yeah. Very good. There’s, there’s quite a lot of discussion about how Bomber Command were viewed after the war. Let’s say, sort of just after the war and that part after that. Did, did you dad ever, ever talk about that or give a view about it or —
CC: Not, not to me. And it’s, I think it might be indicative that it probably happened quite a lot that these guys didn’t actually talk about it. Sadly, my dad passed away in 1990 at the age of sixty eight which you think is not necessarily fair given what, what he went through during the war. You know, by that stage I had joined and strangely I was told what must have been two weeks after my dad died that I’d just been promoted to squadron leader and that would have been nice for him to know.
JS: Yeah.
CC: But, you know c’est la vie. Time is everything. So he never really spoke to me about, about that. I did ask him once when I was younger. I was doing a bit of research and clearly, you know his career influenced me quite markedly having, you know literally joined months after he, he retired. I realised at that stage that the Pathfinders were entitled to wear the albatross on their, on their number one jacket, left breast pocket and I asked dad why he didn’t wear his Pathfinder brevet because my understanding was that, you know once a Pathfinder always a Pathfinder and you could continue to wear it for the rest of your career. And he sort of passed it off saying that ‘Well, you know it’s not de rigueur anymore, and nobody wears it.’ And, ‘Well, probably they don’t wear it any more dad is because there aren’t many Pathfinders left.’ And he never really made comment about that. He always wore his medals with pride but it was just the standard four, you know ‘39/45 Star, France and Germany and the other two. The War and Victory or War and Defence. And sadly, stupidly I’ve never as yet applied for his Bomber Command clasp which I frankly should do I must confess. But he never really commented on it. I think he was amongst a crowd of people who were obviously Bomber Command pilots themselves in his QFI days at CFS but I still think he was quite proud of what he did albeit with the fact that he knew that, that flying over Germany however high dropping bombs was going to kill people. But no. He never really spoke about it. I think from my own personal perspective I, I do wish Bomber Command had had more recognition but it goes down to what we, what we as military guys and girls do. You know. We, we do what we’re told to do. It’s not, it’s not for us to question the policies. It’s for us to deliver what’s required. And, you know, you can extrapolate that argument straight up you know to the Falklands and the Gulf War One, Gulf War Two, the whole lot. You know. Was it the right thing to do? Did Saddam Hussain have WMD we don’t know. Still think there’s no proof but the government made the call. You go do it. Ours is not to reason why but ours just get on with it because that’s our job and I think that’s the way dad would have looked at it as well. He, I sense but only sense, I’ve no evidence that he found it quite strange in 1958/59 to be serving in Germany and living in Dusseldorf which is where we did live knowing that only a matter of years previous to that he’d been over it at thirty five thousand feet dropping two thousand pound bombs. That I think was slighty odd as far as he was concerned. And I honestly don’t think they particularly enjoyed their tour, my mum and dad particularly enjoyed their tour in Germany and I think they were quite keen to get home. And when I look at it they only did eighteen months in Germany and during the period I was born there but, but still not the happiest days of dad’s career probably because there was the subliminal issue of, you know, I’ve been here before but at a different height and with a different mission. So, but no he never formally said. I think what is sad, that he never saw the recognition that has now finally come to Bomber Command in terms of the Memorial and in terms of the IBCC. I think he would have been quite proud of that, and I think he would have been very pleased to have attended either the opening of the Bomber Command Memorial or the IBCC had he still been alive. Again, c’est la vie. The way things go.
JS: Yeah.
CC: As for Jack I can’t answer the question. I have no idea.
JS: Yeah.
CC: My aunt kept many, many clippings of, you know what he did because he was on one of the very early raids where a squadron commander got a DSO. They were presented to the King as a result of that because it really was one of the, it was a late 1939, very early air raid. And, and I think that’s in the days where you know before we were dropping, carpet bombing. And, and I think Nancy was very proud of Jack as well but again you know clearly I don’t know what he would have felt about it. Probably slightly stranger given that his extraction was German, you know. One generation German. So, I mean his father was a hotelier in Germany. So, you know, came over prior to the war so I think he would have felt quite strange about it.
JS: Yeah.
CC: But he was staunchly British. I understand that. And staunchly Welsh as well, strangely. So yeah, a different world. I don’t know. I can’t answer all the questions.
JS: That’s alright.
CC: Haven’t talked about it for a long time.
JS: That’s interesting. That’s interesting [pause] Because your dad served in the RAF for —
CC: Thirty five.
JS: That period after —
CC: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: And to a certain extent as you’ve mentioned earlier that you were born abroad when your dad was in service. Then, then at the end of the day, that thing, you’d been embedded for the, within the RAF a lot longer than you served in the RAF.
CC: Oh yeah.
JS: I suppose that was the, the thing is do you think it was always likely that you would join?
CC: Yeah. I think it probably, I think it probably was. I mean, I guess I vividly remember at school I mean I was fortunate I got a, I won an academic scholarship to an English Public School and it was a case of, ‘Well, Coombes, what are you going to do?’ And I think, that’s from my careers master and I said, ‘Well, I probably will join the Air Force, sir.’ And he said, ‘Right.’ and that was a tick. That’s one solved. That’s one less issue to worry about.
JS: Conversation over.
CC: Yes. You know, so I didn’t trouble my careers master for very long and I remember I, I went for a university scholarship or a university cadetship and didn’t get it, but was offered an immediate place straight from school and which I accepted. So literally after finishing school in the July I joined in the September of 1978. And clearly knowing I had a job I didn’t do particularly well at A level, and very much enjoyed my last year at school and then joined up straight away and actually have no regrets about that because subsequent to that the training I’ve done, you know I’ve got my, I’ve got my masters level education through the Australian Air Force having served out there on exchange. And yeah it was probably the easy option for me but I have absolutely no regrets. I mean, I think if I do have one regret it’s that my eyesight wasn’t good enough to, to allow me to be aircrew so I became a personnel support officer. But in so doing have had a very, very varied career. Done an awful lot of jobs, served pretty much all over the world and, and enjoyed my time. I guess if I were to be held down and pinned to the wall saying, ‘Do you regret not being a pilot?’ The answer is, ‘Hell yes.’ Because I know I had the aptitude and I proved, you know I went through Aircrew Selection Centre, and had pilot aptitude but sadly couldn’t see, and and that’s probably a regret. But not withstanding that I served in some great places. Had I been air crew I don’t think I would have been as good as my dad. I probably would have been a journeyman pilot flying maybe Hercs or VC10s around the world. Which would have been a great time. I don’t think I would have been good enough to go fast jet albeit that in my career I have fortunately managed to log about three hundred hours on fast jets because I’ve got some very good friends and I had a wonderful time. But I have no regrets being ground branch officer because you know what I did in the end of my career particularly, the last five years I did jobs that were aircrew jobs previously and ended up managing to convince those that needed convincing that actually a ground branch officer could undertake these jobs satisfactory. And I think, you know irony of ironies I ended up, my penultimate tour was in Germany as the deputy commander of the Rhine and European Support Group based at Rheindahlen, and part of my area of command was the former RAF Wegberg site where I was born. And so I ended up actually being the garrison commander of the garrison on which the hospital that I was born in resided. So it was a bit, that was a bit spooky but, but also quite oh wow you know how the wheel turns. So, you know no regrets about that. And I know full well had I been aircrew I’d never have done that so that little thing sort of comes, comes to pass. So yeah. Interesting. An interesting career for me but very much influenced by what dad did and sadly, you know I’d only been serving for twelve years when dad passed away so it would have been nice if he’d still been around to see me go, you know a couple of ranks above what he did, doing things that he never did. But, but there you go. That’s life. You make, you make your career choices as he did.
JS: Well. Yes. But I’m, I’m sure he knew that your career was on the right track.
CC: Well, one would hope so.
JS: You know. I think in —
CC: I do remember my second, third tour was I was the ADC to the air officer commanding in Cyprus and mum and dad came out to, to Cyprus for, for a holiday and they were invited kindly by the, by the AOC to come and have dinner and dad said to me afterwards, he said, ‘Oh, you know, the boss thinks you’re ok. He thinks you’ll probably make wing commander.’ I thought that wasn’t bad given I was a flying officer so that was, that’s ok. And, and to achieve one more than that was a great, was a great privilege, so that, that was interesting. He, he was quite good. I do remember that quite vividly. He thinks you might make wing commander. Well, thanks. That’s great.
JS: That’s good. You, you spoke earlier about Memorials.
CC: Yeah.
JS: Which was interesting. How, how important do you think memorialisation is to the RAF as a whole and also to yourself personally? I think we touched on that sort of personal thing earlier —
CC: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: But it would be interesting to hear your thoughts as a, as a recent serving officer. What, what you think the view in the RAF is on that?
CC: Well, its again interesting. I mean, I joined the Air Force in ‘78 when there were a hundred and [unclear] thousand, a hundred and twenty something thousand people in the Air Force. I, I left in 2014 when there were just a smidge over thirty thousand. Ok. Roles change. Technology changes and you don’t, you know you don’t have eight man crews on Shackletons, and six man crews on Hercules and you know it comes down to single crew aircraft. But I think sadly, you know this sounds like a really crusty old boy talking the Air Force was not, not the same when I left it as it was when I joined it, and clearly that’s, that’s obvious. But I still, I think that that when I joined it in 1978 it was a career. I think sadly now for most people who join the Air Force it’s a job. And that’s why I hope that, that memorialisation of some kind in whatever form is is continued and indeed improved because these, these things can’t be forgotten. I think, you know the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park is very special. I think the IBCC is a wonderful set up, and having visited it very recently for the first time I am hugely impressed. I’d like to see other things go in there. I’d like to be able to help with that. It’s a long way from Edinburgh to there and you know that but things like the RAF Club remain very special, you know. The memories that are in the RAF Club are absolutely amazing. And Runnymede still takes my breath away. We can’t forget.
JS: Yeah.
CC: You know, we did very well at RAF 100. And I was, I re-joined for a year for RAF 100 as a reservist and did, did a job up here, predominantly with the Tattoo. And it was nice to come back in. I think, I think to come back in when you’re fifty nine years old is quite strange and you know you’re dealing with a lot of young people who have a different ethos to you. And bearing in mind that I spent my last eight years of service, three of them in Germany commanding, effectively commanding an army garrison and five years, my last five years working for the Foreign Office overseas in South East Asia where you know you’re just going home when, when the Ministry of Defence comes to work. I really did notice a sea change when I actually re-joined the Royal Air Force having been out of it effectively for a decade and it wasn’t the same. There was a lot of self-interest, and I know that what we tried to achieve in RAF 100 was, was would have been impossible had it not been for reservists and volunteer reserves and part time reserve service people. Which is quite sad given that you would expect to be able to do what you needed to do with the regular people. Those who were actually serving. So, you know we had a big success with RAF 100 but by jingo if it hadn’t have been for the people who’d, you know served before and come back in as reservist there’s absolutely no way we would have achieved it. I do remember the words of the then Chief of the Air Staff Steve Hillier saying that, you know, ‘It’s a privilege to be the CAS at the RAF 100 but all I’m doing is laying a future for my successors, successors successor,’ blah blah blah, ‘Who will be CAS at RAF 200.’ I just wonder how big the RAF at two hundred will be. Not very big I don’t think. And whilst I won’t be here and none of my progeny will be here I do wonder what it will be like. I’ve got a horrible feeling being probably glass half empty on this one that it will be the Defence Forces of The United Kingdom all wearing green uniform. I don’t know. We’ll see. But you can’t take away what’s there. IBCC is there. Runnymede is there. Other memorials are there. Long may it continue as far as I’m concerned and anything I can do to assist with the memorialisation of that then I will continue to do that, and this is a first step for me. And I’m pleased to be able to contribute. And hopefully sometime in, you know RAF 200 somebody might listen to this and say, ‘Jeez, who was that old boy talking?’ We shall see.
JS: Clive, thank you very much.
CC: My great pleasure.
JS: That’s been fascinating. Thank you.
CC: Thanks very much indeed, Jim. I hope it gets somewhere.
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 Clive Coombes
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
James Sheach
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
2020-03-06
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ACoombesDC200306, PCoombesHS2043
Conforms To
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Pending review
Format
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00:37:09 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Second generation
Description
An account of the resource
Clive Coombes grew up on Royal Air Force stations, eventually joining and serving for 37 years before retiring in 2014. During this time, he served across the globe, including in Australia and Germany, as a ground branch officer. Clive outlines his father’s and uncle’s service, as well as his own. His uncle, was born in Llandrindod, Wales and joined the Royal Air Force in either 1934 or 1935, becoming a pilot and serving in Iraq before returning to Great Britain and serving in the Second World War. Originally flying Blenheims, Jack was shot down and killed on the 10 January 1940 flying an operation for 109 Squadron. Whilst Jack did not serve long within the Second World War, Clive retains a large amount of information pertaining to his service, including his logbook and a number of poems sent to Clive’s Aunt. Born in Burking Head, his father Horace 'Ken' Coombes joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 as a pilot, training in Alabama and Florida, before returning in 1943. His first posting was to the 582 Squadron at RAF Little Staughton, flying Pathfinder operations over Dusseldorf and the Ruhr, amongst others. He was eventually moved to 626 Squadron at RAF Wickemby. Throughout his service, Clive’s father flew Lancasters, Spitfires, Hurricanes, Mosquitoes and Wellingtons. After flying on Operation Manna, he was decommissioned and reenlisted soon after as instructor, later becoming an air traffic controller and a reconnaissance flyer, flying Meteors and Vampires at RAF Shawbury. Following his retirement in 1977, Clive recalls his father refusing to mention his opinion on the view of Bomber Command following the war. Clive wishes that Bomber Command would receive more recognition, especially through the efforts of the IBCC and Runnymede Air Forces Memorial.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Shropshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Cambridgeshire
Germany
Alabama
Australia
Florida
Germany
Germany--Düsseldorf
Netherlands
United States
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sam Harper-Coulson
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940-01-10
1942
1943
1977
109 Squadron
582 Squadron
626 Squadron
aircrew
Blenheim
Hurricane
killed in action
Lancaster
Meteor
Mosquito
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
RAF Little Staughton
RAF Shawbury
RAF Wickenby
Spitfire
Wellington
-
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1286/20097/ASutherlandD191211.1.mp3
aaf42e489f40275ed15b16ed9b7f62ba
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
Sutherland, Don
D Sutherland
Sutherland, Donald
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Don Sutherland (1919 - 2022). He was conscientious objector during the war and worked on a farm in Lincolnshire.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-05-17
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
Sutherland, D
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DE: So, this is Dan Ellin. I’m interviewing Don Sutherland at his home in Lincoln. It’s the 11th of December 2019 and this is for the IBCC Digital Archive. So, Don, I’ll just put that there. You were, you were talking about your father and, and his work in, in the First World War. What is it you, you think that made the first and the Second World War so, so different?
DS: Well, the first, the First World War I think could easily have been avoided. Certainly, in comparison with the Second World War which the way things had developed in Germany it was quite inevitable that it would lead to so many countries becoming involved and, and there was certainly much more of a drive from the Germany who had become the enemy so to speak. And it became so inevitable that it should lead to war because the way Hitlerism originated and developed its prime intention was, was to make them masters of the, of a huge area which would, would, would together lead to quite a different sort of civilisation really.
DE: So why was it that you chose not to fight?
DS: It’s a very good question because it, it was something which in, in Newcastle where I I was brought up and first, first worked for, I’d say half a dozen years the fact was that we had this annual thing going on in the, in the town moor there where all sorts of meetings were held. And this was an opportunity which the, the Pacifist people used to talk about alternatives to war and it was through a meeting that took place there just before the war began more or less, a year before the war began that gave me any ideas about, about the history of war and what you might say the inevitability of war and that there was a possibility that the idea of war was something that was a historical fact that people had learned to accept as being inevitable and that there was no possibility of any objective. Any alternative to, to war. And when the idea came to me that you could refuse to accept war as being inevitable and that certain people had made that part of their life to devote themselves to propagating that, that purpose in life to oppose war rather than to accept it as an inevitable thing. And until, until, until that time in in nineteen, was it 1939 it began — ?
DE: Yes.
DS: That, and it began in such a sort of a mixed way from what, what was done in Germany and then the surrounding countries in a gradual way. And of course, we went to war. Germany didn’t declare war on Germany, on England as you know but we became involved because of promises we’d made to, to support the country that Germany had invaded.
DE: Yes. Poland. Yes.
DS: Yes. That was, that was the reason we went to war because Germany had never actually declared war on us and so I, there was a feeling of sort of, a ridiculous feeling I think that, that Britain wasn’t really interested. And they had no idea or I should say we had no idea that, that war was inevitable and would involve us as it involved all the other countries. And in the way, the way Hitler had little by little, and country after country become such a powerful set of people by using the most violent means which were completely foreign to us really. Germany had a set up a system which was, was quite unique and he was able to engage so many different people and, and use so many terrible methods gradually to dominate the areas which led to such a huge powerful and of course this was partly too with the, with the help of the other people with similar ideas who had already set up in Italy to, to dominate other countries. And it just became such a powerful theatre for war I suppose. It’s, it seems so foreign to us to understand how it could happen because we, we find now that that the so-called enemy is as much a friend as, as anybody else. And, and in fact is leading the way to try and keep people together and not to have one nation dominating another.
DE: So, I mean we spoke about this in the other interview when I was here a few months ago. So, we have on tape the process that you went through and the tribunal you went to. I’d like to ask you a bit more about your time on the farm in Lincolnshire. I wasn’t quite sure. Was it, where was it at? The farm.
DS: Well, there were two. Two farms, communities in, both in Lincolnshire. In Lincolnshire. And also there were similar types of communities involved in other parts of the UK. But I think the place at Holton Beckering which was the first place I went to was a set up by various prominent Pacifists. Pacifist people who centred in London and one, one section there by advertisement if you like to call it one way and, and by interviewing individuals set up, set up a very organised and financed thing. So that was, that was, that was at [pause] at Holton and it involved two separate farms. And I think that came more or less at the same time as two individuals, using their own finances set up a separate place right next door to it and I I joined first this main big one and I was interviewed in London to go, to go to that one because one of the, one of the the conshys who was a Quaker in [pause] where, where I lived and I went, I went and stayed with him when that community had started. So that was my first. It was just like a holiday there. I hitchhiked there and then when I happened, it turned out that I got the sack from work that’s where I applied to go. In the first place they said no. I didn’t, they didn’t, they interviewed me in London and took one look at me and said he, he’ll never make a farm worker. And then later on the same year when I, when I got the sack from my job I, I wrote. I wrote to them again and when I, one of the executive members of the committee came and talked, talked in Newcastle and I told him I’d lost my job and I’d already applied to them and been refused. It was a possibility that they might reconsider it you see.
DE: Yeah.
DS: Well, I got a reply straight away nearly. ‘Yes. We’ll take you.’ They’d set this place up and they were short of men you see and so they decided that they would take me. So, I went there straight away and joined. Joined one of the places which was adjoining but it was not, the other place was supposed to be the main place because they had the very highly skilled bloke, a local chap who was the, the boss, plus a local ex-farmer who was a Pacifist. And I worked there for two and a half years and that covered the time of the war because I didn’t start until 1941. I I was employed at work as I got complete exemption.
DE: Right. Ok.
DS: And then when, when the end of the war I I was somehow out of touch with, with, with what had happened to the first community because the fact that we, we had, I then moved on to the, the other one because the second community was just run by these two men and they were in charge so to speak. But not in charge in a dominant way but they, they’d financed it you see so it was completely independent from the first community I belonged. And, and that’s that first community slowly died off so to speak. I’m not quite sure exactly what happened because I was so much attached to the, to the new community and unfortunately it didn’t stand ground on its, on its own. Key people left who had been quite important in keeping it together and eventually it, it ended up in in the hands of two people who were, who were financially dominant. But we, those who wanted to were carried on, carried on as ordinary farm workers but, but we still felt it was a community. Very much so actually and so, I was working there for about twenty five years and then because of my health didn’t seem strong enough for the job I was doing I I changed my work and the house I was living in. We were able to buy it. So, although I was living in the area I had no direct attachment to the community. Although I was still attached to some of the people who were working there.
DE: And what was, what was life like in the community? What was, what was the sort of every, every day like? Or what was it like across the seasons?
DS: Well, we, we had married and unmarried helpers and we had, certainly in the, in the section that I lived and there were, there were in, in the second community we had, had separate houses but they were more or less adjoining. And the married couple were in charge and they sort of looked after us and we were just like a part of a family the rest of us. But it slowly, it slowly disintegrated unfortunately but we had young, quite young children there with us. But as I say that, that, that community lasted a lot longer than the much larger first one which was more or less organised in London. So, it was quite sad really. We had a, we had a very large farm. A farm with a very good quality flock of pedigree sheep.
DE: So, what was, could you describe what a typical day would have been like?
DS: Well, a lot of the work I did and of course on the farm it varied according to the time of the year what you had to do.
DE: Of course. Yes.
DS: And so, in the wintertime I would be working chop, chopping the hedges down, keeping them in track, digging out the ditches and that sort of thing. And in the early days it was all so run by human labour. We didn’t have many, many tools at all really to use. It was only latterly that we developed to a size where we became much more mechanised. So it was, it was quite tough work but we got used to it. I mean, I never dreamed that I would become so used to hard work. I just, it wasn’t in my, my training at all and so it was a completely new life for me as it was for most of them really and the thing was that this, this place where I belonged, the second place there was quite a tendency for the people there to, to have an upbringing in art and three of them or four, four altogether I think were, had already been training to get degrees in art. So, when they finished work for the day, farm work they would then go, go to their room at night and spend another few hours working at what was really their, their chosen ambition. So they, they were quite quick to leave when they had the opportunity to do so and that’s what they ended up doing.
DE: And what did, what did you do in the evenings?
DS: I think we just sat and talked most of the time. I I had a little cottage to myself. I don’t know what it was built for originally but it was big enough to, to have a bed in it and so I suppose I read a lot and —
JS: There wasn’t any electricity was there?
DS: No. Not at first. Not at first. But —
JS: So, you read with candles or oil lights?
[pause]
DS: Yes.
JS: I remember when Uncle Bill, which was my mum’s brother said when you worked with the horses you would throw the windows open wide very early in the morning and wake everybody up.
DS: [laughs] Yeah. We, yes, well yes. My favourite job was wagoning. Driving. Driving horses. But we had to get up quite early to give them their food because they were not, they were not as well looked after as they [pause] A lot of people would have their horses in stables overnight. Particularly in winter time but our horses were kept out in the open air right through the winter. So, we had to go out and they would reluctantly come with us so they could get fed properly before we put them to work in the day. And then later on they would have to go back outside again so it was a bit of a rough life for them but they were used to it.
JS: And you’d harness them up to the plough.
DS: Pardon?
JS: Did they go with the plough or did they just pull carts?
DS: No. We did have, we had tractors as well and the really heavy work was done by tractors. But when the land was prepared for sowing and it had to be worked down to get the right, the right place for the, for the seed to grow that was, a lot of that work was done by horses.
JS: So that was harrowing and —
DS: Yes. Keeping, keeping it clean. Clean and that sort of thing and of course in those days, those days too we didn’t have, we didn’t use a lot of manure. The, we would keep, keep the ground clean by dragging, dragging harrows over the ground to keep it clean. And, and then we’d also go over it by hand with, with hoes as well to clean the land. It was very much manual.
DE: Yeah.
DS: And hand, and hand working in the early days. And it was some time before we, before we had the combine harvesters.
DE: So very very very hard work.
DS: I couldn’t, I couldn’t believe when I when I saw the first combine harvester that they would find a method of harvesting without using the old fashioned way of, of using a plough system.
DE: I know, I know some farms used prisoners of war to help. Did, did you have any of that?
DS: Yes. Well, first of all because when the war, the war ended in two different stages because first of all we, we stopped being at war with, with —
DE: Germany.
DS: No.
JS: Italy.
DS: Another country.
DE: The Italians.
DS: Yes. That’s right. Yes. But Italy, you see that war finished first you see and so they were released from the, from the prisoner of war camps in the country and, and were allowed to go home before the Germans and the Germans were kept behind for three years after the war finished. They weren’t allowed to go home because there were so many troops, British troops still involved in in the countries that we were at war with. They were kept there and so we were short of people and employed the Germans for two or three years after the war finished. And we had four. Four working for us. Three, three were people who we got on well with and the other we thought he was a lazy beggar which he probably was and two of the others were they had both been teachers or heads of schools, junior schools in Germany and on the section of the farms that I belonged to we had one who we got to know very well. He had, his wife had one child who he’d never seen, this child and so the father was looking forward to be allowed home so that he could see his first, first baby. And we later, I later on went over to Germany and stayed with them.
JS: And his children came to stay with us, didn’t they?
DE: And then the, the son came over and stayed with us on more than one occasion and, and I still get Christmas cards from him but he —
JS: And they did a play didn’t they? The Holton Players. They put on a play.
DE: I wanted to talk about that a bit. Yes.
DS: Yes. Yes. They, they put on a play at Holton. This was where, this was where they were kept. At the ex-Army base there. And they had liberty during the day. They, they would walk around and have complete liberty but they weren’t allowed to go home so it must have been pretty tough for them. I think some of them must have tried [laughs] tried to escape but others felt that they were probably much better off where they were than going back to Germany because Germany was in a pretty raw state when the war finished. It was not a, not a very pleasant place to be because they were starving. A lot of them were. Because the, Germany treated the people so badly. It’s all so forgotten now, isn’t it?
JS: And the Holton Players you, they, they were the pre-the Broadbent Theatre weren’t they because they did plays in the Nissen hut that then got burned down.
DS: That’s right. But that was, that was a little time afterwards really.
JS: In the ‘50s.
DS: I’m not quite sure what, what year it was because the place we, the place we used at first was part of the place which the German prisoners of war had lived in. So it was a little time before the Players got, the Players got together and it was, it was some of the people in the, in the original community that I belonged to who were extremely good at theatre work and —
JS: Phil Walshaw. Her aunt was Sybil Thorndike.
DS: Yes.
JS: And she’d been to RADA for a year before she had to leave.
DS: Yes. Well, several people who, who were very experienced at theatre work.
JS: And Roy Broadbent, who was the father of Jim Broadbent he was a big part of the theatre wasn’t he?
DS: Yes. But it was, it was when he left, he left the community that I joined second of all. It’s when he left that I, that there were vacancies and they were getting the extra people in that I joined from the first, the first community.
JS: So, you went to Bleasby then?
DS: That’s right. Yes.
JS: With Dick Cornwallis and Robert Walshaw.
DS: Yes, but Walshaw wasn’t there. Walshaw had been there and left because he had the opportunity of joining a farm right in the southwest of England and it didn’t work out. And after I’d joined that second community he wrote to us asking if he could come [laughs] Come back. And we decided that he, that he could. He was welcome to come back.
JS: And his son still lives on the farm. He’s farmed it.
DS: Pardon?
JS: Chris is still, still lives on the farm and he’s farmed it hasn’t he?
DS: Yes. He has. Yes, well he lives on the farm but he doesn’t really do much.
JS: Any more.
DS: Work. It’s been passed, passed over for use by somebody who, who just developed a huge dairy farm.
DE: So, the communities were, were quite democratic. You sort of had votes about whether people could join or not.
DS: That’s right. Yes. The first, the first was. Was, we had we had a rough say in what happened but the second we were, we were all classed as equal people although we knew that the money was in the hands of mostly two people who eventually took it over and we were, we were told we could stay on with the terms which we could agree to. Which I did for quite a time.
DE: Yeah.
DS: Until I got this other job.
DE: So, if we can just go back a little bit to during the war you said that there were, there were Italian and then German POWs that sometimes worked alongside you. Did you have anything to do with any of the people from RAF Wickenby which was quite close I believe?
DS: No. What happened was that you had different groups of people among the Pacifists. Some were used to a different type of living and some were in the habit of going to pubs and some weren’t. Some were quite reversed and religious and you know they became preachers locally. Part time of course. And, and some of the others and they mostly came from the second community that I belonged to but some of them moved in to the, in to the other one which had developed into a, a varied group with different ideas and just fizzled away gradually. So, I didn’t have much, much contact with the err I never went to, to any of the of the pub gatherings which the others, others did and they really became much more in touch with the airmen and got on reasonably well with them apparently. But I never, I never saw that side of it at all because the aerodrome, you know the aerodrome disappeared soon after the war finished.
DE: How did you feel about being so close to, to the aerodrome?
DS: Well, it was more the Bleasby, the Bleasby farm that was really close and parts of it, gradually more was taken off the farm to be used by the Air Force. So because I I belonged to the community which was further away I didn’t see very, very much of the Air Force really.
DE: Ok.
DS: No.
JS: But you’d hear the aeroplanes.
DS: Oh yes. Yes. Of course, they took off at night time mostly and where they took off, and the direction they were going on the way to Germany would be, they would not pass where I was staying you see. So we didn’t see as much of them as you, as you might, might think really. We would hear them but not see them necessarily. And as far as I know there was not much bombing took place in Lincoln itself and very little where, where we were. I don’t know why but that seemed to be the case. There wasn’t much bombing took place but there were quite a lot of aerodromes all, all over Lincoln that, that did get, did get bombed. It was quite a, apart from the armament places which were one of the main places and the bombings that were done purely for the sake of killing as many people as possible which took part in London and other big cities. And that was sort of quite a long way from this area you see.
DE: Yeah.
DS: They just went for, for the big cities. I don’t think that Lincoln, you see we didn’t see much of Lincoln. We would never think of going in to Lincoln. There was no way of getting there. No, no coaches to take us.
JS: You worked very long hours, didn’t you?
DS: Pardon?
JS: You worked very long hours on the farm.
DS: Very?
JS: Long hours.
DS: Well, we had double summertime then. We had, we had, we had, so, so in the wintertime we we we were using the hours that we now use in summertime. So we changed, changed our clocks at the usual time but we were an hour ahead, an hour earlier in starting our summertime.
JS: And then you had to lock up the chickens later, didn’t it? I remember.
DS: It was midnight.
JS: Because you worked with the poultry later on. And that was your job.
DS: Yes.
JS: But pea harvest was quite something wasn’t it?
DS: Oh yes. Yes. That was, that was hard work. We used to have special things which we, we had props that we put up in the field and when we, when we cut the hay the [pause] would you call it hay? I don’t know. My memory.
JS: The pea stalks.
DS: Yes. We put, and take them into big round sheds so that the wind would get through and dry them all out more quickly than if you just left them on the ground. So that was all hand work. It was all hand work early on so, it made me stronger I suppose. Not that, I’ve never been big. I’ve never been, never weighed ten stone but I’ve, I’ve managed. It was a great experience really. It was a fine life. A fine life working together really. So, it was, it was a blessing to me really. But then I was also in the position of being in a safe, comparatively safe situation whereas so many of my friends at work had gone into the different forces in time and one in particular who was, hadn’t been married very long but was very tempted to register as a, as a conshy. He decided to join up and not long after he’d joined up he was killed. And I don’t, still don’t know how many of my friends at work came back. [pause] Unless this is something which people haven’t experienced they won’t, won’t understand. What war does to people. And why some people still think war is the answer.
DE: And you continue to campaign against war. I noticed on your door you have have an anti-war —
DS: Yes. Oh yes. Yes. I hope people will take the message but we leave it to other people now to do our dirty work [pause] And it tends to be romanticised.
DE: Can you tell me some of the ways that you’ve protested against war and tried to spread the message?
DS: Well, we, we still go down to the RAF and spread propaganda there.
JS: You’ve flown kites there haven’t you in solidarity with the Afghani kite flyers at Waddington, haven’t you?
DS: Yes. Yes. We go to Waddington.
JS: And you went to the different peace camps. You went to Molesworth.
DS: I don’t go anywhere now really.
JS: But you went to Faslane as well, didn’t you? When you went to the Quaker conference a few years ago in Scotland.
DS: Oh yes. Yes. My daughter, my daughter took us on a nice holiday in Scotland last year and the group fairly recently set up, we’d been to the performances. Have you been to any of the performances?
DE: I haven’t. I didn’t know about them until it was, it was too late. But can you tell me a bit about them?
DS: Well, it was, it was because this, this chappy who was I think the oldest member of the group who came to the area and met some of the original people in the community and since he, since in the few years that he’s been the area we’ve now only got one friend. One. One friend and there’s not just myself and one friend left who belonged but when he came there were two more alive who, who had belonged to the community. And so that’s how he’s been able to get all the information that’s gone in to the creation of this, this play which he’s written.
JS: Some of the other children from the community, one was a journalist and she’d done a lot of recordings. Sarah Farley who, who I grew up with and also one of the Makins did also some interviews. He wrote about it. So, Ian Sharp used these memories as well as interviewing you and Arthur Adams and Phil Farley to make the play.
DS: Well, I, it’s a little uncertain at the moment as to, as to whether there will be another production but I’ll be sure and let you know.
DE: That would be wonderful because it, it was, it was shown at the Edinburgh Fringe and it was shown at the Broadbent Theatre as well, wasn’t it? It was put on there.
DS: It’s been several times at the Broadbent Theatre and that’s where its likely to be shown again.
JS: And recently it’s been on at Quaker meeting houses. And this autumn we went a fortnight ago, didn’t we to Doncaster meeting, the Quaker meeting house which was the last performance.
DS: Yeah. It’s been held at various Quaker meeting houses.
JS: The meeting would have known about it.
DS: Not with, not with the large attendances as we might have had.
JS: In Chesterfield there was a very good turnout. A lot of the people from CND were there and one of the men was ex-RAF that we spoke to that’s a big part of CND because when we were children you belonged to CND and we used to protest didn’t we then?
DS: Yes.
JS: Carried placards and that was how you carried on campaigning for peace.
DS: Yes. I don’t know to what extent young people are interested in peace making. What do, what do you think? Do you think they take a real interest in peace making?
DE: I think it’s because to a lot of people wars today are, are quite far away. They’re quite removed and they don’t have the real experience. I think that’s probably the problem. It’s something that happens to other people who it’s too easy to forget about. I don’t know. What, what do you think?
DS: Yes. I agree with you but I’m not so much in touch with people as you probably are and I might see one, one side of it.
JS: Well, when we’re in a recession the rise of nationalism is always worrying, isn’t it? You know, like in Germany the war started because of recession and when you get a current situation that’s very much saying you know people from other countries aren’t welcome even though they, our country wouldn’t function without them it’s, it can make people fearful that that people from other countries are enemies rather than just our neighbours.
DS: Yes. I, I’m very disappointed with the general attitude of people in the UK now that we should think about ourselves and not about the world as a whole. And we’re all so interdependent. I think it’s only now when we, it’s been revealed to us the dangers of not working together. And yet we’ve still got people fighting one another. Actually, wasting the parts that are valuable.
JS: Well, the politics and the economics of war where countries sell arms to countries that are then used against them is totally absurd.
[pause]
DS: I I don’t know much about it but you’ve probably heard the report of what, when we’ve had meetings at Bomber Command. Have, have you, do you, do you get a note of what’s happening there as far as our meetings there go?
DE: Sometimes I do. Yes. I think mostly its Heather gets involved with those. Those things. But yeah, I know there have been several meetings because we’re thinking about changing parts of the exhibition up there.
DS: Well, it’s the room upstairs which is, the idea is to develop that more isn’t it?
DE: That’s correct. Yes. Yeah. I mean that part of the, that gallery at the Bomber Command Centre has tried to tell the story about how the war has been remembered and how that feeds in to wars and conflicts today.
DS: Yes.
DE: I’d just, I’d just would like to have a go at it and try and make it a bit better.
JS: I mean the title to me is so to me alienating of the place that —
DS: Well, you haven’t been to it, have you?
JS: No. No. But if it was combined with, with something that was promoting peace as well.
DE: Well, that’s what we’re trying to do —
JS: Yes.
DE: In part of it and we have tried quite, well, you’d, you’d have to go judge how successfully but we’ve not tried to glorify war.
JS: No. No.
DE: We’ve tried to show it from all perspectives and we’ve tried to show the shared suffering and sacrifice —
JS: Yeah. Absolutely.
DE: Of people in the air, on the ground and on both sides.
JS: It’s not about who’s right and wrong.
DE: No.
JS: It’s not a, you know —
DE: No.
JS: It’s not a divisive thing, is it? It’s —
DS: It’s unfortunate that my, my, I had my stroke, stroke it’s affected my memory so much that I can’t express myself as well as I would have liked to.
JS: But for a hundred years old you don’t too badly.
DS: A hundred years [laughs] years young you mean.
JS: And we had, we had three versions of the play to celebrate your hundredth anniversary, didn’t we? There were special performances where you had, where the play was adapted. It’s been a changing thing but it’s —
DS: It’s not been very well lately.
JS: The theme of it became more climate. The threat now of climate changes.
DE: Right.
JS: So, it’s like it’s a changing movement towards what is most close to, to causing harm to populations.
DS: Yes. And you’ve got, you’ve got countries which are a long way from here much much bigger than us and it must be extremely difficult for those people to feel they’ve got any say in in what happens. [pause] Whereas I don’t know how, how much the countries in the, in the UK area and a bit further away from us how much feeling we have of any sort of control of what the future is going to be. Are we just dragged along by some invisible force? Out of control. Is there a meaningful, meaningful force bringing us along in the right direction or are we at the mercy of something the invisible which is hiding us from the right direction? [pause]
DS: What difference do you think the election will make or could make?
DE: I I have no idea. No.
DS: I’m very disturbed at the number of people who don’t use their vote to say where they want to go. And I think that’s the most disappointing thing about the present day that people don’t feel how vital it is that we have a say in what, in what future we’re going to have.
DE: Yeah. I think, I think I’m going to pause it there.
[recording paused]
JS: Well, we got a knock on our door one winter night by Malcolm Bates who wanted to re-establish the theatre. He was an adopted son of a Lincolnshire family. So, they started rehearsing didn’t they at Faldingworth and did, “Oliver.” You were in “Oliver.”
DS: Yes.
JS: And Helen was in Oliver, my sister and a lot of the community people were in it as well as others.
DS: But it was in the big sort of big building which was used for accommodation for the for the conshies working at the other area of Lincoln. That was, that was where some of the first meetings and the cinema items items were done in the, in the early days because there were several people who had been used to performing as actors or actresses. So we were very fortunate that we had these people who were quite experienced and very very able and were able to draw other people in who hadn’t actually belonged to the community but were interested in plays that it was able to be, to to fill up and then to have our own theatre which was the generosity of one particular person that we got, got the place when prices were not so high as they, as they’ve become now that we were able to to get this which is still on the go. How long it’ll last for I don’t know because I think all the original people now must have died because it’s a long time since it began. They used to have a theatre at, at the [unclear] at least theatre company at at the main place. [pause] Well, I’ll be very interested in hearing what ideas you have about developing the complex. I, I’ve never actually got as far, so far as going through all the list of deaths shown at the Memorial.
DE: There’s only a few people who have because there are, there’s fifty seven thousand names there so.
DS: I know, but I mean I know the names of all the people who, you know, the full names of all the people who, who were with me when I worked and who, who were called up. And I know some of them went into the Air Force so I might have a record as to whether any of them were killed or not. But then there must be, if there’s a complete list of, of soldiers and other types of people. I don’t I don’t know what that would be. How much room it would take up to put all the names of the various soldiers who were killed. It would be a huge list wouldn’t it because I would, I would think there were probably more of other different types of soldiers than the Air Force.
DE: Yes. I don’t know if they’re all collected in one place actually physically but the Commonwealth War Graves Commission would have —
DS: Yes.
DE: All the names available on the internet. Right. I I think I’m going to, I’m going stop the recording there so I will just say that also present in the room, the other voice on the recording was Don’s daughter Janet Sutherland. Thank you very much, Don. That was absolutely wonderful. Thank you.
DS: My pleasure.
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Interview with Don Sutherland. Two
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Dan Ellin
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2019-12-11
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Sound
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ASutherlandD191211, PSutherlandD1901
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Pending review
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01:07:34 audio recording
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eng
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Civilian
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Lincoln
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Don was brought up in Newcastle, where he worked for a number of years. He attended a meeting a year before the war began, about alternatives to war and that war didn’t have to be accepted as inevitable. Don joined a community which organised work on a farm in Lincolnshire. After two years he transferred to another similar community, where he remained for about 25 years. Everyone was classed as equal and could vote on who could join this community. Don described everyday life in the community and farm work throughout the seasons. His favourite job was looking after and driving the horses. He worked with poultry for a while and also remembered the pea harvest. RAF Wickenby was one of the nearest airfields to the commune. They had four German prisoners of war working with them, one of whom kept in touch with Don after the war. Don campaigned against war and would sometimes go to the RAF Waddington with anti-war propaganda. A play had been produced about the pacifists, which was shown at the Broadbent Theatre and also at Quaker Meeting Houses.
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Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1941
animal
entertainment
faith
home front
perception of bombing war
prisoner of war
RAF Waddington
RAF Wickenby
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1300/17898/PGreenJ1901.2.jpg
b14602c2b2a5a0d0f474ee6b3099f4cf
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1300/17898/AGreenJ190307.2.mp3
c4c66aa1cf8bc65f3c03434e1d4d9290
Dublin Core
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Title
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Green, John
J Green
Description
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An oral history interview with John Green (b.1921, 1213252 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as an air gunner with 100 and 12 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2019-03-07
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Green, J
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Transcription
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GT: This is Thursday the 7th of March 2019 and I am at the home of Mr John Green, born 22nd September 1921 in Penge, South East London, England. John’s home is in Auckland, New Zealand. John joined the RAF in June 1942 as a drogue operator on the Isle of Man. Later, John volunteered for bomb disposal, and after fourteen months he volunteered for aircrew and trained as an air gunner in early 1944. From June 1944, John crewed up with pilot Flight Sergeant Leslie Flooder, or Podge, an Australian, at 30 Operational Training Unit, Hixon and then 1667 Conversion Unit at Sandtoft, Lancaster Finishing School at Hemswell and then on to operations with 100 Squadron at Grimsby late October, completing sixteen operations and posted to 12 Squadron at RAF Wickenby for fifteen operations. All on Lancaster Mark III aircraft. John completed his RAF operational flying in May 1945 with a total of one hundred and eighty four hours, day and night flying. John, thank you for allowing me to interview you for the IBCC Archives, so please tell me why, and how, you joined the Royal Air Force.
JG: Right. Well, when war broke out, I, all your mates were joining up, and I think I was eighteen at the time and I thought myself well if I wait till I get called up they’ll put me in the Army, and I didn’t want to go in the bloody Army I said! So I went down to the recruiting centre and joined in the RAF just as an ordinary airmen, nothing special. They said okay, we will call you when we need you. I think it was another year gone by before they called me up.
GT: And what were you doing while you were waiting?
JG: I was working in engineering factory and when I got the call up I was posted to Blackpool for six weeks training, you know, fitness training and education and all that.
GT: But that was a far cry from you riding a bicycle wasn’t it?
JG: Yeah!
GT: What was the bicycle thing about?
JG: Oh, the bicycle, that was in one of me jobs, was, I was, what d’you call them, errand boy! That was when I left school at fourteen, I went as errand boy riding a bike with a big basket on the front delivering all the goods and that to people who’d bought them from the shops.
GT: And whereabouts did you grow up there, and born?
JG: In Penge. Grew up in Penge, joined, volunteered in Penge, and then I got posted from Blackpool, I got posted to the Isle of Man; a General Duties airman. And when I got the Isle of Man they wanted drogue operators, people to volunteer to fly, which you got an extra shilling a week by doing that which I was interested in, cause a shilling was a lot of money in those days!
GT: What was the role of a drogue operator?
JG: He dropped the drogue. In the bottom of the aircraft, mainly Lysanders, or whichever one I was in, you had a trapdoor. You open the trapdoor and in front of you, you had like a drum, a big drum with three metal drums on it, filled with wire and you used to clip one of these wire onto one of the drogues and try and drop ‘em out the aircraft, then you stood up and controlled the speed of the drum with a handbrake until you got near enough all you want out, you lock it up and then the aircraft used to fly around, towing the drogue, training all aircrew to fire at it.
GT: So the other aircraft would bead on to you and -
JG: On to the drogue and fire.
GT: Your log book states you flew Lysander, Fairey Battle, Anson and Blenheim aircraft and that was all with the drogue operations.
JG: No, Lysander and Fairey Battle, and what was the other one?
GT: Anson and Blenheims.
JG: No, Anson, Anson they done, I flew doing me camera work. Instead of guns, instead of having bullets, you had a camera and you used a camera firing. and the Blenheim, Blenheim was just a trip you wanted and I think it flew me, flew me I was going on leave.
GT: So that were the gunners flying, aircraft, to shoot at the drogues, the Defiants or aircraft like that?
JG: Yeah, any, could be even the Anson used to fly along the side, and they used to open the window and poke their cine camera out, or the guns out and if you had usually three gunners in your aircraft they had different colour bullets so when they got the drogue back, dropped back, into a, had a special field you should drop the drogue back then fetched it back to headquarters then they could count the bullet holes whether they were red, blue, black, or yellow, they knew how many hits you had.
GT: They just dipped the bullets into paint, didn’t they.
JG: Yeah, to get the colour bullet and that’s how they knew, and course with the camera, they had a cine camera. Because one day I was up there doing camera and I saw, I think it was an Anson coming along, towing, towing a drogue so I took a photo of me shooting this Anson down! I got a right bollocking for it! [Laugh] But good laugh, but it was such a good target, I said, it’s there. And I didn’t use a lot of film!
GTL Any close calls? Did any of the aircraft nearly shoot you down instead of the drogue?
JG: I think it happened once on our station, drogue operator got killed like that. Whoever was using it, instead of firing at the drogue away from the towing aircraft they fired while they were coming in and the bullets carried on and hit the towing aircraft.
GT: They were all three nought three machine guns, yes.
JG: Yes, 303s.
GT: So you liked that, is that something you wanted to carry on with or you went to volunteer for something else?
JG: No, I liked that, getting paid and then it came up they wanted volunteers, you get fed up with it as a youngster, wanted volunteers on this Bomb Disposal Unit so I thought oh, that’ll be a change, so joined that and I was posted to Bath, Barford Manor, that’s a country village outside of Bath in this big manor house what the RAF had commandeered. I spent I don’t know how long, quite a long time there, and from there I joined up from, into aircrew training.
GT: What explosives disposal training did you have?
JG: Bom disposal, oh just the lessons on the fuses and how defuse and listen, if they were ticking and that.
GT: So the bombs could have been ticking and did you have something to tell you?
JG: Oh yeah, you had like an instrument you got here, stuck on there and if it was ticking, if the fuse was ticking that meant it was alive, ready to go off. It’s timed.
GT: So what did you do?
JG: Run! [chuckles] Yeah.
GT: And if they wanted to dispose of them, how did they dispose of them?
JG: They had a disposal officer who used to go, get down a hole, and it was surprising, the bomb, could unscrew the cap which allowed him to get to the fuse and he could undo the fuse and slowly [emphasis] get it out to defuse the bomb.
GT: It was the officer doing that?
JG: Yes, that was the officer’s job.
GT: And these were mainly German bombs you were training on?
JG: They were practically all German bombs. A few of them were English ones where the plane, English planes had crashed.
GT: So did they send you out on daily, or night?
JG: Yeah, whatever it was needed. I mean when we wasn’t out digging up, or digging after the bombs, we were in the schools training, what to do, you know, learning all about it.
GT: Did you lose any men?
JG: No, not on bomb disposal.
GT: That’s good. So from bomb disposal you looked at aircrew and they obviously accepted you. Was it difficult to do?
JG: Yes, took a long time to get accepted. You had to go to school, you had to pass exams and that, for education purposes, and once you pass all them exams then you start your bomber training, your air gunner training.
GT: So when you were doing your training though, did they look back at what you did at school?
JG: No, no.
GT: Was it open to everybody? Everybody had to do that training. School.
JG: Well everybody who was going to be a gunner like, it might be my turn to go to the aircraft to take the guns out and take them to the armoury and then strip the guns and clean it all and check the barrel, cause on one occasion, that was I think after I shot down that Ju, when I clean and checked it, the barrel had no rifling left, was smooth, and the other three was okay, so that meant the barrel was useless, you had to put a new barrel in the gun..
GT: So did they choose you to be an air gunner or did you ask them that you wanted to be one?
JG: I chose, I chose to be an air gunner.
GT: And you had good eyesight, good health.
JG Yeah, I had good eyesight, hearing, everything was good and I didn’t, well I wasn’t intelligent enough to be a navigator, and wireless operator, I couldn’t stand that dat dat dat dat dat Morse code and of course the engineer you had to study specific engineer, studied all the instruments and the engines, navigator, that was the main job in the Air Force, was navigator. I think he was the most important man in the aircraft. I think he was more important than the pilot. He was the one who got you there and got you back, or told you, to get there and get back.
GT: Did you end up back on the Isle of Man in the aircraft doing the drogue shooting or did you do that at another place?
JG: No, I think we might, I’m not sure, no, didn’t land on the Isle of Man again. Once I left there I went to Waltham like the training stations, the different ones. The main two was Waltham and then Wickenby and then when I, that was it and when I was and waiting for demob I was at a RAF training unit for all new people coming in, joining in; I was in charge of the stores.
GT: So how long was your gunnery course?
JG: I don’t know, only by looking, offhand, you know, quite a long time, cause you used to start off wearing a cap with a white bit in.
GT: As a cadet.
JG: That signifies you’re a cadet for an air crew.
GT: Once you were, graduated and completed, that was what, late 1943?
JG: Yeah, the training.
GT: And you moved on to crew up somewhere?
JG: Yeah, Hixon, should be, should be 30 OTU, Hixon.
GT: And your log book shows that to be the 9th of June 1944 when you met there, on Wellingtons, so you met your future crew there.
JG: On Wellingtons, yes.
GT: So tell me about your skipper and your crew.
JG: He was, well what they used to do to crew you up, all the aircrew are posted to this aerodrome and when you come out, or in the mess for a meal, you meet all the other airmen. You get friendly with one, or they get friendly with you, and then by the time, I think it was only about, only about a week, I got friendly with the rear gunner, he wanted to be a rear gunner, I wanted to be mid upper, so then we met Barney, he’s the navigator, oh we met Podge walking round and we said, you go up to him and hi, you know, and have you got a crew, no I’m just getting crewed up. Did you want a couple of gunners? Yeah, he said, right, that was me and Jack and a pilot, carried on walking, we picked up the bomb aimer, navigator and a wireless operator, he was Australian, that was six of us and we done a lot of training there before we got posted to another station where all the engineers had been posted to and we made up our seventh member of the crew.
GT: What was the aircraft types that you did your OTU work with? Wellingtons?
JG: Wellington and Halifaxes, Halifax. It shows you there in the book how many Halifax, and then from that, Halifax, we went to er -
GT: Well your Conversion Unit was 1667 and you flew in Halifaxes there for about two weeks.
JG: Yeah. That’s right, that was coming off the Wellington onto that Conversion Unit and we flew Halifaxes and then from there we went to another station, Lancaster Finishing School.
GT: You only did five days flying for that!
JG: That’s all! Yeah, then that was it, then you were posted to your, you know, whatever squadron you were going to be; got posted to 100 Squadron
GT: You were 100 Squadron at Waltham and did your first operation on Cologne on the 31st of October, 1944.
JG: That was something I always remember about that first trip. We wasn’t, we wasn’t scared to start with, but we was once we was up there, but being in the mid upper gunner that had a three hundred and sixty degree turn, where you turned all the way round and when your guns got round and it was your own aircraft, they had something there where you couldn’t fire ‘em. But as I was turning round, I looked up the front the way we were going and all I could see was one big mass of red, where Cologne was alight, and the flashes of the flak and that exploding and all the FE, all, it frightened the bloody life out of me. I never, ever [emphasis] looked again where we were going to go, until after we left. That once, I only looked that once, and that was enough. I looked a couple of times, Heligoland is in there, that was towards the end, that was with the other pilot. And that was, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and there wasn’t a German fighter in the sky either. We could fly round there as if we owned it, you know, they just didn’t have the fighters left, not the Germans.
GT: Well John, I’ve just got a list of your crew and if you’ll allow me I’ll just quickly read them out, for the record here. Flying Officer Flooder, Australian Air Force pilot; Sergeant Barnes, RAF navigator; Sergeant Williams, RAF flight engineer; Flight Sergeant Maslin, Australian Air Force, wireless operator and Flight Sergeant Armstrong, RAF bomb aimer. And yourself Sergeant John Green, as RAF mid upper gunner, [dog barking] and the rear gunner was Sergeant Everly. So you stayed together for your first part of your flying, on 100 Squadron.
JG: The first fifteen ops, yeah.
GY: And for those fifteen ops.
JG: Until he got grounded.
GT: It was your skipper that was grounded, was that right. What was the story with him?
JG: After the Dresden raid there, it’ll be in the log book, after the Dresden raid we got back all right. Next night, next day they sent us down out Chemnitz after we’d done canals flying, we were put on, and the navigator, we’d been flying about an hour, and said I’ve had enough of this skipper, I can’t do my job, I’m too tired. So he come back, he told the pilot to come back and the pilot got the rollocking for it, for not carrying on, you know, regardless, dropping the bomb sort of thing.
GT: So he brought the bombs back to base.
JG: Yeah, and then what happened we got back to base you’ve still got all your bombs on, go out somewhere the North Sea and drop the cookie and we had to go and drop the cookie to get rid of it.
GT: Did you drop them armed? Were they armed when you dropped them? Did you make them explode or just?
JG: The cookie? No, we just dropped it. No, what the, there’s one op there, that, we dropped the bombs, and I’ve got it in, got: ‘Dropped cookie manually on spare’. That it? What happened there -
GT: It was the 15th of December 1944.
JG: Yeah. We got out and bombs away the pilot said, and then as we went away, he said, “Bluey,” that was the bomb aimer, Bluey, “are you sure all the bombs have gone, he said it feels heavy, the way it’s flying, so he said, “all right I’ll press all these switches, John will you get down and have a look?” So I get out the turret and look through a window in the floor of the aircraft and I could see the bomb. I said no, the bloody bomb’s still here! So they said right what we going to do? I’m sure it was the bomb aimer: let’s go round and drop it. And all of us: no you f-ing well don’t! We, no, we’re not going round there again! So I said to ‘em look, we’ve got to fly back, we’re gonna fly over, somewhere over Germany, you notify when we’re getting near where to the bomb aimer and skipper, when he gets out, I’ll drop it, I’ll pull the lever and drop it manually. And that’s what we done. We suddenly come up, there’s a town ahead, John, place called Spau in Germany, and then I’m talking to the bomb aimer and he’s saying, “right John get ready, get ready, when I tell you go, pull that lever, get ready, go!” Pulled the lever and the bomb dropped, and we just carried on. We just saw a big flash on the ground and that was it.
GT: What height would you have been at to do that?
JG: About fourteen, fifteen thousand feet. Cause we all, all [emphasis] of you kept above ten thousand.
GT: You’d have been on oxygen at the time.
JG: Yeah, yeah. Though when I, actually, what I done, get out my turret, and then at the side of your turret’s a small oxygen bottle, pull that out, clip it on to your oxygen mask so you’re on oxygen from the bottle, not from the aircraft. Yeah. That’s how they done it.
GT: And that was an eight thousand pound cookie.
JG: Yeah, er, four thousand pound cookie, but they finished up making them twelve thousand, that one they built, imitation up at MOTET haven’t they. They built that one. Must’ve made a bloody big ‘ole!
GT: So that was on the 15th of December, you did a further three operations there, 24th Christmas Eve, 1944.
JG: That’s when we landed at Rattlesden.
GT: Ooh! So tell me about that. What happened there?
JG: When we got back, I believe our engine caught fire.
GT: Ah, okay, was that from enemy damage, or did it?
JG: I don’t know, just so, put the fire out [cough] and when we get back it’s a bit foggy and that, and we didn’t have, only three engines, we didn’t have the mucking about, so we got ordered to land at Rattlesden. Rattlesden was American drome, and that’s when they pinched me bloody gloves, thieving bastards!
GT: Did the Americans not have much kit?
JG: No, they, Americans, course everything with the Americans was souvenirs. Course when we landed, we’d taken one, two, four pairs of gloves, the gunners had, and they were all left in the turret and of course we went you know, for a meal and briefing and for a meal, and then bed. When went up the next morning to fly back, we get to the aircraft and me gloves and that were gone and we couldn’t fly back cause our plane was unserviceable. I can’t, I believe it says there, come back as a passenger.
GT: So you lost all four pairs of gloves, to the Americans?
JG: Yes.
GT: Did they grab anything else?
JG: No, and they, I know when I come back and reported it, the CO, oh, I was put on a charge because losing your kit, and the officer who interviewed me over it was a New Zealander and he said, look he said, you couldn’t lock up. I said no, we had no locks on the door, he said so how the bloody hell can you, either take all your kit with you, how can you stop if you can’t lock the aircraft up? And he made a verdict of not, well, I wasn’t charged, it was dismissed and I was issued a new set of gloves. Through this officer, Wheatley.
GT: Your log book states that was about the 18th of November that that particular incident happened. You managed to get back to your home base. So what happened then with your skipper? You were telling me that your skipper -
JG: Yeah, well when we got back from the Chemnitz raid, you’ve got Chemnitz there, haven’t you, Dresden ten hours.
GT: Yup, what happened after that?
JG: We were flying, next day we flew to Chemnitz, and that’s when we returned, the pilot, the navigator said he was ill, that’s when they grounded the pilot, said his eyesight is not good enough to fly a four engined bomber, and he’d already done seventeen trips.
GT: So the pilot took the rap for the navigator’s -
JG: Yeah, more or less, yeah. He wasn’t, obviously, that was when the Station Officer, was a real cocky sod, but he come unstuck cause Podge, being Australian, imagine coming, going to Australia and saying this is what they’re gonna to do to me, because they kicked up a hell of a bloody stink.
GT: But the station officer’s accused your pilot of being -
JG: Lack of morale fibre, that’s what he was going to do, to stop him flying, but then I heard it was six months after, he was sent back to Australia.
GT: Did he fly again?
JG: In Australia he did, but I don’t know what though.
GT: But what happened when he went to London, to the Australian Consul?
JG: He went to Australia House, and course Australian, as they said, that’s the RAAF, it’s got nothing to do with you, and you’re on loan to him, he can’t make you lack of moral fibre and not only that you’ve done seventeen bloody ops, and course their, whoever’s in charge up there, he kicked a hell of a stink up. It’s getting to know the people who to kick up the stink with, and said this bastard’s not going to do this to one of my men, Australian. Next thing we knew, I think it was about, must have been about the second day, that next, we saw him, one of the crew saw Podge, he said oh he’s had to apologise to me, the CO, he’s had to apologise for what he said and done. It made him look a real right fool, cause everybody, all of it, all the news went round the squadron, about it.
GT: So that was coming up into mid February 1945 in your old log book, you’ve noted that your pilot was grounded. Was that the end of your time on 100 Squadron?
JG: Yeah, cause then, we wanted another pilot and they said no, we, other station was short of gunners and they posted me straight away to that gunnery, to RAF Wickenby.
GT: So your crew, incidentally disintegrated.
JG: Crew was finished, yes. Oh, they give no thought, for you or anything, you know, not when you’ve got an officer like that in charge of you.
GT: So there’s about two or three weeks in between the squadrons in your log book here, so on the 7th of March, is your first flight with 12 Squadron. So how did it work then, did you join another crew straight away or did you have a choice?
JG: No, that was when, as I said to you, when I got there they posted me to, I gets in the squadron, you have to call in the guard hut, as you go through the gates, and they said right go to the Gunnery Leader and send you over there. I went there and that, he said to me well John look, I can’t see you now, and I told you, we’ve got ops on, so I’m busy, come back and see me tomorrow morning. That was when they posted me to this crew that got killed. And that’s when I went back to him.
GT: Tell me about that, what happened there, you visited another crew that night?
JG: They were getting dressed and we were talking and they said how many you done John? I said I’ve done sixteen, they said oh, we’re lucky then, I said why and they said we’ve done twenty nine, we’re doing our last one tonight. Never got back.
GT: You were in their nissen hut were you?
JG: In the nissen hut. I woke up at six o’clock in the morning with the noise, it was all the Special Police coming to collect all their gear, collect all their belongings and everything; it’s all taken away. Then when I went back to see the Gunnery Leader he said, that’s when he said right we’ve got three crews all want gunners, you fly with all the three and choose one of them. And you can see the three there through, one of them was Castle was it?
GT: You’ve got Raymond, Dickie and Granham.
JG: That’s it.
GT: So why were they short of gunners? What happened to the other gunners?
JG: Well one of ‘em, I asked that question. One of them had a bomb, what you call ‘em, little bombs, incendiary bombs, drop through the mid upper turret.
GT: From above, another aircraft.
JG: Yeah. That killed him. Another one, he was sick, in the oxygen mask, and obviously the pilot, his pilot hadn’t kept in touch with him enough, got lack of air, and I don’t know about the third one. But anyway, I chose one of the three and the other two got shot down on the next time we all went on a raid. So I was lucky. That’s when I got with Granham, but you know I can’t remember any of the names, except Granham of that second crew. There wasn’t the same feeling between the first crew and the second crew. I mean the first crew we was all mates, always out together at night and that, and the second crew, I know you’re friends and that, speak and everything, it’s not the same what you call it, camaraderie there, I can’t even, all I know is one was named George, I can’t remember the names of all, any the others, and the pilot.
GT: And you did fifteen ops with that new crew.
JG: Sixteen with ‘em, yeah. Or fifteen.
GT: On your log book, mid March you’ve got one thousand bomber raid on Dortmund.
JG: Yeah, I think we, I went on three or four, that was when, towards that time of the war, they had all these aircraft, used to send everything up, Bomber Harris.
GT: That’s March 45 that was Dortmund and Essen, so what was that like, you were mid upper at that time?
JG: No, I was rear gunner then. It should say there.
GT: Rear gunner. Oh yes, it does. So what was it like with all these aircraft around you, and above you, and below?
JG: Well, during the day it was all right, but at night you didn’t see, only when you nearly had a smash with one, we crossed like that, that’s how close we were and you know, nobody, he didn’t see us, we didn’t see him, and, was something else to do with flying.
GT: But you were able to warn the skipper of any aircraft above you.
JG: Oh yeah, I remember, oh with Granham, oh that was when this Ju88, perhaps that’s why I didn’t get sighted, because we’re flying along and next minute tracer bullets come up, come up underneath [emphasis] the tail plane and over the top of the wing, big long stream of tracer and the pilot - what the hell’s that, and I said it’s all right skipper, it’s only tracer bullet, just like that, not even thinking, and then I gave the order corkscrew starboard go, and he dived down.
GT: So that was on your twentieth operation to Nuremburg, on the 16th of March 1945, eight hours thirty at night and your log book states: ‘combat with Junkers 88, fired five hundred rounds, fighter destroyed, crashed in flames, exploded on ground, brackets: confirmed.’
JG: Yeah. That’s what, it was confirmed by this other man from another station but they said, I mean there was a lot of talk about Granham getting the DFC and me getting nothing. But.
GT: So your skipper at the time was Flying Officer Granham.
JG: Granham. Yeah.
GT: Granham is his surname there. So he already had the DFC.
JG: Yeah, already had the DFC. He got the bar to it.
GT: And he was awarded a second with a Bar directly for shooting down.
JG: Yeah. Shooting down.
GT: And you shot it down and you weren’t awarded anything.
JG: That’s what a lot of ‘em were saying on the station. How is it that he got a Bar to his bloody DFC and the gunner got nothing and he shot the plane down.
GT: You were a sergeant at the time? Flight Sergeant.
JG: Not sure, probably Flight Sergeant. Then.
GT: So you don’t know if you’d been accredited with the kill.
JG: No, never bothered about, you know.
GT: There was distinction there that you should have been awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal for your action.
JG: Yeah.
GT: And that never happened.
JG: That never happened. And then that’s how that came about, Paul.
GT: But in this case though your DFM, that others had been awarded for the same thing, you found out later that there was great disparity between -
JG: Oh yeah, between officers and airmen, non-commissioned officers and commissioned officers, big [emphasis] disparity, you try and get, and check out how many DFCs were awarded and how many DFMs were awarded.
GT: Did you find out the quantities of that?
JG: Yes, I’m almost sure it was what I said: twenty thousand DFCs and six thousand DFMs.
GT: And the shooting down of that Junkers that night for you saved your crew, and your aircraft.
JG: Well yeah, and if I’d have shot us down, I mean it’s lucky that the tracer bullets, if that’s your aircraft, come up under, underneath the tail plane, over the wing. That’s how.
GT: Normally every one tracer you see is another is four or five of rounds that are.
JG: All depends what they do, I think we had five, sometimes six, sometimes seven and then one tracer put in, you know, there.
GT: That’s pretty good shooting with three nought threes, to be able to get a Junkers.
JG: Yeah, but, that’s another thing what made me smile. On the training they’re telling you about your gunsight, your gun ring, you got a fifty, fifty percent crossing speed by half the gun sight, against a full gun sight, how you do this and that, and I said to ‘em, when they spoke to me about it after, some of the men, I said it’s biggest load of bullshit. What do you mean? I said I’ve ordered the pilot, I said, he’s corkscrewing like that, I said, all you’re supposed to aim at fifteen degree part I said all you’re doing is you’re firing a gun, the bullets are flying around and you hit lucky enough, hit a part of the engine what caught fire. And how the hell when I read sometimes on there or I read they got air gunners shot five or six, dunno, how the bloody hell, you couldn’t aim your gun, aircraft going like that. That was that you know, corkscrew come up the same way and then it went down again, till you ordered it, the captain, to stop. I know when we come up and the pilot, on one occasion, we’d just come out above the cloud, we’d dropped the bombs, flying back and he come above the clouds and it was beautiful [emphasis] clear and the pilot said Johnny, it’s pretty clear up here and we can be seen, what do you want me to do? I said can you go just in the cloud, just in the cloud so, and that’s what he done, for probably ten mile or so, flying just in the cloud. Made it a bit awkward, bit bumpy and that, wasn’t very good, but at least they couldn’t see us. Cause when you’re up, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, probably you haven’t but, if you’re about the cloud like that, that looks like sea above it, nothing there, just your lot, just looking at the cloud, yeah.
GT: On 75 New Zealand Squadron there was little documentation, but I’ve interviewed one chap who was an under [emphasis] gunner. Did you have any experience on 12 and 100 Squadron of Lancasters having under gunners?
JG: I know towards the end that’s when they found out the Junkers, instead of, he was firing upwards.
GT: Schrage musik. Upward firing cannons.
JG: Upward firing cannon. That’s why we lost so many aircraft before anybody knew about it! Then after that, when we’re searching, the mid upper gunner, the pilot every so often had to turn the plane down so he could look below and that way make sure there’s nothing underneath it.
GT: So the squadrons didn’t employ under gunners in any of the aircraft.
JG: No, not like the Americans, Americans had gunners in their Flying Fortresses. They had ten, ten gunners in their Flying Fortresses.
GT: For the gunnery side of things for you John, did you, that Junkers 88 you shot down did you have any other chance, or any other shooting opportunities with other attacking aircraft?
JG: Duren, we dropped, the Master Bomber called us down from seventeen thousand, called us down to five thousand feet, in Duren, dropped the bombs from five thousand, that was almost as if you’re on the ground, he called us down: it’s lovely down here. And we answered back and joked, yeah it’s f-ing lovely up here an all! We’re staying here! Of course, the Master Bomber couldn’t do nothing, he had no idea who it was!
GT: So you did all joined him?
JG: Yeah, so we slowly went down and joined him. You know, you’re talking amongst the crew, what do you reckon? Well look. if we go down, there’s a lot gone down, we’ve got more chance being in the crowd than staying up here on our own.
GT: But you risked being, having bombs dropped from those still above.
JG: Yeah, well that was my argument, but after this, seeing this plane dop bombs on another plane, how the hell, we were supposed to be the highest crew, usually round about sixteen, sixteen five, seventeen, seventeen five, eighteen. All depends how, I think on that particular night we were, our height was eighteen five hundred and yet there’s aircraft above us, and course we were talking, we’re supposed to be up the top, and the pilot saying what do you think they want these aircraft with these propellors for! They can go up higher! So long as the navigator knows, that if it’s, if he’s due to bomb at say sixteen thousand, then the instruments all set, but if we’re flying at seventeen, as long as the navigator knows, he can work it out, fiddle it out, that we’re a thousand feet higher than we should be.
GT: So by your twenty sixth operation which was Heligoland, in your log book you’ve stated: very good prang. Why was that a very good prang?
JG: Oh, l there wasn’t, well there was no cloud, it was a perfect sky like you get here, there wasn’t a cloud or anything in sight, not a fighter, no flak, you just flew round Heligoland. It was a u-boat place where all the u-boats dock, at Heligoland. That’s when they, they couldn’t, our bombs and that what we had, wouldn’t go through until they built the twelve thousand.
GT: Tallboy and the Grand Slam.
JG: That went through the bloody –
GT: Concrete.
JG: Concrete.
GT: So on the 29th of April, you started doing something different - Operation Manna. Tell us about Operation Manna, please.
JG: Yeah well, now we were given, [pause] first of all we were all told at a meeting that Holland is starving and that they’ve done a deal with the Germans that we won’t load our guns or fire on anything in Holland and we can drop the food, which we did do, the first time at six hundred feet I think it was. Was it, the first time?
GT: You’ve three entries in your log book for Valkenburg.
JG: Yeah, that’s Valkenburg was the first one.
GT: End of April beginning of May.
JG: So, and what happened, when we saw, it’s all in sacks, all stacked in the bomb bay, had a hell of a job with the bomb bay just opening like that a little bit to get the stuff in and course when it dropped, hit the ground we saw flour bursting and that, and we said, got back and reported it’s too high. They said right, go lower and the pilot said yeah, we can go lower, there’s nothing in the way at Valkenburg, and I always remember the second op Valkenburg, we’re going along, looking back and everybody’s running round the field and you’re dropping all these bloody great big sacks of food, and then we flew up the High Street and when I looked out the window, the church steeple’s up there! [emphasis] And we’re up the High Street and all the kids waving and that, to you, and you’re down flying up the Hight Street like a car and the church bloody steeple, I think Christ skipper, I said I want to go to Heaven but I don’t want to go this way yet! You know, and laughing and joking and all that, and then what we done then, on our particular, and evidently it was done. We used to fill up milk bottles and you know razor blades, how thin they are, you could bend it, bend it enough to put in the top and it used to open up, the blade used to open up jammed in the bottle and when they, you threw them out the turret it made a screaming noise, we used that a lot to frighten ‘em and what we done on our third trip to Holland, everybody on the station either had rag or handkerchief and cotton, you know the cotton, you know, parachute, you make your parachute, you tied it four corners and tied it round the choc bars. We all threw out we could see all the kids running with these little parachutes with the chocolate bars. Because that’s why, that’s why in the letters some of what Jack wrote, he went to Holland for two years running, they invited him over on the day they celebrate us dropping the food to ‘em, and the last time was Rotterdam, racecourse, flying along the racecourse about fifty, sixty foot high. Of course the pilots used to love it. So did we, flying like that! See when you’re young and that you never thought of danger, how dangerous it was. I think from what I was told, we only lost one aircraft on that and that was a Flying Fortress, on the way back, or something.
GT: Did you see any of the American aircraft doing the food drops as well, which was their Operation Chow Hound?
JG: No I never saw them, it was different timing and different places, you know.
GT: How many Lancasters would have been involved with the food drops that you saw?
JG: A few hundred, and then a lot of them, while that was carrying on, they went to pick up the prisoners of war.
GT: Juvencourt.
JG: Yeah, pick up all our prisoners of war, I wasn’t on that.
GT: Would you have wanted to be?
JG: One of me mates who was on it, he said we had twenty on the way back, prisoners of war, in our plane. Picked up twenty of ’em. Yeah.
GT: So you didn’t manage to do any more Operation Manna trips after that lot?
JG: No, I only done the four.
GT: That was your thirty one trips all together.
JG: Yeah. They posted me out.
GT: And you found out later why.
JG: He wanted to do some flying! I don’t blame him, I mean.
GT: Was that your gunnery leader?
JG: I went home on leave, they, I met the wife, and fourteen weeks I was home, fourteen weeks leave and while I was home on leave, I was a Flight Sergeant, I got a letter, on the, I got a letter on me demob leave promoting me to Warrant Officer which was another hundred and twenty pound!
GT: Good grief! That would buy a house, wouldn’t it! Now there were a couple of funny things that happened, funny when you look on them now, and one was when you were a mid upper on your first tour and the Lancaster above you was about to drop its bombs. They missed you but they got an aircraft below you.
JG: Missed us but got another one.
GT: What happened to the other aircraft?
JG: That’s what I said, the bombs had all dropped, we’d dropped our bombs and all, and the smoke cleared and the rear gunner, that was Jack, we’re on fire! I said shut up you silly sod, I said it’s not, I said it’s some poor sod’s had bomb’s dropped on ‘im! As the smoke cleared away, this other Lancaster bomber was turning like that, slowly turning to get back on course, with a bomb jammed in the wing. Told the skipper, and the skipper, we were going round, we went near enough to see it all and then skipper just carried on, you know, to get back himself, and we found out afterwards he landed, he made it, kept asking the people involved in our station and he said oh yeah, he landed okay, he landed in France on the emergency drome.
GT: The bomb hadn’t had time to arm itself before it hit the wing. Must have been so fortunate. That’s amazing. Now there was also a bit of an own goal, you were telling me about seven pound jam tins!
JG: That was the time I emptied it out the side.
GT: Tell me the story, come on, from the beginning!
JG: All the gunners had a big empty jam tin from the mess to use as their pee bucket cause we couldn’t get out our turrets to use the Elsan and this particular night I filled it up and I thought well what am I going to do? Am I going to empty on the floor, which it can go out through the bottom of the turret. I thought well, if I do that, the ground crew won’t be very happy that they’ve got to wash that out, and I slid the window at the side of me, in the turret.
GT: And what height would you have been at?
JG: Probably around eighteen thousand feet, I slid that open, and emptied the jam tin out. Within one second it had all gone round, straight back through the front of the turret – cause we had no windows, we took ‘em all out – all over me. We had no windows in our turrets, all the gunners took their windows out in front of ‘em, just had the guns there.
GT: So that would have been minus twenty, minus forty, is it?
JG: Sometimes it were really cold. We were cold, the rest of the crew were bloody ‘ot!. But the two gunners were nearly always cold. We had electric heated suits in the end, and I was colder still. Course when I told ‘em I looked like a bloody ice block, all they done was laugh. So did all at the station.
GT: So it all came back at you.
JG: Yeah, they couldn’t stop, they all thought how funny it was.
GT: And the jam tins there you said they were seven pound jam tins and the WAAFs managed to save these for you.
JG: Yeah. That’s what they used to have as their food: seven pounds of jam, in tins. That’s what all the RAF stations had, and I suppose the Army, Navy, and everything.
GT: Gee, you were lucky to not to have something frozen off.
JG: Yeah!
GT: So, the other thing was that during Operation Manna you’ve seen a photograph with the tulips and there was -
JG: Yeah, ‘Thank you boys.’
GT: There’s a photograph in one of the IBCCs books showing that and you remember seeing that.
JG: Yeah, I remember it was red tulips and ‘Thank You Boys’, probably from where we were about six foot long, so they must have had dozens and dozens of workmen overnight, planted all these in the middle of this field of tulips: ‘Thank You Boys.’
GT: You saw action with your, active bombing operations and then you did the Operation Manna and they classified that as an operation too.
JG: Oh yeah, we didn’t think they were going to, but they did in the end. Cause, and I remember at, what they done with the aircrew finished, they posted all the officers to one station and as many men to another one, filled up and they, let me tell you now, they got us on parade and said right, we’ll call your names out, just repeat your last number, your last three numbers and go and stand over there. They were calling all the names and this great big crowd got smaller and that one got bigger, and bigger and bigger, and in then end there was only about six of us left here, and we wasn’t in it. They were all going, being sent to Japan, against Japanese, Japan, we were too close to being demobbed, so they said it’s just a waste sending you out there, you’ll be sent back, and that’s when we got demobbed, you know. When we got our log book back, our pay book, there.
GT: The difference between the two, did it strike you then, that from doing the bombing operations that finally you were saving lives, of our allies?
JG: Oh yeah, with the food dropping, cause where we dropped, where we dropped the food at Valkenburg, it was surrounded by Germans. Actually I saw one German standing in the corner of the field, but, they had done a deal with the RAF not to take pictures and all that, and load the guns – like hell! We had our guns loaded, we weren’t going to take that chance with ‘em, but nobody got fired on.
GT: And nobody fired their guns.
JG: No, because, I found out afterwards by talking to somebody, of course they wouldn’t, cause they were starving as well. They wanted some of the food you were dropping: they were starving as well. Cause it was like, like a field, this part surrounded, all the rest is, a different, this part of Holland was surrounded by the Germans.
GT: You know there’s an Operation Manna Memorial in Rotterdam?
JG: I didn’t know.
GT: They hold a service every year and they thank you for your service to save them. It’s very special for the Dutch.
JG: I believe they’ve got to the last one or something, yeah. I know Jack used to go.
GT: Jack was your ex?
JG: Ex gunner. He used to go. Had a wonderful time he said. Said you never spent a ha’penny, you never spent anything. You wasn’t allowed to pay for anything.
GT: All the streets around the area are named after the commanders that organised everything in respect.
JG: What, actually what did annoy me, was this Dresden business, you know. Over the years they had meetings, cause they said there was three hundred thousand killed, in Dresden. Well it wasn’t all that long ago, only a few months ago, they had their last meeting over Dresden and they, all the people involved in the meeting are settled on nineteen thousand killed; well we had that in London! And they settled on nineteen thousand, killed in Dresden and not the three hundred thousand what they tried to say, you know, and that was only people over here, not over here, over in England. A lot of the do gooders, you know, you’re terror bombing, dropping bombs like that on Dresden and what annoyed me was Churchill blamed Bomber Harris for bombing Dresden, he said he had no need to do it! He went on the, yeah, he did, something there somewhere, I don’t know where I got it from, but he had no need to bomb Dresden. Well Bomber Harris had a letter from Churchill, ordering [emphasis] him, and he said I can prove how, I call him fat guts Churchill, whisky drinking gut, do you know if anybody speaks to me of Churchill, I say don’t talk to me about that fat gut! I said he put the blame on Bomber Harris for all these people being killed, I said, and he was the one who gave the order: him, Stalin, Roosevelt, at a meeting.
GT: And the very reason Bomber Harris was never given a peerage.
JG: That’s why though, when he finally come back here, they did do didn’t they, Memorial, they got the shock of their lives the way the people supported it.
GT: The Bomber Command Memorial in the Green Park. Now in 2011 and 2012 when New Zealanders went across, you being a British person.
JG: Couldn’t go.
GT: You were not involved, or not allowed to be involved with that. Have you been, yet, back to England?
JG: No, I’ve never been back; I won’t go back. I’ve never wanted to go back to England.
GT: Now if we can just move a little bit back from there. You emigrated to New Zealand in?
JG: 1979.
GT: And you followed your sons then, because you and Beatrice, or Betty, you had two sons.
JG: Yeah, and one of ‘em who’d already been back once to England, he went back home again and this time, he broke up with his wife.
GT: So you’ve got Mike who’s aged seventy two, living in Kent.
JG: In Kent.
GT: And you’ve got Paul here, living in New Zealand.
JG: Just over there.
GT: Who is fifty five, so you have your son close, and obviously you had a great time, Betty and yourself, here in New Zealand.
JG: You can go and see his garden, Paul’s gardens, see his swimming pool and all that.
GT: Fabulous, so Betty, she was, what did she do when you came to New Zealand?
JG: She was a dress maker, machinist, and in the end she had, we had a big machine up in that garage there, we made it into a, like a workshop for her.
GT: Fabulous. Now, at the, when you demobbed from the RAF, you went back as an engineer and then into the fishing tackle game, selling in London there. So you became a store owner, was that right?
JG: See, in England fishing tackle is a lot different to New Zealand. In New Zealand, I hate to say this, but all they think about is trout. Trout, trout. Can you eat it? If you can’t eat it they don’t want to catch it! Whereas the poms, we do it for the fun of catching the fish.
GT: You do the coarse fishing.
JG: Coarse fishing. And course, so therefore, the shop in England was selling ten times the amount of stuff than what they do in New Zealand, cause there’s so much, such a bigger range.
GT: And where was your shop?
JG: Down, opposite, opposite Penge Police Station funnily enough.
GT: And you sold that up to come out to New Zealand in the early seventies.
JG: Yes.
GT: You’ve already said you didn’t want to go back. Did you get homesick for England?
JG: I didn’t. The wife’s been back, twice, but I didn’t. Never been homesick and wanted to go back. And I told me son, when he left here and went back home, I said that’s the second time, don’t expect me to follow you, I won’t be following you, which I didn’t do, I didn’t want to chase after him. He’s happy enough, he’s married a Russian woman, got divorced. His wife was one of these moaning types, always got something to moan about! [Chuckle]
GT: Fabulous. So you’ve managed to keep your home that you purchased as soon as you arrived here. And so, when did you lose Betty?
JG: Eleven years ago.
GT: You’ve been very active here with the New Zealand Bomber Command Association.
JG: Yeah, I used to go there every Wednesday.
GT: So you were part of the, now in New Zealand we have a Lancaster that’s been rebuilt and is on display at the MOTET, which is the Museum of Transport and Technology.
JG: That’s right. We used to clean that.
GT: Right, so you were part of the Wednesday Bomber Boys. Was a group of you veterans over the years.
JG: Every Wednesday up there, and why I stopped in the end, driving here to there took nearly an hour, driving back was under half hour and driving on that motorway with all that, everybody going into Auckland, I couldn’t take it any longer and I had to pack it in. The Wednesday Boys.
GT: So for those who are unaware of our Lancaster here in New Zealand, it was donated by the French Navy and it was not an aircraft that had served during World War Two but was just after. But it sat for many years here and finally a group was put together to get it back to display status, and it’s a magnificent aircraft at the Museum of Transport Technology and at the current time it has 75 Squadron markings on it. But for your factor John, did you spend much time inside the aircraft when you were fixing it up?
JG: No, we, one of the jobs I had was, every week., four of us used to sit round the table with all log books, reading out what this one done, oh this one he flew so and so, so and so, and somebody like yourself is making a note of it, and all that was reduced to a disc, so that if you wanted, if you had a father or grandfather who was one of the aircrew got lost, you wanted to know what happened. Instead of you searching through all the records: it’s on the disc.
GT: Under that guy’s name.
JG: Under that guy’s name, and that would tell you everything. And that’s what we done. We used to sit there for hour, or couple of hours then it was tea time, cup of tea and a bun, and then some of us used to have a duster and clean the aircraft up. We, I took me mates up there once and they were, they had to pay to get in! [Laugh] They said no lads, sorry, but. I said they’re my mates, and he said yeah I know, he said but if we let them in then others will want it. I mean I didn’t have to pay, I could go in there any time: One of the Wednesday Boys.
GT: How many Wednesday boys were there all together? A dozen?
JG: Oh, couple of dozen. Yeah.
GT: Any left, besides yourself?
JG: Yeah, oh yeah, there’s still, still two or three left – like Peter Wheeler, I’m sure he was one of the Wednesday Boys.
GT: Peter’s not a veteran though, but he’s the executive of the New Zealand Bomber Command Association. He looks after the aircraft for MOTET, the aircraft’s not the MOTET particularly, it’s part of the Bomber Command Association.
JG: The last time, which is years ago, they had a Sunderland flying boat, outside.
GT: It’s inside now.
JG: That’s inside is it.
GT: It’s all been painted up.
JG: I know they were doing this Lancaster up, somebody said these two brothers got together and paying it out, paying for it out their pocket.
GT: You’re talking about the Panton brothers at East Kirkby, Lincoln. It’s Just Jane.
JG: They reckon there’ll be a couple of Lancasters flying.
GT: They’re looking at that. And this is where the International Bomber Command Centre has come about, now it’s not far, and this is where this recording will end up, with them in their archives and it’s been fascinating. Now what you have on your wall here is a huge framed effort with your rank slides, your medals and some photographs, and some badges of the squadrons you flew with, which is fascinating. Your son built that for you?
JG: No, he had it built by the chap owns the bed and breakfast at Russell, you know Russell? He owns the bed and breakfast [cough] right on the front of Russell. I don’t know, I think it cost a couple of thousand to do that. What he was charging.
GT: Awesome. That’s pretty neat there.
JG: Paul paid for all that.
GT: To have your information up on the wall.
JG: And then trouble is, one of the cards has slipped down and it’s too much bother to undo the back, because it’s sealed, so we just left it.
GT: So we see that you managed to secure the Bomber Command Clasp at least. So that’s good to see. Now John, you’re now coming up, in September it was your birthday, you were ninety -
JG: Seven.
GT: Ninety seven. You’re feeling good about yourself?
JG: Well, I’ve got all this problem now what’s going to happen about when they start knocking down my wall and pulling up me carpets.
GT: Bit of a flood in the laundry yesterday.
JG: I don’t.
GT: But the other thing too, John, you’ve just survived an accident on the road! Gosh, what happened there?
JG: Well that, on that mobility scooter, I’ll show you if you like before you go. Well coming down Buckman’s beach road you’re supposed to stay on the pavement, well I’ve been using the road, but on this particular time there was a lot of traffic so I went on the pavement. Coming down Buckman’s each but you know the houses’ driveways are slanted up like that, going along and we got to house and it was quite steep so I went to move over to the right to get nearer the wall of the house, and what I didn’t know, in front of me, the pavement ended, it was mud. And the wheel, ruddy wheel went down and threw me over the top.
GT: Were you hurt?
JG: I’ve done all this, out gardening more or less stopped now.
GTL And you also attend a lot of the Bomber Command services.
JG: Well I shall, I’m going this one June 9th at ten thirty. I’m going to phone up Kerry and Don, Paul said he would take the four of us there, you know, to the service. Well if he does, if they come, and we stop in the restaurant there, I’ll tell ‘em I’ll treat ‘em to breakfast. I know Carrie and Don won’t eat much - Paul will! [Laughter]
GT: So, the service is all about the Bomber Command stuff, right.
JG: Yeah.
GT: So, and you’ve been doing this every year?
JG: Every year, yeah, and Peter met, Peter said I haven’t seen you, was last year you saw me, cause he came here, Peter, to interview me over something. I will have to find his phone number and phone him up.
GT: The other thing John you mentioned to me, was that during your operational tours, you had a white scarf.
JG: Yeah, a white silk scarf.
GT: Tell me about that please.
JG: It was about eighteen inches wide and over six foot long, and every op when I come back, I used to take it with me on ops, when I come back, I had this WAAF used to embroider the name of the town we’d been to bomb. Even when we shot down that Ju 88, she embroidered a swastika on it. So I had sixteen names at the top and fifteen names, and fifteen names at the bottom with a swastika and I gave them to John Bannon to put on show.
GT: Well we’ll find out more about that.
JG: See if you can.
GT: It’s fascinating that you actually had that done.
JG: He died. When he suddenly died, I thought meself I wonder what happened to my scarf?
GT: We’ll have a look for that. So have you been up to see the Lancaster lately?
JG: No I don’t get out there now. You know, I mean I’ve got the address, 9th of June, Paul’s already, I can make a note, yeah, we’ll take you dad, him and his partner and I’m going to phone up Carrie or she’ll come over, and Don, see if they want come with us.
GT: Well you have got a amazing amount of your historical documents here: your log book is safe and is being scanned and copied. You have a folder full of all of the New Zealand Bomber Command Association newsletters for quite some years, you have some from the 100 Squadron in England.
JG: There’s two there.
GT: There’s two that you have managed to secure, and see what they have been doing and been up to, I have now given you have some IBCC material I brought back from England last year with me so you have some material there to check on, and when I arrived here to visit you today you were looking at your photographs on your big tv which is fascinating to see.
JG: I fetched the flying, the Lancaster flying with it, with it the Hurricane and Spitfire flying along there and then I fetch them flying over, practicing on that dam, all on my, but I’m not so good now with the computer, getting it, you know, cause I play poker a bit on it, on the computer.
GT: What did you do when you came to New Zealand? What was your career, job? What did you get up to?
JG: Er, [pause] I had a job with Shatlocks. You know, Shatlocks, I worked for them.
GT: The company that made stoves.
JG: They made all the stoves down Dunedin. All the electric ones and that, and Fisher and Paykel got their name on one of them.
GT: Fischer and Paykel are a very famous brand here in New Zealand aren’t they, John, making cooker tops and such.
JG: Well they done, well they didn’t actually make the cook tops, it was Jack Shatlock, Shatlocks made ‘em, made all the cookers.
GT: And you were a technician or a salesman?
JG: Technician. I’ve got, actually, see that red tin there, up there, there’s a red tin up the garden, there’s about twelve up there, that was what they used to enclose the dishwashers in and all the aluminium sheets up there, was all part of the plate what came out your cooker.
GT: You’re in a very large house here, with a large back yard which is not the same as what many English households have.
JG: I used to do a lot [emphasis] of gardening, but now, half hour and that’s me lot. I’ve realised now, when I start getting tired, I just come and sit down, read.
GT: And you’re the last man of your crew that you know of, John?
JG: Yeah, Jack was the, Jack was, he died a year ago now, and some of the others have been dead a few years you know, slowly getting less and less.
GT: You were involved with two different crews though. Did you keep in contact much with any of the other chaps?
JG: No, none at all.
GT: Once you demobbed.
JG: No, none at all, not even.
GT: Other than Jack of course.
JG: Jack and, talking to Podge cause he used to come over from Australia to stay at Jack’s place and he invited me, I spoke to him on the phone one day when he was visiting England, he said John, if you’d like to come to Australia and pay for half the petrol, I’ll take you all around Australia, flying, he had is own aircraft, type like Tiger Moth. And I never did go, but I could have flown all the way round Australia.
GT: You stlll can.
JG: All you got to do he said was pay for half the petrol.
GT: That’s amazing. You are amazing for the New Zealand Bomber Command Association to be one of the few left here in New Zealand, so, John, I am very honoured to be able to interview you today for the IBCC especially. You and I have crossed paths for many years at the services, this is my first time to sit and chat to you so I’m quite honoured to spend time with you today. I think is there anything else you would like to speak to with your interview here?
JG: No not really I think I’m quite surprised, you know that, I’m glad Peter Wheeler’s still there. I can have a chat with him, when I go. I will phone him up though.
GT: But this is your story, this is about your -
JG: If you remember, try and have a look for that scarf.
GT: I can do that too. But for your history and your remembrance of your time, serving with the Bomber Command itself, long before you were in New Zealand. I know I certainly can be proud to thank you for your service and you obviously served with distinction and pride.
JG: Thank you.
GT: And memories of those days: good, bad?
JG: Yes. Some good, some bad. I can think to myself, I must have been bloody mad volunteering for this when I was up there flying at times, when we was in trouble, you know, but then I realise, now, how lucky I was to be one [emphasis] of the men who got back. Like all, evidently, all [emphasis] that crew who you saw there, every one of them, survived. I don’t know how many ops Jack done, but I know he done a lot less than me, cause he done six food, no seven food drops, he told me, he done seven there so, if he done seven of them he didn’t do many, that’d been seven ops left. Can’t get, I’m lucky to have a son like Paul over there.
GT: Well John, I’m going to finish our interview here now, sadly, because I’d love to keep talking with you, but thank you very much for your time here, and I’ll make sure the IBCC have the recording from this, sent to them and I hope you enjoy reading their cards I’ve left with you.
JG: I will read all that. I’ll sort it all out and read it.
GT: They will have now your contact details and I’ll make sure they’ll send some to you. From me, from Glen Turner, of 75 Squadron Association, the secretary of the Association and my friendship with the Bomber Command gentlemen, I thank you and I thank you on behalf of the IBCC.
JG: I think thank you for taking the trouble to, you know, do this sort of thing. There.
GT: My pleasure for you. Thank you, John. Goodbye.
JG: Bye-by.
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 Green
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Glen Turner
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-03-07
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AGreenJ190307, PGreenJ1901
Format
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01:28:12 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
John Green was born on the 22nd of September 1921 in Penge, South East London. He registered for the Royal Air Force to prevent being called up by the Army and was drafted in 1942. He was posted to the Isle of Man, where he volunteered as a drogue operator during training operations, before transferring to bomb disposal in Bathford. In 1944, Green volunteered for aircrew and opted to train as an air gunner. He formed a crew at 30 Operational Training Unit, RAF Hixon, converted from Wellingtons to Halifaxes at RAF Sandoft, and attended the Lancaster Finishing School at RAF Hemswell. The crew joined 100 Squadron, RAF Grimsby, in October 1944. He recalls the conditions inside the mid-upper gunner turret, manually releasing their bombs over Speyer, and failing to complete their sixteenth to Kemnitz, which resulted in a Lack of Moral Fibre accusation to ground the pilot and disband the crew. In March 1945, Green was posted to 12 Squadron, RAF Wickenby, and completed fifteen further operations. He describes the lack of camaraderie with his new crew and shooting down a Ju 88 on an operation to Nuremberg, for which the pilot received recognition but he did not. For Operation Manna, he undertook three trips to Valkenburg, and one to Rotterdam, and recalls dropping chocolate bars for children and viewing a message of thanks written in tulips. Green describes his career after demobilisation, his opinion regarding the treatment of Bomber Command, emigrating to New Zealand in the 1970s, and his active membership with the New Zealand Bomber Command Association.
Contributor
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Tilly Foster
Anne-Marie Watson
Language
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eng
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
New Zealand
England--Bath
England--Lincolnshire
England--Somerset
England--Staffordshire
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Speyer
Great Britain Miscellaneous Island Dependencies--Isle of Man
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Netherlands--Valkenburg (South Holland)
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Coverage
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Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1944-06-09
1944-10-31
1944-12-15
1945-02
1945-04
1945-03-16
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
100 Squadron
12 Squadron
1667 HCU
30 OTU
air gunner
aircrew
bomb disposal
bombing
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Ju 88
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
military service conditions
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
RAF Grimsby
RAF Hemswell
RAF Hixon
RAF Sandtoft
RAF Wickenby
recruitment
shot down
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1206/11779/PWilsonJS1601.2.jpg
747bd879cd48f91749b7814008d33422
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1206/11779/AWilsonJS160630.1.mp3
7e2477216099e63b9b0e50063ace01f3
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
Wilson, James Stanley
J S Wilson
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with James Wilson (1924, 1821217 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 626 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
2016-06-30
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
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Wilson, JS
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JF: Hey there, I’m John Fisher and I’m talking with Mr. Stanley Wilson, who is ninety one and a half he tells me, and he lives in Wolverhampton. He’s originally Scottish as you’ll soon find out and he was in 626 Squadron having volunteered for the RAF when he was eighteen in around November 1942. Stanley, you had a rather rough initiation, didn’t you, with your first operation? What happened?
JSW: Yes, that’s quite correct. The first operation of course was unfortunately on Berlin and as we flew over the enemy territory, we were engaged by Fw 190. Information from the gunner, the rear gunner, pilot went to do a corkscrew and at that particular time we were hit by some shells. One came through my windscreen and through my seat, fortunately I wasn’t there at the time, having gone into a dive, of course I left my seat and finished up on the roof of the cockpit. After various corkscrews and assistance from the pilot, we evaded the, eventually evaded the fighters although severely damaged although no damage was done to the [unclear], elevator or anything so we pursued, carried on to the target. No more attacks were made that night. We arrived safely.
JF: What were your feelings when you, here you are, you’re a flight engineer, having just done three months in a flight engineer’s course, this is your first operation, what did you feel about that? As soon as you got over Berlin, there you are, being attacked?
JSW: It was frightening, because we had no idea what happens on an operation and all these things like fairy lights and flares, flashing round about, you wouldn’t realise these were anti-aircraft shells exploding.
JF: You were [unclear] green, they didn’t tell you too much.
JSW: They told us nothing, despite the fact that the pilot had been on a Second Dickey trip, he couldn’t explain much because the trip he was on was fairly quiet. So what we did see over the target was really frightening. Unbelievable you wonder how you can fly through all these flak, the anti-aircraft shells exploding and suchlike, but you can hear the shrapnel hitting the aircraft and bits and pieces where it explodes. What do you do? You carry on and hope for the best.
JF: So, how did you get back to base then?
JSW: Oh, no problem get back to base, fortunately there was no damage done to the aircraft as far as flying was concerned so we did do the ride back, safely, shaken and wondered what, is this what we are in for the future?
JF: So, you really thought, is this every night?
JSW: Yeah, this was expected, this was our initiation, do you get this every night?
JF: Oh dear, how old were you then? You weren’t very old, were you?
JSW: I’d just turned nineteen.
JF: God!
JSW: And my birthday was the first of January, first of November and that flight was somewhere in December, so, I can’t remember, I think it was the 24th, Christmas Eve.
JF: Oh dear! And base then was?
JSW: We were based at Wickenby at that particular time.
JF: Yeah. And of course this is in 626 Squadron.
JSW: This was 626 Squadron.
JF: Yeah.
JSW: Wickenby of course is something like ten miles outside Lincoln.
JF: On your second night, what happened? Stanley is consulting his logbook [laughs]. It’s a long time ago, it’s difficult to remember, isn’t it?
JSW: It is at all. [laughs] The second operation again was Berlin and quite a trip that time, entirely different to the first one even over the target, it was well lit up by searchlights and flares dropped from above, to enable the fighters to operate that night instead of anti-aircraft fire so although we could see the fighters flying about, we didn’t have any attacks and made a fairly safe journey back home. Did ever hope that at the end of that, all the other trips would be the same.
JF: Did you know why the fighters didn’t attack anybody or?
JSW: Oh, we could see the fighters attacking, yes, we could see them, we could see also see aircraft being shot down, we could also see the odd parachute coming out of the aircraft. And you could also see all the aircraft blowing up.
JF: Had you any experience of parachuting?
JSW: Never, never even taught how to parachute out.
JF: So you wouldn’t even know.
JSW: Well, we knew what to do, get out quickly and pull the cord.
JF: [laughs] So, you really no idea what that experience is?
JSW: [unclear] no idea at all what it’s like to parachute.
JF: So, did you very quickly become experienced of operations?
JSW: You soon get into the way of it, but up most in your mind. Is this my time tonight? Well I’ll be going back home tonight, there is always that thought in your mind, when you take off, by saying cheerio, so the thought is always there because at that particular time, roughly five weeks was the expected time on a Squadron. Well, when somebody tells you that the losses are fairly heavy that particular time, you begin to worry, you say, when will it happen?
JF: What about your parents, did they?
JSW: Unfortunately my parents didn’t know I was flying until they read it in the paper about the first operation and then of course then it was extreme worry all the time. Unfortunately I think that was one of the reasons that they both died before I was demobbed.
JF: Just worry.
JSW: Worry, yeah.
JF: So, do you remind the identification on your plane at all? What that was?
JSW: I can remember the number, only because it’s in my logbook.
JF: [laughs] and what is it?
JSW: This was a DV 171 K2. That was on that particular occasion. But of course, because of the damage to some of the aircraft, we never knew [unclear] was going and as being a new crew to the station you took all the old summer past sell-by date, the older ones until you were there for and did a few operations, that was when you were allocated, you know, one of the newer aircraft.
JF: Ah, and did you get one of those?
JSW: Oh yes, we did eventually, oh, yes, yes.
JF: So, how many operations did you do?
JSW: I did, we did thirty.
JF: You did thirty.
JSW: Yeah.
JF: Yeah, that’s good. And have you ever kept in touch with any of the rest of the crew?
JSW: Oh yes, the pilot and the navigator were Scottish and we used to meet once a year when I went back from Scotland we spent a day out, wives and the husbands, we spent just reminiscing.
JF: And what were their names?
JSW: The pilot was Jimmy Stewart
JF: As it would be [laughs]
JSW: And the navigator was Bill Meir. Jimmy Stewart came from Elgin and Bill Meir came from Motherall. I came from Coatbridge so we were all
JF: Yes, you’re not far away from each other.
JSW: Yes, we were not far away from each other. The rear gunner had a farm down in Taunton, Somerset, we did meet him very, very occasionally, kept in touch the mid upper gunner, Lane Smith, until he died on the Isle of Man a few years ago. I can’t say anymore of the rest because the bomb aimer lived in London and I think, emigrated to South Africa. The wireless operator, because we had problems with our original wireless operator, we finished up with spare [unclear] so we didn’t get to know them very well. And two of them were Australians, so they went back to Australia, so really it was the mid upper rear gunner, navigator, pilot and myself that kept in touch.
JF: Now, you were at the sort of, at the front end of the D-Day operations, weren’t you?
JSW: Yes.
JF: Tell us a bit about what you did and where you went.
JSW: Well, at that particular time, D-Day, we were on this special duty squadron, which was formed by number 1 Group and the purpose then was to mark the targets visually on moonlight nights only along the coast to disrupt the transport of troops, equipment etcetera. [unclear] camp, camps where the tanks were all spread out, offices where the senior officers were, so this was our contribution then to disrupt the transport of all the goods about along the coast, which stretched from the North of the Channel, from Calais right down to the Normandy beaches.
JF: They were totally different to bombing over Berlin I take it?
JSW: Oh, that was entirely different because we were only, at that particular time, this special duty squadron that was formed, we did nothing but drop flares. We went in at low level, visually mark the targets and then contacted the main Pathfinder force to mark the targets. We marked them with a certain coloured flares and informed the master bomber then to mark the target that we had already marked.
JF: And were there any really, really major targets that you were able to identify?
JSW: One in particular which is a book written about [unclear] Marne, which we marked properly but unfortunately there was a lack of communication between the master bomber and the rest of the Pathfinder force, there was a mix up there so that was one in particular.
JF: And what was you were marking, what was, tell us a bit about what it was?
JSW: Sorry?
JF: What was it you were marking?
JSW: Well, it could be if we take, let’s get this, Lyon. We marked motor works, was ammunition dumps, Reims ammunition dumps, Coburg gun positions
JF: This was fairly important.
JSW: These, yeah, these were all selected of course. Maintenon ammunition dumps, railway [unclear]
JF: Were you getting any resistance when you [unclear] cause you had to do low flying, did you?
JSW: Resistance, we had ground fire, quite a lot of ground fire and of course severe damage too. On many occasions we suffered. Can you stop that for a bit, I just.
JF: Stanley has some photographs here which is showing the bomb doors and the damage done to the bomb doors and also to the fuselage. How did that happen?
JSW: Well, we were struck by obviously ground fire which exploded the ammunition and blew out all the gunner’s ammunition and set the flares on fire. The aircraft went on fire, we were only at two thousand feet.
JF: How did you feel there cause although you were up in the
JSW: Well, we were smoked by, we were covered in smoke and suchlike and the instruction was, the pilot instructed the wireless operator and the mid upper gunner to, the pilot to make sure, and he said he would climb and enable us to bail out if it were necessary because at two thousand feet we couldn’t, so he got up to eight thousand feet and went into a dive, bomb doors open, the flames were put out by not just for the fire extinguisher by, also by the diving.
JF: So that was another lucky escape.
JSW: That was a lucky escape, so, that was it, we take home, come home.
JF: Yes, cause there was nothing you could do at that point.
JSW: We had already marked the target, that was no more because all our flares had gone and fired at an aircraft and that was it so we come home. But the target was successfully marked. Then we made our way home and had our cup of coffee [laughs]
JF: That was a relief.
JSW: Yes.
JF: Mainly because how did you get coffee [laughs]?
JSW: Ah, well, you see, this is it, when you go through your debriefing, the WAAFs are there with their coffee and the [unclear] is there with the rum, which you distilled with an eye dropper [laughs] and then we always had a debriefing after each raid. No matter where you went, you were always debriefed, very carefully and suchlike. But then we went back here and had your flying meal.
JF: And what did you do between tours, you know? You went on a pub occasionally on your weekends off when you got?
JSW: There was no such thing as weekends off, there were no such things as days off unless the weather was such that there was no flying. There was always something to do if there were ops, if you were free of ops on a particular night you may get the time off which if you are at Wickenby you are going to Lincoln and when we were at [unclear] we were into Grimsby. What do you do when you are going there? You look for the nearest pub you look for and also at some [unclear] where you can get something to eat and enjoy yourself, make the most of it because you never know when you will be back again.
JF: No, there’s no point. And what about comradeship on [unclear]?
JSW: Well, of course, six of us, we had problems with the wireless operator, the first wireless operator after the third operation disappeared from the squadron.
JF: Do you know why that was?
JSW: Yes, he lost his nerve, LMF. We then had a second operator, he lasted one raid, he [unclear] LMF. Then we had spare operators after that, we were very good. John [unclear] was an early man but he was an excellent wireless operator and another one was an Australian, he finished his tour with us, he’d only a few operations to do, he finished his tour with us and we had an Australian, [unclear], who was very good and he finished his operations with us. And then with the third one, and for the life [unclear] I can’t remember his second name was Johnny, he finished his tour with us. And then that was it.
JF: Was it something you said? [laughs]
JSW: [laughs] And, but the rest of us, the six of us stuck together, we went everywhere together. We didn’t know many other people, we were so close, even when we travelled, we travelled north and the train, Jimmy, Bill and I, obviously went to Edinburgh and then separated when we got there. But despite the fact that these two were officers first class, I travelled first class with them [unclear] then CO.
JF: That was quite a privilege.
JSW: Well, I’ll tell you. Yeah, that was it. So, we were very, very close together right until the day we parted. Because you aline each other, you’re dependent when you’re flying you’re so dependent on each other and we trusted each other, that was the most important thing, the trust. Jimmy was a good pilot, but we were all good.
JF: Was there a lot of banter?
JSW: No banter while we were flying,
JF: No.
JSW: It was silence. No, no, that was one thing, it was installed on us, there was no talk, unless it was necessary. Jimmy and I sitting next to each other, we did a lot of signs, if there was any problems we didn’t want to disrupt the [unclear] we knew what was wrong and we could.
JF: As flight engineer, what were your duties there on the plane?
JSW: Everything except fly the plane [laughs]. Well, what would you say, start up, everything that the pilot didn’t do, what the second pilot used to do, you could say anything except fly the plane although I was taught, Jimmy taught me how to fly the plane and did fly it on many occasions but not on operations. That was just as a safeguard if anything happened to him. At least we made people to fly home, not to land but to fly home and bail out. Things like that.
JF: So you never actually had to bail out at all.
JSW: Oh no, we were very fortunate, we always got back, well, yeah, we always got back home eventually.
JF: And did you, were you able to contact your parents then to say, hey, we’re home or?
JSW: Oh no, no, there was no, there was no telephone.
JF: Tell us, you could, telegrams
JSW: Well, first of all, in those days, my parents hadn’t their telephone, not many people had, but how do you contact them and send them a telegram? I didn’t want to do that because if the telegram boy comes to the door, they’re thinking of something else, they could hear on the radio, forty aircraft missing last night, they think, well, you know.
JF: Yeah, how did you feel then when you heard that sort of things because?
JSW: I’m afraid you get used to it and really, if you see the, so and so hasn’t come back from the squadron, you just say, oh dear, bad luck or else. That’s it, I’m afraid that’s the feeling you get. You know, you accept death as a normality. Terrible.
JF: Yeah, and when you are up in the air, over Berlin or somewhere, are you slightly sort of numbed or?
JSW: Oh no, no, no, because you’re concentrating on.
JF: Yeah.
JSW: Everybody’s watching.
JF: Yeah.
JSW: You’re on the lookout for everything, you’re watching for fighters.
JF: You’re detached from it really.
JSW: [unclear]
JF: Yeah.
JSW: You’re so busy, you’re watching for the enemy, you’re also watching your instruments, watching that everything’s alright. You have no time to think of anything about danger here.
JF: So, as the war ended, what were you doing then?
JSW: Oh, when I finished my tour, you’re sent on a, you’re given six months what they called screening but at the time I finished which was back in, I think it was August, September ’44, they had enough aircrew so they decided that those who had finished their tour may have to go to Japan but if necessary, and if necessary they would be trained as such but then we were sent to, most of the air crew was sent up to our receiving centre in Scotland and assessed, tried to give you another job, a ground job, because I was a flight engineer they thought they’d sent me on a mechanics course
JF: [unclear]
JSW: Which I finished up at Cosford. Well, that was eventually, but I didn’t know where I was going, I went home on leave and fortunately they forgot all about me and I was home on leave for two months and I got a telegram telling me to report to Digby, which is outside Lincoln. And for some time I worked in an engineer’s office sending reports into Bomber Command about the aircraft that were fit for flying etcetera etcetera. Then months later they decided I should go on a mechanics course, which I went to Cosford and spent doing my mechanics course I knew more about the aircraft than the engines that worked some of the [unclear] [laughs] and then I was posted to Suffolk, Graveley where there was a Lancaster squadron and I was in the office until I was demobbed.
JF: And what year was that?
JSW: I was demobbed in January ’47.
JF: And did you go back to your old job then or what did you do?
JSW: Oh yes, I returned to, because I was [unclear] my friend as an engineer and I volunteered, when I volunteered, part of the deal was they would take me back and I went back to my old company from the Air Force, that was in 1947, I became a foreman in 1948 and I decided I didn’t want cause I [unclear] my hands and stuff like that and I went on to the management.
JF: Just remind us what this company is.
JSW: It was Murray and Paterson, who were an engineering company. Manufacturing all, again steel works plant equipment.
JF: Yeah. And where was that based?
JSW: That was based in Coatbridge, my hometown. So, and I remained with them until 1952 and then I joined Harvard and Wolfs. And that was the engineering department in Wolfs, which slightly different, ship building. I started there as an inspector and but then in two years I was a foreman and then I became a superintendent in the engineering division. [unclear] three or four years after I joined them. And then I was headhunted to a company in Sheffield in 1961, I joined a company in Sheffield as [unclear] manager and remained with them until I, with the company until I retired in 1988, finishing off as an engineering technical director.
JF: Do you ever go back to the war and what happened and do you talk to people about it?
JSW: Yes, my daughter is connected with the education of children. I’ve been asked to go back and speak about the war time, living in the war and war service, I’ve done on several occasions at one or two of the schools.
JF: And the children, what sort of questions do they ask?
JSW: They are mostly interested in, of course children today you got to explain the difference in aircraft, some of them [unclear] and they think it’s police shells flying in the aircraft and you got to explain it to them, it’s very difficult to get them to understand that. Then you try to tell them about blackout and you explain it to them, it’s just like being in your bedroom and no lights on, and they can’t understand how you can walk about like that. It’s very difficult to get the children to understand. The older ones those I have spoken to those who were on [unclear] and they asked more questions about how does one feel about the killing of people and that type of, they’re more interested in killing of people.
JF: And what do you tell them?
JSW: Well, it’s, all I could say to them was we had to do that because if we hadn’t done what we did do, I wouldn’t be able to stand here speaking to them in a free manner. We would have been very restricted in our [unclear] and they accept that.
JF: Cause it is very difficult for children to understand that, doesn’t it? When I was a youngster nobody talked about the war. We didn’t hear anything about til years later.
JSW: Well that’s quite correct, because I can tell you this that when you research the subject my two daughters were, well the youngest one is twenty five, and the oldest one, the other one was thirty one, didn’t know I had been flying, until they were at that age. I’ve never spoken about it.
JF: I can understand it, my mother never spoke.
JSW: Never, never raised it and the people I worked with didn’t know. In fact, when I retired when I was 64, I said, some of the directors there didn’t even know I’d been in the Air Force. I’d never spoken about it then.
JF: Why didn’t you talk about it?
JSW: Well, it’s difficult to see, you feel
JF: Do you shut it out of your mind or?
JSW: You try to shut it out of your mind because for years afterwards I couldn’t sleep. I had nightmares, the thoughts and the things that happened and the more you think about it, the worse it becomes and then you start thinking about the killing of people, was it worth it? And of course, the feeling from the public after the war because of Churchill, the way he treated Bomber Harris and never referred to the bombing etcetera, despite the fact that he was the one who instructed us what to do, people were anti and that’s why one of the reasons why I never spoke about it because you would just create rouse and suchlike and that’s why at this moment of time I’ve been asked to speak at one or two of the Churchill’s things, whether the women ventureship, I refused to do it because I know some of them are anti bomber, they become involved in any discussion.
JF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I suppose they can’t comprehend what the alternative would have been.
JSW: No, that’s the difficulty. Yeah.
JF: Yeah. How do you feel today? Should youngsters be told about all this thing, I know you [unclear]?
JSW: Yes, I do, I think youngsters should be told all about it but not the blood and guts of the thing, the reasons for it, I, this is something I hate to see on television, they won’t concentrate and show you dead bodies and sorts like, I said I think that’s totally unnecessary. Bu they should realise why we had these things, why we had to fight them,
JF: Would you do it again?
JSW: Yes, I would. Because, when you ask people would you do it again, well, you got to put the situation, if the situation was exactly the same, I would do it again.
JF: Stanley, thank you very much for your thoughts.
JSW: Pleasure.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with James Stanley Wilson
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John Fisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-06-30
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
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AWilsonJS160630, PWilsonJS1601
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Pending review
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00:30:53 audio recording
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
James Stanley Wilson remembers serving as a flight engineer on 626 Squadron during the war. Tells of his baptism of fire on his first operation to Berlin, when his aircraft was targeted by enemy fighters. Mentions marking targets on D-Day. Talks about comradeship among the crew members.
Contributor
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Peter Schulze
Spatial Coverage
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France
Germany
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Suffolk
France--Lyon
France--Reims
Germany--Berlin
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1944
1 Group
626 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
coping mechanism
fear
flight engineer
Fw 190
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
perception of bombing war
RAF Wickenby
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1187/11760/PWatsonJ1501.2.jpg
5e82adc2824b4bab6c98c732b381cc02
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1187/11760/AWatsonJR180202.1.mp3
f81235f23e0bc02c8249edb6f60394e4
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
Watson, John Robert
J R Watson
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. An oral history interview with warrant Officer John 'Jack' Watson DFM (b. 1923 Royal Air Force) his log book and photographs. He flew three turs of operations as a flight engineer with 12 and 156 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by John Watson and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-08-25
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Watson, JR
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: Right. My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 2nd of February 2018 and we’re in Eastbourne talking with John Watson, Jack Watson DFM about his times in the RAF and before and after. So, Jack what are your earliest recollections of life?
JW: It’s quite a strange one really. I had to go to Great Ormond Street when I was about three years old to have my tonsils out. And my father was in bus work all his life. He, he was in the First World War driving an ambulance. The [pause] I forget the name of the unit now but I’ve got a picture of him somewhere with his, standing by his ambulance. And he was at this time driving for a company called Fairways. They used to drive down to Worthing from London daily. And he came to collect me and my mum in his coach and I can remember the cab was just half the, the bonnet was just outside. He sat me on the bonnet, put his arm around me and drove off [laughs] And in the back of the coach was a little pedal car he’d bought for me. And the other recollection, I can remember that quite plainly the other recollection we were living in Acton although I was born in Putney at my grandmother’s house. All the family were born there except my dad but I can remember the R101. I was out in the street in Brouncker Road in Acton.
CB: The airship.
JW: And watched the R101 go over. And I can still marvel at the size of it because it wasn’t all that high and of course it went on to crash in France didn’t it?
CB: It did. Yeah.
JW: And, but then my father was the manager, manager of a coach company running coaches from High Wycombe to Oxford Circus to High Wycombe and Guildford. And when Mandelson’s grandfather Morrison decided he would nationalise because London was full of one man buses he’d nationalise it all. In those days it was a bit cut throat but they did. They put a coach to Guildford in front of my father’s coach. One behind it. And of course customer loyalty only goes so far. They see a coach comes along. And of course they ran him off the road. But they gave my father a job as a chief inspector at Dorking. We moved down there for two years. And after that we went to, he moved, took him to a bigger garage at Guildford which is where he stayed through the war. And then while we was, it was I’d just left school and I heard about the Air Defence of Great Britain Corps which was the forerunner of the ATC and they were at Brooklands Aerodrome. And I told my father that I wanted to join it and there was, I think that he could see the fact that the war was coming on. I think the war had just started actually. Yeah. And he’d seen what went on in the war, he didn’t want his son — we had arguments galore. Eventually he relented and I used to cycle over to Brooklands, about a twelve mile run on a Sunday morning and joined the ATC , the Air Defence of Great Britain Corps. And it was very much, me a working class boy in amongst, there were a lot of well-educated young men there and I must admit I felt a little bit out of place. But anyhow I stuck it out. But then of course they formed the ATC and I was able to transfer to Guildford. And I wanted to join the Air Force badly. I wanted to fly. I mean I’ve, as I said, I wanted to do my bit and save the world but that’s a lot of nonsense. I [laughs] I wanted to fly. And I, again because I was serving an apprenticeship my father, ‘No. You’re not going to join the Air Force. You’re not going to.’ I kept nagging nagging nagging. In the finish he said, ‘If Mr Biddle,’ who was the one of three brothers who owned the printing company where I was apprenticed, ‘If he says you can break your apprenticeship I’ll agree.’ ‘Fine.’ So immediately I went and saw Mr Biddle. I said, ‘Look, my father has given me permission to break my apprenticeship but I need your authority as well.’ Well, of course I forgot that dad being in charge of transport when his buses were late he used to phone around to the different companies so that the men didn’t lose money and they’d known each for some time. Of course it came that neither of them would give me permission [laughs] So the following Saturday at the top of Guildford High Street was an RAF Recruiting Office. I walked in there and joined up and then went back and said to dad, ‘I’ve joined the Air Force.’ I think if they’d have realised it they could have but I don’t think they, I presented them with a fait accompli. Anyhow, I then got about a week later to go to Abingdon for an interview. And I walked into this office and there was a whole range of high ranking Air Force officers sitting around and in front of them was a huge table with a map on it. They asked me very, and funnily enough they said, ‘Why do you want to? Why do you want to join in the Air Force?’ I said, ‘Well, firstly I want to fly and the other thing is I want to get my own back because in Guildford although it wasn’t badly bombed there was one night a bomber went over. A German bomber and just, I think there was a searchlight at Stag Hill by the Cathedral. He got caught in that and he just dropped his bombs. They came down and one of them hit the house next door. In a terrace. One fell opposite. And I was sleeping in that room downstairs but it was the curtains had been pulled across. It was rather like a bit of a bay and the curtains were back a bit but the bomb going off of course blew all the glass and shattered it and shredded the curtains which saved me. So anyhow I, they started asking questions and then one of them said, ‘Can you find Turkey on that map?’ Well, you know it’s a big place Turkey, isn’t it? And there’s a piece of Turkey below the Dardanelles. That’s the only bit I could find. I suppose it was nerves really. And anyhow, he said, ‘Any more?’ I said, ‘No.’ Anyhow, they said, ‘We think you’ll be better off as ground crew.’ So I went out and I thought, right. Ground crew. Wireless operator. I can transfer straight to air crew. So I went in and I sat in front of this corporal and he asked me some questions. He said, ‘Do you know the Morse Code?’ I said, ‘Oh yeah.’ But the rotten so and so bent down and picked up a Morse Code key and said, ‘Right. Take this down.’ [laughs] And of course the only thing I knew about Morse Code was how to spell it. So he said, ‘I think we’ll put you in as a flight mechanic.’ So which is what I went in to and I was called up in September or August. August of ’42. Went to Blackpool. Oh, Penarth first and although you considered yourself fit they gave us your kit you never had the strength to lift it. You dragged it back to your billet, got changed, put your kit into a little suitcase with your name and address on. Sent it off home. And then we started doing the square bashing in Blackpool. Well, the first morning we all lined up and we started a run to go to from Blackpool north to Bispham. Five mile run. I met them half way back. And I thought this is ridiculous. So the next morning as we used to start off there were some steps up to some public toilets. So the next morning I’d got a penny in my hand. And they all ran and I ran up because I’d sussed this out. You stood on the lavatory seat and looked through the little window and you could see them coming back. As they came back I came down joined then on the back and then I was fit enough to do all the exercises that they were going through. And this, I got away with this morning after morning and, but I just could not see the point. I’ve never been a runner or a sportsman of any kind and I certainly wasn’t at that stage. But the little Irishman sergeant we had in charge of our squad had got his stripe, his third stripe on the strength of the way he’d turned out his previous squad. So he had something to prove and he was a bit of a martinet. But when it was raining, I don’t know whether you know Blackpool.
CB: Yeah.
JW: But there’s the three promenades. He used to take us on to one of them and he’d lecture us on women. Quite an interesting character. But he didn’t ask us to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. When we went on the, so it was Stanley Park in Blackpool on the assault courses we were all in PT kit. He was in full uniform and he went with us and he ran the whole way there and back. I forget his name now but he was a real character. We went from there. When we left there we were put on a train. We had to go to Manchester and change. We weren’t allowed to take the kit bag and all the back pack off and we were, but when we changed there we then got on another train which took us to Wendover because we were going to Halton. And when they marched us from Wendover up to the camp with a kit bag on the back it was nothing. We were that, it really got us fit. And while we were there the, there was a chap there he’d been a drummer in a band and he said, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ve found a set of drums,’ he said ‘We can form a drum corps to march the people down to the workshops and back.’ So he said, ‘You’re excused other duties,’ like Home Guard type duties. So that was it. It was going to be a get out of that. We wouldn’t have to go out at night. So we joined up and we had a practice room in one of the cook houses. And of course you gave a load of seventeen eighteen year olds a set of drums it, it was half an hour before he could make himself heard [laughs] And anyhow, he did. He did make us into a reasonable drum, we used to play these drum tunes. March them down to the workshops. March them back at lunchtime. Of course the advantage was you were at the lead so you were the first one in the cookhouse for your meal. And we used to go to Battle of Britain weeks where they used to go around the towns with an RAF, an RAF band. We weren’t allowed to play with the band. He used to the drumming with the band but we used to do, when they had a break we’d do our bit for the raising money for Spitfires. And while I was on the course for the fitter, for the air training mechanics course suddenly a notice went up on the board they were looking for flight engineers because obviously they were trying to take people off the squadron. They didn’t want to take too many because they were depleting their ground staff but equally the ground crews were watching what was coming back and thought well I don’t want any of that. So they were, except they would lower the standards like they did it didn’t affect me in that way and I applied. Went to Euston. And the night before we went to Euston a crowd of us went out and we went to see Lou Preager at the Hammersmith Palais and we got knocking back beers and stuff. The next morning we go for a young, there was a young flight lieutenant and I stripped off, I got on the scales he said, ‘Get back on them scales.’ I was only nine stone. Then we come to the dreaded holding the mercury up and after, after the night before I was [pause] and suddenly I was halfway through. I suddenly, and he looked around whether by accident or not I don’t know so I was able to take another breath and hold it up again and ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘You’ve passed.’ And I had to go back on the fitter’s course and passed all that before going down to St Athan for the flight engineer’s course and passed that with, with I think about seventy five percent. It was quite a, I was quite pleased with that result. And then we went up to Lindholme. Oh the first thing was the, when we finished our course for a week they sent us up to Ringway. Ringway. Where they were building the Lancs. To show us what was going on. And it was incredible. They took us all to Pointon. We all got off these coaches and we were met by all these girls. We all paired off and I met a fair headed one. I’ll never forget her name. Yvonne. She taught me more in that week about the facts of life and I thought well this is better than sliced bread [laughs] And so yeah the obvious happened. And I should have kept in touch. Her father was a manager of a printing company in Manchester. But I don’t know whether it was we didn’t think it was a proposition for somebody going into aircrew to get involved in a serious relationship. But anyhow we left there and we were sent back to St Athan. Then we, from there a couple of days later we went up to Lindholme and got all our flying kit and everything and then because I was going down to Faldingworth which was south there was only me and another chap going south. The rest, all the other people. So we had to go to Faldingworth with all the kit and then make our way from there back which was a nightmare. But anyhow we had a week’s leave and got back to Faldingworth and all shoved in a big hangar because my crew had been a Wellington crew. They hadn’t been on ops at all but of course they needed a mid-upper gunner and a flight engineer. I walked in and I was just wandering aimlessly about. I hadn’t got a clue what I was looking for and this wireless operator come up and he said to me, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘We’re looking for a flight engineer,’ He said, ‘What’s your name?’ I said ‘John.’ ‘Right, Jack.’ And I became Jack. All the Air Force life and all my working life. And it’s only the family that call me John. And anyhow I was introduced to the crew. And it was, it was quite a strange thing really because we all took to each other straight away. The pilot was, he was a month, he was only nineteen anyway. I mean, we was all only nineteen. He was a month younger than me. And the first thing, we got to Faldingworth was two days later he said to me, ‘We’re going up on fighter affil, on familiarisation tomorrow. Only me and you.’ So we picked up the screened pilot and walked out to the aircraft [pause] and I looked and I said, ‘I’m trained on Lancasters. This is a Halifax.’ I said, ‘Not only don’t I know anything about this it’s the first time I’ve seen one.’ I said, ‘Where’s the screened, the screened engineer?’ ‘Oh, we haven’t got one. You’ll be alright. You’ll be ok. Just the three of us.’ Well, we took off and we were flying at about four thousand feet and he said, he called me up, ‘Engineer, I want you to change the fuel tanks,’ he said, ‘Listen carefully.’ I said, ‘Well, first of all where are they? The controls.’ ‘Under one of the rest beds in the fuselage.’ Because the Lancaster and the Halifax are two totally different aircraft. So he said, ‘Under the rest bed,’ he said, ‘There’s two levers each side,’ he said, ‘Now, listen carefully. Turn off the lever on number one on the port side. Turn off the number one on the starboard side. Turn on the number two on the port side. Turn on the number two on the starboard side.’ Well, something didn’t sound right there. But anyhow I thought well I’d better follow what he says. I don’t know how the system works. So I turned off the number one. By the time I’d got across to the other side the aircraft did a nose dive. I carried on and set the tanks and then it picked it up. Well, of course he told me he should have turned off number one turned on number two. He told me the wrong way. He apologised very profusely. I said, I said, ‘Apology would have been a bit late wouldn’t it if we’d been two thousand feet lower?’ And he couldn’t, he couldn’t have been more contrite. And as I say I cut the fuel but it soon picked up. Anyhow, from then on I never ever had a screened engineer go with me. I was always on, but when we landed I went to stores and got the manual for the Halifax. And I spent the whole, I never even go for any meal. I spent all that afternoon, all night going through that manual. The next morning when we went out to the Halifax again I knew what I wanted to know about it. But it was a stupid thing he did. And I should have had a screened engineer with me. Especially being a, a —
CB: A complete rookie.
JW: Complete. Yeah. I mean to, I can’t imagine what I was thinking to even agree to go. Because in the flight of the Lancaster you sit alongside the pilot. In a Halifax you sit with your back to the pilot. So the whole thing was completely different. But anyhow we got away with it. My guardian angel was sitting on my shoulder. But we, we went from there to, we got a posting to 12 Squadron at Wickenby. And it’s only about five miles so it was a crew bus to go, and as we drove in two Lancs were on the side of the perimeter track. One screwed into the back of the other. As they were taxiing around apparently one stopped, one didn’t. But luckily nobody got hurt from it. And then they took us to our billet. And I can see it now. Walked in the billet and it was as the crew had left. The beds were unmade. Sheets just drawn. And I looked over to the bed that I’d picked and it was the pilot’s name. Sergeant Twitching. And years later a chap, you’ve heard of Currie, the pilot who wrote one of the books, he phoned me up because I’d phoned him up about something else previous and he said, ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘I’ve been asked to write something about strange happenings to people who were flying.’ And I told him how I’d joined and I said to him, I said the, I never forgot the name of that man, Sergeant Twitching. He said, ‘What an unfortunate name for a bomber boy.’ And when I went years after the war, I’m digressing a bit I went to Lincoln Cathedral and saw the volume and I asked them if they could open that book at this man’s name. I said I felt as though I needed to make some sort of tribute to him. And they were all killed. I think it was either Leipzig or Stuttgart. One of those. And anyhow we started off. Went on our first op and when we were, you were convinced that going from what the instructor’s told you that you were never going to make your first op. And it was at Brunswick on the 17th of January ’44. And we took off and as we took off nothing happened. We got our, we were going past I think Hanover and I looked down and the whole of the cloud, it was all cloud but it was all lit up with the searchlights shining through and I called up and I said, ‘Bill there’s a Lanc down on the right hand, on the starboard side there,’ I said, ‘He’s about three thousand feet below us.’ ‘Oh, that’s good,’ He said, ‘They’ll be watching him and they won’t see us.’ And I thought, cor what a man. What a pilot. You know, we’re alright here. We went to Brunswick. Got back without any problems at all. And we did, it was the next thing was on the second trip was to Berlin. An eight and a half hour trip. We called up at Wickenby on the way back when we was coming for to permission to land and they said yeah ok. We were in the circuit and there was low cloud. As we broke cloud, it’s unbelievable to think they talk about near misses, Another Lanc alongside of us on our port side broke cloud at the same time with about six feet between the wing tips. And our pilot, we went that way, he went that way. So, you know. Anyhow, we carried on and landed. And Bill called out, and he said, oh. ‘Clear of runway.’ And there was a few minutes silence and then a voice said, ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ And we had landed at Ludford Magna.
CB: Oh right.
JW: Which was an adjoining. In that sort of taking that evasive action thinking we were joining the circuit again we weren’t. Anyhow, they kept us for about four hours then before the let us fly back to, to Wickenby. And the next thing was that we did a trip to Stuttgart. And we had the most fantastic mid-upper gunner and he didn’t have a brain he had a computer. We were going in to, on the bombing run and he suddenly said , ‘Dive port, Go.’ Bill just went. And as we did I watched tracer go over the top of the aircraft. And we got, we got the, it dipped, it broke away and didn’t make another attack. We got back ok and our wireless operator said, ‘We owe our lives to Appy and Bill.’ And we, because we were so close a crew we didn’t have engineer and pilot it was Bill and Appy and Ollie. I was Watty. That’s how. But it worked for us because we all knew each other’s, as soon as we spoke we knew who it was talking. And we got back and the next thing we had was a raid, we were walking down to briefing and I was on my own and there was a spattering of [pause] this was in February, there was a spattering of snow on the ground. I was walking down to the briefing room on my own funnily enough. I don’t know why but I just, going through some trees and I suddenly stopped in my tracks. And it was the most strange feeling. I knew that if we didn’t leave Wickenby we wouldn’t survive. It was the most strange feeling. We went in and again the target was Stuttgart. And we got there and back without any problems. But two mornings later we were called into the flight commanders office and he’d got us all around standing in a row in front of him. I can see him now. He said, ‘You’ve got two options,’ he said, ‘You’re going to either volunteer for the Pathfinder force or we’ll send you.’ [laughs] Now, having experienced that strange feeling two nights previously that was the answer for me. The two navigators weren’t, the bomb aimer and the navigator weren’t all that keen but they decided to go along with it and we didn’t fly any more ops from there. We were sent down to Warboys for the Pathfinder Training Unit. And it was going to be straight, the bomb aimer was going to become the second navigator. The flight engineer was going to be the bomb aimer and also I had to learn some navigation. So we did all these necessary courses. About nine days I think we were there. Nine, ten days something like that. And we went in to see the navigation officer and he said to me, ‘Ask me some questions.’ I had to learn to take an astro shot with a sextant. I did that. And he said to me, ‘What’s the difference between a planet and a star?’ As, yeah a planet and a star. And I thought I don’t know. All I could think, going through my mind was, “Twinkle twinkle little star,” and I thought what an idiot. And I said to him, and I thought this is going to get [pause] I said, ‘A star twinkles.’ He said, ‘That’s correct. A planet is a steady light.’ And I thought it was [laughs] and I didn’t let him know that it was the nursery rhyme that got me out of trouble but it did. Anyhow, when was, we’d done all the courses we had to do the practice bombing with the triangle and the fuel and and you had to get to within about a yard of that. We did. But of course at two thousand feet having got it and hit it we then, this is, we was doing a bit of low level flying we came across a field and there was a load of sheep. Well they nearly beat us. As the aircraft suddenly came, all these sheep suddenly [unclear] from shock. But one of the instructions when, when they said after we’d finished when I was sitting chatting to one of them and he said what squadron are you going to?’ I said, ‘156.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘The rebel squadron.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘They’ll fly ‘til the cows come home but,’ he said, ‘Lectures or anything like that they can never get them in to them.’ He said, ‘As soon as there’s a stand down they’re off. And it was like that. It was like that. It was. They were all really, years later a friend of mine, I was sitting chatting to him he was, he was the same as the rear gunner. He flew with about ten different crews. One of the bravest men I knew as a rear gunner and I said to him, ‘How did you manage to do all that with all those different — ?’ He said, ‘All the crews on 156 were good.’ And they were. And the number of them who got killed because they didn’t finish when they could have done. Just went on like we did. You know. And but anyhow [pause] he said, ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘They can’t seem to do anything [unclear],’ he said, ‘But they’ll fly night and day,’ he said, ‘All week.’ But anyhow at that point they, because they’d transferred 156 from Warboys to Upwood, and Upwood which was to be a, in to a Warboys and we got to Warboys just as they changed. But we did quite a few. We never did any more Berlin trips. The first one we did from Upwood was to Essen and the next one, our thirteenth trip and it was, it was only a little sometime later that I realised this, we were flying in M-Mother. Thirteenth. That was the alphabet. Our thirteenth trip. It was Nuremberg [pause] and we noticed we were giving off contrails so we decided to lose height until we found a height where it wasn’t affecting us. But a lot of crews just carried on. I mean it’s not surprising that so many of them got caught. Some probably didn’t have a chance to, there was another crew of course Tony Hiscock was the skipper and he was, he was talking to me. He said. ‘Yeah, we had those contrails. We just, when the rear gunner told me we was leaving them,’ he said, ‘We just changed height until we realised we were stopping.’ But we never saw anything on that trip other than other than other aircraft going down which our gunners were reporting to us. But it was — oh, hello love. This is my daughter Suzanne.
CB: We’ll stop there for a mo.
[recording paused]
CB: Getting out of them.
JW: Yeah. And we, we had some [pause] a couple of trips where we were, on one trip we were coned.
CB: With searchlights.
JW: Searchlights. And I was actually on the bombing run. I was, ‘Left. Left. Steady.’ And suddenly the lights caught us. But Bill never hesitated. We were at eighteen thousand feet and he just went down in a dive and of course I shot up into the front turret. I was fixed. I couldn’t move with the gravity. He pulled out at six thousand feet and I come crashing down over the bombsight again. And ten minutes but he got us out of us. He got us out of the, out of the, those searchlights. And we then finished up,. We bombed. We went around again and bombed at twelve thousand feet. But it was another one we did was to Lens, and this was the night when the flying bombs were coming over. The V-1s. We could see all these lights coming below us and hadn’t a clue what they were but it was not ‘til we got back the next day but it was, it was in France. But going down we were going down at, going through at seven thousand feet. We came on the target so quick.
[recording paused]
CB: Right.
JW: As we were going I was giving him the instructions. Suddenly —
CB: As the bomb aimer at that time.
JW: As the bomb aimer.
CB: Yeah.
JW: Suddenly realised that we got on the target before we realised it and I said to him, ‘Dummy run, Bill. Go around again.’ But it was, it was years later before I realised what had happened. Came back. Coming on to the target and I could see all these black shapes going past me in the corner of my eye. Anyhow, that time I got the target on the marker. The target markers. Dropped the bombs and when I looked I thought to myself [unclear] the operational record books, one of the sheets I’ve got and when I looked I realised he didn’t go around again he did a u-turn and we were flying into the bomber stream. And I thought strange. How did we do that? Then I looked. In that turn he lost two thousand feet. We bombed from five thousand feet. Everybody else was coming over at seven but how we flew through all that lot. All the bombs going. I don’t know. But [pause] I’m just trying to find it. As I say it was the number of times. Three times at least on the bomb aiming run I called dummy run.
CB: We’ll just stop again. Hang on.
[recording paused]
CB: You bombed at five thousand feet.
JW: Yeah.
CB: And everybody else did it at seven.
JW: Yeah.
CB: Which was what you were briefed to do.
JW: Yeah.
CB: So this is part of your lucky escape —
JW: It is. Yeah.
CB: Series, isn’t it? Extraordinary.
JW: But, as I say on at least three occasions on the German trips I called dummy run, and not once did I hear one murmur of dissent from any of the crew. You read reports from people, ‘Oh, get rid of it,’ you know. But none of our crew did that. We had complete faith and trust in each other. But, yeah on at least three occasions we did a, we did a dummy run to go around. On one occasion when we were at Wickenby and I think that this is when we came to be on Pathfinders, because Hamish Mahaddie used to go around picking crews and he must have looked at this particular order and it was this. On debriefing it said we were six minutes early so we put the flaps down and did dog legs to lose six minutes. And this was on Stuttgart. I mean [laughs] but it was, we were told to get there and our pilot he always said there was a lot of talk about some of the crews were throwing their bombs in and either banking and then so that they didn’t actually fly over the target. And I know that when that happened Bill said, ‘What the hell’s the point of going all that way without going over and doing it properly?’ But he was, he was a fantastic pilot. He was a fantastic. He was the only man I have ever known apart from people like Alex [pause] Grimshaw? What was his name? The test pilot at Ringway. He did —
CB: Oh, Henshaw.
JW: Henshaw.
CB: Yeah.
JW: Well, I think he did it. He did a rate four turn on a —
CB: On a Lancaster.
JW: On a Lancaster.
CB: Crikey.
JW: And he did it to come up, we were on fighter affiliation and we were being attacked by a Spitfire but instead of doing the normal corkscrew he did this rate four. We came up behind the Spitfire. And unbelievably —
CB: In the Lancaster.
JW: Unbelievably the Spitfire pilot complained and he called, our CO called Bill in and he said, ‘You’ve got to stick to the rules.’ And he had, I think he had a grin on his face as he was saying it. Bill said if that had been a Messerschmitt we could have shot it down. Yeah. But he, and it was the most I can see it now. You’re standing there and you are horizontal but you’re not falling. Yeah. But he was, he was, we loved him. And when, when I looked to see that I think that report as I say going around to Hamish Mahaddie I think that he read that and thought well we need crews who are going to be there on time and this is what, this is what we’ve been looking for.
CB: Yeah. Extraordinary experiences. Yes.
JW: The, but then of course when we got to, I did one spare bod trip. I got caught. I think it was the flight commander. Wing Commander Scott. He was a New Zealander. His engineer went sick and two SPs came down and saw me. Engineer. Right. I had to fly with him. It was to Stuttgart again. But on the run in did the bomb aiming, came out of the target and I looked at the inspections bit and the cookie had held up.
CB: Oh.
JW: So I said to him, ‘Skip, go around again. We’ve got the cookie.’ Well, our own pilot would have been natural enough just to go round but what he called me. He was questioning my sanity as well apart from insulting my mother and father but you didn’t take any notice of that. So I said, ‘I’ll go around and try and release it manually.’ And there used to be a little flap above the cookie that you could pull back. A little slide and release the bolt that held it. And I’d got a, made a little sort of little light there. I was just, I suddenly saw the bolt start to shudder and pulled my hand back just as this thing shot across. He pulled the toggle on the instrument panel and dropped the carrier, the lot. Didn’t look to see where we were. He just opened the bomb doors. And he started weaving as we took off and he was still weaving until we landed. Oh, he was complete nerves. And —
Other 1: Gosh.
JW: Yeah. Wing Commander Scott. He was posted shortly after that. But I made sure I didn’t do any more of those. There was one occasion when they, knew they, what they were looking for a flight engineer. So I went up in the loft and [laughs] ‘Flight Sergeant Watson here?’ ‘No. He’s gone out. He’s gone into Peterborough.’ ‘Oh alright.’ And I was up in the loft like this. I lifted it up just to listen [laughs] because we had arranged we weren’t flying. I was going out. But I wasn’t going to do another, and I’d already done halfway through my third tour so I was well away to saying no. But the other —
CB: Would you class him as a dangerous pilot then?
JW: Who?
CB: Because of his nerves.
JW: Well, I didn’t. I didn’t have any confidence in him. I wasn’t, I wasn’t frightened at all but I thought to myself, no. I didn’t like flying with a strange crew anyway. None of us did. But that’s what made me admire my friend in Southampton. He was, the number of times he went with strange crews. But we’d done that lot and I thought well half way through a third tour because we finished a second tour, we was all in the Red Lion in Ramsey, and we were all celebrating and Bill came in and it was, there were never enough seats and we were all sitting around on the floor with pints of beer. And he said, Bill said, ‘How about carrying on?’ ‘Yes.’ So the next morning he said, ‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘We’re going to carry on.’ ‘Oh alright.’ But we wouldn’t have let him flown with anybody else anyway. So that was the mid-upper gunner, the wireless operator, myself and Bill. As I say the two navs packed up and we had a range of rear gunners after he’d done forty one trips. And we finished the third tour and he pulled the same stroke again. So we was in a [laughs] we was on, the last trip was the master bomber trip to [pause] Munster. And it was a day like this. Really beautiful sunshine and we were just lying round and we got, this is a twenty second trip with these two Canadian navigators and there was an anti-aircraft gun. Obviously you could tell who the master bomber gunner was because brilliant daylight. Not a cloud in the sky. And the shell went off alongside of us. And I said to Bill [unclear] we went down five hundred feet and they put a shell in the same place. So when he did that we went back up. And they put one where we were. And this went on. It was [laughs] it was ridiculous really. But anyhow we got away with it but when, when we were sort of circling around doing, Bill was directing the raid one of the navigators came out from behind the curtain. He took one look. We were surrounded by shell bursts. And he said, ‘Jeez, let’s get out of here.’ And Bill said, it was the only time I ever heard him raise his voice, ‘Get back inside.’ And he scuttled back in behind the curtain. I mean, navigators never came out and if you came out like that and you see. Because it is a bit of a shock seeing those shell bursts. The first daylight we did got to the target and you could have walked on the shell bursts there was that many. And I thought we can never fly through that. But we did. Got away with it.
CB: How many times did you actually get hit by flak?
JW: About four times I think. Five times. But none of us ever got a scratch.
CB: What sort of damage did the aircraft —
JW: Holes in the bomb, in the bomb bay doors and some in the fuselage, but not enough to [pause] There was one that we did get hit and I think it took a bit out of the engine. It was on the raid Trossy St Maximin when Bazalgette got his VC. It was on that raid. It was such a heavily defended target. It was a bomb bay, V-1 bomb dump and as we went in we dropped. I think we just dropped the bombs. There was suddenly this hell of a bang. A tremendous noise and we just went into a dive and I thought we’d been hit but anyhow, I looked. We had a clear blister on the nose of our Lancs. You could put you head in and I could look through and I could see that the, both engines, all four engines were still in sync so there was obviously nothing wrong with them. So I called up and said, ‘Engines are ok. I’ll check Bill.’ I went up and he was ok as it turned out but he’d just, when that and they knew they’d got the range he just went into a dive but that took a piece out the side of one of the engines. But the engines still worked.
Other 1: Extraordinary.
JW: We didn’t even know there was anything wrong with it. But that was, going back to the Nuremberg raid when we landed we landed at Marham and on the way back as we left the target I noticed one of the oil instruments wasn’t working. Now, that could mean you’ve lost power. Anyhow, the engine, I didn’t say anything because I kept a check on it and noticed that there was no, the engine was not giving any reports of any failures so it was obviously the instrument that was at fault. So when we landed the next morning when we were going to take off again and the number of Lancs at Marham was unbelievable. It was just everywhere and it was a grass drome as well, the [pause] I said to Bill, ‘There’s no point in reporting this fault because they’ll never get anybody to —’ I said, ‘I’ll go out and check the oil to make sure there’s no lost oil.’ Because sitting on the engine that’s been going for eight hours I was covered in oil when I got back. Sitting on the engine dipping the tank. And it was, there was no loss of oil so I said to Bill, ‘No. There’s no point. We can take, we’ll never get away if we report that.’ And we took off. Got back and reported it when we got back. But the other thing was we had to take up on the flight from Upwood, we were going up on a night flying test and we were asked to take up a senior RAF [pause] I forget what rank he was now. Quite a high rank. Anyhow, suddenly one the port inners started. The starboard inner started playing up and I couldn’t control the pitch of the propellers so I said to Bill, ‘We need to feather it.’ He said, ‘Ok.’ When we landed he said, ‘What’s wrong?’ Now, I can’t tell you the name now but it was one of three things it could have been inside the nose, the hub of the propeller and there was one main one and I said, and one thing that they taught you when you went on Pathfinders, you’ve got to think quick and you’ve got to act. You can’t dither. You make a decision. Right or wrong you make a decision. And that way. And I said to Bill, oh it’s the so and so. So when we landed chiefy come around. The sergeant in charge of the ground crew and he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Why is the engine feathered, skip?’ Bill said, well because this [laughs] he named the part that was broken. And the chiefy looked at him in amazement and said, ‘With respect, sir,’ he said, ‘How do you know that?’ And I could have wanted the ground to open up. ‘Because my engineer told me.’ But luckily I was right. I got it right. And it was at [pause] we had to abort one. We got they gave us the trip because we got within fifty miles of the target. We had boost surge. We just could not cure it. And when we got back I said, ‘I think there’s something wrong with the camshaft.’ Ha ha ha — that was the laugh I got from the engineering officer. But they couldn’t find it either. So they sent the engine back to Derby and they found a cracked valve which was obviously after the cam shaft.
CB: We’ll stop there for a mo so you can have a bit of your coffee.
JW: Yeah.
[recording paused]
CB: On the Munster trip. Yeah.
JW: Yeah. We got —
CB: Yeah.
JW: Back from there. Landed. And we were walking back to debriefing and one of the rear gunners saw another crew came running up. He said, A signal’s come through to say that Cleland’s crew are to be taken off operations immediately and not allowed to fly on any more ops.’ We never knew why. Because we didn’t have one abortive trip. We’d always bombed the target. Everything. And yet the only thing I could think was that we’d been flying for fifteen months without any break.
CB: That’s extraordinary.
JW: And I think they thought that we were [pause] and I’ve often thought that they saved our lives. The next trip could have been.
Other 1: Easily.
JW: The one that we would have — [pause]
CB: How did you feel about that?
JW: Well, we were choked because we knew they were going to split the crew up. But we thought we might be able to carry on as a crew for a little while but within a week they posted us all off. They sent me as an instructor to a Wellington OTU. A flight engineer. They don’t fly flight engineers on Wellingtons. And that was really a case of I was there for a little while. Then they decided to post me to a Maintenance Unit. 56 MU. Except it should have been 58 MU. 58 MU was at Coventry. About twenty miles away. 56 MU was at Inverness. So I went all the way up to Inverness and I had an aircrew sergeant with me. He’d never done any ops because the war had finished as he finished training. He was going with me and he lived in Edinburgh and so he said, ‘Right. We can go to Edinburgh.’ We had three days in Edinburgh where he lived. Went off up to Inverness and we got out from the station and I can see it now. As we went through Perth and that area. Beautiful scenery because by this, it was an overnight trip. Anyhow, we found, couldn’t find what we were looking for. We couldn’t find the unit at all. We suddenly spotted an airman and I said to him, called him over and I said, ‘Tell me where — ’ ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘It’s in a garage down here.’ Which is what it was. A garage. And he said, and he said to me, ‘Watch the station warrant officer,’ he said, ‘He’s a bit of a martinet. He’ll find something for you to do.’ Anyway, we had to report to him so he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘We’re closing down.’ He said, ‘I don’t know why they sent you here.’ Somebody had misread [laughs] Anyhow, he said, well he said, ‘I’ll put you in charge of the police for a week.’ Well, they had about a half dozen coppers there. RAF police. And I walked in. I said to them, ‘What are you all doing here?’ Well, they said ‘There’s nothing to do.’ So I said, ‘Right, you three have three days off. You three cover the whole lot. Three days later you go on three days leave.’ They thought I was the best thing since sliced bread [laughs] But we got back from there and as I say I got to this other MU and it was at [pause] on the mainline.
CB: Near Coventry was it?
JW: No. This was, it started with an N. Not Northampton. Anyhow, I called up. Phoned up the unit and said, ‘Is there any transport to, out to unit?’ She said, ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘On the station.’ She said, ‘On the up or down line?’ She said, ‘Well come out,’ she wouldn’t have known that which part.’ She said, ‘Look to your left. Can you see a black building about four hundred yards?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘That’s us.’ And it was where they made the lawnmowers. They made, well it wasn’t making them then but as we used to have to go in private billets as we were going down to them their lot was coming away and it was just a track. But all on bikes of course. But yeah that was quite a, and what I had to do there it was the Queen Mary’s there. The long low loaders. And I had to work out the next week how many were going to be off and with what fault. And I thought bloody silly. How the hell can anybody work that out? But it quite surprising. It worked. The system they’d got. So that so many would be off with flat tyres. So many would be off with this. And I had all these sheets that I had to fill in with all the, one for each of the loader. A lot of them were a way out in different places on locations. But then from there they sent me to Skellingthorpe and there it was, it was ridiculous. It was as though they’d forgotten you. In fact, you were just milling around. I did take over the, they couldn’t find anybody to take the sergeant’s mess over and I knew that you can’t run a pub which was what it was and lose money. And I discovered that they were getting five pounds to go to the NAAFI at Waddington to stock up from the [pause] So I said to the, saw the officer in charge of the mess and I said to him, ‘Can I have twenty pounds?’ ‘Twenty pound. What do you want twenty pound for?’ I said, ‘Well, people want to buy toothpaste.’ I said, ‘There’s none of that in there or domestic things.’ So got in the van, went over to Waddington and I spent this money and I thought the ration was Players cigarettes and I thought no. They’re going to be Churchills. So I bought a load of Churchill fags. When I got back I said to them, I said, ‘Sorry lads. The ration’s Churchill fags but I have managed to buy some Players. But I had to pay over the odds for them.’ [laughs] I made a fortune. I came home. After a week I came home. I had managed to pay somebody to look after the mess bar for me, and I came home with a suitcase with a little attache̕ case with two bottles of whisky and two bottles of rum in it and, oh yeah I made quite a bit out of that. In fact one night one of the ground staff, he’d been in the Air Force years and years. Before the war. He came in. He’d been in to Lincoln and he was, well he’d had quite a skinful. And he coolly asked for a pint and he held it up. He said, ‘That’s off. That’s cloudy.’ So I said, ‘Oh, ok sir. I’ll get you another one out of a different barrel.’ ‘Ah that’s better.’ So when the, the officer in charge of the mess came in the next morning I said to him, it was the, he was a warrant officer ground staff and I said to him, ‘Warrant officer,’ so and so, ‘He’s complained and said that barrel’s off.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘We can’t have that, he said. We’ll write it off.’ But it was half full. I think there was about nine gallons in it. And the next night I knew there was nothing wrong with it. The same warrant officer came in. He was sober this time. Poured him a pint from the same one. Now, that’s lovely,’ he said, ‘That’s great.’ So I had nine gallons and I had three days of my demob leave on that barrel with some of the mates I’d met. Oh dear. Yes. It was, it was quite a, but because of the way it went I decided to come home on leave. I was milling around. I went and saw my governor and I said to him, ‘Can I come back to work?’ So, ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘You can come back.’ So I went back to work. And got paid for it. Not a lot but it was because it was only apprentice’s wage and, but about a fortnight one of my mates phoned up and he said, ‘Come back quick he said. They’re sending everybody home.’ So I went back, got demobbed to come home. But I had a couple of, a couple of near squeaks with the CO there. But the mess was just a hut and the bar was a cabinet which stood about that high. About that wide. And 12 o’clock at night I’m in there with a couple of other sergeants and we got bass sitting on our knees and the orderly officer walked in. ‘I said, ‘Do you want a drink, sir.’ Silly thing to say wasn’t it? I was under open arrest and in front of the CO the next morning. But I went round and managed to say, ‘You saw the bar was locked, the cupboard was all locked up, didn’t you?’ They said, ‘Yeah.’ Well, because it was all locked up I got away with it. But another time I went home on I used to go on the pay parade on Thursday, special pay parade and go home. And I used to catch the quarter past ten from Lincoln because pay parade was about, no it was a bit later than that. The pay parade was at 9 o’clock. I had time to get paid because it was only a short pay parade, walk into Lincoln and get the train down to Kings Cross and then across to Waterloo and home. Now, I did this this particular week and then on this particular Thursday I’d just got in and a telegram arrived at the door. “Report back to base camp immediately.” I thought that’s funny. So I phoned up one of my mates there and I said, ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Oh, you’re in dead trouble. You were the witnessing officer at pay parade.’ He said, ‘Half the camp stayed for food that they weren’t prepared for. The other half went home and left the pay, the witnessing the officer with the money with all that money he didn’t know what to do with.’ Anyhow, I got back. I went round and I reported, saw the RTO at Guildford station. Reported to him and told him that I was allowed to go back and I’d, I said, ‘I’ve only just got home.’ This was the Friday of course. The day after. And got —
[doorbell and knocking]
[recording paused]
CB: We’re talking about the pay parade. The fact you’d gone home.
JW: Yeah. I got back. I got back on Friday night. Reported to the orderly officer and was put under open arrest. The next morning we went in to see the CO and he said, ‘You went home on Thursday, Watson.’ And he was a wing commander ground staff. Been in the Air Force about forty years. I said, ‘No sir,’ I said, ‘I went home on Friday morning.’ ‘Why did you go on the pay parade on Thursday then?’ I said, ‘Well, I knew that I wanted to get away on Friday, sir.’ He said, ‘But didn’t you read the DROs?’ Well, I knew that it was a crime not to read them but looking through the King’s Rules and Regulations the night before I discovered that it’s not a crime if you read them and forget them. So I said, ‘I did read them, sir.’ I said, ‘And it went right out of my mind.’ I said, ‘I just forgot it completely.’ And of course he went through and he said, ‘Watson, I know you went home on Thursday.’ ‘No. Sir.’ I said, ‘I left here and,’ I told him the times. ‘I caught the train down to — ’ and because I was in a billet which was just on the edge of camp, had my own room there nobody could see me leave. And I said, ‘I caught that train just after ten. I got to Guildford,’ I said, ‘And the telegram arrived as I got home,’ I said, ‘I turned straight around and came back,’ I said. ‘In fact, I reported to the — ’ Anyhow, we went on and he said, asked me another. In the finish he said, ‘Right. Watson, you stay here. Everybody else go out.’ And he said to me, ‘Watson, I know you’re lying.’ He said, ‘I know you went home on Thursday but,’ he said, ‘I can’t prove it.’ He said, ‘But you’re not going to get away with it.’ He said, ‘You’re going to do three weeks of orderly officer.’ He said, ‘If you go out of camp I will know.’ And I knew he would do as well. I said, ‘Well, I’m sorry sir but,’ I said, ‘You’re wrong. I did go home on Friday.’ [laughs] But it was complete bluff. If he’d have said to me, ‘Swear on the bible,’ I don’t know what I would have done. But, yeah. I did discover that, you know. You can read. If you can’t, if you don’t read them it’s a crime. But read —
Other 1: And forget.
JW: And forget. You can’t, you know the loss of memory, it’s [laughs] but, and I got away with it. But he never held it against me because he gave me quite a good report when I left. He signed my release book. The next —
CB: But you did have to do the orderly officer.
JW: I did, yeah. Religiously did and the funny, it was quite funny really because I went in the mess one night and they’d just had a delivery come in. I said, ‘You got any Guinness?’ They said, ‘Yeah. We got a crate in today.’ ‘Right,’ I said, ‘I’ll buy the lot.’ ‘You can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Yes I can.’ And of course as a warrant officer and he’s a sergeant he’s not going to argue is he? I bought the lot. And then a chap came in. He played football for one of the Division One teams. Blackburn Rovers was it? And he sat down. I said to him, ‘Do you want a Guinness?’ ‘Oh yes please.’ So we sat there and but he was as wide a boys as me. He had got hold of you know the Lindholme dinghies that they used to drop the crew in? They had, they had the big main dinghy and then either side you had four flotation units. Two that side. They used to drop it so that it would spread and drift down to the crews that were ditched. He’d got hold of one of these and we sold it off. We even had the dinghy. I don’t know where he got it from but he got the dinghy. But our nerve failed us when we tried to get rid of that because we didn’t realise that all the surplus was going to be sold off after the war otherwise we’d have sold that and all. But —
CB: Who were the people who wanted to buy these things?
JW: All people in the camp.
CB: Oh right.
JW: Yeah. Other sergeants and other aircrew. And there I finished up there with twenty three German prisoners of war under my charge.
CB: On the airfield.
JW: Yeah. And they were quite clever. They used to make light bulbs and put ships and, and cliffs and lights inside the bulb. I don’t know how they did it. Built it up with the cliffs and the lighthouses in there and a little ship. Fantastic. And one of them made it, I bought it off him. It was a crocodile and in front was a little bird. And as you pulled it along the crocodile opens up and came like that and as it did the bird shot forward. I should have had enough sense to realise it was a money maker. I bought it for one of my friend’s little kiddies.
Other 1: Dear.
CB: What was their role? What did they do as prisoners?
JW: Cleaning and doing odd jobs you know around the camp. The American. The, their sergeant in charge of them he’d been, spent time in America and he spoke, spoke like an American. And I shall never forget he said to me we were talking one day and he was quite an educated chap and he must have been about a year or so older than me and he said, ‘I can’t understand the swear words,’ He said, ‘You talk about using the F word. F table,’ he said, ‘You know. It’s ridiculous.’ And I said to him, ‘Yeah. I agree with you.’ You know. He was always saying about language. The way it’s used. But, but he was, he was quite educated and he spoke without any German accent at all, and he was a [pause] I know that one of them one night somebody had taken some stuff out of the mess. And I just warned them. I said, ‘I don’t know which one of you it is but you’re in dead trouble if it happens again.’ It didn’t happen again. They did, they learned their lesson. But no it’s, as I say when it came to getting demobbed I was so disillusioned with the discipline and everything else that, and I knew I’d got an apprenticeship when we were on the, at Faldingworth taxiing round. Because aircraft were going off the end Faldingworth was a mud bath. If an aircraft went off the edge it would go down in to the mud to its axles and it would take days to get it out. So what they did they were fining crews a half a crown each which was half a day’s pay. So as we were taxiing around on the perimeter track I’m watching the wheel. I suddenly looked up and we were coming up against, it was, it turned out to be the engineering officer. He’d parked on the perimeter track and gone into one of the huts. And of course by then I said to Bill, but you can’t stop a thirty ton aircraft and the outside prop and it was one of those Hillman Tilts with the framework and the canvas and the outside was going over. It went right through all the canvas and ripped it and I thought I hope no one is in there. There wasn’t fortunately but Bill was on, he was pulled up for it. And I said to him, I said, ‘Tell them I was the one that was at fault,’ I said, ‘You couldn’t see from your side anyway and he shouldn’t have been parked there.’ ‘No.’ he said, ‘I’m the skipper. It’s my fault.’ And he got a mild reprimand. But that was the sort of bloke he was, you know. And as I say but it was [pause] we would have, well we’d have done anything for him really. We certainly wouldn’t have let him fly with anybody else if it had meant we had to carry on flying. Which is the reason we carried on. And it was years that we couldn’t find him after the war. Years later we tried to find him. And then my Appy, the mid-upper gunner phoned me up one day and he said, ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘I’ve been told that Bill lives at a place called Hilmarton near Calne in Wiltshire. So I said, ‘Well, the next time I go down to see my sister I’ll go down that way. Well, Hilmarton is, it’s, it’s a funny little place. You go through and there’s just a little turning to the church. I didn’t realise we go down that turning. There’s a school and then houses, part of the village. I went into the pub and I said, ‘Do you know anybody called Cleland?’ I said, ‘He was, he was with BOAC.’ ‘No.’ Turns out, Bill said, ‘I don’t know how they didn’t know that,’ he said, because Frances, his daughter used to go and help out in the bar.’ Anyhow, I went into the little garage on the main road and they didn’t know. But they said, ‘I’ll tell you what, he said. In the little bungalow next door but one there’s a chap there. He knows everybody in the village,’ he said, ‘He can probably tell you.’ Knocked on his door. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘He lives just around the back here. The other side of the church.’ So we drove around and I knocked on the door and Bill’s wife answered and I said, ‘Does Bill Cleland live here?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Is he in?’ She said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘I said will you tell him his flight engineer’s here.’ She went in. He was, he was going, supposed to be going out to a meeting. But he said we’ll go and have some lunch. He was so pleased. And of course from then on we kept in touch and, but he’d gone on to, he’d been seconded. In fact we were both demobbed the same day. I met up at Uxbridge. And he’d been seconded to BOAC. He’d actually, he got the King’s, yeah the Kings Commendation while he was with, or the Queen I can’t remember which one it was. He got it for his efforts in flying. Because I know he said to me, he said, ‘You just sit there. Press the button. It takes you to that point. Press another button it takes you to the next point. ‘He said. Oh that’s when he told me he met the wing commander that I flew with as he was. He met him in Canada. He said, ‘We were both going through,’ He said, ‘I know that he recognised me. ‘He said he was a, he wasn’t a nice bloke at all. When they were on the squadron when you looked to see in 156 there was a little number of people who were doing all the master bomber trips. Who had been the master bombers and the, we eventually got on to them but, and Bill went in one day and he said they were all pilots because you had a room each of pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, engineers, wireless operators, air gunners and he said to this wing commander, he said ‘Is it fair that Cocky’s doing all the master bombing?’ He said, ‘Can somebody else take a turn?’ And I think he thought Bill was saying he ought to do it. He wasn’t. He was saying look, you know, some of the others can do it because it’s amazing that the same few were doing them and a lot of them were on dodgy mostly French trips. And anyhow he said, ‘Everybody out.’ He said, ‘Bill, not you.’ He said, ‘I’ll decide who does the master bombers, and their deputies not you.’ and Bill, ‘I wasn’t suggesting that.’ ‘Shut up. Get out.’ He said, ‘I know he recognised me but,’ he said, ‘He completely ignored me.’ And he didn’t do any master bombers himself because it wasn’t a very nice job to do. You know. You’re putting yourself, sticking your head over the parapet. But if you were briefed to do it. We did a couple of deputies and I know one of them we was doing it was on Frankfurt, we was the deputy master bomber. Daylight raid. And our mid-upper gunner suddenly spotted an aircraft in trouble above us. He called up to our skipper and we went up alongside of him. It used to be, it turned out to be one of our own. And they’d been hit by flak in the bomb bay and the engineer’s leg was hanging off and [unclear] hole in the bottom of the fuselage. The mid-upper gunner got out of his turret and stepped straight through the hole. They found his parachute, handed it in when they landed back so obviously, he was, he was obviously killed. The mid-upper err the engineer had been a medical orderly in the previous so he was able to show them to put morphine into him to stop the pain. He got the CGM for that. And after the war another one of the, of our Association lives in Southampton his father was killed on 156 but he collided with another aircraft. And he went, this pilot was in a home alongside them and they came in, knew him. They went to see him and he mentioned that and he said, ‘Yeah. I remember that when he came up alongside of us.’ He mentioned the fact that our, we went up alongside of him. We were the master, deputy master bombers.
CB: Could you describe what, how the master bomber, what his role is and how it works please?
JW: He, he was very often either he or the deputy would do the marking. They’d decide that first. Usually the master bomber would do the, he had a special like we did. You had an eight man crew if you were a deputy or a master. He would then go and mark the target having originally, you would have supporters dropping flares to illuminate the target providing of course down to the weather. And then that would light up, the master bomber would then go in low and find out the target, mark the target and then he’d circle around and he’d watch the way the bombs were falling. And if they were falling short he’d tell them to overshoot the markers and he’d call in the deputy visual centrerers which were following through the raid to keep those markers backed up. And we had backers up and visual centrerers, and he’d call them up and tell them where to drop the, if his markers were a bit off and then he’d direct the raid and tell main force. He called main force up, overshoot to the markers by two seconds to stop the creep back because you always got creep back. People always dropped their bombs short. As one, as Bill used to say, ‘If you’re going over for God’s sake do it properly.’ And you were there the whole of the raid.
[doorbell and knocking]
CB: Just stopping a mo.
[recording paused]
JW: He could, the bomb aimers were pretty good at it and the bombsight we had was really good. And he would then call up [pause] We had backers up, visual centrerers, backers up that would drop flares too because obviously they would gradually go out.
Other 1: Yes.
JW: You know, so he’d call up these people. Their bomb aimers were also good and they would be then bombing on, dropping their flares on the original flares. But if they were slightly off the master bomber would then tell main force. Sometimes they’d put a dummy one up about ten miles away but he’d tell them to ignore that and then he would call them up and say, ‘Overshoot by two seconds,’ to stop as I said the creep back. You always got the creep back. The newer crews used to be at the back of the [unclear] through the raid.
CB: Of the stream. The back of the stream.
JW: Always dropped their bombs short and you could see. You could see that by the way they were falling. So he would tell and they would adjust that and keep the raid going. When we went to the one at Munster, when we got there they was bombing and Bill really called it up and really coated the life out of them. Called them all sorts of things. Concentrate on where the bombers were going and brought the raid back to make it a successful raid.
CB: Why was there bombing creep?
JW: Probably inexperience of the bomb aimers. Nervousness. Perhaps when they were coming along they suddenly, I think it was a natural reaction that they dropped. They got the bombsight coming up to the target and if they think that it’s there but you had to get that, it was a [pause] The gradual was like a red cross on plastic about four inches by two inches that looked.
CB: On the bomb sight.
JW: On the bomb sight as you looked through that and that arrow had to go straight the way through and if it was, this was why sometimes you get thrown off course by slipstream or different things and if, if that happened I used to call dummy run. And then go around the target and come back again. As I say I think that happened about three times and this was on German raids but it was so concentrated and you were oblivious of everything that was going.
Other 1: Yes.
JW: It was quite incredible really. You know. But if you’re not concentrating that much it’s easy enough to press the bomb tit.
CB: So as the bomb aimer you effectively are in control in the last how long? Two minutes or —
JW: Yeah.
CB: Something like that.
JW: Yeah.
CB: And the master bomber you said goes down to make his mark.
JW: Sometimes they would go down. Sometimes they would bomb from the same height.
CB: Right. But then to control the raid.
JW: They’d fly around.
CB: They’d fly above it, would they?
JW: Yeah.
CB: Fly over above everybody else.
JW: They’d fly, they’re coming back at the same height, and they’re usually on the edge of the target and circling around.
CB: Right.
JW: And I mean it was a pretty dangerous job because there was quite a lot of master bombers got shot down because obviously they could pick them up on radar. They’ve got one aircraft going around and around and around.
Other 1: Yes.
CB: Now the master bomber marked in red did he?
JW: It depended. Mainly in red.
CB: And the follow ups would mark in green.
JW: Green. Yeah.
CB: Any other colours?
JW: Yeah. The reds and greens. Sometimes red and greens. Reds. But I don’t think there was any other colours.
CB: So how far back would the green be for doing the marking because this was for the re-energising of the marking wasn’t it?
JW: Well, the master bomber would call that up when he see the, if he sees his flares beginning to fade.
CB: Yeah.
JW: He’d call up and some of them were briefed to go in anyway.
CB: Yeah.
JW: But he would, he would control it from that.
CB: Now, when you did call dummy run what was the actual procedure for getting out and then rejoining the bomber stream?
JW: You just went. We just carried on. Bill, Bill would pull the, close the bomb bay doors. Go on, circle around and come back and join the bomber stream and then do another run on the —
CB: Would it be a standard procedure? You’d always turn left or always turn right or what would it be?
JW: I don’t know. I think we always turn left.
CB: Right. And you’d go out how far because the bomber stream’s quite wide?
JW: I couldn’t tell you that. I don’t know. That would be up to the pilot.
CB: I’m thinking on seconds. So, a minute or — to get out of the stream.
JW: Well, it’s difficult to measure or think about the time. We’d just do it until we get back in.
CB: Yeah.
JW: I don’t think it took that long.
CB: Because you can’t see the other aircraft.
JW: Oh no. occasionally you would see them if you come up. On one occasion I I looked out. I was down in the nose of the aircraft looking and I suddenly see this face in front of me. And I was looking at the rear gunner of another Lancaster. I called Bill up and we were so close to him it was, I could see him. See his face.
CB: What was his reaction?
JW: I don’t know.
CB: He didn’t wave?
JW: No [laughs]
CB: Hello mum.
JW: I think he was clenching his buttocks [laughs]
CB: Can we just go back to, because you’re a flight engineer but you’re effectively changed to do bombing.
JW: Yes.
CB: Because you’re trained as supplementary.
JW: Yeah.
CB: To a bomber, bomb aimer. Your lying prone and you’ve got your head straight down effectively with the bomb sight and the the —
JW: You’re oblivious to everything else.
CB: Yes. And you’ve got the blister that you’re lying in effectively. You’ve got your head in.
JW: Yeah. No. You only put that in afterwards.
CB: Right. So what is, what’s the pattern and what are you seeing and how do you react to what you see because you’re looking at the inferno?
JW: Yeah. You’re looking at, you’re looking at the marker, the indicators, target indicators.
CB: Right.
JW: And you’re getting your cross going through that, those markers and you’re concentrating on that, ‘Left. Left. Steady. Steady. Right. Steady,’ until you get that cross on there and then you press the button. Bombs gone.
CB: So, on your run in you’ve got two minutes effectively when you’re as it were in charge. The navigator is giving you the drift is he? How do you, how do you —
JW: It’s purely and simply, you either, the way the aircraft’s flying. The pilot is just keeping it if he knows you’re steady he’s going to keep that line.
CB: He knows what the drift is.
JW: Yeah.
CB: So —
JW: But you’re telling him that.
CB: Right.
JW: But when we went to, we went and did a raid on Nantes in France we did five. Five dummy runs.
CB: Did you really?
JW: Yeah. Because it was so difficult to see with cloud and everything else. And I think that’s in there.
CB: Is this daylight? Or —
JW: Night flight. Night.
CB: Night. Yeah.
JW: It would be.
CB: What I was trying to get at was there’s the, what you might call the professional aspect of this, of lining up and then calling, ‘Bombs gone.’
JW: Yeah.
CB: But what’s your feeling as you look down into this. Are you busy concentrating on the markers —
JW: You’re oblivious of everything else. I used to be concentrating so much that I didn’t even realise what was going on outside.
CB: So in practical terms there’s a huge barrage of flak bursting all around. Above, below and the side. You’re oblivious to that are you?
JW: Yeah. Yeah. If you’re doing your job properly. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
JW: Yes. And this is my, perhaps the feedback if suddenly a shell bursts near somebody and get rid of the bombs but —
CB: Because the navigators are actually sitting in a cubicle with a blanket hanging down so they can’t see anything.
JW: No.
CB: That’s what you meant earlier isn’t it?
JW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So it’s a bit of a shock to them to see what’s happening around them.
JW: Our other two navigators never came out. And it was the last trip that we were fated to do although we didn’t know it at the time when this, this Canadian navigator came out. I mean it’s a bit of a shock if you’ve not seen anything and then you see the shell bursts around you and know that one of those too close is curtains. I suppose yeah it did shake you.
CB: What was the main difference between flying daylight and flying in the night?
JW: Well, flying at night you couldn’t see other aircraft normally. Daylight you can see what’s going on. You can see the shell bursts. You can see fighters coming in. I know that my friend in, on his, it was on his last raid at Hamburg and he watched one of our aircraft go down. Funnily enough his brother lives in, when he’d seen that picture in the paper he got in touch with the paper and said, ‘My brother was on 156.’
CB: Really?
JW: ‘Can you give me that man’s name?’
CB: Yeah.
JW: They said no. They gave me his number. But he watched him go down and they were then attacked by a German jet fighter. And he said he watched it come in. He’d never seen anything move so quick in all his life. He was, the jet fighter opened up with cannons, It shot bits of the tailplane off and never touched Rupert.
CB: That’s the tail gunner.
JW: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Extraordinary. So you had a huge variety of raids that you went on. The normal standard was thirty ops and then when you get on to Pathfinders what is the, what is a tour?
JW: When you went on Pathfinders, because of the extended training that you’d had you had to do two tours straight off.
CB: Right.
JW: And because on main force it was thirty trips then you had six months rest and sometimes they called you back sometimes they didn’t. You did another twenty. But on Pathfinders you had to do forty five. But like all of it they were the goalposts. You see I did fifty [pause] fifty two I think to do my two tours because they suddenly brought in a points system. You got five points for a German trip, three points for a French trip and then you had to do [pause] you had to get a hundred and fifty points to finish your first tour. So if it was all French trips it would be more than if it was all French err all German trips. But the, yeah it was, I know there was joke going around about it. If you get shot down over France is it only three fifths dead? Which is, some wag came out with that.
CB: In your case you got the DFM. When did you get that?
JW: It was first promulgated I think in November ’44. I got it in February. 1st of February when I was first noticed it, first notified.
CB: Yeah. ’45. And what about the rest of the crew? What did they get?
JW: The pilot got the DSO and the DFC.
CB: The DSO. At the same time?
JW: No. Different times. DSO, DFC. The two navigators both got the DFC. [pause] The mid-upper gunner got the DFM and the Belgian Croix de Guerre.
CB: Yeah.
JW: I got the DFM and the Croix de Guerre err the Legion of Honour.
CB: Did you get the Croix de Guerre as well?
JW: No.
CB: Oh, right.
JW: And, and of course the Pathfinder award. We all got the Pathfinder award.
CB: Yes. When did that come out?
JW: After you had, when we finished on the squadron.
CB: Right. And as well as getting the scroll what did you get as far as the medal part? There is, there is a, you get a separate badge for Pathfinder.
JW: Yeah. You got that. When you’d done six marker trips you got the temporary award of the Pathfinder badge. You were allowed to wear it on your, you weren’t allowed to wear it on your battledress.
CB: No.
JW: Because if you got shot down and they could see even the holes where [pause] that was your lot.
CB: Yeah.
JW: So, but that’s, as I say that’s the Pathfinder badge. That’s, after the war people were wearing it and some of the jumped up people in the offices said in the higher ranks, ‘You can’t wear that. You can’t wear that anymore.’ But Bennett was a lot cleverer than they thought because when he promulgated it it was promulgated as an award. Not as a badge. It’s an actual award. So they couldn’t stop them wearing it.
CB: This is Air Marshall Bennett.
JW: Yeah.
CB: The CO CNC Pathfinders.
JW: Yeah.
CB: Did you meet him many times?
JW: I never met him. You met him if you went, if you applied for a commission. Then you met him. But I wasn’t interested in a commission. A, it meant a drop in pay for six months and I didn’t fancy that [laughs]
CB: And then you changed messes.
JW: Yeah.
CB: You had to change messes.
JW: Yeah.
CB: We’ve talked a lot about the action but what about in the time off? What did you do then? Did you, did you go out as a crew?
JW: With the —
CB: Socially.
JW: The mid-upper gunner, the wireless operator, myself from the time we met we used to go. We were never out of each other’s company. We even arranged our leave passes. They lived in Newcastle. I lived in Guildford. But we managed to get our leave passes that worked when you, when you looked at it it went from Burradon which was just outside Newcastle to Guildford. So we’d get, when we had leave every six weeks we’d go to Newcastle for three days. We’d get out at Newcastle and say, ‘Oh, we’re going on to Burradon later.’ So you kept your ticket. When we got to, going back there after three days we’d go back to Guildford. We’d get down to Kings Cross and of course you’ve got, you’ve got to go over to Waterloo to get to Guildford. But we used to buy a ticket from Waterloo. It was only about a shilling. Something like that. And so we used to be able to go three days in one place. Three days in the other and —
CB: Overnight travel.
JW: Yeah [laughs] it was, but we used to, all used to go and so our leave was together. Going out we’d be out as a crew. We’d usually meet girls as well. So the only time we were apart is when you were in one corner they were in another [laughs] But we used to go out. We used to go out and drink. You never used, sometimes you did get a bit tipsy. You never went out to get drunk which is what seems to be the norm today. But you went out, you got drunk but because of what you were drinking. You didn’t sit there swilling it to get as much down you as you could.
CB: No. But was the social aspect of life on a squadron partly an antidote to the experiences of raids?
JW: Well, it’s, it’s like I say you used to go out every night you could. We were getting around about seven guineas a week I think at that time which was a lot of money. Beer at a penny err a shilling a pint you know. And —
Other 1: Chris.
CB: Right. We’ll turn off a mo.
[recording paused]
CB: Seven guineas a week.
JW: Yeah. That’s what I was getting then.
CB: And beer was a shilling a pint.
JW: A shilling a pint. Yeah. But it was, some days you’d have do in the mess. Perhaps a dance or something like that but mainly we used to go out if we could. I know when I spoke about the discipline on 156, they decided, they had a group captain Airey there who was a station commander and he’d lost three court martials in a row. So that meant he had to be posted but they put in charge a man for discip. A disciplinarian. A man called Menaul. Menaul. And group captain Airey, he was an elderly man but he used to go out on ops occasionally and, but Menaul, I don’t think he ever did. One thing he did do I found out afterwards was when they were bringing prisoners of war back he’d do those trips all right. But on one occasion there was the mid-upper, Bert, Appy, Bert and myself and the rear gunner of another squadron, another crew. A chap called Ron Smith and we going up to Ramsey. To the camp. To the aerodrome. The first entrance you got to was the officer’s entrance what went past the station commanders house. And then you went on another couple of hundred yards to come to the main gate. But this particular night we’d been down, we weren’t drunk we’d been and had a couple of pints each. We decided to go in through the officer’s entrance and we were quite a way along it and suddenly a car pulled up behind us and a voice yelled out, ‘Airmen.’ We knew at once who it was so we scarpered. I went over a fence. The other, I don’t know where the other two went. And then the car, he was looking around. He couldn’t see anybody because it was dark. And the car drove off and then I heard a voice say, ‘Where the bloody hell has he gone to?’ And of course I was on the other side of the fence and walked up and frightened the life out of them. But then we carried on walking and we had to go past the airmen’s billets because this was a peacetime ‘drome so it was all brick buildings. But every time a car came in the main gate we were in open ground. So we had to go down on the flat. We knew what was going to happen. The next morning he had all the squadron into this room and bearing in mind his, his war record was I think one tour as a fighter pilot towards the end of the war and he insulted, he called us all the names under the sun. Now, at this time we’d got something like sixty trips in between each. Appy was fuming. But everybody on the unit knew who the people were except him. Even the adjutant knew. And two of Appy’s mates are sitting on either side of him holding him down. And if we’d have owned up God knows what he would have done. But he couldn’t do the whole squadron so, but do you know what? After the war that man, somebody was writing a book about [pause] I’ve not been able to find a copy of it. I had a copy but I leant it to somebody and I never had it back. It was, they were talking about the airfields in Lincolnshire and round in Cambridgeshire and he had, they’d, they’d interviewed him and he said in there that on that occasion we had gone up to his front door, frightened his wife, urinated against his front door. I wanted the book back because I was going to take the author something about, for libel. Slander. Whatever it is. But anyhow I never got the book back so I could never see it. But they’d actually quoted him verbatim in there. Saying that we’d frightened the wife, his wife and daughter and urinated against his front door. Now, what idiot could do that sort of thing? But that’s in the book. So if he had known who we were, this was written after the war our names would have been there.
CB: Extraordinary.
JW: But funnily enough a friend of mine who was on the squadron with me he lived in Brighton and he lived near Hamish Mahaddie and he went to see Hamish and he was talking about Menaul to Hamish. ‘Don’t talk to me about that — ’ so and so, he said. So he was not only liked, disliked by the rank and file he was utterly disliked by his peers.
CB: There are occasions when very, when senior officers, group captains did fly.
JW: Yeah.
CB: And that’s how they got them in the prison camps.
JW: Yeah.
CB: In some cases. So under what circumstances would they do it, and what would they do?
JW: It was up to them. They decided what they’d do, where they’d go and what they —
CB: And would they be the pilot, the captain or would they just be there for the ride?
JW: If they took over the crew they were the captain. But if they went as the supernumery the pilot is always the captain.
CB: Yes.
JW: Even if he’s a sergeant and he’s got flight lieutenants in his crew he is still the captain.
CB: Yeah. So these people would be flying as the pilot normally would they? The group captains.
JW: No. Not necessarily. They’d go along, you know.
CB: Just to get the experience.
JW: Yeah. Just to get to [pause] but I know that Group Captain Airey went on at least two or three. They weren’t supposed to so it was done surreptitiously.
CB: Might have been a good defence in the court martial.
JW: Yeah [laughs]
CB: What would you say was your most memorable recollection of being in the RAF in the war?
JW: Just the odd occasion when, to get away with as many trips as we did you had to fly a lot of trips where there was nothing happening. There was no, you know, you got away with it. You dropped your bombs you got back, and [pause] But of the probably eight or nine instances when we were attacked by fighters or got hit by flak [unclear] [pause] Probably the time when I looked up and see that bloody aircraft above us with his bomb doors open.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. You talked about the Nuremberg raid a lot of which was in bright moonlight. What did you see in terms of aircraft exploding?
JW: Well, we were, it was our second trip on the Pathfinder squadron so we were acting as supporters, which meant we were right at the front of the — with the master bomber.
CB: Right.
JW: And we were following three Mosquitoes that were doing a spoof raid up to Hamburg I think. Somewhere up there. And we were right behind them so we think we got that through before they realised where the raid was going to go. So what was happening was behind us. I mean the gunners were calling out and saying that they could see aircraft going down but where we were we, we thought it was dangerous because I think the last two hundred miles was a straight leg, straight down to Nuremberg and there were searchlights nearly all the way down there, but so, from our point of view being at the front of the wave of bombers meant that the fighters only took off when they were behind us before they realised where we were going.
CB: Yeah.
JW: And when we got down to come back, lower down in Germany by that time they were down on the floor refuelling. So probably that’s the reason why we got through again.
CB: What was your understanding of the term scarecrow?
JW: Well, they said they were sending up these huge it was like a big dustbin if you like coming up, and they were explaining but in actual fact what they never told us was though they must have known about it was upward firing, the up firing guns and we didn’t know about them. they weren’t, we weren’t told about it.
CB: The Schrage Musik.
JW: Yeah. It was [pause] I know on one occasion on, it was, I think it was on the Nuremberg raid, our mid-upper gunner told me this there was a, the wireless operator had Fishpond. What was called Fishpond. It was an offshoot of H2S and it would pick up fighters.
CB: Trailing behind you.
JW: But the fighter, the fighter disappeared when it got within a hundred and fifty feet, and the wireless operator and the mid-upper gunner were, he was telling him where it was. That he could see it. And then suddenly it disappeared and then Appy said that as we were flying along another Lanc alongside of us, and it used to go over about that sort of speed as you were going over. As it got underneath us it suddenly blew up. And what we think was that that fighter was beneath us firing at us and this other Lanc came in underneath and got blown up instead of us. That’s what, that’s what our mid-upper was thinking, you know. That’s what he thought. He said, it was the fact it disappeared from the Fishpond meant it was within a closer range to come off where it wasn’t showing up and he said this other Lanc, it was, it used to be ok, you used to see it going very slowly underneath you but as it did, as it went underneath suddenly it went up.
CB: Did you feel the blast?
JW: No. No. I don’t know what sort of, you know, I didn’t see the aircraft going under us.
CB: No.
JW: But him being the mid-upper gunner he was, he was up at the top. He could see quite a lot.
CB: You talked about the wing commander who flew in a weave. To what extent were you aware of LMF?
JW: I don’t know of anybody who was accused of it. All I know is that any aircrew never condemned anybody as LMF. It was only some little jumped up merchant in an office sitting behind a desk who’d never even seen a gun let along had one fired who decided this. But I can understand at the top stating it, because they said that if it was easy enough to just pack up the threat of LMF was [pause] but the way they treated them when they were. I mean people had done two or three trips. But not everybody’s the same, and some people just couldn’t. You know, it’s quite, it was quite terrifying really at times. Obviously. I don’t know what we’d have done if it, we were lucky enough not to get hit but, but even so you were quite aware of the fact that you could easily get killed if, you know. You put it out of your mind but you knew really deep down that that was, that was an option. You’ll have to excuse me.
CB: Yeah. We’ll stop for a mo.
[recording paused]
JW: Well —
CB: Now, you you also relied on the ground crew and you talked about the chiefy earlier. What was the relationship between the aircrew and the groundcrew?
JW: Well, that was, well funnily enough I don’t know any of their names. because we had [pages turning]
CB: The ground crew would often look after two aircraft.
JW: That is in, that picture is in quite a few places. And that’s the ground crew. I tried to find out the names of them and I couldn’t. I hoped somebody would be able to find them by publishing it but they couldn’t.
CB: And how did the, how did you get on or did you not talk to them much?
JW: Oh you, we didn’t socialise with them. As I said we didn’t socialise with anybody except our own crew.
CB: Quite.
JW: And it was only the three of us.
CB: Who did it. Yes. But the officers would tend to socialise separately from the airmen wouldn’t they?
JW: Yeah.
CB: Anyway.
JW: Anyhow, there’s [pause] When we were getting dressed we’d get our flying kit on.
CB: Yeah.
JW: We used to sing [pause] it was, I forget the artist who sing it. “My mother done told me when I was in knee pants.” [laughs] We used to sing that as we were getting ready.
CB: And then when you got to the aircraft what rituals were there there? Like watering the rear wheel.
JW: No. We never did that. I don’t think there were any. We used to, I know that with all the checks that we used to have to make, about seventy checks but all the ones outside I never used to let the ground crew see me doing them because I always thought they would think I wasn’t trusting them. So I used to walk round and you could, you could check them yourself without which let them see that you trusted them to do their checks as well. The ones inside the aircraft of course were ok.
Other 1: Was there a very close relationship between the ground crew and the flying crew?
JW: Not as close as you would think.
Other 1: Because there’s a huge amount of reliance or —
JW: Oh yeah. You trusted them completely.
Other 1: You’d have to.
JW: Yeah. I’ll tell you what though. One thing that was happening when we, we were going. A we were taking, got around, suddenly Bill said, ‘We’ve got no brake pressure.’ So he said, ‘Do we need it in the air?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well we can carry on then.’ I said, ‘Yeah’ You don’t use your brakes in the air do you? So the only thing we had to be careful of was taxiing around behind other aircraft. And we took off and when was it that [pause] it meant that when we got back they wouldn’t let us land there. They sent us over to Woodbridge. But on another occasion we were on the short runway and this is when I, you heard say, Bill flew the aircraft by feel as well. On the short runway and there was something wrong with the speed.
CB: Airspeed indicator. Yeah.
JW: Because it was showing a completely different reading on the, on the instrument to what was and he could feel that according to the reading you could take but he didn’t, he flew it without and by the feel and when he felt it could take off on the short runway and I knew that the airspeed cover had been taken off because I’d checked that myself.
CB: Yeah.
JW: And I said to him, ‘There might be an insect in there or something.’ Anyhow, I said, ‘Right. We’ll go through all the checks. Every check that we normally do inside.’ And one of them just in front of the door at the back was it was about that size. A rubber thing with a hole in and there used to be plugs put in that. So you had to check to make sure the plugs were out and I knew that if one was out they’d both be out. The only way I could check it was to sit with the door open and reach along the side of the fuselage and I could just reach it. I knew I could. So what I did I put my parachute on because I realised I could get sucked out. I had Bert hanging on my legs in the fuselage. Opened the door. And when I told Ed Straw who used to fly the Lanc that we’ve got now he said, ‘You bloody idiot,’ he said, ‘You could have been killed. If you’d have got sucked out,’ he said, ‘The tailplane would have hit you.’ I said, ‘I know. That’s why I — ’ Anyhow, I did try that and went on and did all the rest but I couldn’t see the other side. I said to Bill. I don’t know what I was going to do. He didn’t say anything so I thought good. But yeah it was quite funny really.
CB: And the result was?
JW: It was, it was, it was as I knew it would be. The plug wasn’t in there. But this was at ten thousand feet over Guildford.
CB: Oh right [laughs]
JW: And I thought if I fall out I could go home.
CB: Go home. Yeah. Ideal. Yeah. Did people fly with lucky charms?
JW: Yeah. I think they did. I used to have a white scarf I used to carry with me. A silk scarf. Because you couldn’t wear your tie because if you came down in the water it could shrink and choke you. But —
Other 1: Yes.
CB: And did you have any weapon on you?
JW: They issued us just after D-Day. They issued us all with revolvers.
CB: 38s.
JW: Yeah. The aircrew NCOs could only wear, they had to carry them in camp. But officers had to carry them at all times because they thought that the Germans might drop parachutists on to the aerodromes
CB: Oh.
JW: And, but the other thing that I had was a six inch bowie knife. I had them both tucked in me, in me flying boots because I always thought, it never occurred to me if we got shot down that I’d get killed. Didn’t occur to me that. And I thought, and afterwards we used to go on these three day weeks and I thought, I looked, we went out on a trip on the Rhine and I thought, you thought you were going to get across. You can’t bloody swim and you were going to get across there. What sort of daydream were you in? I mean it goes on forever. The width of it. Doesn’t it?
CB: Yeah.
Other 1: It does.
CB: When the war finished did you do any Cook’s Tours?
JW: No. No. We’d been slung off. We were taken off. In April posted away from the unit and never got near an aircraft after that. Oh. I went up. I went up once with, when I was posted, first posted to the Wellington OTU. And they wanted you to go up and they wanted somebody, you need somebody sitting in the tail of a Wellington. I said, ‘I’ll go with you.’ With the pilot and the navigator. We came down and had a look around over where I lived. But —
CB: Not in Germany.
JW: No.
CB: Where did you meet your wife?
JW: Oh, this was, we were working. Both working in the same firm. Works outing actually. We went. They took us all down for Brighton for the day. Two coaches. And we went in to, I didn’t even know she was working there, went in to lunch and suddenly this girl looked around and she had the most beautiful blue eyes. And I thought cor, you lovely blue eyes. Anyhow, I didn’t expect to ever see her again. But in those days the coaches used to go and park somewhere, then they’d come along the front, creep along very slowly and you picked your bus, your coach out and got on as it was going along. And when I got on she was sitting on the front seat. I said, ‘Anybody sitting with you?’ ‘No.’ It was a right curt. I thought I’ll sit down anyway. Got chatting and halfway back we stopped at a pub and had a drink. A couple of drinks. And we got the bottom of Waterloo Road, the factory was. We stopped outside there. We all got off the coach. And she said, ‘You’re not leaving me here on my own are you?’ I said, ‘No. Where do you live?’ She lived just around the corner from the Elephant and Castle. Anyhow, she said, ‘Come and have a cup of tea.’ So I was in there when all the family came back. They’d all been at the pub at the top of the road. Met the family. That was quite strange because when it comes time to say cheerio she went down and presented her sister and her husband had the bottom flat and they had the flat above. And I shall never forget, I said to her, ‘Can I kiss you goodnight?’ She said, ‘I’d have hit you if you hadn’t.’ [laughs] By this time although she was very curt to start with by this time we’d sort of got some rapport and I arranged to meet her again in a week. But when I got outside there was a rail strike on and so I couldn’t get back to Guildford but I was staying with my grandmother at Putney. I got outside and I thought bloody hell how the hell do I get to Putney? All I’d got in my pocket was a half a crown. And I hadn’t got a clue where I was. Anyhow, I walked up to the main road and I see a taxi. I hailed him. He said, ‘I’ve finished mate.’ I said, ‘Oh I’m in trouble, trouble here,’ I said, ‘I’m trying to get back to Putney and I don’t know where it is,’ I said, ‘I’ve only got a half — ’ ‘Get in,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you to Putney Bridge which was, I knew where I was then. And he did. And it was ever so good of him. But then we went out and then later on we decided to get married.
CB: When did you get married?
JW: In September the 1st on 1956.
CB: What was the company you were working for then?
JW: It was Cockayne and Company.
CB: Who?
JW: Cockayne’s.
CB: Oh Cockayne.
JW: C O C K A Y N E. The chap who owned it used to drive around. He used to have a chauffeur with a Rolls Royce and his chauffeur wore a peak cap, gaters, polished gaters. And occasionally he would come around. At Christmas usually he would come around and say hello to everybody. I forget his name now. But they had a factory in Eastleigh in Southampton. And we went down once to play football with them. A football match. Clever they were. Treated us all to a bloody great lunch. And then their team arrived didn’t it? We were playing football on a full stomach.
CB: Different people. Yes. Gamesmanship they call it.
JW: Yeah. Yeah. We were married for [pause] She died in 2013.
CB: Oh dear. Was she younger than you or —
JW: She was five years younger than me.
CB: Well, Jack Watson. A really interesting conversation. Thank you so much.
JW: I’m glad you enjoyed it.
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 Robert Watson
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-02
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AWatsonJR180202, PWatsonJR1501
Format
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02:04:35 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
John Robert Watson joined RAF Bomber Command in 1943, volunteering after he witnessed his next-door neighbour's house being destroyed by a bomb. Against his father's wishes, John joined Bomber Command initially as a wireless operator, before transferring to a flight engineer course. Travelling to RAF Ouston, John flew in Lancasters and Halifaxes. His first operation took place on the 17th of January 1944, which he believed he would not survive. His second operation was to Berlin and featured another close call, in which he almost crashed into another Lancaster. He remembers his crew fondly, stating that they did well throughout the war because they trusted one another so much. Joining the Pathfinders force, John travelled from RAF Wickenby to RAF Warboys, changing crews and being put through extra training. Completing over 40 operations John recalls several operations, including one over Nuremberg which featured another close call. John was then moved again and became a flight instructor for Wellingtons. He also gives information regarding his crew, being a flight instructor, his scariest moment whilst flying, the impact of lack of morale fibre, and master bombers' role. He also gives several humorous stories of his time at RAF stations and his run-ins with higher-ranking service members. During his service as a Pathfinder, John received the Distinguished Flying Medal, the Legion of Honour and the Pathfinder badge. When he was demobilized, he became disillusioned with discipline within the RAF and continued his apprenticeship, meeting and marrying his wife in 1956 and living with her until she passed away in 2013.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Huntingdonshire
England--Northumberland
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Nuremberg
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944-01-17
1956
Contributor
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Sam Harper-Coulson
Julie Williams
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
12 Squadron
156 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
crash
Distinguished Flying Medal
fear
flight engineer
Halifax
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Master Bomber
mid-air collision
military ethos
Pathfinders
RAF Faldingworth
RAF Ouston
RAF Warboys
RAF Wickenby
recruitment
searchlight
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1077/11535/APlenderleithJ151007.2.mp3
cd3b1395d95d7734637103a4e5584cff
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
Plenderleith, John
J Plenderleith
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with John Plendereith (1822478R, Royal Air Force). He served as a wireless operator air gunner with 626 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
2015-10-07
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Plenderleith, J
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PL: Ok. So, hello. My name is Pam Locker and I’d just like to thank you very much indeed for agreeing to talk to the Bomber Command Memorial Trust. And I’m in the home of Mr John Plenderleith and he’s going to tell us all about some of his experiences through his life. Not just in Bomber Command but through his life. So, John, if you’d like to just to kick off. Perhaps telling us how you, perhaps a little bit about your earlier life and how you came to be involved with Bomber Command.
JP: Thank you. Right. I went through the normal training of an air signaller from 1943 onwards. I did my ITW at Bridgnorth. And Radio School at RAF Madley, in Herefordshire. And OTU, Operational Training Unit in sorry AFU, Advanced Flying Training Unit at Mona in Anglesey. And Operational Training Unit at Husbands Bosworth in Warwickshire. Then I went on to Heavy Conversion Unit at North Luffenham on Lancasters and during that time of training we took part in a diversion raid for a target in Germany. After that I moved on to 626 Squadron at Wickenby in Lincolnshire on, and that was in April and May 1945. During that time I took part in four Operation Mannas which was delivering food to the starving Dutch people in Holland. In enemy occupied Holland. And also at the end of the war I took part in Operation Exodus which was ferrying, flying prisoners of war from Brussels to the UK when the war finished. And also later I took part, part in Operation Dodge which was bringing the 8th Army back from Italy to the United Kingdom. Can we have a break?
PL: Of course. We’re just stopping now.
[recording paused]
PL: Restarting the tape. Ok John.
JP: When the war finished in Europe the RAF asked for volunteers to continue the war in Japan. Well, we had only just started our, our bomber programme and we volunteered for Tiger Force. Now, this was to continue with the Lancasters in the war against Japan. It carried on for quite a while and eventually the, the atomic bomb was dropped and of course the war in Japan ended in August. So we never really reached Japan but eventually ended up in Egypt and replaced 104 Squadron with Liberators to Lancasters. And we joined 104 Squadron for a short time. I was there for only about six months practically and the crew became split up. And I volunteered to carry on flying which I did do and I ended up in Air Headquarters Greece and spent the best part of two years there during the Greek communist civil war. Which was interesting. After that I came back to the UK and various postings. The main one was Transport Command at Lyneham on Hastings. And I did a good few overseas trips there. Including Australia for the testing of the atomic bombs. And after that the main flying I did was at Farnborough where I flew on the experimental side for up to seven years. And that completed my flying in somewhere about six thousand hours. After that I became an air traffic controller. And I was approach and radar controller at Lyneham until I retired in 1968. After retiring I took the Civil Air Traffic Control Licence and became a controller for the Army Air Corps and I spent a further twenty five years with the Army Air Corps which made sixty years service with the military in all.
PL: That’s amazing.
JP: That was a rough account of my service. Service history.
PL: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much. A couple of things I wanted to return to.
JP: Hmmn?
PL: A couple of things I wanted to return to —
JP: Yeah.
PL: Going back to Operation Manna.
JP: Uh huh.
PL: Can you just expand on that and expand —
JP: Sorry?
PL: Could you expand on your experience of Operation Manna and how that all worked, and you know. And your personal experience of that?
JP: It’s a job remembering now. Well, as with regards to Operation Manna I did [pause] where are we? [pause] I did four trips on Operation Manna. The first one was to the Hague and the second one was to Valkenburg. And the next two were to Rotterdam. As you know this was for dropping food for the starving Dutch people. And we flew out ultra low level. Mainly five hundred feet and below. We flew out and, to the drop zones and we did observe. It was occupied Holland and we did observe military. German military. But there was a truce which was more or less kept over all but occasionally it was broken with small arms fire. And that was really about it. That was the, the four places we dropped on and of course the public were most appreciative of what was happening at the time, dropping the food to them. And they made a great, it became a very important part of the war. Operation Manna. And we returned there four or five times and looked after the Dutch people who were, who really appreciated what was done. And I think it was a good thing to take part in a mercy mission rather than a bombing mission. Much better. Any more?
PL: So when, when you got to the to the sites, the drop sites were the people there? Or what could you see from from the air? Were the people waiting to pick up the food or how did it work?
JP: No. The Germans kept the crowd back, you know, from the drop zone. Because it would have been dangerous, you know. Because we dropped the stuff without parachutes and it would have been rather dangerous if it, if it had fallen on the crowd.
PL: And then they would be allowed to to go forward and —
JP: Well, it was then all collected to a centre and distributed. Yeah.
PL: Right. Ok. Ok . That’s fascinating.
JP: Yeah.
PL: And after the war did you hear any more about that and the affect that it had had? I mean obviously it was of such —
JP: Hmmn?
PL: Did you ever, after the war hear any more about the effect of Operation Manna? Obviously it was —
JP: Oh yes. It was quite often during, over the years it was quite often brought up that this was carried out. I think possibly to give a good name to Bomber Command. Which it did. Yes.
PL: Because it, it was stopped wasn’t it? Do you know anything about that? Why it was stopped.
JP: What?
PL: I think that it didn’t go on right until the end of the war did it? Or did it?
JP: Operation Manna?
PL: Yes.
JP: Yeah. Well, right more or less, up to right to the end of the war. Yeah.
PL: Right.
JP: Until Holland was liberated and there was then freedom of travel and, you know it was delivered by road as well.
PL: Fantastic. So, the crew must, it must have been such a different, a different experience to, to going on the raids. It must have been a wonderful uplifting experience. Did you feel safe?
JP: Well, you felt, I don’t say, I mean on the first one when we went to the briefing and found out what the trip was and we thought well at five hundred feet.
PL: Yes.
JP: We’d be been blown to bits.
PL: Yes. Yes.
JP: If they do, you know. But yeah. We did wonder and the first time really what would happen. Yeah.
PL: So quite nerve wracking.
JP: Hmmn.
PL: Yeah.
JP: But anyway, and then as I say after Manna there was Operation Exodus. That was bringing the POs. That was on the 9th. The 9th of May. The day the war was supposed to have ended. And there we went into Brussels and picked up a lot of the aircrew who had been shot down. And we brought them back alive to, to the UK. And that was —
PL: So was it specifically aircrew then that you brought back?
JP: Mainly. Mainly it was, yeah. Yeah. We brought back, I think it was, yeah it was twenty four. We had twenty four prisoners of war in the Lancaster. And there was never seats of course. They just sat on the floor of the aircraft. And the trip took what? There and back was four hours forty five minutes. But the, it was, you know bringing them back. When we came to the coast of England coming back. Some had been there, prisoners of war, for up to five years. And it really was something, you know. They really did appreciate coming back.
PL: It must have been very emotional for them.
JP: It was. Yeah. It was for us as well. Yeah. So —
PL: Yes. Good. Wonderful. And it must have been a bit tight having twenty four. Was there, was everybody a bit squashed in?
JP: Well, they were mainly, mainly from the crew compartment at the front to the back of the rear turret. And they were all on the floor there. Yeah.
PL: Fantastic. Did you want, did you want to say any more about that before I move on?
JP: Sorry?
PL: Did you want to say anything more about Operation Manna before we move on? Or the, or indeed Operation Exodus.
JP: Not really. The big thing about Manna was how appreciative the Dutch were that it was carried out. I mean, when we were at the Bomber Command Centre this last week a Dutch officer came and presented to the Centre a picture of the Lancasters flying low over Holland and dropping the food. And they want that to be shown you know, in the Centre. As part of the war. Yeah.
PL: It must make you feel very proud.
JP: Yeah.
PL: Wonderful. Thank you. So something else that you touched on was your involvement with the civil war in Greece. And you said that was an interesting experience.
JP: Yes. Well I was on the communication flight there for the RAF delegation to the Greek Air Force and we did quite a bit of flying in the operational area where the communists were. And we carried the Greek generals and British generals who observed what was going on. And with the fight against communism. I don’t, I really shouldn’t say this but the Greek Air Force, they awarded us their General Service Medal for what we did. RAF, the Air Ministry turned that down because it would mean that we were showing an active part to the Russians. So, that was cancelled. Yeah. It was amazing really.
PL: It’s all about politics in the end.
JP: Yeah. Yeah.
PL: So how long were you involved there?
JP: What? In Greece? Best part of nearly seven and a half years.
PL: Goodness. A long time.
JP: Yeah.
PL: Goodness.
JP: And during that time I married a lovely Greek girl. The photograph’s there. Do you see it?
PL: I can’t see it.
JP: Well, have a look—
PL: Oh there.
JP: Yeah.
PL: That was my first wife.
JP: She’s gorgeous.
PL: And she died when she was twenty eight years old.
JP: Oh no. Oh, I’m so sorry.
PL: Yeah.
JP: That was Maria. She died of cancer. And then five years later I married again. To Reina. And she died of cancer as well.
PL: Oh dear.
JP: Yeah. Anyway, that’s just bye the bye you know.
PL: So did you have children?
JP: Hmmn?
PL: Did you have children?
JP: Yes. I had three children. I had one by my first. First marriage. Who’s sixty five now [laughs]. And two by my second marriage. Yeah. And they are in their forties.
PL: Right.
JP: And my daughter, she just had breast cancer. So —
PL: You’ve had a tough time of it.
JP: Yeah.
PL: So Greece was a really significant —
JP: Hmmn?
PL: So Greece turned out to be a very significant part of your life.
JP: Oh yes. Yeah.
PL: In all sorts of ways.
JP: It was, flying wise it was interesting working along with the Greek Air Force, you know.
PL: So did you make lots of friends in —
JP: Hmmn?
PL: Did you make lots of friends in the Greek Air Force?
JP: In the Greek Air Force.
PL: Yes.
JP: Well, yes. Not a lot. No. But I met quite a few. I flew the odd trip with the Greek Air Force and just as young and daft [laughs] Yeah.
PL: But that was a very different experience.
JP: Yeah.
PL: Right. Ok.
JP: So, that was my history really in the services.
PL: Well, something else I wanted to ask you about that you mentioned that I thought would be really interesting to talk about is you talked about your involvement with the atomic bomb.
JP: Oh yes.
PL: And you mentioned that a couple of times. Do you want to just expand on that and say —
JP: Well, the one. Oh sorry.
PL: No. No. Don’t worry.
JP: I flew on the trip to Australia. To, it was either Woomera or Maralinga. And we carried the head for the hydrogen bomb. That was some trip because they had the, the head of the bomb in the centre of the aircraft and a yellow circle painted around it. And no way had we to step within that yellow circuit, circle. And an RAF squadron leader sat with it all the time until we got out to Australia. Yeah. That was, that was interesting. But —
PL: Was that, was that just a security procedure then?
JP: Sorry?
PL: Was that just a security procedure that you weren’t allowed to step within the ring?
JP: No. That was because, well the possibility of what do you call it?
PL: Radiation.
JP: Yeah.
PL: Right. Goodness. It just seems so —
JP: Anyway.
PL: Yeah.
JP: We were all —
PL: So how many, how many times did you do that? Was that just the one trip to Australia? Or —
JP: No. I did two, two trips to Australia. To the base in the south of Australia which was Maralinga or Woomera. Yeah. And that was, that was a long trip there and back in those days because it was in a Hastings aircraft which was a piston. And a piston aircraft and rather slow.
PL: Goodness. So how long did it take?
JP: The flying was somewhere over a hundred hours there and back. Yeah. Yeah.
PL: Goodness me. So you stopped off along the way.
JP: Oh yes. Yeah.
PL: Can you, can you remember where you stopped off and what the arrangements were?
JP: I think the first stop was Castel Benito. I’ve got it in my logbook there somewhere. And first stop was in North Africa. And the second was Iraq at Habbaniya. The third was Karachi. The fourth was Ceylon. Ceylon which is now —
PL: Sri Lanka.
JP: Yeah. And then on to Singapore. And then down to Darwin. And then down to Adelaide. And then across to, to Maralinga. Yeah.
PL: Amazing. Amazing.
JP: And then when I was at Farnborough and then the last years of flying I was mainly on the training. The, mainly on the trials of a navigation aid to cover the whole world. So, to do that we had to fly the whole world. Which was great because I went from South Africa to the North Pole to the Far East. To Hong Kong. To Australia. To Canada. What do you call it? The Caribbean. And South America and that. We had to fly world-wide which was very interesting. But of course all that’s been superceded now by what? Sat nav.
PL: Well, it’s everything is part of a process.
JP: That’s it. Yeah.
PL: And without your process then, you know nothing else could have followed.
JP: No.
PL: What an extraordinarily adventurous life you’ve had.
JP: Sorry?
PL: What an adventurous life you’ve had.
JP: Well, yeah. It was. It was. The two sad times was the loss of my wives.
PL: Of course.
JP: But, with regards to the rest of it. As regards to the services I wouldn’t have changed anything. No.
PL: Wonderful.
JP: Yeah.
PL: I I know we’re going right back to the very start but I’m curious to know how you became involved in signals in the first place. What drew you to that particular discipline?
JP: What? Sorry?
PL: I’m curious to know how you became drawn into signals in the first place.
JP: Well, we, it was what, well — you volunteered for aircrew. All the aircrew were volunteers. Nobody was called up to fly. I volunteered in Edinburgh. And at the time it was, what they were after at the time was air gunners and wireless operator air gunners. That’s what they really were after. And I became a w/op AG. What was known as a w/op AG or wireless operator air gunner. Eventually that became a signaller. Yeah. But —
PL: So that side of it appealed to you.
JP: Hmmn?
PL: That, that side of things appealed to you. The wireless operation. Had you had any experience before that? Had you had any interest before that or was it just something that you wanted?
JP: In the Air Force generally —
PL: No. No. In the, to be a wireless operator.
JP: Well, no. I was in the Air Training Corps of course. As a youngster in 1940.
PL: Right.
JP: And I was good at Morse. And of course they gave you, this was part of the selection procedure. I, I was then able to do what? Fifteen words a minutes Morse. Which I’d done and of course that was it.
PL: Fantastic.
JP: Yeah. Because the communications with Bomber Command was all done in Morse in those days. Yeah.
PL: And when you joined your crew were you with the same crew throughout Operation Manna and —
JP: Yeah. Same crew with me. Yeah.
PL: Right. So can you remember how you all came to be together?
JP: How did everybody —
PL: How, how —
JP: How did we come to be together?
PL: Together as a crew.
JP: Well that was at OTU. The Operational Training Unit on Wellingtons. What they did was they put all the aircrew in a hangar and the group captain said, ‘Sort yourselves out into crews [laughs] So it was, you know —
PL: So, how did you do it?
JP: Well, just sort of went around and speaking to each other and — yeah. Our skipper, Flying Officer Hall, he said, ‘Have you got anybody? I said, ‘Not yet.’ He said, ‘Well, you have now. You’re going to be my wireless operator.’ [laughs] You see. And that was how the they selected you. You selected yourselves.
PL: Fantastic.
JP: I had no idea what — really when I think of it now. We all volunteered. We didn’t know what we were volunteering for. My God we didn’t. I mean the losses were something terrible weren’t they? I remember when we went to, went to the squadron. Posted into 626 we were, we went to the picket post and they said that we would be in hut twelve and as a crew. So we went to this hut twelve and there was all the beds there. And you know people that had got up from there and, you know. Haven’t they got rid of them? We went back to the picket post and said, ‘It’s occupied.’ They said, ‘Well, they were shot down last night.’ And that was that. But I thought, well what an introduction to the squadron. Yeah. Yeah.
PL: Terrible.
JP: Still —
PL: And you all, did the whole of your group survive the war?
JP: The whole of — ?
PL: Did your, did your group survive?
JP: My, our crew.
PL: Your crew.
JP: Oh yeah. Yeah. We all survived. Yeah.
PL: Fantastic. Fantastic. And have you, did you keep in touch at all?
JP: Yeah. Kept in touch with the, with the bomb aimer. The two gunners were Canadians. Of course they went back to Canada when the war finished. And I kept in touch with the bomb aimer right until he died. What? A couple of years ago now and we used to go together to Holland for the Operation Manna. We went together on that. And, you know we were good friends right until he died. Yeah. Arthur. He’s up there on that photograph. That’s 626 Squadron.
PL: Fantastic. Fantastic.
JP: Yeah. That was taken in May ’45 when the war ended. These were all aircrew. It just shows. You know. I think the, those killed in 626 was somewhere about a thousand two hundred. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Right then.
PL: Well, there’s one more thing I want to ask you and that is about your feelings about how Bomber Command were treated after the war? What did you think about that? Do you have any comment that you’d like to be recorded?
JP: Well, there’s no doubt that the bombing of Germany [pause] was it right? Was it wrong? It’s difficult to say. I think, I think it was a means for the ending of the war but of course they always bring up Dresden don’t they? And Hanover. But I’m convinced that if the Luftwaffe had had an aircraft equivalent to the Lancaster we would have been bombed off the face off this earth as well. But they didn’t have a an aircraft that carried the load that we did. I mean they were mainly twin-engined in the, in their bomber force. Heinkels. But the Lancaster was a marvellous aircraft. And, was it right? Was it wrong? Difficult to say. I’m glad I ended up on Operation Manna. That was the, the saving grace wasn’t it? But no. It was wrong in a way and of course it was right in another way.
PL: Of course. Do you think that Bomber Command should have had more recognition for their contribution to the end of the war?
JP: Oh yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it’s funny. Last week we had a picture taken against The Spire. And I don’t know how many of us were on the picture but there was quite a few. And there was one chap who said that. Why have they never given a — what do you call it, a campaign medal for operations in Bomber Command? It’s true. Why they didn’t I don’t know. They wanted to keep it quiet I think. But now. Now, they talk about it don’t they? Yeah. I mean the Memorial down at, in London. That came, what a couple of years later on. No. Two years ago or something like that isn’t it? And now the Spire. They’ve shown. Yeah. Because when you think of it fifty five thousand five hundred and seventy three. God almighty. Imagine a football ground full of fifty five and a half thousand airmen. That was the amount of aircrew that were lost. And they were all volunteers. Yeah. Well, anything else you would like to know? There’s nothing much more I can say.
PL: Well, unless there’s anything else you’d like to tell me then I guess the most important thing for me to say is to thank you very very much indeed on behalf of the Bomber Memorial [coughs] Bomber Command Memorial Trust.
JP: Yeah.
PL: For sharing your experiences with us. So thank you very much indeed.
JP: That’s alright I’m sure.
[recording paused]
PL: So, there was just another operation that you didn’t have a chance to talk about. Do you want to just tell me a little bit about that?
JP: Well, Operation Dodge was bringing the troops back from the end of the war in Africa and that. And we, we flew back. I think it was twenty four on each trip. That was much the same as Exodus. They were seated in the fuselage. And it was a longer trip of course. It was over six hours from, from Pomigliano and Rome to the United Kingdom. And I did that trip twice. So, we, we flew out there. Spent one night and then back the next day to the United Kingdom. This was to speed up the evacuation and the return of the troops. There’s nothing much more to say really. That, again that was they all looked forward to home coming and it was a quick way to, for them all to return home.
PL: Wonderful.
JP: Yeah.
[recording paused]
PL: So you were just telling me John about the cathedral.
JP: Yeah.
PL: So you set off and then you circled around.
PL: Well, how shall I put it? We, we often passed close to it you know. After leaving. Yeah. And of course it was always, I mean all those airfields were all, a lot of them were in sight of the cathedral, you know. It was a point that —
JP: A landmark.
PL: As I said it was a point that some of the, a lot of the crews never saw again and that was it. You know. They didn’t come back. But yeah. Anyway, that Spire. The height of it is the wingspan of a Lancaster. Yeah.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with John Plendeleith
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Pam Locker
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-07
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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APlenderleithJ151007
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:42:36 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Description
An account of the resource
John Plenderleith was in the Air Training Corps before he volunteered to join the RAF. He was posted to 626 Squadron at Wickenby and when the crew were allocated their hut they were surprised to find it was still occupied with another crew’s personal possessions. When they enquired they were told the other crew had failed to return from their last operation. He took part in Operations Manna and Exodus and recalls the appreciation of the Dutch people for receiving the food aid and of the ex-prisoners returning home. After the war he was posted to Transport Command and flew in Greece and also carried the nuclear head for the atomic bomb for testing in Australia. While at RAF Farnborough he took part in testing of new navigational equipment. When he retired from the RAF he became an air traffic controller for the Army Air Corps.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Egypt
Great Britain
Greece
England--Lincolnshire
England--Farnborough (Hampshire)
England--Hampshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
104 Squadron
626 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
crewing up
Lancaster
memorial
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
perception of bombing war
RAF Farnborough
RAF Wickenby
Tiger force
training
wireless operator
-
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a7ede1ce3148022fc08a58cd38b494b9
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1063/11519/AParkerE160505.2.mp3
921dd41f7f0eb7cf7f983979dcc2aa64
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1063/11519/PParkerE1603.1.jpg
563dacd16da85c61cd2e12662c64117d
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
Parker, Eric
E Parker
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Eric Parker (b. 1924, 1522919 Royal Air Force), a photograph and a biography. He flew operations as a navigator with 12 and 166 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Eric Parker and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-05
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Parker, E
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
EP: A child then up to eighteen.
GR: Yeah. Yeah.
EP: And then going in the RAF.
GR: Right. This is Gary Rushbrooke for the International Bomber Command Centre at Lincoln. I am today with Eric Parker at his home in Formby, Merseyside and the date is the 5th of May 2016. Right then, Eric, I know we’re in Formby, was you born round here? Are you from this area?
EP: I was born on the 10th of January 1924 in West Derby, Liverpool. In those days West Derby was a small detached village joined to the main City of Liverpool by a tramway.
GR: Oh right.
EP: And I went to the local village school, which was St Mary’s Church of England School, very adjacent to the big church, which lays right in the middle of West Derby village. I was at the school, it was a boy’s only side of the school, there was a girl’s department on the other side. I was in the school for — ‘til I was fourteen and I left and took up work immediately, as everybody did in those days.
GR: Did you have any brothers or sisters at the same, at the time?
EP: I had two brothers. One named Sydney and one named Reginald. They were both older than me.
GR: Both older brothers.
EP: So, I was the junior in the family. My first job was a lift attendant in a national bank, a seven storey building, which was a skyscraper in its day, in Liverpool. And as a lift attendant, I attended to all the needs of the staff who worked in the various offices, going to toilets and things like that. And I was there for about a year but I’d always wanted to be an apprentice electrician, and an opening came up, and I went down and got the job as apprentice electrician for seven and six a week. This was a drop in my wages, because in the lift attendant I was getting fourteen shillings a week.
GR: Right.
EP: Which was a very big wage for the time.
GR: And a big drop in wages to seven and six.
EP: However, I didn’t last long as an apprentice electrician because one day, the owner of the business wanted me to work on a Saturday, on a special job, and I said, ‘I’m sorry Mr Carling’, that was his name, ‘I can’t do this because I’m going into Liverpool to see “Robin Hood and His Merry Men of Sherwood”, at the Paramount Cinema’. He said, ‘Oh very good. Very good’. he said, ‘Enjoy it then, and you can take your cards at the same time’. So for a while I was on the, on the, not on the dole, I wasn’t old enough to get dole. I was, had to go to the dole school, and I did a bit of time there in the workshops, on metalwork and I learned quite a lot about metalwork. But I did have a small job in between, when I went to Hunter’s Handy Hams in Broadgreen, where they were canning bacon for the troops. And I spent about three weeks there doing a casual labour, and it was quite hard work. I was carrying these cans ready to be boiled and tinned.
GR: Yeah. Had war broken out by then?
EP: The war had broken out by this time. And I was on the dole, not the dole, unemployed.
GR: Yeah.
EP: I should say, for several months. My dad got a bit fed up. He said, ‘Get out and get a job. Can’t be having you doing nothing all day. We need money in the house’, because he was a farm labourer, and he wasn’t on a very big wage. So, lo and behold, in the newspapers in Liverpool, the Liverpool Echo, there came an advert for student gardeners, that meant they would learn all about gardening and would spend one week — one day a week, in the Liverpool Technical College, learning soil science and hygiene and various botanical things. All about gardening. And I was in, I was posted to Newsham Park, in the greenhouses there, I was there for a year. And then the following year, they posted me to a place called Harbreck Farm, near Fozakerley Hospital at the time, and I was there for another year and it was very hard work. And by this time, I’d reached the age of seventeen and a half years, and the war was, the phoney war was at its height, and they were looking for aircrew, young people to go in aircrew. Volunteers. So, I was seventeen and a half at this time, this was in June of 1941, so along with my friend, we volunteered for aircrew and we was posted on deferred service and was called up, finally, in the January of 1942.
GR: Right. Had your two brothers gone into the Forces?
EP: Well, both brothers went into the Army.
GR: Right.
EP: And they served — one served in Italy. I tell a lie. My other brother — one of my brothers went to Italy, served in Italy. My other brother, Syd, went into the Air Force, but he was invalided out with stomach trouble, so he only had a short six months of service.
GR: Right.
EP: So that left me as the young one. So, in 1942, January, I was called up and my first posting was to the Aircrew Recruiting Centre in London, and we lived in one of the big luxury flats there.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Stopney Hall, I think it was called.
GR: Yeah. That was St John’s Wood and Lord’s Cricket Ground.
EP: Around St John’s Wood and Lord’s
GR: Yeah.
EP: That’s correct. I was there for about three weeks while we got our, my jabs and all the other things, all recorded and things like that, and finally, I was posted on a three week course, learning Morse code and semaphore — to Brighton. And that lasted three weeks where we learned, we became quite proficient at Morse code and semaphore flags, and from there, I was posted to Paignton in Devon, to a twelve week course of ITW, Initial Training Wing.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And there, we learned all the ins and outs of aircrew.
GR: Did you know what you were going to be then or –?
EP: At his time, we were posted as PNB. Could have been a pilot, could have been a navigator, or we could have been a bomb aimer.
GR: Oh, so it was one of the three. Yeah.
EP: Of that three, you were automatically put on a pilot’s course, and having finished our ITW, was posted on a grading school, on Tiger Moths, to a little airfield named Sywell, which was near Leicester.
GR: Yeah.
EP: If I remember. And there we did twelve hours flying on Tiger Moths, and we all went to Canada, and all those who had passed the flying school, including me, were made — were put on a pilot’s course in Canada, and I went to a place called Caron, near Moose Jaw, in Saskatchewan. However, I wasn’t very good as a pilot and I scrubbed out after about twelve flying hours on Cornell aircraft, Fairchild Cornells. Single engine monoplane.
GR: Yeah.
EP: So, there I was, no longer on the pilot’s course, but sent to a holding unit in Brandon, Manitoba and I was there for a couple of months, waiting for a pilot —for a navigator bombardiers course to come through. And one came, finally came through, and I was posted to Mountain View, Ontario, on a twelve week bombing and gunnery course, having been reselected now as a navigator bomb aimer.
GR: Right. What was life like in Canada? What was —
EP: Well, life was grand in Canada. Everything was as it was in Civvy Street in Britain.
GR: Before the war.
EP: White bread for the first time. Actually crossed, it took seven days to get across Canada by rail, slept on the train, and everywhere, every station we landed at, there was a big reception committee, giving us all sorts of goodies. And we finally got to Caron, in Moose Jaw, probably in the Easter of 1943.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And finally — anyway, later in that year, I got on the NavB course at Mountain View. Did the Nav, did the bombing and gunnery side of the course, that was very interesting, and then I was posted on a twelve week navigation course to St John’s in Quebec, and that was quite interesting. And then, finally, we ended the course in the end of ’44, got my wings and was posted home again by sea. We went to Canada, by the way, on the Empress of Scotland, one of the Empress lines.
GR: That’s one of the cruise liners, wasn’t it?
EP: One of the cruise liners of the day, yeah. There was a lot of Empress liners we used as troop ships.
GR: And how did you get back?
EP: And I came back on the Empress of Scotland as well.
GR: Oh right.
EP: And I was posted to Harrogate, where we were just on a holding unit there for about a couple of weeks, and I was posted to AFU at Silloth in Scotland. And that was [pause], I’m trying to think how long. A month’s course, I think it was.
GR: Yeah.
EP: It was getting familiar with England. Flying over England.
GR: Yes, because you’d done your training in Canada. You needed to [pause] —
EP: So we were on Ansons there, map reading and doing those, sort of, cross country things, and finally, I was posted off that, onto an Advanced Flying Unit. After the Advanced Flying Unit, I was posted to OTU at Husband’s Bosworth, that was on Wimpies, and it was a twelve week course there. Conversion unit onto Bomber Command.
GR: Right. When did you actually crew up? When did you meet –?
EP: We crewed up at OTU.
GR: Right.
EP: All the crew, except for the engineer.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And so we crewed up there, and did the usual stuff, bombing and gunnery, cross-country’s.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Bombing raids, artificial bombing raids. And finally –
GR: Still lots of training.
EP: Lots of training. Lots of training. Twelve weeks, I think it was. We were posted to a six weeks conversion course on Lancasters.
GR: Yeah.
EP: At Gainsborough. I can’t remember the name of the airfield there. Near Gainsborough anyway.
GR: Yeah. Yeah.
EP: And we did the six week course there. We picked up our flight engineer, and from there on, we were posted down to Wickenby on 12 Squadron.
GR: So when did you actually find out you were going to a squadron? Was that at the end of the Lancaster Finishing School?
EP: End of Conversion Unit.
GR: Yeah.
EP: They said, ‘You’re posted to 12 Squadron, Wickenby.’
GR: Yeah.
EP: I said, ‘Where’s that?’ They said, ‘Just the outside of Lincoln’. And it’s an RAF squadron.
GR: Yeah.
EP: With a few continental — a few other members from the empire [unclear].
GR: Yeah. Yeah.
EP: So, when we got there, after a couple of days settling in —
GR: Did you fly down or did you make your way there in a car?
EP: Made our way by —
GR: Car. Bus. Train.
EP: By train.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Train and bus.
GR: Right.
EP: Bussed us in. And [pause] where am I?
GR: So, you’ve arrived at Wickenby. First day at Wickenby.
EP: They gave us a couple of days to settle in, then one day, the wing commander, flying, said, ‘I want you all’, and by that time, all the other aircrews had mingled in. Signallers, gunners, bomb aimers and we mingled in. They said, ‘I want you all in the big hangar tomorrow’. There must have been a couple of hundred aircrew bods, so, ‘I want you all in’, and he said, he came in and said, ‘You’re all here now, so I want you to mingle and form a crew. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. If you haven’t formed a crew by then, from each other by mingling, I’ll put you all together. Whoever’s left’. So, I was sat around, had coffee, the NAAFI was there, you know, and this big, gangling New Zealander came across to me. He said, ‘Hello’. he said, ‘My name’s Alec Wicks’, he said, ‘I’m from New Zealand. I wondered, would you like to be in my crew?’ So I said, ‘Oh yes. I’d love to’. He said, ‘Well, I’ve got a couple of crew members already, two other New Zealanders’. So, we’d got Snowy White. He had blond hair. Snowy White.
GR: Snowy.
EP: Snowy, and he said, ‘We’ve also got Tacker Connelly’, who was a dark, semi Maori, half Maori. He said, ‘We’ve already got them, but we’ll go around now and hunt out a signaller and two gunners’, because we’d got the bomb aimer.
GR: So, at the moment, it was three New Zealanders and one Brit.
EP: One Brit. And we found two Londoners, real Cockney eastenders.
GR: Yeah. Right.
EP: Two Londoners and, of course, the front gunner was the bomb aimer.
GR: Yeah.
EP: That made up the six of the crew, and we didn’t get the engineer, but we carried on doing all our crew work.
GR: Yeah.
EP: All the training and flights and bomb aiming, and all that sort of thing. And we were like that until we were posted to the Heavy Conversion Unit, where we got on to Lancasters again.
GR: And that’s when you needed the flight engineer.
EP: That’s when the flight engineer joined us. I tell a lie. On the Con Unit, we got a brand new Lancaster. Did you get that?
GR: Yeah. It doesn’t matter. Yeah.
EP: On the Con Unit. And then the engineer joined us then. His name was [pause] God, I’ve forgotten his name.
GR: We’ll come back to that later. Not a problem. So, what was the first day at Wickenby like?
EP: First day we just —
GR: Bearing in mind, you’re on a Bomber Command base.
EP: We did our marching in orders, got our arrival certificates. Tried to get a bike, but there was none available. And we were posted to the sergeant’s mess. The skipper, as I said, was a flight sergeant, so was the bomb aimer
GR: Yeah.
EP: And so was the wireless operator.
GR: Yeah.
EP: They were ahead of us. We were sergeants, the rest of us.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And we settled in to the mess and we got, as I say, we got into the big hangar, and we crewed up, and I always remember this. When the, when the wing commander, flying, came back, we were all in crews. There was a couple who weren’t crewed and he said, ‘You go with him’, ‘You go with him’, ‘You go with him’.
GR: That’s it. Done.
EP: Yeah. Done. ‘Now, I want you all in one long line’, and we all crewed up. He said, ‘Now, I want you to look at the man next to you’. So, we looked at him. The one fella looks at the one to the left or right, you know, we looked at each other. He said, ‘I’m going to tell you now, one of you, who you are looking at, is not coming back’, he said, ‘You’ll be killed on ops. It’s a fifty percent loss rate’. So he said, ‘Any of you, it’s all voluntary, any of you don’t want to carry on with ops, take a step forward’. Not one.
GR: Not one.
EP: So, he said, ‘That’s it then’, and so we went on ops. On our first trip, the pilot went on an experience trip on his own.
GR: Yeah.
EP: With a tap crew.
GR: Yeah, like a second dickey, yeah.
EP: He went as a second dickey.
GR: Yeah.
EP: So, he went to the big Dresden night.
GR: Right.
EP: And he came back the next night and he said it was great, you know, because it was great as well. The Yanks had been there during — well, we went the first time.
GR: Yeah, and the Americans bombed in the daytime.
EP: Daytime, the next day. So, the next night went in, we were all on ops. The first trip was Chemnitz, which was about thirty miles away from Dresden.
GR: Yeah.
EP: I’ll always remember the briefing.
GR: Its quite a long trip as well, isn’t it?
EP: It was a long trip, about a quarter of an hour less than the Dresden.
GR: The Dresden.
EP: I always remember the intelligence officer, who gave you your briefing.
GR: Yeah.
EP: When we into the, into the briefing room, he got up, he said, ‘Tonight’s op is to Chemnitz. There’s no target, you just bomb the TIs. Bomb anywhere in the city. There’s no targets at all’. He said, ‘We’ve got notification from reconnaissance planes, that thousands of refugees are streaming from Dresden, there’s thousands of them, so bomb them’. That was it, there was no target, just —
GR: Yeah. Just bomb Chemnitz.
EP: Just bomb the city. And so, we bombed the city.
GR: How did you feel about that as a bomb aimer?
EP: It was great. We were stupid kids at the time.
GR: Yeah, and that was the job, and that’s what you’d been told to do, yeah.
EP: That was what we were told to you. Oh great, you know. We just bombed the TIs when they tell us, the master bomber’s going. Bomb the reds, bomb the greens.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Cancel the reds, with the flares down, you know, bomb upwind of the target. Just listen to the master bomber, you know, and then the master bomber occasionally, you’d get, he was flying low level, about two thousand feet above all the bombs, and occasionally you’d hear blank silence. And then a new bloke on, ‘This is master bomber two coming up. Master bomber one has gone down. Don’t know what’s happened to him. Just carry on’. Carry on bombing this.
GR: Yeah.
EP: He just kept a running commentary. Cool as mustard, they were. And so we came back from that. We’d done six ops, various ones, and we were sent — we went on a weeks’ leave every so often.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And you got an extra bit of money from Lord Nuffield. He was the boss of the motor cars, you know.
GR: That’s right. I’ve heard this.
EP: Morris.
GR: Was it something like, if you went on leave, a weeks’ leave, you got an extra pound or two pound off him.
EP: That’s him. Yeah.
GR: And he did it for every Bomber Command veteran.
EP: For every. He gave us two quid, and so we got a couple of quid and we went on our first leave. Oh, and did I tell you we got a brand new aeroplane. Y-Yoke.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Y for Yoke. PHY. Brand spanking new, flown in that, that very day, you know. On the second day, we took it for an air test. Everything was fine, and by this time, we’d done about six ops in Y-Yoke, and we went on leave, and when we came back there was no Y-Yoke.
GR: Gone.
EP: A sprog crew had took it on their first op, and it got shot down. There was no trace of it, no wreckage, nothing at all. It must have just blown up.
GR: Blown up.
EP: ‘Cause the main trouble as I remember it — went outside the towns, it was fighters. Around the big cities, it was flak.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And as you were flying along at night time, you’d suddenly see a big flash in the sky. That was outside the flak zones and it could have been a night fighter attack — shot down, or it could have equally been two aeroplanes colliding.
GR: Colliding.
EP: Because you tried to keep three miles either side of track, it was a designated track. If you keep on it —all well and good. If you keep three miles, they give you a six mile band. It seems a lot, six miles. It’s nothing is it?
GR: Nothing.
EP: And all the aeroplanes are flying down, all trying to keep on their time. So, you had plus or minus three minutes on your target time, and when you were ahead, when you were behind time, you could open the engines up and carry – get speed up, you know, to knock off a few minutes. So you never tried to let your time go more than three or four minutes outside the brief time. At you’re your turning point, you have a mark with a time you should be there.
GR: Yeah.
EP: It was a sort of a zig zag around all the, all the cities, you know, and - where was I? Oh, when you were behind — when you were ahead of time, as I say, you had to lose time.
EP: Yeah.
GR: And you did that by doglegging.
GR: Yeah.
EP: So if you were flying due east, you turned sixty degrees. Fly three minutes across the stream. They’re all going that way, all going east.
GR: Yeah. And you’re going —
EP: And you’re going across them at forty five degrees. Sixty, turn sixty. Then you come back one twenty for three minutes. So you’ve done an equilateral triangle.
GR: Yeah. And then you were back on.
EP: So, you’ve six minutes, so you lost three minutes. That was how you lost time.
GR: That was the way you lost time.
EP: And if you wanted to lose six minutes you do it — you went across track. Back that way for six minutes, across the other side of track, and back the other way. And you lost, that was twelve minutes lost, so you lost six minutes on the two parts of your tracks —
GR: On the track. Yeah.
EP: To get your time. And that’s how you kept time.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And you were allowed to be on target plus, and invariably most people got there within a couple of minutes of the time they should, so it was quite good.
GR: It was quite good. Yeah.
EP: And once you were on the target, you listened to the master bomber, and they had, they had the master bombers on Mosquitos at my time. They were down below, keeping a running commentary, and they had the PFF force, with back-up Lancs, with TIs on board. And they would say, put, the master bomber had put down a green TI down here, say it was a windy, and the smoke was obscuring the target, he’d select a new point outside the smoke and drop another TI. Then the main master bombers in the Lancs, would back them up with further TIs as they died out. And we’d, as bomb aimers, all we did was, bomb doors open, and the old pilot would be keeping straight and level if he could. All the twisting and turning going in. The bomb aimer would be, ‘Left. Left. Steady. Steady. Steady. Steady. Steady. Bombs gone’. And then we had to stay on a straight and level course for about thirty seconds while the camera cut in, and they took a series of photographs, because you got assessed on them when you got back. And then as soon as he said, ‘Photos finished’, revs went up, shot up in the air, got to turn through the target, got the hell out of it as quick as we could.
GR: Get back home.
EP: You were supposed to stick to a very torturous route always, you know, but we always, when we got to the French coast, we always cut the corner there to see who could get back first. It was a straight run back across the North Sea. It was naughty, we weren’t supposed to do it, but everybody did it.
GR: Everybody did it. Yeah.
EP: Trying to get back first. So, we did that right the way through ‘til I got twenty three ops in. And I did. The last two ops we did [pause] — what was the one?
GR: Did you do the one to Berchtesgaden?
EP: I was just going to say the last two ops [pause] was, we did [pause] God. The island.
GR: Walcheren.
EP: No. [pause] Up by the —
GR: Yeah.
EP: Up by Kiel.
GR: Doesn’t matter.
EP: It’s on the record. Went on the last two ops. And then the next day was Berchtesgaden, which was the last op.
GR: That’s right.
EP: And we didn’t go on it, our crew. We were not posted, so I missed the last op.
GR: Missed the last.
EP: It was a gestapo headquarters op on Berchtesgaden.
GR: That’s right. Yeah. So —
EP: Thingy island. Little island. German island. Kiel. Kiel was it?
GR: No. It wasn’t Kiel.
EP: Not Kiel.
GR: We’ll have a look in a minute.
EP: Kiel’s a Canal.
GR: So where was you on VE-day? When the war came to a close?
EP: On VE? I can’t remember.
GR: No. Obviously not on operations. You might have been at Wickenby.
EP: I was at Wickenby.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Certainly. We just had a big booze up in the mess, I think, that’s all.
GR: Did you have any close calls while you were flying?
EP: We had three fighter attacks. One. Two. The first — what you had to do on bomber, on main force, was do two mining raids.
GR: Yeah. Yeah.
EP: You did them on your own. You took mines.
GR: Yeah.
EP: You didn’t have the benefit of the main force all come together. You just went out to Kiel Bay and around where the big battleships were.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And for two of those, two of our trips, we got attacked by night fighters. We were sitting ducks for night fighters, because they were single aeroplanes, they could pick them up.
GR: Yeah.
EP: On radar, you know. And in two cases we corkscrewed. You know the –
GR: Yeah. Yeah.
EP: Diving starboard, pulling up and twisting out and we lost both of them. Once you lose them, they’re away and they go and look for another target.
GR: Look for something else. Yeah.
EP: The third one managed to get a burst of machine gun fire, and he took a big hunk out of our left hand tail fin.
GR: Yeah.
EP: But nothing dangerous, you know. We still, still rudder, so we did well.
GR: So, you got back.
EP: And we corkscrewed. So again, there we corkscrewed, we did the same. The gunners were pretty good at picking them up.
GR: Yeah.
EP: They always seemed to come from starboard, starboard stern ahead, starboard beam ahead. Sort of flying — if you’re flying along, they’d be up there.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Higher. And they’d do a curve of pursuit attack, closing in, and you turned into them. That meant they had to get the turn tighter and tighter and tighter. Tighter than they usually got. They turned upside down and broke away underneath you.
GR: Yeah.
EP: That was the topic of a corkscrew, and while that was happening — the first time it happened, I wasn’t prepared for it, we’d never done one. And the gunner said, ‘Starboard. Starboard. Fighter. Fighter. Starboard. Beam up. Prepare to corkscrew. Corkscrew, go. Now’, you know. That was the way they always said that.
GR: Yeah. Corkscrew. Yeah.
EP: Corkscrew port or starboard. If they were starboard, you corkscrewed starboard into them. You always turned into them to make them tight. I shot out of the seat, just literally dropped out the sky. Got the nose down, throttle back and nose down, going down like that, and I shot out of my seat, because we never strapped ourselves in. We were on like a bench seat in the Lanc.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And radar here and radar. You slid along the seat, and all my maps, my charts, everything was loose on the table, went up. I shot out my seat, banged my head on the roof. Everybody else was more or less in the same boat, apart the pilots who were strapped in.
GR: Who were strapped in and knew what they were doing.
EP: The pilot and the engineer.
GR: Yes.
EP: So, we corkscrewed out of three situations, but it was the flak that was the worse stuff, ‘cause as soon as you got into a flak belt, you couldn’t get out of it. Just rattled the fuselage – bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, dong, doiing. Like ping — all the noises, you know. And searchlights would catch somebody, some poor sod would get caught in them, you know. And that was how it went, you know.
GR: So how did you feel at war’s end?
EP: Oh, and then about a couple of weeks before war’s end. The last ops we done.
GR: Yeah.
EP: We were told no more ops, but the war, it was a week before official war ending. They said, ‘They’re starving in Holland. Can’t get any food’. so he said, ‘You will now spend your next week or so, dropping supplies in Holland. So, you’ll be going on Lancasters, and filling the bomb bays up with food’. So, everybody mucked in. Food came in lorries. Flour in loose sacks, all loose stuff, and special panniers were made for stuff that had to be parachuted down. Medical stuff, stuff like that. All the other stuff was loose or tinned stuff which could stand the drop. And we all — if you’re carrying panniers, you open the bomb doors fully to put these things in. If you weren’t carrying panniers, you opened the bomb doors so there was about a foot or just a bit over. You could get up by your shoulders.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And everybody mucked in. Sacks of loose, packed loose. Sugar and flour and any seed. Cornflakes.
GR: Yeah.
EP: All loose in strong sacks. And you got in the bomb bay, and you loaded them on to the bomb doors itself. Just like that.
GR: Just lying flat. Yeah.
EP: Yeah. Just piled them high, and when you — everybody, the aircrew, the whole lot, the CO, the WAAFs, all loading. And when they were full, couldn’t get any without falling off. There were too many, you know.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Skipper would get in and just close the bomb bay and that was it.
GR: It was all there.
EP: And we’d fly over there. Must go over about a thousand feet.
GR: Yeah.
EP: But we went, we all went in about fifty feet, skimming over the church tops, onto the racecourses and dropping them. Now and again a sack would burst, big splurge of white, you know. But —
GR: That was Operation Manna, wasn’t it?
EP: That was Operation Manna.
GR: Where they fed the Dutch.
EP: And we did four. I did four Manna trips. And then they said, oh —it was still wartime, so they said, ‘We’ll allow you to keep these Manna trips as ops’.
GR: Yeah.
EP: ‘You can count them as ops’. So, I ended up with twenty seven ops.
GR: Twenty seven ops.
EP: So, I didn’t get my thirty, and then from then on, we spent all our time flying over the North Sea, dropping bombs. Jettisoning bombs with no pistols in them.
GR: Just to get rid of the —
EP: And ammunition. To get rid of all the big bombs in the bomb sights. The sights where they stored the bombs, you know.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And then finally, oh I didn’t tell you the story. I’ll tell you the story how, how I’ve got the picture there.
GR: I’ll just pause for one second.
[recording paused]
EP: When I told you that Y-Yoke, our plane, had got shot down?
GR: Yes. Earlier on.
EP: We had no aeroplane, so N-Nan had about ninety odd ops then.
GR: Yeah.
EP: It was the standby aircraft on the squadron. it was always there available in case one was u/s. Couldn’t take off.
GR: Yeah.
EP: So you had to change over quick.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Get in to N-Nan.
GR: So the old plane with ninety operations on.
EP: It had ninety ops on. It was given to us and it was a marvellous aeroplane.
GR: Oh good.
EP: And so it, when that was taken, with our ops, it went over the hundred. So every plane in the past was traditional. Every plane in the past that did ops, it was awarded the DFC, so that was the award being awarded, the DFC. We painted a little DFC cross on.
GR: Yeah. We’re just looking at a photograph of Eric, with his crew, in front of N for Nan and they’ve just done the hundredth op. So, yes, they’ve got a DFC painted on top of the picture. Very good. So —
EP: So that was it.
GR: Yeah.
EP: So that brings the story up to date then.
GR: Yeah. Did you do any — bringing back prisoners of war from Italy?
EP: Oh, I’m going to carry on then.
GR: Yeah.
EP: So when, when we finished, finished jettisoning bombs after VE day, a couple of weeks later, the squadrons had virtually finished flying. We were flying all the Lancs up to Silloth, which was near Carlisle.
GR: Yes.
EP: And when they got there, N-Nan was amongst them. They put a big weight on them and just bust them all up and they went on to make kettles and pans [laughs] and various other bits were taken off.
GR: Yeah.
EP: The only thing I’ve got is a pair of War Office scissors, out of the first aid kit. I’ve still got them, they’re around somewhere. And that came out of there, out of the first aid kit.
GR: Excellent. And I know, very briefly Eric, you stayed in the RAF didn’t you?
EP: Yes.
GR: Yeah.
EP: So after the war, sorry, as soon as the war ended, we went on to our operations to Italy to ferry the prisoners of war back.
GR: Prisoners of war back. Yeah.
EP: And we did that for about four trips.
GR: Right.
EP: One of the trips was a bit different as we ferried back twenty WREN nurses.
GR: Nurses.
EP: Twenty nurses. So, it was a bit better that [laughs] and then the war ended. We had a good booze up. The New Zealanders went back to New Zealand or, so I thought.
GR: Yes, because —
EP: And I was posted to a holding unit prior to going on Transport Command, I was awaiting a course at Dishforth on Yorks. So, while I was at this holding unit, I’ve forgotten the name of it now, I got a telephone call one day. I said, ‘Hello’, and a voice with a New Zealand accent said, ‘Hello Eric. I haven’t gone back to New Zealand. I’ve signed on in the RAF’. It was Alec Wicks, my old skipper.
GR: The skipper. The pilot.
EP: He said, ‘I’m going on Transport Command and I’ll be on the next course and I’ve asked for you to be my navigator’. So, I was highly delighted, because he was a good friend as well as a pilot, and we met up again and made a crew up on Yorks. And we flew, first of all on — [pause] what do you call it? Not passenger Yorks. Luggage.
GR: Yeah.
EP: What do they call it?
GR: Freight.
EP: Freight.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Freighters. My memory’s going.
GR: Don’t worry. No, your memory’s been great, and -
EP: We were posted to Holmsley South, near Bournemouth, on freight, freight Yorks. We were on them for about a year and presumably, by then, we’d qualified to be good enough to take passengers, so they posted us up to Oakington, on passenger Yorks. And while we were there on freighters, we only went as far as India, Delhi, to a place called Palam. And we only took freight, and we went on the usual route through Egypt, across into Shaibah in Iraq, and then into Mauripur via Karachi, and then across to Delhi, to Palam. And when we got on to passenger Yorks, our route was extended. We went to Singapore, to Changi, so it was a couple of years. By this time, I’d extended my release number, and I’d already served about eighteen months over the demob date. I hadn’t signed on yet, I was still ready for demob, but I’d signed on at about eighteen months over and I signed on for another six months. So, we got about two years on Yorks, and we were getting quite a few hours in by this time, all with my old skipper. And, lo and behold, he was posted to the Empire Air Training School at Shawbury as a special pilot, you know.
GR: Yeah.
EP: These special trips they did in the —what was the — the Lancaster. No.
GR: The Lincoln.
EP: Not the Lincoln.
GR: The Washington. No.
EP: No. The one where they made an airliner out of it.
GR: Canberra. No.
EP: No. It was a Lancaster —
GR: I know what you mean and I can’t, even I can’t think of the name.
EP: [unclear] Again my memory’s gone.
GR: Anyway.
EP: He was posted on them at Shawbury, Empire Air Training School.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Went on all these special ops.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Special navigation techniques.
GR: Yeah. Yeah.
EP: And so, I was left with another pilot I got then, and I stayed there up until [pause], until, what happened? Oh, until I, until the Berlin Airlift started and all the Yorks were made to call.
GR: They were used on the Berlin Airlift, weren’t they? Yeah.
EP: Used for coal aeroplane, mainly carrying coal. I didn’t go on the Airlift, because I was posted at that time, lo and behold onto, of all things [pause] I’m trying to think where I am. I’m getting a bit confused.
GR: That’s alright. Well we can go forward. How long did you stay in the RAF for? When did you finally –
EP: Twenty two years.
GR: Twenty two.
EP: I did the twenty two.
GR: You did twenty two full years.
EP: Oh I’m with it now. I was on Yorks until the Airlift started. Then, lo and behold, out of the blue, they posted. By this, I hadn’t signed on either. I was still -
GR: Oh, you were still —
EP: on extended demob leave. And out of the blue, when the Airlift just started, when I was posted back to Bomber Command.
GR: Oh right.
EP: I was posted to Upwood.
GR: Upwood.
EP: RAF Upwood.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And I was there for about six months, and by that time, I’d got married during the war, and we moved into a caravan there, and my daughter was born there, and I was there for about a year and, lo and behold, we were suddenly posted over to Wyton, on Lincolns, and that meant I did a back and forwards on the bike. About twelve miles because we were very close. Into the caravan.
GR: Yeah. Yeah. Keep you fit.
EP: And then they built — they had already embarked on building married quarters at Wyton, so we got a married quarters, it was ideal then. And I was there for about six months enjoying everything and I’d signed on by this time for twenty two years. Signed on for twelve initially.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Then extended it later to twenty two. And I was at Wyton for about six months and suddenly, out of the blue, I was posted to Marham. To Marham. In —
GR: East Anglia isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah.
EP: East Anglia. So that was, put paid — couldn’t come home all the time. So Amy went home, closed the house down, give up the quarters, had to give them up anyway, was posted, and we got a place in Downham Market, about twelve miles away. Lived in a little —over a shop in a little flat. Lovely little place. And I cycled back and forth twelve miles every day to Wyton.
GR: Very good.
EP: Why was I posted to Wyton? Because they were starting a new Con Unit there, because they were getting B29 bombers.
GR: The Washington.
EP: The Washington. And I was to be posted as a bomb aimer instructor on Washingtons, I was a flight sergeant by this time and so there I was. So, Amy was in the village, in Downham Market. Twelve miles, used to cycle in every day. But then they started extending the runway to this one huge runway they’ve got there, and every day, lorries were coming through, about one every ten minutes. Through Downham Market, loaded with gravel and bricks or cement. I could just, could just pop out of the flat, stand on the corner -
GR: Get a lift.
EP: Just put my hand out. I was in uniform and I did that until, and then they started building houses on Marham, and by that time I had plenty of points. It was all on points.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And we got, finally got a house in Marham and they opened a little, Sandie was about five by this time, a little infant’s school on the camp, you know. And the B29s came.
GR: Yeah.
EP: We had the Yanks there first of all, as a Con Unit, teaching us. Then we, in turn, became the Con Unit, and we taught the squadrons that came through.
GR: Very good.
EP: And finally, when we had taught all the squadrons, and everybody was back on fully operational commitments on their various airfields, we closed the squadron down, and we became 35 Squadron in our own right. So, the Con Unit became 35 Squadron.
GR: 35 Squadron.
EP: And I stayed with 35 Squadron right through until the V bombers came. We flew the Yanks, the B29s, did four trips back to the States, to Tucson in Arizona. And I was only saying, maybe I told you this before, when I got to Tucson the first time, out in the desert, all cocooned, was thousands of four engined aircraft. Bombers.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Fighters, transports, you name it. There was every aeroplane you could think of stretching out as far as I could see into the desert.
GR: A World War Two graveyard.
EP: That was in 19’, around 1960.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Many years later, when I say many years, I’m talking about, about two years ago here, they had a picture of Davis Monthan Air Force Base. He was going over — something to do with America.
GR: Yeah.
EP: And he took a photo of this Air Force Base and there they did an aerial view, quite low. Lovely picture. And I was sitting here watching it and I looked and all the bombers and planes were still there.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Thousands of them, but they weren’t propeller driven. There wasn’t one propeller driven aeroplane there.
GR: They were all jets.
EP: All jets.
GR: Yeah.
EP: What happened to the propellers? And what a mighty Air Force.
GR: Oh God. Yeah. Yeah.
EP: And that’s all one place.
GR: That’s all in one place. And I believe they have them out there because it’s dry and everything.
EP: Exactly.
GR: There’s no rust.
EP: Yeah.
GR: And all that sort. When did you finally leave the RAF, Eric, and then we’ll —was it in the –
EP: I left the RAF in ’42 — 64.
GR: 1964.
EP: August ’64.
GR: August ’64.
EP: And I went. Come August ‘64.
GR: Yeah.
EP: What was I doing then? I spent the last year on a home posting, so I was in command of a radar plotting unit, plotting so called bombs dropped by the V bombers, and it was only for a year. The last year of my service.
GR: Last year. Yeah.
EP: And when I left the service, I went for a two years course at Edghill Training College for teachers. I had been accepted. I took all my GCSEs in the RAF.
GR: Yeah.
EP: Been accepted on a teachers course.
GR: Yeah.
EP: I did two years of a three years course. I joined the young ones as a mature student. I came out of training college as a fully qualified teacher, got an immediate posting. By this time, I’d moved into a house in Formby, my own house, had a brand new car, and life was good and I was posted to a little village school in Formby itself, which I’ll show you a picture of.
GR: And that’s where I will draw it to a close, and Eric has kindly lent us his typed up memoirs called, “Eric’s Story”, which gives a lot of detail to what we’ve just been talking about.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Eric Parker
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Gary Rushbrooke
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-05
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AParkerE160505, PParkerE1602, PParkerE1603
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:51:54 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
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Cambridgeshire
United States
Canada
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
1964-08
Description
An account of the resource
Eric was born in 1924 in West Derby, Liverpool and volunteered for the Royal Air Force at the age of 17 and a half, finally being called up in January 1942 where he became a navigator / bomb aimer on Lancasters. After completing his training in Canada, Eric was posted to 12 Squadron at RAF Wickenby. Eric tells of the crewing up process, and recollects receiving a brand-new Lancaster, Y-Yoke which was lost after only six operations. Eric flew 27 operations, and took part in Operation Manna and Operation Dodge. He flew in N-Nan which survived 100 operations. He was then posted to Transport Command flying the York, before being posted back to Bomber Command. Eric recollects flying B-29s at RAF Wyton, his training in the United States and the transatlantic crossing. Eric left the Royal Air Force in August 1964, having completed 22 years of service, and took up teaching.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Vivienne Tincombe
12 Squadron
166 Squadron
aircrew
B-29
bomb aimer
bombing
Cornell
crewing up
displaced person
Lancaster
Lincoln
Master Bomber
navigator
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Marham
RAF Wickenby
RAF Wyton
training
Wellington
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1021/11392/AMartinFJK180309.1.mp3
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Title
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Martin, Frederick Joseph Keith
F J K Martin
Description
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An oral history interview Warrant Officer Keith Martin (b.1921, 1580351 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a wireless operator with 626 and 300 Squadrons.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2018-03-09
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Martin, FJK
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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DH: Right. Ok. Right. Let’s start off with a serious thing to start off with. This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Dawn Hughes. The Interviewee is Mr Keith Martin and you like to be known as Keith, don’t you? Yeah. The interview is taking place at Mr Martin’s home in Wem, Shropshire on the 9th of March 2018, and thank you Keith for agreeing to talk to me today. So, the first thing I wanted to ask was thinking about the lead up to joining the RAF how did it come about that you joined the RAF?
FM: Right.
DH: And what influenced you?
FM: I can go back to living and working in Shrewsbury. I was working for quite a big countrywide firm of agricultural machinery merchants with a branch in Shrewsbury. Hence that’s where I was working. My calling up papers came quite quickly. I was eighteen and my boss said to me, ‘You won’t need to go,’ he said, ‘Because you are on a Reserved Occupation.’ Well, I was very immature. Honestly. No, I was very immature and so that suited me. And it happened again a year later when I was nineteen. But when I was approaching twenty and I knew it would happen again I was reaching the stage where you felt guilty really if you were comfortably sitting at home, when even your own friends were going off and so I said to my father, ‘I’m going to volunteer.’ He said, ‘Volunteer for the, for the Royal Army Pay Corps,’ he said, ‘Because they get you, you’re excellent at figures,’ he said, ‘To get you well behind a desk.’ And, I, I thought about that and decided no. I liked the RAF uniform. It’s quite true. I don’t want to go in to the Army in case I land up with a bayonet. And I can’t stand the thought of the water but I can’t swim anyway. And so I went and volunteered for the Air Force which I was accepted straight away, and on the 20th of April 1942 I arrived at Padgate which is North Lancashire for my indoctrination. That’s the right word. I was there for five days only during which time there was a group of about thirty. This squadron leader addressed us and he said, ‘Would any of you like to take an aircrew medical?’ And so, well a damned good idea having a medical so I put my hand up didn’t I? And of course I passed the medical, which mainly funnily enough was, and several other failed through vision. Vision. What I didn’t know, I was innocent at the time, that I had already volunteered for aircrew and about four days, be about the 24th of the month, April I was interviewed by the same squadron leader and he said, ‘Martin, your legs are too short for us to train you to be a pilot.’ And he said, ‘Your educational standard is too poor for us to educate you to, to train you as a navigator.’ I accepted that, because I only went to the Catholic, Catholic ordinary school. So, he said, ‘We’ll train you as a wireless op air gunner.’ ‘Alright, sir.’ The following day I was posted to Blackpool, and I found that Blackpool was the school that taught you two things. One was, the important thing was how to learn the Morse Code and how to handle sending and receiving, and the other thing that was important to them but not to us was how to learn how to march up and down Blackpool streets. Behave ourselves because we were not in billets we were out to houses. Took us in, you know. So they took me. Was it how many? The school for wireless operators was I think three months. May. June. July. That’s right. And I left Blackpool having passed out at the required eighteen words a minute on the 4th of August. Went home for a, once you got a break you know. And then nine days later I received a posting to a place called Yatesbury in Wiltshire, which was the flying part of the learning to be a wireless operator. Doing it in the air. So, in effect that was the first, my first meeting with an aircraft. So, from August to November I was training as a wireless operator air, from which you got your sergeant’s stripes if you passed out. And I passed out, and got my sergeant’s stripes and was then sent for a short, what I call waiting to be properly dispersed. A small, well yeah it was a waiting station and that of all places was Ternhill. And I was at Ternhill for [pause] three weeks from the middle of November to the middle of December, and then I was posted to Calverley in Nantwich. Near Nantwich. And that really was further progress, and I have an idea of what we were flying then. Memory you know. Very good but —
[pause]
FM: I think. ’43. No. That’s right. Calverley as I was saying was again just further progress on generally learning how to fly in the air, you know. Nothing particular. And then I was sent to Aircrew Recruitment Centre in London, and I didn’t really know why but it, it did, how can I put it? It was, in fact to tell me or to tell the person that they had been selected for A — wireless operator, and B — air gunner. And I’d been selected for wireless operator. And then, so then I was sent to 18 ITW, Initial Training Wing, Brignorth for just a month. Initial Training Wing speaks for itself. And from there, from that very station I got married.
[pause]
FM: Then I was posted of all places to a place called West Freugh in Scotland which was Advanced Flying Unit, which you have to be in an aircraft flying over the sea, and you had to go through certain rules and regulations to do what you had to do. Having passed out there in May 1943 [pause] No. No. Sorry, no. No. That’s before, having passed out in August 1943. That’s right, when I finished at Yatesbury, and then to West Freugh. I passed out there in October ’43. Sorry. I was only there about six weeks and I was posted to Hixon, Stafford, which is an Operational Training Unit and we were, I was introduced to Wellingtons, Wimpies. I was also within the first week [pause] I was introduced if I can describe it as the crew. The crewing up procedure need, needs talking about because it’s something that outsiders wouldn’t know. How do you get crewed up? Who does it? The answer is the pilot chooses his own crew. The end of the week that you’re there being introduced as I said to Wellingtons, you’re told to report to the, what was the big room that was used generally for dances and things, and there was thirty wireless operators, thirty navigators, thirty engineers, thirty rear gunners, and thirty pilots. Now, that was a crew of a Wellington. Did not include a mid-upper gunner because a Wellington does not have a mid-upper gunner turret. So the skipper chose his own crew, and I was there in the room and this, seemed to be elderly gentleman he turned out to be six years older than me [laughs] came along to me and he said, ‘You’re Sergeant Martin.’ ‘Yes.’ He was only a sergeant, so I didn’t have to say sir. ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You’re from Shropshire.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘So am I, would you like to fly with me?’ I said, ‘Thank you very much.’ And that in effect, I say to this day saved my life because he was a superb pilot, and he got the crew together and instead of us being half a dozen individuals we became a crew. Right. So we then flew Wellingtons as a crew in training from a place called Seighford, which was a depot of Hixon’s’ and we were, I was there from November ’43 to January ’44. I think it was possibly at that time that we flew our first not exactly operation but our first trip over a foreign country [pages turning] Yeah. It was on the 30th of the December during that period that we were sent to do a leaflet raid over Belgium. This was one of the Royal Air Force’s ideas that every crew should taste flying over the sea and flying over what was still dangerous territory, and so that we got back and we hadn’t lost our nerve and we didn’t report anything silly. You know what I mean, and so that was the important thing and that was in a Wellington on the 30th of December. Having [pause] passed that, we then immediately got transferred to a four engine Conversion Unit. Immediately after that. We were not going to fly in Wellingtons in operations. We were going to fly in the new four engine bombers that were coming on line. And the first thing we did when we got there was pick up a mid-upper gunner. The mid-upper gunners had been trained ready, but had been sent straight to Conversion Units as they’re called because it was there that the, the skipper would pick one up and so that’s where we got hold of Jock. And now we were a crew of seven which you need. And so we did Conversion Unit at Sandtoft, and during that time had a crash. We crashed a Halifax [pages turning] We crashed a Halifax on the 6th of April 1944. We had a 5 o’clock take off. Evening take-off. It was only what we called circuits and bumps learning, for the skipper to learn how to take off and land and he had an engine failure on take-off. And because we hadn’t really got any height the skipper, the skipper decided to crash land. The decision he made we just accepted it, and in the subsequent report which I’ve got a copy of it says, “No pilot error. No disciplinary action to be taken.” But we were a bit, we were sent straight to the medical to be checked over, and we were a bit cheeky so in their wisdom they sent us straight up again. Well, in a few hours, 9.15 that night we went up again but this time we were also accompanied by a senior pilot as well as our own to see that there was nothing wrong, and that went on all right. And the amazing thing is we saw that Halifax the other, the next day or the following day and it was, it was a ruin. We’d hit a tree in a forest or in a field, and it had torn the wing off. But how we all got out alive I don’t know but we did. The aircraft was a write off. So, we —
DH: Can I ask what plane that was—
FM: That was a Halifax.
DH: A Halifax, yeah.
FM: An old Halifax. They only sent the old ones to training places. So we had a couple of little trips before we, whilst we were there when we had to go to learn what they called ditching practice and this was up in Lincolnshire. Just a day out. You had to go. They had a big pool with a half a Lancaster in the middle and you were taken out but you had to get the dinghy out and on and get yourself home. You see what I mean.
DH: Yeah.
FM: Right. We were posted from Sandtoft to Hemswell for the month of April to transfer from Halifaxes to Lancasters. A small transfer. Just the difference for the pilot really and on the 1st of May 1944 we were posted to Wickenby.
DH: So can I ask with your job as a wireless operator what was different going from the Halifax in to the Lancaster for you? Was there any difference?
FM: Nothing on those two. Different coming from the Wellington because it was a different radio. But no my job was basically the same. Very little radio, and mainly standing in the astrodome as an extra set of eyes but I’ll come to that when it comes to operational flying. Right. On the 10th of May, on the 11th of May we were on just Lancasters locally. Further training. But on the 19th of May we had our first operation but to the marshalling yards at Orleans. Orleans south of Paris. Total time there and back five hours and fifteen minutes. Right. We then had to prepare for the next one by an air test. The next operation which was on the 24th of May which was the marshalling yards at Aachen right on the border. Five hours and five minutes. Now, I don’t want to go through these individually. I shall want to just pick out those that matter. We went to Aachen again. We went to marshalling yards. These marshalling yards were so important because it was coming up to D-Day. We didn’t know that. But the Germans were, their marshalling yards were bombed ruthlessly. The next one is a marshalling yard as well.
DH: Can you explain what a marshalling yard is please?
FM: Well [laughs] I thought you’d know that.
DH: No. No.
FM: A railway. Well, they’ve got a big railway. When you marshall all your equipment it’s a marshalling yard.
DH: Right.
FM: You know. It’s the same in this country. We got in to early June and we were on such things as heavy gun batteries on the coast. Railway junction again, and marshalling yards again. You can see the picture. We’re averaging the 5th of June, 7th of June, 10th of June, 12th of June. We were averaging one almost every other day and then [pause] that’s right. I’d passed it over without thinking how I got the Legion of Honour because on the 5th of June and the 6th of June was D-Day and in those twenty four hours we did two operations which was a thing unknown. To do two in twenty four hours. One was to the north of the coast, and one was to the south. And I’m talking about the German coastal batteries and we bombed them north and south. The south one we did first. You’ve heard a lot lately of these emigrant towns called, one was called Sangatte. Well, that’s where we, that was a bombing because Sangatte then was a big German coastal battery. So we did Sangatte and within a matter of no time at all we were off again, and this time we did the bottom ones near [pause] near, well I can’t think what the big town is on the corner. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. It was one of the southern ones, and doing those two on D-Day was the reason for the French had fixed that anybody operating on D-Day would get this medal. So, came to the last trip that I did was on the 12th of June. Again, marshalling yards and then I was transferred to the Polish squadron with a week’s leave in between. Got back. Got to the Polish squadron 17th of June. We, they didn’t waste any time. We air tested on the 17th of June morning and went on operations in the evening on the 17th of June. So we then go to several operations with 300 Squadron in June. I’ve got 24th, 25th, 29th and 30th. On the 30th, the last one was a daylight. Marshalling yards in the daylight God knows why. I can’t think of why but in fact the next one, the 12th of July, by now I must have gone on leave then. You had a leave generally every so many months because I have a blank space between the 30th of June and the 12th of July. On the 12th of July we started operations. Now were on longer distance ones. This one is nine hours and eight months. This one which I just wanted to describe is the most dangerous one we did. It was to a marshalling yard in the south of France, almost on the Swiss border at a place called Revigny, and when we got there it was ten tenths cloud. You were flying at about ten thousand feet in beautiful sunshine with a blanket of cloud right over the target. Couldn’t see anything. The Master Bomber, I don’t know whether you understand Master Bombers, the person who is there controlling. The master bomber said, ‘I can’t mark the target.’ And he recommends go home. You know, abandon. Abandon the exercise. And I can remember my skipper saying, only to us, ‘Look lads. We didn’t fly all this way to take our bombs home.’ He said, ‘I’m going to try to go through the clouds and see what happens.’ So then came the most scary time of slowly, slowly descending through cloud, and could see nothing. The navigator had taken the distance. No. Yeah. No, the direction that we were travelling so that we could reverse and go back and kept on going through this cloud to Revigny. Anyway, we came out into sunshine. Or night. It wasn’t sunshine. It was moonlight really. At four thousand feet. The skipper said, ‘Right lads. Now, we can reverse along so that we go back the way we come until we find these marshalling yards.’ And so the bomb aimer was the important one because he was lying in his turret in the bottom and he could see, and he right up, ‘Coming up marshalling yards.’ Right. So skipper said, ‘Right. Prepare for bombing run.’ And we had a very quick bombing run. Not the usual four minutes because he wanted to get the bombs away whilst we were over the marshalling yards, and so we bombed. We luckily we had time to close the bomb doors when a four engined plane which we could only describe as a four engine plane, couldn’t say it was a Lancaster or a Halifax came right underneath the clouds straight down underneath us, all four engines ablaze. An absolute, you know, a roman candle and either it exploded or it crash landed and exploded but it blew us up on our backsides. And I can remember skipper who never swore saying, ‘Oh Christ.’ And we seemed to be all over the place, and he was desperately trying to correct. Anyway, at two thousand feet he corrected, and we were back on an even keel so he said, ‘Lads, I’m going to stick these throttles right through, and we’re going to get home quickly.’ Now, when we got home we had to report to the intelligence. Why? Two things. A — the skipper had disobeyed an order to abandon to go home. B — he pressed on and bombed the target. A — he was going to be court martialled. B — he was going to get a medal. He got the medal. So he got the DFC, quite rightly. Then we carried on several quite long trips. Stuttgart. We went twice to Stuttgart and that wasn’t very nice.
DH: Can you explain why it wasn’t very nice? What mainly —
FM: Because you’re going to go through the Ruhr first of all. You’re on the chance of night fighters for such a long distance before you even get to the target because it’s an eight hour trip. Four hours each way. Do you see what I mean? You’re under, you’re in a, their well armed area, and to do it twice in oh hell, twice in four days. Yes. 24th and 28th. I can remember one little thing. On the way home on the second trip I said to the, through the, ‘Skipper, permission to speak.’ You weren’t allowed to talk, you know. ‘Permission to speak.’ ‘Yes, wireless operator.’ ‘Will you all wish me a happy birthday? It’s my birthday today.’ Because it was now, we took off on the 28th of July and on the way home it was the 29th of July.
DH: And did they?
FM: We did that night. Then there were several trips, and then came the period at the end of August. We had already now done [pause] we’d now done twenty six. And the skipper, and now the bomb aimer had also been made a [pause] a what do you call it? You know, we were still sergeants and he, yeah. You know what I mean. Anyway, the skipper called us together and he said, ‘I’ve had,’ because he said, ‘I’m a senior crew,’ he said, ‘I’ve got the ears of Bill Misselbrook — ’ our squadron commander that at the end of August the wing is being disbanded because the Poles have now got sufficient trained people to take over the wing completely. Now — ’ he said, ‘We’ve got four trips to do.’ And he said, ‘I would like to think that we could get them done without us being posted again to some other squadron, you know and have to start all over again.’ So, he said, ‘I’ve got to get your agreement that if you agree I’ll see Bill Misselbrook and say, ‘We volunteer for every trip that’s going.’ And he said, he must have agreed and from the 25th of August to the 31st of August we did four operations, and one of those was the biggest we’d ever done and it was at, it was up to a place in the Baltic called Stettin. Or it was called Stettin then and there was a Nazi naval base there and somehow Stalin had asked for us to bomb it. I don’t know how. You can get these funny things that go on. So we did Stettin as our twenty ninth trip and again on the way home he said, break the rules, he said, ‘I’m not going to stooge back under the rules of the speed that you can do safeguarding the engines,’ he said. ‘They can only shoot me.’ So it was boof, and we came home and the funny words, we landed and I can remember the words coming over the, over from the ground radio lady. She said, ‘U-Uncle. U-Uncle have you completed your mission?’ Because we were fifteen minutes before time getting home. Whereas the others took fifteen minutes longer obeying we’d, anyway that was another story. And then we did a daylight raid on the 31st of August and at the end of that I have a note signed by the station commander, and the squadron commander, “You’re tour is completed.” And so that in affect ends the chapter of my time doing bombing raids. Can you —
DH: Do you want to pause?
FM: Well, do you want any further more?
DH: I’ve got some questions if that’s ok.
FM: Because I mean going on, you can go on forever. I’ve got —
DH: Yeah, no, I’ve got some questions if that’s ok.
FM: Otherwise, I can go on so long with —
DH: No. That’s fine. On an op what would your job entail because it took you five hours, eight hours? So what would you do during your time?
FM: Your main job that you are trained to do for the, for the crew is that you take a message in code from Bomber Command Headquarters at oh, they’re active then. Not the headquarters now. They’re active headquarters every fifteen minutes. Every fifteen minutes they send out a message. It may be status quo. It may be they’d got a change of wind direction, change of wind speed, a change of anything, but every fifteen minutes the wireless operator takes a message and passes it on to the navigator.
DH: Right.
FM: In between, each skipper may want to use him in a different way but most want to use him as a lookout, standing up under the astrodome and helping to spy night fighters.
DH: Right.
FM: And the bit, the important thing he does on a bombing run, when you can imagine there’s a mass of aircraft coming through to bomb on the same you suddenly see one appearing above you and immediately you tell the skipper. Because what you don’t want to do is be bombed by one above. So you’re first of all a wireless operator and second of all you’re a lookout.
DH: So you kept busy.
FM: Yes.
DH: You mentioned before we started the interview, you talked about the Polish squadron. You talked about the make up of the Commonwealth crew.
FM: Yes.
DH: Can you explain that please?
FM: No, when a Commonwealth was pure luck and they had to use the name Commonwealth because they didn’t want to insult like for instance our navigator was a Canadian. My friend that I had there who’d trained could still be alive. The last time I heard of him he was in a wheelchair but his navigator was the most unusual thing. He was a Yank. But he was a Yank who had wanted to get into the war, and so he volunteered from America to join the Canadian Air Force, and from the Canadian Air Force he got, so there’s another one. So if you said it’s an English crew, or a British crew you could be offending, so it was called a Commonwealth.
DH: Right near the start of the interview you talked about your training and everything and you were saying that you got married.
FM: Yeah.
DH: Before we started the interview you said briefly about your feelings about getting married and did you do the right thing at the right age and that. Can you, can you talk about that again please?
FM: That came after though, dear. I don’t know whether it’s worth talking about. I mean, I didn’t [pause] how, how can you say that in effect during your period of the war until, until the later time that when she was allowed to come and live close to because I was no longer on operations but in those early days every leave was like a honeymoon. You got, you know you and to be honest with you we, we reached demob without ever realising what married life was, and then by then we got a baby on the way, very difficult to put it in to words. I just felt that she was too young. She never complained, but at eighteen.
DH: Yeah.
FM: But as I said marriage went on for sixty one years and we got a letter from the Queen here so that couldn’t have been too bad.
DH: Oh no.
FM: It was only in my own mind that. Yeah. Yes.
DH: Right at the start you were saying that you got the call up papers but you were in a Reserved Occupation.
FM: That’s right.
DH: So were you allowed to ignore those call up papers if you were in a Reserved Occupation?
FM: Oh yeah. Only, only as a volunteer.
DH: Right.
FM: Only, and if you were accepted you could have been a volunteer in a far more important Reserved Occupation for some reason and be turned down. You could have been in a, some kind of laboratory somewhere and what have you. But the rule was you, if you, if you, you had to volunteer and you had to be accepted.
DH: Right.
FM: And my Reserved Occupation was really only agricultural machinery. I know it was helping to keep the farmers going but it wasn’t of grade one importance.
DH: You said at the, near the start again that you went for your initial training. You said you went for training and the indoctrination. What did you mean by indoctrination?
FM: I think I can explain that. A big word for a little thing.
DH: Yeah.
FM: 16th of June 1943 [pause] That’s right. I hadn’t started. I hadn’t got to the [pause] Yeah. The first introduction to an aeroplane we [pause] now, can you edit this if you —
DH: Yes. Yes. It can be edited.
FM: The important thing was to try and make you sick on the basis that once you’d been sick you were never likely to be sick again. But if you persisted in being sick you would get discharged from aircrew because you couldn’t be sick.
DH: Right.
FM: You just couldn’t be. Now, that was the indoctrination that I, and it, on the 16th of June ’43, I went twice in one hour on a Dominie with seven, six others and we marched to the aircraft and as we marched they gave us each a bucket. Now, that was before we got to the aircraft they gave us a bucket. When we got inside they had purposely not cleaned it up and I think half of them were sick before we got off the ground. But then he was an experienced pilot and he could hedgehop. You were only up and hour but believe me we were all terribly sick. Is that sufficient indoctrination?
DH: Yeah.
FM: If you see what I mean.
DH: Yeah. Yeah.
FM: If you followed on, and I had four but the first two were only experience. The second two I had to do two message taking. That was my initial contact with the wireless.
DH: So I take it you stopped being sick.
FM: I stopped being, I was only sick once. It’s a terrible feeling and you walk out, stagger out of this aircraft and they say, they march you out, two march. ‘You now go and clean your bucket in the toilets.’ It’s not a nice story, but that was the indoctrination. It had, they could not have people who were going to be sick passed as aircrew. It could not be allowed, and so they had that method to making you sick and giving you four chances really.
DH: Yeah.
FM: I can only, I can’t honestly tell you if they all failed. All four. All I know is I was only sick once [pause] The crew, or most of them.
DH: Which one are you?
FM: None, I took it, I took the photograph as it happened. I didn’t know at the time, you know.
DH: Yeah.
FM: That I was going to take a photograph of the others. The skipper of course is in the middle. The one who looks a little bit elderly.
DH: All so young.
FM: Yes, all so young.
DH: So young. Can you tell me when you were actually on an op did you get a chance to get scared? Were you so busy that you couldn’t get scared?
FM: You were scared all the while. But you were a part of a crew and you got your courage from them, and they in turn got their courage from you. You were a crew. To say you weren’t scared would be a lie. Many’s the time I hung tight to the [pause] especially on, when you get a bad take off and you don’t get off the ground at all due to weather conditions but that’s another story. You can’t. You can’t. Some get all the stories you need to get your memory, you know. But scared, yes. We were scared. We were scared. Especially when you were flying over the Ruhr and the ack ack was almost bouncing off the bottom of your aircraft. You could hear the crackle of it. Yes. Yes. Anything else?
DH: I don’t think so.
FM: I think I’ve been pretty thorough.
DH: You have. You have.
FM: I, as I said I had two further RAF lives after that but I don’t want to go into them all.
DH: No. No. After, so after VJ Day how, how did, what affect did the war have on you do you think?
FM: None at all.
DH: No.
FM: We were still going on targets. The fact that they were targets of a different lot, because the one lot was being prepared for VE day and the second lot afterwards. No. The only thing, you know, how can I put it? When we finished we didn’t know that we weren’t going to be called up for a second tour and would have done if it hadn’t been for the Americans dropping the atom bomb. If that hadn’t have happened after six months or more of it we would have been called back again.
DH: So, after you finished your tour how did the RAF occupy you?
FM: Well, that’s another life. I could go on then about a whole year flying down near here, and then a third tour. A third life when I managed to get appointed to the Test Pilot’s School and that’s where I finished.
DH: Are you able to tell me about the Test Pilot’s School?
FM: Yes. It’s very interesting. We’ll forget the next bit. That was a year literally at South Cerney just outside Gloucester where I was flying with advanced, advanced trainee pilots when they sent, and it was a two engined aircraft, an Oxford when they sent them out to do night trips. They were not allowed to go without a wireless operator because the wireless operator could get them home by getting directions. So that was literally a year. And then there was a message on the notice board, “Volunteers wanted for the Number 4 Empire Test Pilot’s School,” which was being transferred from Farnborough to [pause] I can’t think of the name now. Anyway, I’ve got it in here. It begins with a C. Yeah, that appears, Neville Duke. I flew with him once. Empire Test Pilot’s School. What am I trying to tell you?
DH: You transferred from Farnborough to —
FM: Right. No. They were transferred. I was still at the Advanced Flying Unit until the end of October ’45.
DH: Right.
FM: So, I’d been there a little over a year and they wanted volunteers. Wireless operators who would go to just a quick training school to teach them how to help a pilot flying on his own on a four engine aircraft. You’ll appreciate that if being able to handle all the throttles, being able to close down one or more engines, jobs like that we were taught and then we were sent off to this school. And when we got there, there was nothing there and the station commander called. He said, ‘Your warrant officer has just come through Martin so you’re going to be in charge.’ So, he said, ‘You set up this unit. There will be five others,’ he said, ‘We tried to get youngsters who haven’t had the — ’ he called it luck, ‘The luck to have a bombing life because they came in too late.’ So he said, ‘They’re raw youngsters most of them but,’ he said, ‘There is one senior man as well as you.’ And so we set up this. They gave us an office. Oh anyway, we set it up and eventually it was got going but it was months. A long, I don’t, I can’t remember why but anyway it was January’46 before we actually flew when they were ready as well. And we flew from this Empire Test Pilots School. From Cranfield. Couldn’t remember it. Cranfield, which is north of, north of Bedford. Anyway, we started flying there in January ’46 and we did very little flying because they didn’t, they weren’t always flying four engines. They only needed you when they were. But, you know you did some interesting small jobs with them. And then came my moment of, there came a time in May ’46 when I think we’d had a couple of these six taken ill with something, flu or something and suddenly we, we had to do a lot more because I got a book here when I’d flew four times on the 6th of May, five times on the 7th May, twice on the 8th of May, five times on the 9th of May. I don’t want to go on but you can see I was doing a lot then and during that time, you’ve never heard of Duke have you?
DH: No.
FM: Neville Duke.
DH: No. I haven’t.
FM: Well, he became, later on he became a test pilot and he became holder of the speed record and I, and I just flew with him once for forty five minutes. N. Fifty minutes. So that’s my fifty minutes of fame, and carried on there still flying and the last trip I did before I was demobbed, 8th of July ’46. Without this I couldn’t remember all those things.
DH: No.
FM: That was the best and the luckiest posting I ever had. Suddenly going from training pilots in night cross countries often being more scared than I ever was bombing, and suddenly getting pilots good enough to be test pilots, you know. It was an entirely different experience. And the fact that I’d became a warrant officer which helped a lot. Financially it helped a great deal.
DH: Yeah.
FM: Right. Any more questions?
DH: So after, after you were demobbed what were you going to do?
FM: Well, I was lucky you see. One of the reasons that I could safely volunteer was the company, and I’ve got a letter from the boss, what would I call him? Anyway, he was the boss, guaranteeing any member of the staff anywhere in all of the branches around the, that volunteered for the Services, whichever Service and came back were guaranteed a job. And I’ve got the letter from Hubert Burgess himself and he thanked me very much for my service, services, and understood my feeling of, of volunteering. And so when I got back I went down to the branch in Shrewsbury, had an appointment with a man named Richards who I worked for. He’d, he’d been too old, you know to go in. Anyway, he’d be too important to have to go in the Services and he said, ‘Yeah. When do you want to start?’ And I said, ‘Well, can you give me a week? I’ve got to find, I’ve got to find lodgings for the wife and, and my daughter.’ And so I think I started work, I think I started work on the 1st of September.
DH: Wow, that’s, that’s quite good, isn’t it? That’s very good.
FM: It was good.
DH: For them to say that.
FM: Because, because this man Richards and I had a very long working relationship and he, he pushed me up until I was eventually, you know in a very good job. So that’s really the story of how lucky we were that we came back. I mean, I can remember one very good high rating head office boy who went, and he went in the Air Force and he came back and he went back to a job and it happened. He kept his promise. Your job was there, and that was a marvellous thing, you know. You didn’t have to worry about your week’s wages did you?
DH: No. That’s quite something.
FM: Another thing he did. This is, this is only for your information because you had to recognise what money was worth. He instructed the wages people to put ten shillings a week in an envelope in the safe in my name.
DH: What? During the war?
FM: All the way, whole time I was through.
DH: No.
FM: For the whole of the time I was through he paid me ten shillings a week for fighting for me country.
DH: Wow.
FM: Believe me when we came out that money set up the furniture for our first place. Now, how many bosses would do that?
DH: Not many.
FM: But that’s actually absolutely true. They say, ‘Oh, ten shillings a week,’ but ten shillings a week then.
DH: Was a lot.
FM: Was a different kettle of fish. And anyway, he didn’t need to give me anything, did he? Guaranteeing me a job was sufficient without paying me ten shillings a week for five years.
DH: Wow, that’s quite —
FM: So you do get good bosses. You do get good bosses. Yes.
DH: Well, can I say thank you. You’ve been absolutely fascinating to listen to.
FM: No. I, I didn’t want to overdo it as I said. There’s the three lives. The second one I told you about flying trainee pilots around the skies over Gloucestershire were not a happy experience and then the Test Pilot’s School which was quite marvellous. Quite marvellous. Although to get in [laughs] this is not for you, I’m just talking to you, you get in, and this test pilot he says, ‘Well, Martin —’ or, yes. Well, yes. Sometimes they know your Christian name but you know there was, you weren’t together long enough. He’d say, ‘Well, I’m doing single engine flying today.’ So he said, ‘You know how to feather.’ That was what I was taught of course. I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Be careful to feather in the order that I tell you because —’ he said, ‘I’ll have to adjust the balance of the aircraft.’ So you get quite happily tootling along and he says, ‘Feather outboard.’ So you press the button for stop the outboard and the engine dies and it’s just running in in the wind and he’s adjusting. And a little later he says, ‘Feather inboard.’ So you press the inboard button and that so he says, ‘We are now flying on two engines.’ That’s alright. And then he said, ‘Feather inboard,’ or whatever. The one he prefers. He may say that he prefers to feather inboard, or feather outboard of the other two and you do it and suddenly you’re flying or trying to fly a four engine bomber on one engine. It has its own moments. It has its moments. Oh yes. But you trusted them you see. They were skilled, and they had to be able to fly this bomber on one engine without losing height. Just keep it and they would, they passed. Anyway, enough about that.
DH: Which aircraft were they?
FM: Lancasters.
DH: They were Lancasters.
FM: Yes. And the latest model too. The latest Rolls twenty two engines I think. They had all the best to train on they did. Yeah. Anyway, thank you for coming. I don’t want to bore you to tears.
DH: You’re not boring me whatsoever.
FM: I mean, I was one of the lucky ones to have lived through it and to some extent to still have an active memory. I do need this because the dates sometimes run into one.
DH: It would be very difficult to remember all those dates.
FM: Oh yeah. Yes.
DH: Very difficult, one last question.
FM: Yeah.
DH: Have you got any you know, lighter moments. Any funny things that you can remember from your time on operations?
FM: You know, it’s hard to remember a funny thing. I think the funniest thing was not what happened on the day but what happened on the day had a remarkable [pause] how can I put it? Resurgence of life many years later. And I’ll tell you this, I can’t remember which daylight raid it was but the Polish squadron, Polish aircraft my pilot had got friendly with their pilot was in, landed in the next bay, and they were getting out and we were getting out and they had, one of the ground crew was a bit snap happy taking pictures and he came along and we grinned at him and he took the picture and that was it. Never thought anything about it. Now, this is one daylight raid towards the end of the, with my life at Faldingworth with the Poles. Now, how many years later? I would be [pause] Phyl had died so it was one of their anniversaries at Faldingworth and I got an invitation and I had a friend, a golfing friend who was very keen on anything to do with, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you. I’d love to.’ He said, ‘I’ll take you willingly.’ I said, ‘Ok.’’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about driving,’ he said. I was still able to drive. I hadn’t reached this stage but it must have been ’87 ’97. Fifteen. It must have been fifteen years ago. An anniversary they had and that we went up and we went first thing and we went in to the village hall which was also now laid out with old photographs and everything to do with the Poles. And the Polish people, or the remnants were there and a lot of them had got tales to tell. And I was walking along here, this lady had got a book and she spoke English. She said, ‘Have a look at my records.’ She said, ‘Do you happen to know my father? He was a Polish pilot in this.’ And I said to her, ‘Apologies,’ I said, ‘We were only there three months. We never got really to know our own lot properly let alone — ’ ‘Oh, I understand.’ She said, ‘Have a look at my pictures.’ And she turned over a page and there was the photograph there that he’d taken what would be the best part of, if he’d taken it in ’44 and this would be in, in ’84. The best part of forty years later. And I squealed. I said, ‘You won’t believe it,’ I said. ‘That’s me.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, reading it. This was the pilot who was a friend. And this ground crew had taken, and it had got to her and she got it and there it was. A photograph of myself and oh, I remember the bomb aimer was there and the rear gunner. Unfortunately, the skipper hadn’t got out of the aircraft because we were only disembarking, you know.
DH: Yeah.
FM: But I can remember squealing. Then I called my friend, ‘Brian. Brian come and have a look at this.’ So he came along and I said, ‘Look at that.’ ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. I said would you believe that you could come to a place and see yourself forty years ago. And that was in effect, you could call that the most happy and unexpected —
DH: Yeah.
FM: Thing to happen. To find that you, your photograph had been taken and been kept in this, her father’s album.
DH: Yeah.
FM: And had got to her. Anyway, yes so that was I think that was a jolly tale. You know what I mean. It was a happy one.
DH: Yeah.
FM: Not a miserable one. A happy one.
DH: Well, thank you so much for talking to me, Keith.
FM: I could tell you one which is dead funny. Unbelievable but still it happened. You wouldn’t know, couldn’t know but during the war only bottled beer was available. There may have been draft beer in small quantities round about Burton on Trent and places like that but I mean normally bottled was the only beer. And the day we finished operations was a daylight raid so like it wasn’t like coming back in the middle of the night and so we all, we were all going to go down to Market Rasen which was only three and a half miles away. The skipper had arranged transport. He’s the boss now. He’s well thought of on the squadron and he arranged transport so we can drink as much as we like. So we go in to this hotel in Market Rasen. I wish I could remember its name but it’s there. We go in to the bar. It’s quite early. Not in to the bar. Went in, oh no we went in to the smoke room. Didn’t mix. We wanted a big room of our own and there’s seven of us sat around this table and the, and the navigator, Frank who came to see me from Canada who, thirty five years later, but he said, ‘The first round’s on me.’ We didn’t argue about a round. But he walked up to the bar and we could hear him. This young girl came and he said, he said, ‘I want fifty six pint bottles of beer please.’ She said [pause], ‘I’m not joking,’ he said, ‘I want fifty six pint bottles of beer.’ And they were all brought around our table. Eight of us, seven of us, supposed to drink eight each. The skipper could drink one. The navigator could manage twelve. I may have managed my eight at a push, but I think that particular order was the biggest individual order for beer I’ve ever heard placed.
DH: Yeah.
FM: Yeah. That was Frank. He was going to buy the first round so he did but there was never a second [laughs] Yes.
DH: Could you tell me the names of the people on that crew?
FM: I can. Very well. Pilot George Davies from Oswestry. Navigator Frank Yate from North Hamilton in, in Ontario. Bomb aimer Freddie [Pittey] from Newbury, trainee, a trainee teacher and went back to become a school teacher. Jock Gilchrist. Jock, obviously mid-upper gunner, Scottish from Ayr. The one, the one we found difficulty keeping in touch with and I don’t know why maybe he got married and moved around was the engineer. I’ll think of his name in a minute. And then the rear gunner was the oldest. Harry [Fay], a cockney from East, East Ham. Harry was the first to die. He had a heart attack and one by one they all dropped off leaving me, yeah. I even kept in touch with the wives. With the widows. The two widows that I mainly, because it was rather amazing when you think of I went to the wedding of the bomb aimer and I went to his silver [pause] Oh, let me think. If he was married in ’46, and I went to his golden wedding, that’s right. That’s right. He was married in ’46. Ninety. Yeah, that’s right. And Phyl was alive of course and at his golden wedding of course we were guests of honour fifty years later. That was one amazing thing. The skipper of course married a New Zealand nurse who then wanted to go home and he didn’t have no interest in his father’s business which was a business that I was in. And when he’d gone and I was living in Oswestry and his mum and dad were still alive in Oswestry, I used to visit them didn’t I? And his dad who used to run this big agricultural, owned it, that George wasn’t interested in because he was a Batchelor of Science in his own right on metallurgy. Anyway, that’s another story. Anyway, his father said to me, ‘Get in touch with your boss and tell him that when I’m ready to retire I want you to buy the business.’ Now, geographically it was perfect. We’d already moved from Oswestry when we bought out a company in Welshpool so one more step to new town was perfect. And it happened. He called me, ‘Come and see me. I want to retire,’ he said, I want to safeguard my staff,’ he said. ‘You get hold of your boss.’ Well I did and of course my boss, the big boss then contacted my boss Ben Richards who’d been with me all the lifetime and we went down and we looked and eventually we bought it. And because of that I was made what you’d call area supervisor, having already taken over Welshpool as well from Oswestry, and the funny thing to think that from that day when George Davis says, ‘You’re from Shropshire.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I’m a Salopian too. Would you fly with me?’ Comes years later his dad. It’s, you know —
DH: It’s amazing, isn’t it?
FM: It is. You can’t really believe these things happen. Yes. Yes. I’m glad I’ve got a pretty active memory because sometimes I can enjoy going back on a given period. I don’t have to go back on the lot. I can remember doing something that I never thought you’d do in the wartime. Have you heard of mayday?
DH: Of?
FM: Mayday. The word mayday.
DH: I know what the word mayday means. Yeah.
FM: What does it mean?
DH: It’s a call for help.
FM: Right. It’s also something you don’t use unless you’re in —
DH: Trouble.
FM: In trouble. And so I called mayday and I had to explain when we got down why, and this was with these trainee pilots. We were out one night in January and we were in a horrendous snowstorm. He quite rightly had lost his way. I could understand that. We got down to, over a big town at about four thousand feet or was it, sorry four hundred feet, and we could recognise it was Cheltenham. I also knew that we were, had a safe flying height over the Cotswolds of fourteen hundred feet, and we were flying at four hundred feet. So I tapped him on the shoulder and I [pause] ‘Oh yes,’ he said. We climbed up, and then we were lost, you know. We were close to home and yet lost so I called, ‘Mayday. Mayday.’ The answer, ‘Your requirements?’ And I just said, ‘Searchlights.’ And within no time the beams came up. We could see them and we came home. Got home. I got away with them. My reasons for mayday. They accepted it. I don’t know whether he got away with having lost, you know. I don’t know. I can’t remember, but I do remember that. Possibly being the most scary night of the, you don’t call mayday once in a lifetime. Yeah. And then have to say, go in front of the intelligence and tell them why you called mayday. A thing unknown. Mayday. Yes. Yes. A bad thunderstorm in an old fashioned aircraft is pretty terrible you know. I mean you can’t see anything. Not like these modern things where you’re, yes, enough of me. You’ll never get home ‘til tomorrow. You get me on my memories and I’ve got so many. So many.
DH: Well —
FM: I don’t know.
DH: If you wanted to chat another time and give me memories that would be wonderful.
FM: [unclear] Right. My legs get, slowly but surely they’re deteriorating. You’ve seen that medal haven’t you? That’s the —
DH: Let’s have a look.
FM: That’s the Legion d’Honneur.
DH: Oh yes. That’s beautiful isn’t it?
FM: It is.
DH: Beautiful.
FM: Put that there.
DH: Yes.
FM: It’s just something. I don’t know if I’ve got it. It won’t take a second to look. I’ll finish my coffee. So many documents that I’ve got which [pause] Different crew members but I don’t want to show you bits and pieces. I thought I’d got a [pause] There’s the skipper. What you can see of him. Only his head.
DH: Oh, inside the plane.
FM: No. I can’t see there’s anything particular. It’s hard to remember [laughs] I told you we were in civvy billets in Blackpool.
DH: Yes [pause] Ah, which one are you?
FM: Right in the middle, at the back.
DH: Oh right. Oh yes, nuisance.
FM: I’ll get it. I’ll get it.
DH: All right, love. I did get a little one of the two gunners. The rear and the mid-upper together.
FM: Yeah.
DH: I’ve got other photographs somewhere dear but I don’t know where they are.
FM: Ok. What I’ll do is, if we finish —
DH: Yes.
FM: If I finish of the interview now.
DH: Yeah.
FM: And then I’ll explain a few things. Ok. So, 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 Frederick Joseph Keith Martin
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Dawn Hughes
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
2018-03-09
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AMartinFJK180309
Format
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01:41:51 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Keith Martin was working for an agricultural machinery merchants in Shrewsbury when the war started. This was classed as a reserved occupation but when he was nearly 20, he decided to volunteer for the Royal Air Force in April 1942 and was selected to be a wireless operator/air gunner. Initial training took place in Blackpool, followed by further training at RAF Yatesbury, RAF Ternhill, RAF Calveley. Promoted to sergeant he was then posted to 18 Initial Training Wing at RAF Bridgnorth to complete his wireless operator training. Flying training took place at RAF West Freugh and in October 1943 he was posted to an operational training unit at RAF Hixon flying Wellingtons. It was there that Keith was formed in to an aircrew. In December 1943 Keith’s crew flew their first operation, as part of their training, which was leaflet dropping over Belgium. January 1944 saw a posting to a heavy conversion unit at RAF Sandtoft to fly Halifaxes. In April their aircraft had an engine failure on take-off, resulting in a crash landing which wrote it off but injured no-one. He transferred to Lancasters at RAF Hemswell and was then posted to RAF Wickenby. From May he was in an operational squadron. Keith describes the many operations that he carried out, including an operation during which an aircraft below his exploded, and caused his aircraft to go out of control until the pilot recovered control at 2000 feet. In June 1944 he was posted to 300 Squadron. By August his crew had flown 26 operations. On completing his tour, Keith went on to spend a year at the advanced flying unit at RAF South Cerney before volunteering for the Empire Test Pilots’ School at RAF Cranfield. He was finally demobbed in 1946 returning to his pre-war employer, who had kept his job available.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Nick Cornwell-Smith
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Belgium
France
Great Britain
England--Bedfordshire
England--Cheshire
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lancashire
England--Shropshire
England--Staffordshire
England--Yorkshire
England--Wiltshire
Scotland--Dumfries and Galloway
England--Blackpool
France--Paris
France--Sangatte
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-04-20
1943-05
1943-10
1943-12-30
1944-01
1944-04-06
1944-05-01
1944-06
1944-08-31
1946
1944-07
1944-06-05
1944-06-06
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
300 Squadron
626 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
bombing
bombing of the Normandy coastal batteries (5/6 June 1944)
crash
crewing up
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
propaganda
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Calveley
RAF Cranfield
RAF Hemswell
RAF Hixon
RAF Sandtoft
RAF South Cerney
RAF Ternhill
RAF West Freugh
RAF Wickenby
RAF Yatesbury
take-off crash
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/912/11154/PKingJ1701.1.jpg
b4aa4fba71c1c25ac700f1c5ae5071d5
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/912/11154/AKingJ-L170905.2.mp3
b13c2fca6893d04645fc952046d30107
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
King, Joan
J King
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Joan King and Linda King about Edward Frederick John King (1320799 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as an air gunner from RAF Scampton.
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
2017-09-05
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
King, J
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CM: This interview is being conducted on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Claire Monk. The interviewees are Joan King, and also present in the room are Linda
LK: Yes
CM: And Sandra Bisset. The interview is taking place at Joan’s home on Tuesday the 5th of September 2017.
JK: He wasn't very old when I was younger than him as well [laughs]
CM: That's good. So can you tell me where were you born?
JK: Lincoln
CM: In Lincoln?
JK: Yeah
CM: Where did you meet Eddie? Where did you meet Eddie?
JK: Where did I?
CM: Where did you meet your husband?
JK: Oh in the town I think on the bombers, he was on the bombers I think he, he couldn't dance between that he met me in a dancehall because that's where I was dancing and he met us when we were all going home [laughs] that's all I can tell you and he couldn't dance but he learned after he [unclear] met me [laughs]
CM: Sounds like fun. What, was he in the Air Force at that time?
JK: Oh he was only, only a sergeant I think yeah, yeah
CM: Yeah
JK: He was a sergeant for a long time
CM: Nothing wrong with that
JK: Most of them were yeah
CM: What role was he doing then, what was his job?
JK: It was on the bombers, going out to bomb the Germans all the time right through the war yeah
CM: Did he?
JK: Yeah, night after night after night yeah and he still kept coming back [laughs], plenty of them didn't but he did yeah, yeah
CM: Can
JK Wasn’t very old, he was then, it wasn't like long after 18 when he joined. I didn't know him then, I didn't know him until later on, yeah. But he was all on the bombers all the time but that's what they were all doing, all the young chaps here then, yeah
CM: Can you?
JK: He was at Scampton and that was a very busy drome, always was and that's where all the raids used to be going from, more than ever yeah. Scampton was very busy, dromes all the way around but he was on, [unclear] on Scampton most of the time he had to go on and to learn somewhere of course, to train you know, but he was at Scampton most of the time yeah. I can't remember what his position was when he finished can you?
LK: He was a pilot officer
JK: Well it
LK: Wasn't he?
JK: Yeah
LK: And he was
JK: Well yeah
LK: He did, he was in
JK: [unclear] what the next step
LK: He was, I don't know mum, he was in
JK: It’s such a long time ago
LK: He was a mid-upper gunner, wasn't he?
JK: Sorry?
LK: He was a mid-upper gunner
JK: Yeah, yeah but
LK: On the Lancasters yeah
JK: I can’t think, [unclear] position but what he was called. Yeah. Oh, never mind I’ll have to look for something I’ll go and have another look in the drawer see if I can find anything
CM: Okay
JK: [unclear] then [laughs]
CM: Can you tell me what was a, an average day like when you were at Scampton? What was is
JK: I wasn't at Scampton
CM: No Eddie was, what was
JK: That was
CM: Can you
JK: I didn’t live at Scampton, I was still living at home
CM: So you
JK: I didn’t go with him?
CM: [unclear] Lincoln?
JK: Yeah. No, I didn't live at Scampton
CM: Can you
JK: He was boarded at Scampton, but he wasn't there all the time, he was I think two or three different places, but it was the Scampton when he was on the bombers all the time yeah, yeah. I can't tell you any more than that
CM: That's fine
JK: But it was only what was he, 18 when, it, it was a bit, they sent him home cause he was, he applied to be, when he was too young I remember his mother said, they sent him home and she let him go back again when he was ready he went yeah, he was only just old enough to go into the forces yeah, yeah. That's such a long time ago [laughs] yeah
CM: Did he tell you about what happened each flight?
JK: Oh no, they didn’t used to do that, no. They didn’t used to discuss what they’d done or where they, no it wasn't like that. You were just pleased to see them back that's all [laughs] yeah yeah, they should just go and enjoy themselves that's all yeah
CM: Fantastic
JK: I can't tell you a lot more than that
CM: You're fine, you're doing brilliantly. Linda
JK: A long time ago
CM: Linda said
JK: I wasn't very old myself then
CM: Linda says he was mentioned in dispatches, what was that for?
JK: Mentioned?
CM: In dispatches what was it for, can you remember?
JK: Linda?
CM: No, Linda said Eddie was mentioned in dispatches, your plaque on that
JK: I couldn't, I couldn't give you any more details on that, if Linda hasn’t got it, I haven't got it no
CM: Not a problem
JK: Because when they were, when they were kids were looking after them as they were older, I let them take what they wanted you see
CM: Yeah
JK: But she hasn't got it nobody's got it, I can tell you
CM: Not the problem
JK: Because none of the lads were very old when they went in [laughs]
CM: Did he always fly with the same people?
JK: Uhm, no, not always but they'd go for quite a while and then they'd have a rest and they'd be posted away and then while the war was still on, then they sent them back with another one and they did that twice but he wasn't very old when he joined you see, yeah, yeah. Oh, he did a fair share. There's not much more I can tell you really
CM: Do
JK: I don't know what Linda thinks she'll find I’m sure I’ve got [unclear] an awful lot now. Well in the war, I mean things used to get lost anyway where they used to, when they were looking after them themselves, they might not find them when they wanted them, you know and that sort of thing. He wasn't very old himself
CM: Where did you
JK: But he did two tours, he did a whole tour and then he’d come off for a rest and he came back and he was posted back in Lincoln and then he went on and he sent him on a second tour and they survived. I mean a lot of them didn't survive yeah so that's all I can tell you he did the second tour one and then we got to the end of the war and that was it yeah. What are you looking for? You haven't got anything much, have you? What's in there then? Yeah, well
LK: This is what I, sorry,
CM: It’s ok
LK: This is what I made for you, do you remember with all of the bits?
JK: Yeah, we’ll get you there there
LK: Yeah
JK: Yeah
CM: Thank you, will have a look at [unclear] in a minute
JK: But, the information
LK: Yes
JK: I mean I can't tell you much more because he wasn't very old himself was it
LK: No, no, that’s right
JK: He wasn't old enough to join when I first met him but as soon as he was older, he was in, you know
CM: Where did you go to, where did he go after Scampton?
JK: Well then he was, uh I can't remember it’s such a long time ago now love but he was at Scampton right through the war love
LK: He went to RAF Wickenby, didn't he? From Scampton he went to RAF Wickenby
JK: Yeah but that was, he wasn't, he wasn't flying from there
LK: Yes he was, that’s where he
JK: It was at Scampton where he did all his raids
LK: Yeah but he went, he went from Wickenby
JK: He went to Wickenby for a short time, not very long
LK: Yes and that was when he was injured
JK: The war wasn't so busy then by the time he went to Wickenby
LK: Yeah
JK: He was at Scampton when he did it, when he was very young, yeah
LK: That's right yeah
JK: I can't remember what was the number of Scampton?
LK: 57 Squadron
JK: That’s right, that's it
LK: And then they, then from that
JK: You know as much as I do love
LK: Well, I just remember, don't I?
JK: Yeah
LK: Remember what you've told me in the past
JK: [unclear]
JK: Well we weren't, you weren't, kids weren't very old were you, well I mean, I don't think you were around were you?
LK: No
JK: No
LK: Not then
JK: It’s what I've told you wasn't it?
LK: Yes. Good job I’ve got a good memory. Hey
JK: Yeah. Oh well we have a lot written down, but we kept what they were didn't we?
LK: We did
JK: I'm sorry, I can't, I can't be any more help
LK: No, no, no that's all right. Claire’s been listening to what you're saying
JK: Well, I know that he was out night after night after night from Scampton what was the other one?
LK: Wickenby
JK: Wickenby, that's it, yeah
LK: Cause we went to Wickenby, didn't we, to have a look?
JK: Oh that was later, that was after it was all over, wasn’t it?
LK: Of course, yeah. But we went to see what if there was anything there, memorabilia from that time, didn't we?
JK: Yeah, but that was a long time afterwards, wasn't it?
LK: Well yeah, it's only a few years ago, wasn't it?
JK: A long time after that. You don’t go near, you couldn't get anywhere near the station when it was happening
LK: Of course not, of course not
JK: No well, he wasn't very old himself, was he?
LK; No
JK: I've found what, what is important, and I can't find anything else no. I’ve kept what I could
CM: You're doing amazingly, don't worry
JK: I was only in me early, in mid early [unclear] at the time [laughs]
LK: Yeah. Was a long time, wasn’t it?
JK: And the fact that, [unclear] wasn’t they? I don’t know what they had or anybody else then but nobody else noticed that
LK: No
SB: The boat, it was
JK: The bombers
SB: When he was in the hospital
LK: Yes
SB: Which hospital?
LK: And that I don't know, uhm
CM: Was that when he moved, they moved to London?
LK: It would’ve been in, yes yes, I think so, well they landed at Woodbridge uhm which is where all the injured aircraft went I understand
SB: Alright
LK: But as to a hospital I don't know, I wasn't, I never had that information
SB: So presumably your mum went from Lincoln down to the air, to join
LK: Yes, they got married, they didn't get married until 1947.
SB: Alright
LK: Three years after my dad was injured
SB: Right
LK: Uhm and that
JK: That was a long time
LK: Yeah and at that time uhm they were, I think you got married in Lincoln, didn't you?
JK: In what?
LK: Did you get married in Lincoln?
JK: Yes. yeah
LK: Yeah. But I think it was only because
JK: Yeah, got grandad came up here
LK: Mum's family, yeah it's only because grandma and your mum and your dad were here wasn't it? They
JK: Yeah and grandma and granddad
LK: Yes
JK: Came up
LK: Yes, they did
SB: And all the time until she’s married your mum said I’ve never unders, got my head around this backwards and forwards but over the years that I’ve spoken to her
LK: Yeah, yeah
SB: So uhm your mum lived with your grandparents on Newark Road all the time
LK: Yes
SB: Uh-huh
LK: Yes
JK: But yes, your children didn't go to school down there did you?
LK: Yeah, In London.
JK: I can’t remember that.
LK: Yes, we were living in London mum
JK: That's right yeah yeah from a time ago, I can’t remember
LK: Yeah we lived at nan and grandad's house in Hoppers Road, didn't we?
JK: Yes
LK: To begin with and then when Janet was born we moved to Carpenter Gardens in Winchmore Hill JK: Yeah, yeah
LK: And that's where we stayed until I was 16
JK: Yeah
LK: Uh 16 and a half and then we moved back up to Lincoln
JK: That's right
LK: And uhm and you lived in, you lived in Russell Street then, didn’t you?
JK: But your dad wasn't back
LK: No, no dad, dad had died, dad died in 1958
JK: ’58 was it?
LK: Yes, yeah so, he was, he was uhm 34, coming up to 35
JK: [unclear] He wasn’t very old when he went in
LK: Yeah, that's right mummy, that's right so
JK: He was on the bombers night after night after night, he was only a youngster himself yeah
SB: So after your dad died and you were all down there was it for, to family assistance that you all came back to Lincoln I presume?
LK: Uhm
SB: To support, I mean
LK: Uhm I did, I think, uhm to be honest, I think mum wanted to come back because my, her parents were getting older
JK: They only had me
LK: And they only had mum whereas my, my dad's mum and dad had, he had a sister, an older sister and a younger brother who were both still alive and lived fairly local to them
SB: Right
LK: And they died, uhm, well my nan died eight years after my dad and my grandad died ten years after my dad so
SB: Now I know on the way to church I can talk [unclear] before when I used to take, when I was taking your mum regularly to church
LK: Yeah, I remember
SB: We used to walk and drive through Newland Street West and up White hall
LK: Oh yes
SB: And she always said that that's where uhm where her dad’s mum lived
LK: Yes, that's right, Saint Faith’s Street, yes, yes Granny Cox and, yeah, that’s right
SB: I’m going off the track, it's just getting some background
LK: Yeah [laughs]
CM: I love it. It's amazing
JK: We moved a couple of times as well you see since then and since I’ve moved here, I’ve moved again, haven't I?
LK: Yes, you have, yeah that's right
SB: Presumably you ask her about the dispatches
US: Yeah, yeah, yeah
CM: What do you know about the dispatches mentioned?
LK: I don't know an awful lot that was, uhm to do with uhm when my dad was injured uhm because apparently the pilot wanted to bail out over Germany
JK: But they didn't
LK: And no and dad said, encouraged everybody and said, no we can get home, we can get home even though the plane was uhm sort of uh
SB: Damaged
LK: Damaged thank you [laughs] what word [unclear] do I want yeah, I was gonna say injured
US: [unclear]
LK: Uhm but and at the time uhm because of my dad, that everybody said the crew wise that survived that it was because of my dad encouraging them to get home
SB: Right
LK: That uhm, that they did get home and uhm and they so that's what he got mentioned in dispatches for
CM: Yeah
LK: But again
CM: Yeah
LK: Uhm his crewmates said that he should have had a medal for, for his for what he did
SB: Yes
LK: So that's and that's all I can tell you but and I know from obviously that goes back years, from what mum's told me
CM: So that was the flight that he got injured as well
LK: That was the flight he was injured on yes yeah yeah
CM: Impressive
LK: But he, he was actually to be honest he was, he was real stiff upper lip, you know just grip your teeth and get on with it type of person
JK: Well, he joined the RAF before he was 17 and he had to come out of it because he was too young
LK: Yes they told him to come back when he was old enough
JK: But presumably he was old enough and he went back again apparently, yeah
LK: Yeah
JK: So that's as far as
LK: Yes, he was anxious to do his bit
JK: Yeah, but he did lots of chores, didn’t he?
LK: Yeah well, well the um average survival rate was if you got through one tour you were lucky
JK: Night after night
LK: Yeah and I only know this because I I’ve read a lot as well and and uhm, yeah I had
JK: He used to talk to you
LK: Yes, he did but not he never really used to talk much about that, did he?
JK: I’ll never forget, he used to be standing behind his chair laughing
LK: And you, I just knew, I had a sixth sense that he wasn't very well he never said anything he just knew showed used to stand right now or sit on the arm of the chair with my arm around the back of the chair so yeah yeah
JK: [unclear] she chokes me [laughs]
LK: He thought I knew that apparently yeah, yeah, yeah. I liked to think I was always very sensitive to JK: Because I have two more young ones to look after [unclear] you say
LK: Three!
JK: No, no the others
LK: Ah, Malcolm and Janet?
JK: Yes
LK: Yeah, yes, yeah. Rob, Rob’s a year younger than I am yes.
JK: And Rob of course
LK: Yeah. That's what I said, three don't forget Rob
JK: Yeah [laughs]
LK: Yeah, don't forget Rob
JK: You're here to tell the tale
LK: Yes yeah. Yeah
SB: Are we still talking?
JK: I told you as much as I can remember
CM: You're fine
JK: if I find anything else but I’d, I can't think I’m going to
CM: You're amazing, don't worry. She said you used to go out on the lorry with him
JK: We went through a lot
LK: I did yes um and apparently, I used to go and help him with his deliveries, didn't I, when he was working for Ferguson yeah and
JK: He wasn’t very well then
LK: I remember I used to take off the delivery sheet and I remember one day we'd got the windows open and when we got to the next delivery, I couldn't find the sheet. I said oh my god and he was, he was uhm because he would’ve been in real trouble of course and he was quite upset and then I found it down the side of the seat so thank goodness but yeah yes, I did. I used to like being with him. I used to go and help him clean the car
US: Yeah
LK: On a Sunday as well yeah
JK: She’s always got [unclear] patient these days. He used to say we choked him he used to say
LK: I know, I know yeah. I just, I just knew he was ill even though I didn't if you see what I mean
JK: Yeah, yeah
LK: Just a sixth sense yeah. But anyway, there we are
JK: Well you're the one that remembered most because you're the oldest on aren’t you?
LK: Yeah that's it and I have got a good memory thankfully so
JK: Yeah. The other [unclear]
LK: At the moment [laughs]
JK: It's much, it's strange how Malcolm’s a lot like him isn't it?
LK: Malcolm looks very much like him, yes
JK: But he’s a lot like him and his wife
LK: Yes yeah yeah you've always said that
JK: He doesn't remember his dad like he's, like the other one did he say but he's a lot like him in his wife than I think yeah yeah
LK: When he was about three or four years old, he used to go out and help
JK: Have you got Malcolm much of his pictures or anything like that? I don't think so
LK: I have. You know I have
JK: Yes?
LK: Yes, cause I took all of your photographs and, and took copies of them didn't I?
JK: I wonder what Malcolm’s got then
LK: And it was me that took that one and got it framed for you with the Lancaster in the snow
JK: Yeah, yeah, yeah
LK: And then you said you'd like to get that done for Malcolm and Janet and Rob as well for, uhm for Christmas one year we got, we got yes you know
JK: Did I?
LK: Yes I got, I got them framed for you, copies and, and you paid for it
JK: Sorry [unclear]
LK: Yes, I know you, you
JK: That's all we've got to remember him, wasn't it?
LK: Yes yeah
JK: Because he wasn't very helpful for a start, was he?
LK: No
SB: He didn't have any of his badges or anything like that
LK: I think, I'm not sure, I think Malcolm might have a couple just the um standard things. I'll ask Malc for you, I'm not quite sure about that
CM: You mentioned when we were starting
JK: The only thing we've got that's written on is it that picture up here that's
LK: The dispatches when he was mentioned in dispatches, yes
JK: Yeah that's it
LK: Yes, that's right
JK: That’s all we've got doesn't it
LK: Yeah but I’ve got a feeling Malcolm’s got some badges or something off his uniform
JK: Ah, Malcolm might have, yeah
LK: Yeah yeah
CM: You mentioned when we were chatting earlier about the severity of his shoulder injury
LK: Yes
CM: Did that cause him, uhm, did they manage to save his arm? Did they manage [unclear]
LK. Yes, uhm yes
CM: [unclear] later on?
LK: Yes, they did um they did and and everybody that I remember sort of said how amazing it was that he could handle the big vehicles with the injury and and he had some rehab at uhm Roehampton I think it was and uhm Dan Maskell who was a tennis coach at the time used to coach them with ten he used to have some rehab training with Dan Maskell, I remember mom saying that years and years ago as well but I don't, couldn't tell you any more than that but it was amazing what he could do he and as I say, very stiff upper lip and he, he just used to grit his teeth and get on with everything so never complained
JK: He wasn’t very old himself
LK: No, he never complained though, did he mum?
JK: No, no no
LK: No, no
JK: Well, they no, never, none of them did, no
LK: No, no, that's true that's true
JK: They were all a great lot like that
LK: Yeah
CM: Did he stay
JK: But it’s such a long time ago anyway
CM: Did he stay in touch with
LK: Sorry?
CM: Did he stay in contact with any of the rest of the crew?
LK: That I don't know that I don't know
JK: But they were all too young for that
CM: Yeah
LK: That I don't know yeah
CM: Yeah, that's fine
JK: [unclear] ago
SB: Did he ever go to any reunions?
LK: And that I don't know either. I've actually tried to look at, look into things like that and we actually, uhm going back years uhm actually wrote to the personnel department uhm, I think it was Gloucester at the time for the Air Force uhm and we had to get mum's permission to request his uhm war records and I did get a letter back but some of it didn't actually tally with what was in the log book and what we already knew and uhm they, they actually said they were very kind and they said but we’re sure you'll appreciate it and
JK: As it was in war time it wasn't all clear you see yeah
LK: Yeah and, and they said we're sure you'd appreciate that as it's uhm over 40 years ago, uhm the records aren't very thorough so, so we kind of accepted and as I say, we thought we had more with the log book and, and various other bits
JK: Jenna's the only one that could remember most of it yeah,
LK: Yes
JK: Cause Robert doesn’t remember anything
LK: No, he doesn't, no. That's why he suggested to Sandra that I might try and help when uh [laughs] when I came up so that's why. Although Malc's got uhm a fair, fair sort of knowledge of it, cause he's interested as I was
JK: And I can't remember how long but I mean after he died eventually I, we came back to Lincoln didn't I? I brought you back here
LK: You did, yes, I was 16 at the time, wasn't I?
JK: What were you 15?
LK: 16
JK: And then you went back on your own
LK: I did yes. Lincoln wasn't for me, was it? Wasn't, wasn't uhm
JK: No, no
LK: Interesting enough [laughs]
JK: Where did you go back, cause you, you went into a
LK: To London
JK: Yeah and what what
LK: And I worked
JK: It was like a club wasn't it? What was it called? It was something to do with a
LK: I worked for a store on Oxford Street didn't I originally?
JK: Yeah. I can't remember
LK: Because they had a staff residence
JK: That’s it
LK: And that was how you let me go yeah
LK: Yes
JK: And that's where I let you go didn't I?
LK: Yes
JK: Yeah, yeah
LK: Yeah, that's right
JK: And that was the start of it
LK: Yeah, yeah and I’ve been there ever since [laughs]
JK: What were you? About 16 and a half, weren't you?
LK: No i was 18 and a half when I went back yes
JK: When you went [unclear] You were as old as that?
LK: Yes
US: Yeah
LK: Yes, so I was here for two years and I said that's it
JK: I didn’t let you go too early [unclear] I’ve had enough [laughs]
CM: Do you have any other memories of your father?
LK: Uhm, I can remember, yes very much so um when the sun shone, we used to go out on picnics, didn't we? He used to say get the kids ready, Joan and we used to pack up a picnic and we used to go to
JK: Yes, yeah. Oh yes, we used to go out a lot
LK: Yeah, he used to take us out to Heathrow airport to watch the planes and uhm, used to go to a park in Tottenham that had all kinds of things for kids, they had like a mini road
JK: Yeah [unclear]
LK: Where you could hire a bike for a quarter of an hour
JK: [unclear] Picnics for us, where was that
LK: Pardon?
JK: Kind of perhaps you wouldn't remember that I can't remember where it was um it was a like a big picnic area, and it was halfway up the hill and your daddy was there then
LK: No, I don't remember that
JK: I can't well, you will ideal, she was the eldest [unclear] but she was
LK: Well I remember going out on lots of picnics but I don't remember that no. Downhills, at Downhills park we used to go to in Tottenham Downhills
JK: Downhill somewhere like that, anyway I can't remember probably, it’s a long time ago
LK: Yeah
JK: But your dad wasn't there then was it?
LK: Pardon?
JK: Your dad wasn't there then oh yes, he was yes
LK: He was, he used to take us, didn't he?
JK: Yeah [unclear] to start with yeah, yeah. But towards the end it didn't take him long to go, did it?
LK: No, I don’t mean, I don't remember that very well, but he was
JK: But no, no, no, his mum and dad, he went pretty you know, he wouldn't have known you know he made no fuss about it but yeah. Well once they got him into the hospital in town, I used to go all the way from north London right away in town didn't I ever?
LK: Yes, yes
JK: And he never came back that's where, that's where he had to be all the time
SB: Do you remember which hospital it was, Joan?
LK: It was the Central Middlesex um yeah and uhm the last time I saw him was on Christmas day in 1957.
JK: Yeah, yeah
LK: And I, since then I don't like Christmas anymore
JK: I can't remember the name of that hospital, can you?
LK: Was the Central Middlesex, wasn't it?
JK: That’s it
LK: Yes, it's not there anymore it's a block of flats and a car park
JK: Yeah and the other Malcolm and [unclear] and the other one weren't very old, were they?
LK: No, we went up there and they gave us a present off the Christmas tree, didn't they?
JK: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. Yeah
LK: He was very poorly very, very poorly
SB: Yeah because he died in the January
LK: Yeah, yeah, I remember when we were there uhm he had his eyes closed the whole time and a couple of the doctors came into the ward dressed as a horse and I can remember saying oh look dad look at that horse and he just kind of half nodded, he didn't even open his eyes so he was ever so poorly poor soul but there we are
JK: He just stuck it out
LK: He did, yeah, he did
JK: Can't remember the hospital he died in, can you?
LK: Central mid, oh he went to a hospice in Bayswater, didn't he? You went to a hospice in Bayswater. You had to go
JK: [unclear]
LK: You had to go to Bayswater
JK: [unclear] had to go every night
LK: Yes, it was yes that's right yeah yeah
JK: Yeah. That’s a long time ago
LK: It is, it is
JK: And he certainly suffered but no [unclear] about it
LK: No, no, he never made a fuss, did he?
JK: I don't know how many raids he did, do you?
LK: Well uhm, one tour of operations I think was 32 and he, he did uhm maybe,
JK: I think [unclear] 30
LK: Maybe, maybe about 12 on the second, second tour when he got injured
JK: It wasn't the second tour
LK: I can’t remember, it’s in the book, haven’t [unclear], I can't remember
JK: Yeah, a long time ago
LK: Yeah, it is a long time ago
JK: And they were all very young anyway
LK: Yes, that's right
SB: That’s a list of medals
LK: Oh, is it?
JK: What’s that?
LK: Mal, that's Rob's writing so maybe it's a list of medals. I’ve got a feeling Malcolm’s got those. I'll ask, I will ask him
SB: Because Rob told me he had nothing
LK: No, he doesn't, he doesn't. I think it's Malcolm that's got them to be honest there's, they're certainly not here and I’ve just got a feeling it's Malcolm because
JK: What you [unclear]?
LK: A list of medals that dad had
JK: I'll have a look when I’ve got [unclear] the folder there might be something might there? I’ve got the folder in the drawer
LK: No, no, no, this is this, I think Malcolm’s got them for safekeeping
JK: Are you sure?
LK: I think so yes, I’m going to ask him
SB: Bob seemed to, rob seemed to think that Malc had some stuff
LK: He does
SB: That he was showing people um and I think Rob thinks
JK: Did you talk to Malcom?
SB: That he took them to the Dambusters Pub, you know because
LK: Yes, I don't think, yes he would have taken them
SB: Not to lend them but to show them to somebody
LK: Yeah, yeah because the, well the chap who was the um the landlord of the Dambusters he had so much memorabilia there from the Dambusters because it was Scampton of course and uhm, cause mum and I, we went out, do you remember we went to the Dambusters pub in Scampton for Sunday lunch one time didn't we?
JK: Yeah
LK: And they had a picture on the wall which had which were had dad in it, it was
JK: Uhm yeah
LK: And it was the 57 squadron and I’ve got a very bent uhm picture of that you know the whole, cause they used to take the wide screen it's about that wide, I’ve got it somewhere but it's, you know, it's in sort of like three or four pieces because it was folded up before I ever came into, I think I got it from my dad's sister I think uhm but I’m sure Malcolm’s got those and I’ll ask him
JK: Oh, it’s right in the middle of the lot
LK: Yeah and Malcolm, uhm Malcolm, they had uhm part of the uhm uh control panel
JK: The night after night after night bombing
LK: The joysticks and things he, because the guy who lived, who ran the pub he used to collect all that stuff and he went, he went to France in the end and he died
SB: Have you've been there recently?
LK: No
SB: The, the pub has really been done up, you need to go again
LK: Really? Really?
SB: [unclear] got more stuff
LK: Has it? oh my goodness someone would do that then, yeah
JK: What was that?
LK: The Dambusters has got even more, the pub has got even more memorabilia now than it used to have
JK: I’m not surprised
LK: Yeah. Well the guy who started it he's um,
JK: They’re still open, aren’t they?
LK: Yeah, yeah. Maybe he sold it. Maybe he sold the stuff to them, I’m not sure.
JK. [unclear] to look at
LK: I’ll ask Malc, cause Malc knows all that kind of stuff
JK: probably [unclear]
SB: He’ll be still going strong.
CM: You mentioned when we were discussing the logbook earlier about the height tests
LK: Yes uhm yes, they were, uhm the dad and the crew went doing low-level flying training, didn't they at one point?
JK: At what was that?
LK: They did low-level flying training at one point
JK: Yeah, yeah
LK: Yes and uhm I remember mum saying at the time of course dad couldn't say what it was for and and they didn't know either uhm but it, it seems it was a pre-empt to uhm they were testing the crews for the Dambusters and, and as far as I’m aware because squadron leader Avis was such a valuable pilot and on the ground they didn't want him to go uhm and they said that my dad's crew could go with another pilot but he apparently said no if they don't, if they don't go with me they don't go. So, they'd done all the training and, and weren't sort of picked at the last minute because of their, their squadron leader pilot so that's what I understand
JK: That was the time when they were going to blast back to get in again, all of them
LK: They were going to do the dams weren't they?
JK: Yeah, yeah
LK: The dam busters
JK: That’s right
LK: Yes, so they they, flew over the Derwent water and places like that I think yeah
SB: Ladybower Dam
LK: Yeah, pardon?
SB: Ladybower Dam
LK: Yes that's it, yeah. See you know [laughs]
JK: She knows a lot about it
LK: I know she does, she does I know but uhm, but I did uhm as I say I read guy Gibson’s Enemy Coast Ahead and I’ve got a big book of uhm, on the Lancaster which my dad's brother gave me uhm and there's lots of stories from uh, from those days and I’ve also got a book called Bomber Boys which is also uhm, I just I’m just interested so
CM: Keeps a living memory, doesn't it?
LK: Well it does yeah, he said, well he's always been there for me anyway, you know even though he's not with us he's, he's very much there and I still talk to him
JK: So they weren't still around here when you were around?
SB: Sorry?
JK: They weren't still around here when you were around, weren't they?
SB: No
JK: No, awful long time ago
SB: I’m not that old
LK: [laughs] she's too young mum
JK: Yeah yeah [laughs]. Well, I forget how old I am
LK: Yes, she keeps asking me and adding a few more years
JK: Anyway
LK: This plane that he used to fly on, was it O for Oboe?
JK: It could be right
LK: I seem to remember that, I seem to remember yeah, I seem to remember grandma telling us
JK: Yeah, I think, I think [unclear]
LK: Years ago, that you used to listen to the radio
JK: Yeah
LK: And they used to announce so you knew whether, you knew, whether, you know, Dad’s plane was coming back,
JK: [unclear] Yeah
LK: Was it O for Oboe?
JK: Yes, it was. I could remember Grandad listening for it
LK: Yeah, yeah, I do, so that's a vague memory that's half right I don't know if it was [unclear]
JK: Yeah, yeah
LK: That might [unclear] somewhere
JK: [unclear] early hours in the morning, you see
LK: They were used to
JK: [unclear] getting ready for work in the morning
LK: Yeah, to make sure dad had got back safely
JK: Yes. O for Oboe, that that was it
LK: Was it?
JK: Yeah
LK: Oh, okay [laughs]
JK: He was remembered
LK: Well, I don't know whether I did [laughs]
JK: I can't tell you any more than that
LK: No, neither can I.
US: [unclear]
LK: Yes, uhm, oh no, no, that’s
SB: Doesn’t look like him
LK: Oh no, no, that was, uhm apparently, I think mum said he was a Canadian
SB: Alright
JK: There was a lot of Canadians
LK: A friend of dads in the Air Force and you, didn't you say he had a Canadian friend? One of the crew was
JK: I’m not, I haven’t heard of that
LK: A Canadian chap in the air force was a friend of dads
JK: I wouldn't know if [unclear]
LK: No, no see those are the originals
JK: Lots of British nationalities
SB: You've got copies of them
LK: Pardon?
JK: I thought they were all sorts of
LK: I know, I know but I seem to remember you saying that he had a Canadian friend who got, who got killed and you thought that one of those pictures might have been him
CM: So how long was he [unclear]?
LK: I don't, to be honest I really don't know
JK: [unclear] a long time
LK: That was when he was home on leave one time, that’s South Mimms in Hertfordshire
SB: Hold a pipe
LK: Yes, he used to smoke a pipe, didn't he? For a little while
JK: He did for a while, yeah
LK: Yeah
JK: He didn't always
CM: Did they smoke when they were flying?
JK: Yeah
LK: Oh yeah, apparently he, that poor chat uhm went walking past mum and dad when they were in, you were in South Mimms and you said uhm dad said he was the village idiot so that's why I put it in there
JK: [unclear] South Mimms very well [laughs]
LK: Yeah there you are
JK: Yeah. He did look like the village idiot
LK: Yeah, if there's, yeah, any any, yeah that's it, I think mum said he was three sheets to the wind in that one [laughs] or it might have been that one if his cap's a bit skewered on one of them I can't remember
[laughter]
JK: Is a long time ago
LK: Oh yeah that's the uhm
JK: Oh, a lot happened in those years yes
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Joan and Linda King
Creator
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Claire Monk
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-09-05
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AKingJ-L170905, PKingJ1701
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Pending review
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00:39:41 audio recording
Language
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Second generation
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Description
An account of the resource
Joan King was born in Lincoln and together with her daughter, Linda King, talks about her husband, Eddie King, who served as a mid-upper gunner on Lancasters at RAF Scampton with 57 Squadron. He did two tours of operations. While he was briefly posted to RAF Wickenby, he suffered an injury on a flight back from an operation to Germany and while the pilot wanted to bail out over Germany, Eddie convinced the crew to fly back home. Following his injury, Eddie was sent to Roehampton for rehab under tennis coach Dan Maskell. Flew on O for Oboe. Linda mentions Eddie doing low-level flying training on 57 Squadron. Joan and Linda also share family memories.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Peter Schulze
57 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
RAF Scampton
RAF Wickenby
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/874/11114/PHollierM1701.2.jpg
2d2bff42122046751c24c3477c3ffe25
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/874/11114/AHollierM171016.1.mp3
1cffc294b38a22c75f045c3808219b63
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Hollier, Marian
M Hollier
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Marian Hollier (b. 1926, Royal Air Force). She served as a wireless operator in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force at RAF Wickenby and RAf Ludford Magna.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-10-16
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Hollier, M
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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DK: Right, I think we’re ok. So, this is David Kavanagh for the International Bomber Command Centre interviewing Mrs. Hollier on the 16th of October 2017. I’ll just put that down there and if I keep looking down, I’m just making sure it’s working. Yeah, we’re ok. Could I just ask you then what were you doing immediately before the war?
MH: I was in, it’s another funny thing, I was in the accounts department of the George Wimpey company who built most of the aerodromes, so of course, I knew everything about aerodromes all over the place but I did belong to the Women’s Junior Air Corps and in there I learnt Morse. And my father was a telegraphist in the First World War, so I suppose the radio bit hereditary, so I decided that I was about coming seventeen and a half I will join the RAF
DK: Did, was Morse something that came easy to you?
MH: Yes, so I, that’s what I joined the RAF, which we were sent to Wilmslow in Cheshire for the six weeks square bashing and injections and what have you and then went to Blackpool for three months on a radio course doing the Morse and then after three months we were sent to Compton Bassett in Wiltshire to finish the course. And from there I went to, oh dear, my mind’s gone
US: Ludford?
MH: Where did I go to first?
US: Ludford
MH: Ludford,
DK: Ludford Magna
MH: Ludford, sorry about that [laughs]
DK: [unclear]
MH: My mind’s gone.
DK: That’s right, we’re [unclear]
MH: But I wasn’t there at Ludford Magna all that long but one did have a scare there one night, I was busy taking a Morse message and my colleagues just dived underneath the benches there oh my god but I had to keep on doing the Morse and so finished and I said, [unclear] what’s wrong with you lot? The Germans had followed our aircraft in and strafed our headquarters.
DK: Oh, right
MH: So that was a bit of a scare
DK: So Ludford Magna then, whereabouts were you [unclear], were you in the control tower there or?
MH: No, no
DK: Right
MH: We had our headquarters in the main building
DK: Ah! Alright, ok. So, what would’ve been your role there? You are sitting there and you’re receiving messages or you’re transmitting them?
MH: Yes, receiving message for aircraft coming in and yes, and they strafed the headquarters, so that was scary and then I suppose I must have been there for about six months or so and I was transferred to Wickenby because Morse was coming to an end then so that wasn’t necessary so they put me into the wireless section, the radio section and that was doing the daily inspections on the Lancasters and that’s where I met my husband and there again we had a scare because the Germans who liked to come in after our aircraft and start bombing but this particular day some chaps said to my husband would you like to change shifts with me? So he said yes, I don’t mind because they used to have to go out, when the aircraft were coming in and going out they used to have a radar van that used to go round the airfield, so this chap said, oh, thanks, anyway the same thing happened, the Germans came in our aircraft and the bomb dump went up and this poor chap was killed, he had changed with Eric for this to go out somewhere, so that was scary.
DK: If I can just take you back to Ludford Magna, did you know anything about the squadron there, 101 Squadron?
MH: Yes
DK: Because they were special squadron, weren’t they, with radio countermeasures?
MH: Yes I don’t think I knew a lot about Ludford Magna
DK: No. They didn’t mention anything about what the squadron was doing
MH: No, no
DK: No. Ok, so, you’ve gone on to Wickenby then and you said that Morse wasn’t being used so much. You’re now transmitting by radio, is that what’s happened? You, at Wickenby
MH: Yes
DK: You are using radio now instead of Morse
MH: No, we’d be doing the daily inspections on the aircraft
DK: Ah, right, ok, right. So what would that involve then?
MH: Go onto the aircraft and testing the headphones and all the radio equipment, was it, 1154, 1155, I think they were [laughs] and
DK: So
MH: But of course, I wasn’t trained to do that so I only did menial jobs on the aircraft
DK: And that would be after the raid
MH: Yes
DK: Would these be the following morning, so you’d go out to the aircraft and then
MH: Yes, and do an inspection on them before they went off again, but I mean, they used to come in and go out and sometimes there was no chance that you could do an inspection on them
DK: And then so, what did the inspection sort of involve then? Did you take the radios out or are you inspecting?
MH: Yeah, just to see if they were working alright
DK: Yeah
MH: That sort of thing
DK: Yeah. And how long were you at Wickenby for then?
MH: From forty, I did write it down somewhere, can’t remember what I’ve done with it,
DK: [unclear]
MH: Don’t think that’s in there, I was there from about March ’44 until about September ’45 and then I got sent to Sturgate on 50 and 61 Squadron and that was just in looking after headsets and that sort of thing, nobody was interested in doing anything at the end of the war [laughs] and then, have you ever heard of Ralph Reader?
DK: I haven’t, no, no
MH: Well, he did gang shows for the forces and then at the end of the war he decided he would do a gang show involving all the people who were involved in the war, all the services, the fire people, the police, everything and it was going to be held in Royal Albert Hall and they were asking for people who lived near London if they would like to come and do it and so that we could work in the week and at weekends we could go home and that’s what happened with many because I lived in Middlesex
DK: Right
MH: So, and then we were based at Epping during the week and that went on for about three weeks so that was something interesting after the war and a lot of people don’t remember
DK: No
MH: Because if you weren’t involved you wouldn’t remember. And then I got sent to RAF [unclear] at Eastcote in Middlesex which was near my home, so we got billeted out and a friend of mine that I was at Wickenby with, she got sent to Eastcote and we were allowed to go home to my mother and father at the week, every week and they, we got billeted there
DK: Yeah. So how long were you in the Air Force for altogether?
MH: From beginning of February 1944 until November 1946, because I got married 194, September 1946, so I had to come out anyway
DK: You had to come out with, if you got married, did you?
MH: But I did enjoy my life in the RAF
DK: Just going back a little bit, you mentioned a bit earlier about the ground crew, did you see much of what the groundcrew did on, at Wickenby?
MH: No, not really, because you just stayed in your own section.
DK: Ah, right
MH: But, one thing is when I was at Wickenby, somebody came up and said to me, you’ve got to see one of the officers, so I said, what for? No, I can’t tell you, she says, you’ve gotta come with me, so I got to this office and said, [unclear] the officer, and he says, I understand your name is Taunt, T-A-U-N-T, so I said, yes, that’s right, it turned out he was a long distant cousin of mine. No, I didn’t know him, I didn’t know him at all and they owned the red bus company in Birmingham and his wife bred Bedlington terriers [laughs], that was funny. But a lot didn’t happen to me, not [unclear] exciting, did some exciting things [laughs]
DK: So what did it feel like then when you used to see the aircraft going off on the raids? How did that?
MH: Well, we all, if we were on duty we would be out there watching everything,
DK: You were, yes
MH: Yes, yes
DK: So can you recall what actually happened then as you watched the aircraft take off?
MH: No, not really, just hoping they would all come back.
DK: Did you use to wave to them?
MH: Yes, yes, yes, but when we went on this trip to Canberra, I got talking to two gentlemen there and they were looking at this aircraft so I said, you are looking very lovingly at that aircraft, yes, he said, we were on this squadron during the war, I said, oh yes, were you? Whereabouts? Oh, you wouldn’t know whereabouts, so I said, well, try me, so he said, well, we were in a place called Lincolnshire, I said, oh yes, and whereabouts in Lincolnshire? Oh, he says, that’s no good, we were only in a village, so I said, well, tell me the name of the village then, he said, Wickenby. And he was there in ’45 when I was there
DK: Yeah, And they were Australians, were they?
MH: They were Australians, yes
DK: Oh, right
MH: And he wrote a book of poems, his name is Jeff Magee and he wrote a book of poems and he sent us a book of poems and every year when we used to go back to Australia we used to meet up with him but he’s gone now
DK: Do you, can you recall what type of aircrew he was? Was he a pilot or?
MH: Oh, he was a pilot
DK: He was a pilot, yeah
MH: Yes, yes and his friend was a gunner
DK: Right
MH: And they both survived but it was amazing to go twelve thousand miles
DK: And bump into
MH: And to meet up with these two people
DK: You didn’t remember each other from Wickenby then?
MH: Sorry?
DK: You didn’t remember each other from Wickenby?
MH: Oh no, no, no, but it was funny that all this business of this chat, chat, chat to think that we were at Wickenby at the same time during the war or after the war I should say
DK: So were you actually with 626 Squadron or
MH: With 626 and 12
DK: And 12, alright, ok
MH: Yes, yes, we did both squadrons,
DK: Right
MH: The radio school did both then
DK: So the radio school there wasn’t allocated to one or either of the squadrons
MH: No
DK: You just did both squadrons on the base, yeah
MH: Both, yes
DK: So what was it like living on the base there, did you have much of a social life?
US: [unclear]
MH: I didn’t
US: I think you did, [unclear] the story you told me, I think you did
MH: [laughs] we
DK: [unclear]
MH: No, one thing that we did have was the Americans, they were, they [unclear] Scunthorpe
DK: Right
MH: And they used to send a truck down to take the WAAFs for dances
DK: Right
MH: But I didn’t go on one of them, no, I didn’t like Americans [laughs], my son-in-law is American
DK: Oh right
MH: No, they were up to no good [laughs]
DK: So did you manage to, apart from the Americans, did you manage to get off the base at all? Did you go to the pubs?
MH: Oh yes, I took my bicycle with me all over the place and it’s amazing now to think that from Wickenby or Ludford Magna to Louth was, is a long way but we used to cycle and then, when we had time off, when I was at Compton Basset, I lived, my grandmother lived in Berkshire, which is not all that far from Compton Bassett, with my mother’s home is round there, so I used to skive off and one day I did skive off and I left my bed, cause we used to have to make our bed everyday but this day I left the bed and put that bolster in the bed and skived off overnight and I got caught [laughs] and spent some days peeling potatoes in the canteen [laughs]
DK: So how, when you are on the base then and the aircraft have all gone off on their operations, did you wait for them to come back?
MH: Well, only if we are on duty because at Wickenby the WAAF section was on one side of the airfield
DK: Right
MH: So unless we were on duty, no
DK: So, the WAAF section then was quite someway
MH: Yes
DK: From the rest of the base?
MH: Yes
DK: Right
MH: Yes, cause when we see it now, you know the road that we come in, that right-hand side was where all the WAAF was
DK: Alright. That’s at Wickenby is that as you got to the control tower
MH: Yes
DK: So, you were on the right on the road there
MH: Yes, yesh
DK: Right. So how, when you did see them come back how did you feel about them as they all came back damaged aircraft and things?
MH: A bit tearful you’ve, because they, in the section we had a list of the aircraft that were going out and coming back and some of them didn’t come back, didn’t know what happened to them, dreadful. Their choice, flying
DK: So, how did you feel once it was all over then and the war came to an end?
MH: Elated, glad it was over. We, my husband and I, when he was my husband then, we skived off, got a train to Grantham, and cleared off home and came back a week later but we didn’t get any jankers for that [laughs]
DK: So there was a bit of a celebration then, was it, for the end of the war?
MH: Yes, yes
DK: Yeah. And how do you look back on your time now [unclear]?
MH: I loved it, yes, I loved being in the Air Force,
DK: And was that your main role then, just the radios?
MH: Yes, yes
DK: And can you still do the Morse now, if you [unclear]?
MH: I could do it, that’s where my Morse key that I had when I was at Ludford Magna is there
DK: Oh right, right
MH: And they hadn’t got one
DK: And it’s on display now
MH: It’s on display, yes, yes
DK: And you say you received messages then you would
MH: Yes, yes
DK: And what sort of messages were they?
MH: They were all in code
DK: Right, alright, ok
MH: Yes, but we didn’t do the code, we had to pass that on for somebody else to do
DK: So you wouldn’t really know what the message was
MH: No
DK: Right, ok, so
MH: When it was in code
DK: So it’s in code and then it’s deciphered elsewhere
MH: Yes
DK: Right. And if you transmit to them, was that in code as well?
MH: That in code
DK: So you pass the code
MH: Yes
DK: So the message you are sending out, you also [unclear]
MH: Yes, you wouldn’t know what the code was, no, no
DK: Did you sort of [unclear] that and wonder what you were saying or?
MH: No, I was young, wasn’t I? Seventeen and eighteen [laughs]
DK: So, once the Morse finished then, you were transmitting by radio? Presumably that wasn’t in code then
MH: Say that again
DK: Once Morse had finished, you said radios came in, you weren’t speaking in code then
MH: It was all in code, didn’t have anything in plain language
DK: Oh
MH: I didn’t
DK: Right
MH: No,
DK: Ok
MH: I liked the Morse code. When I came out and we moved to Horsham in West Sussex, I joined the Air Training Corps
DK: Right
MH: And taught them Morse, that happened for a little while, why I don’t know
DK: It’s not used very much now, is it? It’s not used today.
MH: No, well, they had what they called Morse lip reading and then, oh, what else did they have? There is the same as the aircraft, they change as well because they had a blister under the aircraft radar, and my husband one of the first people to go on a course for that
DK: H2S
MH: Yes, that radar
DK: Yeah, H2S
MH: At Yatesbury
DK: Right. So, he was, he worked on the radar [unclear]
MH: Yes
DK: Yeah
MH: Yes, yes
DK: OK, well, I’m happy with that if you’re ok
MH: Not very interesting.
DK: It’s very interesting, if you ask me. You’ve got a photo here. Right, this is
MH: That’s Wickenby
DK: Right, this is just for the recording then, so
MH: That is a, on the back of this, that’s the radio section
DK: Alright. So, just for the recording here, we’ve got a picture of a Lancaster with
MH: Yes
DK: Are you in this?
MH: Somewhere [laughs], I think I’ve circled where my husband and I are [laughs]
DK: Oh, ok. So this is the signal station at RAF Wickenby, June 1945. So, assuming that sort of something taken for the end of the war, was it, a sort of souvenir?
MH: Well, I suppose so
DK: Yeah
MH: I can’t remember.
DK: So, it’s got the names of everybody on here, can’t see your circle
MH: So, how old’s your dad then?
DK: Oh, he’s ninety next year, be ninety next year
MH: A bit younger than me [laughs]
DK: Yeah. He would’ve, as I say, he would’ve caught the very last year of the war [unclear] he was called up
MH: Yes
DK: He was nineteen then, as I say, failed his medical to get in the Navy and ended up in the factories. I can’t see you here, see if you can point yourself out. Ah, right, ok, so you’re third one in from the left, front row. Ah!
MH: [laughs]
DK: Oh! That’s a wonderful photo there.
MH: What a change! Thank you
DK: So, just for the recording then, I got two photos here, that’s [unclear] good so and this is your husband
MH: Yes
DK: Yeah, and what was his name? What was his?
MH: Eric
DK: Eric, Eric. Yeah. So he was signals as well then. Yeah. Just for the recording here, I say, it’s a photo of a Lancaster from the signal section RAF Wickenby June 1945 and the aircraft is coded PH0, PHO, that’s for 12 Squadron and is that the squadron leaves the field? Is that the squadron right at the bottom there?
MH: Oh, that’s the, oh no, that’s the, that’s on the badge
DK: The crest, on the crest, so that’s the 4 Squadron crest
MH: I have been down to Brookwell, that’s where my mother’s home is, I’ve been down to Brize Norton and taken over the airfield by one of the workers there and had coffee in the officer’s mess
DK: Cause 101 squadron is still going, isn’t it?
MH: Yes, yes, yes, that’ll be, that’s a hundred years
DK: Yeah, I’m not too sure about 12 Squadron though, I don’t think, is 12 Squadron still going, do you know?
MH: No, 12 Squadron is, no, only 101
DK: Nor 626 either
MH: Uh, no
DK: No, no
MH: But I noticed that 61 Squadron was mentioned the other day. I can’t remember in connection with what. Because I thought to myself, oh, I was on 61, oh, something to do with that body that they found somewhere
DK: In Holland
MH: The aircraft that got lost
DK: Yeah
MH: That was 61 Squadron
DK: That was a wreck in Holland, wasn’t it?
MH: Yes
DK: Yes
MH: That was where I was in Sturgate was on 61 Squadron
DK: Right, alright. Cause I think they found the remains of one of the crew, don’t they?
MH: Yes
DK: Yeah
MH: Yes, yes, I think it was the pilot cause he’d told all the others to jump out, didn’t he, and he didn’t.
DK: Right, right, yeah. Ok, let’s, let’s stop that there. I’ll ask the question again. Did you ever get to fly in a Lancaster?
MH: No, I didn’t [laughs]
DK: And there was a reason for that. What’s the reason?
MH: Yes, uhm
DK: You did flights to Germany?
MH: Yes, they were sending flights over Germany and I said to my husband who was my boyfriend then, I’m going on one of those, he says, if you go on one of those, I won’t marry you [laughs], so I didn’t go on one. And we were married for fifty-eight years [laughs]
DK: Did he go on one of those trips?
MH: No, I didn’t, no
DK: He didn’t either
MH: No
DK: No
MH: No [laughs]. When, going back to Brize Norton, an uncle of mine was at Brize during the war when they had the Wellingtons pulling the Horsa Gliders
DK: Oh right
MH: And apparently, they had to hold onto the back end of the glider before it took off and he held on and he fell and got killed and that was at Brize Norton.
DK: Right. Yeah. So, have you had many family members that have been in the RAF?
MH: No
DK: Right
MH: Only me.
DK: Right.
MH: My brother went into the navy, my father was in the army
DK: You mentioned your son-in-law, is it, he’s at Coningsby?
MH: My son-in-law
DK: Yeah, alright, ok
MH: With his husband
DK: Right, and he was at RAF at Coningsby?
US: No, he was in the United States Air Force
DK: Oh!
US: He served in, during the Vietnam war
DK Oh my!
US: He was in, think he was in Laos
MH: He gets teased. If anything goes wrong, he says, I’ll stay in America again, he doesn’t mind [laughs]
DK: So, what did he do in the US Air Force?
US: He was on, as far as I know, cause he doesn’t talk about it a great deal, he was on the helicopters, in the back end of the helicopters with a machine gun
DK: Oh right!
US: To, cause they used to go and pick up the downed pilots.
DK: Right
US: And he was one of the people that, you know, was protecting the people that were
DK: Going and pick’em up
US: Going to pick’em up
DK: Oh right, cause someone I know, I’ve never met him, but he’s the son of somebody who fought in, who served in RAF Bomber Command, who was a pilot but he has since gone back to America, lived there and he served in Vietnam on the helicopters doing a very similar job. Yeah. So where did you meet him then?
US: RAF Bentwaters
DK: Right. So you were
US: I was civil servant, yes.
DK: Right
US: And he was still serving time, I mean he was, he was actually military place
DK: Right. Spent time in Vietnam, interesting
US: Well, I think again, it was a case of joining the Air Force before he was
DK: Drafted in, yeah
US: Before he was drafted
DK: Drafted into the army, yeah. Ah, well, right, just for the recording again, there’s this lovely photo of your wedding
MH: Honeymoon paid for by the RAF in the Isle of Wight [laughs]
DK: Ah, that’s very nice, I’ve just come back from the Isle of Wight funnily enough, I was [unclear]
MH: Freshwater [laughs]
DK: Freshwater, yes, we went there. Very handsome chap. I like the way the flairs are in color
MH: Yes, you didn’t get things in color in those days
DK: No, no
MH: They all had to be hand done afterwards
DK: Lovely photo. And did your husband stay in the RAF?
MH: No
DK: Alright
MH: He wanted to
DK: Alright
MH: He was an architect, but I said no, I didn’t want my children to be sent to boarding school in this sort of and keep on moving here, there and everywhere so he went back and then got his degree in architecture
DK: Ah right. Did he tell you much about what he was doing cause you mentioned he was working on the radar?
MH: No
DK: Alright, so he never really talked about that
MH: No, he wasn’t very talkative about other things, was he?
DK: Alright.
MH: He would be a good friend, cause he wouldn’t tell anyone anything [laughs]
DK: But you knew he was working on the H2S radar then, yeah
US: His wing
MH: was part of the section
DK: Right, yeah, yeah
US: We were talking to a lady cause my mother got invited to one of the memorial flight
DK: Right
US: And we were talking to the curator there and she said, you know, how interesting it is talking to people after the war, how some people are quite happy to talk about it and it doesn’t bother them and other people just
DK: Just don’t
US: Just don’t want to
DK: We’ve actually found that this was part of this project there’s a lot of people now who obviously, you know, got to a great age are only now talking about it so when you ask about how many, you know, are still surviving, a lot of these people haven’t mentioned it but we identify them and then for the first time they are talking about what happened, you know, for understandable reasons they haven’t spoken about it before. Sometimes the families haven’t been interested and sometimes they just obviously found it too difficult to talk about and you know, it’s sad and understandable but you know hopefully now we are capturing some of those stories before it’s, you know obviously it’s too late. Cause some people say, well, why didn’t you start this project twenty years ago when the memories were fresher? And perhaps we should’ve done and [unclear] we would’ve done but they didn’t want to talk about it twenty years ago
MH: I’ve still got my father’s diary that he went into the army in 1916, was eighteen in 1916, and I’ve still got his diary written in pencil and still readable
DK: Yeah
MH: Of his time in the army and I’m just wondering whether records in any of the Army things might cause that’s no good to me, nobody wants them
DK: Yeah, it might, you can’t, does it mention which regiment he was with? Because there’s regimental museums, they might be interested probably
MH: Yes, oh right, I think I didn’t give it, I gave you something, didn’t I?
US: I’ve got a few bits and pieces of [unclear]
MH: I think I’ve got a
DK: Because there’s
MH: A little disk upstairs somewhere
DK: Because there’s similar projects to the Bomber Command one where if there is research into this particular regiment like us they might want to copy it, you keep the original document but they, cause now you don’t really need to hand over the original document, they just make a copy of it electronically and the family gets to keep the documents, so it might be worth looking into
MH: It’s very interesting reading and exactly as you see in these pictures with all the margin, he had, a bullet went in his neck and he lived until he was seventy-nine, but he had mustard gas
DK: My grandfather on my mother’s side, he was gassed in the First World War, he lived to be ninety-nine but he was, I think it was phosgene gas that he was wounded and he collapsed and had a label on him and he said, oh, you’ve got a blighty wound, you know, you’re going home and then my grandfather on my father’s side as well and his brother so my great grand uncles all fought in the Western Front
MH: I like hearing about people’s experiences during the war because I’ve got a friend that lives on the estate, he’s coming up ninety-three, and he was in the Red Berets
DK: Alright, yeah
MH: What are they called?
DK: The commandos
MH: Yes
DK: Yeah, yeah
MH: Yes, and he can tell me a few stories
DK: Ah, right. But once again, there might be a project where his stories are being captured, cause I know old history’s now is really a big thing really
MH: And I keep meaning to try and go to Ypres because an uncle of mine got killed in the first week of the First World War and a couple of years ago friends that live at Brize Norton they found his grave
DK: Ah, right
MH: And but I haven’t managed to get there
DK: Hopefully, you’ll get to see it
MH: So
US: Did you, did you have any Polish people on your squadron?
MH: Can’t hear you
US: Did you have any Polish people on your squadrons?
MH: Yes, no, no
DK: Oh, right, ok
MH: Oh no, not allowed, at Faldingworth, have you heard of Faldingworth?
DK: Yes, yes, yeah
MH: That was part of the number 1 Group at Faldingworth and when I got transferred from Ludford Magna to Wickenby which isn’t that far, we stopped at Faldingworth so they said you gotta stay in the van, what do you mean I gotta stay in the van? WAAF are not allowed to get out on a Polish squadron
DK: Really?
MH: The men are always after them [laughs], but you could always get lipstick and nylons and this sort of thing
DK: From the Polish
MH: And silk stockings and, yes, we swear that they used to land somewhere and pick these things up [laughs]
DK: So you have no idea where they got this stuff from then? You’ve got no idea where the Polish were getting the nylon from?
MH: No, no, no, no
DK: So you never actually met any Poles then, no?
MH: But they were always very nice [laughs]
DK: Yeah
MH: But you weren’t allowed out of the van [laughs]. But I don’t know whether there were any women on that squadron at Faldingworth, I didn’t know much about it but I know it was all Polish fliers there
DK: Yeah. So, when you were allocated to a squadron or a base, you really kept within that, did you, you didn’t really mix with people from other squadrons
MH: Well, I think so, I did because it was still Lincolnshire when I went to Gainsborough
DK: Right
MH: To Sturgate so I just stayed in and of course they used to, when you went from, you finished your course and they said, where do you want to go? Everybody put near home, well, you never ever got near home it was miles away [laughs] cause I was in Middlesex
DK: Did you manage to get home much though while you
MH: No,
DK: Served, no
MH; No, no
DK: So, you weren’t granted leave for the weekend or
MH: No, not very often, might get seven days now and again, and you would get days off, but you would just stay locally, well unless you were like me and skived down to my relatives [laughs]
DK: Ok, well, I’ll stop that there but thanks very much for your time. Put that back on again, the radiation cells, so they were all
MH: They were valves
DK: Right. So, was part
MH: Nothing electric
DK: So, was part of your role then changing the valves?
MH: Yes, yes and on the aircraft it was the same
DK: Alright. And this might sound an odd question, but did you take the whole radios out? You had to pull them out presumably.
MH: It could’ve done but I didn’t because they were too heavy
DK: Right. Right
MH: But there will be a receiver, what’s the other thing?
DK: Transmitter
US: Transmitter
DK: Yeah. And then all the valves that you had, did you use to change the valves?
MH: Yes, yes
DK: And could you tell if the valves needed changing?
MH: Can’t remember, long time ago [laughs]
DK: But it was good technology because it worked
MH: Yes
DK: Yeah
US: I mean, my dad used to build his own radios, didn’t he? Papi used to build his own radios after the war
MH: Yes
DK: Yes, yeah
US: Locked in boxes
MH: He really wanted to stay in, no, I wasn’t going to have my children taken away from me [laughs], go to boarding school
DK: It’s understandable. 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 Marian Hollier
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
2017-10-16
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHollierM171016, PHollierM1701
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:38:19 audio recording
Language
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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
England--Lincolnshire
Description
An account of the resource
Marion Hollier served as a wireless operator in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force from February 1944 to September 1946. Before the war she worked in a construction firm, The George Wimpey Company, which built aerodromes. She learned the Morse code in the Women’s Junior Air Corps. Tells of her father who served as a telegraphist in the First World War. Later on, she joined the Air Training Corps. She was trained at RAF Wilmslow, then Blackpool on the Morse code, before moving to RAF Ludford Magna, with 101 Squadron, and from there to RAF Wickenby with 626 and 12 Squadron. At RAF Wickenby her duties included radio transmitting and carrying out inspections on aircraft. While she was stationed at RAF Ludford Magna, she witnessed enemy aircraft strafing headquarters.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Peter Schulze
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945-06
101 Squadron
12 Squadron
626 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
ground personnel
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
RAF Compton Bassett
RAF Faldingworth
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Wickenby
training
wireless operator
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/833/10824/AGauldA180608.1.mp3
659710d8a372d91317571d2f50ae2868
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
Gauld, Andrew
A Gauld
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Andrew Gauld (b.1924, 1823711 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a wireless operator with 12 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-06-08
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
Gauld, A
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 Alan Pinchbeck. The interviewee is Andy Gauld. The interview is taking place at Mr Gauld’s home in Scarborough, North Yorkshire on the 8th of June 2018 at 10.35. Also present is Karen Chapman, the interviewee’s daughter and Brenda his wife. So, Andy can we start off by you telling me a bit about what you did before the war.
AG: How far back do you want me to go? The school I went to?
AP: Yeah, where, where were you born and when were you born?
AG: Where was I born, now you’ve got me. I was born at, in Gardeners Cottage, part of Craigmyle House which was owned by, oh I forget his name now. Shaw. Craigmyle House, a huge house. Long since gone now. They knocked it down as they wanted the erm —
BG: Land?
AG: Stones to build somewhere else. Old history I’m afraid. That overlooks the village of Torphins where I was educated. If you can call it education. It was an excellent school. Do you want to know about the school? Various, I had, I had one particularly good headmaster. Now, what was his name? Davidson. He went into the history of the pupils and all sorts of things. Excellent. Not a great deal to say about the school really. Apart from it was a nice building. It was a granite building. It was rebuilt, partly during the war and partly after the war. Beautiful granite building. Still there today. Just across the road from the local village hall.
AP: And after you left school, what did you do then?
AG: After I left school I was a member of the air training core and I stayed, stayed in that and I went in to the Post Office. I joined the Post Office and I worked in the local Post Office in the village for, I don’t know, for quite, quite a few years until I got married I suppose, more or less. I don’t know all the details, I can’t remember all the details, not now. But I lived in the village until, I don’t know what age I was. I went into the air force and I didn’t really go back to the village after I came out the air force.
AP: I’m just going to pause it there a minute.
AG: Well I joined — I volunteered for air crew and then when I got called up I went, I eventually went into 12 Bomber Squadron and got crewed up with Pilot Officer Stephenson from Newcastle, Hank Baldwin, no, yes, was it Hank Baldwin?
BG: You said it was.
AG: Hank Baldwin, a New Zealander from North Island. I still keep in touch with him. Well I did until — he’s dead now. He died. I met the rest, the rest, my bomber crew there. Taff Edwards from South Wales, pilot of course. He was, he was a Sergeant Stephenson. Became, he became a Squadron Leader eventually. New Zealand navigator was Hank Baldwin. He was — the, the overseas people that came and joined the air crew usually got commissioned and he came across as a pilot officer and became a flight lieutenant or a squadron leader. I’m not sure what. And again, after the war of course he returned home. What else do you want to know about him? I did quite a few raids. My log book is in there. There it is. Five or six raids. Survived them all, hence I’m still here.
AP: You were telling me you trained in the UK?
AG: I got trained in the UK. Yeah. Oh, that was at Wickenby. RAF Wickenby. Where did I do air crew training. My wireless op training. Do you know I, I forget? It escapes me now. Mostly in Shropshire and then Lincolnshire. And I got crewed up in 1943 I think with Pilot Officer Stephenson. He’d probably just be a sergeant, a sergeant when I joined him but he became a wing commander eventually. And New Zealand. I went on bomber crew. The New Zealander was the navigator. Hank Baldwin. He’s just died recently. And the rear, the mid upper gunner was Taff Edwards from Swansea, South Wales. And the rear gunner was from Enfield West. The one, our engineer, we had two different engineers. One was a Scotsman who drank too much and he got [laughs] he got booted out and then another Scotsman joined me, joined me called MacNelly. I forget his first name now. Called Mac and stayed, I stayed with a bomber crew until, I don’t know when. Until the end of the war I suppose.
AP: Can you remember any particular operations you went on?
AG: Yes. I did [pause] I did a place called Paderborn and Hamburg a long time ago. And, where else? In my logbook. Gosh I forget now. I got it here in my logbook actually.
AP: We can have a look later. Yeah. We’ll get that sorted out.
BG: Can I prompt at all?
AP: Could do. So, if you were going on a typical raid. What, what can you remember about preparing for any particular raid?
AG: Oh God.
AP: Was it — were you nervous or against it?
AG: I am not a nervous chap. I, I get anxious about things but I’m, I’m not really nervous. Well I was a sergeant. Sergeant Officer Sergeant Gauld. I became a flight sergeant and then I became a warrant officer. And had I stayed on they offered me a commission if I stayed on the air force but I didn’t want to stay on. I wanted to come out. So, that’s the end of it [laughs]
AP: OK. You mentioned flying on Operation Manna.
AG: Oh yes.
AP: That must have been quite something?
AG: That was dropping food to the Dutch. I did one or two others. I rarely knew we were flying. Flying book [long pause] [background noise] we wouldn’t have suffered from the cold, I, we had, we had sheepskin boots and things like that.
AP: I think the wireless operator’s position is quite close to the airing, the heater intake isn’t it?
AG: Yes.
AP: So, you’d be quite warm?
AG: Yes, it was in the centre of the, centre of the plane so it was in a warmer area. So how far back do you want me to go? Llandwrog. I was stationed a Llandwrog Advanced Flying Unit in nineteen [pause] I forget, I don’t know when. Then I went into Wellingtons. Operational Training unit at Peplow which is in [pause] it’s not Lincolnshire. I don’t know where it is though. It’s all history now.
BG: His memory is fading.
AP: Yeah. Yeah.
AG: Wellingtons. Flew in Wellingtons
AP: And when you got to Wickenby, when you went with your crew to Wickenby.
AG: Yes.
AP: What did you think when you got to Wickenby? What did you think to it there?
AG: Oh. It was quite a nice, nice station was Wickenby. It was near Lincoln and Lincoln was a nice town. It was a friendly town towards aircrew because Lincolnshire of course was Bomber Command country and we were mostly all heroes there. Which was good. Peplow. I was stationed at Peplow which is, is that in Lincolnshire? I’m not sure where it is. Lincolnshire or just outside Lincolnshire.
AP: And did you have any encounters with night fighters?
AG: I don’t know. That wouldn’t affect me very much anyway because that was an air gunner. And it was an air gunner job to follow the night fighters. I didn’t see very much in my little area ‘cause of this, I had a door to look out but there’s not much to see at night. So, it was of no, no great interest really. We see the odd plane get shot down. See a plane get shot down [unclear] and you’d see it spiralling in to the air. Not very interesting I’m afraid.
AP: And when you took part in Operational Exodus brining prisoners of war back —
AG: Yes, I did.
AP: Do you remember doing that, going on that with your crew or just some of you? Did you not take gunners or —
AG: Most of the crews were broken up after the war. When the war finished. Because a lot of the crews were Australians and New Zealanders. In fact, my crew the navigator was a New Zealander. And of course, he went home when the war finished. Who else did I have? Taff Edwards, South Wales, he went home. I forget what his, what his job was. He went back to South Wales. There was Flight Lieutenant Stephenson [pause] who went back into civvy street, like, like I did. It’s all history under the water all this.
AP: Do you remember anything about the people you brought back, the prisoners of war you brought back? Were they pleased to see you? Were they —
AG: Not a lot except that what we, we was, we used to do, we used to get flight rations. We used to get chocolate and stuff that poor civilians didn’t get and we used to keep ours and when we brought prisoners of war back we passed it on to them. Some of them would be in tears when you gave them chocolate. I fed, fed quite a lot of prisoners like that which was nice.
AP: After the war then, what did you get up to after the war?
AG: Well I was in the Post Office before I went into the air force and when I came out the air force I went back into the Post Office.
BG: You went to wireless school in Aberdeen, didn’t you?
AG: Yes, I went to wireless college in Aberdeen.
AP: So, you kept up your interest in wireless?
AG: Oh Yes. I still do. Not much to tell you about that.
AP: So, tell us about your crewing up Andy?
AG: Well [laughs] we, we went to this station. I can’t think where it was now. Probably Peplow, Peplow, I’m not sure. Anyway, an, an aircrew station and the gunners were already there and the bomb aimer was there and of course, the wireless operator and the pilot and navigator. And we went around meeting each other and somebody would come to you and say “do you want to be in my crew” [laughs] and you’d say yes. So, I was crewed up. The first pilot I was with, he was a good pilot and he was slightly older than we were. He was one of these men who I called mulisha[?] men who were called up early in the war and he was, he was sent to Canada. He became air crew. He was sent to Canada and he got a — now I don’t think he was commissioned there because he was still a [clears throat] flight sergeant when I joined him but he soon be — he got a commission, I think he was commissioned. British aircrew that went to Canada got commissioned straight away, from nothing they didn’t have to wait like us poor old sods had to do. He went to Canada and did his air training there and then he came back to the UK and I don’t know where, where I got crewed up, probably Peplow was it. I’ll have to come back on that one in my log book. And the pilot went around looking for a wireless op, rear gunners and a bomb aimer. Talked to them all and all, all joined together and became a crew. That’s how we got together. And eventually the crew would be sent to a, an operational station. I forget where I went to now [pause]
AP: So, if there is nothing else you want to tell me Andy. I want to say thank you ever so much for your time and thank you for what you have done for us. I really appreciate coming to chat with you. It’s been an honour. Thank you.
AG: Thank you. 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 Andrew Gauld
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alan Pinchbeck
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
2018-06-08
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
AGauldA180608
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:17:29 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.
Canada
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Shropshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1945
Description
An account of the resource
Born in a Gardeners Cottage, Andrew Gauld joined the Air Training Corps whilst working in the local Post Office, after finishing school. Andrew then joined the Air Force and went into 12 Bomber Squadron and was crewed up with Pilot Officer Stephenson from Newcastle and Hank Baldwin from New Zealand as a navigator. Also in Andrew’s crew was mid upper gunner Taff Edwards from Swansea, and a rear gunner from Enfield West. He recalls having two Scottish engineers, the first drank too much and was kicked out and the second one stayed, and he was called MacNelly. Andrew remembers doing training at RAF Wickenby. Andrew recalls some operations in Paderborn and Hamburg. Andrew recollects being offered a commission when he was a warrant officer but wanted to come out. He recollects being a part of Operation Manna and his experiences of ‘crewing up’ with other aircrewmen. He went back to the Post Office and went to wireless college in Aberdeen after the war.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Benjamin Turner
12 Squadron
aircrew
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Peplow
RAF Wickenby
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/709/10107/ABirchallJW170816.1.mp3
ea889d81b3af8f15e94dfed07b1db474
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
Birchall, James William
J W Birchall
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with James Birchall (b. 1923, 16062 Royal Air Force). He 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
2017-08-16
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Birchall, JW
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DB: This interview is with James William Birchall and it’s on the 16th of August 2017 at 15.50 hours. Also present in the room is Mr Brian Keen. James — or apologies, Jimmy.
JB: Thank you.
DB: Tell me a little bit about your life before you joined the RAF.
JB: The RAF. If I start reading. I left grammar school at sixteen which was the usual time then. I went into a solicitor’s office. At eighteen I wanted to volunteer for the RAF and I was in the Air Training Corps. My older colleagues were volunteering but at that time there were too many volunteers so they put us on what they called deferred service. ‘We’ll call you back in another six months to start your training for air crew.’ I thought if I go in December they’ll call me back in June which would be about the right time to start. But on the 7th December 1941, I remember that date because it was Pearl Harbour, I went to RAF Cardington for medicals. The warrant officer said, ‘You’re one of the lucky ones. Down for immediate service.’ I said, ‘No. I don’t want to come in the middle. I want to come in the middle of the year.’ And he said, ‘Oh, you’ll have to explain that to the group captain and it’s Friday afternoon and he’s gone playing golf. You can’t see him ‘til Monday.’ So, I stayed in this empty camp. Everyone had gone off for the weekend. The warrant officer on Monday said, ‘Write out why you should be given this deferred service.’ He underlined various sentences in red pencil, went into the group captain, came out and said, ‘The group captain’s considered your case and you’re still on immediate service.’ I went to the Aircrew Receiving Centre and that’s ACRC at St Johns Wood. Spent Christmas there on picket duty. Then finally went for the Initial Training Wing at Stratford on Avon where you did initial training. Square bashing, learning aviation law and things like that. Then you did what was called a grading course flying Tiger Moths to see if you had an aptitude because most of the flying training at that time was done in South Africa or Canada or America. Our weather was too bad. Anyhow, I soloed in eight and a half hours. If you hadn’t soloed by ten hours then you were out. I soloed in eight and a half hours. The instant I’d done this I was shipped off to Calgary in Alberta, Canada. It’s rather a coincidence that my son who is a medical consultant he got a scholarship to Stow and then on to Cambridge to study medicine. He’s there now. I won’t carry on about him. He is married and has three daughters. Flying training. I did my elementary flying training in Calgary in PT17s which were like biplanes made by Boeings. They’re still using them today for wing walking. Single-engined. Very good for aerobatics. Very good for training. From there they assessed your aptitude for fighter aircraft or multi-engined aircraft. Bombers. I thoroughly enjoyed instrument flying. We did some instrument flying in the PT17s with the hood up. Then I, we were then moved to Service Flying Training School which was at a place called Penhold, flying Oxfords. And it was parallel to the Rockies. I got my wings on the 18th of December 1942, exactly a year from my start. Sailed back from New York in the Queen Elizabeth carrying fifteen thousand troops. Mostly American. Crossing the Atlantic at the height of the U-boat packs. There were too many of us but at that time the RAF had units that would absorb you. So they gave us a commando course at Whitley Bay. Swimming in the North Sea in January and February wasn’t fun. To assimilate us back in to flying we went on a refresher course and then we did a lot of beam approach flying and then from there on we progressed to OTUs. Operational Training Units where we flew heavy twins. Wellingtons. Lovely aircraft. The pilot had a cushioned leather seat instead of just a metal bucket seat where you sat on your parachute. Wellingtons are much heavier, much bigger than Oxfords. We did a course of about fifty hours flying Wellingtons from Seighford near Stafford. And then here in a big hangar at Stafford men were gathered in groups of aircrew. Navigators, bomb aimers, radio operators and rear gunners. ‘Go and pick your crew.’ That’s how it was done. We then trained as a crew on Wellingtons. Did one or two operational flights at the end of our training over North France. From there we progressed to a Lancaster Finishing School. LFS at Lindholme near Doncaster flying Halifaxes and Lancasters. About the same size as Lancasters Halifaxes were much heavier to fly with a very strong undercarriage. I’ve got here built like a brick shithouse but I don’t know whether you [laughs] Lancasters were a delight to fly. Beautifully balanced. More delicate. But you had to be careful on take-off. If we opened up and then it goes on to say that they would normally swing to the left and you’d got to be ready to correct it. After Lancaster, Lanc Finishing School I went to 12 Squadron in 1 Group at Wickenby near Lincoln. I did three or four bombing trips there. One was to Hanover. And then it’s here where we were shot up by a Messerschmitt 109 and we got the impression, it felt like a bucket of hot coals had been thrown over us because it was a tracer hitting us. I felt a kick in my back and nothing else. And then we were — we lost our mid-upper gunner. He was, his Perspex turret had splintered and part had gone in his eye and he lost his eye. At the time I got — I then went with him to the Medical Centre. We were x-rayed and they found that I’d got a bullet in my back, and a couple of — I’m getting [pause] Then I, when I was in hospital at Rauceby for three months when I was fit again I was a head without a crew because my crew had been cannibalised while I was away. But there was another crew without a head in 103 Squadron. Their captain had gone on a flight as a second pilot with another crew to get experience and he’d been shot down. So, here was a headless crew and here was a head without a crew. That crew had been trained together from the beginning. They were all NCOs, and ultimately when we were shot down they were sent to an NCO POW camp all together. So, I never really saw them again until after the war. Another trip of interest was to Nuremberg on the 30th of March 1944. I think everyone knows that date. And the briefing we got from Bomber Harris said, ‘Very shortly Bomber Command will be called upon to support the invasion of Europe.’ And Sir Arthur Harris is anxious to strike at one last target before this happens. It’s a target he knows is very dear to Churchill’s heart. Nuremberg deserves a maximum effort and that is what it’ll get. Then there will be ten squadrons in one group, eight squadrons 3 Group. Etcetera. In addition there are fifteen Mosquitoes adopting an intruder role. So you will have lots of company but keep a good look out at turning points. And then it says Pilot Officer JW Birchall, Captain, Lancaster ND700 which took off at 22.10, landed at 06.46. Coming back of interest he coasted in at Selsey Bill. We were based south of the Humber. Ninety six aircraft were lost and a further ten were damaged on landing and were written off. I think I’ve got further details separately. The type of German night fighter technique, it was called schrage musik which apparently means slanting music which means jazz. It’s the German for jazz. The twin engine night fighters mounted four twenty millimetre cannon behind the pilot, sticking out of the cockpit at an angle. The ground radar monitored these night fighters in to the bomber stream and using his airborne radar the navigator could direct his pilot towards the target. When he got about two miles away the night fighter could duck down and come up underneath the bomber. We didn’t even rumble it. We couldn’t see underneath in Lancasters. He could then almost read the registration of the aircraft fifty feet above him. They then had the gunsight arranged so they didn’t aim at the middle of the aircraft to kill the crew. They were like ourself. He just wanted to knock out the aircraft. And — no I won’t. So, I think this is getting a bit laboured isn’t it? The next one was Dusseldorf on the 22nd of April. I think I’ll probably try and summarise that. They were, on our squadron there were fifteen aircraft detailed to go to Dusseldorf and we lined up each side of the runway and the aircraft ahead of us, we were still waiting, took off and on take-off he swung off the runway into the soft ground. Undercarriage collapsed. His bomb load exploded and we could see the crew evacuating, rushing off. But instead of cancelling operations the tower said, ‘We’ll change to runway — ’ I think it was runway 22. So it meant that all the ones behind me had all got to turn around with their bomb load on on the perimeter track. And some got off and some didn’t. And we had just got to the stage where we were lined up and then the tower said, ‘Aircraft not airborne return to dispersal.’ Now, at that time we were conscious that the set course time had been and gone about twenty minutes before. So we were going to be twenty minutes late even if — so I said to the chaps, ‘What shall we do? Shall we do as we are told and go back to dispersal or shall we go?’ So, we all said, ‘Oh, let’s go.’ So we all went and tried to catch them up. I asked the navigator to give me a straighter course. He did this, which took us right through the Ruhr up to Dusseldorf and so we, we got hammered going through the Ruhr and by the time we could see the fire of Dusseldorf ahead of us we were still about thirty miles below it err before it so we carried on. We dropped our bombs. And then we turned for home and suddenly something hit us. Just about knocked us on our back. And it must have been one of these night fighters with its four twenty millimetre cannon. It had formated underneath us and bingo. The number three engine, the starboard inner engine was on fire. We put out the fire. The engineer put out the fire with the extinguisher and we feathered the engine and we were going to hope to get home on three engines. But then we saw the fire come back again and it was really burning very intensely and getting very close to our number one tank which I remember was five hundred and eighty gallons. It got to the stage where we couldn’t do anything about it. We used the fire extinguisher. So I had to, told the crew to abandon the aircraft. Well, to abandon aircraft in Lancasters you have got to be dominated by that big spar which goes right across. So, people like the wireless operator, the rear gunner, the mid-upper gunner who were behind, aft of that big spar could go out through the main back door. The people who were in front of that would never stand a chance with parachutes on and all the rest of it so they would go out through a small hatch underneath the chin of the aircraft. It was a padded seat that the bomb aimer used to lie on while he was lining up his sights. So the place was blazing. I was holding it as fast as I could while the other ones got out. I could see the flight engineer went out, the bomb aimer went out. And I managed to see the navigator and he went out but I had a, an impression that his flying boots were on fire somehow. And he was interested in knocking flames out when he went out. And unfortunately the bomb aimer, whose job was to jettison that hatch before he went out he brought it indoor and he’d left it inside. And with the motion and the suction this I could see as the navigator went out wedged cornerways in the hatch. I couldn’t get out myself there. So the only way I thought was to get out through the roof. Now, I wasn’t thinking rightly because the little exit in the glass panelling we used in practices for dinghy drill with the aircraft supposedly floating on the water so we had to get out above it. But if you’ve got a parachute on and your flying gear to get out so I remember I panicked. I tried to rip this metal canopy apart. Couldn’t do that. So then I hit on the idea unhook my parachute, push it through still holding the rip cord and then I could follow it out. And it pulled me out so I was lucky to get out. So, that was how I made my entrance into Germany. Now, I I think I’m, that was a photo, a squadron photograph we had taken. I’ve got an arrow here with me. In the original which the wireless operator got he’d got a little arrow on this side but it’s chopped off a bit so we couldn’t see. So I put a ring around it. But it shows how big a Lancaster was when you see the whole squadron including the bull dog which was the mascot. But then you have the WAAF drivers. You have all the ground crew and it’s a lot of people to man fifteen aircraft. I think that was just on the official records of this ME 741 in 103 Squadron. It was built in April ’44 and it was lost over Dusseldorf on the 23rd of April having only flown thirty one hours. My capture — well I don’t think that’s [pause] I landed. Well, in your battledress you had a kit which gave you foreign currency and of maps of Europe so you could escape. And as was coming down I got all this out and I thought oh, this is alright. I can make a trip now through Germany and Spain. I also noticed that I heard the German all clear because we were so far behind the rest of them once they shot me down there was nothing [laughs] That made sense because we were the last aircraft over the Ruhr and we’d been shot down. So they sounded the all clear and I remember thinking the German all clear is the same as ours. I started to concentrate on where I was going. It was a moonlight night. I could see the River Rhine and thought I was going to land in it. And I could see I was drifting away from the Rhine so I was alright. Then I could see something round coming up in the moonlight and I thought that’s either a round greenhouse or a summer house. I couldn’t make out what it was I was aiming for. And I plonked down and found it was an ack-ack gun emplacement and these were all the sandbags around it. There was only one Luftwaffe man guarding it. The rest had all gone back to their billets having heard the all clear. He was surprised and he called an officer who attempted to interrogate me. He spoke, ‘Some German?’ I said, ‘No,’ I said, ‘English?’ He said, ‘No.’ So we had a bit of French and didn’t get very far. A train took us. We got a train the following day to Krefeld where we were to be taken to a Luftwaffe collection point for shot down POWs. At that time there were a lot of Americans because every time a Flying Fortress got shot down there was a ten strong crew. We got off the train and we walked. Walked to the town centre where a tram car would take us to the collection place. I was with this corporal who made me carry my parachute. I’d landed heavily so my knees were very painful. On the way to the square we made to turn up a little side street when he hesitated and walked past it. I thought oh he doesn’t know his way. But as I walked past that little street I had a glance up there and saw four RAF sergeants hanging from lampposts. Krefeld was part of the Ruhr which had taken an enormous pounding. And I thought this is real, this is happening. When we got to the Square and waited for the tram car people gathered around to see one of the terror fliegers carrying his parachute. They were very volatile. Surged in. Kicked me. Hit me. I remember one big plump fellow with a walking stick shouting that I’d, ‘Bomben my kinder and frau in Dusseldorf.’ He walloped into me. Knocked me down, kicked me, jumped on me. I was losing consciousness when I heard a pistol shot. I think it must have been the guard whose responsibility I was. Four SS men arrived which terrified me even more in their black uniforms with skull, silver skull and crossbone badges. But they held the crowd back ‘til the tram came along. Two of them came on the tram with the guard and for once in my life I was grateful to the SS for saving me from being hung up on that next lamp post. That was a bit of the parachute which I got the crew to sign after the war. I’ll just rabbit on. I don’t want to. Yes? The interrogation — we were at this collection point for a couple of days when they took us, a group of us, mostly Americans to the main flyer’s interrogation centre at Oberursel near Frankfurt. Built specifically for interrogating prisoners. I was in a solitary cell, eight by six. I paced up and down. The walls were all lined with some sort of thick absorbent cardboard and the window had bars on it. It was hot in Frankfurt in April and in the daytime they would switch on a big radiator in each room and close the shutters from the outside so you really cooked. At night the radiators went cold and the shutters were opened so you were exposed to the night and got very cold. That was the only form of torture I suffered. They fed us much the same blah blah blah. After about a week I was taken to a big interrogation office where a Luftwaffe major who spoke excellent English did the interrogating. He was very friendly. He said, ‘I’ve told the German High Command that you are a shot down British airman but they don’t believe me. You are a spy.’ I said, ‘No. I’m not a spy. I’m wearing my uniform. I’ve got my dog tags for identification.’ He said, ‘Yes. But all spies, not knowing where they are going to land put on a uniform so they, they’d be helped by the Geneva Convention. Dog tags. they’re no proof.’ He said, ‘Well, tell me about your aeroplane. If you are a shot down British airman we’ll have the wreckage of your plane with its registration on. Tell us that.’ I said, ‘No. All I can tell you is name, rank and number.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Tell us some members of your crew because we will have caught those. That will confirm you are a shot down British airman.’ ‘No. Name, rank and number.’ So, he said, ‘Well, I’m sorry. I can’t convince them that you’re not a spy.’ And then, well they, which is the German High Command I think, ‘You’re not a spy and that orders are that at 8 o’clock tomorrow you will be shot.’ I didn’t sleep much that night. 8 o’clock still no jack boots down the corridor outside my bell. Breakfast came at the usual time. I was there for another week thinking that if they ask me again I’ll tell them anything they want to know to prove that I was a shot down airman and not a spy. Well, it just goes on. But anyhow the next time he interviewed me he had, it was in the same briefing room but he’d got a large map on the back wall and a lot of these manilla folders with the squadron crest on the front. And he thumbed through these and he had his pink tape on the map behind him but he didn’t have our base on it. The tape was just from the English coast. They could monitor where the bomber stream was on the radar. He was thumbing through some brown manilla files on his desk. Each one with the squadron crest on. ‘Oh yes. 103 Squadron. Recently you’ve had quite a few losses on your squadron.’ On such a night so and so was shot down. He had three or four of these but thinking about it they had been shot down. They’d have been interrogated so he'd have got their details. Then he said, ‘Did you know your squadron commander had been recommended for his DSO?’ We didn’t. I didn’t know if it was true. He was looking to see my reaction each time to confirm if what he was saying was correct. I asked him about one of my chums who was shot down and hadn’t come back. ‘No. He probably had to ditch in the North Sea so we wouldn’t have any details of him.’ All very plausible. So, he asked me one question about the funnel. The leading light funnel leading to the runway. And he called this, he says, ‘Out of interest what’s this Christmas tree you have at night along your runway? A series of lights you call a Christmas tree.’ Did he mean the six mile funnel of lead in lights? One aircraft was coming in to the land and unknown to us a night fighter infiltrated. Coming in behind him on final approach. Positioned under him and shot him, shot. The aircraft crashed and they were all killed. This must have been what he was talking about. So it was a different form of interrogation he made. Confirmation of known facts and the Christmas tree question. But he did give me the consolation, ‘We’ve established you’re a shot down airman.’ Can we have a break now?
[recording paused]
After the interrogation they took us by train to Stalag Luft 3 at Sagan in Silesia. The notorious camp of the Great Escape where seventy six officers escaped on the night of March the 24th ’44. Only three got back to England. The rest were re-captured and on Hitler’s express orders fifty were shot. I arrived in the camp before this fact was known. The senior British officer, Group Captain Massey demanded of the German commandant that their bodies should be returned for a decent internment and perhaps a monument. And although told that they had been shot while escaping the bodies came back to indicate that they had not been shot in the back but in the front. It looks like a firing squad. We tried to find things to do. I read the whole of Charles Dickens. We had one navigator and he set off to run a navigation course up to the standard of the Civil Navigator’s Licence Second Class. You could get documents through the Red Cross and do the final exam through them. It was something constructive to do and I got my licence. We had lots of theatres. There were, there were POWs who enjoyed training for theatre work and they used to put on a play for us every week or two. We, the audience dressed in our best blue which we’d sent from home. I remember Blythe Spirit. And Messaline, which was written in the camp about a Greek prostitute, I think. There was Pud Davies, that was Rupert Davies who later played Maigret on television. Then there was Commander John Casson RN. He was the son of Dame Sybil Thorndike. He worked in the management side of theatre. There was Talbot Rothwell as was known. We knew him as Tolley. Another expert thespian who now produces the Carry On films. And also Peter Butterworth who was also on the Carry On team. There was one effeminate Squadron Leader, Bobby Lomas who always played the female. And the whole camp, starved of female fancied him. There was no rapport with the German guards with strict rules, but when we had a theatre show we invited the commandant and the senior guards to come and gave them the front seat. And we of course dressed in our best blue. So, all very prim and proper. We were still tunnelling. There was one under the theatre hut. And you — the tunnels dug through sandy soil required to be shored up by slats from bed boards, and each bed had eight slats. And when you were called to surrender one slat for shoring up the tunnel you took the biggest slat and split it in two so you gave one to the tunnel but you still had eight. You could see the Germans doing inspections through the windows as you were lined up outside counting the slats. But the slats were getting thinner and thinner and eventually a bed would collapse. If it was the top one of three tiers it would come crashing down on the two beneath. No more tunnels were successful while I was there. Then we met the winter, the bitter winter and the Russians started their offensive across Poland, and they had liberated Warsaw. And at Sagan we heard rumours that we POWs were either going to be shot or taken on a trek. Hitler wanted to hang on to POW officers for possible bargaining at the war’s end. They could let the Russians take other ranks from their camps to Odessa and ship them back to England. The week before we’d seen horses and trailers with big boilers and chimneys. One or two people had been in Belsen or Buchenwald and had even seen these Death Camps. So we started to get a bit twitchy when a dozen of these boilers were lined up outside. Were they going to incinerate us? We decided that if they did we’d make a mad rush for the wire and try to climb over. We’d all be shot but it was better than being cooked. Anyhow, the following morning it had all gone. It was a German field kitchen. On the 27th of January, about 10.30pm we got the call, ‘We are marching out in one hour’s time. Take a blanket, take your overcoat, your greatcoat and gloves if you’ve got any.’ And we left at midnight on that date, the 27th of January where snow had been snowing for the past three weeks. And we marched for two or three weeks in the snow from then. The Germans didn’t know where we were going. We were just wandering aimlessly about. It got really cold and we had one instance where we were sleeping just outside the, on a barn, outside a barn. And in the morning the Germans came, prodded three officers but they had frozen to death during the night. One was Pop Green. He was quite an old one. I was marching on the side when I, with German tanks going past I collapsed having been struck by a tank and I was just hauled out by my buddies. We all pulled together. We marched almost to Hanover where they took us by train. Locked us in cattle trucks labelled forty hommes or eight chevaux. They packed us in as tight as they could and we travelled about Germany for two or three days. Those with dysentery were crowded into one corner and the rest took turns sleeping. Half lying down while the others half stood up. We were occasionally given rations when a field kitchen caught us up. It was barley glop. Boiled up barley but it was nice and hot. We drank rusty water from the tap on the side of the engine. When the train stopped we were allowed to walk about with the guards all around. The spring weather came and we were met very often by Typhoons or Tempests, some of which came out of from Selsey. The — that time they had they, they thought that we were German troops evacuating so they would take pot shots at us. And on one occasion towards dusk we were parked in a field with guards all around and we heard Merlin engines. A Mosquito doing a reccy had spotted a field full of troops so soon, the next thing a Typhoon came and had a go at us. One or two people got injured. Part of our walk finished up in a field by a German autobahn with a bridge nearby. Under it for safety were four or five German horse drawn carts. A couple of Typhoons spotted them and started shooting, annoyingly killing the poor old horses. We felt very sorry about that. As we crossed the Elbe some more Typhoons or Tempests had a go at the ferry. Wasn’t very successful. Nobody was hit. We then stayed at a place near Lubeck and we were told that we need not stay in Lubeck because they had typhus or, or typhoid. Instead we were permitted, we got the German commandant to agree to take over a large estate and he was very cooperative then because he knew the end of the war was in sight and he hoped we would speak up for him afterwards. Anyhow, we persuaded the troops, the German troops to throw hand grenades into the lake. The fish floated to the top and we swam in and got them. We dined well from there. When we got back to England they expected us to be skin and bone but we were fine and fit from living in the open. The, the Germans surrendered on May the 8th. We were, on May the 2nd we were liberated by a jeep with a driver and a British army corporal who stumbled across us. ‘You’re all liberated now. Stay here. Don’t try and wander. We’ll arrange transport to take you back to England,’ So, they took us to a Luftwaffe station called Diepholz where Dakotas or Lancasters took us back to England where we arrived in the afternoon and interrogated to find out what we’d seen in Germany that might be of interest. Any secret weapons or whatever. They gave us money, identity papers, clothing, railway warrants. So, on the 8th of May, VE Day we worked right through the night and I was given a train pass and arrived home the next morning in South Lancashire. No one was at home. They were all at church celebrating VE day. When they came back what a surprise. They’d heard nothing from me since September the previous year.
[recording paused]
My trip back from Germany was from a place, a German Luftwaffe station called Diepholz and we came back in a Dakota to one of the OTUs, in Oxfordshire I suppose, called Wing. It so happened that my future wife was in air traffic control at a place called [pause] it was at Westcott where the — no. My mind’s gone. Hut in Stalag Luft 3. We had fifteen of us in three tier bunks and in the top bunk there was a New Zealand squadron leader called Len Trent. And he was, used to be sleeping there in the afternoon and we had nothing else to talk about so we used to spend hours arguing who would win the war. Would it be fighters or bombers? And then we heard his voice, ‘For Christ sake shut up. I want to get some sleep.’ And we all stayed together where ever we went. We all stayed together. And we finished up by being interrogated in England. And there was Len and the other fourteen of us and we were all wanting to get cracking so we could get off home but Len was still being interrogated and talked. And we said, ‘Come on Len. Come on. You’re holding us up.’ But, ‘No. No. No. Shut up. No.’ And it was then, just after VJ day that word came out that Leonard Trent, New Zealand Air Force had just got the VC. And he hadn’t mentioned it of course to us. Well, he didn’t know at that time. So, that was Len Trent. I think it was three trips at 12 Squadron at Wickenby and then I got this bullet in my back. So, of course that was, although my crew then, we’d all been trained together I lost them at that time when I had to go in to hospital. They’d been cannibalised and so as I said I had then to take over a new crew on 103 Squadron and we didn’t do very many trips there. Altogether I think it was about twelve, thirteen but this was the time in April ’44 when the Germans had really organised themselves with these four cannon. And they would see where the bomber stream was going. They would then direct the night fighters into the bomber stream. The navigator in that night fighter could see his echoes and he would then direct his pilot on to the targets there. And when he got within two miles they’d duck down underneath and from then on [pause] And I spoke afterwards. Went to a place in London. There was some discussion I vaguely remember. Lord Tedder was there. But this fellow was a night fighter pilot and he said that it was, he regularly shot down four or five Lancasters every trip he did. And the average tour length at that time was about seven because you didn’t stand a chance. Yes. When I was shot down the team at the back got the mid-upper gunner, who was unconscious having had his face shot up. And they hooked his parachute hand over the ripcord which was the you know, the silver thing on the side which, and he was unconscious but they turfed him out thinking well that was the best they could do for him. And apparently he woke up the following day in a cabbage field. Blood all over himself and the parachute there. So he must have automatically pulled his parachute. So, I met them all afterwards and he’d lost his eye so coincidence that I had two mid-upper gunners lost their eye. But there are bits when you’re sitting on top there. There’s any, I’ve got the strip. These were reflections. We were all very young. Initially it was a game. I’ve got the parachute of the trip I was shot down in. I got the crew to sign it. The camp we were in. Fifteen sleeping in three tier bunks. Well, this was on the top bunk was Len Trent, New Zealand accent said, ‘For Christ sake.’ During that week in solitary in the beginning I thought I must think of something. Today, I will think entirely for the whole of the day on my mother, tomorrow my father, then my brother. Dragging up everything I could think about them to keep my mind occupied. How people survive in solitary for months I don’t know. I didn’t have a girlfriend at that time. I didn’t meet Heather ‘til after the war. So, I don’t think — these are just reflections. Then I think you’ve seen this one about when I went from RAF Feltwell. I’d been a little time when I was promoted to fill the squadron leader. Yes. This is about posting Heather to RAF Mildenhall ten miles away. She used to cycle over to see me and we carried on. Feltwell closed and was taken over by the Americans to store Polaris. I was then posted to Mildenhall because the squadron leader was demobbed. Then the group captain came. So I think that is that now. One — and that is in the camp I’d forgotten that I kept a diary. It was on a very thin flimsy paper and it was written in pencil and my mother must have been, at the end of the war she got hold of it. And this then came to my cousin and she said, ‘Oh, this is wonderful. You must make a record of it.’ So, what she did. Well, she wrote to, to the Bodleian Library in Oxford to see how you could preserve these things and what he should do. And then they contacted the RAF Museum at Hendon who were very interested and they have now been given, I think most of these books. But I’ll show you. I won’t go through them because it’s going to take you too long. I can say on this march, this long march we had the guards marching alongside us to see that we didn’t escape, although no one would want to escape in those conditions. But the guards were very old men and they got further and further behind. So they were moving slower than we were and they finished up at the back of the column. So then the guards had vehicles to collect them, take them to the front of the column, put them down and they started on the front of the column and gradually drifted back to the [pause ] but they were very, very old. This June ’46. On the 22nd of June Heather and I were married in Pinner Church after Heather’s demob in May. I applied for a vacancy in Civil Air Traffic Control having had my military experience. When they interviewed me the minimum recruiting age at that time was twenty five. However, when they saw me they reduced the age to twenty three and I was in. I landed up, they posted you nearest your home. I landed up at Speke Airport, Liverpool. Now, I think it’s called John Lennon Airport isn’t it? While there I did a month’s leave relief for a controller at Ronaldsway which was at Douglas Isle Of Man. Both Heather and I enjoyed the holiday although it was so cold that we ironed the sheets to warm them up before getting into bed. In 1947 I volunteered to open up Belfast Civil Airport. At the former RAF airfield called Nutts Corner. I soon devised a new routing coming and going from the Isle of Man direction. At that time the inbound and the departures all followed a common routing between Belfast and the Isle of Man and then further down to Manchester or Liverpool or, or London. So, we had to devise some way of separating them because if you had one aircraft coming in and another one going out you couldn’t climb one and descend one through the other. So, I hit upon the idea that I would, I went to see the Belfast BBC transmitter site which was well south of the inbound route. And departing aircraft then took off and turned south homing on the BBC beacon, and the, my efforts were approved. We had two separate routes and I was rewarded. Some, something else I did on the radar I became fifty pound richer. So, anyhow I must have impressed someone because in 1950 I was transferred to open up the Air Traffic Control Experimental Unit based in the north west corner of Heathrow, and with access to a radar installation. The ATCEU was a small unit. Just four controllers. Two operation officers and a team of radar radio staff at our disposal. The projects in which I was most involved was the use of a third parallel runway for Heathrow. We decided that the introduction of a third runway was not feasible or cost effective and to have a second runway at Gatwick at a later date would be more feasible. Sixty years later, well it’s now about seventy years later the government is still undecided. Another project I had was to visit manufacturers who were providing radars. There was Cossors, Deccas, Marconis and Plesseys. And the three of us enjoyed that project which determined, it was to determine the gappiness, the cover of any new radars coming by using one of our Civil Aviation Flying Unit’s aircraft from Stansted. We could fly slices through radar beams at various heights and thus determine whether a particular envelope was reliable. Then there was another project of new procedures for increasing the landing rate at Heathrow. And that got rather complicated. It involved the use of two radar talk down systems. In fact, later on we tried putting a trial. We arranged to close Heathrow for one night between midnight and 5 am. We borrowed four aircraft from the Civil Aviation Flying Unit plus four aircraft from the Empire Test Pilot’s School at Farnborough and invited any scheduled aircraft to participate if they wished. The second GCA unit was provided and we were all set to go when the minimum weather conditions we’d agreed were right on the lower limits. As half of headquarters had come to watch and Heathrow had been notified as closed and the aircraft and the aircrews were standing by I said, ‘Ok. We’ll go.’ It worked out a marginal success although one Farnborough Canberra aircraft on being guided back to the holding stack for another go, he lost himself and he declared Mayday and we spent some half an hour looking for him. We found him over Manston in Kent. In all it wasn’t a great success but once or twice when conditions were right and I was the watch manager at Heathrow I initiated a system but really it wasn’t a resounding success. There were too many variables which could fail. The other thing which was interesting, a possible high level holding procedure for the newly introduced family of jet aircraft. The Comet was the first jet aircraft coming along and with the Comet of, with the introduction of the Comet as the first commercial jet we worked closely with two BOAC pilots, Captain Rodley DSO DFC, and Captain Majendie DFC MA, ex-Cambridge and he was very much a boffin. And they were taking over the Comet from the manufacturers at Hatfield and they were evaluating it. One of the things we were rather concerned about was how much fuel they would use if they got to hold over Heathrow. And the favourite suggestion was for the Comet to reserve a slot but to hold at high level. When its approach time came the Comet would make a high descent in to the approach phase. I made many Comet flights at the time before the demise of that first and the British passenger jet aircraft. And in 1954 we moved into a newly built house at 40 Gatehill Road, Northwood where Ian was born. Two years later it was decided that I should get more experience in Air Traffic Control Centre work along the airways. And I became the watch deputy supervisor to facilitate travel to watchkeeping hours. We had to buy a three quarter acre plot on prestigious Stoke Park Avenue, Farnham Royal so we could get there by public transport at the later hours. Three years later, 1959 I was promoted to a grade one and transferred to become the D Watch manager at Heathrow. One of five watches. Each with some eighty controllers and twenty assistants. On one occasion and probably from my experience at the EU I was co-opted into the accident investigation branch to help concerning an aircraft crash at Gatwick. I left watch-keeping and became assistant chief controller at Heathrow with operational responsibilities and contact with companies. Ian was just starting at Stow and Heather, having refreshed her secretarial skills had become PA to Mr Robbins, European manager of Johnson and Johnson and then when they moved to South Wales she left there and became PA to Mr Bales, training manager at International Computers Limited at Windsor. And then a memory from my Bomber Command days. Our friend and neighbour at Stoke Park Avenue was Robin Mobbs, widow of Sir Richard Mobbs whose father had founded the Slough Trading Estate after World War One. She invited Heather and me to lunch with a friend of hers who lived about a mile away. That was Don Bennett. Air Vice Marshall Donald Bennett CB CBE DSO and the Chief Executive and founder of British South American Airways flying Lancastrians. We both enjoyed that lunch with that distinguished guest. Concorde was the only regular supersonic commercial flight which caught my interest. The Russian Concordski, roughly modelled on Concorde was briefly operational but sadly came to a tragic end at the Paris Airshow. As the Americans never did develop a supersonic airliner they had a jealous admiration for us Brits. Yet having spoken with various British Airways Concorde crews a common theme arose. Concorde, departing from Kennedy would sometimes be shuffled towards the back of the queue awaiting departure thus burning fuel which may have been critical when it arrived at Heathrow. Another instance — to obtain the maximum arrival rate the radar director was positioned inbound aircraft of various approach speeds at different distances to ensure that the second aircraft would be about two miles out when the first one had landed and cleared the runway. We found that for no obvious reason the runway had not been cleared on one occasion and Concorde had thus to make a missed approach and re-position for other, for another try. The puzzled radar director assured me that they had left adequate spacing when turning Concorde on to final approach. After several of these instances I looked back through the records and found that frequently aircraft ahead of Concorde, having landed were slow to clear the runway. They were often Pan American or Transworld Boeing 707s or 747s. Coincidence? Again, when I was assistant chief ATCO there was one instance where Speedbird 02 had been well placed behind a British Midland prop jet which, having landed and missed its turn off point, was continuing slowly to the next. At six miles out, ‘Speedbird 02 request landing clearance.’ From the tower, ‘Negative 02. Continue your approach. There’s traffic clearing the runway.’ At four miles out ‘Speedbird 02 requests landing clearance.’ ‘Negative 02. Continue your approach. The traffic is still clearing the runway.’ Then at two miles out, ‘Speedbird 02, I’m landing on this approach and if the other buggers are still on the runway I shall spear him.’ ‘Traffic just clearing 02. You’re now clear to land.’ I didn’t put this word on it. I said, ‘If the other aircraft is still on the runway,’ [laughs] but it was obvious that he was getting a bit — Later an apologetic Brian Walpole who was the Concorde flight captain he phoned me to explain that 02 had been much delayed when taxiing out for take-off at Kennedy. Consequently, was very low on fuel. If he couldn’t land off that approach he would have needed to fly to his nominated alternate, Gatwick and land there. Surprised, I asked him why he didn’t declare an emergency as he would have then ensured and we would have then ensured the runway was clear for his approach. He replied that knowing transmissions galvanised the press who monitored our frequencies if Concorde had declared an emergency it would have been headline news. When Brian Walpole invited me to his office upstairs for lunch I was surprised to find that the flight manager of British Airways top flight lived in a small cramped corner office with walls plastered with photographs of prominent people on Concorde flight deck. Each of them had been given a speech bubble with amusing comment. The Queen Mother was saying, ‘I could take to this. It’s much quicker than by train.’ He invited me to join him on a crew training flight in Concorde the next day. We were off just before 8am. Landed at Gander in Newfoundland, refuelled, filed a flight plan and were back at Heathrow a little after 6 pm having spent an hour in Canada. 1970, I was elected to go to the Joint Services Staff College. I became the second controller only to be accepted on to the JSSC course at Latimer which was composed of middle rank officers from the three services plus ten Commonwealth high rankers and a handful of American officers from all services. There were also three civilians. A nautical architect, a Hong Kong police superintendent and myself. Having been security cleared, vetted by two admirals and an air marshal at the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall. I enjoyed that fascinating six months course involving high level lectures from all walks of life. Government, cabinet ministers, diplomats, service chiefs, scientists, heads of security as well as military exercises including Cold War and nuclear exchanges. Being a joint service course we had the choice of outside attachments to each of the services to see how the other service worked. At that point [pause] where are we? Our — for my army visit I opted to go to Berlin which was the prize place, this was when the Wall was still there, because I was interested in their airway system and their traffic sequencing. More like Heathrow. A dozen of us in the team were housed in the brigadier’s residence overlooking the Berlin Lake which had supposedly belonged to Herman Goering, where we were briefed on the interaction with the Russians during the Cold War and the Berlin Wall. As military personnel we were allowed through Checkpoint Charlie to tour East Berlin. We found the methods used by the intelligence services most interesting. Our air force options covered a choice of a week on the Scottish RAF station where their involvement with flights in Nimrods proved very popular with our Naval members. These aircraft flew long range air sea rescues acting as command and control centres. Our Army members seemed to favour attachments to the newer Avenger and Phantom fighter units. I opted for a visit to Brize Norton to see the RAF troop handling which was coupled with a visit to RAF Valley in Anglesey to see pilot training. In Valley I was invited to fly in a Folland Gnat which brings Red Arrows fame, flown by the chief flying instructor Wing Commander Max Bacon. It was fascinating how tiny and so very light on the controls after Lancasters. Having been shown all its capabilities we did some very low flying in the designated low flying area of Snowdonia and we scared all the cattle underneath us too. Wonderful course. I remember one of our social gatherings at Pleasant Corners. Heather pulling out all the stops and Ian, back from Stow was helping. Amongst the sixteen officers at that party were Colonel Nigel Bagnall who became later chief of the general staff, an American commander in the Royal Marines who was OC flying on the American aircraft carrier Nimitz which was, I think the biggest American jet aircraft carrier they had. On which I believe he said they had seventy Phantoms. And the other member was Wing Commander Peter Harding. He was a great friend of mine. Largely of course because he was on this, on the RAF side and who later rose to the dizzy heights of Chief of the Defence Staff. So he was above the military. The lot. I also remember a Group Captain Beausoliel, who was head of Ghana. Now, it turned out that Wing Commander Peter Harding later came to grief. Do you remember his case? You probably wouldn’t. Well, he had a strong liaison with some woman who also was associated with a Russian and she said, ‘No. They couldn’t carry on their alliance.’ So, she said, ‘Well, let’s just have one meal in the Savoy.’ And as they came out she bent over and kissed him and she’d tipped off the press. And from then on that day he gave up his post. Not only as the supreme of all the armed forces but as the RAF. So, I’m sorry for Peter. But then this was the critical bit. Later in 1970, on completion of that Joint Services Staff College Course I was transferred to the Southern Division Headquarters at Heston. They felt that I was more a boffin now rather than just a practicing controller. Under a deputy director one section covered the airways and the other section covered the airfields. I became in charge of airfields and maintaining the level of air traffic control at various units. I was responsible for maintaining that and it includes non-civil aviation units in the southern part of England from — we had to look at the Scilly Isles, the Channel Isles, Bristol, Gloucester, Northampton and Norwich. Across that. And all airfields south. Along the south coast we covered Ashford, Shoreham, Goodwood, Southampton, Hamble, Leigh on Solent, Bournemouth, Exeter, Plymouth, Jersey and Guernsey. So, we had a twin Commanche at our call and what we had to do was when a new controller went to his unit, until he was valid he got his basic driving licence but he had to be checked out. So before he was validated he’d got to be checked by us and then we could sign his licence and then he could go solo. And so we had this twin Commanche and one of us would fly. I didn’t do any flying because I didn’t keep my licence going. But one of our team of four would fly and say, ‘I’ve got — lost an engine. I can’t maintain height.’ Or, ‘I have lost my RT,’ and you’d have to go to a system of one click for yes. Two clicks for no. All that sort of stuff. So —
[pause]
Test. And Ian had left Stow and was reading for his medical degree at Clare College, Cambridge. I had to occasionally fit in just to sort of keep Ian in the picture. I moved back to Heathrow as the deputy chief, acting as a stand in for the chief controller. Amongst other tasks I covered the oversight of our Radar Training Unit and including the Validation Board. As the Chairman of the Health and Safety Committee I remember we were — on the same floor as my office was the Civil Aviation Medical Centre where pilots were expected to make the grade once a year. And as such I could sometimes see them when they came past my door on the way in or out. And one or two, one I recognised as Douglas Bader whom I had seen very shortly in the POW camp. But then because he was such a naughty boy what with him always wanted to escape they sent him to Colditz. So, we had a talk and I’d got a big conference table, a big mahogany conference table in my office and it didn’t have four corner legs but it had two central legs. And he came in, having a chat and he jumped on the table to sit on the table and of course the thing upended. And I rushed around and I just caught him in time and pushed. Otherwise he’d have been a goner. So, then I said, ‘Would you like to have a look around air traffic control?’ So he said yes. So, I took him and when it came to the very steep steps up to the glasshouse I suddenly realised what a faux pas I’d made because he couldn’t have any legs to walk up there. So I said, ‘Oh, last week the Queen Mother visited us and she walked up those steps.’ So, he said, ‘Well, of course anything she can do I can do.’ Typical Douglas Bader. And he did. He pulled himself up with his arms, trailing his legs behind. And when they got on the next step off he’d go again. So, and the next time I met him was when I had a phone call from the personnel manager of [pause] I’m thinking. Shell Mex, one of the big petrol station. And they had just taken over an HS125 which is a small fast twin jet aircraft and they’d take that over for use by the board when they were going. So, he said, ‘Oh, we’re just doing a route flying stretching this out. We’re doing longer and longer legs to see what the aircraft capability is and tomorrow we’re going to Milan. Would you like to come with us?’ So, ‘Yes, please.’ So we went out there on to the tarmac and who was there to meet us was the flying, the pilot, Douglas Bader. So we recognised each other then. Anyhow, he flew us down to Milan. We stayed in the aircraft. He re-fuelled. He filed his flight plan for the return trip and on the way back this personnel manager for Shell Aviation said, ‘Oh, well let’s sample the [pause] the dish, the spread that they’ve given us.’ They’d got a refrigeration and all the rest of it so out came this on this little table and just the three of us sat down. So, halfway through or toward the end he said, ‘Well, is there anything you can think of that’s missing?’ So I jokingly said, ‘Well the wine you gave us. Those was wine glasses when they’d been used there’s no place to put them again.’ ‘Oh, quite right. The trip’s been worthwhile,’ [laughs] So, he was grateful that I’d found nowhere to store used glasses. So, that was random. There was one occasion where since I’ve often been asked whether I’ve ever needed to make instant life-saving decisions. I had one such memory. As a watch manager at Heathrow I arrived to take over the afternoon watch at 13.00 hours. I checked with my approach control supervisor that his full team had arrived and I went up to the aerodrome control. The glasshouse. One team member from my team had not arrived. And the off-going man was still on duty. Now, partly to retain the respect of my team members and partly to maintain my own validation I periodically took over an operational position. Although I was aware of the other managers policies of why keep a dog and bark yourself. At that time, with an easterly wind Heathrow was landing from the west over Windsor Castle and departures took off to the east over London. Northolt had also been required to take off in the same direction. And if they were routing going south after take-off they’d make a left turn and route around north of Heathrow and down to the west. So, I took over the [pause] the, I let the landing, the last departing man go. I took over his air departure position with six aircraft at the holding point. There was a Turkish Airline Boeing 727 who had just lined up and I had given him clearance to take off and he started to roll. He was halfway along the runway when I heard someone behind me shout, ‘Christ. The Northolt one’s turned right.’ Well, immediately, in a flash I visualised two heavily laden aircraft colliding and crashing right over London. Although almost too late I instructed my aircraft, then close to flying speed, ‘Cancel take-off. Cancel take-off.’ Thank goodness he reacted immediately. Finally stopping at the upwind end of the runway. I thanked him and asked that he clear the runway to his left. He replied, ‘Negative. Can’t move. My brakes are red hot. I require ten, twenty minutes for them to cool down.’ Another occasion the chief and I visited Chicago because they were supposed to have more aircraft flying than we did. We found the reason was that they just packed them in and expecting that they would, some, a lot of them would not make the landing. Would have to overshoot. Well, we took a pride in getting most of them down. And it turned out the, the pilot on that VC10 was, had been in A flight 103 Squadron while I’d been in B Flight. Here we are. Incidentally, in my report I included the fact that on our return Heathrow was landing on westerlies. That is aircraft arriving from the west were required to fly past the airport turning back on to the final approach at about seven or eight miles. I heard the captain, because I was on the jump seat, I heard the captain ask his first officer if he would like to have a go at final approach and landing. Even to my inexperienced eye I thought his turn on in a heavy aircraft would position us on about a two or a three mile final approach. However, he made a turn on whilst still doing his landing checks. Yet he made a spot on landing. In my report I noted his name. First Officer N Tebbit. Norman Tebbit. Barcelona — we went to Barcelona. Shell Aviation. Milan and that I’ve already told you about. The personnel manager. I recognised Douglas Bader, Chopper blades. I don’t think you’d be interested in the chopper blades. Perhaps I, as inspector of Air Traffic Control Standards for the South of England I visited Netheravon one of the several military and Naval units which operated to civil ATC standards. As they had six helicopters on a night cross country when we were there soon after they were due to return we visited their control room. Now, unbeknown to Netheravon, RAF Lyneham were practicing night parachute jumps over Salisbury Plain using C130 Hercules. As it happened the two exercises coincided. The helicopters with downward facing landing lights appeared as did the higher flying Hercules. The paras were dropped about two or three miles away. Visions of paras carving up chopper blades. Being carved up by chopper blades. So I enquired why there wasn’t any coordination. They thought it more really approached military operational standards. I got the system changed. Netheravon or, if closed Middle Wallop would coordinate movements over Salisbury Plain. Another one, Sir Laurence Whistler. He, it appeared that some industrial group were making a royal presentation of a cut glass bowl engraved by Sir Laurence Whistler. It would show Windsor Castle with the City of London and Heathrow Airport in the background. This was required by the company to present to the Queen. He said that he would need to get a perspective involving the use of a helicopter positioned over Windsor Castle. Now, I considered this would need coordination between the helicopter, departing aircraft and that I should fly in the royal helicopter to reflect the coordination. I was suitably impressed by the interior walls and ceilings of quilted with cream plastic insulation. The tables and chairs and book racks had holding copies of London Life, Illustrated London News, Tatler and Vogue. It did however have the characteristic of a helicopter vibratory flight. He was pleased with the sketches and later sent me a photo of the finished engraved bowl. I won’t go on about the time when we’ve argued with the Duke of Edinburgh. So, I could go on but it’s taking too much time. So, that was my civil one. I can’t go on about this. I think I’ve probably have mentioned this diary which I kept. We’ve got mice [laughs] This was a entry from the Royal Air Force Museum. An entry to this it was probably a thing I would get from you isn’t it? It’s 125 towing a small glider. Now, we didn’t know what the glider was. At that time it was secret and it turned out to be a Messerschmitt 163 and it was towed up into the American formations. It only had ten minutes endurance and it would decimate the Americans. And then of course it would glide down. So this was this. We didn’t know what it was. And this was a Messerschmitt 110 towing a very small tubby glider. The wingspan of ten to twelve feet. I don’t know what that was. It was some memorial with a swastika underneath. Well, I was next on the list to get a new aircraft and the fellow ahead, who’d had the last one he was shot down so I got the new one. And I went into the control tower to watch it arriving and out of that when it landed, a lovely landing, came someone in a white overall with a helmet on and then a second person. So, I was waiting for the rest of the crew but there was just these two. They came over to the control tower, came up and then the pilot then took off his helmet and it was a woman. See, we’d never heard of, and beyond that she had no navigator, no radio. She’d just ferried this. And I’ve got the book about, “The Female Few,” and there are pages and pages. And she was quite a bright girl. She went to Oxford. She was head of Somerville College and obviously did a lot of and she did learn to fly before the war. And when I met her again when I was at this Experimental Unit and we were working to see how you could increase movement rates at Heathrow. So we borrowed some civil aviation. Two of them, or four of them, I think for that. And we had a break for lunch and who should one of them? Lettice Curtis.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with James William Birchall
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Denise Boneham
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-08-16
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABirchallJW170816
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Pending review
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01:33:02 audio recording
Language
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
James Burchill was in the ATC before he volunteered for aircrew training. He was expected to be deferred but was told he had been chosen for immediate service. On one operation he was injured and by the time he was ready for operational duties again he had lost his crew. He reformed with a crew who had lost their pilot on his second dickie flight. His aircraft was shot down and the crew became prisoners of war. While being walked to the collection point under guard he saw four RAF crew hanging from lampposts. When he was seen by the civilian population they set on him and he was rescued by members of the SS. Jim took part in the Long March and saw the bodies of men who had frozen to death. After the war Jim had an interesting career in civil aviation and became involved in the Joint Services Staff College courses and the Air Traffic Control Experimental Unit.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
Poland
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Nuremberg
Poland--Żagań
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Diepholz
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-12-07
1942-12-18
1944-03-30
103 Squadron
12 Squadron
aircrew
animal
bale out
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
crewing up
Dulag Luft
entertainment
Halifax
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
lynching
Me 109
Oxford
pilot
prisoner of war
RAF hospital Rauceby
RAF Lindholme
RAF Seighford
RAF Wickenby
shot down
Stalag Luft 3
strafing
the long march
training
Typhoon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/635/8905/ARobinsonG150803.2.mp3
2652d25678132b8eb534dfafdbf25fe5
Dublin Core
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Title
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Robinson, Geoffrey
G Robinson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Robinson, G
Description
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four items. An oral history interview with Geoffrey Robinson (Royal Air Force) and three memoirs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 12 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
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2015-08-03
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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TJ: I’m Tina James and I’m here with Mr. Geoffrey Robinson in Burton upon Stather where he lives with his wife Eileen and we’re going to get some memories of his time with Bomber Command, so Geoff first of all lets lets ask about where were you born?
GR: I was born in Scunthorpe.
TJ: Yes, in what year?
GR: Nineteen Twenty Five.
TJ: And your parents were they involved with the First World War by any chance?
GR: My father was in the First War and sadly he never spoke about it he only said three things about the First War one was that er he could play the piano by ear and he used to go round Scunthorpe with a band of hope and a harmonium [laughs] and he said when he joined the army he played the piano on his first night in the NAAFI and he never bought another pint of beer the whole time he was in the army because he could play anything, and the other thing he told me was that er they had to kill lice by running a lighted match along the seams of their trousers and he said when the war started he said ‘now if ever you are caught without your gas mask urinate on your handkerchief and hold it to your nose’ and that’s the only three things he ever said about the army and he had a rough time we discovered because my daughter sent for his records which were available er for anyone and unfortunately the records office was bombed in Nineteen Forty Three and er quite a lot of the records are have been destroyed but I subsequently discovered that he had been wounded three times, he had been buried in a trench up to his neck for two days with his dead corporal beside him, and he was in hospital with shell shock and finally in Nineteen Seventeen he was transferred to the Royal Engineers unfit for trench warfare anymore, and I never knew that.
TJ: It sounds like
GR: Not in his lifetime.
TJ: Yes it’s not really surprising he didn’t talk about it much.
GR: Well but my mother did tell me once we had a very severe thunderstorm and my father I can see my father was visib visibly unsettled and I said to her afterwards ‘well’ she said ‘I think it’s the war’ she said ‘when there was a thunderstorm when we first married he used to roll out of bed and roll under it’ and er I never knew these things really so you know it’s it’s sad really but he had a rough war and then I remember my brother he er he was a a qualified mechanic and he said to my brother ‘now don’t you be thinking you going in the army lad you get in the air force don’t be getting into trench warfare’ and er so he joined the air force and he was in South Africa for three years er with with the Empire Air Training Scheme and I remembered that and so I joined the Air Training Corps in Scunthorpe and er one of the instructors was the owner of the garage where my brother was an apprentice and he was teaching us about engines and so when I volunteered for the air force they said ‘well what sort of experience have you had?’ and I said ‘well I was taught about engines in the Air Training Corps’ so they said ‘well we’ll put you down for aircrew shall we?’ and I said ‘yeah that’ll be fine’ and so there it was I went to er air training air crew selection board and er was duly er enrolled as a flight engineer cadet [laughs] which er pleased me but didn’t please the family very much [laughs].
TJ: About what year would that have been?
GR: Nineteen Forty Three April Forty Three.
TJ: Right.
GR: And then I was on reserve until September Forty Three then of course you went to I joined up and er had to report to Lords Cricket Ground and er when the er intake was complete forty members of the intake we were marched into the Long Room at Lords [laughs] to sign up so that we’d arrived so I’ve been in the Long Room at Lords [laughs] so there we are and then of course er we’d three weeks in London which was quite an experience for me being a local lad and er [laughs] not gone very far from Scunthorpe.
TJ: Was it your first time in London?
GR: No it wasn’t actually because um it’s Eileen’s aunt lived in London and I’d been there twice but only for short visits but I’d never been in the West End and that was quite an eye opener but there was some very good clubs in the West End where the top flight entertainers used to entertain the services.
TJ: Right.
GR: But after three weeks in London we went we went to er near Sunderland for the additional training learned to march and fire a rifle and sten guns and all that sort of thing then we were moved for some reason to Bridlington for three weeks for the final three weeks of additional training which was very pleasant Bridlington and then of course er a week’s leave and then to St. Athan for training as a flight engineer which er.
TJ: How long was that for?
GR: Six months took exactly for six months so er I qualified on June the First married on June the Third and er.
TJ: And your’e still married to this day to Eileen.
GR: Yes Yeah and then having qualified at St. Athan I was posted to Sandtoft near Scunthorpe and er there for three weeks and then I went to Lindholme where I was crewed up with er Canadian crew and the crewing up system was a bit crude really and they er the crew came with six people from operational training unit having trained on Wellingtons and they were without a flight engineer and the crews went into this hangar and the flight engineers went into the hangar and by a matter of luck you got crewed up [laughs] no selection point you just wandered round until these crews thought well you’ll do for us.
TJ: I’ve been told that before.
GR: Yes It did it worked apparently and they did the same thing at operational training unit there’s no selection or what have you and er so I crewed up with an all Canadian squadron er crew apart from the er wireless operator who was English so there was just the two English people British people qualified at Lindholme on Halifaxes then went to Lancaster Finishing School and Hemswell for three weeks then we went to a squadron 626 Squadron at Wickenby we did one or two trips there and then er the pilots had to do what they call a second dicky trip where they went as a second pilot with an experienced crew on their first operation and our pilot went on this second dicky trip and didn’t come back [laughs] so that was a bit of a shock to us because we thought it would all be [laughs] an easy ride through squadron and as I say he er they sent for the navigator who was the senior man and they said ‘well you’ll have to go back to training school for another pilot’ which shook us a bit [laughs] as we didn’t think we would lose a pilot so soon but he did come back actually he landed in the sea in Sweden waded ashore and was repatriated and brought silk stockings back for the er parachute packers [laughs].
TJ: Oh lovely story.
GR: So we went back to Lindholme and we were in the crew hut and two pilots came in second tour pilots and er they chatted to us and got to know us the two pilots then they said ‘well we’ll just have a chat outside’ and obviously they were weighing us up I suppose [coughs] and er they came back in and said ‘well we’ve tossed a coin’ and we got er who we called Dickie Bird Flying Officer Flying Office Peter Peter Bird but everybody called him Dickie Bird but he got the DFM on his first first er first tour and so we retrained or he retrained on Halifaxes and back to Hemswell to Finishing School and then to Wickenby and er we were lucky because the other man a chap called Gillingham he got killed about three about three operations into his tour so we picked the right pilot [laughs] so then we started the tour of operations and er after twenty twenty er operations of course the pilot we had was was screened because the second tour was only twenty operations and the full tour for a new crew was thirty so we stayed on er at Wickenby and we flew with the er Squadron Leader Huggins the Squadron Commander, Wing Commander Stockdale the er oh the Squadron Leader Huggins was the Flight Commander, Wing Commander Stockdale was the Squadron Commander, and we also had the odd trip with Group Captain Haines the Station Commander, so we were the spare crew but we had all the senior people as as pilots.
TJ: So whilst you were at Wickenby where was your wife living?
GR: At Burton at home she was born in Burton but she was born in Burton and she worked we met at Nitrogen Fertilisers er at Flixborough which afterwards actually became Nitrogen Fertilisers Nitr Nypro and then was blown up on June the First, Ninety Seventy Four.
TJ: I remember that.
GR: And er she stayed working there whilst I was away.
TJ: How often did you get to see her?
GR: Well not very often when we were training but aircrew were given a week’s leave every six weeks so I saw here every six weeks but apart from that er I was a keen cyclist [cuckoo clock chiming in background] and I often cycled from Wickenby if we’d had a stand down it was only twenty five thirty miles I was quite fit then so er but then I found that er if I cycled home the train times were coming I cycled to Barnetby which is on the Grimsby to Scunthorpe railway line caught a train there I could catch a train to near the station but I used to be leaving home at er six in the morning to catch the seven o’clock train from Barnetby but I managed to get home a few a few times when you had a squadron stand down and er it was all very interesting.
TJ: So you were flying operations over Germany mainly was it?
GR: France and Germany yes.
TJ: Never had to bale out?
GR: No no we did have er parachutes clipped on once but er we had capable on flying on two engines and they er they I think they er [looking through book] I can’t remember when when we took off to Bonn one of the er red lights came on on the engine which mean’t that it wasn’t getting fuel so we feathered it and the skipper said ‘we’re we’re over the base we haven’t got very far’ he said ‘well we are going to go on we are not going back’ ‘cos if you went back with an engine gone they used to look a bit askance at you and say ‘well you shouldn’t have done you should have done your duty’ so the pilot said ‘well we’re going’ and off we went and I think it was the one of the trips it was [looking through book] it said alone over Bonn and we were the last over the over the target and er I think one of the papers said Lancaster a sole Lancaster over Bonn and that was us [laughs] and so we were late back and when we got back they er they’d put most of the lights out they didn’t expect us [laughs] so that was so that was one trip and on another trip where we had the accident there we were attacked by [looking through book] Duisburg Twenty First February.
TJ: What year?
GR: Nineteen Four Five and er having the the rear gunner having written his memoires I wrote mine and we were attacked by the er fighter and er the cannon shell hit us there was a six foot hole at the side of the aircraft and the rear gunner started started talking in a very incoherent manner and er saying all sorts of daft things so I said to the pilot ‘I think I ought to go back I think he’s probably without oxygen’ because over the thousand feet your brain starts to starts to wander so I took a spare oxygen bottle back and er he’d got out of his turret and he was sat on the Elson toilet he was quite unaware of where he was so I fixed him up with the oxygen bottle and I sealed the oxygen pipe which had been severed to save oxygen and er we had one engine I’d feathered one engine because it was on fire and then another engine failed and so we came back on two engines on that particular night [laughs].
TJ: A hairy escapade.
GR: And that’s a piece of.
TJ: Oh a piece of metal that you are indicating here.
GR: Yes.
TJ: And this is from what’s this from exactly?
GR: That’s from from the fuselage [tapping the metal]
TJ: Oh yes I see there’s writing on it oooh.;
GR: We all got a piece like that.
TJ: Yes.
GR: A bit of a keepsake.
TJ: So do you think that was your hairiest escapade?
GR: Yes I think it was er that was the worst we had one or two near brushes with with fighters and we were coned in coned in searchlights and er that’s not a good experience but er the pilot was he was an excellent pilot he could throw the Lancaster about and he’d just shouted to me full revs so we opened the throttles wide open and he’d dive down as fast as he could go and then swung over to either our right or left starboard or port and we’d escape the searchlight but it’s quite er I mean they if they got you in the searchlight they had prediction guns which could home on you and they had heat seeking shells as well so we [laughs] it was quite fortunate.
TJ: You were lucky.
GR: We were but er it was er we didn’t think much about it I suppose at the time you know.
TJ: You didn’t come back and it would sort of hit you oh goodness what happened last night was it?
GR: No not really.
TJ: Did it hit you after the war?
GR: No not really.
TJ: No you took it in your stride then.
GR: We were nineteen or twenty you know you have a different aspect on life don’t you.
TJ: Yes of course you do.
GR: It’s a totally different world you know you just get on with life but it affected quite a number of people because they used to they used to get what we call a tick you know you could see they were full of nerves and sometimes they were just taken off flying duties but er generally speaking we just got in the mess for breakfast and think well a few empty chairs but you just got on with life you never thought about it really it’s uncanny I can’t explain it and of course you had absolute full faith in the crew we er ate together, we played poker together, we drank together, everything we did was together, you’d nearly you’d nearly think or know what a person was thinking and you moulded as a family and you could rely implicitly on every member of the crew to do what they had to do, it was uncanny I can’t explain but it was there and you knew you could rely on every member of the crew to do what they had to do and more if necessary it was a wonderful experience in that way.
TJ: Very character building.
GR: Yes well when you’ve been through that sort of life there’s nothing really troubles you [laughs] you know you get things into perspective so there you are.
TJ: So Nineteen Forty Five we are approaching the end of the war when was your last sortie?
GR: I think it was to, I’ve got arthritis, it was to Heligoland I think the er but after the um but before the war finished we did the Manna trip the food dropping.
TJ: Oh yeah, so for the purpose of the tape would you just like to explain what the Operation Manna was about?
GR: Yes the last operation was April the Eighteenth to Heligoland my twenty fourth trip in wartime.
TJ: And what did you drop there?
GR: Fifteen fifteen thousand pounds of bombs [laughs] four four point three five hours flying [laughs] but then.
TJ: And Operation Manna was that after?
GR: No er Operation Manna was er the first Operation Manna trip was er [looking through book] May the First.
TJ: May the First Nineteen Forty Five.
GR: Five yes.
TJ: Operation Manna and you dropped food supplies?
GR: Operation Manna and we were warned Operation Manna I did I did two trips May the First and May the Third er we were warned that there hadn’t been a truce signed and we went at almost rooftop height and we could see all the German anti-aircraft guns following us round as we went but um the truce hadn’t been signed but they didn’t they didn’t fire at us anyway and of course as we got to the dropping zone it was er well I can’t explain heartbreaking almost to see er the Dutch people going to the dropping zone wheeling bicycles, prams, and anything hoping to get some food and of course the the the number of a whole number of Dutch flags on the roofs but of course they were still occupied they hadn’t been freed so I did Operation Manna on the First and the Third and er as I say it was quite an experience.
TJ: Mmm.
GR: And then after Operation Manna we er no I did three food drops the First, Third, and Seventh of May and er.
TJ: How long did Operation Manna go on for altogether do you know?
GR: Well I think it’s it seemed I do know I’ve got a book with it but I can’t remember the dates.
TJ: Can’t remember offhand.
GR: But it it went till after went on until the Peace Treaty was signed and then the Germans allowed convoys of food to go in and then of course after Operation Manna I did two trips er repatriating prisoners of war from Brussels.
TJ: That must have been good?
GR: Well twenty eight we brought twenty eight back at a time and er they were they were pretty well crowded there’s not much room in a Lancaster and they were pretty well crowded in the back but they didn’t mind they sat on the floor and they two of them couple sat on the navigators bench with the navigator and to see their faces as they got out some of them kissed the ground and then they nearly all came up to the front to shake hands with the pilot and myself and they were so so delighted to get back to England and er that that was quite a quite a moving experience yes it was quite something then after the on May the Twenty Third um I was posted away from Wickenby and the crew split up and then I went.
TJ: Where was you posted to?
GR: I went to um Valley on the Isle of Anglesey and er we went there the whole host of er Canadian built Lancasters had been flown across the Atlantic and they were all lined up at er Valley and we went there to er prepare them for the Far East er ready for the Japanese War and so we spent quite a lot of time at Valley air testing and getting them all ready to go and er pretty well having a good time and on one occasion the pilot who was a bit uppercrust there Flight Lieutenant Lloyd Davis he lived at in a big hall in in er Norfolk Caldecott Hall and he er he said ‘well we need some steak for the officers mess’ so he said ‘we’ll take a Lancaster to Ireland’ [laughs] so we took a Lancaster to Ireland and landed at er Balleykelly which is the only Royal Air Force runway to have a level crossing [laughs] and a train line across it so we had a weekend in Ireland and er a weekend in Belfast really and er we got stocked up for the officers mess with steak and flew it back that was the sort of nobody told us what to do we just had to air test these Lancasters then of course they dropped the er the atom bomb and these beautiful Lancasters with ten hours flying time on we flew them up to Silith [?] to be scrapped [laughs] with just ten hours flying time [laughs] it was quite incredible really anyway after that I was posted to Transport Corps still with the same pilot and er he er he came in one day and said ‘we’ve got to take a Halifax to India’ so I thought that’ll be good so er he said ‘well’ he said ‘before er Munich’ he said ‘my family was going to send me on a tour of Europe but’ he said ‘Munich arrived so I never went’ so he said ‘we’ll make it a Cooks tour shall we?’ [laughs] so [laughs] we went to er went to we had a weekend in Cornwall [laughs] and we went to Istres and Castel Benito then Cairo [laughs] and we had two or three days in each place then we went to Karachi [laughs] so we had er a wonderful then Allahabad in India we had a wonderful time and er he succeeded in having his tour and unfortunately when we got back he was demobbed so er that was really the end of that episode and then when the first Christmas after I was demobbed I got a letter from him to say I’ve moved out to Chile I’ve bought a ten thousand pound ten thousand acre sheep farm would you come and work with me [laughs].
TJ: So when were you actually demobbed?
GR: March Forty Seven.
TJ: Forty Seven?
GR: Yes yes but er I turned him down.
TJ: When did you have your first children?
GR: Ninety Fifty Two first daughter one daughter Fifty Two and when I rang Eileen to say I’m being demobbed on March Sixteenth she went in to the er office manager and said ‘I’m putting giving me notice in’ and she’s never worked since she’s been a kept woman ever since [laughs].
TJ: Oh how lovely.
GR: [Laughs]
TJ: Good for Eileen.
GR: But the strange thing was that the thing that when I was in the air force I was er getting a warrant officers pay flying pay they were paying me half my wages from the company I worked with Eileen was getting family allowance and although it wouldn’t be perhaps very much but I was we were getting between us about twelve to fifteen pound a week and when I came back I was getting four pound fifty [laughs] and on the day I was demobbed they started building a house for me up the road I bought a plot of land when I was on leave and they started building a house and the mortgage was seven and sixpence a week [laughs] and we were we were almost penniless so er.
TJ: What would you do for work then?
GR: Well I was er I was er a trainee clerk down at Nitrogen Fertilisers and er before I joined up I’d been going to night school three nights a week doing bookkeeping and shorthand and maths and er when I came back I said to the office manager I said ‘this is no good I’ve got to do something I’m going to study for accountants degree’ but he said ‘it’ll be hard work’ I said ‘oh I’m going to do it by correspondents course’.
TJ: Was that your demob package?
GR: Er no.
TJ: Because I know when my dad was demobbed it was paid for his accountancy exams were paid for.
GR: No no I hadn’t thought about it until I got demobbed and I realised how hard up I was so I joined up with the er correspondents school and er it was hard work and er I was twenty was twenty two when I was demobbed and I didn’t qualify until I was twenty eight [laughs] but er it was worth it.
TJ: What qualification did you get?
GR: Er
TJ: Chartered?
GR: Not not chartered incorporated accountant er Society of Company Works Accountants and er so I qualified and then I was headhunted to go from there to er er a local company a slag company using slag for roads and er the managing director of that company lived in Burton and er I met him socially and he said ‘would you come and work for me?’ he said ‘I want to expand the contracting company’ so I said ‘what I don’t know’ so er I thought about it joined the company and we’d three men when we started and we’d two hundred when I retired [laughs] and branches in Plymouth, Sheffield and Manchester so I I was director of five companies so I thought I’d done fairly well for myself.
TJ: Certainly did.
GR: I retired at fifty seven [laughs].
TJ: Lovely. So grandchildren I’m looking around this photos of young people?
GR: One granddaughter she’s a Cambridge graduate and she’s the only female waterworks manager in the Anglian Water Authority.
TJ: Interesting.
GR: And we’ve now got a great grandson who’s two and a half so we’re a complete lovely family.
TJ: Right where does your um daughter and granddaughter live?
GR: My daughter lives at Barton which is twelve miles away so she’s handy if we need her and er my granddaughter lives in Felixstowe which is too far away.
TJ: Yes.
GR: But there we are we see her about every three months.
TJ: So let’s just rewind a bit after the end of the war there’s been a lot said about the way Bomber Command was sort of ignored wasn’t given their due accolades how did you feel about it?
GR: Well that goes back really to the Dresden raid and I remember the briefing for Dresden because it was on the er request of Stalin because he we were told us at briefing that German troops were going to Dresden on the way to the eastern front and he’d requested that we go to Dresden but apart from that Dresden was a manufacturing city or area for er high high technique um submarine equipment so it was a legitimate target and of course we went to Dresden and the following night we went to Chemnitz and er they were both ten hour trips and of course the the people afterwards condemned the Dresden raid it was a beautiful city but then Coventry was and er I didn’t feel any qualms about that because er five of my colleagues had been killed at Nitrogen Fertilisers it was bombed on May the Twelfth Ninety Forty One as I say I’d been down to Eileen’s aunt in London and they’d been bombed out and we regularly went across to Hull shopping and that was devastated and it was the worst bombed city after London in the country so I didn’t really have any qualms about bombing and of course when this hoo-ha started up Churchill sort of said ‘well shouldn’t have gone Bomber Command shouldn’t have done it’ and he was the behind it really saying that you know we’d done too much bombing aerial bombing and I remember when the controversy arose er it was on the national national news and so forth and er Butch Harris, Air Chief Marshall Harris or “Butch” as we called him he said ‘well if it saved the life of one person in a concentration camp, if it shortened the war by one day, if it saved the life of one British grenadier it was worth it’ and er I’ve lived with that er I mean all war is to be well you don’t want it nobody gains anything from it and there’s so much loss of life and disruption to the to the community that um you know it’s just a useless effort but er we had a duty to do we did it we did as we were told and of course we did er I did write to my MP on more than one occasion asking for a Bomber Command Medal [laughs] and of course we got the Bomber Command Clasp er two years ago or was it two years ago anyway probably last year can’t remember anyway we got it.
TJ: Are you did you think about time too were you pleased with it or did you think its too late too little too late?
GR: Well a lot of people er have passed away there are there aren’t many that could appreciate that we’d been recognised I mean bear in mind about a half of the aircrew were killed fifty five thousand five hundred and seventy three were killed and that was the worst er casuality rate of any of the services in the in the war so it was a pretty dangerous occupation and we felt that we’d we’d shortened the war quite substantially and there we are you just go along with the politicians these days don’t you.
TJ: Yes yes, well thank you very much for giving us that plotted history of your war experiences [clock chiming] and a little bit of life since and I didn’t say at the beginning but today it is Monday the Third of August Two Thousand and Fifteen.
GR: That’s right.
TJ: I’m going to switch off now.
[Recording stopped and then restarted]
GR: In those days every wedding reception was in the village hall and er I think that’s well friends and family got er food coupons together and dried fruit and made cakes, Eileen’s brother was a butcher so he he’d got some hams that he’d killed pigs for so the reception was in the village hall with a lot of help from friends and three days just before our wedding the Canadians on their way south for D Day commandeered the hall [laughs] anyway the vicar managed to persuade the commanding officer to set the reception [laughs] and er we went in the pub for a drink and my father was with us and so Canadian senior NCO’s were in the pub and I remember my father saying you know ‘say you lads want to be getting on with this war these air force lads are winning it for you’ [laughs] and he was only about five foot four wasn’t he [laughs].
TJ: And you were getting married in uniform I take it?
GR: Oh yes yes nothing else would fit me [laughs] well that’s not true because er my brother I said he was in South Africa and when he got home I got a telegram in the in the mess to say he was home and because we were a spare crew I rang the I rang the squadron leader to see if I could have a bit of time off and he said ‘well yes’ he said ‘you can’ this was dinner time said ‘yes you can be back by morning’ so I cycled home and we had a reunion but then I was on I was on leave and er we went to the er local theatre Eileen all the family went in the evening and my brother said ‘shall we put civvies on’ and I’d been out the night before bombing and then come home for a week’s leave anyway we went into the theatre and a woman after the show turned round said ‘you two lads you ought to be in uniform’ [laughs] me brother had just got home from three years in South Africa and I was over Germany the night before just goes to show.
TJ: Did you make any comment?
GR: No no not worth it is it?
ER: You can say it underneath your breath can’t you [laughs].
GR: The second time we paid our way but the the Dutch people were so so grateful the older people there embarrassing almost wasn’t it Eileen you know the way they put their arms round you.
ER: Oh yes they did yes they did.
GR: The couldn’t do enough for us it was a wonderful experience.
TJ: Have you seen the picture of the flower arrangement for Operation Manna?
GR: Yes yes it was on the national news wasn’t it.
TJ: Are you on the internet are you on email?
GR: Er well I don’t use it I don’t know.
TJ: Just that if you wanted to keep a picture I was going to email one to you.
GR: Oh lovely er.
TJ: What’s your email address?
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Geoffrey Robinson
Creator
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Tina James
Date
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2015-08-03
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ARobinsonG150803
Conforms To
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Pending review
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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00:44:10 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
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Chris Cann
Sally Coulter
Description
An account of the resource
Geoff joined the Royal Air Force as a flight engineer in April 1943. He reported to Lord’s Cricket Ground and went to an Initial Training Wing near Sunderland. He moved to RAF Bridlington, followed by six months’ training as a flight engineer at RAF St Athan. Geoff was posted to RAF Sandtoft and went to RAF Lindholme on Halifaxes where he was crewed up with a Canadian crew. They went to Lancaster Finishing School and Hemswell, before joining 626 Squadron at RAF Wickenby.
Geoff describes a couple of incidents relating to Bonn and Duisburg, part of his 24 operations. The last operation was to Heligoland. He carried out three food drops as part of Operation Manna and then had repatriated prisoners of war. He was posted to RAF Valley where they were preparing Canadian-built Lancasters for the Far East. They were scrapped after the atomic bomb. He was demobbed in March 1947. Geoff gives his views on Bomber Command.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-04
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany
Germany--Bonn
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Helgoland
Netherlands
626 Squadron
aircrew
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
crewing up
flight engineer
Halifax
Lancaster
military ethos
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
perception of bombing war
RAF Hemswell
RAF Lindholme
RAF Wickenby
searchlight
Tiger force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/630/8900/APotterP150914.1.mp3
49c3d71a056c6727044fcaedd6b957b8
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Potter, Peter
P Potter
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Potter, P
Description
An account of the resource
39 items. Collection concerns Peter Potter, (1925 - 2019, 1876961 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a rear gunner with 626 Squadron. Collection contains an oral history interview, his logbook, memoirs and photographs
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Potter and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-14
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
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GC: This is an interview being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre, my name is Gemma Clapton, I am interviewing Peter Potter of 626 Squadron this morning, and the interview is taking place on 14th September 2015, at Mr. Potter’s home in Colchester, Essex. Tell me a bit about before the war, how you joined up?
PP: Do you mean for my childhood or just before I joined up?
GC: Anything.
PP: Well, well my father actually, when I was born, he was working at Shell Haven and we lived at Fobbing. We, my grandfather had three farms at Fobbing running down to Shell Haven and he actually lived in [background noise] Oozdam Farm that’s [spells it out] which was also called Black House Farm, and he had two other, Red Brick Farm and Flaky House Farm [laughs], names were different in those days to what they are now. Anyway we, we had, I think most of this is in there, but we used to go, because it was also on, backed on to Fobbing Creek, we used to fish the creek, net the creek, let the fish go in then pull the net up so they couldn’t get out again [coughs], quite illegal, I think but, but that was quite often done in those days. They had salt pans which we used to let the water in and, and then have to stand there until it evaporated and, and drain, all that sort of thing was part of farming in those days. Grandfather was really a sheep farmer, stock farmer, he had cattle, horses, sheep, pigs whatever, and, and then we moved to a smallholding and then from there to a farm at Easthorpe, near Colchester, the other side of Colchester, and a massive place with a fireplace, that is now in Colchester Castle Museum. Anyway, there well we, we were there when the war started, but I think we had seventeen people working for us, but once the war started a lot of them joined the services and we couldn’t cope with the farm, that size of farm, so my father moved to Fingringhoe and we had a self-free farm at Fingringhoe. And it was there, that by that time I was fifteen, I think, and we, we, a farmer’s son was in a reserved occupation so I had to run away from home and get myself a job at Shell Haven, and, and then once I’d got a job I, as I say, I lived with a chap who volunteered, rather was called up on his eighteenth birthday, not called up, called in to sign on, and I gave his birth date anyway, I then volunteered for air crew. There were several reasons for that, one that I wanted to fly, one, that I didn’t want to go into trenches, and I didn’t want to go on a ship. So I volunteered, volunteered for air crew, and at that time, of course, if you volunteered for air crew you couldn’t be put on any other service, but you had to, of course, pass an educational test and a physical test, you had to be a hundred per cent fit, and also, you know, educated well enough to be able to take on the jobs that we had. And, eventually, I was called up to St. John’s Wood in London, and to a place called Grove Court, where it was a block of luxury flats, and still had some civilians there. The rooms that we had were opposite to those of a couple of girls, very well off girls, of course, two in the place, and they used to take us, when we were off, they used to take us to the Chevrons Club and all the different clubs in London, we couldn’t have afforded, but they, they were quite well off. There were two of us in there and the two girls just used to take us, mind you we had to travel, there was no such thing as a car to move around in, in those days because of the petrol shortage, but we were able to travel on the underground and go around, and they looked after us very well considering. I thought that was wonderful, you know, for a start in the RAF and we were there about, we were only there about three weeks and then we moved to other stations until I finished training, and eventually finished up at Wickenby, and did my full tour there. I also did three trips with other chaps, with other pilots, actually I did one to Kriel, which as a passenger when my pilot was taken, all pilots when you got onto an operational airfield were taken by another crew to see what they were getting into really, and because I got on very well with my pilot he arranged for me to go as a passenger as well, although I don’t think I was ever booked, because that wouldn’t have been. Also, I told you about the Orom, I flew when two of his chaps were killed, I flew with him to help him finish his tour. And I also flew three operations, and I think in there, I have got the names of the pilots, I no longer remember the trips because I get confused now, and I’m not gonna put down something that I’m confused about. But when their gunners were, they were probably called in or something, and didn’t get back to the airfield or were unofficially out of the, because you could walk out through the gaps in the barbed wire and that sort of thing, and they hadn’t got their gunner and I would, I took the place of three chaps like that whilst I was at Wickenby. So I did an extra three trips which, of course, had to coincide, when our crew weren’t flying anyway, but, yeah, but the names of the pilots, I remember the pilots, but the rest of it I’d rather, I put the pilots, the names of the pilots down at the time really, but of course I couldn’t really do. I wouldn’t mention the actual chaps that were booked as being there even though they weren’t, but um, and that was quite common, I think, but I never had to do that myself. But it was, in those days, oh, the CO on one of the occasions, he noticed that I was with the wrong crew and, actually that was when he called me to the office and I was offered commission and I had to refuse it because of my age, and at night I was with the wrong crew and he noticed it and he had a word with me and I, I obviously had to tell him what was happening and he said, ‘Don’t ever do it again, if you do it, I must know if you do it’. Even though, you know, he wouldn’t, he could have said, but he wouldn’t put the chaps on the charge but they wouldn’t anyway, because if they had, if you were put on the charge, you weren’t allowed to fly. So, you know, but he wanted to know so that if we were shot down, he would be sending a telegram to the parents of the chap who hadn’t flown, to say that he was shot down, and the RAF would have done anyway and er, and, of course, the chap would still be alive but I would have been shot down and I’d be missing and booked as absent without leave, you see, it had to be sorted out in some way [unclear interference on recording] and I finished my tour there and, after that I was put on, I was, I went to Hardon, after leave, I went to Hardon where they, I took a course on flying control duties and I then came, mainly my basic job was flying control but I had many. When I eventually met up with Group Captain Adrian Boyd, he gave me all sorts of jobs, at that time immobilisation was starting to take place and, and I was given jobs, like taking the officers through until a new company officer came in, somebody that was qualified. I had no qualifications but was given the job until somebody was able to take over and that sort of thing was quite common. And I was also, also was taken around by him, because I had a good memory at that time, a very good memory, I rarely forgot anything and he would take me with him to a meeting and after the meeting had finished he, he would put down what he thought [unclear] had to be you know [unclear], had to be dealt with, one way or another, and I would, he would then ask me if there was anything that he’d missed because he, he was a wonderful man, Adrian Boyd. Last week, not last week, the week before, a chap from South Benfleet came to Boxted Museum when I was there, and he remembered me [unclear] Boxted Airfield, ‘cos he was stationed there, and he, he made a statement about Adrian Boyd, he said, ‘He had never ever known a CO like that, who would go into the, into where they were working and sit and have a cup of tea with them and a chat, and find out where they came from, whether they were near their homes and that sort of thing, and if they were a long way from home, he would try to get them posted to their home’. And that sort of thing, you know, he was a really fine chap. And I, I used to fly around with him, he had a Gloster and we used to fly in that to different places like [unclear] or wherever he’d go to go to a meeting but he used me just like a memory stick, as you might say. Yeah, and oh, he was, I lived in a billet and by the A12 and across from my billet, across the road was the Ardleigh Crown and there was a gap in the hedge there, and I used to go through to the Ardleigh Crown. The CO, Adrian, lived just up the, a little bit further up the hill from me and he used to come down and we would walk through the gap and go to the Ardleigh Crown, and if anybody phoned up asking for him, his wife would say, ‘Oh, he’s walking around the airfield somewhere.’ And, and so that, that he’ll contact you later, you know and we would be having a pint in the Ardleigh Crown. He was an absolutely lovely person, and I met some marvellous people, and my crew we were so close. I had a Lagonda RGP, which I used to go round travelling, but if the crew were going anywhere or any number [unclear] we would take the RGP, Boyd [unclear] had an aerial Square Four, if only the two of us were going we used the bike. But whenever I used the Lagonda we would probably have anything up to twenty people piled onto the car, and I used to use hundred octane and TVO mixed to run her on, and you never got enough petrol with the coupons, so our ground crew used to push in, the [unclear] the air raid shelter which was on the edge of the dispersal, they would put some cans of 100 octane in there and also when the tractor came round they would bleed the TVO and I used to mix it, you see, to make it roughly about seventy octane which was what cars and that ran on in those days, and that way we, we were able to cart a lot of people backwards and forwards to Lincoln or Gainsborough, or somewhere, which we wouldn’t have normally been able to do, you know. We’d never have got to Gainsborough because it was little or no transport for any distance unless you went by train and that was, well you never knew when you were going to get anywhere on the train because they could be bombed at any time and that sort of thing. When I finished flying, which was I think about the eighteenth of, when I stopped, I think it was about the 18th December ’44 and then I was due leave, and I received, and I got on the train to London but the line had been bombed at Peterborough, and so they actually sent us through on the side, back line through Colchester where I got off, and, and, so I actually after finished flying, I actually got home on Christmas morning, five o’clock Christmas morning, which was a surprise for my family because they had no idea that I was coming home, I wasn’t able to let them know. I woke my father up about five o’clock, and he ‘Peter [unclear interference] [laughs] at this time in the morning’ [unclear interference on recording]. Is there anything else you need?
GC: [unclear interference on recording]
PP: Perhaps I, this is all in the memoirs, we took off on an op to Aire [spells it out] and, and we took off, got roughly to the coast and we were faced with a, a massive cumulus cloud, thunderstorm which we tried to fly over because if we’d tried to go round we would have been too late for the estimated time of arrival, and we got up to about twenty-four thousand feet and then the, we hit the down draft and we fell to, until we actually pulled out at about four thousand feet. On the way down we, we had no control when falling but there was a wonderful sight of St. Elmo’s Fire, running all over the plane everywhere was, and the Elmo’s Fire even though the cloud, we were, the cloud was black [unclear] say there was little light in it, but the St. Elmo’s Fire lit the plane up and my navigator, Jimmy Jackson, took photos from the astro hatch as we were falling [laughs], and, of the St. Elmo’s Fire, but we, on the photos, there was no St. Elmo’s Fire but you could see the plane as though it was daylight. You know the wing, and obviously you couldn’t see much of the plane. When we pulled out, the two air board motors pulled down in their mountings as though they were facing down about fifteen degrees, I think there was considered when the report came in, the rivets were torn out of the leading edge of the main plane and the main, the, um, one or two of the metal plates had rolled back, so we lost a lot of lift but we, when we pulled out we went straight back up to twelve thousand feet before we could level off again, and we realised that we were, all we were doing was about a hundred and forty miles an hour at that time after we got up to twelve thousand feet and we just couldn’t get any more speed out of it, and we also realised that we were also losing height at the same time, so we decided to turn back and we attempted to drop the bombs but we couldn’t because some of the bombs had torn out of the mountings and were laying on the bomb doors. Anyway we, we decided to go back to the station, we weren’t all that, you know, we didn’t have to go all that far, thank goodness, and we were gradually losing height and when we got back to Wickenby, we were only a few hundred feet and we had to land the first time which we managed to do, a very good landing, the photo flash which we’d got had dropped out of the flare shoot and ran along the runway behind us and sparks flying [laughs] which I had a good view of being the rear gunner. [laughs] Anyway I didn’t know what it was at the time, of course, so I wasn’t all that worried I thought perhaps something had fallen off the aircraft, but we were sent to the farthest point of the airfield because we’d got bombs still on the aircraft, well away from everybody else, and the plane was left and we got out in a hurry, you know, we probably took us about ten, about five to ten seconds at the most to get out and away. And Avro’s came to check the plane and they took, took, they all the photos and that and then took the plane away and we got a letter from Roy Chadwick, the designer, to say that, ‘To have incurred the damage that we had, we must have been exceeding five hundred and seventy miles an hour,’ and he put in the bottom a little postscript, ‘You probably have flown the fastest bomber in the Second World War’, which we’ve always considered was, you know, very special. He wrote that to my navigator, Jimmy Jackson, and Jimmy Jackson is the only one of my crew that I don’t know whether he is dead or not, all the rest are dead, and Jimmy Jackson, his last known address is the same as that in the Wickenby Register and it’s, oh dear, British Columbia, Canada. He was a teacher at Richmond, I think was, British Columbia, but all the rest, I know what happened to them, or roughly what happened to them, but Jimmy, I lost contact and so I think, I think he must be dead because he was quite a bit older than I was, yeah. That was one time. The other time was from the Kiel Canal, all this is in my memoirs if you don’t want it, but Kiel Canal we, we were given special orders to drop mines, six mines in Kiel Canal, and at, indeterminate spaces so that you know, instead of, say, six second drops or ten second drops, we dropped them as we felt like, so that the Germans wouldn’t, if they found the first two, we had six by the way, if they found the first two and they were so far apart they would say, well, they was the next one will be the same distance, because normally, on mine laying, you, they were at set distances more or less, but we didn’t do that on Kiel Canal and we flew along the canal and we had to drop from five hundred feet so that the mines didn’t break up. [laughs] We, we actually flew along and it was like daylight with the amount of flak from all, from all these, because we were at five hundred feet, every gun along the, the Kiel Canal could fire at us without fear of hitting one another, as you might say, if we’d have been lower it would have made, you know, but as I say we had to drop from five hundred feet so the, to make sure the mines didn’t break up, and the, the amount of firing it was just like daylight that we went along we could see people walking about, or running about, most of them were running, and we got through and really, I mean, I think we were hit forty-four, fifty-four times that they found, you know, but nothing serious. We were absolutely dead lucky, because you know, I mean, I wouldn’t ever want to go through that again that was really horrendous. And from Frankfurt we were attacked on several occasions and we managed to evade, but when we were pulling out from a dive, I wasn’t expecting to pull out and my head went down and smashed, and I smashed my jaw on the controls. When we got back to the station, I had to go to the dentist and he took pieces of jaw bone and teeth away and I was on fluids for about six weeks, you know, until my jaw knitted together again, but I had splinters of bone coming out of my, working way, their way out for many years afterwards, in actual fact the last one was after I met Janet, we’ve been married thirty –
JP: Thirty-one years.
PP: Thirty-one years, and, and the last splinter was when I’d just married, I think I’d just married you hadn’t I?
JP: Yeah a few years yeah.
PP: And this splinter came out –
JP: A long time.
PP: And so they kept working out you know, but yeah.
JP: So he’s only got half a tooth left. [laughs]
PP: Yeah, that’s in the top though, and they had to take nearly all my teeth away eventually in the lower jaw because a lot of them went black, but er, and, of course, I was, although I was on fluids for six weeks, after one week my crew had to have spare bods flying with them, and they hadn’t managed to complete an operation, they thought that I was their luck so they asked me if I would go back, and I’d got me jaw all strapped up obviously and I went out to the airfield and by that time, I was able to talk a bit again and I was able to make myself understood and then I went back flying with them with my jaw strapped up, and, and it wasn’t as I say, it took about six weeks for my jaw to knit strong enough so that I could eat again instead of just living on fluids. It was quite an experience because the pain is like cold, the pain in my jaw kept me awake quite well, I couldn’t go to sleep because it was so pain, painful, although you know, I mean, you got the oxygen mask, my previous one had been smashed to pieces. But, well, that’s what smashed my jaw, I would imagine as much as anything, but the [laughs] the, yeah, I just had to put up with it, it was one of those things and you know, and the crew thought they were jinxed if I wasn’t with them so I had to fly, I had no option really, and I didn’t want to be on the sidelines anyway, I wanted to be with them so, and from them on we finished the tour, that was it. Yeah, they had engines pack up, and all sorts of reasons, so I think they had news and that, and I don’t know if two or three ops and they just couldn’t complete them, you know, I had to come back, and they decided that was that they wanted me back, so yeah.
GC: As I say, as a rear gunner, you had a slightly different view
PP: Oh yes, yes.
GC: What was it like at the back of the plane seeing …
PP: Well when you took off, which was normally in the evening, in the last light probably, and you’d take off and it was some absolutely marvellous sunsets, it was, I, the mid upper gunner and myself, we were lucky that we could see those, it was, some of them were absolutely amazing, you never, and also, which all of us could see, was the Aurora Borealis, you could always, very often, particularly in the autumn, see the Aurora Borealis and it was, you know, in the distance, yeah. Also I mean, of course you, as you say you had a different aspect and I was often able to give information about something that maybe the bomb aimer or somebody had seen, but only fleetingly, but they would mention to me and I would be able to look for it. I could say, you know, ‘On the starboard side there’s something coming,’ I can’t make out what it might be and, with cloud about, if you were looking for a bend in the river or something like that they would probably think they saw it, let me know and then I could look for it myself and I had, of course, a lot longer to look for it than they had, so I could then tell them, ‘Yeah, that is a bend and you know we’re probably at so and so’ or they would work out, the navigator would work out where we were. Because navigation was very basic in those days, with all the aids, we had the number of times everything worked well was very limited and so we just had to stick to visual as much as possible although, I mean, sometimes you couldn’t do that at all because of low cloud, but sometimes, you know, if you got low cloud you could get above it and get an astro shot, but the, between us, we managed to work out different things, you know. I also used to sort out the drift for the navigator, ‘cos if we were drifting and to agree with his figures I would set my turret to dead central and then nav would say, ‘Take a sighting and follow that sighting’, and after we’d been flying for a given time, I would work out the, the actual degrees of drift that we got over that time, might only have been one or two degrees, but given that time we’d know that over a period we would be, say, five miles off track or ten miles off track, and if that agreed with what the navigator had got then, of course, we felt more satisfied. The navigator, of course, had different means of doing it but, and also the bomb aimer would sometimes give a hand, he’d go down into the bomb bay and, and try to get the drift measurement, we always tried to make sure, between us all, really, that we were within say ten, fifteen miles of our track, which in those days wasn’t too bad really, yeah. I think, mainly, they were the main ops that we went on, you know, I mean we had, I think it was Saarbrucken, we had an engine go which left us with no heating and everybody got frostbite and we eventually had to turn round and return and that, you know, I mean, we, was the sort of thing you got, every now and again. [laughs] My means of keeping warm. [laughs]
JP: Would you like a coffee or cup of tea now?
PP: Oh forgot what I was saying, oh dear.
GC: It’s all right.
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Title
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Interview with Peter Potter
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Gemma Clapton
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-09-14
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Sound
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APotterP150914
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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00:45:25 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Peter Potter was born in Fobbing where his grandfather had three farms in Shell Haven. He ran away from home at age 15 and got a job before volunteering for aircrew after falsifying his date of birth. He talks about his time in London, visiting several clubs while completing his tests at St John’s Wood. After three weeks of training, Peter was posted to RAF Wickenby where he did his full tour with 626 Squadron, including an operation to Kiel. While on flying control duties, he took officers through and was also taken to meetings by the commanding officer because his memory was so good. Recollects commanding officer Adrian Boyd and his impression of what his time was like serving with him. Peter recollects a 1944 episode in which arrived home at 5 am on Christmas morning, waking his father up as he was unable to let him know he was coming. He recalls encounter with St Elmo’s fire, the difficulty it caused, and having to park his aircraft at the farthest point at the airfield because they still had bombs on board. Peter took part in dropping mines in the Kiel canal where the aircraft was hit about 54 times, but as he claims that was ‘nothing serious’. Peter had a serious injury on a return from Frankfurt when, smashed his jaw on the controls, but returned to flying before it had healed completely because his crew thought him a good luck charm. He also tells of how, as rear gunner, he saw the aurora borealis and of checking navigation to make sure figures were correct.
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--London
England--Lincolnshire
Germany
Germany--Kiel Canal
Temporal Coverage
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1944
626 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
Chadwick, Roy (1893-1947)
military ethos
military service conditions
mine laying
RAF Wickenby
superstition
training
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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
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Horry, Margaret
M Horry
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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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
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2016-08-19
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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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
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Sound
Identifier
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AHorryM160819, PHorryMA1601
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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
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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/551/8815/PLancasterJ1501.2.jpg
794d475655253509adf90821a41de268
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/551/8815/ALancasterJO170308.1.mp3
0854aad26e9a380b5f2a5cc40af42a9a
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
Lancaster, Jo
John Oliver Lancaster
J O Lancaster
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lancaster, JO
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. Two oral history interviews with John Oliver 'Jo' Lancaster DFC (1919 - 2019, 948392, 103509 Royal Air Force), photographs and six of his log books. Jo Lancaster completed 54 operations as a pilot with in Wellingtons with 40 Squadron, and after a period of instructing, in Lancasters with 12 Squadron from RAF Wickenby. He became test pilot after the war and was the first person to use a Martin-Baker ejection seat in an emergency.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Jo Lancaster and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-18
2017-03-08
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.
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 of March 2017 and I’m in Hassocks with John Lancaster. Jo Lancaster. To talk about his long career in the RAF and as a test pilot afterwards. So, Jo, what are the earliest recollections of life that you have in the family?
JL: I was born in Penrith in Cumberland. In the Lake District. I was very lucky really. I didn’t realise it much at the time. And my first ideas of aeroplanes were drawn entirely from, from books. They were very rarely seen over Cumberland. If they were they were just a spot in the sky making a humming noise but I became very interested in aeroplanes and made models out of the rough materials I could find to hand. I eventually had a flying model with an elastic band which gave me great, great fun but I never actually saw an aeroplane close to until I was about aged sixteen when a Gypsy Moth made a landing due to bad weather in the, in the area. I left school in 1935 aged sixteen and it was during that summer that Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus visited Penrith and I had my first flight in an Avro 504. I remember that well. There was a bench seat going forward and aft of the rear cockpit on which you sat astride and a young lady who I didn’t know was my co-passenger and she just put her head down in the cockpit and screamed throughout the whole flight. [laughs] But I thoroughly enjoyed it. I could see the engine with the tapits, with the bells going up and down. The exposed bells. And it was on that flight that the pilot had a piece of piano wire on the wing tip and picked up bits of cloth from the ground with it. I was completely bitten by flying then but there was little chance of it in the, in the near future. I left school at sixteen and I didn’t want to go to university. In point of fact I couldn’t really because my father’s business had a bad time during the recession and there wasn’t any money left in the kitty but I didn’t mind that. I didn’t want to go to university. I wanted to go out and get amongst mechanical things and an aircraft apprenticeship seemed to be the answer. We considered the RAF apprenticeship scheme, I forget where now. Henlow. Not Henlow.
CB: Halton.
JL: Halton. Considered the RAF apprenticeship scheme at Halton but I wanted to be in the start of the aeroplane flight and not, not the sort of maintenance of it and so I, somehow or other, got a list of aircraft manufacturers in Britain who were offering apprenticeships. Some of them wanted premiums so that put them out but Armstrong Whitworth sounded the best and in due course my father accompanied me down to Coventry for an interview. And I was accepted and joined Armstrong Whitworth in October 1935 starting a five year apprenticeship. The apprenticeship was very good. We had pay and we had one morning and one afternoon off paid time for, to attend the local technical college. [Cough] Can we have a pause?
CB: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
CB: So you’re at Coventry.
JL: The apprenticeship.
CB: And you’re just on the apprenticeship.
JL: Yes. When I — I went down to Coventry to take up my apprenticeship having negotiated some digs through the local paper. I didn’t like the digs we had, I had but [pause - interference] but when I first started there [I feel sure?] it was at the airfield at Wheatley, an old World War One airfield with still the original hangars. I first of all went to, as a stop-gap to the final assembly unit where they were building Hawker Hart trainers. I found everybody very very friendly and one of the almost time expired apprentices, expired apprentices asked me about my digs and I said I didn’t like them and he said there was a vacancy at his digs so I was very glad to go there and I, I was there for over three years. Nearly four years in fact. In, in the original interview it was, it was stressed that there would be no flying involved in the apprenticeship but I had ideas that I would join the, what was then the RAF Class F Reserve which operated very similarly to the Territorial Army. Consisted mostly of a two week summer camp. But on reaching the age of eighteen that coincided with the start of the RAF Volunteer Reserve and I joined straight away and followed that up with the full time ab initio training course at Sywell in July of 1937. Having done that I went back to, to my apprenticeship of course and attended the local RAF, [pause] oh dear. Elementary Reserve Training School at Ansty. That was local to Coventry. During the day, during the weekdays the instructors there were instructing a course of short service, short service commission pilots and at evenings or other times when convenient as at weekends they were training the volunteer reservists. There instead of Tiger Moths as at Sywell we had Avro Cadets with Armstrong Siddeley Genet engines and I converted on to Cadets and then converted on to Hawker Harts. When I was still eighteen I was flying solo on Hawker Harts which was a beautiful aeroplane.
[pause]
JL: I don’t know how to continue.
CB: We’ll stop just for a mo.
[Recording paused]
CB: You mentioned digs. People don’t seem to have digs now so what were they and how did it work?
JL: Well my first digs, which were arranged through the local, by post through the local paper, when I got there I didn’t know the people. I didn’t care for them very much. I was there for really just over a week I think and I was happy to leave when my new acquaintance apprentice, Tony Carpenter suggested I join him in his digs. There I was with a family, or we were with a family. Mrs Hinder who was a widow, widow of a parson and her two children Ruby and Percy. So there were five of us in the house and Mrs Hinder provided us with breakfast, a packed lunch, an evening meal five days a week and breakfast and all the other meals during the weekend at the princely sum of twenty five shillings a week.
CB: Brilliant. Yes. And what about your washing?
JL: I can’t remember. I didn’t do it. They must. It probably went to, I don’t know. I don’t suppose she did it. I don’t remember.
CB: What sort of hours did you work in those days?
JL: We had to be there at 8 o’clock in the morning. We had a half hour’s break for lunch and left at 5 o’clock four days of the week and half past five on Thursdays. And Saturday morning it was 8 o’clock till twelve [cough] I shall have to go and get another drink.
CB: Ok.
[Recording paused]
CB: That’s really useful so when we have the time to talk about the apprenticeship how did the apprenticeship work?
JL: Well as I said I actually started in final assembly but I was only there a couple of weeks. That was a stop-gap and then I was moved to what they called a detailed fitting shop where all the various parts of the aircraft were made using hand tools. And I was there for probably nine months and then I moved to the milling machine shop. Learned how to work a milling machine and then moved on from that to working a, working on a lathe. Learned all about lathe work. Then I went to sub-assembly where units of the aircraft were assembled. The aircraft going through at this time was the Whitley. And then eventually I went on to, moved up to Baginton. The new airfield and the new factory on final assembly and I was there until the — when the war started. I was, I was held back until I joined the — the RAF decided to have me back in January 1940. But I wasn’t actually called up until June of 1940. Incidentally there was a rather amusing episode in May of 1939. Shortly before the war. Everybody knew the war was coming. They had to re-introduce conscription and I was a bullseye for the first age group and I had to go and have an interview with a little [petrie?] army major so I lost no time in telling him I didn’t want to join his army and I was a trained engineer and a trained pilot and he said, ‘Well you’ll be, you’ll be a dead cert for the Royal Army Ordinance Corps.’ And why he said that and not the Royal Engineers I don’t know. But anyway the war started and in no time at all I received a letter containing a traveling warrant to Budbrooke Barracks and a postal order for the four shillings in advance of pay to join the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.
CB: Oh.
JL: So I dashed down to, and by this time they had a combined recruiting centre in Coventry. They’d taken over a skating rink, a roller skating rink. And the air force recruiting officer was no help at all but the naval recruiting officer was a Chief Petty Officer Brown and I went and told him my problem and he said, ‘Well we’ll get you out of that,’ and he took me on for the navy on, on deferred service. So I then got a letter saying please return the travelling warrant and postal order. You need not now apply, attend Budbrooke Barracks. So whilst, whilst I was on deferred service for the navy the RAF changed their mind and decided to have me back and, but I didn’t actually re-join until about June of 1940 starting with a six weeks course at ITW Initial Training Wing at Paignton in Devon. And then we were all disbursed to [pause] God. [pause] Sorry, this is my brain. [pause]
CB: From ITW you went to Initial Training Wing.
JL: Well it was Flying Training School.
CB: Yes but at Sywell again.
JL: The first one was Sywell.
CB: Yes.
JL: But this time, after the war started it was Desford near Leicester
CB: Oh yes.
WT: Yes. Desford. Yes.
JO: Yes. Yes. We were, we were all divided up. I went, I went to Desford with some others. During the, during this ab initio course the Battle of Britain was in full swing and of course we all wanted to be fighter pilots and I was in fact selected to be a fighter pilot and sent to number five elementary flying, 5 Flying Training School at Sealand which had Miles Masters and there I was going to be a fighter pilot. I trained on Miles Masters. Later — later in the — we were down, we moved from Sealand down to Ternhill in Shropshire and continued training there but the, during the winter ‘40/41 it was very bad. The training — some of us got well behind and I was on a course of about forty eight divided into four flights of twelve and our flight was the only one, was the only one who succeeded in doing the night flying part of the syllabus on Masters and at the end of the course the whole flight was posted to bomber OTUs whilst the rest went to fighters. And I went to Lossiemouth, 20 OTU as I remember and was converted on to Wellingtons. I was very cross about this at the time but in the event I think it was the right thing to do. When I got to Lossiemouth we were next door to [pause] oh dear [pause] sorry. A Whitley OTU.
WT: Wycombe?
JL: Hmmn?
WT: Wycombe
JL: No. A Whitley OTU up in Scotland. Oh God. I’m sorry.
CB: Was it on, was it a coastal OTU or was it a Bomber Command OTU?
JL: It was a bombing.
CB: Whitleys. Yes.
JL: I was at Lossiemouth converting on to Wellingtons.
CB: Yes.
JL: At 20 OTU.
CB: Yes.
JL: And there was another OTU only about ten miles away with Whitleys. It was well known. It’s still open.
CB: Yes. Kinloss.
JL: Kinloss. Yes.
CB: Yes. Yeah.
JL: Sorry. Thank you.
CB: It’s ok.
JL: I got an interview with the group captain of Lossiemouth called Group Captain Smyth-Piggott and told him that I had been building Whitleys and knew all about them and that I’d like to convert. To transfer to Whitleys. And he wouldn’t have it so I was stuck with Wellingtons. And so we were paired off as pilots with first and second pilot. I was the first pilot and my second pilot was Derek Townsend and having done our conversion training we then had to be crewed up and we were all ushered into a hangar with the right proportions of pilots, navigators, wireless operators and air gunners. And Derek and I wandered around looking at people we’d never seen before and we eventually finished up with a Canadian navigator Glen Leach, a very Welsh wireless operator called Jack Crowther, another Canadian front gunner and a New Zealand rear gunner. Now, at that time I’d never met a Canadian before and I was just, I was surprised they spoke like people we saw in the cinema. But I hardly knew where New Zealand was. Anyway, we went down to that, to the pub in Lossiemouth that night and we were blood brothers from then for the rest of our lives.
[pause]
CB: Right. Stop there for a mo.
[Recording paused]
JL: What had happened.
CB: At Desford. Yeah.
JL: At Desford. We did a — went off and did a flight. When we landed he said, ‘You haven’t forgotten how to fly.’
CB: But you still had to go through.
JL: I still had to do the whole thing through.
CB: The whole thing.
JL: Yes.
CB: Because that’s the way the process ran. Can we just go back to your VR time because you might have continued with that but how long were you in the VR, flying and what caused you to cease?
JL: Well I as I say I was being converted on to — [pause] Oh God.
CB: On to the Hart. Yeah.
JL: Cadets.
CB: Oh the Cadet. Yes.
JL: And Harts. I was flying Harts at a very tender age and I was the ace. I thought I was the ace of the base. And one Sunday after a very bad period of weather where there was no flying we had a very fine Sunday morning in April 1938 and I dashed out to Ansty. There were no Harts available but I was given a, alloted a Cadet to go and do aerobatics and off I went. There was something wrong with the engine actually. It tended to choke and had to be re-started. I wasn’t even bothered with that. I went off and I did some aerobatics. I got doing a slow roll. There was a fire extinguisher under the dashboard and the instrument panel and on the final turn with full top rudder the fire extinguisher fell out and got behind the rudder bar so when I got right way up I got a whole lot of left rudder on. I managed to sort of kick it halfway through the fabric so that I could get steering rudder and instead of going back to Ansty as I should have done I became insane and landed at Wheatley. Well it was a Sunday so there was only a sort of a maintenance man there. When he walked up I gave him the fire extinguisher and took off again. And then, then I, my fellow digs chap, Tony Carpenter, he couldn’t join the VR because of his eyesight but he bought all sort of what we would call a microlight called a dart splitter mouse and he had it at a field near Kenilworth and I then went over to him and did a few aerobatics there. Then I did what was actually a perfectly legal exercise. A simulated forced landing where you from two thousand feet or whatever you throttle the engine back and did an approach on to a suitable field, opened it up and go around again at the end. I did what the, I opened up and the engines stopped and I went through a hedge so that’s rather spoiled things and I was thrown out. You’ll find it in there.
WT: Gosh.
JL: I wasn’t thrown out for going through the hedge. I was thrown out for doing low level aerobatics.
CB: Ah
JL: That was because very very close by was Kenilworth Golf Club and playing golf that morning was a chap called Tom Chapman who was a director of Armstrong Siddeley’s who was hand in glove with Armstrong Whitworth’s and he, he reported it. [laughs] Tom Chapman. Bless his heart.
CB: You never became friends.
JL: I never met him.
[pause]
CB: Right. So we’ve got to the stage that you’re at Lossiemouth and you’ve crewed up. This crewing up — could you just explain how it actually happened? The process.
JL: Well Derek and I just wandered around looking at people’s brevets and we got together a navigator. We found this Canadian with a, he had the O brevet.
CB: Yeah.
JL: He was very proud of that. The Observer. Asked him and he came along and we continued the process till we got the full crew. And we all, we all agreed to meet in the pub that night and we were thick as thieves from that time on.
CB: So how long were you together for?
JL: Well from Lossiemouth, when we were crewed up we did a number of cross country exercises [cough] oh dear. To finish the course. Air firing and practice bombing and then we were posted as a crew to 40 Squadron at Wyton. So we all went off on leave and we all arrived at Wyton on the appointed day only to be told that we weren’t supposed to be at Wyton. We were supposed to be at Alconbury. The satellite. And so we got a service bus from Wyton to Alconbury and signed in there and we were promptly all put on a charge for arriving late. And we were, what are the — ? [pause] I forget the expression was. The lowest. The lowest telling off. So that wasn’t a very good start because we didn’t like the WingCo much anyway. He wasn’t a very popular chap. A [jock?]. Wing Commander Davey. Anyway, we were, then Derek, Derek left us to join another crew and we were given a captain in the form of a Jim Taylor who — he’d already done a lot of ops and he took us on our first eight ops and then he left us. He was, he was screened and I took over as captain and we were given a series of second pilots from then on. And we succeeded in surviving thirty operations including a daylight on Brest. And then we, then we all split up.
CB: So this is in a Wellington.
JL: Yes. And I was posted to a Wellington OTU as a, as an instructor [coughs] oh dear. I’m sorry about this.
CB: Ok. Would you like to stop for a mo?
[Recording paused]
CB: So can we just talk about the tour? The aircraft was a Wellington. Which model?
JL: Yes. Throughout this period all my flying was on Wellington 1Cs which was powered by Bristol Pegasus Mark xviii and with these it was very very underpowered. It was supposed to be able to fly on one engine but in fact it couldn’t because it had non-feathering propellers.
CB: Oh.
JL: Fortunately the engines were fairly reliable. The most common problem would be that one of the rocker boxes would break loose from the cylinder head which introduced, which put that cylinder out of use and caused it to be, to vibrate rather a lot. That happened from time to time. But at least you had the use of most of the engine.
CB: So you couldn’t really feather. You couldn’t feather the prop.
JL: No. No.
CB: So you kept it running did you or you stopped it? The drag was huge.
JL: Well if you lost the engine it just, just windmilled.
CB: Yeah. Right.
JL: Caused a lot of drag.
CB: So of the ops, one of them was to Brest. What was that like?
JL: There was one occasion when we went off. Actually it was fortunately in daylight and when we got up to about seventeen hundred feet and the oil, the oil pressure on one engine dropped to zero. I looked out and there was oil all over the engine but fortunately we were just within a mile or so of Wyton and I was able to drop straight down and land in Wyton complete with a full load of petrol and bombs. But had, had it been dark the situation would have been very different. It was too late to bale out and we had a full load of bombs and it was dark.
CB: In circumstances where you’re still, you’ve still got your full load of bombs what was the proper procedure?
JL: Sorry?
CB: In the circumstances where there was difficulty with the aircraft and you had a full load of bombs what was the proper procedure as far as the bomb load was concerned? Were you supposed to jettison or keep them?
JL: Well normally only jettison over the sea.
CB: Right.
JL: But of course you had to be in full control of the aircraft. If you lost an engine and you weren’t able to, to maintain flight you’d probably leave them where they were.
CB: So thinking of the rest of the tour how did the ops go on that? You had a bit of variety. They were all at night were they?
JL: All except one. The 24th of July 1941 there was a major daylight operation on Brest in which we were involved. The squadron sent six aircraft in two lots of three. The other three lost, lost one aircraft in a direct hit but our three all survived. Knocked about but still working.
CB: So the other one was lost to flak.
JL: Yes.
CB: What operating height were you using then?
JL: Twelve and a half thousand feet.
CB: And what bomb load were you carrying?
JL: Probably five. I can’t tell you. I didn’t record these. Probably five hundred pound armour piercing but it was all a waste of time as I discovered later. Much later. I visited Lorient after the war and went and saw the U-boat pens there and none of our bombs would ever do anything to them. They had a huge roof about two metres thick and then a false roof on top of that. You could see where bombs had hit it. There was just a little pock mark. That’s all. We were all wasting our time. I don’t know what our intelligence people were doing. Thinking about.
CB: So for the other ops then. These were at night. Where? Where were they going? Where were the targets?
JL: Mostly in Germany but we did one to [pause] oh Christ, I’m sorry.
CB: Was it a port?
JL: On the Baltic.
CB: Right. Kiel or Wilhelmshaven. Bremen.
JL: Further east.
CB: Ah.
JL: Poland.
CB: Oh. Danzig.
JL: Oh God. I’m sorry. My brain’s going on strike.
CB: Stettin.
JL: Stettin. Thank you.
CB: Right. So that was a port. And what were you after there? The shipping. Were you?
JL: The port. Yes. That was a long one. That’s well over nine hours. We had overload tanks.
CB: The overload tanks were jettisonable or were they inside the aircraft?
JL: Oh no. They were, they were in the bomb bay.
CB: Oh right.
JL: So we had a reduced bomb load.
CB: And this is the early part of the war so how were you getting on in terms of navigation and pinpointing the target?
JL: There was very little to help us with navigation. We had a choice of dead reckoning and any pinpointing we could get. At night, providing there was no cloud, water could usually be seen. The River Rhine. We used to get quite a bit of haze over the Ruhr but you could usually pick out the Rhine. All the coastlines and harbours. We did have Hamburg two or three times. Bremen. Wilhelmshaven. Berlin. Most of them were to the Ruhr though. I think we did [pause], oh God my brain.
CB: So there was flak all the time but to what extent were there —?
JL: Nearly all the time. Yes.
CB: What about night fighters? Were they?
JL: We were attacked. Yes. On the way back from Berlin actually. We were. Berlin was clear but there was, on the way back we encountered cloud and we were being shot at through the cloud pretty well continuously. And we couldn’t understand this because we shouldn’t have been but what had happened was that the forecast wind which was all we had had changed and they’d taken us north and we were actually going down via Hamburg, Bremen, Emden but eventually there was a break in the clouds and as I looked down I could see the causeway across the mouth of the Zuiderzee and as I reported this and obviously everybody, including the rear gunner, was looking down and it was just at that moment that a burst of fire went right over the top of us followed by an ME110. And we didn’t see it. We were lucky. But anyway, anyway we went down a very steep spiral and this 110 tried to follow us and Keith Coleman, our New Zealand rear gunner got a good shot at it and we both went into cloud and we never knew what happened to it but after the war some people checked up on it and there were no night fighters shot down that night but one inexplicably crashed on landing and it’s just possible it might have been the one.
CB: Because you’d damaged it. Yeah. Now, in those days had the corkscrew evasion system operated or did you make up your own technique for avoiding a fighter?
JL: Well, only, only did corkscrewing if you were, if you were attacked. In my second tour actually it was different. It was my own idea. I kept changing course and height. Five hundred feet up. Five hundred feet up. Turned left, then right. Pretty well all the time because the eighty eight millimetre guns were radar controlled and they were bloody good. So by doing that we were never actually seriously shot at. Not enroute.
CB: You mentioned that you had various co-pilots. Why was that? Were they being prepared for captaincy themselves or what?
JL: Yes. They were doing their training before taking over their own crew. I’m very sorry.
[Recording paused]
JL: That was the daylight raid on, on Brest I think.
CB: Oh. We talked about the 110 just now but what, on what other occasion were you attacked by a fighter?
JL: On the daylight raid on Brest in July there were several 110s about. Sorry. Correction. 109s about.
CB: Yes.
JL: But there were a lot of Wellingtons about and they were all, they were all firing at these 109s and one went, certainly went down because the pilot baled out but all the others tend to claim it. [laughs]
CB: Right. Is that your —
JL: In retrospect it’s impossible to say who hit it.
CB: Yeah. Ok.
JL: We had, we had beam guns but both my gunners, front and rear were blasting away and we had two beam gunners with Vickers, Vickers VJOs fitted up and the second, our second pilot and the wireless op were blasting away with theirs as well and of course all the Wellingtons were probably doing the same thing so the sky was absolutely full of CO3.
CB: Right. So in your flying training at Ternhill what sort of people were there?
JL: We had two American air force officers. Sam Morinello and the other one was called Galbraith. But of course they left us to join their Eagle Squadrons. We also had Neville Duke.
CB: Oh right.
JL: And we had David. Oh God, here we go again [pause] oh I’m sorry. My brain’s —
CB: It’s alright. That’s interesting Neville Duke because he took the world speed record in the Hunter.
JL: Yes.
CB: Didn’t he? In the fifties.
JL: He was also on the same course at ITW.
CB: Was he? Yeah. What about these Americans then. What were they like? Because they weren’t in the war and they’d volunteered to join?
JL: Yes. Well most Americans joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but these two didn’t. Sam Morinello had done a lot of parachute jumps. Just what he’d, they’d been doing. I think they both had pilot training. Why they didn’t join the Canadian Air Force I don’t know but I suppose this was the — they wanted to be certain to get to the American squadrons.
CB: So they were posted to the Eagle Squadrons.
JL: Yes.
CB: Yeah.
JL: Yes. They were. I think they distinguished themselves fairly well later on.
CB: And how did they fit into the general way of things because they were a different culture?
JL: Oh well. Very well. I’m trying to think of the name of this. His father was chief. Well his father was a pre-war, a World War One pilot. He became a chief designer at Bristol and he had four sons. He was killed in 1938 flying one of his own design and the [pause] and the three sons, I think it was three sons. Might have been more. So, anyway, two of them were killed early in the war and this David. He was just one of the boys. Happy. We knew nothing at all about his background at all.
CB: Oh dear.
JL: But he, unfortunately he was killed as well. Oh God. The name, name, name. [I must have written it?] I bet it’s in there.
CB: Ok. Right. We’ll stop just for a mo.
[Recording paused]
CB: So going back to the time when you finished at 40 Squadron. Where were posted and why?
JL: I was posted to Wellesbourne Mountford for instructional duties. Wellesbourne Mountford being Number 22 OTU. Operational Training Unit. Still with Wellington 1Cs. I was attached to the conversion flight. I was converting them to fly the Wellington after which they did their navigational exercises. I didn’t like the job at all. I’m not born, I wasn’t born to be an instructor and I was very unhappy about it. Not only that but it involved night flying details and in the winter the night flying practice was divided up into four sessions being 6 till 9, 9 till 12, 12 till 3 and 3 till 6 and if you were on a late show you know you had to be out at 3 o’clock on a cold, miserable morning and go and do three hours circuits and landings and that was not very funny. I discovered that there was, at Central Flying School, they ran a course for OTU instructors so I asked to go on that which I did but it didn’t help. It didn’t help me much. When I went back to Wellesbourne I was still doing conversion training. Then in July another OTU opened at what is now East Midlands Airport.
CB: Castle Donington.
JL: Castle Donington. That had just opened and I was posted there. When I got there there were four or five other people there and no aeroplanes. So we had a nice time for a while. Then we collected some aeroplanes and started training. Right. Now we start. Originally I was on conversion training but then I went on to the navigation side and I was sent on a cross country with a, a five hour cross country, with a pupil crew and when I got — this was in October ‘42 and when I got back I found I was rostered to go on what they called a bullseye that night which is an exercise cooperating with the Observer Corps and the ground defences. I went to the mess and there was no food and there was no option but to go back down to the flight and took over yet another pupil crew I’d never met before. We went off on this bullseye. We got, we got over the Solway Firth, we were actually going to North Wales but via the Solway Firth and we hit icy conditions. Ice was [cough] ice was banging away on the side. I discovered that the wireless operator had declared his apparatus unserviceable. I’d no idea what the navigator was like. I was frozen stiff so I decided to go home. We were over ten tenths cloud as they called it and so I flew east for a long long long way before letting down safely and then found my way back to, to the airfield. The next day I was on the carpet for abandoning the bullseye. I explained everything but it didn’t cut any ice. This wing commander who hadn’t done a thing I think for himself demanded to see my logbook and in my logbook I’d cut out a little comic thing from a flight magazine where the caption was, “All the way from Hamburg on one engine,” and of course it was a chap sitting astride just an engine and this wing commander took exception to this and told me to take it off. By this time I told him I didn’t want to take it out. And we departed. We departed the worst of friends and very shortly after that a posting came through for me to 150 Squadron at Snaith which I quite welcomed because I was absolutely sick of OTUs. When I got to Snaith the wing commander said, ‘Who are you and what have you come for?’ So I said, ‘I don’t know why I’ve come, sir. [laughs] I’ve just been posted.’ And he said, ‘Well what do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to go on a Lancaster squadron.’ And so I did about three flights in their aircraft. 150 Squadron’s. They had Wellingtons 3s by then with a Hercules. And then I was posted to, [cough] oh dear. I’m sorry. 12 Squadron at Wickenby. Just outside Lincoln. When I got to Wickenby they still had Wellingtons but they were scheduled to train on to Lancs. I did three operations with Wellingtons. Then we were stood down for six weeks to transfer. Convert on to Lancasters.
CB: We’ll stop there just for a mo.
[Recording paused]
JL: And I think a couple of squadrons in 5 Group. That’s all there were at that time.
CB: So how did the conversion process operate? Bearing in mind there were no HCUs.
JL: Conversion on to Lancasters? Well we had a couple of pilots seconded to us. [coughs] I’m so sorry. Let me take a cough pill.
CB: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
JL: Between the Frisian Islands and the mainland.
CB: We’re just talking about your ops on the Wellington before you moved to Lancaster. So one was Hamburg.
JL: Not many on 40 Squadron.
CB: No.
JL: Nor at the OTU.
CB: No.
JL: But when I went back to 12 Squadron as I say we still had Wellingtons and I took over the flight commander’s crew as a going concern. We did one mining operation between Terschelling Island and the mainland and one on the approach to St Nazaire. In the estuary. That was a timed run for an island. I think in between was Hamburg. Bombing.
CB: And with mines you couldn’t drop from too great a height because it would shatter the mine so what height did you go?
JL: I think it was five hundred feet and a hundred and sixty miles an hour.
[pause]
CB: And you operated in miles an hour rather than knots did you?
JL: Yes. Incidentally on that run when I went to St Nazaire I decided to go across Brittany. Low down. It was dark but it was clear enough to fly at two or three hundred feet and I saw quite clearly somebody on the ground with a lantern and they swung it around in a circle as we went past.
CB: Exhilarating at low level at night was it?
JL: Well I think I probably thought it was safer than going higher because the guns couldn’t get at you.
CB: So that was a lone sortie. You weren’t going out as a squadron at the same time.
JL: Oh no. They were all lone sorties.
CB: Right.
JL: Except the, except the daylight on Brest.
CB: Right. So after those three then you do the conversion on to the Lancasters. So what was the process there?
JL: We spent quite a little time learning about the Lancaster on the ground and then we had two pilots from 460 Squadron attached to us and they quite quickly converted us. It didn’t take very long. A Lancaster was quite easy to fly and then we took over our crews and spent some time.
CB: So when you moved to Lancasters the four engines all had an engineer. How did that selection work? Did you have all the crew with you?
JL: Well we had, oh a suitable number of mid-upper gunners and engineers arrived and we didn’t choose them. They were just allocated.
CB: So —
JL: And with a full crew then we started doing navigation exercises, a lot of which, much to our concern, were low level formation.
CB: Daylight or night?
JL: Daylight. We didn’t like the idea very much. In the end we didn’t do any daylights.
CB: So what time are we talking about now? 1942.
JL: 1942. Yes.
CB: Yeah.
JL: My first operation on Lancs was a mining operation. To Norway. Haugesundfjord fjord
[pause]
CB: What was the, that was just in the fjord. Just in the entrance was it? Or close to the shipping?
JL: It was more or less parallel to the coast as I remember.
CB: Right.
JL: It wasn’t, it wasn’t very well defended at all. Searchlights came up and a bit of light flak and my gunners responded quickly and, and they put the lights out again.
CB: What sort of height were you doing your mining?
JL: Five hundred feet.
CB: That was also five hundred was it? Right. Ok. And then the rest of the ops. On that tour how many did you do? With 12 squadron?
JL: I think I did twenty two [pause] on Lancasters. Did thirty on Wellingtons. I did the two thousand bomber raids. And then another twenty two [coughs], another twenty two on Lancs which made fifty four I think.
CB: So that normal tour would be thirty. So why did you stop at twenty two?
JL: Oh well I’d done, I did the fifty fourth operation which was to La Spezia in Italy. And the next morning I was called in by the wing commander. And wondering what I’d done wrong, and he said that a new edict had come through that a second tour was now twenty operations. Not twenty. And as I’d done twenty I was finished as of then.
CB: Right. Not thirty. Yeah.
JL: So I finished very suddenly at fifty four.
CB: So what was the next move from there?
JL: Well I wanted to be a test pilot and I thought the best way of starting was getting a posting to a maintenance unit. The wing commander. Wing commander. [pause] Oh dear. Wood. Wing Commander Wood was very very helpful because my first posting after having finished the second tour was back to Wellington 1Cs at Harwell.
CB: Oh right.
JL: And I complained very very loudly about that so WinCo Wood took me off that and made me sort of supernumerary on the squadron. I was talking to new crews and doing odd jobs and then I couldn’t go on forever so they gave me a posting to the Group Gunnery Flight at Binbrook. 1481 flight. I was, they had a Wellington flight and a Martinet flight — the target towers. I was in charge of the Wellington flight and I had a right royal time there. I was my own boss and we did as we liked. But then a posting came through for me to Boscombe Down. A&AEE which I was rather frightened about that. I wasn’t sure if I was up to it. In the end it was fine. Incidentally, the posting to Harwell, another second tour pilot finished shortly after me [pause] Once again his name’s gone. But he took it because his wife lived near Harwell and within about six weeks he was dead. The engine caught fire and the thing folded. What was his name? All these names are in there.
CB: Yeah.
JL: In ten minutes time I can tell you.
CB: Ok. We can pick it up. So now you’re on the way to Boscombe Down.
JL: Yes. I went to Boscombe Down. I was posted to, there was an armament flight and a performance testing flight. I went to the armament flight and the flight commander gave me a ride in a B, oh dear, B25.
CB: Mitchell.
JL: Mitchell. Mitchell. And that was it. I didn’t have any dual. You just got in to an aeroplane and flew it.
CB: Right.
JL: And that’s just, just what happened. And I amassed a total of, I think eventually a hundred and forty four types.
CB: Really. So what formal process did they have for introducing you to test flying?
JL: None at all then. I was just posted in, as I said given a ride in a Mitchell because I’d never been in an American aircraft before. And that was it. I flew them all. Liberators, Fortresses. What was the, was it a B26?
CB: Marauder.
JL: Marauder. That was a bit of a handful.
CB: Was it?
JL: Very high wing loading.
CB: And when you were doing the flying did you have people with you on instruments? Who were monitoring instruments? What was actually happening at Boscombe Down?
JL: Most of my flying was done for armament purposes and we had armament technical officers. Sort of bombing and gunning and we were supervising the tests. We were just drivers really.
CB: Yeah.
JL: My first job, my very first job when I got down there was to drop a four thousand pounder from fifteen hundred feet. Well in the, in Bomber Command the quoted safety height for dropping a four thousand pounder is six thousand feet. Really it was nothing. You felt, well you heard and felt just a little bump. And all this was, they were doing a lot of tests in preparation for what they called second TAF. Second Technical Airforce for the invasion.
CB: So this is army support effectively. So the four thousand pounder’s the cookie which is just a barrel.
JL: Oh yes.
CB: And did you feel there was some danger in doing that? Or did you prove there wasn’t?
JL: Well as I say we’d been told the safety height was six thousand feet and we were sent off to do it at fifteen hundred but I had no problem.
CB: Which was what they wanted to know.
JL: They were measuring it.
CB: Where would you, where was the range where you dropped those?
JL: Lyme Bay. Just off Lyme Regis.
CB: Yeah. What other things were you dropping? Or was there a lot of gunnery involved as well with the fifty seven millimetre.
JL: A bit of both. I had another job with a Mosquito. Oh incidentally. Mosquito. This was typical Boscombe at the time. There was quite a lot of social drinking went on in the evenings and one of the chaps who was, I was very fond of as an armament officer called Shepherd. He was a school master in civil life but he was involved with the rocket. RPs rocket projectiles which was flown by the [pause] oh God.
CB: The Mosquitos and the Beaufighters.
JL: Yes.
CB: Yeah.
JL: Anyway, one night he said, ’Would you like to fly a Mosquito?’ So I said, ‘Yes please.’ And the next day we just walked out to this Mosquito. Let’s say 8RPs. Four under each wing. And I got in. He got in behind me and we went off. That was literally true.
CB: And you’d never flown a two engine.
JL: I’d never flown a Mosquito before.
CB: No.
JL: And I’d certainly never fired rockets but there was quite an art in that because he was telling me what to do all the time. And then another job I had with the Mosquito was — I think they were probably four thousand pound casings filled with [pause] oh dear my brain. Flammable stuff.
CB: Oh yes. Napalm.
JL: What?
CB: Napalm.
JL: Napalm. Yes and this was, this was done we had a range at Crichel Down which, which was, I guess, sometime after the war and low level and so I went off and dropped one of these things at low level. Went back and landed and they phoned up and said, ‘You’re too high.’ So I had another one. I think we did this four times. Eventually I was flying just as low as I possibly dare.
CB: Was this in a Mosquito again?
JL: Yes. And then I saw some cine film of it afterwards but to see this Mosquito scuttling along just above the treetops and a great flame drops the, a great flame went up like a clutching hand way up above the Mosquito. Came down just missing its tail. It was quite frightening to watch and I did that four times.
CB: Blimey. This is using the four thousand pounder casing.
JL: That’s what it looked like. Yes.
CB: When you were doing your four thousand pounder at fifteen hundred feet what plane were you using to drop?
JL: The Lanc.
CB: That was the Lanc. Right. Ok. What other exciting planes? Did you fly single seaters at Boscombe Down?
JL: Oh yes. You could fly anything you wanted. Just go along and say, ‘Please can I have a go at this.’ And you did. There were, well I’d already flown Spitfires. I don’t know where they got that from but I pinched a Spitfire.
CB: Oh did you?
JL: At Binbrook.
CB: You felt it needed exercising.
JL: Yes. You haven’t, you haven’t got on to this one.
CB: No. Go on.
JL: Well —
CB: Right.
JL: 1 Group. They had a, I think he was a New Zealander with a Spitfire. He used to go around all the squadrons doing fighter affiliation. He came. He used to come to Binbrook about once a week I should think. Every time he came I used to say, ‘Give us a go in your Spitfire.’ And eventually he said, ‘Well I’m going to lunch. I know nothing about it.’ So I took that as a have a go.
CB: Have a go.
JL: Yeah. So I went off and did fifteen minutes in this Spitfire and the station commander was Hughie Edwards.
CB: Oh right. [laughs]
JL: Well actually I got on well with him and just a couple of days later, I can’t remember what he said but it was just a very few words just to let me know that he knew about it and having done that I thought well I’ll have another go. So the next time this chap came in I had another go. And then at Kirton Lindsey, not very far away there was a Spitfire OTU. So I went off in — Hughie Edwards used to have a Tiger Moth. He used to let me fly that and I just introduced an Aussie, Aussie wireless op of 460 Squadron. So we went over to Kirton Lindsey and said we wanted to fly Spitfires and they said, ‘Well you’ll have to use Hibaldstow. Our satellite.’ So I went over to Hibaldstow. Now. I can’t for the life of me think how this ever happened but I walked in there and said, ‘Please sir, I have flown a Spitfire before. Can I have another go?’ And then he gave me a Spitfire and I went off for forty five minutes. They’d never seen me before. I’d never seen them before. But this is true. It’s true.
CB: Was this the OTU for the Eagle Squadron?
JL: No. I don’t think so.
CB: No.
JL: I don’t know what it was. It was just a Spitfire OTU.
CB: Yeah. Right. Amazing.
JL: I mean authorising. Who the hell would authorise a flight in a Spitfire from somebody they’d never seen before?
CB: What rank were you at that time?
JL: Flight lieutenant. [pause] Yeah. Lots of things like that happened to me. It’s hard to believe them now.
CB: Yeah.
JL: I guarantee it. I don’t know how you would ever prove it now but [poor old Max Kiddie?] the Aussies. He died. Well most Aussies seem to die young. Most of the ones I knew did.
CB: Yeah. Back at —
JL: Hughie Edwards only made sixty eight.
CB: Yes. Back at Boscombe Down you’ve got all these variety of planes and you’re in the armament flight. So on the single engine planes what are you testing?
JL: Mostly guns. Things like the Avenger I remember, which was quite a nice aeroplane. We didn’t have many single engines. Only for our own test purposes but I used to go around and fly other people’s.
CB: So the Grumman Avenger was — you were doing that for the navy were you?
JL: Yes.
CB: Right.
JL: Yes I remember the Avenger. The Avenger, I think, yes. I can’t remember what. We did anything. And we were all much the same. We were entitled to one day off a week but nobody ever took it. All that happened when there was a non-flying day we all went into Salisbury. Otherwise every day was the same.
CB: Yeah. What other twin-engined aircraft did you fly at Boscombe Down?
JL: I don’t know.
CB: Did you have a Whirlwind for instance?
JL: No. No. Unfortunately not. I liked the look of a Whirlwind. They had the, they had the Wyvern there but it never went into production. It was a sort of larger, uglier looking one.
CB: Wellington.
JL: I’ve made a list somewhere of what I’ve flown.
CB: Ok. So after Boscombe Down. Then what? We’re now getting to what? What time of the war?
JL: Well the Empire Test Pilot School had started and had number one course for only about eight or ten people on that. And they had number two course. That was going on during the time I was there. They were based at Boscombe. I applied for number three course which began on the 13th March 1945 and actually I’d been, I was scheduled to drop the, I can’t remember whether it was the Tallboy or the Grand Slam but the weather had been duff and the 13th of March came up and that was the date of DPDS started so I had to give up that and a chap called Steve Dawson did the dropping of it. But of course 514. Oh my brain. Come on. The Dambusters.
CB: Yeah. 617.
JL: 617. That’s better. They already had them of course.
CB: So talking about Tallboy and Grand Slam. How were you testing those and where?
JL: Dropping them on Ashley Walk in the New Forest.
CB: So did they, they were looking for penetration were they? Or accuracy of flight? What were they looking at?
JL: I can’t remember.
CB: Because they were pinpoint delivery bombs.
JL: Probably the mechanics of dropping it. Yes that would be it. No point in dropping it on Ashley Walk except to make a big hole.
CB: Were they testing the ability of the two bombs to penetrate concrete?
JL: I don’t think so. I think 617 squadron were already doing that. They did the Tirpitz and that thing in France.
CB: Yeah.
JL: Coupole or whatever they called it.
CB: Coupole. Yes. They did a good job on that.
JL: Did a good job of the Tirpitz too.
CB: Yeah. And V3. Tallboys. The guns. The guns in the hillside. So did you, after doing your dropping did they ask you to look at the result of what you’d done?
JL: I can’t remember that. No.
[pause]
JL: I had a wonderful time at Boscombe. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
CB: I bet. So you talked about ETPS the Test Pilot School so what happened there. Number three course.
JL: I was on number three course. Yes. And of course the end of the war came. Chief test pilots round the industry had a habit of coming down and taking lunch with the senior officers and Cyril Feather who was the chief test pilot at Boulton Paul wanted a pilot and somebody suggested me. And I was a bit flattered and thought it would be a good idea so I accepted. And at the end of the course actually we were all being, getting the future sorted out. I had applied for a permanent commission. In the event they didn’t issue permanent commissions immediately. They did what amounted to short service. They didn’t call it short service. Four year contracts.
CB: Yeah. Just Short Service Commissions.
JL: It was a short service commission but they called it something else.
CB: Yeah.
JL: Extended Service Commission
CB: Oh right.
JL: In the event they only issued Extended Service Commissions and I took this offer of Boulton Paul’s but when I got there the chief test pilot engineer was there. He didn’t know I was coming. He was a bit put out understandably. Anyway, we got on alright but there was nothing to do there and I went to ETPS course dinner and we had a number four course I suppose which at this time it was [pause] oh dear [pause] somewhere near Milton Keynes
CB: Oh Cranfield.
JL: Cranfield. Thank you. I’m sorry about this.
CB: That’s alright.
JL: And the Groupie — I can’t think of his name now. A little chap. Said, ‘Are you happy where you are?’ I said, ‘No sir.’ He said, ‘Well, Saunders Roe are looking for somebody. Well, Saunders Roe suited me very well because apart from being on the Isle of Wight my wife lived near Winchester and so I I left Baulton Paul and went to Saunders Roe and [cough] oh dear. I don’t know why my throat’s doing this.
CB: Do you want a break? We’ll just stop for a mo?
[Recording paused]
CB: Now, one thing I didn’t ask you about the Boscombe Down range was you were actually testing American aircraft as well as British.
JL: Oh yes.
CB: One of the night fighters, American night fighters was called Black Widow.
JL: Yes. Flew that.
CB: What was that like?
JL: It was not a very pleasant aircraft to fly really. I think it had remote controlled guns for even firing. It was alright but not a, not a very brilliant aircraft. Yes. The P51.
[pause]
CB: Right. Thank you. So we’re now at Saunders Roe. So what was the task there?
JL: Well they didn’t have a proper pilot there but chief designers [unclear] had been at the fleet air arm. He was doing a little bit. There were, at the time they were building Sea Otters and refurbishing Walruses, the jet flying boat fighter was on the docks. The SRA1. And in the distance was the Princess.
CB: Right.
JL: And so I just joined in flying the Walruses and the Sea Otters and then they, they sent me on a Sunderland conversion course to Pembroke Dock which was very nice. So I had the full OTU course on the Sunderland. Now what had happened at Saunders Roe was that Short Brothers — where did they used to be? On the Thames.
CB: At Chatham. Rochester.
JL: Rochester. Stafford Cripps, who was a trade minister or something, nationalised Short’s and sent them to Belfast. They never did like that including the chairman Sir Arthur Gouge. So he carried these down to Saunders Roe and he was, he was followed by a whole lot of other people including a general manager, Browning and a whole lot and they just didn’t want to be at Belfast. And whilst I was away at Pembroke Dock I got a letter from the managing director [laughs] Captain Clark saying that Geoffrey Tyson would be joining the company as chief test pilot. Well he was one of the Short’s. Well he was chief test pilot at Short’s. I thought well that’s fair enough. He knows his stuff. I don’t. And so I wrote back and said, “Yes, that’s fine by me sir.” And when I got back I met Geoffrey. He was the most peculiar chap. He wasn’t the least interested in me, my background. He didn’t want to see my logbooks. Nothing. He knew nothing about me. And I found it very hard to get on with him. He hadn’t any sense of humour, he didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke. But we staggered along and he did the first few flights on the SRA1 and then he let me have a go. Well then, well we, we didn’t get on at all. Face it. We shared the same birthday but he was twelve years older than me.
CB: Right.
JL: And —
CB: In flying boat terms he was a cold fish.
JL: Then he, he told me one day that John Booth, who was another Short pilot was going to join as his number two so obviously that was my invitation to leave. So I rang up Eric Franklin at Armstrong Whitworth and got a job back there straight away and that was, that was the end of the things. I flew the SRA1 at Farnborough along with several other do’s.
CB: Just to put this —
JL: He was a most peculiar fellow.
CB: To put this into a context if I may. The SRA1 was the first jet powered Flying Boat.
JL: Yes.
CB: So what was the concept and what was it like?
JL: I think the idea was it would be handy in the Pacific area where they wouldn’t have to have a runway. It was quite a powerful machine with four twenty millimetre cannon.
CB: It was a fighter.
JL: It was a fighter. Yes. And although it was a bit bulky for a fighter it was quite lively but of course the Pacific war ended and there was no more call for it. Three were completed and two were crashed. One by Winkle Brown and one by a [Pete Major?] at Felixstowe. Another one is at Southampton.
CB: So you did the course on the Sunderland at Pembroke. That set you up.
JL: Pembroke Dock.
CB: Pembroke dock. That set you up in anticipation of flying the SRA1 did it? Was that the idea?
JL: Yes. That was the Flying Boats in general.
CB: And you were flying the Walruses and the Otters
JL: Yes. The Walruses and the Sea Otter you could taxi on the slipway.
CB: Yeah.
JL: The others needed mooring.
CB: So, what, how did it feel flying a jet flying boat? Because compared with flying a piston engine it was quite different.
JL: Well I had flown jets before. I flew the Vampire and the Meteor.
CB: At Boscombe Down.
JL: Yeah. [pause] I don’t know. Didn’t feel particularly different.
CB: Did you have to have particularly unusual handling techniques because of being a jet engine and getting water in it?
JL: Well they had designed in an extended snout but it was never necessary. It was never used because the spray was always well clear of the intake. I’ve got to have another.
CB: That’s alright.
[Recording pause]
JL: At that time the Isle of Wight was bristling with retired naval captains.
CB: Oh.
JL: Actually I thought he was one of those.
CB: Right.
JL: It turned out to be a captain in the Royal Flying Corps and equivalent of a flight lieutenant.
CB: But he called himself Captain Clark.
JL: Oh he was very fussy about the captain bit.
CB: Yeah. How interesting. What was he like as a personality? As the chairman.
JL: He was a bit peculiar. He had very little technical knowledge. How he came to be managing director I don’t know.
CB: Of an aviation company.
JL: Finance I suppose. But he was a bit of an oddball.
CB: Now after the Saunders Roe situation changing you went back to Armstrong Whitworth.
JL: Yes.
CB: So how did that come about? You just made direct contact or how did it work?
JL: Well when Geoffrey told me John Booth was joining as his number two that was obviously my cue to go so I immediately phoned Eric Franklin who — he’d been an apprentice with me at Armstrong Whitworth and he was then chief test pilot and he offered me a job straight away. So I was on my way within a very few days.
CB: So what was Armstrong Whitworth working on then? We’re talking about 1946 now are we?
JL: ‘49
CB: ‘49. Right.
JL: When I, when went back there the bread and butter was the production of Mark iv Meteors which became Mark viii Meteors. Simultaneously we had the Apollo which was a heap of rubbish.
CB: An airliner.
JL: Yes.
CB: An imitation air liner.
JL: It was supposed to be in competition with the Vickers Viscount. That was because it had to have Armstrong Siddeley engines, which were rubbish so it was never made anywhere. They were very [pause] well, a child of ten could have designed it.
CB: Oh.
JL: We had the 52. The 52 glider.
CB: So how, the AW52 was a flying wing.
JL: Yes.
CB: So could you just explain what the concept there was and the use of the glider first?
JL: Well, one of the purposes of it was to try to develop laminar flow over the wing.
CB: Right.
JL: But it wasn’t very successful because it’s impossible to keep the wind surface clear of squashed flies and things but actually it was a very experimental aircraft. I suppose they had ideas of building a massive passenger aircraft in that form but in this case it was just a two seater but they, it only had twenty six degrees of sweepback which was not nearly enough. And on controls they had several choices. What they chose was an elavon — a combined elevator and aileron. They could have split them and had separate ailerons and elevators or power controls were coming along although they hadn’t reached it yet. Well they wrongly decided on the elavons which meant that fore and aft was a very short lever balance, was very vert sensitive fore and aft, very very heavy laterally and they had a compromise and the compromise was through a spring tab. Are you familiar with a spring tab?
CB: Yeah.
JL: On a spring tab the spring had to be very very weak so that your controls are connected to a very floppy spring and my problem was exceeding the [pause] exploring the higher speed range before flutter set in. I was completely disorientated and I believe that I would have passed out very quickly so instead of that I pulled the blind down. I didn’t do anything properly in the ejection. You were supposed to put your heels on the footrest. I didn’t do that. I just didn’t do it. That’s all. And it had spectacle controls. Somehow or other my knees missed that. They were bruised but otherwise, otherwise ok. So once again I was very very very lucky.
CB: What height were you flying?
JL: About three thousand feet.
CB: And what speed?
JL: Three hundred. About three hundred and fifty. The limiting speed had just been increased and that’s what I was doing.
CB: So it’s the —
JL: Exploring that.
CB: Right. And theoretically what was the maximum speed? Fairly low was it?
JL: Oh I expect so. Yes. Yes not much performance testing was done. It was all sort of handling. Trying to get the controls right.
CB: So you’re at three thousand. Three thousand feet. What sort of speed were you actually flying at at that moment?
JL: Well the last I remember was about three fifty.
CB: It was at three fifty. Right.
JL: We were still at miles an hour.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
JL: And —
CB: The parachute automatically deployed.
JL: No. No.
CB: You had to do it.
JL: I had to do the whole thing.
CB: Yeah.
JL: I had to release the Sutton harness and pull the rip cord.
CB: Right.
JL: I made a very bad landing and hurt my shoulder a bit. Still hurts.
CB: Where? Where did this take place?
JL: A place called little Long Itchington.
CB: I know it. Yes.
JL: Do you know it? South of Coventry.
CB: Yes. Good pub there.
JL: Yes. I’ve been there.
CB: The Blue Light.
JL: The Blue Light.
CB: Yes.
JL: Used to kept by Wing Commander Sandy Powell.
CB: Oh.
JL: Who had been at Boscombe Down. In charge of C flight.
CB: And he he became a Comet test pilot and that blew his mind.
JL: Hmmn?
CB: He had been a Comet test pilot as well hadn’t he?
JL: Sandy?
CB: Yeah.
JL: Well he’d flown all sorts of things.
CB: Yeah. Right. So that’s where you came down. And the plane came down somewhere. Where?
JL: About two miles further on.
CB: Yeah. What? How did you start off with the gliders? The Glider. How did that handle? You were towed up by something and then —
JL: [laughs]. Not exactly. They had, they had a Whitley to tow it off first of all but when I got there they’d just been allocated a Lancaster. That Whitley was the last off the production line and they took it away and broke it up. There was no Whitley any more. But we had a Lancaster which was much better getting the glider up to a decent height. Used to take it up and then do tests on the way down.
CB: So how manoeuvrable was the glider?
JL: Well it was much better. It was two thirds the size of a big one and it was not metal? It was plywood construction which made it much more rigid and the controls were much better. Still a bit odd.
CB: And what sort of test envelope would you be exploring in that?
JL: Oh I don’t know. I don’t remember.
CB: Then you moved to the AW52.
JL: Yes. I only did two and a half flights in the AW52.
CB: Right.
JL: And the other one was grounded. Then they did some vibration tests with it at very slow speeds. When they sent it to Farnborough where it was regarded as a curiosity. I think they tried to resurrect the laminar flow test but it was no good and it finished up as a curiosity and was eventually broken up.
CB: What was the engine power on that? Was it twin engine?
JL: Yes. Two Nenes. Yes. One had two Nenes. One had two Derwents.
CB: Right. So this was a government contract.
JL: Yes.
CB: To examine laminar flows.
JL: A research. A government supported.
CB: So after that you get out. You’re the first person to use an ejector seat in serious operation.
JL: Yes. The Germans had got on of course during the war. They weren’t as good of course. I think they were operated by compressed air. But I think there were a quite a lot of German ejections.
CB: Were there?
JL: And I was the first of the allied side shall we say.
CB: In peacetime. So you injured your shoulder. What did you do after that?
JL: I was off flying for about a month and then I went to central, CME Central Medical Establishment in London and they gave me a going over and sent me home with a little piece of paper which said, “Fits, fits civilian MOS pilot but not to be exposed to the hazards of the Martin-Baker ejection seat.” And so shrieks of laughter at that. Still are. [laughs]
CB: An interesting point though in practical terms the seat is operated by a cartridge. What was the affect? The seat is operated by an explosive cartridge so what did the ejection itself do to your spine?
JL: Well I had already gone up to [Denham?] and got on the test rig and following that I had a little bit of pain in my tail. I mentioned this to my GP and explained what had happened. He said, ‘Well, I expect you bruised it a bit.’ But the pain didn’t go away. It wasn’t constant and so I ignored it. Then when I ejected they x-rayed me and they said that I’d suffered a compression fracture of the first and second vertebrae and what’s more this was the second time this has happened. So the same thing happened both times.
CB: Right.
JL: I think it’s quite common actually.
CB: Yes. It’s just the modern seats are rocket and they still have a sharp acceleration don’t they?
JL: Yes.
CB: So, ok. What did you do next then? Did you return to flying?
JL: Oh yes. I went to Armstrong Whitworth and started again. And well we went through a lot of productions the Sea Hawk, the Hunter 2 and 5, Hunter 7. We had [pause] God. Come on brain. Javelin.
CB: Oh yes. ‘Cause they were building all of these. Some contractors were they?
JL: Yes. I mean we took over. We took over the Sea Hawk complete. Design and everything.
CB: Oh right.
JL: But the others were just sub-contracts. The Hunter 2 and the 5 had Sapphire engines. We built all those.
CB: How long did all that go on?
JL: Well the Argosy came along 1959. And I participated in that for a while which wasn’t a very good aircraft at all. Didn’t have enough range for the RAF to start with. But Glosters closed down. Who else closed down? Avro. Avro’s closed down [pause] No they didn’t. Glosters closed down. Somebody else closed down and the Hawker Siddeley Group was sort of imploding rapidly and so I thought it time to go rather than just sit about and wait to be picked to be sacked. And so I went to the managing director and said I’d be happy to leave and that I had a suggestion that they see me through the necessary, considerable training to obtain an airline transport pilot’s licence and they happily agreed to that. They paid all my expenses. In all for about three months. I got that licence and they gave me a year’s salary and said thank you very much. And unfortunately I was, met another chap who’d got into crop spraying in Africa. Made a lot of money. And he talked me into joining him in the business but unfortunately he had a wife too many and he bought a house out of the business and things were going very wrong and I lost a lot of money and pulled out. And I needed a job and there was a job down here at Shoreham regional air maps. Doing air survey photography and map making. So I took that job to give me, keep me sane while I looked around for an airline job but the only airline job that came my way was flying a Dakota to Dusseldorf at night with the papers. I didn’t fancy that at all. I was well placed because the crewing manager at British United was a chap who’d been at Boscombe Down, Charles Moss and he was looking out for me. And nothing came along. This was in 1964. So I took this job and I got engrossed in the air survey business anyway and passed the point of no return age wise I think and I stayed there until I was sixty five.
CB: So looking back on your RAF career what was the most memorable point, would you say, of your activities?
JL: I think my first tour with that motley crew I had.
CB: In what way?
JL: Well we went everywhere together. Did everything together.
CB: Yeah.
JL: It was rather different with the second tour. We didn’t sort of mix socially so much.
CB: Didn’t you?
JL: Well I had good happy times but —
CB: When were you commissioned? In the first tour.
JL: In my first tour. Yeah. August 1941.
CB: Right.
JL: This was another little story. I was down in the dispersal one day and an airman came down and said, ‘Here. You’ve got to fill this in.’ [laughs] And it was an application form for a commission. So I thought I’d better fill it in which I did and I had to go to London for an interview and my crew, I went down by train late at night. My crew duly saw my off via the George Hotel and I was in a pretty fair state when I got on the train. Got to London in the blackouts. There was an air raid warning on. I had nowhere to go. I eventually found a dim light which was the Church Army or Salvation Army or something. A little hostel. So I went in there and they gave me a bed for the night. In the morning I never saw the proper toilet facilities. I just got, I just got dressed. I had a terrible hangover and went for my interview. I think it was actually Adastral House in Kingsway. Then went back to the squadron and carried on. And then we went on leave and I still had my car. If you had a car and you went on leave you had petrol coupons for the place you were going so obviously the best thing is to have a destination as far away as possible to get the most petrol. So I had the address of a friend in Shrewsbury and I just gave that as my address whilst on leave. Whilst I was on leave they sent a telegram to this address saying commission granted and never to return as pilot officer so I turned up not knowing a thing about this so I had to rush into Cambridge and get myself fitted for a uniform and rushed in again to put it on and went in as a sergeant and came back as a pilot officer. And my crew all came with me as usual and they marched in front demanding that everybody saluted me. [laughs]
CB: Sounds like a riot.
JL: Yeah.
CB: Didn’t work the same way with the Lancaster crew. Is that because you had two people join later?
JL: Well I had a ready-made crew. The commanding officer had gone off sick. He needed some surgery and I took over his crew which was a Wellington crew. And the navigator was a ex-Exeter prison jailer and he had, he had funny ideas. He used to take a .38 revolver with him on ops. Yeah. The wireless operator was, came from Dublin and surprisingly he was a teetotal. The original wireless op and the rear gunner both changed quite quickly having finished whatever they were on and so I had a sort of a scratch crew to start with and when we changed we changed on to Lancs we had two new members and we were all on happy good terms but we didn’t sort of go down the the pub as a gang as we did on the first tour.
CB: How many other officers in your crew? In that case. On the Lancasters.
JL: There were no officers except me in the first crew. The second crew [pause] I had two changes of navigator and they were both commissioned. The rear gunner in both cases both were commissioned. Just in the last legs I had a commissioned wireless op. A Canadian. Gordon Fisher. The rest were all sergeants.
CB: You had an unusually broad experience because you started early and did various other things. To what extent did you come across LMF?
JL: On 40 Squadron we had a chap. I can tell you his name can I?
CB: Ahum.
JL: [Hesketh?]
CB: Yeah.
JL: And all sorts of things kept going wrong with him. He did a lot of second pilot trips. I had my [unclear] [serves me right?] one time prior to going out on ops he retracted the undercarriage. Almost anything to stop him and he was eventually flying second pilot with the flight commander and that aircraft was seen circling on a point on the East Anglian coast well north off the point where we were supposed to stage through and it spun in and crashed and they were all killed including the flight commander. Creegan was it? And this chap Hesketh. You can’t help but think that Hesketh had something to do with that but why they were, they were about fifty miles north of where they should have been. The other one I only know by hearsay which was 12 Squadron. A crew ditched in the North Sea. The dinghy was upside down and they had to sit on the upturned dinghy for three days and they were rescued and of course they were hospital cases. Apparently for days afterwards when they squeezed [the flesh?] water came out. The wireless op I believe, this was all hearsay Flight Sergeant Rose and he was put back on ops far too soon. He wasn’t ready for it and he was whisked off. Presumably pronounced LMF. Which was very very very unkind. My experience of the RAF was that they were always very kind and compassionate to me.
CB: Well.
JL: Particularly Wing Commander Wood.
CB: Jo thank you very much indeed for a fascinating interview.
JL: I don’t think it was very good.
[Recording paused]
JL: One incident at 12 Squadron again. Lancs. We were right over the top of Hamburg a Junkers 88 went. We heard his engines.
CB: Did you?
JL: Straight over the top of us. Missed us by about ten feet I think.
CB: In the dark.
JL: In the dark.
CB: Yeah.
JL: Well in the dark but you could see quite a lot.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Quite a shock.
JL: Yes [laughs] if he’s close enough to hear the engines he’s too bloody near.
CB: Yeah. And you thanked your lucky stars.
JL: I had another one. I had a very good Australian navigator on 12 Squadron. Anyway, he had to miss an op for some reason or other and we were given a Canadian. A chap called Abrahamson. I’d never sort of met him till we got in the aircraft and the target was Essen. And we went off and by the time we got to the Dutch coast he wasn’t making any sense at all but fortunately the PFF were putting down markers at a couple of turning points and the night was absolutely gin clear. You could see everything. You could see the coast and rivers and I didn’t want to take issue with this Mr Abrahamson so I just carried on and we duly, I made the markers that PFF had put down. You couldn’t miss the target because they were marking that as well. Some duly did deliver the bombs and just flew home. Didn’t need any help flying home. We could see everything and of course when we got back we had to report everything to the squadron navigation officer. Mr Abrahamson was never seen again. By the time we got up in the morning he wasn’t there.
CB: Was he —
JL: Off the station. Where he went? Don’t know.
CB: Did you put that down to stress or just as an incompetent navigator?
JL: I’ve no idea. I’ve no idea. I didn’t know the chap. I hadn’t spoken to him.
CB: Right. Thank you.
[Recording paused]
CB: Wife died.
JL: Well [unclear]
CB: Right.
JL: Very sad. That’s right. We had a legal separation and she wanted to marry again so we did the divorce and then she died 1977.
CB: Right.
JL: I remarried and this wife went a bit berserk. I think she was almost certainly she was got onto drugs. She had her own car. Used to disappear into Brighton for days but she had her father who was a mouse living there and looked after my daughter Jenny and eventually she, well I divorced her and the next thing I knew she’d developed cirrhosis of the liver.
CB: Oh.
JL: And due to her very very peculiar behaviour she hadn’t any friends left at all. She was a very very sad case and she committed suicide.
CB: Right.
JL: In 1964. I’d just retired.
CB: A big strain.
JL: I was left with a daughter sixteen. Just doing her O Levels.
CB: Oh were you really.
JL: Fortunately she’s turned out absolute trumps.
WT: Good. Good.
CB: Excellent.
JL: And the son is fine too. So I have a son of seventy and a daughter forty nine and a loving and loyal family.
CB: Is Jenny married?
JL: She should be.
CB: Oh.
JL: I said, ‘Why don’t you get married?’ ‘What’s the point?’
CB: Oh right.
JL: One of those.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Jo Lancaster. Two
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-03-08
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ALancasterJO170308
PLancasterJO1501
Conforms To
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Pending review
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Description
An account of the resource
Jo Lancaster grew up in Cumbria and joined the Air Force as soon as he was able. After training as a pilot he flew a tour of operations with 40 Squadron from RAF Alconbury. He then became an instructor before his second tour flying Lancasters with 12 Squadron from RAF Wickenby. He then became a test pilot at RAF Boscombe Down. He continued to be a test pilot after the war and was the first person to eject from an aircraft in danger using a Martin-Baker ejector seat. In all he flew a total of more than 144 aircraft types.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
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.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Coventry
France--Brest
France--Saint-Nazaire
Germany--Hamburg
Scotland--Lossiemouth
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Warwickshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1945
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
02:00:18 audio recording
12 Squadron
150 Squadron
20 OTU
22 OTU
40 Squadron
aircrew
B-25
B-26
bombing
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
crewing up
Grand Slam
Lancaster
Me 109
Me 110
Meteor
mine laying
Mosquito
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Alconbury
RAF Boscombe Down
RAF Castle Donington
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Wickenby
RAF Wyton
recruitment
Spitfire
Tallboy
training
Walrus
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/551/8814/PLancasterJ1501.1.jpg
794d475655253509adf90821a41de268
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/551/8814/ALancasterJO150406.2.mp3
5eafd09ebb3a1d2459a7b55f8591b8a7
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
Lancaster, Jo
John Oliver Lancaster
J O Lancaster
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lancaster, JO
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. Two oral history interviews with John Oliver 'Jo' Lancaster DFC (1919 - 2019, 948392, 103509 Royal Air Force), photographs and six of his log books. Jo Lancaster completed 54 operations as a pilot with in Wellingtons with 40 Squadron, and after a period of instructing, in Lancasters with 12 Squadron from RAF Wickenby. He became test pilot after the war and was the first person to use a Martin-Baker ejection seat in an emergency.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Jo Lancaster and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-18
2017-03-08
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.
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 Jo Lancaster. Mr Lancaster was a pilot in various aircraft during World War Two and the interview is taking place at xxxx on April the 6th 2015. Apologies for the poor sound quality during various sections of this interview due to static on a tie clip microphone. Talk a little bit about that raid July the 24th 1941.
JL: Well at the time the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen were in the harbour at Brest. On that day the Scharnhorst made a run for it down the coast to La Pallice but the Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen were still in Brest and a number of Wellingtons, I think of 3 Group were ordered to carry out a daylight bombing raid on the harbour there. We were at Alcon, operating from Alconbury at the time. Near Huntingdon. And we were routed right down to the Scilly Isles. Then doubled back towards Brest and you could see a black cloud of flak smoke from quite a distance away. It was a beautiful, a beautiful clear day and we just had to barge straight in. There was, we only saw two ME109s, one of which went right through the middle and got severely shot up by everybody and the pilots baled out. Everybody claimed it of course but nobody knows who did it. But, anyway, we were in two vics of three. We [weren’t in company?] but our trio sailed through without too much damage. A piece of flak came through the windscreen alongside me and dropped on the floor which I still have and we’d used up a lot of fuel trying to keep formation with constantly altering the engine settings. And so, having, as I say, got away again out over back over the channel we and several others headed for St Eval in Cornwall and quite a number landed there. Many of them in various stages of damage. We’d had our hydraulic system knocked out but apart from flak holes we were intact.
AP: Did the searchlights sort of —?
JL: Well when that happened you were singled out for particular attention by the flak which happened to me several times. On one occasion it was right over the middle of Essen and did some violent evasive action and lost a lot of height and gained a lot of speed and finally outflew the searchlights.
AP: What was the evasive action? Did you corkscrew or did you dive?
JL: Well just various. Mainly sort of spiral diving but keep trying to keep a heading away from the searchlights all the time.
AP: And flying through the flak and the anti-aircraft again.
JL: Well there was nothing we could about that. We heard it and smelled it and when you got back you found lots of holes.
AP: Right. One of the things she was asking about was what it was like when you’re coming in on the final approach to your bomb run. You as the pilot. What are you doing? What’s the crew doing?
JL: I think you made yourself as small as possible. I just used to [unclear] and went in.
AP: So you were just taking orders from the bomb aimer. He was in control. Not the pilot.
JL: Yes. He would take over and he’d say. ‘Steady. Left. Left’ or ‘Right,’ and we would keep laterally level and try and make these small adjustments in heading until he was satisfied and then eventually he would say, ‘Bombs gone.’
AP: And then what?
JL: You felt the thud as they left and usually we had a camera aboard so they had to hold, hold the heading for a few, well about thirty seconds or more. I forget now. Until a camera had, the camera had flashed, had gone off, and then we were free to leave. On the Lancaster we had, usually had cookies and incendiaries. With the Wellingtons the target was usually the Ruhr. That was standard nine, five hundred pounders.
AP: Right. And what was the age? How old were you when you were flying? Can you say a little bit about how old you were? And your crew?
JL: In 1941 I was twenty two.
AP: And your crew. Could you say?
JL: Well, all much the same. I had a Canadian navigator, a Welsh wireless operator, a Canadian front gunner and a New Zealand rear gunner. The navigator, in the Wellingtons the navigator went forward to do the bomb aiming. Later on of course we had the bomb aimers on this, on the way back from Berlin. In a Wellington. And we were rather taken by surprise because you come down with the change in the wind over ten tenths cloud and we adjusted north and we came, we were flying back over Wihelmshaven and Emden and were getting shot at all the way through the clouds and then eventually there was a gap in the clouds and I could see, see through the clouds, the clouds across the causeway across the mouth of the Zuiderzee. And I think we were probably all looking at that and then an ME110 shot overhead and circled around and went into them and I went into a deep spiral dive and he tried to collar us and showed us a bit of [unclear] and I think he should have [unclear] went into the cloud and we never saw each other again so we don’t know what happened to him. In 1941, on a Wellington squadron such as 40 Squadron, each Wellington had its own ground crew. There was a fitter for each engine. That was his engine. And then there were two airframe fitters. And they were more or less permanently with the aircraft so we became very friendly with them. And on operational days they would do what they called an NFT — Night Flying Test and some of the guys would always come with us on that. They were very industrious and proud of their aeroplane.
AP: And other? Other people that you had to rely on? Was there? Can you say, talk about, some other people?
JL: The only people I can think of were the [lovely ladies?] in the parachute section which, on 40 Squadron our parachutes went to [unclear] RAF Alconbury had virtually no buildings at all. A couple of wooden huts and that was about all so all the things like parachutes and things were at Wyton which was our base station. I never went to the parachute section there but at Wickenby on 12 Squadron we had a parachute section there and it was always WAAFs who looked after the parachutes.
AP: OK. Any, any —?
JL: And we had WAAF drivers of course.
AP: Yeah. Ok. Any thoughts about the aeroplanes that you flew like the Wellington or Lancaster? A favourite or, you used to fly? Or —
JL: The Wellington is a well-designed aeroplane but it is grossly underpowered. When they finally put in decent engines in her. The Hercules instead of the Pegasus. It was a very good operational aeroplane.
AP: Right.
JL: But I think everybody loved a Lancaster.
AP: What was so special about it?
JL: I don’t know. It was viceless. It was doing, carried a big load, doing a good job and with the Wellingtons I had two complete engine failures and by the grace of God we were within easy distance of an airfield. On one occasion we took off on operations and the port engine started — oil started pouring out of it and eventually it stopped and we were able to, it was still fairly light and we just lobbed down into nearby Wyton. And the other one I was on in the, actually in the circuit at Wymeswold when I was an instructor at OTU and we were just able to go straight in from there because on the —
[Recording paused]
JL: Oh well. Yes. Well. I was, before the war I’d served an apprenticeship in Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft at Coventry and after the war I went to join Saunders Roe at Cowes but they didn’t have very much going on and I got a bit fed up with that and re-joined Armstrong Whitworth as a test pilot. There were three of us there Eric Frenton was a test pilot and another one — Bill Else, and they had, there was a lot of work going on. Amongst other things we had the AW52G which was a glider, a tail-less glider. Two thirds scale of the bigger versions of the AW52. There was two of those. One with Nene engines. One with Derwent engines. The Nene were more powerful. And the Nene engine one, when I went there, was out of action having the structure stiffened. And then it came out and had the limited speed increased by quite an amount and I was only on my third flight with it and the job was to explore the higher ranges, speed ranges and it’s rather difficult to explain technically but the controls were called elevons. They were combined elevators and ailerons. And in order to get them light enough for the pilot to control them manually they had what they called spring tabs which meant that the connection from the pilot’s control was actually, to the flying control was actually through a spring. And what happened was that while I was doing something like three hundred and twenty miles an hour, we didn’t use knots in those days and a flutter, what they called flutter set in and it became very very violent. Very very noisy. I anxiously estimated the frequency as one and a half cycles per second. The amplitude we don’t know. You could only guess at. It was probably six or eight feet as I was going up and down at that rate and I was rapidly disorientated and I thought the thing was going to break up anyway. But if it didn’t break up I was going to be unconscious so I decided to eject. A thing I’d never even anticipated before and I wasn’t in a very good state by then so I didn’t do the drill properly. I managed to jettison the canopy and I pulled the overhead blind down over my face which fired the seat. I should have put my heels on the, on the rest on the front of the seat which I didn’t do. I just was very lucky I did that because the aircraft had sort of spectacle controls and I think, as an afterthought, they realised that wasn’t very good combined with an ejection seat so they put in another system which jettisoned the hood and fired some cutters which, which disconnected the controls from the stick and I think you was just supposed to push the stick forward too. It was a bit of Heath Robinson system but I couldn’t do that because it was wired off anyway. Anyway, I got away with it with a lot of bruises on my shoulders and on my knees. I landed very badly. I thought I was going to land in a canal and tried to remember the drill we’d been given in the RAF but I only succeeded in making the descent worse by swinging. And when I landed I broke a chip off my shoulder bone and they took me away and x-rayed me and they said that I’d sustained a compression fracture of the first and second along the vertebrae and they said, ‘Not only have you done that but it’s been done before.’ And I have to say that it was in, I don’t remember the date. The 1st of January 1947. We had the SRA1 — that was at Saunders Roe — which has an ejection seat and we went up to Martin-Baker’s and went up on the test rig and after that I had a rather sore tail for a while. That must have been what it was. 30th of May 1949. And after all the kafuffle had died down on it I wrote to Sir James Martin. He wasn’t Sir James then. He was just James Martin to thank him and got a very nice letter in reply and also a custom made little wooden box which came through the post marked, “Explosives — danger” [laughs] which was delivered to Armstrong Whitworth. To me at Armstrong Whitworth. It contained a very nicely inscribed Rolex gold watch and [pause] I’m sorry am I —?
AP: That’s alright. No. That’s alright. Got to watch the microphone. Yeah. The watch. Yes.
JL: [unclear] In 1975 when I was living in the South. In West Sussex. I had a little bungalow with casement windows and some, one of the local villains I think, got in and took that watch and another one and several other small valuables and I presume that both watches had gone straight down to The Lanes in Brighton and by now would probably be melted down but — and just two years ago I was invited to go up to Martin-Baker’s and they showed me around, gave me lunch and I wondered what it was all about. Then they started asking me about my ejection and finally got on to the watch and eventually Andrew Martin produced from his pocket my watch. And the story is that they’d had an email from somebody in New York who had read the — it had my name on it and James Martin and somehow or other they put it together and connected it with Martin-Baker. Whatever company, I don’t know who it was in New York who went over or whoever it was contacted this chap who they said was a very shifty character and they bought the watch back. I don’t know for how much and they gave it back to me.
AP: That’s an amazing story.
JL: What happened then was that I didn’t really want the watch so I asked them to auction it but then they said instead of auctioning it we’ll put it in our company museum and we’ll put five thousand pounds in to the Bomber Command Memorial Trust. It applies to almost everybody. We usually crewed up completely at random and almost always within twenty four hours we were as thick as thieves.
AP: You relied on each other didn’t you?
JL: Loyalty all down the way.
AP: Strong teamwork and trust.
JL: Yes. I was with these two Canadians and a New Zealander. Yes. The two Canadians. I’d never met a Canadian before and I was mildly surprised that they sounded like the Americans I’d seen on the films. And I hardly knew where New Zealand was. But —
AP: I think it’s good to mention that it was an international crew wasn’t it? That they were from all over the Commonwealth.
JL: Yes.
AP: You had Canadians, British.
JL: Yes. And later on on the Lancaster squadron I had an Australian navigator.
[Recording paused]
JL: In the Wellington was to Stettin. That was a nine hours something. And the longest in the Lancaster was to La Spezia which is about sixty miles south of Genoa. A sea port. And that was, that was about nine and a half hours I think.
AP: You were the only pilot. Right?
JL: Yes. We did, we did carry a second pilot but he was just supernumerary. Usually he just stayed back in the astrodome helping to keep the, keep a lookout.
AP: Can you talk a bit about what it was like to fly so long? I mean did you eat anything? Drink. How did you survive on those hours?
JL: I don’t think I ever ate or drank anything until back in, back in safe area. In a safe area. I think most of us were the same. In those days everybody smoked and we sometimes smoked when we were below oxygen level which was ten thousand feet but we probably weren’t supposed to. We didn’t on operations anyway. Once again that would be when we were safe and nearly home.
[Recording paused]
JL: One long drag over France. And we had a thing called Mandrel which was a microphone in one of the engines to the wireless operator and he had, the wireless operators were given a recording of German night fighter RT traffic and they didn’t understand it but they could recognise it and I had a Canadian wireless op, Jordan Fisher, at that time and he was listening out on Mandrel and he was highly excited. He was apparently getting very good results. He could, he could tune in to one of these frequencies where the night fighters were operating and he was doing his Mandrel trick and they get very annoyed [laughs] Shouting.
AP: How did he use it? Did he block their signal? Or reduce it.
JL: Yes. Yes having identified the frequency he transferred the engine noise on that frequency.
AP: I see. So he could block their frequency.
JL: He was having the time of his life apparently [laughs]. Mandrel was a microphone mounted in to, actually in the port inner engine, the [strength of it?] the wireless operator, the wireless operators had been given some training to identify but not necessarily understand German night fighter RT traffic and they would listen out, looking for this RT traffic and when they found it they would tune in the transmitters to that frequency and then transfer the engine noise which blotted out everything and frequently made the night fighter pilots very cross.
[Recording paused]
Having completed a tour you then became a screened aircrew and you went to an OTU where you became an instructor in your particular aircrew job. As a pilot I went to Wellesbourne Mountford OTU and my job was conversion on to Wellingtons which are just circuits and landings, circuits and landings and not only in daytime but at night. And in the winter when I was there the night flying programme was divided into four three hours stints 6-9, 9 to12, 12 to 3 and 3 to 6 and you can imagine what it was like having to get up or be prepared to go down and be ready to start doing circuits and bumps at 3 o’clock in the morning.
AP: Yeah.
JL: It was bad enough at 12 o’clock. So I hated it. I wasn’t a very good instructor anyway. And then they started with these two one thousand bomber raids I was on. They started doing quite regular operations with screened, so-called screened aircrew at OTUs and I thought it was far better to be on a squadron if I had to do all that.
AP: Were you on, did you say a two thousand bomber raid?
JL: I was on the first two.
AP: Two thousand bombers in one raid? Or one thousand bombers?
JL: There were two one thousand bomber raids.
AP: Two one thousand bomber raids.
JL: May the, May the 30th and June the, June the 2nd I think.
AP: Could you say a little bit about what happened? I mean, was that Cologne?
JL: The first one was Cologne. The second one was Essen.
AP: Essen. And so you were flying Wellingtons.
JL: Yes. Wellesbourne Mountford OTU put up about twenty aircraft that night and we lost four. My aircraft still had the dual control in which made it very very difficult to get in and out because the entry was via a hatch under the nose. So in a hurry it would have been very awkward. And the aircraft were generally fairly clapped out. And on the way back I had a screened navigator and a screened wireless operator. And on the way back, when we got back over England the wireless operator came. Came up front and sat beside me. I think together we saw the oil pressure on the port engine just drop off to nothing and fortunately the wireless operator, he was familiar with Wellingtons, knew what had happened. It had run out of oil. We had a reserve oil tank down in the fuselage with a hand pump and he knew what to do immediately. He went scuttling back down. Started hand-pumping oil back in to the engine.
AP: That’s before you got to it.
JL: No. This was on the way back.
AP: On the way back.
JL: What I didn’t say — over Cologne we were quite high and I had two Canadian gunners. You know, they were students and they got very excited and wanted to spray their guns around [laughs]. I told them to sit quiet and keep a good lookout.
AP: What was the weather like on that night?
JL: Clear.
AP: So you had a good shot at them.
JL: Oh yes we could. We were late. Late on target and we could see it from miles away.
AP: It was already lit up.
JL: We were, we were more or less unmolested I think.
AP: A thousand bombers. Did you see the other ones around you?
JL: Oh yes.
AP: Can you say a little bit about what it was like?
JL: Yes. I saw them. Quite a lot. Yes.
AP: There were Lancasters, Halifaxes. Stirlings.
JL: Everything. Most of the ones I saw were Wellingtons.
AP: But you’re not in formation.
JL: No. No.
AP: Loose formation.
JL: Completely random.
AP: But you’re on your course and you’ve got aeroplanes.
JL: Yes. Had to try and keep an eye open. Very occasionally you’d hit the slipstream of one of them [laughs]. There’s one not very far away in front.
AP: So you had to keep a constant picture of that.
JL: Oh yes. There must have been hundreds of collisions we never heard about. Fatal ones.
AP: So when you arrived it was well and truly lit up. .
JL: Yes.
AP: Yeah.
JL: I don’t, I don’t remember actually being shot at.
AP: No? And then the other one was Essen.
JL: Yes. And that was a complete disaster because there was thick haze over the whole area and we just couldn’t see anything so I think we just let them go and came home.
AP: Right. Yes.
JL: Stood down for six weeks to convert. We were operational again on Lancasters on the 1st of January 1943.
AP: The operations that you did then. Can you say a bit about what you did?
JL: I think I did three mining operations. My first operation on a Lancaster was to Norway, to Haugesundfjord, and dropped, I think it was four, fifteen hundred pound mines in the fjord there. When we got caught out by searchlights and the gunners were able to reply and they, they won. Off Emden and the islands. We put a stick of mines there. And another one was at the entrance to St Nazaire harbour.
AP: Oh yeah. That was in France.
JL: Yes. That’s where we did, there’s an island, I think it’s called Belle ile and we had to do a timed run from Belle Ile. Went right up the estuary and let them go. I think the load was four, fifteen hundred pound mines. Parachute mines.
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 Jo Lancaster. 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
2015-04-06
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ALancasterJO150406
PLancasterJO1501
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.
Description
An account of the resource
After leaving school, Jo Lancaster was an aircraft apprentice with Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft Company in Coventry. After volunteering for the Air Force, he trained as a pilot and completed a tour on Wellingtons with 40 Squadron from RAF Alconbury. Following a period as an instructor at an operational training unit, he flew another tour of operations. After the war Jo became a test pilot and was the first man to eject from an aircraft in danger using a Martin-Baker ejection seat.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
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.
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Essen
Italy--La Spezia
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1943
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:30:15 audio recording
12 Squadron
3 Group
40 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
fitter airframe
fitter engine
Gneisenau
ground crew
Lancaster
Me 109
Me 110
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Alconbury
RAF Wickenby
RAF Wyton
Scharnhorst
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/487/8371/PButlerDWJ1602.1.jpg
1c0c36ea5b3b4bc79bf3758d968344d7
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/487/8371/AButlerDWJ160623.2.mp3
11e879c4cada4b9163a2cb09c3a2959f
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
Butler, David
David William Jack Butler DFC
D W J Butler
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Butler, DWJ
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Squadron Leader David Butler DFC (b. 1920).
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by David Butler and 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
JH: My name is Judy Hodgson and I’m interviewing David Butler today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We are at Mr Butler’s home and it is the 23rd June 2016. Thank you, David, for agreeing to talk to me today. Also present at the interview is Edna Butler, David’s wife. So, David, can you tell me when and where you were born and something of your early years?
DB: I was born in Cambridge, in a place called Cherry Hinton, on the 27th of April 1920 and I lived in Cambridge and went to school in Cambridge, and the local school, and I joined the RAF then [unclear] in later years, on January the 11th 1940, I can remember that quite clear and I did my training in various places and was later posted out, and served in France during the war. And on one night, we got warned the Germans were coming in the end of Reims, where I was stationed, in Reims and we were warned that the Germans were coming in the [unclear], and so we made a very hasty retreat out and went so we couldn’t go north because the bomber, er, the beaches were packed, so we had to go right across to Saint Lazare and we ran out of petrol and we had to walk forty miles to the coast We then got on to a Polish [unclear], wet knees up to our thighs and we got taken to Southampton in a Polish boat, and from then onwards, it was back to RAF stations and that sort of thing until I went on various courses, and I became an instructor at aircrew receiving centre in London and had to go down to Lords and collect sixty cadets [unclear], train them and have fun and games with them and whilst I did their selection boards to become pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, air gunners and that sort of thing and I later became a trainee with aircrew. I volunteered for aircrew because they were getting a little short of aircrew with the amount of losses that they were entertaining, and so I took a six-month, the quickest route [unclear] to an RAF station was as an air gunner, so I took a six-month course as an air gunner and was fortunate in, with another friend we passed top of the course, and we were interviewed by a very senior officer, and in my log book it registered that the very keen and smart cadet [unclear] will be well worth the commission, so I felt very chuffed about that Did my training and then was finally posted on to crew up to an RAF station at 12 Squadron at Wickenby, flying Lancasters, and we did all our training on Lancasters, and from then onwards we did our bombing trips out to various places and I [pause] completed about four or five bombing crews to various places, and if you want to know what places they were my log book will tell you, er, did you want to -
JH: If you’d like to say the ones that there were.
DB: I did a total of [pause] thirty trips but unfortunately, on one occasion they, I was taken to hospital ‘cause, with a very high temperature and er, it was very, I was very close to sort of not completing [pause] -
JH: Right.
DB: And my crew were posted with another chap in my place, who had just come back from leave, and they went off to Nuremburg and the chap came in the following morning to tell me that my crew were missing and they’d all been shot down outside Nuremburg .
JH: Gosh.
DB: So the CO said, now I can either go back and be re-crewed, but if the present crew where the chap was missing is prepared to take you, I said that will be fine, I would much rather continue my flying period, and so I finished off my tour with a new captain and a new crew which was super, and we did thirty trips including ten trips, bombing trips on Berlin.
JH: Really.
DB: Which was a rather lengthy tour, er, trip something seven or eight hours there and back and particularly in the winter, it was ruddy cold [laughs] so, but nevertheless we finally made, we had one or two little unfortunate enterprises of firing at Luftwaffe aircraft which, who dared to come up and see us, getting caught in flak, getting caught in searchlights but eventually we made it, by the grace of God and a good pilot flying the aircraft.
JH: What position were you in the aircraft?
DB: I selected which one and I was the rear gunner, which was well known to be a hot spot!
JH: [laughs].
DB: Having met a load of Luftwaffe pilots some years later, they did say, we always used to try to shoot up the rear gunner first, so I used to say ‘thank you very much’ [laughs] so, but we did finish. I then, I then took a gunnery leader’s course, did some specialised courses and run a lot of other gunners through the course and then I volunteered to do another tour of operations, and I was crewed up with six other crew members and, er, one of whom was a New Zealander, and a top line pilot, and we went to a place called RAF North Creake which was 12 Squadron. My previous squadron was 12 Squadron and this at North Creake was 171 Squadron, so we knew, we used to know that quite well and we managed to survive to the end of the war, another twenty five trips altogether including a number of little incidents involving Luftwaffe aircraft so there we go! So that really is a quick summary of my flying days [laughs].
JH: Okay, and what did you do then, immediately after the war, were you still in the RAF?
DB I stayed, I stayed in the RAF and I made a career of it, and I was fortunate enough to be offered a full time commission and I did so and got posted out to various places, er, to Egypt, I was in Iraq when Gaddafi had his rebellion, and we did have a tank roll up to our RAF El Adem in those days and, er, we got to know the Iraqi captain very well and he would literally sign anything for half a bottle of whisky [laughs].
JH: [laughs].
DB: A great chap, so we went all over and we were, I was allocated a bungalow in Tripoli with my wife and of course she was all stopped out, so she didn’t get out at all so that’s, and I was posted one or two other places, er Aleppo. Oh I was posted to Jordan, I got to know the Jordanese people and we got to, er, we made arrangements to have our, er, the runway lengthened and we had a very nice big, after when it was all over, we had a very, very nice time with a big marquee with the local Arabs, which was all very exciting, and then I got, I was then eventually posted back to England and became a SAR officer.
JH: Where was that at in England? Where were you posted to?
DB: A very good question. Do you know I can’t remember the name of it, it’s down south somewhere, I can’t, oh [pause] can’t remember the name, no sorry, name’s gone, old age has finally -
JH: Is it?
EB: Was it Headley Court?
DB: Head, no, no, I -
EB: Lionel?
DB: Oh, I did a tour at Headley Court which was an RAF medical station, and that was down south [pause] and, er, I was the adjutant there and I got posted all over the place from there, so it was quite a career one way or another.
JH: So when you were posted, you mostly went off on your own, it wasn’t something that your wife could go with you?
DB: No, no, then my wife joined me wherever I got.
JH: She did, right, yes, yes.
DB: And then, that was from 19-, oh, about 1940, 1950, I suddenly reached the age when it was retirement age, so I wondered what it was like to apply for a job and be told ‘you’re not what we’re suited for’ or ‘you’re too old for this’ or ‘you’re too old for that’, so I applied for a job at Girton, my home town, at Girton College [pause]. And, but I thought my family, my father still lived there and I thought it would be rather nice to be, and he was concerned that, concerned also with the local St John’s College as well so I thought it would be rather nice if I could join him in one of the colleges. Anyway I had five interviews by various women, because Girton College was a woman’s college in those days, and the job vacancy was for a steward and a junior bursar, and I applied and much to my surprise, after five interviews, I was offered the post and so I went to, er, and lived a month at the academics. And not being, and not having ever gone to college myself, I was given college status which meant that I had to become a Master, and I finally went to the Senate House in Cambridge and received a Master’s degree, an honorary one [laughs] and I said to the [unclear], do I have to take, my service means in the RAF you have to earn it and pass exam to get there, this I feel a little cheated getting my Master’s degree and I got all the paperwork to go with it and so I was with them for about three or four years and then I got another job with a local firm [pause] to manage the director’s office, which was rather pleasant. And I retired then and took up local work with the British Legion, and did a lot of work with the British Legion in Cambridge, in Histon and was finally elected as their president of British Legion and I’ve been their president since 2008, so I go to all their meetings, I don’t miss a meeting and I find it very honourable to go to all memorials, the meetings where they all have meetings so really, that’s a very brief summary of my career outside the RAF and inside the RAF.
JH: Yes, yes.
DB: There we go [pause], forgot to mention that I was, I transferred from the admin branch in the RAF because they did, the flying ceased and I then went on an admin course, and then I did an admin course for about two or three years and then they ran short of catering officers, and I thought a new career, and so I went on a six-month catering course and started from start to finish to be taught about all things in the RAF about catering, which was a wonderful course, very, very, very, and had the pleasure of meeting so many other caterers and posted to so many other RAF stations as the catering officer and became a staff officer in the catering branch which was very nice to have, so [pause] that’s another part of my RAF career besides flying and er, [pause] -
JH: It was very varied actually wasn’t it, you covered quite, you know, a lot of -
DB: Yes, after my service I had the pleasure of being invited to a German Luftwaffe gathering in Germany, and so I went with twelve other last Lancaster aircrew and went to the Luftwaffe gathering, and had the pleasure of meeting all the chaps that used to fire at us and, er, miss us thank goodness. But they were an incredible bunch of people and I’ve got some, I’ve got a couple of photographs of them here if you should want to have a look at them and show you -
JH: Yes, definitely.
DB: And later on, we invited them to come to Cambridge and we took them all round Cambridge and whilst they were here, I got them to sign my old flying log book and in it [pause] [background noise], there we go, that’s a photograph of all their signatures, all the Luftwaffe pilots that used to fire at us when we was flying over Germany.
JH: That’s fabulous, isn’t it.
DB: Yes, isn’t it.
JH: What a record .
DB: And I don’t know of another log book which has got those names in, unusual. I got very friendly with one of them, Martin Chivers, [then pronounces Chyvers] and he’d only, his log book indicated that he’d only shot down fifty-two of our English bombers, all written down, and he says ‘can I see your log book’, [adopts accent] so I showed him mine, and he said ‘you did fifty-five? how come I missed you!’ [adopts accent], [laughs], I said the simple reason, when we were, I were a target, very near a target, I used to get my pilot to jink which is -
JH: Sway?
DB: And we could see underneath if there was anybody there. ‘Ah’, he says, ‘you were one of those’, I said, ‘why is that’, he said, ‘because if we come across anybody was doing zinking, [adopts accent] we went to somebody who didn’t do that.’ [laughs]
JH: Wow.
DB: So that was very good and we’ve been sending one another Christmas cards, I didn’t get one from him last year so I assume he’s gone, but I got two photographs of him and his big [unclear] was very close to Goebbels, so that was a very interesting little incident, so there we go. All part of a peculiar little career of one’s life. Back on some of our bombing missions, the flying, the Lancaster was a very manoeuvrable aircraft, in an attack or getting out of searchlights, it was very manoeuvrable, and the skipper was able to manoeuvre the aircraft very quickly and get us out of trouble. And on numerous occasions he was able to do this, a very, very good pilot, Adams his name was, Flight Lieutenant Adams, very, very good and on my second tour, we were less with having to go and set up screens of, wireless screens to allow the bomber stream to go through these screens, in order to bomb where we’re going to bomb. And getting those into position was always a very tricky position, and getting caught in searchlights was a very tricky position, and being able to get out, Bill could, our skipper was a New Zealander and was five foot nothing, but he could throw that aircraft about anywhere. It was a very sluggish aircraft, the old Halifax and, er, I remember one being caught in some flak on one occasion, and we had the engine catch on fire and we had to get down very, very low level and fly back to England, and we got back home, with the engine blew up again so we had to find the nearest air place to get in, and by some stroke of luck, Bill said, ‘is Waterbeach down below?’ which is just outside Cambridge. I said ‘oh, home town!’ so we managed to get down and we got, we asked permission to land, we were given permission to land [unclear] and we down the whole length of the runway and tipped up at the end and I was still sitting in the back in the turret so, and I had to get out quickly, and getting out of a rear turret was extremely difficult, and I had to put my hands behind my back, open the doors and literally fall, grab my parachute which was hanging up but I didn’t get the parachute, we didn’t need it fortunately, and fell out backwards and damaged my ankle. And all of the crew thought it was highly amazing and most amusing because I was the only bloke that was injured [laughs], busted me ankle! So there we go, so that’s another little story about the second tour.
JH: And when you were in the Lancasters, were you always a rear gunner?
DB: I was always, I volunteered to do the rear gunner in our new crew and I volunteered to do the rear gunner’s spot on the Lancaster, and I’ve got some photographs I can show you of a rear turret which will give you an idea of what it was like, getting in was difficult. I was, very little room but you could, but knowing every part of a turret was essential, you knew where all the stops were. If you had a stoppage, you knew how to clear it and how to, but you, and that was in the dark, you would never have any lights in the, bit of moonlight if you were lucky, but generally speaking you, I used to get stoppages in, and I had to find the stoppage and knowing where the parts were and guiding me, the turret you would guide it round to the left or to the right by power and hydraulics and it was extremely difficult [unclear] and very cold. My thighs used to get frozen and I used to carry with me a tin of orange juice to drink coming back and it used to get frozen up, so I used to have to tuck it in my flying suit to soft it down a bit, and I never got out of the turret once, I never had to get out in a hurry once so we, so we did thirty trips .
JH: That’s extraordinary, isn’t it.
DB: in the Lancaster, a total of thirty bombing trips and that was bombing over the target, we never once let them go free. We had the bombing, the bomb aimer had a special area where he was told to drop the bombs and this he did, and it was a [pause], flak was always a problem over targets. It used to come up and flak and when we used to get back to the squadron, the mechanic used to come back ‘you’ve got seventeen holes in your body this week’ or ‘you’ve got one’, yeah, but I had one, I had a bit of flak through the side of my turret on one occasion but, er, that smashed the window but that was all right, no problem.
JH: I presume there was great elation when you actually came back, you were very elated when you got back?
DB: Er -
JH: Or quiet?
DB: Not really, we took it very much in our way, our main thing when we got back was going down to the briefing room and having a mug of coffee with a little drop of brandy in it, but nobody supplied the brandy, we had to take that ourselves, but we had a cup of coffee which was very good. On every trip, we had to be interviewed and record what happened on our trips, it was quite a lengthy operation before we were able to go and have breakfast in the, and occasional we used to get an extra egg from the people who didn’t get back and there, we always felt very sad when we knew the people that had been shot down.
JH: I’m sure.
DB: We felt they were missing, and we used to raise our glasses and drink their health and that was it. Some we knew that were made prisoner of war, others were killed, my own crew were all killed and [pause] if I may just add a little story to this [pause], some years after I retired from the RAF, I had a message from a gentleman named Tommy Cass, whose nephew was the air gunner that took my place when I was in hospital, and he says ‘can I come and talk to you’. So we got together and apparently he found out where that aircraft had been shot down in Germany and he went to Germany, and he tracked down the area and the local police force which found it, and they actually found the pilot, the Luftwaffe pilot that had shot the aircraft down, and made a big story of it in the local press. And I have, and he gave me a copy of [sneezes], oh excuse me, [everyone laughs], [sneezes again] and I have actually got in my little side entry here a copy of that report, amazing, so that was a very interesting interview from the chap that was the uncle of the chap that took my place. And [pause], they, and I actually got photographs of the graves of my old crew, in fact there’s, in the local German report there were three bodies picked up on the edge of the village and the three names were the three of my crew and I, you can’t imagine how I felt.
JH: No, no.
DB: There but by the grace of God, I should have been.
JH: Yes, mmm.
DB: I think they were saving me up so that when I go off to Hell [everyone laughs], the old big chap, big devil will be waiting for me downstairs, ‘Butler, I’ve been waiting for you, now we’ll have a good night out together!’ [everyone laughs], that’s my little story that is, yes.
JH: That’s fabulous.
DB: Oh I can spend hours telling you about the trips but it’s, it was a trip that had to be done and so many that didn’t come back, by the grace of God I still wonder why so many of us got through our thirty trips.
JH: Yes, that’s quite something isn’t it, quite something.
DB: Wonderful, wonderful, even now you meet them and they say ‘hello’ and it’s, you can’t remember their faces but you could remember particularly. I can’t go to any of the bomber command reunions now, I find it’s too much, er, hanging around and waiting, but I still meet them if, particularly I have two of them that I meet on a Monday at Tesco’s! [laughs] and we have a little chat.
JH: That’s lovely.
DB: Very rare about the war, we don’t talk about ops, just ‘how are you, ok?, how you’re getting on, how’s everybody’, just a general chit-chat so, I was very fortunate, er [pause]. After I did my first tour, I did receive the Distinguished Flying Cross which was a great honour for me, the only sad thing was I was hoping to go down to the Palace to get it presented, but there were so many of them being awarded, getting through it, that I was not invited but I did get a letter from the King to say congratulations and it’s hanging up on the wall! [laughs].
JH: Oh yes.
DB: Leave it up there love, leave it up, oh yes.
EB: That’s it, I like to see it.
DB: [reading] ‘I greatly regret I am unable to give this person the award you so [unclear], I will now send it with my congratulations, signed George RI [laughs].
JH: What an honour, that’s lovely, yes.
DB: Buckingham Palace, so I’ve had a little letter from Buckingham Palace, yes.
JH: As you say, it’s a shame you weren’t able to receive it personally.
DB: Yes, I didn’t write back and say thank you [everyone laughs], I still wear it, I wear it on occasions, oh we had a parade the other day which was to put, get a new banner and we took [background rustling], oh that’s the old Lancaster [pause], and that’s the photograph of the parade which was interesting [background noise].
JH: So when was this, just the other?
DB: Last Sunday.
JH: Really? Where was this at, where was the parade?
DB: Oh the parade was at St Andrew’s church in the village.
JH: In the village, right, yes you must be very proud when you’re wearing the medal.
DB: Yes.
JH: When you were actually flying the operations, did you have to keep going up day after day, was there a break, you know, if you went on an operation did you -
DB: No, no, no.
JH: Did you -
DB: You just carried on, whenever there was an op on, you may have a break of three or four days, perhaps a week, but then perhaps you had two or three in a short space of time.
JH: And what were you actually doing while you were on the break then, when you weren’t -
DB: Oh checking your guns, and catching your, checking your turret, making sure it was all working because it was essential for it to be working properly, er, that in an attack the, the chap that I made friends with flew 110, FN 110’s and his method of attack was to fly from the ground, up underneath the aircraft because they had upfiring guns in their Luftwaffe aircraft and he used to position himself under and fire at the bomb bay and the engines and that’s how he managed to shoot down fifty-two bombers. Quite a character, he knew what he was doing [pause]. After the war I was very fortunate in being taken in the current Lancaster for a trip out and we went round the runway, and when we got back from the runway I was able to sit in the rear turret like I used to, knowing where everything was as if it was yesterday, knowing about the gunneries, the handles for this and the stops for that, knowing exactly where everything was. I got out and the skipper said, ‘how was that?’, I said it was like a dream come true, I said sitting in my rear turret, I said ‘do you realise that you’ve got a piece of turret missing?’, he said ‘turret missing?, what do you mean?’, I said ‘there’s a piece of your turret that is absent’, he said ‘what is that?’, I said ‘it’s the dead man’s handle’. He said ‘what on earth’s a dead man’s handle?’, I said ‘if we got shot up during the war through flak or Luftwaffe and we lost our hydraulics to the turrets which meant we couldn’t turn the turret, the dead man’s handle was on the left hand side and we used to click it into space and turn it to which way we wanted to get out quick’, ‘ooh’, he said, ‘I will have to look for one of those!’ [laughs] and I don’t think they’ve yet found one! [laughs].
JH: And this was at East Kirkby was it, the East Kirkby runway?
DB: Yes, yes, somewhere like that, yes lovely, well there we go, well I’m glad I found you a Luftwaffe pilot!
JH: Yes, that’s lovely [laughs].
DB: All the comments we’ve had in the past about bombing of Dresden and scattering bombs around it, I feel quite hurt that we should be criticised for the action that we took. Prior to our trip to Dresden which is in my log book on the certain date, er [pause], we were briefed as we always used to have before a bombing trip, we were briefed to what was going to happen there, we were briefed that there were a lot of German troops stationed around there, and the Russians were coming into it and there were at least three other Luftwaffe factories in that area so we didn’t feel quite guilty when we bombed Dresden, and we went into Dresden. We arrived late and the big fire which was reported in the papers, we arrived when it was going at full strength and that was when we dropped our bombs in the middle of it, and we got caught in some searchlights and the flak but we made it through to the other side, but I have no guilt complex whatsoever of bombing Dresden, nor do I have any guilt complex about bombing Berlin ten times. I have no guilt complex about bombing any German cities whatsoever, they were our enemies, the number of people that they had killed off-hand throughout their marches to all these wonderful old countries we knew of, that’s it, I have no guilt, that’s how I feel about our bombing of Germany.
JH: Yes, yes.
DB: So that’s on one trip, Berlin was always a heavy place to bomb, it took us one, it took us something like an hour to get from one side of Berlin to the other and that was always full of flak and searchlights and [pause] -
JH: I mean, looking back, you must think how lucky you were to survive.
DB: I still wonder and I still think it was the old devil looking after me, I’m quite convinced of it, looking after me! A wonderful period in my lifetime, that there are occasions when I tend, at ninety-six, to forget little items these days, not as flowing with memory as I used to be which is annoying for me, not being able to walk as easy as I did but it’s all wonderful memories because I’m so pleased I lived through it, I have no guilt [unclear] at all.
JH: No, I mean you obviously had wonderful camaraderie with your fellow colleagues at the time, your crew.
DB: Oh the crew that I flew with were wonderful, wonderful people, all, the bomb aimer was accurate, the pilot was superb, the engineer knowing what to do, the mid-upper firing his guns and keeping us safe, wonderful team of people we were, all seven of us and [pause] I, as far as I know, I am the last remaining member of two crews, having lost my first one so sadly who were lovely people, but now the other thirteen members have now left me on my own. I’m not very pleased about that! [laughs], not very pleased about that! Wonderful period.
JH: And did you have, after you I know you’d lost your first crew, then was the pilot then with you all of the rest of those operations? The second one?
DB: Oh we had one pilot for one crew, for one tour, he did thirty and he went off and did some other things, I don’t know what they all did, er.
JH: But you always flew with that pilot.
DB: I always flew with that pilot for thirty trips.
JH: Wow, right.
DB: And the same on my second tour, I flew with him for twenty five trips, every pilot, because they knew who you were, what you did, what you were capable of as well [pause].
EB: Well, did you not have to be accepted by the crew of your second trip?
DB: Oh yes, yes they accepted me quite well but they knew, of course, that their rear gunner had been, he’d put, he was the first chap back from his leave when I was missing, they had, there was a full crew requirement on all the aircraft and so they took this chap who’d just come back from leave in my place in the rear turret with my old crew. I didn’t know that, I didn’t know who he was, I never met him, I didn’t know of him so I, er [pause], you can’t imagine how I felt when I knew, I felt like death warmed up, as if it was, he had taken my place and didn’t come home and he was missing, they were missing for some time before they were declared shot down, as his nephew found out that they’d been. And it was interesting to read the, an old pilot’s report on how he shot the aircraft down, it was on its way back from Nuremberg and Nuremberg was a very heavily defended city for flak and guns, and it was probably that that brought, I don’t know what it was brought down, whether it was a, I have a feeling that it was a Luftwaffe pilot that brought it down who gave me his report on how he shot it down [pause] and I got the report of him in my papers here somewhere. I never thought I could have got that out unless you read it but [unclear] so I’m glad I’ve found [background noise] my old friend there! [laughs], he put on a little bit of weight when I met him [laughs] but he got the iron cross, two iron crosses which is one of the top.
JH: Oh, awards for the Germans.
DB: [pause] handsome lad!
JH: And obviously through all this time your wife, then you had met him, did you say, in the 1940s?
EB: Oh yes we met, we met in 1940.
DB: She didn’t know what I did when I went down to London because I’d met her and we then parted.
EB: Yes, I didn’t hear anything from him for quite a while, did I?
DB: No, it must, ‘40, the end of about, the beginning of ’41, I got posted down to London, ‘41, ’42. It was down at London when I volunteered to become aircrew. I then went through all my training and it was 1943 when I got crewed up and ‘44 when I finished my first tour and about ’44, ’45, I’d received, I’d been promoted to flying officer, I’d got my gong up with my aircrew badge which I didn’t have when I first met Edna, and I was a young flying officer so when I first met Edna I was just an ordinary AC plonk [laughs].
EB: Yes! [laughs].
DB: And so I reverted from being an AC plonk to a young flying officer with a badge up and a medal up, so I thought ‘ooh’, and I was posted to a station four miles down the road from where Stafford operated and I was, I used to borrow a bicycle, go from the Officers’ Mess into Stafford and I said I wonder what it’s like to go and knock on the door to an old girlfriend and see what she’s like, so I duly arrived at Blackiston Street, remember the name of the road?
EB: Yes.
DB: Knocked on the door and says, ‘hello, oh surprise, surprise’ and we went together ever since.
EB: Well, I used to work at the Admiralty because when the Admiralty was down in Coventry, when Coventry was bombed, they moved it all up to one of the new schools that had just been built in Stafford on the outskirts, so I had, I and my sister both went to work there and we were there and when I came from there on the bus one Saturday from work down to, I used to get off outside the cinema and who should be standing there but this one! Absolutely flabbergasted, I said -
DB: Well, of course.
EB: ‘What are you doing here?’
DB: I felt [unclear] in my glory at being commissioned and badges up and medals up [laughs].
EB: Yes, and from then on -
DB: I, I really felt the bee’s knees as you can just imagine, how you would feel at that and I was only [pause] -
EB: You weren’t very old, were you?
DB: No, I was about twenty-four.
EB: Yes.
DB: Beautiful.
EB: Full of himself.
DB: And I’m still, and I’m still beautiful [laughs].
EB: [laughs].
JH: [laughs] of course!
EB: And everything went from there.
DB: Yes, I always tell my wife, never mind my lovely one, you’re still beautiful and she still is!
JH: Absolutely.
EB: He got on very well with my stepmother, didn’t you?
DB: We got on like a house on board, yes.
EB: He’d got a motorcycle and I wouldn’t go on it, because when you went round the corners I was frightened you see, but Mother used to go on the back, oh she never used to worry, did she?
DB: I was off, yes, I retired to Stafford.
EB: And then you went on the council.
DB: I got on the council, and then I was offered a commission because they ran short of officers in the RAF, they wanted specialised [unclear] officers so I was offered a permanent commission. So I said I was a job in Her Majesty’s Government, tax office for a short while, so I said ‘I’m off’ and so we, I went back into the RAF and -
JH: What year was that?
DB: That would be ’48, something like that, ’47, yes.
EB: Yes.
DB: ‘47 yes, about three years afterwards, came out then went back in again and then spent thirty-two years in it and I still miss the RAF, used to enjoy the RAF, enjoy, splendid place, splendid people. Ah well, there you go
EB: So, so that’s what he misses now, don’t you, you really do miss -
DB: Yes I do
EB: Lots of parts of the RAF life really
DB: Yes, that’s, you can’t have it always
EB: It’s just memories now, David
DB: Yes, yes, difficult remembering memories too sometimes. I was trundling along telling you something and then I couldn’t remember the end of it [pause], but then it flashed back again, a bit disjointed our little chit-chat I think somewhere.
JH: I think it’s been -
DB: A little bit fed in
JH: Yes, but that’s -
DB: Is there anything that I can broaden for you to give you a little bit more information, is there anything you’ve fancied I ought to tell you?
JH: [laughs] well
DB: Is there anything you, memorabilia-wise I could tell you?
EB: I think you’ve told it almost everything
DB: I’ve told you what it’s like sitting in a turret, I’ve told you about one or two other -
JH: Yes, absolutely
DB: Attacks that we had, and we completed, we mentioned what the Luftwaffe, telling the pilot to jink, we got that in about telling the pilot to jink
JH: Yes
EB: Yes
DB: Got that in
JH: Yes, no, I think we’ve fairly comprehensive
DB: There some little bit about something, exciting ones [laughs]
EB: I think you’ve covered almost all the -
DB: ‘course you’ve been sitting there as well, you’ve listened.
EB: Yes
DB: This lass has heard it all over again, she’s heard it so many times now she can even tell me the stories!
EB: I could write the book meself!
DB: You could write , I did start writing a book and after the first chapter I got fed up with it, ‘oh to hell with it’, I never bothered, never bothered.
EB: Well, I think you thought that so many people had already written -
DB: I’ve got books here about air gunners and what have you so, all with their funny stories and they’ve got lots of stories that I’ve never seen or heard of.
JH: Well, you all have something to say, don’t you, I mean, you know, in fairness so -
DB: I used to like to fly in the Lancaster, wonderful, I had the pleasure of flying my son in an aircraft, he’s got his own aircraft, and he took me up one day and said, ‘here you are, fly it!’ and I did and I said ‘star, we’re diving starboard, go!’ [laughs]. But I used to enjoy giving other pilots who used to, we used to get Spitfires and other single-engine flights doing practice attacks on us so that we knew what was coming and how to avoid them, what was the best evasive action and I worked out one or two good manoeuvres which I used to get the Spitfire doing, and they used to say, ‘sod you, I’m off!’ [laughs] and they used to dive like that away from us.
JH: When was this then, what -
DB: In between bombing trips.
JH: Right.
DB: So that we could practice and get the other people, and it was my job in the rear turret to give evasive action command to the skipper because I could, I was a better [unclear], because I could see him coming up, the mid-upper could see coming down, and I could see him coming down, and I could see him, being in the turret gave me a much better view.
JH: Right, so that was quite important then, position.
DB: Yes, if I saw anything I used to say to the skipper, ‘I’m going to give him a little burst, skip’, ‘okay’, because if I saw anything, because seeing [emphasis] a fighter in the dark you couldn’t, except moonlight. You could see a bit, depends on where he was, you could see movement, you might see a little bit of engine combustion but generally speaking you didn’t, the only thing you did, you saw was some red hot bullets coming over the top of your turret or pinging your turret. That was the only thing you saw and then you knew you’d got problems and I always used, if I saw anything coming up that was, I always give him a ‘dive to starboard, go, go, go’ [shouts] and he used to dive to starboard, dive to port whichever, if the fighter pilot was this side and he was coming up, I always used to give a ‘dive to starboard, go’, that meant the skipper would put the aircraft down like that and present a crossing speed, you passed aircraft much quicker than you would do if you started, ‘cause he could then follow you so you had to.
JH Yes, cuts across.
DB: You had to be on the ball to make sure that he couldn’t follow you and shoot at you, it was essential [emphasis] you gave him the right order, so you had to, you had to be on the ball when you first saw and you didn’t have a lot of time when you first saw the chap.
JH: So the pilot was relying on you an awful lot?
DB: Oh yes, very much so that you gave him the right [pause] -
JH: instructions.
DB: Yes, oh we never got shot down so that was [laughs].
EB: Mind you-
JH: You must’ve been good! [laughs]
DB: Must’ve helped!
EB: There was a lot of rear gunners lost their lives, wasn’t there David?
DB; Oh yes.
EB: Because they used to attack the rear gunner before anything else really.
DB: I suppose so.
EB: There was quite a lot, a lot of them that got killed wasn’t there.
DB: Yes [quietly], a long time ago.
EB: So you have to count your blessings my love, don’t you?
DB: Yes, and I still think you’re beautiful! [everyone laughs].
EB: This is the flannel I have to get from being in the Air Force! [laughs].
JH: Well, I would like to thank you, David, for allowing me to record this interview today and thank you both very much.
EB: It’s been a pleasure.
DB: But I’m rather sad that I (unclear).
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 David Butler
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Judy Hodgson
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-23
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AButlerDWJ160623, PButlerDWJ1602
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
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01:02:27 audio recording
Contributor
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Davy St Pyer
Vivienne Tincombe
Description
An account of the resource
David Butler, DFC, was born in Cherry Hinton in April 1920 and joined the Royal Air Force on the 11th January 1940, serving in France at Reims as the Germans advanced. After walking some distance, he was evacuated back to England on a Polish boat and arrived in Southampton.
He tells of how he was hospitalised with a very high temperature, and how his replacement and his crew were lost over Nuremburg.
He was posted to 12 Squadron at Wickenby, flying in Lancasters as a Rear Gunner, and then he was posted to 171 Squadron at North Creake.
David tells of his scraps with the Luftwaffe and meeting some Luftwaffe Pilots at the end of the war and he tells of meeting those pilots who were firing at him.
Made a career in the Royal Airforce and served in Egypt, Iraq and Jordan as well as completing administration courses and serving at other Royal Air Force Stations including the Royal Air Force Medical Station at Headley Court as an Adjutant.
After the war, got a job at Girton College and became President of the Royal British Legion in Cambridge.
David completed a total of 55 Operations, 30 on his first tour of duty and then completing 25 operations on his second tour.
12 Squadron
171 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
Distinguished Flying Cross
Lancaster
military ethos
military service conditions
perception of bombing war
RAF North Creake
RAF Wickenby
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/480/8363/ABrooksR151029.2.mp3
d0d059fc3e408586027f57552f30d5d2
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Brooks, Edward
Edward Brooks
E Brooks
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Brooks, E
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Rita Brooks. Widow of Flight Lieutentant Edward Brooks DFC, DFM who flew operations with 12 and 460 Squadrons.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by Rita Brooks and 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
AS Right we’re in business. We’re ready to start. Ok, thank you.
RB Right. My late husband was Flight Lieutenant Edward Brooks DFC, DFM. Now Ted hadn’t meant to join the RAF. He’d already started work as an office boy in London and had joined the Home Guard, but he wanted to join the Army. So he went to the army recruiting office and all was going well, until with the innocence of youth, he stated that he wish to join the Oxford and Bucks, the regiment in which his uncle Company Sergeant Major Edward Brooks had been awarded the Victoria Cross in 1917. The recruiting sergeant looked up and said : ‘You can’t pick and choose sonny.” To which Ted replied : ‘Right, I’ll go and join the RAF.’ This he promptly did. His date of enlistment February 1941. But he was dismayed to learn that they were unable to take him immediately, but they gave him a lapel badge to indicate that he’d enlisted and that they would let him know. The months passed and although he must have been very busy, working during the day and Home Guard duties at night, he just wanted to be in the service, so after several months had elapsed he wrote to the Air Ministry [Shuffle of paper]. Two months later, two weeks later he was at Uxbridge. There followed the initial three months training course at Blackpool. There they were billeted in a former seaside boarding house. They had to surrender their ration books to the landlady and they were always hungry. Their meals were served in the dining room, but they soon realised that the Corporal in charge of the bul- billet had all his meals in the kitchen with the landlady, and was enjoying much better fare. On the day they all left, to register their dissatisfaction [turning of page] they nailed a kipper to the underside of the dining room table. Another memory of Blackpool was, before leaving they were lined up, sleeves rolled up and given multiple vaccinations. Then they were allowed to go home on leave before their next posting. Ted collapsed on arriving home and taken by ambulance to RAF Henley hospital, they lived nearby, where Vaccine Fever was diagnosed, and where he spent most of his leave. The chapter Ted contributed to “Lancaster At War Two” as wireless operator follows his training up to OTU where he said he met the RAAF. At some time during those previous months his mother, always concerned for her sons comfort, was worried that his regulations shirts were too rough. So she bought him officer’s shirts which she sent to him and which he wore on a night out to the local town. He was, however, picked up by the MPs and put on a charge for this offence. This was quickly followed by an individual posting to Northern Ireland to serve on a small anti-aircraft observation unit miles from anywhere. The isolation of this unit and the ever-present threat of the IRA made him sleep with his rifle alongside. They were a small group of young lads unused to cooking for themselves, so each one took their turn to be cook for the day buying meat and vegetables from the local farmers. Stew was the main meal of the day but Ted was horrified to see how it was being cooked. Meat and vegetables were thrown into a large saucepan, potatoes, carrots etc just as they had been lifted from the ground complete with the soil. Ted said that he’d do the cooking. Then to OTU at Litchfield where they crewed up. Five of the crew were Australian with the pilot being Murray Brown. I had the privilege of knowing Murray Brown and John Clarke, his 460 Squadron pilot in post war years when they visited the UK. The crew were posted to 12 Squadron at Wickenby, a satellite station of Binbrook. The Commanding Officer was Group Captain Huey Edwards, who was the CO of Binbrook [alarm sounding in background]. Many post war years later, Ted saw an article by Group Captain Basil Crummy[?] who said he was Wickenby’s first CO. Ted said he’s confirm the facts by writing to Sir Huey Edwards VC who kindly wrote at some length explaining that for a short while he was in charge of Binbrook, Wickenby and one other station, Basil Crummy taking over from him soon after. I realised a little while ago that these letters from Sir Huey should be in an appropriate archive, and I donated them to the RAAF Museum, Melbourne. And so Ted’s first com- tour commenced on 13th May 1943. The target being Bochum. The operation had to be abandoned after crossing the enemy coast due to an outer engine catching fire , and they had decided that would have to ditch but Murray went into a steep dive and mercifully the fire went out. When looking through their list of t- targets it illustrated Bomber Commands Battle of the Ruhr, known to the crews as Happy Valley. Also Peenemunde, Berlin, Cologne, Turin, Genoa and Hamburg. [Turning of paper]. Many years later in the 1950s we sailed along the River Elbe to Hamburg. As we reached our moorings Ted looked at the other bank where there was a large sign Blohm and Voss. Ted said that the shipyard had been their aiming point. Their tour finished with Stuttgart on 8th October 1943. After returning from Mannheim they were on their crew bus on their way from dispersal to the interrogation room when it collided with a petrol tanker which had broken down on the perimeter track. They were all pitched forward off their seats and were dazed for some seconds, Ted had been smoking at the time but when he came to he realised that it was still in his mouth but broken in half. They hadn’t realised, however, that a member of the crew had been pitched out they continued. Some considerable time later when he[stuttered] he they continued but some con - considerable time later [stutters] he appeared in the briefing room and amongst other things was asked for his escape rations. He said : ‘He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t as he’d had to eat them on the long trek back.’ On their leave on the 22nd of October 43, the crew made a BBC broadcast entitled : “Lancaster crew describes an operation.” I found in Ted’s papers a receipt from the BBC for three pound. Ted was then posted to Lindholme instructing. He said that one night in the mess Squadron Leader John Clarke came up to him and said that he was forming a crew to do a second tour, would Ted like to join him? ‘Yes,’ he said and so to his posting to Binbrook and 460 Squadron. The first operation there was the 22nd/23rd May on Dortmund and the last 16th September, Rhine which was the night of on [incomplete]. [Turning of page] The pattern of this tour was essentially supporting the invasion. On D-Day 5th/6th June 44, their target was the Normandy coastal bat- batteries in which over a thousand aircraft were involved. Their target being the battery St Martin de Varreville. The following night the important six way junction near, road junction near Bayeux and the Forest de Cereza. There followed oil plants, flying bomb sites culminating in their final operation 16th/17th September Arnhem. Bomber Commands main operations that night were in support of the following days landings. Several surrounding airfields were to be bombed 46- 460’s target was Rhine. However John Clarke’s crew was selected to remain behind after bombing Rhine [cough]. They were secretly briefed to carry out a low level reconnaissance over Arnhem, and told because of the importance [sneeze] of this assignment the radio equipment would be modified to take quartz crystals, so that the tuning would be spot on to transmit their observations. Just as Ted was about to enter the aircraft the Signals Officer drew up thrusting two small objects into his hands. ‘I don’t know how to use them,’ said Ted. ‘Neither do I,’ said he, ‘but you’ve plenty of time to find out.’ So ended his operational career. During this time, I’m not sure whether it was 12 or 460 Ted had been feeling very unwell during the day but they were told that would be taking two high ranking army officers on their night’s operations as they wished to observe the German anti-aircraft defences. During the flight Ted felt very sick but there was no suitable receptacle. He looked down and by his position he saw two upturned army caps, these he suitably filled and then despatched them down the flare shute. On landing the two chaps searched for their caps but they were told by the crew that very strange things happen at night. He always suffered from severe migraines in post war years, this he attributed to the fact that on one trip shrapnel had penetrated the fuselage and severed his oxygen tube. He didn’t tell his pilot at the time as he knew it’d been very dangerous to reduce height and did not do so until it was safe. However he said the pain in his head was just unimaginable. After Binbrook, I believe it was back to Lindholme, there they would take ground crews to see the destruction in Germany. On one separate occasion the flu had to [laugh] the crew had to fly to the Luftwaffe base on the Island of Sylt, purpose unknown. They dined in the mess with the German officers and I understand it was rather a tense situation. After time he flew to Brussels but burnt a tyre, burst a tyre on landing. They were there one month before a replacement tyre was obtained. He said that he had volunteered for Tiger Force and that he had crewed up. I believe that this was the plan for the RAF and USAF bombing campaign of Ger- of Japan. And I found confirmation of this in his 460 records. Finally, in summer 1946 he was demobbed at Swinderby. You will note that in the 12 Squadron crew list I didn’t named the mid-upper gummer gunner. This is because on July 28th/29th they were briefed for Cologne and during the outward flight he had collapsed very distressed and had to be physically restrained by other crew members. The operation had to be abandoned and they returned to base after dropping their bombs in the sea. [Sharp turn of page]. After that they had several replacement MUGs. He finally left the service in August 1945 from RAF Swinderby.
AS 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
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Interview with Rita Brooks
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adam Sadler
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-29
Format
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00:14:54 audio recording
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABrooksR151029
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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
Rita’s late husband was Flight Lieutenant Edward Brooks DFC, DFM. He was in the Home Guard before he enlisted with the Royal Air Force in February 1941, and sometime later went to RAF Uxbridge. Following his training at Blackpool the recruits were billeted in a former seaside boarding house. Whilst at Blackpool they had their vaccinations before going home on leave. On reaching home Ted collapsed and was diagnosed with vaccine fever and he spent most of his leave in RAF Kenley hospital.
Ted was trained as a wireless operator and was posted to Northern Ireland to serve on a small antiaircraft observation unit. Next he went to Operational Training Units at RAF Litchfield where they crewed up. His crew was posted to 12 Squadron at RAF Wickenby. Ted’s first tour commenced on 13 May 1943. The operation had to be cancelled due to an engine catching fire. The pilot managed to extinguish the fire by going into a steep dive. Targets included the Ruhr, Berlin, Peenemünde, Cologne, Turin, Genoa and Hamburg. On the 8 October 1943 the tour ended with an operation to Stuttgart. On their leave on 22 October 1943 the crew made a BBC broadcast entitled 'Lancaster crew describes an operation'. Ted was then posted to RAF Lindholme as an instructor but then joined a second crew and was posted to RAF Binbrook with 460 Squadron. On D-Day they supported the landings by bombing batteries. In August 1945 Ted finally left the service from RAF Swinderby.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Northern Ireland
France
Germany
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
England--Staffordshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Stuttgart
Italy--Genoa
Italy--Turin
England--Lancashire
England--Blackpool
Germany--Peenemünde
Italy
Great Britain
Great Britain
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-05-13
1943-10-22
1943-10-08
1945-08
1941-02
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
12 Squadron
460 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
Cook’s tour
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
RAF Binbrook
RAF Kenley
RAF Lichfield
RAF Lindholme
RAF Uxbridge
RAF Wickenby
Tiger force
training
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/363/6086/AJossDA151007.2.mp3
e6f59399c580ffcb25c07f1869f9492e
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Joss, Douglas
Doug Joss
D A Joss
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Douglas Alexander Joss (632261, 56113 Royal Air Force), and two wartime photographs of him and his crew. Douglas Joss completed 32 operations as a rear gunner on 626 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Andrew Joss and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-11
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
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Joss, DA
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: We’re rolling now. My name is Chris Brockbank and we are in Wendover speaking with Squadron Leader Douglas Joss, and the witnesses today are Brenda Ponton and Janet Ford and we're talking about the background experiences and the wartime experiences of Squadron Leader Joss. So over to you Douglas.
DJ: Oh, where do you want me to start?
CB: So if you start, please, with your earliest days in the family.
DJ: In the family?
CB: Yep.
DJ: I was born in Aberdeen, the eldest of five, and I was born in Aberdeen and then my father at the time, who had been in the First World War, he and his brother came back. He wanted to be a vet but his parents couldn't afford to send him further. The brother, the older one, got the money and he went to Aberdeen University and became a very well-known doctor in Nottingham. Dad wanted to be a vet and he couldn't anyway, but they said you can go out to East Africa as an assistant with the vet's out there doing research on sleeping sickness in cattle [coughs]. I think it's quite amusing that when I was born, he and my mother [coughs] decided what I was, should be called. Charlie after one of her twin brothers. When somebody you know, these people said he got killed in the First World War and somebody told her if you name him after somebody who's dead, your son will be dead within a year and she was daft enough to believe that so she changed my name to Douglas. We turned up eventually to join my father in Uganda and Kampala and he, she called me Douglas, and he said, ‘what's this Douglas business’, so she told him that. He said, ‘bloody madness. We said we’d call him Charlie and I'll call him Charlie’, so for twelve months he called me Charlie and she called me Douglas so you can see why I'm a bit of a mixed-up kid. Oh dear [coughs], anyway, while we were out there my sister Dora was born In Kampala. My son last year, year before, went out with my other son. Two sons went on a tour of Uganda, I said call in to Saint James's Church in Kampala and you’ll find out that I was baptised there by the Reverend Pitz, Pitz, you can never forget a name like that [coughs], I beg your pardon, sorry which he did and they did and they made him very welcome and said to him — well that's by the way. When we came back, he couldn't get back into the veterinary business at all and then he went in for post office and became what they call an SC and T In those times, sorting clerk and telegraphist and we went to Angal, which is not far north and he was postmaster. It's a tiny little post office and I recall visiting him there because I was fascinated how he would sit and receive telegrams with a Morse key which he’d learnt during the war in the Army, you know they'd took the old Morse out and you remember telegrams used to come out on a strip of paper, which they stuck on a telegram when it went out. So that's why we went there and we stayed there until he was offered a better job in Coventry and we moved to Coventry, and he was there. I met one or two lads who were in the Air Force, well [unclear] it might slip off a bit, I was in the Scouts while I was there, there’s a bit that comes up later on that. I remember the two lads, they were in the RAF and they came on leave, I became interested so I said to the family I think I'll go and join the Air Force and seeing mum was having a struggle to pay our fares and everything, we moved from our house at twenty-one shillings a week to a council house at fourteen shillings a week because we were hard up. I can't believe it, I can remember her crying because she hadn’t got tuppence to go to the Women's Institute and get cup of tea. However, err — where was I. I'll just remember there, it's there I decided to go in the Air Force anyway and she didn't want me to go in. Then the war was loomed. Jimmy Wales was my, if you like, Patrol Leader in the Scouts and I — mum didn't want me to go in the Air Force. Anyway this business of war looming in thirty-eight, I says well if I don't go there you know what will happen, I'll go and be called up in the Army and that will be worse. So she signed up to let me go. My father was uninterested, he says you please yourself and that's what I did and I went in Air Force in the [coughs], in the end of thirty-eight [coughs], October thirty-eight. I was tested then but because they were having trouble filling or building all the training schools which were expanding so rapidly at that time, I was sent home and they said we’ll call you back again, so go home. After I'd been tested and I actually went in, in the January of thirty-nine. You can get my number off that 632261, which I remember well. And I was sent from there down to Pembroke Dock just – I was sent as HCH, aircraft hands, labourers if you like. I'll interrupt you there, that's the first place I got a chance to fly in a Short Sunderland. Can I get you off your seat? Come here. My brother found a poster somewhere and he bought it for me. Now look in the right-hand corner. Can you see that poster was painted from the spot I was photographed in 1939? The beginning of thirty-nine and you can tell he stood — the photographer must have been, the painter must have been standing where I stood there from, absolutely [unclear] so that's it. So that's literally the first aircraft I flew in, the Sunderland.
CB: Right. Very interesting. Yes.
DJ: By that time it had been decided I should be a flight rigger. I don’t think there was any choice. I think I was told I would be a flight rigger, chippy, as it had an element of woodwork in it which fascinates me, I wasn't, I guess, I loved it. I became a chippy rigger and went from there to do basic training at Henlow, and then from Henlow down to — what’s the name of it? Weston-super-Mare, Locking, from Locking, down to Locking where I did my twelve months training as a rigger and passed out as a glorious LAC Leading Aircraftman. Whilst I was there I had a bosom pal, Ernie Morton, with whom I remained in close contact till last year. He died last year, didn't he?
BP: A few years ago.
DJ: Ernie.
BP: A few years ago.
DJ: Was it two years ago?
BP: A few years ago.
DJ: We remained close all that time and we were bits of lads, we were a bit naughty and we heard that on King’s Birthday they have a parade and then a day off, and we said we'll try and get out of parade, you know. We hated them but they had big boxes there and the two of us got into this great big box [coughs] to keep away from this parade and after, I don't know how long, everything was so quiet we got out. We were fools, they’d all been given the day off and they'd gone and we stayed in this, this bloody box for hours to get out of this. My memory of Ernie all these days. Anyway from there, when I first passed out as LAC, I was posted to Upavon which is the Central Flying School. Now Central Flying School, I went in as a rigger. You, you, I don't know what you did in the Air Force
CB: I flew.
DJ: Well, well you weren't an airman fitter or rigger then?
CB: No, No.
DJ: No. Well in those days we were given an aircraft, that was your aircraft and you serviced it to give it all its flying. I was allocated to a very famous bird called George Stainforth, the last Schneider trophy pilot who won the Schneider trophy for us and he had the last Fairey Battle, not bigger [unclear], not Fairmount. What's it called? Oh dear. He had the last — left in the Air Force. It will come to me in a minute. Anyway it was his he didn't like anybody flying it. It was a biplane, fighter biplane.
CB: A Gladiator was is it? Was it a Gladiator?
DJ: No, no it was very sharp and almost a forerunner of the Spitfire, if you like.
CB: Hawker Fury?
DJ: I've got a picture.
CB: Well we can pick it up in a minute.
DJ: Doesn’t matter it will come and he was — two things about him. Upavon had its own golf course, it still has I think, or it’s an Army unit. He made me act as his caddy when I was due days off, which hacked me off no end and he also, when he was away (it's a Fury, the Hawker Fury, his aircraft), he would say to me, ‘Joss, put that out of service, I don't want anybody else flying out, make it unserviceable so if anybody else had it, you could in all honesty, say it's unserviceable’. So I made it unserviceable, I’d take something out or I’d do something anything I used to do to make it unserviceable until he came back and there. Another chap came along at the time to get his wings back, a bloke named Bader, Douglas Bader, he came back there to be trained back up to get his wings back because you know he'd lost his wings when he'd lost his legs, and he came back there and I — he was being taught first of all in a Tutor a Hawker a, a –
CB: Avro Tutor?
DJ: Avro Tutor.
CB: Yeah.
DJ: He went in a Tutor and I helped him in and out of the aircraft. I have a memory of him, bearing in mind he was a Flight Lieutenant that day and I was still the LAC, a lady came up in a red sports car, about this high it is, and she said ‘do you know Douglas Bader’ and I said ‘yes ma'am’, she said ‘I'm his mum, can you tell me where I can find him?’ So I found him and introduced him, didn't introduce him and I says ‘come on, your Mum's waiting to see you over there’, which was lovely. And she — one thing that was ridiculous to me at the time was, isn't it lovely two of Douglas’s friends, and as for an LAC and a Flight Lieutenant being friends was just hairy fairy stuff, I laughed. Now if I might go right back to Halton they got Douglas down and told him a, an open day here and I reminded him of this case. I said ‘your mother came up to me’ I said, ‘she had a red MG that was half painted, it was being repainted, it was red and half grey and an MG’, and he said ‘I can't remember that’. I said ‘well she came’, he said ‘I know she came to drop it’. I said ‘I flew with you there’, you know, because if you did a major inspection, you flew with that aircraft if you could just to make sure you've done the job properly and he couldn't remember this at all. Anyway he was very kind. When he went back to the station [unclear], another Battle of Britain pilot a [unclear] at Halton, he came to see me one day and said he'd had a letter from Douglas thanking me for looking after him with his time here and it says if you see Joss you can tell him. I have now checked my log book and he was dead right, we did have a car which was half painted, ‘cause my mother was alive in those days, well his mother and I said ‘well yes she came along with a half painted car’. A fond memory. Well I thought that was touching. I’ve got a cutting of a newspaper cutting of Douglas Bader and I having a chat which was rather nice. Anyway, going right back to Upavon, a notice came up said volunteers required to go abroad in a not too pleasant surroundings. Now this was where my friend Ernie and I split up. I said ‘come on Ernie, let's go to that’, I talked him into everything except that. He wouldn't go, he’d met a girl, fool that he was [laughs], you see [coughs], and he preferred to stay with the girl rather than the excitement of going abroad [coughs]. I was told ‘we're not telling you where you're going but you've got to go up to London Hospital, in London with a bunch of other boys, to have special inoculations against yellow fever’ and I didn't know where that was. Anyway we went to London and we came back and went on a troop ship eventually in [pause], just south of Glasgow, whatever it was. Anyway it was a troop ship we got on and half way out we found out we were all going to the Gold Coast, to a place called Takoradi and what Takoradi was doing there was aircraft. The Maryland Kitty Hawk, Mohawks were coming in pieces and we were then, we were assembling them there. And it was known as the white man's grave in those days. All the expats that lived out there, all had spine pads you wore on your shirt, a big padded cloth which went shoulder to shoulder and down your back so your spine didn't get hurt. Needless to say, the RAF took no notice whatsoever and we worked in shirt sleeves all the time for they could get away with it, and the locals were very hacked off with this as it reduced their income because they got paid for that job. So I was there for a bit and once we hadn’t been there all that long and I got malaria three, four times while I was there. Which wasn't very nice. Again a request came up for volunteers to go up country so, like an idiot, ‘yes please I'd love to go’, and I went there and I went via Nigeria Lagos, to a place called Maiduguri in northern Nigeria and funnily enough it was a place called Jos, which is, which is where, where the locals lived. All the expats would go there because it was higher and it was better climate. But I was there and I went for — there for up to Maiduguri. We were in mud huts. I've got photographs of them here somewhere [coughs] which wasn't very nice, the water was fetched from the river of Lake Chad and boiled. All the water used for cooking, for washing, for everything else was from there and we were invited to the Lake Chad Polo sports club. They do Polo, they do most sports but there was all the expats and Europeans over there and there were two people and I heard two people talking and they said the name Joss, you see, and I said ‘yes’, and the chap turned around and he said ‘yes what?’ I said ‘you mentioned Joss, that's my name’, he said ‘no, I was talking about the town Jos where we go for a break’, he said ‘where do you come from?’ So I told him as much as I’ve told you and he said ‘any other relatives named Joss?’ I said ‘yes, my uncle's a doctor’, he says, ‘I shared a billet with him in Edinburgh would you believe’. He said he's quite honoured really and we became very friendly with him, he was the local civilian white Doctor and he used to [coughs], used to treat all the, the — his favourite story of the West African Winter Force, before the WAFs, before the RAF WAFs they were called, the WAFs, West African Winter Force, he used to have job finding his shoes to see them, because the smallest they would take were tens, they were big but he said ‘they're brutal’. I said ‘what do you mean they're brutal?’ he said ‘well one of them got me to circumcise him and next day he came back and he asked me to put stitches back on him’, you know because he was out with his girlfriend performing, tore his stitches and could he put them back in again. I thought that seemed a silly past time to me [laughs] [coughs] so that was there. And while I was in fortinamy, I went from there to French Patrol Africa, fortinamy on Lake Chad, and while I was there de Gaulle visited us. I got another rollicking there because he came in there called a [unclear] Flying wing. I've got a photograph of it there. There was only three of them ever made. They were given to de Gaulle. One was his private plane. Whatever happened to the other two I don't know. His pilot was a civilian, it was Jim Mollison, Amy Johnson's husband and he flew him about all over the world and over the country. After his visit I had a French Captain say ‘you come here English, English come here, you're very rude, very naughty’ he said, ‘they’re playing the National Anthem and you're walking around taking no notice’. I said ‘I was taking photographs’, which I was. ‘I'm sorry I didn't recognise it’. ‘Didn't recognise our national anthem? Well, that's disgraceful’ he said and the other thing he said ‘that flag of yours is higher than ours, get it down’. We’d got an old pole and put up our RAF Ensign [laughs] [coughs] so we had a Sergeant and a Corporal, Ginger Bunsen and Willie Downie which was four of us. He said ‘well you better fetch it down’, so he fetched it down this homemade flag pole and I fetched our flag down about four inches. I wasn't going to do anymore I thought it was enough but he got a bit stroppy with me about that and made me fetch it down another foot [laughs], so I was there and I got malaria again. Then he had a very, to me, unusual treatment. I had beforehand was being, was — quinine and all sorts but he said ‘no, lie on your stomach’, which I did and on my back he had little oval bottles which he heated and he placed on my back. He says ‘that will take all the fever away’, and I thought he was, he was a Martinique and I thought the man’s a bloody witch doctor. I don't know what he did but it worked beautifully and I mentioned it to doctors since and said that we’ve heard of this but never known anybody, and I says ‘well I had my malaria taken out of me by little bottles which are heated up and put it on’. My back was covered in bruises after they all came off. Anyway, I was in the village one day and we were on the edge of the British, of the Foreign Legion village and I saw a young lad, an Arab lad, come running out and a Legionnaire running after him and kicked him from behind and knocked him flat and started to kick him. I didn't know what he was doing, but I picked up a bit of wood and I hit this Legionnaire on the back of the head and said ‘stop doing that to that boy, he's only a boy’, and what he says, he says ‘I caught him stealing something’ and I said ‘I don't care’. The next thing is I'm picked up by the Legion and put in their billet with some Italian prisoners. Now this was interesting though, because if you wanted to go to the loo, you all had to go or none. If you're all bursting they’d say right outside and march and you’d march to the loo and you stood there and you performed if you did and you were taken back. Anyway, the French Captain at the time was Mercenaire, Captain Mercenaire, he said ‘I don't think you’d better stay here in the in fortinamy’ and he sent me back to Maiduguri and they sent up an Army Captain who took me back to Maiduguri. ‘What the devil did you do?’ I said ‘I only knocked this bloke out with a bit of wood really’ and he thought that was worthwhile.
CB: [laughing]
DJ: They took me back to Maiduguri and I stayed there and the doctor there, (isn't it funny how you remember these things talking), was South African, a Doctor Tatz, T A T Z, and he said ‘well I'm not letting you back on the airfield, you can become my assistant. I'll find you jobs to do in the, in the sick quarters’, which was a sort of a mud Hospital. South African [unclear] which I did until I had a – what do they call it? A rigor, you know, a relapse of the malaria, of the malaria. He said ‘well you're not much use to us out here, you'd better go home’. So I went home and they flew us down to, to Lagos and we got on a French troop ship that brought me back to the UK. And there when I came back my first visit, to would you believe, Lincoln, where I was in Newark. I was posted to Newark, Ossington which is just outside Newark and I was there but I kept getting relapses and they sent me to Cranwell to hospital there for a long time until I was — got rid of it and they came in one day and said ‘we need some volunteers and you people have had malaria’. And I was in a ward with others and they said they're some expert to [pause] examine me, tests going on, on some tests that I was told you’re having these relapses. I’ve got — a moment [unclear], I forget there was, two eights, three eights, twenty-four of us put in this ward and they said ‘any of you willing to go on these examinations’, yes said I and they said ‘we will draw for it, one of you will have a liquid one, one of you will have pills, the other one will have a jab in the bum’. You can guess, of course, which one I got.
CB: [laughing]
DJ: A jab in the bum and that's that but it worked. After that I didn't get a relapse, well I did some years later but a very mild one. It worked and they said and I [unclear] here used to be the centre of tropical medicine for the RAF and they told them about that and they took notes that you're taken and they said we've heard about those tests can you, can you tell us, can and I said yes, and they said can you remember the doctor, but I couldn't but I remember the day and they took notes of this and I've never had any since at all no relapses. Anyway, where are we now?
CB: What year are we in now and month?
DJ: Oh, now I'm at Ossington, Ossington which is B42. Whilst I was there we had — oh, I applied to be a flight engineer and I got back on from a general office saying no your application is turned down, they got so many applicants for flight engineers, every fitter and rigger wants to be a flight engineer and so you've had it. Anyway, you may remember they had an Inspector General, well used to have in the RAF, and he came on inspection that day and I'd been on nights and I was the standing by the bed and he came along the billets and talked to everybody and was very friendly, and he came down our billet and the old station officer said ‘attention!’ And we had to stand there out of bed and we’d been on nights and we were made to get up out of bed, and I was standing there in my pyjama trousers only. Anyway, he came and he was quite amused and said ‘I'm sorry you shouldn't do that. Anybody got any complaints’. [unclear] well what’s your trouble and the old Station Master was glaring at me, I said ‘well, I applied to be a flight officer and I've been turned down, I want to be air crew’, and he turned to his ADC, take this man's name, who turned to the station master and said take this man's name and I thought well that's the end of that. Two weeks later the tannoy went. I was a corporal then. Corporal Joss report to Station Commander immediately, don't stop to take your overalls off. So I went over and he said ‘you're a cheeky bugger Joss, aren't you? You stopping the Inspector General’, he was only an Air Vice Marshal, I said ‘well he asked’ and he said ‘well he's replied, and he says if you're prepared to take a gunner, you can go’. Which section? [unclear] Oh well I said ‘I can go Wednesday, tomorrow’, he said ‘don't be ridiculous, I'll let you know when you go’. He said you've got to go for selection first of all. So it was only about a week later I went down to — what’s that place near the Zoo in London?
CB: Lords, Lords.
DJ: No it was all blocks of flats. It was near there, anyway they were big blocks of flats just outside London Zoo because we were was [unclear] London Zoo when the selection went on and who turned up there, going right back now to my scouting friend, you'll see his name on there. Wales [coughs], and by this time I've done three years service you see, so I was an old hand, I'd got a GC, you know the one stripe you have for three years behaviour. Well he didn't want to go so I said stick with me, I'll look after you, I'll see you through, we’ll stick together on this.So we went through the things and he said we'll both [unclear] and I went up to the people, the class taking notes of sending and posting or whatever, and I said this chap [unclear], he's got to come with me, his parents asked that I look after him. And they said I've heard some tales but they said alright. So — where was the first place we went? Bridlington. Now I've got a very happy memory of Bridlington. They billeted us in — they emptied the council houses in the town and put us all in the houses, but I don't know where the whole Village went. And then one day we were parading all over the place, down near the Harbour and they said right, back here tonight at, I think they said eight o'clock, at the harbour. So we went back at eight o'clock to the harbour and we were all given a flying suit, just looked like an overall, and a life jacket and the other thing is, we were given a thing which was like a whistle, he said fasten your whistle onto [unclear] you must have seen it [unclear] on the collar, he said ‘what you are going to do in the dark. You are going to jump in the harbour in the dark and you will find a dinghy upside-down. You've got to find it, put it the right way up and as soon as you blow your whistle so they all come together, soon as you fill it with seven people, you can come in and have some supper’. And that's what we did. I remember pitch black, freezing flipping cold and we had a man named — I remember him [pause], Mogford was his name, no it wasn't, it was whatever it will come to me — Shadmaniham. He said ‘I can't swim I'm not going in there’. They said if you don't go in there, you're off the course and you're finished and we all liked him. He was a — I remember, he was a Sheffield steel worker or had been. Anyway we're all lined up, eleven o'clock, it was pitch black and we saw them throw this dingy and move it right out to the middle of the harbour in the dark. There wasn't a light anywhere and, and this man Shadmaniham says ‘well I'm not going in’ so one or two of us nodded like this you see. We just grabbed him and ran with him and jumped and took him with us. He was screaming like mad and he jumped in with us. Anyway we kept hold of him. Jimmy Wales was still with me then, we grabbed him and we started blowing our whistles and he wouldn’t move, you know swam or floated whatever you like until we got near the whistle. And we eventually found the dinghy, got in to it and we managed to turn it upright and dragged this lad in, and he said ‘I would never have done that if you hadn't done that’ but he says ‘I didn't want to lose my place, I didn't want to be thrown out’. So that's my one and only fairly memory of Bridlington. I hated it, it was terrifying, it really was awful. I don't know how many people they did that to but we did that. Anyway from there [pause] Andreas on the Isle of Man, where we did [unclear] re- training. Now then [long pause] my log book. Can I, can I read it out of my logbook because I'm very proud of this. If I can find it. Where is it? Where's the front page?
CB: This is one of the first entries in your log book.
DJ: Yeah. It says here, D Joss, air gunner. With affect from the 21st June forty-three. Squadron Leader Tooth signed it. Qualified air gunner and this is the bit I like, over the page. Theory - above average. Practical - outstanding and I like that, and the reason I got that is, I used to go four or five in the back of an Anson at the time and you had to climb into a turret on the back of the Anson and [unclear] flew with a dinghy trailing way behind and you shot at that. The rounds in the gun were dipped different colours so they’d know who had red or green or blue and they know who had hit the drone. Two of the other lads were terrified they wouldn't, they didn’t get out they didn't want to go in the turret, they didn’t, so I said let me go in there I'll do yours, I'll do yours, you see as a result, of course, I got no end of drogue colours. My, their colours and mine were in there and I got the credit for it. Anyway, above average theory. Outstanding - practical. Results - average. Recommended for commission at a later date after first experience and that was signed by Squadron Leader Tooth, OC Training Wing, Number One Air Gunnery Squad. So that's my proud possession. Exercises [pause] I shot two hundred rounds there and two hundred rounds there and so on. So there, that's that.
CB: That's really good. Do you want to have a break for a bit?
DJ: [Unclear]. The other four of us. My grandparents and her brother said ‘we’ll send two of them up to us in Aberdeen and they can stay with us until you get posted’. So I went and stayed with the grandparents and my sister went with my mother's brother. [Unclear] we were only going to go for a short time until she felt better but both of us stayed, lived up there for a further eighteen months. Really until we were summoned back.
CB: This is when the youngest was born?
DJ: Yeah.
CB: Right
DJ: And when mum had got over all that lot, she said she wanted us back and back we went. And we left Aberdeen and went back there. But I, I've been back once, only once since [unclear] the and memories came flooding back. Yes I have a brother, who is going to stay with us next week, he was also born in Aberdeen. Anyway where had I got to?
CB: Just, just briefly there, you moved, the family moved south and went to Coventry.
DJ: Yes.
CB: So we’re now from the narrative you've reached so far, got to 1942.
DJ: Two.
CB: But what was the experience of the family of being in Coventry during the bombing?
DJ: Ahh. This thing says we moved in the November and I was on a troop ship on the way to West Africa, and on the radio we heard this and I knew nothing about. I didn't hear from them and anyway, when I went at Takoradi [unclear] just, I was getting quite desperate I want to see the padre. One always visited the padre [unclear] and I told him about this and I said can't you do anything for me and he said he’d I’ll do what I can. He apparently had got permission to signal the police in Coventry to find out what had happened to family.
CB: This is Operation Moonlight Sonata so 17th, 18th November forty, yeah. OK.
DJ: And he did and they were very good. They said, police Coventry said to [unclear] the family were alright and well. They were all well and alright. I got a letter eventually from my mother and men used to [unclear] phone the [unclear] and what amazes me they got the pleasure when it used to take three weeks or three months sometimes to get the mail. There's only one amusing bit that I know of at the time. They could hear, where we lived in Radford in the corner of Coventry, they could all hear the bombing going on further in the town and Mum apparently, when she went to have a look to see what was happening, see if there's any flames and she opened the door and a bomb went off not far away. Blew the door and her in the kitchen and she laid on her back with the door handle in her hand. The rest of family thought this was hilarious and they all burst out laughing she says ‘there's me lying there, in pain and didn't know what happened and the kids are all standing there around laughing and I'm still holding the door handle in my hand’ [laughs].
CB: [laughs] what an extraordinary thing.
DJ: So for the rest of the time the letters, I got they referred about the tin can they had in the garden and they baked on for some months before they got power back on in the house. She did that. Dad was, he did, I don't know what he did during the war there, he did something. I think he was a, a warden for the Post Office, he used to go on the roof in the Post Office and do things there, an air raid warden.
CB: Umm.
DJ: That's the only thing, his contribution there. I tried to persuade him to go and join the Army. Now we weren't very friendly, I don't know why, he didn't bother, he didn't like us kids, he, he had nothing to do with us. He never came to school, he never came to anything. We weren't unfriendly but he was never, never friendly. Took no part in us. And I said well you were in the Army experience with the First World War, why don't you go and see if you want to go in the Post Office at Nottingham. Why I said that, his brother was a doctor in Nottingham, had been. He got an MC in the First World War and a Barterat in the second, would you believe. However, I said the Army Post Office is in Nottingham, you can go and stay with Uncle Joss as he was called or something, they'll give you a job in the post office but he wouldn't. He said no he’s staying at home and that was it as far as I was concerned. That was his contribution to the war, it was nothing at all.
CB: Ok, thank you very much. So now picking up on where we were before, you’re at, in the Isle of Man.
DJ: Oh yes.
CB: And you’ve — so we’re talking about 1943.
DJ: Yes.
CB: And the practical outstanding recommended for a commission later.
DJ: Yeah.
CB: So at that stage, what happened next?
DJ: Well, I was the most senior, if you like, cadet or recruit at the time in the thing because I’d done a bit of service in. So when our course had finished they said you're all going back to Loughborough, which I was pleased about because we did our college at Loughborough. You're going to Loughborough to join an aircrew, a bomber crew. It was quite amusing ‘cause the old ferry port of — and there were some RAF police on the side shouting ‘can we have the Senior NCO for this lot’, you see, and we said ‘where is the Senior NCO for this lot’, and all our lot are standing there looking round until one of them reminded me - you're the senior. Oh God I said the first time I've been given a Senior NCO job, you see, so I had to get them off and march them there and we were put on coaches, some of us and we were posted, moved to Loughborough. Now I don't know what the system was to become crewed down there in those Bomber Command days. Do you know what they — well I'll tell you anyway.
CB: They put you in a hanger.
DJ: Well.
CB: To crew up.
DJ: Well what it was, it was a big place anyway and there was enough to make seven, you know there's so many gunners. Two of each and there’s navigators and bomb aimers and flight engineers and pilots. Now I didn't drink, never drank and when we went there, I’m with Jimmy and I, I said stick with me Jimmy we’ll get on the same crew and they, they got us all together and they said now we're going to leave you and we’ll assemble tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock or whatever, and if you haven't formed yourself into a crew of seven or six because we picked up [unclear] late, then we will form you. So we didn't want to be [unclear] Jimmy and I looked round, we didn't know what to do. He didn't drink either and he was very proud of the fact that he was a Kings Scout. He was always on about this being a Kings Scout was Jimmy. We used to get him to do all sorts of jobs because he did that [coughs] and we saw a bloke sitting in the corner, quiet, ‘cause all the others did the obvious thing and said let's go down the pub and sort ourselves out, you see. Jimmy and I didn't want to go and we saw these chap sitting quietly in the corner and we said why do you [unclear] and he said ‘well I don't drink, I don't like bother’. ‘Well’, I said, ‘well Jimmy and I don't drink, shall we join up’, and that's how we got Len the Navigator and we looked around and there was other people about, and we said any of you teetotallers who don't like pub life and we picked up the bomb aimer and that was [unclear], and there was some flight lieutenants there, pilots so, oh no they were pilots, just commissioned or NCO pilots a lot of them. You know, most of them were sergeants in the early days and we said, look at him, he's a flight lieutenant, he must have experience, so we went to him and said ‘have you got a crew’, and he said no, so we said ‘well look, we've got a crew here, there’s him, there’s him, there’s him and him, we’ve got them all, would you like to be our pilot?’ Yes he says, alright I'll be that, which was a mistake.
CB: This was Wood, Chippy Wood this was, was it?
DJ: No this wasn’t.
CB: Oh it wasn't, oh right.
DJ: No this wasn’t Chippy no, this was a pilot whose name I can't remember. It's in here, it doesn't matter
CB: Yes, ok.
DJ: We got him and they said right you as a crew are going to Castle Donington to do some twin engine to enable you to practice, you see on Wellingtons. So we all turned up there and they told us we were going to do service and bombs first of all, you see, which was fair enough. We all did service and bombs, except that our pilot could have — whatever it was we don't know. He took off three times and he landed straight ahead three times in ploughed fields or in the grass. He went helling off like a mortal fire bell, as you know.
CB: I was coming to that, ok, go on.
DJ: They took him off and there so there was us crew as referred to as a headless crew and then they said, well you go to your training in your own various department, gunners, navigators or what, but we didn't, we used to go into Derby and to dances and all the rest, you see, much more fun. Anyway the old [unclear], whatever this chaps name, I must find it, if I can find it, in here.
CB: So he was shipped away?
DJ: Would you believe it, a flight lieutenant, he was made OC Station Bicycle.
CB: Oh right.
DJ: And I couldn't get over that.
CB: Right, nice one [laughs]
DJ: I just couldn't believe it.
CB: Interesting connotation, station bicycles.
DJ: I can't find his flipping name.
CB: Some of them were even metal.
DJ: It doesn't matter. Sleight, s, l, e, i, g, h, t and we all — the tannoy went and the crews were to assemble in OC Flying Wing, Wing Commander. So we all trooped back in there and marched in and stood there, and he said ‘right crew, we've got you a new pilot. There he is’, and there's a chap sitting in the corner. He unfolded himself and he was six foot five. He'd lost his crew, he was the only survivor from a crew that had bailed out somewhere and he was the only one surviving.
CB: Gosh.
DJ: And the first thing that happened he said to us, I thought this was hilarious he, he says ‘come on what will we do, I tell you what let's go down the pub so we get to know each other’ and I said ‘you're going to be upset about this, you’ve just inherited the only all teetotal crew in the RAF’. ‘God Almighty’, he said, he said ‘I'm going to have you stuffed and put in the Imperial War Museum after the war’. He said they can't be, I said yes that's what you've got. Anyway we came good. Chippy and I fixed up particularly and we became very, very good personal friends as well — he was a terrific pilot, he was lovely. Anyway, by the time we did a few ops. I don't have it in there. At, from Castle Donington we were posted to [long pause], I can't remember but this is where I was put on a Halifax.
CB: Yes, this is the HCU now.
DJ: Yes, the HCU. Yes, Heavy Converse Unit, yes [long pause], Wellington, Wellington, Wellington, Wellington. I can't find it [long pause], Wellington, Wellington, Wellington, the Wellington, Wellington HE [pause] and we had instructor pilots. We had different pilots there, one was an Officer Pilot Palmer and one who was [unclear] and one who was a Woodland and one was a Palmer [pause], but we only did five hours on that, on thingme there. There was one interesting incident there.
CB: Are we on Halifaxes now?
DJ: No it was —
CB: Are we on Wellingtons or Halifaxes?
DJ: Halifaxes.
CB: Right, ok
DJ: Three. Where we met, I did three ops in the Halifaxes, I can't see why I haven't written it in here. I suppose it was in my log book, I don't know. Anyway there was an incident there which I thought was interesting, nobody else did, but I did. We were doing service and bombs and we used the Halifax at nights, at night cross country and come back but they told us, the gunners, keep your guns loaded because the Germans have been coming and if they saw lights, go on in a — you maybe know all of this, they would attack aircraft landing. The German fighters would get you so we had to go round and if you're going to land and old Chippy would say are you loaded Doug, and I would say yes I am and loaded up my guns just in case. What happened then is we went in for a very nice landing, the tail goes down with a bit of a bump, my guns, which I hadn't switched security on went - brrrr, brrr - right across the Officer's Mess.
CB: [laughs]
DJ: When we came off the aircraft and back in, he said your crews wanted by the station commander. He said ‘how the hell did that happen?’ I had to put my hand up and I said ‘well I forgot to put on my safety catch when we landed’. He said ‘at least you had the sense to land them loaded’. That's all he said. He says ‘well bugger off, use your loaf in the future’ but that's it. And I said, was it Honington? Is it Honington? There's a place up I think it was Honington. Anyway, I was shown the bullet holes later on, on the side of the Officers Mess. It was just one burst that went, you know, I quickly switched off. So there's a memory. Anyway I thought, I hate this aircraft because you know, we were right down and to get past that big column at the back of the thing into the turret was [unclear], I thought if I have to get out of this it will take me hours. Anyway we were sent for and were told we were going to a place called Wickenby. That's 12 Squadron. They've taken A Flight off 12 Squadron and made it into 626 Squadron and you're going to join 626 Squadron at Wickenby. And I've been in touch with them ever since.
CB: So the Halifax was 12 Squadron?
DJ: No the Halifax —
CB: No, the HCU was the Halifax
DJ: Yes, HCU, and the 12 Squadron was all Lancs.
CB: Yeah, ok. Do you want to stop for a bit?
DJ: It so happens that the only apprentice which got a VC was at 12 Squadron and they’ve got a memorial service to him — 3rd of November?
BP: Yes.
DJ: Yes, 3rd of November this year they're doing that. He was the only bloke that got a VC. He was an apprentice there, but anyway we were there so we started. Now then it's all — you’ve got it all here written down for you in that thing I've given you.
CB: Ok.
DJ: Every operation is in there and we were the first crew to go for three months. Complete a tour in three months, while the others were being [unclear]. The first crew to come back in three months, you know, only with a minor injury or [unclear] and you were hit by flak occasionally but if you look in that you can get every op in that one. So there.
BP: You did an extra, you did an extra one.
CB: Just to, just to recap. So you were on Halifax, you did only three ops on that.
DJ: Yes, and then we were transferred to, to Wickenby.
CB: Yes, to Halifax.
DJ: To help form 626 Squadron.
CB: Yes, yes Lancaster. Ok. Good.
DJ: We did a — it's all there, I won’t go through —
CB: Where, where —
DJ: But they're all in there.
CB: Yes.
DJ: And when we came home, we were hit by flak sometime, quite a peppering we got and the — it burst in the perspex cover of the bomb aimers nose bit.
CB: Yep.
DJ: And old Dom was there and he said ‘no skipper, I've been hit, my face is covered in blood’ and skipper said ‘well come on back up here, we’ll look at you on the bench’ and he said ‘no I'll stay here’. I thought, here we go, here’s a medal going and left him. Anyway, he says when we were coming back, he radioed in, injury aboard, medical standing by and it really is funny, well it was at the time. When they came and the ladder that went in to came out at the front, he’d got a bit of perspex stuck in his oxygen mask in the end of his nose. No wonder he was covered in blood, it was going in there, about as big as a pencil [laughs], we thought all this was absolutely hilarious [laughs]. Anyway, the medics took him off and they said, ‘well bit of shock here, we better put you in bed you know, to see that you're alright’. Anyway, he was alright. He came back to us two days, well three ops later. Towards the end of the tour, because we’d finish the tour, the station commander came down. He used to meet those that had done their tour and he said congratulations, you know, all you can go off now on two weeks leave except you [unclear], you missed a couple of ops, you've got to do a couple or two to pack up. Chippy didn't even hesitate, he said, no he's not, we’ll do another tour because we're not letting him fly with another strange crew. He just felt infinity and we were all such good friends and we knew each other so well, so we did the extra to make a total of thirty-two and make him finish his tour and that was alright [long pause].
CB: Amazing.
DJ: So, and that's me in the Bomber Command.
CB: When you, when he wasn't around, who was the stand in air bomber?
DJ: Oh I couldn't tell you.
CB: No but was it one person who — both times or a different, sorry, the same person both times or how did they select them?
DJ: Where, which bit?
CB: When, when your man was wounded.
DJ: Oh we were just told that there was a spare bomb aimer, you know, come and join our crew. I couldn't tell you his name now. Well I don't think it's even in my log book, I'm pretty sure it's not. We were just given a gash one and he would have been a gash one, you see, for somebody else had he done another tour. Ok [pause]
CB: Ok. So that's fine, thank you. So you did thirty-two ops. What happened after that?
DJ: Oh, well I volunteered for [pause], what do they call, a song about — Dambusters for the, what do they call those that [pause].
BP: Don’t know. Pathfinders?.
DJ: No, no, which lay the markers. What do they call that?
CB: The —
DJ: Always used to lay markers.
CB: The markers, the markers.
DJ: The markers.
CB: Well they were, they were the Pathfinders.
BP: Pathfinders.
DJ: Pathfinders.
CB: Yes.
DJ: Well I volunteered for the Pathfinders.
CB: Right.
DJ: And they said no. I said well alright can I go overseas, they said yes [laughs]. So the next thing is, after a bit of time, I’m on a troop ship on the way to India. I got about three weeks leave I think, and then I — Gourock was it, is it Gourock, yes I was in Gourock, and I sailed from there, again not knowing where I was going at the time until we were well on the way, and then they said we were going to India, first to Bombay and that happened. Went to Bombay. Went ashore. I chummed with a bloke named — for a pilot officer to chum up with a wing commander was just not very friendly, but I chummed up with a dentist who was, who'd been to India and was an old hand and knew it all, and we got on very well. So we went to India and then we went ashore at Bombay, under the gateway to India, opposite that beautiful hotel that got attacked. The Taj, it was named after the famous Taj, it was the Taj hotel. And there, from there I was sent to Delhi which was then the Far East Air Force Headquarters, and they said ‘well we've got no use for you here, we’ll send you down to a place called Chittagong’, which was in Assam. And I said what am I to do there and they said [unclear] and we were hoping we might be able to release or get some prisoners released, in which case you'd be responsible for sorting them out and touring them home. So we went to Chittagong and I got a real rollicking there, because amongst other things I did, was issue a certificate for the amount of alcohol to each unit. Five to airman and NCOs and a bottle, you could have whiskey or scotch, went to officers. Terrible that in the middle of the war, wasn't it, and I, somehow I forget one of the blokes [unclear] he was a group captain, he wrote me a snotty letter because he’d been late in getting this chit to get the stuff from the Indian we had there, not a NAAFI, it was a sort of, I don't know they weren't called NAAFI, I forget what they're called now, but it was, it used to issue the sort of stuff that NAAFIs issued, and I got this stinking letter from this group captain that said he was delayed and nobody had their drink, and don't you realise we’re at the frontier, and all the rest of it. So I was just a flying officer then, I wrote back a stupid letter to him saying that I'm very sorry I couldn't get the Japanese to coincide their retreat with your thirstiness. About sixteen years ago, I phoned him up from [unclear], who was Air Officer Banham who was the OEC. What do they call it? In the air — Middle East Air Force. No it wasn't, it was called — it was, whatever it was.
CB: Far East Air Force.
DJ: They used north just off — what’s the capital? Rangoon. He was, he was a very good AOCH. He sent me for there. He says now come and I’d stand to attention for him. He said, I can see him standing there, he says ‘you don't look like an idiot to me, Joss’ and I said ‘what makes you say that sir?’ He says ‘you write bloody rude letters to [unclear], not even in the third party, you write it in the English party, you don't do service mail like that’ and he says ‘will you go back up to Chittagong, we've got a job for you in a bit’. So I went back up to Chittagong and the next thing is new we’re assembling up all the air, Middle East Air Force. that bit of it anyway, HQ 22 Group or 24 Group. We were going to assemble, going down to Bangalore.
CB: This is all in Burma?
DJ: No, this is —
CB: No the earlier bit?
DJ: No going down to India. He said ‘we're sending, the whole units moving down there. The train had come in, a special train loaded with all our stuff. We're going to fly the others down or they're going to go down eventually. You, Joss, for being an idiot, are going to be in charge of that train down to Bangalore’ and I said ‘who will I have with me’. He said ‘you've got six Indians’, or what do they call them, followers. ‘ You've got six followers’. And I said ‘what about rations and food?’ He said ‘use your initiative boy, you've got six followers, tell them you need to be fed and they’ll sort you out’, and I thought, god this is awful. Would you believe it? It took me over six days to go from Chittagong to Bangalore, we were right down the outside of India. It was a one trick track and if there's trains coming up, we'd park, we parked sometimes overnight, sometimes just for a couple of hours, sometimes for five or six hours and the old [unclear] would come along, ‘hello Sar, we stop here and make you cha?’ ‘Yes’ I says ‘please make me cha’. I said ‘I want some food, any chance?’ They said no money. I said ‘I've got some money’, I give him some, he said ‘I buy chicken, I buy eggs’, and that was my journey and it was fascinating, absolutely. I was the only European, if you like, on the train all the way round to Chittagong to, to, to — what did I say it was?
BP: Bangalore, Bangalore.
DJ: Bangalore, yes. What was the place called outside? Yelahanka, and we were all in Yelahanka, and he said, told us what we're going to do, we’re moving back up to Bombay now, to assemble for re-entry in to Malay in Singapore. And you're joining the Army in Bangalore for landing in Singapore. So l thought lovely [unclear] stuff, you see. So we got — oh, while we were there, they announced that the war in Europe, VE, where you know — the war, peace was there. It went hilarious. We were very stupid really. We had decided, everybody wanted a paddy and we went into Bangalore and we got a little [pause] bola. Oh, what do they call them? You know the two-wheeled carts you pull it, the two wheeled cart. The cha bola? Oh no cha is a tea. Well whatever it was. He was the bloke that used to tow these things and we said to him ‘how many rupees you get if you work all day?’ ‘Oh Sar [unclear] five, six rupees’. So we had a whip round and we took the money and put it in his hand and said no more work today. We will take you home and we put him in the cart. No, no, no, I can't do that. We put him in and made him show us the way home. We towed him to his home and we were told afterwards that we did him a grave disservice. He’d lost face [unclear] towing him, you know and about five Europeans towing a thingme right through the Indian quarter in the back of the [laughs], so we were surprised why he wasn't very grateful. Anyway, from there back up to Bombay. Troop ships again. On our way and we were, we were in the Indian Ocean. We stopped at, what is, what is the place in the South? Sri Lanka, but we weren't allowed ashore, but we carried on sailing and the announcement made then that Japan had packed in and we carried on, and we went to the, the, the pass between Malaya and, and a bit of land, I forget what it is. Anyway, we moved off a place, the stip, Malacca. We moved off the stip and we had ropes on the side of the ship to get down you see, and I might have a photograph of it, and a sailor says to me as I was going down the ship, he says ‘mate’, he says ‘if you had any sense in you, why don't you load that gun of yours’. I’d got a pistol in here but I hadn’t loaded it. He says ‘you're going ashore, you don't know what's going to happen to you there, you want to load that’. Oh yes I thought, I’d better, which I didn’t. But we went into LST, Landing Ship Tanks and we went ashore, not a — no opposition whatsoever and this, a chap I'd got pally with too always seemed [unclear] we decided to walk into Kuala Lumpur as best we could. So we said, they said find your own transport and so we went there and two Japanese came along in a little van sort of thing, which we told to come out and surrender and they came out no bother. And we took the key off them and pinched this car, you see. We went into Kuala Lumpur and this chap and I. I remember he was a Glasgow policeman, he was a big strong chap. He says ‘come on let's get out the way, we don't want to get involved in this’. So we stood and watched the rest of the troops march into Kuala Lumpur, you know, we stood by the side of them. It was, it was fascinating and there again the same air commodore that I met at Bangalore, Paddy Banham , The Air Commodore, the Earl of Banham was known as Paddy Banham. He sent for me. He says ‘Joss, you can use your intelligence, I've got a little job for you’, and I said ‘oh yes, sir’. He says ‘have you got any transport?’ I said ‘yes sir, I've got a very nice thing’. ‘Oh good’ he said. We did — this lad says shall we hand it in now? I said ‘no, no, no if we do hand it in the senior officers will take it off us’. We’ve unclipped our gold bands, which we’d kept. He says ‘if you go down to Singapore, and there's a conference call there by the Army to reallocate accommodation for the Navy, the Air Force and us. Now what you’re to do, you’ll find the instructions down there, you’ll find some [unclear]’ and he produced a list of who or what we needed accommodation for. His own, something and various other officers and the various units. Six health units and he says you're not to take up any new units from the Japanese. It’s only the units only previously [unclear], you know, used by the Japanese. So I thought — so I went down there. I, this lad, who's quite a [unclear] we looked in, we were told, we knew where the Japs had come out of. And you've heard of Raffles Hotel, well next to that used to be Raffles Institute, which is a block of flats overlooking Padang, so we went in there and they were very nice flats, so we said that's ours, his and mine. Paddy then came down and, oh yes, there’s an interesting thing, I was sent for by an Army colonel and he says, I was a flight lieutenant by now, I'd really got on, he says where's the RAF representative on this allocation and accommodation? I said I'm it. He sent a signal up to Paddy Banham saying, you know, we've only got this. I think I was a flight attendant or a flying officer, or whatever I was there. He said, he says we haven't got any proper representative and Paddy said, I don't know what the Army and Navy do, but flying officers here are perfectly capable of sorting out accommodation for their officers. Which the army didn't like that. I did.
CB: [laughs]
DJ: But it didn’t matter we were sent in there. Anyway, Paddy Banham came down about three days, four days later and he says ‘right, could you arrange to meet at the Raffles Hotel’. He says ‘now you're taking me to the accommodation reserved for me’, and we’d found him a rather nice place. And the bugger he says, ‘no before we go there, can you take us to where you're going because we know what’ll happen’. So we said ‘yes sir’. So we took him in this place and he said ‘and I'll have that, I'll have that, you can move that to mine’. He took all the prime bits of furniture and statues and all things that the Japs had collected, removed into his flat. He said ‘right you can keep it now’ Joss’. So I was there. Now then if, I go right back to the beginning, when I joined the Air Force, originally I joined for six years. My six years came up round about that time and I got a message. You are entitled, now the war is over, to be demobilised as you’ve performed your six years and you'll be shipped home, you see, so there's that. I thought — oh, and the job I had there was sending Prisoners of War and families, wives at Siam Road. Very few people have heard of Siam Road which was a women's prison where they kept them interred. I was to sort — I sorted them all that and put them on ships home or flew them where there was aircraft possible, so that was my job while I was there, which I quite enjoyed. Lots of, few people knew about Siam Road but the women had a rough time because it was very difficult. Some of the women started fighting with each other ‘cause of extra rations allegedly. Some of them were given favours, some Japanese in exchange for food which they would give them because they had their kids, and they slept on raffia floors and their child beside them. These huts had about forty or forty-five women and kids all inside Siam Road. Anyway, we got them on troop ships and sent those home. Then the signal come, I was to move and go home on the next suitable troop ship, which I did. Came home, went to Padgate, was signed off, given a civvy suit and, and I think some money, I don't know how much. Went home on two months demob leave. I’d been home forty-eight hours and a telegram came. Please get in touch with me and a number to ring. We’d like you to stay in the Air Force. Would you like to cancel demobilization, if so, you’re to report to a place, you’ll know about, Silverstone. Now, you are to join a squadron leader, god, I can’t remember his name, and close the station down. So here again, I have affected history because I went there with this bloke, he lived in Towcester. He was a farmer and he’d been sent there for his demob but to close this down, you see. He used to go home every night, he’d phone me every morning as a station hand, do you need me? No. Alright I’ll ring you tomorrow. So I was left to close the station down which was just getting trucks, taking stuff and all these instructions came in about where it was all to go and the rest of it was funny. Now going away to my sister and my middle sister was very pally with a girl called Ken Richardson who was a Senior Engineer for Raymond Mays, a [unclear] war. Have you heard the name Raymond Mays, a racing driver before the war? He was his engineer and he was on the, the testing and research for Jag, and Lou sent me a note saying can you get me on the telephone, which I did. She says he’s looking out for an Air Ford, a disused Air Ford to do track runs, round and round the track. So she says can he come to you? I said well I don’t know, I’ll check with Air Ministry, which I did, and they said yes, providing they’ll take out one hundred thousand pounds third party insurance, which I did, they did. The rest is history. They’ve stayed there ever since, so there you are. I opened up Silverstone. Yes I did. Really, I was on old telly. Was it my fiftieth Birthday?
BP: I can’t remember now.
DJ: They came and interviewed me here. And they says, can you show us [unclear] looking at photographs. I said I’m not doing any of that sort of cliché, I said, everybody wants to look at photographs, I haven’t got any, but there you are. I closed Silverstone and that was it. And then I went to [pause] Bridgehill, I was based there, I went to Bridgnorth to close that. RAF Bridgnorth was where all recruits came through at the time. You know of it? And I closed that. And then from there I was posted to [pause] Acklington was it? Acklington, Northumberland. Was it Acklington? Yes it was, close to Acklington. They rebuilt that, I stayed there and I had the only really unhappy days there. I had a CO who was a real bully, a rank bully. He made my life purgatory [coughs], the kind — I was there SAO, Senior Admin Officer. The, I was squadron leader by this time and he. Oh I’m sorry. Oh hold on, I’ve jumped, I’ve jumped because —
CB: From Silverstone?
DJ: Before that. Oh, I was sent back to Upavon. The one place where I’d been as an airman, as command drafting officer with the peace staff, dealing with a post in every rank below officer, and then they said, well we’ll move to the intake shelter recruits. You’re to go to Cardington, you know, the lone hangers.
CB: Yep.
DJ: And I was there, I forget, about six months and then we got a signal coming through, your posted. Upavon, back to Upavon where I’d been as an NAC. I said lovely ‘cause I knew it. You’ll go back there as command [unclear] officer. The night before a phone call said ‘we forgot to tell you, you’re promoted to squadron leader. Get your rank put properly on your dress and report properly dressed to the AOC there CNC’, so that’s when I got squadron leader. Anyway, that was lovely, I enjoyed that. I had a good time RAF [unclear] when I was back up to Acklington now and I had this CO. The kind of silly things he did. If I was duty officer for the day, he’d ring me up and says the horses from a field are loose on the airfield. Get rid of them. I said ‘yes sir’. So I did what any squadron leader would do and rung the orderly sergeant. I said ‘there’re some horses on the airfield, get rid of them’. He said ‘yes sir’ he said, ‘I’ll get the orderly corporal to do that’ which I through was perfectly right and proper.
CB: Yep.
DJ: And anyway, this damned Dennis Sutton his name was, he was called Zebedee by all the troops, Zebedee, he said the next day ‘did you get the horses off the airfield Joss?’ I said ‘yes sir’. He says ‘no’ he says, ‘you didn’t hear me. I said did YOU get the horses off the airfield’. I said ‘no, I told the sergeant, who I believe told the corporal’. He said ‘I told YOU to do it’, and that’s the way he behaved with me. He, he disliked me as much as I disliked him, we didn’t get on. So I then put in an application to get posted. Wing commander admin was Tanner, wing commander, he came to my office and said ‘can you withdraw this?’ I said ‘no, I want to get away from here as soon as possible’. He says ‘well, he says the station officer has had to move, the station medical officer has asked for a move and now you’ve asked for a moved’. I says ‘what about you?’ He says ‘never mind me, will you withdraw it?’ I says ‘no’. Anyway, I had a phone call from Air Ministry. Oh, going back a bit before I closed Padgate, I’d had all the recruits came into Padgate so I had three hundred troops at anytime there, anyway, when the phone call went and said this application of yours to get moved, how soon can you be ready? I says in about two hours, I said ‘where am I going?’ And they said ‘well we thought we’d send you to, to Halton’. ‘Oh’ I said, ‘you couldn’t do better if you’d given me the choice of the Air Force, I’d go back to Halton apprentices’. It would just suit me down to the ground. I like the area and I like working with the youngsters, so I said alright. They said ‘we’ll give you ten days’. I said ‘you can give me 10 minutes. I can be on my way’ and I stayed here until — I don’t know how long I’d been here, nearly four years, and then my son here was saying one day, he says ‘I suppose you will be on the move again sometime, you’ve been here sometime’. I said ‘yes I will’, and it dawned on me. I’d never, all my moves, I’d never consulted my family but anyway, I just excepted I’d come home and say were going to here were going to there and I said [coughs], ‘do you not want to move?’ He says no I’d like to stay here. My wife said the same and my younger son said ‘well if you’re asking me, I’d like to stay here too’. So, I was chatting with somebody that I was thinking of coming out and these lovely coincidence. I had a pal here who was a training officer at Handley Page Aircraft Company. He came round one day, he says you’re talking about leaving, I said yes. He says the training officer, the welfare office, training officer at Handley Page has died, they’re looking for another one and they’re looking for an ex-Air Force chap, you’re just the man says he. He knew me and I said I am so he put me in touch with their [pause] whatever he was, director of personnel, who, would you believe it, was an ex Halton apprentice and he says would you like to go for an interview. I says ‘can I be very rude to you and say would you like to come over here and look round your old alma mater and have lunch in the MESS and that’. I did. He did, he came over and it was lucky, everywhere I went people couldn’t have been nicer to me and very polite, and he said, ‘by god, you get on well, just the lad for the job’. He said ‘how soon can you get out?’ I said ‘I don’t know’ and I waited. I put in my application to get out. They made me wait three months. I came out, stayed here until [coughs] sixty-nine, and then I thought it’s time I came out and be bone idle and there you are. That’s your lot.
CB: Fantastic.
BP: Lovely.
DJ: Sorry.
CB: Right let’s have a break. Thank you.
DJ: I had a nice refreshing cup of tea with a [bleep] bloke named Bob Martin who used to be my boss and he was —
CB: This, this is interrupting a moment. This is when you were posted to Spitalgate?
DJ: Yes.
CB: And the Dutch people?
DJ: Yes the Dutch people there. My boss was Bob Martin who was responsible for flying aspects and I was responsible for the admin of these Dutch recruits, which was lovely. I was there and when they passed out Prince Bernard came across to inspect them and give them their wings and the rest of it. Now Bob and I had been very kind to these Dutch boys, we used to take them into Nottingham for parties and took them home and did all sorts, and Prince Bernard he said to me he said, ‘the lads have been saying you’ve been so kind and very good, I’m going to send you an honorary George the order of the honorary of something or other. It came. The bloody station commander kept one and the, I think his equivalent officer kept the other, we never got it at all, they kept it. It’s a pity, I fancied that ‘cause the thing went round your neck.
CB: What an extraordinary thing.
DJ: The station commander, it’s interesting. I told you I was teetotal, I didn’t have any, the Mess had — what was it a we just mentioned it — at Grantham.
CB: Oh Spitalgate.
DJ: Yes Spitalgate.
CB: Yes.
DJ: Yes, pre war officers didn’t stand in a bar, you gave all your drinks to stewards. Were you pre war?
CB: No, no.
DJ: No, you gave a steward your drink and —
CB: You were served it at the table.
DJ: But they, they — what you call it? They split off the mess main lounge and put a bar one side and a lounge the other, which was fine. Now the lads I was there with were good fun, they really was, and bearing in mind, I wasn’t very old. We decided we’d have a cycle race in the lounge one day, so they moved the settees and the chairs, piled them all up in the middle and we all got the cycles, went round. I hit this wall, went through it, I got off the bike to meet the station commander standing against the bar, and I said ‘good evening sir’. ‘Evening Joss’. He shook his head like this. Anyway, you may remember, they used to fill in a confidential report regularly and in the column, thirteen sixty-nine it was called, and besides when he put in mine, drinks regularly but drinks unwisely, and he says, you can’t put that about Joss, he said he doesn’t drink at all he is teetotal. He says rubbish. He says ‘I’ve seen him as pissed as a fart. He rode through a wall, took his hat off to me and said hello and walked out again as though nothing had happened’. Anyway, that was alright. He sent for me for a bit, he said you’ve been posted again. I shouldn’t have missed this important bit because it’s really important. He says you’re going to Germany to PA to Air Vice Marshall Spackman. That was a lovely job, oh I did enjoy it. He was, he was a bachelor. He was big, about six foot four and he was a joy to work for, AVM Spackman, CBS, Charles Basil Slater and I was his PA and he lived alone in a house just up on the hill, you know. A German had been thrown out and he was there and I, everywhere I went, I went with him. What he didn’t know and I knew now because I’m about five foot six and he was about six foot three, well everywhere we were known, everybody else referred to here’s mutton Geoff coming along, you see, we were and I was there — my little office I had was between his air vice marshal and the CNC was [pause], it will come to me, I can’t remember. His CNC was in a room that side. These had been bedrooms in a hotel at Buckeberg, [unclear] rather, and every time the two of us would meet each other, they’d go through my office, you see, and I was leaping up and down and they both said ‘don’t keep jumping up and down Joss, when we come through, if we want to speak to you we’ll tell you’. Anyway the CNC came through and stood in front of me one day and he says I’ll be, I’m posting you Joss. ‘Oh’, I said, ‘I don’t want to go and leave the air marshal here’. I says ‘I do enjoy it here and I don’t want to be posted thank you. Can’t you stop it?’ and he says and he called Spackers, ‘Spackers, come in here’, he says ‘I can’t get your PA to leave you. He’s crying his eyes out here because you’re moving him’. Of course, Spackers came in and said to him ‘now your being unkind sir, tell him what you’re going to do with him’. He says ‘I want you to be NCO at Scharfoldendorf which is Leave Centre in the Harz Mountains’. I says ‘goodbye sir’. I’d just refused to go and I said goodbye. Now I was there just over a year and Korea started, and they wanted gunnery leaders to go onto Sunderlands and out to Korea, and I was to be posted home, which really hacked me off. Anyway, the post had come through and I couldn’t do anything about it but I can show you something if you can lift this across. When I left the Germans there, I had got on so well with them they, they commandant of whatever the Germans call these camps they had, he’d been very good to them and the, the people —
CB: What the prisoner of war camp?
DJ: He didn’t want him tried at all.
CB: Right.
DJ: This colonel. Anyway he was a good — he made this at my station as a farewell present. That’s Scharfoldendorf [laughs]
CB: Amazing.
DJ: It really is lovely. He knew he had me in tears.
CB: Amazing model complete with swimming pool.
DJ: Yes, yeah. That was the [unclear]
BP: Oh, I say.
DJ: It was a sort of Officers Mess.
BP: Wow.
DJ: And that was my house in this corner, I didn’t even know. No, no that’s the Mess, the red roof’s the Mess. That was my house but I didn’t live in it, I preferred to live in the Mess with the blokes, it was just paradise. In, in the winter you could skate down the hill, we had skating into [unclear] and then [unclear]. It was a gliding school as well and the gliders were launched, you will like this, if you didn’t know of it, they launched them with elastic bands. They would get three either side, six elastic bands and it was a very steep drop and they would run pulling this elastic band and shoot the gliders off the end. We put up barriers to stop them falling over. And then as they were, what upset me there was I was posted home. I had arranged for my brother to come here [coughs] and when I got home, I met another old air gunner that I knew and he said ‘oh you lucky devil, I would love to go there’. By that time I was married, and my wife had had our first. He said ‘I’d love to do that job you know’. I said ‘well I didn’t want to go if I could help it’, so we put in a joint application to swap. I got to stay there and he went to thingme, so he went there and I stayed there, so that was it. What the devil did I do after that? Oh yes, went to Aden [laughs], sorry about this.
BP: [laughs]
CB: It’s alright.
DJ: I forgot about it. Went to Aden, did a good two years in Aden and came back [pause] to Bridgnorth to close it. That was a bit before Bridgestone. So that’s it, I’m sorry I missed that bit. Good job you’re sitting there [pause].
CB: Well we’ll have a break now. Thank you.
DJ: I, I —
CB: Hang on.
DJ: I got a —
CB: So we’re now back at, when you were in Germany and the Berlin airlift.
DJ: I was at the hospital, RAF hospital [coughs] and this little redhead was there and I was, I shared, four of us in a bay, two soldiers and two airmen, and we made a hell of a lot of noise apparently with our radios and that, and the matron said to her go and stop them making that noise or I’ll be in trouble. She came in and said ‘you stop it’, I said ‘if you marry me, I’ll stop making the noise and I’ll stop there’. She died after we’d been married fifty-two years.
CB: Really.
DJ: Yes.
CB: Fantastic.
DJ: Every time she was on duty she’d come there or I’d go and fetch her and there we are, so that was that business. What else have I forgot?
BP: The Berlin airlifts.
DJ: Oh yes. Well that was during the Berlin airlifts, yes. That was, you know we went down to the airlift. I don’t know which one he wanted.
CB: So Spackman was something to do with the Berlin airlift?
DJ: He, he was the senior air staff officer. SASO, Senior Air Staff Officer, in fact, he was acting CNC for a while. Oh yes, there is one interesting bit on that. He couldn’t and he was pally with an American called, he was very popular name down the American staff, oh he was well known. Anyway it didn’t matter. They couldn’t decide whether the first airlifts should be fighter escorted or not because the Russians, and he debated with him and anyway we were there. Anyway he said ‘we’ve got to make our mind up’. He said ‘get me onto the Prime Minister’. So we had a call to the Prime Minister, who was Clem Attlee at the time, and oh yes I’ll tell you about him in a bit. He used to get through to his secretary and he would switch on a recorder and so would I, and I would say the airbus was at the scene and wants to speak to the pilot, and they had a [unclear plane noise in the background] and [unclear] in fact. You as a man on the door must make a decision. Whatever decision you make I promise to back you. Are you recording it? He says yes sir I am. He says alright. I will leave it to you. Let me know. So they rang off and he rang off, this was about, oh, two in the afternoon. He says ‘I don’t want to be disturbed or spoken to’ he says ‘I don’t want to be disturbed’ he says put me through to General [long pause] oh dear, well known American General. Anyway, whatever it was put through to him and they nattered away. I said ‘do you want this recording’, he said ‘yes I do’, so we did and then I had to listen on all the time and they decided no escort, no fighter escort. He says alright. And he came into the office with me and he says put me through to the Prime Minister again, and so I put him through to the Prime Minister again and his, his secretary or whoever it was says, are we recording, and I says yes, we’re recording, I said, do you want to go through there as it was lonely, he says I’m going through and then I’d hear him say message to Mr Prime Minister and I suspect them on to you and I would put them through. And he says ‘we’ve decided sir, no fighter escort’. ‘Very good’ says the Prime Minister, Clem Attlee, ‘I’m glad. That’s a decision I was hoping you would make’. But when I thought of it afterwards, there’s a bloke he could of incited war his rate of pay as an air vice marshal at the time was three thousand a year. Can you believe it? An air vice marshal, a bloke, the future, the country was on his hands. So that was it and that was old Spackers. He and my only collusion with the Prime Minister. He came out later on to visit, he says ‘I’ll come out and visit you’ said the Prime Minister. By this time I was up at [unclear] and old Spackers rang me and he says ‘I’m bringing the Prime Minister, he’s coming out Joss. He says can you lay on a reasonable lunch’, I says ‘yes sir’. He says ‘I’m bringing the Prime Minister, he’s coming out and spending a day, a look round [unclear] and he and I want to chat informally’. So that’s fine. He did — that week, the lass that become my wife was just visiting me at the time, she used to have to get a lift back to her, her thing which was near the same place in Buckeberg and so I said to old Spackers ‘look’ I said, ‘I’ve got a nursing sister here, got to get back tonight. When he’s taking Clem back to Buckeberg to fly home, could you give her a lift back’. He says ‘yes, she can sit in the front with the driver’. Anyway later on, old the Spackers said to me, ‘that nurse, that lovely nurse, are you going to marry he?’ I says ‘quite likely sir’. He says ‘well I would, she spent the whole bloody journey telling me how lucky I was to have you as one of my commanding officers’ [laughs].
BP: [laughs]
CB: [laughs]
DJ: It sounded fairly typical so fancy me forgetting that. There you are.
CB: Thank you. Let’s, let’s have a break now.
DJ: Yes please.
CB: Because you could do with a lemonade of some kind.
DJ: Yes.
CB: Let me start [pause]. So we’re restarting with Douglas talking about the operational experiences after HCU where the squadron was on Halifaxes, and then changed to Lancaster’s and so could you just tell us your experience as in operations, please, including the nice bits and the not so good?
DJ: Well, it’s very different. There were some bits that were less worrying. It would be much easier if I look at this as we chat.
CB: OK.
DJ: Because I remember, I can remember some instances which were, you know, when we were hit by flak and another one you see there’s one op that I remember which after D-Day.
CB: Yeah.
DJ: We did north of Caen and we were bombing when the Germans were still north of Caen on the Tuesday, and we were told to bomb Caen but to miss the church. It had a big red cross on the top, it is being used as a hospital. So as we bombed north where the Germans were, you know, nearer the sea, and they said — now beside me there’s another Lancaster and I knew the squadron because you all had squadron numbers, and it hit by flak and its engine went on fire. Within seconds we saw two jump out, paratroopers. Now the sad thing is, they jumped a bit early because if you’re on German lines, you got taken prisoner, but the pillar, the, the, their pilot was an ace really, you, you could see this hell of a mess, this thing was burning, it got worse and worse and he banked it round, going over the sea and the others all bailed out then. We counted them out so we know they all went out, dropping in the sea. My skipper, he went down as low as he could and he said to the wireless op, signal that there’s all these aircrew in the sea, signal the position, exactly to the wireless op. And the wireless op says to Len, what Len, what position, what position and there, anyway we didn’t bother because we saw the Navy about four or five small aircraft come and pick these up and would you believe they were back on the squadron alright the next day, anyway which was lovely. But their pilot, I think, did a superb job because eventually it, it just burst into flames and went into the sea and he got an immediate DMC when he got back. He did. But that was, that was really quite exciting. It was worrying really.
CB: Did you see any scarecrows?
DJ: Oh yes. Well, the flaming balls they used to shoot up and they’d look like an aircraft had exploded. might be seeing exploded aircraft so you weren’t sure which was which.
CB: Did you, did you know what the scarecrow really was?
DJ: Well, well we were told it was a, a sort of offensive bomb which exploded in the air.
CB: Right, but, but what was the reality?
DJ: Well, we just used to feel sorry for them. Really you didn’t —
CB: OK.
DJ: You didn’t have any sort of — you’d say Christ, and we were — I remember a bomb going down and we said look there’s one going down, come on, get out. It was a shout for them to come on get out of —
CB: Yeah.
DJ: The skipper said ‘never bloody mind them, you look round to see what’s coming to us. Ignore them’.
CB: Yeah.
DJ: You can’t do anything for them.
CB: Yeah, yeah. What, what I meant is did you, the, the official line was that these explosions were from a particular type of German munition. Were you aware of what the reality was and how they were hit?
DJ: We were told.
CB: And what was that?
DJ: Because we couldn’t recognise, well we were told this is what they were called. Were they exploding dustbins or something they called it.
CB: Oh I see right. So the, the reason for the question is because this was a way of concealing to air crew.
DJ: Yeah.
CB: The fact that the German night fighters had upward firing cannon.
DJ: Yeah.
CB: Which shot the plane down from underneath and I just wondered if you were aware of that?
DJ: No.
CB: Right.
DJ: No, no at least if I was I can’t remember.
CB: Yeah.
DJ: Yeah.
CB: And that was called Schrage Musik.
DJ: Was it?
BP: You, you had the incident where it was very cold. Without the electricity, you didn’t have the electricity. Douglas?
DJ: Sorry.
BP: You had your incident —
DJ: Oh well, this is, we’d been, you know mine laying, was dropping mines outside —
CB: Yeah. Gardening.
DJ: Outside the port, gardening.
CB: Yeah.
DJ: The other side of Denmark, you know.
CB: Yes.
DJ: The sea there. On the way back there was a hell of a storm. It was quite bad and the skipper he says ‘I’ll try and get over this’, and he climbed and climbed and said, ‘I can’t get over it so I’ll go down’. As he went down, we were struck by lightning. He said ‘Christ I can’t see, I can’t see. It’s blinded me. Come on’. He called to Jim and Don, ‘hold this prop for me, hold the stick for me, hold the stick for me I can’t see’. And my — four turrets, there’s a stream of flames. What are they called? Whatever lightning calls it. There’s a name for this I gather.
CB: Right.
DJ: And they were just circles of flames and I thought, God, it’s going to set us on fire too. But he couldn’t see, and Don and Mac were, were together flying the plane, that’s the bomb aimer and the flight engineer, they were flying the plane together. They were talking, I was listening to all this which wasn’t very nice at all.
CB: Oh.
DJ: Anyway, and the skipper then says, ‘its coming back, its coming back, I can see a bit, it’s coming back’ and eventually he said ‘yes it’s cleared’, now which was about I suppose ten minutes, quarter of an hour and he says ‘I still can’t get over this thing’ and he says ‘we’ll go under it’. So we went down and he crossed the North Sea at about two hundred feet, which is frightening in itself. He went down and down to get under it and he says ‘well I can’t go down any further, are you holding on’, holding on and climbed back up and as it was, you know the, the storm cleared a bit and he got up to a reasonable height and got us back, but I don’t know if it’s in my log book that a pilot was blinded.
CB: So what about other experiences that were slightly or considerably disturbing? What was the most disturbing situation?
DJ: Well it was — you know, it’s memories.
CB: When was your Le Havre operation?
DJ: September the — I’ll tell you here, because that’s in here [long pause], the 21st of [unclear] bombs brought back, low cloud, in danger of hitting our own troops so the trip was disallowed.
CB: Right.
DJ: We’d been there and were shot at but we weren’t allowed to do it. Then the very next day we went to [unclear] troops and armoured concentration. The last commission that day. So that was handy, that was nice.
CB: What date was that?
DJ: That was the 26th of September forty-four.
CB: When you were commissioned?
DJ: Yeah.
CB: OK.
DJ: And —
CB: So could you just tell me —
DJ: It was 17th Le Havre, it was the 6th of September, 17th Le Havre. To accentuate the surrender of German Garrison, which I found out later was [unclear], there was no German Garrison in Le Havre.
CB: At all?
DJ: No.
CB: Right
DJ: They were out, this as I say, there was this big, very almost mountains behind it, hills all the way round Le Havre.
CB: Yeah.
DJ: They were all up there.
CB: Not in the town?
DJ: They told us they were laughing like a drain at us busy bombing the centre and killing off the froggies.
CB: Yeah. So they didn’t get hit at all?
DJ: Well —
CB: The Germans?
DJ: No not much because we weren’t aiming at them, we were aiming, you know, right in the centre. Even though our aim was good, it was just it shouldn’t have been there.
CB: Did, did you have Pathfinder that day?
DJ: I couldn’t tell you.
CB: Oh.
DJ: It doesn’t mention here so it would mention in there if they were, it would tell you.
CB: Yeah. OK
DJ: In that thing it tells you how many Pathfinders accompanied us.
CB: Yeah. OK. What other experiences were memorable in your —
DJ: It’s difficult to say. Yes, Dijon, I can’t remember the date, we got one engine hit, put it out of commission and the skipper decided we’d come back, we wouldn’t come back straight up, north of France. He turned out towards the Wash to the Bay of Biscay and we went out there and he went as low as he could, and we were going quite low, about four or five hundred feet, something like that and a very brave pilot, a JU88 came up behind us, even lower, and I blasted him and I know I hit him but I never saw him go down, but I thought he had bags of guts to come under there but he disappeared. There but that was —
CB: This is day time is it or night?
DJ: And the next. Sorry?
CB: Is this night time or day time?
DJ: Night time.
CB: Right.
DJ: And so we went out over the North Sea and came in on the Channel and we were sort of over Southampton or somewhere like that, and the next thing, I don’t know why I wasn’t paying attention but, I suddenly looked and there right behind us was a Beaufighter. He’d seen a Lanc come in there and he’d got in behind us and I hadn’t seen him coming. It was disgraceful, but I didn’t tell, I didn’t own up to this until later on, but this Beaufighter was there. He realised it was us and ‘cause, you know, we’d, we had the different colours of the day you could shoot, and then he veered off and left us. But we got back, but we come back on three engines all the way.
CB: How many times did you engage fighters?
DJ: Oh god knows, again I’ll have to look. So let’s say about ten or twelve.
CB: Right.
DJ: But some of them just came and didn’t stay, you know, like I remember when we went to — we were going to the Rhine somewhere and I saw a Messerschmitt come round behind me and I just, I saw him there, he was going to bank in to come round and I blasted him when he went up. I did about four hundred rounds something like that, and when he saw that he cleared off. And then another one. And we saw, but we didn’t realise at the time but, Jimmy and I both thought it was a Jet. It came on and it started blasting in our stream, you know the four hundred, sometimes in the stream, four hundred loads, sometimes —
CB: Yeah.
DJ: You’ll see in that how many each op had. And he started blasting, you could see him blasting and they had a point five cannon at our stupid 303s, which was the worst thing ever they gave us, and he just came through blasting and then cleared off, but we didn’t see him get any Lancs at all.
CB: Right.
DJ: But sometimes you were in the middle of four hundred loads, it could be a bit frightening, you know there was the odd occasion when Jimmy would shout, you know, cooks report, cooks report because a bomber tumbling down from a Lanc, you know. Some of the naughty ones would fly too high and their bombs would come down between our main plane and tier one, two or three times I remember that happening.
CB: So explain, could you explain what you mean by that, I mean why were they bombing from too high?
DJ: Because they, the, the story was they wanted to get away from the flak and leave us to get the flak.
CB: Oh, I see.
DJ: It was a bit naughty to let the lower aircraft have the flak and they would get up above us, but it was one of those things we were told about.
CB: Yeah. So they released their bombs, not on the target, is that right?
DJ: No, mostly on the target.
CB: It was? Right.
DJ: But too high.
CB: Yeah.
DJ: Above other Lancs.
CB: Yeah, yeah.
DJ: I mean it was mentioned about, on many briefings it would be mentioned.
CB: Yeah.
DJ: You know, just remember who you’re flying above.
CB: Yeah.
DJ: Do take care.
CB: Right. So what other times do you think you hit other, hit fighters? On what other occasions?
DJ: I don’t, I don’t, I, I can’t remember. There’s two, the two Messerschmitt. There was Jimmy [unclear] from the BFM.
CB: Yeah.
DJ: I’m not positive on them because I don’t know. This was, these are not very accurate, you just bung in what you think at the time. It’s a reminder.
CB: You’re just looking at the log book at the moment.
DJ: Yes.
CB: Yeah.
DJ: I got a few there. Incidentally you know the French Governor decided to give the —
BP: The Légion d'Honneur
DJ: Légion d'Honneur, it was an honour to people that were on the thing. Then they sent one to Len and they sent me a note saying I’d be getting one but I don’t know when it was coming but I haven’t had it.
CB: Right.
DJ: That was some time ago.
CB: So that’s a French Embassy job isn’t it? Are you following that up by any chance?
DJ: It was on my fifth op. Yes. Dijon.
BP: We tried but —
DJ: Come back with query fighters but no damage.
CB: What date was that?
DJ: That was on the 5th of July.
CB: Right. Forty-four?
DJ: And then going on to the 18th of July at Caen. Hit by flak. Starboard fuel tank holed, which was frightening because we were worried that that was on fire.
CB: Yeah.
DJ: And then next week, 20th July, Martin Lars at [unclear], we had two combats. Number one was [unclear] 210. Number two I couldn’t identify what his name was.
CB: Just in general terms, how did you feel about going on these bombing raids?
DJ: Well I never doubted I’d get back alright. I used to get, my mouth used to get a bit dry, as a bloke said that’s when you discover that blood was brown, you know you get a bit [unclear]
CB: This is right. Yes.
DJ: You get a bit excited.
CB: Your underwear changed. Yes. How did the crew in general feel about these operations?
DJ: Well I don’t think we discussed, you know, unless there was an incident we did.
CB: Yeah. Well I think we’ve covered an awful lot and thank you very much for all the time.
DJ: The other bit that might be in your log. On my twelfth op to [unclear]. We were fully escorted by USA Thunderbolts and Mustangs.
CB: Oh. That made you feel better.
DJ: Yes, oh to see any fighters on your side. Yeah.
BP: I think the fact that they concluded all their ops means something.
CB: Thirty-two of them.
BP: I mean were they lucky. I mean, what, how, you know —
CB: I’m going to stop it 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
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Interview with Douglas Joss
Identifier
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AJossDA151007
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-07
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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01:47:00 audio recording
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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France
Great Britain
India
Singapore
England--Lincolnshire
India--Bangalore
India--Yelahanka
Temporal Coverage
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1944
1945
Description
An account of the resource
Douglas was born in Aberdeen, the eldest of 5 children. He signed up for the Royal Air Force in October 1938 and trained as a Flight Rigger, becoming a Leading Aircraftsman after training.
During his time as a Leading Aircraftsman, he tells of working with George Stainforth, the last Schneider Trophy Pilot for Britain, and his experiences of meeting Douglas Bader whilst he was training to get his Royal Air Force wings back.
Douglas spent time in the Gold Coast, assembling aircraft such as Maryland Kitty Hawks before moving further inland to Nigeria and tells of his run-in with the Foreign Legion, before contracting Malaria and being sent home.
After recovering from Malaria, Douglas then trained as a Flight Engineer before being posted to the Heavy Conversion Unit on Handley Page Halifaxes, and then on to Avro Lancasters with 12 Squadron.
After his time in 12 Squadron, Douglas volunteered for the Pathfinder Force but was sent overseas to India and Singapore instead where he was involved in the sending home of wives and families from Siam Road, who were interred by the Japanese.
Douglas completed 32 operations, doing 2 extra operations to allow his bomb aimer to completed his tour of duty and he left the Royal Air Force with the rank of Squadron Leader.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Vivienne Tincombe
626 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
fitter airframe
ground crew
Halifax
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
RAF Bridlington
RAF Castle Donington
RAF Halton
RAF Honington
RAF Padgate
RAF Silverstone
RAF Upavon
RAF Wickenby
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/310/3467/PNoyeR1501.2.jpg
2653db561dc3c7ee26ea68bcaca8b1ef
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/310/3467/ANoyeR151022.1.mp3
be6dc302b639364c57f551e47bc43bba
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
Noye, Rupert
Rupert Newstead Noye
Rupert N Noye
Rupert Noye
R N Noye
R Noye
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history with Rupert Newstead Noye DFC (1923 -2021, 1332761 Royal Air Force).
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-22
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
Noye, R
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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RN: My name is Rupert Noye. I was born in February 1923. When the war started I was, er, sixteen and in 1940, when Churchill formed the LDV, I volunteered for that. We were renamed later Home Guard and it came in useful when I eventually went into the Air Force because we had learned a lot of rifle drill, marching, things like that. And in, after just a few days after my eighteenth birthday I volunteered for the Air Force as a wireless operator air gunner. I was accepted in April ‘41 but then put on deferred service and eventually called up in September ‘41 and, er, went to Blackpool on a s— a radio course, failed it miserably and re-mustered to air gunner. We were posted to Hendon then and at Hendon for about six months and then I was posted onto Scotland to take the gunnery course. After gunnery course we did OTU on Whitleys at Abingdon. When that course was finished we were posted to St [unclear] attached to Coastal Command, where we were doing sweeps over the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay, and one day we did actually see a submarine and attacked it but we never knew of any definite result. After that we were posted on to Wellingtons, went to Harwell to convert from Whitleys, and we were then to posted 166 Squadron at Kirmington and our pilot disappeared one day and we had another pilot, an Australian, starting his second tour. He was very, very good and, er, we finished our first tour at Kirmington when they converted to Lancasters in September ‘43 and I was posted to Operational Training Unit as an instructor. I was recalled in April ’44 to 12 Squadron at Wickenby to replace a rear gunner who had been injured and they, the crew, had already volunteered to join the Pathfinder Force so I went along with them. We went to Upwood and started operating with Pathfinder Force. You had to do so many marker trips before you got your Pathfinder badge and, er, but due to an incident of — we, the crew was broken up. I stayed at Upwood as a spare gunner and during that time I flew with quite a few different pilots and eventually finished up, er, in about September ‘44 with, er, Tony Hiscock. He was what we called a blind marker. He bombed on radar or dropped the flares on radar and we did quite a few, well we did about nineteen trips together, and the last one was over Hamburg, a big daylight raid just before the end of the — 31st March actually, 1945. After that we were all made redundant, went to various stations and different jobs and I volunteered to stay in the Air Force for another three years and eventually was posted back to Upwood on 148 squadron, again on Lancasters, and I stayed there until I was demobbed in 1949. That’s about it. I was very lucky during my time in Bomber Command. I did three tours of ops and was only once was attacked by a fighter. That was on the 5th of January 1945. We were coming back from Hanover and I saw [bell rings] a fighter, a single engine fighter, approaching from starboard side. I told the skipper and he started to corkscrew but the aircraft did fire at us and we were damaged in the tailplane and the wing. The damage to the wing disabled my turret completely because of the hydraulics were damaged and the — but there was no real serious damage. We got back to base quite happily but we did lose about three hundred-odd gallons of petrol. Then in March ‘45 I was again rather lucky and I was awarded the DFC and Tony Hiscock, the pilot I flew with, he was awarded a bar to his and, er, he was a very good pilot and we got on very well together as a crew, which was one of the biggest things you needed, to be a happy crew. I think that’s about enough. When you flew with Bomber Command you were in a crew and the crew — you were trained as crew and you got, generally speaking, you got on very well together and at times, er, when me as a rear gunner would have given instructions to the pilot, having seen possibly an enemy aircraft, instruct the pilot to dive or corkscrew and he would do that without any hesitatation, although I must say we were — that I was lucky in my time that we didn’t have many times when that was necessary but the crew, the crewing up system was a bit haphazard. When you reported to OTU you were all at one time, a varying number of pilots, wireless operators, navigators, bomb aimers and gunners were put in a big hangar or big room and told to crew up, which seemed very haphazard, but the system seemed to work. Later on, if you went on heavies as a crew, you went to a Heavy, Heavy Conversion Unit and got a mid-upper gunner and a flight engineer and, er, I never had that because as I joined from a place of rest to a place as a rear gunner. I think that’s about it. We got up to about to, er, on our training and we went into these Defiants and the — firstly you couldn’t, not allowed to work the turret until the pilot says so, and so he said, ‘OK.’ So, I turned the turret round and you have to raise the guns first, turn round and looked at the tailplane and there’s this little tiny tailplane behind you and you think, ‘That’s all that’s holding us up.’ [slight laugh] But it wasn’t, we had wings built the right way round and a good engine [slight laugh] but it was funny really because I mean that was the first time the vast majority of us had ever flown when we were on training because, I mean, you didn’t fly much in those days unless you paid five bob ride with Jack Cobham when he came round to a local airfield and you could go and have a short trip for five bob or seven and six or something. Alan Cobham that was. He started off doing refuelling in mid-air didn’t he, er, down in Dorset? But funny ‘cause when we were at Blackpool we went to the Pleasure Gardens there had they had what they used to call in those days the scenic railway and got on this thing and then down in almost vertical swoops and up the other side. And I think that was designed to put you off flying. [laugh]
MJ: Did it?
RN: It didn’t. No, Not really. Not when you got on a bit on bigger aircraft with the rest of the crew, you were alight, you were quite happy because you couldn’t do much with a Whitley [slight laugh]. It was quite good fun.
MJ: People don’t realise it was good fun.
RN: Well, it was as you steadily, as you, after you crewed up and got steadily got to know a bit more about the rest of the crew because, er, that pilot we lost when we got on the squadron because I think he went LMF. And — but he was married and had a young daughter. He was a Welshman and later on the wireless operator went LMF. There must have been something wrong with us because the navigator and the bomb aimer and myself finished the tour eventually on, on Wellingtons. But we had a nice picture of the Queen, didn’t we, for our 60th wedding anniversary? And I must get a frame for that. Put it up. But it’s a nice picture.
MJ: That’s the point. It’s — that’s how it works. That’s how you remember things.
RN: On Pathfinders, um, they were all volunteers from various squadrons but we used to have talks on the squadrons from, er, Hamish Mahaddie who was one of Don Bennett’s leading men and he used to come round trying to talk people into joining PFF and, um, he must have been very successful because they were never short of volunteers.
MJ: Did — what sort of training did you have to do for that?
RN: Well, when we went to PFF you went to Warboys because Warboys was the Navigation Training Unit for Pathfinders and you went there and you did so much, about a week or ten days’ course there, training, mainly training for navigators and then you were sent to the squadron and did the ops and marking as the time came [background noises]. You didn’t mark straight away because you were, weren’t considered experienced enough or trained up to the, the standard that they wanted.
MJ: Did you have to go with another crew then?
RN: No, you had instructor pilots that went with you mainly but, of course, all the navigators’ logs were sort of checked by the navigation officers after you came back from every trip whether it was training or an actual operation. [background noises throughout sentence]
MJ: On behalf of the International Bomber Command I’d like to thank Rupert Noye DFC for his recording on the date of — I forget what it is now, 26th? 27th, ah —
RN: 31st is Saturday.
MJ: I’ve got — I’ll see this is on and stays on. 27th of October 2015. Once again, I thank you again and even though I got the date wrong. Thank you.
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ANoyeR151022
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Interview with Rupert Noye
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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00:12:40 audio recording
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Pending review
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Mick Jeffery
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2015-10-22
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Rupert Noye completed two tours of operations as a rear gunner with 166 and 156 Squadrons.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Coastal Command
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Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
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Christine Kavanagh
12 Squadron
148 Squadron
156 Squadron
166 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
civil defence
crewing up
Defiant
Distinguished Flying Cross
Home Guard
Lancaster
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Abingdon
RAF Harwell
RAF Hendon
RAF Kirmington
RAF Upwood
RAF Warboys
RAF Wickenby
submarine
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/292/3447/PMacdonaldK1703.1.pdf
c95d205c4198d82d8852fe9584466cac
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/292/3447/AMacdonaldK170222.1.mp3
c455719386ed5595e6ad4b299a1473ab
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Title
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Macdonald, Ken
Ken Macdonald
K Macdonald
Description
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Two items. An oral history interview with Ken Macdonald (b. 1924, 432233 Royal Australian Air Force) and a photograph.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Ken Macdonald and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2017-02-22
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Macdonald, K
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jean McCartney. The interviewee is Ken MacDonald. The interview is taking place at Mr MacDonald’s home in Banora Point, New South Wales on the 22nd of February 2017. Ken, let’s just start right back in June 1924. You were born in Dee Why.
KM: Dee Why. That’s right. Yes.
JM: Yes. And does that mean that you and your family lived around Dee Why and stayed around Dee Why?
KM: No.
JM: Or —
KM: My parents came out from Scotland six weeks before.
JM: Right.
KM: With five children and me on the way.
JM: Gosh. Yes.
KM: And I was born in Dee Why. Yes. Dad was a farmer in, just out of Glasgow and that’s his farm up there.
JM: Oh my goodness. Yeah.
KM: Yeah. Which is — I think it was knocked down during the war.
JM: Right. Which part? Which side of Glasgow was it?
KM: Dalmuir.
JM: Dalmuir. Which is —
KM: Yeah. Don’t ask me, you know.
JM: Oh ok. Right. Right.
KM: You’ve got the river. The river and then Dalmuir would be out somewhere.
JM: Yes. Yes.
KM: In farmland in those days. Yes. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. So you never had the opportunity to go to back and see where it was?
KM: I went back to Scotland when we, during the war I went there. I never got to Dalmuir. I met my uncle. You know.
JM: Uncle.
KM: Relatives. Relatives who lived around the place.
JM: Yeah.
KM: They were farmer’s as well. Yes.
JM: Right. Ok. Well that’s all very interesting. So then did your family live at Dee Why? Or —
KM: They had a, yes we lived at Dee Why for about five or six years. They had a corner store. Something different for mum and dad, you know. It was a twenty four seven job, you know. Every day of the week and so forth. They worked very hard. From there we went to Cessnock.
JM: Right.
KM: They bought into a fish and chip shop. They’d never done that either.
JM: That’s even harder work. Yes.
KM: Yeah. In Cessnock. And the MacDonald’s Fish Shop was in the town up until about ten years ago.
JM: Gosh.
KM: It passed down through the family and then one of my nephew’s had it and he retired from it.
JM: Gosh.
KM: From there we went to Victoria Street, Potts Point. One side of the road was Woolloomooloo. The other side was Pott, was Potts Point. They had a private hotel.
JM: Right.
KM: And do you want the others? Where we went after that?
JM: Well, where, where so how long were you in —? So you would have finished your, so if it was five years you would not have actually not have started your school in Dee Why, I assume.
KM: No. I started my school at Cessnock.
JM: In Cessnock.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. So did you — how long were your parents running the shop?
KM: We were there ‘til about 1934.
JM: 1934. So —
KM: Yeah. Then I went —
JM: So —
KM: To Manley for a year.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Manley. And then Darlinghurst Public.
JM: Public, yeah.
KM: Then in 1937 I went to Sydney Boy’s High.
JM: Boy’s High.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Ok. Right. Yes. So at Sydney Boy’s High did you do both your intermediate and your leaving?
KM: Yeah.
JM: Right. So you finished your leaving.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: I didn’t excel but still I passed them.
JM: Well, that’s, that’s —
KM: I left school in 19 — when did the Japanese come into the war? ‘42 it would be.
JM: Well presumably —
KM: ‘37 ’38 ‘40
JM: Yeah. So you would have, you would have left —
KM: No. Forty —
JM: ’42 you would, probably you would have finished up school in ‘42.
KM: ’41.
JM: ’41.
KM: I finished school. Yes.
JM: Yeah.
KM: ’41. And then I turned eighteen on the 16th of June.
JM: June in ’42.
KM: Yeah.
JM: And that’s when you enlisted I presume.
KM: Yeah. I did my medical on the 29th of June.
JM: Right. Ok.
KM: But I wasn’t called up until the 5th of December.
JM: Right. Ok.
KM: Yeah.
JM: And —
KM: Bradfield Park.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Then to Maryborough.
JM: Yeah. Well, so you did you ITS at Bradfield Park.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Right. Ok. And —
KM: I was in 35 course at Maryborough but I had to repeat the last month.
JM: Right. Ok. I’ll come back to that. I will just backtrack for a second. When you were doing — in your youth did you help mum and dad in the chip shop? The fish and chip shop at Cessnock?.
KM: No.
JM: Or you were too young.
KM: I was too young. Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: I was too young. Yeah.
JM: Because you were under ten.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Up to ten so yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: I guess that would be. Then what about the private hotel. Did you do any? Help out at all?
KM: Yeah. I learned how to iron and different things like that. Yes.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
KM: Helped as much as I could.
JM: Could. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.
KM: And then —
JM: Because they had, so they would have had that all the time that you were at school then.
KM: Yeah.
JM: I would assume.
KM: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Ok. So and what —
KM: And after school I went to, I ended up going, in the last few months I was at teacher’s college.
JM: Oh ok.
KM: That was just, just to make —
JM: Between. Just between that that six months between you finished your leaving certificate and before you were old enough to enlist.
KM: Well I had, I had a job with a real estate man who was going to train me. He didn’t have any children and I think he was going to train me to sort of take over but he was killed in a car accident so that put the kibosh on that.
JM: Right.
KM: So then I went to teacher’s college.
JM: Right.
KM: Just to make sure if I was lucky enough to come home from the war I had a job to come back to.
JM: Back to.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. So what sort of teacher training were you doing? Were you doing primary school?
KM: Primary school.
JM: Yeah. Right.
KM: At Sydney’s Teaching College.
JM: College. Right.
KM: I did six months there.
JM: Right. Ok.
KM: Then I went in to the Air Force. Yeah.
JM: Right.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Did you do anything else? Did you play a lot of sport? Did you join the Air Training Corps?
KM: Oh yeah. I used to sport. I was never a champion but I got involved in everything.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Lots of team sports or —
KM: Yeah. Rugby. Rugby mainly.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Cricket. Yes. Anything that was going.
JM: Right.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Did you ever join the Air Training Corps or anything like that?
KM: Yes. I was in the Air Training Corps.
JM: When did you join that?
KM: Oh, I was [pause] I was still at school when I joined that. That would be about 1939 or something. Yeah.
JM: Right.
KM: I was in the Air Training Corps.
JM: Right. And did you stay in the ATC through.
KM: ‘Til I joined up.
JM: ‘Til you joined up?
KM: Practically, yeah.
JM: Which means that you basically just transferred over.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Once you were eighteen I presume. So did you do any flying or anything or just theory when you were in the —?
KM: It was just theory. I learned how to send Morse, so when I went into the air force I had a background in Morse code.
JM: Morse code. Right.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Ok so —
KM: So when I was at ITS, you know, they said, ‘Have you got any desires what you want to be?’ And I said, ‘Wireless, air gunner.’
JM: Yeah.
KM: Because I had that basic training.
JM: Training. Yeah.
KM: I didn’t think I’d be good enough to be a pilot. Yeah.
JM: Right. Ok. So you did you medical. And so then you say you did, you went to Maryborough and then did you follow straight on from Maryborough with a gunnery course at Evans Head?
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Ok. And then from there you went to, you had some leave before —
KM: I think I had a week’s leave and went to Melbourne. We left on a Saturday and arrived there on a Sunday. Straight on to a ship and sailed out on a Monday.
JM: Out of Melbourne.
KM: Out of Melbourne. Yes. On the Nieuw Amsterdam. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: So that was in December.
KM: No. That was the 26th, I think, of September.
JM: September.
KM: Yeah. When we sailed.
JM: Ok. Yeah. Yeah. Ok. Yeah. Ok. And so that was September ’43 wasn’t it?
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Just pause while a little gentleman flies overhead. Mr Virgin or Mr Jetstar.
KM: Yeah. Or Tiger.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Or could be Air Asia.
JM: Yeah. Could be anyone. That’s right.
KM: We went to New Zealand from there. Then to San Francisco. We had leave in San Francisco for a few days and then went by train which was great. Got the train across to New York where we had porters on board and everything. They were great troop trains. Better than we had here in Australia. And then from New York we went —
JM: Just — you went straight through but I presume —
KM: We used to stop off at various places.
JM: Places yeah —
KM: And that. Yeah. Give you a bit of a march and — yeah.
JM: Yeah. You didn’t have a chance to look around as such.
KM: No.
JM: But if you did a bit of a march.
KM: Yeah.
JM: I guess you were out in the streets a little bit to take in the different —
KM: A bit of exercise for us.
JM: Yeah.
KM: To keep us going. Yeah.
JM: Going.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. And did you form any impressions? Were you able to see different contrasts between the various places that you stopped off or you were just not really looking around that much at that stage.
KM; No. No.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. Because five days was a long time to be cooped up on the train.
KM: That’s right. Yes.
JM: Because you had probably — what? Several bunks in one area.
KM: Well we had little, we had —
JM: Cubical type things I suppose.
KM: Yes. It was like a [pause] it was just like a passenger train really.
JM: Train. Yes.
KM: And had the bunks. Tiered bunks. You know —
JM: Yeah.
KM: Which were the, they weren’t made especially for the troops. They were just —
JM: Yeah. Normal.
KM: What the passengers used to use and had the porters there to look after you. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. And so you get to New York.
KM: Yeah.
JM: And you get a few days leave in New York.
KM: Yes. Yes. Yes. And we had about a week in New York.
JM: What sort of things did you get up to in New York?
KM: Oh. Normal things.
JM: Normal things. Yeah.
KM: You’re not — you couldn’t drink in a lot of places because you had to be twenty one.
JM: Yeah.
KM: That was the first thing we struck when we got off the ship in San Francisco. The first place we went to was a bar. He wasn’t going to serve us at first because he said, ‘How old are you?’ And we all — we told him.
JM: Honest.
KM: He said, ‘You’ve got to be twenty one.’ We said, ‘Oh we’ve all just turned twenty one.’ Of course we were in uniform and everything like that, you know. We were sergeants. You’d think that they would have given it to us which they did. Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And people were very good. Very kind. Americans were beautiful people I thought.
JM: Yeah. So, so you had a bit of a wander around New York. Saw some — as well as going to a few bars.
KM: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
JM: And saw some of the main sights there.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: The Empire State Building. Rockefeller Centre. That’s what I can remember now.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
KM: Had a ride in a Hansom cab. Cab around, you know, horse drawn. Around Central Park with a young lady I met. And it was nice. Yeah. Course you fall in love quick quite easily You fall out twice as quick [laughs]
JM: Yeah.
KM: That’s where I first saw Danny Kaye. Do you remember Danny Kaye the actor?
JM: I do indeed remember Danny Kaye.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yes.
KM: I went to the theatre and he was on. There was a film on as well which I can’t remember what that it was. But he was on as a just doing a few acts and I thought he was tremendous. As a matter of fact I’ve sat through the film again to see him. Yes. He was a great comedian. Got lots of people. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
KM: And from then we went across to England on the Queen Elizabeth where there was about eighteen thousand troops I think on there as well.
JM: Yes.
KM: No, no escort or anything like that. Just flat out. The way to go.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And I must tell you that there was one of our, one of my mates Mick Jordan and another chap called Douglas McCartney — they ran the Crown and Anchor.
JM: Yes.
KM: Which is a gambling thing.
JM: Yes.
KM: Yeah. And took my money.
JM: Did they now?
KM: Yes. Yes [laughs]
JM: I see.
KM: You can’t win at that.
JM: You can’t win at that.
KM: No.
JM: No. Now, I don’t know whether it was this trip or not with the QE2 but I haven’t got the dates with me unfortunately. But one, one of the QE2 voyages they had to deviate via Greenland because they were being pursued by a —
KM: No. It wasn’t us.
JM: It wasn’t you.
KM: No.
JM: Right. Ok. So you went in to Scotland.
KM: Yes. And from there on to a troop train and down to Brighton.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: And so you were in Brighton for your —
KM: At the Grand or, Grand or Metropole hotels.
JM: Hotels yeah. Yeah.
KM: Yes. And we were there for two or three weeks I suppose. Then we went to Whitley Bay for the commando course. Gee, you’re stretching my memory.
JM: Yeah. That’s alright. So then from that commando course —
KM: I must tell you while we were at the Grand there there was a chap. There was, around the corner from the Grand Hotel there was a bar that used to, you had a dance there as well. It was like, you know, a bit like a nightclub. And one of the boys who I didn’t know but he, when he was coming back one night he was half full. And there was a keg outside the, outside the place which was full and he rolled it back around to the hotel and we all carried it up to about the fifth floor and proceeded to drink it [laughs]
JM: So you actually got it up to the fifth floor.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Well that’s interesting because one of the other chaps I’ve talked to said they tried to do something similar and they’d covered it with a coat etcetera but they got, while they were covering it, while they were carrying it one of them slipped or something slightly and they lost their grip on it so the coat slipped and suddenly revealed that it was a keg and so they were sprung and they were told to — they didn’t get into trouble per se but they just got told to put it back down again and that was it.
KM: That might have been the end of war.
JM: Was it?
KM: ‘Cause I did hear that this same chap.
JM: Yeah.
KM: He tried it later on.
JM: Later on.
KM: Yeah. After the end of the war and he was caught. But the police let him off.
JM: Off.
KM: Because of the fact it was the end of the war.
JM: The war.
KM: Yes. But this keg we got it up. Whether it might have been the fourth floor or the fifth floor but I know it was up high enough. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: And it required a bit of effort to get it up there.
KM: Yeah. And it was terrible beer as well. It was. The beer was shocking over there when we first arrived. The first, the first drink we had we walked in to the pub and I think we all had about one mouthful and that was it. We left the rest and walked out and said we’re going to have a very sober time here in England. But it’s surprising how your tastes change. Yeah. [laughs]
JM: Tastes change.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. So roughly how long was the commando training? Roughly.
KM: I think it might have been a couple of weeks.
JM: And where were you off to after that?
KM: We went on leave then.
JM: Where did you go for your leave? Do you —
KM: To Edinburgh. Yeah. For a few days. I’m a bit lost after that [pause] and then I went to, I was posted to Milham after that. I don’t think Dougie went there did he?
JM: No.
KM: No. That’s, that’s when we sort of broke up. Milham was a place on the west coast of [pause] west coast of Cumberland. In Cumberland. Not that far from Blackpool. But it was cold and wet and it was a bugger of a place. It really was.
JM: Was.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. And so was that some —
KM: That was —
JM: It wouldn’t have been an OTU it would have been a —
KM: No. It wasn’t an OTU.
JM: It was a —
KM: It was an AFU more or less. Yes.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Advanced Flying School.
JM: That’s right. So what were you flying there?
KM: Avro Ansons.
JM: Right. OK.
KM: Yeah.
JM: So would that have been your first sort of full flying experience?
KM: No. We did a fair bit of flying at Maryborough.
JM: Maryborough.
KM: Yes.
JM: Oh yes that’s right. But they were —
KM: They were Wacketts.
JM: Wacketts. Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah so that would have been —
KM: And at the air gunnery school they were Fairey Battles.
JM: Yes. Yes.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. So — but the Avros are slightly different to both of those.
KM: That’s right they were two engine kites.
JM: Kites. Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: And fully enclosed.
KM: That’s right yeah.
JM: Yeah. So —
KM: That’s where that [pause] you know the chap that appears in the other side there Stan Jacobs.
JM: Yeah.
KM: He’s on the right hand side.
JM: Yeah.
KM: He was in a plane. They crashed into a mountain. They weren’t killed, you know. He broke a leg and so he was off for a little while.
JM: Right. Right.
KM: Then unfortunately later on he was on a Halifax still training and they iced up over Oxford and crashed and they were all killed. Yeah.
JM: Gosh.
KM: He was a lovely man. Yeah.
JM: Yes. And so roughly how long were you at Milham?
KM: I think about five or six weeks.
JM: Yeah. And so where —
KM: I didn’t shine there.
JM: You didn’t shine there.
KM: No. I got am [pause] it’s in my logbook saying my discipline was poor.
JM: Oh?
KM: Because I had a couple of run-ins with some of the, you know the —
JM: Officers.
KM: Well not officers. No. The drill sergeant.
JM: Oh ok.
KM: And officers. Different people like that.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
KM: Objected to being told what to do.
JM: I see. Right.
KM: The thing, you know, it was just one of those things there. Nothing serious.
JM: No.
KM: No.
JM: Just the usual Australian.
KM: Well that’s all it was. Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Vernacular batmanship.
KM: Yeah.
JM: That’s right. So they didn’t formally discipline you or anything I presume.
KM: No.
JM: No. Just a word about calm it down MacDonald.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: But it was reported.
JM: Right.
KM: Yeah. And there was, I’ll tell you about one occasion that happened at Milham.
JM: Yeah.
KM: I was in the bar this night having a drink with another chap and he’d had quite a few drinks and then we were going back to our hut and another Australian and he wanted to go to the tut and I said, ‘Well, we’re almost there. Or go behind that hut.’ He said, ‘I’ve got a better idea.’ There was a ladder outside one of the huts. The workmen had been doing something. So he climbed up the ladder. He got to the top there and there was a bit of a chimney coming out because every hut used to have a coke burner inside or a coal burner inside there and he pee’d down the chimney. And all the blokes [laughs] were sitting down inside and all of a sudden there was steam and you know you could hear the yells. Of course we went for our lives, you know [laughs] He managed to get down and we got into our hut and the next thing the door burst open and they said, ‘Has anybody just come in here?’ ‘No. Of course not.’ And the other boys said, ‘No.’ And they said, ‘Well why have you two got, these two got their great coats on?’ I said, ‘Well because we want to go. We were just about to go to the toilet.’ If they’d have caught us they would have killed us. As I said before that was my first occasion of being close to death [laughs] At the time there we thought it was a great joke.
JM: Joke. Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: I presume you didn’t have any of those sort of hijinks when you were at Whitley Bay?
KM: No. No.
JM: No. That was —
KM: I wouldn’t tell you if your father was involved.
JM: That’s maybe why you should tell me but anyway, ok, so from Milham?
KM: To Finningley.
JM: Yeah.
KM: That was OTU.
JM: OTU.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. And whereabouts is Finningley?
KM: Out of Doncaster.
JM: Oh ok. Down. Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Down south right.
KM: There I crewed up.
IJM: I was going to say you would have probably crewed up there. Yeah.
KM: Yes. With three Canadians.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And two Englishmen at the time. That made six of us.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Then they, from there we —
JM: What were you flying at —?
KM: Wellingtons.
JM: Wellingtons. Yeah.
KM: They were doing, they were building a new runway there. Or improving the runway so we went to a satellite ‘drome called Worksop.
JM: Right.
KM: And we were on Wellingtons there.
JM: Right.
KM: Yeah. That, well, you know that skipper was going very well except one time he tried to land the plane thirty feet up in the air and we just dropped like a stone. Luckily we had the undercarriage down but it pushed all the undercarriage back up. He had a screened pilot with him who immediately pushed the throttles forward and we took off again. We had to fly around for quite a while. They had the ambulances and the fire brigade and God knows what there because they thought we’d have to belly land.
JM: Land yeah.
KM: But fortunately they were able to, we were able to hand winch them down.
JM: Hand winch them down.
KM: That went down. Yeah. It didn’t go against the skipper. It was just one of those things, you know.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah. He wasn’t as close to the ground as he thought he was.
JM: Thought he was. Yeah. Right. So that was a bit of a —
KM: It was another one of those things.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. And I might just pause for a minute because of that noise outside.
[voices outside. recording paused]
JM: Ok. That group of people have passed by now. So we won’t have the voices just drifting in and that.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: So ok so was that the only sort of a bit of a hairy moment for you?
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: in the flying at OTU.
KM: We did a lot of flying there. And night flying.
JM: Flying.
KM: Day flying. Yes. Yeah.
JM: So what was your pilot? Was your pilot one of the Canadians?
KM: Yeah. Canadian. The pilot was a Canadian.
JM: Yeah.
KM: The navigator was Canadian and the bomb aimer was Canadian.
JM: Right.
KM: The mid-upper gunner was English and the rear gunner was English.
JM: Right. Ok. Ok. So you finished your OTU and did all fair number of hours doing your day and night flying all around there. And —
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. And then —
KM: And then we went to [pause] it was a Heavy Conversion Unit.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Just have to get my logbook and see.
JM: Yes, certainly. We’ll just pause. [pause] Have you got a summary at the back there of your [pause] sometimes they put, they put a little summary at the back of the various bases or something.
KM: Yeah. No, I’ve just got the name of the aircraft.
JM: Right.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Right.
KM: I know it was 1667 Heavy Conversion Unit.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Gee.
JM: That’s alright.
KM: I should know.
JM: Yeah. That’s alright. We’ll — it may well come back to you shortly. We’ll continue on and we’ll, as I say, see how — if it comes back that’s good.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Otherwise it’s not a problem. It’s not a problem.
KM: Here’s Lindsey.
JM: Lindsey coming in is he?
KM: I think he’s bringing his logbook. You want to scan it or something don’t you?
JM: Yeah but not, not at the moment.
KM: No.
JM: I want to finish chatting to you first.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. So maybe he didn’t realise. So we’ll pause while Lindsey comes in.
[recording paused]
JM: And so we’re resuming after a brief interruption. Lindsey Hibbard, whom I have interviewed a previous day happens to live just a couple of doors away from Ken and he just popped in to see us for a moment. So Lindsey’s now gone. Returned to his home. So we’re now resuming and we were covering Heavy Conversion. You were doing Heavy Conversion on Halifaxes.
KM: Halifaxes. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. And that would have what? A few weeks of flying you think. And then, any particular, do you remember any particular incidents?
KM: No. There was no particular incidents there. No.
JM: No.
KM: No.
JM: Ok. And after you finished your Heavy Conversion is that when you were posted to 12 Squadron.
KM: No. From there we went to —
JM: Oh you had to do a, a Lancaster, yeah.
KM: Lanc Finishing School. Yes.
JM: And where did you do, where did you do your —
KM: At Hemswell.
JM: Hemswell. Right.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Ok. And —
KM: About a fortnight we were there.
JM: About a fortnight there.
KM: Yeah. Yeah. And from there we went to [pause ] that’s where we picked, we picked up the —
JM: Engineer.
KM: At the Heavy Conversion Unit that’s where we picked up our engineer.
JM: Engineer. Yeah.
KM: He was a, he was a Welshman.
JM: He was a Welshman was he?
KM: Yeah.
JM: Ok.
KM: Yeah. So we were a variety of nations of crew.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
KM: I was the only Australian.
JM: Yes.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yes. Indeed. As was the case with quite a few crews.
KM: Yeah.
JM: So, so then it was off to Wickenby to 12 Squadron.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: You’re getting —
KM: Before that we’d lost our rear gunner. I’m sorry, mid-upper gunner was — he went missing.
JM: Did he?
KM: Yeah. I think that he might have — it was too much for him.
JM: Too much.
KM: Yes. Yeah.
JM: So —
KM: Whether he went — we just don’t know.
JM: No.
KM: He never came back to us.
JM: Came back.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Ok. So who came in and replaced him?
KM: Oh another English bloke.
JM: Another English bloke. Right. Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Ok. And was that during the Heavy Conversion or the Lancaster Finishing?
KM: The Heavy Conversion.
JM: Conversion. Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Okey dokes. And so nothing else. You would have had a little bit of leave and that between these courses.
KM: I had leave. Yes.
JM: What sort of things did you do?
KM: I went up to — I never, I very rarely went to London because I thought it was too big and, you know, very impersonal. Used to go to Nottingham where there was ten females to every man. So [laughs] so it was a good place to go to. Yes. You were never lonely.
JM: You were never lonely.
KM: Never lonely. Yeah.
JM: No. That’s right. You had a wide choice.
KM: That’s right. Yes. Yeah.
JM: Yes.
KM: Yeah.
JM: And did the whole crew go when you were on leave or did you go your separate ways generally.
KM: Well. Yes. Mainly. Mainly I went on my own because the others, you know, they used to go home or something like that.
JM: Yeah. Well, presumably the Englishmen.
KM: Yeah.
JM: May have been a bit harder for the Welshman to go home but certainly.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Probably the English chaps went home. The Canadians probably stuck together then I suppose.
KM: Yeah. Well there were two officers among the Canadians and then the skipper he became an officer as well. So —
JM: Right.
KM: Yeah.
JM: So did you feel that created a bit of —?
KM: No. No. No.
JM: No. Right.
KM: The skipper was great. He was, he was —
JM: What was his name?
KM: Johnny Murray.
JM: Right.
KM: John Grimler Murray.
JM: And —
KM: When we were on the squadron you know when we weren’t flying we used to — you see you talk about pubs a lot.
JM: That’s alright.
KM: It’s probably one of the things but we would ride our bikes down to the local pub there and he’d come up with us and play darts and you know, other things and then drive back home again. A bit hairy coming back. Especially during the snowy weather when the roads were very icy and everything. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Any tumbles?
KM: You tumbled on occasion. Yes. And then when we, when we got back to the squadron there we were very friendly with the service police or military police whichever you want to call them and we’d call in their headquarters and they used to be able to purloin bacon and eggs and different things like that so we’d have a little bit of a feed with them. Yeah.
JM: That’s good.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Good to have these cordial relationships.
KM: That’s right. Yes. Yeah.
JM: Yes. That’s right. So any other particular incident? Well, that stand out at this stage or you really, this is when the hard work starts. When the op starts.
KM: That’s when the hard work starts when we got to the squadron. Yeah.
JM: The squadron. Yeah. And what sort of — where were you going and what sort of things were you doing?
KM: What raids were we on?
JM: Yeah. What raids were you on?
KM: The first two we did Essen. Essen. Cologne. Cologne.
JM: Right.
KM: Two nights and two days.
JM: Days.
KM: It was a little bit of shock to the system to start off with. But the, you know especially when you’re on the tail of the target. And on the way to the target as well. If you’re off course at all well you could run into problems there.
JM: And any difficult — any real difficulties I mean?
KM: Not in those four. No.
JM: Not in those four.
KM: No. We got shot up on one occasion. We had to — we had no [pause] no brakes, no flaps or anything like that. We had to land at one of the emergency ‘dromes which they had.
JM: Right. No hydraulics in other words.
KM: No. That’s right.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And they’re about two miles long the runways. With an overshoot, you know, of about a half a mile. When we landed we took the whole length. Just rolled to the end. We were lucky. Yeah.
JM: But was it a belly landing or —?
KM: No.
JM: No. You were —
KM: Got on the, manually wound the —
JM: That’s right.
KM: The undercarriage down.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And then the blokes. They were great there. Manston I think it was. The chaps there. The mechanics worked all night and got us back flying the next day.
JM: Right. Gosh.
And we got back to our ‘drome. Yeah.
JM: And what [pause] which raid was that raid during that you got that flak? You’re not sure.
KM: I’m not certain.
JM: Yeah. That’s ok.
KM: I’d be guessing.
JM: No.
KM: Doesn’t make a great deal of difference.
JM: No. That’s right. So that’s, they were the first few raids.
KM: Yeah.
JM: And then what? What — where did you go next?
KM: We went to Nuremberg. Munich. Bochum. Didn’t get to Berlin. Nuremberg was a very dicey one.
JM: Yeah.
KM: We lost quite a few planes there. Then towards the end we went to a place called Royan in France which was still an enclave that hadn’t been captured by the French or the allies, you know. And we bombed it but apparently, we found out since then, I only found out recently that we should never have bombed it. It was an agreement between an American officer and, you know some of the French and there was a bit of — they’d been drinking and there was a misinterpretation and there was a hell of a lot of civilians in the town which we — I don’t think they came out if too well. Yeah. We should never have bombed it. Yeah.
JM: Bombed it. But you were not to know.
KM: Oh we didn’t know. We were just told. Every target we went to it was ostensibly a military target. It was either oil wells or different things. Factories. But never civilian targets. Actually civilians would be killed because everybody is not that accurate with their bombing. Yeah. So we were never, we were never told to bomb civilian targets.
JM: That’s right.
KM: Even though people thought that we did but we didn’t. Yeah. And then on the 14th of June — 14th of January.
JM: 14th of January.
KM: Yeah.
JM: ‘45.
KM: Yeah. We were on our way to Merseburg. It was 11 o’clock at night and a German fighter got us. It was —
JM: How far out were you? Were you right over Germany?
KM: Yes. We were well and truly into Germany.
JM: Germany.
KM: We still had our bombs on board.
JM: Right.
KM: Hit us with cannons and so forth. Set us on fire and we took evasive action and actually got the fire out. Then we dropped our bombs. We jettisoned our bombs there. And the fighter came in again and hit us again and set us on fire again.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Skipper said we had to bale out and were waiting to bale out. We were on fire at the back. Couldn’t get to the gunners. I tried to get to them but, you know it was all fire. Couldn’t get through. The front was jammed a bit. The front escape was jammed a bit. Finally got it open and then we blew up.
JM: You still had fuel on board I suppose.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: None of us went out through that. We were just all blown out.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And the skipper, engineer and myself were the only ones that came out of it. The others were all — well the gunners had both been wounded.
JM: Wounded.
KM: And the others were killed in the explosion.
JM: Explosion.
KM: Yeah.
JM: And so you had your chutes on at this stage?
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. So you —
KM: It was the first time I had done up my harness. I never used to do up a parachute harness you know. I’ve never had, never put a parachute on. But I soon put it on that night.
JM: Yes. Yes I can imagine.
KM: Yeah.
JM: So —
KM: And so we landed in the snow. It was a beautiful feeling. I went out — I was unconscious. I came to in the air. It was a beautiful feeling falling, you know. And I thought will I pull rip cord or not? But then I think self-preservation came in. I pulled it. And went out to it again and landed on the ground. But I lost my flying boots on the way down. And I met up with my engineer. We decided to escape. Go to Switzerland which was three hundred miles away.
JM: Yeah.
KM: We were in the snow and I didn’t have any flying boots. Yeah.
JM: What, how were your boots sort of damaged is why they came off?
KM: The rush of air used to get them. That was the trouble. They had a fault with them. And then they brought in a new type of flying boot which was an escape boot.
JM: Boot. Yeah.
KM: Which you took part of the flying boot off and you end up with a shoe.
JM: Shoe.
KM: Yeah. But I hadn’t been issued with those.
JM: Issued with those.
KM: The engineer had.
JM: Oh ok.
KM: So what we did we took the top part of his flying boot off and wrapped it around my feet, you know. But we only, we went two or three hours and my feet were absolutely frozen.
JM: Frozen.
KM: So I said to him, ‘Well I’m going to give myself up.’ So we came to this few houses and knocked on the door. It was about 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. And knocked on the windows and called out, ‘Australians.’ You know [laughs] But there was women in there. They wouldn’t open the door. I think they were frightened of us.
JM: Yeah.
KM: We got to another place and a bit of a farmhouse and just went in to the farmyard and let them know. A bloke came out and put us in a barn and we spent the night there. And then the police arrived the next day. The farmer by the way gave me a pair of old boots to put on.
JM: Oh that’s good.
KM: They weren’t the right size.
JM: Size.
KM: But still they were something.
JM: They were something. Yeah. Gave a bit of protection.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Did they give you any food or —?
KM: I think he might have given us a cup of tea. Yeah. They, the farmer, they wouldn’t be too badly off. But the Germans were you know [pause] their place, you know, was in a mess. From there we went in to this town called Wetzlar and it was and — there wasn’t a thing standing. They put us in the local jail and we got kicked around a little bit but still —
JM: So this was just the normal German police at this stage.
KM: No. That’s where they handed us over to the army there. Yeah.
JM: Oh right.
KM: Yeah. Admittedly they did get a doctor to come and have a look at me because I’d done my shoulder in as well. I lost the sleeve off my battle jacket. You know, it was torn off. My shoulder was injured and they got, the doctor did come which was good I thought. Yeah.
JM: And did he, was he able to do anything? Or did he just strap it up or what?
KM: No. He just looked at it and he put a couple of dressings on the leg and feet. Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Because it was eating right in to the ball of my feet, you know eating away. Yeah. From there we went to Dulag Luft which was the interrogation centre. Had a week there in solitary confinement which, we were in a room where you can’t see out and you didn’t know if it was day or night and they’d turn the lights off. On and off. And the heating. They’d turn that on and off as well. On the wall there were, you could see where blokes had scratched the number of days. I don’t know whether the Germans had put it there to upset us or not but [laughs] you’d look at and you’d say, ‘Oh God.’ Yeah — but the Germans —
JM: But did they try to —
KM: Well they tried —
JM: Torture you in any other way. I mean obviously this was mental sort of torture.
KM: Yeah that was mental torture. The interrogation. Interrogation part was, they were very good to you. They tried to be nice to you. They’d offer you cigarettes and everything like that, you know. But they knew what squadron we came from.
JM: From —
KM: Yeah.
JM: And their English was reasonable?
KM: Oh his English. There was a chap that I had he was, he had an American accent. And he said he’d spent all his childhood in America.
JM: Right.
KM: And he’d just came back with the war. Yeah. And we were, we were carrying a new piece of equipment which I didn’t know what it was. I, you know, I wasn’t properly aware of it. What it, what it, how to work it or anything like that so they couldn’t get anything out of me about it. They, they were very interested in that. Yeah.
JM: And was your engineer with you? Still with you at the station or had they separated with you at this stage?
KM: Oh we were in separate. Yeah. Never saw him.
JM: You were in separate cells but —
KM: Yeah. Never saw him. Not during that period. No.
JM: No. Well yes obviously in solitary confinement. No.
KM: Yeah.
JM: But you were both, but you were both in the same station.
KM: Yeah. So was the skipper.
JM: Oh was he?
KM: Yeah.
JM: Oh he’d been pulled in as well. Right.
KM: Yeah. He’d been brought in as well. Yeah.
JM: Right. Ok. Right.
KM: Yeah.
JM: So at least you knew the three of them ultimately you knew there was three.
KM: I knew there was three. There was three of us still alive.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah. And then they let us go. We went to a transit place where they gave me a new top. Some American flak jacket or some bloody thing. I don’t know. No collars or anything like that. And then put us on a train to Luckenwalde, which was south of Berlin. We spent about seven or eight days on that train. One of those where forty men or eight horses. You know. We were supposed to go up to a camp on the north of Germany but I think because of the bombing I think we were being diverted all the time and switched and everything. It wasn’t the, wasn’t the greatest of trips. It wasn’t as good as the trip across America [laughs]
JM: No porters in other words.
KM: Yeah. And it was very awkward. There was no toilets or anything. If you wanted to go and do a wee, you know, you’d have to, you could open the doors but the cold, you know. It was freezing cold.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And I had, I could only stand on one leg.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And standing there and you’re swaying.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And getting abused by everybody because the doors were open.
JM: Abused by everyone else because the doors. That’s right. Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. And trying to, you know, make sure the wind was blowing in the right direction apart from everything else.
KM: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Because this was, what? This is January. This was what? Towards the end of January I suppose by this stage if you were in —
KM: It was. Yeah. That would be it would be yeah. Would be the end of January.
JM: Because you’d had seven days in solitary confinement so —
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. So you’re getting towards the end of January.
KM: Yeah.
JM: So yeah. So I mean gosh. It’s just so cold. That’s just peak midwinter.
KM: Yeah.
JM: It’s freezing.
KM: Then we got, we finally got to Luckenwalde and it was a camp. It was a very big camp. It was about thirty miles south of Berlin.
JM: Yeah.
KM: It had a multitude of different prisoners there. Russians, Italians, French, Poles, Americans. You name it. The hut that I went into — Hitler at one time had tried to form an International Brigade. He wanted people to fight for Germany against the Russians. Not to fight against England. And he, what he concentrated on were the Irish because the Irish were only in the war because they like fighting. So anybody with an Irish name they went to this camp and they were offered, you know fight to, to join the army and fight for Germany. Very few did it but I ended up in this Irish hut. And it was north of Ireland one end and south of Ireland the other. They didn’t talk. Some of them, they’d had been prisoners for four of five years you know and there was still that division between them. Yeah. When I was there [pause]I was going to say something but a different type, you know. Coming from Australia and being very young you’re not going to be aware of this sort of thing. I couldn’t understand it. Actually, I still shake my head in bloody amazement. The fact that people could be like that you know.
JM: So stubborn.
KM: Yeah.
JM: In the circumstances.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yes.
KM: It was religion as well you know. But still.
JM: So you didn’t. So —
KM: And I was lucky while I was there. There was an American. He’d been captured. He was in the airborne division and was captured at Arnhem and they’d marched them all the way across. He still had some Sulfanilamide powder which he put on my feet because the, there was, you know holes about that far in to my feet you know. I couldn’t walk. And he put the Sulfanilamide powder on and that brought them back to life. Yeah. Eventually. Yeah.
JM: And were the pilot and the engineer also brought into this same camp?
KM: Yes. The engineer was. The pilot — he was over in the officer’s compound.
JM: Compound yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: So did you see, and then see the engineer from time to time?
KM: Yeah. Saw him a lot. Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And then eventually the Russians liberated us. Didn’t want, didn’t want to let the — we were in the, you know where the Americans had stopped at the River Elbe and we were, I suppose about forty or fifty miles from there. They wouldn’t let the Americans come through or anybody else. What they wanted to do was to bring us back, take us back through Germany and then claim the money. You know. And we weren’t supposed to leave the camp.
JM: What were conditions like in the camp? Generally speaking.
KM: They weren’t —
JM: I mean obviously it’s a prisoner of war camp so it’s not going to be great.
KM: Yeah.
JM: But I mean, you know — any particular things stand out for you?
KM: Food was very light on, yeah. Conditions weren’t the best but —
JM: How many people in each sort of hut type thing?
KM: I suppose could be about a hundred I suppose. Yes. Yes. It’s a bit hard to remember now. Yeah.
JM: No. That’s alright. Just an impression.
KM: Yeah.
JM: That, you know. I mean —
KM: There would have been about [pause] in the camp itself — it was a big camp. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was fifteen to twenty thousand there. You know. The Russians were treated atrociously because they didn’t have the Geneva Convention. Yeah. And luckily we did get some, on occasion we got a Red Cross parcel and through that we could buy bread with cigarettes or, yeah, chocolate. Yeah.
JM: So how long were — how long before the Russians came in? When did the Russians come in?
KM: They came in the end of April or beginning of May. Beginning of May, round about. We were forbidden to leave the camp. Which is like a red rag to a bull [pause] and the chap that, the English chap — I used to muck in with him, you know. We used to share things like food and everything like that. And he’d gone in to, in to the town and he’d met up with two frauleins or fraus they were and he sent a message back for me to come in. So, I went in to the town and when I was in the town there, there was two bloody British officers and I said, ‘Hello,’ to them and they handed me over to the Russians and that was the first time I was really scared. There was, you know, they couldn’t speak English and there was this big Russian officer and a Mongolian offsider and they had me in the room there interrogating me and I thought [laughs] I thought — you know.
JM: This is not good.
KM: Not good. They said, ‘Stop here.’ And they left the room. I did a bunk. Thank God.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Then I went around.
JM: Why? Do you know why the British officers would have just handed you over to the Russians?
KM: Because we’d disobeyed the rules.
JM: Oh. Ok.
KM: Yeah. They were Air Force blokes, you know.
JM: That’s ridiculous.
KM: It’s amazing. Yeah.
JM: But had they been prisoner of war as well?
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: They were out of the camp.
JM: They were from the camp as well.
KM: They were out of the camp. Yeah.
JM: So why were they out of the camp? Were the officers allowed?
KM: Well they were, they were allowed. They were on duty to make sure that the —
JM: There were none of the underlings running around the town.
KM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Ok. Right. Cushy job to get that then wasn’t it?
KM: Yeah. I went and caught up with my mate and I had a bath there and he said, ‘Stop the night,’ and I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I’d rather wait to get back to England.’ Yeah. So I went back to the camp. That night, after I’d left there he said there were two Russian soldiers came to the door and came in and he said, he met her put their arm around him and he said, you know, and the he was looking in the barrel of a shotgun and one of them raped one of the women. And then they came back and the other one raped the other one. My mate said to me, he said, ‘Jeez I wish you’d been there Aussie,’ he said, ‘We would have done something about it.’ I said, ‘Thank God I wasn’t there because I wouldn’t be here now.’ Yeah. Then two days after —
JM: Did he, did he then come back to camp as well did he or —?
KM: He came back to camp the next day. Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: But then he went back to town.
JM: Ok.
KM: And then two other chaps and myself we purloined a couple of bikes each. A bike each. There were three bikes. And we set off on our own towards the River Elbe and we got to a town and there was an American truck there that had come in to do some liaison with the Germans. With the Russians and he picked us up and took us back to the American line. And on the way there we passed two other chaps. They were officers. RAF officers riding their bikes and we said to the Yank to stop the car, the truck. He stopped and we told these blokes to throw the bikes away and get on board. They said, ‘No.’ They were enjoying the ride. Fair dinkum, you know. So we told the driver to, bugger them and he and we drove on. When I think about it now they could have even been Germans dressed up as — yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah. When you think about it. Because I don’t think anybody could be that stupid.
JM: Stupid. No.
KM: Yeah. Yeah. So then I got —
JM: So back to the American base on the Elbe.
KM: Yeah. We were there for a day and then we went on to another place and then the surrender came through while we were there. While I was there. Yeah. And then the next couple of days, you know, went to [pause] flown to Calais, then caught a tank landing ship —
JM: How did you get flown?
KM: British.
JM: British?
KM: Transport. Yeah. We were taken to an aerodrome.
JM: Yeah. So that was —
KM: Some place in Germany.
JM: Near Berlin then I presume.
KM: No we were in the American lines. We were well from the, well away Germany —
JM: Oh ok.
KM: From Berlin.
JM: Berlin.
KM: Because Berlin was well inside. They had to stop at the River Elbe you see.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
KM: British and American.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Had to stop there.
JM: So it was on the other side of the Elbe.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah so —
KM: Back towards France.
JM: Yeah. Ok.
KM: And they were picked up by a small plane there and flown to Calais
JM: Yeah.
KM: Put on a tank landing ship and went across to Portsmouth. Portsmouth —
JM: Did the engineer go with you? So were you —
KM: No. I was on my own then.
JM: You were on your own then.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: And the pilot was obviously being —
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Handled differently again.
KM: Yeah. They were still in the camp.
JM: Oh ok. Right. Oh that’s right. You’d gone on your bikes and —
KM: Yeah. We escaped.
JM: You were a couple of Irishmen were they?
KM: No. English.
JM: Oh a couple of English.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Ok. You say you got back to Portsmouth.
KM: Portsmouth and then they put me on the train. Sent me down to Brighton.
JM: Right.
KM: And that was good because I had my battle pants on. Had an American jacket without sleeves.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Without collar.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Then one of those brown knitted caps that the Americans wore.
JM: And you didn’t have any sort of coat. You must have been freezing just about all the time just because you were still —
KM: Yeah. When I say coat it did have sleeves on it.
JM: Oh ok.
KM: It did have a sleeve yeah.
JM: Oh of course but this time it’s May isn’t it?
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Do you know roughly, do you have a date that you got to Portsmouth in mind or you don’t remember exactly?
KM: I think it was about the 11th of May.
JM: Right.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Right.
KM: Yeah.
JM: So then you went —
KM: And I know I was having a feed in the mess at Brighton and I broke all the rules because I still had the cap on. I hadn’t taken it off yet. You’re not allowed to wear a cap in —
JM: In the mess.
KM: At the mess. Yeah. Yeah. And from there had a week’s leave, a week or two leave and then I had six weeks at a rehabilitation place. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Where was that?
KM: Hoylake.
JM: Hoylake. Right.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Whereabouts it that?
KM: Hoylake is near Liverpool.
JM: Yeah.
KM: In an old home that was right on the golf course. They play the British Open at Hoylake. Yeah.
JM: Open there. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.
KM: Beautiful old home.
JM: So you were able, you said you had, before you went to Hoylake that you went to — had a couple of weeks leave.
KM: Yeah.
JM: What did you — were you able to enjoy that?
KM: Oh yeah.
JM: Or were you still banged up a bit from — well your feet and your leg would have been still giving you problems still I presume.
KM: No. My leg was alright then.
JM: Oh right. Ok.
KM: I had a couple of medical appointments in London as well.
JM: Yeah.
KM: For my arm. That was the reason they sent me to Hoylake.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Because I’d damaged all the nerves in my arm. It’s still not right, you know. It’s permanently damaged.
JM: Damaged. Yeah. So did you have leave in around London then?
KM: Around London yeah. Of course there was —
JM: Yeah. So did you go to any shows or anything like that?
KM: No. There were some people that I knew, that I had known here in Australia. They’d gone over to London in some sort of capacity. You know. Repatriation capacity. I saw them a couple of times. Yeah. Then I went to Hoylake. We were allowed to get out. Go to the pictures. I met a girl there. Fell madly in love or that’s what you think [laughs] She was going to come back to Australia but it never eventuated. You know, I can’t think of her surname. Isn’t it terrible? I can think of her Christian name and no surname. Yeah. She was a lovely girl but still. One of those things. And then in the end they said, because I got in to trouble with the doctors there as well because I used to be late home from a night. You had to be home at 11 o’clock and I used to in about twelve. Yeah. In the end they said they thought the best thing they could do for me was to send me back to Australia. And I said, ‘For once I agree with you.’ Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah. But I can always remember in the place there, there was, you know. You think you’re badly off but there was a young bloke about my age. He had lost both arms. I went past his room this time and you could hear him crying, you know. I thought what sort of a life has he got to look forward to? Yeah.
JM: Was he English or Australian?
KM: English.
JM: English. Yeah.
KM: Yeah. I don’t know how he lost them but yeah I did. I did speak to him.
JM: Perhaps he was army. Possibly army perhaps he was army because I mean —
KM: No. He was Air Force.
JM: He was Air Force ok.
KM: It was an Air Force convalescent home.
JM: Oh this was specifically Air Force. Right. Ok. I thought —
KM: Yeah.
JM: Sometimes they were multi service ones.
KM: Yeah.
JM: But that was — right ok.
KM: So then we got on the Orion and came home via the Panama Canal. And halfway home the Japanese surrendered. So I missed the bloody victory in Europe and I missed victory over Japan. Yeah. So —
JM: On the other hand you were safely on board a boat.
KM: I was safe. Well, yeah. Yeah.
JM: On a, the Orion would have been reasonably comfortable was it?
KM: It wasn’t bad. Yeah. Yeah. Not — it was still, still a troop ship.
JM: A troop ship yeah. How many? Was it?
KM: I can’t remember.
JM: Can’t remember.
KM: I know that there was a lot of English sailors on it who were coming out to join the, you know, the fleet they had out here in Australia. Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Then home here. I had two or three weeks leave and then I went to a convalescent home at Sussex Inlet. The air force had it. Had it down there.
JM: Right.
KM: And then I was finally discharged in February ’46.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah. That’s my story.
JM: Yes. So then that’s —
KM: It went on for a while.
JM: No. That’s — so February ‘46 you were discharged.
KM: Yeah.
JM: And so what, what, did you feel that you were fully recovered then from — after you’d had that time you had at Sussex Inlet? I mean the time were the physical injuries more or less —?
KM: Well they couldn’t do anything with me down there. They couldn’t get this repaired so that was it. It was just —
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah. And so then I went straight to university and did dentistry which I failed my exams which was understandable. I didn’t go back to teacher’s college because after the life I’d led in the air force I felt that teaching was too mundane, you know. It just, it didn’t appeal to me then. So then I had a couple of other jobs and I ended up going to the Commonwealth Bank in 1949. Got married in 1949 as well.
JM: So you’re back in Sydney at this point.
KM: Yes.
JM: And you’d been living with your parents?
KM: At Kirribilli.
JM: So they’d moved to Kirribilli.
KM: Yeah.
JM: By this stage.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Ok so they had sold — had they sold —
KM: Sold. Yeah.
JM: Potts Point.
KM: They had another business after that.
JM: Oh ok.
KM: They had a business in Margaret Street in, next door to the Scotch Church at [unclear]
JM: Oh yeah.
KM: Yeah. Lammington Hall was — yeah. They sold that and then went to Kirribilli.
JM: Right.
KM: And —
JM: And what did they have at Kirribilli?
KM: Same sort of thing. Private hotel. Yeah.
JM: Private Hotel. Yeah. Yeah. And so you were staying with them?
KM: Yeah.
JM: While you were in those other couple of jobs.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: And then —
KM: And when I got married we just had a small unit at Mossman before we went to Mona Vale.
JM: Right.
KM: Yeah. And then we lived at Mona Vale for about forty years until I retired and then moved. Went to Nambucca Heads for a year, ten years. Then to Cabarita Beach down here. And Helen developed Alzheimers and I’d looked after her for about ten years and it got to the stage I knew that she’d eventually have to go, she would have to go into care so that was the reason I came to this place here, because they had the nursing home. It was easy for me because I could go over every day and see her. Bring her home if I wanted to. But she was only for about three months when she died suddenly. Yeah. So that was six years ago.
JM: Six years ago.
KM: On the 20th of February. Yeah. But I’ve got three kids, seven grandchildren and three great grandchildren.
JM: And are the children around the area at all or —?
KM: The two girls are.
JM: Yeah.
KM: My two daughters are.
JM: And where are they?
KM: One’s at Kingscliff and the other one’s at Tanglewood.
JM: Right.
KM: Which is out at Cabarita beach.
JM: Beach. Right ok.
KM: And my son’s at Dee Why in Sydney.
JM: Sydney. Ok. So back in Sydney still. Right. So from basically ’49 to when you retired in — when did you say you retired?
KM: I retired in ’82.
JM: ’82. So you did all that time in the Commonwealth Bank. Did you stay in Sydney all that time in Sydney all that time, or did you do any country postings?
KM: No. I was a relieving manager. I used to relieve all over New South Wales. But —
JM: Right.
KM: But I didn’t [pause], they wanted me to, wanted to know if I was mobile which meant I’d go to any country town and I said no. Because we had a nice, we were living in Mona Vale. The kids were just going to school. We, you know, so they, you know, they had continuity. It cost me promotions and things like that but that’s not everything.
JM: No.
KM: No. And the Commonwealth Bank was never my kettle of fish. It really, you know, it was a job which I did to the best of my ability but I wouldn’t say that I was overly enjoyed working there.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: But it gave you the security that you needed.
KM: Well it gave me security. That’s right. Yeah. Well in those days that’s what you looked for.
JM: Yeah.
KM: They don’t seem to worry about that these days. Security doesn’t mean, seem to mean very much.
JM: No. That’s right.
KM: In those days everybody took a job in public service or Commonwealth Bank or something like that, you know where you were going to have a job for life. Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. That’s right. So, and of course obviously that was while it was still part of the government before. I’m just trying to think when did the government sell it off. Before or after you retired?
KM: No. They sold it off before I retired yeah.
JM: Retired. Yeah.
KM: Yeah. And that’s when it —
JM: Started to change.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Wait a moment. No. I had retired. I’m Sorry. I had retired. Yeah.
KM: Yeah. That was probably a good thing you were out before. Yeah. It was ok for the first few years but then it became a dog eat dog job. I had mates who were in there.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And they said you’ve got no idea what it was like.
JM: Like. Yeah. Yeah.
KM: So all they were after was the mighty profits.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And it was it was functioning well before that. We were the leading. When I joined the bank we were tenth. There was ten banks and we were tenth. And of course there was an amalgamation and everything like that. When I left we were first.
JM: Yeah.
KM: But we hadn’t, we were still a government bank.
JM: Bank. Yeah.
KM: Yeah. And then it all they want to do now is to make big profits.
JM: Profits. That’s right.
KM: And I think the banks are terrible. You know the — [unclear] set up here. One of my mates was telling me. Went in there the other day. There’s no tellers.
JM: No. That’s the new style. That’s right.
KM: You’ve got to go to an ATM.
JM: ATM. Yeah.
KM: And what they forget is that old people are frightened of ATMs. Well they’re not frightened of them. They just don’t trust them.
JM: They just don’t. They prefer not to use them that’s right.
KM: They don’t trust them and you know that’s one of the things. You like to go in to a bank and speak to a teller.
JM: That’s right.
KM: But yeah and —
JM: And just going back to post-war as such. Were, have, did you maintain any contacts in the post-war with the pilot?
KM: I did —
JM: And the engineer?
KM: I did for the engineer for a little while and then like all things that you drop off. And then with the pilot I had contacted him for a while as well and that dropped off.
JM: Yeah.
KM: But then a mate of mine, he was with 460 Squadron.
JM: Yeah.
KM: They had an Association and he told me that 12 Squadron had one which was called the Wickenby Register. And he managed to get me an application form to join it so I joined it. They sent me a booklet and there was my pilot’s name in there. So I wrote to him and then we went over to see him.
JM: Yeah. What year was that roughly? Seventies. Eighties.
KM: Eighties.
JM: Eighties. Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: That was after you retired.
KM: After I retired yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And then they came out here. Then we went over again. And they came out again and then she died and then he died after that. Yeah. Yeah. But we had [pause] we met one time. We met them and we met them in, we went to a squadron reunion. It was at Nottingham and from there we went to France. We had a, got a car which we arranged. It was a left hand drive car. It was manual. It was a brand new car. A manual sedan, and he wouldn’t let me drive because it was on the wrong side of the road. But the trouble was after we’d been driving for a while I had to tell him when the lights were changing because he’d had to have an eye operation beforehand and he hadn’t had it [laughs] Then we had a little bit of a prang and that’s when he let me drive. So I drove up all the way after that you know, to Belgium.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Holland.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Germany.
JM: Germany. Yeah.
KM: France, Spain everywhere.
JM: Gosh. A fabulous trip.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: But it was difficult because you were on the left hand drive and a manual car as well.
JM: Yeah. I know.
KM: The gears are on the wrong side.
JM: You’re on the wrong side of the road. I know.
KM: Every time you put your indicator on it was your windscreen wipers came on.
JM: Windscreen wipers [laughs]
KM: It was a good trip. A real good trip.
JM: Yeah. You covered, you must have covered a lot of territory.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. So you didn’t go back to Germany at all.
KM: Yeah. We went through Germany. Oh yeah.
JM: Didn’t do go anywhere near where you —
KM: No
JM: Didn’t go far enough up to —
KM: To the camp
JM: To the camp. Yeah.
KM: No. No. No.
JM: Did you go to any of the places where you —
KM: The rest of the crew were, they’re buried in Hamburg.
JM: Yeah.
KM: In a joint grave. They were at Wetzlar and were taken over there which I think was a joint grave because I think they had trouble identifying them. Yeah.
JM: So did you go to Hamburg at all?
KM: No.
JM: No.
KM: No.
JM: Right.
KM: That was too far over.
JM: Over. Also, yeah.
KM: As a matter of fact I just discovered this the other day [pause]
JM: And did you go to any of the places that you bombed?
KM: What happened after the war he went back into the Air Force.
JM: Oh ok.
KM: Went to university and then went back to the Air Force and he was stationed in Germany for, for quite a number of years so he got to know a lot of people. So we went to places where he knew.
JM: That you’d been over during the war.
KM: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s with the mayor and the council of some town.
JM: Town. Yeah.
KM: They made a presentation to us. It’s all in German.
JM: German yes.
KM: So don’t ask me what the name of the place is now. I’ve just discovered that the other day.
JM: Gosh, amazing. And they gave you a little presentation.
KM: Yeah.
JM: How did they know you were coming?
KM: He, he’d been in touch with friends.
JM: With friends. Right.
KM: And his friends over there got in touch with the council. Yeah.
JM: In touch with the council.
KM: And I didn’t know we were going there.
JM: Going there.
KM: The pilot. That’s him on the — over there I think. Yeah. Johnny.
JM: Right.
KM: This chap’s [pause] yeah that’s my pilot and that’s his wife.
JM: Right.
KM: And that’s Helen there.
JM: Right. Yeah.
KM: That was Helen.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And that was me.
JM: Yeah.
KM: I know that they’d taken a small gift over. Did that just go off?
JM: No. That’s all right.
KM: A small gift. I didn’t know we were going there. It was a bit embarrassing because we didn’t have anything to give them, but still.
JM: But if you didn’t know you couldn’t —
KM: That’s right. I could do anything about it. No.
JM: No. That’s right.
KM: Yeah. But they were great.
JM: Yeah.
KM: But do you know it’s an amazing thing. I had not yet met a German, and we met a hell of a lot of them while we were there, and not one of them was a Nazi.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. Not one of them was a Nazi.
KM: Not one of them was a Nazi [laughs] you know. None of them liked Hitler.
JM: No. That’s right.
KM: And I can tell you as a prisoner of war we were fed with this propaganda of how terrible the Germans were and what they did and everything like that. They’re exactly the same as you and I.
JM: Yeah. There’s some nice people and some not so nice people.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. [pause] Goodness me. And just going back to your flying. So how many —
KM: Fifteen and a half.
JM: Fifteen and a half.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Ops, you did. And in those —
KM: Yeah. That’s what I say. Lindsey did thirty and he got a DFC.
JM: Yeah.
KM: I did fifteen and a half and I got a prisoner of war badge.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. That right.
KM: An ex-prisoner of war badge.
JM: That’s right. And the crew did any of the crew members have any good luck charms or superstitions or anything like that?
KM: No. No.
JM: No. They were just —
KM: Yeah.
JM: Straight up and down.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Just happy chappies.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. What [pause] what is your overall feeling about having been a prisoner of war? Was it —
KM: It was an experience.
JM: Experience.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. You feel that —
KM: Air force life I loved.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah. I often feel I should have stopped in the air force. But if I had I wouldn’t have met Helen and I wouldn’t have had the kids I’ve got.
JM: No.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Where did you meet Helen?
KM: At Narrabeen in Sydney.
JM: Yeah.
KM: My parents were in between businesses. We took a house on Narrabeen Lake and she was living next door with her sister. Her sister was married and they had a couple of kids there and Helen was sort of helping out as well, you know, with the kids although she was working. And my brother, he told me, he said, ‘Gee,’ he said, my brother was married. He said, ‘There isn’t a bad looking girl living there.’ I said, ‘is that right.’ And I came home from uni one night and I was walking down and she was putting out the garbage so I just spoke to her and, you know, we were talking. I said, ‘Would you like to go to the pictures?’ She said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘On Saturday night.’ We went to see “The Jolson Story.” And my mother came along as well. And I [laughs] I still don’t know if she was there to protect Helen or me. But I said, when I said we were going to “The Jolson Story,” she said, ‘Oh gee, I’d like to see that as well.’ Yeah. So yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: So then yeah just things developed from there on and we were engaged for about eighteen months, and, yeah.
JM: Married and —
KM: Six years later she had our first child. Yeah. Yeah. We had, we had no money when we came from honeymoon. I think we had twenty pounds between us.
JM: Yeah. Where did you go for your honeymoon?
KM: Came up the inland highway through the floods. There were big floods in those days.
JM: Yeah. So this would have been, when would this, these weren’t the ’54 floods was it?
KM: No. The ’49.
JM: Oh the ’49. Yes. Right. Yes. ’49 yes.
KM: Came up to the gold coast and just stopped off at different places.
JM: So just a little touring the rounds.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Well, that’s an incredible experience that you’ve had. And it’s [pause] like many, very different. I mean every one, every one’s story is different.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Because they’ve had different experiences. Different circumstances they found themselves in. But yet, you know, everyone has contributed in such a way that —
KM: Yeah.
JM: You know, hasn’t been recognised up until now and that’s why it’s so good that it’s finally happening even if it is just so late.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Just so late.
KM: What do you do is you remember the good times. You don’t remember the bad. There probably were occasions when things weren’t going right with the flying and everything like that but I can’t remember them now.
JM: Yeah. So strongest memories are all the good times.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Well, yeah, with the exception of course one particular, you know.
KM: Well even that has [pause] just an experience. You know. When we were shot down and it doesn’t. I don’t think it was a momentous occasion or anything like that. It was just something that happened unexpected. Yeah. You follow?
JM: Yes. Yes.
KM: Yeah.
JM: But yet you had some training, so you had some skills to call on.
KM: Yeah.
JM: To know how to handle it.
KM: Well you knew it could happen but yeah.
JM: Could happen. Yeah.
KM: But you always had to go on it wasn’t going to happen to you.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: And when it did well —
KM: It did. Well, it happened. Yeah.
JM: You can’t change it. You had to go with it.
KM: And I must say I wasn’t scared.
JM: Right.
KM: I can honestly say that I was never scared. The first time I was really scared was with the Russians.
JM: With the Russians.
KM: Yes, in the town. And of course the war was over as far as I was concerned, you know.
JM: Yeah.
KM: It was to end and then what’s going to happen now?
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. And even when, you know, you were on earlier raids and you got some flak and all the rest of I. Oh it sounds like we just have to have another little pause while we wait.
[recording paused while plane passes]
JM: Yes.
KM: Had nine months off work.
JM: When was that?
KM: Just before I retired.
JM: Retired. Oh goodness.
KM: It showed that I could retire without problems.
JM: Right.
KM: Yeah.
JM: So where were you knocked down?
KM: At Taylor Square.
JM: Taylor Square. Ok.
KM: Yeah. I was doing some relief out there and I was outside. We had a thing of a morning that we had keys in combinations. You didn’t go to the bank first. You had to wait and send, you know, of the younger ones in because they used to break in to the ceiling and hide in the ceilings and then get in you know in the bank and wait for someone to come with the keys and take them hostage sort of thing and get them to open up the safe. So — and this morning this girl was, she never late. She was late. Running late. And the car came around the corner, mounted the footpath and put me through the window of a funeral parlour. [laughs]
JM: I guess you would have had a bit of damage then out of that.
KM: Yeah. I had my leg all smashed up.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Pelvis as well. But — yeah.
JM: And what about the glass? Did the glass not sort of shatter?
KM: No. No.
JM: Not lacerate you?
KM: Actually behind the plate glass there was a brick wall. So it just sort of shattered, you know. I was lucky.
JM: Lucky. Gosh.
KM: A piece of glass went down and cut my pants. Brand new pair of pants I had on [laughs] That was the only time I ever wore them. [laughs]
JM: And before we just paused there for that aeroplane we were just saying —you were saying you were never scared, and I was just going to come back to sort of, couple of the early raids. You did have a fair bit of flak around and had a few holes in the plane.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: That, that, you weren’t scared then.
KM: No. No. Not really. No. Apprehensive but not scared. You were still flying alright though.
JM: Yeah.
KM: You know. Yeah.
JM: And you managed to deal with all the cold and all the rest of it when you were flying.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: So you didn’t have any real ongoing sort of issues.
KM: No. When I was flying there when I was cold I used to control the heating.
JM: Yes. So you were always comfortable. And was the gunner always freezing?
KM: Well the heating didn’t get back to them. They had —
JM: That’s right. They had —
KM: They had electric flying suits on them.
JM: Suits. Yeah.
KM: No, that would be terrible. Being a gunner.
JM: Yeah.
KM: They were out on their own. Got nobody to talk to, you know.
JM: To talk to. Very hard.
KM: Yeah.
JM: At least you could —
KM: Well I was right next to the navigator.
JM: The navigator. That’s right.
KM: He was, I could see what he was doing. There was a bod there near you. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Well I guess at this point unless there’s something that we haven’t covered that you’d particularly would like to mention as I say that we haven’t covered through then we might wrap it up at this point.
KM: Yeah. That would be fine.
JM: Yeah.
[recording paused]
JM: Right. We’re just talking with Ken again a little bit. I got a map out with the various raids over Europe that — and Ken’s just looking at the map. In the first instance you remembered where you did your —
KM: Conversion Unit.
JM: Your conversion. Your Heavy —
KM: Conversion Unit.
JM: Your Heavy Conversion Unit was where?
KM: Lindholme.
JM: Lindholme. Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: And now were just also looking at the map of various raids and looking and you were pointing out where you were headed when you on the raid that you were shot down and you were —
KM: Yeah. Near Leipzig.
JM: Leipzig and what else?
KM: The prisoner of war camp was just south of Berlin there.
JM: Yeah.
KM: And we were shot down near, not that far from Wiesbaden.
JM: Wiesbaden. Yeah.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. So that’s a reasonable distance. So you were on trains weren’t you.
KM: Yeah. We were on trains yeah. Yes. Yeah.
JM: Yeah. And so your raids basically were.
KM: We went to the Ruhr a few times. Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: Yeah. I shall have to have a look at my logbook now to see where most of them were. Yeah.
JM: Yeah.
KM: We were all over the place.
JM: Place. Yes.
KM: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Something here. Something there.
KM: That’s right. Yeah.
JM: Ok. Thank you.
KM: And before we finish as a personal disclaimer I should say at this point that a couple of times Ken has mentioned a Doug McCartney. And in the course of setting up this interview, because of Ken’s extraordinary memory he remembered that there was a Doug McCartney on his wireless operator training at Maryborough. And in about the second phone call he raised this with me and I looked up my records of my father’s service and indeed they were together there and it turns out for about the following six months. And so it has been an amazing experience as never did I think I would meet someone who knew my father after all these years. So I thank you very much Ken.
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
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AMacdonaldK170222, PMacdonaldK1703
Title
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Interview with Ken Macdonald
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:33:10 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary. Allocated S Coulter
Creator
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Jean Macartney
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-02-22
Description
An account of the resource
Ken Macdonald grew up in Australia and volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force. He flew operations with Bomber Command.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Germany
Great Britain
United States
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Luckenwalde
New York (State)--New York
New York (State)
Contributor
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Julie Williams
12 Squadron
1667 HCU
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
Dulag Luft
entertainment
fear
final resting place
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
military living conditions
Operational Training Unit
prisoner of war
RAF Hemswell
RAF Wickenby
RAF Worksop
sanitation
Stalag 3A
training
Wellington