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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/330/3490/ASolinD170220.1.mp3
72bf807187c9aefe4305a0b3bcca21db
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Solin, Donald
D Solin
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One oral history interview with Donald Solin (427265 Royal Australian Air Force)
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2017-02-20
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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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Solin, D
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JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre, the interviewer is Jean Macartney, the interviewee is Air Commodore Retired Donald Solin. The interview is taking place at Don’s home in Carrara, Queensland, on 20th February 2017, also present is Don’s friend Helena. Don let’s start at the beginning I believe you were born in Perth in 1924.
DS: Yes.
JM: Yes. And does that mean that you lived in Perth for your early years of?
DS: Until I was eighteen.
JM: Eighteen.
DS: And the day I turned eighteen I was conscripted of course into the RAF as everyone else was I think, and I ended up in well it was a crowd called, and there was a you know stopping, stopping the bombs, no bombs, you know. Anyway, er, we were tying explosives around bridges you know [unclear] that was our main watch that happened, concerns about the Japanese invasion and then we wouldn’t explode them, we would rush off somewhere and say yes they had exploded and after that we would go back untie them all again for tomorrow. Now that went on for several months and it didn’t appeal to me very much because I would always wanting to fly. So I pulled all the strings I knew which were not many, I had no one in particular to help me but anyway we made it finally. In the meantime being in the Air Force, er not very at there was an idea where we took twenty-one lessons prior to joining aircrew, and I started on a session of lessons, and for one way and another of course I then became switched over after a lot of trouble from the Army, and I then became an AC2.
JM: Right. Let’s just pause there for a moment.
DS: Yes.
JM: And go back before you were eighteen and you were conscripted, your schooling was in Perth so you —
DS: Ah t was all over the country.
JM: It was all over the country.
DS: Yes, all over Western Australia.
JM: What because your family were travelling or?
DS: Well mother had been, ‘cos she was a district nurse and she had been divorced for very good reason and there were two small children living with grandparents and I was one of those, been looked after very, very well, we lived in Donborough, and we had all the delights of being able to fish and swim every day, and go rabbit shooting, and fox hunting and god knows what, and it was all very good. So that was brilliant in-between until we got a bit older, not much doing, very little, so I had a lot of catch up to do of course as soon as we go on to these twenty-one lessons from the Air Force, and it introduced me to things like algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, which I hadn’t really done much more than hear about average schools don’t cover too much, I finished it but boys one year you can’t catch up too much, so anyway that was it.
JM: So that was like equivalent to an intermediate certificate?
DS: Yes I believe it was Union [?] University, Western Australia.
JM: Right.
DS: That was hard as I went back I was very good really but nonetheless so there was plenty of catch up work.
JM: And so you that would have been sixteen you finished sort of that schooling?
DS: Er, I finished schooling at fourteen.
JM: Fourteen.
DS: And left school then.
JM: At fourteen okay. So between fourteen and eighteen when you were conscripted what sort of things did you do?
DS: Nobody asked me that for a long time, but I, I got a job, any type of job all I wanted to do was to work and get a few dollars. Now I got a job with Harris [?] Centre the big hardware people in Western Australia and they were, they covered a whole lot of things and you could do everything from broom sweeping to filling bottles and I did all that, it was all right, l had a, they were a good crowd, very good. But that was it then that covered two years at least may be three out of the four, anyway and then —
JM: And was that in Perth?
DS: Yes, yes. And then I did something else for a pharmacist for some time until the day I was eighteen.
JM: And had your mother come back to Perth at this stage and you were living with her or were you had the grandparents moved in to?
DS: Yes she was back from er, I don’t know, I’ve forgotten. I think the last, her last country post was Greenwood [?] she was the matron at the hospital there, and I lived there for a while until the local [unclear] you can’t do that because the maternity ward is just so close to where you were sleeping and what’s going on there is not good for growing boys, something in that order so they said right oh well you’re out. So some very nice English lady who already had three children more than, more than she could manage was good enough to take me in. So that was it whilst we were in the country we were staying with this and finally we got together with mother in Perth for say about twelve months before the call up date.
JM: That’s call up, so you had your call up and sort of then from the time, well I think you did your initial training, in June 1942 at Clontarf, so that would make you twenty, a bit over twenty, about twenty and a half so then you were in the Army for about two years?
DS: Oh no, no, no.
JM: No, not that long?
DS: Probably.
JM: Right okay.
DS: I was only the Army for about three or four months.
JM: Oh okay, right.
DS: Not that that matters, and then we were in the course of doing these lessons from the Air Force the crowd that gave you lessons, I’ve forgotten, er but I’m not sure about the time but anyway —
JM: No, no, I think it was my actual, I’ve got an arrow in the wrong place I can see where I’ve made the mistake so that’s okay. So then you did your initial training at Clontarf and then did your pilot training —
DS: At Cunderdin
JM: Yes, that was when you were in to Tiger Moths.
DS: Yes we were on Tigers but then you did the solo bit.
JM: Yes.
DS: In time yes.
JM: So how long before you went solo?
DS: Six months, quarter hours I think it was something like that.
JM: And how was your experience first, of your first solo flight?
DS: Oh well, course all of you, you know, all of you are as proud as punch you can’t think of anything else really, er, but we were mostly very happy about that, but then it was only a matter of another weeks or a month or so we went off that job and of course on to —
JM: Avro Ansons? Ansons, Avro Ansons?
DS: Oh Ansons, yes, and of course they were very reliable you, you could make a dozen mistakes you know and they would still be in the air, but, er —
JM: Which was a little different to the Tiger Moth situation?
DS: Oh yes, oh well the Tigers you had do give them some respect because they were so gentle but really that’s about it the way you had to treat them and once you get used to that you’re right, gentle [unclear]. They used to say there was a saying, gentle treat them like a woman, and so that’s what we tried to do and that was successful. So we went on the job and that was another four months graduating [unclear] with hundreds and thousands of others, and then it was only a matter of days or may be weeks and we got the posting and of course the posting was to the UK. And well there was via Laporte.
JM: Freemantle.
DS: I went to Melbourne.
JM: So Freemantle to Melbourne.
DS: Melbourne.
JM: And then Melbourne to —
DS: Sydney by train.
JM: Oh okay right.
DS: And then there was an amalgamation of bodies and they got on, we went on The Matson Line.
JM: Right.
DS: The Matsonia [?]
JM: Right, so when would this have been?
DS: It was about the middle of ‘43.
JM: The middle of ’43.
DS: And, er, wended our way to the US and across the US, in the normal way, and then —
JM: Across to New York obviously.
DS: Yes, sometime in New York big camp [unclear] there, enormous place a small city in itself and then finally we got on a boat to England, that was the Queen Mary.
JM: Right the Mary, yes.
DS: All very nice that was the first of the [unclear] that could go unaccompanied by a whole of plethora of ships because they were fast, it was fast enough —
JM: To out speed the German U-Boats and all the rest of it?
DS: Subs.
JM: So did you land in Scotland, land in Scotland?
DS: Yes, yes, and finally ended up on the south coast.
JM: To Brighton?
DS: Brighton.
JM: Yes.
DS: Where there was a whole load of us and er, not much time there and then we were off to a whole load of different training, we’d go do this course, that course.
JM: You do your affiliation in a sort of is that where you first started flying Wellingtons?
DS: Er, Wellingtons was the first large aircraft yes, yes.
JM: So it was a conversion from your Avro Anson to your Wellingtons?
DS: The Wellingtons was the next. Did that, and it was a nice old aircraft really you know and of course it was the mainsail of Bomber Command early in the piece [unclear] you know a first class bomber. Always did stay as a bomber but of course less and less significance, anyway —
JM: And from that conversion course did you then get, is that when you were posted to 149?
DS: Oh no, no, no, oh crickey you can’t get away with that, there was half a dozen courses in-between, one on stars you know meteorology, another on beam landing systems, and another on some other, oh there was a whole load a plethora of reasons that we had to do another week here, or a week there, always in a tent it was winter, and anyway—
JM: In a tent did you say?
DS: Mostly in a tent somewhere?
JM: So you didn’t even have the Nissen hut?
DS: Oh yes, we lived in, we had our permanent time there, but when you’re posted off to a course somewhere you know you’re a week away from it.
JM: Right, so if this is approaching the end of ’43 you’re coming into the winter?
DS: Yes, I, I, I [unclear] a little bit because we had to have someone on patrol every night you know with the heater in the middle of the, of the unit you know there was thirty-six bodies I think in the, in the tin shed that we were in, but they were nice units but just made to put beds in after all, and we, but we had this fire in the middle and that was very useful, very useful. Anyway so it was only then a matter of getting another posting to another place and we then converted onto the next step up.
JM: Then the Halifaxes or Stirlings?
DS: Stirlings.
JM: Stirlings right.
DS: Stirling was the first four engine that we had and we loved it.
JM: How did you, what sort of differences would you feel you experienced between flying the Stirlings and the Wellingtons, anything stand out for you?
DS: Not really no.
JM: Only major difference is four engines versus two obviously —
DS: You just had to get your fingers over the fourth thing you know make sure that you had it covered, I remember having initial problems with it you know not my fingers but obviously it, it becomes easier, no trouble at all, so that was it amen, you finally get a post.
JM: Posting.
DS: A post, at we got ours at 149 Squadron, but, just out of London, north of London, and but ah her we go, we were quite happy to go, go off in a Stirling really but they had mainly Halifaxes and Lancasters there so, they’d only just getting the Lancs so what happened the first thing we did was oh you can’t fly that you’ve got to do a course first. In the usual way so we did our course on the Lancasters and about the last day or the second last day a posting came through from whoever does the postings in the UK to say your crowd, your crew 82 special duties.
JM: Right. Just before we go to that you by this time had a crew.
DS: Oh yes.
JM: So where did you crew up?
DS: Before we got in the four engine aircraft.
JM: So
DS: That was after the Stirling, after er, —
JM: At —
DS: After the Wellingtons.
JM: After the Wellingtons.
DS: After the Wellingtons yes, that was about crewing up time.
JM: That was crewing time. So who what sort of crew did you have, did you have a mixed, mixed crew then if it was 149?
DS: They were mixed.
JM: Oh no you weren’t actually on 149.
DS: We went into a, the expert way in which it’s done, your shoved into a room like so many cattle, and said, ‘Right everyone’s got to make their own crew, pick their own bodies, seven, seven each, and that’s it.’ Very scientific of course. So how much, how do you know who the hell unless you know people, and as a pilot you, you only learnt people’s names and friendships since you’d been on the course, so it’s the luck of the draw really right from day one. But of course that’s the whole of the Air Force then became Bomber Command is a story of the luck of the draw and if you’re really lucky you’ll be all right, [unclear] bad luck. So anyway we crewed up all Western Australians and that was my scientific method of ticking the box, a perverse, quite a perverse crowd, navigator for example who was subsequently killed in an accident we had in Italy, er, he was a great [unclear] of a person he was over twenty-eight most of us were still eighteen or —
JM: Twenty, I think you probably would have been about —
DS: Nineteen twenty.
JM: Nineteen twenty by this stage.
DS: So whatever it was, you weren’t all that old. Anyway you crew up and you ask what, what was the crew, I mean there was a bomb aimer from Sydney who had done nothing much but drift in his life but a nice guy, and then the wireless operator who, whose still alive we became you know real, real close, he’s the only member of the crew that’s still around other than myself, so and then we’d got an English engineer who had according to him had all kinds of experience in a Rolls Royce factory but in fact I think in practice had very little experience but a nice bloke but he was a womaniser and loved drinking, but you know all full crews had that I guess, [unclear] anyway that was it that was our crew.
JM: That was your crew. So you’re together you did your concluding together for Wellingtons sorry Stirlings and then you get the you’re about to start on Lancasters when your told you’re going off to, so you didn’t actually do any operations, do any ops?
DS: No less. No, I did no operations at all in England.
JM: In England right.
DS: As it happened at the time well it was something to do with someone who [unclear] because the timing was right it was just at the end of our conversion course. Obviously they didn’t want another crew although the squadron had have a number of losses but, er, and that was it. I would they made to go on oh you’re content for a week here, the posting [unclear] about a week second time down to somewhere in the South of England, we were then flying Stirlings and we had to press a button, right here we go it’s a brand new aircraft no hours on the clock. [unclear] you’ve got to give it every check possible, it’s yours, it’s yours if there’s any complaints feel free but give it now because it’s then yours, so we did just that.
JM: And this is a Stirling?
DS: Yes. Talk about it performing perfectly the whole time, we wouldn’t have given it back anyway so [laughs] there was no way, and that was the aircraft we took away with us.
JM: Right.
DS: Another week or so later they said, ‘Right you’re off to across Africa.’ We didn’t know you know we just got a posting that’s all, so we were posted to Radar Salem, North Africa [?] and we stopped there for the night and thought oh you know we’re on our way certain we were going to the Far East because they were very short, the Japs were getting the better part of the war there, so we reckoned we were on our way. But no it wasn’t that at all we got a posting to North Africa and another part of North Africa if you’d like to call it that, BNA, British North African Forces. And so we go to Algiers it was a place called Blida, big aircraft, a big Air Force base just outside of Algiers the capital, and they said, ‘Right oh you get this ops here.’ And we, we were in, we were actually posted to 624 Squadron that was our first post and we flew several on to [unclear], Africa South, but just across the Mediterranean from there. That was about the time there was a big upheaval when we, we lowered, took over, captured or freed up whatever, a lot of, held up ships, French, French warships, that were valuable to the allies but were being held up and put away the German fleet. Anyway so we thought oh we’re here for ages, but no we were there about four or five, six maybe six days, not sure, and a signal came through this time saying we’re going to the Far East, but no we’re going to Italy then.
JM: Right just before we get off to Italy, in those four, five, six trips, did you drop any bombs at all, were you just surveillance or what?
DS: All bodies.
JM: Sorry?
DS: We dropped bodies.
JM: Bodies right. Were they Special Forces or something?
DS: A whole lot of activity going on particularly in Southern France.
JM: So they were what Special Forces that you were dropping or?
DS: Oh yes, well we were in, of course still 624 Squadron was a part of the Special Forces, Special Bomber Command Forces. And then when we, we moved over to when we got the posting to Italy we found out that was Brindisi and that was Brindisi 148 Squadron which was still of course RAF, actually it was all RAF [unclear]. We had any, we had a mishap and [unclear], on take-off on one trip apart from that it was [unclear] aircraft.
JM: So how did you go with any particular damage to the airplane or?
DS: Well the aircraft was in pretty [unclear] shape I’m not too sure whether they could fix it up or not because we didn’t stay long enough to see what and you asked blokes about it, ‘Oh no, oh no, never heard of it.’ Anyway.
JM: So that was the most —
DS: That was the excitement.
JM: The excitement in those half a dozen or handful of trips, yep.
DS: Brindisi we got to.
JM: Got to Brindisi —
DS: Brindisi yes. We had, there was a Polish flight, really nice squadron on the other side of the airbase, we were on this side, whichever side you were looking at. They were operate, they operated absolutely separately from us and I have to say they were fearless, there were lots of days that we couldn’t fly because of the weather because of the distance, it didn’t worry the Poles they were always flying, and particularly a bit later on we had four trips towards Poland, er, we weren’t allowed to go fortuitously or otherwise a week or so before we got there, maybe it was that week, we were helping, we were trying to help the Poles, when the Russians were approaching and of course they had the German Panzer there, then they had the Russians coming that way. They appealed to every squadron everywhere, commanders in chief the lot, we want all the assistance we can get, anyway it was quite a game, half a dozen [unclear] as many as they had planes for about five hundred or more were lost over wasn’t over Warsaw but it was I would say the battle for Warsaw.
JM: But you weren’t on that particular mission?
DS: No, no, oh no fortunately, once again luck of the draw, and they said cancelled all, all, all those trips to Warsaw, Poland, but there were plenty of others till we [unclear]. We never ever had a prime aim or you’ve got to do this or you’ve got to do that. We just —
JM: Mission by mission basically.
DS: We were on call.
JM: Yes, yes, for whatever they decided they wanted to be the next target.
DS: One of the big thing was, or one of the big things if not the biggest, Tito of course was commander of the forces over the, over the war, and Tito was a very vigorous fighter, we weren’t too sure whether he, which side he was on but we were supposed to be helping him and each second or third crew were surprised you know we used to call it [unclear] with the Luftwaffe quite [unclear]. There were all kinds of things they introduced I remember a land mine in those days of course these things were about this round all big heavy —
JM: A couple of feet wide?
DS: Oh anyway all the holes in aircraft that you get in and out are square you see so we had to cut a big round hole to accommodate these, course we had —
JM: So these were the bombs that —
DS: Oh we didn’t drop them as bombs —
JM: You didn’t drop them —
DS: We dropped them as for TJ [?] forces when we dropped those kind of things, that was quite a frequent player because arms and ammunition actually were always short for on the other side. Mind you we didn’t know too much of what was going on, they very rarely opened up to say we’re going to do this, or you are going to do that, or you’re going somewhere, but you never ever well very rarely ever knew there was no fixed place. Mainly the trips at night when we were dropping bodies were in the dark and mostly on a hillside that was hard to find always of course, but that, that was all part of the, part of the act of course.
JM: And what, and you still had your initial crew?
DS: Oh yes, yes.
JM: That you’d crewed up with —
DS: Yeah we had —
JM: That would have been 14 —
DS: 148 —
JM: Stages there, so that crew had come through from all each of these different stages, you still had the same crew?
DS: And we were all together except the navigator who we lost on the, oh what trip it was but it was on 26th December ’44, would have been ’44 or ’43?
JM: Probably ’43 I’d say.
DS: No.
JM: No ’44.
DS: And we crashed, I should never have ever really, this is off the record of course, but I should never ever have going forward we lost an engine on take-off, so many times it’s easy to turn back your excused you know so it’s just to press on, this was an occasion I thought we’d press on you know the old story, press on regardless —
JM: And you were taking off from?
DS: Italy.
JM: From Brindisi?
DS: Brindisi. When we got to about the Slavic Coast, the north coast it became pretty evident our engines were overheating and the engineer said, ‘Oh we can’t go anymore.’ Because dropping stuff we have to go low and then you’ve gotta, so it got to the stage that we thought we’ve gotta go back, and we went back cut across to Italy and we looked for a nice soft landing spot of course and we picked a fairly good spot it was a grape growing place in, a place called San Pico [?] if I remember rightly, and unfortunately you, you don’t know the aircraft but the Halifax was, we were flying [unclear] the navigator used to be way beyond the front and you had to climb two flights of stairs to go up, and at, on that particular flight we were loaded to the hilt, there were extra clothes and food it was Christmas time you know, and er, he just couldn’t get up the stairs he had the certain navigation equipment that he should have done this with but struggling up to get the stairs and sooner or later of course you know he the props flew off, the right, the right hand motor had been what do you call it not seized up, but it had been cut off because —
JM: Feathered?
DS: It was propeller, it had been feathered [unclear] but it had been freewheeling there’s a word for it special [unclear] anyway. So as soon as the prop hit the ground the bits just flew off and fortunately the pilot was just about that far in front of where the props fly off so it missed you know who, but unfortunately the navigator was right in the road and it cocked him, so I don’t know what number trip it was but we, that was, we flew on for months after that you know borrowed a navigator. You’ll have to excuse me I’ve got to go to the toilet frequently.
JM: We’re just resuming now we’re picking up on December ’44, so where you had —
DS: We did a number of very interesting trips following that —
JM: Following that —
DS: The most interesting one was when we took four very brave characters to the Hitler’s retreat[?] up in the mountains, of course we came from Southern Italy just a bit to the left, our big concern, biggest concern in getting there and getting back there was, there was a squadron of Messerschmitt 362 had moved into somewhere near Trieste, and of course we had the option of our own of doing our own navigation you know we were well away from this crowd, so we dodged them without any trouble, then we had to find this virtually a torchlight, and I said, ‘oh no trouble.’ We’ll follow the mountains close to the mountain peak of course and they were all mountain peaks [laughs] heck of a place. So anyway we finally estimated what we reckoned what was right, confirmed by the blokes we were carrying because the method of identification was pretty raw really, but that’s the problem we were happy when they was off, snow and it was desolate you know but very close to his headquarters, we flew around a long time looking for the place but anyway we’d done what we were doing for months no too keen on that trip at all but anyway —
JM: And they dropped successfully?
DS: Oh yes, yes, the drop was. Unfortunately we never or very rare ever heard back from the blokes as whether it was successful or otherwise. But obviously some of the operations were captured before the blokes got to the ground, because the, they’d been the fellas down there had been captured by the Germans and they were using the signals you see, but you know that’s war and I guess happens all the time. Anyway so that took us up till about they declared armistice in Europe and then of course we thought well we’ll get a week have a little rest and peace and quiet, but the next important job was flying all the oddbods all over the place back to Europe, and of course that was a very joyful task, but we didn’t partake because the next day or the day after another signal came through all Australians have got to be returned they wanted everybody in a hurry so that was it, and then we boarded the first ship, or a number of aircraft ready we’d got over to Egypt and we were on the banks of the river there, The Nile, for months, months, and then the war finally ended whilst we were there, they dropped the big bomb —
JM: Hiroshima?
DS: Hiroshima, that was it, end of story.
JM: And when you were in Egypt there you were just —
DS: Doing nothing.
JM: Doing nothing just waiting?
DS: Waiting, waiting, waiting.
JM: Okay backtracking to Brindisi again, you obviously because it was such a long period of time a long posting do you have any recollection of how many ops you did altogether?
DS: We did forty.
JM: Forty ops?
DS: Forty trips yes.
JM: Okay from Brindisi?
DS: No, no all told, our log books recorded, I don’t have mine I lost it mine years and years ago, Rod Harrison said we logged forty trips.
JM: Right, right. A fair reasonable number would have been while you were at Brindisi?
DS: Oh yes, yes.
JM: So what sort of things did you do in your down time during ops?
DS: I’m afraid we probably drunk too much red wine but I’m ashamed to say, but there wasn’t too much to do —
JM: That’s the point —
DS: And you had to fill in the day and every now and again of course they did say the weather was so terrible, but the Poles can fly but you can’t, so we got four days off we’d say right we’re off to, the favourite place was Pollina[?] in Sicily but that wasn’t very far away from Mount Etna, a road goes through from Pollina [?] up to, to the mountain, and you know it’s a story really but we got hemmed in there was the biggest snow of all time there were hemmed in just as we’d kind of settled in ready to come back [unclear] very little time.
JM: So what you’d driven up —
DS: Oh no, no, oh you’d get to the, the accommodation was in Pollina [?] a little place by the coast and then you would scrounge your way up there was plenty of vehicles going all the time Italian vehicles, so we got up there without any trouble it was the getting back of course we had to have a quick lessons in skiing, and you know we were trying all the time to do a bit of this and of course falling off most of the time but—
JM: So where did you get the skis from?
DS: Oh they loaned us to, they said, ‘Right you’re quite welcome to them just hand them into whatever centre it was back in the Pollina [?]. So I think one or two of them were badly bruised but we didn’t break anything except didn’t break any bones really they were badly bruised, lucky because when you can’t steer properly you’re bound to hit a tree and things like that, anyway we were much better skiers at the end of the time because it was a hell of a long way from up top down to where the road, where the snow stopped, a long way, unbelievable.
JM: Did you have any sense of time, sort of was it four hours, five hours, or any sense of timing at all?
DS: Really lots of time.
JM: And how did you sort of navigate, how did you know where —
DS: Ah well you know but it’s —
JM: You followed the road I presume?
DS: Yes, well more tried to follow the road but you knew if the road was east to west you knew that it was basically east to west or whatever it was, so that was one of our special trips, mind you we did quite a number of others. I don’t think we ever told the story, we were going north, north to Naples but anyway that’s another the story, but we were particular keen about Malta [unclear] never done this, never done that, there was a thousand rogues and vagabonds there, every street corner was covered with them, and of course if you were stupid enough to be out after dark you were asking for trouble, anyway we, we probably had a few drinks one day or every day I guess, but we it was after dark and we were still out and of course we got the greatest lashing of all time the whole crew.
JM: The whole crew?
DS: No there were only five of us there I think five out of the seven, the two other were too smart to come with us but probably a good idea of what was going to go off, but anyway —
JM: So how did you get to Malta?
DS: Ah, that’s another story. We had a, I’ve forgot the name of the type of [unclear] kind of a major repair very close to us, they fixed all kinds of aircraft from all over the place, so if they had anything that was flyable that we thought we could, that I thought we could fly we flew, so we had this water repair and we could [unclear] there was supposed to be —
JM: Another type?
DS: Another type, yes, that’s right. And we just squeezed in should never have had quite that many but anyway I was, I thought I could fly this in and so we did, I got it down there but very glad to leave it to someone else to fly it back because I don’t think I could have done it again but, and there were all kinds of other trips we could do.
JM: So just going back to you flew, so you got this aircraft it —
DS: Yes. Borrowed it.
JM: Borrowed it, flew over to Malta, had a bit of a day or so in Malta and then you in the evening you copped a bashing, and how did you —
DS: Get home?
JM: Get home then?
DS: I’m not too sure but we finally made it, there were some reprimands of course [laughs] but fortunately it didn’t extend beyond that, mind you they wanted, they wanted crews to fly, so they couldn’t, they couldn’t kind of send us off and say right you can go somewhere, but that was, it wasn’t our biggest adventure really, but these are the things that you know, all the aircrew, or nearly all aircrew were up to it one way or the other.
JM: No that’s right and of course the difference being with you being over there in Brindisi was very different to squadrons back in the UK —
DS: Oh yes.
JM: When they had leave they could go to London or wherever it was, but as you say sort of very much almost left to your own devices at Brindisi.
DS: We were entirely, entirely. Eventually it was rare when well Rome particularly was always a magnet to go up and you know you had to have your photograph taken in —
JM: For the —
DS: In all the places that were old and historic and that was all good fun but —
JM: So how many times do you think you would have gone to Rome?
DS: Oh several, several times.
JM: Any particular incidents stand out then?
DS: No, no real nasty incidents, we were stuck on the road sometimes, all you could see were Indians, and you know you think —
JM: How did you get to Rome?
DS: Always vehicles going, coming and going all the time, sometimes took an aircraft halfway if it was down for servicing or going back again, there was always a you know, never really anything exciting happened other than the historical photographs outside this place and that place, and of course seeing it, ah that’s right I forgot to mention our, our historic visit was the day we visited Rome and we had a special trip, an invitation from one of the padres that were training, under training here and they were quite a few of them a good number of Australians’. And anyway so we had this invite, special invite, a couple of cartons of cigarettes you know to do all this, so but we did it, and we had this personal interview with the Pope and received his blessing.
JM: Goodness me.
DS: That was a, we thought it wasn’t a big deal, but everyone else thought it was a big deal after, but it was exciting, and you can remember things you try to have a good look and see the big ring on his finger all that.
JM: So that was what a ten minute —
DS: Oh that was, we had an audience —
JM: An audience?
DS: There was a great crowd out the and we sat out there, he had a thing like this right up at the front, and at that stage he used to stand, I’ve read about it since, he’s now down on the floor level for some reason they cut out this special groove, ‘cos they were all first to get the blessings if there’s any blessings left [unclear] they on the floor, but anyway that was you know so at the time, but otherwise it was all pretty average, pretty ordinary you know, all we wanted to do really was to get home, and but we then spent four at least four months over in Egypt waiting for a ship before we got home, that was the time the bomb was dropped, the big one. We got home as peaceful civilians you might say.
JM: And when you were flying did you have any lucky charms, or any of the crew have any lucky charms, or have any suspicions that you used to that they following that anyone followed, ‘cos some I know that having talked to a few other chaps that you know other chaps did have lucky charms, and did certain things in a certain routine that you know never varied, I mean obviously the usual checks and all the rest of it.
DS: We were a pretty ordinary crew really, a pretty ordinary crowd. One of our, well it wasn’t a problem but for social aspects all the rest of the crew were under twenty-one years of age and we had these two blokes were twenty-eight and they were quite elderly.
JM: By comparison yes.
DS: Yes, so that, that upset some of them, well it didn’t upset them but it, it was divisive in as much as they didn’t all want to come with us, but mostly we drank too much anyway, nearly all the time if we could get booze but you couldn’t get good beer anywhere.
JM: Not in Italy I wouldn’t have thought.
DS: So you just drank what there was.
JM: What there was?
DS: So to cut a long story short, mother was very pleased to see us get back, she was down at the ship there so [laughs]
JM: I’ll say. And I didn’t check before did you have any brothers or sisters?
DS: I had a sister who joined the Air Force about the same time as I did and she became a radio operator and they used to be stuck up in the bush up around Jordan [?] or out north from Jordan [?] in the bush there, where the [unclear] that was it she —
JM: No it’s just that so for your mum there was only the one that she had to worry about coming back, returning from overseas, yes.
DS: Yes.
JM: So that was in you came back and then you ultimately were discharged in February 1946, is that right?
DS: Yes, that would be.
JM: Is that right?
DS: Yes. Had a week or two after we got back not very long, anyway.
JM: And then what did you do for the next few years?
DS: Well, they were very, very busy years, because when I was in the desert waiting for the ship we bought a store at Mingenew[?], do you know west at all?
JM: Not really that area no.
DS: You’ve gotta know Mingenew relatively speaking, it’s not the most salubrious town around, a typical country town, wheat and sheep, but all the good properties all the nice houses are way up in the [unclear] not many around town except the pub and our store that was good whilst it was there. I was there for not long a year or so but it was everything was rationed you know, milk, you were around at that stage or were you?
JM: Not quite no.
DS: But everything was rationed, I mean cigarettes and booze were most wanted, hard to get but you know, you couldn’t buy extra milk or cream or butter, a whole range of stuff, it was very difficult to even think that we were like life could have been like that, but anyway that didn’t last for long. I trained to be a schoolteacher, quite stupidly, god knows how I got the thing in that you know, but anyway so we left the store round there and a fortune with it for an academic career. And we were going fine, I was I did the teacher’s course and it was only two years.
JM: At Perth? Was this at Perth?
DS: At Perth yes. Became a I forgot what they call it something psychological and so and so expert you know, I only had about five minutes of training on the course. Anyway that was, that was good until and I was gonna, oh mother was happy with that, she said, ‘You’ve got a job for life son you’ll never get the sack, oh there’s permanent holidays’. Anyway so I was busy teaching, I had because of my training you know I did ended up as a special class of kids, children, and some of them had an IQ as low as fifty-five and that’s a if you know IQ’s that’s getting down a bit, nice you know, lovely children and all that but you know I was happy to stay doing this every day of the week. Ah in the meantime I’ve bought another store [unclear] you’re good at this and I thought should be a supplies store, and my wife said oh I’ll look after the store through the day and we had a manager in as well, he used to drink all, a fair drop, it was hard to get of course, and everything was sailing along beautifully for the first several months but until one day two big burly strong fellas came in and they were from the union the teacher’s union, and of course they said, ‘Oh we understand that you’re not in the you know, you haven’t joined the teacher’s union.’ And I said, ‘No that would be right I haven’t.’ They said, ‘Oh you’ve got to join the union otherwise you can’t stay, you can’t be a teacher you’ve got to be in the union.’ And I said, ‘Well, you serious about that?’ So I said, ‘Okay well.’ That was a very big silence and there we are I went off to the headmaster and that finished that job. [laughs] So no more, no more academic career for me.
JM: What, what sort of years was this, this was about ’48, well you said you did about two years training so are we up to about —
DS: No, no, no, not two years training.
JM: Teacher training I thought you said.
DS: Oh yes, yes that’s right yes.
JM: So are we up to about ’49?
DS: Well, what, two years on top of what after the discharge, would have been about right, I needed another six months to get a leaving certificate as well.
JM: Right.
DS: To allow me to do it.
JM: Do the two years.
DS: So there’s two and a half years, busy years, between drinking and, and school work, there was no spare time, oh and of course I got married in the meantime.
JM: I was going to say you mentioned your wife there, so we, I was going to find out, fit that in as well, when you got married and how, when you met your wife?
DS: Well, we met in the usual way, before I left we were both in the surf club.
JM: Which surf club?
DS: City Beach.
JM: City Beach.
DS: City of Perth, and it was you know, things were very rough and ready out there, we had a, although we had a nice, nice big shed for dressing and undressing, and we had a nice big heavy surf boat, which, which it took about eighteen blokes to just get off the ground, but we had to walk across the sandy beach you know to get it back up to the surf club. Anyway, that was, that was the recreation side, but I met Julie used to come along with several other elderly sisters, two elderly sisters and another one or two girls, and you know in the usual way we got to talking, a bit of this, a bit of that, and we decided it mightn’t be a bad idea all the rest of ‘em had said they were getting married, doing this and doing that. So we said that would be a good idea, but not till we got, not till I got back from overseas. So we did just that, got back from overseas and a couple of months later I still hadn’t turned twenty-one so it was pretty quick but it was all fixed, and she was very good she looked after the shop while I was still teaching, and then she took over the ladies section up at, when I bought the big place up at Mingenew [?], and of course you know very handy to have a wife, who suffered the most. [laughs] Very handy. Anyway you know and then the Korean War hit.
JM: So then yes, so what you decided to give teaching away?
DS: I gave it away, I packed up
JM: Yes you gave it away after that —
DS: And it wasn’t short, no it was about that time I started to get letters from Air Force Headquarters, and so they, they decided that things were getting serious again and we were needed to re-arm and the Air Force of course had let everyone go, a lot had gone [unclear], so the first thing they wanted was old aircrew back particularly, oh of course we were still on the active reserves so wanted to see you back, so that took some months of wangling and selling my business and you know cleaning up. And then you don’t have a house to go to, Air Force then had very limited accommodation, so you had wherever you went you had to buy your own house and you know self-accommodate, so we did that of course, you just get by. And then of course they said all of you we’d like you to stay and they gave you, you get up as your old rank was flight officer. So you go back as that and then, I don’t know whether that’s when I got a new number was it? Perhaps it was 051723. Anyway, so that was it, it was just a nice long career in the Air Force.
JM: But well yes. So you were still based in Perth at that time?
DS: Oh yes, that lasted about five minutes.
JM: And from there?
DS: Melbourne.
JM: You moved to Melbourne yep. And that how long were you in Melbourne roughly?
DS: A very short time.
JM: A very short time.
DS: So then you, you needed experience of course.
JM: Because at this point you’re not flying?
DS: No.
JM: Your in —
DS: I was doing a bit of flying but there were too many old war time pilots that had gone back and they were very, very jealous of their careers and they didn’t want any extra crew around, so they said, ‘Oh you better do this, you better do that, become a teacher you’ve got the qualifications.’ So I said, ‘No, no, no I don’t want to do that.’ And I took the job as equipment officer and, I, all I know about it, all the girls used to hand stuff over the counter, when you wanted clothing and stuff you know, I thought that’s what the equipment officer, that’s what they do. So of course, it is what they do, it’s a very small part of it of course, so that was my view of it. So we did this there was really no appreciation of time you know you get [unclear] So we got, till we got up to Canberra, and of course once you’re there you’re stuck there, you know it doesn’t matter what you do or say or where you wanna go. Oh we had a couple of years in the States.
JM: Okay, what sort of, heading up a base or something?
DS: No, no, no, they didn’t want too many strangers, too much for them. There was the nicest, kindest people in the world as long as you didn’t cast any shadow on the mishap or the US generally, well no, no trouble, I mean we enjoyed the place it was all very nice. So we had two years ensconced to the Air Force base, and I was the chief missiles man quite a new sidewinder missiles they’ve still got some a very basic missile but very, very effective.
JM: So what you were looking after their —
DS: Well looking after our interests or trying to.
JM: Or trying to.
DS: Yes. And that was an Air Force base where they’ve got a lot of [unclear] and we they were kind enough to lend me a, an F100 which was very modern aircraft and the gentleman with me the pilot he’d got a flare for me you know and it worked, and we saw it work it was all good fun.
JM: So that would have been a very different flying experience to your Stirlings and your Lancasters?
DS: Oh yes, a world apart, world apart, but mind you Bomber Command was Bomber Command and they had nothing better anywhere, and the States never got, never got up to the bombing raids because they were, their aircraft weren’t specifically built for that particular job whereas our aircraft were, and they might have been clumsy to get around them because there was bits of stuff sitting out the floor here you know, but they were essentially for carrying bombs, the more they could fit on the better, and they did just that. Well —
JM: And, except when they were used for transferring all the at the end of the war, after the war had concluded and were transporting all the troops back from, from Europe back to England, of course then it was a fairly difficult exercise trying to get the chaps you know I believe they just packed in and sat on top of their parachutes.
DS: Well in some parts in others they only had a handful of blokes.
JM: So how many, you did a few of those —
DS: No, no, I was ensconced in Egypt by then.
JM: Yes, yes, in Egypt by then.
DS: But my friends, who one was a Kiwi, another a great Englishman, and we were in close contact with and they had some terribly exciting trips to all parts of Europe picking up two blokes here and three blokes there for different reasons why there were only two or three there, and of course there were other sad scenes too where they got a lot of others, but anyway that was and I, we weren’t there, I missed out on all that I’d have loved to have been there, but so endeth the —
JM: So then, we were just talking about that flight you know comparing that flight for you in that F100 —
DS: Oh yes, yes. F100.
JM: Compared to the experience in —
DS: Oh, chalk and cheese.
JM: Chalk and cheese, yes that’s right. Again that’s more or less the fighter pilot which again you know as we said, we’re talking specifically designed for bombers, for bombing raids.
DS: Yes.
JM: So that’s a major, major difference there and then. So what sort of roles did you ultimately do in Canberra?
DS: Oh well, briefly I’d have to say pen pushing, there was a lot of politicking and inter-action with the department you know the crowd that were close to defence and —
JM: Defence affairs?
DS: No, no, defence affairs, there were well I should, I should be able to spout it off but I can’t, anyway that, there was a lot of as we got sent on a course, lot of politics.
JM: Foreign affairs?
DS: No, Air Force Headquarters.
JM: Oh Air Force Headquarters.
DS: You know you always had to be a bit careful of which side of the camp you know, we got a very nasty senior civilian in the Department of Defence, he was the first of the Defence Ministers that was oh rough, and gruff and anti-services, so there used to be this constant battle all the time you know to get, to get to do this to do that, now of course many years later there well and truly integrated, were into their department as well as they’re are with us and hopefully things work differently now sometimes they do, but anyway that’s not for me to say. But I enjoyed it every minute, the last couple of years when I was Air Commodore the last year anyway when I was briefly in charge of our branch, er, I used to be at work at seven in the morning, half past seven, but purely there was a load of stuff to do always, always working, always behind, but I always had my dilly bag and maybe a carrier bag, I’m afraid I wasn’t not much of a nightlife at home because had to do the books, the Air Force books every night, anyway that’s another matter, but I enjoyed it anyhow.
JM: Which Air Force books were those, which Air Force books?
DS: Oh, the books, the books, er, well our own branch in particular because we had thousands of blokes in the branch, but you so far away from most of them you only know the names of all those that are up close and we did it, we had a an Air Vice Marshall who was actually senior to me and he was posted to Defence so it didn’t leave too many others round our way, but that didn’t matter, we enjoyed, I enjoyed life, and going to the mess and having a few grogs, but not half as many as I drank as a younger bloke, not half as many.
JM: No.
DS: So it got to be different anyway.
JM: Oh that’s right, that’s right. And of course as well I mean you were going home to your wife and all the rest of it so that’s a totally different situation.
DS: Yeah well we flew over from Perth with, er, we only had one child at that stage, and he’s since dead, died, what we did bring over was a big cattle dog, I’d been, one of the blokes had come back from the Kimberley’s and he was a drover and he bought it origin magnificent countryman good family, he said, ‘There.’ But cattle, on the cattle side I can speak for exactly [unclear] crossed with a dingo, but he said, ‘He’s a faithful animal.’ So we had this, I called it “Aspetari, Aspetari Peter” so that was his name [laughs] not quite an ordinary dog’s name.
JM: Not quite.
DS: My navigator we used to in the end we used to call him, the navigator that replaced poor old Fred, we used to call him Aspertari which is Italian for going slow, or a derivation of that anyway. Anyway so we brought our big dog over, he used to bite anyone he could, oh he was always heeling and very, very rarely would he break anyone’s skin, but I bought a lot of socks for people, he used to grab it and anchor it you see, grab a bit of sock with it, there all good stories.
JM: That’s right yeah.
DS: All good stories.
JM: So when you, so you retired in what?
DS: Ah, it would have been, it was either ’80, ‘4 or ‘6, or ‘8, it was one of those multiples, I’m gonna say the middle one about ’86.
JM: About ’86.
DS: Yes, it’s very close to that anyway. So I didn’t need to retire I could have they wanted someone to take over the support command and then post another bloke into my job, so I went home and told the bad news to Julie my wife and she said, ‘Oh love, I just don’t wanna move again, I, we’ve been from there, to there, to there.’ So then we bought three or four houses along the road, none of them very good but good enough to live in for the time being, and that we’d, she’d had enough and I wasn’t far behind so I didn’t take much convincing so I threw it in. But you know there comes a time for everything.
JM: That’s right. And did you stay in Canberra then?
DS: Oh no, the day, oh we left the house and oh we came straight up to the Gold Coast that’s right. I bought a block of flats pretty clapped out they were but all they needed was a little bit of —
JM: TLC?
DS: Oh perhaps a lot of TLC.
JM: Okay.
DS: But anyway, that was, the story is they were right next to the Grand Hotel, you don’t know the Grand?
JM: Not really, where, which part are we talking about?
DS: On the coast, on the Gold Coast, at Labrador.
JM: Labrador, right okay.
DS: There’s this much water between us and the ocean.
JM: Goodness me.
DS: The road up there, anyway, I didn’t, we didn’t realise at the time what an asset it was but of course I don’t know why you know you get the urge when you’re younger and for some reason you want to do something else. Anyway this crowd came up from I don’t know Canberra probably and offered a price and it meant I made a few dollars, and I was silly enough to sell it, mind you the wife had worked too hard there and I wasn’t too keen about that either but, and so, I was stupid enough then to buy I think we bought some more flats but they, they weren’t as good, oh anyway that’s another story. I bought two more blocks of in Main Beach and they did become very valuable, but by that time I’d gone, we had a house a very comfortable place but you know there you are.
JM: Yes, by this stage a few years had passed by —
DS: To get away from the Air Force too, you can’t go to any of the, we went to the reunions till they finally wore out.
JM: Yes.
DS: But there’s a limit, there weren’t that many bods around here, but —
JM: So in terms of then maintaining contact you said that your wireless operator is still alive?
DS: Oh yes.
JM: And what was his name?
DS: Rod Harrison.
JM: And whereabouts is Rod?
DS: He lives in, um, oh, it’s 19 —
JM: No just the, Queensland, New South Wales?
DS: Oh sorry he’s in Perth still.
JM: Oh he’s in Perth okay right.
DS: Yeah, when we were younger and fitter we used to visit each other of course, his wife died at the end of the century and my wife died nine years ago, so we’d been on our own, he was foolish enough to remarry at the age of eighty-four but you know that’s life.
JM: And what sort of contact, you said made reference to a couple of other chaps that you’ve spoken to, a Kiwi chap and another chap are they Bomber Command people were they?
DS: Yes the Kiwi blokes gone he was with us in 14, 148 Squadron, yes he died, and the other guy I can’t remember.
JM: Can’t remember that’s okay that’s fine.
DS: It was bad enough remembering, you know ’cos I’ve been in the RSL for years and years and years, but even there the old timers have all gone and I’m the eldest member there certainly the only ex Bomber Command, so nobody knows anything about it, nobody cares, that’s my how I get the message, and it wouldn’t matter if you walked in with the VC tomorrow it wouldn’t upset any of them. Anyway that’s enough.
JM: So that’s —
DS: I’ll come back to one or two reasons, the luck of the draw and if your just lucky, and postings come up and they protect you, I mean I was protected with going to a special unit, how you’re picked for it, God knows and he won’t tell us, so you can never find out, but these things just happen that’s it.
JM: And it was good, it was good for you too that you were able to take your whole crew with you at the same time which makes a big difference because having that core of people around you to come back to, and when you came back, I mean obviously as you say they’ve all passed away now bar Rod but did you keep in contact with the initial ones?
DS: Oh except our engineer, the old Englishman and even nice correspondence didn’t elect any, he was that kind of a character.
JM: He just didn’t want to maintain contact with you?
DS: No, but he was a happy-go-lucky engineer. So, but you know that’s life, I’m very fortunate to be around I suppose although there are many bloody days I think that’s a misfortune, one of them is that I’ve gotta go to the toilet all the time, and I’ve gotta go again.
JM: You’ve got to go again. Well, is there any other particular things at this point that you wanted to bring up?
DS: No.
JM: Well we’ve covered a tremendous amount of territory there Don and I very much appreciate your, your candidness and —
DS: Well nothing to hide, nothing to –
JM: No, no, no, just being able to sit and reminisce that’s so important and I’ll thank you for it. Thank you
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ASolinD170220
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Interview with Donald Solin
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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01:32:13 audio recording
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Pending review
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Jean Macartney
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2017-02-20
Description
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Donald Solin grew up in Perth, Western Australia and worked in a store before joining the Air Force. He served in Europe and North Africa. and flew 40 operations as a pilot with 624 Squadron, a special duties squadron dropping supplies and agents into occupied Europe. He was demobilised in 1946 with the rank of Flying Officer. He rejoined the Royal Australian Air Force during the Korean War and eventually retired with the rank of Air Commodore.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
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Algeria
Australia
Italy
Italy--Brindisi
Italy--Mount Etna
North Africa
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Jackie Simpson
148 Squadron
149 Squadron
624 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
crash
crewing up
Halifax
love and romance
pilot
Special Operations Executive
Stirling
Tiger Moth
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2468/11768/AWhymarkR171103.mp3
d15b6bbb5d4a4b59a1d617d0068cd018
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Title
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Whymark, Jack
John Percy Whymark
Description
An account of the resource
X items. <br /><br />The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Jack Whymark DSO DFC (1920 -1945, 616289, 53481 Royal Air Force) and contains a<span>n oral history with his son, Robert Whymark. </span><br /><br />He flew operations as an air gunner with 103 Squadron and was killed 04 October 1945 during Operation Dodge. <br /><br />The collection was donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Graham Thurlow and Robert Whymark and catalogued by Lynn Corrigan. <br /><br /><span>Additional information on Jack Whymark is available via the </span><a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/230288/">IBCC Losses Database.</a>
Date
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2017-11-03
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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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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Whymark, JP
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[his log book, correspondence, documents, objects and photographs].
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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RM: Tactical.
JM: Right. This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Julian Maslin and the interviewee is Mr Robert Whymark. And the interview is taking place at Mr Whymark’s home in Little Haywood in Staffordshire on the 3rd of November 2017. Robert, could you please tell us a little bit about your background and your awareness of your late father’s service.
RW: Right. Thank you, Julian. Very firstly my thanks to the IBCC for this opportunity and all the volunteers that are doing the work. I’m Bob Whymark. Only son of Jack, or John as he was christened. He was also known as Johnny. Flight Lieutenant John Percy, but we don’t talk about that, Whymark DSO DFC RAF. He was an air gunner. Robert is a name slightly out of the family tradition. I’m not sure where that come from. I don’t know of any others but the surname is originally Breton I’m told. We could claim 1066 and all that if we did the connection. There was a Robert de Whymark who was the Sheriff of Southend in 1086. They say everybody’s descended from a royal so we might be Harold the III’s lot. He was a big friend of William the Conqueror. However, more realistically we are immediately down from a load of farm labourers in Norfolk and Essex. I’ve gone back about mid-1700s. My dad’s father went to school with my other gran, my mother’s mother in the1890s in the village. My dad was born 10th of January 1920 in Grays, Essex. He had a sister nine years younger. He seems to have been quite bright because he got a scholarship to Palmer’s Boys College for secondary education. His first job was at the Bata Shoe Factory in Tilbury which was seven miles each way on a push bike. Rain or shine. Character building as we called it. He joined the Royal Artillery Territorials when he was fifteen, 1935 to ’38. And then he went into the Air Force in October of ’38 as a ground crew mechanic armourer. He went to St Athan for a mech’s course. I followed twenty-six years later in 1964. His first posting was 17 Squadron Hurricanes at Debden and Martlesham Heath. He was also on the Allied Air Strike Force in North West France, Le Mans, Channel Islands. The same time as Dunkirk was going on. He had to burn the Hurricanes as they French wouldn’t give us any fuel. He was evacuated in July 1940 and went air gunner for safety reasons as he told my mother. He’d gone to school with my mother. They had boys and girls separate schools with a fence between them of course. His best friend was somebody called Mervyn who married Eve who was my wife- my mother’s best friend. There’s more on that at the end of this tale. So, he went aircrew. Evanton in the Cromarty Firth was an air gunner’s training place and Salisbury Plain. There were two areas there. Twenty-four hours of flying time later he was put on first tour with 149 Squadron at RAF Mildenhall. December ’40 to April ’41. He was a Wellington rear gunner. He did fifteen ops from December to March over Europe. The first five all ended in some sort of tears. One with two crash landings, one shot up by anti-aircraft fire and two diversions for fuel. Then there was an outbreak of peace until operation number fifteen over Cologne where they were coned in searchlights for six minutes. I spoke to a guy who’d been coned at twenty thousand feet for about four and he said he’d never felt so helpless in all his life. After that 148 Squadron was formed in Kibrit which is on the Suez Canal. They also went to Malta. This again was on Wellingtons. April to September ’41, he did two hundred hours for a tour so that ended up as thirty-nine ops. He did twenty-four ops in North Africa. A lot of Benghazi’s and Malta in the thick of their bombing. They were actually bombed by a Junkers 88 on landing and ran off into the quarry which snapped the Wellington in half. People who know how they are built, which is rather like the Forth Bridge know that was quite an achievement. They also discovered when they got back one time that a shell had gone through the fuselage side to side. Didn’t explode of course. Nobody noticed. He then came home by troop ship from Suez, stopping off at Aden, Durban and Trinidad. He then had about two hundred hours of instructing duties at RAF Manby and West Freugh near Stranraer February ‘42 until October ’43. This was while the Battle of Berlin was on so he may have been rested from that or else I wouldn’t have been here. He did have one off operation mid-way November ’42. They used to take training troops and boost up the number of crews for some raids. He was detached to RAF Syerston, 106 Squadron. There was an American pilot who’d come up through Canada and over, Joe [Curtin?] He had a DFC from his first op which was while he was on pilot training. They’d been hit by a phosphorous shell in the cockpit and it blinded him for a while. The flight engineer kept it going and then he landed it. He got another DFC later on before he was killed. This was Guy Gibson’s squadron before the Dam Busters. Their op was to Danzig. Or Gdansk Harbour. It was ten hours fifty-five minutes in November of ’42 as a rear gunner. He went into Leconfield for fuel. So, it was fairly tight because it was only twenty minutes hop over to Syerston, between Newark and Nottingham. Back to West Freugh. Promoted to warrant officer and then at the end of that was commissioned. His second tour was from February ’44 to May ’44. Quite quick. 10 squadron- 101 squadron, sorry. RAF Ludford or Mudford as it was called, Magna. He did twenty ops in less than three months. The last one was his number sixty, the night I was born, 20th of May ‘44. He got a DFC for this tour. The first one was to Leipzig and there were seventy-nine aircraft missing which is about three hundred and fifty-three men, I think. No. Four hundred and fifty-three, I beg your pardon. He then flew in DV290 Lancaster five times. Once to Berlin, seventy-three aircraft were lost then which is four hundred and seventy-five people. The same, same as Afghanistan over fifteen years. Now, while those deaths were obviously terrible it does give a perceptive. Four hundred and seventy-five in less than eight hours. The Nuremberg raid — he should have been killed twice on that — ninety-seven aircraft were lost including the photo Mosquito the next day, plus eleven that crashed in UK on recovery. So, about six hundred and fifty people there. He’d flown in DV290 so many times he wrote it down again for that raid. It crashed at Welford near Newbury. They were all killed. Over the target they were nearly hit by a Halifax on its bombing run. He had to side slip. He also had a do at Aulnoy which was a railway yards in North East France. They were coned for nine minutes at six thousand feet with, “accurate flak” as he put it. A night fighter pilot got seven aircraft in two sessions there. He was cruising the searchlights. When the ack-ack stopped our crews knew that night fighters would come in. He must have been down refuelling when they were in the lights. Nobody knows how they got away with that. Another tactic the night fighters did was to attack the mid-upper gunner first as he couldn’t help the rear gunner. They did say that the rear gunner was the loneliest job in the aircraft, and I’m sure it was, but the mid-upper wasn’t that mid, it was quite well back and he could fire backwards. So, they took him out first if they could. The only time he’s recorded attacking anything was at over Schweinfurt where they were attacked by a Junkers 88. He said he fired three hundred and eighty rounds and hits on the fuselage. He didn’t claim anything and they were damaged by flak. He then did a gunnery leader’s course. And then third tour, which nobody could make you do, was from September ’44 to October ’45. That was on 103 Squadron at RAF Elsham Wolds. The main runway is now the slip road up to the Humber Bridge. It’s almost all Severn Trent Water. A heavy gravel type company operates on the main field and there’s a big industrial estate. One hangar is left. The big one. They can’t get that down. He was a mid-upper gunner on all of these trips. He was gunnery leader so he didn’t have a dedicated crew but was still busy. He started daylight ops then as well. He did a few Manna, Exodus and Dodge operations. That was dropping food to the Dutch, Exodus was re-pat of prisoners of war and Dodge was bringing people back from Italy. He did eighty-one ops but as he was grounded in January by the big boss he didn’t record all of them. Two or three veterans I’ve spoken to have said he was probably up to ninety-five or ninety-seven. His DSO citation says that he flew with weak or disturbed crews. Not a good idea I don’t think. There was a Canadian crew. [ Sachs?] was his name. It doesn’t say whether they were weak or not but he flew with him six times on the trot. Then he changed crews and they both went off to Dessau near Berlin and Sachs was shot down. His DSO for this tour was one of eight hundred and seventy to the RAF. As he was not a captain it was very rare, if not unique for a flight lieutenant to get that medal. Probably the leadership element came from his appointment as gunnery leader. He was then killed October, yeah October the 4th of 1945. This was a Dodge operation. He and the pilot were going mental doing admin, the pilot said. I’ve got a letter from him to his nephew. They picked up nineteen women passengers at Glatton or Honington, Peterborough Airport now. It was a filthy night. Many aircraft turned back to Istres, Marseilles, as did they after an electric storm and engine trouble, they radioed. I’ve spoken to crew members on this operation and they confirmed the weather. I’ve spoken to the navigator of the other aircraft that was with them and they were the last to talk to the aircraft. They were posted missing. Nothing was ever found. Six crew, seventeen ATS and two nurses were lost. A week before, twenty-five passengers, male, had been, went missing. Same area — plus a crew of six of course — same weather conditions. And a month later the same numbers. So, three Lancasters, ninety odd people all vanished within six weeks. No trace of any of them ever found. One of the girls was a Lance Corporal May Mann. She was engaged to a Warrant Officer Basil Henderson who was on General Alexander’s staff. And this is where Mervyn comes back in. He was waiting in Naples, Pomigliano for my dad. Basil was waiting for his fiancé. Basil had been the filter warrant officer for General Alexander’s staff and Mervyn had spent the whole of the North African Campaign trying to get past him. Basil eventually met my mother through correspondence over this accident and they got married in 1948. I was four. I remember Mervyn turning up, took one look at Basil, he spoke just like Lionel Jeffries, and he said, ‘Oh gawd,’ he said, ‘I don’t suppose you’d let me in here either.’ That’s my first memory. That’s the family link if you like. Basil died in 2008, my mother in 2014. My dad of course, when he was twenty-five. He would have been ninety-eight in January. I’ve been through his logbook, I think he should have been killed about thirty-seven times properly. All raids were difficult, in fact even flying was because of crude navigation equipment — not the navigators — technical problems, maintenance was difficult, weather, and they used to say, lastly, the enemy. But he had some scrapes and lucky escapes by changing crews or aircraft or what have you. They say that for every one hundred aircrew, fifty-one were killed on ops, nine were killed in UK training type crashes, three were seriously injured, twelve were POWs, twenty-four survived. Now, if you’re very sad you’ll have totted that up to ninety-nine. I can only assume that the one spare bloke went AWOL or something like that. However, that’s the basics of his story. I — all I know is that I have no memories of him. Luckily, he met me. I know many people who were killed, their fathers were killed before they were born etcetera. So, we had a little bit more than they did.
JM: Thank you. Thank you very much.
RW: Alright. That was —
JM: Was, was your decision to join the air force in any way influenced by your father’s career?
RW: Yes. About fifty percent. I was at grammar school. I did two years in the fifth form to achieve four GCSEs. Mainly because of these guitars we’ve been talking about and I was trying to be Eddie Cochrane really, and I missed any sort of technical training. I was too old for an apprenticeship. I had a couple of years at the telephone manager’s office, telephone engineering, and then went in the Air Force as much for the education as my dad. But certainly, that was that. My stepfather had no problems about talking to me about it. He said — I remember him when I was four saying to me, ‘I want to marry your mother but I’m not going to make you change your name because of your dad.’ Well, I didn’t know anything about him then of course. But I found out later on. Mervyn, my dad’s best friend from school was a big help. He tidied up some puzzlement I had about this last accident because my mother had the idea that my dad had been pulled out of bed because somebody had broken their leg playing football or something. Well, he’d obviously had time to arrange it. In fact, they were all up at Brigg on the Monday. On the weekend before they had a big dance, probably for VJ-Day. She was up in Brigg, stayed probably at the White Hart. They all piled off back on Monday morning. He telephoned her to say that he’d be down on the Saturday. Of course, they took off on Wednesday, crashed on Thursday morning. The pilot was a big friend of his. He’d just been picked to be Bomber Harris’ personal pilot and he’d done some — he’d got a lot of hours but there’s not much about him, so I don’t know what he was up to. He may have been slightly clandestine. He’d written a letter to his family, I think they were in Leeds, and he said, ‘We’re going mad, Jack and I, so, we’re off to Naples’, he said, ‘I’ll see you on Saturday for my great coat.’ Right, he had a very young brother who didn’t have any kids ‘til he was about thirty-seven. So, he had a nephew of the pilot who’s the same age as some of my kids. He’s about fifty now. And all he knew was, his uncle — he thought he flew Lancasters, and he found the 103 site so he wrote to David Fell, the historian then. He passed it all to me and we emailed and I said, ‘Your uncle’s service number was —’ this that and the other. And it was weird talking to this lad. That I knew more about his uncle than he did. Now, we’d been brought up in just south of Middlesbrough because Basil was a Durham lad originally. He was living down in Harold Wood at this — during the war. ,He moved back up north. I said, ‘Where are you?’ to this nephew of Jeff Taylor’s, the pilot. And he said, ‘Oh. We’re in Thirsk.’ Which was about eight miles from where we were living. And he came over one Christmas Day and he had a crew photo and this letter. It’s a bit poignant. And I helped him a lot I’m glad to say. I’ve got a pile of research from all the veterans on 103 and other historical branches. They had my dad down as second pilot in one letter. So, I queried that, and they said, ‘Oh, he may have been in the bomb aimer position,’ because this last — these Dodge ops were part of bringing back the 8th Army who were about to mutiny. It was called Dodge because some cretin at Air Ministry decided they’d dodged D-Day by daring to be overseas for six years all through North Africa. I hope he was —had it explained to, you know. So, that’s what they were doing there.
JM: So, the nurses that were on board. The women that were on board. Do you know what they, what they were doing? What was their role?
RW: Seventeen were in the ATS. Army auxiliary.
JM: Territorials.
RW: Territorial girls. They were sort of secretarial I believe. And drivers maybe. They were all — they’d been right through the North Africa Campaign from Tunisia right through. My stepfather was at Dunkirk. He got off the last ship from a jetty. Didn’t have to do any wading out. Because he was a Durham lad it upset him because the Durham Light Infantry were left as a rear guard. He wouldn’t talk about that. I persuaded him to give me his medals to get mounted and we found he’d been mentioned in despatches three times. Which was — he was in the Supply Corps.
JM: Very unusual.
RW: So, that was one down from a decoration frankly and so on, but he was well thought of. He didn’t get back from Italy until 1946. They lived in Warwick Road opposite Earl’s Court and we moved. That was my first sort of basic memory is up from Chadwell.
JM: Can I —
RW: Yeah.
JM: For the tape. Can I just clarify, my understanding is that on occasions the Lancasters might well be full of Italian POWs going home, and when they got to Bari or to Pomigliano then there would be British servicemen coming back to the UK.
RW: Yes.
JM: And it was this route that these ladies were on when the aeroplane went down. It was the return journey.
RW: No. Going.
JM: They were going.
RW: Going.
JM: Right. So, they were going out to Italy.
RW: Yeah. It has been put in some research that was, not stolen from me, but passed on without my knowledge. I corresponded with a Canadian guy who’d been at Elsham in ’42 and he wanted to know if anybody knew anything of that era. I said, ‘Well, I don’t but you might be able to help me.’ Told him that story briefly and he crossed it over that we were coming back. They were coming back.
JM: That’s fine.
RW: But they were actually going out.
JM: Yes.
RW: Now, the army I’m convinced had lost these girls. They’d been up to Liverpool twice on, for a troopship which would have had to come right out around the outside of Ireland because of the mine fields that were still about. They weren’t reported missing ‘til this troopship docked a fortnight later. The army would not release any information. Basil, on the staff of General Alexander couldn’t find anything out. And his — this girl’s mother, Mrs Mann, she put an advert in the paper and my mother was told about that so they corresponded. I’ve got a lovely letter from Mrs Mann about this and she’s saying ‘We couldn’t find anything out. We’ve written to everybody.’ And my mother was able to put her in the picture immediately. In fact, this Mrs Mann was more — as — concerned about my mother losing her husband of course. And so on. They were living near Harold Wood.
JM: Another aspect of it which is interesting and I don’t understand clearly is we are now in peacetime —
RW: Yes.
JM: It’s the October of 1945. The war has been over some months and yet the Lancasters were still carrying gunners. Why was this? Because you would have thought that had they not had those there would have had room for more passengers.
RW: Yeah. I’m not — I don’t think they’d removed the guns but that wouldn’t have affected the number of passengers. My dad was basically doing admin. I think he was virtually on a jolly as we call it.
JM: Right.
RW: Hence this bomb aimer’s position. Crowd control or what. I’ve seen how they load up the Lanc for that when I was instructing at Cosford. They’ve got a museum and there’s a big clump of them in the middle and then they go front to back for weight and balance. So, fifteen was in the bomb aimers position. It would be a cosy little fit. Sixteen was right at the back by the toilet you know. Which was no fun. There were nineteen passengers. So, there was a number fifteen. So, it’s nineteen to one whether my dad was sitting next to the, this ATS corporal, my stepfather’s fiancé. Which would have been a bit spooky.
JM: Yeah.
RW: Her middle name, funnily enough, was Eleanor. Which my stepfather said he never knew. He had her shoe brushes as a souvenir which was what you used to do. My mother was Eileen and my dad called her Eileena. And he always said that if he knew he was going in he’d shout her name out. Now, she says that on the day, Thursday morning, she sat upright in bed thinking she’d heard his voice. And then they got a phone call that night from a friend of his at Elsham. He said, ‘Look, they’ve gone missing. I’ve asked them not to send this awful telegram,’ which they did. He said, ‘I’ll come and see you. I’m on my way to Ramsgate. I’ll drop in on you at Grays,’ near Tilbury, in Essex. Now, that’s a bit of a trek by train and stuff for him so that was very good. He turned up on Saturday morning with my dad’s father and it all came out. He’d got the full chapter and verse by then.
JM: Yes.
RW: But the army would not tell anybody anything for some time.
JM: My understanding is that the passengers in the Lancaster would sit on simple seats and they had no oxygen which would have —
RW: Yes.
JM: Limited the height at which they could fly at.
RW: Yes.
JM: Is that correct?
RW: Yes. And the heating wasn’t brilliant either. But they were both — there were two of them with passengers from Honington. I beg your pardon. That should be Conington. It was because of Honington and Coningsby they called it Conington. I hope I’ve got that right. Yes. It was an American B17 base so they knew. The, Glatton, was on the other side, there was a grass strip for Spitfires and such. Different accents. Yeah, they were sitting on rudimentary canvas seats or their kit bags. You’d think something like that would have floated up to the top but it didn’t. Three times.
JM: Do you have a theory as to what caused your father’s aircraft to crash?
RW: They did report to the other guys that they were down at two thousand feet. I went off the point there because I spotted that mistake. They were down at two thousand feet. They were in a filthy electric storm. The other two, ten minutes behind. The other aircraft was in pitch black but clear, if you understand that. They could see Corsica so they knew they were that far. They crashed off Cap Corse which is the north point of it. There are sort of pot holes in the sea so there’s — the three other crews saw an explosion or fire on the sea, they knew what they looked like of course, and they plotted a latitude longitude which I’ve plotted myself. There was a misprint in one of the reports which made it east-north-east of Cap Corse which was too far, too close to Italy. It was the other way, west-north-west. And that was that. But as I say, they were both low down. The rest of them — there was about twenty aircraft up that night going — they went over high level because they were on oxygen and whatever. Yeah.
JM: So, it might well have been weather related.
RW: Well it was —
JM: The electrical storm may well have been a factor.
RW: Yeah. They were struck by lightning. Or, they did report engine trouble so they were turning back to Marseilles they said.
JM: Robert. Thank you very much.
RW: Ok.
JM: Is there anything you wish to add? You’ve given us a very, very, thorough account.
RW: Right. Good. Thank you very much. No. If anybody wants to get in touch by all means. I’ll pass my — I’m on record with the IBCC people. And, Julian, I’m sure will be able to —
JM: Yes. Absolutely.
RW: Tidy up the link.
JM: Yes.
RW: But I’ll be delighted to help anybody with any further information or questions.
JM: Thank you very much on behalf of IBCC. Thank you very much Robert.
RW: Thank you.
JM: Thank you.
RW: Cheers, Julian.
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 Robert Whymark
Creator
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Julian Maslin
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-11-03
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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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AWhymarkR171103
Conforms To
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Pending review
Format
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00:30:54 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Second generation
Spatial Coverage
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France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
North Africa
Poland
France--Cape Corse
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Leipzig
Poland--Gdańsk
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
Temporal Coverage
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1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945-10-04
Description
An account of the resource
Robert Whymark’s father John ‘Jack’ Whymark took part in three tours of operations. Initially Jack was trained as a mechanic and was posted to 17 Squadron at RAF Debden and RAF Martlesham Heath. He then volunteered for aircrew and trained as a gunner. He was posted to 149 Squadron, 106 Squadron, 103 Squadron and 101 Squadron. He was killed when his plane flew into a storm en route to Italy as part of Operation Dodge.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Emily Bird
101 Squadron
103 Squadron
106 Squadron
149 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
crash
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Service Order
Hurricane
killed in action
Lancaster
missing in action
Operation Dodge (1945)
RAF Debden
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Manby
RAF Martlesham Heath
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Syerston
RAF West Freugh
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1350/28422/MJenkinsFC59301-150515-01.2.pdf
0c7c59931cbf002ba0c9725bfe8b94e9
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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Jenkins, F C
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant F C Jenkins (1920 - 2000) and contains his log book, biography and three photographs. He flew a total of 56 operations as a navigator with 149, 148 and 271 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Kevin Jenkins and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-05-14
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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Jenkins, FC
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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Flight Lieutenant FC Jenkins
Born Eastney, Hampshire March 1920. The only son of a Royal Marine Gunner who had been put forward for a Victoria Cross after the raid on Zeebrugge in 1918.
Married Sheelagh Newman at the age of 20. Had one son at the age of 23. Died on the Isle of Wight at the age of 80 years.
Flew in Wellingtons as Bomb Aimer/ Navigator and after his proscribed tour of duty (which he extended even in the face of a devastating rate of mortality for flight crew) he transferred to Transport Command flying in Dakotas including being the Navigator in one of the Dakotas towing gliders to the Arnhem battle.
Signed up to serve in the RAF (not ‘called up’) at the age of 19 years. Left the RAF with the rank of Flight Lieutenant. Won the DFM For gallantry and devotion to duty in the execution of air operations. As an airman of 148 Squadron he participated in 57 operational missions, of which 28 were carried out over Germany and enemy-occupied territory. Sergeant Jenkins was specially chosen for the first raids on Italy from England. In one raid on Milan, he scored a direct hit on the Pirelli factory. On another occasion, with the oil refinery at Port Marghere, Venice as the objective, he displayed superb navigation as, owing to adverse weather conditions, he was compelled to rely entirely on astro-navigation. On his last operational flight from England, he scored a great success when attacking the Focke Wulf factory at Bremen. He dropped two sticks of bombs, scoring a direct hit with every bomb. In addition, he secured two photographs which recorded each stick bursting on the target. As a result of this raid, intelligence information stated that one third of the factory output ceased. In the Middle East scene of operations, he performed excellent work, including successful raids on targets in Libya, Greece, Rhodes and Crete. On one occasion, during an attack on Tripoli harbour, he obtained a direct hit on a ship which was set on fire, while in another attack at Messina he obtained a hit on the power station and assisted in the attack on the marshalling yard whereby the entire objective was set on fire. Throughout, he was said to have shown great courage, skill and determination.
Anecdotes: On one raid over Germany his Wellington was ‘held’ by German searchlights for many minutes. Amazingly this was not followed up by anti aircraft fire as presumably the German ‘Ack Ack’ guns were too busy firing at other targets! After another raid his Pilot misjudged the landing back in England and overshot the runway but fortunately all escaped with bruises and the plane was largely undamaged. On one raid as the Wellington finished its bombing ‘run’ the bomb bay doors jammed and as the plane banked Freddie Jenkins began to fall through the open doors, but was able to grab the edge of the bomb bay opening in time to prevent his disappearance into the dark night below!
[page break]
He and his fellow crew men never seemed to bother overmuch with parachutes and also they got rid of the machine guns in the beam of their aircraft to reduce weight. They were proud of the plane’s manoeuvrability, strength and speed and overall felt that to ‘stay with the plane’ come what may was the preferred option.
I’m almost 100% certain that 149 Squadron was the one that my Dad was serving with. The Log Book sent you does make reference to my Dad having dropped food ‘packages’ (towards the end of his active service and after he had finished his bombing sorties plus the extra ones he tacked on).
At the end of the war no. 149 squadron participated in Operation Manna, to drop food to the starved Dutch population still under German occupation, and Operation 'Exodus', to return former prisoners of war back to the UK.
The other interesting thing regards ‘his’ Squadron is that the famous war time movie called “Target for Tonight” being commanded by Group Captain Pickard (who was later killed when bombing the Amiens prison camp) was based on 149 Squadron and features a Wellington bomber called “F” for Freddie. A bit of a coincidence I guess as my Dad was always known to his chums as “Freddie” and all of his active sorties were in Wellingtons.
One other anecdote was that he would never fly without his ‘lucky charm’ - ie. a rabbits foot. On one occasion he forgot to have it in his pocket with all his fellow aircrew in the Wellington getting ready to take off. His ‘skipper’ (ie. the first pilot) waited on the tarmac whilst Freddie ran back to the billet hut to get his ‘charm’.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Flight Lieutenant FC Jenkins
Description
An account of the resource
A biography of FC Jenkins. It covers his birth and marriage but concentrates on his RAF years. He took part in 58 operations and survived the war to continue in RAF service.
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K Jenkins
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Two printed sheets
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eng
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Text
Text. Memoir
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MJenkinsFC59301-150515-01
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Hampshire
Netherlands--Arnhem
Italy--Milan
Italy--Venice
Germany--Bremen
Libya
Greece
Greece--Rhodes
Greece--Crete
Libya--Tripoli
Italy--Messina
Belgium--Zeebrugge
Italy
Germany
Belgium
Netherlands
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IBCC Digital Archive
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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.
Contributor
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Jan Waller
149 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bomb aimer
C-47
Distinguished Flying Medal
navigator
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
pilot
superstition
Victoria Cross
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1154/11712/AThomasPG180302.1.mp3
5f48a36e221c6e96879ffcba1c0006cb
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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Thomas, Peter
P Thomas
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Peter Thomas (b. 1923, 1524026 Royal Air Force) and his log book. He flew operations as a navigator with 149 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Peter Thomas and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-03-02
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.
Identifier
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Thomas, PG
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
MC: The interview is being conducted on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre. The Interviewer Is Mike Connock and the interviewee is Peter Thomas. The interview is taking place at Mr Thomas’ home at [buzz] Lincoln on Friday the 2nd of March 2018. Also in attendance is Peter Selby and Catherine Selby. Ok. Peter, what I’d like to start with is just to start with just tell me a bit about when and where you were born.
PT: Oh, I was born 26 Glenfield Road, Nelson. Are you picking that up?
MC: Yeah. That’s fine.
PT: Yeah. That’s where I was born. Nelson.
MC: When was that?
PT: 26 Glenfield Road, Nelson. There’s a lot of twenty sixes in my life and I regard them as being of good fortune. So I was born at 26 Glenfield Road, Nelson.
MC: In Lancashire.
PT: Lancashire.
MC: Yeah. What, what did your parents do?
PT: My father was a furniture manager and my mother stayed at home and she had three sons to look after. You know going to work and playing football and taking dirty washing to her, you know [laughs] from football because it was a slushy, a bit of a slushy pitch.
MC: What do you remember about your schooldays then, Peter?
PT: Oh, I liked, in contrast to my younger brother who didn’t like it I loved the school. It was Nelson Secondary School and it was just, I don’t know. I should have brought a photograph of it but it was just off the off the, off Walton Lane and it was on Oxford Road. So From Glenfield Road you went there, there and on Oxford Road and there behold. And in recent times, it was built in 1927 and the headmaster was a very strict man. He was. He was mad on getting people through. He was only interested in getting through, people through matriculation as it was then. So, I went there at in 1934 and I was about eleven.
MC: Yeah. And how old were you when you left school?
PT: When I left school?
MC: How old were you?
PT: 1940.
MC: Were you sixteen?
PT: Yeah. Sixteen or seventeen. Yeah.
MC: So what was your first job then when you left school? What did you do after you left school?
PT: When I was, I always had a, had a flair for writing. Not clever stuff. Just writing. Copy anything. And I went for a job at the Marsden Building Society but just when that came up there was another one in the Treasurer’s Department and I thought oh that’s my, that’s what I want. So I went to, I had an interview, borrowed my brother’s overcoat because it was a very small one and got through this interview and I think it was fortuitous that this interview the chap I interviewed or the gentleman I interviewed was Harry Crabtree and he was the, he was one of the old school treasurers. He’d got to the stage when he was back, he was a deputy treasurer but he was conveniently bypassed from the treasurer [Hyram] Reed who was a Geordie. Very clever man and he bypassed Harry Crabtree and came around to Steve Dyson. He was, he was the chief accountant and Steve [pause] was to do with [pause] Steve but there’s a funny little story about Harry Crabtree. He said, I was a junior at that time and he said, ‘Are you busy, Peter?’ And I said, ‘Well, no more than usual.’ Because I worked behind the counter and I also did another job which was ancillary to the ledgers that were being prepared and, ‘No,’ I said, ‘What do you want?’ ‘Just come into my office.’ So I got in to his office and the whole floor was covered with disused envelopes and he had a, he had a pile of new envelopes, new stick ons and we spent the afternoon sticking these temporary covers on these envelopes which was a bit strange for a deputy treasurer. But he was, I think they gave him, I think the only job that he got was I think he did loans. Something like that. Something that was really not, not responsible. The main man was [Hyram] Reed who came from the northeast. He was a Geordie and he was a clever man. And Steve Dyson, he was the chief accountant.
MC: So you worked there until you got, the you joined the —
PT: Eh?
MC: You worked there ‘til you joined the Air Force did you?
PT: Yes. Yes. I did.
MC: When did you join?
PT: I was there ‘til 1943.
MC: How old were you then?
PT: I was twenty then.
MC: Twenty.
PT: Yeah.
MC: So you —
PT: Well, I was born in 1923. So twenty. Yeah.
MC: So you joined the Air Force at twenty.
PT: I joined in nineteen [pause] Well, I joined in 1943 and I had to wait to go in. I wasn’t called up ‘til twelve months after.
MC: You were called up were you?
PT: Yeah. Well, I’d, I’d actually joined when I was about eighteen or nineteen. I can’t just remember the date.
MC: So, did you volunteer for aircrew then?
PT: Oh yes. Well, I’d had a little hiatus as it were and I, my, my friend was joining the Navy and I thought I’d have a go at the Fleet Air Arm and of course I didn’t get accepted because the gentlemen, there were these guys with the old, you know they were old sweats of, of the Navy. And they had bother with the, and one of them produced two, two aircraft and he said, ‘What’s this?’ and ‘What’s this?’ And I didn’t know because the gentleman in Nelson who was crazy to go in the Air Force and be a navigator he was a newly appointed headmaster at [unclear] Senior School. And because I wasn’t able to stay at the Primary School I’d been sent down and there was only me that went there. I can’t know why. But I went down to this Senior School, and I did twelve months and conveniently failed the scholarship again so, to go to the Grammar School. So anyway, I sat an entrance exam to the Grammar School and I was top of that school. Of that class. There were thirty and Francis Myers who was the temporary headmaster said, ‘Peter Thomas.’ So I stood up and he said, ‘You did rather well in arithmetic. We’ve got a place for you in the scholarship class.’ So having failed the scholarship exam twice I finished up in this scholarship class and it was very interesting, you know. Of course, it swelled my head a bit. Consequently, at the first exam at Christmas I was twenty nine out of thirty. That really shook me so after that I was never out of ten. I was always usually in the first five or six in the class in the exams and we were going to sit, we should have been able to sit for the [pause] for the school whatever exam it was but the, they introduced a remove over a year where we had to wait another year. So instead of it being a four year to, to matriculation if that’s the right word we had to wait ‘til, they called it five remove and I was in, in that situation with, with a lot of brainy fellas actually.
MC: That’s why you finished up at —
PT: In fact, there was only one fella —
MC: Yeah.
PT: In that class who managed to get in to the A Section and he was studying to be a doctor and he was KS Oate, of [unclear] Road, Nelson.
MC: My word.
PT: Yeah.
MC: What a memory.
PT: Sorry.
MC: Yeah. So what you, so you joined the Air Force say in ’43. Where did you first go when you joined up?
PT: Well, when I joined up I went to RAF Waddington and I think it was RAF Waddington I got, that’s when I —
MC: No. You did your basic. Where did you do your basic training?
PT: I went, I went to London to do to be accepted because you had the eye tests and hearing and eyes and curiously my friend who’d rode a motorbike he, when we came back I said, ‘How did you go on Milton?’ And he said, and he said, ‘They failed me.’ He said, ‘They failed me on eyes.’ He said, ‘I’ve, was riding my motorbike without goggles. I’ve altered the focal length of my eyes.’ So he was, so he said, ‘I’m going to be a despatch rider in the Army.’ He said, ‘I’ve finished with the Air Force.’ And he went back to his uncle who had a bakery and curiously enough he never got called up. He just worked in this bakery and he, he owned it eventually and that was that was my friend Milton Fothergill.
MC: Yeah. But you went to London and that was —
PT: I went to London.
MC: Aircrew Reception Centre.
PT: Pardon?
MC: Aircrew Reception Centre.
PT: Yes.
MC: Yeah.
PT: I went to London. And then from London I went to Paignton. That was ITW. ITW at Paignton. I was there four or five months and from there when I’d passed out of there we didn’t, we were at the Singer Estate and we did running and sport. And we had a fellow called Chang and he was a, he was a guy who wanted to drive you to kingdom come in running through this Singer Estate. And there was also a boxing ring you know but I didn’t get involved with that I can assure you. No. I’m not a boxer. Anyway, from, from Paignton we moved to [pause] I moved to Cambridge and I did four, twelve hours flying on Tiger Moths but I was, I was a bit unlucky. The first two hours the chap was an Australian pilot. A trainer. A teacher and he said ‘Oh, we’re not going to have any bother with you are we?’ And he came the next day and he said, he said, ‘I’ve been posted.’ He said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ So then we got another chap who [pause] who’d have been in an accident so he wasn’t very, I weren’t very happy with him. But in the meantime, a Manchester policeman called Charlie Kent grumbled about his position, his situation, so they gave him, they gave him my, they gave him, I got his trainer you see. And so as a result of that I didn’t get selected as pilot. When I got to Manchester and there was a big auditorium of combination of Nissen huts I suppose. I don’t know. It was a big hangar type of place and I was in there and my 026 was called out and they said, do you know they called out my name, my number 026 and I’ve a lot of stories on 026. Anyway, they said, ‘Yeah. Straight navigator.’ So I, well they didn’t say that but I knew that when he said what he’d intimated. That I wouldn’t be a pilot. I’d be a navigator. So that was alright. I mean I didn’t know what was what at the time.
MC: Did you, did you have to do any aptitude tests for navigator or did they just say you’re a navigator?
PT: No. They didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t go up for, I went from Manchester to, I went from Manchester and I finished up in Liverpool to go on a ship to Canada. And when I was on this ship, I mention it in passing because we were still avoiding submarines. Still avoiding submarines and as we were going south during the day he got one of the, one of the chaps got burned and he was the, we were going down to the Azores where it was sunny. And then we came up the Atlantic coast past America, you know. New York and right and came into Halifax so that’s where I started my initial training. In Halifax.
MC: Obviously avoiding the submarines in the North Atlantic.
PT: Yeah. And avoided that. Yes. And I went to, I went on a train from Halifax to Moncton and that was a Receiving Centre. And I met a chap who lived up the street from me and he was Naval uniform and I said, ‘What are you doing here, Harold?’ I can’t remember his last name. He was called Harold anyway. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m, I’ve trained as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm.’ So where I’d failed the interview for Fleet Air Arm he, who couldn’t pass his scholarship could. He had a job getting in to, he couldn’t get into the Grammar School. Anyway, he passed, passed for Fleet Air Arm. Anyway, and he’d done flying you know and he went back to England and I don’t think he, I think you won’t believe this but he’d failed on ship recognition. So, so he didn’t get much further in the, I think he finished up on trainers. You know. Link trainers. You know the sort of [pause] he was. He became a teacher.
MC: On link trainers.
PT: In that respect. And he were. He was a teacher anyway and he finished up a teacher. I mean they weren’t the brightest some teachers were they?
MC: Yeah [laughs]
PT: Anyway.
MC: So your navigator’s training started at Malton, Ontario.
PT: Basically yes. I mean we had a long journey from, from Halifax to, to Moncton and then on again through, through Montreal overnight down to, we arrived on the 1st of January nineteen forty something. ’43.
MC: ’44.
PT: ‘44. We arrived at Toronto and we were wondering around in this place and it were, it was the Town Hall. There were no, there were books and files and I don’t why, how we managed to get in and somebody eventually appeared and there’d been a notice of arrival and we got a gash meal you know. And then, then of course we were filtered out to, it was Malton. It wasn’t Toronto International then. It was Malton Airport and we, we were stationed there and that’s where I did my first flying.
MC: What aircraft was that in?
PT: Pardon?
MC: What aircraft was that in?
PT: Avro Anson.
MC: Oh, the Anson.
PT: Yeah.
MC: Yeah.
PT: Yeah. And I did all the flying in Canada on Avro Ansons and I passed everything there. I used to get, I used to get, ‘Ahh Monsieur Thomas.’ That was a Polish, [Weselovski], and [Denowski] and they all wanted to fly with Peter Thomas because they knew I could do it because I’d had so much training with this Mr Brooks at the Senior School In Nelson and he, he trained me on navigation and I never, I never had any trouble with any problems in navigation because I got such a grounding in navigation. And of course, I passed out in Canada as a, as a navigator.
MC: What rank were you then?
PT: I was an LAC but my friend who I met on the ship going out he happened to be on the same walking around the ship at night with, with rifles supposedly on guard you know and we finished up together as friends. And when it came to the exams I was about fourth. Fourth on the course and he was seventeen. But he knew a general in Ottawa didn’t he? So, so that made it rather difficult for me. So he got the commission and I got three stripes. So I came back a sergeant and he came back an officer and he was very generous. He said, ‘You know they’ve robbed you haven’t they Peter?’ They knew, he knew what the game was you know because he’d been, he’d had a forty hour pass, forty hour leave and he’d gone up to see this general in Ottawa. So he, you know the wheels had turned you know and his father was Sir Arthur Smout who’d done, who was doing business on armaments with Paul Revere Incorporated who had a vast building in New York because subsequently David Smout as he was called, we were subsequently invited to have a weekend at New York. So we went overnight on the train to New York and David rang the, the Paul Revere Incorporated and we went around this level of where they were so that it, they showed us New York from four points you see.
MC: Brilliant.
PT: And then at dinnertime we went to the [pause] to the Columbia. I think it was the Columbia. It was a restaurant you know. I’ve forgotten the name of the restaurant. Anyway, it don’t matter and we had our meal with these and then these two gentlemen said, ‘Well, we play Bridge at Saturday afternoon.’ Him and his deputy. So he said, ‘We’ll see you at teatime at this address.’ It was on 5th Avenue. So they bundled me and David off to, to the Rockettes. You know, the famous American Rockettes. The girls who were dancing and stuff. And then there was other items and then they finished up with, with somebody called Doris Day, I think it was in, “Up in Arms.” Yeah. And we watched that. And then of course we, we appeared in these drab Air Force uniforms because all Americans were in if they were in khaki it was serge. There were none of this rough stuff and we were in these rough and we were introduced at 5th Avenue, at this address of this president and we were introduced as Lieutenant Thomas and Smout [laughs] And of course we were LACs weren’t we? Anyway, we didn’t tell them did we? And during that meal David managed to spill his ice cream and I I had a little argument about, with the other chappie, he was, of course they were very strict Conservatives and I was, I’d come from Nelson and Nelson was a [laughs] well you couldn’t be any stronger labour than Nelson. It was a really [pause] yeah. So then from there if you just let me finish, then from there when we, when I’d finished at —
MC: When you finished in Canada.
PT: In Toronto. I had the chance. I had the choice of going up to Montreal or, I’d seen a dance band. Louis Armstrong on the shores of Lake Ontario and, and that week that I was to go I had the choice to see to go and see Duke Ellington who was my, he was one of the great jazz musicians. Have you ever heard of him? Eh? Yeah.
MC: Indeed. Yeah.
PT: Anyway, I went to, I went to Montreal and I met a chap who was a writer in the Navy. A writer is a clerk I think, and this was Bill Farmer, he was, he became a solicitor but he was in the Navy and he was a writer and we met up and we had, well we had at least a day together and then I was left on my own. And then I met a nice lady from [pause] she was, she was a French lady. She spoke, because when I rang her up she said, ‘Oui?’ She didn’t say yes. She said, ‘Oui.’ And she spoke French of course and she spoke English as well so it didn’t matter. And then from there we went back. I went back to Toronto. I did my flying from Malton Airport. Malton Airport was, became Toronto International. Big stuff you know. Toronto International.
MC: So having finished your flying, your navigator training in Canada you then got shipped back to the UK.
PT: Yes.
MC: And where did you come to?
PT: And then when we had, we were in the, we were in a Dutch boat and we got a, the bells all ringing and it all went boom boom boom. We were in the middle of the Atlantic and quite frankly I was shit scared you know [laughs] and we had to appear on deck with our life jackets on like this and we were all lined up like that. And it were just an exercise to see if you could do it if it actually happened. So anyway, we arrived at Gourock in Scotland and we were then posted to Pannal Ash College which was just a holding place. We didn’t do any lessons there. But there was a, it was a, Pannal Ash College was it was probably a private school and they had a swimming pool outside which was, it had sort of been a temporary dugout and the water ran in and it ran out at the other end and the only way you could get in, you could get in at the top but the only way you could get out was at the bottom and it were freezing this water because it was a river you see. Anyway, we, that passed and we from there —
MC: So, there wasn’t any flying there.
PT: No. No flying there. No. No. I think, I think we went up to Millom and did, did some flying from there. And that was when we were flying from Chicken Rock and up to the, up to all the islands of Scotland. Did a lot, quite a bit of flying up there.
MC: And that was in Ansons again, was it? Oh right.
PT: Pardon?
MC: That was in the Avro Anson again. Avro Anson.
PT: Yes. The same as in Canada. And then we moved down from there to Husbands Bosworth.
MC: Was that —
PT: That was a —
MC: That was the Operational Training Unit.
PT: Yes. OT. Yes, it was. Yeah. And there we, we had this incident of not arriving. We were, we were flying on a, on a course and the engine, flight engineer who I think at that time was still the mid-upper gunner but he was looking after the petrol tanks, you know, switching the tanks. And he said, he said, ‘I think, I think we’ve got a problem here skipper with the, with the petrol. Supply of petrol.’ So they started then looking for somewhere to land. And they got, they got a position line from, from the wireless operator the Welshman, Peter [Hoare] and they went, they got this, they got this position line to Leicester. Leicester way. Leicestershire. Leicester. But before that happened the skipper noticed a landing place and it was, it was, it was a grass landing arrangement. It was [pause] I’ve just forgotten the name. I think, is it there?
MC: When was that? Was that while you were at Husbands Bosworth?
PT: When we came back to England that was.
MC: Yeah. It was.
PT: That was when we were [coughs] we were on a, on a —
MC: Was that at Millom?
PT: Pardon?
MC: Was that at Millom or Husbands Bosworth?
PT: That was —
MC: When you were at the OTU.
PT: That was, that was after Millom, I think.
MC: Yeah. The OTU.
PT: Yeah. And that’s when John spotted this landing. It was grass you see. It was a grass landing and they were training pilots because I met a chap there. He knew me from the Grammar School and we had a few days there and they were enjoyable and then we were carted back in a wagon to where we were you know.
MC: Because it mentioned that you force landed.
PT: Yes.
MC: At Penkridge.
PT: Yes. That’s right.
MC: Penkridge.
PT: Forced landing in this grass landing and we just of course it wasn’t it wasn’t designed for Wellington bombers it were designed for Tiger Moths you know. It wasn’t designed for [laughs] for landing these bigger aircraft and he just landed. And he’d had trouble landing this Wellington when we were at, when we were training on the Wellington. He had a devil of a job landing these Wellingtons. Yeah.
MC: Yeah. I was just about to ask you what aircraft.
PT: And —
MC: And you’ve just answered that. Yeah.
PT: The story goes that he used to just, he used to sing, “Johnny’s Hero,” when he were, when he were coming in to land you know. Anyway, we got through that and he landed and they just pushed the wheels over of this fence and that was it. We, we were carted back to the base with, to where we had come from with, in a van. In a wagon, you know. And the, they sent a chap to fly this Wellington to get it out of this grass landing affair. Of course, they landed in a, they landed in, they landed in a Morris Oxford, in an Oxford. There was an aircraft called an Oxford. It was comparable to the Anson.
MC: I know it.
PT: This Oxford, it had a little accident and landed so that was [other voices not part of interview] But finished with Wellingtons. We moved up to Lancasters. To convert on to Lancasters.
MC: Oh, it was a Conversion Unit. Yeah.
PT: Yeah. That was Woolfox Lodge and that’s where, that’s where I really was. I think about it even today one morning I was sat in the navigation room and there was a blue serge uniform. He was an officer and, and I didn’t really know this face but I knew the morning after when he wasn’t there that he was killed the day after. They came. This crew were regarded as being the best crew in the, in the intake. There were eight. I think they were either six or eight crews in the intake.
MC: Yeah. Can we just go back slightly? Obviously, you’ve gone to the Conversion Unit. When did you crew up?
PT: When what?
MC: When did your crew get together?
PT: Oh, did it, yes. When we moved from Millom where we’d done this Avro Anson flying we went to —
PT: Then you went to the OTU.
MC: Pardon?
PT: When you went to the OTU.
MC: OTU at —
PT: Husbands Bosworth.
MC: Husbands Bosworth.
PT: Yes. Is that when crewed up with them?
MC: Was that at Husbands Bosworth?
PT: Yeah. You’re not recording now.
MC: Yes. I am.
PT: Especially —
MC: Is that when you crewed up?
PT: Yes.
MC: Yeah. Yeah. But that would have been a five man crew there.
PT: I often tell the story about my younger brother who was always a tendency to knock me, you know. And being knocked with the elder brother and knocked with the younger brother because I was the middle one and he, I’m trying to think. Well, he’d be surprised who chose the pilot because there’s a story about who chose the pilot. Because I’m in the NAAFI queue or some queue and I’d been [he's left the door open] We moved from Millom to Husbands Bosworth and that’s where we crewed up. And we were in this queue and somebody tapped me on the shoulder and he said, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘We’re looking for a navigator. We’ve got, we’ve got an air gunner and a mid-upper gunner and a wireless operator and a bomb aimer,’ he said. ‘But we haven’t got a navigator.’ And, ‘Would you like to join us?’ They knew I was a navigator. ‘Would you like to join us?’ And that. ‘Yes. I’m happy to join you if you think I’m suitable.’ And from there we chose the pilot. The pilot was called Dennis Johns and he was a, he’d been a public school lad but he was, he wasn’t, he didn’t strike me as being a very well educated man but he, he was, he was alright.
MC: Was he a good pilot?
PT: Sometimes we wondered. I wondered. They wondered about me with navigation. I wondered about him. But I have to say yes he was a brilliant pilot because we finished [laughs] We finished.
MC: You arrived at Husbands Bosworth. Yeah.
PT: And there’s, that’s where we crewed up.
MC: Yeah. You said.
PT: And we chose, we eventually chose this Johns for a pilot. We chose him. My younger brother would have essentially have said the pilot chooses the crew but no it wasn’t like that. It was always different to what he thought because he was, I was not knocked with, I had two brothers. An elder brother and the younger brother and I used to get knocked from both sides so —
MC: I remember you saying. Yeah.
PT: But —
MC: Yeah. So you went on the, on to the —
PT: I won though you know because they’re both dead [laughs]
MC: [laughs] Bless you. So you went to the Conversion Unit on to Lancasters.
PT: I went up to the, yes and this is where there was a tragedy. I don’t, I didn’t mention it.
MC: Yeah.
PT: There was a tragedy because they were, they were reckoned to be the best crew.
MC: Ah, you said. Yeah. Yeah.
PT: And —
MC: His uniform was there.
PT: And they were coming back from a diversionary sweepstake. No bombs. No. No. The war had nearly finished and they were coming back and they lost an engine and then they flew a bit further and they lost another engine. And then as they were coming in to land they had to just turn like that and he lost another engine. He went like that and they were all killed. And he was the chap that was sat next to me the morning before and he was, and I think, I think many a time about that that family losing that boy.
MC: Yeah.
PT: Because he was an officer. I probably wouldn’t have bothered if he’d been a sergeant like I was [laughs] Stamina.
MC: So, so when you finished at the Conversion Unit —
PT: Yeah.
MC: You were then posted to your first, your squadron.
PT: Yes.
MC: What squadron was that?
PT: 149.
MC: And where was that?
PT: Methwold.
MC: Methwold. So you —
PT: Methwold was a satellite of, I think it was a satellite of Mildenhall.
CS: You’re on the Mildenhall Register, aren’t you?
PT: Yeah. Yeah.
MC: Yes. And that was obviously with the same crew. Johns.
PT: Oh yes. Yeah.
MC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: We were on. We were, we were crewed up together for about two years and then in the middle of 1946 I would say, you know. After we was, we were together from nineteen forty —
MC: Yeah. The story, I think goes while you were there about the Astro compass. Can you —
PT: Oh yeah. Well, that was on the operation.
MC: Oh, was it? Which operation was that?
PT: The Kiel.
MC: Oh Kiel. Yeah.
PT: Yeah. Kiel. Yeah. I should have kept my mouth shut but I didn’t as usual. Big mouth. No. I put this, I put this Astro compass . It was a disastrous operation. We got to the to the Danish coast and I warned the skipper. I warned him. I said, ‘We’re much too early. We’re at least twenty minutes. Fifteen twenty minutes too early. We should be doglegging.’ And of course, there’s a risk when you dog leg that these oncoming on stream can be, you can —
MC: Collisions.
PT: Go in to one.
MC: Yeah.
PT: So he didn’t want to do that. He said, ‘We’ll go in with the first wave.’ Typical Johns you know. And anyway we, I think when we, I think we were so early that when I got the message from what was being said that the main target was under the wing when we, when we got through so we missed that. So we turned around and we turned back to come back and this is where there was such lack of brains. We should have made allowances for all the time that we’d lost when we should have gone back up over the North Sea and got away from any impending German fighters because as we were flying the rear gunner said, ‘Port go.’ And Johns just put his wing [psst] and we lost about twelve thousand feet in no time. When we pulled out of this operation we were about six thousand feet, or six hundred feet. I’m not quite sure but I know, I know it were, it was a bit dangerous.
MC: So where does the Astro compass come into this story?
PT: Well, when, when we, I don’t know if it was before or after but when we were flying along and we were, we were trying to find out where we were the astrocompass it does not give you a fix but it gives you a position line. So when you put the astrocompass in the right way around, the first time I put it in the wrong way around but I mean that was so what? You were under a lot of stress then you know. I turned it around and put it in the right way and I said, ‘We’re going in a westerly direction skipper. You’ve no need to worry.’ And I asked him. I said, ‘Is your P4 compass working?’ He said, ‘Yes, but it’s better that you give me the position line,’ because the P4 compass it’s a bit dodgy really. It’s not, not too reliable. Anyway, we ploughed on and ploughed on and we, we had this incident with a fighter, with a German fighter when he said, ‘Port go.’ That meant go and Johns —
MC: Corkscrew.
PT: Responded to Cherokee. He was called, our rear gunner was called Cherokee and he came from Dumbarton. Yeah. Are you recording all this? Very good. And he came from Dumbarton and he was only a little fella but he were a good rear gunner. He spotted this one that was approaching us and went [psst]. We lost a lot of time. I think double quick time and never saw that guy. Now, possibly he thought well the war’s over why, why risk myself? Because he could have got shot down you know. We never saw him again and we kept ploughing on and ploughing on and then, then we, we flew as somebody said it’s a, we’re flying over a big lake and I knew what that was. It was the Zuiderzee as I knew it. And we got through the Zuiderzee and by that time, I’ve forgotten to mention that all through this operation the Gee box which gave you a fix, it gave you a position line and, and both. With the Gee box it was, it gave you a fix. You got these two posters.
MC: Yeah. Height and —
PT: The B Posts and the C Post and when you lined them up you locked the machine and it gave you a reading. And you had a special Gee box map which told you your, you read off the numbers and you got where you were.
MC: Yeah.
PT: And of course, it’s a lot. We was trusted. A bit stressful, you know.
MC: Well, the navigator. Yeah. Right. Of course.
PT: Yeah. Anyway, we got through this Zuiderzee.
PS: But they were jamming you, Peter weren’t, they were jamming you.
PT: Got through the Zuiderzee.
CS: At night. At night.
[recording paused]
MC: Yeah, but —
PT: Somebody else. And he said, ‘It hasn’t been so good, sir’. He said, ‘You’re first back,’ he said, ‘And don’t worry about anything,’ he said, ‘Because they’ve been all over the sky this operation.’ He said, ‘It’s been a real shocker,’ he said. ‘So you’ve done very well.’ And when I signed my, I signed it you know he said, ‘And that’s,’ he said, ‘When you get to Civvy Street,’ he said, ‘That’s signature is worth two thousand pounds.’
CS: Dad. When, when you did, when you dropped height when you’d seen the German fighter.
PT: Yeah.
CS: Isn’t that when all your —
PT: Oh yeah.
CS: Instruments went up in the air.
PT: When he, when he went like that.
CS: When you dived.
PT: He went. You flew up in the air and landed on the floor and dropped me down on my hands and knees trying to find these instruments you know. Pencil and that you know. Bits of stuff that you use you know.
MC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: There was I think it was about as big as that book and it gave you, you set it up and it was a, it was like a mini computer.
MC: Yeah. I know what you mean. Yeah.
PT: You know what I mean.
MC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: You know what —
MC: Navigation computer. Yeah.
PT: Eh?
MC: Your navigation computer.
PT: Yeah.
MC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: Yeah.
MC: So the story also about the [unclear] navigator who was, whose Lanc crashed when he came back from a diversion raid.
PT: Yeah, and then crashed.
MC: What happened there?
PT: Well, they went —
CS: That’s the one that [failed]
PS: You had that.
MC: Oh, that is the same one is it. Yeah. It is.
PT: They went, they went they went on a diversionary sweep and as they were coming back they lost an engine. They were at Woolfox Lodge.
MC: Yes. That’s the one you were telling me about. Yeah.
PT: They lost an engine.
MC: Yeah.
PT: And then they lost another engine.
MC: Yeah.
PT: And —
MC: Yeah. You’ve told me about that. He flipped over his back.
PT: Over.
MC: Yeah.
PT: And they were all killed.
MC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: And that was the chap that was sat next to me the morning before and I knew who he was.
MC: Yeah.
PT: I didn’t know him personally but I know, I knew who he belonged to. So that was very sad. I’ve been thinking about him over the last —
MC: Bless you.
PT: Yeah.
MC: Yeah.
PT: Terrible.
MC: So —
PT: Terrible loss to that family.
MC: Yeah.
PT: I think about it even today after all seventy or eighty years. Yeah. Terrible.
MC: Yeah. Do you want to have a break?
[recording paused]
PT: Worked at weekends. He was a subset. a sub editor on the —
CS: Was it the Thompson’s Newspapers up in Dundee?
PT: This is ET Thompson’s.
MC: Jock Fraser you say.
PT: Eh?
MC: Jock Fraser.
PT: Yeah. Jock Fraser. Yeah. It’s his dad.
CS: Was it his dad?
MC: What did he do on your crew?
PT: He was the bomb aimer.
CS: Was he not eighteen months ago dad?
PT: He —
CS: About eighteen months ago.
PT: Yeah. Is it eighteen months?
CS: Yeah. Something like that.
PT: Yeah.
CS: I mean he must have been well in his nineties too.
PT: Yeah.
CS: Yeah.
PT: He was the, I think, I think if you were reckoning brain power he was the, he was a very clever chap really. Good with words you know. If he wrote a letter he didn’t write pages. He wrote all that was necessary in one page and he were, he were clever you know on words. You know, he was, he was a good friend.
MC: So, tell me about this losing the engine.
PT: Pardon?
MC: You lost an engine during —
PT: Yeah.
MC: Coming back on.
PT: What happened was that after the war it were three group. Certainly 149 we were designated to photograph up to the Russian demarcation line. So sometimes we went down towards Switzerland and we were supposed designating —
CS: Designated.
PT: Different areas which we were trying to photographing but we’d a lot of trouble coming, going and coming because of the cloud formation. You couldn’t photograph if there were cloud formation. [unclear] Catherine’s mentioned. One morning we were at 9 o’clock we were at off, off the Norwegian coast and we were just, just about to either come back because there was not, we hadn’t got the too much cloud or some reason and we turned around. As we turned around as we were flying we lost an engine. So no problem we were coming back on three. So I wanted to go to the nearest landfall which was the Orkneys. Johns, Johns of course said, ‘No,’ he said, ‘We’re alright. Straight back to Cromer.’ Cromer which was the landfall into our base you see.
CS: Do you mean Cromer?
MC: Cromer. Yeah. I know. I realise what he meant.
CS: Yeah.
PT: Now in the Fleet Air Arm the navigator is the captain. Did you know that?
MC: Yeah. You told me.
CS: Maybe he wished —
PT: I’ve just told you now.
CS: Maybe he wished he’d been the captain that day.
MC: Then.
PT: I’ve told you now haven’t I?
MC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: I hadn’t told you before, had I?
MC: No. You hadn’t. No. I was thinking something when you said about the pilots. So yeah. So you made, you wanted to come back to nearest landfall but he decided to come —
PT: Yeah. Yeah.
MC: Come back to base.
PT: ‘No,’ he said, ‘We’ll be alright. We’ve got three.’ Well, that one that that this guy was with me.
MC: There was always the chance you’d lose an another one wasn’t there?
PT: Yeah. They lost three didn’t they?
MC: Yeah. Yeah. You didn’t want that happening to you.
PT: They lost three and lost their lives.
MC: Yeah. You were making, so why did he need to get back to base?
PT: And that same night [pause] Say what were you going to say.
MC: No. Why did he want to get back to base and not land up north?
PT: Perhaps he had a girlfriend that night. I don’t know.
CS: Well, my dad, my dad thought it was a girlfriend.
PT: He had a girlfriend in London. We could have had a trip to, there’s a place on the Norwegian coast. Now that name is just I haven’t got that name.
CS: Bergen?
PT: Eh?
CS: Bergen. Stavanger. Bergen.
PT: No. Not Bergen. No.
CS: Stavanger.
PT: Eh?
CS: Stavanger.
PT: Stavanger. No. No.
PS: Trondheim?
PT: Anyway —
CS: Trondheim.
MC: Trondheim probably.
CS: Trondheim. Trondheim.
PT: No. No.
PS: Tromso.
PT: Anyway, the thing was —
CS: What did you say? Trondheim. What was the other one?
PS: Tromso.
CS: Tromso.
PT: Eh?
CS: Tromso.
PT: No. I don’t know. I’ll have to look it up. That, that opportunity to go there and stay there.
CS: Right.
PT: It could have been dangerous but it was an opportunity to be based in Norway. Or Sweden.
CS: Do you mean, do you mean when you lost your engine to go and fly back to Norway.
PS: No.
CS: You don’t mean that do you?
PS: No.
PT: Say that again.
CS: I said you don’t mean when you lost an engine to go back to flying to Norway to land do you?
PT: No.
CS: No. You don’t mean that do you?
PT: There was no question of going back. No.
CS: No. No. No.
PT: The [pause] no there was no question and we never thought about that.
CS: No.
PT: Possibly we could have done if we’d thought about it but you don’t always thing about these things when —
CS: No.
PT: When you’re stressed.
CS: No.
MC: So did you, did you, I mean you did a raid on Kiel but after that it was did you fly any ops bringing prisoners of war back and —
PT: Yes.
MC: Operation Exodus.
PT: Did one of those.
MC: Operation Exodus.
PT: And I did two dropping food over Holland.
MC: Oh, Operation Manna. Yeah.
PT: Manna. Yeah.
MC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: There was a badge for that too.
MC: Yeah. I believe so.
PT: I never got that.
MC: I believe so. Yeah.
PT: A friend of mine who’s now deceased he got that badge. He, he was keen on badges and stuff like that. I couldn’t be bothered. Then when we were, when we were on, when we were at Methwold we were, we were wearing the 1939/45 badge. And then, and some others which would, I can’t just remember and they told us that we couldn’t wear that badge. You couldn’t wear that and that’s when Fraser said. ‘Well, if we can’t wear that badge, we joined up in 1943 and it’s 1946 if we can’t wear that badge well we won’t wear any of them.’ And he just he just washed his hands of it. Fred. And we just fed up with it and he gave the, gave the medals that he had, he gave them to his kids to play with he were that fed up.
CS: Yeah.
PT: But I I don’t know.
CS: So what were you, there was a badge you were given and then —
MC: Was this —
CS: And then the Ministry of Defence took it back off them didn’t they?
MC: Yeah. Yeah. It was a medal. He was on about, yeah you’ve got it down here. Peter.
CS: It’s amazing actually isn’t it that he did it?
PT: That’s Peter’s stuff.
MC: Yeah, it is. I just [pause] So when did you, I mean when did you fly over Niagara Falls?
PT: Oh, that was in Canada.
MC: Oh, while you were in Canada where it was.
PT: You can’t fly over —
MC: Not from the UK you can’t.
PT: You can’t. You can’t fly over Niagara Falls in Norway. It’s in Canada.
CS: It’s because he was based, he was based in Toronto.
PT: No. I was on a trip in Canada.
MC: I thought you’d gone back over there.
PT: Toronto to Hamilton and I was with this Flight Lieutenant [Bowen] who was, he was sort of, ‘I’ll go with, I’ll go with LAC Thomas today for a change.’ It was designed to see that everybody was being, was working according to plan. And he was with me that particular day and when we got towards Hamilton he he just. none of the civilian pilots on the shore and I don’t know what they were saying but he turned and we went to, we went to, and he turned and we went to Niagara falls. So we flew around and saw Niagara Falls from height. So when we were around the crew reunion do at, at the, at the hotel in, in Toronto. I just forget the name of the, in the big hotel and of course there were these menu things and Flight Lieutenant [Bowen] he was signing them, you know. Flight Lieutenant Bowen put his name. “Flight Lieutenant Bowen. Remember Niagara.” You know. That was that.
MC: Good memories.
PT: Super.
MC: Good memories.
PT: Super. Yeah. Wonderful.
MC: Yeah. Yeah. So if we come back to, at 149 Squadron you flew Operation Exodus. Exodus and Manna. You flew on Manna. Were you quite low flying on Operation Manna, weren’t you?
PT: What?
MC: You were low. Flying low on Operation Manna supply drops.
PT: I didn’t know this. The don’t tell you about losses you know. I mean when we were at Woolfox Lodge and that one kite crashed on the runway nobody knew about it. Only that that same night some fighter bombers came over and shot two more of our intake. I’ve never mentioned that before.
MC: No.
PT: But that’s what happened.
MC: Yeah.
PT: We lost, we lost three crews out of our intake and I think there were eight. Eight crews. Eight sixes. There were six in a crew you see until we got the flight engineer and we didn’t get the flight engineer until we got to squadron.
MC: Yeah.
PS: I think where you were going with that Pete was that some aircraft were lost in Operation Manna.
PT: You said that.
PS: Yeah.
PT: It’s him that has [pause] it’s him that started all this nonsense. He fired us up and fired me up and —
PS: We got you the book about —
MC: Yeah, when I’ve talked to odd people, Dutch people I talked to Dutch people and they tell me about waving to the aircraft because they were so low.
PT: Yes. They did that with me when we went to, when we dropped food over Holland they had a big wide circle with Germans. They were starving too. With Germans and Dutch all around this and of course as we were dropping these boxes of margarine and whatever they’d be rushing in. But we weren’t, we were bothered about that because if you don’t get off the ground, if you don’t get off the, out of that situation and I remember being stood behind the pilot and a lady came out of a [pause] roof like and waving this Union Jack. That was good, wasn’t it?
MC: Yeah. You were low enough to see it all.
PT: Yeah.
MC: Yeah.
PT: Never seen [pause] No. No.
MC: Yeah. So I think they were very —
PT: But do you know —
MC: They were very pleased to see you.
PT: Do you know, Mike. Is your name Mike? Yeah. I remembered your name. Mike. We went to a camp in nineteen, I just don’t know when it was. We were avid campers my wife and, well we had no alternative with children. We did a lot of camping and we got to a site near Riez. That’s the major town there. Riez. When you go to Riez you go about fifteen kilometres and you get to this Lak de St Croix and this lake was formed, it’s a, it’s a barrier supplying water to Marseilles and it was, it was the gorges of Verdun. Not the north one. The south one. There’s two gorges. There’s two gorges. There’s this one gorge and that one is in the south and he comes down and they started filling this barrier that they’d made, the French and it took them five years to fill. And when we got there in 1978 it were just about filling up. Yeah. Yeah. And they were swimming in it and paddling in it and of course the big thing was wind surfing so big head Peter went. I had a windsurfer off John Claude. He was the guy you know and I didn’t I fall off it [laughs] but we learned and my wife was a better windsurfer than me because the Dufour wing board, it was a little bit light for me. I weighed fifteen stone. I really needed a heavier [unclear] as he said. John Claude said, ‘You need a [unclear] Peter.’
PS: But Peter there was a Dutch —
PT: But we made friends with them you know.
PS: There was a Dutch connection at St Le Croix. The Dutch connection.
PT: Yeah.
PS: There was. That’s your story isn’t it? The Dutch were there.
MC: The Dutch.
PT: Oh, a lot of Dutch people there. Do you know you can’t believe this that we went to that camp for ten years and I never [laughs] I must have been as thick as two short planks I never ever, never mentioned that I’d ever been in an aircraft. That I’d ever been RAF navigator, you know. Which was a big big thing.
MC: To the Dutch it was.
PT: A big thing when you dropped food to them.
MC: Yeah. It is. Very much to the Dutch.
PT: And they were never mentioned.
MC: Yeah. They you are.
PT: Never mentioned that.
MC: They have got great affection for the RAF.
PT: I’ll give you, if I can get your address you can write to them and tell them you’ve interviewed Peter Thomas.
MC: I see, I see you also did a Cook’s Tour.
PT: Pardon?
MC: You also did a Cook’s Tour.
PT: Did a —?
MC: A Cook’s Tour of the Ruhr.
PT: Oh afterwards. Yeah.
MC: Yeah.
PT: That was —
MC: Yeah. You went all over.
PT: Yeah. That was, when we did that Cook’s Tour we took about a dozen blokes in the ground crew you know. And that was a dangerous operation you know. Somebody, I don’t know who it was but they were, it came through the grapevine that somebody pulled a ripcord or something and we lost an aircraft, you know. When you pull a ripcord and it puts a boat on the wing. And that, now when you’re flying you don’t want boats on your wing do you [laughs]
MC: So, tell me what —
PT: There were, there were some, these were Army blokes who should have just, they should have just been like that ‘til we got there and somebody pulled the rip. So they said. I wasn’t in that aircraft.
MC: Fortunately. Yeah. So you mentioned in your logbook review. What was, what was the review? What was that. The review. It’s got review Norway. Review Switzerland. Review Med and Nice. Southern France.
[pause]
CS: Dad, you need your reading glasses.
PT: A map of Norway there. We landed at Woodbridge.
MC: Oh yeah.
PT: That was a big airfield to land. A big aerodrome. That was an emergency landing there that we did that.
MC: Yeah.
PT: We did a lot of things that you forget about you know. I mean that one. The biggest when —
CS: Why did you —
PT: When you think about Johns and his flying when you landed on that grass runway at Penkridge that was superb. And that —
MC: He did a good job.
PT: You never bothered about landing after that. No.
MC: Yeah. No, I was just wondering what it meant by review.
CS: Dad. Dad, why did you an emergency landing?
MC: Yeah. Because you did some photographs. Took some photographs, didn’t you?
PT: Yeah. Yeah.
MC: Yeah.
PT: Well, we went to Switzerland. Switzerland and the Mediterranean at Nice. Southern France.
MC: Yeah. You said about your emergency landing. I’ll come back to what you were saying earlier because you said you made the emergency landing because you lost an engine, didn’t you? Was that it?
PT: That was in Norway.
MC: Yeah. When you were coming back from Norway.
PT: When we, when we got to Norway.
MC: That’s right. You did do that. Yeah.
PT: We were just about to start the photo and we lost this engine.
MC: Yeah.
PT: And I wanted to come back via John O’Groats.
MC: Yeah. Yeah, we did talk about that. Yeah.
CS: You talked about it.
MC: Yeah. I thought that was the one that —
PT: ‘Oh no,’ he said ‘Give us a course back to Cromer. We’ll go straight back over the —’ Of course, we’d three engines and when you’ve got three engines you should be doing something about it. Now that firm that lost their lives was the best crew. They came back from the northern, north coast of Germany who lost two engines and then they turned.
MC: Yeah.
PT: To land. You know you have to, you bank don’t you to —
MC: Yeah.
PT: They did that and lost another engine.
MC: Swept on his back.
PT: They went over and they were all killed.
MC: Yeah.
PT: And that chap was, that chap was the serge uniform that I was aware of when they were sat next to me. I don’t know his name but I’ve thought about him many a time. I’ve thought about him since I’ve been holed up here.
MC: You also mentioned in your logbook about different operation names like [Sinkum.]
PT: [Sinkum.] That were dropping bombs over. [Sinkum.]
That was getting rid of —
They were getting rid of —
MC: Yeah.
PT: These, what was the —
MC: Incendiaries. The bombs.
PT: Yes. When they bombed they dropped these —
MC: Mines. Oh no. They wouldn’t be the mines.
PT: They dropped these. Made fires.
MC: Incendiary bombs.
PT: Yeah.
MC: Yeah.
PT: We dropped those.
MC: Dispose of them. Yeah.
PT: To get rid of them over —
MC: Over the North Sea. Yeah.
PT: Over the Welsh Coast. Over the water of the Welsh Coast.
MC: Give them to the Welsh.
PT: You what?
[recording paused.
MC: So, you enjoyed your time in the RAF did you?
PT: I did what?
MC: You enjoyed your time in the RAF.
PT: I enjoyed everything that I’ve ever done except being too close to Peter Selby [laughs] If you say the wrong thing to him and for goodness sake don’t point to him [yeah] I didn’t point. I thought about that.
MC: So when did you come. When did you —
PT: He’s my best friend and when I want any advice I go to him and usually he provides me with the right advice. Not enough money but advice.
MC: So when, so when did you finish?
PT: He’s been great hasn’t he Catherine?
MC: Yeah.
PT: He’s been great.
MC: When did you finish with the RAF? Let me see.
PT: 1946.
MC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: No. I think. No, it might have been early ’47.
MC: ’46. No. This is crashing in a Mosquito. This is a new one.
PT: Yeah. I had a crash in a Mosquito.
MC: Did you? Where was that from? Where were you flying from on that?
PT: That was from [pause]
MC: Were you at Methwold then?
PT: Eh?
MC: Were you at Methwold then?
PT: Feltwell.
MC: Oh Feltwell.
PT: No. No. I wasn’t at Feltwell.
MC: Methwold.
PT: Can I have a look at the book? [pause] The navigator, and somebody said, ‘We’ve a, we’ve a flight test going on in a Mosquito. Have you somebody you could send who wants an air trip?’ and I said, ‘No. There’s nobody here. I’m the duty navigator and there’s nobody here.’ And he said, ‘Oh well, that don’t matter. Do you want to go?’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah. I’ll have a go.’ So I went in this Mosquito and this chap had, he’d got a, he’d done well in over the Mediterranean. He had, he had an award for what he’d done in ground, the ground loop to an aircraft. Not a Mosquito. It was a two engine job. I’ve forgotten the name of it and you could, you could ground loop it like that and you got away with it. But he didn’t. He tried to do that when we were landing this Mosquito and it just shot into this field you know and cut, just cut my arm. I was next to him of course and he was up with the lid and out. Being first out. Of course, it didn’t fortunately set on fire and then the group captain came around and had a word with me and said, ‘Are you alright, laddie,’ sort of business. ‘Yes sir.’ [laughs]
MC: But nobody was really hurt.
PT: No. No. No.
MC: No.
PT: But he got a, he got a black a black mark on his logbook. He got —
MC: Was —
PT: I don’t know just what he got but he was —
MC: Was the aircraft a write off?
PT: Oh well. It was pretty well buggered [laughs] Well, the, it was, a Mosquito was essentially a plywood affair.
MC: Yeah.
PT: And in the accident it broke the fuselage here and it cut my arm here. Only a slight cut and of course he went around all the camp. [unclear] accompanying the navigator to the pilot he had, you know you’d have thought they’d have had my arm off you know. Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah we were lucky then. And that taught me not to do any more reserve flights you know [laughs] So I didn’t, I don’t think I flew —
MC: So you were station navigation officer at that time or —
PT: Pardon?
MC: You were station navigation, navigating man.
PT: Yeah. Yeah.
MC: At that time.
PT: For a bit, yes. At that place.
MC: What rank were you then?
PT: Pardon?
MC: What rank were you then?
PT: Well, I was, it was two years from being a sergeant in Canada. That was in about the 19th of June. Nineteen, nineteen —
MC: It would be ‘46 would it?
PT: What time was, have I made a note to you when we were finishing in Canada? Nineteen.
MC: You have. Yeah, 1944 wasn’t it?
PT: Yeah. 1944. Yeah. That’s when we finished in Canada.
MC: Yeah. You were a sergeant then.
PT: I was sergeant when I got, not until I got back to —
MC: To the UK.
PT: No. That’s right.
MC: So what rank were you when you finished in the Air Force?
PT: When I finished? A warrant officer.
MC: Oh, you did make warrant officer.
PT: Yeah.
MC: Yeah.
PT: I made a mistake. I should have, I should have had a uniform you know but being tight fisted I thought well I won’t be needing that when I go in Civvy Street but I wish I’d have got it now. There was a serge one, you know.
MC: Yeah.
PT: It was an officer type uniform.
MC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: You know. Is this my tea?
CS: Yeah. I just topped it up. They might be able to supply him with one if he goes to this awards do, do you think. Mike?
[recording paused]
PT: Friendly with a girl you know.
Other: Can I interrupt for two seconds. I need to find out what he wants for his tea.
[recording paused]
MC: I’ve paused it. Right. It’s paused anyway.
CS: What do you want for tea, dad?
PT: What do I want for tea?
CS: That’s ok.
[recording paused]
MC: So you went back to work. Did you find it a bit calm, mundane after. After flying? So, this was —
PT: He was a nice bloke.
MC: So this was a souvenir from your 92 navigator’s course.
PT: Yeah.
MC: Yeah.
PT: I should be on that somewhere.
PS: LAC Thomas. You’re on the list there. LAC Thomas.
CS: Has he told you about going to New York?
PS: Yes.
MC: Yeah.
PT: No. I haven’t told. No.
CS: Oh, haven’t you talked about —
MC: Yeah.
PT: This chap that I met on the boat going to Canada he was, we were on the ship, on board ship and he finished up in the next bed to me and we got, we got quite, well we were friends. We only lost that friendship when he got a commission and the other fellow was from St Austell in Cornwall and unfortunately he was lost on a, on a [pause] on a Mosquito. When he came back instead of I did the same thing I volunteered. I made application to go on Mosquitoes rather than Lancasters because I thought it would be safer you see. Anyway, I didn’t. I think they were choosing officers and I was only a sergeant. So I missed it but this fella got it and he was lost on a —
MC: Yeah.
PT: He was lost on a trip on a Mosquito with a Canadian, a South African pilot who came over when we went for a tour with my Javelin. The first car I bought. We called at this cottage. We made enquiries at St Austell and the man said, ‘Oh, it’s my wife. On the roadside. It’s a cottage. Go and knock on the door and it’ll be you.’ And when we went into this room it was just like a mausoleum. There were all these things from, from him being in the Air Force and [pause] sad. His mother lost her only son.
MC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: And it was sad.
MC: So, did you find it, going back to when you came out the Air Force was it difficult? Was it difficult to settle back into civilian life after four years of flying?
PT: Not for me. No.
MC: No. What did you think about the job that Bomber Command did?
PT: What Bomber Command did?
MC: Yeah. During the war.
PT: Well, like the guy who was running it. Harris. He was called Harris, wasn’t he?
MC: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: Harris.
MC: Bomber Harris.
PT: He said if we just keep bombing them a bit longer they would [laughs] they’ll give up.
MC: Yeah.
PT: We lost a lot of lives that we could have avoided but you see they’d have been Bomber Command lives. So, I don’t know. I don’t know. I were glad I didn’t —
MC: What about Churchill?
PT: Pardon?
MC: How did, did you get much about what Churchill was doing and Churchill was —
PT: Not then. No.
MC: No. Yeah. Yeah.
PT: People didn’t. They didn’t tell people. You know, when that, when that aircraft crashed upside down you know we got, we didn’t get to know that. We just got to know that it was lost. Somebody else told us something else.
MC: Yeah. So, I mean, post-war Bomber Command wasn’t recognised probably for want of a better word as it should have been. How did you feel about that?
PT: I think it was, I think we were underestimated.
MC: Did you get the clasp? Did you get the Bomber Command clasp?
PT: No.
MC: You didn’t send for the clasp.
PT: No. I haven’t anything.
CS: Have you applied for that?
PT: Have I got a clasp?
PS: No. No. You didn’t get the clasp.
PT: No.
PS: You had —
CS: He’s made enquiries.
PS: Yeah. Nothing’s about —
CS: He hasn’t made —
[recording paused]
PT: He, if there are any clasps —
MC: If you what? Sorry, what was his name?
PT: Pardon?
MC: What was his name? Victor.
PT: Victor Tytherington.
MC: Oh right.
PT: Have you heard that name?
MC: No.
PT: No. Well, he, he was a navigator late on and he went and he trained in South Africa and he, there was various, there was a Manna clasp for dropping food over Holland. There was something for that. I haven’t anything for any of them.
PS: So we —
PT: Sorry.
PS: I could fill in the gap.
[recording paused]
PT: A tour of ops on Bomber Command. You know, like joining Methwold. If that job had have gone on, it finished of course but if it had gone on you’d have to do thirty ops before you’d finished your tour.
MC: A full tour was thirty. Yeah.
PT: Thirty. Thirty two. I don’t just know. I know there was a gunner in Todmorden and he did about eighty odd in a, as a gunner. Henry he were called. There were a few in Todmorden you know. Just navigators and stuff you know but we never bothered. Got to do. I had enough to do with this bakehouse that I got shuffled into with my dad.
MC: You were in Todmorden?
PT: Pardon?
MC: You lived in Todmorden.
PT: Todmorden.
MC: Yeah.
CS: [unclear]
PT: I was fifty years in Todmorden.
CS: Yeah. He was born in Nelson.
MC: I used to work up that way. How long were you a baker then?
PT: When I came out of the Air Force I had the, aircrew they had the chance of going to university. That was the first mistake I made.
CS: You could have gone.
PT: Me and my wife, no matter now said, ‘Well, you were that busy trying to get your end away.’ [laughs]
CS: But also you said you could have gone into BOAC.
PT: With her.
MC: Yeah. Did you consider BOAC?
PT: Pardon?
MC: Did you consider BOAC? British Overseas Air —
PT: When I was, when I was at Methwold, yes. I could have gone on BOA, BOAC. I was asked to go with having this Reserved Occupation in the Treasury Department I turned it down but I’m not sorry about that. I never felt sorry about that really.
CS: But you also thought, he said they wouldn’t need navigators. That’s why he didn’t want to go to BOAC.
PT: When I left, when I left the squadron and the outfit, when they brought the crew up I don’t know where Johns went but Fraser, the bomb aimer he joined another crew and, but I went. I went north and I did an instructor’s course and I was, when I was, when I was on that test flight I was supposed to be an instructor at this aerodrome. The aerodrome. There’s that many around there. There’s, it could be North Luffenham. There’s a lot of different ones. Cottesmore. Woolfox Lodge.
MC: Yeah.
PT: That was tragic when they lost that one you know. That were just poor bloody maintenance. There was, there was a little amusing incident. I was in a, we were in a NAAFI queue and you know the ATS people? They deliver aircraft. Well, a person had. We were sort of in this queue for the NAAFI and over to our left a person not known at the time man or woman walked and had a helmet on and they were, the ATS people they used to deliver any sort of aircraft. Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancasters, Halifaxes. Any one they could fly them. And on this particular occasion there was a queue like of the pilots you know, and they were sort of saying, ‘Great job that,’ you know. And suddenly this great job [laughs] pulled her helmet off and she were a woman and all the pilots that were in this queue you know and we said [laughs].
[recording paused]
PT: I think when I, when I got the, when I got back into the Grammar School stream through sheer luck really I think that’s when I enjoyed it. And my brother, younger brother he hated the Grammar School but I liked it and I liked this teacher, Mr Fowles and Miss Graham and all different people. I loved it. Yeah.
CS: His younger brother was six and a half years younger.
PT: I didn’t do particularly well because I was always going out with this girl or that girl. I had a girl from when I was at Grammar School [laughs] yeah.
CS: His, his —
MC: A bit of a lad were you?
CS: His young brother, his younger brother —
PT: A lad yeah.
CS: Was in the military police.
PT: Yeah.
CS: So he was there in Germany when they had the trials you know for the —
MC: Oh yeah, Nuremberg —
CS: Yeah. That’s right.
PT: I probably missed a lot out really.
CS: So what are you going to tell us about the ATA?
PT: Not a —
MC: Yes. It was ATA, wasn’t it? Yeah. Air Transport Auxiliary I think it was. Yeah. I mean they were good pilots some of them.
PT: Pardon?
MC: They were good pilots some of them.
PT: Oh yeah. They had to pilot anything. They would jump into a Spitfire or a Lancaster. They were good.
MC: Yeah. Well thanks very much for your interview, Peter.
PS: Shall I put that —
MC: Thank you very much.
PT: You know all these crew members? Pilot, navigator, bomb aimer.
CS: Gunner.
PT: Mid-upper gunner, rear gunner, wireless operator. If you want to, if you want to contact them for any information unfortunately they’ve all gone. They’re dead.
MC: You’re the last one.
PT: So you can’t. You can’t. You can’t say, ‘Is it right what Peter Thomas said?’ I’m the last one.
MC: I believe every word you said Peter.
PT: I mean they were, they had their moments, you know. I mean Peter’s told me things about dropping food over Holland when I never thought anything about it but they were, they lost aircraft there hadn’t they Peter?
PS: Yes. According to the book on Operation Manna.
MC: Yeah. They lost three.
PS: Three Lancasters on that.
PT: And I did —
PS: They collided I think.
CS: Collided.
PT: I did two. It did two to the Hague. To the Hague.
MC: Yeah.
PT: And, and we I don’t know just which. I tell you what we did one to Juvencourt.
MC: Oh yeah.
PT: And we brought, we stayed overnight and then we brought a lot of ex-prisoners. British boys who were prisoners. Prisoners of war.
MC: Yeah.
PT: That was, that’s tragic.
MC: Yeah. Juvencourt.
PT: When you hear of one being lost through stupid pulling at a rip cord and you know you can’t believe how daft people are.
MC: There were a few aircraft lost when the prisoners were brought back.
PT: Anyway, it didn’t affect me.
MC: No.
PT: We only did the one and one’s enough. Well, when we were at Juvencourt we went, we went drinking. These French [robbing] us you know with this cheap wine you know and I can’t, I can’t understand why I finished up on my own and I finished up in an American camp and this, this American said, ‘Oh sure. We’ve got a place for you boy.’ I went and I slept in this American camp and I wasn’t, I were on my own you know. I don’t know where any, we’d been drinking this wine. I didn’t know where the hell I was and this American said, ‘You follow me and I’ll finish you.’ That sort of talk you know. I thought that were wonderful. I really, I enjoyed the Grammar School. You see at the Grammar School in 1940 I’d been there then about four or five years and a lot of the boys they’d been called up and I lost a very good mentor of Harry Marsden who was lost on a ship in, opposite St Nazaire. He was, they battened him down and he was lost. Harry Marsden. He was my mentor. He was the cricket captain. The head of the school. The football captain. If you mentioned Harry Marsden he was in it, you know and we lost him.
MC: He was in everything.
PT: 1942 he was killed. He was killed on this ship. It was an, it was a British warship. I forget the name of the ship and it was outside St Nazaire and it got sunk and they battened it. They saved a lot and they didn’t get, they didn’t get Harry out. He was, he was battened down and that was sad you know when we were going on to another course you know. I mean when we got back from Canada we were at [pause] we were at Millom. Well, we were at Pannal Ash College and they sent us up to Millom and we went back flying on Avro Ansons.
MC: Yeah. So you brought plenty of —
PT: Chicken Rock and up to the islands and back, you know.
MC: You brought plenty of stuff back.
PT: Then we went to, then we were posted to —
MC: Husbands Bosworth.
PT: Husbands Bosworth. Husbands Bosworth, yeah. And that’s where we crewed up and we were on Lancasters.
MC: Yeah.
PT: No. Not Lancasters. Wellingtons. And that’s when we went and converted on to —
MC: Lancasters.
PT: Lancasters. Yeah.
MC: Yeah. So when you came back from Canada you brought a load of stuff back with you from Canada. Cigarettes and stuff like that.
PT: When I came back from, when I was in Moncton they said, we had a, we had a kit bag. A Canadian. And a Canadian kit bag and they said, ‘If you want to get the maximum amount on board ship,’ he said, ‘You’ll have to buy a Canadian, not a Canadian one but a special one they had for erks like me. And it were a bag. It stood about that high and of course you didn’t need the others but I had that many cigarettes and stuff and bottles of cream for my mother that I put this this big kit bag and I had a pack. What did they call it? Like a —
MC: A rucksack.
PT: Knapsack. Yeah.
MC: Yeah.
PT: And I put this big one, I got somebody to lift it up and it lifted on like this and it were, it were about like this you know and when we got to the ship, when we got to the ship you know I was just hoping that we would have just gone up one step and on to the ship you know. And we went up this gantry you know. Up and up and up with this and when I was [laughs] when I got to where I was supposed to be I were absolutely knackered with this. With this big kit bag you know full of cigarettes and bottles of cream for my mother and stuff like that. Yeah. I enjoyed that. There were moments when you were a bit fed up you know and I mean I got walloped with a master who was, he also hit me but he’d been reported in a magazine that he’d hit a girl the same way. He just, for some, I didn’t know what I’d done wrong and he just whacked me across the face and Geoffrey my younger brother said, ‘He did the same to me.’ And then in this magazine, “Reunion,” this girl said she got whacked with him. He were a bully. He was a bully.
CS: Dad —
[recording paused]
MC: So I’ll just finish up by saying thank you for the interview anyway Peter. It’s much enjoyable. I’m, I thank you very much for doing the interview.
PT: Yeah.
MC: It’s been very good. Very entertaining.
PT: It was good, was it?
MC: Yeah.
PT: Yeah.
MC: Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Peter Thomas
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Mike Connock
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
2018-03-02
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
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
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AThomasPG180302
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:33:14 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Leicestershire
England--Devon
England--Harrogate
England--London
England--Norfolk
England--Rutland
England--Yorkshire
Scotland
Canada
Ontario
Ontario--Toronto
New Brunswick
New Brunswick--Moncton
North America--Niagara Falls
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1945
Description
An account of the resource
Peter was born in Nelson, Lancashire and had two brothers. He was sixteen when he left school in 1940 and got a job until joining the Royal Air Force in 1943. He went to London Air Crew Reception Centre before going to Initial Training Wing at RAF Paignton. He then moved to Cambridge where he spent time on Tiger Moths. He was told he would be a navigator and from there he went to Liverpool to sail to Canada and start his training before going to Moncton receiving centre and then on to Toronto. On one occasion Peter flew over Niagara Falls. After training Peter got shipped back to Great Britain, arriving in Scotland before going to Pannal Ash College. He then moved to the operational training unit at RAF Husbands Bosworth where crews were formed. The crew went to the Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Woolfox Lodge to train on Lancasters with 149 Squadron. They were then posted to RAF Methwold. When training on Wellingtons they had to make an emergency landing due to loss of an engine. He also recalled a trip in a Mosquito when the pilot crashed the aircraft but no one was injured. The crew was sometimes designated to take aerial photographs and was also involved with Operation Exodus and Operation Manna. Peter was demobbed as a warrant officer. After the war Peter and his family did a lot of camping. He said he had enjoyed everything he had done in life. Peter thought that Bomber Command did not received the recognition it deserves.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
Julie Williams
149 Squadron
aircrew
crash
crewing up
forced landing
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Mosquito
navigator
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Husbands Bosworth
RAF Methwold
RAF Paignton
RAF Woolfox Lodge
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2178/38205/PPalmerRAM17010018.1.jpg
946db56ec9225386ce97d6aaf5d628bb
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2178/38205/PPalmerRAM17010017.1.jpg
b98780ea75beeaf4ab69f2d6ecb20619
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
Palmer, Robert Anthony Maurice. Photograph album
Description
An account of the resource
Fifty-one items. Contains photographs, documents, telegrams and newspaper cuttings.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-30
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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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Palmer, RAM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[crest]
[underlined] RECORD OF SERVICE OF SQUADRON LEADER ROBERT ANTHONY MAURICE PALMER VC DFC[symbol] AE (115772) RAFVR [/underlined]
[underlined] Date of Birth: [/underlined] 7 July 1920
[underlined] Service as an Airman [/underlined]
Enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve as No 758016
Aircraftman Class II/under training Pilot – 22.8.39
Promoted Sergeant – 23.8.39
Remustered Pilot – 7.9.40
Promoted Temporary Flight Sergeant – 1.6.41
Discharged on appointment to a Temporary Commission – 28.1.42
[underlined] Commissioned Service [/underlined]
Granted a Commission for the Emergency as Pilot Officer on probation in the General Duties Branch of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve – 29.1.42
Confirmed in appointment and promoted Flying Officer (War Substantive) – 1.10.42
Promoted Flight Lieutenant – 29.1.44
Granted rank of Acting Squadron Leader – 10.12.44
Previously Missing on – 23.12.44
Now Killed in Action
Body Recovered Overseas
[underlined] Postings [/underlined]
Rochester – 1.9.39
No 5 Initial Training Wing Hastings – 25.9.39
Headquarters Reserve Command Pool – 11.4.40
No 12 Flying Training School – [inserted] Desford [/inserted] – 8.6.40
No 15 Officer Training Unit – [inserted] Harwell [/inserted] – 7.9.40
No 75 Squadron – [inserted] Feltwell [/inserted] – 16.11.40
No 149 Squadron – [inserted] Mildenhall [/inserted] – 26.11.40
200 Training Unit – [inserted] 20 Op. Tr. Unit [/inserted] – 13.2.41
No 20 Operation [inserted] al [/inserted] Training Unit - [inserted] [indecipherable word] Operational Training Unit [/inserted] – 29.1.42
No 1501 Beam Approach Training Flight – 12.10.42 – 18.10.42
No 20 Operation [inserted] al [/inserted] Training Unit – 28.12.42
1685 Mosquito Training Unit 80 Path Finder Force – 9.11.43
No 109 Squadron – 16.1.44
Missing (Flying Battle) – 23.12.44
1
[rubber stamp] M.O.D. R.A.F.
P.M.C.
19 JAN 1984
PM (AR) kb (RAF)
GLOUCESTER [/rubber stamp]
[page break]
[crest]
[underlined] Honours and Awards [/underlined]
Mentioned in Despatches – London Gazette – 14.1.44
Distinguished Flying Cross – London Gazette – 30.6.44
Bar to Distinguished Flying Cross – London Gazette – 8.12.44
Victoria Cross – London Gazette – 23.3.45
Air Efficiency Award
[underlined] Medals [/underlined]
1939/45 Star
Aircrew Europe Star with Clasp France and Germany
Defence Medal
War Medal 1939/45
G W Hayson
G W HAYSON
for Air Secretary
[rubber stamp] M.O.D. R.A.F.
P.M.C.
19 JAN 1984
PM (AR) kb (RAF)
GLOUCESTER
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
Record of service for Squadron Leader Robert Antony Maurice Palmer VC DFC* AE (115772) RAFVR
Description
An account of the resource
Gives personal details, service as an airman, commissioned service with promotions, postings including 75, 149 and 109 Squadrons, honours and awards including Victoria Cross, Distinguished Flying Cross and bar, mentioned in despatches, and air efficiency award.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984-01-19
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1984-01-19
1939-08-22
1939-08-23
1940-09-07
1941-06-01
1942-01-28
1942-01-29
1942-10-01
1944-01-29
1944-12-10
1944-12-23
1939-09-01
1939-09-29
1940-04-11
1940-06-08
1940-09-07
1940-11-16
1940-11-26
1941-02-13
1942-01-29
1942-10-12
1942-10-18
1942-12-28
1943-11-09
1944-01-16
1944-12-23
1944-01-14
1944-06-30
1944-12-08
1945-03-23
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--East Sussex
England--Hastings
England--Gloucestershire
England--Gloucester
England--Sussex
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
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Two printed pages on two album pages
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PPalmerRAM17010018, PPalmerRAM17010017
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
MOD RAF PMC
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
109 Squadron
149 Squadron
75 Squadron
aircrew
Distinguished Flying Cross
killed in action
Mosquito
Pathfinders
pilot
Victoria Cross
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/589/8858/AHughesWR150713.2.mp3
18e37bacec69f09e545be17b9d8cdabd
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Hughes, Bob
William Robert Hughes
W R Hughes
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Hughes, WR
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Bob Hughes (751133, 137124 Royal Air Force). He flew operations with 149, 50 and 23 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
NM: So, this is now recording, and my name is Nigel Moore, I’m the interviewer, and I’m interviewing Flight Lieutenant Bob Hughes on the 13th of July. I’m in Mr Hughes’ home in North Hants. So, Mr Hughes, would you like to tell us something about your upbringing and your life before you joined the RAF?
BH: I was only a, a ordinary seniors school and I never went, never passed Eleven Plus, so I went to the, one of the senior productive schools and then I, I passed, I suppose, most things, you know, and when the opportunity came, I took [unclear] said we had a – I’d been working as a coachbuilder, or in, with a coachbuilding firm, and we were, were making Rolls Royce – taking Rolls Royce chassis in and making them into finished cars. And while I was there, we had a fellow named Serge Kalinsky, he was a Scandinavian diplomat and he started swearing and said ‘There’s gonna be a bloody war any time now! Within the next few months, I guarantee it, in the next few months!’ So, knowing that I – my father had had a rough time in the army, in the trenches, I thought ‘ Well, no army for me, I’m gonna join the air force now,’ because Sywell was a handy aerodrome, so I went and joined weekend air force. And, once I was in there and the war was declared, naturally I was transferred straight away into the main RAF. And, erm –
NM: So, you joined a reserve squadron, did you?
BH: That’s right, RAF Volunteer Reserves. And I don’t know the na – well, I think it was 23 Squadron that I went to, which was when – during the Battle of Britain.
NM: So, how – can you describe your training, your flying training?
BH: Flying training?
NM: What were you training on? What were you flying?
BH: Well, mostly, in Ansons and, well, you know, I, I’m terrible at trying to remember the names of these aircraft tonight, but the – oh dear, two, two, two engined, the planes that we flew in, and – oh, I can’t think of the, the names, have I got it in here at all? [sound of turning pages]
NM: Not to worry, what about the training itself?
BH: Well, this was to go in these aircraft and did a few bail-outs practices and in the, in the, oh dear, in the yards of some big firms where they, they’d got escape possibility there, so we tried, tried those out several times. [background noises, turning pages]
NM: So, you say you flew in the Battle of Britain?
BH: Yes.
NM: What –
BH: That was in Blenheims.
NM: Can you de – can you talk –
BH: Now, this is the thing: quite often, when the Battle of Britain is mentioned, it’s either – what’s the two [unclear] the two aircraft that were always noticed? I think every time they mention these two aircraft, I think, how about the Night Shifts? ‘Cause I flew in, in the, in the Night Shift, and the aircraft we flew in wasn’t – oh dear, I’m terrible at names, I’m a terrible, terrible person to interview, really, because my memory is absolutely shocking. Blenheim, yes, but [pause] these, these were the usual things that we flew in those days, Ansons and Blenheims.
NM: So, can you describe the role that you played in the Battle of Britain flying these Blenheims?
BH: Well, I was a wireless operator/air gunner, and of course, in the, in those aircraft, you could picture everything, what am I talking about? Got a picture here [background noises].
NM: Yep, there’s the Blenheim.
BH: That’s – do you rec – do you recognise the one?
NM: Mr Hughes is pointing out a Mark 1 Blenheim.
BH: Mark 1 Blenheim, yeah, that’s right, yeah.
NM: ‘S’ right, and you were –
BH: And we had a, we had a turret on the top.
NM: And that’s where you were.
BH: When I flew later, in, in the big aircraft, the four-engine aircraft – they’re all here [background noises] when I flew later in the Wellington – that one’s the Lancaster, that is the Dambuster, they’ve got no turret on there but we, where we flew in the Lancasters, we had a turret, you see but previously, during the Battle of Britain, it was on, on the twin-engine aircraft.
NM: So, when you flew the Blenheims during the Battle of Britain, were you on bombing missions, and what – if so, what were your targets?
BH: Well, it, we were on defence.
NM: On defence?
BH: Defence patrol, up and down from the south coast up to, up the Thames Estuary, most of the time. [pause, sound of turning pages]
NM: And this was – were you called the Night Shift?
BH: The Night Shift, yes. There we are, there’s the aircraft. And that’s the flew – the pilot I flew with most of the time, this is Alan Gowarth [?] and that was, yes, and all Blenheims.
NM: So, this was Number 23 Squadron, night –
BH: 23 Squadron, night fighter squadron, yes.
NM: And can you describe your operations flying for 23 Squadron?
BH: Well –
NM: In the Blenheim?
BH: It was a, a patrol, up and down from the south coast up the Thames, the Thames Estuary, keeping a guard on things to the starboard, you know, any incoming aircraft, and we, we had quite a few that we, we followed, and went and dived down with them but we didn’t actually have a contact. [Pause] This first one, yeah apart from anything else, we had anti-aircraft cooperation, searchlight cooperation, going backwards and forwards along the Thames Estuary. That’s what they were: night defensive patrols. And that was, that’s the fella, fella that I flew with most of the time.
NM: So, you encountered a few contacts but didn’t actually –
BH: We didn’t see anybody shot, shot down but we, we fired at them and we saw the bullets, you know, sort of going their direction but didn’t see anything falling down, not then.
NM: And what type of aircraft were you engaging?
BH: It was a Blenheim. Oh, I don’t know; well, they were twin, twin-engined aircraft, yeah. I can’t –
NM: Okay.
BH: Think of the name. [sound of turning pages] I’ve got a picture.
NM: So after the 23 Squadron, how did you move to – can you describe how you moved from Fighter Command to Bomber Command?
BH: Well, at the time, they were losing a lot of crews and aircraft and crews in, in Bomber Command, and so they were asking for volunteers and I volunteered to – went to Number 9 Bomber Squadron, which was at Honington, but I only did one air test with them, and then I was asked if I would volunteer and go to one, 149 Squadron, which was at Mildenhall, and that’s where I did most of the bombing trips that I did, up to, up to seventy-three, but they weren’t all to Germany. A lot – we had a spell over in the Middle East, and it was Benghazi that we were bombing then.
NM: So, the start of your operational life with 149 Squadron –
BH: 149, yes.
NM: Was that –
BH: Mildenhall.
NM: At Mildenhall.
BH: Yes.
NM: And –
BH: And we were –
NM: And how did you – can you describe how you met your crew and got a crew together?
BH: No, only a sort of friendly meeting and you like the look of somebody and who you think was, was genuine. This first fellow we went – I flew with was a Squadron Leader Heather, and we went to Wilhelmshaven, [unclear] class cruisers and we were, we were bombing all around it, when this – oh, we went there again another night, repeat, repeat. I tell you what, when we first, when we first went there, they, they took us to canal, canals, and we got to aim in the canal with the mines, and mind you, was such a narrow mine, margin, and having such a small tar – item, when we got back home, we told them how difficult it was, so we suggested ‘Why not bomb it instead of just putting mines there?’ So they sent us back the next night to, to do that. That was Wilhelmshaven.
NM: So, at this point, you were flying Wellingtons?
BH: Wellingtons, yes.
NM: And this was in nineteen-forty –
BH: 1949, February ’49.
NM: Forty – 1941?
BH: Ah, no, no, beg your pardon.
NM: Yes.
BH: Yes, ’41, yes.
NM: So, can you describe squadron life on 149 Bomber Command at Mil – Mildenhall?
BH: Well, it was just –
NM: What was life like?
BH: Just a friendly get-together, you know, I’m ninety, nearly ninety-five now and I was twenty, twenty then, nineteen or twenty. So, you know, to remember exactly what we did, we got friendly; whoever we met, we made friends with and wanted to know how we got on.
NM: Did you go out for nights out around Mildenhall? What was – what were they like?
BH: Yes, yes, but, you know, just a drink here and there and, but nothing to really note.
NM: And what about your crew? Do you have particular memories of your crew?
BH: Yes, I think I, quite honestly, having done so many and for such a long period, long number of ops, I reckon I was very lucky picking the, or matching up with a good set of wonderful pilots. You see, each of the pilots I flew with were absolutely wonderful; they seemed to go to the target and did the business and get back, no messing and no wandering about all over Germany.
NM: And how about the rest of the crew? Were you a close group?
BH: Yes, yes, I think, generally speaking it was with the naviga – with the observer, or navigator, as they were then, more than anything, and because with the navigator, it was a question of, when we got over the target, sort of the geography of the place. I remember one of the things, one of the worst op we went on was Essen, and the geography of that place was so – we could spot it out as easy as anything. [Pause] But then later on, we did a lot of coast, coastal things like Wilhelmshaven, bombing the cruisers there, they, they took [unclear] class cruisers up the, up the, the fjords.
NM: Why was Essen such a bad target?
BH: Well, being an ammunition manufacturing place, I believe it was very heavily defended because of that. I mean, it was a manufacturer of, manufacturer of explosives and suchlike, and we seemed to cruise around it quite a lot, and anyhow, I was always telling the skipper, ‘Such-and-such is at the, on the starboard side,’ or, you know, ‘We’ve got to turn a little bit to the port to get this thing.’ That was on a reserve flight, 149 Squadron, and then I went to a reserve flight at Stradishall where they were preparing to get crews to go out to the Middle East, and then I had a spell in the Middle East.
NM: So, just back on your bombing raids here, over Essen and other German targets, you were giving instructions to the pilot –
BH: Oh yes, yes!
NM: To help him to do what?
BH: Yes, notifying where the canals are shooting off, to the south or the, the west, you know, that sort of thing. On very sunny [?] nights, the, the water whether it was a river or a canal, you could spot it that much easier, and you would report, you know, what you could see.
NM: So, tell us a little bit how you then transferred out to the Middle East. Was this the same squadron, was the whole squadron go out to the Middle East?
BH: Oh, no, no, it was with a, a, I was with this, what, this one point one, this reserve flight to start with, wasn’t I? And then, then we heard that there’d been so many losses, crew losses, and there were appealing for people to, to go to transfer to the Middle East, and so I went to this reserve flight at Stradishall, and from there, via Malta, I went to, to 70 Squadron in Kabrit, which was in Egypt.
NM: That must have been quite a change. What – can you give us your memories of the change in going to the Middle East?
BH: Well, the thing was, we had, we had a turret to go to, and the preparations for, for raids and things were absolutely marvellous. We had an advanced base; we used to land in the desert and then take off again for the raid. Well, this one here, the first one we had, operations against enemy was Menida [?] Aerodrome, so actually, I liked the possibility of going into the front turret if we were going and attacking an aerodrome, so we can go ‘round and, you know, shooting up the, the, the arm – armoury points.
NM: So, you moved from the mid upper to the front for these raids?
BH: That’s right, yes, but most of the time, you know, we were, when you were in the rear turret, we were solely concerned about attacks by enemy aircraft, you know? So, most of our light was emphasised downwards. [Pause] We had one or two come up to us and nose – nosing towards us and managed to tell the pilot to do a dive and then we went down in, in a curve dive, you know, and got shot of them.
NM: So, you encountered enemy aircraft?
BH: Yes, yes.
NM: On many occasions?
BH: Oh, at least, oh, I’ll just think, at least a half a dozen times.
NM: So, tell us about squadron – your memories of squadron life in the desert. How different was it from the UK?
BH: Well, of course, water was the problem, sort of rationing out water, you know, and sort of having exercise, running and all the rest of it, but had to avoid having too much water. But then, in the desert, particularly, that was an even worse problem. [Pause] That was a thing that we did quite often while in the Middle East, was staffing the motor transport on the – between Cairo and Benghazi. The, the main road was, was used quite a lot by the enemy and we’d attack transport along there, and railway sidings, particularly, so they would try bringing the forces, German forces, into the desert via Benghazi and so we attacked the– oh, I can’t, I was trying to think of the, the general’s name: Rommel. Rommel was bringing all his replacement troops into Ben – Benghazi, so we went there and we – well, they called it the mailroom [?] because we hit it so many times, but it was where they were bringing the re – the new forces in.
NM: And were these daylight raids you were on, or night raids?
BH: Mostly night, but we did one or two; well, yes, I should think about a third of them were daylight, but mostly night. [Pause] Then it was a question of geography and remembering the shape of the, the land underneath you, whereabouts you’d got to. Location, on the main way up to Benghazi, we had to sort out Bardi – Bardiyah and Menidi [?] for erm, to locate us that we were hitting the right thing. Railway sidings were attacked an enormous amount, but we had to sort out our geography to make sure we were bombing, strafing the right things. [Pause, sound of turning pages]
NM: So how did, how did your war continue? Can you describe – were there any changes over this period, 1941, in terms of how the squadron life continued?
BH: Well, towards the end of my period, we did a lot of education of fresh crews.
NM: Who had come out to Egypt?
BH: Yes. [Sound of turning pages] Oh, this is Pershore.
NM: Is that –
BH: Pershore, that was the OTU there, Pershore, where I did a lot of bombing from there, and then on to 12 Squadron.
NM: So, tell me how you managed to get then transferred back from the desert, back to Bomber Command in England.
BH: [Sound of turning pages] 50 Squadron [more turning pages] It’s in –
NM: What happened between 70 Squadron and, and 50 Squadron?
BH: We – everything was going alright and we were bombing everything we were asked to, and, but then they were asking for volunteers to do – to go to, to England again.
NM: So, did you volunteer on your own or did the entire crew volunteer?
BH: Oh, I volunteered on my own, I think, but this was 50 Squadron, 5 Group, Skellingthorpe, it was a liaison visit we did there, and while we were there, they wanted us to go to, to – on Lancasters to Magdeburg. As a matter of fact, I’d been on seventy-two trips, missions, and I’d never once been to Berlin, somebody was talking about going to Berlin, so we went to Magdeburg, and after we’d bombed there, the skipper says ‘See on the starboard side, you’ll see Berlin, Bob, and that’s the nearest we shall get to it!’ [slight laugh] And of course we got ‘boo’s by the rest of the crew, and that’s where we finished up. That’s the seventy – that was my very last mission.
NM: So, we’ve jumped ahead into 1944 from 1941.
BH: 1944, January ’44, yeah.
NM: What – going back a little bit to coming out of Egypt into – back to England: you say you went to an OTU?
BH: Yes, yes.
NM: And you were still flying Wellingtons?
BH: Yes, as a trainee. No, not as a trainee, as a –
NM: So you, you became an instructor?
BH: Instructor, yes.
NM: What was it like being –
BH: Yes, was that ’43? January ’43.
NM: That’s ’43, yep.
BH: Yeah, that’s right, went to an OTU.
NM: So you became an instructor?
BH: Instructor, that’s right.
NM: What else –
BH: And we did an operation from there at – oh, to Essen, several times.
NM: Just what was it like converting from a Wellington to a Lancaster? Can you –
BH: Well, we were –
NM: - describe it from a crew’s point of view?
BH: Well, we had wonderful turrets on the Lancaster and, well, I think we were just pleased that it’s – that it was a new aircraft and we’d got four engines, you know? I don’t think we gave it much sort of consideration as to whether it was better or not, it just – we just accepted that it was [emphasis] better, and we were moved fa – we were flying faster. They, they were some of the worst planes [?] we did with Essen and mine laying, oh, we did a mine laying off Heligoland and that, that was a bit dicey; they seemed to have high defensive, the defences at these places. [Pause] While we were on OTU, of course, we did a lot of experience in cross-country, knowing our way about, you know, air-to-air fire, firing and air-to-sea firing, and that’s just for practice.
NM: Describe a little bit life as an instructor as opposed to operational air crew.
BH: Well, I was quite happy about that; I mean, I knew what I was talking about and the – I, I did see quite a lot, the fellers were coming to me for, you know, ‘Well, how do we, how do we sort out this?’ you know, the rear-see [?] retainer keeper, this was a familiar phrase, you know, ‘How do we deal with this when we’re still flying in the air?’ you know? You’ve got to do it with blinds – blindfold, and that was the case in some, sometimes, ‘cause there was machine, with machine guns. [Pause] That was the last trip we did, we were attacked by an ME-210, that was the target, and fired hundred and fifty rounds but there was no confirmed hits. [Pause] I’m sorry I’m not able to answer your questions quite as freely as I ought to, really.
NM: No, don’t worry about that, you’re doing wonderfully.
BH: Well, a few years ago, perhaps I should – I’m a bit more chatty, but – [pause, sound of moving papers] You’ve got a record of service here, you see: I joined in May the 12th 1939, I joined the RAFVR and received calling-up papers, then, into the regular air force in August of that year, August 27th.
NM: So, when you came to the end of your operations, why did you finish operations? Had you done, finished a tour, or –
BH: Yeah, well –
NM: What happened after your last operation?
BH: [Sound of turning pages] Oh yes, joined an AF – was an AFU, that was the training unit.
NM: So you became an instructor again?
BH: That’s right, yes, on gun, guns and armoury.
NM: And that took you to the end of the war, did it?
BH: Yes, well, February, February, no, Oct – no, October ’44. [Pause] Various aircraft that I flew in was a Blenheim Mark 1, a Fairey Battle, that was an early, early one that I flew in a lot, and then the Boulton Paul Defiant, which we did most of the shooting with on, on nights, and then the Avro Anson that, this was a transport aircraft most of the time, and then in the Wellingtons, I flew in the 1, 1C, 1A, Mark 2 and the 3, and then the Avro Lancasters, Marks 1 and 2, and 3. Oh, also, I flew in the Lysanders quite a few times, and Blackburn Bothas; Blackburn Botha, they were used to use for training quite a lot. I know they weren’t very popular for some reason, but they did the trick.
NM: So they were the training aircraft?
BH: Yes, Bothas.
NM: So, I’m interested in the Lysander, your role in flying in a Lysander; what was your role then?
BH: My role then was to, to, to take us into the desert for take-offs, they just, for operations, or to res – rescue from the desert after we’d landed. That’s when I used the Lysander a few times, was for – was rep – was actually saving, you know, escape. I flew also in Fairey Battle, Ansons, Bothas and Lysanders. Well, the Lysander, as I say, was a thing to save you, you know, sort of a –
NM: So, of your seventy-seven operations, either in the desert or across Germany, are any particularly memorable for you?
BH: Seven – seventy-three, it was.
NM: Oh, seventy-three missions.
BH: Yeah.
NM: Okay.
BH: Well, yeah, occasionally we got caught out with the ‘Un [?] defence plane catching catching up with us, but most of the time, we were wide awake to it and whenever we saw something on the starboard or the port side, we’d tell the skipper and we’d dive away. [Pause] Course, one of the main things, maintenance, was the machine, with the machine belts, belts of machines, you know, sort of making sure we didn’t get caught up on those. [Pause] Anyhow, there’s a – unless there a record of service in the whole, the whole lot, that I, you know, kept it down to a minimum there. I went recently to Clarence House; my wife’s been there to the Queen.
NM: When you look back on your time in Bomber Command, what are your main thoughts?
BH: Well, I was glad I was available to do it, and the friendship that you made with most of the people there was pretty good. [Pause] That was the thing; with the link trainer, I used to enjoy going in that, flying the various things through the link trainer.
NM: How do you think Bomber Command has been treated since the end of the war?
BH: What? Haven’t really, haven’t had any more to do with it or knowledge of it, really. No, I don’t think that we’ve – I think we’ve, we would have cottoned on to it a bit more if anything had gone wrong, but everything seemed to be right, we sort of sorted all the problems out.
NM: Do you think Bomber Command has had enough recognition since the end of the war for what they did, or what you did?
BH: Well, yes, I think so, I think we’ve been reason – reasonably recognised.
NM: Tell me about your life since the end of the war. Did you stay in the RAF long?
BH: Oh, no, when – I had been with a firm that repaired converted Rolls Royce from the chassis into a cars, you know, and it was a good firm to work for, and I, I did a lot of this, this work, and this is how I came to meet this Kalinsky, who came in with his Wellington, with his Rolls Royce, and so he told us that there was gonna be a war, so that’s what made me go into the fleet, into the reserve occupation, so that when I was called up, I was bound to be in the RAF.
NM: So, on leaving the RAF, you rejoined the same company?
BH: After – do you know, my memory, my memory’s terrible. Yes, I must, I must have done, went straight to Mulliner’s, who were coachbuilders, class coachbuilder, they were mainly, mostly London but we had a branch in Northampton, and then [pause] think I got the DFC for my last, last trips over Essen.
NM: So you were awarded the DFC?
BH: Yes, that was December the 12th, 12th of the 3rd, ’43, and then the other thing later, the RAF.
NM: What was the background to the award of the DFC?
BH: We were on – trying to see where this is. [Pause] Oh, it was on the second tour, I’d done a tour of ops already and volunteered for another, and it was during this that I was awarded the DFC on the secondary tour, tour.
NM: Was the reason for the DFC because of your –
BH: Length, length of service, service.
NM: Length of service, rather than a particular –
BH: Yes, volunteering for so mu – so much with the, with Flying Command, with Bomber Command. I went to another squadron, 950 Squadron, we went to, on operational liaison duties, did that quite a bit – it was nice to go to other squadrons and find out how they were getting on and tell them what we did.
NM: So that was between your tours?
BH: Yes, yeah.
NM: So, what was the role you played as a liaison officer, then?
BH: Oh! [laughs] I was to sort out the ammunition, and of course, in the early days, we had the pans to slap onto aircraft, onto the gun, but later on, of course, we had machine belt, belt machine, belt ammunition.
NM: Did you see much evolution in air gunnery between 1939 and 1945? Can you –
BH: Yes, well, we had a lot of new aircraft, new guns coming along, American, lot of new American guns that we were using, and also the, the loading, the belts, not just the belts, but ammunition belt, pan, pans. I don’t seem to be able to tell you anything more positive, really, you know, but –
NM: You received a commission during your service, didn’t you? Because you joined as a LAC and -
BH: LAC, yes.
NM: And moved up to flight lieutenant.
BH: Flight lieutenant, that’s right, yes.
NM: What was the history there?
BH: Well, I’d been, I’d been moved from one place to another and volunteered for so much, much, and there was a lot of training and did a lot of training with pupils coming along. [Pause] Show you this last one there; we had an enormous amount of people with us, we had somebody with seventy-two – oh, that was me with seventy two! So, if all the others had had twenty-four trips, then we were – this was a mission for, for training. It was a voluntary – well, it was while I was on a liaison trip to, to Skellingthorpe on training for, for measured score [?], I said that I’d, I’d done seventy, seventy-odd trips and I’d never been to Berlin, so this gunnery leader there said ‘Well, you’re alright, well go with us tonight,’ got to the end of the runway and this aircraft, this aircraft, yeah, this aircraft, and the target was changed to an alternative, and in the end, we went there and bombed that, and as we come away from it, the skipper says, ‘Well, you’ve seen Berlin on the right, on the starboard side,’ he says, but you know of course, the rest of the crew didn’t care too much for this, they wanted to get home, back home [slight laugh]!
NM: Do you keep in touch with Bomber Command through squadron associations or reunions?
BH: No, that’s – do you know, apart from our local reunions at Sywell, I haven’t gone back to any RAF squadrons at all.
NM: And what’s your association with Sywell?
BH: Well, our, our early training was there, we, we – it was the first aircraft we flew, flew in. We – every opportunity we had of getting a flight, we, we, we took it, you know?
NM: And you get – you go back there now for reunions?
BH: Oh, yes; well, we’ve got a Battle of Britain fighter association, and also, there’s a local – we’ve got a gunnery leader and – oh dear, what do we call the things now? We go to Sywell for the reunions for air, air gunners, all the air gunner, local air gunners, and we joined this local Battle of Britain – no, not Battle of Britain fighter association, it’s the – we joined this – oh dear [pause] gunnery association, really. Do you know, I – my mind’s really terrible.
NM: And do you still meet as a group?
BH: Oh yes; at Sywell, we’ve got a, quite a nice little bunch of fellers there, I think about, we’ve had as many as fourteen or fifteen, but it gradually faded, you know, died off a bit, and so we’re only getting about three or four of us go, once a month.
NM: And are these just socials, social get-togethers over lunch, or just to talk about old times?
BH: No, just at the, the aerodrome at Sywell, where there was a bar there, you see, that was the attraction amongst. There were various cross-country trips, you know, to renew our flying experience.
NM: When was the last time you flew? Was it at the end of the war, or have you flown since the end of the war?
BH: [unclear] [sound of turning pages] So, Uxbridge, we had a – was Bishop’s Court – was about ’44, February 44, it says.
NM: You haven’t flown since the war?
BH: No; oh, well, not air force. I, I, we’ve flown private, private flying ‘cause we’ve got some friends in, in France, we used to go nip across, you know, by ordinary aircraft.
NM: Okay. Shall we stop the recording there?
BH: Yes.
NM: I think.
[recording is stopped and restarted]
BH: Well, people had lost their logbook, or oil. So I managed to rescue mine and copy this from it. [Pause] Who was that?
NM: So your logbook doesn’t exist anymore but you’ve copied all this out from it?
BH: Oh, yes, that’s right, remember him.
NM: So, are you still in touch with any of your original air crew?
BH: Well, I was in touch with the skipper that I flew with most of the time, Alan Gowarth [?] of Monaco, Monaco, he was a night pilot, fighter pilot in 23 Squadron in - during the Battle of Britain, and this, this was illustrated with the seventieth anniversary of the Battle being commended.
NM: So you’re still in touch with him? Are you in touch with him now?
BH: No, no, not in the last – I think he might have pegged out since, but yes, I think it was quite late when I still, still in touch with him, March.
NM: So you were in touch by letter. Did you ever meet him again after the war?
BH: No, no, no, of course, he was New Zealand, he went to settle in his home in New Zealand. [Pause, sound of turning pages] Spires of Lincoln coming out of the mist as we got closer to home, a wonderful sight. As a matter of fact, we did have a situation where we were followed in to our own base, and we warned – we’d been warned about this, and anyhow, it was the last minute, really, before he was gonna fire at us, and we noticed that he was almost nose nose to tail with us, and so I told the skipper, you know, ‘We, we, we’re being followed, turn, turn starboard,’ you know, and he says ‘Okay, yes, fair enough,’ and we shook him off, but he got to within, oh, within a few hundred yards, I suppose, of shooting us down, and we got back home.
NM: So, you had a clear sight of this?
BH: Oh, yes, it was a, it was a Heinkel.
NM: And at this point, you were coming into which airfield?
BH: Hmm, not sure.
NM: Was that Wickenby or somewhere in Lincolnshire?
BH: Yes, somewhere, somewhere in Lincolnshire, but I can’t remember which. I should ought to remember because we were near, near to being shot down!
NM: Was that the closest you’ve, you came?
BH: I think so, to our demise, yes. [Pause] We’d been told about this: ‘Be careful, the blighter’s follow, following you in,’ and he almost on our nose, on our tail, you know, with his nose. [Pause] And then the skipper says, ‘Glad you kept your bloody eyes open, Bob!’ [laughs]
[recording is stopped and restarted]
BH: On the way back from the major target, we’d sort of go to various aerodromes, and the skipper’d ask me to go into the front turret so that we could go around the, the dispersal points shooting up all and setting fire to a lot of aircraft. We did this on quite a few occasions.
[recording is stopped and restarted]
BH: I was just wondering where to start, what, what was I talking about, now?
NM: You were talking about the geodetic construction.
BH: Oh, yes, yes, I was thankful and praised God for Barnes Wallis because of his aircraft design. We were over Benghazi, and we had a, a enormous hole inside of the fuselage (about six foot diameter), and the fact that it was geodetic construction of air, the pilot still flew the aircraft quite smoothly, and then we landed in the desert and checked up on what was what, and we took off again! And that was with a six foot diameter hole in the side of the, the fuselage, and of course, as I say, I thank God for Barnes Wallis and the fact that the geodetic construction was so, so wonderful.
NM: And the damage was caused by en –
BH: By flak, but that was bloody uncomfortable to sleep and we – ‘course, when we were in the desert, we, when we went up from Cairo up to the advanced base, we’d have to sleep in the aircraft, but the geodetic construction was as comfortable to sleep on! [laughs] You know, you’d have load of flying kit all on your hip, you know, to stop you from being scarred [?] ‘cause it was in – we slept in the co – oh, if we, if you laid out, you slept outside the aircraft in the desert, in, in the, oh dear, well, if, if you slept outside in the desert, on where there were lots of dried-up salt lakes, but you could have slept on there, and that was – but there were a lot of darn [unclear] about, and they were, actually, they sounded worse than they were, so it was a question sleeping inside the aircraft, but then, of course, you’ve got the geodetic construction, you know, made it uncomfortable, but having a lot of Irvine jackets and trousers, of course, to pad the sides.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Bob Hughes
Creator
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Nigel Moore
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
2015-07-13
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AHughesWR150713
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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00:58:38 audio recording
Contributor
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Beth Ellin
Sally Coulter
Carolyn Emery
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
Bob Hughes joined the RAF as war became likely to avoid repeating his father's First World War experience in the trenches and transferred to the RAF Volunteer Reserve when war was declared. He trained on Ansons and then flew in twin-engine Blenheims in the Battle of Britain as part of 23 Squadron. They carried out night defence patrols from the south coast up the Thames Estuary.
Bob volunteered for Bomber Command which had lost a lot of crews. After one air test for Number 9 Bomber Squadron, he went to 149 Squadron at RAF Mildenhall and flew in Wellingtons. He describes the difficulty of targeting well-defended Essen and bombing cruisers in coastal areas, such as Wilhelmshaven.
Bob then transferred to 70 Squadron in RAF Kabrit, Egypt and the Middle East. Water rationing was an issue. They would carry out raids on transport and railway sidings in response to Field Marshal Erich Rommel bringing German forces into the desert via Benghazi.
Bob had instructor stints at the Operational Training Unit at RAF Pershore and Advanced Flying Unit. He went on operational liaison duties to 950 Squadron. Other aircraft in which Bob flew included: Battle, Defiant, Lancasters, Lysanders and Bothas. Bob undertook 73 operations and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on 12th March 1943.
He describes the evolution in air gunnery during the war. He also praises Barnes Wallis’s geodetic construction.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Suffolk
England--Thames River
North Africa
Egypt
Egypt--Kibrit
Libya
Libya--Banghāzī
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Essen
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1943
1943-03-12
1944
1945
149 Squadron
23 Squadron
49 Squadron
50 Squadron
70 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
Battle
Blenheim
Botha
Defiant
Distinguished Flying Cross
Lancaster
Lysander
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
promotion
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Pershore
RAF Skellingthorpe
training
Wallis, Barnes Neville (1887-1979)
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/908/11150/PKentAW1701.2.jpg
c9ec5bbbd87ecfe7d5cb1559f5f95eb5
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/908/11150/AKentAW170202.2.mp3
6ae3878d734d5f9765f038ab5e2fd409
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
Kent, Anthony William
A W Kent
Description
An account of the resource
A oral history interview with Flying Officer Anthony 'Tony' Kent (1923 -2021, 189184 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a navigator with 149 Squadron from RAF Methwold.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-02-02
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.
Identifier
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Kent, AW
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
NM: Good morning. My name is Nigel Moore. It’s Thursday the 2nd of February 2017. I’m with Tony Kent in his house XXXXX Ruislip, Middlesex. So Tony, tell me a little bit about your childhood, growing up and where you went to school.
AK: It goes back really. I was born over in Wood Green and a lot of my education was split up between Wood Green and Leicester because my father had a summer job there and then we came back to Wood Green or later Eltham. A similar sort of thing until finally we settled in Eltham and my education was, I finished up in a central, central school at Ruislip er at Eltham but I sat for competitive student apprentice situation and took that up on the Monday after war was declared on the Sunday. Now, as the student, the apprenticeship was based at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich it soon became clear that I was not going to get a good machine education operating in the Arsenal and then going to the Woolwich Polytechnic for further studies. It was soon clear that I was sent out to a drawing office in the country and I was out there for some time and decided, after about eighteen months that that was not for me. I did not want to spend my life as a design draughtsman because that’s where I was heading. Design draughtsmanship. And I, it was a protected industry but I managed to be one of the last people of that ilk who managed to get out and I volunteered for the RAF. My RAF training, in the main, we were sent, initial training was in Scarborough and then eventually I was taken out on [pause] on the sea, troop transport carrier, to South Africa where I trained as a navigator at East London. And I was there for about a year and then was brought, brought back to England and started. And we crewed up at Stradishall where, as I expect you probably know, they put a whole heap of crew members in there. Pilots, air gunners etcetera etcetera. And a pilot went around asking people would they like, would we like, to join his crew. And Alan, my pilot, was from Adelaide. Australian. And we had two Scottish gunners and a Geordie engineer and one other. So from then on we went on to, Alan went on to training on the twin engine Wellington at Stradishall. Switched to Stirlings. And joined, well and then joined the 149 Squadron who we’d volunteered for, or at least asked for because they were known as a special squadron and their work was dropping supplies and agents into Europe. Well we were with those Stirling, a Stirling squadron and we did three operations from there. Bomb laying, mine laying, sorry. Mine laying. Then we were given the Lancs and we were operating from Methwold. Previously we’d been operating from, I call it Feltwell but there was 146 something Grove I’ve got the name but thirty of my operations were with Lancs at Methwold. Mainly daylight. We were then after a while, I could give you dates, we were equipped with GH and I think we were probably the first squadron to get it. Have you heard of GH?
NM: No. Tell me about it.
AK: Well GH was, was like a satnav of the sky. Germany, or Europe was covered in a sort of range of criss-crossing lines. Whether you’d call them radio waves or not and with using that equipment I could navigate with it obviously but when we first had it we had mainly daylights and in the daylight operations we would have two other Lancs formate with us and we would lead them in. I would navigate when we got near the run-in to the target. I would then take over the run-in and instructing Alan and I had previously set up the setting of the point at which the bombs would be released. Pre-calculated at the briefing and we would run down one of these lines, there’s a better word, run down one of these lines and my aircraft would be seen as a blob running down. As we got near the target a blob would appear on one of the crossing points and as we got near that I would order the bomb doors open. Two other aircraft would then do the same thing. As we got to this particular point of bomb release I’d press the bomb tit. First bombs went. The other two aircraft released their bombs so we were going as triple, triple bombing range. The beauty of it from our point of view was that we could bomb through ten tenths cloud. We didn’t need to see the target with this thing at all which was quite a benefit because it was very difficult for the German fighter pilots to get up through ten tenths cloud and find their way back home. So we, that was our, that was most of the work we did once we had the GH was daylight and leading in to other aircraft. We did that until we finished our operations virtually. We didn’t always do this. Sometimes we did night operations in a gaggle. Not leading anybody in but that, that we, as I say we did thirty operations in the Lanc and three in the Stirlings. Then after that we weren’t wanted bomber crew and I switched to Transport Command. From Transport Command and the experience I got there I came and joined British European Airways and spent the rest of my life with the airline. British Airways. Finished up as a senior man. Senior planning manager at Heathrow.
NM: Ok. Ok. Fascinating. Fascinating.
AK: Now, there were one or two, shall we say, interesting points during all these operations. One of them — we had to move to Woodbridge. It was a very very fierce winter and we were, we positioned to Woodbridge which was a massive great airfield right on the coast. On one of these daylight operations from there we we turned and taxied. Oh. As, as the bombs were released it was the bomb aimer or engineer’s job to go down the fuselage to check at each button that the bombs had gone and we taxied in to our station, bomb doors open. Ground crew flat on their faces because a bomb had dropped out flat, fortunately. What had happened was it looked as if it had released but it was so frozen up that it stayed there but it looked as if it had gone and of course eventually it did drop down into, in to the bomb bay. That was one interesting thing. Our very last trip we, it was quite a long one but, when we, we’d been briefed and we were in the aircraft and I was testing the GH screen it was snow-flaking. I was getting a lot of interference. Snow-flaking. So I called the ground staff and they switched one. I still was getting snow-flaking on it. And this took up so much time that I realised that even if we took off with this and saw how it was in the air, which was a suggestion from the squadron, I couldn’t make the rendezvous point to turn on to the route and across Europe. So I asked could I be allowed to navigate over, across London and I was given permission to navigate across London and make the turning point and join up with the rest of the gaggle at night. That trip was, was quite exciting in a way because when we came back the — we couldn’t land. We were diverted to St Mawgan’s because of weather. Right across down to Newquay and Alan, we landed safely and got to the end of the runway and the engines cut. We’d run out of fuel. It was as close as that. Alan never, didn’t say a word at the time but he must have been having his fingers crossed. But that, that was quite a trip. We did have other, one other but it wasn’t on an operation. We were doing bomb training using Ely Cathedral as a, as a bombing target. And that was, you know, the bomb aimer was in control of that and when he thought he’d got it right he pressed, pressed the button for a photograph and that was checked to see how accurate he was. Now we were supposed to be at eight thousand feet for this and there was a Polish crew who were supposed to be at twelve thousand but they weren’t. And Alan, in the split second, saw them coming straight at us. They went, he put the nose down, they went over the top of us and their propeller screwed through our port tail. Hell of a bang. I didn’t. There was a hell of a bang and then there was a silence in the aircraft until I said, ‘What the hell was that?’ And then Alan called down to the rear gunner and said to Jock, ‘How are you? Are you alright?’ And he, ‘Yes Skip. ’ God knows what, how he’d, what he was feeling. But because of the damage to the tail plane Alan, I had to give Alan a course for home obviously and he had to steer home using the ailerons on the, on the wings. We landed safely but the Polish crew crash landed and there was very careful checking of the logs as to what height were we at, what height were they at. Well fortunately my log was written out. Eight thousand feet. So that was the nearest we got, ever got, to not making it.
NM: And that was, they were over, over England. Let me take you back. When you decided to leave your apprenticeship.
AK: Yes.
NM: Why did you choose the RAF as opposed to the army or the navy?
AK: I wanted to be a pilot.
NM: You wanted to be a pilot. Ok.
AK: Yes. As it happened I went, I did go on the testing and did some training on the Tiger Moths and quite a lot of others as well. And then they called out all the names they wanted for pilots and Tony Kent’s name was the first one as a navigator. I missed being a pilot by one. Probably saved my life. [laughs]
NM: So, but did they choose navigator for you or did you, did you volunteer to become a navigator after your —?
AK: I volunteered for the air force.
NM: Yeah.
AK: Hoping to be a pilot.
NM: Right. But how did you, when you, when you weren’t selected as a pilot did they then say you are going to be a navigator?
AK: I was already in the air force then.
NM: Yeah but —
AK: Sworn in.
NM: But as a navigator or a flight engineer? How did you become a navigator as opposed to any other crew member?
AK: Because that was the next one on the list. They then did all the pilots. Then they called out how many navigators they wanted.
NM: Right.
AK: The rest were air gunners and that sort of thing.
NM: So they selected you —
AK: There wasn’t any choice.
NM: Right.
AK: Yeah.
NM: And how did you feel about that at the time?
AK: Not, not too bad actually. Not too bad. I was a little disappointed obviously ‘cause you know the pilot was the thing if you wanted to be in the air force but as it turned out it was, it was a very interesting job. In fact you were, as a navigator you worked damned hard and I think it seemed to suit me. I’m not so sure whether I would have been a good pilot or not. I had, hadn’t really got the feel for it. When I was training I never really felt that I’d got good control of the aircraft. I mean, yes I put it in to spins and stalled and that kind of thing. I could do all that. It was the actual landing and assessment of the height of the aircraft over the runway as I was going in. I did, I did that two or three times reasonably well but obviously not well enough to make the top. Top list. And I was, I just took it. I just took it and that was it. I was going to be a navigator.
NM: Did you actually get to fly solo as a pilot?
AK: No.
NM: During your training?
AK: No. No. I asked to but they said no. [laughs] I asked if I, I asked if I could go. I would have been prepared to go solo but they weren’t prepared to let me [laughs]. When I first met Alan he he said — he showed me a picture of a great heap in the middle of a field. He said, ‘I did that.’ He’d crash landed his Tiger Moth. I thought that was a pretty good [invitation] to a bloke who was going to be your pilot. Yeah. But in fact he was a very very good pilot and when he went back to Adelaide he became part of a display team. Aerobatics etcetera. Yeah. We stayed, we were very great friends, we stayed. We went out. Being in British Airways I could get out to Australia and my brother emigrated to Australia and so, and Alan was in Adelaide. We visited two or three times but he, unfortunately he and Sammy the wireless operator have both died of cancer through being heavy smokers. Some years ago now.
[pause]
AK: I don’t know whether I skipped too briefly over the —
NM: We can go back. That’s fine.
MS: Tony told me that he had to record in the flight which might be like up to six hours or something. Every six minutes he had to re-plot the course so he had to be not —
AK: The longest flight we did was just over seven hours to a place near Leipzig and every six minutes was hard work for seven hours believe me.
NM: Yes. It must be.
[pause]
NM: Your training. Navigation training in South Africa. You say you were there for about a year.
AK: Yes.
NM: What was?
AK: We were flying Ansons piloted by the South African pilots who weren’t that very enthusiastic about us. I think they were the Dutch South Africans.
NM: Right.
AK: Because they weren’t particularly friendly but you just got on and did your navigating really. That was, of course the Anson was a very slow plundering aircraft and I mean, if you couldn’t navigate that you, you were hard up. My log shows me as an average navigator but my instructor told me that I came third out of about two hundred. Average. You had to be average. You could hardly be anything else because you had no, you hadn’t really been tested in a proper service in wartime.
[pause]
AK: I’m trying to think how much I can tell you. I had two pals joined up with me. One of them, it was very tragic, one got blown out of the sky with flak hitting the bomb bay and the other one it was almost the end of the war and you know the Netherlands had the sea wall blasted and they were going in dropping at low level. Dropping supplies, and the engines cut and went in. I don’t. I never found out the facts because his father didn’t want to talk to me about it. He was so upset. He was the only son. And when I went to see him he said, ‘Tony, I can’t talk to you. ’ He was that upset. To go that way of all ways, you know when you’re doing something like that.
NM: Yeah. Humanitarian effort at the end. So you came back from South Africa and you went to Stradishall where you flew.
AK: Yeah we crewed up.
NM: You crewed up.
AK: And then went to Stradishall.
NM: So when you crewed up, you described it already but who chose who? Did you?
AK: The pilot chose his crew.
NM: Ok.
AK: He just went around. He just came up to me and said, ‘Would you like to be, would you like to join me as my navigator?’ And I just said, ‘Yes. Sure.’ Anyway, he seemed perfectly alright and how do you say no? [laughs]
NM: That’s right.
AK: But, yes. It turned out to be a nice combination. We were good friends.
[pause]
NM: From a navigator’s perspective how do you compare the Wellington and the Stirling and the Lancaster?
AK: Wellington was a good aircraft and we didn’t have that much, we didn’t have many hours flying hours with it before we were converted. The Stirling was a menace. Fine for the navigator. Lovely big office. But I expect you’ve probably heard the Stirling had a very high undercarriage and on take-off there was tremendous torque and it wasn’t unusual for the aircraft to take off at forty five degrees to the runway with the torque. And our first operation, with mines on board went, was over the top of a hangar. It was really that bad. When all my, when the tour was over and I was going out to what is now Karachi. What did we go out on? A Stirling. And one or two of us looked at each other and sure enough we went out at about forty five degrees off the runway. It was a menace from that point of view and you were forbidden to be, the front gunner was forbidden to be in that aircraft as it was landing and taking off but particularly landing. Yeah. I did it. It was quite an experience. [laughs]
NM: And how about the Lancaster?
AK: But the Lanc — I mean, you know, you can’t say enough about the Lanc. It was great from my point of view. It as a navigator it was everything, you know, it had everything I needed and as it said it really was the, turned the war in our favour undoubtedly. That aircraft. Massive rate of loss initially on the air raids. I was a little bit later. Missed the worst of it but still lost two pals at the same time and one or two on the squadron but the fact that we could operate over cloud in daylight was quite something. Strangely enough my senior, one of my senior manager in British Airways was a squadron leader. Spitfire pilot. And we became good friends and decided one day we’d have a look at our logbooks and it turned out his squadron escorted us on daylights three times. Yeah. It’s a small world.
NM: Small world. So how would you compare navigating daylight raids versus night raids?
AK: It didn’t make much difference to me. Daylights of course at least I could see, put my head out and see things around us but that wasn’t always clever because it wasn’t funny to see you running into the target with a lot of grey puffs of smoke right over the target we were running into. But no. Mainly you just had to keep your head down and work all the time until, you know. I signed my log off and waited for Alan to touch down. You really had no, no break from it at all. Day or, day or night.
NM: So as a crew who decided to join 149 squadron? Was it, was it Alan the Skipper or was it all of you together?
AK: Well Alan had heard that this was a special squadron and volunteered for it. Yeah. As I say our understanding was it was for dropping people and supplies into Europe. Well we didn’t do that at all. We, of the three operations we did with the Stirling they were all mine laying. The most exciting ones. We did one laying, a timed, we did a timed one from the coast and laid mines in front of the maintenance, submarine maintenance base in the Bay of Biscay. Another one was a low level run in to Brest. Again, dropping, dropping mines. I think, I think that was a night operation. In fact I’m almost sure it was because I seem to remember the flak.
[Pause. Pages turning]
AK: That’s right.
[Pause. Pages turning]
AK: [Can’t find it?] [pause] Yeah. It was night. Four hour thirty job. Four mines we dropped in. Yeah.
NM: So you were initially flying from Feltwell were you before you moved to Methwold?
AK: Methwold. Yes. Initially we, and then, and then we switched to Methwold with the Lancs. Yeah.
NM: So what was the feeling on the squadron when you converted to Lancasters from Stirlings?
AK: Hurray [laughs]. As far as I was concerned — hurray. Yes it was and as I say the Stirling was a lumbering great thing and it was just once we got used to the Lanc we just realised just what a, what a super aircraft they were.
NM: So what was station life like at Methwold? Can you —?
AK: Very good. Very nice atmosphere. We always got our eggs and chips after, after a trip [laughs] and I think it was a dash of rum in our tea as we were being debriefed. There was one, this is a side story altogether. Our squadron. I know we weren’t on it, were targeted. Were sent out to hit a rocket launching site on the French coast. Near Calais I think it was. That proved unsuccessful because that was covered in ten tenths. They couldn’t do it. They were told to return home but jettison the bombs in to The Channel and on the debriefing a rear gunner said that he had seen a light aircraft going into the sea. That was the day that Glen Miller went missing and that was, I would say that’s, that was more or less certainly his aircraft that went in and the pilot should not have been there. He’d been given a different route and he was not, not on that route.
NM: So do you think he was brought down by a jettisoned bomb? Do you think he was hit by a bomb that had been jettisoned? Or —
AK: Must have been. Must have been.
NM: Ok. Interesting.
AK: But an awful lot of bombs were going down at that time in a smallish area. But as I say we were not on that operation. No. When, when we had this mid-air collision of course Alan did a mayday —mayday and this was at night obviously and when he, you know, he landed, they had everything, everything ready for us running alongside us as we landed but we were ok and you know that that was great. They looked after us and debriefed us very carefully on that one.
NM: So what about when you were off duty as a crew? Did you socialise together or where did you go from the station off duty?
AK: Yes. Not a lot but [pause] but Alan, Alan came home with me on leave and we went, we were invited to go to [pause], oh dear. The Wall’s Ice Cream people. Office in Acton where they make ice cream. Pork pies and things like that. Oh dear. My father was aid to the chief executive and we had been invited for a tour to see all the pigs coming in one end and the pies coming out the other sort of thing which is quite an experience to see a big pig being tossed around up in a [pause], and having all the hair come off and cleaned up and you know. I remember I’ve got a vision of that thing happening. Oh dear. At this, at my age this happens to me sometimes. A name won’t come up. It will later on when I’m not thinking about it. So that was, you know, that was one way we socialised and Alan and I were so good friends he actually named his son Tony. Anthony. Yeah. Sammy. Yeah we used to go out. Both of us liked going to ballrooms. Wherever we went we went to the local ballrooms of course. That’s where you met the girls in those days and Sammy and I would go to ballrooms wherever we were. Very much so. Yeah. We were mid-way between Kings Lynn and Cambridge and most of the time if I was on my own I went up to Kings Lynn. Met some, met somebody very nice there who used to be a chauffeur to a bigwig and she turned up at the squadron in this car which was quite sensational [laughs] for us to go off to a dance or something like that. She was very nice. And very strange coincidence when I was at Maripur Airport at Karachi I learned to drive at night on a lorry and the fellow who taught me we started talking and I’m talking about Kings Lynn and I said I said had a very nice partner there. Dot. He said, ‘I know Dot. I know Dot. I know who you’re talking about. ’ Yeah. Amazing.
NM: Great. So were you, were you all commissioned as air crew?
AK: Yes. I was commissioned. Yes.
NM: But the rest of the —
AK: Early on in the squadron. Yeah.
NM: Right. And what about the rest of the crew? Were they all commissioned?
AK: Alan of course was. No. The others. Oh yes — Sammy. Sammy. He also was, the wireless operator, he was commissioned too. The gunners were not.
NM: Right. So on the squadron.
AK: And the engineer.
NM: You had, you were in separate messes and accommodation.
AK: Yes.
NM: Yeah.
AK: Yeah.
[pause]
NM: So of the thirty operations, thirty three operations that you flew, which were the most memorable?
AK: The last one. The one where I had to ask permission to fly across London where we had to divert right across country to St Mawgan’s and ran out of petrol. That was, that’s fairly memorable that one. There was one where we were under the guidance of the master pilot up top and then the bomb aimer was running this one and flares had been dropped by the bloke upstairs and he was saying, ‘I want, right, down the side of the yellow flares. Down the side of the red flares,’ and we were working on the [assumption?] they were dropping and flattening this particular town, or small town which was being used as a maintenance base by the Germans and looking back at that was just a massive circle of flame when we left it. I can still see that one. Yeah. There were pictures of the damage. Mainly, we were mainly, most of them were in the bomb, in the Ruhr area. And you know picture the Ruhr at that time. There wasn’t a roof on anything with the photographs we saw of our targets. Absolutely frightening for them. You knew you were killing civilians but you were also trying to block railroad junctions and ball bearing factories and things like that. We always had a particular target. We were told it was this, that or the other but the last one was as I say very memorable. Most of them as far as I was concerned were sort of routine. We, we got pierced with flak now and again but remember I had my head down working like mad. Only, I could only look out in the daylight at any one point in time to see what was going and as I say it was quite disturbing when you was doing a run up, run up on the target to see the air full of, full of smoke puffs where the exploding anti-aircraft but even that towards the end became less and less. They just hadn’t got the equipment any more. Yeah. But mostly it was, as far as I was concerned just routine, head down and get on with it.
NM: So what happened to the crew at the end of your tour?
AK: Well, Alan of course went back to Adelaide. He was an architect. He built his own home, beautiful home at the back of Adelaide so when you sat in his dining room at night you looked down right across Adelaide and out to the sea. It was lovely. Sammy. His bank manager told him, ‘Sammy. Buy leather’ And of course he came from the Leicester area so Sammy did and he started off with two small operatives making uppers with the leather that he acquired and then went on. He finished up with a factory and making an awful lot of money. Lovely home. Had his own — he had two cars. The very flash one which he didn’t use to go in to work. He had an old, oldish car to go in to work so he didn’t upset his workers. And as I say he had his own horse. But again he died. He died of cancer and we went up for his funeral and his wife had had an oil painting done of Sammy and he was sitting in an arm chair, hand over one side. What was in it? A cigarette. Alan went the same way but I didn’t see him in his last year or two. I hadn’t gone out to. He said, ‘Tony, I’m going to beat this.’ I said, ‘I’m sure you are Alan. ’ But he didn’t. He didn’t beat it and that was ten, fifteen years ago. Both of them. I count myself lucky. I really do. I count myself lucky in every way.
NM: So you went into Transport Command at the end of your —
AK: Yeah.
NM: End of your tour. As a navigator?
AK: No. I was offered it. I applied to BOAC and BEA. BOAC offered me a position as a navigator but I decided there wasn’t a great future. I was offered a five year extension of commission in the RAF but I turned that down. I thought what am I going to do at the end of five years? Everybody else would have got established. So I turned that down. I turned down the BOAC offer because I was pretty sure that with modern developments navigators weren’t going to be required for very long. I think that was, that’s how it turned out. So I went into BEA line and I started work in [pause] at Northolt Airport in the [load?] control office. I answered a vacancy and went up to BEA Line House. Their head office. And into their planning department there. And then of course when we merged and went to Heathrow at a big office there again I applied. I applied for the Manage, Manager Australia became available. Advertised. My brother was in Australia. Alan was in Australia. My father was in New Zealand having remarried a New Zealand lady. I thought I wouldn’t mind that job but I was warned that it was already fixed and so it proved but I gave and I know, although I say it, I did give a very good interview. So much so that they offered me a senior manager’s position as a result of my having applied for Manager Australia. I was given a senior planning. I was called Planning Product Manager for South and East Europe. And that was quite a nice job because that meant I was liaising and negotiating with all the, let’s say, starting from the Netherlands. The Dutch, the Belgian, the French, the Portuguese, Gibraltar Airways. Italian, Greek, Turkish, Maltese, Cyprus and Israel. They were my, if you like, that was my group and I had a team of blokes working with me. Obviously I didn’t, but I did a lot of travelling meeting these airlines. We used to meet once before each season. Just sit down and decide what we thought the traffic was going to be. How much it would grow. And then we would share the capacity between us. We would have a partnership. What they called a pool partnership. So that meant I had a lot of contacts in airlines and if I wanted flight tickets for so and so no problem at all. Just rang up. Equally they wanted it back again but that was a nice liaison and we got on well and it was a very interesting job as you can imagine. Sort of having all, having all those contacts and travelling in some very nice countries. I left. I actually took an early retirement because my wife Jean had contracted MS and at the time they were downsizing and Roy Watts, who was Chief Executive, I had worked directly for Roy Watts at one time and I sent a message out to him saying, ‘If you could give me as good a deal for the people you don’t want I’d like to go,’ and I got away. I came out with a handshake, a good pension and for two years I applied for, I signed on and got the dole for two years. Everybody did. Pilots used to turn up in their blooming great cars to collect their dole money. [laughs] They dropped that but so that I never looked back. I think that was the best thing I ever did was take early retirement. I was fifty seven when I retired. I’d been with them thirty three years and I’ve been retired thirty four.
NM: Yeah.
AK: Thirty four coming up thirty five. Yeah. As I say I count myself very very lucky. The twists and turns of my life. Getting out from my student apprenticeship to go in to the air force. Surviving the air force and getting into Transport Command. All the twists and turns of my life which proved to be very lucky for me. And I mean the worse things that’s happened to me is I had to have a pacemaker because I blacked out a couple of times. I think if I’d blacked out a third time I wouldn’t be here talking to you now.
NM: Ok.
AK: But a section of my heart wasn’t working properly so and that’s been fine. Margaret has proved a very good friend and companion. Yeah. We’re partners at Bridge and long walks and visits aren’t we Margaret? We do things together a lot.
MS: He’s amazing. He goes to the gym. His neighbour says he’s mental. He goes over to the gym, Ruislip gym, two or three times a week. On all the machines. I tell you. He’s amazing. He goes walking across the fields to the coffee place in Ruislip, and stuff.
AK: Well it is the safest way to exercise.
MS: Just amazing.
NM: Keeping active. Good. Good.
AK: I still say I’m lucky.
NM: Yeah.
AK: But er I’ve got two very nice daughters who take, ring up and keep contact. Nice contact. They’re happily married and I’m very happy about that. First marriage for one of them wasn’t so good but from that two nice grandsons but she’s remarried now and very happy too. So that’s nice. To know that they’re ok and doing well. And I want to stay here as long as I can because I can cope on my own. It’s very, it’s not the way I would have liked it but Jean because she had MS lost control of things and I’ve had a lift. This house had to be absolutely suitable for having a lift installed and if you went in to this house you wouldn’t know there was a lift. It’s in the corner. An L shaped kitchen and it’s in the far corner and the carers could wheel Jean in and take her up. Bring her down again. Now that occasionally has proved very useful to me. A — I never carry heavy things up and down stairs. The lift does that for me and I had a knee operation a year or two ago. Again the lift got me up and down. So I’m not moving. This has got, this has got the right sort of facilities for me. No.
NM: Do you keep in touch with the RAF at all through Associations or reunions?
AK: No. No. I’m not a bloke for doing that sort of thing. I didn’t apply for my medals at all until my daughters said, ‘Dad we’d like them.’ And the reason I hadn’t is I was so cheesed off with the attitude towards the air force. There was no Air Force Bomber Command medal. And also they seemed ashamed of the air force. They shouldn’t have been ashamed of the people who had carried out their orders. If you had to be ashamed of anybody it was the people who picked the targets that caused the feeling. I think the politicians were ashamed and they didn’t want to make a fuss of the air force. Anyway, in the end I did send for my medals. They’re in boxes upstairs. And then I applied again when they finally did something for Bomber Command and now I’ve got a metal strip across my medals saying Bomber Command but as I say they’re all in boxes upstairs. I’m not a bloke for walking around with medals and going on marches and that kind of thing. Celebration. So I’ve not kept in touch at all.
NM: So when, when you look back in your time in Bomber Command what are your, what are your main reflections as you look back on your time in Bomber Command?
AK: Well [pause] it is as I said just now it is each twist and turn unplanned. I hadn’t a — when I left initially when I was sixteen I hadn’t have the faintest idea what I wanted to do until this chance came up. I saw this, you know application for student entry apprentice and I sat for it and passed. And I say from that it so happened I started on the day after war started and the apprenticeship tuition was not developing the way I wanted, that suited me at all. So I got out. One twist of my life. Well second twist because I went for this. I hadn’t the faintest idea of what I wanted to do. I thought well I might as well go on and see how I do. Then there’s the twist of having had enough of that. Not wanting to be behind a draughting board, drawing board the rest of my life. Getting out of the air force. Possibly not being a pilot but a navigator might well have saved my life. I spent a year out in South Africa. Very pleasant. Came back and crewed up and got away with what I’d been telling you, telling you about. The life there. And then the twist at the end of it of deciding that there’s got to be a future in civil aviation so applying for Transport Command. From there I was in to British European Airways before my demob leave had finished ‘cause they were recruiting heavily at the time and because of my experience of running a unit out in Maripur that got me straight in. And that was my career for the rest of my life. So, you know, twists and turns. I keep saying to myself and anybody who asks I have been very lucky.
MS: One thing you haven’t yet confessed is what you didn’t confess when you first applied to the RAF which you told me about which was that as a child you suffered very badly from any sort of travel sickness to the extent that you were sick if you went on a bus and, and really really suffered and that when you applied to the RAF you did not mention, you weren’t asked about it and so you didn’t mention it and as you’ve told me you were always sick on every flight. It became routine.
AK: Nearly every flight. Nearly every flight I was airsick. Sometimes during the flight but more often than not when we were coming in to land. The aircraft was getting warmer. It was under manual control now instead of George. And very often I would be airsick before we touched down and the ground crew made comments about this when we took them all out to dinner at the end of our tour. We took them all out for a meal and a thank you and they passed remark about somebody always leaving, leaving a bag for them to clear out of the aircraft. But fortunately I was young and fit enough that I could be sick and get back and carry on working but had the aircraft er had the air force known I suffered from air sickness I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have made it. Yeah.
NM: So what did the rest of the crew —?
AK: I’m still suffering from travel sickness even now. It wasn’t long. I can’t stand coaches and I have been, I have been sick quite recently on a coach. It still, still bothers me a little. I mean, I can drive all over the place and not be ill and if I’m in the front seat of a car no problem as a passenger but coaches, buses, and the Tube sometimes. The stop start of the Tube it it’s a bit jerky during the journey and a long journey. We went up to town recently on the Piccadilly Line. When I came home, when I came back I was headachy and really feeling a bit sick but I wasn’t but I get very hot, starting to sweat and I know that’s a sure sign that if I don’t get off the bus or whatever I’m going to be ill. Yeah. But it didn’t affect my ability as a navigator. Fortunately, as I say, I could be ill and just get straight back and carry on working.
NM: And the rest of the crew were fine when they realised they had an air sick navigator were they?
AK: Pardon?
NM: The rest of your crew were fine with you when they realised they’ got an air sick navigator. Were they?
AK: It was too late then. We were all crewed up. But it didn’t bother them at all. No. They weren’t bothered. It was the ground crew that were bothered. They had to. It was always in a bag.
NM: Yeah.
AK: I mean they never had to clean the aircraft from that point of view so it was alright. I always made sure I always had a bag with me so I could be ok from that point of view. Yeah. But as a child I couldn’t go two stations on the tube. Dreadful. My father told me it was all in the mind but it actually it wasn’t all in the mind [laughs]. Far from it. I don’t know what. I can’t think of anything in particular. Margaret. I talked a lot to Margaret about it and she made a lot of notes. I don’t think there’s really anything that I haven’t mentioned.
MS: I just find it really interesting reading the logbook. Every detail. Exactly how many bombs. What weight on ever mission. Very detailed.
AK: Yes I’ve always recorded the bomb load. Yeah. Have you seen one of these?
NM: Yeah. I’ve seen one. But I’d love to look at yours at some point.
AK: Yeah. I did that for my own interest. I think the biggest bomb we carried was a four hundred towards the end. Oh yeah here’s one. When we went to Homberg. One four thousand and fourteen five hundreds. So that was a fair load. That, the, I think yeah we carried a four thousand. Both times to Homberg. We bombed that two days running. I don’t know what we were after on that one. Can’t remember.
MS: I found it interesting when Tony was explaining what “gardening” meant and “vegetables” and things like that but there’s one reference. A few references to something. What was it ASR.
AK: Oh yes.
MS: And you couldn’t remember what it was and we looked it up online and it was Air Supply Research and that was in the Stirlings over the North Sea.
AK: But that would be one of the drops.
MS: Right. But I think at that time they were looking to find ways of dropping equipment and possibly agents and so on and it was, there was a lot of practices over the North Sea.
NM: Ok.
AK: Funnily enough the last three trips we did were all with one four thousand and fourteen five hundreds. They were — the last one was Osterfeld on that section there. Oh no. No. We did a lot more. A lot more using four thousand. I hadn’t realised how many times. [pause] Yeah. Six one thousands, six five hundreds, four two fifties. Where was that too? [Warwinkle?] wherever that is. Same load to Cologne. One four thousand, six one thousands Bonn. Yeah. It was all, most, the majority was around the Ruhr by daylight.
NM: By daylight. That’s where your Gee could work best isn’t it?
AK: GH. Yeah.
NM: Yeah.
AK: Yeah.
NM: What was the first? What was the longest raid? The furthest east you got. Did you get beyond Gee range?
AK: That long one. I can’t remember.
MS: Was it Leipzig?
AK: I think I would most certainly would have had it. Just let’s have a look at that. Merzenberg which is brackets Leipzig.
[pause]
NM: That’s a long way east isn’t it?
AK: I’m trying to see when I had GH come in? I think I had GH by then? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah I had GH then. I’m sure that would be ok.
NM: Yeah. Ok. Thank you very much.
AK: Ok. Well I hope it’s of interest.
NM: Absolutely.
AK: Nothing in particular, you know. Not like the bombing — bombing dams and things like that but it was still dodgy at times.
NM: Absolutely.
AK: You just got on with it though. We were all daft and stupid [laughs] It was never going to happen to us sort of thing and you just got on with it. It was sickening in the way as I say I lost, lost two pals. Yeah. But that was life.
NM: Well I appreciate you talking to us this way. It’s been very helpful.
AK: Yeah.
NM: So the interview will get transcribed.
AK: Yeah. I’m sure.
NM: And it will —
AK: Edit that down.
NM: And it will, it will go in to the digital archives of the —
AK: Go to?
NM: The digital archives of the Centre that’s being built now in Lincoln now. It’s being opened later this year in fact.
AK: Oh yeah.
NM: In fact there was an opening of the, there’s a Spire which is the same height as the length of the Lancaster wing.
AK: Where’s this?
NM: This is up near Lincoln.
AK: Oh yes.
NM: And there is going to be a Commemoration Centre, a museum and an Education Centre.
AK: Yeah. Yeah, I’m a bit chuffed about that. I mean to commemorate the Lincoln squadrons. What about the others?
NM: But this is for the whole of Bomber Command.
AK: Norfolk and area.
NM: This is going to be for the whole of Bomber Command. So it happens to be in Lincoln because Lincolnshire obviously —
AK: I thought it was just a Lincoln memorial.
NM: It started off I think as a Lincoln memorial but it’s now, it’s now called the International Bomber Command Centre.
AK: Oh. Hooray for that.
NM: And the Memorial Walls have got the names of all fifty five thousand five hundred and seventy three names of those that were killed in Bomber Command.
AK: Oh so I shall see my friend’s name up there.
NM: Your friend will be there. That’s right. And the Spire was opened.
AK: Oh I didn’t know that. That’s news. I was really cheesed off when they talked about a memorial for Lincoln. What about us?
NM: Yeah. That was a hundred and twenty five thousand in total wasn’t there all the way from Yorkshire through to where you are? I’ve got a leaflet which I can give you about the Centre.
AK: Sorry?
NM: I’ve got a leaflet I can give you about the Centre.
AK: Oh can you. Oh great.
NM: Ok.
AK: Of course it wasn’t long ago that we had that memorial up in Regent’s Park.
NM: Green.
MS: Green Park.
NM: Green Park.
AK: Yeah. I have seen it and I think it’s good. Great. But it took a long time to come didn’t it?
NM: It did. That’s right. I have seen it too. It’s —
AK: I’m still not, I’m still not wearing my medals.
NM: Fair enough. Absolutely.
AK: The girls can have those.
NM: But when the Centre’s opened later this year you might be able to find the opportunity to go and have a look.
AK: Yes. Well we’re going up that way, or planning to aren’t we? Possibly when your brother comes over.
MS: Yeah.
AK: That way. Going north.
MS: Yeah but I don’t think that will be via this.
NM: Yeah.
MS: And it’s later in the year. You reckon maybe the autumn or —
NM: Something like that I think. I’m not quite sure of the date myself but yeah. It’s being built as we speak.
MS: Really.
NM: Yeah. Yeah. The Spire was opened last October and there was a big event and veterans were invited back and this tall Spire was opened.
MS: Oh really.
NM: Yeah. Oh yeah.
MS: Wow.
NM: So now you’re on their database. They know about you now and they will get this.
AK: Oh God.
NM: They will get this recording.
AK: Will I see any of this? Will I have a copy of anything?
NM: If you want a copy of the interview then absolutely they will make one available to you.
AK: Ok.
NM: Would you like that?
AK: Yeah. But the whole thing will come out what? As a book?
NM: The. Well no this is going in to the digital archives of the museum.
AK: Oh I see.
NM: So people when they go to this museum.
AK: Yeah.
NM: And the Education Centre and for research as well if they come across the story of 149 squadron - Tony Kent. They may be able to then listen through headphones.
AK: Oh. I see.
NM: To some of the interview we have just conducted.
AK: Right.
NM: Hear your story directly. And you’re entitled to a copy of this on a disc so if you or Margaret.
MS: I think Tony’s daughter’s would be really —
NM: Daughters.
MS: Really thrilled to have a, they’ve been on at him for quite a while to sort of try and extract information from him [laughs]
NM: So this is, this is ideal.
MS: I think they will be really really happy with that.
NM: Ideal. Yeah. Ok. So once again thank you very much. Much appreciated.
AK: Pleasure. Well I hope it was good enough for you.
NM: It, well I can tell you it absolutely was. Fascinating to listen to. Thank you very much.
[Recording paused]
AK: Hanging down out of the aircraft and Alan coming home he would get right down very low until Sammy couldn’t carry on with his wireless. All of a sudden it went blank and what he’d done he’d flown down so close to the sea that the aerial had gone in to the sea. That was one trick he had. But another one was very naughty actually. He was flying low and he went over the hedges just, and over the top of a Flying Fortress as the crew were getting on it and they were, two or three of them threw themselves off the wing as he came over the edge of the airfield and there was this. How he didn’t get done for that I really don’t know because actually they could have broken their legs, back or anything, jumping off the wing but they did. They just jumped as this Lanc came over the hedges of their property. Don’t know if it was Lakenheath but it was coming in from the coast at low level. Yeah. When we finished our tour and came back from St Mawgan again Alan did his low level run across the airfield with Sammy the wireless operator firing off verey cartridges on the way and, ‘A trifle over the top old man,’ [laughs] came from the control. But when I told you that I had that snowing effect on GH screen. When we landed the senior bloke in the maintenance bay he said, ‘That was pretty good,’ he said, ‘But did you realise that your starboard inner was not firing properly?’ And I think that was causing trouble.
NM: Oh.
AK: That it wasn’t firing cleanly and that’s why I was getting snow effect.
NM: Interference.
AK: But when we got up in the air it settled down. But he could tell that one engine wasn’t, wasn’t running quite true. Yeah. But that was what caused me to think there was a fault in the GH set but it wasn’t. Fortunately as I say when we got into the air it cleared but we got permission to fly across London. Probably the only Lanc that’s ever flown across the middle of London. But it was ok. We joined up with the gaggle. Night time gaggle was murder really. In a way. I’m quite sure that we lost a few aircraft because you’re not flying in formation. You’re flying along a track. You and a, you and a few dozen other aircraft. And our wing commander came back with a five hundred pound through his tail. And I’m quite sure that one or two aircraft must have been hit and blown out doing that ‘cause you just did not know. The only way you knew you were anywhere near aircraft was when you got a bump from the slipstream of the aircraft ahead of you.
NM: Yeah.
AK: Because there were no lights on at all. It wasn’t, it wasn’t the cleverest way to go but it was probably the safest to go but no lights on but you just didn’t know who was around you. Where they were. When you were running over the target dropping your bombs and there might have been somebody just about a hundred feet above you also doing the same thing. And I’m quite sure it happened. I’m sure it happened. Well as I say if the wing commander can come back. You see if I can come back with a five hundred pounder what else is happening? You know. That was a bit dodgy.
NM: So did Alan always come back low level?
AK: As often as he — yeah. Very often. Not always but he did like his low level flying. Yeah. And he loved to upset Sammy with getting the aerial going into the sea. Yeah. He liked his low level. But that was very naughty going across an airfield. I don’t think Alan realised he was going across an airfield until he went over the hedge kind of thing and there they were all gearing up to go on a, on a raid. He was very very lucky I think. He could, he could have been in serious trouble.
NM: Can I just take a look at the logbook please? Can I look at the logbook?
AK: Yeah. Sure.
NM: Lovely. Thank you. Because another thing the Centre would like to do if you’re willing is if I can put down on the list that you have this, you have this logbook.
AK: Yes.
NM: And they will arrange for it to be scanned and digitised to go part, as part of the content of the centre. If you’re agreeable to that.
AK: You want to take it away.
NM: No. No. No. No.
AK: Oh.
NM: I won’t take it away. What I’ll do is I’ll let them know that you’ve got the logbook and then if you’re happy they will contact you.
AK: No reason why not.
NM: Someone will come and scan it. They have scanning to quite a high standard.
MS: Do they?
NM: They have people to do this and they trained people to do this.
MS: Oh really. It’s so different now isn’t it with the museums. Everything being digitised. I mean you know like fifty years ago that particular log book would have probably been on display.
NM: Yes. Behind a glass case.
MS: And now you’re saying, so what they’re saying Tony they scan it. Like photograph the whole thing and you will retain the logbook but they will have this, this record which is sort of in digital form.
NM: Correct.
MS: Presumably on screen in the museum. Would it be, Nigel? So you can look at the logbook on screen.
NM: I assume. Absolutely.
MS: Yeah.
NM: Yeah. It will be online.
MS: It will be on screen. Like on a computer thing.
AK: Well they won’t screen everything because training’s not very interesting. Only the ops.
NM: No. No. They will scan.
AK: Scan the whole thing.
NM: The whole thing because they’re looking at the total story around Bomber Command. The people, the training, the aircraft, the operations, people’s story, people who are affected by the bombing as well as those who took part in it. Ground crew. All the, all the, so it’s, and I’ve got the leaflet here. I can —
AK: When we were going out to South Africa we went out from Greenock in convoys but the sea was so rough and we had to go so slow because we had to. The convoy went as fast as the slowest ship. Propellers were coming out of the water.
NM: It was that rough.
AK: It was. I didn’t get off my back. As a travel, somebody who couldn’t travel well.
NM: Oh dear.
AK: I did not get off my back. We were down on hammocks. You know, deep in the blasted ship and I just didn’t eat or move for about three days. I was very ill.
MS: Bay of Biscay is notorious anyway.
AK: I got my sea legs eventually and enjoyed the sunshine on the way down. Down to, well we went to Cape Town. Well we went to Freetown first. Gibraltar, Freetown, Cape Town. That was the run.
MS: Freetown. My dad was based in Freetown. He was in West Africa quite a lot I remember and Freetown was one of the places and then there was Liberia.
AK: For all I was seasick.
MS: And a lot of that stuff.
AK: And you can be so sick that in the end it hurts and it hurts like hell if you have to go on too long. When we, when we went into Gibraltar they came out and turned into the Mediterranean at night. Waited till night, turned and then came out and down the Atlantic to Cape Town.
MS: To look as if it was crossing into the Mediterranean and then came out.
AK: Yeah. So people watching from the shore would think that we’d gone into the Mediterranean and then with everything, all the lights turned off etcetera they turned around and went out and down to Freetown. All trying to deceive.
NM: Yeah.
AK: There was a time when the destroyers who were escorting us they were letting off depth charges way out on our starboard side at one time but we didn’t have any, didn’t strike any trouble. But as I say I got my sea legs. That’s where I started playing Bridge. They let us sit up on deck stripped to the waist in the tropical sunshine. No wonder my skin suffered a bit. Definitely overcooked.
MS: ‘Cause there were so many American bases weren’t there in was it Norfolk, Suffolk or East Anglia?
AK: Well Lakenheath was the big one. Lakenheath was the big one.
MS: Was it? Right.
AK: That wasn’t very far from us.
MS: Because Nigel you were Bushey. Lincoln’s Field in Bushey, that was, wasn’t that where they organised the Berlin Airlift from?
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 Anthony William Kent
Creator
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Nigel Moore
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-02-02
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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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AKentAW170202, PKentAW1701
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:18:10 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
South Africa
England--Norfolk
South Africa--Cape Town
Description
An account of the resource
Anthony Kent was born in Wood Green, London, and his family settled in Eltham. Tony started an apprenticeship with Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, at the start of the war and worked as an apprentice draughtsman for eighteen months before volunteering for the RAF. After initial training, he sailed to South Africa to train as a navigator. He completed his training at RAF Stradishall, initially flying Wellingtons, then Stirlings, before joining 149 Squadron at RAF Feltwell where his first operation was mine laying at the Bay of Biscay. After his third mine laying operation, they converted to Lancasters at RAF Methwold. Tony recalls returning to the station after an operation and a bomb dropping to the ground when the doors opened, as it had frozen in place, causing the ground crew to dive to the floor. He describes the nearest they came to ‘not making it’ when a Polish aircraft collided with the tailplane during a training exercise. They landed safely but the Polish aircraft crashed. He describes the use of Gee and Gee-H, and the perils of bombing while aircraft above dropped bombs at the same time. On his last operation, the aircraft was late leaving due to a fault, so Tony requested permission to fly across London and catch up with the bomber stream. This was granted and he believes it was the only Lancaster permitted to do so. As they returned, they were diverted to RAF St Mawgan and as the aircraft reached the end of the runway, all four engines stopped because they had run out of fuel. After completing thirty operations (mostly during daylight) he was transferred to Transport Command, and after the war worked for British European Airways.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Nick Cornwell-Smith
149 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Gee
Lancaster
memorial
mid-air collision
mine laying
navigator
perception of bombing war
RAF Feltwell
RAF Methwold
RAF Stradishall
Stirling
training
Wellington
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Doxsey, JA
Description
An account of the resource
Nine items. The collection concerns Warrant Officer John Alfred Doxsey (b. 1921, 630441 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, photographs and documents.
He flew operations as an air gunner with 149 Squadron before serving with No.3 aircraft Delivery Unit in North Africa.
A sub-collection photograph album contains pictures of aircraft, people and places in Europe and Africa during and after the Second World War.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Nigel Doxsey and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
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2018-09-20
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.
Identifier
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Doxsey, JA
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Bestselling author of FIGHTER BOYS
[inserted] J.A. DOXSEY [/inserted]
PATRICK BISHOP
[inserted] Glasinfry [sic], Bangor, Gwynedd [/inserted]
Bomber Boys
[inserted] 1939 – [/inserted]
Fighting Back 1940 - 1945
[page break]
[sleeve notes]
[page break]
BOMBER BOYS
[inserted] J A Doxsey
Glasinfryn 2007.
[underlined] was in: [/underlined]
B Flight 149 Squadron
3 Group Bomber Command
Mildenhall, Suffolk.
Sept 1939 – Sept 1940.
(Front gunner & 2nd WOP with B flt commander S/ldr Paul Harris, then ditto & 1st WOP with F/O Robertson RCAF (Canadian), was on daylight raids on Dec 3 & 18, 1939. A bullet [indecipherable word] off the sole of my RH flying boot of[?] Dec 18 I clipped my foot (I did not go sick" but put TCP on it!) The above raids were on the German Fleet at Heligoland & Wilhelmshaven harbours On 1/1/40 3 of us were out again in day light (raiding German fleet) & we were the only aircraft to return. I lost my friend Denis Grove on that one. His mother wrote to me asking if I thought he would survive as a prisoner. But I had to tell her "No".
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
Cover of book - Bomber Boys
Description
An account of the resource
Cover with photograph of six aircrew standing and sitting in front of a bomber. Inside on front page, a brief handwritten account of John Doxsey's service on 149 Squadron September 1939 - September 1940. Mentions his crew positions and two pilots with whom he served. Recounts daylight raid to Heligoland and Wilhelmshaven on 3 and 18 December 1939 when bullet took of the sole of one flying boot and clipped his foot. Mentions further operation on 1 January 1940 from which his was only aircraft of three to return.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
P Bishop - book author
J Doxsey handwritten note
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2007
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939-09
1940-09
1939-12-03
1939-12-18
1940-01-01
1940-01-02
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Great Britain
England--Suffolk
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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One hardback book dust jacket
Identifier
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MDoxseyJA630441-180920-020001, MDoxseyJA630441-180920-020002
Contributor
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Sue Smith
149 Squadron
3 Group
aircrew
bombing
RAF Mildenhall
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1560/35630/BMillingtonRWestonFv1.2.pdf
8f0a70969cd59c55fef62f5a0d5a383d
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
Weston, Fred
F Weston
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
2016-11-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Weston, F
Description
An account of the resource
20 items. The collection concerns Fred Weston DFC (1916 - 2012, 126909 Royal Air Force) and contains documents and photographs. He flew operations as an air gunner with 101 and 620 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Catherine Millington and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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
Air Gunner
Based around the WWII service of Fred Weston DFC RAFVR
Description
An account of the resource
A biography of Fred. In addition it includes histories of aircraft and squadrons he served in, Details are included of airfields he served at. Additionally there are biographies of various servicemen associated with Fred's squadrons and service.
At the end there is a biography of the officer in charge of Arnhem, Lt-Gen Sir Frederick Browning and his wife Daphne du Maurier.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Roger Millington
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2005-01
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Cambridge
England--Letchworth
Wales--Bridgend
Wales--Penrhos
Egypt--Heliopolis (Extinct city)
Singapore
France--Cherbourg
Netherlands--Eindhoven
France--Brest
France--Boulogne-sur-Mer
France--Dunkerque
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
France--Brest
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Berlin
Italy--Turin
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
France--L'Isle-Adam
France--Quiberon
France--Boulogne-Billancourt
Germany--Essen
France--Le Creusot
Germany--Leverkusen
France--Caen
Netherlands--Arnhem
Norway
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Belgium--Brussels
England--Rochester (Kent)
Northern Ireland--Belfast
England--Longbridge
France--Arras
England--Darlington
Italy--Genoa
England--Longbridge
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
Europe--Frisian Islands
Germany--Peenemünde
Germany--Nuremberg
Italy--Sicily
France--Normandy
Netherlands--Arnhem
Netherlands--Eindhoven
Netherlands--Nijmegen
Wales--Pwllheli
England--Yorkshire
England--Leicester
England--Sunderland (Tyne and Wear)
Scotland--Edinburgh
England--Rochford
England--London
England--Cornwall (County)
Scotland--Ayr
England--Friston (East Sussex)
England--Gravesend (Kent)
England--West Malling
England--Hailsham
England--Yelverton (Devon)
England--Bentwaters NATO Air Base
England--Great Dunmow
England--Heacham
England--Weybridge
Wales--Hawarden
England--Blackpool
England--Old Sarum (Extinct city)
England--Kent
England--Folkestone
England--Hambleton (North Yorkshire)
England--York
Scotland--Scottish Borders
England--Cambridge
England--Thurleigh
England--Darlington
England--Hitchin
England--Lancashire
Italy
France
Egypt
Germany
Belgium
Netherlands
Great Britain
Yemen (Republic)
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Bedfordshire
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Devon
England--Durham (County)
England--Sussex
England--Essex
England--Herefordshire
England--Norfolk
England--Suffolk
England--Surrey
England--Wiltshire
England--Worcestershire
England--Leicestershire
England--Swindon (Wiltshire)
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Coastal Command
Royal Air Force. Fighter Command
British Army
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Royal Canadian Air Force
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Free French Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Personal research
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
85 sheets
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
BMillingtonRWestonFv1
1 Group
100 Group
101 Squadron
103 Squadron
105 Squadron
114 Squadron
139 Squadron
141 Squadron
148 Squadron
149 Squadron
162 Squadron
1657 HCU
1665 HCU
18 Squadron
180 Squadron
2 Group
208 Squadron
214 Squadron
239 Squadron
3 Group
301 Squadron
304 Squadron
342 Squadron
6 Group
6 Squadron
620 Squadron
7 Squadron
75 Squadron
8 Group
9 Squadron
90 Squadron
97 Squadron
99 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
air gunner
aircrew
B-17
B-24
B-25
bale out
Beaufighter
Blenheim
bombing
Bombing and Gunnery School
Boston
Caterpillar Club
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
crash
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
ditching
evading
final resting place
Gee
Gneisenau
H2S
Halifax
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Horsa
Hurricane
Ju 87
killed in action
Lancaster
Lysander
Manchester
Me 109
Meteor
mid-air collision
mine laying
Mosquito
navigator
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
P-51
Pathfinders
prisoner of war
propaganda
radar
RAF Bicester
RAF Biggin Hill
RAF Boscombe Down
RAF Bottesford
RAF Bourn
RAF Bradwell Bay
RAF Bramcote
RAF Chedburgh
RAF Chipping Warden
RAF Coltishall
RAF Drem
RAF Driffield
RAF Duxford
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Evanton
RAF Fairford
RAF Finningley
RAF Great Massingham
RAF Halfpenny Green
RAF Harwell
RAF Hendon
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Honington
RAF Hornchurch
RAF Horsham St Faith
RAF Kenley
RAF Lakenheath
RAF Leconfield
RAF Leuchars
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Little Snoring
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Manston
RAF Marham
RAF Martlesham Heath
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Newmarket
RAF Newton
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Oakington
RAF Penrhos
RAF Pershore
RAF Ridgewell
RAF Shepherds Grove
RAF Sleap
RAF Stradishall
RAF Tangmere
RAF Tempsford
RAF Tilstock
RAF Tuddenham
RAF Waterbeach
RAF West Raynham
RAF Woodbridge
RAF Wratting Common
RAF Wyton
Resistance
Scharnhorst
Special Operations Executive
Spitfire
Stirling
target indicator
Tiger force
training
Typhoon
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1224/3356/ABrownJ170118.2.mp3
a8113fdf85b50ce4324c3cbdb34aa73f
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
Brown, Jeff
Jeffrey Brown
J Brown
Description
An account of the resource
35 items. One oral history interview with Flying Officer Jeff Brown (b. 1925, 2205595, Royal Air Force), his log book, service material and photographs including 16 pictures of B-29s. He flew operations as a Flight Sergeant air gunner with 576 Squadron from RAF Fiskerton towards the end of the war and took part in Operation Manna.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Jeff Brown and catalogued by Peter Adams.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-01-18
2017-01-31
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
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Brown, J-3
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SP: So this is Susanne Pescott I am interviewing Jeffrey Brown today for the International Bomber Command Centres Digital Archive, we are at Jeff’s home and it’s 18th January 2017, so first of all Jeff thank you for allowing us to talk to you today and also present is Yvonne O’Rourke Jeff’s daughter. So Jeff do you want to tell me about your early life before you joined the RAF.
JB: Well after school when I was fifteen I became an apprentice electrician in the local bus depot working on buses and trolley buses and then when the, I was always interested in aircraft model aircraft my neighbour friend and I used to make and fly model aircraft er we had a good place to fly them because across the way from where we lived was the Ashton Golf Course so when nobody was playing golf it was our flying area [laughs], so when the Air Training Corps started I think it was 1941 I joined that and er got interested and of course the war was on then and er there was the possibility of later after a year or two I might be called up to go in the services so er at that time if you waited until you were called up at eighteen every tenth conscriptee was sent to work down the coal mines, it was a scheme developed by a Government Minister called Ernest Bevan because they were short of miners, and if you were unlucky enough to be caught in that you had to go and work in the coal industry now I didn’t want that I wanted to join the air force so to be sure of going in the air force at seventeen and a half you could volunteer for the air force and you went and had a medical and aptitude test and if you were accepted for training as air crew you were given an air force number, you were paid for the days you were at this centre which was at Warrington, and you were in the air force but you were then sent home on what was called deferred service until you were eighteen and at eighteen you could be called at any time to start serving properly and this ensured that when you registered at eighteen they couldn’t send you down the coal mines because you were already in the air force that was one way of avoiding coal mining [laughs]. So I was accepted initially to train as a wireless operator air gunner and at about eighteen two three months I was finally called up to serve and er in those days air crew trainees the first place you reported to was Lords Cricket Ground in London which was rather [laughs] an unusual place to start service and er there you were kitted all your equipment had medicals and so on and then after a few weeks you were sent out to start your training properly, after about three months of this er which was largely basic air force training and learning to receive and send Morse Code er we were called to a meeting by a group captain and he said ‘I’m sorry to inform you that we have so many wireless operators under training we cannot cope with the numbers so we are going to have to suspend your training may be for six months possibly indefinitely’ but he said ‘we are at the moment of short of trainee air gunners anyone wishing to change can do so by leaving a name now’ so most of us being young and daft said ‘oh yes we want to be air gunners’ so we started training again as air gunners, er the basic training was done at Bridgnorth in Shropshire er after that we were sent to an Air Gunners School at RAF Dalcross near Inverness, we trained there for about three or four months and then we qualified as air gunners er the training was done in Ansom aircraft er we flew with another aircraft pulling a target which was a long canvas sleeve and you fired ammunition which had been dipped in paint, the nose of the bullets were dipped in paint, so if you hit this white canvas sleeve besides making a hole in it it left a little colour smear this way the scores could be counted afterwards and er we did this all types of different exercises out over the sea the Moray Firth er following that I was sent on leave and then posted to Operational Training Unit which was at um a place called Westcott and there you were crewed up in a crew, um it was a rather haphazard method all the different air crew categories were put into one large hall and told ‘find yourself a crew’ and I wandered round a bit lost and I was approached a a little chap an air gunner he said ‘have you got a crew yet?’ I said ‘no’ ‘well would you like to join ours?’ and I said ‘yes I would’ and that was how I was crewed up, er my pilot was a New Zealand lad flight sergeant and the rest of the crew were all English boys, so [coughs] we were flying in Wellington aircraft we did various exercises all kinds of things for the different trades, navigation training, bombing training, gunnery training and so on and um after this we were sent to er what was it called Heavy Conversion Unit this was at RAF Bottesford in Nottinghamshire where we were introduced to the Lancaster bomber and also another member joined the crew this was the flight engineer, er in our case our flight engineer was also a pilot this had happened because they had a large surplus of pilots and to give them something to do they trained some of them er as engineers so we had two pilots in the crew which was handy, er we did this training again doing all kinds of exercises including the dreaded corkscrew evasive manoeuvre which was quite horrendous, and from there we were posted to RAF Fiskerton to join 576 Squadron this was in April 1945 towards the end of the war, we did further er what you might call squadron training for a week or two before we were considered qualified to go on operations and the big thing at that moment was called Operation Manna this was dropping food supplies in Holland because it was an area which had been cut off by the advance of the armies and in the last six months or so of the war there had been dreadful food shortages and people were dying of starvation thousands and thousands of Dutchmen died through lack of food so we and the American Air Force were tasked to drop food supplies for them and the area was still under German occupation er a rather dodgy truce was organised with the Germans a kind of er ‘don’t shoot at us we won’t shoot at you’ but it was a little bit of a flimsy thing and several aircraft were shot at ours luckily wasn’t but one American aircraft was shot down and the crew killed by the German Occupation Forces, so I did five of these trips er mainly to Rotterdam and we dropped these food supplies er they were simply bundled into the bomb bay of the aircraft and they weren’t dropped on parachutes they just opened the bomb bay doors and everything fell out in a huge cloud tins and boxes and sacks and all kinds of food which were collected by the Dutch authorities and then distributed to the people who needed it, er we did the last flight on 8th May 1945 which was VE Day, the war ended on that day. After the war we continued flying doing various exercises er one thing we did was to fly to Brussels and bring home Army personnel who had been prisoners of war, another thing we did was to fly to Naples in Italy and bring home again Army personnel who were due for early release from the forces er we continued to do this for about I think four or five months and then the big run down of Bomber Command started the squadrons were disbanded and we were all thrown on the scrap heap not really knowing what would happen to us, but um eventually much against my wishes I was sent on a course to be an equipper demanding and issuing supplies and in this role I was finally posted to a small radar unit in Germany er initially in the British zone of Germany and then er eventually in the American zone and finally in the French occupation zone and er I was there for two and a half years something like that, during that time we had on this little unit when I say little there were a total of about thirty five personnel you could tell how small it was we required an interpreter somebody who spoke German and French because we had the contact with the French Occupation Forces and a young lady called Dorothy Bush who lived nearby she was the daughter of the local school teacher became our interpreter and er many well not many years several years later Dorothy and I were married [very emotional].
SP: Do you want to stop?
JB: Right after some time on this small radar station in Germany I found that you could er re-engage you could sign up for regular service and that would be as air crew to be flying again so I applied for this er I was sent to London to have a medical examinations and so on and I was accepted to fly again as an air gunner but before you could start the flying training er as gunners we had to be trained with er er sort of auxiliary trade and we did this at RAF Kirkham near Preston it was a school of armament trades we learned about all the armament equipment in use at that time in the RAF guns and mines and all the er ancillary equipment, and then we had to do a course at a place called Wellesbourne Mountford on aerial photography that took another couple of months or so so we were quite highly qualified in the trades by that time and then we were posted to RAF Marham in 1950 to join 149 Squadron which was reforming it was the first squadron in the RAF to be equipped with American B29 Super Fortress Bombers the type of bombers that the Americans had used in the Pacific to bomb Japan and drop the atom bomb with so we did this course at RAF Marham and then we had to move out and make room for the next squadron to come in and do the course and we were sent to RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire which at that time was shut down and we arrived there but we didn’t have any aircraft because in the meantime the war in Korea had started and the Americans stopped the supply of B29’s to the RAF because they wanted them for themselves [laughs] so we sat at Coningsby fully trained squadron, air crew and ground crew, for six weeks and the only aircraft we had was an Oxford and a Tiger Moth [laughs] had the Russians known they could have walked in [laughs]. So finally one B29 arrived and our crew had the honour of making the first B29 flight from RAF Coningsby er in I think it was November 1950 er so eventually more aircraft came and the squadron got rolling and operating as it should do and er we were there for a couple of years doing all kinds of exercises, some very very long range flights lasting fifteen sometimes as long as eighteen, nineteen hours without landing or refuelling and then of course jet aircraft began to enter service and on these aircraft no requirement for air gunners so once again facing redundancy, several of the chaps applied to retrain and were accepted as navigators, pilots, so I thought I’m going to have a go at this so I applied and after the interviews and medicals I was accepted for pilot training but by this time the RAF had decided that if you were pilot or navigator you had to be commissioned not like in the old war time days where you could have sergeant pilots etcetera so we had do to a commissioning course which lasted about five months at Jurby in the Isle of Man, having qualified for that and gained a commission I was fortunate to be chosen with a small group of chaps to go and do our flying training in Canada under a NATO training scheme so we flew to Canada in er civilian aircraft and after some time in kind of transit units we eventually landed up in Alberta a place called Claresholm which was about sixty miles south of Calgary, this was a flying training school and unlike the British trainees who started their pilot training on a light aircraft like a Tiger Moth we went on day one on Harvard aircraft which for a trainee were quite a handful they were a sturdy little aircraft with a big five hundred and fifty horsepower engine and they took a bit of handling when you were a novice but er we coped with it and we did the all the necessary exercises day and night flying and er finally after I think it would be nine or ten months er we qualified but we were caught in a rather unusual situation previously at the end of flying school training they had a big parade and celebration and you were presented with your wings the Canadian authorities had decided they were not doing this any longer they were giving our chaps their wings when they’d done a further advanced flying training so what was going to happen to us we were due to come home then and nobody could really tell us what was going to happen when are we going to get our wings, so we flew home in a civilian aircraft we arrived in London airport and were taken in buses to the Air Ministry this was about half past six seven o’clock in the evening by then going dark and we were ushered into a dismal basement room where we met by a civilian clerk, who from the smell of his breath had been out and had a few pints whilst he was waiting for us so, he then issued er instructions of where we were to be posted to and in those days we were still on rations so he issued ration cards and as we were due to leave he said ‘before you go any questions?’ and one chap piped up he said ‘when do we get our wings?’ and this half drunken clerk said ‘oh it’s okay you can put them up now if you want to’ that’s was how we were awarded our wings I thought it was the most miserable bit of service time the whole of my air force career. So we were then posted to RAF Turnhill to do a course on instrument flying to get a qualification called the white card er instrument flying this and they wanted you to fly under various weather conditions, er the grades were white, green, and master green, if you were so experienced and qualified if you got a master green you could fly in any weather conditions whatsoever so we got the white card which had limitations and when we had arrived there some of the chaps not believing what this clerk at the Air Ministry had said arrived not wearing wings odd chaps who had previously been other air crew like a engineer or air gunners were still wearing their old air force air gunner engineer wings and the first day we were introduced er by a squadron leader to tell us what the course was all about and he started his speech and then after a moment he stopped and he pointed at the lad in the front row who was wearing the single wing of a flight engineer and he said ‘who are you what are you doing here?’ so the lad said ‘well I understand sir I’ve come to do an instrument rating course’ so he said ‘well are you a pilot?’ and the lad said ‘well I’ve done a pilot’s course’ and he said ‘why aren’t you wearing pilot’s wings?’ so the lad said truthfully ’because I’ve not been awarded them’ and the squadron leader took no notice of this at all he looked around the room and he said ‘well if you want to do this course you better get some wings up damn quick and that goes for all the rest of you not wearing them’ that was our introduction to being pilots. [Pause] So this business of the wings I thought was disgraceful and thinking about it years later I feel that about that time due to the way we had been treated I really began to lose interest it destroyed my enthusiasm for the RAF, and for flying, and for the whole bloomin thing, however, we did this um instrument training course and then we were posted on to er Meteor Jet Fighters a twin engine jet fighter of that day er and we did conversion on to those and er I did I did conversion I went on solo on them they were comparatively easy to fly engine wise because you didn’t have too many points to consider with a jet engine as you did with a piston engine aircraft and er we carried on with this course till we got to the stage where we started aerobatics and then I found that due to the violent manoeuvres with aerobatics er I started blacking out so I was removed from the course and after a while I was sent to the er er the School of Aviation Medicine School at Farnborough where they have flying doctors who took me up in a Meteor equipped with G measuring device and they flew the plane around and blacked me out all over the place and declared that I had a low G tolerance and I would be grounded so that was a big disappointment after all that I’d been through before, I I was then offered the choice of one or two ground trades which I didn’t fancy doing if I wasn’t flying I didn’t want to be in the air force so the other alternative was to leave so I was then discharged having been in the air force something like eleven years altogether, and um I came home and I started applying for jobs and I went for various interviews and er people asked me what I’d done and so on as usual the case ‘oh that’s very interesting but your no use to us’ so I got a bit despondent I was out of work for may be about six weeks and I was walking along one evening I bumped into an old school chum of mine and the conversation got around to jobs ‘what are you doing?’ I said ‘I’m looking for a job’ ‘what are you doing?’ he said ‘I’m on a management training course in Manchester for the CWS the Co-opertive Society’ er he said ‘come round to my house I’ll show you what we are doing’ so I went to his house and he showed me all these books and information and I thought oh how boring after flying [laughs] doing that didn’t appeal one one little bit, all this time his father had been sitting there quietly reading a newspaper and he chipped in he said ‘have you tried our place?’ so I said ‘well where is our place?’ he said ‘A V Roe’ and he gave me the address of the employment officer so I wrote in and er they called me in for an interview and I think they had it in mind that I would fit in to some kind of position in the works so they sent me home and said we’ll notify you and then a letter came sorry we can’t do anything for you so disappointment again and then almost immediately another letter came from them would I go for an interview with the chief draughtsman ‘cos at that time the Avro factory at Chadderton was the main design office for the company, so er I went for this interview it was a Friday afternoon and er I saw this gentleman the chief draughtsman and he asked me all about my service career and so on and then he said ‘I think we could find a place for you in here’ so he said er ‘when would you like to start Monday?’ [laughs] following just a weekend away [laughs] oh rather puzzled I said ‘oh yes that’d be fine’ so on Monday morning I turned up and I was placed in the middle of the design office and due to my armament work that I had done in the forces I was put onto what was called the armament section the design office was broken up into sections groups of about a dozen men each section did a different type of work some did air frames, some would do engines, some would be radio, and I was on the armament section and quite a lot of the work they were doing was stuff I already knew that I’d seen and worked on in the air force but of course there was a lot of new stuff because at that time they were just introducing the Vulcan Bomber so I fitted in very nicely and er got going steadily working on the Vulcan and the Shackleton and later on the Nimrod and er several aircraft we did er certain parts of those and er so I worked quite steadily and happily for several years I think about twelve years in the design office on armament equipment mainly of the different aircraft and then the company decided to have a huge reorganisation, er they moved the design office to the company airfield at Woodford and of course it was practically impossible for me to get there I didn’t have a car at the time it would have meant several bus trips a train journey and er it was just impossible so I joined a bunch of rebels who said ‘we’re not going’ [laughs] so we were kept for a while at Chadderton in the design office on a sort of queries section and I thought well this will just potter along until the company get fed up with it and then you’d be given the ultimatum either get to Woodford or get out [laughs] so I left and I got a job at a local firm building er commercial vehicles again in their design office which was quite different to what I had been doing before but it was in a way quite interesting. I did this for a year or two and eventually I bumped into a chap er who I’d worked with in the design office and er we got chatting and I said ‘I’m a little bit bored with this job I’m doing’ and he said ‘well we’re looking for people at Chadderton in the publications er department’ ‘cos each aircraft has a huge set of books for servicing and maintaining them er he gave me the address to write in to and er eventually after had an interview I was accepted there and I started back again on my beloved aircraft in the publications department and I worked in there for about twenty years [laughs] until I finally retired in 1989 [laughs] so that was the end of my life with aircraft more or less right through my whole working life [laughs] it had been aircraft one way or another.
SP: So Jeff you talked about when you first joined up you went to Lords Cricket Ground do you want to tell me a little bit more about that?
JB: Yes, oh for aircrew trainees during the war the place you reported to when you were called up was Lords Cricket Ground in London, rather unusual setting to think you are going in the air force er we were billeted in blocks of flats all around Regents Park and we were kitted out you got all your uniform and equipment and er you had your introduction to things like how to march and drill and so on, and one day we were taken back to a building on the side of er Regents Park which was a medical centre we were led into the backyard amongst piles of coke and coal [laughs] taken upstairs to about er the third floor on the way up you had to take your tunic off and roll both sleeves up when you stepped inside the door there was a duty airman on each side with a basin with some sort of disinfectant fluid in and a scrubbing brush and he scrubbed both your upper arms, you moved on into the next room and there were doctors in line and you were given various injections inoculations er oh what what was it something fever they had in those days, and then you were led out down some stairs onto a road at the side by the railings of Regents Park [laughs] it looked like a scene from a battlefield there were chaps hanging over the railings vomiting, there were others lying flat out on the pavement having fainted not being used to all this injections and inoculations [laughs], luckily it didn’t affect me although I did have a rather sore arm for a little while [laughs].
SP: So Jeff you were talking about during when you were on the plane the dreaded corkscrew.
JB: Yes
SP: Do you want to tell me a little bit about that?
JB: Yes er when we did the course er on er to train on the Lancaster er one of the exercises we had to do was to er learn er called an evasive tactic in case you were attacked by a fighter they had this manoeuvre called the corkscrew where the aircraft went into steep dives and turns and climbs in order to put the aim of the attacker off and you had certain drills to carry out er in order to aim your guns correctly and try and hit him whilst you were doing this, now the main people involved with this were the gunners and the pilot um you gave the instruction to the pilot when to start this manoeuvre and whilst he was doing it he told you what you were doing because you were thrown about so much you could hardly realise whether you were turning left, right, going up or down whatever it was very very violent and er you repeated back to the pilot so he understood that you knew and according to what he said you had to apply certain rules of sighting in order to hopefully hit the attacker, so the the manoeuvre would start like this, oh before I say anything more I should say that our first corkscrew was done by an instructor pilot an experienced fella, the manoeuvre went like this you as a gunner had a thing called a reflector sight you looked through a glass screen and it had a red ring with a dot in the middle you compared the size of this to the size of the attacking aircraft you had to learn the wing span of the groups of the attacking aircraft when he filled a certain amount of your ring and bead sight he was at six hundred yards that was the distance when you were to open fire ’cos it was the best range for the guns you were using, so you watched this attacker and make him he came in a curving dive which is called a curved pursuit and you raced him with your gun sight you warned the pilot he was coming in when he got to six hundred yards you said ‘corkscrew’ either port or starboard depending which side he was coming in from the pilot then we did the first one to port which is the left side he just simply stood the aircraft up on it’s port wing tip and we went down in a screaming dive after a few hundred feet he rolled and he went down on the other side the starboard side for a few more hundred feet and then he pulled up violently, on the way down you were virtually weightless you just floated up off your seat the only thing I was holding onto was the two control handles for the gun turret [laughs], all this time you were trying to apply these what we call sighting rules where you aimed your sight at the attacker you didn’t aim directly at him and then the pilot pulled up and he did the same manoeuvre going up and then the G Force came on you were slammed literally just slammed down into your seat became several times heavier than you normally are [laughs] and it was so severe you couldn’t raise your arms try as you may you couldn’t lift them and you had an oxygen mask on your face this pulled away on the straps and then you climbed up to your starting height and then you went down and started another corkscrew [laughs], all this time other members of the crew that weren’t involved with this as I said it was just the pilot and the gunner the other people such as the navigator and wireless operator were sitting there with their stomachs churning and quite a lot of them being airsick but due to the fact that you were so concentrating on what you were doing it didn’t make me airsick strangely enough so that was our introduction to the corkscrew [laughs].
SP: Jeff you also talked that you were at Fiskerton on VE Day do you want to talk me through what happened on VE Day what you did?
JB: Yes er VE Day 8th May 1945 we were scheduled to do the last Manna food drop in Holland [coughs] we got out of the aircraft and a photographer suddenly appeared and asked us the crew and the ground crew to pose in front of the aircraft and took our photographs which I still have, and then something happened that had never happened on any previous operation a car drew up and it was the station commander the group captain wishing us well [laughs] and hoping that we had a good trip of course we knew that it was the last day of the war [coughs], my pilot and two other pilots from our crew had made a secret arrangement that on the way back at one of the turning points on the route back was Cambridge that we were going to meet up formate and fly back from Cambridge to Fiskerton and beat up in the airfield in formation, so [laughs] we arrived at er at er Cambridge and [coughs] they’d arrange [coughs] not to use the radio so that it wouldn’t be identified [coughs] they arranged to fire off a coloured vary cartridges so these two planes were milling around at Cambridge when we arrived and they were shooting off these coloured vary cartridges I think they were green and we fired some off so we knew who we were and we all joined up together and headed off to Fiskerton, now we were flying a rather old Lancaster and we were slowly dropping behind these other two aircraft we couldn’t keep up with them ‘cos they were going flat out and our engineer told us he said they had er a sort of toggle which was called an emergency boost button to give the engines a little bit of extra power he said ‘I’ve pulled the emergency boost and we still can’t keep up with them’ and we were dropping more and more lagging behind them dropping away so eventually our pilot said ‘okay well we’ll forget it’ but because of all this extra power on this old aircraft was shuddering and shaking suddenly there was a loud bang and a whole sheet of metal fell off from underneath the starboard wing [laughs] we didn’t know what it was at the time [laughs] but I reported it to the pilot he said ‘well I don’t know what it is but we’re still flying okay so we carry on’ and we flew back to Fiskerton and of course this beat up had occurred by the time we got back and when we landed we found that this vibration had loosened some of the skin coverings on the outboard engine nacelle and it had ripped off with the airflow that’s what we saw some farmer would find a nice sheet of aluminium in one of his fields [laughs], so we then went to the debriefing and the station commander came up on the dais afterwards and he said ‘all pilots are to remain behind everyone else is dismissed’ he didn’t know he hadn’t identified who had done this beat up at the airfield so we scurried off to get our bacon and egg which was the meal you got after flying [laughs] whilst all the pilots got a tremendous bollocking from the station commander [laughs] that was VE Day [laughs].
SP: Jeff do you want to tell me about the time in the Wellington bomber that you were talking about?
JB: Yes um we were introduced to the Wellington at a unit called Operational Training Unit OTU this is where you joined a crew [coughs] and amongst various exercises you did of course there was quite a lot of practice bombing er you dropped small smoke bombs on er des designated targets where er how well or badly you had done there were staff there could record it and send the results back to your unit [coughs] now to do this exercise er we were based at this er place er Westcott near Aylesbury we had to fly er about thirty miles in a northerly direction to the area I think it was Northampton and back for the navigator to calculate the wind ‘cos this was a vital thing for the bomb aimer to know he set this into his equipment er the target we were to attack was on some moorland in the Oxford area, so we took off and we had to climb up to twelve thousand feet to fly this course to calculate the wind er on the way we flew through quite a few heaps of cloud it got a little bit bumpy and unknown to us behind all this cloud was a cumulus nimbus thunderstorm cloud and we flew straight into it and it was a fantastic all of sudden it went grey and then it went almost completely dark this is sort of ten o’clock in the morning and the turbulence we were thrown about up and down and in a flash then the the inside of the gun turret was painted matt black in a flash it just became white all over with hoarfrost and I made the aimless gesture of trying to scrape some of it off with my fingers [laughs] I don’t know why I did that [laughs] but we were thrown about we went up and down and the pilot said ‘we’re getting iced up I’m losing control’ he said ‘we’ll have to get out of this’ and he did the worst thing he could have done he tried to turn round to go back out of it, the rule was if you were in that position you flew straight through it, so he started this turn and he collected so much ice on the wings he lost control of it he called out ‘I can’t control it’ and he gave the order ‘fix parachutes and standby’ now you wore your parachute harness all the time in the aircraft but your parachute was in a pack in a stowage near to where you were sitting so we grabbed the er the parachute out of its stowage and it fell to the floor just at the moment we started to be lifted up at some tremendous speed and the G was so strong I couldn’t lift the parachute pack and I thought if this carries on I going to die pretty soon [laughs] ‘cos I’ve heard of stories of planes flying into thunderstorm clouds and coming out in bits in the bottom so we were flung up and down, up and down, and then eventually we came out of the clouds and we began to lose some of the ice that had got into all our and the pilot regained control so he said ‘stand down’ we didn’t need to put the parachute on to jump but we fell out of control iced up from twelve to four thousand feet totally out of control and the air speed indicator broke the the air speed indicator pointer the needle was just hanging down and swinging like a little pendulum so we’d no air speed however our pilot er was experienced enough to know that if he put certain power settings on the engine it would keep us flying [coughs], so we abandoned the exercise and flew back to Westcott where we were based told them what had happened they then divert, oh they asked how much fuel we still had so we had sufficient fuel, they then diverted to us to RAF Wittering which is in the Peterborough area and Peter and Wittering was a big pre-war airfield and across the fields from it was a smaller wartime airfield called Collyweston and there was a flat land flat fields between the two and they had laid what was called pierced steel planking between the two airfields to create an emergency landing strip was a bit longer than the normal landing strip so we were given instructions over the radio and we told them what had happened to us what power settings to set on the engine to make a faster than normal approach so there was no danger that we would stall and we all got down in what we call crash positions we were trained to do this and we landed on this pierced steel planking runway which made a hell of a noise [laughs] when you ran over it but we got down safely and then motored back to the Wittering side where we were interviewed as to what happened then we were taken for a meal whilst the aircraft was prepared and then later on that day we flew it back to Westcott, but that from that day on until we got on the Lancaster which was an all metal aircraft I was always a bit scared [laughs] when we flew into big heaped up clouds [laughs].
SP: So Jeff you talked about Operation Manna how did you feel about doing that?
JB: Well at times it was quite emotional because so many people had died twenty odd thousand in total I think in the last months of the war er and many people had suffered so greatly through this starvation and eating all sorts of weird food like the flower bulbs they used to fry flower bulbs and all kinds of stuff, they used to make from what we were told foraging trips the people in the big cities suffered the most because they could out may be on bicycle or walking ‘cos they’d no vehicles er into the country areas and barter for food with the farmers to get a few eggs or potatoes and give away their valuables and all kinds of thing and when you spoke with some of the people that had suffered with this er it’s quite er emotional, little old ladies would want to come and hug you [laughs] and that kind of thing, and er one boy I think about probably twelve years old came to me spoke very good English as most of them do and he said ‘I want to shake your hand and thank you’ so I said ‘well what do you want to thank me for you weren’t born at the time we did this’ he said no ‘you saved my grandparents lives’ and that was the kind of thing that er happened to you people come ‘thank you thank you’ and giving you gifts it was utterly amazing the gratitude that er they showed was just overwhelming at times.
SP: Okay thanks for that is there anything else at all that you feel you haven’t had a chance to say?
JB: Well one little amusing story er when we came back from Canada and we did this instrument flying course at Turnhill er the course included normal exercises besides instruments and navigation exercises and so on and er we were being briefed to do the first solo night cross country flight we we had a rather er broad spoken Yorkshire flight lieutenant flight commander who was giving this er briefing before the flight and er he told everything we were supposed to know the weather and everything and er at the end he said ‘just a word of advice before you go’ he said er ‘if’ in his broad Yorkshire accent he said ‘now if you get lost or owt bloody silly like that for god’s sake give us a call even if it’s only to say goodbye’ [laughs].
SP: [Laughs] That’s great Jeff so thanks for all the stories there [Laughs].
Dublin Core
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ABrownJ170118
PBrownJ1721
Title
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Interview with Jeff Brown
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
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01:03:08 audio recording
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Pending review
Pending OH summary. Allocated T Holmes
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Susanne Pescott
Date
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2017-01-18
Description
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Jeff Brown worked as an electrician until he joined the Royal Air Force. He flew with 576 Squadron from RAF Fiskerton.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Netherlands
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
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1945-04
1945-05
Contributor
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Jackie Simpson
149 Squadron
576 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
B-29
bombing
crewing up
Harvard
Lancaster
Meteor
military service conditions
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Bottesford
RAF Dalcross
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Marham
RAF Westcott
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/501/22514/MCurnockRM1815605-171114-006.2.pdf
b093d3095f57641bbba0152dd44d736c
Dublin Core
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Title
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Curnock, Richard
Richard Murdock Curnock
R M Curnock
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Curnock, RM
Date
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2016-04-18
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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
92 items. An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Richard Curnock (1924, 1915605 Royal Air Force), his log book, letters, photographs and prisoner of war magazines. He flew operations with 425 Squadron before being shot down and becoming a prisoner of war.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by Richard Curnock and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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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The Kriegie July 1999
Description
An account of the resource
The News-Sheet of the RAF ex-POW Association. This edition has news on the Annual General Meeting, visits to RAF Henlow and Stafford, Remembrance Sunday, Recco Report -stories about former POWs, a cartoon on Precision bombing, 1939, requests for donations to Albrighton's church bells, The Great Escape documentary, Obituaries, reunions of the East Anglian and North West and North Wales branches, the Caterpillar club, the Associations new web pages, RCAF Memorial at Trenton, Book reviews, the Ottawa reunion, new members and widow's lists and the Association's accounts.
Creator
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The RAF ex-POW Association
Date
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1999-07
Format
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16 printed sheets
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Identifier
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MCurnockRM1815605-171114-006
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Stafford
England--Leeds
Australia
Victoria--Melbourne
New South Wales--Sydney
Belgium
Queensland--Gold Coast
England--Leicester
United States
Georgia--Andersonville
England--Northampton
England--Snettisham
England--Letchworth
Ontario--Trenton
Germany--Berlin
Ontario--Ottawa
North Africa
France--Boulogne-sur-Mer
Québec--Montréal
Libya--Banghāzī
Victoria
France
Georgia
New South Wales
Queensland
Libya
Ontario
Québec
Canada
Germany
England--Norfolk
England--Northamptonshire
England--Yorkshire
England--Herefordshire
England--Leicestershire
England--Staffordshire
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
149 Squadron
207 Squadron
460 Squadron
49 Squadron
58 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
Caterpillar Club
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
Dulag Luft
escaping
flight engineer
George Cross
Halifax
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Hurricane
Ju 88
Lancaster
Me 109
memorial
mine laying
navigator
prisoner of war
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Cosford
RAF Halton
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Pocklington
RAF Spilsby
RAF St Eval
RAF West Freugh
Spitfire
Stalag Luft 1
Stalag Luft 3
Stalin, Joseph (1878-1953)
Stirling
Whitley
wireless operator
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/104/984/MEdwardsED1236492-160517-010001.1.jpg
a481c4f96461c1cd823c3c3c15141988
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/104/984/MEdwardsED1236492-160517-010002.1.jpg
455a169f4fa44096109f81cd8d78f224
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/104/984/MEdwardsED1236492-160517-010003.1.jpg
781adbc8fc6ac85cd1aa189608141ae0
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
Edwards, Ellis
E D Edwards
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. The collection concerns Sergeant Ellis Drury Edwards (1236492 Royal Air Force) and consists of his logbook, memorial booklet and four letters. Ellis Edwards was a bomb aimer with 149 Squadron and flew operations from RAF Lakenheath. He was killed when his Halifax crashed on an operation to Berlin 30 March 1943. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Pauline Harkett and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.<br /><br />Additional information on Ellis Edwards is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/208271/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-17
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. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Edwards, ED
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Crew of a Stirling
149 Squadron
lost over Berlin 29/30 March
1943
'Sergt [sic] Heulgrave, bomb aimer
" Blackford, rear gunner
" Hunt, rear gunner
P/O Ian Fulton, "the skipper"
Sergeants Saunders, mid upper gunner
" Edwards, engineer [sic] 'X',
" Crosson, navigator.
Sergeant Blackford came back but remainder paid for freedom with lives.
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
Memorial booklet
Description
An account of the resource
Cover and back have faint image of a sailing ship. Loose sheet of paper with names of Edward Ellis's crew.
Left inside page is blank, right inside page has images of seven aircrew, two at the top, 3 in the middle and two at the bottom. All are in uniform and Ellis Edwards is marked with 'X'.
Additional information about this item has been kindly provided by the donor.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two page booklet with typewritten page inserted
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MEdwardsED1236492-160517-01
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
Germany--Berlin
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-03
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
149 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bomb aimer
flight engineer
killed in action
missing in action
navigator
pilot
Stirling
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/79/1912/PCollyerSmithJ1516.2.jpg
d4ea3068309b4b1e9594b5c4cd1452a5
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/79/1912/PCollyerSmithJ1517.2.jpg
00ea1c42c6532e6a1fbeb7867c96ffec
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
Collyer-Smith, Jacque
Jacque Collyer-Smith
Subject
The topic of the resource
World War (1939-1945)
Great Britain. Royal Air Force.
Description
An account of the resource
12 items. The collections consists of photographs of a Stirling and Women‘s Auxiliary Air Force personnel. The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Jacque Collyer-Smith (2133664 Royal Air Force) and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Still image. Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Collyer-Smith, J
Language
A language of the resource
eng
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
Seven aircrew and two members of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in front of a 149 Squadron Lancaster
Description
An account of the resource
Seven aircrew wearing Mae Wests and two members of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in battledress stand in front of Lancaster OJ-R with its flaps down. On the reverse 'Taken at RAF Methwold, the crew and kite take off flying over to G'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PCollyerSmithJ1516, PCollyerSmithJ1517
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--Norfolk
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
Photograph
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
149 Squadron
aircrew
ground personnel
Lancaster
RAF Methwold
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/161/2051/PCushwayAW16010029.2.jpg
b771fa1305036025075e8e966dc93960
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
Cushway, Arthur. Album
Arthur Cushway's photograph album
Description
An account of the resource
28 items. A photograph album with multiple pages. It contains pictures taken during Arthur Cushway's aircrew training in Great Britain and in Canada. Subjects include airmen and aircraft and sightseeing in Great Britain and North America, including Niagara Falls, Ontario, New York and Reykjavik in Iceland.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Rosemary Lester and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-07-04
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
PCushwayAW1601
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
Three Wellingtons in flight
Description
An account of the resource
A formation of three Wellingtons, 'W-OJ, M-OJ' and N-OJ' silhouetted against the sky.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PCushwayAW16010029
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
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
149 Squadron
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/165/2156/NWrightJ150410-01.1.jpg
b5626caf48e722c77338c49251c00627
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
Wright, Jim
J R Wright
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-05-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Wright, J
Description
An account of the resource
93 items. The collection contains two oral history interviews with Jim Wright, letters, cuttings and photographs. It concerns James Roy Wright’s research into his father, Sergeant Arthur Charles Wright (1911 - 1943, 1149750 Royal Air Force) and an operation to Turin 12/13 July 1943 which caused 100 aircraft to violate Swiss airspace. Two aircraft were shot down or crashed in Switzerland. There are many photographs and details of the activities that night including reports by the Swiss authorities. The crews are identified with photographs and there are several photographs of the funerals at Vevey. Additional material includes aerial photograph of bomb damage in Germany and the logbook and airman's pay book of W G Anderson. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Jim Wright and catalogued by Nigel Huckins, with descriptions of official Swiss documents provided Gilvray Williams. <br /><br />Additional information on Arthur Charles Wright is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/126015/">IBCC Losses Database</a>. This collection also contains items concerning Hugh Burke Bolger and his crew. Additional information on Hugh Burke Bolger is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/102186/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
‘I have no regret dying for my county’
Three months before he was reported missing from an operational flight, Sergeant Air Gunner J. A Clough wrote his parents a letter –“to be opened in the event of my death.”
His parents, Mr and Mrs F.F. Clough who live near Canterbury have now learned that their son is buried in the military cemetery at Kiel.
“I have no regrets dying for my country” this 20 year old airman wrote. “It is a grand country, and any man who can call himself an Englishman should be proud to die in the struggle for freedom.”
“Give this message to my friends and yours and to the people of England if it is possible: Let every Englishman flight to the last drop of blood in his body.”
“Let him keep the golden fields and busy streets clean and fresh, and let him keep the air he breaths free from the stench of Nazism”
8/12/42 149500
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
I have no regrets dying for my country
Description
An account of the resource
Three months before he went missing Sergeant J A Clough wrote his parents a letter expressing no having regrets dying for his country. Annotated '8/12/42 149sqn'.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1942-12-08
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One newspaper cutting
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
NWrightJ150410-01
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
Germany--Kiel
England--Canterbury
England--Kent
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Claire Monk
149 Squadron
final resting place
In the event of my death letter
killed in action
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1059/17860/PCuthillMSFH1802.2.jpg
396b175e06caae6d5e90db3a683ac499
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
Cuthill, Margaret
Margaret Scott Foster Harper Cuthill
M S F H Cuthill
Description
An account of the resource
10 items. An oral history interview with Leading Aircraftswoman Margaret Cuthill (b. 1926, 2151005 Royal Air Force) (nee Logan), a written memoir, her service and release book and seven photographs. She served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force from May 1944 to October 1947 as a teleprinter operator.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Margaret Cuthill 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
2018-12-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Cuthill, MSFH
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
Seven airmen standing at the rear of a Lancaster
Description
An account of the resource
Seven airmen, including Charles Robert Cuthill (3rd left), standing at the rear of a Lancaster.
Additional information about this item has been kindly provided by the donor.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PCuthillMSFH1802
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
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
149 Squadron
aircrew
Lancaster
RAF Methwold
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/681/17875/OAyreR1894209-170628-010001.2.jpg
1a11b3b028d324d192a34b45ffb71f65
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/681/17875/OAyreR1894209-170628-010002.2.jpg
932cd3c18852bf7f901f54593be2b3ac
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
Ayre, Robert
R Ayre
Description
An account of the resource
One item. The official record document concerning Robert Ayers (b. 1922, 1894209 Royal Air Force) who served as air gunner on Bomber Command squadrons in 1944.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Anthony Wilson and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-04-28
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
Ayre, R
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Robert Ayre 1894209 Royal Air Force Personnel document
Description
An account of the resource
Contains personal details including next of kin. Enlisted 16.4.43. Notes mustered as air gunner discharged as AC2 on 27 February 1945 as services no longer required. Noted that after initial training went to 31 Base and served on 149, 90 and 115 Squadrons. Final units to were ACDU Keresley Grange and 18(P)AFU.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1943-04-16
1945-02-27
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two sides printed form handwritten filled in
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Service material
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
OAyreR1894209-170628-01
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--Warwickshire
England--Coventry
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
115 Squadron
149 Squadron
90 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Lancaster
Stirling
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/879/17966/PHolmesWC1601.2.jpg
20a33824bf043e2475d06a832e1f3e3d
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/879/17966/PHolmesWC1602.2.jpg
46b842d984930c3b89bde73f60073faa
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Holmes, William
William Cyril Holmes
W C Holmes
Description
An account of the resource
Ten items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer William Holmes DFC (b. 1921, 131013, 176554 Royal Air Force), his logbook, a memoir by his bomb aimer, official documents, Guinea Pig Club memorabilia, photographs of him and his crew and a memoir of his time training in Canada. He was a Stirling pilot on 149 Squadron in 1944. He flew 17 operations before crashing his aircraft at RAF Thorney Island 18 June 1944 and subsequently becoming a member of the Guinea Pig Club.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by William and Bill Holmes and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-11-05
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
Holmes, WC
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
William Holmes crew
Description
An account of the resource
Seven aircrew standing and sitting in two rows. All wear battledress with brevet and side caps. From left to right, rear row: Sergeant Cyril Marjoram, gunner; Sergeant Douglas Richard Bacon, gunner; Flight Sergeant Tom Smith, wireless operator and Pilot Officer Charlie Watson, flight engineer. Front row: Flying Officer Harry Stannus, bomb aimer; Sergeant William Holmes, pilot and Sergeant ‘Chalky’ White, navigator.
On the reverse '149 Squadron Bomber Command, P/O Charlie Watson F/Eng, F/Sgt Tom Smith DFM Wireless Op, Sgt Doug Bacon gunner, Sgt Cyril Marjoram gunner, Sgt Chalky White navigator, Sgt Bill Holmes DFC pilot "Skipper", F/O Harry Stannus bomb aimer'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PHolmesWC1601, PHolmesWC1602
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
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roger Guernon
149 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bomb aimer
flight engineer
navigator
pilot
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1365/22934/PThomasAF20010049.1.jpg
8bce49e319ad1d6b730b0d40476254da
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
Thomas, Arthur Froude. Album 1
Description
An account of the resource
An album containing 50 pages of photographs of Arthur Froude's family and his pre war career and service as a flight engineer with 90 Squadron. The album also contains family photographs dating from 1900.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Thomas, AF
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
Arthur Thomas and his parents
Description
An account of the resource
Photo 1 and 3 are the same. Arthur's mother and Ted are standing in the snow, captioned Christmas dinner 1946, in the garden.
Photo 2 is Arthur in uniform sitting on a wall, captioned 'Flying Officer AF Thomas DFM 149 Squadron RAF Methwold'.
Photo 4 is christmas dinner with Athur's parents and Ted.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1946-12-25
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Four b/w photographs on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PThomasAF20010049
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Norfolk
England--Somerset
England--Banwell
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1946-12
149 Squadron
aircrew
Distinguished Flying Medal
flight engineer
RAF Methwold
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1365/22937/PThomasAF20010052.1.jpg
bd0015d207005f91f8859614b7d7d2dd
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
Thomas, Arthur Froude. Album 1
Description
An account of the resource
An album containing 50 pages of photographs of Arthur Froude's family and his pre war career and service as a flight engineer with 90 Squadron. The album also contains family photographs dating from 1900.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Thomas, AF
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
Flying Officer Arthur Thomas DFM
Description
An account of the resource
Head and shoulders image of Arthur Thomas in uniform. Captioned 'Flying Officer Arthur Froude Thomas DFM. 149 Squadron RAF Methwold 1947.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1947
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PThomasAF20010052
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
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Norfolk
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1947
149 Squadron
aircrew
Distinguished Flying Medal
flight engineer
RAF Methwold
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1366/22939/PThomasAF20020002.2.jpg
5127aad804f11f0761c490a9a6244b40
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
Thomas, Arthur Froude. Album 2
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Thomas, AF
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-02-11
Description
An account of the resource
33 items. An album containing photographs and postcards from Thomas Arthur's wedding, honeymoon and holidays.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[Photograph]
NAPOLI – PALAZZO REALE
August 1946. 149 Squadron’s flight to R.A.F. Pomigliano, Naples. To uplift & ferry back to the United Kingdom troops due for demobilisation.
The Officers Mess was in the Palazzo Reale.
[Photograph]
NAPOLI – PANORAMA DA S. MARTINO
[Photograph]
F/Lt. Ken Strang.
[Photograph]
Outside the Terminal Building at R.A.F. Pomigliano. L to R. F/O A.F. Thomas D.F.M. F/O T.C. Walsh & F/O G. Alexander.
[Page break]
[Photograph]
F/O G. Alexander.
[Photograph]
F/O T.C. (Paddy) Walsh.
[Photograph]
NAPOLI - PIAZZA MUNICIPO
[Photograph]
NAPOLI – STAZIONE CENTRALE
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
RAF Pomigliano, Naples and Arthur Thomas' colleagues
Description
An account of the resource
Photo 1 is a postcard of Palazzo Reale, Naples.
Photo 2 is three airmen outside the terminal of RAF Pomigliano. One airman is identified as F/Lt Ken Strang.
Photo 3 is an airman outside the terminal, identified as F/O G Alexamder.
Photo 4 is a postcard of the Piazzo Municipio, Naples.
Photo 5 is a panorama of San Martino with Mt Etna smoking in the distance.
Photo 6 is six airmen outside the terminal. The central three are identified as F/O AF Thomas, DFM, F/O TC Walsh and F/O G Alexander.
Photo 7 is an airman standing with his luggage, identified as F/O TC Walsh.
Photo 8 is a postcard of Stazione Centrale, Naples.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1946-08
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Eight b/w photographs on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PThomasAF20020002
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Italy
Italy--Naples
Italy--Pomigliano d'Arco
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1946-08
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
David Bloomfield
Anne-Marie Watson
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
Workflow A completed
149 Squadron
aircrew
Operation Dodge (1945)
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1366/22940/PThomasAF20020003.2.jpg
22e2a09215be92c4c4c8b6187254367a
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1366/22940/PThomasAF20020004.1.jpg
c41b0d4f15632ef518ff007af8de699d
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1366/22940/PThomasAF20020005.1.jpg
005c973601c6af95f067a1bb9b9270d3
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
Thomas, Arthur Froude. Album 2
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Thomas, AF
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-02-11
Description
An account of the resource
33 items. An album containing photographs and postcards from Thomas Arthur's wedding, honeymoon and holidays.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[Photograph]
NAPOLI – PIAZZA MERGELLINA.
[Photograph] NAPOLI – VIA PARTENOPE E CASTEL DELL’OVO.
[Photograph]
A captured Junkers aircraft with one of 149 Squadron’s Lancasters in the background.
[Photograph]
F/Lt Alec Gilbert D.F.C. & F/Lt Derek Bidwell.
[Photograph]
A day trip to Sorrento & a boat ride to one of the interesting caves on the coast. In the bows-F/O A.F. Thomas D.F.M. with F/Lt Jack Goodrum.
[Page break]
[Photograph]
F/Lt Ken Strang.
[Photograph]
Warrant Officer Ted Ward. [Inserted] DIED 1994 [/inserted]
[Photograph] NAPOLI – NISIDA
[Photograph] NAPOLI – SANTA LUCIA COL VESUVIO.
[Page break]
[Photograph] NAPOLI – PANORAMA
[Photograph]
F/O M. Tavernor.
F/Lt Alec Gilbert D.F.C.
Lady friend. F/Lt Derek Bidwell.
F/O G. Alexander.
[Photograph] NAPOLI – PANORAMA
[Photograph]
F/O Jerry Blenkinsop. ? Lady friend.
F/Lt Derek Bidwell. F/O M. Tavernor.
F/Lt Jack Goodrum.
[Photograph]
F/O, G. Alexander. F/O M. Tavernor.
Lady friend. F/Lt Derek Bidwell
F/Lt Ken Strang.
[Photograph]
L to R. F/O Jerry Blenkinsop. F/O A. F. Thomas D.F.M. F/Lt Jack Goodrum F/Lt J.E. Treble D.F.C. F/O T.C. Walsh F/O M. Tavernor.
Front L to R. F/S Lewis W/O Ward F/S Haxby F/ S Haxby ?.
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
Naples 1946
Description
An account of the resource
Photo 1 is a postcard of the Piazza Mergellina, Naples,
Photo 2 is an aircraft identified as a Junkers with a very distant Lancaster.
Photo 3 is a postcard of Via Partenope and Caste Dell'Ovo, Naples.
Photo 4 is two airmen, identified as F/Lt Alec Gilbert DFC and F/Lt Derek Bidwell. They are standing on a jetty at the sea.
Photo 5 is six men in a boat. Arthur is identified with F/Lt Jack Goodrum in the bows of the boat.
Photo 6 is an airman standing in a park, identified as F/Lt Strang.
Photo 7 is a postcard of Nisida, Naples.
Photo 8 is an airman standing in a park, identified as Warrant Officer Ted Ward and annotated 'Died 1994'.
Photo 9 is a postcard of Santa Lucia col Vesuvio.
Photo 10 is a postcard of a panorama of Naples.
Photo 11 is five airmen and a woman. They are sitting on a balustrade.
Photo 12 is four airman and the same woman leaning on the balustrade.
Photo 13 is the same group of airmen and the woman leaning on the balustrade.
Photo 14 is a postcard of a slightly different panorama of Naples.
Photo 14 is a group of ten airmen including Arthur.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
15 b/w photographs on two album pages
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PThomasAF20020003,
PThomasAF20020004,
PThomasAF20020005
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Italy
Italy--Naples
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1946
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
David Bloomfield
Anne-Marie Watson
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
Workflow A completed
149 Squadron
aircrew
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
Ju 52
Lancaster
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1366/22941/PThomasAF20020006.2.jpg
290b28ebc5e4509db9912d56cbee437d
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1366/22941/PThomasAF20020007.2.jpg
997bf970c5823328a53cf4666ac3a842
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
Thomas, Arthur Froude. Album 2
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Thomas, AF
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-02-11
Description
An account of the resource
33 items. An album containing photographs and postcards from Thomas Arthur's wedding, honeymoon and holidays.
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
Istres and Marseilles
Description
An account of the resource
Photo 1 and 2 is a Miles Master in a hangar in Istres.
Photo 3 is a postcard of the Marseilles Stock Exchange.
Photo 4 is F/O TC Walsh with Lancasters in the background.
Photo 5 is an airmen sitting on a wall by the sea. He is identified as F/Lt Ken Strang.
Photo 6 is a postcard of the Arc de Triomphe, Marseilles.
Photo 7 is a postcard of Marseilles cathedral.
Photo 8 is a man identified as W/O Ted Ward on a beach at Fosse, Istres.
Photo 9 is a Lancaster on the ground with the shadow of a second Lancaster flying over it.
Photo 10 is an airman standing in front of Lancasters at Istres.
Photo 11 is airmen sitting outside huts at Istres.
Photo 12 is a parked Lancaster taken from a second Lancaster.
Photo 13 is two airmen at the door and identified as F/Lt Jack Goodrum and F/O Arthur Thomas
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Ten b/w and three colour photographs on two album pages
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PThomasAF20020006,
PThomasAF20020007
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
France--Istres
France--Marseille
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1946-08-19
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1946-08-19
149 Squadron
Distinguished Flying Medal
entertainment
Lancaster
RAF St Mawgan
RAF Tuddenham
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1367/22994/PThomasAF20040003.1.jpg
7289f07070f070630c7a226377950975
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
Thomas, Arthur Froude. Album 3
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
2020-02-11
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Thomas, AF
Description
An account of the resource
49 Items. An album containing 35 and 149 Squadron target photographs and pictures taken on a sightseeing tour over German cities to see bomb damage.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[Photograph]
On the night of 18/19th August 1941, X9746 OJ-A of 149 Squadron was targeted upon Duisberg. At 23-07 hours the aircraft lifted off for Germany. Crossing the searchlight belt near Venlo the Wellington was attacked by a Junkers 88 & hit by cannon fire. The tail was badly damaged and strenuous efforts were needed to keep the aircraft on an even keel. The Co-Pilot, Sergeant Reed, was severely wounded & the Observer P/O Raffaelli, received a superficial head wound. By this time the fabric was on fire in the tail & the bombs were jettisoned. Sergeant Billington, in the rear turret, succeeded in extinguishing the flames thus rendering the aircraft, in its vulnerable & exposed state, a less obvious target for any renewed attack. He assessed the damage to controls in the rear & reported to his Captain. A safe return to base was made, landing at 04-49 hours. Pilot Officer Gregory was awarded a D.F.C. & Sergeant Billington a D.F.M.
[Photograph]
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
Battle damaged Wellington
Description
An account of the resource
Photo 1 is an airman inspecting the damage at the rear of the Wellington, X9746, 'OJ-A'. The fabric has burned off exposing the geodetic structure.
Photo 2 is two airmen inspecting the damaged fabric at the tail of a Wellington.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1941-08-19
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two b/w photographs on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PThomasAF20040003
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
Germany--Duisburg
Netherlands
Netherlands--Venlo
Great Britain
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-08-19
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
David Bloomfield
Anne-Marie Watson
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
Workflow A completed
149 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
ground crew
ground personnel
Ju 88
pilot
searchlight
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1367/23002/PThomasAF20040012.1.jpg
5f8b216b347012df42856d0b47d5a5e9
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
Thomas, Arthur Froude. Album 3
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
2020-02-11
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Thomas, AF
Description
An account of the resource
49 Items. An album containing 35 and 149 Squadron target photographs and pictures taken on a sightseeing tour over German cities to see bomb damage.
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
Short Stirling
Description
An account of the resource
A port side view of a Stirling 'OJ-K' on the ground.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PThomasAF20040012
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
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Norfolk
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
149 Squadron
8 Group
dispersal
Lancaster
RAF Methwold
Stirling