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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/935/11292/ALunnLG171107.2.mp3
c8898a3fbc1d4aa984ad1a002702b5df
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/935/11292/PLunnLG1701.1.jpg
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Dublin Core
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Title
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Lunn, Leslie Grantham
L G Lunn
Description
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An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Leslie Lunn (b. 1923, 1317021, 157825 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 127 Squadron
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Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-11-07
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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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Lunn, LG
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 7th of November 2017 and we’re in Balsall Common near Coventry talking to Squadron Leader Leslie Lunn AFC about his life and times. So, Les, what are the earliest recollections you have of life.
LL: My sister [laughs] boxing me in, in the house and looking after me. Not allowing me to move. I wasn’t allowed to move [laughs] I was very very young then. After that I don’t know. I just, I just went to school and it was we went to school at Wembley and then at Watford. Then we moved from Watford down to Plymouth and I went to a school called Warren School and didn’t learn a thing because it, it was a totally incompetent and my father and mother decided that their son was an absolute idiot. And I sat the entrance exam to Plymouth, Plymouth College and somehow or other passed and I started and I did my education in Plymouth College. Finished it off at the age, I started about the age of thirteen and I, and I got my School Certificate eventually at eighteen. And then with the bombing raids on Plymouth my parents moved out to, out into the country and we lived at Cornwood in, in Devon. And I volunteered for the RAF from there. I had a bit of a row with me mum and in a huff I went into Plymouth and volunteered. And when I came back and told my mother she wouldn’t believe me [laughs] until my call up papers came [laughs] And then I was attested in Oxford and oh, I had to wait something like oh three or four months before I was attested and then I had to go. I’d never left home and I had to get up to London to Lord’s Cricket Ground to where we were all assembling and I went up by train and eventually got to Lord’s Cricket Ground where there was hundreds of us waiting and we sat there and waited and waited and waited all day and, or for the rest of the day and eventually they never got to me. The L’s. So we were billeted out in, oh I can’t remember now, and we had to go back again and we were eventually had a medical and all that sort of stuff and I was in the Air Force. And the reason why I came to, went in the Air Force was that my father was in the First World War and he was in, he was unfortunately eighteen when the war was declared and he joined the Norfolk Regiment and was in the trenches for nearly a year and he saw these funny little biplanes flying up above him and he decided that he was better up there then down in all this mud. So he volunteered too for aircrew and he was sent to back to England and became an observer. And I can’t, and he was posted then back to Germany as an, as an observer and he flew with a captain, I don’t know his name, in and I can’t remember, I think it was 14 Squadron. It could be. I don’t. I can’t really remember. And the life expectancy was somewhere in the matter of three weeks. Possibly three months. And my father somehow survived for the rest of the war. Three years. So he was a very, very lucky man. And he met my mother in, on one of his leaves because his, his father was a master tailor in, in Norwich, Mother was a typist in in the railway or something and he met her and they were married. And after the war pop couldn’t get a job so he joined the Black and Tans.
CB: Oh.
LL: Yeah. The Black and Tans, and went to Ireland with my mother and my sister then who was a baby and they spent some time in, in Ireland. And it wasn’t, it wasn’t very pleasant. And then pop came, then when they came back father became, worked for a firm called Blundell’s. And they did a hire purchase system. And father stayed with them for the rest of his career and he became the manager of a department store in Plymouth because we moved from Watford to Plymouth and and he retired from, from that particular job. And then during the Second World War he volunteered for is it AR? Not ARP. What was it?
CB: Yeah.
LL: Was it ARP?
CB: Yes. Yeah.
LL: And he had a uniform and there’s a photograph of us somewhere with me in my officer’s uniform and pop in his. And, and the reason why I suppose I joined the, I wanted to be a pilot and join the RAF was because of my father’s background really. Am I nattering too much?
CB: That’s really good. Keep going.
LL: Oh, I see [laughs] where do I go from there?
CB: Well, you were at ACRC so —
LL: Oh yes. I I volunteered and, and I was at ACRC. That’s right. ACRC. That’s right. ACRC. And from there I was sent to Paignton to do my ITW and we lived in a [tin barny] hotel on the front and I made friends. Three chaps. And we all four of us got together and eventually the postings came through and my three friends were posted to, on one of the drafts to America to do their pilot training. And I was left out. And I tried to get on the same tour but they said that I would be on the next one. So anyway I continued doing my training at the ITW and then I was posted to America and we had to go up to Manchester and had to be called from Manchester which was a reception area. We went by, up to Liverpool. I think it was Liverpool where we boarded a troopship called the Montcalm and I had the most awful journey to America, or Canada. It was, it was our troopship plus another troop ship and the weather got worse and worse and worse and we were escorted by those American, ex-American destroyers. Four funnel jobs.
CB: Yeah.
LL: Nasty old things. Anyway, the weather got so bad they turned back to England and left us and we had to go right up towards the Arctic Circle to avoid U-boats. And we landed eventually in Halifax. And the life on that boat was absolutely awful. I was eighteen, never left home and I had to suffer these. Everybody was being sick and the ship was riddled with cockroaches. All the food that was just dished out, we had to go down to the galley and collect it had cockroaches in it. You sliced the bread and you sliced through a cockroach. And consequently I hardly ate anything for the two weeks I think it was. Goodness knows how long I took to get to Canada. But we landed at Halifax eventually and at, I went to Moncton, Moncton, Canada. Where we were stayed for I don’t know what we did there but then we boarded a train and went all the way down to Montgomery in Georgia. Or was it —
CB: Alabama.
LL: Montgomery. That’s right. Montgomery, Georgia. And that was quite an adventurous journey. We stopped at New York and we had a, a walk around Grand Central Station, and oh it was, to be in America and all the food was was absolutely fantastic. And I started, and then we did what they called a conversion to American system of marching and I was, oh yes. I’ll go back. I actually was, my number of the course was number 42H. So ‘42 being the year and H was my graduation month I think. And anyway, we did drill and lectures and things like that. Then I was posted down to Arcadia, Florida where I started my primary training on Stearmans. And my instructor was Mr Ryan and he was a civilian and he had three or was it four students. And I was the only one to survive. The others didn’t make it. And I did sixty hours there. Then I went to Gunter Field, Montgomery, where I did my basic training on [pause] oh dear, Vultee13s I think they were called. Fixed undercarriage and wound the flaps down, that’s right [laughs] So anyway another, did another sixty hours there and then from there I went to [pause] Carlstrom? No. I can’t remember the name of the place. Was it Carlstrom Field? No. I did my advanced training anyway on Harvards and I graduated in August. I think it was August. It could have been early September but I’ve got it in my logbook anyway.
CB: Ok.
LL: And they’re on the table there. And somehow I became a natural pilot. On the advanced we went down to an airfield, Eglin Field in Florida and did air gunnery. That’s right. And I did quite well and that billed me in good stead because eventually when we got back to England and we were at Bournemouth we were all interviewed and they were building up Bomber Command all, all the time. And I should think out of the hundreds that were there the majority of them were pushed into Bomber Command. But at my interview I said I wanted Spitfires and I wanted Fighter Command. And fortunately I had a good gunnery score and that, on my records and I was posted to 129 Squadron on Spitfires. Much to my relief. And to fly a Spitfire was absolutely marvellous. And I was still, let me see at the end of the year oh, I had, gosh [pause] I left a bit. I’m sorry. I was posted to an OCU. That’s right. From Bournemouth I was posted to Grangemouth. Grangemouth in Scotland where I did my OCU and, on Spitfires. And from there I was posted to 129 Squadron at, it was at [pause] oh dear. Oh dear. Carlton? That was Carlstrom Field, I think. It was one of these wartime strips with Somerfield tracking and we lived in — no. I’m I’m sorry. Ignore that. Ignore that. Ignore that. Ignore that. That was sometime later. Ignore that. That’s right. I went to, I joined 129 Squadron at [pause] is there an airfield near Ringwood? Oh I can’t. I can’t remember.
CB: At Hurn.
LL: It will be in my logbook anyway. And the Squadron had actually gone to Hornchurch and so my 129 Squadron didn’t, wasn’t there. So I had to wait until they came back again and then of course I started, and I started my ops from, from there. And we did [pause] I was very green of course and they looked after me, I suppose. And then we were posted from that airfield. I can’t remember the name again, to Hornchurch where I operated from. I don’t know for how long, but we were on Spitty 5s to start off with at, at the airfield I can’t remember the name of. And we then converted on to Spit 9s when we were at Hornchurch and we did fighter patrols and I was nominated as, as I was a good Number 2 I used to fly Number 2 to the station commander and also the Squadron commander. And from there we, the war, the invasion, we prepared for the invasion and we were posted down to, this is where we went to, oh dear. Why? Why can’t I think of it? It was one of these wartime airfields and it was Sommerfield tracking and we lived in tents and life was a bit rough. Unfortunately they had a system where the pilots moved to the new station and took up the aircraft and they had the ground crew of those particular aircraft. And the the airfield was run by a Polish wing and Wold, no it wasn’t Woldzinski, but anyway we had two Polish Squadrons there and we, and we joined with our Spitfires at this particular place. But we had Polish ground crew. But we got rid of our Spitfires almost immediately and we got Mustangs and our serviceability went down very badly because they didn’t understand what we were talking about and we didn’t understand what they were talking about. The ground crew. And eventually we got British ground crew and everything was a little bit more satisfactory and we did patrols. We escorted Fortresses to, into Germany. We did a lot escort work. And most of our, a lot of our, when I was on on on Spitfires we escorted American bombers in France and into Germany and yes it was all all very, very well, I can’t say exciting really. It [pause] and I’m about bouncing around a bit. Does that matter?
CB: Fine. It’s fine.
LL: I’m bouncing around a bit. So anyway. The invasion. We were at this airfield, and oh yes we with, with the Mustang of course we could stay airborne for quite a long time and we, on these escorts to in to Germany with the Fortresses we were airborne in the Mustang for three hours, three and a half hours, maybe four hours some times. And when we got back on one particular trip it had a tremendous rain storm and all our tents had been flattened. All our bedding was soaking wet. And it was a bit of a mess actually. The whole airfield. And it took quite a while to sort of get ourselves sorted out. The other thing about it was that the Squadron commander made me the imprest holder and I had to go to base accounts and collect all the money and pay the troops and the officers the money they wanted. And the trouble was there was there was nowhere to put this money. I had no safe. I had, and I and I used to go on operations with my pockets full of, full of money because I had nowhere to put them. I couldn’t leave it in the tent. So eventually I saw the Squadron commander and I said, ‘This is ridiculous, sir. I can’t, I can’t cope.’ Anyway, he agreed and they got somebody in to, an officer, ground crew officer and he took over the imprest. So if I had been shot down in Germany I would have had lots of money [laughs] Oh dear. So anyway, from there we went to [pause] we were preparing to go over to, over to France. Oh yes. The invasion. We took, we started with the, the invasion started and we didn’t actually take part in the very first day. The 6th. We were, we were on standby and we were on, and I flew supporting the invasion on the, the second day and it was amazing to see. To fly over that beach head and the, and the number of ships in the harbour there. But the Navy was very very light fingered and they invariably fired at us. And to avoid this they introduced a system where we lowered our undercarriages, circled round to prove to them that we were British and then off we went again. But they still fired at us and they invariably got at least one aeroplane which was very, very upsetting. But the fact was that we were then doing ground, ground support and we were supporting the troops in, against the German tanks and doing a lot of ground work and we lost a lot of pilots through ground fire. And I’ve got all the names in my logbook if you want it. And then we were, the Doodlebugs started and we were diverted from the invasion to shoot down Doodlebugs. And we went to Dungeness, a little airfield in Dungeness with our Mustangs and we were given new Mustangs with a higher boost so that we had more speed to catch these Doodlebugs. And I met, I got one which blew up in front of me and bits of metal through all, from the doodlebug sort of passed over me and blackened all my windscreen. And I got two possibles. So, so I had a little bit of a success there. And then from there I was tour-ex and I was posted to Ingham on fighter affil duties. Can we stop there?
CB: We will.
[recording paused]
LL: Then we had the undercarriage down and circled around them. And that’s the whole Squadron you know, sort of doing it. They still fired at us. But it was the actual invasion supporting the troops and doing ground, ground attack work was more or less new to us. We did what they called from Hornchurch and, and, and the other airfields we used to do what they called ramrods.
CB: Yes.
LL: That was low level stuff and we sorted out trains and German cars and things like that. Interdiction I think they called it, didn’t they?
CB: Yeah.
LL: Keep on whirring. So anyway, Ingham.
CB: Just quickly, what was the armament you had on the Mustang?
LL: Sorry?
CB: What was the armament on the Mustang?
LL: .5s, .5s.
CB: Right.
LL: .5s.
CB: But on the Spitfire you had twenty millimetre cannon.
LL: We had. The early ones of course they had eight 303s and then we got two cannons and two 303s on each wing. No. One cannon and one, that’s right and also a couple of 303s and then they dispensed with the 303s altogether and we had two cannons per wing.
CB: How did you feel about that?
LL: Oh, jolly good. Jolly good. For ground attack work they were marvellous. And on these what they called ramrods.
CB: Just quickly on the V-1 Doodlebug.
LL: Yeah.
CB: So what was the technique that you were trained to pursue with them?
LL: Ah. Well they came in at around about two thousand feet, the Doodlebugs. And we had a sea patrol which was, and then and, and we, if you picked and we stayed at about three or four thousand feet above and so when we saw them we used to have to dive on them and with that extra speed we managed to keep up with them. And we then chased them and fired at them or we hadn’t, if we had missed them, they were still pressing on we had to stop because there was a gunnery belt, anti-aircraft belt and we had to stop and turn back otherwise we would have been fired at. And the gunners took over the Doodlebug from us.
CB: Yeah.
LL: And had a go at it. So it ran a pretty dicey journey.
CB: Sure.
LL: The old V-1s, really. So it, oh yes and one of one of the gunners when we were on this airfield the gunners actually shot, shot one down and winged it and it didn’t blow up. It actually sort of tipped over and headed for the ground and it came straight for us. And we scattered and, and, and it landed in the field just behind the airfield. And when I, we sort of came, I came to I was under the petrol bowser [laughs] Can you imagine it? I was under the bloody petrol bowser. Stupid thing. So, anyway it was from, it was quite exciting chasing the old Doodlebugs.
CB: The one you hit —
LL: Because they didn’t fire back at me you see [laughs]
CB: No. But what was the recommended technique for the approach?
LL: To dive down on them from height to get the speed.
CB: So was it a passing shot or did you actually dive and then come in from behind?
LL: Oh yes. Always from behind. You couldn’t get a deflection shot on them.
CB: Right.
LL: You had to fire on them from behind.
CB: So the one that you got. The kill you did. It blew up. You got a ton of explosive at the front going up.
LL: I must have stopped the engine which then slowed it down and I hadn’t realised that and of course I then closed in rather rapidly and then of course my cannon fire actually exploded it.
CB: Right.
LL: And it, and somebody else did this and they finished up with bits of the Doodlebug stuck in their wings.
CB: Yes. And they were, people were brought down by it as well.
LL: That’s right.
CB: So now you’ve gone through the blackness and your windscreen you said was covered in black. So what did you do then? You can’t lean out and wipe the windscreen.
LL: Somehow, somehow you can’t lean forward and clean the windscreen [laughs] somehow by looking out sideways I managed to get back and land it. Oh, I had engine failure on take-off at that airfield too.
CB: This is at Dungeness.
LL: Yeah. We had Packard Merlin engines and they suffered from internal coolant leaks. And I was leading a section off from there and all of a sudden I started losing power and all this smoke came out of the exhaust. And I had selected undercarriage up because I’d just left the ground and the, and that was it. The engine stopped and I finished up at the ditch at the end of the airfield. And my number two sort of pressed on, fortunately.
CB: So, in those circumstances the number two leads the flight.
LL: No. He had no other opportunity. He had to carry on actually. I don’t know what happened. Whether he landed again or not I can’t remember. I was more concerned about getting out the aircraft [laughs]
CB: So you said there were two probables. How did that occur?
LL: They, they were winged but they, but they and they went down, started going down and then they went into cloud and, and that was it. They, for some reason or other they didn’t give the, they didn’t award me them. They just gave me probables.
CB: Because they couldn’t link it directly to you. Is that it?
LL: They couldn’t link it directly to me. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. How did you feel about that?
LL: Well, had to accept it didn’t I?
CB: Not as sick as a parrot.
LL: So anyway where did we get to?
CB: Right. So you then went to Ingham.
LL: Ingham.
CB: In Lincolnshire.
LL: Oh yes, where we had Hurricanes and Spitfires. And I’d never done this sort of thing before and of course the daylight fighter affil was, was relatively easy. In fact, it was enjoyable. Really enjoyable doing quarter attacks on, and we used to meet the bomber above his airfield and then we used to, off we used to go and do the quarter attacks.
CB: This is the fighter affiliation.
LL: Fighter affil, yeah. And, and then of course we, I had to do it at night. Well, at night time I wasn’t very, I didn’t like night flying very much and, but I had to get used to it. And again we had to take off at night, find the bomber because he always used to be above the airfield and then he used to lead us off. Off somewhere. And then we used to do our quarter attacks at night time. We had infrared lights or lamps under each wing tip on the Spitfires and the Hurricanes so that the gunner can photograph us at night time and assess their abilities. And it was their responsibility to bring us back to base because we had no idea where we were going or where we were. And we, the trouble was that we daren’t lose the bomber because we had no navigation systems and we had no radio systems to get home. And it was their, the bombers responsibility to bring us back home again and when it was a lot of cloud around the bomber used to descend into cloud and we had to formate on this bomber in cloud. And the only ident, the only visual, visual of the bomber was the downward ident light. And you had to sort of fly more or less underneath it to keep in touch with it. And it was quite, quite frightening actually. And you daren’t lost it because you had, you had no idea when you broke, if you eventually broke cloud on your own where you were and there was no identification on the ground and and you were really were sort of lost in a way. But fortunately I managed to hang on to the bombers and I never had that, that situation at all. But it was. And then from Ingham we were, they decided that we would have to go to the bomber stations themselves and we went to Lindholme. The whole unit went up to Lindholme where we operated on fighter affil there. And then we saw Bomber Command operating at its, at its full [pause] I remember one night. Would they have had Halifaxes or Lancasters? I think. I can’t remember. But they took, one aircraft took off and crashed immediately after take-off and then the next aircraft took off and that did exactly the same thing. And instead of selecting undercarriage up the chappie must have, they think who operated the flaps must have brought the flaps up and the aircraft must have stalled and gone straight in. But it was a dreadful mess. It was something that sort of stuck in my mind. Anyway, one of the pilots who was posted on to Typhoons and he didn’t want to go and I wanted to get away from Bomber Command at the time. So I wanted to get back into Fighter Command so I volunteered to take his posting and I was accepted and I went down to Aston Down and converted on to Typhoons. And when I was there the war ended. And I had managed to scrounge trips on Tempests instead of Typhoons. I got on to Tempests which was more of a faster and better aircraft and from there I was declared redundant. And I went home on leave and I was recalled and when I got back I found that they wanted pilots on 222 Squadron in Germany flying Tempests and I was nominated. And I was, I think I said, ‘Thank goodness for that,’ and off I went to Germany to, oh dear what was the name of the damned airfield? Anyway, I joined 222 Squadron and on Tempests. And we, we just did ordinary training and flying and, and then we were sent back to England. I was only on, in Germany for a short period like three or four months and the Squadron was brought home and we were converted onto Meteors. And we went to Molesworth and we converted on to Meteors and they were Meteor 1s. And of course they were twin-engine and we, I had never flown twin engines before. None of the pilots had. And we were given dual in an Oxford. And this, the asymmetric training they gave us was the instructor, throttle back one engine and he said, ‘You push the rudder in the opposite side to keep it straight. Ok? And if you throttle back the other one you push the other rudder. Ok?’ And he said, ‘Now, you do it.’ And I do it. And then we went in and landed. And that was my asymmetric training [laughs] They didn’t show no, no approaches or anything and and consequently we had an awful lot of Meteor crashes because the, the engine, the fuel for some unearthly reason had, when they manufactured was getting water into it and the engines were, were, tended to stop. And unfortunately a lot of pilots had to do asymmetric landings and they had very little training and consequently they, they killed themselves approaching on one engine and it, it was, it was, it was amazing. The Meteor had a very, very high accident rate [pause] What did I do from there? Oh, yes. I can’t remember, [unclear] no. Meteors. Where did I operate? We went to Exeter. That’s right. Exeter, on Meteors. And of course that was quite close to my home which was in Plymouth. And I used to sort of nip home over the weekends quite easily. And I had a car then so I managed to get home quite easily. And then I was posted from 222 Squadron to 1 Squadron to convert them on to Meteors. They had Spitfire 21s. And I had the opportunity to fly Spitfire 21s and 22s with, some of them with contra rotating props so you went from Meteors to Spitfires again. And the Squadron commander brought me in one day and said, ‘How would you like to be posted overseas?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘You’re a bachelor and they want pilots in Italy, and how about it?’ So I said, ‘Oh, ok.’ And consequently I was posted to Italy. We went by train all the way across the continent on this military train and it took two days to get to Northern Italy. And it was Treviso. Treviso in Northern Italy. That’s right. Where we flew Mustangs. So, I’ve gone from jets back to piston engines. And we, and of course they were disbanding Squadrons left right and centre at the time and our Squadron was disbanded and I was sent up to a transit camp in Austria where we spent days doing nothing and waiting for a posting. And I assumed I was being posted home again but I was posted to the Middle East. And I [pause] and I eventually after a lot of journeys and trains and aircraft I managed to get via Malta to the Canal Zone, Egypt, where we lived in tents. And from there I was posted to Cyprus on to 213 Squadron. And I, and they were so short of pilots there was the Squadron commander, one flight commander and two pilots. That totalled the Squadron. And I turned up plus a couple of others and we sort of expanded the Squadron a bit. And then they were gradually, Cranwell had started up again and we eventually got some Cranwell students. Pilots posted in and we spent about nearly a year in good old Cyprus. We had a marvellous time in Cyprus. And then I was posted from there. We were sent to Khartoum. And that’s the first time I really saw the Sahara Desert and I was amazed at the extent of that desert. It was fantastic. And flying sort of single engine aircraft over this desert is, is quite, quite something really. And anyway we arrived at at Khartoum and we spent nearly a year there. And we were, from Khartoum we had, yes that’s right it was hot and awful and they had what they called an international front. A weather front called a haboub. And this had, it was high winds and it picked up the sand and it had rain and this black cloud was extended, used to move right across the ocean northwards and and sand was blown everywhere and it was, and it was the first time we’d seen rain. And it was quite, it turned the sand into sort of mud and what amazed me was that after two or three days of this sort of haboub and rain the, if you looked horizontally across the sand you could see it turning green. Grass was actually growing again in the sand. And then of course it didn’t last. It was then of course the heat and the sun killed it off again but that is there, and what amazed me was that it could actually grow and if you could cultivate it I suppose you could have, you know turn the desert into the grass. But anyway, we from Khartoum we were sent down to Mogadishu in —
CB: Somalia.
LL: Somalia. Where we lived very very primitively. It was a dreadful thing. The only toilet was a hole in the ground with a big trench in the ground with holes in it and you sort of had to sit over the hole. We had an air liaison officer, a Claude [Histead?] his name was and he was, he stayed with the Squadron all the way from Cyprus. And he stayed with us for ages. Anyway, he decided that he was, and of course there was a lot of flies over this thing and he decided that he was going to do something about it. So he got some petrol and poured it down into this hole, there were various holes and threw a match in and the whole thing went up in smoke including the [unclear] so it was left a dirty big hole and no small holes for us to sit in, over [laughs] But he got rid of the flies. Anyway, the AOC came down to see us I can remember and, and we thought we’d give him a decent lunch so I went into Mogadishu and I bought these chickens and gave them to the chef or the cook and we, he cooked them up and they served them. And boy those chickens must have been a hundred years old I think because they were so tough that we couldn’t even get a knife into them. And so that was the special dinner for the AOC was a complete washout and we finished up eating corned beef and what was it? What are those red things? Oh, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, we had a makeshift corned beef lunch much to the amusement of the AOC. So we spent time there and we were actually supporting the army in the unrest in that area. And we used to fly, we had long range tanks of course and we had to locate this army unit and we used to fly over them. And our presence helped to back up their system I suppose in keeping the natives quiet because there was a lot of unrest there. And we used to put on rocket demonstrations at [unclear] and do rocket demonstrations just to show them what was in store for them if they didn’t behave themselves. You can’t do that these days. But we had quite a while at Mogadishu and then from Mogadishu we went up to Aden and stayed at Aden for a while where 8 Squadron was. And then I got up to, posted, we were posted back up to the Canal Zone. And the first thing they told me I was required at Group Headquarters for an interview for a permanent commission. And of course I hadn’t got any kit and anyway I got the batman to press my KD and whatnot. Made myself reasonably respectable and reported to Group Headquarters where they kept me waiting all morning and then when I was ushered in I can’t remember what rank they were but they started asking me questions on political situations and things. And I said ‘Excuse me, sir. I haven’t seen a paper or heard a radio now for nearly two years. I have no idea what’s happening in the world so I cannot answer your questions.’ He looked at me as if I’d gone mad and I got, I must admit I got a little bit annoyed because you know he just couldn’t believe that I didn’t know what was going on in the rest of the world. You know, with Russia and what not. And consequently I was turned down. And when I got back to base, to Shallufa, that’s right, Shallufa we were stationed at, the station commander said, ‘How did it go?’ And I said, ‘Not very well.’ And then of course it came through that I’d, I had failed and he said, ‘Right. I’ll put you up again.’ So I was put up again and before I was actually summoned for another interview I was posted home tour-ex. That was after two and a half years. And as a matter of interest my overseas allowance then was two shillings a day, 10p now. That was not exactly [laughs] that was added to my salary and of course taxed as well. Can I go back a little bit? Back to Khartoum.
CB: Do.
LL: When I was, when I was at Khartoum I was sent home on a, on a course. Some, I don’t know I’ve forgotten what course it was now but anyway I took the opportunity and I thought it was jolly good. Anyway, I eventually got back to England again and I did the course, and I had a week’s leave and when I was coming back to report back to Air Ministry I got, we had first class tickets in those days. In my compartment there was a young lady and a young man and she was wearing, and it was a hot day and she was wearing a fur coat. And I said to her, ‘Are you cold?’ She said, ‘Yes. I’ve, we’ve just come home from Khartoum.’ I said, ‘Really? So have I.’ She said, ‘Oh, my daddy is a district commissioner in, in the Sudan.’ And then I told her what I thought of district commissioners because while we were stationed at Khartoum they would have nothing to do with us. We used to go to the Sudan Club where there was a swimming pool and when we used to go to the mess they completely ignored us and wouldn’t have anything to do with us because we were service. And I told her what I thought of district commissioners and I left the compartment. Found somewhere else to sit. So I didn’t think much of her. So, anyway where did I get to?
CB: So you went back on a course.
LL: Oh yes. On a course. And, and that was on the train journey —
CB: Yeah.
LL: To London. Then I had to go up to, oh some transit camp up in Lancashire somewhere and then I got, got on a troop ship and we went, I went back to the Middle East and I rejoined the Squadron in the Canal Zone. And then of course we got involved with the Israeli Egyptian war.
CB: Yeah. 1948.
LL: Yeah,1948. And these, I can remember the Egyptian Spitfires landing at Shallufa and they were in a dreadful state these aircraft, these aircraft. There were panels missing off them and they were, oh dreadful looking aircraft. They were completely and utterly neglected. Anyway, the highlight then that had happened was that 208 Squadron had red nosed Spitfires and I can’t remember what base they were on and four of them went missing one day. And they’d been shot down by the Israelis. And our Group Captain Anderson came over to us and while we were at Shallufa we used to do readiness. We used to do twenty fours hours on, and twenty fours off and we shared it with 6 Squadron. And we had just come off readiness and they had de-tensioned the BFMs which is the Belt Feed Mechanism. And anyway, the group captain came to see me and my Squadron commander was in, in Cairo at the time so I was looking after the Squadron. And he said, ‘Get your aircraft ready, Les and we’re going to go and find these bloody Spitfires.’ And anyway, we got airborne and 6 Squadron got airborne and we flew towards Israel and, well it wasn’t Israel in those days. It was —
CB: Palestine. Yeah.
LL: Palestine, wasn’t it? Palestine. And we saw these two Spitfires, red nosed Spitfires flying out to our left and so we assumed they were 208 Squadron and they came around and the next thing that happened is they were firing at us and they shot down my number two. We couldn’t believe it. And these bloody Israelis attacked us and shot down and killed my number two. [Tattersfield?] was his name. He’d only joined the Squadron a couple of months before. Anyway, it broke up and I somehow finished behind a Spitfire which was firing at one of my Tempests and I pressed the tit to shoot at him and of course the guns didn’t work because my BFMs had been de-tensioned. Anyway, he must have seen me. He broke up and disappeared. So I, in way saved the chap’s life in that second. When we got back to base we looked at his aircraft and there were bullet holes through the fuselage and hitting the back of the armour plating. You know, behind the seat. So he was jolly lucky. And gosh, our Group Captain Anderson was absolutely furious. He said, ‘I’m going to put rockets on these bloody aircraft. We’ll, show these bloody Israelis.’ Anyway, Group managed, somehow found out and they calmed him down and that was the end of that. But it was, it was quite a thing and it never appeared in the papers. I don’t know what would have happened if, if I had shot this bloody Spitfire down. So that was quite an excitement there.
CB: These, these Israelis were all ex-RAF pilots.
LL: Most of them. Yeah. So, anyway what had happened is that they had shot down these four pilots and fortunately all four pilots survived and they were taken prisoner. And [pause] and believe it or not I was given a book and I think it’s called, “Silent Witness,” or something like that. This is stories by RAF pilots that had not been printed or not known. And one of the stories is the, is by the pilot of one of these Spitfires that were shot down. And he recalls his adventures or what happened to him after he was shot down, and he also mentioned the fact that the Israelis actually shot down one of the Tempests. So, I had a double. It’s up, it’s up in the bedroom somewhere, this, this book.
CB: This double link for you.
LL: A double link. I was reading both sides.
CB: Yes.
LL: I found out both sides of the story. But the Israelis were not very nice at all. They were, they were, they were bombing people. They were putting wire across the road, you know and motorcyclists, despatch riders were, had been decapitated by this bloody wire. They blew up half, one of the wings of the headquarters. They, they, they got hold of some army colonel or major and imprisoned him in a tomb somewhere and eventually the services managed to find him again. They were doing all sorts of nasty things there. And they were also trying to get extra aircraft and they would bribe, we found out they would bribe us with money if we actually landed our aircraft into Israel. They would take us over. They would take us out to sea and put us in a dinghy and say [laughs] and say that we had, had engine failure over the Mediterranean and of course there was no sign of the aeroplane. But I don’t think anybody took [laughs] took that little adventure anyway. But that was a little bit of bribery on their part. So it was all very sort of what do you call it? Exciting, I suppose. Interesting.
CB: What did they do with these pilots they captured.
LL: They, they put them in prison actually. And, and I think they looked after them. They didn’t sort of torture them or anything like that. But I can’t remember how they got released. But they were released somehow or other. But I’d have to read the story again. I can’t honestly remember. So anyway, I was posted back to England and I took over a comm flight at Hawarden in north, near Chester, North Wales, where we had Ansons, Oxfords, and this AOC had a Spitfire, and we had a Harvard. And we used to fly ATC boys over the weekend and we, and we flew people from A to B as, as a communications flight. And I eventually got my permanent commission interview and I got my permanent commission there. So it was quite a long time after the war that I actually I got my commission. And the reason, and how I stayed in the Air Force was that there were at the end of the war they were offering, it was about a year after the end of the war they were getting short of pilots or something or the other and they were offering four year commissions. And I accepted the four years and I managed to get my permanent commission during that period of extended service as they called it. Extended service. From, I stayed there for, [pause] oh I don’t know whether I ought to mention it but all my, my friends used to ring me up when they were posted from A to B because they didn’t have cars in those days and I used to go across with the Proctor and pick them up and take them to their new airfield. And I used to charge them ten bob for the [laughs] for the pleasure of doing it. I didn’t keep it. I put it in this, in the, in the flight fund and, and at Christmas time we spent this money on a nice party for the ground crew and the pilots. It was called, “Lunn’s Airlines.” [laughs] I don’t know whether I should say that. Nobody knows that really. So, anyway from there I was posted down or sent down to Little Rissington for an interview to be an instructor. And I didn’t want to be an instructor, but they said you’re going to be an instructor. So I eventually got a posting to Little Rissington on the instructor’s course. And what we used to do there is you had dual with a, you know with a at Little Rissington a CFS instructor and then we used to fly mutual. You know, two pilots together. And believe it or not my co-pilot or confederate was an Israeli I was told and believe it or not his name was Captain Israel Stern. He had renamed himself Captain Israel Stern and I went up and saw the Squadron commander and I said, ‘I don’t want this man. I won’t fly with him,’ and I told him a bit of the story and he said ok and he gave me, they gave me somebody else. But it was amazing that I should be given this bloody man because I must admit I hated them. Anyway, I graduated funnily enough with a B1 instead of a B2 and I was sent up to [pause] outside of York. What was the name of the blasted airfield?
CB: Elvington?
LL: Who?
CB: Elvington.
LL: Elvington. No. No. It’s a prison now. Full Sutton. Full Sutton.
CB: Yeah.
LL: Full Sutton, and of course the Korean War had started.
CB: Yes. 1950.
LL: Yeah. It was the Korean War and they were calling up ex-RAF pilots back into the RAF and we, and Molesworth was opened up again. And it was a disused airfield and there were no facilities there. There were nissen huts and I had half a nissen hut, a bed and a wardrobe I think, or a cupboard or something to put my clothes in. And we all ate in the airmen’s one mess because there was no officer’s mess or sergeant’s mess or officer’s mess. So we all ate together. And we had to set to and open up this airfield and prepare to get aircraft. And we got Spitfires believe it or not, and Vampires and Meteors. And we did a conversion course of these pilots who were being called up. It was, it was quite a lot of, in fact a graduated CFS instructor spent a lot of his time initially in shuffling manure out of the air traffic control building [laughs] so they could get that place, the air traffic control building sort of back into operation again. It was a bit of a mess actually. But after a lot a lot of work we got this airfield going again and I became a flight commander there. And it was a lot of work. We used to start at 6 o’clock in the morning and we lived in nissen huts. And the officer’s mess was a nissen hut and [pause] oh yeah. We, we worked jolly hard actually and we worked weekends as well. And then from there after I can’t remember how long I was at Full Sutton but I spent a lot of time, and of course I did a lot of asymmetric flying there because we had to teach these students or ex-pilots asymmetric. And they used to shut down an engine in the air and then do a single engine landing. And then so many aircraft had accidents they decided it was rather silly to shut down the engine so we just throttled it back.
CB: This was on the Meteors.
LL: On the Meteors, yeah. And anyway, I was summoned to the station commander’s office one day and he said there was an air commodore, I think he’s one, he said, ‘He’s never flown in a jet and,’ and he said, ‘I want you to take him up on a trip.’ So I said, ‘Ok. Fair enough, sir.’ So we took him out to the aircraft and I briefed him and whatnot and set him in and we took off and I got, had an engine failure just as I left the ground. There was a bang and bingo the engine stopped and by God, I really had to work hard to keep that aircraft in the air. Anyway, we managed to slowly climb away and we came around and landed again. And the air commodore said, ‘Oh, asymmetric flying is easy in the Meteor isn’t it?’ [laughs] Little did he know that I was struggling. That I struggled. Anyway, that was one incident anyway. It was a very primitive airfield. Everything was very primitive and it’s now, it’s now an open prison. Full Sutton is. And what happened then? Oh yes. I was posted from there as flying wing adjutant down at CFS where I met Diana Broadhurst, she was a WAAF officer there.
CB: So, Harry’s daughter.
LL: And, and she used to come down to the office every other day and see me. And she said, ‘Look, Les, the WAAFs in the tower haven’t got a toilet. Can you organise a toilet for them?’ And I said, ‘Well, there’s nowhere in the air traffic building that we can put a lady’s toilet.’ Anyway, she used to pop down practically every other day on this subject and so we got to know each other quite well, and I married her [laughs] And she said, ‘You’ll have to ask my dad.’ And I said, ‘Oh.’ And he was CnC Bomber Command at the time. And so I had to go up with Diana to High Wycombe and I stayed with the CnC that weekend and I asked permission to, to marry his daughter. I can’t remember whether he said yes or no but he, the one thing he did say. That she was extremely loyal, and Diana [excuse me]
CB: It’s alright.
Other: It’s alright.
[pause]
CB: We’ll stop there just for a mo.
[recording paused]
LL: Yes. Oh, yes. We we got married at High Wycombe and her father Harry, Sir Harry went on this, the Vulcan was just coming in to service and they had three Vulcan 1s which they were, which they used for trials work and one of them they took out to the Middle East and then out to the Far East and Diana’s father went as co-pilot to Podge Howard, who was the captain. And they went all the way out to Australia and New Zealand and they came back again and they landed at, in North Africa somewhere. And they were scheduled to land at London Airport and the weather at London Airport was awful and they, and it was in the early days of London Airport and Broady, as they used to call him didn’t want to land at London Airport. And he said, ‘Waddington is open and clear. We’ll go up to Waddington.’ But they said, ‘The reception committee is at London Airport. You’ll have to land at London Airport.’ And Podge Howard said, ‘Ok. We’ll have one go and if we can’t make it we’ll divert to, up to Waddington.’ And you know the consequences, don’t you?
CB: Yeah. So do you want to just describe that?
LL: Anyway, what had happened is they were doing a talk down and of course they were doing a GCA.
CB: Yeah. Ground Control Approach.
LL: And you’re azimuth and elevation and you’re on the glide path or below the glide and you’re left or you’re right and you adjust to what you’re being told and the Vulcan 1 had its pitot head heaters, pitot head on the wing tips. So when you came in. we didn’t have flaps so when you were coming in on the approach the aircraft was at quite a high angle.
CB: Yes.
LL: And consequently you got disturbances in the pitot head which produced a two hundred foot error in the altimeter. Now, if you are being talked down it doesn’t matter what the altimeter is showing. You’re either on the glide path or you’re not on the glide path. The altimeter can read anything. If you are actually doing a talk down and they say you should now be passing through eight hundred feet you had to have a thousand feet on your altimeter to be at eight hundred feet.
CB: Yeah.
LL: So you had to add this two hundred feet on.
CB: Yeah.
LL: And they blamed this error into the actual cause of the accident. The trouble was the controller had not guided a jet aircraft in on a GCA before. It was his first attempt. And consequently it was much faster than the piston engine aircraft.
CB: Yeah. On his approach.
LL: On the approach. And they broke cloud and they were very low. And Broady looked up and the runway was at this angle instead of down there. Then they hit the ground and broke the undercarriage off or one of them and if, if Podge Howard had carried on and landed he would have slid and everybody would have been alright. But he attempted to overshoot. Anyway, he opened up to overshoot and somehow or other the undercarriage had hit the underside of the aircraft and knocked all the generators off, and the control systems were defunct. They wouldn’t work and the aircraft started to climb and roll. And Podge Howard said, ‘I’m going,’ and pulled his blind and shot out and Broady eventually yelled to the crew, the rear crew, ‘For God’s sake get out,’ and he was at an angle. You know, ninety degrees, and he operated his ejector seat and went out and landed and broke his, his feet or his, and his leg I think. Something to do with his feet anyway because he hit the ground rather hard. And of course his wife and other daughter Claire Broadhurst were in the tower waiting for him. And they have a controller at the side of the runway in the cabin and they came out and found Broady and they brought him into, into the cabin until they could get transport and take him in because he couldn’t walk. And of course they came out all in fire engines and what not and they thought that Broady had been killed because they couldn’t find him. And so for a while his wife thought she was a widow. But anyway they got transport out and they got Broady and they finished up in that military hospital. I forget where it was. And it was, and of course we’d only been married, what a couple of weeks and we were living in Peterborough and I was posted to 63 Squadron on Canberras and after the honeymoon, two weeks honeymoon I reported to, and of course to the Squadron and as I walked into the officer’s mess the Squadron Commander Wingco Charles was it, and his navigator met me and said, the first thing they said was, ‘Your father in law has crashed at London Airport.’ And I though God, I must get in touch with Diana. Anyway, I managed to get a hold of Diana but she had already been told by someone that her father was ok. But that was the beginning of our marriage really. Anyhow, I was on Canberras there and we lived in Peterborough and —
CB: Where were you stationed?
LL: At Upwood.
CB: Right.
LL: Oh, sorry. Didn’t I say? No, I was stationed at Upwood on Canberras. And then of course the, that Canal Zone fiasco.
CB: 1957.
LL: Nineteen, was that ’57? Occurred. And I think Broady must have, didn’t send 63 Squadron out. They sent, they sent the other Squadron because he thought it would be a bit unkind to send his son in law out after [laughs] I think. I’m only suppositioning this. And, and but he didn’t send me, my Squadron out. So anyway we were, I flew with my, the two navigators and one was the Squadron commander and he had asked for a mature pilot. And of course I flew these Canberras and it was, yeah we did detachments to Malta and that sort of thing. And then our daughter was born, Dorothea. And then I was posted after a while on to Vulcans and I was up at Waddington. Did the OCU and joined 617 Squadron. In the meantime we were, we had moved from Peterborough to, oh golly Moses [pause] A lovely thatched roof cottage aye, aye, aye. And that’s where Dorothea was born. Do you know I can’t remember the name of the place. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. And I did the OCU at Waddington. Then I was posted to Scampton. And they had one Vulcan that had been delivered and they were building the Squadron up of course. And, and I stayed with 617 Squadron for five years I think it was.
CB: Was that a long tour or two tours?
LL: Yeah. I did two tours with them, I asked. I asked to do a second tour and I was nominated as the Bomber Command demonstration pilot and I used to go off on Battle of Britain days and demonstrate the Vulcan. And I went to Canada and I did it over there. I went to Norway, Oslo and I demonstrated it there. And I was awarded the AFC. I assume for my abilities.
CB: What was the Vulcan —
LL: Sorry?
CB: What was the Vulcan like to fly?
LL: Oh, it was bloody marvellous. It was an absolutely wonderful aircraft. It really was. When I was in, doing this demonstration at in, in Norway they were celebrating so many years of powered flight. And the Americans were there with a, B not a 52. 47? Would it be a 47?
CB: Yeah.
LL: Yeah. I think it was a 47. And at the briefing they said, ‘All the spectators are at stands at,’ so and so side of the runway, ‘Could you, can you, would it be alright if you took off on runway — ’ so and so, ‘Which is slightly downwind. You’ll have about a five knot downwind. Will that be alright?’ And the Americans thought and thought and thought and they got their calculators out and what not. And I immediately said, ‘Of course I can. No problem at all. I can get airborne in four hundred yards.’ At a guess. And these Americans wouldn’t believe me and they actually paced out four hundred yards on the runway. And I thought, ‘You’ve got to get airborne boy.’ [laughs] And on the very first demo I taxied out and opened up full bore on all those lovely Olympus engines, released the breaks and I, at the right time I hauled back on the old pole and the old Vulcan lifted off the ground and up she went. And everybody amazed at this aircraft climbing away. And I actually appeared on Norway’s television. And after I’d landed, the Americans they were shaking their heads. Bloody marvellous. Bloody marvellous. So I felt, I felt very proud of the old Vulcan then. I really did.
CB: Well, the story was that the 47 would only get off the ground because of the curvature of the earth.
LL: They had rocket assisted take off.
CB: Oh did they?
LL: Most of the time. Yeah. When, yes we used to do lone rangers from Scampton and we used to go to America. To Omaha. The base there. And I can remember taking off from there on the return journey and I took off and as I say they called up and said, ‘Call passing five.’ I said, ‘Passing ten.’ And they said, there was a pause they said, ‘Call passing fifteen.’ I said, ‘Passing twenty.’ [laughs] They couldn’t believe that I was climbing up that fast, you know.
CB: Yeah.
LL: Because they were used to the old 47s. Again I felt very proud of the old Vulcan.
CB: This was the bombing competition.
LL: And of course there was the bombing competition as well. Yes.
CB: How did you get on with that?
LL: We did, we did very well actually. We, the Squadron came, were second. We didn’t, we never actually won it. We came second actually.
CB: Was it an annual event?
LL: Yes. Oh yes. On one particular trip we were doing we had taken off, at night of course and we were pressing on and my navigator, not Godfrey Salmond. Oh lord. Lord. Lord. Isn’t it amazing how you can’t remember things some times? Anyway, he had a habit of acting rather funnily when he got on board the aircraft. And a couple of times my navigator Arthur Wheatman said that whatever his name was, ‘Is sort of banging his head on the table.’ And I said, ‘What?’ Because I can’t see, you know in a Vulcan, you know. They’re back down there.
CB: Yeah.
LL: And I can’t, I can’t see them. I could see the navigator that side but I couldn’t see down there. And he said, ‘Oh, he’s ok now.’ Anyway, on this bombing competition we were on, on doing the navigation leg and Arthur called on the intercom and said, oh God, I wish I could remember his name, I have to look in my logbook, ‘He’s banging his head on the table again.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean? And he said, ‘He’s looking funny and he’s gone white and he’s banging his head on the table.’ And I thought, well I said, ‘Keep me informed.’ And after about five minutes he said, ‘He doesn’t look too good, skipper.’ So I said, ‘Ok I’ll have to cancel, and I’ll call base and return.’ Anyway, I cancelled the thing, called base and, and got back to Scampton and I asked for an ambulance to pick him up and they hauled him off into the sick quarters. And I went to see him later on and he was sitting up there perky as anything. Anyway, that was the end of him. We couldn’t take him anymore. I got a new AEO called Godfrey Salmond. Why can I remember his name and can’t remember the other chap? And so I got a new, a new AEO. And anyway they got special permission for me to do the, our trip again.
CB: Right.
LL: Normally if you return its part of the exercise. You’ve failed.
CB: Yeah.
LL: But because of the situation they allowed me then to do my portion of it again for 617 Squadron and we got, we were second.
CB: Was he the nav plotter or the nav radar?
LL: Who?
CB: The one who had the problem.
LL: Oh, the AEO.
CB: Oh, he was the AEO.
LL: Yes. I’m sorry. Didn’t I say?
CB: The air electronics officer.
LL: I didn’t say AEO.
CB: Yeah.
LL: That’s right. No. I had, we had a good crew. I had a good crew. And the wives got on well together. And, and Harry, our son was born at Scampton. And Harry is, now lives in Australia. He emigrated about ten years ago to Australia [pause] Oh, when Diana died he immediately came home. Both of them actually, and they looked after me.
CB: We’ll just pause there again.
[recording paused]
CB: Now, you spent your formative years you might say in the war on fighters. And then you transferred eventually to the Bomber Command force but particularly into Vulcans. I just wonder whether as there were some people who had flown Lancasters or Halifaxes or Stirlings in the war whether there was any link in their minds with the more modern arrangement with the V force.
LL: It never, I don’t think it ever occurred to them. It certainly didn’t come up in conversation anyway. It, they like Tommy Thompson he was one of the pilots on our Squadron who was a wartime bomber. And he used to, he did refer occasionally to incidents during the war but he was very, very remisent about it. He didn’t. Unless you particularly asked him he would never introduce the subject. All I know is that Tommy, we used to do these lone rangers and they bought, and he he went out to, I think it was [pause] I forget. It was out to Butterworth, that’s right. In Malaya. And they staged back and they got to North Africa and at the time they said that we should only do one stage a day. And anyway things were getting a bit tight for them so they decided to, when instead do two stages to get home. And they got airborne from North Africa and, and headed home. And the got airborne from North Africa and headed home. And when they got back to Scampton the Group headquarters summoned him up and said, ‘Why did you do two stages instead of one when it’s against orders.’ And anyway, anyway he, I think somebody some high ranking officer was asking him and he said, I know, ‘If you can’t trust me at this stage, I’ve flown in Bomber Command during the war, I’ve flown Lancasters, Lincolns, Canberras and now on this and I have an impeccable record. If you can’t trust my judgement now I’m leaving the Air Force.’ And he turned around and walked out and resigned his commission.
CB: Did he really?
LL: And, and he finished up by going out to Australia. And he took a Land Rover and drove all the way out to Australia [laughs] with his family. That was one incident. That’s all I can think of.
CB: Did, did many people in your experience in the RAF after the war discuss their experiences during the war of any type?
LL: Well, most of the pilots on my Squadron were, weren’t in the war. You know, like in 213 Squadron there were no — they were all ex-Cranwell cadets or pilots that graduated after the war and got commissions and things like that. No. I don’t think so.
CB: Going fast forward again then to the Vulcan. It was an extremely manoeuvrable aeroplane. Did you feel any link between your fighter days and flying the Vulcan?
LL: Well, when I was doing the demonstrations, yes [laughs] In fact I’ve got a book down there and didn’t even bother to put my name to it. I was referred to as the “Star of the Air Show.”
CB: And what did you do there?
LL: I did my demonstration. And we had rapid starter on the old, on the Vulcan and and it was, we had an electrical and then they had air pressure and they made it a rapid start on all four engines. And I had my crew chief to make me a plunger thing which I could press down on the starter buttons and get all four to go down together. And I taxied out at, at, in Paris and, and stopped the engines at the beginning of the runway and then I called for take-off. Or they told me it was ok to take off and I pressed the old buttons, this thing down and I took off and consequently again got the aircraft airborne you know very early and I had a minimal amount of fuel and I climbed up and got almost, and then I practically rolled her and in fact they said I did a half roll and then I carried on with my demonstration. And I was referred to as the star. “Star of the Paris Air Show.”
CB: Where was that? That was at the the [unclear] Show was it?
LL: That was —
CB: Orly.
LL: I can’t remember the name of the airfield in Paris we went to. Anyway, my crew were all married of course and and the wives came out and joined us. In fact, Diana came out with Stuart Macgregor. I think his name was Stuart McGregor and he was Broady’s AD, not ADC. He was something to do with, he was a Squadron leader anyway. He actually had, flew Diana out in one of the Bomber Command communication flight aircraft into, into and she joined me at the hotel in, in Paris.
CB: So in your demonstrations did you ever roll the Vulcan? Or at any time?
LL: No [laughs] I wanted to but I thought it would be a little bit too far-fetched in a way. I half rolled it but I never fully rolled it.
CB: So —
LL: So, of course my crew in the back were sitting there being thrown around.
CB: So, technically a half roll is being inverted is it?
LL: That’s right. Yes.
CB: Yes. And then taking it back.
LL: Yeah.
CB: And pulled through and turned.
LL: That’s right. That’s what I used to do at the top of the climb.
CB: Yeah.
LL: And pull around.
CB: And then turned back the right way on the way down.
LL: That’s right.
CB: So we’ve —
LL: I used to enjoy those, it and when I went to Canada it was their, some exhibition and I was introduced to a chap, a Canadian who, he told, he was a most interesting chap. He had spent his career flying. And he started flying a solo aircraft and out in the Arctic, Northern Canada and he used to take, deliver mail to these outposts in the Arctic and he used to sleep in the aeroplane because there was nowhere else to go. And to stop the aircraft oil system solidifying because of the intense cold he used to have a small burner thing underneath it. Underneath the engine to keep the engine sort of warm. And he did that for some years and then he bought a twin engine, and he became quite a rich man and he had, he used to spend six months down in Florida. In for the summer and then fly back up to Canada again for the Canadian summer. And, and I was allowed, or the AOC who was out in, in Canada with me as part of the ground effort allowed me, said that it was ok. This chap wanted to fly in a Vulcan. And he said, ‘Ok. You can take him up.’ So, anyway, on my demonstration he sat or stood on the ladder holding on to the back of the two ejector seats while I threw the aircraft around. And when I landed he said, ‘God, that was bloody marvellous, [laughs] That was bloody marvellous.’ And when we were due to come home he had this fruit farm, or I don’t know, but he had he brought this crate of peaches and he put them, we put them in the bomb bay and when I landed at Scampton, we got all these peaches, this crate out and we distributed amongst the fruit to the, to the ground crew. But he was a marvellous chap. And, oh yes, the ex-Squadron commander of 617 Squadron. The Canadian. And he was the first to drop that huge bomb. What weight was it?
CB: Oh, the twenty two thousand pound Grand Slam.
LL: Grand Slam, he was one of the first to drop that. He was the CO and he was in Canada and he contacted me and actually took us out a couple of times. In fact, we were invited to a hotel, to a big reception and he, this ex-Squadron commander and my crew had a table and it was dry, there was no drink. And anyway this, why can’t I think of his name?
CB: What, Shannon?
LL: Sorry?
CB: Shannon?
LL: Sorry?
CB: Shannon or did he not become a CO? One of the Dambusters was Shannon. He was an American.
LL: Yeah.
CB: Who became Canadian.
LL: No. He was a Canadian.
CB: Right.
LL: Not an American.
CB: Ok.
LL: No. He was a Canadian. Oh lord. I wish I could remember his. Because he looked after us and in fact I think he was invited and he in fact invited myself and my crew to this reception. And they had all these dignitaries on a top table and all these other small tables around in this big hotel. And anyway, anyway this ex-Squadron commander called a waiter over and said, ‘I want some drinks.’ And he said, ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ He said, ‘Get me some drinks.’ Anyway, we had wine with our dinner. And, and anyway. Oh dear, my navigator. He was —
LL: Right. We’ll just stop for a mo.
[recording paused]
CB: So you all got your wine.
LL: We all got our wine. Anyway —
CB: Yeah.
LL: That naughty navigator or ours went around collecting napkins.
CB: Oh yes.
LL: And he tied them all up together, you know, into a great big — and he crawled to the next table and said, ‘Pass it on.’ You see. And this long stream of napkins headed its way up towards the top table. And I thought, oh God. Anyway, it started, it got to the top table and started to go across and then it stopped before it got to the dignitaries and of course our AOC was on the top table as well. And he, and next, next morning the AOC came to see me. Oh, I can’t remember the name of the bloody airfield, and said I was a very naughty boy. And when I got back to Scampton my squadron commander met me and said, ‘I understand you’ve been a rather naughty boy, Les.’ [laughs] but it was a good party. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
CB: Why was it a teetotal event? Was it a religious?
LL: I don’t know. It was a teetotal event. For some reason they had it was I forget what it was all about. I don’t, I don’t think I ever did know. But anyway this ex-Squadron commander got a little bit tiddly and when he was driving, he was driving us back home he stopped and said, ‘God, I can’t drive anymore. You drive Les.’ And of course, I [laughs] I drove his car back to, to base.
CB: Vancouver was an Air Show where they very much appreciated the Vulcan.
LL: Yes. That’s on, that’s on the further side.
CB: Yes.
LL: Yeah.
CB: So this was the Atlantic side.
LL: Oh yes. That’s the thing I had not mentioned and that was that we had a reunion when I was at Coolham. That’s right. Coolham. This airfield down south. And from there we had a reunion. Afterwards, that’s right. No. I’m getting a bit mixed up. Hang on a second. Anyway, the Squadron in that area had a reunion which also celebrated the invasion [of the day] and somebody organised all this and they got hold of this lady whose father, Skip Paine was her father and he was killed in a flying accident at Coolham. And she came over from Canada and we met and we became firm friends. And Christine and Rick, he’s to do with the theatre, they come to England and they come and see me and we talk and I keep in touch with them and and they’re very very good friends. Christine and Rick. And her father, she planted a tree in memory of her father when she came over once. Can I pop and see Sarah?
CB: Please do.
LL: Yeah.
[recording paused]
CB: You’ve talked about the tragic accident at Heathrow.
LL: Well, we used to do target study.
CB: Yes.
LL: And we had to do so many hours every week and we used to go in to a locked secret room in the operations block and study our targets. And I always think at the back of my mind that it was never going to happen. And I think we lived with that feeling that it’s not going to happen because it’s impossible. We can’t do this sort of thing. It would be ridiculous even to start it.
CB: This is nuclear war.
LL: Yeah. A nuclear war is out. Really out of the question and I think in our minds that people will eventually sort themselves out and it will all be cancelled. And I took a Blue Steel out to Australia in the Vulcan.
CB: Right.
LL: Because that was, I don’t know, a weapon.
CB: A stand-off weapon.
LL: A stand-off weapon.
CB: Yeah.
LL: And I was hoping that we would be able to fire it but they had, they took it off our aircraft and put it, and they did it themselves. The test people down there out in the —
CB: They didn’t drop it from a V bomber at all.
LL: No. Well, I don’t know what they did with it. They must have done trials on it. They must have dropped it from something.
CB: But a Canberra wasn’t big enough.
LL: And of course the navigator had to keep the Blue Steel working all the way out and of course he had a lot of work to do.
CB: Yeah.
LL: But when we got there a car turned up and I said, and they said, I said, ‘What’s this for?’ He said, ‘It’s been ordered for you.’ And I found out that that dear father in law of mine had been in touch with somebody out in Australia and ordered this, this car for me so I could use it to get around.
CB: Fantastic.
LL: That was, that was marvellous.
CB: This is, this is Woomera isn’t it? And Woomera is the middle of ruddy nowhere.
LL: Broady was, he was a fine chap actually and it’s, and that’s his picture up there when he was a wing commander.
CB: Oh yes.
LL: And there are all his medals.
CB: Yes.
LL: Behind you there. And those medals were sold. Somebody who was doing the history of Hornchurch, a chap called Mr Smith got in touch with Diana because he knew that her father was station commander at Hornchurch at one time. And he told her that the medals were at this particular auction, on an auction and I tried to stop it and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t get anybody to talk to me. Eventually I got hold of somebody after a lot of trying and I said I wanted the medals to be withdrawn. And they said, ‘You can’t do that. We can’t do that. A family member has put them up and they’re in the catalogue and they will be sold.’ I said that, ‘They are not to be sold. They are to stay in the family.’ But no, they wouldn’t listen and they were sold. So where Broady’s medals have gone I have no idea but I think they fetched something like thirty eight thousand pounds at the auction. And where that money went to I don’t know. But Diana’s half-sister Claire she was a rather spoiled girl. She dropped us completely and after her mother died she inherited everything. Diana hardly got anything at all. And she just dropped us. And we haven’t heard from her at all for donkeys years. But Harry, actually, when he, she’s living in Spain and Harry actually managed to get in touch with her by email to inform her that Diana had died but she didn’t even try to contact me or anything. So as far as I’m concerned Claire doesn’t exist. But Diana’s other sister Jill, she lives in Herefordshire and she’s been absolutely, she was absolutely marvellous and I keep in. I still keep in touch with her. And she’s very artistic and I’m celebrating my ninety fifth birthday in January and she is doing the invitations for me.
CB: Oh excellent.
LL: And it [pause] and I’m going to have that put on the front.
CB: Oh excellent.
LL: And this is the sort of invitation.
[pause]
CB: That’s jolly good. Yeah. With your picture on the front of it. That’s really good.
LL: Yeah. That’s right.
CB: With your Meteor behind.
LL: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: Is that a 1 or an 8?
LL: This is a Meteor 3.
CB: Oh, 3. Right. Just quickly you mentioned you never expected a nuclear war to happen. Did you believe in those days that you were making a substantial contribution as a deterrent?
LL: Yes. I’m pretty certain we did. I’m pretty certain we did. We did all this QRA, you know.
CB: Quick Reaction Alert.
LL: Quick Reaction. And we were also detached on to a peculiar airfield in Scotland so that if Scampton was bombed at all we would be up, you know away from it. And we did have, I had, Diana and I had discussed it and she said, ‘If anything does happen I’ll grab the kids and everything else and head for Herefordshire. If it does. If it does happen.’ So we had planned that sort of thing.
CB: Changing the topic to an earlier one which is the crew of a V bomber is five and three of the crew sit facing backwards. In the case of the Vulcan below the two pilots. Only the pilots have an ejector seat. What was the attitude of the crew to the inherent danger of such an arrangement for escape?
LL: They just, they just accepted it.
[telephone ringing]
LL: They just accepted it.
CB: Yeah.
[pause]
LL: I don’t think [pause] did we ever bale the rear crew out? Yes. I was watching the Vulcan take off once and as the nose lifted the whole nose wheel hydraulic system fell out and the nose wheel ran along the runway so he just had a stump. And I rushed back and rang air traffic and said, ‘For God’s sake get hold of that aircraft. He’s lost his nose wheel.’ And anyway they called him up and he came on around and they took and he flew low over the airfield and they said, yes, the nose wheel had disappeared. And then for some unearthly reason they sent him over to Waddington and they baled the rear crew out over Waddington. Why they didn’t do it over Scampton I don’t know. But a chap called Blackwell I think his name was, his ‘chute didn’t open properly and he was killed. But they naturally had to have the undercarriage up because the nose wheel was right behind the door. The whole structure. So if you slid down the door you hit, you would hit the the nose wheel. So therefore the undercarriage had to be retracted to bale the rear crew out.
CB: So, then what did they do? Did they do a —
LL: They, they, they had the undercarriage up, they opened the door and you had to have the speed somewhere below two hundred knots actually to —
CB: Yeah.
LL: For the door to open fully.
CB: Yes.
LL: One of the Vulcan crashes was that, on the Mark 1 and they grounded the Vulcan for a bit was that the a, that they had a single buzz bar for the generators, alternators. And one of the alternators back fired and knocked off all the other general alternators and this was on a long range to Canada.
CB: Oh.
LL: And they were over Canada when all this happened at forty thousand feet. And they always said that the batteries would operate the powered controls for ten minutes. Anyway, they had, believe it or not there was no means of resetting these alternators. So they couldn’t get them back on line again and so the aircraft was incapacitated really and it started to descend and it consequently got faster and faster and of course the co-pilot ejected and the captain didn’t. And they couldn’t get the rear crew out as far as I know.
CB: Because they couldn’t open the door.
LL: They were going too fast. And anyway, the co-pilot was, hadn’t got his Mae West on and he landed in Lake Michigan and was drowned.
CB: Jeez.
LL: And the aircraft crashed and the Vulcan was grounded. And then they split the buzz bar, so that if it happened again you’d only lose one side.
CB: Of power generation.
LL: Yeah. So that was the only time I can think of that you would want to get the rear crew out. But then of course the door wouldn’t, as it was over two hundred knots the door wouldn’t open properly. So —
CB: Now, after a bit then the nuclear deterrent was withdrawn and replaced by the Navy so low level flying was the order of the day.
LL: Yeah. It was quite exciting. Low level. But it wasn’t designed for that sort of thing. It, it didn’t absorb the, you know the disturbance or the bumps.
CB: The buffeting.
LL: It was an uncomfortable trip really. No. It’s the old Mark 2 of course we could get up to what forty thousand feet almost fifty thousand feet on the old Mark 2. It was a bloody marvellous aeroplane.
CB: Some people got over sixty.
LL: Yeah.
CB: Thousand.
LL: Yeah. I got a Canberra up to forty odd thousand feet [laughs]
CB: Just going back to your very earliest days there you are in America being taught by civilians. Are you treated as civilians yourselves in civilian clothes or was it RAF?
LL: We were in, we were the first British cadets to go in uniform after America had declared war. Before that they had to wear civvy clothes.
CB: And the instructors. Were they all —
LL: At, they had American sort of senior instructors but they had recruited civilians because they hadn’t got enough instructors with the expansion.
CB: Right.
LL: And so they employed the ordinary civil aviation instructors.
CB: And what was the general attitude of the American towards the British? The RAF.
LL: They were fine. Fine. We put up a bit of a black hole when we arrived because we arrived at Turner Field. That’s right, Turner Field on the very first day. We came down from Canada we finished at Montgomery at Turner Field and when we got off the train we all assembled, fell in and we were marched off and somebody struck up the tune, “As we go marching through Georgia.”
CB: Oh.
LL: And we all started singing, “As we go marching —” and the Americans were not very pleased [laughs] and [pause] in fact we had a mutiny there on my course. It was, they were in six months we did all the ground school and all the flying and sometimes we used to get up at 6 o’clock in the morning. Do ground school until lunchtime, flew all, flew all the afternoon and then did night flying. And then, alternatively it was flying. Get up, do flying in the morning ground school in the afternoon, night flying at night. So it was a lot of, a long, long day.
CB: So the mutiny was —
LL: I admire the Americans for their organisation. They expanded so quickly and they really, they really got cracking once they got, they declared war. They really did. Craig Field. That’s right. Craig Field. That’s where I went to. Did my advanced. Craig Field.
CB: And there you’re flying Harvards.
LL: Harvards. Yes.
CB: Or T6 Texan.
LL: Yeah. Oh, you remember I said I had these three friends at ITW.
CB: Yes.
LL: Well, all of them were killed during the war. None of them survived. I was the only one to survive.
CB: But was that on operations or were some killed in other ways?
LL: Well, one was killed on, on, in Bomber Command. Another one was on Mosquitoes and I don’t know what happened to him and the other one was on Tempests and they were off on a trip to France and he had engine failure over the Channel. And of course he tried to ditch the thing but with that great big intake in the front, you know —
CB: Yeah.
LL: It just immediately tipped up and it sank and he was killed. And in fact, I’ve got another, in that same book this chappy is talking about this particular incident of Neil. Neil was his name. Was it Neil? Anyway, that’s how I got confirmation that he [pause] so all three of them died.
CB: Yeah. You were talking about the losses in training. Were they a mixture of the instructors and the students or just the students?
LL: Well they had, we lost, again the course before me, where that would be 42 EFG F 42G they, we did a day/night cross country. We flew the, the, these were on basic training. I think it was the basic training. Anyway, we did a first leg down to Miami from from Montgomery. It would be the Vultee basic training aircraft and then they did a trip. Took off at night and flew a dog leg and back up to Gunter Field. And the Met forecast was completely and utterly wrong and they hit one of these ghastly tropical storms. And there was something like twenty odd aircraft. One aircraft managed to get back to base. We lost six pilots that night, were killed. And others force landed and survived. But that was a big blunder by the Met people. That was the course before me. And when I was at primary I think you were either born lucky or born unlucky and I certainly was born exceedingly lucky. But this chap was flying with his instructor and he hadn’t got his seat strap done up and they hit a bump and he left the cockpit and finished up sitting astride the fuselage in front of the rudder. Much to the amazement of the, of the instructor up front. But anyway the instructor managed to get the aircraft back again and landed and then the next, then a couple of days later he was testing the mags at the end of the runway, running the engine up and the engine just blew off. Just left the aircraft. Boom. And then believe it or not somebody landed on top of him and killed him. Now, that is what I call unlucky.
CB: Yeah. Extraordinary.
LL: Yeah. But the Americans were very good actually. We, we had no — the only leave we got was three days I think it was. After primary. And we registered at this military club and they were, Americans would come along and pick you up and take you off and entertain you and look after you. And two of my friends and I went to this club and these Americans [unclear] was their name, took us down to, this was in Florida, to their house and they had a private beach with cottages on it and they gave us a cottage and we lived in this cottage. The provided all the food and we had barbecues and they looked after us. And they wrote to my parents as well. So yes, they were very good actually.
CB: A very hospitable people the Americans.
LL: Very good.
CB: Right. We’ve done extremely well. Thank you very much and I think we need to have a pause because you need your lunch.
LL: [laughs] Yeah.
[recording paused]
CB: Did the, the turbine blades would come off at any time would they on the Meteors?
LL: Hmmn?
CB: The turbine blades you said separated.
LL: Yeah.
CB: Was that in flight as well as on the ground?
LL: Oh yes.
CB: And what was —
LL: Mostly in flight.
CB: What was the effect of that?
LL: Just a rumble really. A vibration.
CB: And then you had to shut down the engine quickly.
LL: You had to shut down the engine. Then you were faced with asymmetric which you hadn’t been trained for. That’s why you had so many fatalities.
CB: Yes.
LL: The thing is on an asymmetric, on the approach you have an approach speed and if you get low and of course as you, as you approach you’re throttling back and if you’re getting a bit low you open the throttles but you’ve got have to have sufficient rudder to offset the amount of asymmetric.
CB: Yeah.
LL: And eventually if you got too low and you got too, if you had too much power the aircraft would naturally, you’d got full rudder on but you would still divert from your heading. So you’re only faced with one thing and that is to dive and get a bit of speed up but then of course you haven’t got that height most times.
CB: Oh right.
LL: So you’re in, in a non-return situation.
CB: Was it realistic to go around again?
LL: Well, you wouldn’t be able to do because your rudder wouldn’t allow you to open up to full throttle.
CB: Right.
LL: All it would do was swing you around and eventually you’d —
CB: You’d topple it.
LL: Topple on to your back and that would be it.
CB: Right.
LL: You couldn’t go around again.
CB: Right.
LL: Because your speed was too low.
CB: Yeah, I see, right.
LL: You had an asymmetric speed of say one hundred and sixty five knots or something and you didn’t want to let it go below that.
CB: What was your touchdown speed normally?
LL: Well, as you approached the runway of course you could reduce that speed and it was the actual Meteor touchdown was something like ninety, ninety five knots.
CB: Oh was it?
LL: Something around about that.
CB: I’ve seen figures that suggest that the RAF lost four hundred and eighty pilots flying on Meteors.
LL: Yeah. And also they lost pilots because of the oxygen system. We had a couple of aircraft go in from altitude at Full Sutton and when they were doing that they couldn’t understand why. We assumed that they’d lost control and they’d gone into a spin and that was it. But in fact what had happened was when they were doing a service, a major service on one of the aircraft they had the oxygen system out and they was found that it wasn’t actually producing the oxygen that was required. There was something wrong with it. It had worn or was leaking or something like that and they checked all the other Meteors and they were all, they were faulty.
CB: Were they?
LL: And we were all flying Meteors with a faulty oxygen system [pause] And they were of course passing out from lack of oxygen at height. And then of course that was it.
CB: They wouldn’t recover.
LL: They wouldn’t recover in time to do, and they lost a lot of pilots that way.
CB: So we talked about you on Squadron in the Vulcan. And we haven’t got to the end of that.
LL: No.
CB: So, did, did you move to another Vulcan Squadron after 617?
LL: No.
CB: Or did you go to something else?
LL: I went straight from 617 to Boscombe Down.
CB: Right.
LL: And I joined the Transport Flight at Boscombe Down and I spent six years there. A most enjoyable six years.
CB: And what were you actually doing then?
LL: I was, well I was on the transport side actually.
CB: But was it experimental or were you delivering people?
LL: Well, it was experimental with the VC10 of course. And we had the Andover. And I’m not a test pilot. And the other pilots were in fact test pilots.
CB: Right.
LL: And so they were doing trials on cross wind landings and all that sort of stuff. And we did some overseas tropical trials. And what Boscombe normally do but you need a test pilot to qualify to do it?
CB: Yes.
LL: And I was not qualified. So I spent some time just flying. We had, we had a Beverley [laughs]
CB: Gosh.
LL: I took, and I took a Beverley all the way to Churchill in Northern Canada. We took [pause] we went from, from Boscombe Down to Iceland.
CB: Yeah.
LL: And then —
CB: Greenland.
LL: No. We didn’t. We were going to go to Greenland but there was a lovely low and they had, we got the navigator had found that we had if we went a little bit further south we’d have a lovely tail wind and the old Beverley was tanking along at a hundred and forty five knots. With a, you know fixed undercarriage four bloody great engines. And we went from there —
CB: It’s a flying brick.
LL: All the way to Goose Bay.
CB: Oh yeah. Labrador.
LL: Labrador. And then from Labrador we went to [pause] where was it? Near Toronto. An airfield near Toronto and then from Toronto up to Churchill. That was an amazing station. That really was.
CB: What were, what were you doing there? Delivering something?
LL: I was, I went there to collect the helicopter that was doing cold weather trials.
CB: Oh.
LL: And the helicopter was put in the back of the Beverley. And I had ground crew with me as well of course to keep us in service and, but I’ve never, of course the Aurora Borealis was in full swing when we were in Churchill. And it was amazing to see all this. And I could see icebergs in the in the gulf there. And the, and the whole station relied on this power station that provided electricity to keep the station going. And they had an emergency system that if ever that power station packed up that the Churchill itself would freeze. And consequently like the loos and all that sort of stuff would all be non-operative so they had an emergency escape. Evacuation system.
CB: Oh.
LL: But as far as I know it never happened. And they also had warnings that when the temperature was so low that they weren’t allowed to go out and most of the buildings were actually interconnected so you didn’t have to go outside.
CB: Too cold.
LL: To get to another building. And of course to get people to actually service there or work there they were, they were usually naughty boys who [laughs] who wanted to get away from it all. Like doctors. That’s what I was told anyway. But it was, it was quite an experience. And there from there, from Churchill I went all the way to the Azores and we landed. I had to refuel enroute. I forget where. Then we finished up at the Azores. And on the way to the Azores the engineer was, said, ‘Well, the revs have dropped slightly on number three,’ I think it was. And he said, ‘It’s still running ok.’ Anyway, when we landed he ran the engine up and it sort of, and there was hardly any mag drop. Or the mag drop was in limits anyway. Anyway, we took off the next day and this engine was still showing a bit funny but it was running reasonably smoothly, or smoothly and when we got back to Boscombe Down when they checked the engine and put it unserviceable they found that one of the cylinders, you know, a radial engine had actually become detached and it was actually bouncing up and down with the piston.
Other: Wow.
CB: Blimey.
LL: And it actually had dented the actual cowling.
CB: Gosh.
LL: And that engine kept going.
CB: Bristol Centaurus.
LL: Amazing, the old Centaurus, yes.
CB: So after Boscombe.
LL: Boscombe. Oh yes. I was sent up to Finningley to take over the Vulcan simulator. And I had to be checked out on the Vulcan again.
CB: On a flying one.
LL: Yeah. And we used to go there and I used to fly about once or twice a week.
CB: So, with the simulator did the crews go into that before they did flying in the OCU?
LL: Yes. Part of their training for their conversion.
CB: Yeah.
LL: Was to do the simulator.
CB: Right.
LL: And then they had to, when they were on the Squadron they had to do so many hours on the simulator every month.
CB: Right.
LL: And of course they came to me. Then we put in faults and all that sort of stuff.
CB: Yeah.
LL: And it was very, it was an analogue type simulator. It was nothing like what they have these days.
CB: Right.
LL: And the one I saw at Heathrow for an aircraft, I forget what it was, you know you could dial up Toronto or Singapore or various airfields and you could do your landings at, you know at those particular airfields. And when you took off it actually looked as if you took off. You know. There was a slight rumble and they’ve got airborne and the horizon and the cloud and all this sort of stuff and it was so realistic it was amazing. It put my simulator to shame.
CB: So how long did you do your tour at Finningley?
LL: I did —
CB: What age were you then?
LL: I retired there and I was coming up to tour-ex and I didn’t, and of course we bought the house and we were living in it and I applied to stay. So I actually did another tour. I did nearly ten years there.
CB: Did you really?
LL: I got a bit bored towards the end of course with it all. I tended to lose a bit of interest.
CB: Well, you’d been doing it in total for how many years? The Vulcan.
LL: Yeah. Anyway, the, I left the Air Force and then they decided that they would civilianise instructors on simulators, The Air Ministry. And as I was leaving the Air Force I thought I might as well become a civilian. And I had to go down to Air Ministry and had an interview and I got the job with the Civil Service as a simulator instructor. A civilian one. And I did that for a couple of years and then because the Vulcan was, the V force was disbanded and I lost my job. And that’s when I left for, a friend of ours put me, put me in touch with somebody or somebody was put in touch with me and came to see me and asked if I would like a job with a recorder with the Milk Marketing Board. And I said, ‘Anything to stop me being bored.’ And that’s how I started and I did ten years of that. And then Diana retired because she was a teacher.
CB: Right.
LL: At the Rossington School in Yorkshire. And she did twenty odd years teaching. When we were at Boscombe Down she just suddenly over one meal said, ‘I’ve enlisted in the teacher’s training course in Salisbury. I said, ‘What? You’ve done what?’ ‘She said, ‘I’m going to be a teacher.’ So, anyway when I was posted north she hadn’t finished her teacher’s training course. She had another term to go. So I got into a married quarter at Finningley and Diana stayed down at, in Salisbury. She stayed with a friend of ours, Geoff Boston and his family. And then she came up and got this job with, at Rossington School.
CB: Brilliant.
LL: You could hear Diana out. I used to go and pick her up sometimes. She had her own car but sometimes I used to go and pick her up. And I could, as I approached the school you could hear Diana’s voice telling the kids to shut up or do something or other. Using her sergeant major voice. One day when I was there and the kids had all gone out and I was back, still on the classroom I wrote on the board, “Silence in class,” in big letters. And the next morning when Diana came in, and the children she couldn’t understand why they were so quiet. You know. Sitting there all peaceful quiet. And then she turned to put the date on board and saw, “Silence in — [laughs] Oh dear. Lovely. Lovely.
CB: Can we do a fast backwards?
LL: Oh yes. Go. Yes.
CB: Most people flying with your seven thousand hours of experience have had the odd hiccup and we’ve talked about one or two things but when you were at Hornchurch what happened there as the most dramatic event at Hornchurch when you were taking off one day?
LL: At Hornchurch.
CB: So, two of you in Spitfires.
LL: Do you know I can’t [pause] Hornchurch.
CB: You mentioned earlier that at Hornchurch you’d had a bit of a dicey time taking off with your wingman.
LL: Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, it was a grass airfield. Hornchurch was. We were over there. 129 Squadron and 222 Squadron were over here and Wing Commander Crawford Compton.
CB: Oh yes.
LL: Was the wing commander flying and he had a Spitfire which was the pride of Hornchurch. It was a special finish. And anyway that day we were called for operation and we used to take off in twelves. And Crawford Compton taxied out with 222 Squadron and lined up across the airfield and we came up and lined up behind us. And I was flying as number two to the CO. And I had my number two, number, number one to the CO, and I had my number two tucked in here and of course we had the other aircraft. And we saw the aircraft ahead of us 222 Squadron getting airborne. And [unclear] was my Squadron commander and he put his hand up and dropped his hand and we were off and I formated on him. Up came my tail to be confronted with a bloody Spitfire right in front of me, you know. And I slammed. I couldn’t turn left because I’d hit the CO. I couldn’t turn right because my number two would have gone straight into me. So I slammed the throttle closed and I couldn’t stop and I finished up on top of the Spitfire. I married it [laughs] And Crawford Compton saw me coming and he leapt out. Got out of the cockpit but he was still attached from his Mae West to his dinghy and so when he left, got out the cockpit he was held in, part in and part out by his connection and he actually physically broke it.
CB: Blimey.
LL: And then fell onto the ground as I hit, landed on top of his aircraft. And he tried afterwards to break that and he couldn’t. It was sheer bloody wilful powers.
CB: Yeah.
LL: That actually did it. And that morning he had said at briefing anybody who damages or [unclear] that Spitfire is posted out. And I’d got two. [laughs]
CB: What had happened to his Spitfire that caused you to catch him?
LL: Well, it was my prop chewed up all the tailplane and the fuselage and that sort of thing. And anyway, Crawford Compton came to see me afterwards and he said, he apologised to me. What had happened was that he had been running his engine on the Spitfire and consequently it was warmish or hottish before he got into it. And of course we started up and he taxied out and he was looking at his watch for take-off time and of course it got over heated. And he closed the throttle and shut down the engine and waved the rest of the Squadron on, and stayed put. Well, it was bloody obvious that the Squadron behind, somebody’s going, somethings going to happen. What he should have done was taxied out and to hell with the engine boiling and got out of the way. But he apologised for, and said that it was alright. And funny enough when we were married and at the reception committee at the CnC’s house old Crawford Compton was there. No, it wasn’t Crawford Compton. It was, I’ve got the wrong name. He was a New Zealander. Anyway, he came up and sort of was talking and I said to him, ‘I nearly killed you.’ And he looked at me and he said, ‘Hornchurch.’ I said, ‘Two Spitfires. Remember.’ ‘Oh, of course.’ [laughs] He was at, he was at our wedding reception. Crowley-Milling was the CO of 6 Squadron out in the Middle East. And he became quite a very senior officer. He became an air marshall or something.
CB: Yeah.
LL: And I met up with him again at Broady’s funeral. He was there.
CB: Yeah. He was a Battle of Britain man.
LL: That’s right.
CB: What would you say was your most memorable point during your service in the RAF?
LL: That’s a very difficult question. Getting my AFC at Buckingham palace, I think. Because I’m very much a royalist and to go to Buckingham Palace was really something. And Diana was with me and my mother.
CB: How did the day go?
LL: Unfortunately, Diana had a stinking headache when she came out and we were going to celebrate but all she wanted to do was to go to bed and rest. And so we were staying with a friend of hers and so the rest of the day was, had to be cancelled. But it was, you know I think getting, going to Buckingham Palace and getting the AFC was really a highlight in my life. And I appeared in, my name was in the Plymouth paper and what not.
CB: So how did the day progress? How did it start?
LL: What for AFC?
CB: Yes. Did you spend the night in London?
LL: Oh, yes.
CB: And then go.
LL: Yes.
CB: Or what did you do?
LL: We were living in Salisbury and we came up by train and we got a taxi. And I think we went straight to Buckingham Palace.
CB: You were a Squadron leader at that time.
LL: No, I was — was I? I suppose I must have been. Yes.
CB: And what was the procedure? You came to the front of Buckingham Palace.
LL: Yes. And then the ushers actually took us in and took us to this big hall and got the AFCs and those sort of minor medals were right at the end. All the knighthoods and things, you know were up front.
CB: Yeah.
LL: So I was right, right at the end.
CB: In your number 1 uniform.
LL: And the Prince. Yes. Oh, yes. Nicely pressed and presented. And Prince Phillip said, ‘What did you get your medals for?’ I said, ‘Well, I haven’t seen the citation, sir.’ In fact, I never did see the citation.
CB: oh.
LL: And I told him that I was the Bomber Command demonstration pilot and I performed in various places and countries. And he said, ‘Did you bend it? Did you bend it?’ Said Prince Phillip. I said, ‘No. I pulled the odd rivet, I think.’ And he grinned and that was it.
CB: So the procedure is that he pins on the AFC medal.
LL: Yes. That’s right.
CB: What did you do then?
LL: Oh I don’t know. I think we just left. There wasn’t a sort of reception or meal or drinks or anything like that. I think we, I think we left. Do you know I can’t recall. All I know was that Diana wanted to get away because she had this ghastly headache. It was a migraine of some sort.
CB: In the wartime what was the most exciting activity that you engaged in? Was it chasing the V-1s? Was it ground attack?
LL: I think it was ground attack. We, when I was on Mustangs at Coolham and the invasion started we had two five hundred bombs stuck underneath each.
CB: Did you?
LL: One under each wing and every time we went over there we bombed sort of bridges or targets, and various targets, and it was, it was quite hairy at times I can tell you. We’d got twelve aircraft sort of, you know milling around and doing things. You had to keep your eyes open.
CB: Did you have a designated target before you left or was it a target of opportunity?
LL: No. It was, we had to go to a certain area.
CB: Yes.
LL: And possibly bomb a certain bridge, and then it was freelance after that. But we knew where the front line was and all that sort of thing. And it was the old Typhoons that really braved the day. Of course, the old Tyffy was designed for ground attack and at Falaise Gap they really slaughtered —
CB: Yeah.
LL: The Germans there.
CB: With rocket firing.
LL: Yes. The introduction of rockets was really a step forwards.
CB: Yeah. The sixty pound warhead, rocket.
LL: When they said that Rommel was killed, you know.
CB: Wounded.
LL: I think it was, was it an accident?
CB: He was in his staff car, wasn’t he?
LL: Well, I thought it was me did it in a way because on one of these ramrods I was leading another Mustang and we came across this staff car with outriders and, and we attacked it. And the, and the occupants sort of dived for the ditches and that sort of thing and it looked like a senior officer as I shot over the top. So afterwards I thought I must have done it. But I hadn’t. It must have been some other senior officer. But on those ramrods. It was a target of opportunity if you see what I mean.
CB: Yeah. You weren’t called up by a forward air controller.
LL: Yeah. We went for trains and that sort of thing. Engines.
CB: How did you get trained to drop your five hundred pounds bombs?
LL: Sorry?
CB: How did you get trained to do your bomb dropping?
LL: Ah, there’s a thing, there’s a thing. When, before we went on to Mustangs or it could have been afterwards, anyway we went to an Armament Training Centre. Now, where I’ve no idea. I think it was North Wales. We did air gunnery and we did bombing. And the way you did bombing was using your gunsight. You know, diving down but generally speaking when you’re low level it, we just came up towards the target, hoped for the best, pressed the tit and both bombs went.
CB: But you needed to know —
LL: It was hit and miss. Very much a hit and miss but with the, if you dived down from any height you used your gunsight on a target and you had to get a, possibly a forty five degree angle.
CB: And would you put deflection on the gunsight?
LL: That’s right. And when I was in the Middle East with 213 Squadron I became an ace at rocket firing, I don’t know why.
[doorbell rings]
LL: Ah, that’ll be the gardener.
CB: Right, I’ll stop it there.
[recording paused]
CB: We talked a bit earlier about fighter affiliation and you being up at Ingham and it’s really the process of that that I wanted to know more about. So before the sortie, how did the briefing go when you ran a fighter affiliation?
LL: I was just told that the bomber would be over head at a certain time and then it was my responsibility to get airborne and meet it.
CB: Right.
LL: That’s about it.
CB: I was thinking in terms of once you’ve done it you can do it regularly. But what was the instruction for the fighter pilot? In terms of his actions —
LL: Had to do quarter attacks on it.
CB: Right. So that means —
LL: To give the gunner deflection —
CB: Yeah.
LL: Type practice.
CB: So would that be from the forward as well as the rear quarters?
LL: You mean the upper —
CB: When you’re coming away from —
LL: Well, whoever I suppose all positions were manned and I suppose they were all taking pictures of me.
CB: Yes. I was thinking of your attack on the bomber. So the bomber is flying along.
LL: Yeah.
CB: Would you be doing some attacks from the front quarter?
LL: No. I would up to the left and diving down on to them
CB: Right. Now, with fighters there is a fairly prescribed route that you take. You don’t go straight in, do you? It comes, you come in you come in on a curve. How does that work?
LL: Practice.
CB: But, but yes, so you work it out. Could you explain how you work it out what you need?
LL: Well, the thing is somehow, in daytime of course it’s easy.
CB: Yes.
LL: Because you can see the bomber and you do a quarter attack on to it as you would do on to, on to another fighter really.
CB: Yes.
LL: But at night time, of course to see the bomber invariably you had to be much closer before you actually started.
CB: Yeah.
LL: If you were got far away you lost sight of the bomber.
CB: Yeah. Just going back on this just to get some idea are you coming in in a sort of parabolic curve? So that means that it’s not entirely predictable but you are coming in instead of straight —
LL: Oh yes.
CB: In a curve.
LL: One varies one’s attack, so from partially below or from above. And that sort of thing.
CB: Right.
LL: Oh yes. You had to vary your, your attack.
CB: Yeah. And in the dark identify where the bomber is. What can you see of the bomber? Can you see the exhaust flashes?
LL: Not really. Not really. They had the downward ident and I think while we were actually doing the attack they had the nav lights on dim or something like that. We had a method of somehow seeing the bomber. You know, you are asking me something now I can’t honestly remember. All I know is I daren’t lose it.
CB: No. But you were in a, in a group doing this activity at Ingham. There was a unit.
LL: That’s right.
CB: So there were a number of you who were fighter pilots who’d finished a tour.
LL: In fact one or two were ex-bomber pilots.
CB: Oh.
LL: Who’d been transferred across. And they’d come from Lancasters to Spitfires.
CB: Really?
LL: In fact when I, that posting I told you about that I accepted it was one of the bomber pilots, ex-bomber pilots who was posted on to Typhoons and he didn’t want to do it, and I took his posting.
CB: So, as a, as a unit to what extent did you exchange views, ideas and experiences in attacking bombers?
LL: I don’t think we did, we did it just our own experience.
CB: Because you were all experienced. Normally you were experienced pilots.
LL: That’s right. We were all experienced.
CB: Yeah. And then in the dark you would follow the, if you were at Ingham then the bombers didn’t land at Ingham did they? So —
LL: Oh no.
CB: So did you land with the bomber and then move in the daytime back to Ingham?
LL: Well, Ingham was quite close to the Bomber Command station and sometimes, most times we flew up to the, say Lindholme or Sandtoft or someplace and met them above. Above. Above.
CB: Yeah. But you wouldn’t be able to see the airfields normally would you?
LL: No.
CB: Right. And did the bombers have their IFF switched on so people —
LL: Ah. If they did it certainly didn’t help us.
CB: No, but I was, what the reason I asked that is the Identification Friend or Foe is designed to make sure that other aircraft —
LL: Oh yes, yes.
CB: Night fighters particularly don’t shoot you.
LL: Well, we carried IFF enough.
CB: Yeah.
LL: On the fighter.
CB: As well.
LL: I’d forgotten about that.
CB: So yours would have been switched on.
LL: Yeah.
CB: Because you don’t want to get jumped by a bona fide night fighter.
LL: [laughs] Oh dear, yeah. Then of course when we moved from Ingham and we were actually posted to, to Lindholme we were actually on the airfield where they took off.
CB: Yeah.
LL: And so therefore we used to just take off and meet them up above. And I can remember once there was thick cloud and I climbed up and up and I came out the top and I hadn’t a clue where I was. I couldn’t find this bloody bomber. I milled around and I called him. We could talk to each other and I couldn’t find him. And so I eventually descended and fortunately I knew where I was.
CB: When you go under the cloud.
LL: Under the cloud. I came in and landed. Aborted.
CB: So —
LL: Couldn’t find the blasted man.
CB: So, you’re in the dark coming back to land. How do you know where the airfield is and what runway you’re on?
LL: Well, contact air traffic.
CB: And they would put up the landing lights, would they? Airfield lights.
LL: We had — yes.
CB: The lights on the runway.
LL: That’s right. They had lights on the runway. They had to have.
CB: I’m thinking of just as —
LL: Yeah.
CB: The RAF did interdiction into Germany to shoot down night fighters the Germans actually did the same. So you had an interesting contradiction here.
LL: Do you know I suppose they must have had some sort of lighting on the runways. I can’t honestly remember. I can’t honestly remember. And talking about landing. Going back right back to America. When we started night flying on Harvards the American way of landing a Harvard at night was to come in on the approach and when you touched down stuff the stick forward to stay on the ground. And I couldn’t do this. I was either too early or too late and consequently if you hit the ground and you were a bit late you started bouncing. And I couldn’t master this and I went, go around again with my instructor sort of in the back getting a bit sore and I said, ‘Can I land this thing the way I want to please, sir.’ And he said, ‘Alright.’ And I came in and landed three pointer as I would in the daytime. And I made a lovely smooth landing. And he said, ‘Oh, that was good. Do it again.’ So off we went again. Opened the throttle, round we went on the circuit and I came around and I did another beautiful three pointer again. He said, ‘Right. You can do that in future.’
CB: So, there was a logic to their process. Their own process. What was that?
LL: I don’t know, it was a stupid idea.
CB: A good way of bending your propeller.
LL: And the wheels actually touching the ground, instead of touching you had to stamp your stick forward to hold, to keep the thing on the ground and of course the tail came up in the air. Oh dear. It was the most awkward bloody movement. I didn’t like it, that’s why I couldn’t do it I suppose.
CB: Did it result in accidents with people cartwheeling?
LL: No idea why they did it. But they did teach me one thing, and that was to land in the dark with practically no runway lightings. They had these goosenecks.
CB: Yeah.
LL: On the runway.
CB: [unclear]
LL: And they only had two at the beginning and two at the end. Towards the end. And the rest of the runway was dark and we had to land on that. Now, that bore me in quite good stead because when I was at Coolham George Powell and myself were scrambled in the, in the evening to intercept some fighters and it was aborted or something. Anyway, it got dark or getting dark and George and I somehow got separated and they had told us to divert to Ford Airfield. And I didn’t get it because my radio had gone unserviceable. So anyway, I returned to Coolham in the dark and circled the airfield and I came in and landed on the airfield in the complete darkness. And my flight commander came out and said, ‘Christ, how did you do that. What did you do that for? You were supposed to land at Ford.’ I said, ‘Was I?’ But I landed at the airfield in the dark on this, the runway which was this Somerfield tracking.
CB: Because of your training. At Ingham did they have Somerfield tracking?
LL: No. It was just pure grass airfield.
CB: So, landing there with no identification of runway —
LL: That’s right.
CB: In the dark was a bit of a challenge was it?
LL: It was a challenge at night. Yes. They had, sort of the odd light sort of around the airfield to indicate where I think, where the peritrack was or something like that but it was it was just a grass airfield. We just landed on it.
CB: Right. A lot, a lot of airfields had drem lighting, so once you got on the drem pattern —
LL: It’s amazing what you can do from just pure experience.
CB: Yes. But the drem lighting system led you on to the airfield.
LL: Yeah.
CB: You didn’t get that.
LL: They didn’t have drem lighting.
CB: No. Right. Which was the aeroplane you enjoyed flying most?
LL: I liked the Mustang. It was a roomy cockpit you see and we had this big canopy and you could actually sort of look around and it was, it was nice to fly.
CB: Bubble canopy.
LL: Bubble canopy, yeah.
CB: Yeah.
LL: No. I think the Spit, the Mustang and the Vulcan were the aircraft I liked flying best. And we were caught out in thick fog once in the old Vulcan and, and the country had gone out and when we got back to base they were completely out and they diverted me to Waddington and they were just about as bad. And, and of course we had this ILS approach. And I actually started the approach with the ILS and I kept on going and I couldn’t see the airfield at all. I just kept on coming down and then I flew over a landing tee, you know which is at the beginning of the runway. And I actually got on to the runway and I touched down and I yelled to the co-pilot, ‘Stream.’ And we streamed the ‘chute and I slammed on the brakes because I really couldn’t see where I was going. But I landed and I actually stopped on the runway. Much to my amazement. And I had to shut down there because I couldn’t see the taxi the fog was so thick. How I got down I just don’t know. But the wingco flying, silly bastard. He came out in a vehicle and parked himself beside the runway when I was landing. I could have —
CB: Run him over.
LL: I could have run over him if I hadn’t got straight on the runway. Anyway, they towed, they had to tow my aircraft back into, because I couldn’t taxi it. And when you put your landing lights on of course it reflected on to the fog and it made it even worse.
CB: Yeah. So you landed without your landing lights.
LL: Yes. I think that was my hairiest landing I think I’ve ever done.
CB: What were you carrying at the time?
LL: What was I — ?
CB: What were you carrying at the time? Bomb load.
LL: Nothing.
CB: Right.
LL: I wasn’t carrying any bombs or anything. It was just purely a training flight. Any more?
CB: That’s it. Les Lunn, thank you for a most interesting talk today.
LL: I hope I haven’t bored 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
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Interview with Leslie Grantham Lunn
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-07
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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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ALunnLG171107, PLunnLG1701
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Pending review
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Format
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03:00:37 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Fighter Command
Description
An account of the resource
Leslie Lunn joined the RAF and after his basic training did his flying training in America. In the UK he joined 129 Spitfire squadron after completing his training. The squadron later converted to Mustangs. His squadron covered the D-Day landings and was switched to dealing with the V1 flying bomb threat, and during these sorties he destroyed one V-1 and recorded two probables. He later took part in fighter affiliation duties working with Bomber Command. He converted onto the Typhoon and later the Tempest with 222 Squadron after moving back to Fighter Command. He joined 1 Squadron flying the new Meteor jet fighter. He was later posted via Italy and Austria to the Middle East serving in the Canal Zone. When he returned to the UK he joined 63 Squadron flying the Canberra, and later converting on to the Vulcan joining 617 Squadron. He also became the display pilot for the Vulcan. He was awarded the AFC by Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
United States
England--Essex
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
208 Squadron
222 Squadron
63 Squadron
aircrew
Meteor
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
P-51
pilot
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921-2021)
RAF Hornchurch
RAF Ingham
RAF Shallufa
RAF Waddington
Spitfire
training
Typhoon
V-1
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/669/10073/AAn00086-150722.1.mp3
b69da3885a99576f6754191029cb4a7c
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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An00086
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with a flight engineer who completed a full tour of operations on Lancasters. The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by a donor who wishes to be anonymous and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-22
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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An00086
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AS: My name is Adam Sutch and I’m conducting an oral interview for the International Bomber Command Centre Archive. It’s the 22nd of July 2015. The interviewee wishes to preserve his anonymity but I can record that he was a flight engineer on a Lancaster squadron from May 1944 carrying out a full tour of operations. Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. I’d like to set the scene by asking you to describe your life before joining the Air Force.
Anonymous: My life before joining the Air Force. Right. Well, I was one of three sons of a widowed mother and in 1939 I was fourteen years old, I think. Yes. Fourteen. Both my brothers, well one brother was already in the Royal Navy having joined when he was twenty one in 1936. So he was at sea when the war started and my second brother joined the Air Force a few months later. So I was left at home to comfort mother and because most of our school in Kent were disrupted by evacuation of children I left school and worked in Chatham Dockyard for a time in various jobs and took the apprentice’s exam there. And was about to sign indentures to become a bench carpenter or something similar but backed off that and my mother couldn’t persuade me from setting my sights on joining the Air Force when I was eighteen. But before that I attempted the aircrew selection board at seventeen and a quarter. I expect you know about that. When one went to London for a selection day and went home miserable because one had failed. But, and they told me to come back when I was eighteen. Ok. And so I went back to Chatham Dockyard and then I, as soon as I was approaching eighteen I volunteered for the Royal Air Force. For ground duties in fact because I’d failed the Aircrew Selection Board first time around. Then what happened? Yes. I was called up. Did the usual rooting through square bashing at Skegness for six weeks and did ability, multiple, multi-choice questionings to see what I was fit for. And they said, ‘Well, you would make a half decent flight mechanic.’ So I was then posted to Cosford for a six month flight mechanic’s course I sort of quite enjoyed. During the course the aircrew occupational flight engineer was introduced. And I think that was in ‘42/’43. Hang on a minute. Ok. Yes. So that was halfway through that flight mechanic’s course. They sent around recruiting sergeants to gather volunteers for aircrew you see. And, and I saw it as an opportunity to do what I’d wanted to do from the start. Aircrew selection board at Birmingham. And I passed that one. Some of the questions were the same ones as I’d answered earlier. But anyway, anyway I passed that one and then I had to complete the flight mechanic’s course before I could go down to St Athan. Anyway, I did that. I did quite well in the exam when I passed out. Then I had to wait for the, for the entries to be teamed up properly you know. In the right capacities and so on. So I did a period of maintenance work on Spitfires on 222 Squadron at Hornchurch. Then in [pause] when did I go? September ’43. Oh, that’s when, yes then I went to St Athan in ’43 as part of the entry of — oh we were all ex-flight mechanics in that particular entry because they based your training to be a flight engineer on your previous experience. So they had a good history of that you see. So that was that and that lasted until January ’44. Way into the spring of ’44. And the day of my final exam I was in hospital with the flu. But anyway, so I was delayed from my colleagues and that’s just a by the way. I lost track of them. But in due course, it was only about two or three months, two or three weeks later I went to Dishforth in Yorkshire to do something called a Heavy Conversion Unit. You’re familiar with those?
AS: Yes.
Anonymous: Yeah. Dishforth. And from there I joined, well I joined up with a crew of Canadians and an American pilot on 419 Squadron. They’d already done, they’d been up to, what do we call it? Operational Training Unit. You know, they were, they’d been through the first bit of being a crew. A six man crew. But they had no flight engineers. They didn’t train them in Canada apparently. So we were bolted on at the Heavy Conversion Unit stage using ancient Halifaxes to, to get familiar with four engines, you know. And for the pilots too because our pilots, you know they were astounded by the size of the four engine ones. And so it was, we were only there for about a fortnight. And then we went on to Middleton St George in, when was that? May, I think. May. Yeah. Just after. Yeah. Yeah. Just after that. May ’44. Went to Middleton St George. And I don’t know if you want any silly humorous things. Semi humorous things. The first thing we did when we got there all the flight engineers on our course concentrated on Halifaxes. This is a typical bit of service. So, I learned all about a Halifax. This will tell you all sorts of things about a Halifax in there. And when we got to Middleton they’d just converted to Lancs you know. Great. Great. Only two weeks previously. So we all had, I had to do a lot of re-learning and, and we did our customary getting used to flying the Lancaster thing. And we wrote off the first one we rode. There was a tyre creep that we weren’t familiar with and the bell blew off halfway down the runway on a very fine Sunday afternoon. So we spent two or three hours messing about over Stockton on Tees etcetera getting rid of petrol. And then we had to attempt a two wheel landing on one of the — I should have said that the, the portside tyre blew off or burst when we were half the way down the runway. We were empty fortunately. No bomb load. And so we stooged around and got rid of the petrol and then we were carrying on to the rear wheel and the good wheel and we were doing very well and holding it levelly until the speed diminished and the wing dropped. And the, where the tyre had burst it dug into the, into the edge of the runway and slewed the aircraft right around and broke its back. And by some quirk of fate it was the particular aircraft that the CO had selected to be his own [laughs] Such as [laughs] Yeah.
AS: Promising start.
Anonymous: So the next time he saw it it was at the end being towed away rather sadly to the end of the runway. The end of the airfield. And I don’t know what happened to it after that. Poor chap. But it was interesting being with Canadians and an American. You know, there was the cultural difference. I mean they eat like eating your first meat meal with jam on it which my pilot liked doing. American Joe this was. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Joe Hartshorn. He was, he was quite a distinguished American pilot and, well he did very well with us actually. But yeah he was a geologist by profession and a very interesting man. And I’ve got something here that he wrote. I don’t know if it, I wonder if it would be any help to you. He wrote his account of life in Bomber Command as an American and he called it, “Under Three Flags,” because he was an American. He went into the Canadian Air Force because he, before the war, before America was in the war and then he was flying under the Union Jack as well. So under three flags. Yeah. They were an immigrant family. His father was a miner in the North Country and they’d gone over there. Anyway, so where were we? On —
AS: You’d just written off the COs Lancaster.
Anonymous: Was it? We then embarked on our, on our operational tour. And I’ve got my logbook. It’s, it’s a very poor standard of paper in some of the logbooks. I suppose it didn’t get a lot of priority really at that time. Is this stuff I’m giving you any use to you?
AS: It is. If there is something beyond gold dust Ken this is it.
Anonymous: Oh right [laughs] Right. So where do we go first? We did our first one. Let’s have a look. That was number seven. [unclear] in, a French troop camp and rest centre. In Belgium it was. Four hours thirty minutes.
AS: Ken, this was just before D-Day you went on ops was it?
Anonymous: Yeah. Well, sadly, it was. Yeah. Because it wasn’t enough before D-Day for us to get the Aircrew Europe medal. Medal. We did, well I’ll tell you, you needn’t write this down early but we did, we completed a tour of thirty two sorties and collected three DFCs and a DFM but we didn’t get the Europe. Anyway —
AS: Because it stopped after the 6th of June didn’t it? it was the —
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: Something like that. Yeah. I’ve long since ceased crying myself to sleep to do that. You know. So that was that. Now that was about the time that the only Canadian VC was earned. You know, the Polish chap.
AS: Mynarski.
Anonymous: That’s him. Yeah. He was on 419. I think, yeah there were two air, there was two squadrons on 419 but I’m sure he was 419. We didn’t know him because we’d only been there about a couple of weeks, you know. But reading accounts of how he earned his VC that’s where it places him. Yeah. So that was interesting. That was a revelation to us all. And of course Joe, the pilot, had done two earlier ones as spare pilot for experience with, with an experienced crew. Just, just went as second pilot on those but that didn’t affect the rest of us. So then we started here. When the first, I mean after the initial shock of seeing, they saw this illumination and explosion ahead of you that you’d got to go flying through we — I don’t know if you want to read that little bit. It came out of the local paper. The paper the Canadians produced. Lorne Vince. That’s it.
AS: It’s staggering that. You know.
Other: It’s great isn’t it?
AS: Yeah.
Other: It’s amazing what’s on there.
Anonymous: I think I’m the only survivor of these you know.
Other: Amazing.
Anonymous: Yeah. Yeah.
Other: But did you kept in good touch after the war?
Anonymous: Yes. I’ve got some photographs of meeting the two gunners and their wives in Toronto when it was our golden wedding anniversary.
Other: Oh brilliant.
Anonymous: We did Canada that year. Yeah.
Other: That would have been rather touching wasn’t it? Catching up after all that time.
Anonymous: Yes. I’ve kept in touch with Joe the pilot by correspondence as well.
Other: Yeah.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: That is amazing. Was this your first trip? When you went on to —
Anonymous: No. That was number — let’s see. It was up the Ruhr somewhere wasn’t it? Yeah. Let’s have a look.
AS: That sounds quite hairy. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about that.
Anonymous: It was. It was rotten. Yeah. June the — what was it? Number six I thought it was. Bad luck when you can’t read your own logbook isn’t it? Fighter cover. Oh, Sterkrade. That’s the one.
AS: Ok.
Anonymous: That’s the one. Number six.
AS: Ok. So, so that was a daylight op.
Anonymous: No, it was night.
AS: Ok
Anonymous: Does it, does it give a departure time or —
AS: It does. Yeah. 20:14 you’re right
Anonymous: On there. It doesn’t say that?
AS: 20:14. Yeah. You’re right.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: So obviously your gunners are heavily involved. What, what happened on that particular occasion? Can you tell us a little about that?
Anonymous: Well we were, there was a lot of, let me just refresh my memory on it. Then it was, “Shot up by a fighter.” Yeah. “Hammy injured.” Yeah. Ok. Yeah. What happened was the rear gunner shouted out. We were, we were within sight of the target in the Ruhr and Lorne Vince, the rear gunner, shouted, ‘Corkscrew.’ You know, ‘There’s a fighter coming in.’ Or whatever he said at the time. And he let off a burst and the chap came around again. He must have ducked under us and come up again and he raked us from the rear turret right up through the aircraft. The mid-upper turret had a hole, both sides of it, both sides of the globe, you know and poor old Jason was sat there with his head still on, you know. But he was alright. A bit shaken up. And then it came up through the, through the crew area. You know. Up at the front. And some of the flying shrapnel or whatever it was wounded the navigator in the arm and in the leg and he lost a good number of his instruments. And there was a certain amount of flapping going on up there as well. And anyway, Joe kept the aircraft under control and, and Lorne Vince, the gunner must have let off another burst because he got it credited to him as a probable you know. A bit stronger than a probable maybe. Anyway, they decorated him from it and, but we were like a colander by this time, you know, we’re — yeah. And it was very hairy alright but the bomb aimer was ok and we sort of pressed on and got rid of our bombs and got back home in a mess. As Joe, the pilot said, with less aircraft than we started with [laughs] Yes. And so that was our, that was our initiation into the real thing, you know. Yeah. So that was, but Hammy by the way, the navigator, he navigated us home by dead reckoning. You know. He’d lost so many of his instruments and, and so on. Anyway, so he was decorated as well for that account and repatriated so we didn’t see him again. He was the, he was older than the rest of us.
Other: Was he?
Anonymous: Yes. There he is. Hammy. The tall, the tall one second from the right. Left is it?
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: Yeah. That’s it. That’s Hammy. Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, he died. He died quite a young man, I think. After the war. But, but he was two or three years older than us and it sort of showed when some of you were nineteen, you know and you’ve got a twenty six, a twenty six year old chap with you, you know.
AS: It’s taking your grandad along.
Anonymous: Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. He was great. He was a great chap actually. Anyway, so yeah, so that’s our, then it, I mean I can’t tell you about the variations of the various trips. These were all — if these are in green they’re daylight and if they’re in red they’re night ones. So we, you know, by number eleven we were up the Ruhr again and I mean the typical report would be, “Heavy flak. No fighters.” You know. That was a rail one actually. “Heavy barrage over target,” at Kiel and so on. Stuttgart — flak over target. And so we went on until August time and we were now getting to be a, a sort of an experienced crew you know. And regarded as having a certain amount of luck. Then we had to go, on our twenty third trip we had to go to Stettin which is a long way north isn’t it? And very heavy flak there. I mean the trip took eight hours. It was the longest one we’d done actually. Eight hours and fifty minutes. That’s virtually nine hours isn’t it? And, but we got back unscathed from that. Then we all went on leave and when we got back the first one we were booked for was Stettin [laughs] again. Now this time, I’m speaking from memory now, we were carted around to the dispersals to get in the aircraft, which we did. And we started up and we started taxi-ing around to the, to the hut you know and the breaking and the steering on the ground is all controlled by the rudders. The rudders isn’t it? It was. And there was some fault in that and so we had to stop on the, on the, not on the runway but on the track around. Perimeter track. And they fixed that. Cost us about a half an hour. Three quarters of an hour I suppose. But it’s like going to the pick your own at the supermarket. You know. You get the benefit and then you’ve got to pay for it. By the time we got over the, over to Stettin the main stream had gone through. We’d lost the benefit of Window. You know. The strips. So we were virtually doing a solo act. Not quite of course. There must have been others around. But anyway we were coned by searchlights on the bomb run and, and there wasn’t serious damage but we did [pause] it did start a fire in the starboard inner engine. And we lost, we lost height and we [pause] sufficiently to say in the logbook that we bombed at eleven thousand feet which was quite low, you know. So, and the, I mean it’s quite frightening really when you see these flames going back over the fuselage on the main plane. And the poor old rear gunner in all the noise and shouting and searchlights and so on he [laughs] he came on, ‘What the hell’s happening up there?’ He said, ‘I can’t see a thing.’ You know. So we had to put him in the picture and fortunately we had this cockpit controlled, control for fire extinguishing on each engine. You’d got four, four buttons and you pressed one for each relative engine. And the fire went out. Yeah. It was between fuel tanks. You know, the engine. The starboard inner. And then there was the fuel tank and then another engine but the fuel tank in the middle. It hadn’t got across there and there were no leaks sufficiently to get a big fire going. And what happens with the, when you press that button the engine feathers as well, you know. The blades come around. Do you fly by the way?
AS: A little bit.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: A little bit. Yeah.
Anonymous: So you know what I’m talking about when I say feathering.
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: Yeah. And, and the fire went out. So we all breathed a sigh of relief and set off home, you know. And the practice on our squadron was, half way home normally, if you were over the water you would open the bomb bay doors, give it a shake around a bit to make sure there were no hang-ups and then close the doors again and proceed. When we did that the aerodynamic effect was that it changed the setting of the damaged engine’s propeller and it started unfeathering. All the temperatures went up in there and the fire started again. We were, you know we were well over the North Sea now. Between Stettin and Darlington if you like. Yeah. And we pressed the button again and by some act of God the fire went out again. So we, well to cut the rest of it short we got back [laughs] but it was remarkable really. It was a dickens of a way to contemplate going. Yeah. I mean the Lanc was quite capable of flying on three engines with quite a load on but, yeah but that distance over water, very cold water. Yeah. Anyway, yes, whatever, which one I started. These are not here. But do you know it’s a funny frame of mind you’re in when you’re on these tours. There’s some sort of, oh I don’t know the word [pause] togetherness you know. And a lot of, a lot of genuine feeling is disguised by either bad language or drinking or, or too much bonhomie. You know. That sort of thing. But by and large there was very very few that you come across that were blighted with this wretched, what was it, LMF thing, wasn’t it? Yeah. Yes. That was dreadful. Yes. It’s the only service that punish people to that extent to make it so [pause] Yeah. Yes ok. So there we go. Then we got up to twenty and we began to get hopeful now. By this time, by the way we were going on a number of daylights. D-Day would pass and we were doing army support ones. And the only thing I mention that for is that here you might have seen this in oh that’s one little thing. That was, that was an unofficial photograph taken at the sergeant’s mess on the occasion of that.
AS: The Moose Men. 419 Squadron.
Anonymous: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s yours truly holding that end up.
[pause]
AS: No tie, Ken.
Anonymous: Hmmn?
AS: No tie.
Anonymous: [laughs] No. We were just come back. I don’t know. We used to say that the last thing the cook and butchers did in the kitchen when we were taking off, as soon as the sound died down they put our fried eggs on. They were like yellow rubber heels by the time we got back. So, no. No. This was, the reason I mentioned daylight ones was you might have seen this in, in journals of some sort.
AS: So this, taken from an another aircraft above.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: The Lancaster almost directly underneath. That must have been quite a scary position to be in.
Anonymous: Oh yes. For them it was. The thing is, it was at, we took the photograph.
AS: Oh right.
Anonymous: Yeah. And I’ve got the original. The photographic department broke all the rules and gave us the photograph. Yeah. So, it was us that took the photograph. And what it, it wasn’t somebody aiming a camera at it. It was the, you know at the end of the bomb run, the last exposure on the camera which was photographing the target would be the result if they could. And so that was what, that’s what got caught in the, in the last flash. And you’ll find that in many, many journals on it. Yeah.
AS: That’s extraordinary.
Anonymous: Yeah.
Other: Good framing isn’t it? Great.
Anonymous: Yeah. So, the only other thing we did we — D-Day the Canadian army I think it was, was held up in the Falaise Gap. You know. And we were doing a daylight on the 14th of August in ’44. And it was the one occasion when we earned one of those. Have you seen one of those before?
AS: I have not seen an original. I’ve actually seen a copy of this one.
Anonymous: Have you?
AS: On the internet. On the Moose Men website.
Anonymous: Oh yes.
AS: I have never seen the target token original. That’s just fantastic.
Anonymous: Yeah. That’s one you can take away, I think. If you wish.
AS: Absolutely. Thank you. That will, that will go in the archive.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: Absolutely go in the archive.
Anonymous: Yeah. Ok. And so that was, claimed to be a direct hit you see, on the target which did us all a lot of good, you know. And this — we’d, we got out of our aircraft coming back from a daylight. An early morning one, you know so about a 6 o’clock take-off when we were attacking the flying bomb sites. Ok. And I don’t know, one of the WAAFs I expect had a camera that she shouldn’t have had. And she was down at the dispersal and she took one of each of us as we got out. Apart from Joe. He stayed in.
AS: How did you feel about being photographed? A lot of crew have told me that, or some crew have told me that they felt it was, it was not good luck.
Anonymous: Oh really.
AS: I didn’t, obviously didn’t bother you.
Anonymous: No. No. I don’t think that. I don’t think we discussed that one. No. We were all too vain I expect. Yeah.
Other: How old was the oldest?
Anonymous: Hmmn?
Other: How old was the oldest crew member?
Anonymous: Hamilton. But he only did six with us so he was [pause] I suppose the next one might have been Joe but he was only two or three years older than us, you know.
Other: Yeah.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: Shall we, shall we have a pause there Ken?
Anonymous: Yeah. Why not.
[recording paused]
AS: Here we are back from, from our break. Ken, I’d like to go into your memories of the crew as individuals and then perhaps some of the reunions and the way you kept in touch after that war. If that would suit.
Anonymous: Yes. Right. Well from the top then. We had this maverick chap with us. An American lieutenant of the American Army Air Force who had originally gone up across the relevant parallel to join the RCAF, the Canadian Air Force, before America came into the war. And he did this at the risk of losing his American citizenship in those early days. This was later changed when — after Pearl Harbour. So Joe was a man of great flying ability and saw us through many tight, out of many tight corners. And we were pleased to say that at the end of his time with the Canadian Air Force he went back to the Americans and had quite a distinguished career. A career with them. And became one of the few people in the Air Forces who had a DFC from both of them. Who earned a DFC from both of them. I don’t know why he got it in the American one but I know he stayed in the reserve after the war but we’re thinking about wartime relative. W/O Keelan, Keelan, Bill Keelan was, now where did he live? Somewhere near the Rockies. And he, we acquired Bill when we lost our original navigator over the Ruhr on our sixth trip. Bill was a very quiet chap and kept into, kept at his desk. Rarely came out to view the bomb run or anything of that sort. But he was surprised on one occasion and a bit startled I think when he did pop his head out and saw three or four flamers going down not too far away from us during the bomb run. So he was, it didn’t affect him fortunately. So, and then there’s Tony Delaney was the bomb aimer who often, people who wanted to be pilots but lacked some characteristic that was required and often became bomb aimers. Did you come across that before?
AS: Yes. I think so. Yeah.
Anonymous: You know a lot of people going over from this country had the same sort of selection process I think. And then W/O Lyall. He was quite experienced. The wireless operator. Always anxious to be in the middle of things and, and when he, when he was involved in the shoot up over the Ruhr he was, he was very active in trying to get around and see what else he could do apart from wireless operating at the time. Fred. Fred Grumbly and Lorne Vince both had the same characters really in the sense that they were quite at home being alone for some of these long trips with nobody around them or close to them. You know. And I don’t know what else I can say about them really. So, about the, what we were saying about, yes, seeing them again. Yeah. That’s right. Seeing them again. Yes. For our, for our personal golden wedding my wife and I went to Canada and by arrangement we met both Fred Grumbly and Lorne Vince together with their wives at Toronto and had a marvellous day around the, what is it? The CN Tower or something?
AS: The CNN I think it is. They’re broadcasting towers, I think. Broadcasting.
Anonymous: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s — oh then in addition to that Joe Hartshorn and I kept in touch for most of the period. And he was coming over to Europe on one occasion and came and stayed in Modbury which is quite, that’s this little town here. And he’d expressed a wish to go to an old English pub and stay with his partner and we duly fitted him up with that. And he came over and we had some time together. Took him over on Dartmoor and showed him all the sites over there. And then when he saw me the day after they’d spent their first night in the pub I’d put them in. He said, ‘Marvellous, ‘he said, ‘Lovely flagstones floors.’ You know. He said, ‘It’s the first building I’ve seen in the whole world and I’ve been around a bit,’ he said, ‘That didn’t have a straight wall in it, [laughs] or a right angle in it.’ A right angle. The first building he’d found without a right angle. Yeah.
AS: As a crew. Not when you were operating. When you were down did you all live together?
Anonymous: Well, I mean we were, we were non-commissioned people. Joe, Joe and the navigator Bill, oh wait a minute. Joe was in the officer’s mess, Keelan wasn’t. Delaney was in the officer’s mess. So there were just two in the officer’s mess and the rest of us were in the sergeant’s mess, you know. NCO’s mess. Yeah. So, but socially some of us used to go to the dance hall in Stockton on Tees. The Maison de Dance I think it was called [laughs] with the pub right opposite the door. Yes. So that was our, that was our sort of, I don’t know, our respite I suppose. Swap one noise for another. Yes. But I shall forever remember the Glenn Miller record of “American Patrol,” because we used to think at times it was the only one the band knew. But it stayed with me you know. The American.
Other: The theme tune.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: Your tour seemed to pass relatively quickly. You got thirty two ops in in what, four months which is, is quite — did you feel that you were, it was all happening under pressure? Bang bang bang or did you get lots of time off?
Anonymous: I don’t, I can’t recall. I don’t think we were ever concerned about the frequency. Only if we’d had four in one week we might have done but it was sufficiently phased, I think, to avoid that. I mean during the, this isn’t for, for the narrative by the way, my narrative. My personal view is that the area or the timing of the, all the bravery and so on of Bomber Command doesn’t give enough attention to the early ones who would take off, six or eight of them. Blenheims would take off from Detling and if a couple came back, you know, they’d had a good day. Their navigation wasn’t as good and the equipment wasn’t, was it? You know. But some of those chaps were doing very very long deep European ones and coastal ones. Heavily defended. You know, around the dockyards and so on. I sometimes think that they almost deserve a separate recognition but I know that’s, that’s a vain hope. I do feel, you know, it’s quite right. I mean, if you lose fifty four thousand people and you’re the only command that ever, that was still going at the end of the war that started off then there’s going to be a lots of bravery. I mean there must have been thousands of acts of bravery that nobody will ever know about. Mustn’t there? Yeah.
AS: Someone has to come back to tell. Yeah.
Anonymous: That’s right. Yes. I mean if our, if our engines hadn’t reignited or if the one hadn’t come to life again we could have been in the bottom of the North Sea couldn’t we? In August 1944. No trace. That’s what Runnymede is largely about you know. People who, well they don’t know whether there’s any grave for them. Yeah. Ok. So what was the question?
AS: We were, we had been through your recollections of your crew and keeping in touch after the war. Perhaps we could, we could move on a bit to a different aspect of being a crew. I mean it’s often said that the, the successful and surviving crews were in large part very very disciplined and very skilled. Was your captain? Were you, as a crew practicing your drills, emergency drills religiously? How did you become such an efficient and surviving crew?
Anonymous: Yeah. [pause] I can’t say there was ever any dedicated. You’d have to be selective about what you put here because I don’t want, the last thing I want to do is ruffle, ruffle any feathers. We rarely had team cooperation lectures or practices. We used to do it in practical ways by doing cross country’s at night, you know. And bombing Hull at night. That sort of thing. Yeah. It was practical. Hands on building really. But the most thing, the best thing to build the morale and so on was to get involved in to our Ruhr experience and see what comes out. You know. See where the deficiencies are. Because I mean, talking in modern, modern terms we have this thing called the annual review in big business now don’t we?
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: And there was a lot of suspicion about it when it first came in wasn’t there? Because they thought it was a way of getting rid of me but in fact it was the positive was you got many good qualities which we want to further and exploit and tidy them up or you’ve got several bad habits that are not acceptable. You know. There was a [pause] but I mean none of that, the services have got the basis, or the big advantage of having discipline haven’t they? You know. Ranking. If you come, I was asked to come and work in Plymouth for a time. You can’t say to a man in Civvy Street, ‘You’ll do this because,’ you know, ‘I’ve got three pips and you’ve got three stripes,’ you know. Yeah. You can’t do that. But the military and all the, all those people that have the big weapon of discipline haven’t we? Disciplinary procedures and so on. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you all that but that’s what came more when I was I was doing, well involved in personnel work before I retired you see. So.
AS: I think there’s an element of doing a post mortem really after action. And you linked it to the Ruhr. Your Ruhr operations. So was that, was that a feature of your crew interaction that you discussed previous operations? Hairy experiences or —
Anonymous: I didn’t, I wasn’t party to any discussion on that.
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: No. No. I mean there’s a certain amount of, of relief really that the survivors if you like come back. I don’t, I can’t recall any where they said well we knew there was a bit of a weak link there, you know. Or he ought to be off to Eastchurch. To the LMF camp. You know. Yeah. Yeah. So —
AS: Could we go down a slightly different track and this would be very familiar to you but perhaps not to many people who’ll listen to this interview. Could you, could you take me through a raid from, from basically getting up, going through the briefing. I know a lot of them are different but if you —
Anonymous: You’re asking a lot.
AS: Ok.
Anonymous: I mean I’m ninety one next month, you know. You’re doing very well. You’re dredging all that [laughs]
AS: Would you like me to stop?
Anonymous: Yeah. Go on. Stop it for a minute. Yeah.
[recording paused]
Anonymous: That was not dealt with. No. No. That’s, that’s not right. There wasn’t any so it didn’t need to be dealt with. Joe was a very good, very good captain and, yeah, he really was. He was, he was quite an impressive bloke. He was, he didn’t go, he didn’t socialise a lot. He would, he would never go to hear the, “American Patrol” in the dance hall, you know. You wouldn’t find him there. But, yeah, he was, he was a good man and he held the team together very well. Yeah. So no. I can’t, I can’t deal with that question very, very much I’m afraid from personal experience.
AS: That’s absolutely, absolutely fine.
Anonymous: Ok. But I mean as far as the sequence goes each, each aircrew category had their own building somewhere on the, you know, their hut. The flight engineer’s hut was down near the dispersals. So you’d go down there in the morning and on the wall there was a list like a league table and and it would say, “Flying tonight,” Or whatever, you know, “Engaged tonight.” And there would be the captain’s name all the way down. And then the last figure on it would, I think from memory, fuel load. You know. Which caused speculation then because they said fuel load, or bomb load, whichever. If the, if it was a lot of petrol and not so much bomb load you knew you were going a long way. That’s right. So, so there’d just be the captain’s name and then briefing would be about, well it would depend on the take-off time really. And you’d all go down to the, to the central building and be briefed. All the crew. 419, everybody went. You know. The whole crew. And you were briefed by the various people. The Met people and the navigational people and one or two others and yes I remember the day of Arnhem. Arnhem was it? Yeah. Arnhem. Joe was, Joe was labelled with the name of ‘fearless Hartshorn’[laughs] Yeah. He carried that label for some time. But they had this tape going across Europe you know. The end of the tape would be the target. And, and then there was one that finished on the, right on the coastline. And I remember the, the briefer saying, ‘Don’t get fooled by that one that finishes at the coastline. It’s not Fearless off on his own again,’ you know, or something like that. And [laughs] but in fact it was, it was the Arnhem flight that was being carried out by the airborne people. And they were just telling us this would be about. You know, there would be a lot of activity down there. And we were doing, we did a diversionary raid further south. I can’t remember when it was but if you know the date of Arnhem I could probably tell you when it was from here. But anyway, yeah so that would and then we’d all troop off and go and have our yellow rubber heel at the, you know [laughs] Or was that when we came back wasn’t it? When we came back. Yeah. That maligns the cooks and butchers of course but it was one of those things that happened in the service isn’t it? Yeah. So we’d then go back to our huts or whatever and get ready in our own ways, you know. Personal ways. Prepare. One thing I don’t know. We were in Nissen huts until we could get a room in the sergeant’s mess which was usually overbooked and you’d get about eight or ten of us in a Nissen hut. And you know what they are don’t you? Nissen huts.
AS: Yes.
Anonymous: I’m sure you do. Yeah. And there was only one. Replacement crews would come in. You know, the NCOs of replacement crews would come in to make up the numbers in the crew. And one of the bravest acts I saw within the service culture was a Roman Catholic Canadian. It might have been a French Canadian who came in with some replacements and came about, I don’t know, late evening. We’d all started settling down. And he kept his light on and he actually knelt by his bed and did his prayers. You know. And it took courage of a great sort I think, you know. He was laying himself open to a lot of leg pulling and so on. Yes. But they didn’t make it back from their first trip. Yes. Sad little story but —
Other: In a group of young men it was a pretty brave act wasn’t it?
Anonymous: Well in that, at that company yeah I think it was so unusual. Nobody, nobody made anything of it you know. Mind you we were a good lot. A decent lot in our hut you know. Yeah. The best hut to be in. Yeah. Ok. Alright. So, there we go. So where are we now Alan?
AS: We were preparing ourselves for, or you were preparing yourselves for, for the op.
Anonymous: Oh yes. Well then you’d gather your stuff. Any lucky omens you’d got you stuck in your top pocket, you know and all that sort of thing. And you’d go down and go to the equipment room and pick up your parachute and, and any other gear you’d got in your locker that you needed to take. And then get carted out in the in the wagons, you know to the dispersals. And there you would wait until you got the word to get in. To load up, so of speak. And that one, that one, this one here — that would have been that stage there. Some of them have got their Mae Wests on haven’t they? Yeah that’s right. So we were ready to that stage, you see. Got their Mae Wests and their parachute harness on. Joe, the pilot was quite different because he had to have a parachute he sat on didn’t he? But the others had them clipped on there. But yeah, so you’d then get the word to get on, load up and then you’d get your signal to join the queue going around the perimeter track and you’d be four or five back from the, what was it? Black or white hut was it? Where the starter was. Anyway —
AS: Runway control van.
Anonymous: Yeah. Run control. That’s right. So then you’d, in due course roll around to the start you know, when you got the signals and do your run up. And get the engines going nicely and when you got the green off you went. And at Middleton St George the main runway ended with quite a valley across it. If that was the runway, that was the runway, there was a valley and on the other side of the valley there was a very nice farmhouse. And during the summer, it was double British summertime don’t forget, you could be quite late and the farmer and his wife and family would all come out and we used to think well that was decent of them to come and see us off, you know. What they were scared of was that we weren’t going to make it off the end [laughs] you know and they were the first in line. Yeah. That was the cynical view of it, you know, but, yes, so that was the sort of thing you know. Then the flight engineer and the pilot or the bomb aimer, sometimes the bomb aimer assisted. Sometimes the flight engineer assisted on following up with the — because you’ve got the throttle and you have the revs you know, haven’t you? You know, so the person assisting the pilot would be the follow up hand on the quadrant that increased the power. You know all about that. And hopefully two thirds of the way down you’d feel the big lift, you know. Yeah. Then you’d stooge around for an hour over the coast. And then when the stream was formed off you’d go, you know. Yeah. And —
AS: Could I just pause you there about, I’m interested in the, in the forming up process.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: Some stations had an assembly point. It sounds like you did too. Over the coast where you climbed to height.
Anonymous: Yeah. I think it was often when there was more than one station. One more airfield you know, involved. Maybe four or five squadrons, you know. And I suppose it was a precautionary thing as much as anything. As strategic. Because what’s the position? You want, say five hundred aircraft bombing a target you know. That’s a lot of aircraft milling around isn’t it? So you’ve got to have some discipline about altitude and longitude and all positions, I think. Yeah. So that was I think functionally necessitated. A functional necessity. Yeah. Yes. And the Window cover as well. You know. The bomb aimer used to hate that job. They were like, you know these Christmas wrappers. Christmas crackers. No. Chains. Paper chains you used to make. Strips of paper about like that but about that size those Windows were and they were silver paper. A little more. And he had a little chute by the side of his position and he had bundles of these all the way up. But he thought it was a very menial job for him to be doing. He wanted me to do it. No [laughs] He never told me I should be doing it but I didn’t volunteer. So yeah. It’s all these little things that make life what it is you know.
AS: So on the way you’d be at least, you know a pair of eyes in the cockpit.
Anonymous: Oh yes.
AS: And also was it also fuel management? Was that your main responsibilities?
Anonymous: That was. Yes. Yes. Yes. I’ll show you a book. A dear friend of mine who died three or four weeks ago gave me and it’s the, it’s a book on the Lancaster and it’s got marvellous pictures of the panels of the — it’s got, it’s got the original requirement of contractors to build this. To build the Lancaster. Yeah. I don’t know where he got it from but he was, he was an enthusiast. A Lancaster enthusiast. And he used to ask me questions. He was a trained, a trained mechanical engineer and he used to ask me questions about the Lancaster that I couldn’t answer [laughs] Typical, you know. Yeah. Because he really examined them right down. Yeah. But I’ll show you that book.
AS: That would be great. And you must have been a Jack of all trades because it’s hydraulics, its pneumatics, it’s electrics. It’s —
Anonymous: Oh yes. What staggered me, I don’t want you to mark it for neatness or anything but that was the sort of thing. This was the, this was the pre — this was the learning about the internal combustion engine to start with. Which was a lesson to me. And then you moved on to a specific aircraft. Your last six or eight weeks of training and you learned everything about that aircraft. And this one was the Halifax Mark 3 with a radial engine with a sleeve valved engine. You know. A very, a very unusual engine and so this is, there’s the engineer’s panel look. Open.
AS: Was that standardised with the Lanc or is that too much to expect?
Anonymous: Oh no, they were. I should think they were in competition really but, for the work but I imagine the language was the same but the, the construction would have been you know the positioning and so on.
AS: So this is what you were saying earlier that suddenly when you go to 419 and you’re on Lancs you have to relearn.
Anonymous: Yes. Who’s that?
Other 2: It’s only me.
Anonymous: Oh is there —
[recording paused]
Anonymous: When the bandit was behind us, ‘Corkscrew. Corkscrew. Corkscrew left. Corkscrew left,’ you know. Get out of the way. You know. And this was to reduce the area that the fighter had to fire at but you all had an observation point for fighters anyway and mine was the [pause] where’s that, is there a — where’s that picture gone? Yeah. The, no, the flight engineer’s position was on the, that’s it on the starboard side. Level with the pilot. But well just a little bit behind that. Just there. And there was a sliding window there and that was with a, with a blip, an observation blip. You know. Bubble in the —
AS: A blister. Yeah.
Anonymous: In the window. Yeah. And that was my, so that I could see. So the flight engineer could see below.
Other 2: A small one for you.
AS: Ok.
Other 2: A slightly larger for you.
AS: Is mum home?
[recording paused]
Anonymous: Yeah. Well, my responsibility was to observe through this what would you call it? Bubble window I suppose, which just stuck out a bit from the fuselage and to see if any aircraft, any bandits as we called them were coming up that way. But why I was really telling you that was, when the, when the chap hit us with that spray from the rear turret up through and through the front the window, I was looking at, out of, disappeared. It disappeared [laughs] It just went. Now, I don’t know if there was a break in his bullet supply or whether it was afterwards. We thought it was the pressure really building up inside the fuselage that blew it out. But, you know, I might have come home without my head. But —
Other: So were you guys strapped in? I mean if the window disappears surely there was quite a high chance that you might too.
Anonymous: Yeah. Well it wasn’t that big a window. It was, well I suppose about that.
Other: Ok.
Anonymous: Like that. And it had this like a pregnant window. And it was to enable you to see under the aircraft. ‘Cause one of their wicked weapons afterwards was the upward firing cannon wasn’t it? Yeah. So there we are. So we lost that and Joe lost part of his window and so did the bomb aimer right down there. So that was a good rake from back to front. He must have thought he’d nailed us, you know. But I mustn’t concentrate just on that one but that was it but it’s the best one. I can’t remember many details. I’ve got so many of them. But, sorry Alan. You said you’d got me to where?
AS: You, you were airborne. That’s one of your hairiest moments. Was there any discussion about going on or going back or just the pilot decides off you go?
Anonymous: I think the [pause] I’ll tell you, I mean I can tell you something from memory which I wouldn’t want put in any, anything subsequently.
[recording paused]
Anonymous: Yeah. I suppose my most vivid recollection of flak and its potential was the raid — I might find it here. It’s towards the end of our lot. Calais. Duisburg. We, it was on the 29th 27th of September. Duisburg. It was a lovely day you know. Lovely autumn day I suppose. And we had, what was the target? Bombing results not observed. Let’s have a — right. There was this thing called the random, not the random flak but the flak they just put on with the searchlight on us, on it, you know. Using the same setting as the searchlights. But then they had, they’d put up, they would put up a thing that was radar controlled. They would produce this cone of [pause] not cone. I don’t mean a cone. A cube. A cube of flak. Bursting flak, you know. If you can imagine that and that was, once they’d sorted out your route and what the target might be then they put this rectangle but in fact it had another dimension and it was a cube of flak. And you knew you’d got to go through that. And the most striking time that personally I experienced was on this Duisburg raid. Predicted flak. That’s what it was called in those days. In target area. Obviously once they’d identified that they’re own explosions of their shells from the ack-ack batteries would be concentrated in the area above the target. Where the bombs were likely to be dropped. Yeah. But [pause] so what did we say? Ten ten I don’t know what that is. Not — results not observed. Ten stroke ten.
AS: Perhaps that’s ten tenths cloud was it?
Anonymous: Oh, you’ve got it actually. Yeah. There must have been a layer of cloud as we were coming out. I don’t remember the clouds. But that, I’m sure that’s what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that was the cloud so it was sort of, it wasn’t an option. There were no options other than go through it, you know. Yeah. And so you’d go through and get rocked about a bit and I mean goodness knows where all their shrapnel went but, you know but it got some of them. I think it was operation number [pause] one of the early ones we were. We were in a stream. I forget where we were going now but anyway suffice it to say we hadn’t a a clue what was around us in the way of friendly aircraft, you know until we saw some flames on our starboard side. Starboard side. Port side. Anyway. Starboard side. And suddenly the flames became all-consuming and we saw it was a Halifax and he just fell away behind us and down. You know. We never knew what had happened to that. What happened to that. But then you get all this illumination. You lose your night vision yourself. So you can’t see anything. So you just hoped that the gunner’s guns aren’t going trail you now. But yeah I sometimes find it difficult to recapture one’s feelings. I mean what was 1944? Fifty six. Sixty one years ago isn’t it? Sixty one years ago. A long time isn’t it? To remember things.
AS: It’s entirely, entirely understandable.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: It is.
Anonymous: But I’m sure it’s all therapeutic. Yes.
Other: But I suspect if you knew you had another mission to do that you didn’t really indulge in too much thought about feelings did you? Because you knew you had to go back.
Anonymous: Well yes.
Other: So —
Anonymous: I think we used to put it on the back burner until we saw our name on the morning mist you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. But I [pause] it’s surprising really. You know, you hear stories about people not making it. Well, we’re all different, aren’t we? And there must have been thousands of reasons why people couldn’t cope with it. Yeah. Anyway, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t ever remember being actually frightened. Now, that’s, that’s in no way bragging at all. It doesn’t say anything about me that’s worthy you know. But it’s, I don’t know, I seemed to have some assurance that, well I didn’t think about it really. I mean that doesn’t just say I didn’t feel apprehension because I did. It would be difficult not to wouldn’t it? Yeah. And the actual operation six incident, you know it was all over so quickly. You suddenly come out of it you know. But then you’ve got to get back. I was reading the, some accounts of the dam busting the other day. I think it was Guy Gibson’s. Was it Gibson done that one?
AS: Yes.
Anonymous: It was wasn’t it? And some of the reports of his, of the aircraft that took on that you know. And you can see, well it sort of, it reawakens your sensations or speculations as you’re approaching it. But you try to keep occupied I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. I can’t say more than that Adam. I can’t say.
[recording paused]
Anonymous: Period.
AS: Ok.
Anonymous: And the first thing, I mean we had some army instructions there about map reading. You know, he had a dozen of us and we sat down on the grass. And he gave us a reference and he said, ‘Where’s this reference?’ You know. And of course obviously to the army mind it was where we had our backsides then. You know. ‘We’re sitting on it sergeant,’ you know. That sort of thing. We had to do the usual coupling up with another person and being carted away from the camp about, I don’t know, twenty miles. Something like that. Making your own way back to the camp. So we had that one. We had the good fortune to find a lorry with a friendly driver I think [laughs] Anyway, that was that. And then we had to do the underground bit where you had this, oh about that size had been dug to a depth. I don’t know how deep. I can’t remember now. And then a long, a long tunnel and then coming up the other end. We had to do that. There were no lights there. You just followed the smell in front of you, you know and looked for daylight. So that was about the sum of it. At the time things like going away in the lorry become a challenge of another sort don’t they? You had to outdo your own people [laughs] and do all the things they told you you weren’t allowed. So that was the, it didn’t take I mean the whole Heavy Conversion Unit didn’t take long. I don’t know how long. Maybe a fortnight at the most and we went from there to Middleton then. Yeah. So air to air firing, practice bombing. Yeah. Yeah.
AS: And did you see any escape training films or training films generally prepared for you?
Anonymous: We used to have talks on survival. Yeah. About cooking in the field and so on, you know. But if you, if you get an [unclear] if you catch a hedgehog and cover it with mud and get a good fire going. Bake it. You break the cake off it at the end and all the, all the needles will come out of the hedgehog and you can eat it then. You know. That’s desperation for you.
Other: Lighting a fire might be a bit dodgy.
Anonymous: I don’t think it would catch on here. No. So, yeah that sort of thing we had. Yeah. Quite a number of talks on that. Yeah. Because these are only I mean the logbook is is sort of a structure. That’s all isn’t it? You can’t [pause] flying, bombing an installation. Yeah. There were quite some interesting ones when you read through. It does me good to have to read through this again sometimes. Things we got up to. I’ll tell you one thing we saw when we were on a daylight doing air to air firing or something like that. We were up in the, up in Yorkshire somewhere. Flying over Yorkshire. It was lovely. Another lovely day. Hello dear.
[recording paused]
Anonymous: I can’t remember the purpose for our flight but this brand new looking Halifax suddenly appeared in our, our rear and he overtook us. You know. Overflew us. And I was saying the weather was beautiful. Lovely. And he got ahead of us and we could only assume that he was going to show this damned Lancaster pilot and his crew that the Halifax was just as good. And he flew on. And he started messing about and he stalled. And from about, it couldn’t have been more than two or three thousand pounds he, not pounds, feet, he just fell straight to the moors. No survivors at all. He just stalled, you know. He just tipped it up on its wing tip. Brand new. It looked brand new. So we had no more engagement other than to just mayday the event and fly on. Couldn’t do anything about it. But that, that was a bit of a dampener in our day. Yeah. See these little incidents that just, they’re still there but they’ve just got to be dug out. Yeah. So, so what was the next development now?
AS: Could we talk a little about the emergency landing grounds? What you knew of them. Whether you used them at all.
Anonymous: We knew of them. Yeah. I mean we were diverted twice I think but not for those reasons but because the weather had deteriorated or they’d got it wrong and the raid was off so we were diverted to places like Little Snoring in Lincolnshire. And another one somewhere over on the east coast. But I knew about — what’s the one on the east coast? That’s the big one. That’s the three miler.
AS: There’s Manston. And then Woodbridge in East Anglia.
Anonymous: Oh Woodbridge was the one we were most interested in to know where it was and what it was capable of because [pause] yeah. But we had it clear documented but not used. Yeah. And at Manston was, I’d forgotten about that one. The Battle of Britain must have been useful. I mean it must have been useful at that time, yeah because that’s pretty well on the coast isn’t it? Manston. It is. Yeah.
AS: Yeah. Yeah. I think —
Anonymous: Is Woodbridge still open?
AS: No. I grew up near Woodbridge actually. But it became an American fighter base after the war.
Anonymous: Oh, did it? Yeah.
AS: And it’s now open for the army engineers.
Anonymous: Oh, is it?
AS: It’s called Rock Barracks. The runway’s still there.
Anonymous: Oh is it?
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: Yeah. Yeah. So I can’t, I can’t offer much comment on that other than we knew of them and were glad of them, you know. Glad of the resource being there but fortunately never having to use it. I suppose the only time was the second trip to Stettin that might have involved us going there. I can’t say now can I? Anyway, it was better to get back home. Yeah. I mean we did one, I can’t remember when where we were diverted. And then we did our next op to where we were diverted to. Yeah. You know. Little Snoring. You did that upside down [laughs]
[recording paused]
Anonymous: Look at that. “Cross country. Weather duff.” I don’t, I don’t know if we had to, we took three thousand and fifty minutes. I’m sure we did. “Very moonlight. Good bombing.” Oh dear. Sad isn’t it?
AS: But that was the task.
Anonymous: Middleton St George. “Very moonlit. Good bombing.” Oh dear. Six hours and fifteen minutes. What’s interesting, ops on daylight attack. Siracourt Oh that was a, what was the flying bomb site. Flying bomb sight. There was just a field. You just had a field to bomb and you know if you knocked that one out they moved to the next field. Yeah. Daylight attack on Cannes. Oh yeah. Just forward of Canadian. Oh, that’s the, that’s that one.
AS: Oh the one you got the aiming point photograph.
Anonymous: Yeah. Daylight attack. Was it this one? On Cannes. Just forward of Canadian beach head. “Light flak over target. Good result. Four thirty.” Well we would have. Yeah. They were quite rare you know those. So we were quite happy to get that. What else have we got here? Another one in. I didn’t realise we’d been to Ruhr as many times as this. “Great number of searchlights. Heavy flak. No fighters.” That was a big relief. Flying bomb. We did a number of these bomb installations here. Kiel. See this is supporting the army. And the heavy barrage. Flak over target. Kiel. You know these naval places. Hartshorn, engineer. Stuttgart. What was Stuttgart here? Crikey. Nine hours and ten. That was a long one. I’m grateful to you for making me read it. Read it again. You had your disappointments. Four hours and twenty minutes and we didn’t bomb because it was too cloudy. Yeah.
AS: That would still count as an op would it?
Anonymous: Well it was if you — yes it would. Yeah. The Canadians used the hundred and twenty point system. And they graded the targets as either three points or four points.
AS: I’ve not heard about that.
Anonymous: Yeah. Well that’s how we assumed it was. So if you did the daylight ones over the flying bomb sites would be three points, you know. And the Stettin would be four. I don’t think it ever went above four. And you had to accumulate a hundred and twenty. Or the pilot did if you were a crew. You know. Yeah. So, yeah, that’s what it was. If there was any doubt you used to write the number of points. Stettin. Very heavy flak. Yes. So there it is. I don’t like, I don’t ever, I don’t want to let this go out of my possession you know because I think the children wouldn’t forgive me for that.
AS: Indeed.
Anonymous: From what Gill was saying. Yeah. So, so what more can I answer? You’ve got a picture of him I expect?
AS: Yes. I’ve sat in his office.
Anonymous: Did you?
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: So did the chap — that’s the chap who writes, who wrote books on the Lancaster and well Bomber Command generally I think. He isn’t.
AS: [unclear]
Anonymous: Yes. That one. And he wrote to me and wanted some information so I sent him copies of pretty well, I sent him everything that I’d got and he photocopied it all and he’s written books. I think he must have died because he suddenly stopped writing to me. The other interesting contact I made as a result of John — Joe. Joe Hartshorn was my pilot, you know. He was a great friend. Apparently he’d met him somewhere. One of the air artists. And he got to be very friendly with him and the artist got in touch with me to see if I’d got any photographs. And yes, he gave me a copy. An original copy of one of his big bombing ones. You know. Yeah.
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: I think he’s now married a Polish girl and gone to Poland. So that was interesting.
[recording paused]
Anonymous: The attention that was paid to it until the monuments hit the headlines. You know. In Green Park. Yeah. And there’s been a sudden, the Bomber Command Association I think stirred it all up again. There must have been somebody who found the formula for getting it going. And I think that’s marvellous and I think it’s grown since then and they themselves have been largely responsible for the monument haven’t they? Which has been vandalised a few times I think but, yeah. So it was alright to complain, well not complain. I’m not complaining about what the government could do, or the Air Ministry could do in the early days of the war. They could only use what resources they had. What I’m saying is that the accounts we read of Bomber Command a lot in the war doesn’t always pay a lot of attention to them. It might say, you know eight Blenheims attacked Wilhelmshaven and, but but it doesn’t say a lot about them. But I mean you can’t. I was thinking of something else just now. I mean like the, I mean what about the clasp for Bomber Command on the — I’ve heard it called all sorts, you know. Like a Brownie knitting badge or something you know and that sort of thing. But does it really matter. What’s it for? I mean medals are. It’s alright isn’t it? I mean I think they’ve lost their impact actually because with all due respect to the people that have fought in Afghanistan and so on and Ireland and so on you see young soldiers of about twenty five to thirty and they’ve got about eight campaign medals, you know. But it depends what your take is on these things, you know. Yes. Yeah.
AS: So the, have you got your Bomber Command clasp?
Anonymous: Yes. I got it at Coningsby. The group captain there was a very delightful man and Gill, the one that, our daughter that you went to first she did all the paperwork for us there. Yeah. So I’ve been there and sorry what was the question?
AS: Had you got your clasp? Which you obviously have. Yeah.
Anonymous: Yeah. Well, he wrote and invited us up to come up for the lunch and hear the ladies choir sing and all that sort of thing, you know and I thought it was marvellous. So we, we went up, all five of us. Our two daughters and our son and Vera and me went up. And we had a couple of nights in Grantham. Yeah. And yeah. That was, that was very good. Yeah. And what else was I going to say about Coningsby? Yeah. He was, they were very good to us and I met two or three chaps from Middleton St George. Because it was a Canadian thing you know and there weren’t many of us there who had actually served in a Canadian squadron. So I didn’t notice [unclear] too much you because there were so many people there. I mean there were about eighty or ninety people who, who took the group captain’s offer of re-presenting them with their clasp if he wished them to. So I had already got mine and had it put on my — so I gave it to his person. His right hand. And then when the time came you know we were sitting in numbered rows and when my name was called I went and he pinned, he came around and pinned it on me, you know. That was a bit of service flannel really, you know. But it was rather nice. He was such a nice man the group captain. He made himself known all around the place to the seniors. Apparently the veterans have got quite a good reputation in service you know. Yeah. I mean we got our retired group captain in the village here. And another one who was a, he was a navigator I think so I think he must have come off navigating quite early to get into some other stream. Anyway, the other one was a, used to fly Canberras I think. He was a wingco. And yeah, you know, they always regard with respect anybody who was on Bomber Command. Because they’ve seen the other side haven’t they?
AS: Yeah.
Anonymous: They’ve seen. They’ve probably seen some pretty horrible sites. Crashing on to the home runway.
AS: I think that respect is universal and that underpins really some of what we’re doing at Lincoln really.
Anonymous: Yeah.
AS: Hopefully. Hopefully so.
Anonymous: Yes. How did you become?
AS: Ken, how did you actually become the flight engineer on Hartshorn’s crew?
Anonymous: Now, well it happened because I was the last member of a seven man crew. The six man crew having been formed earlier into one stage of operational proficiency but without a flight engineer. And so when it got to the Heavy Conversion Unit stage the six man crew would select a flight engineer. And whilst I was waiting at a bus stop in Ripon one evening an American brown uniformed flyer came up to me and invited me to be their flight engineer. Apparently he was an American who’d joined the RCAF originally but was now having to do a tour with the RCAF as a recompense presumably. Yeah. Something like that. Is that enough?
AS: That’s great. And did you instantly accept or did you think?
Anonymous: Oh, I said yes. Of course. I think it was getting a bit short because I think some of them already knew each other you know. But I couldn’t have made a better choice.
AS: Excellent.
Anonymous: Pure luck. Yeah.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with an Anonymous Interviewee (An00086)
Creator
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Adam Sutch
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-22
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
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AAn00086-150722
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Pending review
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01:32:47 audio recording
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Description
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This interviewee was working at Chatham dockyard before he was accepted by the RAF as a mechanic. He then remustered as a flight engineer which fulfilled his hopes to be accepted as aircrew. While waiting for a place on the training course at St Athan he did maintenance work on Spitfires for 222 Squadron at RAF Hornchurch. At his Operational Training Unit the crew had the unfortunate of experience of crashing the command officer’s aircraft. The crew were posted to 419 Squadron at RAF Middleton St George. On one operation there was a fire in the engine which they managed to extinguish but while undertaking a manoeuvre on the flight home the engine again caught fire. Luckily they were again able to extinguish the fire. On another operation they were attacked by a night fighter and were raked from one end of the aircraft to the other but luckily were able to fly home despite the damage. However, the navigator was injured and was repatriated home. On a training flight over England a Halifax overtook them and apparently wanted to engage in a friendly way but tragically it stalled and the aircraft plunged to the earth with the loss of the lives of all on board.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
England--Durham (County)
Germany--Duisburg
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1944
222 Squadron
419 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
coping mechanism
crash
evacuation
faith
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Lancaster
memorial
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
RAF Hornchurch
RAF Middleton St George
RAF St Athan
searchlight
Spitfire
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/369/6115/AHicksDK151103.2.mp3
8f3b62f9200c69a23551ea40528cc813
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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Hicks, Ken
Ken Hicks
D K Hicks
Description
An account of the resource
61 items. An oral history interview with Chief Technician David Kennedy Hicks (b. 1922, 0574954 Royal Air force), memories of the Battle of Britain, his Royal Air Force record, and photographs of his Halton entry, his time in Southern Rhodesia and 56 photographs, many of his time in Southern Africa. Ken Hicks joined the Royal Air Force in 1938 as a Halton apprentice. He served with 202 Squadron at RAF Hornchurch during the Battle of Britain as an aircraft rigger. Subsequently he served on training unit in Southern Rhodesia and then in Egypt, staying in the Royal Air Force after the war.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Ken Hicks and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-11-03
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Hicks, DK
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Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: Right. My name is Chris Brockbank and I’m here to talk with Ken Hicks on the 3rd of November 2015 about his experiences in World War Two but if you’d like to start please Ken with your earliest recollections and then just go through your life in sequence please.
KH: To start with, my father, a coal miner down in Wales and when I was fifteen he said to me, ‘Lad you’re not going down the pit. I want you to learn a trade. I want you to go to see the headmaster and join the royal aircraft as an aircraft apprentice.’ I went and saw the headmaster and he said, ‘There’s no one been up from this school. The curriculum doesn’t cover it.’ But my old man went down and thumped the table. And he said ok and he sent for the exam paper and I sat in his office in his chair and I had one hour and I answered all the questions and he came in and he said, ‘Put your pen down.’ So I had just I just worked out the last answer so I jotted that down and he went bananas. ‘When I say put the pen down put the pen down.’ So he put it in a big brown envelope and he said, ‘Lick that,’ and I licked it. And he got hold of me by the ear and said, ‘Come on. I want to see you post it.’ So I posted it. I passed. He had me up in front of the school, tapping my head saying, ‘There’s a clever boy. I want all you boys to try this examination now.’ So I learned a lot about humanity [laughs]. So off I went to RAF Halton as a civilian lad of sixteen. Never been out of the Welsh valley even alone Wales on a train up to London. We got, we got to London and all the apprentices were sort of gathering there on the last train to Wendover and we all straggled up to, up to the camp. Not marched. And I was very impressed. I would, became a member of B Squadron. Two Wing Aircraft Apprentice RAF Halton. There was over a thousand boys in our entry and it was quite an eye opener but I adapted very well. My education wasn’t all that clever so I wasn’t one of the brainy blokes. I never became a snag — a corporal apprentice, or a sergeant apprentice [laughs]. I was still an AA. I got a three year training course but the war broke out 1939 and they cut it down to two years. Cut out a lot of sport and concentrated on teaching us. We marched down to schools, we marched down to the workshops and we marched down to the airfield for the aircraft training. We were training on Hawker Harts and Demons drilling, rigging. Stripping them down. Building them up. And an old Hampden there as the bomber side of it. I passed out in June 1940 and posted to 222 Squadron which was based at Kirton Lindsey, Lincoln at the time. And I’d only been there a week and beginning to settle down when we moved down to Hornchurch which moved straight into the Battle of Britain which commenced then and with two Spitfire squadrons at Hornchurch — 222 and I think it’s 603 City of Glasgow Spitfire squadron. I worked with a LAC 1GC who called me a sprog and I soon picked up we were repairing bullet holes in Spitfires. Filing around. If they, if they weren’t too bad we put a fabric patch on them. Anything to keep the aeroplane flying. Or we had to rivet two small riveting patches. I fitted in well with the, with the airman. We worked until the aircraft was serviceable. Sometimes gone midnight. We lost thirty seven pilots in that three months on my squadron and I wasn’t, I didn’t realise what was happening up there in the sky above us. The Germans were bombing our airfields and the Dorniers were coming across at about six thousand feet and mounds of earth — bombs were dropping and they were trying to – the grass airfields and they were trying to obliterate the RAF camps altogether. Bombs on the airfield. We had civilians out there with shovels filling in the bomb holes. They were bombing our hangars. And I was in the bath one night, 10 o’clock, when a bomb landed right outside the building and blew all the glass from the door into the bath with me and plaster. I reached over for my towel and that was covered in bits of glass. So I turned the duckboard upside down and stood on that. It was pitch dark. Half the block had been knocked down so the next night they moved us over to a round nissen hut the other side of the airfield and we were all in bed and about 1 o’clock in the morning a landmine which had come down went off and blew the roof right off our head. This corrugated roof. And we were all shouting at each other in our beds. Everybody. ‘Everybody alright.’ So we said we were alright and nobody hurt so we went back to sleep looking up at the stars. So that was a good opening. [pause] Where were we?
CB: We’re going to have a break for a mo.
[Recording paused]
CB: Ok. So you’ve lost the roof.
KH: Yeah.
CB: And what happened next day?
KH: The next day I had to go with the corporal. Corporal airframe fitter. I was, I was an airframe fitter. A land rover down, one of our Spitfires had landed down in Kent. In Manston. So we had to go down there and repair it. On the way down through the Kentish fields all the fields that were unharvested at that time of the year and they were all burning. Flames going across the road as we were driving along. I don’t know if that was a ploy to destroy the harvest or what but anyway we got to this Manston. Manston was a place heavily bombed. Anything left, any bombs left, any bombs left going back to Germany they picked Manston out and dropped them there. So there was no one on the station except a skeleton staff but we had a billet and there was, there was an emergency cook laid on for meals and we got to the Spitfire which had bent a prop and a pitot head and the corporal fitter in charge he changed the prop and I had to help him. There was no one on the station so we helped ourselves in the empty yard and anywhere else for equipment and stuff. We worked in the middle of the airfield. There was also a lorry there full of civilian workers. They were shovelling and filling in the bomb holes trying to put the airfield back in to some sort of serviceability state and one of them was binoculars scouring the skies. He was lookout and when he blew the whistle they all dropped their shovels, jumped in the truck and tore off the airfield. So we soon twigged it and when they went off the airfield we went off as well [laughs]. We dropped our tools and went off as well. So we fixed this Spitfire and the pilot came down in an Anson, dropped him off and he took off and flew it back to Hornchurch and then we got home and that was my first introduction to the war as it were. What was happening? Stop.
CB: Ok.
[Recording paused]
CB: Ok Ken can we just talk about what was your role as a rigger? What did you actually do in your job?
KH: As an airframe fitter I’d done the basic training and trained on older type of aircraft but now I was on a Spitfire which I’d never seen before in my life and didn’t know. Hadn’t done any training on it but I was given, I was told to work with an LAC 1GC airframe fitter who knew the ropes and he had to sort of teach me. So any riveting he was riveting that side and I held the block on this side sort of thing. So we were doing patches on the skins and things like that. Change undercart. Change the wheels. Tyre bay. How to use, how to use the tyre levers to change those, get those tyres off. Things like that. They were all practical work which I’d never done before and everything we did I learned. I learned more all the time. We had to learn the hydraulic system, the pneumatic system, the electrical system, anti-freeze system and even spraying. We had to spray and paint the camouflage back on the aircraft. And another role came out. We had to paint the underneath of the Spitfires a duck egg, duck egg blue, a light duck egg blue. So there we were lying on the hangar floor with a twelve inch, two inch paint brush painting the underside of a Spitfire. And we had to do the whole squadron. We’d got a mat to lie on on the hard concrete floor. That took us about a week to do the squadron. I can’t remember other things which I did because it was a long time ago.
CB: What about the flying controls which were wire operated?
KH: Well they were alright but I I had to do some splicing and I got a wire out and made a measurement and got a new wire from stores and spliced in the buckle on both ends. That’s seven and a half tucks on the splicing and then, and then fit it, wire, pull it back through with the string and connect it up. Tension the turn buckle to get it all right. And then the aircraft used to go out then on air test. On one occasion I was working in a hangar and apparently a Spitfire had come over from dispersal. They disbursed the Spits instead of having them in one place and be a target for a bomb they disbursed the other side of the airfield all over the place. Well this one came over and stopped in between the hangars and the chaps coming back from lunch, dinnertime thought it was the next Spitfire to be done so they pushed it into the hangar but this one was armed and nobody knew about it. They came back from dinner and I was down just about opening my toolbox underneath the wing of this aircraft when an instrument basher had got into this aircraft he’d shoved in to check his instruments and he pressed the firing button for some reason and all of a sudden four machine guns blasting. Blasting the hangar wall with the armour piercing tracer bullets flying around all over the place. Quite a long burst. And I was crouching down behind my tool box and I thought [laughs] well it’s a bit dodgy this is. [laughs] Lots of things happened when we were working there. Every now and again we had to drop — drop our tools and run for the air raid shelter and get down there fast. I was down the air raid shelter one day and I was about the last one in I think ‘cause I was near the entrance and I heard an aircraft taxiing off so I l had a look out and there was a Hurricane had come in. It was taxiing around. There was nobody about. We were all down the air raid shelter. And the pilot was waving so I ran out, crossed and jumped on to the wing and it was, it was a Polish pilot and he wanted to know what airfield he’d landed on. He had a map on his knee which showed him more or less the east coast so I turned it over and I pointed out where we were. Hornchurch. Hornchurch. And he had a look around and I knew the Poles were over at, over the other side of London so I said to him, ‘Balloon barrage. Fly over the top.’ ‘Oh yah yah,’ he said, you know and off he went. I hope he got back alright. There were quite a few instances but when you’re young and you’re new to the game you learn pretty fast. You make mates but the Air Ministry post you as numbers and you just get a serviceable team going nicely and you’re posted overseas invariably. Never to, never to see each other again. So you don’t make friends too long in the air force. They come and go fast. Some are posted to the desert. Some are posted to Iceland to the snow. Some are posted up the Far East. I was on the boat. Went down to Uxbridge got my KD and [torpee?] Up to Liverpool. Got on a troop ship RMS Scythia. Hammocks. No bunks. Out in a fifty two boat convoy. Left the Clyde, staggered course, escorted by destroyers and one battleship. Out in to the North Atlantic. I heard depth charges going off. The destroyers were chasing the subs which were after the convoy. Apparently, we heard that they did get one. One of our troop ships. We came down towards the equator and on the day we crossed the equator I had my nineteenth birthday. Crossing the equator going down south on a staggered course. Then we headed west, west again to Freetown. Out into the Atlantic and down the South Atlantic to Cape Town. Mostly army bods on board. They were going around, they were going around up to the Suez Canal, Cairo and they were tackling Rommel in North Africa. But the twenty eight names of the RAF were shouted out. ‘Get your kit off the boat. Get on that train.’ The train set off up for a day and a half and we knew there wasn’t a river line going all the way to Cairo which we thought we were going there. And we came to Salisbury Rhodesia and I was posted to mount, RAF Mount Hampden. There were three stations around Salisbury. One was Tiger Moths, one was Harvards for training fighters and one was Oxfords training bombers and I was posted to Mount Hampden — Tiger Moths. We got there. We were advanced party. Twenty eight men in an advanced party. All trades. And we were setting up, setting it up it. Getting it prepared. The entry arrived on a train from the [wool?] station. Corrugated sink, roofs. Billets with mosquito net windows and doors. Storm ditches. And we soon settled down. Guards. Guard duty. I don’t know what we were guarding from. The natives weren’t, we could hear their jungle drums going all night when they’d had some Kafa beer down them from the village and that was about all. We had no problems from the outside but we still had to do guards. We were assembling aircraft out of packing cases. Tiger Moths. And we kept doing that until we got, we got about forty and they were doing circuits and bumps training pilots and one time there were four prangs on the airfield at the same time. One had landed heavy. Busted his undercart. Another one had landed, watching him, landed on top of another one and they both turned over like that. Upside down. And then another one crash landed and we had a big sign on the hangar wall, “You bend them, we mend them.” When we finished in the aircraft I had to go flying with the pilot on a test flight to test the aircraft before they handed over on to flying training. Loops and rolls and spins. So I used to put my parachute on and pull the straps tight and practice grabbing the, grabbing the rip cord to open the ‘chute. I always wanted to bale out. We were up there flying one day doing aerobatics and the aircraft, the engine cut so I thought, ah. So I shouted down the tube, ‘Can I bale out? ’ He said, ‘No. I can see a clearing in the jungle down there. So I thought oh. So we landed in this clearing. It was about four foot high grass stuff and we hit a termite hill which whipped the undercart off, dug our nose in and slammed us over on our back upside down. So I undid slowly on to the back of my neck, wriggled out and it didn’t catch fire. And that was at half past six in the morning. When the sun got up there it gets up to a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty in the shade in the summertime. We had no food. No water. And the pilot said, ‘I can hear, I heard a lion roaring.’ Well there were lions around that area. I thought well we can’t leave the aircraft ‘cause they’ll never find us. So we were lumbered. We were stuck. Mid-day a Moth flew over, spotted us, waggled his wings and flew back and told them where we were. At about five o’clock a three tonner came through the jungle with Chiefy and a couple of bods and brought us food and water. Our Chiefy had a look at the aircraft. It had broken its back, it had broken its spruce bars and the wings had gone. This, that and the other. And I was watching him. He took his pipe out and he put his tobacco in. He struck a match and he took a couple of puffs and he went over and he threw the lit match down where the petrol was and up went the petrol and he said to the pilot, he said, ‘When you landed it burned didn’t it? ’ He said. He said it wasn’t worth taking back so (laughs] we went and left it. Yeah. Crumbs.
CB: Do you want a break?
KH: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
CB: So the plane was a write off and caught fire so you went back but this was the sort of aeroplane you were trained on.
KH: Yes. That was no problem. They used to use me a lot because I was trained on aircraft and I could rig, I could rig the Tiger Moth so that there was no — it wasn’t flying left wing low, right wing low and all this that and the other and I used to do the trimming. I used to do any control work on it and I used to go up on air tests and make sure with the pilots that it was perfectly serviceable to hand over to flying training. That was primarily my job.
CB: What rank were you at this stage?
KH: I started off AC1, AC2, LAC.
CB: Right.
KH: I was stuck out in Rhodesia. No promotion for three years. I was doing an essential job training. Training pilots. I trained them in Rhodesia, South Africa and Canada so they were out of the way of the war. And that meant no promotion otherwise everybody would be flight sergeant [laughs] on the station [laughs]. Well there was no promotion at all for three years. One. One. He was a chippy carpenter. He got corporal stripes. He was the only one on the station that got promoted in that three years. The rest of the war was going on. That was more important. They were fighting out in Burma, they were fighting out in the Middle East and they were fighting out everywhere. They were moving around and getting places and getting promoted. They were on squadrons, my trade and the corporal would get killed and they thought they’d make an LAC up. There was promotion going on but not down there where we were on the training so I was still an LAC when I got home after three years. Six, six months I was only home in the UK six months and then I was posted overseas again. Egypt. A boat across the channel, a train down to [Touronne?] living in tents in the flooded water in the heavy rain until, for three days, until we got on a troop ship. Took us across the Med. Called in at Malta and I got rid of stuff there. And we didn’t know where we were going of course and then we saw the lovely blue Mediterranean Sea turning brown and we couldn’t see any land but that was the, that was the river coming down from North Africa.
CB: So this is the Nile Delta.
KH: The Nile. And that was coming out in to the Mediterranean and running and it was still brown full days sailing out from, you know. We came Alexandra. Dropped a few people off there and then we got on a train up to Cairo and we were nodding off on the train, with my head on the woodwork at the side and I started scratching and it was bugs come out of the woodwork and was biting me. I was lumps coming up [laughs] so I thought that’s our entrance to Egypt, you know. And this was the thing which we had to do. First of all it was a PGC Almaza in tents and before we left to go out in the evening into Cairo we used to put everything in our kit bag and lock it on to the tent pole because we’d heard that thieves used to get into the camp and pinch airmen’s equipment. When we came back, the rows of tents, there was a tent missing. They’d come in with a lorry and they’d picked the whole tent up pegs and all and put it in a lorry and drove out and nobody said anything. But ours was alright. Then we were waiting for our postings and we were posted everywhere. Down to, down the coast of Africa, down further down in to Egypt. They were posted up to Palestine. They were posted everywhere from there. Distribution place. And I got, I got Almaza Flying Station itself on Dakotas. So I soon picked that up then. We all had to move out of Egypt then so we all moved out of the Canal Zone. Two hundred mile across the desert to the Canal Zone. There was a great bit of lake half way down. It was Deversoir. Kibrit. Kibrit. Deversoir and 107MU and I was posted to 107MU repairing aircraft. But it was good in one thing. There was nothing to do. We had three yacht clubs on the station on the canal and I joined 107MU Sailing Club. I had put my name down first in a queue and then I was called up after about three weeks to join a club. The first thing I had to was allocate myself to a skipper who used to take me out and teach me how to use a jib. When I’d logged eight hours on the jib I was then free to be picked up by any skipper to go out on the main sail and give it dual instruction. And I found that I had a natural ability which I didn’t know I had and I could sail it pretty good. I learned. We’d got the rule book and I passed. Passed the B Helmsman Certificate and I became — I could take a boat out myself so I could book a boat out and take someone out. So, and every – we stopped – we finished, we started work at a quarter to six in the morning and we finished at one because it got too hot after that. So it was straight down the sailing club and I spent a lot of hours on the lake.
[Phone ringing. Recording paused]
KH: I’ve never done that before. [pause] Yeah. So I genned up on my racing rules and I passed my Helmsman Certificate. I could take a boat out and race. I could race. Compete. And I found I had the natural ability and I was, at the end of the year I was coming in first. I had three. The monthly race I was coming in first.
[Phone ringing. Recording paused]
CB: So, we’ve just paused for the phone. We’ve been talking about after the war in Egypt.
KH: Yeah.
CB: But you came back for six months.
KH: Yeah.
CB: What did you do in that six month period because this was at the end of ‘44?
KH: During that six months I was posted on to a squadron of [pause] of Hunters I think it was and I found out I knew nothing about modern aircraft and I asked and I got, I was away on aircraft instructional courses some lasting a month to various stations. I did three courses altogether and briefed up working on aircraft with the hydraulic systems and pneumatic systems, de-icer systems and all types of operational retraction handling and getting used to modern aircraft.
CB: Were these fighters or bombers or both?
KH: Everything.
CB: Right. And where were you stationed?
KH: Bombers. Transport. I was stationed actually at [paused] at — I don’t —
CB: Well we’ll pick up with it later.
KH: I can’t remember it.
CB: But you were getting up to date on modern aircraft systems.
KH: Yeah. Yeah. I did. You realise that I’d been out in the desert I hadn’t worked on them. But that developed rapidly during the war while I was out there.
CB: So after you finished at 107MU.
KH: Yeah.
CB: What did you do then? So you did sailing in the part time but after you left the MU in Egypt —
KH: Yeah.
CB: Where did you go?
KH: Well let’s see. I was posted to RAF [pause] as an instructor at Cosford. That’s right. RAF Cosford. As an instructor instructing air frames, hydraulic systems on the aircraft. From there the Berlin Airlift started and we were we were taken off to do a three month detachment on to the Berlin airlift so I was out of my first Berlin Airlift and straight into Berlin. Shift work. The aircraft. The Russians had surrounded Berlin and so we had to fly everything in. Food, coal, everything. So one aircraft landing every three minutes right around the clock. Avro Yorks, Hastings. Hastings were carrying fuel. But mainly Dakotas. American Dakotas flying right around the clock in shift work and we had the German labour to offload the aircraft and we had to – I was involved in seeing the aircraft in. Marshalling them, stopping them, putting the chocks there and getting them all in line and when they were emptied the pilot came back from having a cup of tea, got all back in the aircraft and started them up. I had a torch. That’s all. Start one, two, three, four engines or whatever what they were and the same all off. Right around the clock. If there was anything wrong we had to tackle it. We had to check, check the tyres, oil leaks, if there was a cut in the tyre we’d put it serviceable to fly back to base if we thought they wouldn’t make it. We didn’t want them stuck in Berlin. It was tough going and it was January. Snow. Three or four of inches of snow. We kept on flying and I was going from one aircraft to the other in the snow and there was a big pile of snow there. And I give it a kick. I thought, ‘What?’ And there was a dead man underneath it. It was a German labourer unloading the aircraft. He’d walked through a prop which was running under the wing and he didn’t see the prop and chopped him and covered with him snow as it taxied away. It was that bad but we kept it going. It was shift work and we were, we were shattered. The food we were having from the cookhouse was what we were flying in. Dehydrated. Everything was dehydrated potatoes dehydrated. Pomme. Dehydrated peas. Dehydrated powdered stuff and we weren’t getting good food at all. For Christmas Day we had one whole orange each. That was a treat. That was the toughest part I’ve ever been in I think. That Berlin Airlift. And the station commander wasn’t satisfied when he walked around our billets because we were doing shift work. We were piling out of bed and getting to work six o’clock in the morning. Leave our, leave our bed made down and that wasn’t good enough. All beds had to be made up. This that and the other. And everybody was put on a charge and we were all given a reprimand. A block punishment. [laughs] But I used to get time off. I was chatting up, my mate and I chatting up a couple of deutsche bints as we called them. [laughs] Yeah. It was alright. Anyway, we were back, back at Bassingbourn which was our base then. On Avro Yorks. Working on Yorks and they put me, when I got back to Bassingbourn, the warrant officer in charge says, ‘You’re a married man. I want you to go to the R&D section,’ receive and despatch section in charge of ten WAAFs. ‘I want a married man to look after them.’ So I went over to the edge of a hangar there was a section and they were sort of changing the white covers over the back of the seats in the aircraft and the airmen I had were doing the fitting of the seats. Taking them out and stacking them on a tractor and a trailer and we used to, an aircraft, a York used to come in, different rolls. Some had a roller. Some had lashing chains. Some had power seats. Some had VIP seats and all these had to be handled. And strip the aircraft and hand it over for it to do the servicing. Into maintenance and then fit them all back in afterwards so it was quite a busy operation and variation and they were all airmen and WAAFs and I was a corporal put in charge of them [laughs] and the first day I knocked off at 5 o’clock. They all left the section and I locked the hangar. Locked the section up which was a steel door. I was going to lock it and one of the WAAFs had come back, had got hold of me and pinned me against a wall. Grabbed a handful. So I thought, Jones, her name was. Bloody thing. So I talked her out of that one. I thought I’ve got to handle these buggers myself now [laughs]. So it was quite a struggle too because some of the airmen were a bit bolshie. They were, they all had demob numbers. They all wanted to get out, get out of the mob. That happened to start with down when I was down in Egypt. I had a, I had a team, servicing team. I was in charge of two aircraft servicing teams and every now and again a demob number would come up and I’d lose a man, lose another man, and lose a man – no replacements. Getting less and less and we had I was training two natives. Two Egyptian natives to do some of the work. Some of the rigging and fitting work. Just the donkey work stuff. And I thought well this is no good. We had fifteen Dakotas there servicing on the line. And then, and Chiefy says, ‘You’ll have to take that Dakota there he said, get in it, get somebody to start it up, pull the trolley acc away and taxi it yourself out into the desert as far as you can. Switch your engines off, get out and shut the door and walk back here.’ And that’s what I had to do. All these Dakotas. The war had finished. The Yanks didn’t want the Dakotas back. Nobody wanted them so took them out in the desert and left them there. And the third day I was going out, I taxied out and there was another one of them starting up so I went over. There was a truck there. It was Israelis there from Israel. They come down starting up to tax, taxiing to the runway and flying them back to Israel. [laughs]. So all I was doing was helping the bloody Israelis out [laughs] nicking all our Dakotas. Well they were supposed to be but they were perfectly alright. We were working all that time to get them serviceable. Cor flipping heck. But I soon adapted to that.
CB: So that was in your desert time. We were just having a reflection there. So back to Bassingbourn.
KH: Bassingbourn.
CB: Were you losing people to demob there as well?
KH: Yes. All the time.
CB: We’re on National Service now of course.
KH: Yeah.
CB: Because we’re on 1948.
KH: Yeah. Yeah it was. It got difficult then. What did I do? I went on courses. Bassingbourn. [pause] Cosford as instructor. Yeah. Married. Yeah Bassingbourn. Airlift.
CB: So Bassingbourn had Yorks.
KH: Yeah.
CB: And then did you keep on that aircraft or did you go to something quite different somewhere else?
KH: Oh no. I’m trying to think what happened then.
CB: We’ll take a —
KH: Oh yeah
CB: Sorry.
KH: I got quite fed up then and I was – what was it? I was at Abingdon. No. I was in digs in Reading. I was married. Digs in reading. I was on a motorbike back and forth to Abingdon. Working RAF Abingdon on Yorks and I was passing Benson and I was chatting to in bloke in Wallingford, a RAF chap from Benson. He said there’s a Queen’s Flight, Benson, King’s Flight at Benson then and he says, ‘Why don’t you come to Benson, you know, instead of going back and forth to Reading all the time.’ Reading to Abingdon. So I went to the orderly room and I I asked if I could be posted and I filled in a form and then I was posted to a Kings Flight. Well I was sent over there for interview. I arrived at a guardroom and I was escorted down to the hangar and up to the warrant officer in charge and I was interviewed and then he took me through to the flight lieutenant who happened to be in my entry. Thirty eighth entry at Halton. He was one of the brainy ones. He got, he got a technical commission and so he says, he says, ‘Right,’ you know, ‘We’ll have you.’ So I was posted to the Kings Flight. I applied for married quarters and I got it. 11 Spitfire Square and and everything was fine. Then it was the Queen’s Flight. The Queen’s Flight [pause]. Two children born there. Halton Hospital. Yeah. I enjoyed my stay there. I did so well when I left and yeah, I got the Royal Victoria Medal presented to me when I left. I was in Germany and I was sent, I was sent down to Bonn where a group captain was dishing out medals and I was presented with the RVM for being on the Queen’s Flight. For the good work I’d done there. I was working on Swift, Swift aircraft. There was only two squadrons of Swifts made. 2 Squadron down on Aden. I was on 79 Squadron and Chief Tech Airframe and nobody knew anything about these bloody aeroplanes. And I reckon I did some good work on them. The warrant officer relied on me for everything. Any snag that came up he used to come and ask me. There was one Swift sitting there. They couldn’t keep it in a hangar because it was running fuel all the time out of a pipe out of the back. Filled the drip trays so they kept it outside. They kept it out over a drain. The next thing the farmer down the road said his cows were getting ill. It was the fuel was going into the brook and drinking the oily, oily water so he asked me to do something about it. So I’ve got, I never seen Swift before in my life and I got, I went and got the one and only book on it and I took it home that night and read it. It was gone midnight when I finished reading that. And I studied all the circuits and this that and the other to where that fuel could come from. So then I went over and I undid a couple of panels and I got to the bottom of the tank, main front tank behind the pilot of this Swift and there was three pipes there and I traced them in the book and one was going up to a recuperator tank which was inside the main tank. It was pressurised from the engine. There was a rubber sock in the middle of that little tank. Pressure from the engine so that when you went into a G turn you was still getting full pressure from the engine on to his fuel to keep the fuel pressure up for his engine and that was the rubber sock in the middle of the front tank and that that pipe was the only one, I thought well there must be a pinhole in that rubber sock that’s getting through to the outside of that, but the air side of it and then coming out the drain at the back. And I told, I told the warrant officer this and he said, ‘Righto,’ and he took me onto another job then and he put a sergeant and a few riggers to work the tank out and put it on test to make sure what I said was true and it was. It was leaking. I’d pinpointed it alright. Then I was posted wasn’t I? Where was it? What do you call them? I can’t remember.
CB: So you were in Germany.
KH: In Germany.
CB: Where was that? Bruggen?
KH: Gutersloh.
CB: Oh Gutersloh. Right.
KH: Gutersloh [pause] Bassingbourn. Bassingbourn.
CB: Tell you what. We’ll have a break.
KH: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
CB: Ok Ken. So after Gutersloh where did you go? You came back to Benson did you?
KH: Came back to Benson and the flights, flight commander said, ‘All the technical jobs are occupied but I want somebody to sort out a pain in my neck,’ he says, ‘Which is the roll equipment. I want to put you in charge of roll equipment and I want you to sort it out.’ I didn’t know what roll equipment was and I got down there and I had three sergeants. They were store bashers in the office and I had been an LAC I had a few corporals and a lot of men out in the hangar and they had twenty five Avro Yorks on the station that they could drop the ramp down the back and they could fit it out with roller seats or any anything [barrow?] and all that equipment, the roll equipment is stacked up in the back hangar at Benson and it, and it had to be sorted out. So I I had them all, all in the hangar there together in a group and I told them what's got to be done. So first of all we got some, some of the roller equipment which is racks with roller, roller balls on them. You could put things on so you could move, move everything around on them easily and assembled racks in the hangar to store these things and you’ve got to go through a servicing and then a servicing bay. US that side, serviceable that side and get a gang on servicing that lot and when they finished put them back on the serviceable rack and there were racks for holding all the chains for lashing down. All the straps, all the buckles and rings you could screw into the floor. There was all the seating. There was all the para seating. There was, there was all kinds of rolls. Centre poles you could put down from the floor to ceiling and fit seats in. All that sort of thing which was quite complicated really and these aircraft was going down the route and there was trouble down in [Muharraq?] and I was told by the wing commander to go down the route to [Muharraq?] and sort it out. The roll equipment there. And I walked in to roll equipment there and the flight sergeant in charge there and he’d put there from somewhere else. He didn’t know a thing about it and he was overloaded with the stuff. It was building up and he didn’t know what to do with it. It was the AQMs were slinging stuff off. They were getting a job sheet to carry so much and drop it off to there and this that and the other and no one was taking into account what was in the aircraft and what wasn’t and if there was room or not and it was chaos and the stuff was piling up down the end of the route. And so I went back and I told the wing commander and he said well make out, make out, he made out sent a directive down the route that any aircraft coming back with room has got to put roll equipment on it to bring it back to roll equipment Benson. So they brought it all back slowly so we got it all back and we could work it, work better then. Sorted that one out. What happened from there? From Benson.
CB: What year are we talking about now? 1954.
KH: Oh crumbs yeah.
CB: ’54.
KH: Yeah.
[pause]
CB: Ok. We’ll stop there for a bit.
KH: Yeah. Stop.
[Recording paused]
CB: So Ken, you’re posted to Hornchurch which is on Spitfire’s and they’re much more sophisticated than you’d been trained at Halton.
KH: Yeah.
CB: So how did they get you, ‘cause it’s the height of the Battle of Britain. How did they get you in on the act as it were?
KH: Yes well as an airman. Aircraft fitter. Airframe fitter. Trained but with lack of experience I was told to work with a LAC 1GC airframe fitter which – and we went through all his normal work and I was his mate as it were and I picked up a lot about the Spitfire. I was always questioning. I was always trying to get hold of air publication books so that I could, but I couldn’t get hold of any to learn more about the aircraft. The aircraft was developing in such a pace that new things were happening to the Spitfire all the time. They were improving this, improving that, improving the other and I wasn’t in a position to go in the flight sergeants office and have a look at the, have a look at all the APs and things like that. In any case that wasn’t my main interest at all. It was just getting the overtime worked. Usually working until you got the aircraft serviceable even if you were working until the midnight. It’s got to be ready first thing in the morning. If not and you do a shift work on it until it is ready. Most of the air frame work was you could, you could do it within a couple of hours. Undercart checks, this that and the other I could do in a couple of hours and carry on with the next aircraft but as an AC you could be taken off that job and put on another job even if you were halfway through it to work with somebody else but you don’t make the decisions. They do and they tell you what to do and it was that state of affairs but the more I did of that the more experience I got and the more experience you got the more responsibility they gave you to do. If you got three men and one of them has some experience and the other two are not its experienced bloke that gets the job and he’s the chap they rely on. So I found out, you find out the hard way. Sometimes you’re given the dirty jobs all the time and other times you’re not. You’re given the good jobs. So it depends who the next rank above you is and what he decides. So you’re bobbing around your corporals and your sergeants. Your sergeants were up top. They were miles away.
CB: You mentioned having to check documents. The APs are air force publications aren’t they?
KH: Yes. Yeah.
CB: When an aeroplane lands what has to be done to it before it can fly again? There are some basic procedures are there?
KH: Yeah. The pilot, pilot signs the aircraft in and he puts his signature down and puts down anything he finds wrong with it and he puts it down. That goes down in to the technical section and they put a man on to rectify that fault. So the pilot’s signature’s always there and before he takes the aircraft up he has to do the last signature that it is serviceable is down and then he signs over the top before he takes over and flies the aeroplane. He’s not allowed to take it up unless he signs the 700 first ‘cause that is the bible.
CB: In the heat of the battle they didn’t have time to do that so what happened then?
KH: Oh they did. They did.
CB: Oh they did.
KH: Yeah. Chiefy used to stick the 700 and a pen in his hand and he used to sign that and run. He didn’t know what he’d signed. [laughs]
CB: Amazing. So you’re working long hours. You get to finish the task. Where are you living on the airfield?
KH: Well before I was married I was in a block with the airmen.
CB: Right.
KH: And it was a station then at Benson here. As an airman, before I got married, and was quartered we used to march down from the block, across the main road, down to the hangars and march back again in those days. But they packed that in because it got too difficult in the end.
CB: Because the war was on.
KH: Yeah. This that and the other. Yeah. They got rid of that lot.
CB: And in the, so in a barrack block there are a number of rooms on several floors. How many people in a room?
KH: There’s a ten, ten. Twenty in a room.
CB: Yeah.
KH: And a snag in a bunk.
CB: Yeah. That’s the corporal.
KH: Six, six rooms and there’s a, there’s a static order. Everybody takes a turn in doing certain jobs. Domestic jobs that’s got to be done.
CB: What would they be?
KH: Bumpering the floor. Everyone had got his own space to do. In the old days you used to make your kit up into blankets. They had biscuits. Three biscuits stacked and then the blankets and sheets folded and the last sheet folded right around the top. Put on the top there and they had to leave that before they went, left to go to work like that. But they eased off on that situation later on.
CB: So bumpering the floor meant polishing the floor with a big bumper.
KH: Yeah.
CB: What other jobs were there you had to do?
KH: Well the, when it was your turn, what was it? Now everybody had his own window to clean. His own floor space. Bed. Locker.
CB: And the communal areas.
KH: The room orderly. There were certain things he had to do.
CB: Who was the room orderly?
KH: Everybody took it in turns.
CB: For a week or a day?
KH: No. A week.
CB: Right.
KH: There was a drying room down the back and a wash. A shower room. The toilets.
CB: How did they get cleaned?
KH: They were, they were all on a roster. So they were all done, all covered. The corporal in the bunk was usually the man who run it so it was run very smooth.
CB: Yeah.
KH: You was directly in contact with him.
CB: So in each room there’s a corporal and twenty men.
KH: Yeah.
CB: And now about eating. What was the procedure for that?
KH: Oh well. You just – what was it? [pause] You just wander over to the cookhouse with your mug and irons and no problem. Yeah. Certain times there was times when we had to work overtime on this that and the other and go back to the cookhouse and it still, it still, you’d still get fed and all that. There was no problem. IF you were orderly corporal or a orderly sergeant. An orderly sergeant in the guardroom. He’s got his job laid down down down. He’s got to make sure the NAAFI’s shut at 9 o’clock and he’s got to make sure that this and the other is done. He’s got to go around. It’s all automatic and back to the guardroom. I went to the guardroom the other day and there was two sailors there running it [laughs].
CB: A bit different now.
KH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So what were the mealtimes?
KH: Oh normal. Half past seven ‘til eight. Work at half past eight. Nine hours. Or 8 o’clock. Depends what what you’re doing. Some earlier than others. The pen pushers well they were static but the fitters and riggers they have to adapt their work time to suit the job. If there was early start aircraft in the morning they had to be there. They were knocking off early and it was all covered that way.
CB: How often did you sleep next to the aircraft?
KH: Never. No. Never got to that stage.
CB: Not even in the Battle of Britain.
KH: No. Well I don’t know what they did our in the flights but they were, we were the fitters in the hangar.
CB: Right.
KH: Working on the aircraft. There were airframe mechanics, engine mechanics out on the flights dealing with them first hand and they had a different system to cover all eventualities.
KH: And the armourers.
CB: And the same with all. All trades the same. Yeah. The armaments sections. Yeah. Instrument section. This that and the other and they all had their ICs and they were the chaps looking after them. It worked very well.
KH: Yeah. Ok. Stopping there for a mo.
[Recording paused]
JLE: [First days?] I’d find quite interesting to know about.
CB: Apprenticeship days. Right.
KH: Apprenticeship days. Well. You were in a billet. Twenty men and a corporal or the senior man in the bunk. Six rooms to a, six rooms to a block. You’re forming, when I first joined, you’re forming outside with your mug and irons in your hand. Marched to breakfast 8 o’clock. Quarter to eight. Something like that. After breakfast came back and you squared your bed up, rolls your overalls, put them under your arm, fall in outside and you marched on to the square. A Squadron, B Squadron, C Squadron. The man in charge. The band would start up and you’d all march behind the band out the guard room and down the hill. And some would go to workshops, some would go down to the airfield and some would go to the school. About twelve — march back. Dinner. Down again. Marched down again and you’re probably a different, different place the next time and you’d go down the airfield in the morning. You were probably in schools in the afternoon. The schools cover all the theories. Worked everything out there. You’d do practical jobs. You’d dismantle it and assemble it again and various components on the aircraft. Engine fitters would be running the engines and the airframe fitters would be doing this that and the other and instruments were all covered. It was training. We would manage to get a few extra aircraft. I started off with a, with a Hampden bomber and a Hawker Demon and we had all kinds of jobs on that. We had to go over and do fabric work. You know to strip a fabric wing and build it up and repair inside. The type of wood used, the glue used and there are pins and rivets. The balance of the aircraft had to be rigged properly with a, with a straight edge, straight edge and get a bubble right in the middle, on whatever you set it at. Wing incidents. Dihedral tail. The fin slightly offset perhaps. The hinges – no play in the hinges. No play in the aileron hinges. No slack in the controls. Even had to polish the glass in the windows. Make sure everything works properly. Sliding hoods. The tyres of course had to be checked. They’d be taken off. Brakes checked to see that they worked properly. Assembled on again, undercart jacked it up, undercarriage actions. Check the hydraulic pressures. When everything’s been signed up you sign up and the NCO would sign over the lot and that’s it. The aircraft’s serviceable and nothing was allowed out until the last signature was there and it wasn’t even flying unless the pilot signs it as well. So it’s all covered. If anything goes wrong pinpoint who did it, who did what and when and who checked it. So it was a double check. Treble check. The safety of the aircraft must come first.
CB: Ok.
[Recording paused]
KH: There wasn’t much.
CB: Wait. We’re just talking about what Ken and his colleagues did in their time off.
KH: Well we took part in sport. I myself played rugby and so I used to go with the rugby team. I also did, what was it? Had to go for long walks. There was walking gangs. There was PTI down on the, down on the airfield. The PTI instructor would have us all out, arms wide, touch your fingertips all along in a line — two lines, three lines, four lines and as he did the manoeuvre and everybody followed him. Jumping up and down, arms waving, legs doing this, that and the other. Running on the spot and all this sort of thing you know and then always march. March back and, invariably with the band. The band were a pain in the ass. They used to go down in the drying room there practicing and it was din and you’re trying to gen up on a book and there was the bloody noise of these blokes trying to play these instruments. Banging their bloody drums. [laughs]
CB: Nightmare.
KH: But you had to live with it, you know. You learned to live with it. Practicing the bagpipes. They used to go up in the woods with the pipes. That was a good thing.
CB: At Wendover.
KH: In fine weather. Up in Wendover. Yeah. Heard them wailing away out there. They’re terrible things when you can’t play. If you play it properly it sounds good but pipes are terrible when they can’t play.
CB: So when you are then on a squadron we are on the front line effectively. What, how did the time off come and what did you?
KH: Well I was young in those days on the squadron. During the Battle of Britain it was, I can’t remember what I did. I just can’t. Because it was all work. I didn’t have much time off. I never went on holiday that summer. Some blokes used to go because they had a death in the family or something. I felt sorry for them but we took no leave. I couldn’t. I didn’t take any leave to go all the way down to Wales. Took a day and a half to get home some times and down again with the old puffer trains and this that and the other so I never bothered. Just go with the lads down to the village, to a pub and have a game of darts and this that and the other. Whenever possible if there was an organisation or sport I used to put my name down to play rugby and I did very well at that. Although I was small I was scrum half. Put the ball in. Talking about rugby I got in the desert in Egypt and the scrum down and the sand was blowing up the dust and you had the ball to shove in to the scrum and you could hardly see the hole to put the ball in. And the dust would cake around your mouth and you were covered in it and it were — [laughs]. Then again in Berlin I played rugby in the Olympic Stadium, Hitler’s Olympic stadium and snow was on the deck there. On the grass. And we played in three inches of snow. We played rugby there. So there’s a contrast for you. Desert and snow. But mainly it’s a grotty old station camp, station field which had probably got a slope in it and probably a low end where there was a load of mud and a dry end up the top but you adapt yourself to all these conditions and sometimes to your advantage.
CB: Good. Thank you.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Ken Hicks
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AHicksDK151103
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Chris Brockbank
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2015-11-03
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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.
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01:21:54 audio recording
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eng
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Sound
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Royal Air Force. Fighter Command
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Pending review
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Description
An account of the resource
Ken Hicks grew up in Wales and joined the Royal Air Force as an Apprentice Mechanic at RAF Halton. He worked on Spitfires during the Battle of Britain. He was later posted to Rhodesia and survived a crash in the bush. After the war, He took part in the Berlin Airlift and found a civilian worker who had died and been buried under the snow.
Spatial Coverage
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Africa
Egypt
Germany
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Kent
Germany--Berlin
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1940
1948
Contributor
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Julie Williams
222 Squadron
C-47
fitter airframe
ground crew
ground personnel
RAF Abingdon
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Benson
RAF Halton
RAF Hornchurch
RAF Manston
Spitfire
Tiger Moth
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/369/5794/MHicksDK[Ser -DoB]-151001-06.jpg
10560f13cd4e3b72ae02fc64f0e39973
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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Hicks, Ken
Ken Hicks
D K Hicks
Description
An account of the resource
61 items. An oral history interview with Chief Technician David Kennedy Hicks (b. 1922, 0574954 Royal Air force), memories of the Battle of Britain, his Royal Air Force record, and photographs of his Halton entry, his time in Southern Rhodesia and 56 photographs, many of his time in Southern Africa. Ken Hicks joined the Royal Air Force in 1938 as a Halton apprentice. He served with 202 Squadron at RAF Hornchurch during the Battle of Britain as an aircraft rigger. Subsequently he served on training unit in Southern Rhodesia and then in Egypt, staying in the Royal Air Force after the war.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Ken Hicks and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-11-03
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Hicks, DK
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Permission granted for commercial projects
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MEMORIES by KEN HICKS
My first posting from Halton, at the tender age of 18, was to 222 NATAL FIGHTER SQUADRON at Kirton in Lindsey. The Squadron soon moved to Hornchurch and, although I didn’t know it at the time, the Battle of Britain was about to commence – and I was being thrown in at the deep end!
Chiefy asked me [italics]“Can you draw?”.[/italics] I nodded and then he said, [italics“Good! On every new spitfire delivered to this Squadron, I want you to draw and paint the letter ZD on the side of the fuselage and then I’ll tell you which letter to paint of the right of the roundel.”[/italics]
I was kept busy with three aircraft in the first week, two of them with the letter E to the right of the roundel. On seeing other Spits with cannon and bullet holes being repaired, it dawned on me that the new aircraft were replacements for the Spitfires shot down.
With all the ‘scrambles’, bombing and night work, I hardly had a thought for what went on in the air.
I have recently read the book ‘Narrow Margin- the Battle of Britain and the rise of airpower’ and in it there is a list naming aircrew who fought under Fighter Command Operational Control from July 10th to October 31st 1940. As a point of interest, I listed the names of 222 Squadron pilots during that period. The total was 37 pilots, 18 killed. I wonder if I would have worked any harder or put more effort into servicing and repairing those Spitfires if I had known what was happening at ‘Angels 15’, above my hanger.
Incidentally, I filed my medical to become a pilot as my right eye was not good enough, so I stuck to my toolbox.
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Title
A name given to the resource
Ken Hicks memories
Description
An account of the resource
Recollection of work Ken Hicks carried out during the Battle of Britain on 222 Squadron at Royal Air Force Hornchurch. He notes that 37 pilots of 222 Squadron fought in the battle and 18 were killed.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ken Hicks
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MHicksDK[Ser#-DoB]-151001-06
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. Fighter Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Essex
England--Romford
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
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.
Contributor
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Claire Monk
Format
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One page typewritten document
222 Squadron
ground personnel
RAF Hornchurch
Spitfire