1
25
2
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/268/3419/PHarrisB1604.1.jpg
4d93a86a74881c8fecbe08584fd4d043
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/268/3419/AHarrisB160626.1.mp3
b2fdeeb3d2a420c4b51393c6b2ae8f14
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Harris, Bernard
Bernie Harris
B Harris
Barnard Harris
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. Two oral history interviews with Bernard 'Bernie' Harris (b 1925 - 2017, 1863168 Royal Air Force) an air gunner who served at the end of the war on 622 Squadron flying Lancaster on Operation Manna. In addition a photograph of four trainees.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Bernie Harris and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-09
2016-06-26
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Harris, B
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
TO: Ok, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, whatever
BH: That’s a quick day, yeah [laughs]
TO: Whatever the case may be.
BH: Yeah.
TO: We’re recording, we’re filming this interview for the International Bomber Command Centre. The gentleman I’m, that I’m interviewing is Mr. Bernie Harris. My name is Tomas Ozel and we are recording this interview on the 26th of June 2016. Could you please tell me what year you were born in?
BH: What?
TO: What year were you born?
BH: 1925.
TO: And were you interested in aircraft as a child? Were you interested in aircraft as a child?
BH: Oh yes, yeah. Yeah, my father was in Royal Flying Corps, he passed it on. But always interested in aircraft, anyway.
TO: Did you collect model planes?
BH: Yeah. Spitfires, Defiants, Lancasters, yeah. Defiant were made with Balsa wood. These days they are more sophisticated but it was made with Balsa wood and coverings. They even put a little turret on top of the Defiant as it was then fighter aircraft with a turret for night fighters.
TO: And did your father ever talk about his experience in the Flying Corps? Did your father ever tell you about his time in the Flying Corps?
BH: Not very often, no. He kept it, like most air crews today I think. He didn’t talk about it much. Nor do air crew today, it’s only in the recent years where there’s not many of us left now become more interested but it’s taken 60, 70 years to recognize Bomber Command in the RAF.
TO: And what was your first job?
BH: My first job was to be apprenticed to tool making and I lived in Forest Gate in East London and I was apprentice to an engineering company in Islington and I was apprenticed to become a tool maker. But after six months, on a drill, right, I thought I was been taken advantage of, so I left and went off somewhere else and took a couple jobs [unclear] and finally I volunteered at sixteen and a half. In a nearby recruiting place, which is still there, Romford in Essex and in between I had a job in a shop one thing and the other. My father was a tailor and he wanted to teach me and he said, right, you start right from the bottom and you sweep the floor, and I said, ‘no, I don’t’, and that was the end of that [laughs] ‘Til finally I got myself in a job in a shop, which wasn’t bad, it was a tailor’s shop, actually, and I said, I volunteered with sixteen and a half and eventually, father had to sign for me really, I can still remember, father sitting at a table with a form in front of him, my mother leaning over his shoulder saying you’re not going to sign that are you? And he said, ‘if he wants to go, he goes’ and he signed and that was that. And then from on I went to Carding, Cardington [unclear] a test station you probably know about, and if you passed that in three days you were good and you came out there and you were graded PNB, pilot, navigator or bomb aimer and just waited for the call. And it was just before my eighteenth birthday that I got the call and that was that. I was in.
TO: Do you remember what medical tests they gave you?
BH: A1.
TO: And do you remember the things that they tested?
BH: The what test?
TO: The thing that they tested like your eyesight
BH: Oh yeah, everything. If you came out of there Cardington you knew that you were sane and you knew you were a hundred percent fit. No problem. 20/20 vision, hearing, everything, you were, I mean aircrew were the fittest of the lot I think. Examinations of course not only medical, physical, eyesight, hearing, mathematics, it was a three-day course with, when it was completed you got the badge RAFVR and that was that.
TO: And in the 1930s did you hear about Hitler’s aggression in Europe?
BH: In the 1930s I was aware of fascism in this country, I was eleven and also the Spanish civil war, I remember the placards with planes, with swastikas on them dropping bombs and flames in their placards. I’m Jewish, my, and even then I thought, you know, things are not so good. I knew what was going on in Germany through the [unclear] and but not to the extent about concentration camps or anything like that but I was aware of Moseley and his mob, saw them marching, you know, one thing and the other and also the Brady Street march in which he was stopped, yeah, I was aware. And all the more reason to get in the fight.
TO: And what did you think of Chamberlain? What do you think of Chamberlain appeasing Hitler?
BH: What?
TO: What do you think of Chamberlain and his plan of appeasing Hitler?
BH: I don’t know really. But can you say that again?
TO: What do you think of Chamberlain when he signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler?
BH: Oh Chamberlain?
TO: Yeah.
BH: Well, I wasn’t politically motivated at that age but it, I mean, from listening to the parents and other people they thought, maybe he’s avoided a war, but as it turned out he didn’t, so. So, my opinion of him was neutral. Well, I wasn’t politically aware. As it turned out, he was wrong.
TO: And do you remember the preparations that were being made for the war?
BH: Ah yeah, very well because I was fourteen and I’d left school but I got, I had, I’ve two sisters and a brother, who are younger than me, and my mother for some reason said, ‘stop work, I’m getting you evacuated’. And we were all evacuated to Chelmsford and guess what? Right next to the Marconi radio factory right, prime spot, yeah, I remember the guys being, territorial was being called up, preparations for the black out, the first air raid siren and I remember that vividly, yeah, I suppose it was more of a thrill than anything else, [unclear] something different, right? Yeah, I remember that vividly, but it wasn’t long before I got the bus and came back home, used to be an eastern national bus, used to go from Bow to Chelmsford and from Chelmsford back to Bow, I lived in Forest Gate was on the route so that was that back home. Eventually my mother took my young, my younger brother, sister, and two sisters to Wells, she evacuated to them there. And I was left at home with my father.
TO: Were you surprised when the war started?
BH: No, not really. I did read, at that age I read newspapers and I wasn’t surprised, I don’t think I was even fearful in that sense. More of an adventure, I think.
TO: And do you remember what you were doing on the day the war started?
BH: September the 3rd, 1939. No, I don’t actually remember what I was doing then but I remember the first day of the Blitz, the day Blitz vividly because my brother and I, we went to the local cinema called the Coronation in Manor Park and they were showing Gone with the Wind. And during the course, that the raid started and all the lights went up, they said, ‘you all [unclear] to leave if you want but you can go back, if you want to stay, go back under the balcony which is safer’ so we decided to do that. When we came out there was rubble everywhere and in the distance was my father saying where you two so-and-so’s have been, we’ve been looking for you. And I remember that was the first day of the Blitz. But September the 3rd, I can’t really remember was it, I think was a nondescript day.
TO: Do you remember Chamberlain’s speech?
BH: Yeah, ‘cause there was no television in those days. There was television, but only for the few that could afford it. But as soon as war had broke out the television stopped, anyway, yeah, peace in our time. There is a little piece of this, and a little piece of that, and I’ll have the whole lot.
TO: And you remember the speech where Chamberlain announced that we’d declared war?
BH: Yeah, that was on the radio, there was sort of quietness everywhere, everything seemed to have gone quiet.
TO: Did you have any relatives who were in the armed forces?
BH: Yeah, I’d two cousins. Actually he was, the first into Paris with De Gaulle and another one, he was a Spitfire pilot and finished up ferrying aircraft. My brother went in as a boy, because he’s two years younger than me, he is dead now unfortunately and he was no higher than this and because I went in he went and volunteered as a boy and he also volunteered down at Romford, anyway he went off, my father realised what he’d done, chased after him, when he got to Romford he asked what, oh, your son has just gone to Romford Station and he’s off to Abedon, Aberothy something or it’ll come to me in a minute and the tale is that he got to Waterloo and he said, went up to a military policeman and said, ‘we are so sorry’, he said, ‘why have you joined his Majesty’s service?’ He said, ‘yes’, he said, ‘well, come with me so’. And that was that, so my brother was in the service as well but he wasn’t involved in the war, he was a boy entry and that was that.
TO: Did they allow boys then? Did they allow boys in in certain roles?
BH: Yes, he was trained in [Reemey ?] and what killed him off was that he was finished up after the war, going to the hospitals repairing x-ray sets, and they didn’t do him any good at all. They didn’t have the facilities to have the protection in those days as they have now, so that unfortunately killed him.
TO: And did you have an air raid shelter at your house?
BH: Yeah, Anderson, the Anderson in the garden. There was a nightly call.
TO: [unclear] camera back so.
BH: You’re alright?
TO: Yeah, just checking the shutter. Yeah, it’s fine. Sorry about that. And did you consider joining the army at all?
BH: I did the air force.
TO: What appealed to you about the air force over the other services?
BH: Well, you go to the air force, you can fly. And then again, in those days, it was the only force that get in touch with the enemy. Especially after Dunkirk.
TO: And how did you feel when you heard about the Dunkirk evacuation?
BH: Pardon what?
TO: The Dunkirk evacuation. How did you feel when it happened?
BH: I can’t really explain really. It’s, it’s a mixture of excitement, in one thing or the other, and getting away from the humdrum.
TO: And were you ever worried that Germany would win?
BH: Never doubted it. Never doubted it.
TO: Can you tell me a bit about what you remember from the phoney war?
BH: The phoney war? Well, the phoney war was [emphasis] phoney. Everything was quiet, everybody going on their normal business. The only difference was the blackout. But, no, everybody went about their normal business. The phoney war stopped of course with the episode of Dunkirk and then the day bombing and then into night bombing by the Nazis, but the phoney war was phoney. Everybody went about their normal business.
TO: And what kind of rations did you have when the war, what kind of rations did you have when the war started?
BH: I really don’t know in a sense because I wasn’t politicised in any sense, I knew we had to fight Germany and I wasn’t really fearful or anything like that at all. My parents were worried ‘cause they knew what could happen that’s why I suppose being a bit thick it didn’t worry me but I mean fourteen year old what do you know? Yeah, but I know the phoney war and it was phoney, as I say, until after Dunkirk.
TO: And there were people, were your parents worried that Hitler would invade? Were you worried that Hitler would invade?
BH: I wasn’t worried, wasn’t worried at all, but I knew if they did and I knew their reputation as far as Jewish people concerned, right, where could you go? Into the hills, Wales, Scotland or anywhere like that? ‘Cause there was nowhere else to go. So we were in it, and fight. That’s it.
TO: And do you remember what kind of food you had during the war?
BH: What kind of what?
TO: Food you had, what kind of food you had during the war?
BH: Food?
TO: Yes.
BH: Well, my mother was the innovative and it was mostly vegetable stuff and little bits of chicken, ration meat and things like that, but she probably went without herself, lots of vegetable soups, vegetables, home grown vegetables, she kept chickens for eggs and even when we had visitors she found something, you know, to make a meal with, so nothing elaborate, I mean, cakes, we had home-made cakes, chocolate was, couldn’t get hold of chocolate, things like that. Meat of course was rationed and the ration books, [unclear] but she made do, like most women and housewives in those days they made do. Comes the occasion, comes the person.
TO: And what did you think of Churchill?
BH: Brilliant, could do with him again. I wish he would be reincarnated. Man of the moment. Didn’t think much of him after the war, he’d become a real Tory after the war but then again after the war there’s a great movement for Labour. People have had enough, I mean, people were returning from the forces so right, we’re not lackeys anymore, might be on better things. So, his speech as far as communism is concerned killed him politically but as a war leader second to none.
TO: Did you listen to his speeches much?
BH: Yeah. Yeah.
TO: What in particular did you like about him as a war leader? What, what, what in particular did you like about him as a war leader?
BH: He hated Germans.
TO: You already told me about the first day of the Blitz. Do you remember, are there any other days of the Blitz that stand out to you particularly?
BH: Yes, as I explained, the first day of the Blitz.
TO: Yeah, yeah.
BH: We were in the cinema, me and my brother. And when we came out, there was rubble all over the place, houses had been knocked down, something, so that was the first day of the Blitz.
TO: Do you remember other days of the Blitz?
BH: No, we just took it in our stride, went to work as normal. We used to get on the tram at seven o’clock in the morning to get to this so-called apprenticeship by eight o’clock. I was fourteen, I was working five and a half days a week, guess how much for?
TO: I don’t know.
BH: In out of thirty seven and a half p a week. I can remember my first wage packet bringing it home, and my mother pinned it on the curtain, it was [file missing] six pence for five and a half days work. No allowances for my age, so thirty seven and half p in today’s terms.
TO: How did the people behave during the Blitz would you say?
BH: All as one, helped one another, didn’t see any general fear whatsoever, I mean the patriotism was great. People helped one another. I remember when the night bombing started at five o’clock every day, people used to pack up stuff and we used to go to a communal bomb shelter, just across where we used to live and then eventually we want back to the Anderson but the first, pack up, be there by five o’clock, come out by six o’clock next morning amongst the rubble, hopefully your house was still intact.
TO: Did you ever see anyone behave badly during the Blitz?
BH: No, no, no, not at all.
TO: Was there a lot of bomb damage near where you lived?
BH: Yes, because the Forest Gate is not far from the docks and the first day of the Blitz was the whole dock area because the pool of London was the great entry into Great Britain, England and all the shipping used to go in there anyway. Most of the bombing in the surrounding areas but when they started bombing civilians that was another matter.
TO: And did you ever watch any of the dogfights that were going on, did ever you watch any of the dogfights that were going on?
BH: Yes we used to watch them coming over because we, actually we knew when raids were about because the balloons used to go off and they stationed all around us, there is a place called Wanstead Flats not far behind us where ack-ack guns were on and the, the balloons used to go up, to deter low flying, but the whole mixture of things really but I remember when, they brought in, like rocket fire, the ack-ack and everybody cheered because it used to be a one-off shell [mocks the sounds of gunfire] and then they brought in these, like rockets with massive, right, and everybody stood and cheered, at last we’re doing something, rather than the old pop-pop.
TO: Could you hear the anti-aircraft guns firing?
BH: Oh yeah. Yeah. In Forest Gate as I say about two miles behind us an area called Wanstead Flats which is part of the Green Belt and the ack-ack were on there.
TO: Did it, did it feel encouraging to know that the German bombers were being fired at?
BH: Oh, absolutely, yeah. But don’t forget the Luftwaffe was really indiscriminate, I mean, even today you know, people say about Dresden, but what about Coventry, Rotterdam, every city in the UK, Bristol, Plymouth, London, they didn’t care.
TO: And do you think France let Britain down in the war? Do you think France let Britain down?
BH: Well the trouble with France, they had the Maginot Line, didn’t they, and it was facing the wrong way, so that was a big mistake. Vichy France of course was fascist, so, as an ally, mediocre but not impressed with them.
TO: And so, when exactly, what year of the war did you join the RAF?
BH: 1943. I went in April 1943, just before my eighteenth birthday.
TO: And how did you come to be a rear gunner?
BH: Ah, as I said, I went in Cardington and came out as PNB graded, so, I, when I went, was called to ITW, Initial Training Wing, which was in Newquay and that’s a three month’s course which in peacetime is three years, so it’s condensed from three years, I did there for three months and from there I was sent to Elementary Flying Training School in Derby, which [unclear] factories on it now in a place called Burnaston. Unfortunately I had a Tiger Moth I was as others on Tiger Moths for a while and the weather was so bad I couldn’t get my flying hours in so to go solo but they didn’t determine the fact that so from there we were sent to Heaton Park. Now Heaton Park was a holding centre for aircrew to go to the Empire, you’ve heard about this, to the Empire Training Scheme and ‘cause it was near the Manchester ship canal as well. So we were stuck there for a while and we waited and waited and three of us went to the CO and said, ‘you know, what’s the problem?’ In a nice way. We said ‘there’s a hold up and we don’t know when you’ll be going’ so we said ‘what’s the quickest way getting to the war?’ He said, ‘go as gunners’, so we did. Others went, sent, who decided to remuster in the navy and that’s how I’ve become a gunner. So you become a rear gunner is because when you go to OTU, Operational Training Wing, which was Hixon, a place called Hixon in Staffordshire, which is on Wellingtons, then you crew up together and then you all meet up, either Australian pilots, Pete and we all met up and the other guy, there was the other gunner, he said, ‘I don’t want to be a rear gunner’, so I said ‘Okay, I’ll do it, it’s fine’, that was it.
TO: And could you have been a pilot? Could you have become a pilot?
BH: I could’ve, well if I’d stayed on, I’d have become a pilot, I’ve gone overseas but I’d have missed the war. As another guy did say, I met him later on, but he got his wings but he missed the war. That wasn’t the purpose, the purpose was to go and kill Germans.
TO: And so what was the first bomber that you flew in on as a rear gunner?
BH: Well there again, we were, as a crew, we go to, from Wellingtons, we’re six of us, go to a heavy conversion unit onto Lancasters, which is a place called Woolfox Lodge between Stamford and Grantham and you pick up a flight engineer. And the flight engineer, he’d got his wings but they didn’t want him as a pilot so they made them flight engineers. And then we, with various things of getting to know your Lancaster and one thing and the other, we didn’t get to the squadron till late which was in Mildenhall and then we was, we were sent on to various things, they put us on some secretive work and even in OTU the other guys would tell you we used to go out on Window dropping, a diversion raids, save the main forces going that way, we would go that way to get the Luftwaffe up in the air of the pundits, drop the Window, metal strips, as if the big force come, then come back and the other force would go through. So [unclear] they put us on secret [unclear] and testing one thing and the other, finally got onto Operation Manna. So that was my only operational, real operational side. Which was disappointing in a way. But we had to obey orders, didn’t we?
TO: And did you ever wish that you were anything other than a gunner?
BH: Well, as I say, I went as a gunner because I wanted to get in the war but my aim was become a pilot or navigator or bomb aimer, the PNB, that was my aim. But as circumstances would show, as I said, I missed the war, probably gone to Australia, to Canada, Texas or South Africa. But as it happens, when the war ended, we were earmarked to go to California as a crew to convert onto Liberators for the Far East but the [unclear] said, no we want the boys to go home. So the whole crew was split up and that was in August 1945.
TO: And what did your relatives think of you being in the Air Force?
BH: Oh, quite proud in a way. My mother was concerned ‘cause I remember going home with all my kit ‘cause we’d be going from one station to another and she spotted my helmet, oxygen mask to the top so she had a little cry but they were concerned, rightly so, I suppose really.
TO: And how did you feel when you first heard that the RAF had started bombing Germany?
BH: Elated. Couldn’t get in there quick enough to help them do it.
TO: How long did your training last in total?
BH: Our training, well the training started right from 1943 right through to ‘45. I think I joined the 62 Squadron in March ’45 as I said, they sent us on various things and one thing and the other.
TO: And were you on board Lancaster bombers?
BH: Yes.
TO: What were the conditions like on board the Lancaster?
BH: Better than the Wellington, actually I flew Tiger Moths, Harfords, Wellingtons, Lancaster and of course, yeah, the Tiger Moth, which is the nicest plane I’ve ever been in, or ever flew in. There there was if you were coming down the landing, the instructor used to say, watch the grass is grass then cut back [unclear] head over the side watching, but that was flying, that’s different, that only got you into next grade but it wasn’t pleasant especially when you were flying at height when icicles were forming on your oxygen mask, you had to break them off, we had the heating closing as well.
TO: Was it colder in the gun positions than in the main cockpit?
BH: Very tight, conditions were very, in the turret, the rear turret, cramped, very cramped, but then, you know, you’re in it, you’re in it, and that was it.
TO: Did you feel glad when you started going on missions over Germany?
BH: I didn’t really go on missions over Germany. They got us on all the experimental and secret stuff and then finally got onto Operation Manna, which we dropped food, have you heard of it? Obviously, so no need to go into that.
TO: Well, No, actually, if you can explain it but.
BH: We dropped, it’s three hundred feet, the old German airfield Epinburgh and after that we formed the Manna Association. Which I eventually finished up as secretary and treasurer. Now of about forty, forty five of us, is six left now.
TO: And, did you ever, did you have to fire the guns in training?
BH: Oh yeah, yeah. And tested the guns coming over to Holland over the North Sea, test them just in case but yeah, we had to fire drogues. In fact when I was, when the war was over I was sent to Italy and I joined the Centododici Squadron, this is 112, Sharks Squadron, they had sharks under the cowling and I used to fly with the air craft towing a drogue so they could fire at it, hoping that they would fire at the drogue and not at me, so, so that was alright but a bit of fun, but can I tell you an interesting story though? In 1945 the squadron was broken down, broken up and everybody went their different ways and were all made redundant and that was in ’45. So 36 years later this guy turned out to be a great friend with it, is Ted Livingstone and another guy, Phil Irvin, decided to put an advert in all, like the fly, all the journals for aircrew who would be interested in going to see the dropping sites in Holland? It cost a hundred pounds and get the coach from Graves End. So I said to my wife at the time, would you like to do it? Yeah. So, put my name down for it. Now I had my own business in those days and I’d been to an exhibition and I got home rather late, my wife said to me, you had a phone call, I think it’s the guy that’s organizing the trip to Holland. So I said, yeah, what’s his name? She said, Hallem. I said, Arthur Hallem? My own navigator. Anyway left his phone call and of course got on to him, chatted and he was going, right, with his wife. And we chatted, and during the course of the conversation, I said, he was articled clerk, I said, did you carry on with your accountancy? He did, yes, I am now the director of Wickbrits pension fund and I said, in Chiswell Street? And when I said in Chiswell Street, my wife said, Arthur Hallem? I’ve been dealing with him for years in the Abbey National round the corner in City Road what do you think of that?
TO: When you fired the guns, did it leave a smell of cordite in the air?
BH: Pardon?
TO: When you fired the guns, did it leave a smell of cordite in the air?
BH: Yeah. ‘Cause your shells used to drop off the side, you spew out anyway. But also in the training for gunnery you had to put a gun together blindfolded. I don’t know if any of the guys have told you that, yeah, during the training, you had to be blindfolded and then put the guns together, in case you had a stoppage or something like that while you’re out flying so it’s dark, it’s black, can’t put a light on, so you had to do in the darkness, take the bridgehead out, clear it, put it back in.
TO: Do you think it was hard to learn that?
BH: To be honest no and I’m not being snobbish in any way when a few of us came from our previous training, the guys up in Morpeth it was, the instructors had a bet that we [unclear] we would beat everybody and we did. Not because it’s snobbish or anything but we knew our way around so as I said [unclear] I’m not degrading the other guys in any way whatsoever but anyway they had a bet and they won.
TO: And what was your, I think I’ve already asked you this but what was your, was the Tiger Moth your favourite aircraft to fly in? What was your favourite aircraft to fly in?
BH: Tiger Moth, oh yeah.
TO: And were there any planes you flew in that were, that weren’t very reliable?
BH: There was what?
TO: Were all the planes that you flew in reliable?
BH: Yeah, expect the Wellington. ‘Cause Wellington was, the OTU operational training unit and we used to have in it Gee for navigation and I used to pop out and help the navigator, Arthur used to, I used to do the Gee and everything else, and we lost the Gee, and we got lost and we were in cloud and the aircraft started to vibrate violently so we had a discussion whether we should pop out or not, ‘cause we didn’t know where we were, anyway decided to leave and when we got back to base we went to the hangar, the chief engineer said, said to us, you had one minute before the port engine blew up. So we were rather lucky. So the whole aircraft was vibrating.
TO: So, did you have to bale out then?
BH: No, we did considered it but we didn’t know where we were, so we are sticking out, so eventually the weather cleared and we got down and it was a place called Gamston,’cause we’ve been moved there from Hixon and the chief engineer when we went to the hangar the next morning to see what’s the problem he said you had one minute before that engine blew up, in his opinion. So we considered it a lucky escape.
TO: Did Wellington engines have a reputation for doing that?
BH: Yeah, they were Bristol radials but as a [file missing] Merlin [unclear] different proposition altogether but of all end like anybody else the Lancaster was the favourite aircraft.
TO: Were the guns different on as Lancaster to another aircraft?
BH: No, 303s, the mid upper had two guns, is it alright?
TO: Yes
BH: The mid upper had two guns, as you know, the rear turret had four, later in they brought in 2.5s because the 303 only had a range. And the Luftwaffe knew it, if they stood off, right, the 303 were going then would start dropping, didn’t have the range until they bought the .5 which the Americans had, which was a different thing altogether and that’s why they introduced corkscrew, have you heard about the corkscrew? Yeah, that was violent.
TO: Did you have to practice the corkscrew?
BH: Yeah. That’s one of the things that we had to do on 622, they brought us in a new sight, gun sight, and it was like a square like that oblong, and there would be crystals and you had to recognize the aircraft like Messerschmitt and you set that in and if you got the aircraft in those crystals you couldn’t miss so we had to do an exercise with a mark 8 Spitfire and he did his attack and I got a hundred percent hits by then. My mid upper he didn’t want to do it so I did his and he got ninety-nine percent and the whole thing went to Air Ministry but we also did a corkscrew now a corkscrew, I don’t know if they told, how we get into it and why, I mean you just, an attacking aircraft who lay off you and he put your speed in and if he is on the starboard side which is [pause] to the right of the aircraft, right, so we called our pilot Pete, the corkscrew starboard so he’s got his wheel like that ready and as the aircraft comes in, he’s got to come in like that, and he’s got to come under the back he said, corkscrew go and he goes [mimics the noise of incoming aircraft] down like that and up again and then down again and his stomach comes up here, goes down there, good fun really.
TO: Was anyone aboard the plane actually sick, by those manoeuvres?
BH: No. Fortunately.
TO: And do you think the guns of a Lancaster would have been enough to take down a fighter?
BH: Oh yeah, if they got in range, as I say, the 303, as the other guys will tell you, the only, limited in range, they would drop down and the Luftwaffe knew that.
TO: And were people more afraid of night fighters than anti-aircraft fire?
BH: Mh?
TO: Were people more afraid of night fighters than anti-aircraft fire?
BH: I don’t think so but towards the end of the war they did have intruders. I don’t know if you were told about that. The Focke Wulf 190 used to follow aircraft back and as soon as you got in landing position, what they called funnel, there you’re lined up, your undercarriage is down, your flaps are down and you are more air worthy, you’re more or less, your air speed is down and it happened to where I was in Woolfox Lodge one of guys got shot down because they used to come in, follow the aircraft and while you’re in that position they were vulnerable and shoot them down. In fact to this day they haven’t found the air gunner, the rear gunner, so we used to get the signal to be sent out over the North Sea, Irish Sea, all clear but then that was towards the end of the war and it claimed quite a few victims, so.
TO: As a, sorry, as a rear gunner, were you in the most vulnerable position? As a gunner, were you in the most vulnerable position?
BH: Yes. Because I explain the line of attack would be, they would lay off, turn in and come round like that and then
TO: Come.
BH: Come to the rear so the rear gunner was really the first form of defence and the first to receive attack. As soon as they introduced these Dorniers with guns they called firing from underneath, I don’t know if you were told about that, right, they had these Dorniers and they were equipped with a gun who used to get under the aircraft and fire upwards, couldn’t see them until you exploded.
TO: And what kind of bombs would a Lancaster carry?
BH: Oh, the big ones. Yeah, sit [?] incendiaries, thousand pounders. And also the big one. It takes up the whole of the bomb bay.
TO: And what did you think of RAF leaders, like Arthur Harris?
BH: If anybody started on me outside, I’ll tell my uncle of you. But he’s brilliant and he liked his aircrew. He went to South Africa because he was contemptuous of the government for not demobbing the aircrew, made us all redundant. And that’s a story in itself, stupid. As I say, when the squadron broke up, we made redundant, send up to a place called Burn, up in Yorkshire, an old ex airfield here and are you ok for time?
TO: I’m fine. I’m just checking there be, yeah, I’m just checking the [unclear].
BH: And I get there, masses of ex aircrew walking about doing nothing and what it was it went there before a panel and you had three choices of a trade: radar wireless, wireless mechanic, driver or radar operator. So, and you got all ex aircrew sitting back, what do you want to do Bernie? Sort of thing. I said, ‘well, I’ll go as a radar wireless mechanic’, ‘nah, you don’t want to go, it’s a year’s course, you will be out by then’, so then, ‘I’ll learn to drive’, ‘No, no one is gonna teach you to drive, you’ll be able to, you go as a radar operator’, so ok fine. In the meantime I was sent to a place as a clerk. So they got that all wrong until I said ‘I’m not a clerk, I’m going as a radar operator’. So finally they realised because when I reported to St John’s Wood, when I first went in, there’s another guy named Harris and he starts three numbers 168 same as mine, but his other numbers were different, so they got him mixed up with me ‘cause they didn’t look any further until they realised their mistake. So that was that, so eventually after much arguments I was, ok go down to in Wiltshire and you will become trained as an operator. So about twelve or sixteen ex aircrew we’re trained as radar operators, yeah, for six months. When we finished the course, the signal came from the Air Ministry, all the ex air crew that had taken the radar operators are now redundant, report back to Burn. So we got back to Burn, said ‘what happened?’ I said, ‘I want to learn to drive’, ‘ok we’ll teach you to drive’. So that was that.
TO: And what did you think of other RAF leaders? What did you think of RAF’s general leaders?
BH: In general, loved it. You see, the pysco is this, with aircrew, all volunteers, no one conscripted, they all had the same state of mind, they all wanted to fly and kill Germans. So we had all that in common and air crew is like a big family even today. Even with so few of us left. Silly contact, so, although it was a war it was a great experience, [unclear] my teams.
TO: Were there any ever occasions where weather at your airfields damaged the aircraft?
BH: No. The only laughable thing is that the weather, one briefing we had at OTU we head to normal briefings what you gonna do and end of which is the met man, I can see him now, tall man, long neck, big Adam’s apple, when he’s going all through the [unclear] and he says, ‘you got five tenths cloud’ and all that, but we said ‘it’s raining outside’ , he said ‘not according to my map it’s not’, and it was, it was bucketing down, not according to my map, he said, and that’s true.
TO: And what kind of information would you be given at the briefings?
BH: On a normal target, what you got to do, courses, the courses, navigation, radio codes, gunnery, the whole lot and then finish up with the met report.
TO: What kind of gunnery would you be, what kind of gunnery would they cover at the briefing?
BH: What kinds of what?
TO: What aspects of gunnery would they cover at the briefings?
BH: Just to make sure that your guns are ok, your belts are ok, the gun belts ‘cause they run on the side and your gun is fully charged and everything else. And also the height you’ll be flying at, in most cases more than about ten to fifteen thousand feet, then up to twenty thousand.
TO: Did you bring any rations with you aboard the bomber?
BH: Yeah. There was chocolate of course, gum, I think the gum, I’m not sure, certainly chocolate, apple, I think, what they called the flying breakfast you had to have a pint of milk, there’s an urn of milk on the side, and you had your flying breakfast going and coming back whatever you did. Yeah, there was a chocolate, I don’t remember any of the others ‘cause I don’t think I used it. I did use the chocolate once, it was like a block of ice, it was frozen, nearly knocked my teeth out. So I used to have it, everybody had a flying ration.
TO: And what kind of rations did you have at the air bases?
BH: Very good, very good, at Heaton Park, where we were waiting to go abroad, they had a most brilliant chef there and he made trifles every Sunday, now if I was out on the site I would make sure I go back, he was brilliant, but the food was good.
TO: Did you have more in the air forces food than as a civilian?
BH: Then what?
TO: Than as a civilian?
BH: Yeah, I think so, yeah, yeah.
TO: And do you remember, sorry I’m going back slightly but, do you remember how you felt when the RAF won the Battle of Britain?
BH: Yeah, elated. Absolutely, that was a turning point of the war. But that’s set off the Blitz, then he resorted to air bombardments by the Luftwaffe and when he was beaten in that, in the Battle of Britain, he resorted to night flying, bombing.
TO: And do you remember hearing about the attack on the Ruhr Dams?
BH: Yeah, 617 Squadron. Yeah, that was May 16th, 17th, and May the 17th was my 20th birthday. So, I remember it well.
TO: Was it widely reported in the press?
BH: Mh?
TO: Was the attack on the dams widely reported in the press?
BH: Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah. See, don’t forget, the Battle of Britain was the only real victory that we had, I mean, the desert warfare was going backwards and forwards with Rommel, so that was the only real victory and the bombing of Germany was applauded because we’d had enough, we, it was a turning point, it was, it was as if the Germans were invincible, that was a feeling, but when we had these victories, they weren’t invincible, they realized we could do something about it.
TO: Did they report much about the campaign in North Africa in the papers?
BH: Well, the campaign in North Africa, was, until Montgomery came on the scene was backwards and forwards, Rommel came, forced the British back, [unclear] finished up outside Cairo, at El Alamein and he stood his ground there and he beat Rommel but a lot of people don’t know if you get into modern history of the Middle East, that Sadat who was president, became president of Egypt, plotted with the Arabs to attack Montgomery from the rear to help the Germans and he was arrested by the British, yeah. I won’t go into modern history about the Arabs or anything else, but yeah, he plotted as the others, the Mahdi of Jerusalem went to Berlin so Montgomery had a lot against him but he fought through and he’s held at El Alamein and that was a good victory there. And that was another turning point of the war but you couldn’t rely on the Arabs nor could you today, I have to say, but anyway, scrub that. But yes, so, Battle of Britain and El Alamein, the bombing of Germany. Dresden, right, you take Dresden, Canon Collins who was anti, against the atom bomb and everything else CND he used to go around preaching to aircrew not to bomb Germany and he was allowed to do it for some reason. However, that’s another story, but if you take Dresden with Stalin who was advancing, Dresden was no longer an open city, before that they were making gun sites as well, had a big industry in gun, opticians and, Stalin said to Truman at that time and Churchill that Dresden, the troops, German troops are massing in Dresden and I want them seen to, I want them cleared, so both the Americans, us, the RAF, bombed Dresden. Dresden was unfortunate but there was twenty five thousand casualties, Goebbels put another nought on the ending, it made two hundred and fifty thousand but Dresden was needed because Stalin wanted it, it was in the way of his troops to get into East Germany so no matter what anybody said about Dresden, I will always say Dresden was needed unfortunate. You tell me about Coventry, you tell me about Rotterdam, you tell me about Bristol, Southampton, Bristol, you tell me about those cities, don’t tell me, don’t talk to me about Dresden.
TO: And then, what did you think of the German aircraft of the war?
BH: Never flew one [laughs]. Well, they served their purpose, the Heinkel was the most hated, the 101, no 111, no 101, because they used to desynchronize their engines, whether they did that to avoid radar or not but you could always tell them, the Heinkel 11, they desynchronized [mimics the sound of engines] so that was a horrible sound. The 109s they were ok, the Focke-Wulf was alright and then they brought in the jet towards the end of the war, the Messerschmitt jet, yeah, fighter aircraft, [unclear] aircraft.
TO: And were you quite friendly with the ground crew?
BH: Oh yeah, yeah, especially the WAAFs. Yes, yeah, always had contact with the ground crew, and they’d always be at the end of the runway when you’re taking off.
TO: Did they see you, were they cheering at you?
BH: Yeah. [unclear] together two fingers back.
TO: And do you remember hearing about the first thousand bomber raid on Cologne?
BH: No, I wasn’t involved in it.
TO: But did they report it?
BH: Yeah, they’re good [?]. Actually they brought in aircraft from OTUs, Wellingtons as well, from OTUs and heavy conversion units, they brought everybody in, it was unlucky not to be called. Took tinsel instead. Window.
TO: And when was Window first developed?
BH: I think by Barnes Wallis, he designed the Wellington, I think it was one of his ideas. He just put it down the chute, the flare chute, just bundled it down. And of course, the Germans on their radar, swamped their radar.
TO: And you mentioned sometimes you went on these, was it secret operations or special operations? You said you went on operations to deploy Window as a decoy?
BH: Yeah.
TO: Would you deploy it around the North Sea?
BH: Yeah, I was [file missing] over the North Sea, yeah. The idea was if the main bomber, the main route was through Holland, from the East Coast to Holland. So, if a main group was going, say, across The Hague, we would go with the Window south of that because the German fighter group were patrolling round [unclear] so if they were sent off that way to find us with the Window, they used up their fuel so they had to come back to refuel and in the meantime the main forces got through. Coming back was a different story of course but the main force had got through.
TO: What do you think of the American aircraft of the war?
BH: Was a big aircraft with a little bomb bay. Didn’t have much to do with them really. I mean Mildenhall 3 Group where I was in, I was surrounded by the Americans, Norfolk and all around that. And the only thing against them was that, when they took off, they wouldn’t go over the coast until they got to their operational height and then they went, so if we had a [unclear] right, we got this humming guide on all the time and once they got their operational height, then their fighter escort would go off, and then off they would go, so we called them as a bloody nuisance. But they are good guys, I mean, they took a hammering, they really did. Their graves, memorial in Cambridge, massive, the graveyards there, massive memorial. Took a hell of a pounding.
TO: Did you, were you ever escorted by American fighters?
BH: No. No.
TO: Or Spitfires at all?
BH: No. The only time had contact with a Spitfire was that one they tested the side.
TO: Did you ever, did airfields ever run low on supplies like fuel or bombs?
BH: The airfields yeah, bomb dumps and fuel dumps, yeah. Yeah, self-contained, yeah.
TO: And did they ever run low on supplies?
BH: No, well planned. It was mostly worked by the Royal Army Service Corps. It was the same Royal Army Service Corps bloated our aircraft with food for Holland. Stacking up the bomb bay.
TO: Can you tell me how Operation Manna worked?
BH: Worked? I’ll tell you how it came about and worked. Yeah.
BH: Operation Market Garden, Arnhem was unfortunately a disaster. The idea was to shorten the war and go through [unclear] backed by the Germans. The Reichsmaster, it was a Hungarian, Austrian Nazi commander in Holland by the name of Arthur Seyss-Inquart was so incensed that he stopped all food coming into Western Holland from the agriculture part of Holland itself. Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard were here in England, in the UK, in exile and in January 1944 she called the railway workers to go on strike in Holland. Well this Nazi Reichmaster in retaliation ordered the sea locks to be broken, flooding Western Holland from Utrecht right round to The Hague. So, the dykes were broken and it was flooded. There was a population of three million nine hundred thousand in that area and this is a fact ‘cause I gave a talk on it to 622 Squadron which was reformed in Brize Norton in May, anyway. So out of three million nine hundred thousand, eventually twenty thousand died of starvation and malnutrition was rife, people were starving, so Queen Juliana appealed to Churchill and Truman and Eisenhower. Eisenhower said, they will have to wait, he is not committing his troops, while there are six hundred thousand Germans in Western Holland. Anyway, so Queen Juliana said, finally Eisenhower said, [unclear] find a way of delivering food. And he brought in Air Commodore Andrew Geddes, who was on tactical air force in main headquarters of the Allies, so cut a long story forward, he was met Bedell Smit and Bedell Smith to him, we have a situation, we got people starving and they have to be supplied by food by air. You devise a plan and you come and tell back and tell me what you gonna do. So, apparently, Andrew Geddes went away with others to tactical air force and he devised a plan for dropping food in certain areas in Western Holland by air incorporating the squadrons of Lancasters and also Pathfinders and he got hold of this Nazi [unclear] and in a school called, they met in a school called [unclear] and they explained the plan. The Germans didn’t like it, he said, not the case of you liking it, it’s what we’re gonna do. And if you interfere in any way in what we gonna do, you’ll be arrested as a war criminal. So, on April 29th, the 28th it started but the weather was too bad, so on the 29th of April Operation Manna started without the agreement being signed until the next day. And quite legally they could’ve been shot down and we’re going three hundred feet, hundred meters, something like that, we did a designated area, if anybody went outside that area they’d be warned by red flares and shot at and shot down. Anyway, so, it went off without incident and that was the start of Manna and it went from April the 29th to May the 8th. The Americans came in, they called it Chowhound, the next day and they finished on May the 7th. So in a total there was twelve thousand tons of food dropped overall, the RAF dropped seven thousand and the Yanks dropped four thousand. And to this day in Holland it’s taught, as history, by survivors and when we’ve been back there before we’ve been invited back, as I say, in 1981, we went in 1982 on that first trip, we were overwhelmed, we didn’t realise, people used to come up to us and still do when we go there, thank you for saving my life, thank you for saving my parents life, children are growing, it’s very touching. And that’s how it came about.
TO: And what do you remember the most when you were participating in Operation Manna?
BH: But we went in, I think about two or three thousand feet and dropped to three hundred when we got over to Holland. My first, I’m the last to see anything ‘cause I’m at the back, there’s this boy on his bicycle, on top of the dyke, flooded all around, astride his bicycle, waving a Union Jack and a Dutch tricolour, right and we were flying in just below the roof of a hospital, they were all waving sheets and God knows what else. And we went between The Hague and Rotterdam to drop at Eppinburgh and straight out again. But we could see people waving, they were warned to keep away, one guy whose pony rushed onto the dropping field, got hit by a sack of potatoes and that killed him. But other thing and the Germans were told that if they touched the food in any way they will be arrested as war criminals but this Nazi, he was eventually tried and hanged as a war criminal because not only was he involved in Holland, he followed the German army through the occupied areas organising transportations and everything else, he was a real, real Nazi and he was strung up.
TO: Is there anything else you remember in particular about Operation Manna, which sticks out to you?
BH: There is a guy named Hans Onderwater also a [unclear] historian, he wrote a book called Manna Chowhound, still very friends with him, right, and he organised a hell of a lot, what we, with the Manna Association, what we used to do, together with Americans, they used to come over here, we meet up in Lincoln, right, on the weekend, and we had four coachloads to go to various, entertained by various airfields the RAF Coningsby, Scampton, Waddington, places like that, and they used to, the fifth year we’d go to Holland, and boy! We didn’t know where were going and we were hosted all over the country, memorials, dining, visiting, schools, lectures, concerts, incredible, absolutely incredible.
TO: And the food supplies that you had on board the plane, were they, did they have parachutes attached to them?
BH: No, just dropped out the bomb bay. Just open the bomb bay, they’d fall down. The Pathfinders went in first who did the markers because they were told, the Dutch were told, the aircraft would be coming in and dropping red markers and then after that on their radios ‘cause they were all hidden, radios were all hidden, [unclear] anyway, the aircraft are leaving England bringing you food and of course all out on the streets waiting for the aircraft.
TO: Was there anyone that you know of who actually got fired at during Operation Manna?
BH: Yeah, one guy got a bullet through his foot because some irate Germans, we followed the guns, the anti tank guns, they were following us, could see that clearly and I tracked them as well, but of course we were vulnerable at that height, there were a few rifle shots, one guy got a bullet through his foot, and you could see that, that sort of things that were given there [emphasis: sound of papers rustling] [unclear] in there, a card from Prince Bernhard, he was our, he was our president, and that’s a card from from Bernhard when Queen Wilhelmina died I sent a card, a condolence card, got load of medals in there, as the other guys from Manna. Now, there is only six of us left and the guy, Bob Goodman, he was the leader of Chowhound, he died this March. So, like all good things come to an end, don’t they.
TO: When Operation Manna began, and you had the briefings,
BH: Yeah.
TO: Were you or anyone else surprised when you heard you would be dropping food?
BH: Not surprised, more of an adventure I think. I mean, it was humanitarian. No, it was a surprise, something we wanted to do and like all operations, when you go for briefing, the whole airfield is closed down, the gates are closed, RAF police on the doors, it’s a lockdown. You only go and get your gear and get your breakfast and go.
TO: Did it feel strange to have, to be carrying food rather than weaponry?
BH: Well we knew that, why we were doing it, I mean, three million nine hundred thousand people, I mean we got photographs of kids [unclear] walking about with large spoons, so when they went by these areas where the, kitchens, common kitchens, they’d scrape out the bottom of the urn, we got photographs of kids dying in the streets.
TO: Do you think Operation Manna could have been launched sooner than it was?
BH: I think it was in a timescale it should have done. Because they did know the seriousness after the what happened to, after Arnhem and this Nazi what he would do. He was rightly strung up as well anyway.
TO: And did you hear, was there much reporting on what was happening on the Russian front?
BH: Yeah, oh yeah. Well the Russians, you know, they took quite a beating until they got to Stalingrad, they could have gone, if they had gone past Stalingrad it would have been another story, but the winter of all things killed them, hope, unfortunately and the Russians, I mean, their hatred of the Germans, you couldn’t describe it, so, yeah, right, that’s why there was a great Communist movement in this country as well, because Communism as against, never mind what Stalin did with Holland he made the deal in ’39 didn’t he? With him, but regardless of all that, the British public could see the only real enemy and allies, as far as we were concerned, allies were the Russians. If it wasn’t for the Russians, the Germans would have been here. There’s no doubt about it.
TO: And when did you or when did the news of the Holocaust reach Britain?
BH: What?
TO: News of the Holocaust reach Britain?
BH: Well apparently, well being Jewish I know [unclear], we knew there was concentration camps and what the Germans did before the war with Jews and everything, with the refugees and everything coming over and telling their stories of what was happening. But apparently the leaders of the Jews in Germany were begging for the Allies to bomb the [unclear], but we were, with Enigma, Churchill’s excuse was we know but we, we don’t want the Germans to know that we have Enigma, that we’ve been broken their code, that was his excuse. There was one flaw, they were begging to be bombed because what was happening. But he didn’t want the Germans to know that we knew all about Enigma. So his excuse was no, if we know about concentration camps we would know their secrets. But they took no notice of what was coming out through the Jewish movement, with the concentration camps. Only it wasn’t only Jews, yeah, there’s the only fly in the ointment.
TO: And when did you personally first hear of the Holocaust?
BH: Not until the war ended actually.
TO: And what was your rank when you were in the air force?
BH: Flight sergeant.
TO: Flight sergeant.
BH: I was just coming up to warrant officer.
TO: And were you actually ever on bombing missions or was Operation Manna your first proper
BH: Operation Manna was only one, yeah. As I say, we were involved in experimental stuff.
TO: Did you ever experiment with stuff that turned out not to work? Did you ever experiment with equipment that didn’t work?
BH: No, no, the only thing we were doing was with that gunsight and also we were experimenting with things, high level bombing as well. I’ve got in my log book high-level bombing, which certain things had to be done and navigational things but as a person who wanted to get in the war I still regret not having a good run at the Germans by getting in to bombing raids. But then the powers above gave the orders. Couldn’t go off on our own. Have you ever met a guy named Harry Irons?
TO: Harry [unclear]?
BH: Irons? Harry Irons?
TO: Irons, I think I’ve heard of him but I have not met him.
BH: Oh, he’s local, he lives not far [unclear], he’d done two tours as a rear gunner. I was with him on June the 4th.
TO: Yeah. Of this year?.
BH: Yeah.
TO: Does he live that far from here or?
BH: Mh?
TO: Does he live near here?
BH: Yeah.
TO: Maybe you can put me in touch with him later perhaps.
BH: You want, well, do you want to see him?
TO: Well, maybe, if he wants to talk.
BH: He wants to, yeah, I only, I haven’t got his phone number. I got his phone number but it’s all wrong.
TO: Oh, ok.
BH: I’ve got his address.
TO: Maybe I could send him a letter or something.
BH: Do you want the address?
TO: Well, we can sort that later. It’s fine.
BH; Yeah?
TO: We can sort it later. It’s fine.
BH: Ok.
TO: So, where would you keep the parachutes on board the plane?
BH: Just inside the fuselage, behind the turret. You had to open the turret doors, get the parachute, click it on, turn the parachute, the turret to the side, open the doors and fall out. But you had to get to your parachute first, because it was in the fuselage. And if you couldn’t open the doors, hard luck.
TO: Did they have a steep hatch [file missing]?
BH: Yeah, further up. Yeah.
TO: And were there any occasions where you were flying over Europe and you got lost?
BH: Only in the one I told you about. We were actually fired at over the, over Jersey, we were doing a trip over there, a sortie over there, Northern France, experimental and we were actually fired at and I see this [unclear] coming up, but it missed, as you can see.
TO: Was the fire anywhere near the plane or?
BH: Not, it was why they missed, they went away. Just watched it coming up, this flame.
TO: Did you, were your missions mainly during the night?
BH: Mh?
TO: Were your missions mainly during the night?
BH: Yeah, night training yeah, most of my flying hours were at night.
TO: And how long would a mission tend to last?
BH: Well, it be anything, an hour, an hour and a half, if you are doing circuits and bumps it could be an hour, we say the circuits and landings, circuits and bumps we called them. But one and three quarters hours, something like that.
TO: Cool. And what was the procedure for a squadron’s aircraft to take off?
BH: Well that was controlled by airfield control. Would you like a drink?
TO: No thanks, I’m fine, my eyes are a bit sore. [unlcear]
BH: You’re alright?
TO: Yeah, I’m fine. Yes, so, do you remember what the procedure was for taking off?
BH: Yeah, first of all you went out to dispersal by the crew bus, then you, you got in your positions, everybody in, everything was tested, the ailerons, rudders, flaps, not the flaps but the, certainly the ailerons, then the engines were started up, first the hydraulics, I think was the port outer then the port [unclear] in [unclear] and so forth. Get them running up all ready, then you got the call from aircraft control and you taxied out. And you waited on the tarmac and then as you were called from the air control on the end of the runway, right, give you the green light, you just went round and off you go.
TO: And what about landing, what was the procedure for that?
BH: Same thing, they called it, what they called the funnel, you’re in, pilot called out ‘funnel funnel‘, and they’re calling and said, ‘you do a circuit of the airfield and you come in’ and then, landing in like that there, one after the other and they called that funnel. That’s when you’re most vulnerable, the flaps are down, undercarriage is down, you have slow airspeed and that’s when they took advantage with the intruders.
TO: Were landings and take offs ever nerve-racking at all?
BH: No, I loved them, it’s the best part of it, landing and taking off. Even now, with commercial aircraft, the best part.
TO: When you were flying, could you, were you always above cloud level or?
BH: Yeah.
TO: Or could you ever see the land below?
BH: Only when it’s what they called ten tenths but if it’s like this you couldn’t, probably the height of the clouds at the moment thirty, thirty five thousand feet so if you did it in twenty you could see, but as I say, most of it was at night and don’t forget blackout everywhere. So, it’s all done by navigation and Gee.
TO: And how did Gee work?
BH: It was a series of signals and it was like a small television screen and they had two bars running, one across there and one underneath it, with like “V”s on them, like that, and then as you match them up, you press another button, up come a map where you were, showing you exactly where you were. But that time we got lost somewhere over the Midlands so it didn’t work so we didn’t know where we were but yeah I used to enjoy doing that because when we knew we were quite safe I used to get out of the turret and help Arthur with his navigation ‘cause one of my pet subjects that was when we at ITW.
TO: Were you allowed to leave the turret or were you supposed to stay there?
BH: Unofficially. No once you’re in there, you’re supposed stay in there, but there you are.
TO: And how, how much, was it very noisy aboard the planes?
BH: Very noisy, drumming. A lot of guys suffered, I still have a bit of tinnutis, a lot of guys got pension for the tinnitus, the constant roar of the aircraft, the vibration as well.
TO: And did you, did you have radio sets to talk to each other?
BH: Intercom. They had what they call RT, radio transmission, which another funny story. Stan Fig [?], our radio operator, he could swear for twenty minutes without repeating the same word twice and at one time, we were coming back, on OT on Wellingtons, and we were in a circuit and down on the starboard side to me, which is the port side, ‘cause I’m in reverse to the pilot, I called up with his [unclear] ‘Pete there is someone trying to muscle in on the circuit’, right, on your port side, right, now before that he puts, he switches the RT on, asked for permission to land, now that goes everywhere. So Stan, he puts his head up then and he starts swearing about these guys trying to muscle in. When we got down in the crew bus, picked us up and then he went and picked the other crew up who were Canadians and they go, who is that so and so and so swearing at us? Pete the pilot forgot to switch off the RT, yeah, and it’s gone everywhere, the Germans must have thought it was a foreign language or code, when we, had to report to the air control right and the WAAF at the air control she had a fit with all the swearing and everything [laughs], so, everybody knew about it, right, so anyway we got roasted over that.
TO: And whenabouts did that occur? Do you know what year and month that occured?
BH: Ah, that was in ’43, ’44.
TO: And this was during a training mission, was it?
BH: Yeah.
TO: Could you ever see the cities below you when you were flying over them?
BH: No, that’s all blacked out.
TO: And did you hear about the D-Day invasion?
BH: Oh yeah. Yeah, because when it happened when they said it was a delay in pilot training they sent us back to St John’s Wood where we originally, all the aircrews reported to St John’s Wood. My first day I reported to St John’s Wood to have an inspection in Lord’s, I dropped my trousers under the portrait of W.G. Grace and again, I’ll tell you what, a plate of oxtail soup and we were billeted in St John‘s’ Wood so we were sent back to St John’s Wood and while we were still there the D-Day was on. We saw the aircraft going over. So, I remember that very well. June the 6th 1944.
TO: Were those have been the airborne troops or bombers?
BH: Yeah. Yeah.
TO: So were they airborne troops?
BH: Yeah. Were going over London from all round, from the South Coast, Sterlings were taking the gliders.
TO: What do you think of the Sterling?
BH: I’ve never got in touch with it, it was older and all but 622 Squadron they had Sterlings at first ‘cause it was a peacetime build up, peacetime field which 622 was born out of C flight of 15 Squadron which now flies Typhoons chasing German, Russian bombers. And they reinformed, we reinformed in Brize Norton three years ago and that’s why I was invited three years ago and also in May this last, this May to go there to give a talk on Manna. That’s why it’s all there.
TO: Did they enjoy the talk?
BH: Yeah.
TO: Do you know of anyone or meet anyone who ever refused to go on bombing missions?
BH: Oh yeah, yeah. Couple of Jewish friends, Harry Irons, who I mentioned, he was a tailor, he went in as a gunner straight away and, yeah, a lot of guys from Manna, who were wing commanders, one was a group captain, and we were as one, there was no rank then but great guys. One was Des Butters [?], he was a pilot on Pathfinders so yeah. Another one, I know very well, friend as well, David Fellowes, he is still very active, goes round signing books and he’s older than me.
TO: Were there any other times where someone refused to go on a bombing raid?
BH: Well, the only contact I had with anything like that is our first navigator, who was married and he couldn’t take it anymore and in those days they called it Lack of Moral Fibre. Today you’d go and see a psychiatrist and you’re just whipped away, away, demoted, taken to a place like Christchurch or something like that and demoted him and they treated you like dirt, where it’s a mental condition, I mean, they just didn’t want anybody contaminated, so we had to have a new navigator, a bomb aimer, sorry, he was a bomb aimer, a new bomb aimer.
TO: Did they ever, did he ever talk about what, the problems he had?
BH: Mh?
TO: Did this man ever talk about the problems he’d faced?
BH: No. No. Kept it to himself and then suddenly it’s gone.
TO: What is your best memory of your time in the RAF?
BH: My best memory is after the war when I was sent to Italy and I was on a Squadron, Cento, 112 Squadron and flying in a harbour towing drogues and they had the wing had it’s own rest centre with a hotel, the place called Grado and they want somebody to run it ‘cause the guy was going home. So I volunteered, so all I had to do was go there, make sure it was run properly, make sure it had all the rations and everything else, saw that the staff got paid, got myself a big ‘Q’ time dinghy, go down on the beach. Go back for lunch, go back to the beach again and make sure everything was alright. So until the winter set in then I couldn’t do it anymore and came home in January 1947. But there was the best time in the RAF [laughs].
TO: And, sorry to ask this, but what is your worst memory of your time in the RAF or of the war in general?
BH: The worst memory is the ones that I told you, when the aircraft was rattling and we didn’t know where we were. Everything else is taken in stride.
TO: What did you tend to do to keep up morale?
BH: Morale didn’t come into, as I said, we were all volunteers, we knew what we were in for, so we used to go drinking together as a crew when we had nights off, each one bought a round of half a pint , so that’s three and a half pints, twice, seven pints, so we used to roll back, go to somebody else’s aircraft and get a wick of their oxygen and go back to bed. And they probably did the same to us.
TO: How did the oxygen help?
BH: Well, it livened you up really, it sobered you up.
TO: Were there any occasions where you oxygen supplies froze up?
BH: Mh?
TO: Did your oxygen supplies ever freeze up?
BH: No, no. Not that I know of.
TO: And how did those heated jackets work that you mentioned?
BH: Very good, in fact they ruined my feet for a while. You had, first of all you had silk and wool underwear, vest, long pants right the way down to the, then you had the uniform. Then there was, as far as the gunners were concerned, there was this heated suit which plugged in, so you had slippers, heated slippers that plugged in and all connected, all the way up. Then, your flying suit on top of that, your gauntlets, inner gauntlet was a heated one and all studded to this inner suit and then of course, your, mae west and then your parachute harness on top of that, so you were really lumbering. They brought you at one time what they called the tailor’s suit, it was massive, I don’t know why they got it, we couldn’t get into the turret with it so we quickly discarded that. It was huge like, huge, you know, God knows, anyway it was a bad buy, called it the tailor’s suit. So, yes, we had a heated suit but the heated slippers created havoc with the sole of my feet, burnt them, and it took two or three years after I had come out of the air force to get it right and after that out of habit I still wear white socks.
TO: And do you remember what you were doing on the day the war ended?
BH: Yeah, I was over Holland dropping food. It was the last flight and then the war was over. May the 8th 1945.
TO: And what kind of entertainment did you have at your airbases?
BH: Well, some of them had ENSA concerts but there was not on the base, you had to go outside, at Mildenhall there was a cinema in the town. Some places had ENSA, where the singers and dancers used to come, they would do a performance, some were horrible, sometimes the cinema. One had a cinema that had broke down, halfway through the film, with Cary Grant, don’t remember the title but anyway broke down and that was that so went to the pub but entertainment mostly go to the pub, local pub.
TO: Were there any particular songs that the RAF liked to sing?
BH: No, not really. We used to sing flying, flying fortresses, fly never so high, go round [unclear] in circles finally finishing on their own, up their own backsides, something like that. Well, we put a girl on a bar in a pub and the song is, this is your ankles, this is your kneecap, this is your and this is r, r, r, you know, all that palaver and the girls loved it. But apart from that, made our own entertainment.
TO: And on days when you were just stationed on the airbases, not on operations, could you hear the drone of other bombers flying around?
BH: Well, the Americans. Oh yeah, well at Mildenhall because they used to start four o’clock, five o’clock in the morning. ‘Cause they would totally fly in day, in daylight, which they could, you know, they were vulnerable, very vulnerable.
TO: And do you think the war was worth the price?
BH: Mh?
TO: Do you think the war was worth the price?
BH: I’m sorry.
TO: Do you think the war was worth it?
BH: It was essential. You wouldn’t be here today. Nor would I. It was essential. The biggest mistake was, when Hitler came to power, I think, Churchill warned, war was coming, nobody took him notice until finally 1938, ’36, the Spanish War, which was a rehearsal for the Germans, they should’ve start rearming then, ‘cause the writing was on the wall. But there were a lot of vested interests in this country like Lord Halifax at that time, who was, he wanted to negotiate with the Germans. Churchill sent him to America as an ambassador, he was a German lover and there were a few others in the arms industry as well, them German lovers, vested interests. So in 1936 the writing was on the wall. So, Churchill was the only one who could see it. And they called him a warmonger. But they say, comes the moment, comes the right man.
TO: And how do you feel about Germany today?
BH: The old generation I don’t want hear anything to do about. The new generation are different ‘cause they don’t want anything to do with their own teutonic ways of life, they’re youngsters, you can understand, they’re a great help to Israel, lot of Germans used to go to Israel, kibbutz and all that, I’ve been there, they’ve been there, right, and no, from what they doing I admire them but the only thing now is, I mean, now we got this exodus, well, I call it the exodus, Brexit, coming out of Europe, my opinion is that in time that Germany will be the dominant nation in Europe, who don’t like the French and the French don’t like them. I just hope [emphasis] that it all works out, we don’t get sucked into another war. Because the idea of a united Europe in the first place was to stop wars. So, I’m sad at the outcome. But as far as the Germans today, I admire them in a way, they’re doing well, very well. In part of course they got right wingers again, which has clouded the whole issue with the referendum, I mean immigration has clouded the whole issue, people can’t see further than, so I won’t go on to that. ‘Cause there is one man I blame, it’s the worst president at the wrong time, at the wrong time, Obama. You can edit this but I’ll tell you, when he said to the Syrians, yeah, that if you use chemical weapons on your population, that is a red line, and he’d become a puff, a puff of a pink line, he’d done nothing and that was the signal for them to do whatever they wanted to do. What general tells the enemy or, I’m not going to send an army in, there will be no boots on the ground and that caused what is happening now and that’s caused, who wants to leave their home really, and that’s caused a desperate refugee problem in Syria. I put it down to, the quicker he goes the better, he’s out anyway, so. That’s my opinion.
TO: And what do you think of Britain’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan?
BH: I think it was the right one. I really do. With Afghan it’s been going on for years, when I mean the Russians and all they’re interested in doing there is killing one another and killing everybody else. I mean, it was going on before the First World War, our Bomber Harris used to fly biplanes, and they used to fly with I think it was a pot of gold ‘cause if they were captured, they gave it to the Afghanis, the tribesmen otherwise they cut their testicles off. So, that’s pre 1914. So that’s [unclear]. With Iraq that was a different story, yeah. The biggest mistake with Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, yeah, and Bush senior invaded, don’t forget Palestinian also, Palestinian terrorist also sided with and in they went into Kuwait as well, right, thought that was a good thing. But when George Bush senior and the Allies went in and pushed them out of Kuwait and on the road to Baghdad all the goodies said stop, you mustn’t do it, said stop, that created the next problem and the next problem was, who knew, he did have gas, he gassed his own people. Of course he had a secret weapon. All these do-gooders, yeah, what happened if they did have them? But the biggest mistake was and is, the Western world does not understand the hatred between the Sunni and the, oh God.
TO: The Shi’a. The Shi’a?
BH: Shi’a. They hate one another. And always will hate one another. They didn’t understand the enmity. So the Shi’a were the governing body in Iraq and the Sunnis hated the sight of them. ‘Cause you got Iran fostering them all up as well. But the bigger to say was they used to call the Foreign Office the camel brigade, Arab lovers ‘cause most of them used be educated in Lisbon, they don’t understand the hatred between the Shi’a and the Sunni and that will never go away. There will never be peace with them. That’s the biggest problem. Don’t blame Blair, blame his advisors who knew the Arab mind, they knew about Islam, they didn’t advise him properly. You go in, make sure you got a proper government. Don’t leave it to the Sunnis or the Shi’a. And that will go on.
TO: I think I pretty much asked all of my questions, so. Thank you so much, I really enjoyed.
BH: You are welcome. Do you want a cup of tea or something?
TO: Ah [file missing] So.
BH: Did the museum supply you with that?
TO: No, it’s my own.
BH: Really?
TO: I brought my so, I do film interviews. And, have you ever watched films about the war?
BH: Yeah.
TO: And what do you think of them?
BH: Yeah, quite good. Glorified, you know, made for the screen, a couple of, a few things they say makes me wince, but for instance pilots always have to be commissioned, right, but, in actual fact you could have a sergeant pilot and a squadron leader rear gunner, right, but films glorify, I mean, as far as a pilot is, ‘cause he’s, the officer he’s the only one to talk about, so. The best film I ever saw was “Journey Together”, where, it takes Richard Attenborough, when he was very young and somebody else, can’t remember his name, where they come together in the ITW and it goes through their course and Richard Attenborough, and then he’s gone overseas, and so is his friend, his friend come to pilot, Richard Attenborough can’t tackle flying, crashes the plane [unclear] and he doesn’t like it, he has to be a navigator, so it is a very good film, so they put him to the test, right, so the screen pilot is flying an Anson which is the one of the planes I was trained on and says I’m not [unclear] and Richard Attenborough, I can’t get what, you know, he want to be a pilot, anyway he says I’m not [unclear] something then they got him, he actually got up, worked it all out then where he were and he realised then that he is just as important as a navigator as all the rest of the crew. Each one has his job to do, they are all important, so, I think that was the best one ever. Another one was the “Journey to the Stars”, we see again only officers please, yeah, otherwise worth watching but that with the “Journey Together” was the only one that I really liked. The other was, you know, we only serve officers if you don’t mind.
TO: What do you think of the Dam Busters film?
BH: Well, that was quite factual, and they couldn’t mess about with that. So, that was quite good, that was quite factual. In fact, in matter of fact, we met his daughter, Barnes Wallis’s daughter up at Coningsby year before last.
TO: Yeah.
BH: Was Open Day up there. I don’t if you went.
TO: No. And do you remember hearing about Japan attacking Pearl Harbour?
BH: Yeah. Yeah, 1941. Of course.
TO: And what was your attitude when you heard that that had happened?
BH: Well, this is the Axis, the come together the Japanese and the Germans, and the Italians of course. No, it was all part of the war process, wasn’t it?
TO: And what do you think of America’s use of the atomic bombs?
BH: Absolutely right. The war could have gone on for ages. Could have gone on for years. Are you tried to sorting out all those islands full of Japanese soldiers and the poor people in the camps? Right? Building the railways, slave labour, starving to death, of course it was right. Absolutely. Don’t call me a warmonger.
TO: I’m not.
BH: [laughs]
TO: And what do you, do you think Bomber Command was treated unfairly?
BH: Bomber Command was not?
TO: Treated unfairly after the war.
BH: Sorry?
TO: Do you think Bomber Command was treated unfairly after the war?
BH: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s why Bomber Harris went to South Africa. He didn’t want us to be redundant. Don’t forget a lot of them had to cover up their chevrons, they had to cover up their rank, I mean, that was degrading.
TO: Why did they cover their chevrons?
BH: Because they were given [unclear] office work and things like that, yeah, and so they couldn’t work amongst people, all the aircraftsmen so they had a thought, oh well, they cover up their chevrons, after all that, the thinking of some of them in Air Ministry that’s why Bomber Harris went in disgust, he wanted us demobbed.
TO: And do you remember hearing about when the Cold War was starting and Stalin was taking over Europe?
BH: [unclear] sorry?
TO: Do you remember hearing about when Stalin was taking over Eastern Europe?
BH: Oh yeah, yeah. Well, first of all there was a treaty between him and Germans over Poland which the Germans broke fortunately, they brought Russia into the war, but he was just, to me, you know, Fascism and Communism in it’s rawest form are just as bad as one another, even to this present day, I mean Putin, he is just mixing it all up and that’s the Russian way of going. And we again in the West are too weak, Crimea, he got away with it, as he gets away with everything. ‘Cause he’s too powerful, he’s bombing civilians. In Syria no one takes any notice but I bet you, because personally, right, if the Israelis done anything like that, it’d be like that on the headlines. Which they wouldn’t. Are you with me?
TO: Yeah.
BH: But Russia, no protest from anybody. He’s moving children out there in Syria on the pretext ‘cause he’s shearing up Assad, ‘cause he wants the Mediterranean Tripoli port for his Mediterranean fleet. It’s the only reason. But he’s a murderer. So he’s as bad as any Nazi.
TO: And do you remember, were there any particular celebrations when Japan surrendered?
BH: When what?
TO: When Japan surrendered, were there any particular celebrations?
BH: Oh yeah, well that was in, what was it June, was it, ’45?
TO: Yeah, August/September.
BH: Yeah, ’45, oh yeah, but that was a sort of a sideshow, as to the war in Europe. But the emancipated people that came out on the, terrible, I mean, they’re animals to do what they did. So, that’s all behind us now, was it?
TO: And how do you feel today about your wartime service? How do you feel today about your wartime service?
BH: I’m quite proud of it. I wish I could’ve done more. Yeah.
TO: And what was your career when you left the RAF?
BH: Irregular [laughs]. To own my own business, owned my own business, had that going. Don’t forget that, you know, I’m not the exception but a lot of people, thousands of people, I mean, come out the forces, they didn’t know what to do, right, some had been in five years, four years, three years, I was in four years, four years out of your teens yeah, so you don’t want to be regulated if you know what I mean, right. You are really unsettled until you find your niche and yeah, unsettled, ‘til finally I founded my own business and that was that. Then I knew what was about.
TO: And, sorry I didn’t ask, during the Blitz, whereabouts in London were you living?
BH: In East London, Forest Gate and then we moved not far from here, to Chapel Heath, which is further up the road there and bought my own house, we had a great time there. The only reason I’m here is ‘cause the house was too big for my wife, she was suffering from emphysema, so the best thing is to get a retirement flat like this. I’ve got a sister who lives in Arizona, we’ve done three months there. I got a son and grandchildren in Israel, we’ll have three months there and the rest of the time in between summer months here. But as soon as we retire, that’s what we’re gonna do. So we bought there [unclear] outstanding [?], you tell him upstairs what’s going on, and what your plans are, he’ll laugh his head off. Didn’t work out. Within two years she was dead. So I’m here, don’t particularly like it, I make the best of it, so I go to Israel a few times, my son is now living down in the Negev but it is too hot for me, I was there last October, [laughs] hit a hundred and four Fahrenheit, so a bit too hot for me, it’s alright further north, Tel Aviv and all around there, Jerusalem, but not where he is. So that’s the name of the game but always say, tell him up there, your plans, laugh his head off, he’ll make sure it doesn’t work out, and you know what I mean.
TO: Is there anything that was important to you during the war that you’ve not talked about, which you think is important?
BH: What?
TO: Is there anything that was important to you during the war which you’ve not mentioned so far, which you think is important?
BH: No, not really, I can’t think of anything. I certainly know when the V1 was about because we were training over the, flying over the North Sea, and we were told, if we see anything like that we shouldn’t mention it to the public, and when on leave with the V2 we just walk, suddenly there’s a thump, it’s the rocket had landed, but then again you know, you’re immune to these things, coming conditioned I think.
TO: So did the V1s or V2s have any impact on public morale?
BH: Concerned but they weren’t frightened of them, they knew, you know, it was the end of the war anyway. Everything was going right and that was the last throw of the Germans, Peenemunde was known about and bombed, but the V1 was transferable, they could move it around, with the V2 rockets had to have their own base and they were bombed out of sight, but a few got up and dropped but people took it as they did in the Blitz.
TO: Did you ever visit any of those places like Coventry or?
BH: Only on business, yeah. Places I built. Portsmouth and Plymouth, Plymouth, new town, new city. Rotterdam new city, absolutely new.
TO: And what do you think was the biggest mistake that the Allies made during the war?
BH: I don’t think they, I think it was circumstances, I don’t think there was any mistake. They had to respond to circumstances and the main thing they had to keep in mind was defeating the Germans. So, if there were a few mistakes, when they tried Dieppe, it didn’t come off but they were probing and they had to do these things to test their defences, so I wouldn’t put that as a mistake, it was unfortunate.
TO: And what do you think was the most important battle of the war?
BH: Mh?
TO: What do you think was the most important battle of the war?
BH: Well, two. The Battle of Britain and the North African campaign. Because they cleared that, there was a jumping off to get into Southern Europe via Sicily and Italy. So, two. The bombing campaign was a consequence of war, that was to stop Germany getting too strong by manufacturing armaments and things like that and also the psychological part of it was giving a bit of their own medicine because the public was screaming out for something to be done in revenge and the Germans, a part from being a planned objective, is also a moral and psychological one, giving them back as good as they get, as they’re given. That’s my opinion.
TO: Anything else you want to add to anything you said earlier at all or?
BH: No, I don’t think so.
TO: Right well.
BH: Just nice to have seen you.
TO: Thank you very much, it was
BH: Give my regards from up there.
TO: Was a pleasure to talk to you, thank you very much.
BH: Yeah. Nice to see you. And be well.
TO: Thank you, you too.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHarrisB160626
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Bernie Harris. Two
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
02:19:14 audio recording
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Tom Ozel
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-26
Description
An account of the resource
Bernie Harris joined the Air Training Corps and volunteered for the Royal Air Force, joining in April 1943 and training to become an air gunner. Mentions his father serving in the Royal Flying Corps. Witnessed the London Blitz as a young boy. Describes training and operational flying conditions. Gives a vivid, detailed, first-hand account of Operation Manna. Expresses his view on wartime events, including Chamberlain’s speech, the North African campaign, the Phoney War and the Russian contribution to the Allied victory. Explains why, in his opinion, the Allies decided not to bomb the concentration camps during the war. He was de-mobbed in 1947, after a final posting to Italy with 112 Squadron. After the war he set up his own business leasing vending machines. He later became involved in an association of ex-servicemen who were involved in Operation Manna.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-04
1945-05
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Peter Schulze
Carolyn Emery
515 Squadron
622 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
entertainment
faith
Flying Training School
Gee
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Heavy Conversion Unit
Holocaust
home front
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
RAF Heaton Park
RAF Hixon
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Woolfox Lodge
Stalin, Joseph (1878-1953)
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/764/10765/ACushingTEC180115.2.mp3
add33b5bbc53891f76d0dd4060454ec4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Cushing, Thomas Eric Chad
T E C Cushing
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Thomas Cushing (b. 1936). He grew up in Norfolk and remembers the building of RAF Little Snoring.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-15
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Cushing, TEC
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is Monday the 15th of January 2018, and we’re at Little Snoring in Norfolk with Mr Thomas Cushing to talk about his experiences as a youngster before, during and then after the war. What are your earliest recollections of life, Tom?
TC: We moved into the Old Hall at Thursford which was in flats actually and my early recollection obviously was there. I went to school in Thursford which, we originally had to walk. We used to walk across the park down in to the village. The Old Hall at Thursford down there, they took the main part of the hall down in 1916 and the part that was left was the servant’s quarters and there were three families living there. One were the Boulter family, and the other was the Hill family. My first recollection of Little Snoring was my father coming home one day saying they were going to build an airfield at Little Snoring and he couldn’t understand how they could possibly get an airfield at Little Snoring because it was full of woodland and there were also a lot of not pits, they used to have these marlpits which they dug out to put soil on the land to help it. Fertilise it when they didn’t have fertiliser in those days. He then said that they were originally going to have the airfield at Great Snoring but for some reason or other they couldn’t get one of the runways in there so they just moved it over. My next memory, thoughts of Little Snoring were that they were carting aggregate through the village. They had a big aggregate pit actually in Thursford, and these trucks were going non-stop through the village. Did you want to stop?
CB: No. Keep going.
TC: They were going non-stop through the village carting aggregate down. My father also had two lorries carting aggregate on to the airfield, and because of that we used to visit the airfield and I’d visit it with my father. I can remember driving up the main runway when they were actually laying the concrete, and the mixers were there and there was a huge heap of soil on the side of the runway because they had these big earth movers which all they did was just graded the soil out, and heaped it out on the side of the runway. Obviously it was eventually spread out and I can remember the chaps actually tamping the various sections of concrete down, and it’s quite interesting because they had a big, they had a, what did they call it? A well, put down and they used to pump the water out to all the mixing sites because obviously they used millions of gallons of water and all the runways on Little Snoring airfield were laid over the winter period of 1942/43 in about four months. And there was a hundred acres of concrete laid. And when you think that every truck that came on the airfield with aggregate was a three ton truck, and all the cement came in to Fakenham Station and was carted out here also on three ton trucks it’s quite, something quite remarkable really. The airfield, in actual fact when they moved in in 1943, in August Lancasters came in here, they were Mark 2s they hadn’t actually finished building the hangars. They were still being built and probably other works were being done as well. I remember the Lancasters arriving on a beautiful August day. I was in the Old Hall and we were actually inside the drem system and I can remember them flying around. Some were coming around fairly sharply. The others ones were going out further and coming in more discreetly. I always felt and I thought the chaps who were coming in tight were probably the experienced than the ones that were going further out and coming in. After that we were aware that they were taking off night time, going on bomber raids and I used to look out of the window and see the lights, because I could see the lights when they were taking off on the north south runway and see them taking off and they’d be climbing up and you’d just see the lights droning around and eventually those sounds would disappear. And we became aware that they were having a lot of losses, and in actual fact 115 Squadron who were flying with Mark 2 Lancasters lost eighteen crews in four and a half months. They actually bombed Peenemunde from here, and my father actually picked some Canadians up hitch hiking in to Fakenham and remembers them talking about the lights and various lights and what was going on on this raid. My next, obviously we were aware of Little Snoring. We couldn’t believe it when the, at the end of the war they dispersed but my father was also friendly with Group Captain Hoare who was the station commander. He didn’t know Group Captain Simms who was the first station commander when the Lancasters were here but he knew Group Captain Hoare. And I don’t know quite why but for some reason he always used to take him to Thorpe Station in Norwich when he went on holiday, and went to pick him up. You’d think that a group captain would get a vehicle to take him there wouldn’t you? But after the war we came down on to the airfield as Group Captain Hoare took us down to look at a Mosquito, and I can remember climbing into it and I sat in the navigator’s seat which was set back from the pilot’s seat and my brother sat in the pilot’s seat. I just felt a bit envious of this but why we didn’t change over I don’t know. But I can remember saying to Group Captain Hoare, who stood outside the aeroplane, ‘You can’t see out of it very well.’ And he said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘When it gets up level you can see out if it beautifully. It’s a beautiful aeroplane.’ Trimming his moustache with his hand. And the other thing, the other person we met up here with was the padre, and because my brother and I were being sent away to Gresham School which was in Holt as a boarder we were both very backward at everything and the old padre came and gave us some extra lessons. And one day he took us down to Ely and I can remember we were following a three ton truck which was an RAF truck and every time he tried to pass it this truck seemed to drive out into the road to stop him. Eventually we did get past and he waved at Dan and he went out and swore at the driver like a trooper. The thing, he took us down to show us around Ely Cathedral and the only other thing I remember was he had a dog which sat in car with us, and I remember going in to a shop where he bought some dog biscuits and dog food. He eventually left, and I understood that he lived off the airfield with his mother but he’d actually come from South Africa and I think that’s where he went back to. And whether he wrote to my father or not after the war I don’t know but I never did hear any more about him or anything of him. And his name was the reverend, well I say reverend, he was Flight Lieutenant Golding. After that, as far as the airfield was concerned they closed it down, and for a time they had a lot of Mosquitoes here which they sold all over the world to other Air Forces. They were just doing them up. And I obviously, was away at school and I should say during the war we were visited by two, 214 Squadron members. And the reason this came about was that Pete Boulter who was the other family in the Old Hall joined the RAF and became a flight engineer, and he flew from Wyton on Stirlings with a chap called Dick Gunton, who was also a flight engineer and they, in actual fact I think were probably about one of six crews that did the whole tour. The rest were all shot down. One of the other ones was a chap called George Mackie who was a pilot. They then went to Waterbeach where they were on a training station which they absolutely hated and they couldn’t wait to get back on ops again. And Dick Gunton said one night in the mess Squadron Leader Sly who was also a survivor of 15 Squadron and said, ‘I’m going back on ops again flying Lancasters.’ Which also happened to be Mark 2s, ‘And I want one of you two as my flight engineer because you’re both in my opinion very good.’ And Dick Gunton said, ‘We tossed a coin,’ he said. ‘And Pete won.’ He said, ‘Though in actual fact, he lost because after about the fourth op he was shot down and killed.’ The whole crew were killed. Dick Gunton then came to Sculthorpe, and while he was there obviously realised the Boulter’s lived at Thursford, and he came over to see Mrs Boulter but Mrs Boulter was away. Her husband was working up in London. Mrs Boulter was away. He got chatting to father and they became friends because they were both interested in old motor cars and Dick Gunton and George Mackie used to come, well right through 1940, the end of 1940. It would be 1943 through in to 1944 when they actually moved to Alton. But we still saw them from there. And I remember Dick Gunton was flying D-Day night and they shot down an ME410. He used to fly with Wing Commander McGlinn and Wing Commander McGlinn flew with all the top chaps, the station navigation officer, the station engineer officer and the station gunnery officer. And the station gunnery officer apparently was in the back of the Lancaster when the, the Flying Fortress when they shot this ME410 down. My next memory of the airfield basically was we, we just used to, I used to drive over it after — I ought to probably go back. I went, I was at Gresham school, and I was useless at maths. And when I left school I joined the Army and when I went up for WOSB I failed WOSB because I was useless at maths but I did manage, through my Army career to become a substantive sergeant after thirteen months which was apparently quite good, Which was a War Office appointment. You could be appointed by your local station. But anyway having left the Army my father at some time during his life had bought the laundry which he had very little interest in, and I was sort of shoved in there at the deep end. And when I joined there, there were thirty six people working there and later when my younger brother left school he came and joined me. We didn’t get along at all well and didn’t have a very good relationship at all, but we did build the business up and when I left there in 1982 when we split up we were employing a hundred and eighty people. We were doing all the American bases in England, which were about ten at the time. We used to send out a vehicle at night time to go around all the bases. And although I didn’t like the laundry it was very lucrative and we managed to make a bit of money and it was after this that I was shooting one day with a friend who was called Martin [unclear] who worked for Saville’s and we owned land at Thursford. We owned a farm there, and we owned the laundry and this chap Martin [unclear] said, ‘Little Snoring airfield is coming up for sale. It borders your land at Thursford. Why don’t you buy it?’ And I said, ‘Well, I can’t possibly afford to buy the airfield,’ I said, ‘It costs a lot of money.’ Some seven hundred acres all in all. He said, ‘Well, you’ve got two brothers. Why don’t you go to the bank and see if they’ll, you can borrow the money?’ To cut a long story short the bank did loan us the money and we bought the airfield. But Little Snoring originally belonged to Lord Hastings and 1947 he sold up Little Snoring and the Air Ministry bought Little Snoring Airfield. But in 1966 they decided they didn’t want it any more. They offered it back to Lord Hastings who said he didn’t want it but he would obviously get it sold and he offered it to the farmer who was farming the most land on the airfield and the only thing, this was the Ross family and old Billy Ross said, he said, ‘I’ll buy the land I farm,’ which was about two hundred and fifty acres, ‘But I don’t want the rest of the airfield,’ which was farmed by two other farmers and obviously there were concrete runways. Well, Lord Hastings didn’t want to sell it individually. He wanted to sell the whole piece. And anyway, we bought the airfield and it caused a lot of ill feeling from the Ross family. The younger ones in particular because they felt their father should have bought it but they had the chance to buy it and they didn’t. That’s how it worked out. Anyway, I actually started looking after the airfield because I was always interested in it. And around that time about, I used to drive around the airfield and I could only see a lot of RAF people with blank faces and I thought I’d start trying to collect the history of the place. Which I did. And the first person I managed to contact was a chap called Bruce Martin who was a Mosquito pilot on 23 Squadron, and he used to keep his motor car in a cart shed of Billy Ross, and old Billy Ross said he’s got an Airviews business now at Manchester Airport. He said, ‘If you got in touch with Manchester Airport they’d probably tell you how to get in touch with him.’ Well, I actually did get in touch with Bruce Martin and he actually came down here and took some photographs eventually. No. He had actually flown over and taken some photographs in 1966, the year we bought the airfield and I didn’t know that. And he said, ‘Oh, the manager of British Airways at Manchester Airport is a chap called Bob Preston who also flew from Little Snoring on 214, sorry 515 Squadron.’ I contacted Bob Preston, it’s just sort of how things got going and I’ve got photographs from Bruce Martin and I got photographs from Bob Preston. And Bob Preston said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Five years ago,’ he said, ‘One of my pilots in Paris was given the card of Chris Harrison, who was actually working for the Goodyear Tyre Company in Australia but he flew from Little Snoring as well.’ So I wrote to Chris Harrison and had a long letter back from him saying he was delighted that somebody was interested in what he did during the war. And he wrote, as I say this long letter and he said, he said, “More and more through the years,” he said, “I felt very guilty that I lost contact with my navigator.” He said, “He was brilliant.” And he said, “If hadn’t been for him I wouldn’t be alive.” He said, ‘But we lost contact when we finished our tour. He went to a navigation station and I went to a pilot training station.” At the bottom of it he put a PS, “Before the war he worked for ICI.” Well, this at the time was sort of in the 1970s and working at the laundry I had a number I used to ring in London if we ran short of supplies of any sort. We used to buy salt and chemicals from ICI, and I had a dry cleaning manager who was a Ukrainian who’d fought in the German Army during the war and daren’t go back to Ukraine because he’d have been shot. And he was one of these chaps who was very good, very clever but he used to very bad with his supplies and tended to run out of things so I had to ring this place in London where I spoke to this lady who used to send these things up usually by the next day. So I rang her and said, ‘Could you put me in touch with your personnel department?’ She said, ‘Yes. You’re trying to trace somebody are you?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I said. There were seven and a half thousand people I think working for ICI in this country then. She said, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘We’ve got twelve people work in this office.’ I said, ‘Very unlikely he would be working there.’ She said, ‘You never know. She said, What’s his name?’ I said, ‘Michael Adams. ‘She said, ‘We’ve got a Michael Adams working in this office.’ It was him.
CB: Wow.
TC: And they obviously put me in touch and he came, Chris Harrison came back and stayed with him. And one day after I’d learned to fly up here, this was sort of in the early ‘70s this car arrived, I was just about to go flying in a friend’s Stearman who had come to take me for a flight, and this car turned up and he introduced himself as Michael Adams and his wife. And I said, ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I was just about to going flying.’ The Stearman actually stood there. He said, ‘Good heavens,’ he said, ‘I did a lot of my training on them.’ I said, ‘You can go in my place.’ Which he did. And when he died his wife wrote to me. I kept in touch with him over the years. In fact, one time he used to send out seventy two Christmas cards to people who were stationed here. And when he died his wife wrote to me and said, “He always remembered how kind you were to let him take that flight in the Stearman.” Then it was just a question of one person knowing another person and I eventually got in touch with people in Australia, New Zealand and even Canada, and collected quite a nice collection of photographs. One of the people who helped me quite a lot originally was Wing Commander Lambert. I can’t remember how I contacted him but his pilots and navigators didn’t like him at all because he wasn’t kind to them in any way apparently. And Chris Harrison, I told you about, who was in Australia said that they used to do these ops where they did a, fly over the canals at fifteen hundred feet, and shoot up the flak that shot at them. And the bomber Mosquitoes used to fly underneath and drop mines, and he said, ‘We did an op on the Kiel Canal and when we came back we heard that all the bomber Mosquitoes had got DFCs and we hadn’t got anything.’ He said the next time when they did the Dortmund Ems canal he was going out with a WAAF in the ops room. She said, ‘You’re all going to get DFCs tonight.’ He, he knew they were going on this Kiel Canal op. Anyway, when he reported to duty they said, ‘Oh, you’ve been scrubbed. You’re not going now.’ So he just went back. ‘The next day I found out that Lambert had taken my place.’ And he said he’d done the night flight test on his aeroplane and Lambert had actually taken his aeroplane and got a DFC for it. And I met another, knew another chap called Terry Groves who actually flew on that op, and he said that when they called up Lambert was nowhere to be heard. They didn’t, he didn’t actually go on the op at all. So he was flying somewhere over Germany. So as I say Chris Harrison wasn’t very pleased. He always felt that Lambert had pinched his DFC. Over the years I obviously met a lot, quite a lot of people who’d been stationed here. Wing Commander Russell who was 23 Squadron commander lived at Blakeney for some time. There was a chap called Ron Steward who was a Lancaster navigator. He lived near Aylsham. Another pilot, 515 Squadron pilot Frank Bowcock lived in Fakenham. I shall have to stop for wind.
CB: Do that. That’s good.
TC: Is that alright?
[recording paused]
CB: It’s really good. Just, quickly. Ok.
TC: Chris Harrison worked for, it would be De Havilland before the war and no, sorry he worked for Rolls Royce in Derby and he, he was on Reserved Occupation because he was an engineer on building engines. But he eventually persuaded them to let him go and he went for pilot training in America. While he was over there they were building the factory that were building Packard Merlins and they were having some sort of trouble with the assembly line, and they, what did they call it? Seconded or they took him off training for six months to work with Packard Merlin. And because of that he had the choice of when he’d finished his training as to what he could fly when he came back. And he said, ‘We’d heard that Mosquitoes were finishing their tours, whereas Lancasters weren’t so he said, ‘I thought I’d go for Mosquitoes.’ But in actual fact the Mosquitoes did have quite a lot of losses here because they were doing low level intruding work. So that’s how he became on to fly Mosquitoes. And I assumed that he’d gone on training and, and for some reason or other hadn’t qualified. The normal thing then was to post this Michael Adams. Post them on to navigators. Ok. Can you —
CB: We’ll stop there for a bit.
[recording paused]
CB: And by the way the, in going, Michael Adams what you’re saying is that he did pilot training on Stearman which was why he was interested in the Stearman.
TC: Yes. Yes.
CB: Yeah.
TC: Yes.
CB: Can we —
TC: I’ll just —
CB: Can we just do a step back to the construction of the airfield?
TC: Yes. The first, they first started constructing on the north south runway, and they gradually worked north on the, on that runway. And the next one was the northeast south west one. That came, that went across towards Great Snoring. And the last runway they put in was the main runway. I can remember coming around on several occasions with my father while they were doing this. One day there was an old keeper’s bungalow which stood to the eastern side of the airfield where they actually did the, they had all the, what do they call the people who set out the place?
CB: The surveyors.
TC: Surveyors.
CB: Yes.
TC: They had all the surveyors in there and that was their office and they had cars parked alongside of that. And during the war of course they were, all we heard was when they were building the place a lot of explosions going off all the time. And what they were doing was blowing up tree stumps.
CB: Oh.
TC: And one of these tree stumps had actually blown up near this, these cars parked and it completely flattened an Austin 7 and it just sat there literally with this huge tree stump plonked on top of it. That’s something I remember very well. The actual bungalow was eventually moved after the war down to Langor Bridge which is about two miles away, and rebuilt by a chap called George Owen. I think he bought it off the Air Ministry. Apart from that just coming around the airfield seeing it rebuilt I know there were a lot of Irishmen here which I understand were billeted all around the place, and the foreman of all the works was a chap called Morrissey. An Irishman. A really big man. A tall man and he was called Lofty, and after the war he started up in business on his own and he was the first person in this country to make a concrete tile because he was friendly, or knew an Englishman who’d been over to America before the war who’d said they used to make tiles of concrete over there. Apparently he made some samples of these concrete tiles, flat tiles with pin holes through them and took them to the council and they agreed to put them on. And the first concrete tiles were put on a bungalow in Thursford, built by this builder Morrissey. And I stayed, obviously friendly with the Morriseys and Lofty Morrisey did a lot of building for us over the years. I was going to get him to build this house. He built my first bungalow in Fakenham but I was going to build this house but the biggest problem with him was he’d start building, then leave it and then go and build somewhere else. And of course when you want something built you want it completed. But I still know his son Jim Morrissey who is still in the building trade. Have I, have I —
CB: What was the sequence then when they build because they’re building runways and taxiways.
TC: Yes.
CB: And then dispersals.
TC: They were, they were actually building all the houses the huts and accommodation places at the same time as well. And it’s quite interesting. All the drains were dug out on the airfield with drag lines. They didn’t have any JCBs in those times. And when you think of it it’s quite a, quite an effort really. The airfield obviously was extremely well drained. All the runways were drained. All the dispersals were drained. And when we bought the airfield in 1966 one of the first things was to get the land, which was obviously disrupted through bad drainage, we had to get it all re-drained which we did gradually over the years. When we three brothers bought the airfield my older brother was farming at Thursford. My younger brother was more interested in the laundry. As well my laundry duties I also looked after the airfield. And when we eventually split up in 1982 I acquired the airfield, and my younger brother kept the laundry. My oldest brother had the farm at Thursford. I can’t remember. Have I done the Army bit?
CB: No.
TC: I haven’t? No. I went, I was away at school at Gresham School, and when I finished school I joined the Army and went up for a WOSB which was to become an officer. But of course I was so bad at mathematics I failed my WOSB, and spent my time in the ranks. But I did raise or rise up to become a sergeant in thirteen months. A substantive sergeant which at that time I understand was quite a, quite an achievement.
CB: I should imagine it was. What were you doing in the Army?
I was I was actually in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. We used to supply everything. Everything the Army had apart from food and fuel. It’s now the Royal Logistics Corps, and I think they supply everything but I, unfortunately I was stationed in the country. I tried to get abroad but it didn’t work.
CB: What was the meritorious activity you did to get such fast promotion?
TC: I suppose I was just good at my work and I took exams. I used to go up to Chilwell to do exams, which I passed. The only thing that did happen towards the end of my time Suez was attacked by us and the French, and we painted all our lorries up, all trucks and vehicles up ready to go to Suez, and we were literally bound to go within three or four weeks. And it all came to a close. Stopped. So I didn’t have to go and I was quite pleased about that because it was near my time for coming out and a friend of mine who’d actually been demobbed a few months earlier was called up and he was still in the Army when I came out. He was on Army Emergency Reserve.
CB: So did they have to repaint them the colour they were originally?
TC: They did. They painted, yes they painted them back again then. Yes. They were painted this desert colour. A sand colour. Then I came back and went in to the laundry business which my father had acquired at some time or another. When I started there there were thirty six people there. The highest paid man was earning ten pounds a week, and the highest paid lady was earning seven pounds a week. It gives you an idea how things have changed. And this was in 1956. And eventually my younger brother came and we managed to build the business up and when I left in 1982 we were employing a hundred and eighty people.
CB: What, what was the motive? How did you manage to grow the business so much?
TC: Well —
CB: What did you do?
TC: I decided from an early age that going around to houses picking up family bundles wasn’t really very lucrative and I managed to get a lot of contracts doing bulk work like hotels and factories. We did ICI at Stowmarket, in fact. But we also did a lot of American work and at one time we were doing virtually every American base in England. We used to send a truck out overnight to pick up stuff which came back to us the next morning. A lot of that had to go back the next night.
CB: Did you invest a lot in machinery too?
TC: A lot of machinery. Yes. Yes. They always said that by the end of the time I was there you could afford to spend twenty thousand pound to get rid of one person. But it was still quite labour intensive and I think we were one of the first people who employed people from France. We took on a family and put them up and board because we were desperately short of staff around the area. In fact, my brother and I used to go out to the villages at night time asking if they knew anybody who wanted to do work, and we actually had five vehicles bringing in people every morning from all the surrounding villages. I think now the laundry is not in the family anymore. I think now, that a lot of employees are apparently from Spain and Portugal. But then as a complete change I had actually done a bit of farming. Obviously my father was a farmer and I’d done a bit of farming in my holiday time and the airfield, there were a hundred acres of land on the airfield and I farmed that for a while. Basically until I retired.
CB: Was that arable?
TC: Arable, just arable land. Yes. In, in the about the 1970s I started collecting this history of the Airfield and over the years I’ve met a lot of people who were stationed here. Chris Harrison, who I mentioned earlier always said could I try and contact a chap called Terry Groves, who was a pilot on 515 Squadron and he said he was one of the only people he ever met who was completely fearless. He was rather like Micky Martin who actually came here, a Dambuster, who came here and flew with 515 Squadron, and I tried very hard to trace Terry Groves, he used to apparently drive speedway bikes before the war, and wasn’t successful. But one day a car turned up outside my house. The window was cranked down and this chap said, ‘My name’s Terry Groves. I used to fly Mosquitoes here during the war.’ I said, ‘Hello Terry, you’ve lost your moustache.’ He said, ‘I don’t remember you.’ He said, ‘You weren’t on the squadron, were you?’ I said, ‘No. I wasn’t.’ But anyway, we became quite good friends and he had a daughter living at [unclear], in fact and he used to come up here quite a lot and because I learned to fly in the 1970s off the airfield here, I did actually take Terry flying one day which he very much enjoyed.
CB: What had he done after the war?
TC: Mundane jobs. Wartime had been his, his greatest time. When he left here he went to Swanton Morley and he’d actually done thirty ops here, and asked to stay on because he said, I said, ‘Why did you want to stay on ops?’ He said, ‘I must have enjoyed it,’ and he said, anyway, they said, ‘No. You need a rest.’ But I persuaded them to stay on, but he said they said, ‘Well, you can two or three more.’ He said, ‘I’d done another twelve before they realised it,’ he said, ‘And then they did post me out to Swanton Morley.’ Well,’ I said, ‘That’s unusual. You have would normally have gone to a training station.’ He said, ‘Well, he said, I went there because they were still flying ops from there.’ And Micky Martin was there as well apparently, and one of the things he did tell me was one day a Spitfire arrived there, and just parked up on hard stand, and he said, after a week it was still standing there. He said, ‘I’d never flown a Spitfire. So I went around to see if a flight sergeant, said, ‘Can you – ’ flight engineer I presume, ‘Can you get that Spitfire started up for me?’ And he said, ‘‘Yes, I can.’’ He said, ‘Anyway, I got in it and took off with it.’ And he said, ‘The only thing was you had to change hands when you took the undercarriage up.’ I think it was over the other side of the cockpit. The lever, and he said, ‘When I took my hands off the throttle,’ he said, ‘The throttle friction nut was loose, and it wouldn’t keep tight.’ And he said, ‘Every time I took my finger off there the engine faded.’ He said, ‘Anyway, I eventually did sort this out and —’ and he said, ‘I, I flew this Spitfire for several months. I used to, and I was the only person who used to fly it. Nobody said anything. I used to fly it down to London.’ And go down to see his wife. He said, ‘Anyway, one day Micky Martin said, ‘What’s that Spitfire I saw you flying the other day?’ He said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I only fly that. I don’t let anybody else fly that.’ He said, ‘I’m going to bloody well fly it.’ Anyway, he said, ‘Next thing I knew he took it off, and he roared over Addison at [unclear] Hall who sat outside with all his papers on the desk which blew everywhere and,’ he said, ‘And after that the Spitfire disappeared.’ But he used to fly down to London apparently in an Oxford with Micky Martin, and they used to land at some airfield there. I think during the war, it was just the way they were. One interesting thing was going back to the war, war years 115 Squadron started off at RAF Marham. They then went to Mildenhall. Then to East Wretham, and then came to Little Snoring. And when I was being taught at school we were being taught by an ex-pilot called Malcolm Freegard. and he flew from Marham but I didn’t realise until I started doing the history of Little Snoring that he’d actually flown with 115 Squadron from Marham, and he didn’t know they’d come to Snoring, because he was actually shot down over Germany and became a prisoner of war in Stalag 3. And he said that he was in an acting group there, and people like Rupert Davies were there who eventually became the Maigret. I don’t know if you remember him. Is that, do you want to stop?
CB: Yeah.
[recording paused]
TC: And he said that in actual fact a lot of these, most of the people on the camp were really fed up with the people who were trying to escape because, he said every time they were caught all the privileges of the camp were stopped. And he said, ‘Not only that they pinched all our, our bed boards.’ So he said, ‘We were probably sleeping on about three bed boards which wasn’t very comfortable.’ And he said although he helped disperse soil around the camp when they were digging it out but he spent most of his time, he said they actually piled most of the soil under the theatre apparently. And I remember him saying that at the end of the war they were put on a train to be sent eastwards away from the Russians, and he said they stopped at a station somewhere and he said, there was a small vent that he could open up, because they were stuck in these cattle trucks. He said, ‘I opened this up for some fresh air and was looking out,’ and suddenly there was a crack right near his head, and he looked around and somebody had shot at them with a rifle. So he said, ‘I thought after all I’d been through to nearly be shot at the end of the war.’
CB: Yeah.
TC: But we used to lead him on through some red herrings to talk about the war, so we didn’t have to be taught Latin or something although I can’t remember what. He was a very nice man and I took him down to a reunion at Ely.
CB: Yeah.
TC: At Witchford. You could land at Witchford at that time and I actually flew down there one time to this reunion. I went to several reunions after the war for 115 Squadron, and 515 Squadron started having reunions back here in the 1990s, and I met a lot of the people who used to come back. But I eventually stopped it because in the end it was becoming too much for the older ones, and the only people coming back really was the children and I wasn’t really very really interested in children coming back to reunions so I that’s why I stopped it.
CB: How did you run it? What facilities did you have that made it practical?
TC: I had a small museum out here, and we used to, in actual fact meet in the Flying Club. The McAully Flying Club Clubhouse, and we used to get a fish and chip van come around to provide the food, and, and they, they were very good. One year I managed to get the Battle of Britain flight over here and a Mosquito. Not a Mosquito, a Spitfire came over and did a display which was quite nice.
CB: The museum itself. What were the contents of that?
TC: It was basically the, quite a lot of things that people had lent me, given me and had my photographs in there. But it was basically a wooden hut which had actually been a sergeant’s mess at Langham, which my father had bought. And it got to the stage where nobody was coming back, and it needed quite a lot of work spending on the roof and whatnot, so the majority went down to Flixton Air Museum. And I’ve still got a few pieces on a table out in one of my barns which I show visitors when they come, and as I say the majority of the stuff either went back to people who, who owned it, or it went to Flixton.
CB: How did people know about your museum?
TC: For quite a long time I had a notice in the church, and one interesting thing happened from that was, one day a person turned up from there and said looking all round, very intrigued, he wasn’t a pilot or anything he was just interested in what happened during the war. And he said, oh he said quite interestingly he said, ‘I was staying he was staying in a campsite down in Devon last year and the chap there said he was a Mosquito pilot serving up in Norfolk.’ And I said, ‘What was his name?’ He said, ‘I just can’t remember, he said. Everybody called him Josh.’ And, I said it was obviously Josh Hoskins, I said who I’d tried to contact but never been successful. He said, ‘Yes, it was him,’ and he said, ‘I’ve got his address at home. I’ll let you have it.’ Anyway, he let me have this address and telephone number, and I rang him up and had a chat with him, and I can’t remember why, I had quite a long chat with him, but I. He was very friendly with Bob Preston who was the manager of, became the manager of Manchester Airport, British Airways. And Bob Preston had always said, ‘If you ever manage to trace him please put me in touch.’ Anyway, I rang him back, and said for some reason or other I can’t remember why, and his wife answered the phone. And she said, oh she said ‘I’m so pleased you rang him,’ she said, ‘He’s dying of cancer. He’s not expected to live many more weeks, she said but you’ve bucked him up enormously.’ And anyway, I rang Bob Preston who I was still in touch with and told him, Bob Preston went down to see him the next day.
CB: Really.
TS: Which I thought was very nice.
CB: Excellent. Yeah.
TC: So that sort of thing was incredibly rewarding.
CB: I bet.
TC: More rewarding than most things that could happen, and over the years another thing that happened was, if you go to the church you’ll see that there’s a poem in there written by a chap called Steve Ruffle who was ground crew on 23 Squadron, and he came up here and I had quite a long chat, and just as he was leaving he said, ‘Oh,’ he said, he said ‘I wrote a poem, he said when I left here after the last time.’ He said, ‘It’s not very good, he said, but would you like a copy?’ and I said, ‘Yes I would.’ And I think it’s the best poem I’ve read of any poem written after the war, and in this poem he mentions a friend of his who’s an artist, and he’d actually done all the record of the scores of the kills and the rewards. And these boards were hanging in the officer’s mess and they were rescued by a lady called Mrs Whitehead who entertained the troops in her house during the war. She lived in a farmhouse in the village, and she went into the officer’s mess one day after the war because she heard a noise in there, and somebody was about to chop all these boards up for firewood, and she cleared him out, and she put these boards in the church and they’re there to this day.
CB: Fantastic. Yeah.
TC: And anyway these boards were done by a chap called Douglas Higgins. This chap, this chap Steve Ruffle’s friend and he said, ‘I feel very said. I lost contact. We were great friends during the war.’ He said, ‘I lost contact with him.’ Anyway, he’d mentioned him in this poem. You’ll see that in the poem if you go to the church, mentioning the artist who did the murals on the wall, and he said he was my friend. And anyway, everybody who came back to the airfield after that, I said, ‘Do you know, did you ever know Douglas Higgins or anything about him?’ And this went on for years. And one day a WAAF came back and I said, ‘Did you know Douglas Higgins?’ Her name was Mary Hicks. And she said, ‘Yes, he lives down the road from me in Sheffield. I still see him.’ So I put them in touch and they met again. They met up every year until Steve Ruffle died.
CB: Amazing.
TC: And Douglas Higgins is still alive to my knowledge at a hundred and two.
CB: Is he?
TC: And he came back here two years ago when he was ninety eight, well he’s. No. Four years ago. He’s about a hundred two, not, but I haven’t heard from him and I should probably ring him up very shortly and have a chat with him. But he was a very religious man, and happiness sort of comes out of him. He’s one of these people, and, but as I say he’s still alive and he did a lot of painting, and I’ve still got one of his paintings here now that he did. When he came back to me, it’s a painting of the church. He looked at this painting and said, ‘That’s very good. Who did that?’ Because I had my name over it and I took my name off. He looked. He said, ‘Oh, I don’t remember that.’ And he’d painted it. I’ll just show you that.
CB: Do.
TC: I’ll just show you. It’s a very nice painting.
[recording paused]
CB: You’ve talked about people coming back here, and we know as a background that actually so many people in the forces never wanted to speak about what they had done. Do you think it’s different? There’s a difference between speaking about it and coming back? What makes them come back? Or has made them come back?
TC: I think a lot of them had worked all their lives after leaving here and generally I think they suddenly look back on their life as they gain, as most people do, things they’d done when they were young. Dick Gunton who came to see us during the war, he used to see us during the war. I managed to trace him up to Lancashire, and he didn’t really want to know anything about anything. He said, ‘Don’t ever put me in touch with anybody. I don’t want to know anybody that I’ve ever met during the war.’ And he said, in actual fact, he said, ‘I felt in the war, I rose to the rank of flight lieutenant,’ which I think is the same rank as captain in the Army and he said, ‘I was the head of engineering on RAF Oulton’ he said, ‘And I, I reached, that was the time I reached my pinnacle.’ He said, ‘After that my life,’ he said, ‘I had a small garage and nothing very much happened,’ he said. And I felt Aubrey Howell who was a, a Lancaster pilot came back here, and he had the small graphic works, but his bomb aimer was a millionaire apparently, and the difference of during the war Aubrey was a very strict, apparently in, in, in the aeroplane and they survived their tour of ops and Aubrey Howell actually did eight trips to Berlin from there, and he’s, he’s sadly dead now but I did meet him on several occasions. I think some of the people, an example probably is probably Wing Commander Russell. I met him on several occasions away from the airfield, and he was very helpful in letting me copy his photographs and talked about it all. When he came back to the airfield, I just felt he didn’t want to be here. I took around my little museum I had here at the time and he showed very little interest in it all. And I just felt he wanted to get out and away. And he actually learned to fly again from Swanton Morley, or got his licence back, but he never ever landed at Little Snoring in spite of the fact I invited him on many occasions. Other people who’ve come back, I think it was basically the fact that they’d worked their whole lives and were thinking about what they did when they were younger and I think over time, I was in the Army you tend to remember the good times rather than the bad times. For example, doing forty eight hour guard duty over a snow cold weekend with snow blowing in the hut you were sleeping in.
CB: Yeah.
TC: But, you know that’s just an example. But I think a lot of the people, Wing Commander Russell’s navigator, one of his navigators, I actually wrote to him I knew where he was he saw Wing Commander Russell and said he’d had, ‘This chap, Cushing write to me about Little Snoring airfield. He said, ‘I’m not interested in that. I don’t want to talk about that.’ That was it.
CB: You were reported to the boss.
TC: Yes. Yes [laughs] but —
CB: Do you suppose that there are some experiences that are too dramatic, too traumatic for people to want to address?
TC: Yes. I, I can tell you —
CB: And how does that come out?
TC: Tell you something else. A chap called John Derby contacted me, and said he’d like to come back and visit the airfield, and he was a mid-upper gunner on Lancasters. And when he got back here he wanted to go down on to the main runway. That was the only place he was interested in. The end of the main runway, he walked around there on his own. I stood talking to his wife. When he came back he said, ‘My crew left here,’ he said, ‘In 1943.’ He said, ‘I wasn’t with them and they all got shot down and killed.’ And he said, ‘I felt guilty about it all my life.’ And he, in fact what he didn’t know was in fact there was a survivor and he was a chap called Heath. And I met him years later and he said they were flying over Stuttgart, I think it was, and he said he suddenly heard the shout from the rear gunner, ‘Fighter,’ and machine guns going off. He said he looked up because he was the bomb aimer, he looked up and there were tracers coming right down the length of the Lancaster, and he said they must have hit the pilot because I know they had an armoured shield behind them but he said the pilot slumped forward. He said, ‘The next thing I knew I was on the parachute.’ He said, apparently the whole aeroplane had blown up and he said, ‘The next day the Germans took me out to where we’d bombed the night before and it was a false town near Stuttgart.’ He said, ‘But I had the great satisfaction of being on the outskirts of Stuttgart,’ he said, ‘When the Air Force came back the next night and bombed the hell out of it.’ But John Darby who I was talking about he had actually won the DFC. He’d been shot down over Europe and escaped I understood through the Pyrenees out of Spain and he got a DFC for that. He was a warrant officer. And literally a few months later his wife rang me up and said he’d died, and he wanted his ashes spread on the airfield, on the airfield where he’d walked. And she came down here and we had a little service out there.
CB: Lovely.
TC: And there are several lots of ashes from people who served here during the war. There are two couples who met here near the flying, near the control tower. They worked in radar. Both of their ashes spread there. And two or three others as well.
CB: In spreading the ashes do they have some kind of memorial plaque?
TC: The only thing is —
CB: On the site or what?
TC: There is a little plaque on the control tower.
CB: Right.
TC: But one of them, there isn’t. I ought to really put it up. A chap called Tom Hodgson. He died.
CB: Was this —
TC: He was a fitter.
CB: Is this control tower the watch office type?
TC: It is the watch office.
CB: Yes. The original.
TC: It’s known as the watch tower.
CB: Yes. Yes.
TC: But I always call it the control tower.
CB: Can we just go back to this feeling of guilt?
TC: Yes.
CB: Of being a survivor. What is it? What is it that gives them that feeling of guilt would you say?
TC: I don’t really know is the answer to that. It’s obviously, I think they think, ‘I should have been there and I shouldn’t be alive. I survived and they’re dead.’ I’ve just read a book about, “The Cruel Sea,” about Nicholas Monsarrat and how things happened there. And similar things happened with them. People survived shipwrecks.
CB: I mean the notion is, the actuality is that on a Lancaster or the big aeroplanes the crew is the family.
TC: Yes. Oh, yes. Yeah. They all, they all went out together, drank together even if they were flight sergeants and officers.
CB: Which was, yes.
TC: All on Christian name terms.
CB: Yes. They worked, toiled and died.
TC: Yes.
CB: As a family.
TC: Yes, they did. Yes.
CB: And is this the basis of the guilt?
TC: The majority of the Lancaster crews and the bomber crews stayed together and in touch. I think it was possibly, I don’t think it happened quite so much with the Mosquito crews for some reason or other. I think they split them, went their separate ways more.
CB: I suspect it varied according to when the end of the operations were.
TC: Yes. Yes.
CB: And what people did later in the war.
TC: One of the people I met was Buddy Badly who was a New Zealander and he was a brilliant pilot apparently. And when he was doing his training in Canada he hadn’t qualified as a pilot but he was sent up in a, in an aeroplane, told to do stall turns and he did this stall turn and when he started to go down he couldn’t move the elevator. It was stuck. So he was going straight down and apparently he was up at about eight thousand feet and all he could see down below was snow and ice because it was mid-winter there. And he suddenly thought the only way I’m going to level this aeroplane out is to climb over the back seat which he did and levelled it. And he found he could fly it by reaching over the seat and controlling the aeroplane like that.
CB: Crikey.
TC: And he called up the station and said that he was in trouble and couldn’t move the elevators and apparently the wing commander took up and came through beside him and said, ‘You’re never going to land that. You’ll have to bale out.’ He said, ‘It was getting dusk,’ and he said, ‘I was still miles away from the airfield.’ He said, ‘I looked down and all I could see was snow and ice and I thought they’ll never find me.’ And he actually took the aeroplane back and landed it.
CB: Gee.
TC: And didn’t even damage it. And for that he got the Kings Commendation for flying before he’d even qualified as a pilot. And he then did a tour in the Middle East and came back to Little Snoring and there is a story in the book I’ll tell you. They had a photograph taken when they arrived from the Middle East. 23 Squadron. There were several of the squadrons around here were flying Mosquitoes and they had a reunion of all the people that had been in 23 Squadron, and Group Captain Heycock who was station commander at West Raynham had also been a 23 Squadron commander. And they had this photograph which I have in my album and I’ll show you. They had this photograph taken where they all had their fingers up. The next photograph, which obviously was a serious was taken and Buddy Badly was standing behind Group Captain Hoare and held a wine glass so it looks as if the wine glass was standing on Hoare’s head. And when the photographs came out Hoare was furious, called Wing Commander Murphy in who was the squadron commander and said, ‘I want him kicked off the squadron. It’s an absolute disgrace ruining this serious photograph.’ And Murphy said, ‘I’m not going to do that,’ he said, ‘He’s one of my best pilots.’ Anyway, Buddy Badly had various situations. He landed a Mosquito back at Woodbridge because I think he’d lost an engine and had been shot up badly. And the next thing that happened they were over Venlo about a fortnight later and they attacked this airfield. He went over there with George Stewart on a Day Ranger, and he said as they went over the airfield George Stewart shot up this JU88 but he said there was nothing in front of me and they said they would obviously never go back, he said. Anyway coming back over the coast there was this big Freya mast and he thought, ‘I’ll have a shoot at that. At least I’ll shoot at something.’ And he went down and shot this thing up and there was a German standing there with a little machine pistol shooting at him and he knocked his engine out and he couldn’t get any rudder controls either.
CB: Jeez.
TC: He said the only way he could go up was on the trim tab and he said, ‘I said to the navigator,’ because he’d lost an engine which wasn’t on fire apparently, just stopped, he’d feathered it he said, ‘We’re never going to back to England.’ He said. ‘You’ll have to bale out.’ But he said he’d got a new navigator and the navigator said, apparently while the navigator was trying to get up, he accidently pulled his parachute cord, and, and he said, ‘I had silk all over me everywhere,’ he said, ‘And I was fighting to get this parachute silk out of the way,’ so he could see what he was doing. He said obviously there was no way he was going to bale out without a parachute so he flew the aeroplane back to Woodbridge and landed it there on one engine. Which took quite a long time I understand. Two or three hours I think. And anyway, he said he rang up from Woodbridge to Little Snoring. Group Captain Hoare answered the phone and he said, ‘Could you send an aeroplane down to pick me up?’ And Hoare said, Hoare said, ‘No. I bloody well can’t. You can find your own way back.’ He said, ‘So I had to gather my parachute.’ Which he had to bring back which he had, and the navigator was carrying his all bundled up and they came back to Little Snoring. So Hoare was still feeling a grievance. Anyway, Murphy went on ops on the 2nd of December which was a couple of months later I think, was shot down, was killed, and Buddy Badly was posted out the next day, he said. So Hoare never did forget. The other thing that they said about Hoare was that when he arrived at the station Micky Martin was here who had the DSO bar, DFC bar, and of course Hoare had the DSO and DFC, and what the chaps on, the pilots and crew on 515 Squadron said was that Hoare had him posted away because he’d got more medals.
CB: Yeah.
TC: But he did twenty two ops from Snoring.
CB: Did he?
TC: Micky Martin.
CB: Yeah.
TC: And he was actually mentioned in Cheshire’s book of calling him up while they were on ops.
CB: Fascinating. We’ll pause there.
TC: Yes. Ok. I think we’ll just peruse —
[recording paused]
TC: I took flying the chap who was actually fearless on 515 Squadron, he said they were coming back off ops one night when they had a radar on the Mosquito which could pick up on anything coming up behind them. He said they were flying along, and this blip came up on the radar and he said, ‘I did a 360 degree turn.’ And they had this ASH radar which had a thin beam. This way rather than a round beam, from an oblong beam. He said he couldn’t pick up anything in front of them, he said anyhow this, this actually happened three times. This blip kept coming up he said and it was rumoured that you could pick up your shadow, and so it was a false reading. He said, ‘I said to my navigator [Doc Wray?] I’m going to ignore it this time.’ But he said, ‘At the very last minute,’ he said, ‘I was coming up. There was a Halifax coming up a bit above us,’ He said, ‘At the last minute I lost my nerve,’ he said, ‘And as I turned,’ he said, ‘Machine gun bullets came up and shot the Halifax down.’
CB: Jeez.
TC: So, he said, there was something behind them.
CB: Jeez.
TC: He said, ‘We scarpered like mad then for home.’
CB: Jeepers.
TC: Because, he said we obviously couldn’t find it on our radar. But the radar that 85 Squadron had which was a, high flying radar apparently had a better, they could pick things up better than this narrow radar. That’s the only thing I really want to say.
[recording paused]
CB: Just returning to the construction of the airfield what’s the, what was the position there?
TC: My father was friendly with Frank [Prune] who founded Little, Great Snoring, and when Frank [Prune] heard that they were going to build an airfield all over his land he wrote to the Air Ministry saying that, giving all the production, it’s very good land there apparently, saying that he produced this that and the other. And obviously didn’t want the airfield to be built there. But it didn’t make any difference and they said he was actually crying in his beer in the pub in Fakenham. And it was only because they couldn’t get one of the runways in. I don’t know which one it was. Long enough. But they just moved the airfield over to Little Snoring. That’s it really.
CB: But the land here was owned by whom?
TC: It was, it was owned –
CB: By —
TC: Lord Hasting, which I have already mentioned.
CB: By Lord Hastings which you mentioned. You mentioned it.
TC: Yes.
CB: What I meant to say was —
TC: Which he wouldn’t have bothered I’m sure.
CB: Do we know anything about his? Do you know anything about his reaction to that?
TC: No. I don’t. No.
CB: Right. Ok.
TC: A lot of the airfield there was a woodland came right up the centre of the airfield.
CB: So they had to take the woodland down completely.
TC: Cut the woodland down. Yes. Yeah. It was a fairly new woodland apparently.
CB: A final thing could you describe what a drag line is and how it works?
TC: It’s a caterpillar, tracked vehicle with obviously a cab. A cab on it. It had a long crane like construction out front with a bucket which hung free on cables and it was just literally dropped on to the soil. And I think they could adjust the angle of the bucket and they pulled it towards them. Pulled it towards the digger. It was a very, very rudimentary type of digger really. And when, when you think of all the things that, all the drains that were dug out they were all put in, and I presume they, they must have been used I would think even to do the smaller roadways and the perimeter tracks. The only other machines they had were these big American earth movers which had a big wheel on the front with a cab and the engine sticking out, and they had this huge container at the back which can literally drag along and, and lift the soil up into it, and they could also deposit that from it—
CB: into a bucket,
TC: A big bucket. Yes. I can draw one even now. The way they looked. I think they still use a similar type machine.
CB: Now, the runways were concrete on top but what was the composition of the —
TC: Absolutely nothing underneath. They were just put straight down on to the clay.
CB: Oh.
TC: And if there were pits which there were, which were pits that were used to take out soil to fertilise the land, they would fill those in with rubble, and all of those pits where they were they would drain right up to them to make sure they were never wet.
[noise in the room]
TC: Did I hear something?
CB: You did. A ting. Right. Thank you.
[recording paused]
CB: So we’ve had a really interesting conversation. Thank you, Tom Cushing. Fascinating.
TC: I hope it's useful to you.
[recording paused]
CB: Right.
TC: I lived in the Old Hall at Thursford as I’ve said and I could see across to the airfield which was to the west. And one morning I looked out my bedroom window and saw a Lancaster upended in a drain. When I started a history of the airfield, trying to trace the airfield I tried to find out which Lancaster this was. And I got the daily record sheets of 115 Squadron, went right through and there’s nothing in it. After that I asked anybody who came back if they remembered the Lancaster, and nobody did. One day a person I flew with, a friend of mine who was a manager at Keiths of Barsham said he’d had a shoot there one day the previous week and one of the guests had said his father had crash landed a Lancaster at Little Snoring. I said, ‘Was he a Canadian or Englishman?’ He said, ‘I think he was an Englishman.’ I knew a Canadian had gone off the other end of the runway. And anyway, to cut a long story short it was this chap, Howard Farmiloe, and I got in touch with him. He was a land agent in Devon. He came back and told me all about it. They’d been on their way to Berlin and been shot up by a night fighter and lost a port inner engine. He said everything else was going ok. The gunners claimed to have shot the intruder down. Over Berlin they’d lost another engine from another fighter. He’d flown all the way back to Little Snoring, they were the first drem lights they’d seen on two starboard engines and he said, ‘We’d actually done quite a good landing.’ Probably shooting a bit of a line, but he said quite a good landing. And he said, ‘I couldn’t understand why going down this runway which was at that time it was 07, why we weren’t pulling up.’ And what he didn’t know was that the runway is twenty feet lower that end. At the eastern end. So, he went off the runway and upended in the drain and he said, ‘When I got to the end of the runway I thought about pulling the undercarriage up,’ he said, ‘But two nights earlier I’d done the very same thing at the station I was at with similar problems of no hydraulics and wrecked a Lancaster and been told off by the wing commander for wrecking a perfectly good Lancaster. Anyway — ’ he said, ‘We, we all clambered out,’ he said, ‘Up and walked up to the control tower. Told them we had a Lancaster down.’ He said, ‘They didn’t believe us but they sent out the fire truck and saw it there.’ Eventually we actually climbed over it and I collected some [ash] spent cartridges which were in the front of the aeroplane which eventually got lost somehow or other. I think, somebody stole them. Eventually they, they put a balloon under the tail of a Lancaster and put sleepers up on to the airfield and winched it back on to the airfield. They did actually fly again and it was shot down some months later.
CB: Oh.
TC: But not, not with him on board, because he’d finished his tour and he was the youngest man to get the DSO in the RAF.
CB: Was he really?
TC: Yeah.
CB: Let’s just to cover one point which you mentioned then, which was, drem lighting. Would you like to describe what that was and how it worked?
TC: It was literally a circle right round the airfield with bleed off points which came into the runways. And when that runway was in action obviously all the other ones were out so there was just one. So they knew exactly which one they had to go in on.
CB: So this is lights on poles.
TC: Lights on poles. Yes.
CB: How high are these poles above the ground?
TC: Telegraph poles size.
CB: Right.
TC: Height.
CB: But you can’t see them from a great height. You can only see them from low.
TC: I think you can see them from a great height. Yes, the ones that were there.
CB: Right.
TC: But the ones on the runways were shaded.
CB: Right.
TC: So you can only see them when you were coming down low.
CB: Right.
TC: I have actually got some old, three old cast iron drem lights.
CB: Have you?
TC: Yes.
CB: Fantastic.
TC: Which were the last three I found on the runways.
CB: Amazing. Thank you.
[recording paused]
CB: So we’re looking at the album here and part of the airfield.
TC: Yes. Over the winter of 1943/ 44 they stored a lot of gliders here before D-Day, and we came down to the bottom end of the airfield and the chap standing on a guard gate there obviously a bit bored took us across down to this field. This field here, and showed us round the gliders.
CB: This is on the edge of the airfield between the runways.
TC: Yes. They stood, they had several on the standing down here I presume, some up here. They had twenty two altogether here apparently and they all disappeared before D-Day. Ok, that’s it.
[recording paused]
CB: We’re, we’re looking at bicycles. All, everybody had their bike.
TC: Yes. When 115 Squadron left Little Snoring they took off, bombed Berlin and landed back at Witchford. And Aubrey Howell said that every crew had all their bicycles on board and all their private kit because, he said they weren’t going to leave their bicycles behind to be stolen. And one crew was shot down. A chap called Woolhouse, because any, any record you ever see it’ll say that he took off from Witchford but he actually took off from Little Snoring. And when I first heard this story Aubrey Howell told me, I thought, well are they exaggerating? Was it true? But Wing Commander Rainsford came back here who was a wing commander at 115 Squadron at Little Snoring, and while we were walking down the runway he said, ‘Of course. you know,’ he said, ‘They took off from here, bombed Berlin and landed back at Witchford.’ I said, ‘Are you sure?’ He said, ‘Of course I’m sure.’ He said during the evening Witchford rang up and said it was fogbound and they said they were probably going to have to land them back here.’ But he said, ‘Later on they rang and said the fog had dispersed so they went back to Witchford.’ It’s interesting, Woolhouse whose aeroplane was shot down, and I often wonder what the Germans might have thought if they had seen seven bicycles in it.
CB: Seven bikes in the Lancasters.
TC: There’s another interesting story to that, I’ve had somebody in touch with me recently who’s going to dig Woolhouse’s aeroplane.
CB: Ah.
TC: Which is in Germany, and he said that although all the crew were killed he said he’d, he’d talked to two schoolboy witnesses who said they saw two parachutes coming down. So they think probably the other two might have been executed. But he’s going to do a dig on that this summer apparently. So I told him to look out for bicycle parts.
CB: Absolutely.
TC: That’s Aubrey Howell and his crew.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Thomas Eric Chad Cushing
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-15
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ACushingTEC180115
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:15:01 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Norfolk
Description
An account of the resource
Tom Cushing lived alongside the site of what became RAF Little Snoring in Norfolk. He watched the construction of the airfield over time and the daily life of the operational squadrons thereafter. After the war he continued to be interested in the history airfield and he purchased the site. He founded a museum on site and started researching the history of the airfield. Over the years he met many former RAF staff who had been based there.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
115 Squadron
515 Squadron
childhood in wartime
home front
Lancaster
RAF Little Snoring
runway