1
25
151
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1989/41032/MGeorgeDB1796593-171117-01.1.pdf
f5f12a5becf7229ddc35e52aa90ba02a
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
George, David Burrows
D B George
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-17
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
George, DB
Description
An account of the resource
14 items. The collection concerns Sergeant David Burrows George (1796593 Royal Air Force) and contains operation reports, correspondence, a biography and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 153 Squadron and was killed 22 January 1945. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Shelagh Wright and catalogued by Barry Hunter.<br /><br /> Additional information on David Burrows George is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/108520/">IBCC Losses Database.</a>
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Raid Report Book - 9 Squadron
Description
An account of the resource
A record of operations conducted by 9 Squadron aircraft between 15 February and 26 March 1944.
Creator
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9 Squadron
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Schweinfurt
Germany--Augsburg
France--Marignane
Germany--Stuttgart
France--Nord (Department)
Germany
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
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Text
Text. Service material
Format
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41 handwritten pages
Identifier
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MGeorgeDB1796593-171117-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Conforms To
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Pending text-based transcription
9 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bomb aimer
mid-air collision
navigator
pilot
radar
RAF Manston
RAF North Killingholme
RAF Silverstone
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Swinderby
RAF Tangmere
RAF Woodbridge
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1895/35624/SGillK1438901v20020.1.pdf
d27079bd7850cc29296b58cd50593335
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
Gill, Kenneth
K Gill
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-09
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Gill, K
Description
An account of the resource
One hundred and sixty-four items plus another one hundred and fifteen in two sub-ciollections. The collection concerns Flying Officer Kenneth Gill DFC (1922 - 1945, 1438901, 155097 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, documents, photographs and family and other correspondence. <br />He flew operations as a navigator with 9 Squadron before starting a second tour with 617 Squadron. He was killed 21 March 1945 having completed 45 operations.<br /><br />The collection also contains two albums. <br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2114">Kenneth Gill. Album One</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2117">Kenneth Gill. Album Two</a><br /><br />Additional information on Kenneth Gill is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/108654/">IBCC Losses Database.</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Derek Gill and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
War changes everything
At the of age fifteen in 1938, I went to work in the drawing offices of the Leeds Fireclay Company. They were sited on Torre Road in Leeds and I found myself sitting alongside my cousin and great friend Kenneth Gill. He was aged seventeen, which at the time did not seem to be that significant, that is, except to Ken, of course, who would always remind me I was younger. Soon after the start of the war in 1939 the company had to close with many of the staff joining the services including my cousin, who fulfilled and ambition by joining the Royal Airforce.
Here my age did become significant. I was too young to join the forces but, after a visit to the Labour Exchange, was sent to work in the commercial stores of Blackburn Aircraft. They were based on Roundhay Road in Leeds now the site of a Tesco and Homebase stores. You can now find a blue plaque, commemorating the part the factory played during the war, on the wall of Tesco.
This was my dream job. I loved aircraft and just being in the stores was like heaven to me. After a short while in the stores I was offered the opportunity to start an apprenticeship as an electrician, a profession I followed before and after my call up on December 7th 1944.
I was ordered to report to Fort George in the Highlands of Scotland to start six weeks of basic training, where the army tried to turn me into a soldier. I'm not that convinced they succeeded. After a brief break it was down to Catterick Camp in Yorkshire where I joined the Royal Corps of Signals. I guess my training as an electrician was significant in the army's decision to send me to the Corps. Things here brightened up as everyone was a tradesman, even the Regimental Sergeant Major who unusually for a RSM was greatly respected and liked by all.
It was like being back at school making friends and learning new things. We were trained in the art of laying telephone lines and given the job title 'linesman'. This was neither a technical, nor difficult job, but during times of war good communications were very important. I also took the opportunity to learn how to drive, on both four and two wheels, which added greatly to the fun of the place. After this I was sent to Holmfirth (now of Last of the Summer Wine fame) in Yorkshire to await embarkation, to destinations unknown. During my brief stay I had the opportunity of leave and managed
[page break]
to get back to Leeds for a few days.
My journey back to Holmfirth, at the end of my leave, should not have posed that big a problem. I went to catch the Holmfirth bus on Water Lane in Leeds and waited and waited and waited. No bus turned up, in fact not a soul was around. I was just starting to contemplate how many days I would get in prison for being Absent Without Leave when a motor bike pulled up alongside me. Sitting on the bike was an RAF chap who, with a cheery greeting, asked me where I was heading. I replied back to my unit at Holmfirth and as luck would have it that was exactly where he was heading. My days in prison had thankfully just been a passing thought. My luck was in on this and many other occasions.
My cousin Ken appeared to be having a much more exciting time. I was both pleased, and proud of him when he joined the RAF, this was the one service I would love to have joined. He started his training for aircrew in the United States of America and Canada and would return to Canada on many further occasions. Strangely I never asked him if he learnt to fly, although I understand that a large number of aircrew did. Ken had a great head for figures so it was no surprise to me that he became a navigator. At that time there was no such thing as satellite navigation, it was all done by maps, rulers and log tables.
In his early days he flew in various aircraft including Ansons and Wellingtons, finally ending up in Lancasters and was first posted to No. 9 Squadron. This was a short lived post as the whole unit was transferred to No. 617 Squadron. This was shortly after the famous Dambuster raid and was no doubt to replace those sadly lost on that revered raid.
We were lucky enough to meet up on leave on numerous occasions, the happiest of these times was when Ken married Vera. I was very proud and honoured to be his best man and they were blessed a year later with a son, Derek. Looking through Ken's log book, now a proud possession of Derek's, makes for interesting reading. One particular raid that stands out was that on the German pocket battleship Tirpitz. The Tirpitz was holed up in a Norwegian fiord and with great understatement, his log book states simply 'sunk'. I only wish he had been able to tell me in more detail of his adventures, but this being war time and the slogan 'walls have ears', was not possible.
Ken, like so many aircrew at the time, had some narrow escapes but sadly his luck ran out on 21st March 1945, so near the end of the war. On a daylight raid over Bremen a direct hit with the bombs still on board ended his and the rest of the crews lives. Flying Officer Kenneth Gill DFC, Aircrew Europe with a star and bar, War Medal with star and bar Croix de Guerre, aged twenty-two, left behind a widow and young child. His wife Vera never remarried always thinking that one day he would return from that raid on Bremen.
[page break]
His Croix de Guerre was awarded for flying operations with a French Squadron which for some reason is not entered in his log book Although his award made the newspapers of the time, I have been unable to find out any more details, so for the present it remains one of those many untold stories.
My posting started the weekend after Victory in Europe had been secured. I set sail with my unit, from Southampton heading east and after a brief stop in India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) we ended up in Rangoon in Burma. Our unit was attached to the 19th Air Formation Signals and we found our first accommodation to be a very large comfortable house that was obviously in the posh part of town. To my surprise on taking a walk around the area the house was situated on Leeds Road. How ironic when my home town was Leeds. After a brief stay in the house we were based at an Aerodrome at Mingladon about 12 miles away and found ourselves now living in tents. This was a foretaste of what was to come; lots of aerodromes, lots of packing and lots of unpacking.
The work load was to change little throughout my national service. We had very little to do the whole time. We were not complaining, seeing parts of the world we would be unlikely to ever visit, getting well fed after the rationing of home and getting paid. We often wondered why we had ever been sent but we could only play the hand we had been dealt.
It was not long before we were on the move again boarded a Dakota bound for Hong Kong. The pilot turned out to be a superstitious type and after a quick count it turned out there were thirteen of us. Someone had to be offloaded. Very reluctantly one of our drivers was nominated, along with his jeep. First stop was Bangkok and then on to Saigon. It turned out that anyone who flew with RAF transport command, regardless of rank, stayed at the glorious Majestic Hotel. On entering the dining room, we were surprised to find our driver sitting with a very smug look on his face. It turned out he had hitched a lift in another Dakota along with his jeep. So our happy little band headed of in two Dakotas, one with twelve souls and one with only one and his jeep of course.
Arriving in Hong Kong gave me an even bigger shock. As the door of the aircraft opened I was greeted, by an equally shocked friend from back home in Leeds. His name Jeff Nixon; because of the censorship of the time, I was totally unaware of his posting. We both just looked at each other, mouth open and could not find anything more fitting for the occasion than 'what are you doing here?'. We then had a pleasant month in Hong Kong sightseeing and were due to become part of 'Tiger Force' destined to invade Japan, but the Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki put and [sic] end to that. Tiger Forces destination was to have been Okinawa in Japan, with the intention of
[page break]
setting up an aerodrome for Lancaster bombers and other assorted aircraft. The bombers were to have been shipped over from the UK, assembled on site, to then be used in similar roles as that carried out over Europe by my cousin Ken. Had he lived, who knows, we may have ended up based together. The end of the war left us in limbo – what to do with us now?
On 3rd April 1946 after a short stay in Hong Kong our small party of 13, joined around 150 RAF personal to board HMS Apollo bound for Shanghai. HMS Apollo was a long narrow ship and had previously been a minelayer, before taking on its ferrying duties. As a minelayer it may have been a very good ship but as a ferry it was hopeless. It never seemed to pitch but had a slow roll that left all but the strong stomached feeling very seasick.
At the end of our journey we sailed up the beautiful Yangtse [sic] river to dock at the Bund in Shanghai harbour. Transport was waiting to take us to our first billet, Ash Camp. During the war Ash Camp had been used by the Japanese as a prisoner of war camp and it filled us with dread what we might find. Thankfully our reservations were soon put to rest as we arrived to find a very comfortable camp. The mess hall was a pleasant shock, cloth table cloths, knifes and forks laid out and milk, butter and sauces in the middle of the tables. At meal times the Chinese waiters would look after our needs and although there was never a menu, were always able to provide us with excellent food.
News reached England that we were staying in a Japanese prisoner of war camp which gave our loved ones worries about our accommodation. They had witnessed the appalling condition our prisoners had returned home in. We were only too happy to set their minds at rest but were left wondering just what sights the camp had seen over the previous years. We were very much in the dark at the time, but were sure that the last Allied soldiers to stay in Ash Camp had not been as well treated as us. Sadly as the atrocious stories gradually filtered through, we found out that our thoughts had been correct, in fact far worse, than we could ever have imagined.
Our next billet was the poetically named the 'Dairy Farm'. Although not a farm there was a field full of cows behind the billet, beyond that some dog kennels and beyond that the Chinese staff billets. The staff liked to keep chickens and when the cockerel got started early in the morning, it set the dogs barking and the cows mooing which resulted in many of the lads getting very little sleep during our brief stay at the Dairy Farm.
From here we moved to our final quarters at The British Country Club. Although our beds were made up in the billiard room this was a very comfortable place to stay. Our meals were taken in the grand old ball room and there was a full size swimming pool. My friend John Bamber and I decided to grasp the opportunity to learn to swim
[page break]
and after a week we had mastered the art of the doggy paddle and a unique form of backstroke.
The purpose of our stay in Shanghai was to establish a staging post for aircraft flying between Hong Kong and Japan. I would like to say that over the next 8 months we were kept busy with the task. This was not the case and gradually the number of personnel was reduced until our party of 13 became 2 with around 100 RAF personnel.
I was lucky enough to be able to spend most of my time enjoying the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai. During this period in Shanghai's history, the city was split into various different national zones. Along with the British zone were Portuguese, American, Russian and French zones. The British zone was near the river and had street names such as Edward VII Street. Each zone reflected its own country and if you ever found yourself lost you could always take a look at the street names to find out who's zone you were in. I had many happy nights sampling different cultures, being invited to various countries all within the confines of one city.
One of the few exciting moments was during a visit to the airfield at Lungwha, just outside the city. John was driving a 3 ton Ford truck with me in the passenger seat. We were driving across the perimeter road, which was poorly names as it went directly across the main runway, when John stalled the truck. There was no automatic ignition on the truck so I jumped out to man the starting handle. John looked on as I turned the V8 engine over with one hand, jumped back in and told him to move quickly. He had not be [sic] able to see the Curtiss Commander coming in to land on top of us. Thankfully disaster had been averted. Once we had got back to camp and calmed down I tried to turn the engine over again, it took all my strength to do it with two hands, let alone one. It is surprising what you can do when blind panic sets in.
After eight happy months in Shanghai we had to leave in a bit of a hurry. The communists were at the outskirts of the city and ready to enter any day. This would be the closest I ever came to actual active service. John and I boarded the ex midget submarine supply ship, HMS Bonaventure and set sail back to Hong Kong. We were the last two British Army personnel to leave Shanghai.
Arriving back in Hong Kong I had to say good bye to John. He had been posted to Singapore while I was to stay on, based at Kaitak aerodrome. This was to be my first proper post since leaving England with the job title 'test clerk'. This involved working from the telephone exchange testing the lines and dealing with any breakdowns. Once again this was not a very demanding job bit [sic] it did have the best working hours I've ever had, 9.00am to 4.00pm with 1 1/2 hours for lunch a NAFFI break morning and afternoon with every Saturday and Sunday off. I took the opportunity to improve my swimming
[page break]
with regular visits to Castle Peak Bay.
When I came to the end of my posting I was offered jobs with both Light and Power Company and the Hong Kong Telephone Company. This was very flattering but I missed my parents and wanted to get home to Leeds so, in October 1947, I boarded my last ship, the MV Devonshire and six weeks later arrived back in Liverpool, to be demobbed on December 7th 1947, three years to the date since my call up.
I had always wanted to join the RAF like my cousin Ken. Ironically for the majority of national service I was posted alongside the RAF. This gave me many benefits; good food, good accommodation, some wonderful parts of the world to explore and the chance to see up close the aircraft. I have maintained that love of aircraft to this day, both watching them fly and painting them.
How different this might have been, had I been born two years earlier. My cousin like so many others lost his life aged only twenty-two, here I am retired for over twenty-five years. Those two years we used to joke about cost so many lost years, for those like Ken who never came back and for those like his wife Vera, who never came to terms with the fact, that he never came back. It hardly seems fair.
Arthur Alexander Gill
[inserted] Memorial to Air Force personel. [sic] the name previous to F/O Kenneth Gill is W/C Guy Gibson.
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
War changes everything
Arthur Alexander Gill's memoir
Description
An account of the resource
Biography of Arthur Alexander Gill and memories of his cousin Kenneth Gill. Writes of working in the same firm as Kenneth Gill before the war. Too young to join forces, he was employed in Blackburn aircraft stores. Was called up in December 1944. Writes of his army training and being home on leave in Leeds. Then provides outline of his cousin Kenneth Gill's service in the RAF including training in the United States and Canada, operations on 9 Squadron and then 617 Squadron. Mentions Ken's marriage to Vera and birth of son Derek. Mentions Ken taking part in Tirpitz operation and finally that Ken's luck ran out 21 March 1945 on a daylight raid over Bremen when aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire with bomb still on board and all crew were killed. Then continues with his own service history after VE day when he served in Burma, Hong Kong, Shanghai before returning to England in October 1947.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
A A Gill
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1938
1944-12-07
1945-03-21
1946-04-03
1947-10
1947-12-07
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
England--Leeds
Scotland--Highlands
Scotland--Fort George
England--Kirklees
Norway
Germany
Germany--Bremen
Burma
China
China--Hong Kong
China--Shanghai
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
British Army
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Text. Personal research
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Six page printed document
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SGillK1438901v20020
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
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Darryl Harrison
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
killed in action
Lancaster
navigator
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
Tiger force
Tirpitz
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1519/30375/BGambleATGambleATv1.2.pdf
2657924e2f12afbc9e2eaea6afe49c54
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
620 Squadron
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-23
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
620 Squadron
Description
An account of the resource
Twenty-three items. The collection concerns 620 Squadron and contains photographic slides or aircraft and places, an autobiography of Alan T Gamble, wireless operator training school documents, a memoir of operations on D-Day by Noel Chaffey and a short biography of him as well as noted of crews lost on 620 Squadron during Arnhem operation.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Darren Sladden and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[underlined] WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE [/underlined]
By
ALAN T. GAMBLE
[line of stars]
[underlined] PART ONE [/underlined]
[underlined] “BY THE SEAT OF HIS PANTS” [/underlined]
[line of stars]
[underlined] PART TWO [/underlined]
[underlined] “NO PROBLEM SPORT” [/underlined]
[line of stars]
[page break]
TO THE MEMORY OF THE AIRCREW
OF
BOMBER COMMAND
WHO WERE KILLED OR MISSING
IN
OPERATIONS OVER EUROPE
1939—1945
[line of O’s]
[page break]
THERE ARE OLD PILOTS AND BOLD PILOTS
BUT
VERY FEW
OLD….BOLD PILOTS
Anon.
[page break]
[underlined] FORWARD [/underlined]
Like most impressionable youngsters I had ambitions; notwithstanding the fact that ambition is one thing and the chance of achieving it is something quite different.
In those early days I was not aware that there were so many factors involved. The only one that seemed obvious to me then was opportunity, or the lack of it, but on reflection it is obvious that both ability and motivation were most certainly lacking.
With the most important ingredients that one needed to guide one's path in life missing. I was stuck in a rut which seemed to be the normal lot of an average child from an average working family, although there may well have been a spark of a Walter Mitty trying to get out.
I had developed an interest in all things mechanical from bicycles to motor bikes then cars and aeroplanes. As far as aeroplanes were concerned I could not get enough of them. I read everything I could lay my hands on. I made models. I went to air shows to be thrilled by Alan Cobhams Flying Circus at Shoreham and to Tangmere for Air Days. On one occasion my hand built bicycle took me as far as Hendon for the Air Pageant and more thrills.
I once watched one of the giant German airships, the Hindenburg, cruise in from the Channel between Worthing and Lancing on it's way to Cardington, never suspecting that in a few years time there would be more lethal visitors following the same path.
Those early days were full of the exploits of aviators. Scott and Black and the original Comet. Amy Johnstone and Jim Mollison. The Schneider Trophy attempts and new records being made all the time by intrepid aviators on transatlantic and round the world flights from places like Hendon and other mysterious outposts of civilisation such as Mildenhall!.
For me to ever come into close contact with aeroplanes looked like remaining a schoolboy dream forever.
My schooling was not spectacular. I reached no academic heights. I could not even qualify for High School. I don't think I ever
[page break]
had a school leaving certificate but if there was one perhaps the kindest comment that could ever have been made on it would have been "goodbye"!.
On leaving school I had taken up an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker/polisher and the years passed by as the world lurched from one crisis to another until the prospect of another war loomed on the horizon.
Eventually the day came when ultimatums were given and promises were broken which resulted in the Prime Minister broadcasting the declaration of war against the German Nazi State over the radio on 3rd September 1939.
I had already made tentative enquiries about joining the RAF which attracted me like a magnet. Perhaps that is when I should have joined but I didn't; and the story that unfolds is the result.
[line of stars]
[page break]
It is difficult to describe one's feelings at the time of a declaration of full scale war in the knowledge that is was likely to be a very messy business.
For myself I could only recall all the stories that my father and my uncles had related of all the horrors that they had experienced or that they knew of and it was only 21 years since the last terrible conflict had ended with all of the human debris and suffering still evident in everyday life.
Even the Sunday walks along the prom. at Worthing were not without their reminders, with the war wounded from a nearby base being taken out in their basket chairs. They were the blinded and the limbless and those with such disfiguring injuries that they had so be covered with netting to avoid upsetting the kids or the sensibilities of some people whose war had only meant a few shortages and would rather that such unfortunates were kept out of sight.
There seemed hardly a family that had not lost a loved one, some having disappeared from the face of the earth with no resting place, and it looked as if we were going to have to go through it all again.
I had a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach as I made my way to the front garden gate with my friends after we had heard the broadcast by the Prime Minister; “....we are at war with Germany .....”. We were very quiet for a while as we contemplated what it was going to mean to us all and were each busy with our own thoughts when the wailing of the air raid siren jolted us back to reality.
As is turned out it was a false alarm but it certainly go things moving. Almost before the siren whined down an Air Raid Warden dashed by on his bike frantically ringing his hand bell and shouting to us to take cover which made very little impression on us except to shout back and tell him what to do with his bell. After that initial jolt the conversation turned to what we were going to do about it as there was little doubt to our minds, at our age, we were bound to be involved and would be likely to join a lot of our other friends who had already joined the services.
[page break]
I had made up my mind that it was going to be the Air Force for me but it was a long time before it was possible to get anything near what I wanted.
Every time I went to the recruiting office I found that their priorities did not coincide with mine and in the end I left it in the lap of the Gods.
Shortly before my 20th birthday I was called up!.
A great deal had already happened. Norway and Denmark had been lost to German domination and most of the continent of Europe was under the NAZI jackboot.
We had suffered serious setbacks all over the world and our resources were stretched to the limit. We had fought the Battle of Britian [sic] and only won it by the skin of our teeth. The threat of invasion of our shores still hung over us, which I and a good many others, as civilians, had been prepared to defend in the uniform of the LDV. (Local Defence Volunteers), later to be renamed 'The Home Guard' or more affectionately known later as 'Dads Army'.
I still wanted to change my kharki [sic] uniform for a blue one so when the time came it was 'in for a penny-in for a pound', I volunteered for aircrew; and much to my surprise, was accepted. There were still hurdles to be overcome like the medical examination and that was a tough one but when it case to deciding the aircrew category that I wanted the selection board and I had a little problem.
With so many young men joining, mostly with ambitions to become a pilot like myself, there was little chance for me with my educational qualifications; or lack of them!
They said No to pilot, No to Navigator, and No to Flight Engineer, which was actually my second choice, but they finally agreed that I might make the grade as a Wireless Operator/Air Gunner. That was good enough for me, especially as there were a lot of other things that I did not want to be!.
That was it, and I still had a chance of getting into the air but it took a long time. Nearly two years; and not without a few ups and downs along the way and a lot of hard work to make up for my mis-spent youth.
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With a great deal of excitement I followed the instructions that I had been given and found my way to Cardington in February 1941 for 'induction', which seemed to me to be a new word for a monstrous machine that devoured humans but had none of the glamour that I had expected of the place that I had previously known from news reels and books. The home of the airship.
Anyone that went through that routine will recall that as soon as the gates were behind you and you got a number that is all you were.
Most areas were out of bounds and we were confined to camp. No longer was our life our own so I suppose it is not surprising that I only saw the airship sheds close up on one occasion whilst I was there.
I saw more of a highly polished floor under my nose, and of the plumbing of the latrines, and the mess kitchens on fatigue detail and of uniform beds and uniform lockers and contents until I was utterly sick of the sight and smell of boot polish, floor polish, metal polish, stained porcelain and disinfectant and stacks of greasy tins.
It did not take long to learn that everything was best done by numbers if I was going to survive without getting into too much trouble.
There was the one time that I made the mistake of allowing myself some original thought when I forget that airman were not supposed to think and that the order of the day was still "yours is not to reason why, yours is but to do and die". The very backbone of blind discipline, in that terrible place.
One wet day the hut sprung a leak allowing a steady drip of water to splash onto our brightly polished stove in it's immaculately whitened surround next to a highly burnished coal bin which contained a load of rubbish under a carefully placed top layer of dusted and polished coal.
I would go as far as to suggest that the coal was kept just for inspection time and was otherwise locked away, whilst we did our best to burn the rubbish and the dust. With very little success of course.
The net result was that the leak was threatening to destroy all of our hard work just before an inspection by an officer was due.
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It seemed that the easiest thing to do was just to place a fire bucket on the stove until the last moment but the Sergeant in charge had different ideas when he came in for his final look around.
I was left speechless after a good dressing down for mis-use of fire fighting equipment when the offending bucket had been removed from the hot stove and the guilty person identified.
He roared; as only Sergeants can, "you, can't put out a fire with 'ot water you stupid airman: what are you?". By that time I had also learned in a very short space of time that the safest thing to do was agree with anyone with stripes on his arm, and admit sheepishly,to the accusation.
After that it was just a case of keeping the head down and only doing what I was told to do in that soul destroying place and hope that my turn would come later.
Most of my off duty time; and there was not such of that, was spent resting or sleeping. I was too damn tired to do such else after being on the go for about 14 hours a day.
It was obviously more than some people could take and it was not unusual at night to hear a little weeping going on in the darkness by someone who was finding it particularly hard going. Our civilian clothes and most of our personal posessions [sic] were sent home in a cardboard box at the RAF's expense and then we belonged to the Air Force body and soul. After that it was just a matter of settling down and running around like headless chickens.
We learned all the basic things that were expected of us. Who and who not to salute and how. Great chunks of Air Force Law and the Air Force Act were thrust down our throats, including the riot act; to leave us in no doubt what-so-ever as to the very meaning of the word 'discipline' as applied to the forces of the Crown.
It was definitely "yours is not to reason why" etc,...and after three weeks of agony, having been confined to camp all of that time, we were considered fit to go out in public with our bright new uniforms and partially shaven heads.
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Going out in public did not mean that we were free. We went in a large party by train, more or less under escort of several NCO's and were delivered to a unit at Skegness for more 'square bashing'.
After being herded and marched about we eventually finished up being allocated billets in what had previously been holiday boarding houses, but there was a difference. Air Force beds and the three 'biscuit' sections of mattress had taken the place of the more comfortable Slumberlands that pre-war paying guests had enjoyed, and as many as possible had been packed into each room.
We were rounded up every morning and marched about and drilled first without rifles and than with, and drilled some more, and then some more until at times I wondered if my feet still belonged to me. They finished up a mass of blisters on top of blisters until a visit to the MO determined that synthetic soled boots did not agree with me and the inflamation [sic] subsided after changing to leather. How glad I was that I had not gone into the Army. I wondered if they would have been as sympathetic?.
At last we were moulded by our drill instructors into regimented lumps of humanity and with the passing out parade in sight there was considerable competition to be the best flight on parade.
Well; among the instructors anyway.
My efforts made sure that we were not!.
It was still common practice in those days to wear such things as sock suspenders as socks were not made to stay up on their own any more than trousers were, so it was not unusual for me to be wearing them.
Unfortunately one of mine came adrift on the march as we pounded our way towards the saluting base with rifles and fixed bayonets. It was causing a bit of a problem as the chap behind me kept crashing his No.9's down on the trailing bit and although it was a bit of a lurching job as it twanged it's way back I am sure we could have got away with it.
Nevertheless, a young officer on the flank worked his way across and came alongside me as I was in the outside file, and hissed out of the corner of his mouth, "step out of line and fix that quickly", so I did.
I stepped smartly out of line by half a pace and bent down to
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rip off the offending article but half a pace was not enough. Four others tumbled over the top of me in a tangle of arms legs and rifles.
We managed to recover sufficiently, minus a sock suspender, to get back in line before we marched past the saluting base but it goes without saying that there were some very red faces. I was of course carpeted by the flight commander and threatened with all sorts of punishments and it was the first time that I had been on a charge of any sort. I'm not sure what the charge was though but I was beginning to get the hang of things by that time. I do remember that with tongue in cheek I stated in my defence that I had only done what I had been told to do like a good airman and the fact that it went wrong was hardly my fault……there were a lot more red faces and a great deal of spluttering. The case was dismissed and I was told that I should go a long way in the Air Force. The further the better…..like TIMBUKTOO!.
As far as postings were concerned I kept my fingers crossed for a few days and was agreeably suprised [sic] to find that I was going to Mildenhall in Suffolk, instead of some isolated outpost, to continue the process of turning me into aircrew.
Sometimes I have thought that Mildenhall might have been better off without me!.
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At Mildenhall my 'on the job training' started off in 'A flight office of 149 Squadron and there I started, to familiarise myself with the workings of a flying unit and aeroplanes.
I sort of bumbled along quite happily as the work of the unit grew on me.
It was one big thrill to be soaking up the atmosphere of this very famous RAF station that had been the scene of numerous departures of record breaking flights before the war and had at one time even been inspected by representatives of the German Air Force High Command.
Currently it was flying almost nightly operations against targets in Germany and German occupied territory, particularly ports and invasion barge concentrations.
I was moved out to the flights after a certain incident which was the result of been asked for assistance by the flight commander. It seemed that he had mis-laid his safe key and as he was 'ops' that night "could I help by getting his pistol out of the safe”?.
It was yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. That request was as good as an order from such an exalted person and it certainly never occurred to me to refer the matter to the Flight Sergeant in charge.
Many years later I was to find out the correct procedure to achieve access to a safe when the key had been mislaid, but then; if the officer did not seem to know what to do why should a 'bloggs' with only a few months in the service be any better informed!.
'Sir' was quite happy to find his pistol, all oiled and cleaned, with ammunition, laying on his desk when be returned from briefing and with many other things on his mind he did not have time to ask questions.
It was two days later when the subject came up again as he still could not get into his safe so I was obliged to show him how. All I had to do was pull it away from the wall diclosing [sic] the hole in the back created by a circle of holes done with the aid of a Wolf electric drill. He seemed very upset and reckoned with a bit of luck that he would become a casualty before anyone found out. I must confess that…………………
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in my ignorance I could not understand his concern.
People and aircraft were being lost and damaged right left and centre but 'slight' damage to a safe seemed to be a much more serious problem.
I am not too sure of it but I do believe, that he was the great P.C.Pickard and that somehow he overcome the case of his damaged safe.
As for me, I was dispatched to the flight line and actually let loose with a tractor and refuellers. I don’t remember anyone asking me if I could drive but as it happened the only thing that I had been behind the wheel of before had been a Bren gun carrier,(in the Home Guard-days), when training with local regular units; but no-one seemed unduly concerned and I was soon charging about happily with petrol and oil refuellers as well as towing aircraft about.
It did not take long for the administration to find out that I did not hold a driving licence for my various sorties onto the public highway when I thought it was about time I tried to qualify for a full service licence. Not only was no-one interested but I found myself restricted to camp boundries [sic] only. No harm in trying anyway!.
In due course I found myself having to undertake a different sort of training.
Everyone was required to do a short local course of field training to ensure that they were proficient in the use of certain basic weapons, and as a relatively new arrival I was detailed to report.
I had handled enough weaponry in the Home Guard to know my way around most of what the RAF could produce and I had been awarded a marksmans proficiency in basic training apart from handling all sorts of non-standard stuff.
We had been issued with Canadian Ross .300 rifles of 1916 vintage that had never seen the light of day since they had been manufactured. They had hastily been taken out of storage as the result of an appeal made by Churchill for assistance after Dunkirk,and had been shipped to us urgently with millions of rounds of ammunition in a special convoy. Along the other items were more hand grenades, some Browning automatic .303 rifles and perhaps the most potent of all; the Boys .5ins anti-tank
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rifle which looked like a king sized rifle which fired armour piercing shot.
This latter item was looked at very suspiciously by the 1914/1918 veterans who were 90% of our ranks and when it had arrived and been degreased along with everything else there had been a lot of dicussion [sic] as to who was going to do the test firing of the thing. The net result was that they; and that included my father, encouraged me to do it, so off we trooped to the range up in the Downs to try and prove something.
Having given the Brownings a satifactory [sic] work-out the time case for the Big-one!
Despite the fact that it was on a bipod and it's heavily padded butt was pulled tightly into my shoulder, and I was in the classical prone position; when it went off I thought the heavens had fallen in. I was forced back several inches but despite the painful process the shot went where it was intended and everyone was satisfied. I promtly [sic] became No.1. on the gun.
The idea was to have a crew of four but it was questionable whether I would have the rest of the crew with me to spot and load when we were confronted by an enemy vehicle, despite the fact that in those desperate days we were expected to stand and fight to the last.
What we lacked in experience then we made up for by our determination to defend our homeland. The order of the day when things were at their worst was 'take one with you' which spelled out some very nasty goings on both for our unit and any Germans that got further than the units manning the beach defences.
Among the assortment of weapons were the 'Molotov Cocktails';bottles of mixed petrol, oil, and parafin [sic] to back up the lavish use of hand grenades.
Part of our defensive plan was to throw then all out of the upper windows to saturate the road junctions with splinters and flame; so my attitude towards that course was one of mild amusement. And a certain amount of smuggness [sic] .
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It therefore presented no problem when, at a certain part of the course we were in the weapons pit and the Flight Sergeant was calling us in one at a time and going through the procedure of throwing a hand grenade. After a series of bangs I was next in line, so it was "next one, step forward" etc and it was my turn to turn the corner into the active part of the pit.
I think that the Flight Sergeant had probably had one or two nasty experiences with the highly sensitive and nervous types as he seemed very tense when I arrived on the scene.
We had all done a dry run in practice so the rest was done in time honoured fashion as I was handed the grenade.
It was "by numbers-one, pull the grenade off of the safety pin, holding down the lever" ...."Two, throw the grenade overarm...and get down". The lever would fly off as it was thrown and then it would go off in either four or seven seconds from the time of throwing according to the fuse that had been inserted, and I doubt if many people hung about after the pin was out.
In the Home Guard we had practiced a short count after releasing the lever so that an air burst would result but what we were doing was not quite as sophisticated so I thought I would show off a bit. After pulling the pin and holding down the lever I enquired of the F/Sgt "now?".
He went a strange puce colour and kept shouting "now, now, now" as I continued to hold down the lever in the throwing position. Then he changed his cry to "everyone out" which was followed by a mad scramble as the trench was cleared in record time.
I contemplated putting the pin back in and handing it back to him but figured that was pushing my luck so I lobbed it down range where it went off with a satisfying bang.
I soon found myself facing a very irate 'chiefy' who suprisingly [sic] enough just sent me back to my place of work instead of escorting me to the Guard Room on a charge of some sort. But not without my ears burning.
He hurled several unkind remarks after me as I departed about "clever s...." and expressed the hope that the nest time I tried anything like that I would blow my f…… head off!!. Charming!.
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I soon found that there were plenty of other explosive articles about the place that one had to be very suspicious of in the absence of adequate instruction.
On my introduction to the innards of a Wellington I was told that the 'magic box' with a loose red cover on it in the navigators compartment had a demolition charge inside it and could make a nasty mess of things if interfered with. The same applied to the red cover over the firing switch on the table.
Other nasty devices were the explosive cable cutters set in the leading edges of the wings. It was good bye fingers if they were accidentally triggered and a short 12 bore type cartridge fired a chisel head into a plate.
A job that I did not particularly care for was towing a fully fuelled and armed Wellington about when repositioning was necessary.
It was a very rare job which I did very gently in case anything fell off despite being assured by many people that it was perfectly safe. After all; it was argued, the pilots had to taxy then around and fly them in that condition.
So they might have done but that did not make me feel any happier about the task.
Too many things just seemed to be taken for granted such as the incident out near 'A' Flight dispersals, no more than 100 yards from the 'Bird in Hand' and less than that from a fuel dump.
I came across an armourer sitting astride one of the new 4000lb. 'cookie' bombs on a bomb trolley. He was carefully chipping away a groove around it's middle with a hammer and a cold chisel as they had a tendency to slip out of the bomb hoist sling when arming up!.
The expression on my face must have been one of absolute horror if it reflected what was in my heart but once again I was assured that it was perfectly safe. Nevertheless, I took off at a high rate of knots to the other side of the airfield until he had finished.
I was to learn later that activities such as that really were quite safe. It was just a question of learning about what made things tick but I always remained a little suspicious ever since the occasion when a Cpl fitter had climbed into a Wellington
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undercarriage wheel wall to investigate the malfunction of an indicator micro switch. I had been shown such things when the safety locks had been in but on this occasion he had said "perfectly safe"…….but it wasn't. The undercarriage collapsed and he was crushed into a very small space and that, unfortunately was the end of his waiting for a pilots course to come through. It was a very unpleasant and messy business for everyone involved.
I generally tried to steer clear of trouble but it was not easy. I once got a loaded petrol bowser stuck in the sand on the way out to 'B' Flight. The Flight Sergeant was called to sort everything out, and me!.
Everyone stood around making various suggestions and I foolishly put in my pennyworth but got told to "belt up” for my suggestion so I just stood back and watched the fun. But I had a feeling that attaching a tow [underlined] above [/underlined] the tractor axle was not a good idea. There were lots of strong words when the tractor and the F/Sgt finished up on their backs but it eventually came out, I finished refuelling. and the aircraft went on ops. despite my efforts.
I still remained on towing and refuelling, even after I was left to refuel a Wellington on my own but I did not secure the filler caps correctly; mainly because as far as I can recall no-one had ever shown us how they should have been done.
It was a very alarmed pilot who landed immediately after take-off with petrol pouring from his wings, and the aircraft was unserviceable for some time whilst drying out. Even then I only had a dressing down and some belated instruction but perhaps the final effort was when I tried to put 'F' Freddie into dispersal on my own.
I had marshalled it in onto the taxyway opposite the dispersal pan and the Sgt. pilot airily told me to put it away; so I tried, but not very successfully.
Although I was fairly adept at hitching up the tow bar and operating the air brakes from the cockpit and I got nicely lined up going into the dispersal I had overlooked the fact that it was a bit of a down hill gradient and the brakes of a Fordson agricultural were not designed to hold a ten ton aircraft in such circumstances....and neither did it!.
Not only did the brakes not hold but the aircraft pushed the
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tractor, and me, through the hedge sideways resulting in a bent tractor and bent rear guns as well.
Eventually someone realised that perhaps a lot of responsibility was being placed upon 'Bloggs' from time to time, inexperienced as he was, and however willing he might be. From then on, although I still towed things about the fitters and mechanics, who were after all the responsible tradesmen, did the jobs that they were qualified and paid for....and more importantly, signed the Form.700 accordingly.
There were still some dirty and unpleasant jobs to be done from time to time; such as cleaning out the remains of a rear gunner from a battle damaged Wellington. A very unpleasant memory to carry with me when I subsequently set off for aircrew training. Despite the banishment to the more mundane jobs I did some-how get dragged in as an 'extra' in the film 'Target for Tonight', by being allowed on the mainplane and going through the motions of refuelling.
It was a great dissapointment [sic] when I saw the film after the editors had been at it. I appeared in a two second flash out of what I recall was at least a two minute take.
There is always the possibility that when they saw the proofs and noticed this leering airman on the wing trying to look like Errol Flynn they were obliged to do more drastic cutting rather than re-take it. We will never know as the film was also darkened by filters to give a night effect although it was taken in daylight!
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Piece by piece the vast programme of aircrew training which involved thousands of people was inexorably sucking me, and others, into it's system as it churned out the crews to man the thousands of aircraft that were pouring off of the production lines. My name came up to the top of the list and I was off on my travels again.
This time it was to Blackpool for the beginning of Wireless Operator training; which turned out to be just another production line although it was not nuts and bolts coming off of the end. Blackpool by that time was a sea of blue. Even Reginald Dixon the well known organist at the Tower Ballroom was in uniform as a Corporal drill instructor and his duties seemed to leave him a lot of time to continue to play the organ.
It was a welcome break to go along to the ballroom to enjoy his recitals. 'Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside' always seemed to be booming out some time of the day, but it was no holiday for us.
The boarding houses had been taken over in the same way as they had been at Skegness and they had crammed even more double bunks in so that there were about ten times the number of "guests" that would have normally have been accommodated in peace time.
It was a new experience to eat in our billets which was a change from the mass catering that I had been getting used to but although the landladies did their best with the ration allowances they did seem to dish up some strange things at times. Nevertheless, my taste buds had already undergone a change and I recall that I was eating a lot of dishes that I would have previously turned up my nose at. It was either that or go hungry!.
Our days were divided between morse training and drill with weekly visits to the swimming pool for our bath. The bath arrangement killed two birds with one stone as all the boarding house bathrooms were either locked up or otherwise out of bounds to us. We used the bedroom washbasins. The alternative to a [underlined] real [/underlined] bath was to partially heat a swimming pool.
The tram-car sheds had been converted for signals training and had been fitted with long tables equipped with headsets and morse keys, and stony faced civilian instructors seated at the
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end of each table.
Half the day was taken up in this environment getting used to the incessant dit,dit,dit,dah,dah,dah, at increasing speeds until the bell went to give us a break or when someone cracked up under the pressure and had to be carried away screaming or crying. It was not only the WAAFS that were affected that way!. No-one who ever went out that way ever came back but there were other ways of being withdrawn from training. It very nearly happened to me when I got 'stuck' at one speed and it was only after pleading with the chief instructor that I finally made the breakthrough.
Then one reached the stage where there was a progress test undertaken in the most nerve racking place. It was in the upper floor cutting rooms of Burtons, 'The Fifty Shilling Tailors', which had also been requisitioned.
The room was set out in a semi circle of tables facing a raised dais upon which there was one table with an elaborate brass morse sending key and a headset. All of the other tables just had headsets.
As we progressed through the course we were tested at an appropriate speed with no re-test if we could not meet the requirements, until the final test came up.
If anyone failed at that point they were washed out, finished, ceased training, call it what you like; and were sent off somewhere else to be something else.
The tension started to mount when the Warrant Officer who was conducting the test, appeared in his white dust coat and issued a dire warning about cheating. After that he set a metronome going to monitor the speed, and by the time he made his first signals check to ensure that everyone was hearing satisfactorily every nerve in the body was jangling.
By the time the opening dit,dit,dit,dah,dit, had come across some people had already gone to pieces but the remainder squared up their papers, checked that their half a dozen pencils were at the ready in case of breakages, and with one more deep breath just ploughed on hoping to get the test piece down with no more than the permitted number of mistakes.
It was inevitable that a good many people 'went for a Burton' in that place. 'Going for a Burton' was a phrase among aircrew
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when referring to those who for obvious reasons had disappeared from active service. That was the signals side of Blackpool apart from the fact that we even tried to read everything in dots and dashes. The paper, the hoardings, even our letters from home. The locals must have thought we were all daft but as in most skills it was a case of practice making things perfect or at least proficient, but I recall that we used to get some strange looks.
A lot of our time was spent in Stanley Park, the Tower Ballroom, and the public baths where we had our weekly bath; (unless one was rich enough to bribe a landlady). and that weekly bath in our case was combined with dinghy drill.
It is indellibly [sic] imprinted on my mind.
Stanley Park was bad enough with incessant marching up and down doing rifle and bayonet drill with a crazy old F/Sgt who worked us up to a pitch where we could have quite cheerfully put one through him. I'm sure old Freddie Fox knew that too.
The baths were something quite different.
Few people had swimwear and in fact it was considered 'cissy' to wear it anyway so several hundred blokes in their birthday suit's were quite a sight and there was a great deal of speculation as to the sight when they were replaced by WAAFS in the same state of undress. The mind boggled!.
To my knowledge no-one ever found out although there were a few bets taken. but security was very strict and WAAF Police replaced RAF Police when the switch was made and a roll call confirmed before the actual change over was made.
Despite the fact that I had been brought up by the seaside I was not a good swimmer, probably due to the fact that I had been pushed in at the deep end at an early learning stage. Being a slow learner I had swallowed a lot of water before being dragged out and pumped dry. It is hardly surprising that thereafter I was not attracted to deep water. Especially the cold variety.
Nevertheless, I did manage to swim the required width across the deep end to qualify as proficient but it was only the preliminary to the so called 'dinghy drill'.
I always seemed to go straight into a state of shock when it came to donning an icy cold, wet and heavy Sidcot
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flying suit, plus parachute harness and 'Mae West' life jacket which was inflated by the mouth after being thrown in. In practice the inflation was done by operating a pressure cylinder toggle but we had to do it the hard way.
There was an awful lot of floundering around after entering the water without swallowing too much especially with all the weight one was carrying, and suffering from the others making waves and generally simulating heavy seas before getting into the dinghy. It made things very difficult and I did not even enjoy doing the aggravation bit to others either.
There were times I could have cheerfully packed it in and remustered to a less demanding ground job but somehow I stuck it out.
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The day finally dawned when the agony was over and with others I was off to Yatesbury in Wiltshire to learn all about procedures and equipment.
At last I was doing something tangible and I sailed through the course to be awarded the 'sparks' badge at the end plus a few more pennies in my pocket.
I certainly needed the latter as at Mildenhall I had for some reason been overpaid to the extent of being some £5 in the red at one time so deductions had been savagely made until the debt had been paid off. I could have settled it in cash at the time but I was told that the accounts section did not have a procedure for it so for a long time I had only been receiving 5/- five shillings, (25p) every two weeks and in a place like Blackpool my cash balance did not last long. It was no fun at all.
I was very glad when it had been finally settled and I no longer had to rely on the kindness of others for the odd cigarette, cups of tea and buns as well as the odd postal order from home. I'm sure a lot of others were pleased about it too.
I did manage to make up for the lack of certain 'home comforts', namely food, on one occasion though.
On a physical training run at Yatesbury one afternoon I decided that I had had enough and dodged the column by peeling off between some huts followed by a shout from a Cpl. who had seen me go. With that I put on a spurt with the intention of rejoining the party further down the route but did not reckon on the ability of the PTI.(Physical Training Instructor). He caught up with me first and that was me on a charge.
Later, when asked by the officer why I had not stopped when told to do so I simply told the truth and said that I thought that I could run faster than the PTI and that I had hoped to beat him back to the group. My award for failing to do so was three days C.C. (confined to camp), full marching kit parades twice a day at the guard room and kitchen fatigues to go with it. I didn't mind one bit!. I had nowhere to go anyway and I finished up being one of the few people in that place who was getting [underlined] four [/underlined] meals a day for a while.
It was worth peeling buckets of spuds and cleaning a mountain of dirty dishes and pans. The cooks were sympathetic and served up generous helpings as they would for themselves. I do not
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ever recall seeing a skinny cook!.
Someone had got hold of the idea that if you were particularly good at morse beyond the basic standard required then there would be a chance of being earmarked for Coastal Command so with others I put in the extra effort and time and achieved the extra speed almost up to Navy Telegraphist standard.
In principal it seemed a good idea when Bomber Command losses were reaching somewhat frightening proportions but it did not do me or anyone else any good at all as far as I can recall.
As soon as the course was over we were dispersed all over the place; mainly in Bomber Command, to consolidate the training doing all the things that Wireless Operators did and still wondering if it was all worth while.
I went to Marham in Norfolk.
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Photo
YATESBURY 1941
-19-
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I covered a lot of ground whilst I was at Marham but I still had to get airborne and there was a long way to go.
I suppose that being aircrew under training had a lot to do with the fact that I was given a wide experience of different jobs in a very short space of time. That is what I thought at the time anyway!.
I started out on the flight line doing daily inspections and ground tests on Wellington and Stirling radio equipments and was later transferred to what was then called Flying Control; as the R/T (Radio Telephone) operator.
Theoretically my job was to relay the controllers instructions to aircraft but everything seemed so incredibly slap-happy during daylight hours that I often found myself doing the actual control whilst the controller kept an ear open in the background.
I found myself particularly attracted to the two Thompson machine guns that were kept in boxes in the control tower. So much so that I was permitted to clean and polish then regularly; provided that I did not put the magazines on!. One particular controller seemed pleased to have someone around that was familiar with then as he certainly was not. My Hone Guard experience again. We only had one in the platoon but everyone knew how to use it!.
On one occasion during a quiet lunchtime with no movements notified I was on my own in the control tower when a Stirling arrived in the circuit and the pilot asked for landing instructions, but the pilot would not circle whilst I got in touch with the controller so I finally gave landing permission. Having given taxying and parking instructions I dashed out of the tower to marshall [sic] it in next to the tower. I was amazed to find that the pilot was a very small lady of the ATA. (Air Transport Auxillary [sic] ) and her only crew was a flight engineer.
I did not have such choice after that but to sign for the aircraft and then had another surprise when an Anson landed and taxied in without any warning at all. The pilot was non other than Jim Mollison who was doing the taxi driving to take the Stirling crew out.
The controller who had seen the activity from the Mess soon came dashing along after he had seen the aircraft in the.......
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circuit and were very surprised to find a brand new Stirling neatly parked but I got a hell of a rollicking for my efforts.
Things got tightened up eventually when another aircraft arrived that no-one seemed to know about. As R/T operator I also performed the duties of 'airmen of the watch' and although I had registered the notification signal in the log and written the details on the movements board it would appear that the controller had not placed a great deal of importance on the movement. As a result he was unaware of the visit of a VIP, (Very Important Person). None other than the Under secretary of State for Air!. Phew!, that caused a stir when he did realise what the score was. The Station Commander was not too pleased either!.
I suppose someone's head had to roll and it was possibly mine as I started a series of detachments to widen my scope of knowledge; unless it was to keep me out of the way!.
I did the rounds of Honington and East Wretham and numerous jobs and being of an inquisitive nature soon found out how things ticked.
At one time I was surprised to find that elements of the Czeck [sic] . Air Force were making a great deal of fuss over what they considered to be their low pay (they were paid RAF rates, Sgt's about £4.50 a week) then the unit moved and things went quiet.
Although I was expecting to be recalled to Marham it was still a shock when it happened. Even more so when I was required to draw flying clothing and prepare to go back to Yatesbury for the air training course. After that everything happened so fast that I wondered what had hit me. It was already mid 1942 and as our activities increased so were our aircraft losses increasing. It was with some apprehension that I embarked on this part of my training. My feelings were not improved when on the morning of departure; waiting for transport at the Guard Room. I was detailed off by the SWO (Station Warrant Officer), to help collect a coffin from the morgue and load it on the transport where it was draped with the Union flag.
I don't know if the SWO had remembered me from another incident which surely should have stuck in his mind, but whether he did or not I have reason to remember it as I was taught another lesson.
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It so happened that I snored; even in those days, which was not a good thing in amongst a crowd of people. In the barracks where we were jammed in with hardly room to move between the beds it was a considerable source of annoyance to my neighbours; if not the whole room although I was not the only one with the problem. It was just worse when I had put a few pints under the belt.
It was not unusual to wake up in the morning to find myself surrounded by a selection of footwear that had been hurled in my direction during the night. Whether any found it's target I would not know. I was usually too far gone.
There was one night that the others in the room could no longer put up with it even when well aimed No. 9's did not do the job and suffice to say that when the SWO marched onto the parade ground is the morning for the colour hoisting parade there I was, still fast asleep in my bed at the foot of the flag pole.
It was a hell of a situation as I struggled back to the billet with my bed and bedding with the SWO hurling dire threats after me. Good job I wore singlet and PT shorts in bed!.
However. it had not resulted in direct punishment. I was still on the mat of course but in my defence I stated that as I had known absolutely nothing about it by virtue of being asleep throughout the whole episode I could not be held responsible.
You can't tell SWO's things like that and get away with it even if the case was dismissed. It was not surprising that after the incident I found myself on guard duty every other night for two weeks, and that included the evening parade as well as the morning colour hoisting parade that the duty people did. It was very uncomfortable being under the eagle eye of the SWO all the time so my turnout and drill had to be impeccable to avoid further punishment. Somehow I got away with it. When detailed off for the loading up I was foolish enough to ask what had happened to the poor chap in the box; only to be told by the man, with a glint in his eye, that it was a Sgt. Air Gunner who had 'copped a packet' a few night [sic] previously. After that I was only too glad to see the coffin subsequently placed in the guards van and draped with the union flag in the care.....
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of the escorts whilst I took off to another part of the train and tried to forget about it.
Back at Yatesbury there were some familiar faces among the entry and we were in a different part of the camp; more or less segregated from the 'sprog' wireless operators, but otherwise there was little difference.
It was not long before many of us were sporting Leading Aircraftsman 'props', and a few more pennies came in useful as well. There was no such thing as a flying pay supplement in those days.
As usual the day was split between job training and other activities, and I was looking forward to the air experience part of it. At last I was going to get airborne and I was all set to enjoy it. It was the beginning of many occasions when I was to feel somewhat disillusioned about taking to the air.
Our initial flying was done in the De.Haviland Dominie as the RAF called them. Many were in fact ex. civilian Rapide's that had been requisitioned and as a result had had a name change and were flown by a mixture of civilian and service pilots.
They were fitted out with several radio positions at which we carried out exercises under the supervision of a Cpl. Instructor with a similar set-up on the ground where we also worked in rotation.
There was of course no toilet compartment, and not even the paper bag that is standard in today's aircraft. There was just an open square biscuit tin of the type that the ancient 'hard tack' biscuit came in, (circa 1917), and there were plenty of those.
That type of biscuit was being substituted for bread several times a week in most units as a great deal of our flour was being sent to the bottom of the Atlantic by the U.Boats, and the civilian population had preference when what limited flour supplies were being distributed. Hence the endless supply of tins. We were obliged to use them instead of paper bags but it was all very crude. It was loose on the floor for anyone to use as necessary. Ugh!!!.
It was a most nauseating experience as most of us were getting airborne for the first time so we were a bit queasy, and more!. It was all part of the elimination process. Anyone who spent
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more time at the 'throw-up' tin was threatened with withdrawal from training and remustered to ground wireless operator.
It was very difficult to force one's self to overcome the discomfort sufficiently to get back to work but the process was motivated by the fact that the rule was that the last one to use the tin was the one that had to dispose of it after landing. Yuk!. I made sure that it was not me.
I was not sorry to progress from that stage to the single engined Proctor for solo exercises. Then I only had myself to worry about…….and the pilot!.
By that time I was getting increasingly aware of the varying abilities of pilots. Not that I had had any alarming experiences, but the seat of my pants was always a very sensitive indicator of how a machine was handled.
It is difficult to explain but I had always had the same sensitivity either in a car or on the back of a motor-bike and that feeling was beginning to develops in respect of pilots. I had come to the conclusion that there were pilots and 'drivers airframe' to use a stores nomenclature description of an item, and it was always to be the same. I knew whether I was comfortable or not.
THEN I MET A PILOT WITH A REPUTATION…………..!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Photo
YATESBURY 1942
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On completion of the course the next move was to an Advanced Flying Unit at Penrhos, North Wales, on the Lleyn peninsular.
I fell in love with that area right from the start and still have a soft spot for it. The years have changed it very little. It was only a small airfield operating Ansons in which Wireless Operators and Navigators carried out more advanced exercises which covered a lot more countryside and took us almost up to the level where oxygen was needed. Just one more thing to contend with.
The pilots were all service types doing a stint as taxy driver to get more hours and experience as they progressed in their training but I had hardly settled in when I picked up a 'buzz' that was going around concerning a certain pilot who apparently was putting the wind up a lot of people.
He had gained a reputation for doing some crazy things and until quite recently had made a habit of flying under the Menai bridge which is the magnificent old bridge built by Thomas Telford across the straits between the mainland and Anglesey.
The practice had just been strictly forbidden under threat of the most severe punishment because someone else had tried it but had killed himself and a few others in the process.
Most people seemed to be keeping their fingers crossed hoping that they could avoid flying with him so I faced the future with some apprehension when I found myself on a flight detail with him as pilot.
My first impression of Sergeant. Francis, Cadell, Macdonald was that he did not look the sort that could put the wind up anyone. I had expected a 'jolly hockey stick' type such as the Pilot Officer Prune, (the accident prone cartoon twit), who featured in an Air Force Magazine, but as he did not fit that category I was forced to the conclusion that he must be downright ham-fisted.
It was a surprise to find that he was a little older than the average pilot, certainly on the wrong side of thirty, and it was many, many years before I was to find out exactly how old he was.
First impressions were of a strangely rugged character with rusty fuze wire type of hair with a heavy drooping moustache to match who seemed strangely out of proportion.
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It took a second look to find the real reason for that impression. His torso was that of a six footer, with well developed chest, arms like the branches of a tree but he had short stocky legs giving him an overall height of no more than 5ft 7ins.
In standard battledress which was designed to be purely functional he looked as if he was suffering from a severe case of 'ducks disease'.
We climbed aboard the aircraft after a briefing that was brief and to the point. "If we get into trouble I will tell you what to do, whether you jump or not, and you only jump when I tell you to. Got that?”. Then he started up, taxied out and took off and although I had my eyes shut during the first part of the routine I opened when there were no unusual sensations and wondered what all the fuss had been about. My sensitive parts had given out no alert signals and it all seemed pretty normal to me.
As the exercise progressed I virtually forgot that I was in an aeroplane despite what he was doing with the machine although it was impossible not to notice that he seemed to be trying to turn it inside out in the gentlest possible way.
The main issue was that I did feel any discomfort at all although a few hill sheep might have done so as we steamed up one side of Snowdon and down the other and we seemed to balanced on one wingtip as we went around the Great Orme on Anglesey with Puffins and other sea birds getting somewhat agitated by the disturbance. My insides took no longer to settle down after that flight than they normally did so I decided that I could cope with that sort of treatment at any time and it certainly made life interesting. My companions still had different ideas though as the stories of his various escapades became more and more exagerated [sic].
Before I left Penrhos I learned a little more about him whilst he was still scaring the daylights out of others.
He was reputed to have previously been Chief Engineer to Gar Wood the racing driver of pre-war years and although I have never found the need to verify the story I have never had reason
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to doubt it either.
As far as I was concerned he certainly knew what he was doing and that was good enough for me.
The operator training became more and more demanding as time went on and I had reached a point where there was a great deal of satisfaction in being able to transmit and receive messages in morse, juggle with frequencies and identify my control station through a cacophany [sic] of background noise. It was gratifying to be able to code and encode messages efficiently but as usual it was not all work and no play. I think we would have gone daft under the pressure if it had been. The pattern was the same as before with the days split between training and exercising.
There were invariably some high jinks in Pwllheli where the Royal Navy had taken over the nearby Butlins as a training establishment and in the traditional Navy way had named it HMS something or other.
There were all sorts of derisive remarks about Nary terminoligy [sic] as they called the bus the 'liberty boat' and they had to salute the 'quarter deck' on leaving and boarding their 'ship'. We called it the main gate!.
Of course we countered with suitable remarks about our 'wizard prangs', 'bombs away' and 'chocks away', but some they resented their 'ship' being called HMS Bullshit, all of which resulted in some good nattered rowdy exchanges in the local pubs.
There was a lot of ale sloshed around. and a great many fried eggs consumed in the basement kitchen of a sea front hotel after chuckout time at 6d, (2 1/2 new pence) each.
The 'end of course' party was a great success and I recall putting in a great deal of effort into assisting one member of the course with some conjuring tricks. He was a member of the Magic Circle and why he picked me I haven't the slightest idea. Little did he know what that did for my confidence which was being somewhat undermined by the realisation that I seemed to be accident prone. As it happened, the, programme went without a hitch and that little exercise did me a great deal of good.
I only vaguely remember the return to camp after that party. It was somewhat hilarious as we came back via the beach where several of us had to be rescued from the sand dunes where we
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had capsised [sic] and ploughed up a lot of sand.
I finally collected my flying log book that recorded the entry of the flight with one Sgt.F.C.Macdonald and normally it would have been just one more entry without much significance as I continued on my travels once more.
[underlined] Fate decreed that we would meet up again!!. [/underlined]
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Photo
PENRHOS 1942
Page 30 And there’s more!
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I continued the process of going up and down the countryside like a yo-yo which was quite an experience for someone like me who had never ventured very far from the home town before the war and I was certainly getting to know my way around.
My next journey was to a gunnery school on Walney Island just off Barrow-in-Furness, flying old hacks such as Blackburn Botha's and Bolton Paul Defiants which seemed to be a very chancy business.
Most of the time the direction of take-off was straight towards a hill and if that was not bad enough the Botha was a death trap on one engine. If there was an engine failure it could not maintain height on one and the emergency exit was straight into the propellor. Turning or not it was dicey.
The Defiant was not so bad although it had a nasty habit of flopping onto it's side in the air if the gunner failed to inform the pilot that he was rotating and firing on the beam. The pilot needed that information so that he could counteract his controls and it was not all that easy to get out of either if in trouble. I have the greatest admiration for the chaps that went into battle in those things.
Somehow I struggled through that period in the depths of winter and at one stage I was very close to being put back in training when I went down with a severe cold and only just avoided going sick, especially as we had strict orders about flying whilst suffering from a cold which resulted in bunged up nose and ears. I felt so bad one evening that I doped myself with whisky and asprin and retired to bed early after a hot shower even though it meant going to and from the ablutions through several inches of snow.
By the time the others came back to the hut later in the evening my condition had them so worried that they woke me up.
There was a considerable cloud of steam rising from me but once they were assured that I was not on fire the threw more blankets on me to continue sweating it out.
Despite the fact that I was a bit wobbly in the morning I still managed to fly my last detail and in fact even get a good score but the rest of the time there is a blurr [sic] .
I have vague recollections of Northen [sic] ale which appeared to be a lot stronger than average and of an hilarious evening at
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a vaudeville in Borrow where most of the course occupied the front row of the stalls, booing and cheering the acts as seemed appropriate.
There were often rowdy exchanges with the conciencious [sic] objectors who were formed into non-combatant pioneer units to man things like smoke generators to mask the docks from air raids, and some energetic clashes with strong minded and well muscled WAAFS who manned a lot of the searchlights and barrage balloons. All good clean fun!.
Eventually, in the end came the passing out parade and the award of the cherished Air Gunners brevet with promotion to Sergeant, and although that was only the outward sign of qualified aircrew it did at least take the place of what had by that time a very grubby white cap flash.
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There was still a lot of training to do, and more travelling as well.
The travelling was not so easy by that time as most of us had gathered more flying kit so everywhere we went it meant struggling with two kit bags.
The next port of call was a Wellington Operational Training Unit at Turweston, which was a satelight [sic] unit of No.12 OUT Chipping Warden, both near Banbury. Oxford. 'A' and 'B' Flights were at Chipping Warden and 'C' and 'D' Flights were at Turweston.
It was there that crews were put together more or less by mutual agreement.
In the first 24 hours everyone just browsed around gathering more paperwork, dealing with arrival procedures and generally making one's self known.
I had hardly settled in when the 'jungle telegraph' was sending out the news that a certain Scotsmen had also turned up. The notorious F.C. Macdonald!.
There were frantic efforts being made by people to find themselves another pilot of their choice. Anyone but him!.
I was not fussy, or for that matter as quick off the mark as some. I had met a Navigator who had also been at Penrhos and had not yet found himself a pilot and although he could not remember Macdonald he found him and introduced himself.
By the next day Macdonald had made up his mind and the crew lists went up on the notice board.
I was looking them over when he came up with a group and announced rather ungraciously, “so we have got you have we?".
A remark that was not designed to inspire confidence although I must confess that I felt a lot happier with someone of known qualities so I was not unduly concerned.
That was the way that the crew came together. I don't think any of us were very special.
Macdonalds background was still vague and was always remain so although I gathered that he was married but separated.
Peter Hobbs, the navigator, was an ex Cpl. accounts clerk who
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had been in the Voluntary Reserve. Both he and Macdonald were a little older than the average and were newly commissioned Pilot Officers.
We actually started with a commissioned Observer/Bomb Aimer but he did not last long.
It transpired that he had already flunked a pilots course, and a navigators coarse so they made him a Bomb/Aimer before they found out that he was too tall for the front turret so off he went to retrain once more.
He might well have been doing courses later on in the war to qualify for some-thing although it is just as likely that he may well have distinguished himself somehow.
He had certainly been been [sic] determined to be aircrew anyway but I must admit that his case was the result of a policy that I was never able to come to terms with.
To commission someone first and then go to considerable lengths to see if he was any good at anything was odd to say the least. However, that is another story!.
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In the place of 'mastermind' we got 'Hoppy’ Hill, so named because he bounced and rolled on the balls of his feet when he walked around invariably with a novel of some sort tucked under his arm. I never did find out what he had been doing before he joined the RAF.
Then we had another Mac. McIlroy, a Canadian Rear Gunner who had been at Walney Island at the same time as myself although I could not recall him. He had been with the Canadian Pacific Railway in some capacity although in his own words he had spent most of his time doing trying to do nothing.
Then there was me. A cabinet maker/polisher who had finished up doing almost anything to remain employed; and I mean anything. My last civilian employment had bees as a milk roundsman!.
Nevertheless, whatever we had been doing we were all in the same boat (or aeroplane) and we all had one thing to common. That was to get on with it and hope to come out of it is one piece.
We were a fairly wild bunch in our off duty periods but I would not think that we were any worse than any other crew.
It was from that point onward that living, working and playing as a crew started. It was for me anyway. Almost to the exclusion of everything else.
Suddenly it seemed that my youthful ambitions had been fullfilled [sic] although it was a pity it had come about under such circumstances.
The most important thing was that we got on well together and we concentrated on getting moulded into a crew which involved an airborne discipline that few people could understand considering our peculiar life style.
Although our crew seemed to be the ideal balance of officers and NCO's with commissioned Pilot and Navigator some crews had formed up with some very odd mixtures with Sgt. pilots and commissioned gunners but which ever way they were mixed the pilot was always the captain is the air.
This arrangement was incomprehensible to some Army and Navy types and even the USAAF. It did not seem compatable [sic] with the normal chain of command yet it worked satisfactorily within the RAF.
Mac, as he was always to be knows, still looked as lumpy in
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his new uniform as he did when we had first met despite a change of rank insignia and a fancy cap but there were more important things to concern ourselves with than how people looked.
We had far more serious things on our minds.
Flying had become a very serious business and if we were going to be together for any length of time we would be relying on each other a great deal for survival and it was to that end that Mac went about his part of the programme as if he had been born with wings.
As far as I was concerned he was an absolute natural and on more than one occasion I was asked by wireless operators in other crews how I got on with him.
I think some of then may well have been regretting their choice of pilot and were looking for a way out but I usually pointed out that I was in no way considering a change. Particularly as no-one saw us overshooting from missed approaches to the runway or had seen us swinging about all over the place on landing or take-off as I had often seen others doing, so what more could I ask?.
On more then one occasion I was told that I would be sorry, (as if I had made the choice): But I never was....Not once!.
I got the distinct impression that for some reason Mac was not very impressed with wireless operators, although from his occasional remark he seemed more interested in having a spare gunner aboard, and I was beginning to feel very spare until one night I had the opportunity to exercise some of my training. We were flying is the local area of Chipping Warden one night when the voltage regulator down by my left foot went haywire and burst into flames.
The voltage shot up and batteries started to cook immediately so I had to work very fast to tell Mac what I was going to do before switching the Ground/Flight switch to ground which cut us off of the engine driven generators, then go rapidly through the fire drill whilst Mac called control for an emergency landing on what little internal battery power we had left.
He did happen to mention afterwards that perhaps a wireless op. might have some use in a crew after all. Only perhaps!.
As time went on we did get to know him a little better although he was one of those chaps you could never get really close to.
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He was not actually unsociable but uncommunicative. More often then not when asked a question on a subject which was not directly related to what we were currently doing his answer would be a knowing wink, a tap on the side of his nose with his forfinger [sic] which could be taken to mean anything; like, "I don't know", or, " leave it to me” or," mind your own bloody business!".
No doubt some people would call it the attitude of a dour, canny Scot but I did get a satisfactory answer on one occasion when I asked him about flying under the Menie [sic] Bridge. His words for once were encouraging.
"Only a bloody fool would attempt that without the wind on the nose, at low tide and through the widest span'", and then I knew that he was not as crazy as some people would like to think.
That in my book added up to a calculated risk, and there were some more to come.
As we ploughed on through the course a great deal of time was spent in the 'Harwell Box' which was a compartmented type of simulator in which we practiced all of the airborne procedures for a bombing sortie, [underlined] only at twice normal speed!. [/underlined]
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All the clock faces had been altered to achieve the time factor and we had to work frantically to keep up with all of the information that was being fed to us from umpteen different sources: It certainly kept us on the ball, particularly the navigator.
That was not the only simulation. For the first time our operating heights were soon to be up in the rarified [sic] air above 10,000ft for lengthy periods. Above that height the use of oxygen was essential and mandatory, and just to wake sure that no-one treated the matter lightly we were introduced to the decompression chamber.
Eight at a time with a medical orderly, we entered the tank which was fitted with inter-comm and after it was sealed the pumps started to reduce the pressure as one would experience in flight.
When 10,000ft was reached on the internal altimeter we fitted our oxygen masks and then the pressure was progressivly [sic] reduced until the altimeter read first 15,000ft, then 20,000 and finally 25,000ft by which time various parts of our internal plumbing were beginning to respond to the pressure change.
We had been provided with note pads and pencils and were than told to start writing our names on the pads as the oxygen supply was turned off.
I was no different from the others when the voice on the inter comm said that the oxygen was back on and we were called by our names and asked to describe any sensations that we had experienced and the answer was unanimous. Nothing!. But the shock came when we were told to look at our pads.
Our signatures had tailed off into an unintellible [sic] scribble and then re-appeared at the bottom of the page.
The realisation hit us all. Although most of us had experienced some light headedness as the pressure lowered we had not been aware that that was the warning that could lead to oblivion and possible death. It was frightening to think that the process was so insidious that it was possible to be unaware of it.
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After that little demonstration no-one needed any further warning on how to recognise the early effects of the lack of oxygen and I was later to find that my tolerance was quite low and I usually needed oxygen at 8,000ft, and that if I needed to move about I had to be fairly quick when going from a main point to a portable bottle especially later on when I was often sitting next to a damned great hole at the back end of the aircraft where there was no main outlet.
The training got more and more realistic both in the air and on the ground. We had got used to the parachute harness and packs by that time and the short briefing on it's use such as "after you have jumped, count ten and pull that", but suddenly it got serious now that we were going to have to face all sorts of unknown difficulties whilst we were defying the laws of gravity.
We started more intensive training off a rig. First without 'chutes just jumping off of a 12ft platform onto coco mats and then right up in the eaves of a hanger with harness and weighted cable system.
The landings were the same spine jarring thump either way as we made contact with the ground with feet together, knees slightly bent, slight angle to the direction of landing to roll over shoulder and hip on contact.
That was the classical way of doing it if you had the opportunity!. A very good friend was not so lucky when his turn came. He had already received a smashed arm when the aircraft was hit but although some of the crew put his 'chute on and threw him out he lost consciousness on the way down and busted a leg is several places on landing. But he fared better than the others. They all went down with the aeroplane!
Perhaps I was fortunate in my approach to the training and found no great difficulty but others were not so lucky and were required to do it again and again until they had improved their technique but not without a few sprains and bruises as one ploughed on through the course.
We finally completed it with a better than average crew assessment and then we were all on our travels again, but for the first time as a crew.
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Our next destination was to a Stirling Conversion Unit at Stradishall, near Bury St Edmunds. Back in-Bomber country again!. We had known that we were destined for "heavies' long before we left OTU. In fact, I had known before I left gunnery school as I had only done the short course for wireless operators and bomb-aimers, and my log book had been annotated accordingly.
Nevertheless, I had hoped that I would finish up on Lancasters or Halifax's as I already knew enough about Stirlings to be very wary of them.
When I had marshalled in a new one on delivery to Mareham [sic] I had been amazed that the pilot of the monster had been a very small lady of the ATA.
The Stirling was impressive. Although it looked very big it’s dimensions were not much more than the other 'heavies'. It was just that it looked so incredibly bulky.
It stood high on an undercarriage that looked more like some scaffolding around a building, placing the pilot's eye some 22 1/2 ft above the ground which was very high for those days and did not make the assessment of the distance between the wheels and the runway any easier whom landing the thing.
I was also well aware that they had been causing all sorts of problems when the Marham Squadrons were converting to them resulting in all sorts of hair raising incidents and bent aeroplanes.
At least I was familiar with it, and the radio compartment but the fact that I was going to finish up as a crew member on one was a thought that I had not entertained.
Soon after arrival the crew was made up to seven by the addition of a Flight Engineer and a Mid-Upper Gunner.
'Paddy', the flight engineer was of course from the emerald isle and was no stranger to the Stirling having been a ground engineer on them at Waterbeach until he had remustered. He was several weeks into his conversion training and it was a long time afterwards that I learned that he had never flown before he got airborne with us. He must have wondered what he had let himself in for.
Certainly he had a nasty shock when instead of finding his pilot to be another fresh faced youngster he got this 'gnarled old man' as someone described his.
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It was suggested that his main task would be to help the poor old bloke in and out of the driving seat!.
It did not take him long to find out that Mac was something different.
The mid-upper was at the other end of the age scale. Ralph was a fresh faced youngster who had just about changed his Air Cadets uniform for RAF uniform although of course he had done the gunners course since joining and had been at Stradishall for a few weeks on a familaristion [sic] course. But he had not long been out of school.
The crew was now complete. although for a while there was a little doubt about us staying together as Mac found out that he was not exactly built for the Stirling; or visa versa.
The lady ATA pilot had been small but she had seemed to cope but I suppose it was a matter of proportion, and Mac's proportions were somewhat different.
With the controls and the seat adjusted to their limits he still needed some special padding made up to improve things. and the seat of his pants took a terrific beating as he wrestled, wriggled and sqirmed [sic] to handle the thing.
The take-off and landing characteristics of the machine did not help such either. An uncontrollable swing to starboard could develop very easily and the tall undercarriage would be incapable of standing the strain and 'crunch', another one would bite the dust adding to the numbers that ended up damaged by that sort of accident which was already in excess of the numbers lost by enemy action.
It usually depended on how fast you were going at the time whether you walked away or were carried away from the wreckage. Not a pleasant prospect!.
In theory the idea was that the engines were opened up on a staggered basis having due regard to any cross wind. until a speed was reached when the rudder would give effective control, then all engines could be taken to full power.
The snag was that with a full load there was never a lot of runway to spare so it was usually a choice of two evils. You either took a chance of running out of runway if you did not get the power on soon enough or you slammed it on at the beginning of the take off run and took your chance with a
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swinger'.
Mac seemed to have it down to a fine art.
Whatever the length of the runway. Whatever the load, the strength and direction of the wind. Whether the runway was uphill, downhill, or both, with bump or a hollow in the middle, his computer brain had it worked out. Whatever the circumstances and however tired he was we always seemed to make a perfect take-off and landing. So far I had not experienced a bad one with his at the controls.
Nevertheless, he was wearing out his pants at an alarming rate in the process.
So much so that the instructors were having serious doubts as to whether Mac and the Stirling were quite right for each other.
Then something happened that removed all the doubts.
On the night of 13th June 1943 we were doing night circuits and bumps in preparation for his first night solo.
After several circuits the check pilot gave Mac the thumbs up after another satisfactory landing and vacated the aircraft the aircraft in the vicinity of the control tower before we taxied around again for the next take-off.
After the usual pause for the routine cockpit check we entered the runway and were soon thundering along gathering speed; when it happened.
At the most critical point, almost half way down the runway, with about 90mph. on the clock, the port outer seized with a crunch that could be felt throughout the aircraft despite all the other sensations, and 30 tons of Stirling started to swing to port.
It was a wonder that the prop did not sheer off which would have been normal but the reflex action that went on in the cockpit was fast and furious. It had to be to prevent us from becoming another statistic.
Paddy closed down the dead engine by stabbing buttons and switches that cut the ignition to the engine, cut off the fuel, operated the bulkhead fire extinguishers and 'feathered' the propellor as Mac called for maximum power on the inboard engines as obviously his hands were very busy with the controls.
As Paddy took over the throttles and the propeller pitch controls the power came on with a bellow as he shoved the inboard
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We were just at the 'unstick' point and almost at take-off speed as the swing to port became more pronounced with Mac struggling desperately.
At least we were almost airborne which was better than being splattered all over the airfield and his efforts were being rewarded as we then started to go slowly into a starboard turn with only just enough speed on to keep us flying.
Standard procedures dictated that we had to go into a right hand circuit as it was invariably neccessary [sic] to turn away from the dead engine. There was so little margin of control if you went the other way that a nasty mess was the likely result.
Still close to the ground with wheels and flaps still down Mac was straining every muscle to maintain control but slowly and surely we increased our speed still swinging to starboard.
From my position in the astro dome I could see the hangars and the control tower dead ahead!.
If that wasn't out of the frying pan and into the fire!.
It looked as if it was going to be decidedly messy and certainly it was going to do me no good at all if I dived for my crash position…...and then we started to climb and bank as the speed had built up sufficiently.
With wings almost vertical we went between No's. 1 and 2 hangers, taking a telephone line with us. I had a very unusual view of the water tower as we went around it straight into a very low level emergency right hand circuit for a landing that was just like all the others. As smooth as silk. Even under those circumstances.
It was shortly after we had landed that I became aware of the fact that I seemed to have been holding my breath for a very long time and I had been very close to ceasing to breath altogether.
We taxied around to the control tower to pick up the instuctor [sic] pilot and when he came aboard he was still very much out of breath as like most of the staff in the tower, he had abandoned it rapidly as we headed straight for it.
He just managed to gasp "you'll' do" before we taxied back to dispersal.
There was so doubt in our minds anyway. He had tamed the beast and there congratulations all round.
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Mac's reaction was normal. A wink and a tap on the side of his nose. No comment!.
After that there was very little let up as the training including flying intensified. Mac continued to wear out his trousers in his efforts to maintain control and that’s what it was all about as far as he was concerned. Total perfection, and he never, ever, let the machine take over. We had absolute confidence in him.
The only other incident of any note throughout the course occurred shortly after we had landed one night and had got back to the billet. A Ju.88 intruder who had followed someone in tried to shoot him up on the runway without success. He sprayed lead all over the place and I think the most damage was done to a window above my bed in the barrack block. I was under it!. There was no one hurt although my bed was showered with glass.
That sort of effort did not impress us very much if that was the best they could do. It all seemed a bit panic stricken and I had seen plenty of similar activity on the South Coast where air raids on Worthing had been mainly of the hit and run type.
I had been close to several attacks as they came blasting along the railway line and the shunting yards but they never hit the gas works which was opposite the hospital; which was just as well as my father was invariably fire watching on top during a raid.
Not one bomb fell on the railway line or the signal boxes in the local area but there was a fair amount of damage to civilian property and loss of life. The flat in which I had spent the first few years of my life was one that collected a direct hit although mostly the bombs fell in open ground.
There is still evidence to this day of the occasion when an Me.110 straffed [sic] along the line. The metal footbridge between East Worthing and Worthing Central still has the canon shell holes in it and my wife remembers it well.
She was walking along the road parallel to the railway when this chap came blasting in firing both front and rear guns and she was obliged to make a hasty dive over a low wall into someone's garden for safety.
Even then I thought it was a bit panic stricken and not very effective.
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It was whilst I was at Stradishall that I saw the half scale Stirling in one of the hangars. A very interesting little machine. It was about the size of a Wellington with a cockpit just big enough for two in tandem, and four little two blade props on Pobjoy engines. It had been built for test purposes early on, whilst the full size machine was still in the design stage. Even then it was-fall of snags but they pressed on.
No-one sees to know what happened to it eventually. It had been pranged and was not airworthy but it just seems to have dissapeared [sic] . Perhaps it will turn up at the back of a barn one days!.
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[underlined] THE SHORT BROS. S.29."STIRLING" [/underlined]
Built by Short Brothers, Rochester & Belfast and Austins, Longbridge.
First flight (Mk.I) 14th May 1939. Followed by Mk's II, III, IV & V.
Began with daylight operations in 1941 before switching to night operations until the end of 1943. Later used as glider tugs. paratroop and supply dropping and finally transports.
2,374 of all types manufactured but none remained in flying service after the early 1950's.
[line of stars]
[underlined] Model B.Mklll [/underlined]
Span...................99ft 1in.
Length………………87ft 3in.
Max. all-up weight…………70,000lb.
Max. speed…………270 mph. (Economical cruising 180mph. fully loaded)
Range……………….Max. 2010mls. (According to load).
Service ceiling………17,000ft.(14-15,000ft with max. load)
Engines………Four 1,650bhp. Bristol Hercules Mk.XVl
2 stage, supercharged, sleeve valve, 14 cylinder radials.
Defensive armament…….8 .303in. Browning m/g. 2 in dorsal and front turrets. 4 in rear turret. All power operated.
Max. bomb load………..14,000lb. (Max. bomb size 2000lb.
[line of stars]
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[deleted] 44 [/deleted]
[underlined] FOR NORMAL BOMBER OPERATIONS THE CREW CONSISTED OF:- [/underlined]
Pilot………………………..………..who was always the captain.
Navigator……………………..…..who was also trained as a bomb aimer.
Observer/bomb aimer…..….who was also trained in navigation and was front gunner.
Flight Engineer………..………...was responsible for monitoring the engines and other systems. Often acted as co-pilot.
Wireless operator/gunner….communications, radio direction finding and trained reserve gunner.
Mid-upper gunner……………..)were interchangable [sic] between positions
Rear Gunner……………….…….)but generally preferred one position.
Note:- On occasions another pilot was allocated to the basic crew for operational familiarisation and became the co-pilot.
[line of stars]
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[deleted] 45 [/deleted]
It was the middle of June when we left Stradishall and it was a pleasant change not to have to travel too far to our new unit. We moved by truck just a few miles up the road to Chedburgh, a satelite [sic] station of Stradishall.
Most Stirling units were concentrated in East Anglia and we were to join a new Squadron being formed on the day we arrived. The Squadron had been numbered 620 and we would be the partner to 214 Squadron which had been in residence for some time. It had been formed by the standard procedure of hiving off 'C' flights from established Squadrons. In this case 'C' flights from both 214 Squadron and 149 from Mildenhall; by coincidence the same Squadron that I had been with at Mildenhall previously. To assist the rapid build-up new crews direct from training were being added so with virtually a snap of the fingers the new Squadron was born on the 17th June 1943.
Chedburgh was just another war-time airfield that like so many had just mushroomed all over the countryside by the hundred. A tremendous achievement both in planning and engineering considering the enormous amount of material and man-power each one absorbed. It was not surprising that Britian [sic] was often referred to as an unsinkable aircraft carrier. There were over 100 airfields in East Anglia alone!.
They were all built to the same basic pattern with Nissen huts all over the place with dispersed accomodation [sic] tucked away in woods and down country lanes that ensured that everyone had plenty of exercise in the process of getting to and from their place of work.
The airfield was situated alongside the A143 Bury St Edmunds to Haverhill road and the set up was much the same as any other unit.
The Station support services comprised an Administrative Wing, a Technical Wing and a Flying Wing and within the latter were the flying units, the Squadrons, which were independant [sic] units.
Altogether the station was manned by between 1800 and 2000 people including Squadron personnel, with an establishment of 16 air-craft per Squadron. plus 4 reserves. Theorhetically [sic] that should have given the station a total of 40 aircraft but we were rarely up to even the basic strength and then not for very
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All the arrival formalities that we had done so often were soon completed with introductions to the Squadron and Flight Commander as well as the specialist leaders, in my case the Signals Leader, who was an operational Wireless Operator filling the position by virtue of his previous experience and seniority.
With all that attended to Mac had received his instructions from 'B' Flight Commander and we boarded the bus that continually circled the outer edge of the airfield where the aircraft were dispersed.
On the way we passed many Stirlings poised like great vultures, except for the odd one that looked as if the vultures had been at them and had gangs of men working on them.
When we stopped at one dispersal pan Mac said "this is it". 'This' was a pleasant surprise. We had become so used to flying old hacks that had seen better days that to be looking at what appeared to be a new one was unique. Even more of a surprise was to be told that this one was 'ours'.
This particular Stirling was serial No.EF433, built by Shorts at Belfast, and was still new enough to have a new smell about it.
The Squadron identification letters of QS and aircraft letter 'W' had been freshly painted on it's sides over some other lettering that turned out to have been 214 Squadron's identification, with whom it had apparently done three operations before being transferred on the formation of the Squadron.
We were concerned with getting to know that piece of machinery more intimately than anything else we had had dealings with in the past.
We spent hours going over it with the ground crew; testing and adjusting until we had it ticking over like a well oiled sewing machine. We air tested it and put it through it's paces again and again. The gunners tested their guns over the sea. Pete checked his box of tricks. Hoppy put the bomb release mechanism through it's sequences and tested the front guns. I tuned my radio and made contact with the control stations as well as testing the radio direction finding system. Mac and Paddy did everything they could to ensure that the engines and controls gave the right responses by throwing it around at height including a landing procedure with first one then two engines
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feathered and everything throttled back just to see how she stalled as well as a maximum height climb until they were at last satisfied that if anything went wrong with it it [sic] would not be our fault.
When all that was done we were ready for anything and both crew and aeroplane were in a partnership which we hoped would be for some time. As it turned out it was longer than than [sic] the average!.
We were soon to find out what we had let ourselves in for on a series of night operations that were not without a little excitement.
[line of stars]
Four days after leaving Stradishall we found ourselves on the Battle Order for the night of the 22nd June and from the moment the order went on the board everything started clicking into place as we started a procedure that hundreds of other crews were doing up and down the country in order to deliver thousands of tons of bombs and incendiaries to the enemy.
Mac had already been through it the night before, flying as second pilot with a crew to Krefeld, but the only thing he would say about it was that we would find out soon enough, accompanied of course by that tap on the nose.
I was naturally apprehensive at the prospect of flying over enemy territory now that we were finally committed and not unaware of the losses that had already occurred in 214 Squadron in the short time we had been on the base. Fortunately there was plenty to do to take our minds off of the inevitable as the procedure had become standard for major exercises and operations and we knew precicely [sic] what to do.
The first thing was to ground test and then air test the aeroplane and with [deleted] that [/deleted] over to try and get some sleep before the briefing and all the other business whilst the ground crew prepared it for the flight with bombs, fuel, flares, ammunition, oxygen, first aid packs and safety equipment such as the dinghy, inclusive of the distress radio and a multitude of other individual items to be checked over or stowed.
Our next step was to change into clean underwear of the aircrew type. The pure wool and silk mixture. Not only for warmth in the sub zero conditions we were likely to
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encounter at altitude but just as important to reduce the risk of infection if injured. That was the general idea anyway, but at the rate we were soon to be flying we very often had to wear underclothes a week or more before the laundry caught up with us.
'Night Flying supper' was always something to look forward to at whatever time it was scheduled. The rare operational egg and bacon special. That meal was not just a 'perk' but possibly the last one that one would get for some time depending on the circumstances, and then we were off to the operations block.
Once we got there we were cut off from the outside world. All the outside telephone lines had either been disconnected or were at least monitored and even the local telephone boxes had been disconnected or secured as soon as the teleprinters had started clacking away earlier to advise that the operations order was following.
Within that environment there was a lot of activity and the amount of stuff we had to get together was quite extraordinary.
There was basic stuff such as parachute harness and pack. Life jacket, (the Mae West), helmet complete with earphones, microphone and oxygen mask, all to be tested on the rig in the safety equipment section. Then to change into sea boot socks and flying boots. Then to empty pockets into the locker and don the heavy fishermans roll neck sweater. The next step was to draw rations and escape and evasion packs that all had to be stowed into the numerous pockets of the life jacket and as if that was not enough we then gathered up our specialist equipment.
The navigator and wireless operator carried the most and it was quite a pile of stuff. Maps, charts, rulers, pencils, computer, (of the Dalton circlar type for wind calculations etc) , sextant, star tables, code books, lists of call-signs, frequencies, identification beacons. colours of the day information etc. Some of the secret stuff was typed on rice paper for the purpose of disposing of it by eating it if if [sic] the need arose.
It was hardly surprising that we needed large canvas flight bags for all of the odds and ends apart from having to carry all of the other gear.
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After assembling all that there was a short briefing by the specialist leaders before the main briefing took place, and it was at this point that the pilot, navigator and bomb-aimer were given advance knowledge of the target so that they could make their special studies of route, and target photographs before everyone else trooped into the main briefing room where the whole thing was put together so that everyone knew what was going on.
The teleprinters had been spewing out stuff for a long time after the planners at Command and Group HQ had held their planning meetings and sometimes the Operations Order was yards long. The operations order contained details of take-off times, route, turning points, target data, ack-ack defences, possible fighter activities, heights to fly and speeds, winds and weather en-route and return, fuel and bomb loads, pathfinder marking, alternative and emergency airfields, radio procedures, radio beacons, frequencies and callsigns, etc, etc. and even details of any POW camps if they were near the target.
The complex mass of stuff had been sorted out and the whole station was in top gear as we at last struggled into the main hall to assemble around our own table where there was a great deal of chat with clouds of tobacco smoke floating about by the time the whole assembly was called to order by the senior briefing officer. That was always a dramatic moment and the climax of all the activity that invariably seemed to be a race against the clock. Heaven help a crew that was late!.
The windows had been shuttered as soon as preparations had commenced and the 'fug' must have been murder for non-smokers.
As soon as everyone was in and accounted for the main doors were closed and two RAF Policemen took up position outside. Everyone settled down within the chaos of equipment all strewn around the floor and on the tables as the briefing got under way as soon as the big wall map was uncovered.
The briefing officers included the Flying Control and Met.Officers. The Armament and Engineering Officers, The Wing and the Squadron and Flight Commanders, and very often the Station Commander
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who took no part in the proceedings although he occasional took part in the operation with a 'scratch' crew but he invariably had a few words of encouragement at the end of the briefing.
When the curtains were drawn back from the wall map there was a bit of a gasp as eyes followed the coloured tapes across to the target..Mulheim, and then with such waving about of an old billiard cue that had been 'liberated' from one of the messes the show got under way.
It was a source of relief to find that we were not part of the main force. Our detail was 'Gardening'. The code name for mining, which we would be doing by flying part of the route with the main force and then dropping out to sow our 'veg' as we approached the Frisian Islands. I was glad of that and would not have cared for a trip to Mulheim first time out.
Mac would still say nothing about his trip to Krefeld. In fact very few people would. When asked, the usual answer was, "you will find out soon enough", and as far as Mulheim was concerned Mac would only say that we should think ourselves lucky that we were not going there. No-one argued with that!.
As soon as briefing was over there was a mad scramble for the crew bus to take us out to dispersal and to load all the gear into the aeroplane.
Having stowed everything where it should be there was time for a tour around the outside to make sure that all protective covers and control locks had been removed.
When all was ready it was just a matter of waiting for start up time with a few minutes quiet contemplation, a pee on a wheel, and a cigarette.
Any chatter there was at that stage was about anything other then the operation ahead of us.
Although the start up and taxy times had been given at briefing there was usually a signal from the control tower as back up bearing in mind that radio silence was strictly imposed from the time that the operation had been notified.
The signals were yellow/green verey flare for start up or a double red for cancellation so when the yellow/green went up the game was on. Some game!. Suddenly it was all deadly serious.
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My only consolation was that it was my own choice. I could have been blown to bits in the infantry, or roasted in a tank, or faced several different ways of drowning in the navy so it seemed as good a way as any of taking my chance.
With the start up everything in the aircraft seemed accentuated. The smell of paint, leather and fuel brat was all mixed up to create the odour that was peculiar to an aeroplane.
There was the additional smell of the rubber oxygen mask that was attached to the now sticky leather helmet and would be stuck to my head for the next few hours.
There was no way around that as the earphones and microphone were an integral part of the helmet.
Then there were the atmospherics on the otherwise silent radio receivers that mingled with all the other muffled noises as the aeroplane case to life in the hands of Mac and Paddy.
Starter motors whined. Engines coughed and spluttered and the airframe vibrated from end to end with the initial rough running in rich mixture. Flaps were operated, bomb doors were closed and brakes released with hissing air and sighing hydraulic systems after the wheel chocks were waived away, followed by the rolling motion of the heavily laden aircraft as we taxied to the marshalling point near the runway threshold. Depending where the dispersal was in relation to the runway in use determined the length of time taxying, and the order of take off, but normally by the time we reached the threshold the oil temperatures and pressures, and cylinder head temperatures had risen sufficiently for the engines to be run at near full power against the brakes to test the magnetoes [sic] .
As was usual in aero engines there were two magneto's to each engine, each serving one of the two sets of plugs per cylinder. That added up to 112 spark plugs altogether and it was neccessary [sic] that every one was doing it's bit when full power was called for. Then the superchargers were tested, and the variable pitch propellors, with the aircraft shaking and rattling until all four engines had been tested after which they were throttled back to a nice healthy tick over.
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That was the decision point of 'go,no-go'. The engines had to give power within certain tolerances before a full load take-off could be attempted, and a decision that we would have to 'abort' if all was not well would here been an anti climax at that stage.
It would have meant entering the runway at the allotted time, rolling down and turning off at the intersection or the end, and then justifying it to the engineering officer and the flight commander. It was not a decision to be taken lightly.
That first time, with a live load and everything checked out satisfactorily, a green aldis lamp signal flashed from the caravan in acknowledgement of the aircraft's letter signalled on the downward identification light and we were ready to go.
We entered the runway with the one hundred and one checks complete and the adrenelin [sic] started to flow as we went through the familiar procedure.
Line up, brakes on, one third flap, engine cooling gills set, superchargers in low gear, props in fine pitch, mixture rich, engines wound up, a momentary pause for a final check of revs and boost with the aircraft straining against the brakes....brakes off; and a surge of acceleration as we started down the runway. Then the continuing acceleration and the tail coming up followed by a final bellow from the engines as the throttles were shoved to the stops.
The runway lights flashed by at ever increasing speed. The aircraft gave a little sideways fidget as the line was corrected and we were soon approaching the critical speed.
Very mindful of several tons of high explosive and a great deal of high octane fuel surrounding us we continued to thunder down the runway until those of us not in the cockpit knew by all the familiar sounds and sensations that all was well up front. The flight engineer who had followed the pilots hand on the throttles up to the stops had now taken them over and applied the friction locks as Mac devoted all his attention to controlling the aircraft as at the same time the engineer was calling out the increasing air speed.
The rumbling stopped; the attitude changed and we knew we were airborne. The next call was "undercarriage up" and as soon as they were showing up the next call was "flaps in" and another
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change of attitude as the aircraft was 'cleaned up' before there was a final change of engine note as they were throttled back after reaching a safe height and speed.
At that point we all started to breath [sic] a little easier.
All the time the intercom between the pilot and enginneer [sic] was lively as the action and subsequent indicator response was called out and acknowledged.
With so such to do and so such depending on it being done correctly it was a rigid discipline, and very soon we were climbing on the first heading to the rendezvous position before climbing further to our operating height.
On that first occasion we set off at medium level under cover of the main force and once more we were on our way. This time with a difference……it was for real!..
[line of stars]
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As soon as we got clear of the coast the gunners tested their guns with a couple of bursts and the smell of cordite drifted around for a while, after which they settled down to their long spell of sky searching.
It was a lonely and demanding job but very neccessary [sic] as they methodically scanned up and down and left and right with the turrets following their search.
You could not see them out there but there were a lot of aircraft milling about with between 600 and 700 hundred converging on the main rendezvous position from East Anglia, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire to make up a solid stream. Even in good night conditions you were lucky to be able to see further than 700 yards so that if anything did show up there was not a lot of time to take action.
Some separation was provided by the various waves being at predetermined heights, and by time separation between the waves going through a check point or turning position, but nevertheless there were still a large number of aircraft packed into a relatively small area of sky at any one time.
When I was not in the radio compartment my position was in the Astro dome. That was the clear vision dome on top where the navigator took his star shots from and where I could assist in the search.
From there I could still remain plugged into the communication system and listen for routine broadcasts from the Group control station every half hour. These included up-dated forcasts [sic] of the weather in the target area and a common barometric pressure setting for the altimeter to ensure that we were all flying on the same datum.
Any message received was rapidly de-coded and passed to the navigator or the pilot although it was more common that only the station identification would be transmitted, (no message). It did not do to miss anything like a recall though, and to find that you were the only one over the target and getting a great deal of attention.
On occasions I would be required to release a flare over the sea for assessment of the wind drift. It was released down the flare chute and ignited after entering the water and then the rear gunner kept his sights on it to read off the drift angle.
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whilst the navigator did the timing and his sums which was very crude by modern standards but the results were a very useful check against the Met. forecast which with the best will in the world was often well out and navigators needed everything they could get to keep us on track. Pete was forever beavering away with his rulers, dividers and computer to cross check everything and did not rely on any one specific facility. The best I could do for his were radio bearings from the UK using the direction finder equipment.
Unfortunately that became suspect as we got deeper and deeper into enemy airspace. The Germans sent out false signals on the same frequency to confuse things and the continental broadcasting stations were suspect as well due to them being made on linked geographically located transmitters. [underlined] The same as we did for UK broadcasts. [/underlined] It was impossible to get bearings on that network. One equipment that they found difficult to interfere with was 'GEE', which was our most important navigational aid up to a certain distance imposed by range and height. That was the 'Magic Box' which used Information from a number of special high frequency transmissions which were received and displayed on an oscillascope [sic] . When the information had been transcribed to some special lattice charts positions could be fixed with considerable accuracy, and from running fixes it was possible to assess wind speed and direction for the purpose of correcting headings. It did not do to stray far off track.
The flight engineer continually monitored the engines, and all the vital functions that kept us going including fuel flow and fuel remaining as well as transferring fuel from the smaller tanks to keep the main one's topped up. There was very close co-operation between Mac and Paddy as Mac was meticulous in his handling of the engines.
The bomb-aimer/observer whose main function occupied very little time often spent time as co-pilot or assisted in map reading when conditions were favourable, so everyone had their job to do and a little bit more. It was team work all the way.
Positioning for mine dropping was meticulous. The Navy provided the charts and told us where they wanted them dropped, and the charts went back to the Navy.
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The mines went down in their specified area on their parachutes which softened the blow of them entering the water after which they submerged to do their evil business at a later date.
I was glad to see those go. Their explosive content of Torpex was far more devastating than that in our bombs; not that the outcome would be any different if we had a direct hit in the bomb bay!.
It all seemed too easy. We saw a little sparkling flak in the distance that someone had stirred up, possibly a flak ship.
Those were the blighters that could crop up anywhere so every sighted had to be logged so that some might be done about them later; if only to give instructions to avoid the area. The trouble was that it was easy for them to more from one anchorage to another before the next day!.
As we droned back to base I found it difficult to reconcile the fact that it really was me going through it all. It all seemed so unreal like a dream.
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I had moved on.
Someone else now had the refuelling job.
If ever I needed to call the W/T (morse) fixer service I knew what was at the other end of the facility and how they could help us.
I had worked in one of Bomber Command's transmitting stations at Honington, (mainly polishing the wretched floor), but as a qualified wireless operator I had often been allowed to plug into the transmitter side-tone as it squawked away and take down the transmission for practice.
Mostly of course at that time it was incomprehensible as it was in code, but now I had found out what it was all about being one of the recipients within a collective call sign.
There were facilities available on the shorter range R/T (radio telephone) service usually need directly by the pilot and although I had means of using it from my compartment it was very rarely necessary [sic] .
Apart from air to air and normal air to ground control there were some very useful services to be obtained such as the D/F (direction finder) cabins which I had also spent time in.
These were the strange tepee like wooden cabins stuck out in some field near the airfield with their double walls filled with fine shingle for protection against shot and shell and an aerial array sticking out of the top. I [sic] was from there that a highly experienced operator was able to give pilots a course to steer for base, or a bearing, and in dire emergency, assistance with a descent through cloud procedure.
I had spent more time in the teleprinter communication cabins and had done duty as the R/T operator in what was then called Flying Control as well as doing daily inspections on aircraft radio equipments.
I had time to reflect on what it all added up to as we droned steadily towards base. There was little else to do except listen out on the control frequency, load the colours of the day into the verey pistol and switch an the IFF (radar identification signal), make up the log etc as we approached the coast, descended and identified the flashing beacons that pin-pointed airfields and other geographical locations by their code. (I had even
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been part of the operating team on one of those at one time); until we identified Chedburgh's among the dozens that were winking through the night.
With navigation lights on and gunners still keeping a good look out for intruders we called the tower and got our joining instructions; joined the circuit, landed and taxied around to our dispersal.
The ground crew were waiting and marshalled us into position and finally when the chocks were in place everything was shut off and at last the dull roar that had been going on in our ears for hours finally subsided.
It took some time to adjust and we found that we still shouting at each other for a long time afterwards.
Apart from that and to get the tacky helmet off perhaps the most relief was gained by being able to slacken the lower straps of the parachute harness that if properly adjusted made life very uncomfortable, and then to have a good pee on a wheel and light a cigarette. What a blessed relief that was!. It became almost a ceremony!.
There were a few minutes to wait whilst the skipper had a few words with the crew chief to pass on any information relative to defects or malfunctions and then finally the crew bus arrived and we boarded on route to operations still drawing hungrily on our cigarettes, that as I recall, tasted pretty horrible at the time.
On arrival at the ops. room for debriefing there were excited exchanges with other crews all milling about after we checked in our parachutes. The room was still thick with tobacco smoke as the windows had remained closed since the briefing and would remain so until until [sic] the end of the de-briefing or to the time when all was quiet. The time when all aircraft had landed back at base or had been notified as landing elsewhere or endurance times had been reached. After that time aircraft that had failed to turn up were chalked up on the state board as FTR. (Failed to return).
We then spent a little more time answering questions put by the Intelligence Officers and their assistants as they probed for information, and completed combat reports as appropriate as they pushed more cigarette across the table.
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Finally came the specialist debrief when we handed in our logs and code books. Returning all equipment. Changing out of our flying clothing and at last making our way to the mess hall for our eggs and bacon, and to top it all off, a nice long walk back to our tin hut where others were already asleep or just tumbling into bed.
That is when it hit. When you were winding down. When it was all over and you felt completely drained. I know I did. Apart from anything else I was never very good at being up half of the night.
It might have been a routine trip for us but later as we found that [underlined] Eleven [/underlined] out [sic] 96 Stirlings had failed to return from the Mulheim raid and one of them had been from our Squadron. The casualty procedure was already under way and we had not even been there long enough to know the unfortunates concerned!.
That was the pattern of our lives. We usually reported to the flight office at 1400 hours the next afternoon whatever time we had landed, to see what was in store for us and a special effort was made for more than one reason.
If we had slept late and had to make a dash for it it [sic] was easy to miss lunch and we would have to go through to tea time before eating again. There was no other way of finding something edible unless one happened to find a mobile NAAFI wagon doing it's rounds. Even the so called 'sausage rolls' or the inevitable currant bun was welcome then. We very soon got around to keeping a tuck box of some sort to tide us over by hoarding some of our flying rations.
If there was no flying there was a serious attempt to be the first in the queue for supper. We always seemed to be hungry in those days. Or perhaps it was just me!
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On the 25th we were detailed for another mining job. This time in the Bay of Biscay, off the estuary the Geronde [sic] and in the approaches to the Atlantic U.boat bases.
Again it was hours of concentrated low flying over moonlit waters that could be so very, very deceptive. It placed a great deal of strain on Mac but that is where he seemed to be in his element and we were glad to get home again after a flight of 5 hours 45 minutes.
The mines had been placed with the same meticulous care as before and everyone seemed of the opinion that mining was 'a piece of cake' although not everyone was happy about spending so much time near the wave tops, especially as on one occasion Mac was close enough to cause the rear gunner to complain about the spray drenching his turret!.
There was some speculation about whether Mac was volunteering for mining but we never found out. What went on in the confines of the Flight Commanders office only ever translated itself into what went on the Battle Order and the Flight Authorisation Book.
That night others were not so lucky and another aircraft and crew from the Squadron failed to return.
We were all beginning to feel a little jaded by that time and we were hoping for some free time, if only to catch up on some sleep; but we had to wait for that.
[line of stars]
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We dragged ourselves down to the flight office in the afternoon hoping to hear the magic words "stand down", only to find that we were on the Battle Order again for another operation that night, and later on, in the briefing room, I was to experience a very strange feeling in my innards, somewhere between my heart and my stomach when the target was announced as Gelsenkirchen, in the Ruhr, or 'Happy Valley' as it was commonly dubbed by aircrew. It had to happen sometime!.
For Mac, it was already his fourth operation in five nights so it was not surprising that he was tight lipped about it. He knew what we were in for!.
For the rest of us it was to be our first time over the enemy coast to face all the perils that went with it. Since no-one would talk about it it [sic] had to be imagined although it not do to dwell on it.
I do know that as we approached the target that I was glad that I was not a pilot after all. How I would have reacted in those circumstances I am really not sure. Perhaps I would have coped but since my responsibilities towards the crew at that moment in time were limited I decided that on looking at that scene as we approached I would rather not know. I promptly retired to the protection of my armour plated seat. As if that made any difference!.
It did not seem possible that anything could fly through that unscathed. There were a lot of explosions and steel splinters out there but it soon occurred to me that the armour plating was only psychological protection. The others had a lot less protection so I went back to keeping a look-out and to hell with it.
As we started the bombing run the sight of the destruction being wrought upon a town by hundreds of tons of high explosive and incendiaries was bad enough but there was also evidence of life or death struggles going on around us as there had been on the run in. The searchlights probed and flak peppered the sky and through it all, flying more or less straight and level, Hoppy guided Mac to the aiming point chanting his left's, steadie's . and right a bit as the target slid up the sight wires.
In the initial stages of the approach the flak had been scattered as the guns went for individual aircraft but as the 'stream'
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Mac had laid down his own ground rules about what was expected of us when we were away from home shores.
In any case he strictly limited the use of the IFF. This was the device that sent out an identification signal to our radar stations, but which some people were known to use over enemy territory in an attempt to confuse the enemy radar. We most certainly did not!, and On/Off entries were made in both the signals and the nav. logs accordingly.
He would not permit the use of the infra-red rear facing fighter warning system which was just as well as we were to find out later that their fighter A.I. (airborne intercept) radar could home on it.
He was insistant [sic] that there should be the absolute minimum use of any radio equipment, and if it was not needed it was to be switched off. (He even used to switch off his R/T set unless there was a very good reason for having it on!.)
The ban even included navigational equipment if there was any chance of an emmission [sic] from it.
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Perhaps he knew something that we didn't but he was never one for explanations and since he was the boss what he said was never questioned. Not openly anyway!.
Like most pilots he carried a mini route map to help him keep orientated and the navigator was kept hard at it to keep us on track and on time as well as keeping in the middle of the stream rather than being a sitting duck waffling around on the fringe where we could be picked off by a roaming night fighter.
My duties had become very restricted by the limitations imposed by Mac. I could not even use the main transmitter without his permission and he was even reluctant to have it switched into the stand-by position which kept it warm and ready for use.
Only the main receiver plus it's associated direction finding equipment were available to me so I was not able to do much to assist in the navigation although there were plenty of other jobs to keep me occupied.
The results of people straying off track had already been obvious when sparkling exchanges of fire between aircraft were seen, or a sudden concentration of ack-ack and the probing fingers of a cone of searchlights and occasionally an orange ball of fire in the sky that would fall to earth and disintregate [sic] . Having no wish to be part of that scene it was 'softly softly catchee monkey'.
One job I often did was chucking leaflets out of the lower rear escape hatch but generally in the final stages of the bombing run I had another job that was another of Mac's specific requirements.
In order to take a photograph of the bomb strike a photo flash was released automatically down the flare chute and a barometric capsule activated it's 'chute and ignited it. Some photo flash!. It contained about 25lbs of magnesium mixture that produced a 3,000,000 candle power flash but the release mechanism of this thing had been known to fail with disastrous results. If it went off inside the chute or failed to clear the aircraft if it malfunctioned the results were as spectacular as getting a direct hit with an ack-ack shell.
It was usually assisted on it's way by a shove from me when I was not otherwise engaged. Just another safety measure that Mac had very quickly picked up from somewhere,
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and I imagine that the rest of the crew were somewhat relieved to hear the call "flash away---chute clear" call on the intercom before I went back to my other duties.
Once more we had run the gauntlet without problems and although the homeward journey was tedious we were eventually back over base and once more flopping into our beds an hour later when it was all over. Even then sleep did not come easily.
There were some more mines to be dropped in the Bay of Biscay on the 25th; again in the approaches to the Atlantic ports and U.boat bases and once more they went down bang on the button.
There was a special technique for accurate positioning but as usual Mac had his own variation. The brief was to transit at medium height and then down to the dropping height after a 'GEE' fix. Our way was to go down to the wave tops after the fix and then climb to dropping height after which we went down to the wave tops again to avoid being picked up by the Coastal radar stations.
It was not only the position in which they were dropped that was important but [underlined] how [/underlined] they were dropped. Too high and they could be out of position and possibly break up on impact. Too low and they were still likely to go up on impact by hitting the water before the 'chute deployed. Either of those results made the effort a waste of time....and there is no fun being blown up by your own mines!.
As soon as they were gone we were racing home again with the taps wide open to avoid the attentions of any prowling Ju.88's in the area….and then we climbed back up to above 2000ft. On that occasion our flight time was 5hrs 35mins.
By that time I was finding it difficult to reconcile our efforts with all the experiences that I had had on operational stations and of other lurid stories told by others of combats, fires, crashes, injuries and deaths. I knew it was not a myth and that it could and did happen so perhaps some people were just unlucky as the BBC news bulletins were regularly giving out that "XXXXX of our aircraft are missing". Just a cold statement of fact but often they were crewed by people we knew. The figure was frighteningly high on occasions, especially among the Stirling force, and there were not only operational losses. On the 2nd July two of the Squadron's aircraft collided in the Chedburgh
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circuit and crashed nearby with the loss of 15 lives. There was only one survivor from that tragic accident which included some ground crew getting some air experience.
We had a few days break before the next operation and like the I others I managed to catch up on some sleep and letter writing as well as sinking a few jars in the Mess but it was not all fun and games.
Hoppy and I took time off to go to Ely for a look around the Cathedral which we had so often seen from the air or the train and of course there were other activities laid on if there was no flying.
There was the often repeated talk about our conduct should we be unfortunate enough to become POW's and it was sometimes made all the more interesting when the talks were from people who had already escaped or evaded to make a home run. There talks on first aid and sea survival and how to make the most of all the equipment that was available to us if we got into trouble. There were not many idle moments but on those days we achieved some sort of normality. One could not be in the front line all the time, and it was too good to last. On the 3rd July we were on the Battle Order again to find that at briefing targets at Cologne were detailed so off we went again.
The defences were even more lively than I had ever seen before. There was evidence of a lot of fighter activity around the City and some very nasty sights as aircraft were hit in their vitals. There must have been some desperate situations as people fought for their lives if they had not already been blasted into eternity. How we went through that inferno I will never know and we were very relieved when we came out into the clear again and were heading for home, still keeping a good look-out for a long time.
It took time after slipping between the sheets before that scene finally faded from the mind. The brain needed time to wind down allowing the need for sleep to take over.
There were [underlined] seven [/underlined] Stirlings lost that time, again about 10% of the Stirling force among the total losses for the operation. It did not bear thinking about for too long and it was rarely the subject of conversation. At that rate according to the law of averages it would not be long before our number came up but
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people normally kept such thoughts to themselves, or shared their fears with their Chaplains.
For me, I soon gave up the struggle of concience [sic] . If people were getting killed or maimed on both side fighting for God and country then any rational person was bound to have doubts at some time. Possibly most people, like me, tried to push such thoughts to the back of the mind and just concentrated on eliminating the enemy, trusting that a forgiving God would understand.
I suppose it was a sort of psychological con. trick that one played on one's self.
It couldn't happen to us!!!!!
[line of stars]
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On one break between operations and sleeping there was flying practice of the kind that I found the most-enjoyable.
Fighter affiliation was the one exercise that involved us all except the navigator. He could get his head out of the 'office' and enjoy the fun. It allowed Mac to demonstrate his skill by causing more than a few Thunderbolt, Hurricane and Spitfire pilots to have to work very hard to get a bead on us, with a very good chance of getting them in our sights first, which Mac insisted was the object of the exercise.
It required complete team work between gunners and pilot and they had a fine old time giving their running commentaries and instructions which were interpreted by Mac into evasive action. The inter-comm was alive. A team of acrobats could not have put a routine together any better as we skidded and banked and slithered this way and that way to the frustration of the fighter pilots.
My place was in the Astro-dome as usual looking for any attacks that the gunners were not concentrating on....just in case!. I never had the opportunity to get into the turrets. The only way that I was ever going to do that was if one of the gunners became a casualty and although I was not over anxious for that experience I still had to keep in practice.
It was inevitable that Mac would get the opportunity to show off to our American friends one day.
We had recently had a liaison visit from USAAF crews and we had shown off our aeroplane only to be left smarting from some tactless remarks about our 'pop-guns' and the lack of them in certain parts, and "where did we stow the pool table", etc, etc. Certainly the fusulage [sic] of the Stirling was big enough for one, but they were more subdued when we told them that we could carry some three times the weight of bombs that they could!. We kept quiet about the fact that they could fly more than twice as high as we could, and very often did.
On one particular occasion we had just completed our exercise and the fighter was orbitting [sic] out of range somewhere when a B.17. (Flying Fortress), came stooging in looking for all the world like a porcupine with guns sticking out of everywhere.
We were a little above him so Mac shoved the nose down, piled on the power to build up the speed quickly, then stopped and
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'feathered'; (turned the propellor blades edge on to the slip stream) both outboard engines before coming up alongside him. After a little hand waving came the big surprise. We then slid up, over the top of him, came down the other side, then underneath and back into the original position before waiving [sic] goodbye to the astonished, and possibly alarmed B.17. pilot and then peeling off like a fighter. All that on two engines!!!!. Very good for morale!.
It has to be said that although the Stirling could not get to a decent altitude it could be thrown about in a very lively fashion and Mac's handling of it had to be experienced to be believed. We might have done some strange things at times and he threatened on several occasions that he would loop it but one thing I do not ever remember him doing was a heavy landing of the sort that some people seemed to make a habit of.
One measure of the quality of successive landings could always be taken from what was known as 'creep' marks on the tyres and wheels.
When a tyre was fitted on one of those enormous wheels a line was painted across wheel rim and tyre so that after a number of landings with the wheel being jerked into motion by the impact with the runway it was possible to see how far the tyre was creeping around the rim. It was only allowed to go so far otherwise the inner tube could distort and fail.
In most cases tyres needed re-fitting about every seven landings but I do know that our aircraft did not have a refitting as often as that.
As for looping, we never did, although we were never very far from it on the occasion when he did attempt it. He had several tries but the result was the same every time. We started running out of air-speed long before we got up to the top and he was obliged to roll out of it with dust, fluff and debris of all sorts floating about loosely in a brief spell of weightlessness. He gave it up after a while having calculated that he needed at least 300mph on the clock before the pull up to make sure of getting over the top but one thing he would not do was to push 'Willie' to that extent,
Someone else's aircraft maybe, but not ours!.
It goes without saying that such fun and games were never
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attempted without a lot of airspace under us. At least 7000ft. of it to make sure that to make sure of recovery if anything did go wrong, and I loved every minute of it.
On the 9th we were back to mining in the Frisian [sic] Islands this time, in the approaches to Wilhelmshaven and Bremerhaven. There was a lot of flak going up from the islands or ships but we had gone in on track fairly low and as soon as the mines had gone down we went again, skimming the wave tops and once more we skirted all the defences finally arriving back at base with no more problems other than just feeling tired even if it was one of the shorter trips.
Someone did mention to Mac that he was likely to slam into the side of a flak ship one night but he reckoned he would always jink around it before they could bring any guns to bear.
[line of stars]
Among the odd jobs that cropped up between operations were trips to pick up a crew or part of one that had diverted or pranged somewhere, or taking a crew to pick up an aeroplane after it had been repaired. Every day it was something different, and some nights as well with a mass exercise to test some procedure or just to keep the enemy guessing. Spoof exercises were boring but very worthwhile as it put the German defences on the alert only to find that the force had turned away half way across the North Sea.
Mac still went out of his way to practice low flying and I recall with shame the number of sailing boats all over the Broads that we capsized with our slipstream as we steamed along with about 200mph on the clock.
It seemed funny at the time anyway. Especially the poor bloke on a bike who was wobbling all over the place as he was looking over his shoulder at a massive Stirling at about 30ft bearing down on him, to be finally flung, bike and all, into the dyke.
None of it was authorised of course but Mac always used to say that if the flight authorisation book was annotated 'local flying' it looked suprisingly [sic] like 'low flying' and that is what he would be doing for as long as he could get away with it.
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On the 24th we were briefed for a raid on the docks and the U.Boat construction plants at Hamburg with a maximum effort being called for.
Every available aircraft was put on; many with 'scratch' crews drawn from the operations staff. This was one with a difference!. The briefing was long and detailed as we were going to drop 'Window' for the first time.
'Window' was the code name for the bundles of foil strips that were to be discharged from aircraft at a steady rate from a given position en route and as every aircraft in the force was contributing it was expected to cause such a smother of signals on the enemy radar that it would be quite impossible to track individual aircraft. It sounded like a good idea to me and I was quite content to spend a lot of time shoving that stuff down the flare chute if it was going to keep us out of trouble.
It did work and losses were cut considerably despite the fact that three of the Stirling force failed to return out of a total of 791 aircraft dispatched. Nine others were also missing.
It was a fairly long flight of 6 hours 55 mins. but was without incident until we were over base on return. Someone ahead of us had done a 'swinger' and blocked the runway so we were diverted to Mildenhall and it was a strange bed for the night for us. The arrangements for diverted crews were a bit rough and ready. After debriefing we were given bedding and then had to hump it, with all of our other gear, around the camp, through the main gate to the pre-war airmens married quarters which were being used as barracks, and we finally flopped into hastily made beds in the kitchen of one of them, dead beat. I'm sure we could have slept the clock around but it was not to be.
We were hauled out of our beds at mid-day by the RAF Police as there was a panic to get back to base. We had no time to have a drink or a meal or clean our teeth or wash or shave. It was a mad scramble to get out to the aircraft as quickly as possible after returning the bedding. That basically is what caused my problem. It was not until we had got airborne that I realised that in the 'flap' I had left my flight bag in the billet and that was
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serious. Among the contents of that bag were secret code books but Mac was adament [sic] when I asked for a turn round. His comment was simply "hard luck". so when I reported the loss on return to base the cat really was among the pigeons.
It was a long time before the enquiry was concluded.
I could have shortened the period, and certainly Mac was soon wishing he had turned-back but he would not take me over later in his car, or lend it to me (not that I had a driving licence), so we had to put up with a Squadron Leader chasing us all around for statements. It must have been time consuming and frustrating for him when we kept disappearing into the protection of the briefing room which were 'off-limits' to him.
The bag was eventually recovered from where I said it was. It was in one of the cupboards in the kitchen where we spent the night. (I had put it there for safety!), and later I got a formal reprimand for my sins. It did not make a lot of difference in the long run.
[line of stars]
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Nevertheless, I was feeling very apprehensive about the outcome of the oversight as we set course for base, air testing the aircraft on the way, and once the loss was reported I was issued with a new kit before we dashed off to try and get a few hours more sleep and a clean up. There was not much time to spare as we were on the Battle Order again. Hence the panic to get us back!.
Even then none of us felt particularly wide awake as we dragged ourselves into the briefing room once more. This time to be briefed for a raid on the Krupps complex at Essen.
Essen was considered to be one of the hottest targets in the Ruhr, being right in the middle with some fairly formidable defences to work our way through.
It was a case of running the gauntlet for a long time with a big of a wiggle here and there to dodge the ack-ack and the searchlights that someone else had stirred up but nevertheless, around Essen itself it was pretty fearsome.
Somehow we got through it and were homeward bound just wanting our beds but it was not to be. Routine W/T (Wireless Telegraphy-morse) broadcasts from Group HQ confirmed that the weather had indeed taken a turn for the worse, as we had been warned about at briefing.
Fog was forming all over East Anglia and we did not have a lot of reserve fuel. We had carried a maximum bomb load instead so someone at Group HQ planning must have been keeping his fingers crossed. The problem was that there were a lot of pilots wanting to get on the ground quickly as the low swirling fog was thickening up rapidly.
The countryside was covered in almost 100% cotton wool with church spires and masts sticking up through it and it did not make it easy to find a runway underneath it.
Our diversion was to Waterbeach and by the time we arrived on the scene it was going full blast. Aircraft were milling around over the top burning up precious fuel and others who had been called in had made missed approaches and rejoined those circling so when we were called in without too much delay Mac pulled out all the stops and made it first time on the BABS (Blind Approach Beam System), much to the relief of all concerned.
There was a lot of nail biting and it did not improve matters
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when we actually passed over one flaming wreck on the final approach. We had made it but some others holding off near the coast ran out of fuel and had to abandon with the inevitable loss of life due to parachute failures, crash landings and drownings.
At least we were home and dry once more even if it was going to be another cold and somewhat damp bed for the night, which was more than could be said for some poor blokes. Nothing at all was heard from another six Stirlings, Three of then from our Squadron. There was another large gap in the ranks that would need filling!.
The weather had cleared up by mid-morning and we were hauled out of our beds again feeling more dead than alive, with another panic to get back to base as we were on the Battle Order yet again!.
I must confess that at the time I felt that we were really pushing our luck.
"Willie' did not come up to scratch as we airtested it on the way back. We had actually taken off with what would normally have been an unacceptable 'mag' drop being unladen but it really did not make a lot of difference so we handed it over to the ground crew to sort out and once again we went through the same procedure as before. Grabbing some sleep, cleaning ourselves up etc. but when it came to briefing time 'W' still had not become serviceable despite Mac's rantings and ravings. He and Paddy had spent quite a lot of time out at the dispersal with their sleeves rolled up. We were allocated EF492 which someone else had air tested.
It finally resolved itself as the operation was cancelled almost immediately after the briefing. That was one time I was very relieved when the 'op. scrubbed' message came through considering the diabolical weather that had been forecast.
Despite the extra time that was available 'W' still failed to give satisfactory engine responses even after they changed all the plugs, ignition leads and magneto's on the troublesome engine so we were still down for EF492 when we were briefed on the following day for Hamburg yet again.
'Windowing' was the routine once more starting long before we entered the flak and fighter belt.
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The only break in that routine was when the flare was loaded as we once again approached the target in the midst of the docklands complex.
There was a lot of chatter and excitement from those up front as we got nearer. I went forward to join Pete who had virtually abandoned his charts about fifty miles from the city. There was absolutely no doubt where the target was. No spoof target fire could have possibly looked like that.
There was a damn great fire up ahead that, obliterated any aiming point so we jostled ourselves into the stream and Hoppy aimed for the middle.
The scene was almost beyond description, with a carpet of fires delineated by the waterways and streets with bursting bombs and other erupting areas of fire with photo flashes and flak tracers climbing lazily into the sky. Probing fingers of searchlights and cascading chandeliers of red and green Pyrotechnic markers.
It was an obsolutely [sic] apalling [sic] inferno down below us. It was sea of flame with smoke reaching up almost to our height to even penetrate the aircraft which bounced and bucked in the updraft.
I had never seen anything like it before and it was a long time before the flames faded into the distance as we left it all behind us. The rear gunner reckoned that he could still see them nearly 100 miles away and everyone was wondering what could have caused such a conflagration. We were to find out later that a combination of freak conditions had caused what was to be known as the 'firestorm’ but it was with some relief that we eventually arrived back at Chedburgh, into a hut now full of new people and to flop into our own untidy beds ready to sleep for a week.
[line of stars]
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We had another free day before the next operation was scheduled.
A day of rest and an opportunity to write to my parents, who, although they never showed their feelings in their letters about the family must have dreaded each day for what news it might bring them, knowing what I was doing. But the following day we were on the Battle Order once again.
We had a shock when we found that the target was Hamburg once more, and there seemed something sinister in going for the place so soon after the last attack that surely must have torn the heart out of the place.
EF433 was back in business as they had sorted it out at last and we had a rough time weaving in and out of a multi searchlight cone and concentrations of flak as we approached the target area. Once again it was a combination of Mac's skill in weaving about and a fair slice of luck. It was not surprising that our gunners were getting a bit 'twitchy' by this time, and so would I have been in their situation. One moment of slackening concentration on their part and we could easily be one of the 'flamers' we saw all too often so when Ralph blasted away at a shadow that swept across the top of us without warning the very fact that he identified it as a Halifax almost immediately was taken for granted. We learned later that Ralph's fire had been accurate enough to have wounded the Halifax engineer in the foot!. It was unfortunate but it really was a case of shoot first and ask questions afterwards. A split second hesitation and there was no second chance if it had been a roaming night fighter trying to drop something nasty on us. We had been warned about that possibility.
Worst things could happen in the 'stream' with hundreds of aircraft converging on one spot with a night visibility of 500 to 600 yds. at best. Collisions were always a possibilty [sic] despite the attempts to achieve separation in the planning, but if someone was out is his timing, and at the wrong height that was it. What the Halifax was doing at our height and mixed up with the Stirlings is anyone's guess. Pete was adament [sic] that we were on time but a total of six Stirlings were lost that night despite the protection of 'Window' and other methods that were being used to give us some cover.
The Special Duties Force had all sorts of tricks up their sleeve
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to confuse and jamb the German fighter control system including German speaking operators on board to imitate their controllers and transmit spurious instructions.
They played merry hell with the system causing Luftwaffe pilots to continuously change channels and in the general confusion they were soon forced to make some drastic changes and then the main force joined in as soon as they entered the fighter belt. Every aircraft transmitted noise on a selection of frequencies which overlapped and were manipulated in such a way as to produce a solid spread of noise across their operating band.
It caused a buzz of excitement when this was detailed at briefing but was Mac was still reluctant to have our main transmitter in use. It produced a typical comment, "It's all very well these clever sods deciding that we will do this and that and the other, but I'm not having a fighter home on our transmissions right up our chuff".
Nevertheless, I had my orders and I could appreciate the value of it. He was finally convinced when I asked him try to listen into the din that was going out on the airways. There was a solid spread of noise from hundreds of aircraft using a microphone in an engine housing feeding to the transmitter. It blotted out everything else so I was allowed to add my bit. Operation 'Tinsel' was good value as far as I was concerned.
Once more the journey was made over the North Sea which always looked so angry and inhospitable when there was sight of it. The very thought of finishing up in the 'oggin' filled me with dread but that was the way so many went following an emergency signal going out at frantic speed to the fixer service. If the sender was lucky it would be followed by a long transmission when the key was clamped down before he dived for his crash position and the transmission ceased when the inevitable occurred.
Everyone who heard those transmissions logged whatever they heard and a D/F bearing if they managed to get one although the transmission would be acknowledged smartly by the base operator for the benefit of all those that might be listening.
The sender would no longer be listening. He would have far more important things to occupy his mind; if he had been lucky!.
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It was not always easy to ditch copy-book style, with the tail down, along the bottom of the swell, exactly at the right speed, at night, and with the aircraft flying like a brick lavatory. Maybe without even a qualified pilot at the controls. But some made it just the same and the rescue services did the rest.
For us once more there were the dulcet tones of the WRAF in the control tower when Mac called for landing instructions, and eventually after all the paraphinalia [sic] had been attended to; to climb into a cold and untidy bed, for most of us, in the same state as we had got out of it!.
The next night we were off to Remchiede [sic] in the Ruhr and marking was carried out to the ultimate. Something different was being tried. There were route markers, turning point markers, target markers, back up markers and shifters, but it was not to Mac's liking. It might have helped to place more bombs in the right place but it also seemed to be an invitation to the night fighters to concentrate their efforts in a nicely defined corridor.
That was the night I did something that I only ever did the once. We were carrying a second pilot on his first operational trip. Paddy spent most of his time in the astro dome, the flare was loaded and there was no window to throw out so I was virtually 'spare'. I retired to my armour plated seat, receiver volume turned right up so that I would be alerted at the first signs of a transmission; and then I dozed off!. At that point in time I decided that if I was going to get killed I did not want to know about it.
It is not possible to go right off in such circumstances so I was still conscious of thumps, bounces and weaving sensations but we still sailed right through it all although eight other Stirling were not so lucky. Two of them from our Squadron!.
[line of stars]
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There was hardly time to get our breath back before we were at it again. We went through the old familiar routine and there were a few gasps when we found that the target was Hamburg once more.
In the meantime a story had gone around in respect of an NCO crew who had turned up for a briefing in their best uniforms, having told their commissioned captain in advance that they were refusing to go, but when they announced that fact to all and sundry that they really had had enough after their last rough trip there was one hell of a commotion. They had all been placed under close arrest and were stripped of their rank and aircrew insignia after which they finished up in the ‘glasshouse'. Subsequently, when they had completed their term they were employed in the Sgt's Mess of another operational station with the glaring signs of removed badges for all to see………and lesson to everyone!.
How much truth there was in that story is anyone's guess but it did show up the anomaly in the aircrew set up that everyone was well aware of.
Despite the fact that all aircrew were volunteers once you were in that was it. There was no going back and staying that you did not like it or you did not want to do it, on moral or any other grounds. You were stuck with it.
Failure or refusal to carry out your duty in the air was classified as LMF. (Lack of Moral Fibre) and led immediately to a Courts Martial. The action was swift although there was a subtle difference between that charge and 'cowardice in the face of the enemy'.
I am sure that a lot of people who were justifiably scared out of their wits still pressed on rather than give way and be labelled with that stigma. In many cases the condition was recognised by other crew members and the individual often 'rested' on medical. grounds which eventually sorted the chap out one way or the other.
In this particular case where there was more than one person involved it was much more serious and no doubt could have been construed as mutiny rather than LMF. It begs the question of how a similar problem would have been dealt with in either of the other services. I have a fairly good idea...but this was
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the Air Force way!!!!!!!.
The briefing was well under way and everyone did their little bit until it finally came to the Met. man's turn.
He commenced to put up a chart such as I had never seen before; or since.
It was smothered in the usual blue and-red symbols of high and low pressure systems. Warm fronts. Cold fronts. Occluded fronts, and the craziest pattern of isobars that looked as if they had been put on by a demented spider.
There was a buzz of anticipation as he finished pinning up his chart, then he turned around, coughed nervously and confessed that he had not got a clue.
What a brave chap!.
The announcement was greeted with good natured hoots, howls, and whistles accompanied by the stamping of feet until, he had an opportunity to explain that the situation was very complex and that it was impossible to draw up really accurate forecast. This was the best that he could do.
His forecast was absolutely grim. We were to expect anything and everything. There were no soft options.
He probably did not realise at the time that all the noise we had made was little more than a cover for the twinges we nearly all had in our guts.
His chart may have been a joke but the weather was not. There were umpteen layers of cloud with heaped up cumulous and dirty great Cumulo [sic] Nimbus embedded in the layers with the most incredible wind sheers in them that was a navigators nightmare quite apart from the fact that if you did happen to be unfortunate enough to blunder into the worst of that it was enough to tear your wings off with updrafts and downdrafts of around 100mph adjacent to each other!.
We encountered ice, snow, hail, rain, thunder and lightning and even that rare phenomenae [sic] 'St Elmo's fire' that lit up the aircraft with a silvery blue glow of discharged static electricity around all of it's extremeties [sic] including the propellors that were turned into enormous catherine wheels.
Mac fought the elements and that aeroplane for hours as it bucked, bounced, and groaned with every lurch. We couldn't get above it so there was only one way....onward!
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Hail about the size of marbles hammered us until we thought that every piece of perspex must give way under the onslaught but somehow we got through although we had to bomb under the parachute sky markers that the Pathfinders had been forced to drop above the diffused glow of the doomed city below us.
It must have been too much for some. It was a shocking night all round. For us as well as Hamburg. We lost thirty aircraft altogether and another 50 were badly damaged, without a doubt as much by the elements than by enemy action and on the whole it is not suprising [sic] that the bombing was scattered all over the place.
We were all utterly exhausted after that. None more so than Mac, and were very relieved to get back to base and flop into our beds again. We were very lucky. A lot of good blokes went to a more permanent resting place that night without achieving a lot on that ill fated mission.
There were some angry mutterings directed at the commanders who had made the decision to go out an such a night.
There is a story told of one Aussie pilot who was so incensed at the debriefing he insisted on phoning Group HQ and when he was connected fired a real Aussie broadside down the line. The story goes that when he had finished the person at the other end said "do you know who you are talking to?", "No" said our Aussie. "This is the C in C, Air Chief Marshall Harris" (short pause), the next question was from our Aussie friend, "do you knew who this is?" to which the C in C said "No". "Thank Christ far that" was the answer to that before the phone was promptly replaced!.
[underlined] Noel [/underlined]
Happy reading
[line]
and there are another 70 pages to ‘Water under the Bridge’ Part 1
[underlined] Alan [/underlined]
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On the lighter side there were a few evenings out together in Bury St Edmunds where someone had found a pub that was just right for us.
It was a back street 'spit and sawdust' place with the very apt name of 'The King William', and give us a common meeting place that we were otherwise denied as we were split between two Messes.
Mac used to get a small recreational petrol allowance for his car but it didn't go far. One or two sorties had proved fruitless as everywhere we went we seemed to be up to our armpits in aircrew and allied troops of all nations, and despite various reports about a certain pub having some beer we would be lucky to get in the door before they sold out. In others it was not unusual to get a watered pint. With war-time beer being limited to 2 1/2% alcohol to start with who wanted a watered pint! We most certainly didn't so once we found the 'King Willie' we kept very quiet about it.
The landlord and his wife had recently heard of a service bereavement in the family and when we turned up they virtually adopted us. We were treated like family and we could not have asked for more. In those days such a place that never ran out of beer, eggs and bacon, or time was the nearest thing to home. We probably spent more time in the private rooms than in the bar.
After 50 years that old `pub` no longer dispenses jars of ale. It has been converted into a private dwelling but the old pub sign boarding across the front that used to bear the name has been painted over, but it will always be the 'King Willie' as far as I am concerned.
I will always have a soft spot for that place and 'mine hosts'. There must have been times when Mac's elderly but mechanically perfect Triumph Dolomite was on auto pilot when we were on our way back from Bury after an excursion but it always did it without fuss even if it was grossly overloaded. Anyway, Mac was quite used to nursing a grossly overloaded machine and under the circumstances I never had any worries.
There was the consolation that of course if anything did go wrong; and one day it did when I was not with then, we would not have far to fall, and on occasions we were past caring.
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After a short break we were on the Battle Order again on the 10th August and that night we had a very close shave.
The targets were at Nuremburg, and everything was as normal as it could have been under such circumstances until we were in the final stages of the bombing run when Ralph suddenly snapped out "go port--go-go-go", and Mac threw the aircraft over without hesitation.
I searched around frantically to see what it was all about because I was as usual looking in the opposite direction to where Ralphs turret was pointing.
My heart nearly stopped when I saw a Lancaster no move than 100 feet above us, sliding diagonaly [sic] across, with a 'cookie'. 4000lb blast bomb just leaving it's bomb bay!.
That instant `jink' undoubtedly saved us as we actually felt the displacement of air buffet us as it passed within a few feet of us between the mainplane and tailplane....and then it was gone. So was the Lanc!
Whether we were late on target or the Lanc. was early, or why the Lanc. was at our height, or why the bomb aimer had not seen us goodness only knows. There were lots of theories put forward and Mac had a lot to say about it for a change.
Our own theory was that a new Lanc. crew had done a panic stricken dive to the target and were more intent on getting rid of their load and out of it, and we were well aware that such things did happen from the whispers that did the rounds.
Hoppy was more concerned that the manoeuvre had spoiled his bombing run and he had lost his initial aiming paint so all he could do was to dump the bombs into the inferno that was Nuremberg below us but we were still sweating over that incident for some time afterwards.
It certainly had the affect of increasing our vigilance in the future and we were not going to be caught out like that again if we could avoid it. Things were dangerous enough as it was without being 'bombed' by our own aircraft.
Sixteen aircraft failed to return that night and three of them were Stirlings out of the 119 Stirlings sent out!.
Despite the savage losses within the Stirling force we were
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off again on the 12th but from all around the briefing room there were sharp intakes of breath when we saw just how far the tapes stretched across the wall map, right down to Turin, Italy, and everyone knew immediately that it was going to be a 'hairy' one. Mainly because every Stirling crew member was only too well aware of just how high a Stirling would go. Even the Wellington and some of the 'oldies' could do better than us so we knew that there was no way we would be flying over the Alps...it had to be through them!. As the plan unfolded we soon learned that that was exactly what we were going to do. The bolt hole if in trouble was North Africa!. Our Stirlings were a standing joke in Bomber Command. Even WWI aircraft could get to greater altitudes. We were lucky in normal circumstances to get above 15,000ft fully loaded despite the fact that the Operations Order often called for heights that were unobtainable. There were occasions when we managed to 'claw' a bit more at the expense of high fuel consumption by using more revs and boost and with a bit of luck, climbing at a ridiculous 200 feet per minute with 5deg. of flap when it was possible to gain another 1000 to 1500ft before starting the run in to the target but it was not always a good idea as it reduced the airspeed at the most vulnerable time. It did of course produce an increase in airspeed in a nose down approach to the target but it was a 'swings and roundabout' situation. It was certainly a waste of time gaining height that way for any other reason as having achieved it it [sic] could not be held in level flight and would slowly sink back to it's own level like a waterlogged hippo. The net result was that we got the full treatment from both the medium and the heavy flak as well as being bombed by our own aircraft!. The die was cast and we were stuck with it and it seems appropriate to relate an incident as I recall it.
A New Zealand pilot of 214 Squadron received a replacement rebuilt machine and to his delight he found that it out-performed any other Stirling that he had ever flown and kept singing it's praises until the news got around and an investigation was started to try and find out all about this 'Super' Stirling.
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All sorts of people flew it and sure enough it went up to around 20,000ft feet just like a Lanc. and there was much scratching of heads. Then they brought the jigs in from the repair depot, (SEBRO), at Cambridge and the matter was solved. They found out that the tailplane was out of incidence, so they promptly put it back to the 'correct' specification and 'presto', it was back to what a Stirling should be.
It might have solved the technical problem but it did not help the pilot much. He was so peeved about that he refused to fly it until it was changed back and he was threatened with disciplinary action but it was overcome by allocating him another 'normal' aircraft so he had to fly that or face the consequences. My recollection of the final verdict is that the powers that be decided that an incorrectly rigged tailplane could cause a structural failure in flight and that was the last word as far as I am aware. Stirlings continued to be produced to the same specification and displayed the same problem right to the end of it's days, even when many were converted or built as Mk.lV and Mk.V transports that were subsequently to be found littered around airfields all over the world.
I think most of us at that time would have been prepared to have taken a chance if there had been a choice of the two evils and Mac summed it up in his own inimitable way. "Bloody stupid sods", but since there was no choice through the Alps it was.
At the other end of the spectrum there was another `rogue' aircraft that arrived on the Squadron after a rebuild but it must have had a very limited test flight prior to delivery. Rogue is hardly the word that it's crew called it after air testing It. It creaked and groaned. The wing tips fluttered and it could not be trimmed from a lop-sided attitude in flight. Despite the most careful handling it showed great reluctance to exceed 9,000ft and was finally landed very delicately as it seemed that it was about to fall apart. It still took another independent short air test to confirm it's condition before it was promptly grounded and handed back to engineering!.
Despite the problems with the aircraft and the conditions encountered in flying right down to the South of France, skirting around Switzerland and heading through the mountains the Fiat factory......
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in Turin received our calling card but Mac was not at all happy with the return journey.
We had used a lot of fuel as a result of the engine settings that he had insisted on as we had weaved in and out of the mountain tops and to make matters worse it seemed to be getting light much earlier than anticipated.
The planned route was given up in favour of a straight line course for home shores and in the improving light Mac went down to deck level to get under radar cover and to make sure that no-one could get underneath us.
There was little I could do. Radio communication was out of the question even if it had been needed. We were far to low for reeling out the trailing aerial without loosing it so I went into the front turret as all of the others up front concentrated on map reading and safety look-out.
We were scudding along and were about 30 to 40 miles South of Paris when Mac let out a yell, "all gunners stand-by.....open bomb doors". He had spotted something that looked like a good place to jettison the incendiary containers. That 'something' appeared to be a German troops early morning parade forming up in a barrack square and we blasted into the parade ground leaving a very nasty mess behind us from front and rear guns as well as the containers.
That got rid of a bit of weight and we continued to steam along until we came to the shores of the Normandy coast where we spotted what looked like another troop assembly for morning bathing which we blasted into as well leaving that area rather messed up as well.
It did seem as if Mac's apptitude [sic] for low level flying was paying off as we had no-one chasing us so we stayed down low until half way across the Channel by which time I had vacated the front turret then it was back up to height, IFF on for radar identification, and on to base.
Mac had his own reasons for imposing a discreet silence about that episode despite what might have been a considerable contribution to the war effort. As far as anyone else was concerned we had dumped the containers and fired off the ammunition in the Channel to lose weight but having run for home more or less in in a straight line we got it........
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in the neck for arriving home early, a little earlier than others. There was even an accusation that we might not have even been to Turin and Pete's charts were impounded, but the target photo proved that we had. What they thought we had been doing for 7hrs 25mins. I really do not know but it was not very pleasant until we were proved to be in the clear but our unauthorised activities were [underlined] never [/underlined] reported.
The relief of crossing home shores again on the return journey was always an anti-climax as there were many hidden dangers on the home run with most of the crew drained by the physical and mental concentration of picking a safe pasage [sic] through enemy defences.
It was too easy to relax too soon with the gunners fighting the overwhelming desire to close their eyes, and even up front it was just as easy to be lulled by the steady throb of carefully synchronised engines with the aircraft flying itself on auto-pilot, particularly during the dark hours.
It was not unknown for the occasional Luftwaffe fighter bomber to infiltrate the home going bomber screen [sic] with a chance of shooting one down or following it through the radar screen to his base to shoot him down when he was most vulnerable during the landing and to give the base a plastering as well.
There was one occasion that I thought Mac had gone barmy when we were homeward bound over the sea and he called me up to take over his seat whilst he went down the rear. The night was as black as a coal cellar otherwise I am quite sure that I would never have had that opportunity but I dread to think of what might have happened if we had been bounced.
Of course, Paddy, in the right hand seat was quite capable of flying the aircraft within certain limits should an emergency arise, that was part of the job. So could Hoppy and although I had done several hours in the Link trainer (Flight simulator) my own efforts were very limited. My best effort was when I had an outside horizon but I was not very good on instruments alone and with the hood down. Under those circumstances I invariably 'pranged' it by losing control so when on that occasion I sat there gingerly making adjustments to the controls; as I thought, Paddy said after a few minutes "easy isn't it?", and when I nodded he added, "especially on auto-pilot"!. Rotten
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swine, and I thought that I had been doing so well to keep it straight and level.
After that I just sat there until it was time to return to my radio compartment to take a routine broadcast. Then I knew why I had been afforded the privilege of a front seat.
There was Mac, comfortably seated on the Elsan toilet down the back end, smoking a cigar, seemingly without a care in the world. Skippers privilege; no-one else was allowed to smoke!.
After the last operation we learned that three Stirlings had failed to return and one of them was from our Squadron.
The briefing on the 16th was for the long haul down to Turin again but we had an engine pack up 1 1/2 hours out and we were forced to return. With obstacles like the Alps to contend with it was no time to invite trouble but it seemed a terrible thing to do to jettison about 1000 gallons of precious fuel over the bombing range at Thetford followed by the bombs. It all had to go to get the aircraft down to landing weight but not all of the bombs went down safe. They never did. If the arming links did not release from their clips the pins were pulled and they went down live.
I remember only too well the occasions when as an airman on the very range, looking after the flashing beacon that there were some hair raising incidents. I have always maintained that the safest place was the target area. Being 2000 yards from it was no guarantee that you would not get earth thrown in your face,.....even when the Lufwaffe [sic] had a go at knocking out the light. At least on those occasions it gave me a bit of fun then with the Bren gun!.
We were certainly more rested than those who had done the full round trip when we found out that there was another operation planned for the 17th.
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Excitement mounted when the Battle Order was posted calling for a maximum effort and every available aircraft and crew was on the board to start with although it was whittled down for various reasons as time went on. We were allocated a 2nd pilot as EF433 was still undergoing an engine change so we were down for EE945 but it seemed a struggle to get many serviceable.
There were gasps and whistles as the wall map was uncovered. The tapes went right out across Demark and jinked about all over the place before they ultimately took up a course for Berlin from a turning point on the German Baltic coast very close to the Polish border. That was the crafty bit. We had been going on that route with variations for some time but that time we were not going to Berlin but to some place by the name of PEENEMUNDE.
The briefing was lengthy and very detailed. We were going in at medium height in bright moonlight to attack an experimental radar establishment (so we were told) and there was an order of the day from the man himself, 'Bomber Harris' to the effect that we were expected to press home the attack with the utmost vigour, and that if we did not knock the place out the first time we would be going back again the next night to finish it off.
Apparently Peenemunde was very special and I did not like the sound of that any more than the rest of our brief.
The aiming point for our wave was the quarters of the technical staff with the intention of killing as many as possible and the other waves would deal with the research and manufacturing plant. There was a lot of quiet whistling through clenched teeth at that announcement. It had a particularly dirty feeling about it to set out to deliberately kill people although we were not so naive not to be aware that the type of bombing that we were engaged in invariably took it's toll of innocent civilians including women and children. Somehow this felt different.
The Pathfinder technique was something new too. We had a 'Master of Ceremony's', who would be flying around the target broadcasting target and marker information to keep the bombing concentrated in the right place. A very dodgy process at low level and under a lot of falling bombs so Mac had to keep his R/T set on whether he liked the idea or not.
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Despite the maximum effort called for all the Squadron could muster was four serviceable aircraft and in fact only a total of 54 Stirlings were committed so we were not the only unit having difficulty in keeping aircraft flying but we got off and were under way without any trouble.
It was a long trip taking a Northerly route across the North Sea with many feint turns to keep the enemy guessing until we eventually turned South to cross the Island of Rugen with the head of the stream pointing to Berlin but in that case using the island as a final navigational check point to line us up with Peenemunde.
In such a bright moonlight night dozens of aircraft could be seen lining up but the rear gunner spotted one that seemed to be lining Itself up on us and it was not one of ours!. He kept an eye on it until he was sure of it's intentions and then there was a sharp warning, "fighter low, corscrew [sic] starboard, go" and opened fire as he spoke.
There was a lot of firing from both gunners as banked and dived followed by a yell from the rear gunner "got him" as the would be attacker went diving earthwards with smoke and flame pouring from him.
We soon levelled out again with the target area now clearly lit up ahead by markers, exploding bombs and fires. The Flak was very light and the target stuck out like a 'sore thumb' although there was a little confusion about the precise aiming point. The MC had been a bit late in giving corrections to bomb upwind and to one side of the markers but Hoppy had already locked on to his target and it was too late to do anything about it once the button was pressed, He always maintained that he went for the correct target anyway as it was obvious that the markers were out of place but there was a lot happening around us and there was more excitement to come.
The bomb bay doors had just closed when Mac suddenly ordered "guns stand-by-fighter dead ahead" and I swung around in the astro-dome to see an Me.110 about 200 yds ahead going from left to right with the crew plainly silhouetted in the cockpit by the light of the moon.
In the time that it had taken me to turn around Mac had already
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rammed on full power, banking right and Hoppy was scrambling into his turret. Ralph was rapidly rotating forward but it was a forlorn hope that we might do something effective. There was no way a thirty tonner was going to produce the sort of urge [sic] that was necessary and we soon lost him as he went into the dark side. I don't suppose the German crew even saw us.
The intercom was a bit lively after that as we cleared the target area and finally headed for home. The fighters were showing signs of getting very busy and there was evidence of combats all around us so it was not surprising that Mac did his usual and to hell with orders to climb away from the target. I heard him explaining to our co-pilot that he did not think it was a good idea to reduce his airspeed to about 150mph in those conditions and our co-pilot was learning a few things too. It must have paid off for him anyway. He stayed with the Squadron to the end advancing from Sgt to Sqdn.Ldr. and with a DFC.!.
Mac did the very opposite to the briefed instructions by shoving the throttles right forward with the nose down and 'high-tailed' it out of there like a scalded cat and kept it going until we were down to about 2000ft which we maintained over Denmark before climbing again.
We got home without any more trouble. The rear gunner had his claim of a `kill' of a Do.217 confirmed by other sightings although it was never acknowledged in the record books and fortunately we didn't have to go there again. We had well and truly put the place out of business and the Yanks made sure that it was unlikely to recover.
It was long afterwards that we learned that the so called 'radar delelopements [sic] ' at Peenemunde were in fact the V1 and V2 rocket research and developement [sic] that had received top priority, but at a terrible cost.
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The raid had cost us 41 aircraft including one Mosquito over Berlin where a diversionary attack was-going in. Of the two Stirlings lost one was from our Squadron and we lost not only the 'A' Flight Commander and another 'freshman' pilot who was down as second pilot.
Altogether there were nearly 300 casualties of which 131 had a been consigned to watery graves; never to be found!.
Later on some more interesting facts emerged. Apparently the Luftwaffe had dispatched their night fighters to Berlin at first due to the Mosquito's stirring things up and in the excitement they had a fine old time shooting each other up; and down, before it became obvious that the main raid was-somewhere else. Then the fighters were diverted to the Peenemunde area and other units were alerted.
The net result was that when the whole flock descended to land, very short of fuel, on diversionary airfields it was every man for himself and quite a number were lost in mid-air collisions and taxying accidents.
One significant loss that could be attributed to that episode was that the senior General of the Peenemunde production staff was among the many casualties and production was put back sufficiently to gain time for the introduction of countermeasures when they did finally launch them.
[line of stars]
I was not sorry when we found ourselves free for a few days as we waited for the nights to get darker and for nearly 300 air-crew and 40 aircraft to be replaced; but it was only a few days.
On the 23rd August EF433 was back in business again and we were off once more. The target was Berlin; the 'Big City' as it was known to aircrew. It no longer gave us any cause for concern when the target was announced....we had been well and truly blooded, so off we went again although it was not without a spot of bother.
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It seemed that there were battles going on all around us with intense activity for a long time. There were 'flamers' going down in all directions and we were all keeping a very sharp look-out whilst Mac weaved about so that at times we could see below us but we were lucky again even when Mac had to take some very lively action to duck out of a searchlight cone that definitely had our number.
The pale blue high intensity radar controlled master light locked onto us first and then a number of others joined in and chased us around all around the sky.
We had seen that situation often enough to know that once you were trapped in that lot there would be a fighter not far away waiting to finish us off if the concentration of flak did not get us first; and the flak got [underlined] very [/underlined] concentrated.
That was no time to just 'corkscrew'. Throttles forward, fine pitch, nose down to increase speed and then Mac more or less played tag with them as they chased us but he used some very rapid changes of direction before they could reverse.
That night was perhaps the most desperate searchlight situation we had ever been in. On occasions the whole interior of the aircraft was illuminated as plain as day and it was like being a fly caught in a spiders web but eventually Mac's tactics paid off as we broke free. We were very glad to get home again after that.
It was becoming increasingly obvious that the relatively quiet earlier missions were a stroke of luck as we were now having to fight our way through almost every time. The odds in favour of us completing a tour were shortening considerably, and to make matters worse the flying time was getting longer. The last three ops. had all been over seven hours and Berlin was nearer eight, and 56 aircraft had been lost on that raid, 16 of them Stirlings!. The beds in our hut were getting new occupants before we even got to know the previous one's!.
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No-one seemed to be getting posted away or 'tour expired'. There was always someone from the 'committee of adjustment' gathering up the possessions of those who would have no further use for them unless they had been particularly lucky.
As far as we were concerned it was still not a subject of conversation although we were a little superstitious about the situation. Despite the fact that our beds were scattered about the hut none of us ever moved from the beds that we first flopped into so that we could be grouped together, although it would have got some of us away from draughty doors and windows.
We just stayed put as the occupants of the others changed regularly and I learned later that Mac and Pete had adopted exactly the same procedure!. Among the most recent casualties that brought things rather sharply into focus was the loss of another McDonald, (slightly different spelling), ex 214 Squadron, on the last operation. We had got to know him and his crew quite well as they were the most experienced, and we had wished them 'Good Luck' as they left the briefing room.
It was his 30th and final operation before being rested and it was a long time later that I learned that only his W/Op. had survived as a POW. Apparently, at the last moment, on leaving the briefing room, he had been offered the chance to stand down and finish his tour there and then but the crew voted to turn it down!. It did not help to reflect on the fact that when the Squadron had been formed there was a McDonald, a MacDonald and a Macdonald. One, Sgt MacDonald had already goes missing on the 25th July, so we were the only one left!.
As usual, despite the long trip the night before, we reported to the flight office in the early afternoon where we learned of the Squadron's loss, hoping as usual, that we would be 'stood down'. Some were but for Mac and I it was a different story.
For us there was a flight detail with some S/Ldr Staff Officer from Group HQ who for some reason wanted to demonstrate the 'corkscrew'.
I don't know why it was us. Perhaps Mac had volunteered again
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as we suspected he did an occasions, but as it only required a minimum crew of three for such details the others were sent off. There was no Battle Order on the board so they did not need a second telling. They were off like scalded cats!.
It was no real problem with two pilots up front so I was down as 'gunner' for the flight and there was a chance that we might learn something new although we had certainly done our share of 'corkscrewing'; and a bit more the previous night when Mac had got into an energetic but still smooth manoeuvre in such a way that it did not communicate the extent of the motion to the back-side. The evidence of that was that Pete, sitting in his darkened 'office' doing his sums, was only half aware of what was going on apart from the occasional interior illumination, came on the intercomm [sic] and nervously suggested to Mac that he "chuck it about a bit"!. That was a bit of a surprise to the rest of the crew. I knew that we were being 'chucked about,' quite a lot. How else was it that I was in my seat and often getting glimpses of the ground through the the [sic] Astro dome on [inserted] the [/inserted] [underlined] top [/inserted] of the aircraft.
When we got out to EF433 I was more concerned with the pre-flight checks of both mid-upper and rear gun turrets in case I had to make a dive for one of them in the event of an intruder chancing his luck, and then basically I was a passenger.
I was a little surprised to see Mac in the right hand seat as I took up my position on the flight deck between the two pilots as we started up and taxied out…..even then I was getting alarm signals in my sensitive parts as I was subjected to an G experience that was rare since flying with Mac.
The brakes squeeled [sic] and shrieked and the aircraft rocked and a lurched about until finally it was heaved off of the runway in about the clumsiest take-off I could ever remember and into a climbing turn that seemed to strain every rivet. And that was before we corkscrewed!.
After climbing to about 5000ft with the engines bellowing I was listening to this chap explaining to Mac how it should be done but it still caught me by suprise [sic] when he went into the most violent, wildest manoeuvre that I had ever thought possible. The wing tips must have flexed by about 6ft although I did not know for sure as I was brought to my knees by the 'G' forces
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one minute and was floating to the roof the next desperately trying to hang onto something to avoid being thrown around the cockpit and possibly finishing up in someone's laps. Even so I could not avoid noticing a purple tinge developing around Mac's neck that had nothing to do with 'G' forces. As it went on he was obviously getting very angry and not learning a lot!.
Eventually he got very emotional as he turned to the other pilot and the intercom [deleted] n [/deleted] fairly sizzled with an outburst that contained phrases like, "how dare you treat my aeroplane like this" and "what the bloody hell do you think we were doing over Berlin last night" and "what the bloody hell do you think the gunners are supposed to be doing whilst all this is going on" and a lot more besides which is unprintable. An argument ensued, the outcome of which was that Mac finished by telling the other pilot to relinquish control by his "I have control....now sit back and you might bloody well learn something". I crept away somewhat embarrassed and took up my position in the mid-upper turret reporting in when I was established and I soon knew how Ralph felt as Mac put us through the same manoeuvres as we had done the night before, (and he was driving from the right hand seat), with no further comment from the visitor.
At least, being in a gunner situation for a change I learned the value of keeping my eyeballs in their sockets which is more than I would have done if the other chap had been driving!.
Having got that off of his chest we headed straight back to base and landed with the Squadron Leader still fuming at the indignity of being lambasted by a Flying Officer, so he stamped away from the aircraft with a flea in his ear!.
Mac left him to his own arrangements to get back to the flight office whilst we spent a long time looking around the aircraft for signs of sprung rivets and other signs of over stressing like wrinkled skin.
Mac was muttering darkly all the time about "ham fisted buggers" and other uncomplementary [sic] remarks that are unprintable.
He was more vocal than I had ever heard him and definitely not impressed that 'Sir' had not done as many ops as we had!.
No doubt the demonstration was well intentioned even if it was a case of 'teaching grandma to suck eggs'.
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On the 27th we were in the briefing room again to find that targets in Nurnburg [sic] were to receive our attention so off we went in the company of another 673 aircraft.
My recollections are that the flak was the worst I had ever seen so far. There seemed to be a solid wall of shell bursts in front of us as we closed in on the city, and 'flamers' were going down right left and centre.
At briefing it had been mentioned that the night fighters were likely to be repeating some new tactics that had already had some success; as far as they were concerned anyway.
It confirmed our suspicions that something different was going on.
Previously the fighters had kept clear of the ack-ack and waited until they saw someone in trouble before going in for the kill but they had started getting in among us and having a go at anything they saw regardless of the possibility of being hit by their own stuff. Between those operating those tactics and others using AI (Airborne Interception Radar) they were beginning to knock us down like clay pigeons.
The searchlight/flak/fighter combination was lethal under those conditions and between them accounted for the loss of 33 aircraft, 11 of them Stirlings from a force of 104. [underlined] Three [/underlined] of them were from our Squadron detail of seven that had ultimately got under way. The loss of nearly 50% really knocked the stuffing out of us. None of them had been with us for more than a few weeks and one of the pilots had flown with us as co-pilot recently.
At this point I was hoping that a spot of leave would help to prolong things but it was not be.
After a brief rest the next place to receive our attention was Munchen-Gladbach [sic] on the 30th and this one started off on the wrong foot.
All was well until start-up when the starboard outer starter motor stripped when engaged.
It was not unnatural that most of the crew immediately started planning the evenings entertainment to occupy a bonus night off as we knew that there was no spare aircraft. I must confess that I had no knowledge of the starting handle!.
There was no reason why a wireless operator should I suppose
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although it was in our own interests of survival that we should know quite a lot about everyone else's [inserted] job [/inserted] . But that was some starting handle!.
Nearly 20 feet long, shoved through a hole in the engine casing to engage it, and with a large double. crank at the bottom designed for two people to turn it.
With Paddy in the cockpit juggling with throttles and mixture controls, and Mac jumping up and down shouting unprintable words of encouragement to the owners of [underlined] four [/underlined] pairs of arms, mine included, we cranked that engine until at last it spluttered into life and then we all piled aboard and got under way.
We soon made up for lost time by taking a few short cuts to catch up the force as there was no way that we were going to be a loner over enemy territory but I doubt it very much if many aircraft had been started that way to go on ops.
We had a bit of a skirmish later as we approached the target. The rear end Mac hollered and fired as we jinked away from an Me.109 which spun away pouring smoke and flame although we did not see what finally happened to him. We were far to busy searching for others as it was obvious that the fighters were very active all around us. McIlroy was only credited with a possible for that engagement.
There was no doubt that our two gunners were really on the ball as once again they had fired first but others were not so lucky and for one reason or another six Stirlings failed to return.
[line of stars]
We were briefed for Berlin on the 31st although there was some doubt about W becoming serviceable although they were half way through the starter motor change. In the event it was not rectified in time and at the last minute we were allocated EF117, but Mac was very peeved about it. It had not even been air tested!.
We did not get very far in it before we found that the rear guns would not fire and then the intercom went dead on us.
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Mac was fuming and we pressed on for a while desperately trying to rectify the faults without any success but he decided that we would not waste the trip or the bombs as we turned away from the enemy coast and diverted to overfly a place that most people tried to keep clear of; Texel, in the Frisian Islands. They started firing as we approached so it was taps open, speed up with a bit of a weave on and Hoppy planted the bombs as close as he could to the batteries and the searchlights. Their effort was certainly reduced as we turned away so perhaps we had done a bit of damage in the process. It was counted as an operation as we had been over enemy territory but there was one a hell of a row as the brief was to dump the bombs in the sea or jettison them on the Thetford range.
In addition there were even accusations of possible sabotage and collusion from higher up until the faults were proven to have been electrical malfunctions that could not have been fixed in the air. Mac was furious about the whole business but it did not help. One can only speculate on what the outcome might have been if we had not been forced to 'abort' the mission. There were 16 Stirlings lost that night out of the 57 dispatched. One of them from our Squadron!.
The gaps around the mess tables were getting noticeable again and if the absence of any entries in my log book is anything to go by we were sent on leave whilst the Stirling Force was being put together again.
I do vaguely remember one leave that started with a fair old session at the King Willie and I must have forgotten where I was as we pulled out of Bury. St. Edmunds station. Apparently I had to be restrained from dispensing leaflets out of the window!. Despite my indiscretion I still managed to retain some of them.
There were a few mining operations undertaken by new crews whilst we were away and on our return we were to find that one new crew had arrived and had already been lost in that short period. It was not long before we were back in the briefing room again to find that the target was the Dunlop factory at Montlucon, Italy, but it was another washout. We never even left home shores.
An engine seized shortly after getting airborne and we were
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obliged to jettison bombs and fuel on the range before landing. We were in 'W' and it had only done a few hours local flying whilst we had been away but sleeve valve Hercules engines really made a thorough job of it when they seized, so of course Mac was hopping mad.
We ail got blamed for the various things that had gone wrong and a lot of accusations were flung around in the heat of the moment. The frustration was understandable as we all knew that he was driving himself, and us, as hard as he could to get the tour over as quickly as possible but eventually he calmed down and we renewed our efforts.
[line of stars]
It was during our last leave that Mcllroy spent a few days with me and the family as we had a welcome break from the East Anglian scene.
We walked miles over the Downs at the back of Worthing where I had spent all my earlier days, and past the spot where in 1940 I had gazed in awe at a shot down Heinkel 111. although it was an area now that was not so regularly visited by the German Air Force.
It had been different then, when the invasion was imminent although they had been forced by their losses and other commitments to limit their efforts in our direction.
I can still recall vividly the occasion when I found myself right under a scrap over Worthing, between three Spitfires and a Heinkel 111. that had dared to venture in the direction of London.
The Air raid siren had sounded and I had seen him going over very high, leaving vapour trails but he had obviously been forced to turn tail and he was in a shallow glide going very fast as he came over the hospital and the gas works. Then those Spits gave him a real hammering.
With hot empty cartridge cases and links cascading down all around me I had watched mesmerised as the top gunner had winged two of them, one going off East towards Shoreham staggering a bit and the other in the direction of Ford and Tangmere trailing smoke. Then the third one went in for the kill if the
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way that the guns suddenly went askew was anything to go by. That was it. He continued out to sea and plunged in about a mile off of the pier. He had put up a good fight but it had not done him much good.
Now the skies were relatively clear but that did not mean that the area was safe. There were elements of the Canadian Army en-camped in the area and they often imposed a threat to life and limb.
I was glad of McIlroy's company in a bar one evening when some of his countrymen who were somewhat 'tanked' up started making derisive remarks about Brylcream boys and a scrap was imminent.
It all looked very ugly for a while and of course those chaps had been trained to the peak of fighting efficiency and no doubt still had a bee in their bonnet about the Dieppe affair.
Just in time Mac defused the situation. He pushed me out of the way, took of his raincoat to reveal his Canada shoulder flashes, gunners brevet and stripes, and drawing himself up to his full height of 6ft plus asked who was going to be first. There were no takers and we moved to another bar to continue drinking in peace.
No doubt that lot had more than their share of fighting later on, on 'D' Day and after.
[line of stars]
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That was all behind us as we finished our leave and got back to the task of taking the fight to the enemy.
On the 16th we found ourselves on the Battle Order for an operation that turned out to be a very dodgy one.
There were the usual mutterings, quiet whistling through clenched teeth plus a few caustic comments from the assembly when we found that we were off to do some damage to a railway station and tunnel at Modane, a mountain pass between France and Italy. What caused most of the comment was the unusual method of attack. Modane was at the Northen [sic] end of the Tunnel-de-frejus, deep in the Alps!.
As it was in a valley, the floor of which was 3,467ft above sea level, with the tops of the valley at about 11.000ft and only three miles across the tops it was impossible (so they said), to approach the tunnel mouth direct due to the sheer rock face above it.
The plan was to approach from a valley at 90° to the tunnel mouth, plant the bombs in the valley wall to bring down a large amount of debris before doing a smart left hand turn into the main valley.
The task was a risky one, bearing in mind that it was at night. Anyone who failed to get it in one was to initiate the left turn and take the station and yards at Modane as the secondary target.
One way or the other it would make it difficult for the German military traffic that was plying between France and Italy through the remote pass.
Fortunately the Met got it right that time. The weather was perfect. It was beautiful moonlit night and we entered the mountain region between the peaks bang on track and worked our way through until the target area loomed up ahead. We rushed towards the rock face at around 200mph and Hoppy did his lefts and rights and steadies and then he goofed it!. !
What happened next caused my heart to miss a beat. Calm as you like as if he was on the bombing range Hoppy said "missed it-round again"!.
I think that is what upset Mac more than anything else as we banked over into the valley expecting him to give Hoppy some verbal about the secondary target but what came next caused
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my heart to miss a few more beats.
We were all alarmed to hear Mac say, 'that is just what we will do too, and get it right this time or you go out next, we are going back to the tunnel"!.
By now we had got to know Mac well enough to know that when he had set his mind on something there was very little that we could do about it. I got the distinct impression that I was riding a runaway roller-coaster as I braced myself in the isle [sic] between the pilots positions.
The horizon went haywire as we banked over into the initial turn and started to descend. We had not quite got to the station yards when we went into a tight 180deg. turn to head back underneath the rest of the force that was still hurling bombs all the way down the railway line.
I don't know how serious Mac was about chucking Hoppy out but he gave it to him straight, "no more messing about" as we charged at the tunnel mouth and when the "bombs away" call came we did not hang around to see the results although I don't see how we could have avoided hitting something. Our greatest concern was getting out of the situation.
All I could see was a kalidascope [sic] of nasty looking rocks as there was only seconds to make the turn, no room to turn back, no chance to climb with aircraft still coming in over the top of us. All we could do was wriggle and twist along the valley floor hoping to God we would not go the wrong way and find ourselves in a cul-de-sac.
It was very uncomfortable for a while as Pete and Hoppy had consulted their maps and assured Mac that all was well. And so it was as suddenly we came out into a wider valley and were able to climb.
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Obviously we had not done the exact reciprocal of our inbound route and it did not matter a lot as we all breathed a little easier until Mac let out a whoop with an "all gunners stand by" and we were all on the alert again. Then he told us what it was all about as the gunners reported "ready".
He throttled back and in rich mixture we were soon whispering along without even a flicker of flame from the exhausts, and then we all saw clearly what he had seen as we went into a turn. We were able to pick out dim convoy lights on a road halfway up the mountainside, so it seemed likely that it was the Southern end of the tunnel that we had just bombed. Mac said "if that is not a military convoy I will eat my socks" and followed it up almost immediately with a gentle turn onto a Northerly heading to within a few hundred yards of the mountainside. All gunners blazed away in turn and there was all hell let loose before we turned away.
The results were spectacular and certainly not quite what we had expected.
There were explosions, scattering lights, and liquid fire pouring down the mountainside with more explosions in the waterfall of fire and after about 20secs. we turned about and repeated the performance.
It was an appalling sight as obviously vehicles including fuel and ammunition trucks had been hit but turning away with most of our ammunition gone and somewhat shocked, we made our way home, low down across the tip of Switzerland and across France just as fast as we could.
Mac's orders were specific. Not a word about it, and he swore each one of us to absolute secrecy as we had not been ordered to do it, or whether we had done the right thing even though we might have contributed considerably to the war effort.
It was never reported and has remained under wraps until Mac can no longer answer for whatever damage was done. With more operations still to do if we were lucky it was best to forget the episode although some explanations were called for as our target photo showed a very messy tunnel mouth and the expenditure of several thousand rounds of ammunition was explained as an attempt to supress some ground fire in the valley. [underlined] And a ticking off for attacking in the wrong direction [/underlined] !!.
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I did not do another operation until the 3rd October as I went on the sick list for a few days.
I received an injury not from enemy action but from one of my own crew, although the outcome showed the sort of crew spirit that there was even if I had to be the 'dogs-body' to prove the point in respect of my own particular crew.
Macdonald and I had been into Bury St Edmunds to the King Willie for a couple of quiet drinks and on return we went to the Sgt's Mess where there was a dance in progress.
As soon as we entered the Mess we found ourselves in the middle of a group of people, Station Commander included, who were being treated to a drunken comedy act by Paddy who seemed to be doing his damndest [sic] to climb a wall by making repeated runs at it.
He must have been in the bar as soon as it had opened and obviously had had far more than his share.
The affair had just reached the stage where the Group Captain had already ordered the RAF Police to be brought in so Mac stepped in to sort things out his way. Exercising his right as 'Skipper' he ordered me to get Paddy out of the Mess and out of trouble. I wish he hadn't!.
With the assistance of another Flight Engineer from the Squadron Paddy was talked out of the building but we had not got very far when the other chap slipped and went down and a very confused Paddy decided that I was responsible.
I was still trying to hold him up but he turned on me and belted me one!, and I tumbled into an open trench.
I could have coped with that but grabbing a large paint drum half filled with solidified paint he heaved it at me and I remember nothing after it bounced off of my head.
I woke up in the sick bay the next morning with the great grandaddy of all headaches and adorned by large pieces of sticky plaster.
In the meantime wheels had been in motion as it had been decided that disciplinary action would be taken against Paddy for the rumpus that he had caused in the Mess. As far as my condition was concerned it was a different case so it looked as if Mac was going to have to do without his favourite engineer for a while if that reached it's logical conclusion…..until Mac did a deal with someone. That is, in addition to me!.
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He came to see me in the sick bay with a proposal that he said would satisfy all concerned.
The deal was that I would be charged with being responsible for the whole affair and as I was hardly in a state to argue I went along with it. The net result was-that Paddy was in the clear, I was fined five shillings (25p) for being 'drunk and disorderly', a scar on my forehead, and an entry on my documents as well as a few days off; but I had an opportunity to even the score sometime later.
Whilst I was on the sick list and grounded the crew did another two operations with a relief W/Op, going to Hanover on the 22nd and Mannheim on the 24th without incident. and each of those two nights I spent in the control tower biting my nails until they were back. One of our Squadron failed to return from the Hannover raid…..and it was nearly a turning point for me.
There was a limit on how long you could remain out of a crew without being, permanently replaced and the relief W/Op was sufficiently impressed with the rest of the crew to ask if he could stay with them. Mac must have pulled a few more strings and the MO signed me off despite the sticky plaster so I was back in the crew instead of becoming spare man.
The other chap had previous been spare because his crew had gone missing whilst he was sick so he went back to being spare.
Unfortunately, when he did get crewed up again the following month he was killed in a flying accident. That's fate! and it was being tempted far too often for my liking.
Eventually Mac did get around to thanking me in an embarrassed sort of way for my involvement but I think that when I weighed up the final outcome I was the one that was most thankful, so despite a sore head and some red ink remarks in the records, we just pressed on as if nothing had ever happened.
[line of stars]
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The operation we were briefed for on the 3rd October was for aircraft factory targets at Kassel and as 'W' had been unserviceable on air test we were allocated EE971. After air-testing that one Mac and Paddy agreed that 'it would do'. Not quite like our 'W' but they could accept it.
A few things had changed by that time. The Luftwaffe hit and run raids were almost a thing of the past as they were well and truly on the defensive and East Anglia now bristled with AA sites which very rarely permitted a raider to get very far.
We had got bold enough to assemble all the aircraft for the night's operation on the runway in front of the main camp area and in sight of the main road, and on this occasion there must have been as many as 28, possibly 30 aircraft lined up, and very impressive it looked too.
I have always thought that one lone raider bold enough (and lucky enough) to have got through the defences to shoot up that line would have done an awful lot of damage, but fortunately no-one ever did. The resultant mess would have wiped out half the camp and the Marquis of Cornwallis pub at the same time.
Nevertheless it was a great morale booster for the locals who were crowding up to the other side of the fence to watch procedings [sic] , many with pints of ale held aloft in salute. It did restrict activities a bit when many crew members were saying goodnight to their favourite WRAF under the mainplane, but the less said about that the better.
Off went both Squadrons in grand style and we were just approaching the coast outbound when the port outer packed up with a great deal of spluttering and backfiring so it didn't look as if we were going to get very far.
Mac and Paddy juggled with the engine controls but the engine steadfastly refused to do much more than 1000revs without protesting so they shut it down and feathered the prop.
By that time Mac was keen to get another op. under the belt and apart from calling me a 'jinx' he decided to 'press on'. We were not keen but he didn't ask us so we went all the way on three engines, bombed the target and headed home with Paddy biting his nails with concern at the high fuel consumption and the strain of the extra power being extracted from the other
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three engines. I do not think he would have put 'W' under so much strain but this one was not ours and that was that.
As soon as we cleared the enemy coast wee started to economise on fuel with a change of engine settings, firing off ammunition into the sea. Flares, incendiary containers and all sorts of stuff being dumped to lighten the load with Paddy getting more and more agitated as he endeavoured to work out our fuel state which was not made any easier by Mac's persistent nagging.
My request to make an emergency call was refused as was a further request to call the emergency services for the state of Tangmere, although we did change course in that direction. I was further refused permission to switch the IFF to the emergency code, in fact he was downright bloody minded.
Nevertheless, I was all ready to go straight into all my emergency procedures with IFF, radio and verey [sic] signals if the need arose, without permission, as we approached home shores.
We were just about overflying Tangmere when Paddy and Pete come up with the results of their combined calculations.
When I heard that on the intercomm [sic] I thought immediately, 'Tangmere, here we come', with one hour to base and one hour five minutes fuel, so we were not amused when Mac said, "what the hell are you worrying about then. Navigator, a direct course to base please".
A direct course for Chedburgh was made in defiance of standing orders that forbade us to overfly London and hoped to God that we would not lose too much height and find ourselves tangled up in the London balloon barrage.
It was bad enough when the banshee wailing of the balloon barrage warning came in on the radio. That in itself was a bit unnerving but we were all in Mac's hands and I was hoping that he would be prudent enough to settle for any airfield whilst we still had a limited reserve of fuel. And it was limited. Paddy had made it quite clear that he had calculated to the last drop of [underlined] usable [/underlined] fuel on the evidence of gauges that he was doubtful of. He could not do more other than protest further to Mac as we cleared the London area, in fact everyone protested that what we were doing was unnecessary, although perhaps not in such mild terms.
His only answer was to request that I open all of the fuel tank
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cocks on the bulkhead behind me and he started to rack the aircraft from side to side to drain every last drop into the main tanks.
That was enough for me. On went my 'chute and it would not have taken much more for me to be heading for the rear hatch which I had left open after jettisoning equipment over the sea earlier. It was just at that time that Paddy decided that he had definitely had enough. As far as he was concerned Mac had gone 'bonkers' and he was getting out whilst he still had a chance. He struggled out of his seat, clipped on his 'chute and had just got by Pete, and I was seriously. contemplating joining him when I received an order from Mac to "restrain him".
That upset any plans, so he was 'restrained', if that is what you would call tripping him up and sitting on him, although it was not for long as Mac had decided that we were serious and he agreed to go for the nearest airfield if Paddy would go back to his seat.
No sooner had he done so the port outer spluttered and died so they started up the port inner for the first time in hours and although it would not run at any speed without backfiring it was kept going as we desperately searched around for an airfield.
Mac was very busy struggling with the controls when one was sighted and we immediately headed for it. I fired off the colours of the day as fast as I could load and fire and when they were gone I fired off all the reds and then everything else in the rack, greens, yellows, star shells and even smoke puffs in the hope that the control staff would be suitably alerted to an emergency. Mac was far too busy to even use his radio and it was all very tense in the cockpit. I was half hoping that Mac would still give the order to abandon, and I was still ready, but instead he instructed Paddy to select wheels and flaps only when he asked for them and that's when the starboard outer spluttered and died. It was in those desperate moments that Paddy 'goofed' and we lost about five thousand feet rapidly after he feathered the starboard inner by mistake, and although he promptly rectified the error we were by that time descending like the proverbial brick lavatory. Not surprising as we were for a time flying; if you could call it that, on between one
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and one and a half engines.
I was back in the astro dome by that time as we aimed at the threshold of the runway at an alarming angle to keep the speed up. My legs and fingers were crossed as I looked hypnotically at where I was quite sure that we were going to make a large sized hole and then the nose came up …….."full flap" was Mac's breathless request over the intercomm [sic] and we were flaring out above the runway with the speed falling off as all power was taken off with another almost whispered request ...."wheels down" and then we floated whilst Mac held her off, to kiss the runway within seconds of the undercarriage 'green lights' coming on with warning horns blasting our ears.
Another perfect landing!!!! even if the approach had been a bit abnormal.
Mac established contact with the control tower to find that we were at Wratting Common, another Stirling base and we managed to stagger to the end of the runway and turn off before everything stopped with a splutter as we ran completely out of fuel!. We subsequently had to be towed away but not before we had managed to compose ourselves.
It was really an amazing piece of flying that had made the best out of a very bad decision that so easily could have ended in disaster…..and we all knew it.
Why else would Paddy come rushing past me towards the rear door, ashen faced, then jump out and spend a lot of time throwing up and kissing mother earth!
As for me. I stayed in the semi-darkness of the doorway until my colour came back and my knees stopped knocking before I ventured out...and I needed the ladder!. I don't think the others were much better.
After a few hours sleep we were back out to the aircraft which had been repaired and refuelled. The problem had only been burned out ignition leads which was something that Hercules engines quite often suffered from and we were soon on our way back to base still feeling as if we had experienced a very dream [sic] but we were still better off than some. Another five Stirlings failed to return that night.
Not another word was said about the incident. No apologies....nothing! Perhaps it was best left that way if we
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expected to continue as a crew…..and we did, although Mac was somewhat subdued afterwards -and was suffering from strained back and shoulder muscles for several days.
[line of stars]
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We had a few days break before we were detailed for another operation on the 8th. It was my birthday on the 9th so I planned a celebration if all went well but that night, as the 8th turned into the 9th we got the sort of party I could have done without. The main target was Hannover although-we were part of the secondary force within the main force with everyone heading for Bremen and at a certain position the main force turned towards Hannover leaving us virtually as decoys.
The fighters had been scrambled to intercept the track to Bremen and I was half way through a large bale of leaflets that I was dispensing out of the rear escape hatch when the rear gunner suddenly yelled "fighter--port quarter--corkscrew port--go" and over we went straight into evasive action as the fighter opened up. The rear gunner opened up at the same time and the interior of the aircraft was lit up by flashes as we were hit and bits and pieces were flying around in all directions. There was not a lot that I could do although I instinctively started to throw out leaflets as fast as I could without bothering to cut the string on some as I came up to the standing position to kick some bundles out. As I was to find out later, a good move. Mac was throwing the aircraft around all over the sky and the firing seemed to go on for a long time with smoke, flashes and a great deal of noise as something stung me in the face, and then it stopped as quickly as it had started. Immediately the rear gunner was back on intercom to report that his rear turret was damaged and had jammed solid when he had resorted to turning it manually.
He also reported a hell of a lot of debris from us had smothered the attacker before he had broken away suggesting that we had lost a few bits of aeroplane.
It was later on when we were piecing together details of the attack that we figured that it must have been my leaflets in the slip-stream, and he also reported that the fighter appeared to have two glowing tails; which is what I had also seen in a brief moment through the hatch.
There was a hell of a lot to do. We were in no doubt that we had collected a considerable amount of damage yet everyone checked in OK and unharmed which was a relief.
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I made my way back to the radio compartment to find Paddy curled up behind the armour plating of my seat which he had dived for after seeing me hopping about in the illumination of tracer that was flying about.
I asked him to check me over as there was a lot of wet and warm stuff running down my face and producing his torch very soon re-assured me that "it's hydraulic oil you bloody twit" before he was off down the back end to make some repairs.
Everyone was checking around thoroughly at that time but there were no fires or fuel leaks and all engines were turning without fuss. All other indications were normal….and we were still flying, complete with bomb load so we pressed on somewhat gingerly at that point in time.
There was another very good reason why I had dashed up front so rapidly after the action. Despite the fact that I had been standing on the edge of quite a large hole to dispense the leaflets, my 'chute had still been in it's stowage a long way from me; and I never ever did that again that's for sure!.
Everyone eased their parachutes in the stowages. Paddy put his on as he had to negotiate the open hatch which we had decided to leave open under the circumstances and as we continued to Bremen we checked and re-checked all our vital functions.
Paddy used a fire axe to clear the rear bulkhead and turret doors before the turret became operational again with a healthy short burst. But Mcllroy was in a very draughty situation as most of his perspex had gone and there were holes all around him, after which he made some first aid repairs to the hydraulic piping in the area of the position where the ventral turret would have been; if it had been fitted. First aid was the operative word; he used the medical first aid kit!. More to stop slippery oil sloshing about than anything else.
The intercomm [sic] was lively and as we had a freshman second pilot with us he was learning very fast. For a change Mac was not telling anyone to quit the chatter as he usually did so bit by bit everything was satisfactorily cross checked and it was reassuring to find that all the essentials were working despite the fact that there was a lot of internal damage: There were holes in the main bulkhead up front near my position and
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even some of the instruments in the cockpit had lost their glass. With everything giving the right responses it was no time to pull out of the stream and becoming a sitting duck for another enterprising night fighter so we stayed with it, bombed and stuck to the route for the return journey still regularly checking and cross checking.
I really thought that that was the one time Mac was going to have to use his "angle of dangle" equipment as he called it; to help him fly the aeroplane. It was in fact a weighted Scots doll suspended by a cord in line with his nose that he always set up for use. He always said that he could fly on that if all else failed but fortunately it was not needed and stayed up on the scuttle.
Eventually Paddy and I replaced the rear hatch and things returned to near normal but I could not help reflecting that I could have been a lot more effective with a pair of .303's sticking out of the bottom instead of dispensing a pile of paper which no doubt the German population used for the same purpose as we would have done in those days of paper shortage.
As it was, we had nothing protecting the underside and the Luftwaffe knew it well enough. After all, they had a fair sized scrap business going in recovering crashed Allied aircraft and re-cycling them into fighters for the defence of the Fatherland, and it was costing us dearly.
Although the attack on us had been from the rear so many losses of the period were being caused by something that for some reason or other our intelligence people did not know about, or if they did it was not made common knowledge.
It could have been that the Luftwaffe system was so effective that few, if any, aircrews ever got back to tell the tail [sic] .
They had developed a weapon along the lines of a British invention of WW1, the COW (Coventry Ordinance Works) gun, originally intended for shooting down airships.
They had put together a pair of 20mm cannon with periscope sights on an upward firing mounting in several types of aircraft, including the Me.110. and codenamed it 'Schrage Music' as part of their 'Battle Opera' control system.
With or without radar they were getting into the bomber stream, picking a target and positioning themselves underneath in the
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blind spot out of sight of the gunners, even to the point of following through a 'corkscrew' so that the gunners never got contact, or the Wireless Operator through his infra-red 'Fishpond' equipment, (if he had got it on) for that matter.
All they had to do was to keep up the shadowing until they got their aiming point 'spot on' then hit the button.
The aiming point was usually the starboard wing root where there was a concentration of fuel lines, fuel tanks, control lines and crew. It was very adjacent to the bombs, one engine, flares, oxygen bottles and other things that go bang in the night.
One short burst in that vital area was usually enough and the aircraft invariably exploded within seconds of the strike giving the occupants very little chance to escape. No wonder that we had seen-so many aircraft just explode and dissapear [sic] in a fireball.
It is on record that one of their night fighters fitted with the system was credited with [underlined] Five [/underlined] Lancasters in a 30 minute sortie so it was hardly suprising [sic] that there was very little feed back of intelligence information.
As we got nearer home we were very careful how we prepared the aircraft for landing. Fortunately the bomb doors had operated satisfactorily and Hoppy had made sure that there were no hangups. That was the last thing we wanted as a primed hang-up was a very sensitive beast.
Finally there was more to do before joining the circuit. Air pressures, hydraulic pressures and electrics were all normal. Mac did a mock landing procedure at height to test the responses at landing speed. There was no way that he was going to have the aircraft fall out of his hands at same vital stage of our final approach, but flaps, undercarriage and control services all gave the right reaction so it was on to base for a landing. Even then he was not entirely satisfied. Our first touchdown as a bumper to see if the green lights stayed an indicating that the undercarriage has locked down and to check that the tyres were not perforated.
Only then did we make an approach for a normal landing which was, as ever, as smooth as silk.
We gave ourselves a bit more time that morning to look around the aircraft after we had parked in dispersal and what we saw
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in the morning half-light made us gasp.
It did not seem possible that nothing had been seriously damaged yet there was hardly a square foot without a hole in it.
There were holes in the undercarriage doors, the flaps, bomb doors, control surfaces, engine cowlings and nicks out of the propellor blades. The rear turret had suffered most of all with 80% of the perspex gone and there were dozens of holes around the foot well.
A count showed that there were 96 groups of damage altogether but what brought me out in a cold sweat was to find a nice group of five holes through the rear step of the bomb bay where I had been sitting when the attack started. It was just as well that I had jumped up when I did or I would never have subsequently raised a family!.
I would not have been surprised if McIlroy had not been in a similar sweat. Not only was his turret a mess but his flying suit was nicked all over and ruined. There were tufts of fur sticking out under his arms and around his waist and even his flying boots had been chipped.
His turret doors had been ripped open like a tin can and the bulkhead doors had been badly holed as well. His parachute in it's stowage between the doors was later found to have quite a lot of lead embedded in it. When they opened it up it was like a colander and it is doubtful if it would have been much use if he had been forced to use its but he had not got a scratch on him!. I will never understand it.
As far as EF433 was concerned, although she had served us well she was done for. She just sort of sat there drooping and creaking so it was just as well that Mac had treated her gently. She was taken apart and sent to Cambridge for repair.
We learned later that when they stripped her down further and further they were still uncovering signs of damage including a cracked main spar, so she was very close to falling apart.
I have often wandered whether all that internal damage was battle damage or the result of the terrible handling she got on the corkscrew demonstration. I am incline [inserted] d [/inserted] to think the latter and it would not surprise me if that particular pilot had not ultimately torn the wings off of something.
However, the repair depot did their remarkable jig-saw puzzle
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repair job with so big an aircraft and there must here been sufficient of EF433 left for it to retain it's identity as it later went back to the Squadron after it had moved to Fairford. Eventually it was transferred to 1665 CU as OG-N until the following February when a mishap with a 'swinger' wrote her off at the end of the month.
In the meantime EF189 had been produced and painted up as the new 'W' so within the period of quiet that seemed to have descended on us that also received the attention that we had previous lavished on EF433. Stirling operations were slowing down a bit and few operations were undertaken. Rumours regarding our future were rife and Mac was very busy checking out new pilots as they came in to bring us up to strength. Several operations were scheduled but cancelled although there was still a bit of mining to do from time to time.
We did not mind a bit. The Bremen affair was not easy to forget and although our last flight in EF433 may not have been all that significant we had get quite attached to her. Some poor chaps had never got any further than their first trip and we had always considered ourselves very lucky that the attack on us had been made with small calibre ammunition. If we had been hit by cannon fire it would have been an entirely different matter.
[underlined] Thirteen years later I found out why there had been no cannon. [/underlined]
As an Air Traffic Controller at Amman in Jordan I was swapping yarns with an ex Luftwaffe pilot, then senior captain of the resident airline, Air Jordan, and an honourary [sic] member of our Mess, when the incident was recalled.
We had got so far with reconstructing the episode that we both went for our log books as the whole thing had reached the proportions of a gigantic 'line-shoot', Nevertheless, there were the details of date, time. and place to match those in my log book.
Apparently he had been a test pilot on jets and had been called in to try out the aircraft in operational conditions.
I don't know who was the most surprised but he had claimed us so badly damaged that we most likely finished up in the sea, and even if we hadn't then we must have had casualties on board. The burning question was "why only small calibre ammunition?",
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It transpired that he had used up all of his cannon ammunition in knocking down two other Stirlings already, so he would have been responsible for two of the three Stirlings lost an that raid. His name is not important in this narrative but it is significant that our combat report of the episode (which has never come to light) had put special emphasis an the aircraft with the fiery tails and it may well have been one of the first reports that identified jet night fighters to the intelligence people. Nothing: was ever mentioned about it so it may well have been kept quiet for good reasons.
Nevertheless, the Messerschmitt aircraft factories continued to be pounded regularly.
[line of stars]
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It was the 3rd of November before we had the opportunity to take our new 'W' on ops. We were briefed for mining in the Kattegat between occupied Denmark and neutral Sweden.
It should have been a 'doddle'. It was a lovely moonlit night and we had to overfly Denmark at medium height before going low level to the dropping area.
All went smoothly until just after the drop when we were engaged by a flak ship with a stream of sparkling tracers squirting at us which started Mac wriggling around all over the place with the taps wide open and down to the wave tops until we put him behind us. We were just beginning to breath easy again when there was a yell from the rear gunner as he spotted an Me.109 on our tail. We must have come in for some very special treatment as a loner crossing Denmark and it was as well that Mac had kept us as low as possible until the drop. Once we got back down there again that's just where we stayed as the intercom between the gunners and pilot got very lively.
It was the fighter affiliation stuff all over again as we slithered and twisted and turned, only this chap was not using a camera.
He sent several bursts after us but they all went wide as the gunners assessed the point at which he was coming into the right position for a deflection shot and then we side slipped and banked out of his sights once more.
We never fired a single shot as Mac had said only to let him have it when the gunners were absolutely sure of a hit so we played tag for a long time.
In the later stages we came to a rugged shore line and still the 109 could not get at us.
In and out and round and round we went across country where the landscape showed up in great detail. We could see people in gardens and lights blinked from friendly windows and open doors. We went around chimney stacks, over power lines and we must have given that enemy pilot a real run for his money until eventually he broke off and disappeared. He either did not care for the low level stuff or he was getting low on fuel but we were glad to see him go after a very hectic 30 minutes. We continued to stay low just in case he had a partner somewhere
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and we were still skudding along weaving about for some time before it was considered safe to gain some height and sort out the navigation.
It was hardly surprising that Pete had lost track of where we were. The number of tight 360° turns had been sufficient to upset both the magnetic and gyro compass's. We were too low for 'Gee' to be effective and I was still refused permission to break radio silence for a D/F fix so we staggered around somewhat blindly for a while trying to sort ourselves out.
At one time we saw an illuminated coastline some miles ahead which puzzled us a bit until the penny dropped...whoops..Sweden!. That gave us a clue as to which way we were going...the wrong way, so it was a smart about turn and back to low level again trying to stabilise the compasses as we picked up the Danish coastline again and crossed the country as quickly as possible before finding some higher cloud to hide in and set a rough course for home.
Pete still could not make a lot of his plot. 'G' was not helping a lot. D/F bearings that I was able to obtain from UK beacons only seemed to confuse the issue and when I looked over his shoulder at his chart it was a mass of hastily pencilled in headings and speeds until it looked like one of those kids dot puzzles that produced a picture when the dots were joined up. Only his picture looked like a bundle of loose knitting wool!.
All we could do was press on in a rough direction, picking our way in and out of convenient clouds whilst Pete gathered as much information as he could. It did not help much that Mac would not fly a steady course but even when he had satisfied himself that we were just off the Dutch coast Mac still had his doubts until Hoppy reckoned he had got a good visual pin-point. He estimated that we were over the Zuider Zee and would be able to confirm it when the Western side came into sight. Sure enough it did, but it was not the sort of confirmation he had been looking for!.
Just as we crossed the coastline, in and out of cloud at about 7,000ft, a number of searchlights switched on as one, in a perfect cone, smack on us, and it seemed several dozen ack-ack guns let loose at the same time.
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The salvo must have gone off about 50ft below us with the sound of gravel being sprayed all over us and we bounced up with Mac piling on the power, banking and balling [sic] "that's Dover you bloody fools".
There was all hell let loose as we wound into a corkscrew followed by the lights and a lot more flak. Mac was hollering "Darkie-Darkie" on the R/T to identify ourselves. I slammed on the IFF (radar identification) switch and fired off the colours of the day as fast as I could fire and reload the pistol and then as if by magic it all fizzled out.
The guns stopped firing, the lights wavered and flickered out and the violent evasive action slowed as Mac asked if everyone was OK. By the grace of God we were and then we immediately started checking around the aircraft which seemed to have taken a bit of a battering.
Despite the presence of several shrapnel holes everything seemed to be working satisfactorily so we set course for base with a lot of discussion as to how we had found ourselves over Dover.
The general opinion was that we must have done a zig-zag course right down the Danish, Dutch, Belgium and French coasts without interception. Perhaps our course had been so erratic that the German fighter controllers had just held back waiting for us to make a navigational error that would have put us within their grasp, or some other problem we had on board manifested itself and did the job for them.
As it was the Dover defences had done us far more damage and we were very thankful for either a slight error in the guns predictor or perhaps a little aiming off just in case we were a friendly aircraft with a spot of bother.
We would not have been the first RAF aircraft that the Dover guns had put on their score board though. They had to be very wary of unidentified aircraft. The Luftwaffe's equivilent [sic] of Farnborough; Rechlin, was known to have quite a comprehensive selection of airworthy Allied aircraft that they played all sorts of tricks with. In such circumstances it was more often a case of shooting first and asking questions afterwards and a risk we had to take if there was any doubt about the position at which the IFF was switched on.
During the final part of the flight back to base we had to go
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over the aircraft with a fine tooth comb to test everything before attempting a landing in the same way as we had done for our previous operation and it was a relief to find that everything worked and ended with a perfect final landing.
I have often wondered how many of the others felt as I did as we prepared for that final landing. Legs, fingers and toes crossed as we took up our crash positions, until we were safely on terra firma again.
I was beginning to wonder how much longer we could keep up that sort of escapade without coming unstuck somewhere.
After we had taxied into dispersal and shut down, the ground crew seemed somewhat concerned as we clambered out. I distinctly remember one of them saying "oh no, not again. You chaps must have a guardian angel somewhere". I could appreciate the sentiment when we looked around the aircraft with them.
The underside was like a pepperpot with slivers of metal hanging loosely from everywhere yet nothing vital had been hit.
We did not fly it again as it was withdrawn for repair and subsequently relegated to the training role' as yet another 'W' was prepared for service.
We were very lucky that night. [underlined] Four other mine laying Stirlings failed to return. [/underlined] Mining was no milk run!.
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[underlined] Picture page. [/underlined]
Macdonalds crew
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We were reprieved after a decision was finally made to withdraw Stirlings from the main Bomber Force and start preparing them for another task.
620 was once of the first to go and crews that were close to the end of their tour were not being retained. That meant us...and it was a great relief when we were told. There was only one other crew made 'tour expired' with fewer operations than ourselves although they had originaly [sic] come from 214 Squadron when the Squadron had been formed.
Certainly it was a relief not to have to fly the two ops that I was short of for the full tour. I had already seen what happened to 'spare' people but it placed our crew in a unique position. We were the [underlined] only [/underlined] crew to have actually started and finished a 'tour' on the Squadron since it had come into being.
The credit really belongs to Mac of course but in that short time we had lost 17 aircraft on ops and 9 in accidents. [underlined] More than the whole Squadron establishment strength, plus six!. [/underlined]
Our gunners had accounted for two enemy fighters. We had carried seven 'freshmen' pilots to introduce them to ops and two of them had not survived Chedburgh.
We had lost 147 aircrew killed or missing of which 47 were known to have become POW's. It was a sad tally.
In the same period of time the Command had lost nearly 1000 bombers with their crews in an air war that showed little sign of abating.
The Squadron distinquished [sic] itself later by towing gliders and dropping parachute troops and supplies into the invasion of Europe, Arnham [sic] and the Rhine crossing, as well as numerous SAS and SOE operations into enemy occupied territory with some very severe casualties.
[line of stars]
We were more concerned with the present at that time. We celebrated with a wild night at the King Willie and a few more nights in the Mess as the strain began to fall away with the added bonus of some special leave.
On our return there were, a lot of new faces but we were more concerned with clearing the station and preparing for our next posting. There was trouble of a different sort on the horizon!.
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As soon as we had returned from leave, refreshed, we found ourselves; that is, the five NCO's lined up outside the flight office with Mac demanding an answer to a very delicate question. It was not very delicately put.
Apparently a certain WAAF who had been fairly liberal with her favours; to say the least, was beginning to show signs of motherhood, and since [underlined] some [/underlined] of us were known to have been in her company at times we were all suspect. Of course, it did not help her case a lot when she was only able to claim that it was one of the Macdonald crew!, and why that did not include Mac and Pete the two commissioned officers I do not know, but Mac's question was blunt and straight to the point. "Which one of you buggers was it", which rather stunned us and for a moment we just shuffled our feet as we studied each other.
I forget who stepped out first followed by another until all five of us had stepped forward. I know for certain that we had not all sampled those favours but a crew is a crew through thick and thin. 'All for one and one for all' and all that stuff. There was not much that could be done under those circumstances so whilst they were trying to pin it on someone else (and there were plenty of others), we were only too pleased to pack our bags and sneak off quietly to our new unit.
[line of stars]
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We had been posted to No.3. Lancaster Finishing School at Feltwell as a complete crew, for instructional duties as strange as it may seem. The unit was just setting up to convert the Stirling Squadrons that were not moving out of the Command and Mac and Paddy went off to a Lancaster OTU in Yorkshire for a couple of weeks whilst the rest of us just familiarised ourselves with the Lancaster. The ground school was just getting going so we soon learned our way around. Apart from the Pilot and Engineer's speciality it was not difficult as most of the equipment was the same or similar and a nice little challenge to convert to a different type.
As soon as Mac and Paddy returned we flew intensively as a crew and within a matter of weeks we were into the training programme and open for business.
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Actually the unit was a bit of a hybrid. Part Operational Training Unit, part Conversion Unit and part Holding Unit for despite the savage losses the Command was still building up it's strength as fewer demands were being made in other theatres of the war, and the station was soon packed to the gills.
Crews started to come in from all over. The Stirling Conversion Units were still in the business of converting people from Wellingtons and then they came to us for changing to the Lancaster until the Stirling CU's were run down. After that they came direct from the Wellington OTU's as well as those Stirling Squadrons that sent detachments for conversion as their aircraft were being replaced by Lancasters.
We became very busy with the flow of people through the unit. Some of them knew the Lancaster better than we did as they were refreshing for their second tour, and very rarely for their a third. They had come off all manner of aircraft and had been 'resting' as we were now doing. There was a great deal of experience to draw on which I was only too willing to put to practical use. There did not appear to be any 'instructors' courses as such. You just threw yourself into it and you just turned out to be good, bad or indifferent at it. In all modesty, I seemed to cope satisfactorily.
After a few months Paddy got fed up with it and eventually got himself crewed up with a pilot of 115 Squadron that was converting and went back on ops. with him. Pete found himself in a spot of bother as a reult [sic] of a little over exuberance at a party and was given an option that he could not refuse....so he went off to a Mosquito Squadron at Downham Market, but not until most of the old crew, with the exception of Hoppy and Mac, attended my wedding in the March.
The bells of St.Mary's Broadwater, Worthing, were rung for the first time since the threat of invasion had silenced them in 1940. That was a traffic stopper if ever there was one and in the ensueing [sic] celebrations the rest of Macdonald's crew left it's mark on the local area. [underlined] I think the marks are still there!!. [/underlined]
I don't mind admitting that for the first time in my life I was smitten with the uncontrollable shakes when standing before the alter [sic] . Call it what you like, fear……………..
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apprehension, whatever, it got hold of me and I shook. My eldest brother, in navy uniform, survivor of numerous sea actions and two lost ships and my best man, came in close and propped me up. All that happened was that I transmitted my shakes to him and we both stood there like jellies and did not settle down until the ceremony was nearly over. Not a pretty sight!. Nevertheless, I married my childhood sweetheart despite the circumstances; something I never thought I would ever have the opportunity to do, and the marriage has stood the test of time.
Eventually Feltwell became so busy that we opened a non-flying ground school at Methwold a few miles away and having already been promoted to Flight Sergeant I got the job of setting up that part of the school for Wireless Operators.
Rather than lose my comfortable room in the pre-war Mess at Feltwell I cycled to and fro' daily and I am sure that it did me a lot of good as far as keeping fit was concerned. I enjoyed cycling anyway having been a founder member of the 'Worthing Wheelers' cycling club and a regular cyclist...even in my job.
To have to peddle a loaded tricycle from one end of Worthing to the other twice a day was quite an accomplishment which I had done for nearly two years and prior to that I had had a job with a builder and cycled 16 miles each way daily; so what was 5 miles.
Getting my bike out from the shed in Worthing where it had been tied up in the roof was no easy task. I have vague recollections of peddling half the distance from Worthing to Feltwell, including across London to save a few pence when some station staffs insisted on there being a ticket for the bike when it was placed in the guards van..to finally arrive in the rain.
The time passed and I only flew occasionaly [sic] to keep my hand in as momentous events occurred on the battle fronts that we, or at least I, felt at times that we were missing out on. I didn't push things though....I wasn't that daft!. There was enough going on at Feltwell and Methwold to keep me busy.
Even the odd operation turned up and that is how we lost a crew and our Chief Flying Instructor. He had opted for a mining job, got together a crew and it did not present any problem in arming up and self briefing. I'm glad he didn't pick me as his Wireless Operator. He took off at the appointed time and was seen clearing
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the immediate area, climbing, and shortly after he disappeared from view there was an almighty explosion as his load blew up and the aircraft disintregrated [sic] , scattering the landscape with a thousand pieces of man and machine. What a hell of a useless way to go for another seven young people. It was a sobering thought that it could have been any one of us that might have drawn the short straw for the privilege of making up the crew.
Life was anything but dull. When the Tannoy started blaring out one evening calling all sorts of people to report here there and everywhere a few of us went up to the airfield to see what it was all about.
It was quite a circus when three B.24's, (Liberators) charged in one after the other.
Apparently these three had not only lost their formation but had also lost their way to such an extent that they had been as much as 100 miles off track and an hour late in getting back to their base arriving at the time it was getting dark.
Just as they were getting into the circuit in a bit of a panic as they were not very experienced at night flying Flying Control yelled 'bandits' as there were Luftwaffe intruders suspected to be in the area, and promptly snuffed out the airfield lights.
[underlined] Panic stations!! [/underlined]
They had been given a course and distance to fly to Feltwell but bandits or no bandits they set off with all their navigation and anti-collision and formation lights on. The bandit scare was obviously false as they arrived in the Feltwell circuit looking like Christmas trees and firing verey signals all over the place. No self respecting Luftwaffe intruder would have passed up that invitation to do a bit of damage. As it happened, they did it to themselves.
The Feltwell controller told them to spread themselves out a bit for landing but they were not having any of that as it was dark by that time. There was no way they were going to lose each other having get that far so in they came, landing lights on. No. 1 got down and was told to go to the end of the runway and follow the 'follow me' illuminated van but got disorientated so slammed on the brakes to come to a juddering halt on the runway. No.2 piled right up the back of him, his props chewing at the……………………
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fusulage [sic] , and No.3, seeing what had happened flung his aircraft into a turn and belly flopped when the undercarriage collapsed. What a mess!, but they were lucky. There was not a single casualty although it took a lot of cleaning up.
We entertained the NCO's in our Mess afterwards and it was a source of amazement at the attitude those blokes had to the whole business. They were not in the least concerned that they had written off three aircraft but it was the manner in which they entertained us to a show that was straight off a Hollywood film set.
They were mostly unshaven, cigar chewing, gum chewing, with side arms and knives slung all around them who seemed hell bent on emulating the six gun cowboys of the wild west films and on the whole it was a lot of fun listening, to their wildly exagerated [sic] stories of 'combat over Germany' totally ignoring the fact that many of us had already done complete tours of night operations over enemy territory. They were not interested but it was better than going to the cinema. Most of them had been in the UK long enough to have sampled 'Limey' beer and were not slow in telling us what rubbish it was so we plied them with it until it was running out of their ears. In the end they weren't so tough. Most of than had to be put to bed!.
As time went by and crews continued to pour through the unit it was obvious to me that my time for moving on could be getting close so I started making the appropriate noises to ensure that I would get something different next time and would not have been surprised at anything that turned up. Nevertheless, there was one big surprise; my appointment to a commission which I had been quite convinced would have been turned down somewhere along the line.
When the appointment was promulgated I did not tell Dorothy but took a few days off having arranged to meet her in Oxted in Surrey, and on the way stopped off at Moss.Bros. in Covent Garden to get fitted out. It felt good. I went in as a Flt.Sgt. and came out an hour later as sprog Pilot Officer, no doubt looking like a tailors dummy, all bright and shining, including my cap, hot foot for Oxted.
Dorothy was not at the station so I set off across the field to meet her half way.
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When we did meet there were expressions of surprise and elation and in the excitement I threw my new, expensive cap into the air. That's how it became 'operational'. It landed in a cow cake and took a hell of a lot of cleaning; in between the laughter.
Later on we continued our journey to Worthing and I was suitably 'shown off' by my proud parents but it was a very odd situation when I met one of my old school pals who was a ground wireless operator.
He was one of those who I had always kept in touch with and had been one of the group at the garden gate on the day war had been declared. He had been totally brainwashed!. The poor bloke kept calling me 'Sir' and the only way I could break him of the habit was to get out of uniform to have a drink together without embarrassment on both sides.
Shortly after leave I found myself detailed for a short course at Fighter Command HQ, Bentley Priory, Stanmore.
There was about a dozen of us and we were told that the course was to train Wireless Operators in the use of R/T broadcasts and relay work of the type that the Pathfinder Force was developing. There was also a suggestion that after the training which was part of the Fighter Controllers course we would be assessed for our suitability for broadcasting airborne fighter control as well.
The first day was spent being shown all the fighter control systems as well as seeing them in practice in the famous fighter control/plotting operations rooms and then we were in business.
The next three days were highly amusing as we worked 'aircraft' from a mock control room with the plotters moving radar plots around the table to set up interceptions as the information from the filter room created the picture. It was the 'aircraft' that caused most of the fun. They were in fact Wall's ice cream tricycles with radar reflectors stuck to a pole on the side with low power battery operated transmitter/receivers in the body of the thing. The 'pilots' of the ice cream carts provided the motive power of course and wore the usual headset plus the restrictive..................
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headgear that pilots wore when they were practicing instrument flying.
As a result we could only see a compass and our feet whilst we were in a world of our own either peddling like the 'clappers' and making turns, or in the control room.
It was a highly amusing sight to see a couple of dozen demented ice cream carts cavorting blindly about a strangely marked out rugby pitch, and the occasional crunch as hunter and hunted came together in a perfect interception. Such crude simulation did not have the advantage of vertical seperation!!!!!. It was enlightening, interesting; and amusing but nothing ever came of it.
[line of stars]
It was getting increasingly difficult to get down to the South coast at that time. It was only by virtue of wearing uniform that I got through the security screen whether it was to Worthing or Oxted. There were troops jam-packed in every nook and cranny and there was hardly a bed to spare in any house or hotel. The streets and wooded areas were gigantic vehicle parks with acres of camouflage netting in some open areas disguising the enormous build up. Both my parents and my in-laws were billeting Commando's and the nights were filled with the rumbling of tanks, guns and other vehicles.
Once or twice whilst I was down that way the Luftwaffe had a go at night reconnaissance of the area but got a hot reception every time. During the day there were standing patrols of fighters that discouraged their attentions and I remember one that tried it one night that found himself facing a daunting barrage of fire that I would not like to have faced. Everything and the kitchen sink was thrown at him as he came through East to West at about 2000ft. Every piece of ack-ack, light and heavy, and hundreds of machine guns let loose from the hills, street corners and vehicle parks with a tremendous racket. It was just too dangerous to stay out in with shrapnel and spent rounds falling like rain. If that intruder got his picture and got back home that night then I reckon he was a very lucky chap.
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As we got towards the end of May it was impossible to meet my wife or get in touch with her. She was in the depths of Montgomer's [sic] HQ scheduling convoys down from the North into the Southern assembly areas although I did not know precicely [sic] what she was doing at the time. It was not until after the HQ had been disbanded that I learned about the restrictions that had been imposed. It was little wonder that I had not been able to get in touch when 'Q' Movements staff were under guard for days and were ever escorted to the toilet!.
[line of stars]
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Back at Feltwell the training programme slowed down and everyone was crewed up into a reserve Squadron. Orders of the day were published imposing all sorts of restrictions.
Crew members were on a two hour stand-by and not allowed off of the station. I was crewed with the remainder of the old crew as Pete and Paddy had already moved on and two others joined us. We regularly ground tested and air tested aircraft to operational standard although our efforts were not always successful. There were always problems with the wicked little 'Gremlins' that attached themselves to aeroplanes. 'Gremlins' were the imaginary demons that were blamed for the many problems that aircraft suffered from.
One of them had a real go at us one night before Paddy had left us. We had landed from a night flying detail and had hardly settled on the flare-path when Mac started giving Paddy a verbal broadside for not having fixed the slow running on the starboard outer engine as it had just cut out when he throttled back. With some surprise Paddy looked at his instrument panel, borrowed my signal lamp to light up the wing and calmly announced that there was no need to worry, it would not need fixing as it had just fallen off!.
That caused a bit of a stir in Flying Control when they were told on the R/T and then something else went wrong and we could no longer communicate with them. There was a lot of choice language from the whole crew and muttering from Mac about "cheap bloody meccano sets" and "it couldn't happen to a Stirling" and other appropriate caustic things as we taxied in.
Before we got to dispersal we were met by one of the controllers on a motor bike who signalled us to stop and then he climbed aboard to tell us to switch the blasted R/T set off. Then we knew why we could not hear the tower. We were stuck on transmit...and in the meantime they had evacuated all the female staff from the control room!!!. Nevertheless, it was quite a programme to get the maximum number of aircraft fully serviceable and operationally ready.
When the big day dawned....'D' Day, 6th June, I found out at breakfast as the majority of us did. The two hour stand-by was
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changed to a one hour and we waited with our ears glued to the radio for the minute by minute news of the events of that day. There was no doubt in our minds that this was the 'big one' that we had been waiting for.
It was incredible that nothing had leaked out although the aircraft had all been tested the previous day, and had been painted with white bands around the wings and the fusulage [sic] . In addition they had all been fuelled and bombed up the night before plus there were two more bomb loads stock piled in each dispersal. All we had to do was to sit around and wait for the signal to report for briefing and we would be off, so we sat around and waited and waited, with nothing to do except go out to dispersal from time to time to move aircraft a few feet as it was not good for them to be in one position for too long with a full load on.
As it happened we were not required. The Luftwaffe were caught napping and by the time they got themselves organised they were very much on the defence. The Allies committed so many aircraft that thousands and thousands of sorties were flown. Even the Bomber Command effort had to be flown on a race-track pattern in and out of the target area for safety and there was no room for us; fortunately!. After three days we were stood down and we went back to the training programme. The rest is now history.
Bomber losses were still heavy at times as the Command reverted to strategic bombing to disrupt enemy communications, supply and fuel resources and there was always the dread thought of the possibility of a repetition of the losses that we had suffered in the attack on Nuremburg the previous March. That had been an absolute disaster when [underlined] 95 [/underlined] of our aircraft were lost. Many of them were crews that had passed through our hands a short while before. It had been a reminder that we were not out of the woods yet and from time to time the Luftwaffe were still a force to be reckoned with.
With the invasion well under way my wife was posted to Newmarket as a result of her Surrey HQ being run down. That was a very convenient arrangement when a sympathetic C.O. arranged for me to be detached to Newmarket airfield as detachment commander for a couple of weeks. Very cosy…..our messes virtually backed
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on to one another!.
It was about that time that Macdonald got himself Courts Marshalled for unauthorised low flying….it had to happen some time. He was returning from an investiture at another airfield, including I believe for his own DFC, but landed on three engines and one bent propellor as a result of low flying over Thetford Forest, and it had taken a bit of explaining.
I was not with him at the time but I remember enough of the case to know the prosecution was badly prepared and could not produce the prop. or bits of tree or photographic evidence and the case was dismissed. I also recall that although Mac was in the left hand seat it was in fact in the hands of Mcllroy in the right hand seat. A piece of evidence that got overlooked, but he was still sailing close to the wind. It was probably similar doubtfull [sic] factors that caused him to prang his car with some of the others on board somewhere out in the Fens when the road did something unexpected. Only Mac was damaged and wore a patch over one eye for a time making him look like a pirate. What hurt him most of all was that in those days before the National Health Service, even in war-time, his accident was treated as self inflicted and he had to pay hospital fees. Even in the RAF hospital at Ely.
By the end of the year the work of the unit was almost complete. Reserves were being built up and replacements could be made by other conversion units so No.3. LFS. started running down with Methwold being cleared first. That kept me busy for a while dismantling all the systems that I had put in and returning stuff to stores, and in the meantime I was pulling strings to get the sort of posting that I wanted.
By the end of January 1945 nearly everything was cleared up and to my delight my posting came in for No.9 (Special Duties) Squadron, sister Squadron of the famous 617 (Dam Busters) Squadron which was more than I had dared to hope for.
Unfortunately a change in circumstances caused the postings staff at No.3. Group HQ. to have a re-think within 24hours of issuing the posting notice.
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My posting to No.9.Squadron was cancelled before I finished packing!.
Instead, after more days of delay I was crewed with some of the remaining chaps at Feltwell and posted to XV Squadron, Mildenhall so it was back on ops. again to fill the gaps that were still decimating units.
'Gaps' was the operative word as in my period of 'rest' at Feltwell the Command had lost a mind boggling figure of around 2000 aircraft.
It would have been nice if the old crew had managed to get back together again but things did not normally work out that way. Pete was already half way through his tour on Mosquito's at Downham Market. Paddy was getting on with his second tour with 115 Squadron. The others had been crewed up and departed. Squadron Leader. F.C.Macdonald.DFC. had been appointed as Flight Commander of 622 Squadron; also at Mildenhall, and it was a whole new ball game.
I only had the opportunity of socialising with Mac once in the very short period that I was there. The hand of fate caught up with me at last.
Our first operation was the last that XV Squadron's new, all officer, all second tour, all ex instructor crew was to do and it was late June before I got back to Mildenhall again, mainly to thank the parachute section for packing my parachute correctly!.
By the most amazing coincidence when the WAAF in the parachute section went through the books to find the serial number of my 'chute it turned out that she had also been the packer!
The poor girl got a sloppy impulsive kiss and a donation to their social fund but when I went to look for Mac I could not find him. There was very little interest; no-one wanted to know as he was away somewhere and although I tried several different ways of communicating with him later I had no direct contact again until 1954.
My search eventually led me to a scruffy motor engineers workshop on the outskirts of Wisbech where he seemed to be both the proprietor and chief mechanic; there was no-one else!.
He was the same old Mac. Uncommicative [sic] and shabby, like the shabby old Triumph Dolomite that stood next to a shabby old
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caravan that appeared to be both his office and his home.
There was not much left of the old sparkle and fire in his eyes although at the time it might have had something to do with the fact that the mid afternoon refreshment served in a dirty cracked cup came from a whisky bottle rather than the tea pot, but he was just as dammed uncommunicative as ever. Never a word when a nod and a wink would do. About the only thing I can remember him saying was "I thought you had got the chop and I was going to write to your wife" but of course, he never had. He did confess to being a bit surprised that I was by that time a Flight Lieutenant and the Operations Wing Adjutant at Mareham but his comment was typical. "I never thought you had it in you". He never was complementary....just a dour Scot.
He really looked as if he could here done with some assistance but there was no way that I could do anything without offending him although I did find out that he had done another 15 ops. and had ditched a damaged Lanc. before his wings had been well and truly clipped.
Shortly after that meeting I was off to foreign parts and on my return to the area about three years later nothing had changed although shortly afterwards he did another disappearing act and it took many years to track him down again. The trail eventually led to Troon and then to Dunoon before it fizzled out once more and it was many more years before he surfaced again with the assistance of the RAF Association and the Mildenhall Register. He was in very poor circumstances in Glasgow where Paddy found him and there was every indication that he would rather not have been found. He was content to be a survivor and the past was over and done with; what he could remember of it at the ripe old age of 82!.
We had not been far out in our estimates in 1943. He must have been one of the oldest Squadron pilots in the Air Force at the time at the age of 38!.
He disappeared again for a short time but following the trail left by Paddy I made a visit to Glasgow and finally tracked him down in a home for the elderly but he was no longer the Macdonald we had known. I don't think he knew who I was. He died six years later!.
I have never regretted my 'choice' of the pilot in which I placed
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my trust and my life and those sentiments are shared by the surviving members of the crew. We look back on those days and wonder how we ever came out of it unscathed considering that in our subsequent flying after the war we nearly all had the experience of climbing out of 'bent' aeroplanes.
Pete flew in a civilian capacity with Freddie Laker as both Navigator and Flight Engineer. They were lucky to walk away from a wrecked aircraft on the Berlin Air Lift. Paddy walked away from a wrecked passenger Mk.V. Stirling in the Middle East and I climbed out of a Proctor upside down on Oakington's runway.
For the record, Mac, Pete, Paddy and Ralph were all awarded DFC's for their efforts, Mac and Pete with bars, but sadly we are no longer a complete crew.
For me, those years were the most traumatic of any life and I will never forget those occasions when we were so close to each other in that short period that seemed like a lifetime.
TO
"THE SKIPPER"
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THERE ARE OLD PILOTS AND BOLD PILOTS
BUT
VERY FEW
[underlined] OLD….BOLD PILOTS [/underlined]
Anon.
[page break]
IN MEMORY OF THE AIRCREW
OF
BOMBER COMMAND
WHO WERE KILLED OR MISSING
IN
OPERATIONS OVER EUROPE
1939—1945
[row of circles]
[page break]
[underlined] ACKNOWLEDGMENTS [/underlined]
To Michael.J.F.Boyer……. whose research and detail in his excellent books:- [underlined] Action Stations--Part-One [/underlined]
[underlined] and [/underlined]
[underlined] The [/underlined] [underlined] Stirling [/underlined] [underlined] Bomber [/underlined]
were valuable sources of information.
To Martin Middlebrook & Chris Everitt for research details made available in the [underlined] Bomber Command War Diaries [/underlined] .
To Jock Whitehouse & Spencer Adams whose energy and enthusiasm helped to correct the many inacuracies [sic] in my early drafts.
and
TO MY DEAR WIFE DOROTHY who was obliged to tolerate the many years of typing and interuption [sic] of more important matters.
not forgetting
THOSE CREW MEMBERS WHO ARE LONG GONE:
WITHOUT WHOSE SKILLS THIS STORY
[underlined] COULD NEVER HAVE BEEN TOLD!!. [/underlined]
[line of stars]
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[underlined] PREFACE [/underlined]
On the 3rd February 1945 seven aircrew were posted to XV Squadron, Mildenhall, to form the crew of a Lancaster.
The pilot was Australian, the rear gunner was an American in the RAF. The navigator and mid-upper gunner were Scots and the remainder of the crew were from the counties of Sussex, Nottingham and Warwickshire.
They had all completed a previous tour of operations and had been resting for varying periods as instructors at No.3. Lancaster Finishing School at Feltwell in Norfolk.
The school was closing down and as the staff were being dispersed one pilot had been given the option of forming his own crew prior to posting back to an operational Squadron. That is how we all came together.
Some of the new crew had flown together whilst at the school and the pilot and flight engineer had previously flown together on Manchesters and Lancasters in operational Squadrons.
The time had come for them to get back into the fray as the bombing campaign was being stepped up to an awesome number of aircraft being employed to deliver thousands of tons of bombs to the enemy as the war was rapidly drawing to a close.
The Third Reich was reeling from savage attacks from both East and West. Their Navy was just about bottled up and had lost most of their capital ships. Her Army was being lost in great chunks and the German Air Force was being severely restricted by fuel shortages and although they fought on desperately the final blows were not far off. Anyone with half an eye could see that; except Hitler. If he had not been so crazy he would have given in a long time before we had reached the critical stage, but since he would not, and the Allies would accept nothing but unconditional surrender, Germany and it's long suffering population had to bludgeoned into submission.
I was the Wireless operator/air gunner of the crew and we were part of that final effort although there was an awful lot of killing still going on in all theatres of the war.
At the time it seemed that we had a good chance of being in at the finish so on arrival at Mildenhall we got stuck into refresher training and emergency drills against the stop watch
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until it did not seem possible to trim any more time off of the procedures and the 'Skipper' was satisfied that we were now moulded into a crew and ready for anything.
For me it was quite an experience being back at Mildenhall again having been there as an 'erk' in 1941, and now I was back again as a commissioned officer and experienced crew member although I did not have a lot of time to dwell on the fact.
A lot of water had passed under the bridge and we were perhaps somewhat unique in that we were an all commissioned crew starting a second tour of operations.
That was a very rare combination and as I thought at the time we might make a name for ourselves.
HOW WRONG I WAS !!!!!!
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On the 7th of February we found ourselves on the Battle Order for an operation and subsequently the old familiar pattern of activity fell into place as we trooped into the briefing room.
The target was detailed as the oil refinery at Wanne Eikel, at the eastern end of the Ruhr industrial complex, which, suprisingly [sic] was still trying to produce something despite the hundreds of tons of bombs that had been dumped on and around it over the years.
Our job, within a force of 100 Lancasters of No.3.Bomber Group, was to try and put it out of business and further disrupt the already desperate fuel situation that was severely limiting the activities of the German War Machine.
As far as I was concerned it was going to be a change to be on a daylight raid. I figured that at last I would be able to see what was going on and that I might even get a chance to assist in doing something really useful from the astro dome. Even the prospect of flying higher and faster than I had done on my previous tour in Stirlings was something I was certainly looking forward to.
I had polished up my gunnery in the various turrets on the firing range including stoppage clearance although inwardly hoping that the occasion would never arise when I would have to put the practice into use as it would mean taking over from one of the other gunners who had become a casualty.
Even so, there was no way that I was going to be caught out in such an emergency----not when the end of my war was in sight!. After briefing and collection of all the usual paraphernalia we all trooped out to the airfield in the crew bus to get on with the pre-flight checks until the time came for us to start up and taxy out for take-off.
With the usual heart stopping lurch Lancaster ME434...coded LS(XV Squadron) D for 'Dog'; the 12th that had carried that identification, (not all Lancasters); took to the air as the end of the runway came into sight with everything straining to get up to a safe height with it's heavy load of bombs and fuel.
The load was around 2000 gallons of petrol with 1 x 4000lb blast bomb and 12 x 500 pounders. Not the maximum that a Lanc. could take but enough to require some delicacy-in handling.
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Everything was normal as we gained height and climbed on course following a route that took us over Newmarket where my wife was.
I was wondering what she was thinking as the thunder of up to 100 aircraft filled the air. I had only seen her the night before and had told her that I was going to be busy so she knew that something was going on.
We were soon changing course for a point on the South Coast near Beachy Head and as it came up on track my home town of Worthing was in sight, to the West as we crossed the coast with the sky clear and bright as we continued to climb to our operating height.
The rest of the force closed around us as we formed up into the usual 'gaggle' as we approached another turning point on time.
Unlike the USAAF, we did not fly in a tight defensive formation as the RAF preferred to present any attackers with a loose, weaving, inconsistent mass of aircraft with a less restrictive field of fire. The exception was underneath, which is why some of XV Squadron's aircraft that took up position at the bottom of the pack had been locally fitted with a pair of ventral guns to cover what would normally be a blind spot.
We were not one of those but a 'Gee-H' leader, carrying some special homing and bombing equipment with which to pin-point the target through cloud. The yellow bars on the tail fins identified us as such.
We crossed the French coast which was no longer as hostile as I had last encountered it and in fact it was an inspiring sight to look down from over 20,000ft in such brilliant conditions on an area that only a few months before had been wrested from German domination.
It all looked very peaceful down there but there was always that false impression of things outside the aircraft and one could easily be lulled into a false sense of security by it.
Despite the impression of a bright summers day out there and the warmth of the sun falling on my shoulders in the astro dome it was, nevertheless minus 12° out there.
It was uncomfortably hot for me so I discarded my 'Mae West' life jacket as we changed course once more to head across Belgium
5
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towards the Ruhr.
It soon became obvious that the bad weather that we had been warned about at briefing was not far ahead. In the distance a huge wall of angry black cloud appeared; from just about deck level right up to the heavens, stretching from North to South as far as-we could see.
It was a typical squall line associated with frontal conditions and the nearer we got to it the more obvious it was that the Met. people had underestimated it's severity.
The formatiom [sic] leaders still did not break radio silence with instructions and as it was obvious there was no way around it we were soon doing what everyone else was doing as the force started spreading out with maximum climbing power until we plunged into it, in an attempt to get out of the top.
At 23,000ft we were still in it and ploughing on yet there were still no instructions to change our plans but with the first of the Ruhr defences ahead of us, and the aircraft icing up to the extent that she was getting very sluggish, Geoff Hammond, the pilot, was getting concerned that we could not possibly go much higher without the risk of losing control plus the chance of carburettor icing as well.
With the sun obscured it had turned very cold inside the aircraft as the heating system was fighting a losing battle and I thought that perhaps it was time that I put my life jacket back on. I thought better of it for the very reason that I would have to take my parachute harness off to do it but with the aircraft waffling around like a drunken duck it perhaps not the best time to do it.
We were all somewhat relieved when Geoff announced that we were turning back and descending to try and find better conditions although it was some time before there was even the slightest improvement.
We could not get out of cloud completely and the ice was still not clearing although it was no longer building up so we set course for our secondary target; Duisburg, from where we could have made a dash for clearer areas. However, Dave Howell, the navigator, although he was able to place us over the target area on radar, was not satisfied that he could pin point a target so we just kept on going and descending as the cloud started
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to thin into layers. As the conditions improved ice started to strip off and clatter about with a great deal of noise although it was no problem and certainly better than being loaded with half a ton of ice in the wrong places.
Even-the Lancaster had very limited de-icing equipment. It was only installed on the leading edges of the wings inboard of the inner engines, and therefore not all that effective. It was policy to increase the-bomb carrying capacity by reducing such [underlined] unneccessary [/underlined] [sic] frills.!!!!!.
It seemed that it was going to be an abortive sortie and that we would be taking our bombs back home and dumping them on the range but after a short conference on the intercomm [sic] Geoff decided that our best bet would be to go back to Krefeld in a final attempt to plant the bombs on the enemy side of the 'bomb line' so we turned around again and headed East for Krefeld.
We were still in and out of cloud at about 8,500ft by the time our new target came up by which time Dave and Jim Murphy the bomb-aimer had decided on a target reference and between them the bombs were dropped in one salvo.
As soon as they had gone we started into a port turn to make for home when Jim reported that the bomb doors would not close, probably due to icing…..; [underlined] when it happened!!!! [/underlined]
The aircraft gave a violent lurch and being in the astro dome I was horrified to see the starboard wing just rear up as if it was going to wrap itself around us.
With my heart in my mouth I went scrambling towards my parachute stowage but before I got there I was brought to my knees alongside the radio compartment as the aircraft rolled right over and the next few moments were rather desperate.
We went into a spin; which way up I shall never know, but to the accompaniment of the sound track from some old aviation film we, were descending at an alarming rate as Geoff yelled "prepare to abandon" on the intercomm [sic] although no-one really needed telling. The trouble was that there was little that we could do about it.
Geoff and Des Cook the flight engineer were fighting the controls together with linked arms as the altimeter unwound rapidly but the spin had locked everyone into their respective positions.
Dave and I were both desperately trying to get to our side by
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side parachute stowages without much success and although our heads were probably only a couple of feet apart I swear that our eyeballs; out on stalks-must have nearly touched.
It has often been said that when one is faced with death one's whole life flashes before you but I do not recall any such images.
The only thing that flashed into my brain-box was "Dear God; this is it-I hope it doesn't hurt too much", and then suddenly the aircraft righted, or at least stopped spinning and we were released from the centrifugal forces that had kept us locked allowing us to get the 'chutes out of the racks as at the same time the order came from Geoff to "abandon...abandon...abandon”. Reaction to that order was automatic after the amount of time that we had spent practising the procedure in the previous three days.
Helmets with oxygen and intercomm [sic] connections were torn off. Dave and I grabbed our parachute packs on the run and slammed them onto our chest clips by the time Jim Murphy had jettisoned the front hatch and had virtually gone out with. Dave went next, feet first and I followed so closely behind, head first, that there could not have been a foot between us.
Archie Macintosh, the mid-upper gunner, was hot on my heels even though he had had to negotiate the main spar to get up front and then the way was clear for Des.
Des had already released Geoff's sutton harness and removed his helmet and connections as well as his own whilst Geoff was still struggling with the controls and he was ready to go the same way as the rest of us.
We had all thumped Geoff's arm as we passed so he got another thump from Des prior to his departure after which Geoff was able to make a dash for the exit before the aircraft went out of control again. As usual, the rear gunner had made his own arrangements by rotating on the beam and jettisoning the turret doors then throwing himself out backwards.
From the word 'go' there was a lot to be done and it says a great deal for a well practiced drill because we figured out afterwards that we were all out in 12 secs. flat, and not suprisingly [sic] , even faster than we had achieved in practice only the day before when Geoff had insisted that we do it again and
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again until he was satisfied.
It was with the same mechanical process that I counted to ten before I pulled the rip cord although I have to confess that I cheated a bit. It was more like 2,4,6,8,10 and after I had done it my heart was in my mouth as nothing seemed to happen.
I had felt some urgency to get the 'chute open as quickly as possible as we had been in cloud all the time and I had no idea of our height at the time of going out. I was just hoping that it would open before I dived into something solid; like the side of a house before it did.
I had made sure that I had put the 'chute pack on with the 'D' ring under my right hand which had been on it from the time I had clipped up. I had heard too many stories of people who had gone out in a panic only to be found later at the bottom of a hole with the right hand side of the pack half torn away by bleeding fingers; yet as sure as I was that I had done everything correctly it seemed like a lifetime before anything happened.
There was a violent jolt and I was swinging under a rustling canopy, still in cloud and preparing rapidly for a heavy landing. For a brief moment there was a tremendous sense of relief as I found myself looking down at the 'D' ring clutched in my right hand. Then the thought struck me that I had better hang onto it as there was a five shilling fine for opening a parachute; but only by mistake. What a bloody silly thought!...so I tossed it away smartly just before I broke cloud.
I estimated that I was about 1500ft and on looking around I found that I was much too close to a turbulent river for my liking, especially as I was a poor swimmer and I had no life jacket on, so I started hauling on the shroud lines to do something about it. With not a lot of time to spare I concentrated on the landing.
I was agreeably suprised [sic] that crossing hands on the lines and pulling them in opposite directions worked like the instructors said it would and with a little more heaving and hauling I soon got a fair idea of where I was going to land in an open field!.
I need not have worried about going into the river as a strong wind was carrying me away from it but if it was not bad enough that landing by parachute was the equivilent [sic] to the rate of
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descent of jumping off of a 12ft wall I seemed to be doing about 30mph on the level so I was not keen to get a busted leg at that stage.
When I was just a few feet above the ground I turned the release buckle to unlock the harness and a fraction of a second before touching terra firma I banged the release buckle and Presto!. I came out of the harness, into a forward roll over the shoulder and hip and immediately up on my feet to grab the lower lines of the canopy and collapse it. It was a classic landing-I was down safely and I could only hope at the time that the others had been as successful.
I had seen no sign of them during the descent but I was to find out all about that later. The most important thing was-where the blazes was I?. The time was 3.30pm and as we had crossed and re-crossed the 'bomb line' there was every chance that I might be on the Allied side.
The terrain gave no indication of where I was and there was not the activity that one would expect of a battlefield area but with those thoughts running around inside my head I gathered up my parachute and shoved it under the base of a tree among some roots as I decided to get away from the immediate area.
[line of stars]
10
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Continuation of “Water under the Bridge – Part II. by A.T.GAMBLE.
I could faintly hear shouts and whistles coming from one area so I scrambled off on my hands and knees in the opposite direction into an area of 4ft nursury [sic] pines towards a road that I had seen on the way down. By the time I got there the shouts and whistles had become considerably louder.
Within a few seconds of reaching the edge of plantation the road was in sight but I stayed under cover until I spotted a Jeep coming along displaying the American white circle with a star in so with great relief I broke cover, stood up and waived [sic] . I immediately regretted it.
The chap standing up front next to the driver let loose with a sub-machine gun so I promptly went to ground again.
I just had time to notice that his uniform, although a sort of blue, was not quite the familiar RAF colour and pattern, Then I knew which side of the line I was on; the wrong side. !!
I was only half aware of the sounds of ZZZtz’s as lead cut into the area around me as I did a reasonable imitation of a rabbit on my hands and knees heading for the middle of the trees wondering how the blazes I was going to get out of this situation, until l was finally forced to stop, exhusted.
I buried my identity card which I should not have been carrying anyway, plus two £1 notes, and drew my pistol which had been tucked in my tunic, cocked it and laid down trying to be very, very small.
A siren was wailing in the distance and the shouts and whistles got even louder with sounds of more local movement that was just audible above the hammering of my heart.
I did not know what to expect but what happened was very sudden. A heavy boot came down on my gun hand. The pistol went off and I was hauled to my feet facing the business end of a nasty looking machine pistol and about half a dozen grinning chaps of my own age; in Luftwaffe blue!.
There were some others behind me and one of them relieved me of my Smith & Wesson .38 and with my hands now free it seemed the most logical thing to do was to put them well above my head. With as cheerful a grin as I could muster I said "good afternoon", to which the bloke behind the pistol said, "gooten abend, fur sie das krieg ist fertig". (good afternoon, for you the war is finished) and although my German was not good enough
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to interpret, the inference in the manner in which it was said was sufficient. I was without any doubt a Prisoner of War!.
In the middle of the group, with a prod and a push I was ushered to a large house, past a battery of heavy looking anti-aircraft guns and the thought struck me that they might have been responsible for my present predicament as there was no doubt in my mind that it was ack-ack that had got us, but I didn't ask. I was not going to give them the satisfaction of an affirmative reply as they already seemed pretty smug about the whole business.
I was led into the house, and up the stairs from the baronial hall of heavy oak panelling and flying staircase and into a room being used as an office.
An officer behind a huge antique desk greeted me with a broad grin, so with very little to lose I gave him a parade ground salute which he smartly returned. So far so good….but what was running around inside my head at the time was the irony that it was just my luck to have come down in the middle of the Luftwaffe flak unit that had shot us down!.
The proceedings that followed were all conducted in German and a lot of sign language apart from one question directed to the single ribbon on my tunic. It was only the 1939/43 star as it was then, but the officer pointed to it and enquired "DFC”?. Well, a DFC was about the equivalent of their Iron Cross, whatever class, and I thought it might influence the treatment so "ja” it was. As it happened it might as well have been a VC for all the difference it made.
Everything was turned out of my pockets. Collar studs were taken from out of my shirt. (They obviously knew that we often had special one's with compasses in them). Then the cufflinks, (they often had the same use). Then all of the buttons from my jacket and trousers. (Again some buttons could be used as a matching pair with one balanced on the other to produce a crude compass). Then the stitching that secured the tops of my flying boots was cut to deprive me of the tops as they were obviously aware that often money and maps were built into the layers of fleece and silk.
A polished metal mirror that I always kept in my left breast pocket was also removed before I was handed a piece of paper
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and pencil, and it was not difficult to understand the next request. Number, Rank, Name, although it was difficult to comply right away until I had secured my trousers with my tie.
Among my possessions now laying on the table was a nearly new pack of 20 cigarettes, so I indicated a request for one but the crafty blighters handed them round first leaving just one in the pack for me. Even then they did not light theirs. They probably pulled them to pieces later to see if there was anything other than tobacco in them. I knew there was not. I had only got them from the Mess bar the night before.
Now those in the escape and evasion pack that had gone down with my life jacket were an entirely different matter but it was no good bemoaning the loss of that stuff.
It seemed that the initial procedures were finished when the officer made a few calls on a field telephone after which I was ushered outside to take my place between two armed escorts on bicycles and with a boot up the backside and "Schnell" off we went with me at the trot.
I found out later that I had come down between Veirson and Alderkirk, about 10mls West of Krefeld but we were soon away from there as was persistently prodded and booted to keep me on the run which was no easy task in sloppy shoes which used to be flying boots, and trousers without adequate support but they seemed in a great hurry and obviously 'I was of no consequence.
There were regular encouraging shouts of "rouse" and "schnell" accompanied by more kicks in the rear so there was no alternative to keeping on the move.
What surprised me was the fact chat the area we went through was devoid of all civilian population. Villages, shops, farms and houses were deserted. There was no sign of life at all. Derelict filling stations had rusty 'Shell' signs hanging lop-sided. Shops with tatty Coca-Cola signs were all boarded up. It was more like a no-man's land that I jogged through with little evidence of all the troops that I expected to see considering how close to the front line that I was. It was even more surprising since in the early hours of the next morning one of the biggest offensive's of the war was launched by the Allies
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on the Northen [sic] battle front in an attempt to break through and reach the Rhine. They must have been known that something big was about to break.
The very fact that we did not achieve immediate success is a matter of history but with great armies lined up and about to be locked in battle less than 30mls to the West I can only assume that if there was any strength of German troops in the rear they were very well hidden. The only traffic that I saw was the occasional military vehicle travelling very slowly hugging the edge of the tracks through wooded areas.
I was just about done in when we finally arrived at the Luftwaffe airfield at Krefeld around dusk.
I was duly handed over and signed for at the guard room with my two escorts still showing signs of being in a hurry to get back to their relatively isolated unit before the RAF or the USAAF started chucking stuff at what was a prime target.
Perhaps they figured they would have more chance against our ground forces but whatever; they were off as fast as they could go with their hand generating flashlights whirring away.
My first impression of the place was the similarity between their buildings and our pre-war bases at home. It all looked so familiar that they might have been built to the same plans….perhaps they were!. Even the cell block behind the guard room was identical as was the exercise yard behind it, but I was not impressed when I was shown to my room.
In the cell was the same sort of wooden dais that served as a bed, (no comfort for the wrong doers), and of course no pillow or mattress. Just a single thin blanket.
It was not long after I had been locked in and I had taken stock of the situation that I realised that it was some time since I had eaten or had a drink, about eight hours actually, so I started making a fuss to attract the attention of a guard and demanding to be fed.
The sign language conveyed the message alright but the only reaction was a great deal of laughter and sign language from them which simply meant "you have had it mate"!.
I have no doubt it was due to a typical military process which ensured
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that there would be no issue of food to a prisoner until he came on ration strength in the morning!.
Everything that I had been provided with for such emergencies (had I been allowed to keep it) had gone down in my life jacket.
I finally went into an uncomfortable and restless sleep with visions of that egg and bacon that would have been waiting for me back at Mildenhall, and grumblings in the tummy. I was also very concerned at the sort of reaction that there would-be when the inevitable telegrams arrived. There was no way, that anyone back home would know what had happened to us. We would just be 'missing' until something was sorted out.
In the morning the routine was simple. An early visit to the ablutions under guard with no means or opportunity of washing, other than splashing a little water on the face and return to the cell to find that 'breakfast' had been served.
It had been placed on the floor outside the cell door. I could have eaten a horse, harness and all but all that 'breakfast' consisted of was one slice of sticky black bread with a smear of bright yellow grease on it and a mug of some brown stuff that they called coffee.
I did not dare laugh at their reference to "cafe' and brot und butter" as there was no was of knowing when I would get anything else particularly as my insides were already protesting at not being fed for nearly 24 hours. Nevertheless, I nibbled and sipped any way through it having never ever tasted anything quite like it before.
Had I gulped it down I have no doubt that I would not have kept it down for long. It was absolutely ghastly.
There was no activity at all until mid-day and after a visit to the ablutions a meal was provided on a small folding table in the passageway and I had company.
My companion was a young Luftwaffe airman of about 17 who spoke quite good English and although he could have been a plant I very much doubt it.
Over the meal which was about a handful of turnip stew. a tablespoon of sourcraut [sic] and a thin slice of black bread without any scrape, plus a mug of the brown stuff we managed to communicate sufficiently for him to tell me his story.
Apparently he had wanted to be a pilot but his eyes were not
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up to the standard required so he had become ground crew of some sort which he had been a bit peeved about. He was in the cooler for striking an officer and what's more he did not seem too worried.
I found it embarrassing when after he had made enquiries about the various insigna [sic] on my uniform and found that I was an officer. It was he who suggested that the scar on my forehead was a duelling scar so I want along with it. After that disclosure he jumped to his feet, clicking his heels and bobbing up and down in typical German fashion until I suggested that we had better get on with our food, what there was of it, before it got cold. Especially as we were using the same utensils...his!. Then we were locked up again and for my part still hungry.
I have often wondered how that lad got on. After all, striking an officer was, and still is a serious offence, especially on active service. He was probably sent to the Russian front in a penal battalion to fight for his beloved Furher [sic] . They might as well have shot him outright. Whilst I was having visions of egg and bacon I was disappointed when supper turned up. It was a mug of a different shade of brown stuff of indefinable flavour and so to bed. It was the same routine the next day and my insides were still trying to come to terms with the 'snacks' that arrived three times a day and even the Luftwaffe airman had disappeared but things livened up the next day.
There was a terrific rattle of light ack-ack when the airfield was straffed [sic] by USAF P.51's, (Mustangs). They did a hell of a good job from what I could see through a small peep-hole in the top corner of the window, only just accessible .by climbing on the bed stood on it's end.
There were quite a few fires and explosions and a hell of a racket from the defences but I was forced to abandon my grandstand view very quickly when lead started splattering all over the outside of the building. It was too close for comfort and the window finished up with a larger hole in it that it had had before causing a bit of a draught.
Archie Macintosh had been brought in the night before but apart from one brief meeting we had been unable to communicate as
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he had been put in a cell at the other end of the block and we were fed at different times.
I was beginning to get a bit fed up with my own company when on the afternoon of the 10th I had plenty of company.
The entire crew of a B.17. (Flying Fortress) were brought in and distributed among the cells so two of them joined me.
They were a bit suspicious at first but were soon convinced that I was genuine as I was sharing their discomfort. Despite the increase in numbers we were not provided with any more blankets and only a small increase in total food, although we were being fed in the cells at that stage. Fortunately my new cell mates had only recently been well fed back at their UK base and were quite willing to forego the "Kraut junk food" so I had my fill. I am sure they changed their minds about it later on.
At least there was someone to talk to relieve the utter boredom of my four walls and I must confess that I was astonished when I heard their story.
Apparently they had lost an engine and could not keep up with their formation so before the fighters could get at them they had just force landed, fired the aircraft and that was that.
I found it difficult to reconcile such an action with what we might have done in similar circumstances but their orders were not to risk lives at that stage for the sake of an aeroplane. There were plenty of them!. Even so I thought that it would not have been difficult to have done some hedgehopping to our own lines rather than finish up in the situation they now found themselves in.
The next day we were all mustered outside the Guardroom after our morning drink and with one guard per prisoner we set off to Dusseldorf by the process of alternatively walking or hitchhiking on military transport. Archie and I were at last able to compare notes.
He had gone out just behind me but had not been able to execute as neat a landing.
He had landed in some fairly tall pine trees and after he had finished crashing through branches he finished up swinging about 20 feet from the ground somewhat winded.
He had a lot to think about once he had recovered and certainly
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did not fancy getting a busted leg by releasing himself from that height, although that is what the Luftwaffe wanted him to do as soon as they arrived on the scene.
There was a lot of shouting and a few shots to give him encouragement so he eventually got a good swing going until he was able to grab the branch of another tree, release himself and clamber down. The rest was routine so that was two of us that were OK anyway.
As we plodded along we took in all that was revealed by the countryside and the signs of the desperate shortages in Germany were even more obvious.
All the things that made up the daily life back home that we took for granted; the butcher, the baker, people, transport and tradesmen were just not there. The area was desolate apart from the odd military vehicle that picked us up and saved our legs for a few miles.
It took a long time to cover the 16 miles by those means and there was no refreshment at all-not for us prisoners anyway!, but we duly arrived at the Luftwaffe airfield at Dusseldorf to be handed over and signed for as usual at the guard room.
Then our escorts came up with an extraordinary gesture that took us completely by surprise They came down the line and shook us all very politely by the hand, with of course the inevitable heel clicking, and then we were led away to our cells. There was four in mine, including Archie.
We were not fed or watered. Only water was available when it was possible to visit the toilets although the guards were very reluctant to let us use the wash basins--but we managed.
By that time I was used to being hungry and our American friends were getting aclimatized [sic] --but getting very vocal about it. It was a total waste of time, even when we were ushered outside at 4.30 the next morning.
Naturally we were hoping that we were going to be fed but all we got was a pack of three dry sandwiches, containing some garlic smelling sausage and being told that they had to last several days. Some only lasted a few minutes as about 20 of us were packed into a bus which took us to what was left of Dusseldorf station and whilst we were waiting around for something to happen we found that Jim was among us. That made three of us accounted
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for.
Jim's descent had been perfectly normal. There had been a reception committee waiting for him and he had gone straight to Dusseldorf where he had waited several days for something to happen. At last it had.
We spent all day on that train, and the next as it clanked and groaned it's way across country. It was a painfully slow journey, and sometimes we were shunted into sidings for long periods, and on others we were just held up by the signals.
The guards were touchy and there was one outside each of the compartments all the time. The only time we were allowed out into the corridor was for the occasional visit to the toilet, still under escort, and the facilities were a bit primitive to say the least.
Drinking water was limited and was only made available twice a day from a bucket with a ladle which we all had to use, so it was not surprising that we were getting thirsty, dirty and hungry. Three sandwiches do not go far---mine went on the first day and nothing else had turned up.
Sleeping was another big problem although we dozed quite a lot as there was-nothing else to do, but ten in a compartment brought it's own problems, especially at night. We took turns for a few hours at a time up on the luggage racks but without any heating on the train it did not take long for the body to get chilled right through so it was necessary to get back into the sweaty and rather smelly huddle of bodies to warm up again.
We had to disembark several times as the train went forward slowly on it's own over either weak or hurriedly laid sections of track or where unexploded or delayed action bombs were suspected and it was all very tedious.
The next night we stopped at one station to change the train crew, I think it was Siegen, and it was another of those rare occasions to get out of the compartment.
The German equivalent of the WVS were on the platform and the ladies of the tea urn were approached by our guards with a proposal to dispense some in our direction and with a great show of reluctance they eventually obliged.
Of course, we had to take it in turn to use the tin cups provided as we had nothing and the news was relayed that the hot drink
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was 'chocolate'. I saw some strange expressions from the others that were ahead of me in the queue when they got theirs and I don't suppose mine was any different when I got my measure.
As chocolate it was more like dirty washing up water and that the average German had long forgotten what chocolate really tasted like.
It was more like the sort of brew that you would get if you dissolved a Horlicks tablet in five gallons of hot water!.
It was welcome just the same and we dare not make any disparaging remarks about for fear of being deprived of it.
I was just wondering if I should finish my ration by washing in it when the air raid sirens started wailing and there was immediate panic everywhere as we set off for the shelters.
We were herded down some steps into caves which had been hewn out of the natural rock alongside the station and some of us helped the guards with their packs. Someone else 'accidentally' knocked over the abandoned drinks trolley in the general rush and we eventually finished up in a dimly lit shelter where we were pushed well to the back as bombs started crashing down outside causing the lights to flicker and dust to start filtering from the roof onto everyone. [The raid was short but the bombs were heavy one's and are thought to have been Mosquito's on a 'siren tour'].
The rest of the occupants of the shelter, mostly civilians including children were terrified and apart from one old bloke, stayed huddled up in the corners. He shuffled across to our group and peered at us through the shield of guards for a while until it dawned on him who we were and then he went frantic.
He lunged and spat, yelling "terror fleiger" doing his damnedest to get through to us but the guards closed ranks into a solid wall in front of us and he shoved off when the all clear sounded. The guard commander was taking no chances that any further demonstration might get out of hand and we left last!.
I doubt if they would have been so protective If they had known what we had been up to. It was some time later after we had re-embarked and were clanking along once more when they found out. First one went to his pack and then another, to find the cupboard bare. Even the: wine bottles were empty!.
They got very upset about it and there were all sorts of threats
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of punishment for stealing but we just laughed it off and it came to nothing.
Their rations were not all that good anyway but by that time we were past caring. I do not remember anyone saying that they did not like garlic sausage or black bread but in that situation you soon forget about any fads and fancies you might have had.
We finally arrived at Frankfurt on the morning of the 15th and I was surprised to see so such of the station still standing. It was not until I took a second look that I realised that the broken framework of the roof had no glass and the only solid thing seemed to be the platforms, and there was a lot of those missing.
It was even worse outside!.
The roads were just avenues between piles of rubble that had once been houses, shops and businesses. What a mess. I had seen some of Coventry after they had done some clearing up in the areas that had been devastated, and a great deal of London's East End but this lot was not in any way isolated. It spread as far as the eye could see. We had seen signs of it from the train as we were pulling in but when we were actually in it was obvious that anything still standing was little more than a blackened shell.
It was not surprising that the population were showing signs of hostility as we were herded out of the station and we were surrounded by the guards almost shoulder to shoulder. It was with some relief that we were all shoved into the relative safety of an old electric tram which eventually rattled and whined it's way up the hill in the direction of the infamous interrogation camp; Dulag Luft, at Ober-Orsal, the place that most of us knew about from the talks that we had from either repatriates or escapees. We had a pretty good idea of what to expect, and were prepared for it.
The tram ran out of line after about two miles and then we were on foot again until we reached the camp at about 2pm.
This time the guards did not shake hands when we were handed over. They were probably still sore about their stolen rations and were as anxious as we were to get a meal. Nevertheless, I was glad that it was policy for the Luftwaffe to look after Air Force prisoners. They seemed reasonable enough under the
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circumstances.
Perhaps they were being particularly nice now that the stuffing was being knocked out of them and although they would not have admitted it many of them must have known that the end was near.
We queued for a long time as forms were filled in and cross checked with other papers and then finally it was time to have our photographs taken.
Most of the staff seemed to be Luftwaffe aircrew who were either grounded by the shortage of fuel or were convalescing but either way they were not very good with a camera. They had been clicking away merrily for some time with the lens cap still on and a buzz passed down the line not to tell them until they got near the end. I was only a couple from the end and it gave me great satisfaction to point it out to them. Much to their embarrassment Everyone fell about hooting with laughter and there were a few derisory remarks made in German about the efficiency of the Luftwaffe. It did mean of course that we had to do it all over again which involved getting colder and hungrier but it was all part of the scheme of things that almost everyone was engaged in. Crudely put, it was 'goon baiting', and something that they failed to see the point of.
After hours of standing around and being herded to and fro' I was eventually ushered into a room that might easily have been one of our own flight offices. It was a cleverly laid out stage set that was a perfect replica using RAF furniture, carpets and fittings that had been captured and put to use. In addition there was even one of our own Marconi TR1154/55 radio equipments sitting on top of one of our filing cabinets with an RAF flying helmet, goggles and oxygen mask draped casually over an open drawer, plus a gunners Irvin fur flying jacket on the door hook to create the right effect. In addition there was a wall map with pins and tapes showing routes and other areas exactly the same as the one in our briefing room.
I could not help wondering how many of these stage sets they had got for the various aircrew categories both RAF and USAF but it was so obvious I was immediately on my guard.
When the officer, or the chap that was dressed as one spoke from behind the desk it was in perfect English, without any accent, that it might easily have been an interview by a flight
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commander on posting; except that he was in the wrong sort of uniform!.
He asked all sorts of questions relative to target and route, the call signs, equipment, and frequencies as well as the codes, all of which I refused to answer. I stuck to number, rank, and name.
After a while he pushed over a packet of Players cigarettes and then launched into some searching questions about the Bomber Codes that we used and even showed me some copies that they had obviously recovered from pranged aircraft. Naturally he wanted to know about the sequence of use and although I told him that it was a random sequence and just issued for an operation he really did not believe it, but it was true and so simple that it was unbelievable. As a result he was not convinced and suggested that as an officer I must know more than that (which I did of course), but it seemed that the best way was to act ignorant, and I doubt if they were ever able to decode anything from any one transmission. It was that simple yet very discreet.
He started off again about the target and why we had been around Krefeld but eventually got fed up asking the same questions over and over again, and getting a blank stare for an answer.
All the time he had been questioning me he had been referring to a folder on the desk in front of him and eventually with a sigh he held it up and showed me the front cover. As plain as the nose on your face the wording was '15 Squadron, Mildenhall'.
It had obviously been put together over the years from snippets of information plus a good deal of intelligence gathering through spies and the like and they may have managed to find sufficient evidence from the wreckage of 'D' Dog to tell them where we had come from. After all, 4ft lettering on each side of the fusulage [sic] would be enough. Nevertheless, he displayed a certain amount of smugness at the disclosure and when I said "well, if you know all that why do you persist in asking damn silly questions" he went one better. He said he knew Mildenhall quite well, and that included 'The Bird in Hand', which was a local favoured pub. Then he trotted out some more local knowledge and rounded it all off with the fact that I would be pleased
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to know that all the crew had been captured uninjured which was a great relief, although it was a sprat to catch a mackerel. He started off right away again about Bomber Codes. No way. Two could play that-game so it was back to number, rank, name again.
All the time the interrogation was going on, in addition to the guard by the door there were two electricians in white overalls working on a side wall putting in electrical conduit and I was doing my damndest to show more interest in what they were doing than my interrogator and especially the materials that they were working with.
The conduit seemed to be rolled up paper' tubing with a foil coating and a crimping tool rather like a large pair of pliers was being used to shape the curves and the corners.
The electricians looked at me with puzzled interest and I grinned back at them much to the consternation of the interrogator. It all seemed a bit daft to me. With Allied ground forces approaching the Rhine for the final big blow and their country being blasted to bits and their armies in the East and the West retreating from overwhelming forces. With death and destruction everywhere wasn't it typically German to be putting in electrical modifications?. I suppose they could have been wiring demolition charges just in case but surely they would not have bothered with conduit---or would they?.
I was dragged back from my meditations when asked to complete a small white card with personal details and when he saw my home address he asked how I managed to get across London with the mess that it was in with the VI's and V2's still a pouring down the question took me by surprise The damage from those weapons had been very isolated however devastating it might have been in the precise spot of impact. At the worst we had learned to live with the things even when one had taken the end off of the London hotel in which my wife and I had been staying and another had blown up a cow in a field just across the road from where we had been staying in Surrey but life went on just the same so I told him. "No trouble".
That was not good enough and he still persisted that London was in a terrible mess so I let his have it straight. I told his that I could still cross London any way I wanted. By taxi,
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bus, underground or on foot as I had done only three weeks previously...or stay in the city if it suited, and certainly a lot easier than he could get across Frankfurt from what I had seen of the place. That was it. End of interview! Could it have been that he had heard all that before and he was soon going to have to believe it?.
I was promptly dismissed and escorted to my 'private' room. It was three paces by one and a half most of which was taken up by a bed, and of course, the radiator!.
The window was shuttered and this type of room was commonly known as the sweat-box and considered by many to be the means of extracting information from people.
Although we had been told about this I am still more inclined to think that since the Germans were generally more advanced in their use of central heating systems than we were they were also inclined to overdo it a bit; even in those days.
I had been locked up for about an hour when the rattling of keys alerted me to the possibility of food arriving but no such luck.
When the door opened it was to admit a tubby, faded civilian, in a faded shapeless suit. He looked like something out of 'Scrooge'` in his cock-eyed steel rimmed glasses, and announced himself as a representative of the German Red Cross as he produced a foolscap sized questionnaire. We had been warned about this one too!.
Red Cross he might have been but the requirements of the questionnaire seemed to be bending the rules a bit and he seemed somewhat upset when I only entered the same basic details that had gone on the white card.
We had been warned that anyone who had been careless in their disclosures would be dealt with later and I was taking no chances.
It would not be the first time that 'Lord Haw-Haw' (William Joyce) had made use of such information and mentioned the names of people that had recently become guests of the Third Reich in his propaganda broadcasts.
Another significant factor was that William Joyce knew Worthing well enough to have made the most of it having been in lodgings just around the corner from home before the war. I was very
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careful.
The little grey man got quite angry and made dire threats about not getting any food if I did not co-operate. Big deal...that was nothing new. No food had past my lips for at least 36hours!. Not long after his departure clatterings at the door suggested food again but instead an elderly guard brought in a dirty metal bowl with some lukewarm water in it and a razor with a blade that had definitely seen better days. One thing was for sure, there was no way a desperate POW was likely to cut his throat with it!.
The rest of the equipment was a dirty damp towel and a piece of 'soap' more like pumice stone which had no intention of producing a lather. It made very little impression on my seven days growth of beard or the 'tide marks' on various parts of my anatomy that had not been exposed for the same amount of time.
I felt better for it anyway even though I still had no opportunity to clean my teeth and it was probably just as well that I had not got my steel mirror to assist in those ablutions. I would probably had a fit.
Some time after that the clatter at the door was followed by the same guard with my meal. Not very much and not very nice but even a dollop of turnip stew in a tin bowl was welcome at that time which was probably nearer 48hrs since my last bite of anything.
It did not take long to figure out the routine. There was a lever by the door which when turned allowed a piece of red painted angle iron to drop on the outside indicating that a visit to the toilet was required.
On my first visit I was going down the corridor and was horrified to see an ashen faced Flight Lieutenant, his arm in blood soaked bandages, just painfully stumbling along, using the wall for support, and I instinctively went to give assistance although he feebly protested that I would get into trouble. I did!.
I got a rifle butt smack between the shoulder blades and down I went. When I struggled to my feet the guard was screeching his head off about "sprachen verbotten" and "schnell" as I was prodded along to the ablutions where another chap was able to tell me about the set-up.
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Apparently the Flt.Lt. was the pilot of a Tempest which was a type fairly near to the battle scene and as they wanted information from him they were withholding medical treatment until they did. His arm was already gangrenous and he smelt awful but there was nothing I could do for him when came back out of the toilets. He had just managed to make a little more painful progress down the corridor and that episode most certainly put all of my problems to the background. I was definitely not amused at the procedings [sic] .
I spent the rest of the night doing what everyone else seemed to be doing. Making sure there was a signal bar going down every few minutes of the night just to annoy the guard. It did!.
On one occasion when he got around to me he was very angry and protested to some considerable length in his pigeon English that "alles ist pissen unt shitzen" so it seemed worth while going without sleep. It was too hot for sleeping anyway with the radiators pinging away.
At 5 o'clock they next morning, after a drink, an untidy collection of prisoners were assembled outside with the usual shouting and shoving and then we were marched the five miles down to Frankfurt station to await a train. The weather was cold and miserable, we were cold and hungry as we staggered along in no particular order and then I was thumped on the back by Des which cheered things up a bit. He had already found some of the others are although I did not feel much like walking it certainly helped to swap experiences and pass the time.
Des had a very good story try tell.
Despite the fact that in his haste he had only secured his 'chute by one side clip and had made a very dodgy descent with every chance of the canopy 'candleing' [sic] and dropping him like a stone he still made a reasonable landing without injury. What was more important, his landing was undetected so he made some very positive arrangements to evade capture.
For two days and nights he worked his way Westward and had made considerable progress towards the front line to the point of having to dodge German patrols and guards.
In the early hours of the second morning there was gunfire all around him and he even heard American voices in the distance when he got a bit too bold.
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He had already fooled a guard earlier by grunting "gooten morgan" after the guard had shown his presence by lighting a cigarette, then strolled by him whistling Lillie Marlene but shortly afterwards made a lot of noise by falling in a ditch and was challenged. There was no way that he could bluff his way out of that and he was promptly bundled off to the rear to spend the night in a village hall before being handed over to the Luftwaffe, so here he was after all that.
It was after mid-day before a train was finally shunted in by which time most of us were just about asleep on our feet but were eventually embarked with more pushing, shoving and shouting accompanied by the liberal use of rifle butts.
The guards must have thought we were all daft by the way we kept bursting into song from time to time. We did our best with that fine old marching song 'Colonel Bogey' which cheered us up considerably. The Air Force had it's own words to that particular piece so we managed to tell them just what we thought of them without them knowing it!.
We finally arrived at Wetzlar later in the day having recovered from our earlier exertions but we were very, very hungry.
When we disembarked we were once more jostled about until the whole party, about a hundred, were ready to move off.
Then Dave turned up, although why we had not bumped into him before was a bit puzzling. Des had already met him and lost him again but it appeared that he had been at the other end of the column and this was our first chance to mingle since we had left Frankfurt.
There was a great deal of chat and it seemed that Dave had been picked up even quicker than me. He had come down in the open and the German Air Force was there to welcome him with open arms. He had been a bit concerned that the reception committee gathering below him were going to use him for target practice and was relieved when he finally touched down and rapidly divested himself of his 'chute and harness before doing basically what I had done. There was no other choice!.
We were chatting away as we trugged up the hill away from the station and eventually the boundary wire of a camp came into view looking somewhat ominous on the skyline but before the front of the column got to the main gate there was a flurry
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of activity.
Suddenly there were a couple of shots and the sounds of whistles as half a dozen guards with dogs came rushing out of the gate and we all came to a halt as they broke though our ranks and raced around the perimeter wire.
They raced out of sight and there was a lot of shouting and dogs barking for a few minutes before another shot was heard and shortly afterwards the party came back dragging a body unceremoniously by the legs along the whole length of the column. The body was that of a young American Air Force Sergeant who had a leg and a body wound in addition to a neat hole in his forehead!.
We soon found out what it had all been about when we got into camp but not until we were fed; this time with a difference.
For a start it was a well run POW transit camp run by the Americans and it seemed to have everything. It was a long time since any of us had been in a dining hall like that one. As traumatic as our arrival had been food was still uppermost in the minds of most people.
Surrounded as we had been by drab ugliness for so long to find ourselves in a clean cheery place with larger than life Disney cartoons and other such characters painted everywhere I half expected to see a Coca-Cola dispenser in the corner but what was on the tables was mind boggling.
There was Spam, beans, sausages, potato, bacon, bread, biscuits, butter, cheese, tinned fruit, dried fruit, chocolate, you name it, it was all there. All the things that came in Red Cross parcels. There was real coffee with reconstituted milk with real sugar on tap, or tea, and we hardly needed a second telling to "get stuck in". It was magnificent.
I can't remember how long we sat there just stuffing ourselves like kids at a Christmas party but eventually when we had had enough we were off to the showers, to be told that an issue of clothing would be made when we had cleaned up and for a start there was a new towel and real soap.
We all needed a good scrubbing before we were all pink and glowing once more and all the gear we had been wearing had been well and truly soaped and trampled on before we went on to the clothing store where most of us needed a complete change to
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bring us up to a acceptable standard.
Like most aircrew I had gone into the bag with just the flying gear that was being worn at the time but like any clothing it was bound to suffer from being worn day and night in all conditions for ten days. Gunners were probably better off than most if they had managed to hang on to their furs, but being military equipment most of them had had it taken from them.
There were other things that came out of the Alladins [sic] cave.
In addition to new underclothes, socks, boots, shirt, a greatcoat and a blanket there were cigaretts [sic] , pipe and tobacco, razor, shaving brush and soap. Toothbrush and paste. A comb and what military folk called a ‘hussif’, (housewife or sewing kit) which was very useful for keeping things in repair and of course for putting buttons back on things.
It was nearly all American Red Cross clothing and the like, mostly olive drab kharki [sic] but that did not make it any less welcome.
The camp seemed to have lavish supplies of everything and the fact that there were no guards patrolling the perimeter suggested that the administration had been bribed with goods to keep it that way with only the towers manned. It was certainly not beyond the realms of possibility knowing the capacity of our American friends to organise such things.
We were soon off to the barrack blocks with arms full of 'goodies' and to finish drying off those items of clothing that we wanted to keep and it was there that I finally heard the full story of the lad that had just got himself killed.
Apparently the poor chap had become very depressed since his capture mainly because as a waist gunner in a B.17. (Flying Fortress) when his aircraft had been damaged, he had panicked and failed to help the ball turret gunner out of his position. (Gunners in this very cramped turret needed assistance to both get in and out) but he himself had baled out and his buddy had gone to his death in the crippled aircraft.
It was hardly surprising that it had affected him very badly and he had been threatening to do something drastic which he had eventually done by going over the wire.
He had had the usual shouted warning when he went over the trip wire but kept going and started to climb the fence. On the way
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over he was hit by the first shot but still struggled on until the next shot brought him down outside but still crawling. There was very little doubt about the third shot that we had heard. That had been a pistol.
Whether he had begged the guards or whether they had needed no encouragement no one seemed to know although he must have been in view from the opposite side of the compound. Either way he was very dead and it was very sad to think that another young life had been needlessly thrown away.
We were not all that happy about our introduction to the POW cage but however much we had been shaken by the episode creature comforts were still uppermost in our minds and I spent the rest of the day sorting myself out and puffing away on my new pipe.
It was just as well that we had got away from Wetzlar station when we had.
I had no sooner made up my bed and was contemplating the luxury of spending the night in it when a racket started in the town as it got a pasting from USAF Thunderbolts and we had a grandstand seat as bits of the town and the station went flying in all directions accompanied by shouts and cheers from the 'grandstand'.
Nevertheless, I did get that night's exhausted, dreamless sleep in a real bed and not troubled by hunger pains. It was sheer ecstacy [sic] and I must confess that I was no longer so worried about how my wife and my family must have been feeling about my disappearance. The way things were going I was confident of getting home in the not too distant future so it was just a case of surviving until that day.
After a leisurely and handsome meal the following morning, the 18th, the whole camp apart from the permanent staff assembled with all their personal possessions and with a Red Crass parcel between two prisoners we were herded; (we refused to march), down the hill.
The station was in a bit of a mess but we were packed into a train on a side line and then left there waiting for something to happen.
What we did not want to happen was for a return of the Thunderbolts to finish off the job that they had started the day before. We had noticed that the carriages had got large
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lettering--P O W in white along the top but there was a lot of muttering about the potential dangers from roving Allied train and tank busters.
An impromptu committee was soon formed from some of the more senior prisoners and it was decided to 'encourage' someone to move the train to a relatively safer place. A collection of cigarettes was quickly organised and for the sum of several hundred cigarettes the guards, station staff and train crew were bribed accordingly. We only moved a few hundred yards into another siding, but It was certainly safer than being in the station notwithstanding the fact that we had an anti aircraft flak car at the front and the rear of the train!
Once again we were packed into compartments, twelve at a time and once more we were obliged to adopt the same procedure as before. Up on the luggage racks for a period. Limited visits to the toilet. Limited drinking water and no distribution of food at all. Fortunately we had all fed well and with the contents of our Red Cross parcels we could last several days.
W were still clanking along on the 19th and perhaps it was just as well that the POW had been plastered along the top after all.
We were buzzed several times by Allied aircraft including one cheeky chap in a Thunderbolt who braved the fire from the flak cars to fly parallel to us waggling his wings and waving from his open cockpit. It was very encouraging even if a little foolhardy but it provided for some more light entertainment.
Although we could not open the windows or the doors we crowded as many as we could into the them [sic] all waving as hard as we could go which caused immediate reaction from the guard in the corridor.
In he came and pulled down the blinds and then the game started.
As soon as he left to pull down those in the next compartment up went ours with a clatter and back he came again. It did not last long---he gave up first!.
At one time we passed through some absolutely devastated areas including some marshalling yards that looked as if a giant had trampled through them.
On one occasion we were on one of the few complete through lines, and everywhere else was a mass of bomb craters, smashed rolling
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stock and rails that were twisted into the most fantastic shapes like so much spagetti [sic] .
Repairs of sorts were being carried out by what looked like Russian or Polish women in headscarves, quilted jackets, sacking and string boots and who were wielding long handled shovels. They looked such a sorry dejected bunch that we put up a cheer but the only response were vacant stares.
One of the most incredible sights among all the mess was that of a huge circle of locomotive sheds surrounding a turntable locomotive roundhouse like the spokes of a wheel which had copped a real packet.
There were several 100 ton loco's reared up on their ends and wrapped around each other like so many discarded Hornby model trains. I don't know where it was. It could have been Frankfurt as it was not far away and we could have come back in that direction, or Wurzburg, but the effectiveness of that yard had been reduced to zero, making it even more difficult to move things about, including us. It did not seem logical to take all that trouble with POW's who were a definite liability.
We found out later what it was all about!.
Apparently Hitler had ordered that all POW's were to be brought down into the area surrounding Birchtegarten [sic] to be used as hostages and I would not have given much for our chances with Hitler in residence backed up by his SS fanatics.
Fortunately Hitler did not get out of Berlin anyway and a lot of his Generals were only going through the motions of obeying orders.
It was a dodgy situation all round and several of his Generals had already come to a sticky end in the hands of the SS.
Meanwhile we were being transported with great difficulty and at one time we passed through a hilly wooded area, still deep in snow which made it all look like a Christmas card scene. It was probably in the Steigerwald area; but at the top of one climb, with the locomotive chuffing and clanking we noticed that there were numerous little sidings among the trees with tanker wagons by the dozen stowed in them. We were to remember those later!.
It was about that time when the young guard positioned in the corridor by our compartment got himself into serious trouble
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with his Oberfeldwebel.
He was armed with an old French rifle of 1914/1918 vintage and we had been working on him for some time about his chances of defending himself when our troops caught up with him considering the numerous automatic weapons that our front line troops were armed with.
He eventually took the bait after some disparaging remarks about his antique rifle and proceeded to show us what a good weapon g it was; by taking it to pieces!.
We had got to the point where one of us had the magazine, another had the rounds and the bolt, another the bayonet until his rifle parts had been well distributed among us and with the train going slow enough to make jumping possible, he was within seconds of being clouted when the NCO on his rounds could not see him in the corridor and burst in on us.
He was blue in the face, waiving his pistol about and of course, shouting.
The guard got a great grand-daddy of a dressing down as he stood stiff as a ramrod and then, sheepishly re-assembled his rifle as the bits were handed back.
After some shouting, with the assembled rifle at the high port the NCO, having said his piece stomped away to a fair bit of tittering from us which turned to laughter as the guard had the last word.
As soon as the NCO was out of earshot, he said, out of the corner of his mouth, "oxen scheissen", which needed no interpretation so we finished up having a damn good laugh with him. For him it probably ended alright but little did he know how close he had been to getting his head bashed in.
In the early hours of the 20th we arrived at a suburban station on the outskirts of Nuremberg. ‘Lagerwasser’ was a dreary little wooden platformed affair and immediately the old routine started. Shouting, shoving and pushing to keep us all grouped together in the darkness we eventually walked about three miles to the camp. Then we walked back again as they were not ready for us!. That episode caused a bit of an argument as we did not know how long we were going to have to wait and it was damn cold. In fact it was actually freezing and eventually we were allowed back into the relative warmth of the train but those negotiations
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cost us almost all the remainder of our precious cigarettes.
Eventually detrained again when it was light enough and we moved down the road in small parties, strung out, until we were well away from the station and with a lot more slow, slow, quick, quick, slow stuff we were all inside the camp at full light.
In the dark and confusion I had lost Archie but had picked up Jim again but the most important thing was that we were more or less in the same group, and that was the only satisfaction that we got out of entering a grim looking place that did not get any better as we took stock of our surroundings.
The board over the main gate said Stalag X111d, and what a dump it was after our experience at Wetzlar.
Apparently it had been recently cleared and was filling up again although at that time we had no idea where the previous inmates had gone. Wherever it was they appeared to have stripped the
place before leaving.
We were counted off, 150 to a barrack room which was actually a very largo hut. Barrack Nr.69 was no different from the others. The bunks were triple stacked and by the state of them most of the wooden slats; (no spring beds or mattresses in those places), had been used for fuel which was the only type of fuel available for the two empty stoves.
We found ourselves places to sleep; and that included the floor as very few of the top bunks could be used after the available slats had been re-distributed to make up as many of the lower bunks as possible. There was not much point in having more gaps than slats up top and doing a balancing act all night with good chance of crashing down on the chap below so everyone co-operated without any fuss.
It goes without saying that the floor was favourite at that time although later on the rats made a bit of a nuisance of themselves. We were obliged to secure our rations very carefully in something they had difficulty getting into.
Shortly after 'settling in' we were called to a room at the end of the hut for a check to be made on our identities by some of the permanent POW camp staff and I was amazed at being interrogated by our own people but these boys knew what it was all about.
They had been in the 'bag' a lot longer than us and knew all
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about 'ferrets' and 'moles'.
Some had come from Stalag Luft.3. in Upper Selesia [sic] and had had the most awful experiences marching through the countryside in the depths of the Winter leaving many of their comrades frozen solid on the road-sides where they had dropped through sickness, starvation and fatigue, many of them having been shot as stragglers.
As 'sproggs' we were very fortunate to have the benefit of their experience but I was suprised [sic] to see a map of Europe spread out on the table and to be asked if there was anything we had seen en route' that might be of any use to our advancing armies.
I got Archie called in and we gave them enough information on the fuel tanker wagons that we had seen up in the mountains for a plot to be put on the map. I still do not recall exactly where it was though.
It was heartening to think that somehow we were actually able to pass on that information and the tankers might go up in smoke. It was not beyond the realms of possibility.
There was a radio somewhere among us. There had to be as we got regular BBC news bulletins after we got settled in. But to imagine that there was a transmitter as well was mind boggling. It must have been a remarkable piece of equipment with it's numerous components concealed in all manner of things with wiring connections and aerial secreted in belts, braces and tin cans. It is worth bearing in mind that a lot of earlier Air Force prisoners were highly trained technicians who could build such equipment out of basics.
I was never privileged to see anything of it. That was the province of the veteran POW brigade and the fewer people that knew about it the better.
It was still freezing and we did not dare use any more bed slats to get fires going as there was always the chance that some might be needed to line a tunnel.
That was only a thought at the time but I found out later that there really was a tunnel linking us with the next compound.
Of course, the toilets were frozen although still in use, and other parts of the ablutions were also locked in deep freeze.
The only running water available was in the compound kitchen where it was used sparingly for producing hot drinks and later
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on some sort of food.
It is understandable that creature comforts were still our primary consideration in such primitive conditions so the first cup of 'hot stuff' that was dished up was very welcome even if many of us had to go to the end of the line and wait until the owner of a drinking utensil was prepared to lend it.
We had been in the camp several hours, when an air raid hit the city, starting with the wailing of sirens in the distance and then the camp sirens.
Then the roar of hundreds of B.24's, (Liberators) reverberated and shook everything as they came in from the South with mass formations glittering in the weak sunshine but they were surrounded by enemy fighters like a swarm of bees around a jam pot.
The fighters must just about have met them head on and they wheeled in and out of the formation. Flak peppered the sky and they still droned on as one fell out of the sky with flames pouring from it. Then the smoke markers and streams of bombs from the lead aircraft was followed by clouds of bombs from the rest of the formation with the most spine chilling whistling rushing sound as they descended followed by the steady roar of explosions they plastered the city in great swathes.
Some went wide, perhaps jettisoned as aircraft got into trouble, and the station that we had only recently vacated collected one or two!.
What was most vividly imprinted on my mind were the numbers of crippled aircraft falling out of the sky at one time. There must have been at least a dozen. Some breaking up, others on fire or exploding with bits and pieces raining down and all the time the continuous roar of the battle with the crackle of machine guns, the thud-thud of cannon mingling with the heavy crack of anti-aircraft guns. It was a savage battle.
There was an awful lot of killing going on up there as well as down below and there were a lot of parachutes too.
The luckier one's fell clear of the city, and I would not have given much for their chances if they had come down in it.
We added to our numbers by one that day and he did not go on the ration strength. He came right down in camp and was promptly hidden before the guards came out of their 'funk' holes where
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they invariably dived with their tin hats over their back-sides.
We learned later that the B.24's had come from Italy and were going though to UK bases, hence they had run into the defences instead of having to fight an extended battle right across the country.
The fires in the city burned all of the rest of the day with the occasional explosion of delayed action bombs which made it very difficult for the fire fighters as well as the inhabitants.
When that bit of excitement was over the rest of my day was spent sorting myself out. I was lucky enough to salvage an old tin can from a rubbish dump and as soon as it was cleaned and polished with sandy soil I was able to join the drinks queue a bit nearer the front.
I had also found a piece of barrel hoop that looked as if it might be turned into something useful so I started working on it. It took two days of hammering and grinding with stones and lumps of concrete before it eventually finished up as a combined cutting tool and shallow spoon to make me more independent.
Ever the optimist, there was never any need for a knife for a long time as most of the food we were getting was easily dealt with a spoon; or the fingers!.
The first night was cold and rough, but we managed to get through it, as usual, fully dressed, rolled up in a blanket and anything else that was available. Even wrapping paper and cardboard was useful; either as cover or to provide some sort of insulation underneath. It was a noisy night too as a few Mossie's turned up and stoked up the city with cookie's.
It did not take long to finish off the Red Cross parcels that we had left Wetzlar with and the food provided during the next few days was very basic.
The day usually started with the ersatz 'coffee', without milk or sugar of course. There was a slice of black bread at midday and the thickness varied according to the number of people sharing a loaf. Sometimes there was a pat of ersatz margarine about the size of a ten pence piece, or a bowl of vegetable stew was a luxurious alternative; if you had a bowl to put it in, otherwise it was handful. In the evening there was a mug of ersatz 'chocolate'. No milk or sugar of course, and that
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was the basic ration when there was no supplement from the Red Cross parcel.
The mid-day 'meal' was quite a performance as there was no mess hall. When the rations came in there was a whole crowd of 'observers' who followed it's progress to the cookhouse and the division and supply to the huts to ensure that there was no pilfering along the way. Considering that we were a mixed bunch of RAF and USAAF, Officers and NCO's it was all done quite amicably. The final division of the bread was usually done by the chap with the sharpest knife under the eagle eye of more 'observers'. He had to be very careful when it had to divided between nine or nineteen people!.
The next day brought another devastating attack on the city. Again they were B.24’s but this time coming from UK bases on their way back to Italy but the concentration was not the same.
They would have spent a lot longer running the gauntlet as attack after attack had been met and probably many losses had been incurred. This time we went for cover as a lot more bombs went very wide of the target and in our direction. They were not quite in the camp but when one or two holes erupted within a few hundred yards of the wire in open ground only the foolhardy would have stayed to watch.
The next day was just another cold and miserable day. The city banged and burned but there was no heat for us. Not that we expected it after what had happened just a few miles away.
It was well below freezing at night and Jim and I found it warmer to do what others were doing by just wrapping ourselves up together to utilise a bit of animal warmth. It was either that or freeze.
I shall never understand what rats found to scavenge for in that place but they were always busy at night and could often be heard in the vicinity. Perhaps they were cold and hungry too and were looking for a warm place but we very soon learned that it was not a good idea to take one's footwear off at night unless you wanted something gnawing at the toenails!.
On the 25th the city was still burning and another batch of prisoners came in. Some more huts were opened up and as we stood there looking for familiar faces among the new arrivals we found one. Lynn Clark, the rear gunner. We soon had him billeted in
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our hut and it was not long before his story came out. After the order to abandon came he had already managed to put his 'chute on and rotated his turret on the beam so all he had to do was jettison the doors and chuck himself out backwards. The snag was that his bulky flying boots got stuck between his seat and the guns as he had not depressed them sufficiently so he found himself hanging out of the back watching us go one by one underneath him and disappear into the cloud.
It was no time to mess about so he pulled the 'rip'; the 'chute deployed and yanked him straight out of his boots. It's a wonder that he didn't break his legs considering that it was all happening at speeds somewhere between 150 and 250 mph but he was lucky and made a good landing, albeit without any footwear!. Unfortunately he too was soon picked up after he had spent some time improvising some foot covering out of his parachute that had served him so well. Later on he was provided with some well worn second-hand boots but certainly better than lashings of parachute silk/nylon. Nevertheless, he had not seen Geoff either and we were beginning to wonder if he had been able to get away somehow and that what we had been told at Ober-Orsal was all 'bull'.
The city still continued to burn all the next day with the occasional crump of a delayed action bomb going off but the highlight of the day was the mid-day meal when real potatoes were dished up.
We knew they were real as there was still a great deal of earth attached to them that had not come off in the boiling. At least it showed that none of the goodness had been lost in the cooking!.
There was even a smear of evil smelling semi-liquid French cheese in lieu of the coal based margarine that in better days would have been condemned for human consumption....and possibly animal consumption!. But we eat it just the same!.
The RAF stoked up the city again that night with a few more 'cookies': Those 4000 pounders certainly did go off with a crump that shook the dust off of everything and that was from three to four miles away!.
Another day dawned and with it good news. A large consignment of Red Cross parcels had come in with more people and lots more
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rumours. Even the rumours were a heartening charge from the daily dose of 'bull' that we were getting from the OKW (German High Command) news bulletin which was always good for a laugh when it was read out by an English speaking guard. I wonder if he ever listened to the BBC London news broadcast.
Every evening now we were getting a summary of that compiled by our own sources, inclusive of information from new arrivals that were not being processed by Dulag Luft. There was a great deal of difference between the two bulletins.
We even got another blanket issued on the 28th so that at last we could manage to keep warm without going into a huddle at night but the most important issue was the distribution of four Red Cross parcels between [underlined] five [/underlined] people. There was a lot of good stuff in those....including cigarettes!. I don't think I was the only one going around puffing happily and blowing smoke all over the guards as if to say "that's real tobacco".
I got real satisfaction out of that as a couple of days before I had traded some soap for a couple of their's and an enamel spoon; but only once.
Theirs tasted like a mixture of dried oak leaves. old tea leaves and pulverised straw-perhaps they were, but like a lot of other things in Germany at the time it was ersatz, (substitute), and tasted like it.
The pattern of each day did not vary much. A bit of a thaw during the day allowed a little more water to come through although it all froze up solid again at night.
The food issue was still the same old rubbish but it was safest to eat it first and then top up with something from the parcel. It would have been so easy to have gone for one big blow out and be done with it and it exercised one's self control to the utmost. It did not always work!. Scrounging and bartering with the contents of the parcel was an occupation undertaken by some with the mental agility of the street trader but it was not for me. Some went around trading in such a way that they doubled their stock but I confess that I was one of those who helped them do it as my stock diminished. It takes all sorts and I soon packed it in when I found that I was being outsmarted. If we all had that sort of ability for success we would probably all be in the stock exchange.
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We did get a little light entertainment on the Ist March that also gave an insight into the plight of the Luftwaffe.
We had often noticed activity at an airfield a few miles away to the North East and on this particular day we observed a couple of FW.190's tail chasing which was the standard procedure for a fledgling to learn new tricks but it was obvious that it was a very inexperienced pilot that was doing the chasing by the way he teetered around every turn at about 3000ft not far from the camp.
We watched them for a while as they went through some very basic manoeuvres. The trainee wobbled around every turn very gingerly and after a short break they had another go. They went on to some more advanced stuff and at one point when the turns got tighter and tighter I think we must have all been willing the outcome when he wobbled and side slipped, wobbled some more and then lost it.
He stalled, flipped, and dived earthwards out of control and wallop, in he went with a plume of smoke to mark his grave.
A great cheer went up from the camp but the guards were most upset about it and we were confined to barracks for two hours. As far as we were concerned that was one FW.190 that would not have to be shot down so we indulged in a little community singing, bawling at the top of our voices everything from 'Abide with me'. 'Colonel Bogey' and 'Lillie Marlene' liberally sprinkled with RAF words, much to the bewilderment of the guards who had been stationed in the doorways of the huts.
On the 2nd March the day dawned much the same as any other until some more prisoners came in and as our compound had filled up the next one became active. We were soon at the wire making shouted enquiries about this that and the other when Geoff appeared; looking a bit pale but otherwise fit and well.
It transpired that he had made a reasonable descent but he also had landed slap into the arms of a reception committee although that did not explain his late arrival at Nuremberg, but that was soon explained.
He really was at Dulag Luft at the same time as us but he had been out of circulation for seven days after his interrogation.
It seemed that towards the end of the interrogation, when presented with the little white card and pencil he told the
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interrogator precisely what he could do with it...in Aussie terms,....sideways; so he got seven days solitary confinement for insulting a German Officer!.
According to Geoff, "Ve haff vays of delink vis you" is not so funny when you are the one being dealt with. But now we were all accounted for. Years later, as a solicitor, practising in Australia, I am sure that he was more careful in his selection of words in difficult circumstances.
As a matter of interest it was the small white card that triggered off the Red Cross reporting procedure that notified all and sundry that so and so was a POW so he could have saved himself a lot of trouble.
Between the 3rd and 7th there was not a lot going on. It did start to get a little warmer during daylight hours on occasions and it soon became neccessary [sic] to find ways and means of filling in the time.
There were a few scruffy packs of playing cards about but unless one was good at poker there was no point in taking a hand unless you were prepared to lose your shirt. The stakes were usually items in short supply and our American friends seemed to have the manopoly [sic] of the schools.
I was of the opinion that I had lived rough enough already to risk my meager [sic] stocks which had already suffered from my attempts at wheeling and dealing especially as I saw a few who got the bug and were going down the drain fast for promissory dollars or pounds in the form of I0U's to be redeamed [sic] later.
Draughts,(or checkers) was favourite with most people, using home made boards and pieces made from cardboard and soot from the still empty stoves to distinguish black from white and it did not take long for regular afternoon and evening classes to get going on all manner of subjects in one hour sessions. It certainly filled in the time with subjects as diverse as music, fishing, maths and agriculture.
I found considerable interest in the German classes which were given by a Flt.Lt. who I suspect was one of the Luft.3. boys and he was as interesting as he was fluent. It is highly probable that he had been partly educated in Germany before the war and apart from the introduction to the language he told us a great deal about their history, the people and their culture.
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There were rumours that he was a 'mole' or a 'stooge' but if he had been I am sure that we would have known about it and not tolerated him for long, but then we thrived on rumour at that time.
Later events were to prove his credibility but there was always a little suspicion about who was who so we generally stuck to people that we did know and bit by bit accepted others on recommendation and found oneself accepted. I even found a Flt.Lt. who came from my home town and who's home was no further to the West of my local pub than mine was to the East. He had been in Wg/Cdr. 'Willie' Tait's crew on 617 Squadron at one time and had helped to make a mess of the battleship Tirpitz before he too had run out of luck.
The days just went by with very little to mark one from another and although I had started keeping a diary using cigarette packs there is a long gap without note after the eighth as things became rather desperate.
The Red Cross supplies were running out. The bread allowance became less and less. At one time twenty two people shared a loaf and sometimes we only got one ancient hard tack biscuit instead.
The days and nights just blurred into each other and there was a general feeling of helplesness [sic] as we became weaker and weaker. People had got into the state where they were falling all over the place especially when going from the horizontal to the vertical. One had to be very careful to let the world stop spinning before attempting too much.
On the night of the 11th RAF Mosquito's made another noisy attack on the city but most of us were too far gone to get very excited. More than half the hut had gone down with the flu' and the limited supply of Asprin did very little in the way of relief. They were only dispensed to the most seriously ill who had complications and the only way was to try and keep warm relying on friends to bring a little nourishment as it became available.
Certain things happened during the period that I cannot put a date to but I know they happened.
Some Red Cross officials toured the camp and the Camp Commandant lost his dog.
The Commandant, in elderly silver grey haired Hauptman, always
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smartly dressed, used to walk around with his staff and his Dacshund [sic] until one day it disappeared around the corner of a hut on his own personal inspection for something to cock his leg up against; [underlined] and did not come back!. [/underlined]
He was very upset over the loss of his little 'Fritz' but he had underestimated the skill and determination of our cooks so our stew that day had a little more 'body' in it. I’m glad I did not know at the time!.
In the same period the civilian contractor who used to bring the rations in by horse and cart was distracted long enough for his horse to disappear in the same way as little Fritz and he made a terrible fuss. Not so much about the horse but the harness and the blanket!.
He eventually stopped hollering when the items were returned plus an additional blanket but there was a lot more fuss when the cart was towed back to the gate by hand and then a search party was sent in to find the horse. All they found were a few nasty bits and pieces down the toilet pit. Everything edible had gone into the pot and was stewed and diluted for several days before it ran out.
As a result of this latest escapade all starts of reprisals were threatened with Courts Martial for theft and with shooting; the lot....but it all fizzled out. It might have come to that if things had been normal but they were anything but normal.
Towards the end of the period I was getting over the worst of my ills and I eased myself from my bed in stages into the vertical position for my daily constitutional and tottered out of the hut.
I had not gone far when I started a nose bleed so I was staggering along, head back, my one and only handkerchief in use to stem the flow when there was a blinding flash, a searing pain in the back of the neck and the next thing that I remember was that I was face down In the dirt.
When I climbed to my feet blinking in pain with a few angry words welling up inside me I was facing a full blown inspecting party comprising of an SS General and his staff which included two giant sized troopers, one of whom had bopped me with his rifle butt.
I think it was astonishment that stopped what might have been
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some ungentlemanly language but was halted in my tracks when the Generals Adjutant or his ADC stepped forward and barked "you must salute a superior German officer".
I was in no condition to argue so he got his salute. It wasn't the parade ground sort though. It was a very sloppy afair [sic] in which two fingers were more prominent than the others and I was shoved out of the way whilst they continued their inspection. After that I staggered back to my bed feeling worse than when I had got up.
The days and nights continued to blurr [sic] into one another and then ran the 13th came the devastating news that President Roosevelt had died the day before and an impromptu memorial service was laid on.
It was difficult to take it in and the guards crowed a bit as if they had somehow been responsible and suggested that it could mean the end of the war without appreciating that that was not the way a democracy worked. It seemed such a tragedy that the great man had not survived long enough to see the end of the war than was obviously not far away.
The following day we were still feeling a bit numb but there were some rumours of parcels coming in that cheered us up a bit but it was very difficult to show a bold front when we were all so cold and hungry....but we tried.
It was not until the 15th that things showed real signs of improvement. The toilets at last came out of deep freeze and then some fuel came in so the boilers were stoked up for the first time in a long while. We had hot showers and made full use of the water that was available and washed some clothes.
Drying them was the problem so there were a lot of people just wearing a blanket for a while, not that anyone cared about that when Red Cross parcels were distributed. One between two!.
Apparently they had come in by truck the night before and during the day some more arrived. Thank God for the Red Cross. What sort of a shape we would have been in without them I dread to think and at the time few people, including myself had any idea of the vast operation that the International Red Cross had going.
The RAF had another go at the city on the night of the 16th yet despite it all some more fuel came in and there was more hot water for a while to continue the cleaning up process. The
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place was turned into a laundry, and like most laundries things got 'lost' but no-one cared much. The most important thing was that we could clean up and that there had been no sign of lice. On the 17th there was another surprise. I suppose it had something to do with the recent inspections that some of our deficiencies were being made up. We were issued with new enamelled spoons and bowls and by way of payment the city got another pounding during the night.
It was followed by some excitement the following day when long columns of prisoners arrived at the main gate. They had all come from Wetzlar...new POW's and the old permanent staff as they evacuated the place and brought all of their accumulated stores that they could manage.
It seemed as if Nuremberg was becoming an assembly point for POW's but it was getting very difficult to absorb the numbers. It did not seem possible that any more could be crammed into the place, but somehow they were.
There were over 200 in our hut by that time and all of the top bunks had to be brought into use by re-distributing the bed boards plus the clever use of all sorts of materials such as string, strips of fabric, and cardboard plaited and replaited and finally criss-crossed to serve as webbing. It was suprisingly [sic] strong especially as some of it had a centre core of fine wire that had been stripped after some of the lighting had been re-routed!.
The new arrivals had brought a large quantity of food parcels so there was a generous issue which led to a bit of a party later in the evening which was rounded off with some community singing. It was all going quite noisely [sic] until the sirens started to wail and the lights went out as another raid fell on the city.
The days started flying by as things improved; especially the weather. There was no longer that bite in the air that seemed to cut right through you, made worse by the fact that you were not getting adequate food.
The showers were no longer permanently frozen so when there was water it was at least possible to have a drink or to have a wash.
Rumours were rife but usually the jungle telegraph managed to
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pick up something from the outside and one rumour of even more food parcels coming in raised our spirits some more. So did the sound of heavy gunfire in the distance on the 25th. That really was a good sign.
There were some French parcels distributed on the 25th but most of us thought that the contents were very inferior although welcome. It was hardly likely that they could have been anything else considering the conditions that the French had been living in for years. They were the bulk version similar to the British ones we got sometimes and were divided between 13 men or went straight to the cookhouse.
The American pack was the most favoured as it was based on the 'K' rations that were liberally distributed to their troops, and were made up of several packs about the size of a 200 cigarette pack. They came in three variations. Breakfast, dinner and supper, and were complete with cigaretts [sic] , matches, can opener and that most civilised item; toilet paper!. Nevertheless, the Americans were not all that keen on them. Too much Spam and coffee powder!. They should be so lucky!.
I got to wondering if the German POW's in our hands got Red Cross parcels and what they would to like. Not that they would need them as desperately as we did, but at that stage of the war with transportation in Germany at breaking point food supplies were probably worse than they had been for years and everyone suffered accordingly.
We were more keen to get out of the wretched place but with the end so near there was no point in trying all the normal escape methods. We had in fact been told by our own administration not to do anything risky. It was only a matter of time.
There was a lot more speculation when definite news reached us that 30,000 food parcels had somehow arrived by train which was possibly just as well as not even basic rations had come in for days. Supplies had been very spasmodic since the dog and the horse had disappeared.
Even more important was the news that Allied forces were less than 100 miles from Nuremberg but what put a slight damper on that was that we received instructions to prepare for a long march so with an issue of parcels was advice on how we should
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turn the contents into 'marching rations'. There being a limit on how much we could carry.
The veterans soon passed the ward around and everyone was soon busy, and trying to avoid the temptation to have what POW's referred to as a 'bash'. A real feast. It was not practicable. The idea was to process as much as we could into convenient and lightweight food. Everything other than the tinned goods had to be considered. Tinned food was to be consumed first but the biscuit, fruit, (raisins and prunes), peanut butter. powdered milk, flaked chocolate, coffee and sugar was all to be pounded together with as little moisture as possible so that when it dried out it could be cut into bars about the size of Mars bars and then wrapped in anything suitable. It made good sense and on the basis of one bar per meal, three times a day there was more nourishment in that than we had been coping with for same time.
Then there was the problem of carrying it all along with blankets and other personal bits and pieces. Trying to carry a parcel as some people seemed prepared to do would have been back breaking so I set myself the task of making a rucksack from the lining of my US. army greatcoat with the aid of my 'hussif'. I put a lot of time in on that and as far as I was concerned it was a masterpiece and copies were being made by others.
It had padded shoulder straps, waist straps, draw string, blanket roll straps on top and other ties on the bottom. I washed and darned my socks ready for the off but I was not in all that much of a hurry. My mind was concentrated on other things.
Every night I dreamed of a shoot out down the road so that we could all get out and go home. But it was not to be.
The 28th came and even more prisoners arrived and were squeezed in. Tents were put up on the spare ground between the huts and the latest news was that armoured forces were only 70 miles from us. So near, and yet so far!.
The longer we hang about the nearer our forces got to us and in the meantime it was just a case of hanging on to our marching rations and eating up any surpluses from regular issues of parcels which everyone was getting. No other food was coming in.
On the 29th more prisoners were squeezed it somehow The place
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was bulging at the seams.
Some of them had come from an Army camp at Hammelburg, 170km. North West of Nuremberg and same very interesting stories came out of that lot.
Apparently an American armoured column had blasted through the German lines with the express intention of releasing the prisoners of Hammelburg but it had all gone disastrously wrong. Although some had been released the Germans reacted very quickly to block their escape route to a safe area and there was all hell let loose. A lot of casualties had occurred and some of the escapees found safety back in their barracks but the Germans took more prisoners and only remnants of the raiding force got back to our lines. So the story went although it seemed too far fetched to be credible.
Each time the story was told it became more and more lurid until we treated it as what the Americans would call "scuttlebuck' or we would call 'bull' despite the protestations of "on my Mother's life' etc.
Eventually it turned out that basically the story was true although officially not a lot was said about it but it did tie up with an OKW news bulletin that a couple of days previous had reported an American armoured column approaching Wursburg was counter attacked and had suffered very badly. Certainly some of the new prisoners had been taken on that raid so it was not all 'bull'.
April 1st brought more parcels and as by that time most of us had our marching rations set aside so we really did have a 'bash'.
With parcels had come another suprise [sic] in the form of even more prisoners. Thirty two members of the Serbian General Staff, also from Hammelburg!, although the normal compounds were by that time so chock-a-block that a temporary compound was set up with tents alongside ours. Then things changed dramatically.
The guards no longer patrolled the compound from the inside but only the outside of the perimeter fence which had been extended, so down came the trip wire and the inner fence which normally we were forbidden to approach at the risk of being shot. Even a stand-pipe was set up to provide then with running water so it was a free for all as ours was still limited. Of
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course there were protests from the guards as it seemed that just about everything was 'verboten'. They just could not understand why we would not obey the rules and it made them very angry.
The very fact that the internal fence on one side had come down saved us from the daily ‘apel' (role call) which had become an obsolute [sic] farce. The guards never got it right anyway.
If a head count did not produce the right answer they tried all sorts of methods but we had all sorts of ways of adding and subtracting people. What gave them most trouble we found was having more people than they should have done so then they would try an identity check which was a bit daft anyway. It always worked out simply because our own administration drew up the nominal rolls anyway. As long as it tallied they had been happy. Now they had given up the whole charade, and left it to us.
A strange phenomena occurred whilst I was attending an open air Easter Sunday religious service. Just at the end of the closing hymn and with many people kneeling in private prayer, there appeared, it seemed, just to the North and very high, an enormous V shaped cloud in an otherwise clear blue sky. I have no idea what caused it but many theories were put forward.
The most popular one was that it was a very high flying aircraft doing a photo recce' of the battlefield but we could see no sign of the aircraft itself. The cloud hung there a long time before dissipating like a cigarette smoke ring. To me. and others no doubt, it was another sign of hope, and so unusual that I just hoped that a little miracle would happen and that somehow we could just walk out of the main gate and go home, but no such luck. Such thoughts were becoming an obsession it seemed.
The next day we were warned to be ready to move out at 7am the following day so there was feverish activity to get everything prepared.
One of the veterans who had already had experience of one of these marches tipped me off that cigarettes, soap, and chocolate were the most useful currency for bartering with the guards and the German population and I had already observed that soap was being thrown away wholesale down the toilet pit.
There was so much of it, still packaged, under the twenty seater
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'thunderbox' that It was not difficult to recover several dozen unspoiled packages of soap. As much as I wanted to carry anyway. The following morning we were up bright and early and the dream came true as we started to evacuate on time.
It was just after eight o'clock when our compound started to file out of the gate and it was a wonderful feeling. Even the air smelt different.
In all there was about 9000 of us with several hundred guards, many with bicycles, and in a long snake column about four abreast we were on our way. Naturally there was a lot of speculation as to the prospects of getting away if and when the opportunity presented itself; it would not have been difficult but our own administration had thought of it first and issued orders that we were not to attempt any chancy breakaways as the escape committees had everything under control.
That order absolved the officers at any rate from their duty to resist and/or escape so there was nothing more to do but to go along with it however frustrating it was.
I knew what it was all about as we had filed through the gate when I saw the Flight Lieutenant who used to give the German lessons, in civilian clothes, and carrying a small suitcase tucked up very tightly in the middle of a group so I tried to keep my eye on him as it was very suspicious.
In the melee I never saw him go and I never saw him again but I'll bet he was home long before I was, with a great deal of information which would help the advancing Allies.
y
TO BE CONTINUED..........................
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One or more pages is missing.
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party went for cover.
There was no cover so everyone scattered as the parties started laying out the markings after the first burst of firing and by the time the Thunderbolts came back for a second pass we had been identified. It was too late for some though. Our casualties were one killed and two injured and for a long time after that everyone spent a lot of time looking over their shoulder. The casualties were sorted out by a small party that was left behind with a guard and the rest of us just ploughed on, and on, and on, and although most people had made some attempt to get fitter by walking around the compound for an hour or so a day we had not reckoned on doing mile after mile without a break.
It was not surprising that by mid afternoon there were lots of complaints about blisters and aching bodies but we were just prodded on by the equally disgruntled guards.
By late evening we were still going; albeit slower than when we had started and finally after it had got dark it started to rain. Nevertheless it was about 10pm before a break was finally called.
I was absolutely shattered as were most people and I took shelter under a railway wagon on the temporary railroad that had been laid at the side of the road and then gorged myself on a large can of stewed steak from my ‘heavy’ rations.
We were not allowed to rest for long. Before there was time for a nap and with the rain still coming down in buckets we were the move again but not before I had investigated the wagons with a view to hiding in one for a few days but found that they were all full of coal and had no covers so that was
that. Nevertheless, a liberal handful of fine ballast from the track into the axle grease boxes made sure that they would not move it very far without finding the odd problem.
Finally, soon after midnight the word came down the line to stop for the night and most of us just flopped where we were. We had done some 22mls, it was still pouring down and as there was very little cover not many had the energy to go any further to look for any.
All I did was to dispose of another can of something, curled up in my already wet blankets at the foot off a tree and went
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out like a light.
It was dawn then I woke, to a clear steamy morning and like most people I was soaked through. I had been sleeping in a puddle several inches deep which had accumulated from the steady downpour, and the prospects were not good until we saw signs of a cheery blaze a bit further up the line.
The whole column had virtually collapsed where they were when the halt had come and some more fortunate characters had been near a saw mill where there was a mountain of off-cuts which they used for shelter. That was until someone set fire to them!
It had of going nicely and it did not take long for us to take full advantage of the situation. The sight of hundreds of naked bodies dancing around getting warm and drying out their clothes whooping away like a tribe of Red Indians was more than the guards could cope with.
They tried very hard to put out the fire and get us to assist but it seemed that we were pulling in opposite directions, and they were losing the battle. We were stoking it up!.
They had not a hope in hell, not even after threatening to start shooting someone after loosing off a few into the air. Right from the start every one was marked by half-a-dozen prisoners and they would have been flat on their backs immediately they had pointed a rifle at anyone:
We kept the fire going as long as we could and most people got dried out and comfortable again as the enormous pile of glowing embers was reduced to little more than charcoal; then we were ready to leave!.
We understood that the mill owner was still going on about compensation as we left and how the poor old Hauptman dealt with it we would never know but he was looking very grim about it having wined and dined at the mill owners home for the night. Once we got ourselves sorted out and got going again we plodded on through the day for another 16mls before a halt was called for the night.
That time, to avoid a repetition of the previous night we were all to be billeted in large enclosed buildings such as churches, church halls, village halls, barns, etc. I was in a party of about 300 who were packed into a small village church around
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which they placed a guard. No doubt they had noticed a thinning of our ranks since the previous night but they would not let anyone out for any reason whatsoever.
It was not surprising that the place was defiled. I was not proud of the fact that someone had used the pulpit as toilet but it was the one place that no-one could sleep and they were lucky that the altar was respected.
The guards made a terrible fuss naturally and I was glad that I was not among the cleaning up party that was left behind, but that was the last time they bothered to confine us at night.
The main party had started to move out at about 9.30 and the pace was steady although slow before we got to Birching about mid-day to find a great deal of activity.
There were dumps of Red Cross parcels along the main street in front of the Town Hall and they were being distributed as we passed through...one each!. Even the guards were getting them but I suppose there was a good deal of sense in that, if only to keep them off our backs.
There were Red Cross trucks, (American and British Army types) and a couple of ambulances going up and down the column, and beyond, picking up stragglers and bringing them back to the fold. Some of them should have been to hospital and were really in poor shape but they had cleared all the hospitals of the walking wounded as well and everyone that could stand on two feet was having to hike it. The Red Cross took some of the worse cases further along the line of march so that they could rest up before we caught up with them.
Nothing else was provided and water had to be scavenged from where it was available in order to have a drink of something. I even got used to instant coffee being made up cold...it was wet!.
We moved off later in the afternoon and stopped for the night at Belingries where Jim and I found a warm corner in a stable where we spent all the next day and night before we were on the move again. I suppose we could not really complain about our conditions as there were two guards in the next stall sharing the same facilities and making the most of the contents of their food parcel.
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It must have been like a Christmas present for them the way they were going on and like us the only thing they had on their minds was survival, food and shelter. They were only Grade 3 troops and were looking for an end to all the discomfort and misery just as much as we were That's what made it all so damn silly!.
Things got better and better as we plodded into Bavaria. The countryside looked lush and green with well tended fields and the early signs of crops was heartening The weather was fine and most of the civilian population treated our progress kindly. We treated it like a Sunday School outing, waiving, smiling and cheering the population. No doubt they thought we were daft but we were not downhearted.
On rare occasions Allied aircraft flew along our line of march waggling their wings so it seemed that they were monitoring our progress.
Some of us eased out of the column from time to time to do a little trading and on one occasion I was able to add some fresh bread and garlic sausage to the stores of our little group comprising most of the crew and I occupied myself happily after being elected cook.
We picked another barn for the night and found a good supply of mauve dyed potatoes of the sort we had at home for animal feed. The farmer was a bit concerned when he found us with them. He made it quite clear that they were for 'swine' only and that it was a criminal offence to use them for human consumption. It was a continual source of amazement to me that whilst their country was being torn apart with the utmost disregard for human life and property there was still so much regard for common law but I suppose that they had been conditioned by years of shortages and regulations.
I had first noticed the tendency at Nuremberg when we did have fuel for the stove and we were toasting the black pumpernikal [sic] by sticking slices on the side of the store and in came a guard who became very angry when he saw what we were doing.
Toasting bread was ‘verboten’ by law as it destroyed the nutritional value of the bread and we were breaking the law!
As prisoners we were well aware that they could impose civil
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as well as military law if necessary. They had made the same threats for the same reason when we had our bonfire but as there was no time for that sort of nonsense there was precious little that they could do about it. In any case, a few gifts of cigaretts [sic], soon overcame the problem.
We finally got on the more again the next day about mid-day but by now we were doing little more than just strolling along enjoying the freedom and the weather. I had the opportunity of selling a spare blanket to a Polish farm worker for 6 eggs but he could not understand that we were mixed British, American and Commonwealth POW's. Nevertheless, there were a few more exchanges after a lot of sign language and I was better off by 30 Reichmarks which caused a spot of bother as the transactions had been witnessed by a straggling guard who wanted to confiscate the goods. Again it was 'verboten' to sell German military equipment. It was easily resolved. He got 10 marks and was told to "getten ze stuffed" so he wandered off somewhat bewildered.
There was a distribution of Belgian Red Cross parcels, and a large wedge from a round Bavarian loaf at one point and eventually we caught up with the main column again to find a comfy spot in another barn and a good night's sleep with a handsome meal tucked under the belt.
I suppose that now we had put a fair distance between us and the battle front there was no longer the urgency to force us along so we continued to stroll through open farm lands and cross a lot of main roads and the Danube; which was not blue. In fact it was quite mucky.
At one point shortly after crossing the river we crossed a bridge over a closed off section of either dual carriageway or autobahn and there was some interesting activity in the road through a deep cutting which had been closed off to traffic near Seiganburg.
To our amazement the road had been turned into a temporary airstrip with Focke-Wolf 190's lined up and being serviced under a great deal of cables and camouflage netting. I wondered how long it would be before our chaps identified it as camouflage and gave it a good pasting even though we did not see so much of them quite so often as we had previously.
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There was plenty of evidence that they were still busy not too far away though.
We continued to plod on past decorative Bavarian farm houses which, with their high pitched roofs and fancy gables looked very attractive. We were close enough to some of them to see into their fine big kitchens in pine and stainless steel where women in crisp pinafores seemed to be up to their arms in tubs and flour. We did not get more than a passing glance though. The guards were catered for with steaming hot canteens of soup and hunks of home made bread cut from big flat round loaves, supplemented by thick slices of farmhouse cheese. It is understandable that all we got were dirty looks!.
We found accomodation [sic] that night in a barn at Swienbach and once again contemplated the possibility of doing a runner but when we made enquiries we also found out why the column was thinning out!.
It appeared that our administration had been organising parties of 25, each with two guards, to do an about turn during the hours of darkness to find a route to our own lines.
How the selection was made I do not know but it was understandable that those who had been in the bag the longest had first choice and if anyone deserved priority it was them. It was also interesting to learn that the guards were being provided with safe conduct passes which would ensure that they would get preferential treatment when they were finally picked up.
We were still told not to go it alone as there would still be many pockets of fanatical resistance and it was just not worth the risk. Geoff had already tried it once and he had a close shave. He had only got a little way beyond the fringe on a daylight attempt when he was apprehended by a couple of trigger happy SS field police. He had been sent back with a warning, but there was a very good chance that those blokes did not send any of their own back to the line if there was any chance of them being deserters. A little on the spot summary punishment was likely to be meted out without having to justify the action. With our guards it was different. Things were so slack that on one occasion one of them sat on the roof and placed his rifle between us. I just could not
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resist the temptation when a hare appeared in the field and I grabbed his rifle that I had been eyeing anyway, quickly worked the bolt to 'put one up the spout', aimed and fired, but missed, so I hurriedly handed the gun back to it 's owner as the Oberfeldwebel came running up to see what the shooting was about. That turned out to be another big laugh. What else was he to think when he found the guard with a smoking rifle in his hands?. The guard must have figured that he would be in less trouble if he admitted to the use of his rifle for sporting purposes than to admit to allowing a POW to get the better of him so he got a good dressing down for wasting ammunition and I got a dirty look. It all helped to pass the time and keep up morale.
The next day we received the news that we were heading for a camp at Mooseburg but although we started off fairly early we soon got the message that Mooseburg was not ready for us. That immediately started the 'go-slow' process again.
At one time we were lounging around at the side of a track that led across the fields when we heard the skirl of pipes and from over a rise to one side of the main column came a small formation of Scots troops in full marching order with a piper in the lead. What a glorious sight they were with kilts swinging, brasses glittering. It looked damned silly to see half a dozen guards marching with them!.
The sight was enough to inspire some of us to drag ourselves to our feet as they converged on us. Some of us even saluted but they just ploughed on ignoring the Air Force rabble. Good luck to them. They were still going strong as they disappeared from view over another rise. Good luck to them. It looked good and it no doubt made them feel good but there was no doubt that they would be back behind barbed wire long before we were.
We just flopped a bit farther along the track and found ourselves a comfortable billet for another night of relative freedom.
The next day I got organised with another group for scavenging and the like.
Things had been going so well that like others I had already got through my marching rations and generally had lightened my load. No-one was hungry any more but I was approached with an offer that I could not refuse.
The offer was made by a Captain of the US. Infantry who wanted
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fourth to complete his team. The others were two American Air Force Sergeants so I left the crew to join his outfit. It was hard luck on the crew though-they lost their cook!.
The Captain was very interesting and enterprising character. It was his third time as POW, having escaped on two previous occasions, but this time he was no longer going to stick his neck out as there was a state-side ticket waiting for him as soon as he was out of his present situation. He was a very shrewd and tough bloke and it did not take us long to decide just how we were going to operate.
At the first opportunity we scavenged some bits and pieces from some farmyard pumping machinery and rebuilt a broken down 'dog-cart' on which we dumped all our kit and went into action immediately.
Two did the pulling whilst the other two went off scavenging. Within the first half day we had done so well at the butchers, bakers and farms a few km. each side of the column that to were soon re-trading among the others at a 'profit'. My carefully hoarded stock of soap was proving to be most useful currency although coffee and cigaretts [sic] were sill the most valuable.
It was too good to be true. We had not gone far with our cart getting piled higher and higher when the owner of the bit’s and pieces that the cart had been built from discovered they were missing. He rapidly caught up with us on a broken down horse and demanded the return of it.
There were more dire threats of punishment for stealing which of course never came to anything but it left us with having to carry, eat or trade the fruits of our transactions, and the two with the column just had to carry that much more. It was worth it though.
Part of the plan was that it was this pair that staked out a comfy site for four when we made camp and generally the scheme worked well.
The Red Cross trucks were still going to and fro’ but with a difference. They were coming from the South East, loaded, and discharging their loads at various places, loading up the sick and lame and actually [underlined] backtracking our route to the Allied lines [/underlined] to deliver them to safety before loading up again and refuelling for the return journey to us, mainly with ‘K’
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rations.
It still was a source of amazement that the Red Cross trucks were nearly all British or American types that had been re-painted accordingly, loaded, and transported from Italy through Switzerland with neutral drivers under the International Red Cross Organisation.
We were told that some 2000 of them had set out and split up near Munich, one column going in our direction and the other North Westerly to meet other POW's converging on us from the North.
If that produced a farcical situation then it was no more farcical than the latest method of communication that had been adopted between our administration and the rest of the Germans to keep us informed of what was going on.
A sort of HQ. unit had been set up by the more senior officers and their selected staffs who were up front and they never missed a chance to harass the guards....and that included their CO!.
Right from the outset the guards bicycles had come in for a lot of attention.
With monotonous regularity they had lost tyre valves, and chains. Tyres had been slashed until constant canabalisation [sic] of what was left had reduced the original number to only a couple of serviceable bikes, and we had reached the ideal solution where they no longer had a pump between them. We had!.
It was not suprising [sic] therefore, that the last bikes were allocated to the Commandant and his Adjutant....but on conditions imposed by us!.
It was agreed that if we had equal share of them there was a good chance that they would no longer be vandalized but the daftest thing of all was when our own Adjutant went up and down the line on one to pass information it still had a machine pistol on the handlebar clips!.
On the 6th we only moved a few km. and there were more food parcels distributed The awful French one's again but anything was welcome in the food line, if only for bartering.
One of the team and I slipped away one one occasion and crossed a railway line to a group of cottages where we made enquiries for eggs.
At one cottage we called at we were received by an obvious
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1914/18 veteran who was minus one leg but who was quite philosophical as we discussed the terms of the deal in a mixture of broken English and German and he seemed friendly enough. When the terms were agreed he shrugged his shoulders and indicated in the direction of the chicken house and then left us alone with two teen-age girls, possibly his grand-daughters, to collect the eggs.
He was either very trusting, or taking no chances and possibly very relieved to find the eggs were all we had helped ourselves to even offered to give them a four minute boil before we departed. Again, after the difficulties of conversation it was the shrugg [sic] of the shoulders and the well worn phrase, “you soldat-me soldat”.
These eggs went down very well with Spam, beans and fresh bread that someone else had aquired [sic] .
Every day brought the sound of gunfire and battle closer well as Allied aircraft sweeping over us on occasions as they plotted the movement of the long snake of people. There was no doubt that that is what they were doing as our identification process had not been needed for a long time.
That evening we were quite close to Mooseberg and we made camp in a sheltered part of a farm with beds of hay and camp fire was set up with bricks and ironmongery that we had accumulated.
As usual as soon we were all together I planned the menu around the spoils of the day, particularly as our team leader, Capt. Dunkleburg, (a good old American name), had just knocked over a plump farmyard hen.
I don't know if he had been a horseshoe throwing champion back home but he was adept at throwing a short length of wood up to twenty feet with deadly accuracy and he had brought the chicken down by catching it across the neck and it was ready for the pot in a few minutes.
After that it was my responsibility as I had been the team cook on joining, and had been able to make all sorts of dishes from anything that became available including nettles and turnip greens, wild berries and even watercress from the streams where most of our water was drawn from.
Everyone seemed to be happy with this arrangement and our chicken supper was simplicity itself. I must admit that I felt a little
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guilty when others drifted around our site sniffing the aroma like Bisto kids but it was a matter of survival, although I did feel a little sorry for those who could not cope with looking after themselves.
Lashings of coffee was consumed and dispensed to others who wanted to make use of our fire and we were off to sleep like babies.
The morning of the 17th started with a leisurly [sic] breakfast which was still in progress long after the time we had been told to be ready. Then the farmer and a guard arrived making a lot of fuss and accusing us of stealing again. I suspect that more than one chicken was missing but nevertheless we pleaded innocence. They threatened us with all sorts of consequences for our actions as we started to clear up bones, feathers and damp down our fire so they eventually called in the Hauptman.
When he arrived on the scene he let rip with a very good immitation [sic] of Hitler and as we took very little notice he worked himself up into a fine old state until he was just about purple with rage. We didn't understand much of it, but Dunkleburg did, and he knew what he was getting at before he got a little calmer and reverted to English. Then he gave us an ultimatum. He was going to count ten and then he was going to shoot someone if we did not get moving.
By that time the situation had got decidedly dodgy but we took our cue from Capt.D, and started to spread ourselves out as the count started.
Ien...drie...swie...by which time he was spluttering again and by the time he had got to ten he was clawing at his pistol holster which was a beautifully polished leather affair with a fancy-lanyard disapearing [sic] into it.
Capt.D. had gathered himself into a crouch like some old gun fighter from a Western, poised as if to try and beat him to the draw..although of course totally unarmed. The guards looked alarmed and backed off as the pistol was withdrawn seemingly in slow motion as Capt.D. prepared to charge.
On the other end of the lanyard appeared a fancy pearl handled ladies handbag model of a .22 which was pointed skywards and fired.
Putt, putt, putt, and everyone relaxed immediately and rolled
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about laughing as we carried on clearing up. The old boy's face was contorted in anger and embarrassment as he stomped away. I think that was the last I ever saw of him.
I imagine that as he was just about to hand us over he was getting the wind up and was going to have to do a lot of explaining about how he lost 2000 prisoners and half of his guards on the way from Nuremberg!. That is always presuming that anyone else was still worried about such things.
We finally reached the camp, Stalag V11a, Mooseburg, by mid-day and then began the process of sorting ourselves out. Eventually we had a hot shower and a meal of sorts and then sat around most of the afternoon whilst the administration figured out what to do with the 1700 strong RAF contingent now that we all been segregated. It was goodbye to all the friends we had made outside RAF circles so I was back with the crew again.
The time spent lounging around was not boring anyway. There were Yanks all over the sky around us, knocking hell out of anything anything [sic] that moved now that we were within the safety of the camp.
We had news that Prauge [sic] had fallen. The Yanks were reported to be only 20 mls from Berlin and the Russians virtually had the city surrounded, so what was there to worry about.
All we had to do was sit tight and survive and eventually we were given an area of huts for the night although they provided little more than just a roof over our heads.
The 19th started with a roll call, with promises of hot water and food which did not materialise. All that happened was that we got moved to another compound with huts in the same condition as those we had just vacated, lacking everything except the bed frames.
I got very fed up with the whole deal. My shaving gear was just about used up. Like others I had over two months growth of hair falling all over the place. My boots were falling off of my feet....they had not worn at all well. There was a long queue at a single tap and no ablutions. There was no heating and precious little fuel for cooking fires. The remaining bed boards were carefully guarded by those who had managed to get a few together. Issued rations were a couple of potatoes, a hunk of
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bread and some mouldy cheese. I went into a nasty fit of depression so I turned in to sleep it off.
The floor was the best place with the shortage of bed boards so it was a matter of just curling up in a corner wrapped up in anything to keep warm.
Over twelve hours sleep cleared the air a bit and the next day I felt a lot better. All the crew except Jim had got together again for parcels and food share out as for some reason Jim had gone in with another group but the waiting game was not improved by a change in the weather so any cooking or brewing up had to be done in the hut. At times it was like 'smokey Joe's'.
The change in the weather did not stop the air activity all around us but fortunately it was mostly ours. The Luftwaffe was rarely seen.
The next day was the same but supplies were improving a little and carefully hoarded stores were opened up. I got a replacement pair of boots; not new but at least the soles were not flapping and I was able to replenish the shaving gear.
The following day looked like being a repetition until an order came through to prepare to march again. The burning question was "where the hell can we go from here?.
The Russians were already through Poland into Czechoslovakia to the East and the North of us, and were coming up through Austria to the South and not all that far away. Even Italy was suggested although the only obvious way was back and perhaps that was not a bad idea as I was not partial to the idea of the Russians over-running us.
There had been lots of stories already concerning the Russian way of life and from what I had seen and heard of the Ruskie POW's on the far side of the camp there was no doubt that they were a strange lot.
Of course they had had it very rough and had no protection under the Geneva Convention as non-signatories which had a lot to do with it. They were very badly treated and their food rations were even worse than ours….and they had to work for it, officers and all.
As a result they had become a desperate band of brigands with little more than survival in their minds and they were up to
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all kinds of mischief.
Only the day before they had been bearing a coffin out of the camp for burial and the German gate guards made sure it was a corpse that went out. They plunged a bayonet through the flimsy coffin and the corpse screamed!. They had buried the original in the compound and although it might have been interesting to have got mixed up with them I don't think it would have been exactly pleasant.
We got back to using the bunks again after a load of rough boards had been dumped in the compound for the purpose of making them up although a number got sidetracked for fuel, mainly for brewing up.
Brewing up was something of a ritual and when fuel was short it was foolish to be extravagant with resources. The most economic were the tin can arrangements that had come down from Luft.3, although some copies had been made.
Usually mounted on a small board they consisted of hand wheel driving a metal fan in a perforated lower chamber with a fuel chamber on top. All driven with a string or bootlace drive. It sounds very crude but the gearing was such that it worked like the bellows of a forge furness [sic] . They were very economical and would burn anything from a handfull [sic] of twiggs [sic] to lumps of tar off of the road. There was always a great deal of whirring going on at brewing time. i
The owners of these masterpieces would usually brew up a can of water for others if a handfull [sic] of fuel was produced and it was amazing how bits of fire was transferred from one to the other rather than use a seperate [sic]match for each start up.
The 25th April dawned a beautiful day and there was considerable relief when we were told that we would not be marching after all as it could only be a few days before we would be free.
The sky was getting thick with aircraft at times, mostly ours, but the odd German Air Force fighter was seen invariably high tailing it for safety to their temporary landing strips, often trailing smoke, with a swarm of stars and stripes after them.
These were exciting times and the guns seemed even nearer as the excitement increased when we had a news flash that Augsburg, about 45mls to the West of us had fallen into our hands.
It seemed to us, and it proved to be the case, that it was a
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race between the Americans and the Russians as to where the gap would be closed, whatever may have been previously agreed. The thrust between us and Munich, and onward to where they finally did join forces did solve one very important point.
It prevented what might have been the fulfilment of Hitler's original plans to surround Birtchesgarten [sic] with his SS fanatics and at least 40,000 POW hostages for a fight to the finish.
Everything was going so well that we were no longer bothered about keeping a reserve of food or conserving fuel supplies. Part of Geoff's bed went into preparing lunch and some of mine went at supper time.
The 26th was another beautiful day. We had a bit of a surprise when a large party of guards marched through the camp to the boundary wire at the edge of the compound, then downed arms, cut the wire and rapidly filed through leaving their rifles behind. It is quite possible that they just went off to somewhere quiet and then sat down waiting to be picked up.
They got out of sight rapidly after I dashed out and picked up one of their rifles to send a couple of shots after them but I only fired over their heads.
That's all there was time for as our administration collected all of the rifles and took them back to camp HQ.
It was not long after that news came through that we were taking over the running of the camp and we were one more step nearer home.
A bread ration came up. The interior fences were torn down. Where the guards had cut the wire we strolled out into the open as if it was a Sunday afternoon along the prom. Along the river bank, chatting to a couple of pig-tailed giggling teenage fraulines and even picked up some firewood which had been our main purpose for going outside.
It was not long after our return that the PA system instructed us not to stray too far if we were outside and although there was a tremendous sense of freedom in doing so it really was not neccessary [sic] for obtaining fuel.
Warning notices, air raid shelters, fence posts and the like were all available to us by that time. It was a change not to hear the PA blasting out 'Achtung' and OKW rubbish but we were being kept informed almost hourly by
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relaying BBC and AFN programms [sic] .
There was an announcement that our documents and personal possesions [sic] were available for collection from the admin office if we wanted them.
After all that had gone on since 7th February I actually got back my mirror and cuff-links that had been confiscated but it would seem that someone had aquired [sic] a very nice white silk scarf that I had been wearing at the time. Perhaps it had been considered service property, which was fair game. I was just surprised that anything was returned under the circumstances.
News came later that Regensburg had fallen and our forces were encircling Munich, and although the weather turned very nasty in the night and the hut leaked like a seive [sic] no-one was concerned about such minor discomforts.
Even the, following day when there was no let up in the downpour we did not worry about it. Even the natural water supply was a luxury!, and a visit to the clothing store gave us the opportunity to change some more of our tatty clothes.
On the 29th P47 Thunderbolts buzzed the camp and then did a bit of straffing [sic] in the local area. Perhaps it was just as well that the cut wire had been repaired and we had been confined to camp until further notice!.
By 11 o'clock there were all the signs of a battle starting to the North so there was another good reason for staying under cover.
Geoff and I had taken cover under our hut and in fact I was brewing up whilst the battle was going on and one or two people who were foolish enough to still be wandering around were hit by stray bullets but fortunately not seriously.
By 11 o'clock the sounds of battle had gone right round the camp to the South of us, giving us a chance to venture outside.
There was still a lot going on almost on our doorstep. Some big guns were firing over the camp from the hills and shells could be heard rushing overhead followed by a 'crump' as they landed between us and the town.
Then one found it's mark when the church steeple and a sniper with it disappeared in a cloud of dust and debris.
News in those conditions travelled as fast as a bush fire and
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we next heard that the senior Allied POW officer and the local German Commander had been out the previous evening under a white flag to confer with the American Commander, but the German was adamant in his response to the ultimatum. He refused to surrender the area without some sort of fight so that was why it had all started up again but it did not last long.
There seemed to be a bit of a lull and then on the top of the hill, along the ridge, dozens of tanks appeared and just took up position menacingly. About mid-day another party went up the hill under a white flag to parley once more and I can only assume that enough people had died to satisfy honour and to find terms on which to end the slaughter especially when faced with that threat.
By 1 o'clock all firing in and around the area ceased. The Stars and Stripes flew in the town and in the various compounds national flags of all kinds were flying.
Those flags had been hidden for a long time at great risk and at last they could be proudly displayed. As far as we were concerned it was all over, and we could look forward to going home.
We were nearly all bursting with excitement wondering what to expect when later on in the afternoon a convoy that was a sight to behold came in through the main gate.
The lead Jeep had a General saluting all over the place. Some said it was Patton as it was the US. 7th Army that had relieved us but there was so much going on with the bustle and the noise it was difficult to take everything in.
Behind the Jeep came a Sherman tank and a whole convoy of armed troops who toured the camp as we shouted and cheered, and cheered some more, and cried a bit too until we were just about drained of emotion.
The PA system belted out cheerful music and then the circus was in town.
Another convoy came in and news reel camera crews set themselves up as Red Cross trucks, ambulances, mobile hospital, mobile bakery, mobile laundry and trucks with mountains of goodies followed.
There was everything from chewing gum to fruit juices and even fresh fruit that some of us had not seen for months and in some,
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cases, years.
Everything was eventually set up in the central compound and we marvelled at quantity of the goods and the generosity with which it was all being dispensed. There was even a Padre' tossing packets of chewing gum into the crowd.
It was announced over the PA system that we could go outside again but only through the main gate, and then only after we had been processed by the general office and provided with a repatriated POW document. It was worth it, although at that particular time I found plenty to occupy myself in camp and did not venture out.
Although we thought that the fighting was over it started up again not far from our compound as dusk fell. No doubt some brave German still trying to defend his Fatherland but it did not last long.
We had already been warned not to try and make for home on our own as some had attempted. There were still some fanatical pockets of resistance in areas that had been encircled and had yet to be secured.
The most noise that night came from the Russian compound. Although they had had their share of all that was coming into camp they had been conditioned [deleted] but [/deleted] [inserted] to [/inserted] such hardships that they were still out for anything they could get and went on the rampage. They raided the camp bakery and having carted off all the bread and the flour that they could carry they finished up by smashing all of the equipment. It took some time to round them up and try to convince them that there was no need for it. It didn't work.
It all flared up again the following morning. They had their freedom, as we all did and got into town but it was not long before they were smashing the place up, pillaging and looting and generally being a damned nuisance until something happened that I though I would never see.
The limited number of Military Police in the area had to be backed up by deputies drawn from the POW ranks and included Officers and NCO's They were armed with the rifles that had been left behind by the departing guards and were needed to guard German shops, homes and the population against rape and downright vandalism.
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As one Welshman who was involved said to me at the time, "There's daft for you. Yesterday the Germans were our enemies and today we are protecting them from certain elements of our Allies". There's no answer to that but I think the Ruskies eventually got the message.
Some of the excitement had died down by the next day until the circus got going again.
The camp had another visit from some top brass and there were more news reel camera crews shooting just about everything in sight.
American Forces Air Mail blanks were distributed and collected again but that is one area where the Yanks did not get top marks. Mine never got home. Probably they were shipped to the States first and then they were dumped on the assumption that we would have got home first.
The mobile bakery was going full blast now that the camp bakery had been ruined but some of the veteran POW's were having problems with the fluffy white American bread. One chap was stuffing great lumps of the stuff into his mouth and complaining that the 'cake' did not fill him up like pumpernikal [sic] . There was plenty of everything else anyway and no doubt by the end of the day he would have tried everything that was on offer and like me, the pains in his tummy would be from eating too much!.
The camp PA system continued to broadcast AFN and BBC relays. The BBC gave news of 32,000 liberated POW's in the drive for Munich and that had to include us. That would be good news for the folks back home who would be getting the same news and were no doubt feeling very relieved that they would soon be hearing from their loved one's.
It was not all good news though. What the army found in places like Dachau, between us and Munich was a very different story, and the world was soon reeling in shock and horror at the scenes of the almost indescribable conditions that were found there.
By comparison our situation was a picnic.
Those that did venture into town could not be stopped entirely from a little 'souvenir' hunting.
They came back with bicycles, radios, weapons, motor bikes, and all manner of household goods but although it was a free
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for all I do not remember that it got too far out of control as it did at the time of the Ruskie's excursion.
One group near us came back from a hunting expedition with a deer that was soon given the treatment. It was barbicued [sic] on a spit over a pit that used to be an air raid shelter and there was everything that one could wish for.
It was open house and became a communal feast. People just contributed anything that they had. There were chickens, eggs, rabbits, ducks, fish, you name it. It was the biggest, most hilarious barbicue [sic] that I have ever been to or ever likely to go to, and of course some alcoholic beverage found it's way into the camp as well.
During the proceedings one American came back from visiting a nearby tank unit and he was absolutely plastered.
He was teetering all-over the place, hanging on to half a case of Champagne on his shoulder and every time he looked like capsizing and people went to help he he [sic] , fought them off. He was very protective of that 'champers'. Even when he fell into an old air raid shelter it could not be prized from him so we left him with a happy smile on his face. There was plenty more.
Although we were getting a little restless at the delay in moving us it was understandable....there was still a war going on!. But on May 3rd. parties started moving out and leaving their surplus goods behind and we spent a lot of time walking around the area inspecting the staggering amount of transport, troops and armour that we came across. We only had to show our identity slips and everywhere we went we got first class treatment with the utmost generosity, but there was the inevitable sad story to remind us that for some people the war was not yet over.
One of the tank crews was suffering from a traumatic experience, the memory of which was still fresh in their minds.
Apparently, when they had been confronted, not far from the camp, by armed school kids in cadet uniform they had tried to discourage them by firing over their heads but it had not been successful. The youngsters still showed defiance and continued firing. The tank crew had no choice but to fire on them for the benefit of their own infantry who were just behind them, and of course some of them had been injured before they gave up.
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In it's way it was very sad but it just showed that it was no picnic out there.
When the next piece of news came it was difficult to take it it [sic] in.
Berlin had fallen to the Russians and Hitler had killed himself in his Berlin bunker. The German High Command had collapsed and a cease fire was imminent.
The excitement reached a new high when that news had sunk in.
The call forward of people for evacuation was speeded up and those called were taking messages for us as well so I was looking forward to being home for my wife's birthday on the 8th, but the days were slipping by rapidly.
We were bathed and de-loused, (the first of many de-lousings) on the 6th for moving out on the 7th only to be frustrated by another deferment.
We were interviewed by an American female War Correspondent and were photographed charging around on bicyles [sic] and yet another frustrating day went by. Some people had got totally fed up by that time and were having a go on their own despite the regular warning being given. I played it safe and was rewarded on the 8th when our party was called forward.
All of the parties were of 28 people and Geoff was in charge of ours when we finally moved out at 5.30am. when we boarded a convoy of trucks, that set off for an ex Luftwaffe base at Straubing to the North of us.
It was a rough and dusty journey, but eventually we rolled into the place and again I was struck by the resemblance to our own pre-war airfields. I could have found my way around there as easily as Marham, Mildenhall or Stradishall but we did not have chance to go far. It was not worth it anyway as we were likely to be called forward at any time.
We were off-loaded on the road leading through the camp with the hangars dead ahead and told to stay put.
There was very little sign of damage so either the Luftwaffe had evacuated smartly or surrendered, but there we were, at the side of a tree lined avenue waiting….and …waiting!
Des and Lynn had been left behind at Mooseburg but they turned up in a later convoy and were not far from us as evening came. Still stuck on the road!.
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Fortunately the weather remained fine and although there was a NAAFI type building on the opposite side of the road none of us wanted to be confined. We had had enough of that.
We relieved the NAAFI place of a small stage about 8ft by 8ft and about a foot high which we set up between some trees. Several parachutes from the stores were used for bedding and a canopy and we had a neat little camp site that was the envy of many.
A metal grid was set up on some bricks to serve as a fireplace and we were able to dispense hot water and coffee to all and sundry as well as being a meeting point. I
We were just about to settle down for the night when the bomb shell came. Germany had capitulated…the war was over at last! As if there had not been enough excitement for one day.
There was still a little light left when there was a flurry of activity up at the airfield and troops were charging in that direction from all over. Curiosity got the better of us and no sooner had we got to edge of the airfield than a half dozen Ju.52's approached from the North East firing red verey signals
as they went into line astern for landing.
As soon as they had landed they were surrounded by armed troops and then the doors opened.
The occupants were mainly women and children, obviously families of Luftwaffe personnel being evacuated from Chechoslovakia [sic] out of the path of the advancing Russian forces. They looked very frightened as they were hustled away but I am sure that they would have been taken care of by the local population even if the military got different treatment.
We were not allowed to get too close but the airfield attracted us like a magnet and we soon found it to be a very busy place. No wonder they did not want us in the way.
There were mountains of stores dumped all around the perimeter.
There were dozens of Mustangs and Thunderbolts in another area and the remnants of dozens of German aircraft of all types piled up in another area.
Then came the next surprise when about twenty Me.109's and Fw.190's appeared in the circuit...all flying white streamers from their wingtips in the act of surrender. The sight of those brought just about everyone up to the airfield as they circled and landed, finally taxying into a neat line in front of the
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hangars.
The pilots hardly had time to switch off before the 'reception commitee' was up on the wing and the elegantly turned out pilots in their No.1. uniforms were unceremoniously whipped out of their cockpits, frisked and relieved of any Iron Crosses around their necks, and watches, binoculars, pistols and holsters were removed before they were lined up and marched away.
I suppose they did try to surrender with some dignity but they were not allowed to do so and neither was the next group that came in.
We had had the families, then the Staffel, and the next arrival was a Ju.52. carrying the unit commander and his staff. It included his female secretary, filing cabinets and all....plus...the pig!.
The latter was no doubt the product of the unit pig farm and an insurance against going hungry at a later date. So here was an almost complete unit apart from the poor old ground staff who were probably having to hike their way back from somewhere just inside the Chech [sic] border about 60 miles away.
The volume of gold braid on the senior officer did not save him from going the same way as the others, so he was bundled off one way, no doubt protesting about his rough handling....and the pig went the other. To the cookhouse!.
One of the last to land in the fading light was a Feisler Storch light communications and spotting plane and the pilot demonstrated it's capability by virtually stalling it into a very short landing run and …..plonk, stopped.
The pilot got out, like an entertainer in the circus, grinning, as if to say "who's a clever boy then", until a huge coloured American airman grabbed him by the collar and he was put through the mincer like the others.
We loved every minute of it and wandered back to our camp site very happily not expecting anything to climax that but the finale came shortly after daylight went completely.
The day was finished off with a giant pyrotechnic display that must have used up everything that could be mustered from all of the combined stores plus stuff from wrecked or surrendered aircraft.
The way some of the stuff had been put together to blast off
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some 200ft into the air must have made the excercise [sic] near lethal but I am sure that there was no shortage of the necessary explosive and technical skills to put on such a show at such short notice.
The night sky was filled with star shells and flares of all colours and enormous explosions for well over an hour before we retired to our communal bed with stars in our eyes, and hope for what the next day would bring.
When May 9th dawned we were up early, washed, shaved, breakfasted and the site tidied up in case anyone else wanted to make use of it after we had gone, all ready standing by long before 7.30 as we had been told to be.
About 8.30 a flock of DC3's (Dakota's to the RAF) started pouring in, landing and taxying into the park directly ahead of the road we were on.
We had seen these depart on the previous day and it was a well drilled procedure by which they took up position in five ranks of ten nose to tail so all we had to do was to was [sic] for the call forward. It did not come!. Instead, truckloads of GI's came rumbling into camp straight past us and out to the aircraft which taxied out as soon as loading was complete and away they went…..all 50 of them!
We did not know whether they were front line troops who were in need of a rest or even walking wounded but it got us a bit steamed up to think that someone seemed to be jumping the queue but we knew that they would be in again in the afternoon so we continued to wait impatiently.
By mid afternoon the flock were back again and after landing formed up with the same precision and then another convoy of Americans arrived, again going straight out to the airfield. Fortunately it was a smaller party and some of our groups ahead of us were called forward but leaving us still sweating it out.
There was nothing more to but to open up our site again and brouse [sic] around the rest of the camp to occupy the time.
There was another firework display but we could not work up much enthusiasm for it. All of our thoughts were concentrated on what might happen the next day.
Again we were on call to be with some of the first away so once more we prepared ourselves and then watched in dismay as another
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convoy came sweeping in and went straight out to the airfield. When the aircraft came in they were promptly loaded and were away again leaving us still stuck on the side of the road. There were some angry mutterings.
Eventually the group leaders had a conference to elect a spokesman who went forward to speak to the load masters and whether it was that that did the trick or whether it was the luck of the draw I would not know but all of the RAF roadside gipsies were moved up to the airfield for the afternoon shuttle.
In came the aircraft as before and as soon as they were parked each party was allocated a specific aeroplane from which they unloaded jerrycans of petrol and other stores which included 'K' rations from which we got an issue and then we boarded....at last.
Like a well oiled machine the 50 aircraft started up, rolled out in sections of ten, took off and in loose formation headed West at about 4000ft.
The precision of that operation made a lasting impression on me as it was shifting about 300 tons of fuel and suplies [sic] in and about 2800 people out each day. With over 40,000 repatriates to get out of the area it was understandable that it was going to take time however frustrated we might have felt at times.
We landed at an airfield near Rheims, France, and were trucked to a huge tented encampment in the grounds of some Chateaux. We got de-loused again, had a label tied on and were then provided with vouchers to exchange for cash, shown the accomodation [sic] and told to be ready by daylight next day..
To someone like myself who, had only been in the 'bag' a short time it was a short step back to reality but for those who had been behind the wire for years it was the start of a long period of adjustment.
The bright lights, the incessant broadcasting of AFN (American Forces Network) and the delights of the tented city with it's cafateria [sic] tents, beer tents, cinema, magazine stalls and one-arm bandits was a different world. Obviously American servicemen (and women) did not expect to be cut off from their home comforts just because they were fighting a war in foriegn [sic] parts, whether they were in our [sic] out of the line. i
Whilst I was having difficulty in deciding what to spend my
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money on…and a beer was one of the first things, others were very reluctant to spend at all. I found that those who had hoarded for years in order to survive could not easily break the habit but we all mucked in together until eventually we had had our share of everything that was going and then it was early to bed, a real one, in preparation for an early start on the next lap.
We were up at 5 o'clock the next morning, piled onto trucks and commenced another bumpy, noisy and tiring drive, seemingly in the wrong direction, to an airfield at Juvencourt, which I found out later was between Troyes and Chaumont. I did not hear any complaints. If everyone was like me they were too pre-occupied with their own thoughts at the prospect of getting home soon to be concerned about a such a journey. Even if it was about 100 miles!.
We expected to be going into another camp but there was great excitement when, on arrival, we found a flock of waiting Lancasters on the airfield and we loaded 25 to each aircraft ready for the off.
The Lancaster was not built for passengers so we were distributed all along the fusulage [sic] and my diary records that I was in one of 514 Squadron's aircraft, from Waterbeach, Pilot, Flying Officer Tasker. His W/Op turned out to be one of my old mates from training days, Tommy Gookie.
There was no opportunity for chat though. Anyone who who [sic] has ever flown in a Lanc. without a helmet will know just how noisy they were but it was a terrible racket when those four beautiful Merlins started up and we taxied out and took off, setting course in a bit of a gaggle, heading West. I did have the opportunity of a few minutes in the top turret but there was quite a queue for it.
I lapped it up but it was a bit nerve racking for some of those who's flying had been cut short when they had been flying 1939 vintage fighters and bombers. Those chaps were going to need quite a lot of rehabilitation that was for sure.
After about an hour's flying all the changes in engine note and attitude suggested that we were preparing for landing and after touching down and taxying in we scrambled out of the door to find ourselves on the tarmac at, of all places, Tangmere.
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Just 18 miles from my home town!. Then the inevitable occurred. First we had to go through a very rudimentary customs check and then we were deloused again. There was no way that anything illegal or catching was going to be allowed into the country but I was beginning to get a bit fed up with having a hose stuffed up trouser legs, sleeves, down the trouser front and back and in the hair dispensing clouds of strange smelling itchy powder. Then it was tea and sandwiches in the hanger served by WAAF's who for some reason seemed to treat us as if we were something from outer space. I did not realise it at the time but that is probably what we looked like.
For the next part of the programme we were bussed to Barnham railway station to board a train that was sitting in a siding, but not before I had attended to one most important matter.
I was sorely tempted to slip away but thought better of it. Instead, I dived into a phone box, called the operator, but before I could tell her that I wanted a reverse charge call she asked if I was a returning POW, so obviously I was not the first she had had on the line.
Having been assured that I was she said that there was no charge and got a number for me in Worthing. In a flash I was talking to a local Chemist who I had been in the Home Guard with. He took a message to my parents, just up the road and on the way met my father-in-law so the whole jungle telegraph got going to spread the news.
Quite a few used that phone but eventually the locomotive whistle brought them back on board and we were off.
The trip was a long one and at times very slow as we wound our way all round London making occasional stops at stations for the ladies of the WVS and the 'Sally Ann' to dispense tea and sandwiches, whatever the hour, until eventually, somewhere around midnight we arrived at the reception centre at RAF Cosford, near Wolverhampton.
The train ran right into the camp which had it's own internal railway system being a storage area and maintenance unit and we dissembarked [sic] almost directly into a well lit hangar.
There were lines and lines of tables creating avenues which were alphabetically indexed; and from then on it was every man for himself for a while.
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The first part of the process was an identification check. There were boxes of Records Office duplicate I.D. cards with photograph after which there were a few questions and once past that check we were back in the Air Force. Some who had not worn too well in the 'bag' took a bit longer but all were eventually filtered through perhaps after calling an officer to verify or a Doctor to advise on suitability for immediate clearance or a spot of R & R. (Rest .and Recuperation) first. Cosford also had a very large hospital so it was ideally suited.
After that we were provided with a temporary I.D. card and authorisation chits for this, that and the other. Leave warrant, ration card, advance of pay, clothes coupons, petrol coupons, cigarette and confectionary coupons…..all taking time as we worked our way down the line of tables until we were further directed towards another hangar which was a monster clothing store for an issue that would at least allow us to change out of the odds and ends that we had been wearing for so long. Half of mine by that time was American drab olive so it was back to blue.
The clothing issue was very basic. Airmans battle-dress and cap. Underclothes, socks and boots. Shirt, collar and tie.......separate of course, and nothing to hold them together, and finally a. piece of braid or a set of stripes appropriate to rank and..........the sewing kit!, plus a new kit bag to put surplus stuff into. Goodness knows what time it was before the process was complete and then we were off to a barrack block, a steaming hot bath and to bed.
We had been told that the Mess dining room was providing a 24 hour service and very few people overslept. We were up and about gathering everything together and I forget how many peices [sic] of braid and collars I sewed on for others before the need for breakfast was calling.
I felt a bit like a fish in a bowl wandering around the Officers Mess again among others dressed much the same as myself. The permanent staff were very helpful and the stewards could not do enough but there had to be a limit to how much one could eat in one go. There was only one thing on the minds of most people, and that was to get home as soon as possible. One of us had already gone. Jim only lived at Coventry and I was told
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that he had ordered a taxi and was off…..and to hell with the expense!.
Buses had been scheduled to run to Wolverhamptan [sic] for main line connections for those who were cleared to go and other nationalities, including Commonwealth personnel were being assembled to go to clearing depots that had been set up in various parts of the country to prepare them for repatriation. For me it was a quick call to Newmarket and I was on my way.
I must have got quite used to the scruffy character reflected in the shaving mirror without realising that there was a lot more of me that I had just taken for granted. When I first looked in a full length mirror it took some time to realise that the wild man from outer space was in fact me. If clothes maketh the man then I really looked like a rag-bag…..but a clean one!.
Clean I might have been but I had over three months head of unruly hair which was almost white from the liberal use of de-lousing powder that would not wash out. My ill fitting serge battle-dress had come straight from the stores and looked like it and although I could have delayed my departure to make myself more presentable I didn't. And I do not know anyone who did!, but as soon as I was back in the public eye it not surprising that I was getting some funny looks.
There were a few more to come before I finished my journey but one incident imprinted itself on my mind.
I have no idea where it was exactly but after changing trains and we got under way, I was lost in thought and the other person in the compartment; a member of the bowler hat and brolly brigade, went to some length to point out that it was a First Class compartment and that I appeared to have made a mistake.
Normally I would have treated it lightly but as his expression suggested that he had a nasty smell under his nose I'm afraid I was in no mood for that sort of nonsense. I cannot recall exactly what I said, but it certainly was not complimentary, I do remember that it was he that moved out and not me....after all, I did have a First Class ticket!
I finally arrived at Newmarket where it seemed that half my wife's HQ had turned out to greet me but why they were on the down-line platform when I arrived on the up-line platform I
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don't know and there was an awful lot of running about before we fell into each others arms. Then it was back to her office for a whirlwind of activity and excitement as a leave pass was arranged.
There was of course a very lively party in the evening before we finally retired to our room with some people that we had often stayed with on previous occasions. It was ironic that the lady of the house was the German wife of an old jockey of some repute.
Old "Willie" Warne had been the Kaisers jockey prior to the 1914/18 war and had been too late to get out of the country when that war started. The result was that he had been interned in Germany throughout the conflict. We had a lot to talk about!.
The following morning we were off to Worthing for a reunion with my parents and the rest of the family with the exception of two of my brothers who were still away in the forces.
My uniform and other clothes were waiting for me, all cleaned and pressed; although a little on the loose side and eventually, after lots more soaking in the bath most of the signs of the de-lousing powder disappeared. Nevertheless, a haircut was necessary, before I could get my cap on. The old barber that I had used for years nearly had a fit when he saw the state of my hair until I told him how it had got that way. That was the only free hair-cut I ever had out of him!. After that it more or less resumed it's natural colour and I was reconciled to a more civilised routine even though a touch of jaundice limited activities for a while. Something was bound to happen when the diet was undergoing that sort of change.
It was another twenty six years before I left the Air Force. I will never know why I was one of the lucky one's and it never ceases to amaze me. Sometimes I have thought that I have lived on borrowed time since those days.
If I had been a cat I would have run out of my nine lives a long time ago and I have always considered myself very fortunate to have enjoyed a longer period of relative peace than the older generation had experienced between two dreadful wars.
My youthful ambition to fly had been fullfilled [sic] ; even if it had been the hard and dangerous way. The war had finished and our country and our society seemed safe and secure at last.
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It had been achieved at the most dreadful cost in human lives and suffering. There were a lot of my old school friends and others that I would never see again.
Historians have since put forward many academic arguments on the conduct of the war as they have done throughout the years over long and bloody conflicts to try and prove points and discredit theories as well as personalities which is easy enough to do in hindsight.
The fact remains. Hitlers evil Third Reich was destroyed, and only just in time before the introduction of a new generation of weapons might have prolonged the war or even given Germany the chance of recovery. Then the pages of history would have been written somewhat differently and I doubt if todays armchair strategists would be in a position to express themselves quite so freely.
The overall number of casualties was appalling and the Royal Air Force had it's share as it wielded one of the most powerful and flexible weapons ever forged.
Bomber Command alone lost 47,293 aircrew killed or missing on operations over Europe, and another 8000 were killed in training and non-operational flights between 1939 and 1945.
A staggering 9000 bombers of all types were lost in the same period and at the peak of the air war 40% of Britains [sic] war production was concentrated in the manufacture of aircraft and supporting services.
Between them the Allied Air Forces devestated [sic] 70 cities and manufacturing centres severely curtailing production.
The Hamburg raids of 1943 disrupted U-boat building and caused the terrible fire-storm that resulted in more than 40,000 deaths. Altogether 3,600,000 homes were destroyed. 7,500,000,people were made homeless and there were 1,000,000 casualties caused by the bombing on the European front alone.
The costly raid on Peenemunde in the Baltic gave us breathing time to develope [sic] a defence against what could have been devestating [sic] damage from the V1's and V2's.
Sea and Air co-operation effectively swung the balance of the U.Boat war and a steady flow of war materials and food was assured from the vast resources of the USA.
The German Navy got bottled up and was no longer an effective
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force. The Luftwaffe was being depleted as their bomber force declined in favour of fighter production. Although in 1943 their production of fighters actually increased they were faced with the fact that experienced pilots cannot be produced, at the same rate as machines and the bombing was starving them of fuel.
Once Germany was forced onto the defensive as was Japan the writing was on the wall.
Towards the end of the war Germany had committed enormous quantities of some 20,000 anti-aircraft guns and vast quantities of ammunition to the defence of the Third Reich, tying up 1,000,000 troops and another 1,500,000 people in fire fighting, clearing up bomb damage and re-housing.
The destruction caused by Allied air raids affected German war production to such an extent that it was estimated by German sources that in 1943 alone, it cost, in terms of production, the [underlined] equivalent [/underlined] of 10,000 heavy guns and approximately 6000 heavy tanks. If the resources that those figures represent had reached the battle fronts the outcome of many a campaign might well have different.
Those figures are just some of the grim statistics on the balance sheet of a war that need not have happened if Hitler could have been prevented from embarking on his plans of world domination.
The overwhelming Allied air power was a major contribution which helped to reduce the casualty figures of the ground forces who eventually squeezed the discredited leaders of the German nation into surrender, giving Europe a chance to sort itself out and lay plans for a more peaceful future.
History will show that the transition into an uneasy 'peace' and the rebuilding of shattered countries and communities was not easily achieved but I am proud to have been part of it.
Alan.T.Gamble.
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"NIL DESPERANDUM”
[underlined] PREFACE [/underlined]
My war came to an end with Victory in Europe, when, after returning from German POW camp I was sent on leave to await further instructions.
For some time I expected to be called for duty in one of the areas of either Europe, the Middle East, India or the Far East where there was still a great deal of conflict going on, but it seemed that there were still plenty of people around to cope and it was many weeks before something was found for me to do.
I was content as long as my pay and allowances were being credited to my account, so I sat back waiting for something to happen and enjoyed being with the family again. My wife Dorothy was still in the Army and soon used up her leave entitlement to be home with me at Worthing although I managed several periods up at Newmarket where she was still stationed which was not too far away so I had a comfortable time rehabilitating myself until a telegram from the Air Ministry requested my presence at Whitehall to determine my future.
Meanwhile I had had plenty of time to contemplate both the past, present and the future. At least I still had a future of sorts which was a lot more than some of my old school friends whose short lives were about to be recorded on the memorial tablets.
My youthful past had been humdrum until joining the Royal Air Force and I could not see it getting any better by doing what so many were doing by getting `demobbed' and back into `civvy street' as soon as possible to pick up the threads of their previous occupation. Apart from anything else I was not even sure that I wanted to resume my previous occupation.
I had made the grade from the ranks to commissioned officer more by luck than anything else and despite some bad moments I had been introduced to a different sort of life; and it attracted me.
I had asked myself time and time again; should I throw it all away or capitalize on it? The answer always came out the same, whichever way I looked at the situation. I really had nothing to lose as I had very little to start with, so I approached the postings department at Air Ministry with an open mind and tongue in cheek.
I was kept waiting for a long time after I had presented myself, and bit by bit I progressed from the main reception to the clerks office then to an outer office until finally being called into the inner sanctum to be asked by a chap who simply asked what I would like to do.
It was such a surprise that I was barely able to splutter out "anything you like" and no doubt if I had not already given some thought to my future I could easily have blurted out "civvy street" and that would have been the road that I would have gone down. Nevertheless, my remark produced a contemplative "hm" and a lot of paper shuffling. I just looked at the ceiling and shuffled my feet!
The next question was "what about administrative work?" and I recall that my reply was something to the effect that "if that is what you would like me to do I will have a go" although my insides were churning. Me! administrative work! What the hell did I know about that, but the die was cast and I was sent off for a few more days leave to await further instructions, which took the form of a telegram instructing me to report to No. 47 Group. HQ, Hendon, for disposal.
I duly reported to the HQ which was in a group of huts, which is still there behind barbed wire in front of the Restaurant of the RAF Museum and by adopting the philosophy of leaving my destiny in someone else's hands the cards were shuffled once more. I was earmarked for administrative duties and sent home, once more to await further instructions.
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It was not long before, they arrived and then I was en route to Lyneham, in Wiltshire, all shiny, new and refreshed for the beginning of a new era.
[line of stars]
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[underlined] CHAPTER ONE [/underlined]
Lynham [sic] was a flying station of No. 47 Group, Transport Command so it made a change for me to be outside Bomber Command but I did not have a lot of time to contemplate the Yorks and Stirlings that were being flogged to and from many parts of the world. The arrival preliminaries were soon over and I found myself being employed as assistant to the Adjutant of 511 Squadron and was soon up to my ears in routine paper work, a lot of which was processing claims for campaign medals but it seemed an easy way to earn a crust for the ten days that I did the job and I learned a lot more about the running of, a unit like a flying Squadron which had not changed a lot since I had been a 'sprog' airman at Mildenhall in 1941 where I had started my first stint of admin in the orderly room. There was something else that had not changed. Stirlings being Stirlings, whatever the mark, could still get into an uncontrollable swing on take off and landing as I found out from the signals that were coming in reporting aircraft all the way down the route to India having swung and busted the undercarriage in some God forsaken place and I had not been flying a desk very long before one did the same thing at Lyneham which finished up careering into the operations block causing a number of casualties among ground staff.
It had previously entered my mind that if I could keep away from flying for a while it would not do me any harm but after that episode it did not seem to make any difference. I think that I would have been most upset at being pranged by a runaway Stirling whilst sitting at a desk; especially after successfully completing a tour in Bomber Command on them without damage to myself.
However, I was whisked out of that job overnight and flung straight into a properly established job in Station HQ. That of Station Assistant Adjutant although the job title of the appointment was a mis-nomer as far as I was concerned. It really was personnel administration and I inherited a staff of twenty headed by a Flight Sergeant Chief Clerk. All of a sudden I was an Admin Officer!
The reason for the sudden move requires a little explanation as I did not physically take over from the previous encumbant [sic] , a WAAF officer who apparently had got herself and the job into one hell of a mess and had been moved out smartly before things could get any worse. My brief from the Senior Admin Officer was to get stuck in and sort things out as quickly and as quietly as possible so I took over everything completely blind. Office, staff, ledgers, account books, cash and inventories. It was difficult to know just where to start so I familiarised myself first with the orderly room procedures and the staff who handled the details of some 2000 airmen and airwomen and then came the process of sorting my own office. It did not take long to find out that things were far worse than they appeared on the surface.
I started checking the inventories as I had signed for them subject to check and although some small one's were fairly easy but when it came to the bedding store, oh dear, oh dear. My heart missed a beat. It showed up a flaw in the system that been exploited for a long time by people quite prepared to make a few bob out of surplus blankets, only they were not surplus! Even in the stock room half blankets suitably folded had been counted as complete blankets to deceive the checkers for a long time. I had to have a long think about that one. There seemed no point in enquiries and chucking charges about. I had a feeling that it would bounce right back into my court. Quickly and quietly the boss had said, so I did it my way and worked at it steadily over a period of several weeks whilst dealing with other day to day matters.
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I had the station scoured for blankets that were being misused as curtains, table covers etc. and a few billet inspections with the aid of the Station Warrant Officer produced a considerable number that were in excess of entitlement and more than a few exchanges were made at the main stores until I was satisfied that the deficiencies had been reduced to a modest number that I could subsequently declare for write-off. War time methods of writing off losses were no longer in force so I was aiming for the minimum possible before asking for an independent check to be made with me in attendance. Such matters absorb a great deal of time and at the same time I introduced a completely new system of accounting for the issue, receipt„ storage and stock control of bedding without adding extra staff although there was a change of staff. The Corporal in charge of the bedding store! who I am sure was very pleased to go without a fuss. I found a place for him in the sanitary squad! In the long run quicker and quieter than the more formal way of doing things. I followed it up with a multi page paper on the subject, with recommendations for the changes that I had already made and submitted it through channels to Air Ministry, as I was sure that there were considerable savings to be made if my scheme was implemented officially. I can only assume that someone, somewhere along the line put his own name to it and nearly two years later an Air Ministry Order appeared almost word for word so it must have had some merit. It was still in force 40 years later!
I did get something out of though!. Nearly six months later after I had moved on and after an enquiry into the deficiencies that had been disclosed, a Board of Enquiry found me responsible for the losses and invited me to pay £5 toward the value of the losses. One learns the hard way and so it seemed that everyone was covering their backs, and they had to have their pound of flesh. £5 was a lot of money in 1945. About 25% of a weeks pay for a Flying Officer!
Had that backhander arrived whilst I had still been at Lyneham I might well have decided that Air Force Admin. was not for me but by then I was engaged in numerous other problems and learning to cope with them without compromising myself. It did not always work but I was getting better at it. In the meanwhile Dorothy had left the Army and was back with her parents in Worthing awaiting the arrival of an addition to the family.
Among other things that were under my jurisdiction were the issue of clothing coupons, tobacco and confectionery and petrol coupons and it did not take long to find out that the system of accounting for those items were far from satisfactory. Of course, they were all issued, or were supposed to have been issued according to entitlement as laid down in the relevant orders but I found it impossible to reconcile the stocks and book balances. I burned the midnight oil balancing, (or to be truthful, cooking them) until I had resolved the petrol and clothing coupons sufficiently to satisfy a snap audit which was always a possibility although obviously no such audit had been done for a long time.
In hindsight it would probably have been to my advantage to have asked for an independent audit when taking over, if it had occurred to me, but I was new to the business and without formal training it could still have gone against me in the same way as the blankets episode. I doubt that it would have gone against the departed WAAF officer who no doubt had left the service very smartly which was the normal practice for someone in her condition. There did not seem any point in making waves so in my ignorance I just pressed on.
The tobacco and confectionery coupons were a bit of a headache although I had not placed any priority on them but the first time I attended a Station Commanders conference the subject came up as the local and area NAAFI managers had apparently been tearing their hair out for some time as their monthly stocks were all being taken up in the first few days of the month and supplementary stocks were having to be put up to supply the demand for the rest of the month. I came directly into the firing line although my predecessor had previously been
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instructed to do something about it and of course the inevitable occurred. The finger was pointed at me with an instruction to "fix it ....and quickly". It did not take long to find an answer.
The blank coupons were initially issued by the NAAFI to units for distribution and generally coupons issued by one unit were valid at another and therein lay the problem. At Lyneham everyone other than the Officers and Sgt's messes seemed have about four times as many coupons as they should have but the work involved was not easy and I burned a lot of midnight oil personally setting up a system to get it right first time. I made all old coupons invalid as new coupons became valid from a certain date. They were all serial numbered and distributed to internal units and departments against nominal rolls There was no leeway or overlap. Any cases that would have previously been arbitrated by the Naafi staff were referred to me and only coupons bearing the Lyneham stamp were valid. All new arrivals got a new issue on surrender of their old one's with a limitation of only two weeks back issue. I did get it right first time!. The rot was stopped dead in it's tracks within the first few days of it's introduction. The Naafi managers were happy and despite the success of the operation that was the only area from which any compliment came and I was presented with an enormous box of chocolates for my wife with their compliments. At least I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had some aptitude for the work that I had been thrown into and had so far I seemed to have done it a bit better than someone with formal training.
There were other matters that needed a nudge in the right direction from time to time to bring them into line but eventually all the serious problems had been attended to and I was able to relax slightly as the job ticked over as it should have done in the first place. I even managed a few more week-ends at home instead of working right through but at that time people were still revelling in the euphoria of the cessation of the war and there was a lot of partying going on, and that of course meant too much drinking as an outlet for pent up emotions. There was one rip-roaring party to which I invited my Petty Officer Naval brother, (with temporary promotion to Lieutenant. RN. For the occasion) and it was the great granddaddy of all binges. We were in a very sorry state the next morning when we went down to the flight office as I had arranged a trip in a York for him. He had never flown before, and it had been no trouble to lay it on although it was in a freighter on air test that we found ourselves in. No seats. Just a load of loose covers on the floor with a few straps to hang onto.
I suppose it's something you are trained for and you grow up with so it was second nature to me. My poor brother felt differently about it with the thunder of the engines, the unfamiliar smells and a skyline that would not stay in place, and neither would his stomach as he was obliged to make use of the paper bag supplied!
His final thoughts on the matter were that he would sooner take his chance in the bowels of a ship than fly or have to chuck himself out of an aeroplane if it got into trouble although I am sure that when he was later obliged to fly back to the UK on compassionate leave on the death of his daughter he had more things on his mind than his own personal discomfort.
Bit by bit I attacked all of the accumulated problems and new one's as they arose and life began to jogg [sic] along quite nicely. I was able to spend time studying the activities and the rules and regulations of the personnel department for which I was responsible, although it was run very efficiently by a Flight Sergeant Waaf. Even so, I began to take more notice of what I was invariably signing for. At that point in time I seemed to have been launched in a career in Admin so it seemed logical that I should learn all that I could about it.
It was too much to expect that I would be left to settle for long. In early Spring of 1946 I received the reward for my efforts when I was notified that I was posted to Holmsley South in the New Forest, Hampshire, for Admin duties, so a quick hand over followed a handshake from the C.O. and to my surprise a "well done" and I was ready to go. One of my
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first thoughts was that I would be a lot nearer Worthing and things seemed to be working in my favour especially as Holmsley was another Transport command station with a Stirling squadron. The prospects were good and I had no reason to make any preliminary enquiries so off I went and waved goodbye to Lyneham.
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[underlined] Chapter Two [/underlined]
I completed the arrival formalities by eventually arriving at the C.O's office and that's when I received a nasty shock to be told that he was very pleased to see me as a very special job had been reserved for me. I was to take charge of 50 German POW's who would be arriving by train [underlined] the following day [/underlined] and the Senior Admin Officer would tell me all about it!
He did. A dispersed Nissen hutted site had been allocated. Beds and bedding had been set aside at the stores and an inventory opened ready for my signature. Cooking facilities had also been arranged on site "so off you go and the best of luck and keep them out of my hair" was the brief.
[underlined] Dispersed [/underlined] was the operative word. Typical of war time airfields it was well spread out and I was to find that the site that I had been allocated was nearly two miles from the main camp area but I was thinking very hard about the prospects and wondering if my reputation had preceeded [sic] me as they must have decided at the last moment to appoint an officer in charge. I must confess too that I rather liked the idea of being a POW Camp Commandant which was the title that I gave myself. After my recent experiences as a POW in Germany it would be interesting to have the role's reversed.
Most of my first day was spent checking out the site and supplies. The electricity was on, the plumbing was working and coal had already been dumped on site but it was the `cooking facilities' that intrigued me. It was no more than an old soya boiler and a Spitfire packing case but I was not going to worry too much about that. One thing was for sure. At the very worst the conditions could never be described as rough by comparison with the way we had been treated as prisoners so after reading up the limited amount of information that been handed over to me and making a few arrangements for the reception of the POW's I settled in the Mess and turned in that night with a clear conscience. The next day could take care of itself!
I duly met the motley crowd at Brockenhurst railway station the following day without too much ceremony having mustered a couple of hefty, armed Service policemen to make an impression and there I was handed a package of `bumph' by one of the two RAF (aircrew) Warrant Officers who were going to be my total staff for the indefinite period that they were going to be with us. As soon as we got back to the main camp I was able to dispense with the policemen and the POW's did a lot of waiting about whilst I poured over the documents with the Senior Admin Officer (who really didn't want to know), but I was determined to keep him in the picture before being told once more "get on with it". By that time I had got the impression that as far as I was concerned I was on my own!.
The POW's were all ex Africa Corp and had been incarcerated in working camps in Canada. They had been well fed and documented and were in the pipeline for repatriation, and they knew it and the best part was that they were to be reminded regularly with the added threat that if any one of them absconded, or even attempted to, then the whole lot would be put back to the end of a very long list.
That solved a lot of my fears and it was with a much lighter heart that I paraded the lot, read the riot act through their senior NCO `interpreter' although most of them knew enough English to understand and then we were off to the site where I paraded them again and explained that it was to be their home until further notice. I also explained that any comforts that they might enjoy would be achieved mainly by their own efforts which soon put a stop to any complaints that they might have thought of voicing. There was the inevitable roll call and familiarisation of faces having formally introduced myself and then we got down to work setting things up.
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The next few days were hectic as I scrounged, scavenged and borrowed all the necessary equipment to make life tolerable and there was a lot of earth moving, hammering, sawing and considerable industry as the days went by. The kitchen and mess room layout was built from the Spitfire packing case and sited in a partitioned end of a hut adjacent to the ablutions block to make use of the plumbing, and the remainder of the hut was turned into sleeping quarters for the duty officer and the site office.
There were few restrictions. By the very nature of our staffing arrangements it was an open camp apart from morning and night roll calls with one of the Warrant Officers or myself on camp throughout each 24 hour period. The daily routine was soon established. I was allowed a small cash ration allowance to supplement the daily ration issue and the prisoners were allowed a small basic pay in script as they were not allowed real money. They spent their script in the small canteen that we set up and it's value was converted into real money under my control (more book-keeping), for purchases from the Naafi main distribution centre in Southampton.
I was also allowed to employ them on the station in a variety of trades that they were suitable for and give small pay increments accordingly, so it was not long before some of them were being employed as drivers, fitters, cooks and butchers, cleaners and baggage handlers with a pool of refuse collectors. My message to them was very simple. "Screw up a good job and you go straight to the garbage detail". (There was no extra pay for that job!)
A bout of very wet weather made life very difficult as the entrance to the site was uphill and impossible for motor transport so that supplies had to be man-handled in but in my travels I had spotted a considerable supply of used and new PSP, (Perforated Steel Planking) of the type that many war time hard standings and even temporary runways were built with which had been more or less abandoned by the Americans, who had used Holmsley for the invasion of Normandy so several tons were transported to the site in the next spell of good weather and we got cracking. There was a lot more earth moving as the surface was prepared and we worked it out as we went along. I got my shirt off too which raised a few eyebrows among the troops.
Like any other body of men there will always be those who will hang about on the fringe of activity trying to look as if they are busy. Germans are no different! But I felt that if I could demonstrate that I could work as well as any of them then I would be justified in putting my boot behind anyone who seemed reluctant to flex his muscles so we toiled like an army of ants the whole of one week-end when I was the duty officer. At the end of the day we straightened our backs with the satisfaction of having done a good job in record time with a firm driveway leading up to a level turning area at the top.
I had a few crates of beer brought in later on and had the additional satisfaction of being told by one of them that it was most unlikely that a German officer would have applied himself in the same way. By that time I had bathed and was back in uniform and once more and `The Commandant' was feeling rather pleased with himself, so the reply that came from me, almost without thinking was....."possibly, and you lost"! Touche!.
After that things began to tick along quite nicely which was just as well as I was beginning to be drawn more and more into the routine work of the station. Nevertheless, the POW's took up most of my time and I had to argue my way out of doing station duties like Orderly Officer on the grounds that I was spending every third night and every, third week-end in the POW compound. I was excused station duties...but not for long!
I had to take fairly swifty [sic] action on one occasion when I had a report from the civilian accountant officer who came to work on his scooter that he just passed one of our two tonner's being driven by one of my POW's on the Southampton road, and he did not appear to have a load! I was off like a shot on my recently aquired [sic] motor cycle and chased after him.
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I was flat out for several miles before I caught him up and flagged him down. The driver was the one that I thought he might be. He was reputed to have been a pre-war racing driver mechanic and it appeared that he had been doing some unauthorised tuning of the truck's V8 engine as well. His argument that he was road testing the vehicle cut no ice as he had no authorisation to do either that or his journey so it was about turn and back to camp with me tailing him. I think he knew what to expect when I had him on the mat. Like everyone else he knew that Southampton was not many miles down the road and my own view was that he was making a dash for freedom although there was no way I could prove it. For him it was the loss of his trade pay and on the back of the refuse lorry instead of driving it! They had been warned!.
My motor cycle was a great help to me and allowed me to get between camp and Worthing in less than two hours giving me much more time with my family especially as I would normally have caught an early Sunday evening train to get back. With the bike I was usually driving into the compound on the dot of eight o'clock on the Monday morning to be received by one of the Warrant Officers and the Feldweibel. The bike was then taken to be cleaned up as I changed and had breakfast before going through the reports and morning inspection. The bike was then taken to be cleaned as I changed and had breakfast, before going through the reports and my morning inspection. [sic]
I had learned enough about Germans to know that they understood and respected that sort of routine so there was some satisfaction in having the bike cleaned and polished, very often by the chap who I had suspended from driving after his misdemeanour but I was too trusting. I should have remembered that once you give a "creegie", (an abbreviation of the German word for POW); an inch, he would take a mile. We used to!
On one fine day I decided to take run to Bournemouth and on the spur of the moment took the head man with me on the pillion but we had barely done a couple of miles when the bike went into a violent, almost uncontrollable wriggle on a bend which resulted in us being thrown onto the verge, on the wrong side of the road, somewhat shaken, when the back wheel locked up!
When had got our breath back it did not take long to find the cause of the trouble. A loose back wheel which had caused the wheel to go out of alignment and the chain to jump the sprocket! That had also upset the brake control but it was soon put right and the outing was abandoned. There was some more sorting out to do. I was quite adament [sic] that wheel nuts do not loosen themselves and I had already decided that the bike would no longer be cleaned by a particular prisoner and the same person found that he never did get back driving, or for that matter on any other job that might have restored his trade pay. There were no direct accusations but I think everyone was aware just how close `Sir' had been to a very nasty prang. It was just one of the many problems to be sorted out where my charges were concerned and it was not unusual for the local village policeman to be hauling one of my `boys' back into the compound in the early hours of the morning having found him sneaking around the village. It was an open camp after all and my staff was not large enough for anything else. Neither would the administration consider giving me a guard patrol at night so all sorts of things were known to be going on after roll call and lights out and I was obliged to turn a blind eye to such goings on provided that nothing desperate occurred. It was impossible to stop the forces of nature and if some of the local lasses preferred the company of German prisoners then that was their affair.
Another problem concerning the motor-bike nearly deprived me of it when I received a letter from an H.P. company advising me that the machine was the subject of an H.P. agreement between them and a third party and as Dorothy had opened the letter at home it really caused a storm in a tea cup!. The bike was costing me about four months pay on an
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H.P. agreement with another company! In the end it was not difficult to sort out. I threatened to sue the dealer that I had got the bike from and told the first H.P. company that the bike theoretically belonged to another HP company and then let them sort it out so in the end the bike remained in my possession.
It very nearly got bent on another occasion when a group of about five of us who had motor-bikes, (including the medical officer), went out for an evening's tour of the local area which included a few stops for [underlined] light [/underlined] refreshment. Perhaps that was what caused a little excess speed as we swept into a bend, line astern, with the Doc. in the lead, but he couldn't quite make it round the bend. Off the road he went whilst the rest of us made our own arrangements to keep control and come to a stop as the Doc. disappeared up someone's garden path. When we had turned around and investigated there was the Doc. bike and all, extracting himself from a flower bed. There was no real damage done except for the loss of an area of skin from his knee and a hole in his best trousers.
The lady of the house had just come out to see what all the commotion was about and seeing a pranged person discharging a quantity of blood on her path asked if she should get a doctor and with great solemnity the Doc. said, “thank you madam, I am a Doctor but I would very much like a cup of tea", so we all got tea and patched him up althoughfor [sic] some reason we did not indulge in that sort of escapade again.
Our little camp matured and blossomed and I thought that it was enterprising of the inmates to have achieved some colour in the place when flower borders appeared. I put it down to the generosity of the locals until I had a telephone call from a retired Colonel living in a pleasant old Victorian house next to the compound. It didn't take long to find out from a visit and a couple of sherry's that as our our flower beds blossomed his had thinned out. Actually he was very reasonable about it for a man with a name like his. It was BASTARD, so I naturally pronounced it Bas-tard, to be put well and truly in my place when he insisted that it was BASTARD by name and BASTARD by nature; but his bark was worse than his bite.
It was all simply resolved by the return and replanting of most of his plants and by the allocation of a regular POW gardener to him for two half days a week. Couldn't be fairer than that! We benefited from the deal as there was no further need to raid his garden. We apparently just appropriated surplus plants from his greenhouse!
I had a few days leave after our first daughter was born only to find on return that there had been a near mutiny among the prisoners when someone had upset their comfortable routine.
I had made arrangements that whilst I was away the Duty Officer would include certain daily checks that would normally have been done only at week-ends when I was not there. It had all been resolved by the time I got back but it had resulted from the actions of one officer, himself an ex POW, deciding that they should have a taste of what he had been subjected to resulting in numerous restrictions, parades and roll calls. Nothing too drastic but quite unnecessary in the circumstances when they were safe in the knowledge that all they had to do was behave themselves and repatriation was certain. The net result was that they had refused to go to work until the status quo had been restored. Just to show them that they were not going to get it all their own way I imposed a fine of one week's pay for everyone although it really need not have happened. It subsequently turned out that the officer concerned had been in Stalag X111b and V11a with me and we continually bumped into each other at various units over the following years but that's another story.
One highlight was our camp concert. News had been filtering through of the closing down of the whole station so I thought we should do something special without thinking too much about what the implications were for me, like what, when, where? so after a tentative enquiry the repatriation authorities suggested that if it did happen then my lot might well be
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moved up the repatriation schedule rather than re-locate them. I thought it wise to leek [sic] this information to them to act as an incentive to good behaviour and it did not take long to get things going. I did very little except to beg, borrow and scrounge stuff for them, including instruments and did not even vet scripts or attend rehearsals. I left that to my two Warrant Officers. It would have been a useless exercise anyway.
When the show was finally presented, the CO. and other Senior officers who had been invited seemed to enjoy themselves anyway although I suspect that many of the jokes were at our expense. Nevertheless, they all laughed in the right places; as I did, even if we did not fully understand what was being said. It was an interesting experience and there were no repercussions although their [sic] was an air of excitement creeping into our daily lives as this particular element of the vanquished Africa Corp. considered the pending return to their homes, or what was left of them, and as for me. What next?
About that period I was in the Mess one lunch-time when a noisy visiting aircrew were attracting a great deal of attention in the foyer and my eyes lighted on one of them. None other than Macdonalds Flight Engineer of my Stirling days, 'Paddy' Martin, now in the rank of Fg.Off, but we only managed a few minutes chat before they were all boarding a crew coach with I suspect, a little more than just their lunch on board, going out to their aircraft which was a Mk.V. Stirling no less.
When we met up again umpteen years later he swore that we had never met on such an occasion; but then he also swore that he had never attended my wedding in 1944 until I produced a photograph to prove that he did. The last information that he could recall of me was that `Tommy' Gamble had got the "chop" early in 1945. Close--very close, but not quite.
One very interesting event took place just about that time. A Courts Martial came up. That of a case of alleged rape of a WAAF by an aircrew Warrant Officer, and I found myself sitting with the court as one of the officers under instruction. All part of the training scheme.
The WO had engaged the services of a K.C. barrister whilst the prosecution had produced a relatively inexperienced officer, not of the legal profession, who had just been detailed for the job and the case lasted two days during which time I studied the form very carefully as it customary for anyone to be detailed for such jobs; either for defence or prosecution and my only experience of court procedure was in my youth when I had appeared before the magistrates for some minor cycling offence and this was very different.
We were in fact treated to some of the finest court arguments that it has ever been my privilege to witness as the barrister ripped the evidence of the prosecution to shreds in the most expert fashion and the case was not proven. It made me feel very uncomfortable to think that one day I might be detailed for such a job and find myself in the same invidious position as that unfortunate prosecuting officer so at that point I made two resolutions. One, to keep my head down when they were looking for someone to make a fool of himself in a court room, and Two, to dissuade anyone from accepting my services should I be so detailed. Needless to say, after it was all wrapped up I think we were all rather pleased to put our medals back into storage.
I then became heavily involved in the arrangements for the Squadron's move to Lyneham and followed the normal procedure of working with the RTO (Military Rail Transport Office) to move the remainder of the personnel that were not flying or going by road but when I submitted my part of the planned move of the movement order to the Station Commander he was not impressed and instructed me to cancel them and arrange for a fleet of coaches so that the move could be accomplished, taking a third of the time and with the bonus that the Squadrons would be non-operational for only a very short period. It made sense and having cancelled the RTO arrangements they were no longer concerned so I duly hired the coaches through a Christchurch firm and all went well. Shortly after the aircraft departed the
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transport baggage train convoy followed and a silence descended as the airfield was closed to active flying.
In due course the bill arrived for several hundred pounds and I passed it through accounts for payment thinking no more about it until an irate Group Accountant Officer came on the phone demanding to know why we had not used the RTO for transport and who had arranged it all. My insides went into a turmoil of panic as I thought of the consequences and the effect that it would have on my already overstrained finances particularly after he said that it was all very irregular and that he would send the bill personally to me for payment. That's when I dug my heels in and pointed out in no uncertain terms that it was the Group Captain's (who was no longer in command); decision and I had only carried out his instructions then the line cooled a little when he said he ought to send it to him instead.
In hindsight I suspect that he felt that he had to make a fuss under the circumstances but I think I chewed my fingernails down to nothing whilst I waited for the outcome. Thankfully I never did hear any more.
Meanwhile there was the problem of the shrinking station. I had been absorbed into the station HQ for all manner of duties and then in a twinkling of an eye I was unit Adjutant with a Squadron Leader CO. With all that on my shoulders it was time to place the full responsibility for the POW's onto the WO's. The senior was placed in charge and as the camp medical centre had already been closed I re-opened it and transferred the prisoners to it from the dispersed site which was closed. As far as their conditions were concerned they were now positively luxurious with all that a complete medical centre had to offer including constant hot water and a superb kitchen. That got them off of my back whilst I tackled the deluge of responsibilities that came my way.
We soon compressed the unit administration into one HQ building as bit by bit activities closed down and brought their own problems and although certain posts were disestablished there were some that had to remain and most of them fell into my lap. Almost every day another crop of posting notices arrived and more people were on there way leaving behind various duties for which they had been responsible and the one quick way was to concentrate that responsibility into the hands of some-one who would discharge the final act to terminate the job. With only a few officers left and with myself being one of the nominated seven to stay I would go so far as to suggest that I got more than my share being the junior officer.
All non-public accounts were concentrated under one control; mine, and although the monies were at the bank by the time I had collected seven accounts to the value of several thousand pounds I was beginning to feel somewhat uneasy particularly as I was delving into the mysteries of double entry book-keeping. There was more burning the midnight oil to study to try and work it all out and I tried desperately to take it in my stride without admitting that I knew very little about it in the first place. Now what would a Secondary schoolboy trained as a carpenter and subsequently a Wireless Operator/Gunner know about such things? Fortunately there was only one active account and although they all had to be audited by the accountant officer monthly who certified the balances I must have done it correctly as there were never any problems.
It was inevitable that among the various hats I was wearing I became the M.T. officer but only as the nominal head of the section which was as usual ably run by an experienced senior NCO. But the Air Force had this thing that only a commissioned officer could take the can back for anything that went wrong and I barely had time to sign for everything that I had become responsible for as it was so most of it was done tounge [sic] in cheek and fingers crossed. I had already crossed that bridge when I was at Lyneham so it was nothing new.
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One of the jobs for early elimination was that of Entertainments Officer as it was not an on-going thing but then it occurred to me that one of the accounts that I was managing was the PSI fund which was particularly healthy. The PSI fund is the equivalent of a Regimental Fund which when all was finally wound up would have any balance transferred to Group accounts. But it could be used for financing other projects-provided that it was not drained and I could not think of anything better than the concentration of the best of our remaining local talents into a final farewell party. It didn't take long to find someone to mastermind the production side and I developed it into a two hour music hall programme with some very accomplished and enthusiastic people. The hall was laid out along the lines of a German beer cellar with barrels of free beer being dispensed by real German waiters (my POW's) in white aprons in the time honoured fashion with free food laid on as well.
Maybe I pushed my luck a little but as I was also in charge of the few remaining service policemen I issued instructions to keep it cool with further orders to the POW's to the effect that none of them were to fall down until they had completed their jobs as barmen, cleaners and general handymen. As far as I know none of them did but no doubt because I was so heavily involved I could not have seen to everything and towards the end I was not far from falling down myself. I do know that when I did my rounds in the morning everything was back in place and cleaned up. If there had been any bad behaviour or punch-ups there was no evidence of it and the cells were empty. All I had to do after that was pay the bills but that was one hell of a party'
As the unit continued to thin out even more business came my way including the dreaded inventories and by that time I had already received the outcome of the Lyneham enquiry so although I was a bit peeved about it I felt safe in the knowledge that having started up my POW inventory from scratch it was a model of correctness from the time I opened it up. Nevertheless I was more than peeved when I found that I was required to take over dozens of depleted inventories from departing people and transfer the stocks to one holding inventory.
A job like that can only be done with a mountain of vouchers and although I tried to get the hard pressed storemen to do it internally I found myself stuck with it but it involved a lot of work including stock taking before taking some of them over. I had learned my lesson!
Numerous problems arose of course. Like the occasion when a bicycle found in the village pond was brought in by the local policeman. Identified by it's [sic] serial number the books showed that it had already been written off so no more paperwork was required. It was consigned to the scrap dump which was yet another of my responsibilities.
Naturally there was a lot of useful scrap in the yard as well as the rubbish and it was my job to see that a contract was let to a local merchant whose outgoing loads had to be inspected and approved by me at the Guard room and the price agreed on a signed invoice which went to the accountant officer who subsequently collected the money. It was all done according to the regulations so it was with some surprise that on one of my tours of the airfield I investigated the contents of a large packing case in the area of the old bomb dump. I found that it contained a brand new, still sealed, Wright Cyclone aero engine with American markings that had obviously been left behind by the USAAF prior to `D' Day.
Perhaps it was too innocent but at that time it seemed that my biggest problem was how to get rid of it as it was definitely not on charge. It was a completely surplus item until enquiries through the supply people resolved it. You simply took such an item on charge by filling in the appropriate vouchers and once it's on the books that's it. You can then transfer it so Engine, Aero, Wright Cyclone, Mk. ?, serial no. ? Port, One, was dealt with and I thought that was the end of it. Within an hour of having it picked up and conveyed to stores the scrap contractor was knocking at my door. He claimed that he had `discovered' same, but had not said anything to me whilst he was looking for a home for it, which he had only just done.
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I have often wondered if [sic] would really have known-anything about it's departure as according to him he had found someone running a one man airline with a Dakota who could have done with a spare engine and £500 was the price he was going to put to me but it was too late. (and hard luck Freddie Laker!). I certainly could have made use of that sort of money at that time and I might have been tempted but as the RAF was still using Dakota's it no doubt found it's way into one of them at a later date. There was never such another lucrative opportunity but there was no time to cry over spilt milk either. I was up to my ears in stores vouchers and posting notices as I had become the Personnel Officer again as the unit got smaller by the day and we got nearer our dead-line date. Then the time came when the POW's were warned to be ready.
When the day finally came there was no ceremony. All the hand shaking had been done before they were paraded. There was just a quick salute and "goodbye and good luck". That was that. Some of them had been receiving mail via the Red Cross and they had had access to UK newspapers so they knew what to expect. Those who had lost touch with family for various reasons did not have a lot to celebrate knowing that they were going back to a land that had been ravaged by a war that had destroyed so much. I knew what it was like; I had seen it, so there was no cheering and I was glad to see the back of them. As they marched off there was one thought that struck me that the WO's had not mentioned; the radio that I had been permitted to purchase on their behalf had not been handed back and I had to account for it. It was "Halt, about turn" and it didn't take long to find it when I told them that it had to be returned, even if they missed their train. One of them had it under his greatcoat!!!
It didn't take long to clear up the paper work after they had left then it was nose to the grindstone again as the next major job had to be attended to. That was the disposal of all non-public assets, mainly PSI funded, that had already been collected and an inventory drawn up which I then had to dispose of by public auction for which I engaged a firm of auctioneers. In all the book value was just over a thousand pounds and shortly before the sale which had been advertised I had a visit from a retired Air Commodore representing the Bournmouth [sic] Branch of the Royal Air Force Association who was prepared to make a cash offer for the whole lot at half the book value. I managed to negotiate the addition of the auctioneers fee if it was acceptable. It seemed a good deal to me but when I put the idea to the Group Accountant he was horrified. Oh dear no! It was most irregular and the regulations stated quite plainly that it had to go to auction so despite considerable pleading and argument he had the final word. Whilst my sympathies were with the Air Commodore and the RAFA there was nothing I could do about except apologise to him and let the sale go ahead.
I did not attend the auction and was quite happy to leave it in the capable hands of the experts but subsequently when I got the proceeds, less commission and handling fees it did not amount to much more than £100 for the lot! I was hot foot down to their offices for explanation but it was all above board although the receipts showed that most items had been knocked down at quite ridiculously low prices but I did find out that a certain Air Commodore had been in attendance and he and his cronies had done most of the bidding. As far as I was concerned the RAFA had got the stuff much cheaper than they would have done by private sale although I had a sneaking feeling that a certain Group Accountant was not going to be very happy so I obtained a complete breakdown of the sale prices and the purchasers before I left their office. Just as well. When the Group Accountant did spot it it really did 'hit the fan'. The line was red hot as we discussed the pro's and cons and it was perhaps my suggestion that in hindsight we should have accepted the cash offer in the first place. That brought forth accusations of collusion and conspiracy. That did it. I was on a short fuse anyway flogging my guts out and with more than my fair share of responsibility and there he was, up in his ivory tower counting paper money so I let him have facts and figures, not forgetting to point out that I was after all a lowly GD(General Duties) Flying Officer doing my best in a job that
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I had received absolutely no training for. Then he simmered down, huffing and puffing, "it's still all very irregular". I began to get somewhat fed up with Admin duties that was for sure but had no option but to "press on".
Fortunately the unit accountant had been the Accountant Officer at Chedburgh when I was there in 1943 and only dealt with the day to day financial matters at Holmsley but knew enough of our experiences there at the time was very sympathetic and supportive and assured me that the Group A.O. was only making waves in case anything went seriously wrong and he got the blame for it so I learned a few more lessons about human nature. He was very helpful in many ways.
On one occasion he arrived at the office from Lyndhurst on his scooter and related the story of how he had just seen a pig clouted by a car down the road and how it had finished up head first in a ditch looking very dead. The driver had not stopped and obviously would not be reporting it as the bye-laws of the New Forest gave right of way to animals. But `headfirst' sounded good to me. I don't know if it was the 'creegie' still in me or just the thought of all that good meat going to waste but in no time at all I had a two ton truck and two kitchen hands with carving knives on board scorching down the road where we spotted the animal, still headfirst and no longer bleeding. Many people must have passed it and there no doubt in my mind that if it was left a great deal of fresh meat would go to waste even if the owner of the animal were to be found within the next few hours so we cruised pat [sic] the corpse and cruised back again keeping a good look-out in both directions. As we came up to it there was nothing in sight arid within a matter of seconds it was on board and we were off. It certainly supplemented our rations for a few days and I had no qualms about my action which were quite illegal and would have caused a few embarrassing headlines if the law had been tested.
Fortunately for me it never was.
The unit finally dwindled to three officers and a handful of airmen and we all finished up in a large house that had been the CO's official residence. I claimed an enormous room, en-suite, as I was the only one living in so I had a little luxury that compensated to a degree for the enormous amount of paperwork that was involved. Even moving has it's problems like decommissioning this that and the other, re-arranging the staff, and getting phones transferred as we no longer needed a switchboard. I was still doing about 16 hours a day to keep on top of the work so that I could have my week-ends free to get through to Worthing when a bombshell arrived in the form of a posting notice detaching me to Hereford, on an [underlined] Admin course!!!! [/underlined]
At the time I thought that perhaps my career was being advanced by that development so I didn't make a fuss although the duration of the course was three weeks. I [sic] would mean nearly a month without visiting home as it was too far on the bike and too expensive by train. My fellow officers thought it would do me good to take the course so I was off.
Perhaps I would have benefited from it if it had not been a course specifically designed for young aircrew officers to teach them the inner workings of the Air Force although at first I decided to go along with it. Within a few days I came to the conclusion that it was not for the likes of me who was actually doing such work. It seemed more of a disciplinary course to occupy idle hands and mine had been far from idle for a long time. I became more and more resentful as the days went by as I was shown how to use a rifle and a pistol and a Sten gun and engage in all manner of field craft including escape and evasion techniques which involved crawling around in long wet grass which at one point I strongly objected to only to be told that I might find the experience useful one day! What does one say to that? Matey, I've done it, and a fat lot of good it was when in the end I was surrounded and had a Schmeisser stuck up my nose. It didn't cut any ice. Then there was all the drill and parade procedures which were not entirely new to me either although I can understand the needs of some who for some reason didn't know one end of a rifle from the other and were
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somewhat unwilling to pull triggers and throw grenades. I wondered what they had been doing in their very limited careers!
The classroom work was mainly forms, forms and more forms and their use therof [sic] as well as stores procedures and of other things like how to write letters, command structure and a lot of other stuff that was old hat. By the end of the first week I was fuming I was not learning anything new and there was a lot of work piling up at Holmsley just waiting for me to deal with. Only the most essential would be dealt with by the others and I could visualise many hours of binding graft before I was likely to have broken the back of it.
I must confess that my attitude toward the course as we started the second week was not going unnoticed by the course commander who quite naturally took me aside to point out the error of my ways. That is when the real reason for the course was confirmed. Not only was it intended for surplus aircrew officers to find something for them to do but it definitely was a disciplinary course as well so I was being assessed accordingly--------and I was not doing very well! It seemed that we had gone back in time to "Yours is not to reason why etc" and I had had enough of that as an airman. For a start I wondered why I had been sent on such a course anyway so I promptly made a request to phone my parent Group HQ `P' Staff which brought forth howls of indignant protest. Despite the fact that I was normally in touch with the chap on an almost daily basis I was told in no uncertain terms that such lowly types as myself were not allowed to communicate direct with the higher echelons. It was only the prerogative of senior officers to the `top brass' and that is what I was on the course to learn about. As far as I was concerned it was utter nonsense and I had serious doubts regarding the background experience of this Flight Lieutenant of the A & SD (Admin & Special Duties) Branch who seemed unaware that the `top brass' were only people like ourselves holding staff appointments. Not only that, a lot of them were like myself of the GD (General Duties-Flying) Branch. Expected to do anything that was thrown at them------including flying!
Suitably chastised I was dismissed with threats of extra orderly officer duties and the inclusion of some appropriate remarks on my course and confidential report so I simmered down a bit as I waited for an opportunity to use his phone whilst he was out of his office a few days later. There all hell let loose when he suddenly burst in, very angry and rightfully indignant at the audacity etc, etc, at performing, in his eyes, an almost criminal act. Not that I was unduly worried as by that time I had already done what I set out to do and the threats went over my head.
Within four hours a signal arrived from Transport Command HQ. recalling me to my unit urgently and naturally I was called to his office immediately to have the signal waived under my nose. "Explain this!!!! So I did, in detail that he had not been prepared to listen to previously and I think he understood my action even if he could not approve of the manner in which I had dealt with it. As far as I was concerned I was off the damn silly course and I was on my way.
As soon as I returned to base I plunged into a mountain of paper work and after two days and nights of frenzied activity I came out on top ready for a long week-end at home.
During that burst of activity there was an unannounced staff visit from Group HQ and all the visitors could find was one junior officer slaving away, whilst the others were out hunting, shooting and fishing around the area and that put the cat among the pigeons. That and my absence for nearly two weeks seemed to solve the problem of the numerous delays that occurred in the closing down procedure. Hence a snap visit! And although I could only explain the absence of the others by saying they were on tours of inspection, when they did turn up there was a lot of muttering behind closed doors and I was only too happy to bury myself in paper again.
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A few more weeks went by until at last we were run right down to a C & M (Care & Maintenance) party. At last I had got my head above water and I could relax a little-----but not for long.
A telephone call from Group, followed by a posting notice gave me advance warning of my posting to Oakington in Cambridgeshire for --------Admin duties, to report in a few days time, but as far as I was concerned, not before I had another long week-end at home. After just thirty months I was a bit of a stranger at home, especially to the baby but I felt that something had to be sacrificed if there was any chance that I could make a career out of the Air Force. At least, I thought, Oakington is a well established station so I should slip into the same sort of job that I had done at Lyneham without any hassle. I had had enough challenges for a while-------but I had overlooked the fact that so had Lyneham been well established and what a mess that had been in. There was more to come.
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[underlined] CHAPTER THREE [/underlined]
The journey up to Oakington was nearly a disaster. After a few days at home I set off on the motor bike on a cold and frosty morning, Loaded to the hilt, wearing full flying kit over my uniform and greatcoat which included a bright yellow immersion suit and flying boots, helmet, goggles and gloves, looking like something from outer space but warm and well protected I had just cleared the London area when the front of a blizzard caught up with me and my speed was drastically reduced to a few miles an hour with my feet stuck out like out-riggers to prevent me sliding all over the place and in those conditions I pressed on until I got to Baldock.
By that time there was between three and four inches of virgin snow covering everything and every sensible traveller had got off of the road. There was very little other traffic so I ventured down the hill very slowly with my aching legs still propping up the bike and found myself gaining on the only other vehicle in sight which was a fairly high standing two ton truck, and I was desperately trying to slow down when suddenly the truck driver braked and slithered along fishtailing to a stop. I knew that my brakes were not going to stop me as I slid gently towards the back-end of the truck and when it quite obvious that the tailboard hinges were going to spread my face I took the only option open to me. I flipped the bike on it's side and went underneath. It was just as well the truck had a good ground clearance as I went right underneath the back axle and came out between the front and rear wheels with my tail in the gutter. The driver had obviously been completely unaware of the incident as within seconds of my coming to rest he started to move off, with my front wheel right underneath his rear wheel so I reached out and pushed on the truck wheel and the bike and I slid out just enough to avoid serious damage to the bike. The truck wheel just squashed over the front number plate and mudguard and then he was gone before I could get my breath back. There was not another vehicle in sight and the only other person around was an elderly lady, who might well have been the cause of the drivers urgent braking; who, observing the situation, was concerned enough to ask if I had had an accident!! What she thought I was doing there, laying in the gutter with a motor-bike I don't know but I think that I said something suitably facetious as she tottered off and I started to sort myself out.
I was very glad that I was wearing so much gear rather than having tried to pack it. I was not even bruised and apart from a slightly bent number plate and tip of the mudguard there was no other damage to the bike but it took a while before I recovered sufficiently to get going again getting more than a little concerned as it had started to snow quite heavily. However, with traffic clear roads I was able to make progress and eventually outran the weather front, coming out completely in the clear and completing the last ten miles completely free of snow. Oh, blessed relief…..until I ran out of petrol just in sight of the camp!! I had overlooked the fact that I had been using it up at a much higher rate than normal doing so many miles in low gears. Fortunately an Air Ministry Works Dept truck came along and with the aid of a length of rope I was gently towed the rest of the way. After an eight hour journey I had at made it to Oakington and I was only too glad to book into the Mess and leave the arrival formalities until the following day. A bath, a change of clothes and a meal and early to bed made all the difference.
I soon found that the job was to be the same as Lyneham and I was looking forward to free-wheeling for a while until I met the C.O. I could hardly believe my ears after the introduction. "Ah" he said, "you are the very man I have been waiting far. My Central Registry and internal communications are in a bit of a mess and I'm told that you the man to fix things. The last chap couldn't sort things out and I've got rid of him so off you go and get stuck in". Oh no........not again!
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The only consolation was that my previous efforts seem to have been recognised and that maybe, just maybe, I might be able to find a career in the Secretarial Branch ultimately as I always seemed to be sorting out jobs that Secretarial types had made a cock-up of; so off I went and "got stuck in". There was no-one to take over from so once again I started from scratch: At least there was not the panic to get things squared up and the routine work went smoothly enough whilst I conducted a searching enquiry into the main problem that I had been instructed to sort out.
At that time my own personal problems needed sorting out as well. Now that I was a family man the household at Worthing was getting a bit crowded particularly since Dorothy's brother-in-law had at last been de-mobbed after being abroad with the 8th Army for four years and there was family expected in that direction. I was frantically looking around for suitable accommodation and although official quarters for married personnel was beginning to come back on the scene the points system that determined one's entitlement suggested that it was going to be a long time before I qualified for one. I was just one of millions of people who were desperately trying to re-settle and in need of accommodation. The story was invariably the same when one enquired. "Sorry, no children" and it all added to the frustration.
Eventually I did find a place just to the North of Cambridge on the Huntingdon road and plans were made although I must confess that I did not tell Dorothy the exact arrangement of the accommodation. The kitchen was in the basement. The living room was on the ground floor. The bathroom was on the second floor and the bedroom on the third floor! I didn't dare, but I hired a car and drove down to Worthing in a clear gap in the weather pattern that the Met. Man assured me would last a couple of days.
Apart from the occasional sortie in the Flight pick-up van when I had been at Newmarket two years previously I had never taken a car on the public highway before but I don't think that I gave it a second thought. The family needed something picked up from near Leighton Buzzard `on the way' which created a fair sized `dog-leg' but did give me a few more miles to come to terms with my lack of experience, and it avoided London so somehow I made it to Worthing.
Travelling by car those days was generally a fairly slow business as there were few major roads that allowed high speed cruising and one just plodded on but there was no time to mess about as we loaded up the car the following morning and off we went, having arranged that the pram, fully loaded, was to follow by rail. There were tears on our departure and I think that perhaps the most ironic thing was the remark from my sister-in-law that there was no need to worry as "Alan was a good driver" and that we would be OK. I don't know what gave her that impression. Little did they know, but I had managed 200 miles without any problem......so what was another 140! The journey was not uneventful! That would have been too much to ask for.
The hire car had been a reluctant starter at the very outset but we had got as far as Kingston when in the dip under the railway by the station the engine packed up and so did the battery. Not the best place to fizzle out but eventually we were pulled clear and towed to a garage a little further up where I purchased a new battery and we were an our way again. The fact that the cost of the battery had to come off the hire fee did not please the hire firm when the car was returned but a compromise was eventually reached. The main thing was that we had taken up residence in a place of our own for the very first time and much to my surprise Dorothy accepted the arrangement of the flat although we soon made alternative plans to avoid going right to the top of the house to a cold bedroom as I had already installed a convertible settee in the living room. That was soon put to use.
The met. Man's forecast was absolutely spot on. The day after we arrived the weather that had been expected hit us with a vengeance when about a foot of snow fell. The basement back door was unusable with a drift of snow filling the door well right to the top and massive
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drifts along the road due to cross winds were up to six feet-high. Cars were already stuck. It was impossible to get the bike out from the bottom of the garden and a colleague who lived in the same building joined me in walking to camp across country. It was a long way and our situation was not improved when we came to the edge of the airfield and in making a direct approach to a gate he disappeared through the snow cover up to his neck in a ditch but we made it in the end. I'm glad it was him in the lead as he was nearly a foot taller than me. I would have completely disappeared!
We struggled back home in the late afternoon as life on the station virtually came to a standstill. There was no flying and with more snow forecast the whole airfield was blanketed although an energetic but useless snow clearing operation was initiated which at least kept us warm. There was a slight spell of thawing when some areas of the road went a bit slushy but then a `deep freeze' hit the whole area and everything was locked up solid. People got to and from work the best way they could. The main Cambridge to Huntingdon road was impassable due to buried frozen in vehicles. The C.O. issued an order of the day allowing any type of clothing to be worn to cope with the extreme weather and we just battled on from day to day. At home of course there was no central heating but fires just had to be kept going on the fuel supplies I had stocked up although it was difficult to get at and it was supplemented with anything else that was to hand but it thawed and froze alternatively for weeks before a general thaw finally set in and vehicles could be released from their icy cocoons, many totally ruined. The A604 (now the A14) was still difficult to negotiate through ridges and ruts of ice well into March.
Meanwhile I had had all the time I needed to complete my survey and draw up my plans accordingly. I placed a brief outline of my proposals before the C.O. and although he gave me cart-blanche to get on with an added word of warning such as "cock it up and you will follow the last chap" so I worked my way right through the plan once more to look for problems before drafting the final order. Meanwhile, I had collected two more responsibilities. The Post Office as Postmaster and that of Mess Secretary which meant that more of my precious time would be used up but the day came when the plan that I had circulated to all users was put into effect and on that day there was absolutely no problem with it's introduction. I had expected some hick-ups but it all worked like a charm.
I decentralised the Registry to cut down the appalling wasteful duplication of just about everything that was going in and out. That in itself was causing delays and was a self generated work load. New index cards and registers were brought into use and the system updated to ensure that files were booked back in as well as out! As daft as it may seem that had not been the case so files could wander around between people and departments and the Registry had no knowledge of the whereabouts of a file if it was not in it's cabinet. I have often wondered what 'mastermind' had set all that up in the first place as it certainly did not conform to the Manual of Office Administration. However, new index cards and registers were brought into use and when it got under way the staff had no difficulty in handling the new system so within days a few sub-registry's became redundant and number of active filing cabinets was reduced from twenty to four, all cross referenced to the old registry. The bumbling circulation of paper was at last reduced to manageable proportions. The C.O. spent less time than he had done previously handling his daily correspondence and when I found that too many people were now sitting around doing little more than making tea a quick establishment review reduced the number of Registry clerks from ten to four. It made my life a little easier too as long as I didn't collect too many other jobs on the strength of my success.
I was certain by this time that it could only do me good as far as my confidential report was concerned. I had already applied for and been granted two extentions [sic] of service that had taken me beyond my normal discharge date and that's, as far as I was concerned, was what it was all about if I was going to be noticed. Any ambitions that I had at that time were
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mainly concerned with holding on to a relatively well paid job as a lot of my school chums were not finding 'civvy street' all that easy. I had no other qualifications other that of cabinet maker/polisher, [underlined] lapsed, [/underlined] and wireless operator, almost lapsed, so I just hung on to what I had got.
Like a good many of my age group and background, politics were not my strong point but it was not long before there was an awareness. Some very odd things were happening. The first post-war elections had shaken a lot of people when our remarkable war-time leader's party had been rejected for a different administration with an overwhelming majority. It did not make sense to me but the daily routine had to go just the same although some very subtle changes were taking place. Naturally I was shielded from a lot of it by being in the Armed Forces but it was difficult not to notice what was going an as the main effort was being channelled into `Nationalisation'! That meant roads, rail, steel coal, electricity, road transport, health care and a lot more that was in the pipeline. It was one of the great bloodless revolutions of the age. It was of course jobs for the `boys', the party members, who were often elevated to manage their previous employers businesses for the benefit of the state. History will show whether it worked or not but a lot of new ideas were filtering into the Forces.
One of those was the formation of a Station Committee made up representatives of all ranks from all departments, elected by ballot and not by appointment, which was to sit weekly to air grievances, discuss working arrangements and conditions and in fact anything other than pay, appointments and promotion. The unit Commander chaired the committee but thank God he had the power of veto and most commanders voiced their indignation at having their time wasted with such nonsense. Like mine did when he was on his way to such a meeting at which I was to take the minutes. "Come on Gamble; lets get along to this bloody silly union meeting". What a funny way to run a military establishment. It was a complete turnaround from the normal well established command structure and had all the ingredients to undermine discipline. It did little more than waste time but I had the distinct feeling that the tail was beginning to wag the dog!
I ran into a union problem sooner than I expected when we had two steward posts in the Mess disestablished. The disestablishment notice came straight out of the blue and the Mess Manager and I agreed that we would could [sic] do without the two least useful members of the staff who were duly served notice. Immediately there was a great deal of protest about being contrary to trades union practice etc, and that their representatives would be taking up the policy of disestablishing jobs without union consultation as well as giving notice to people to terminate their employment without the same consultation.
I turned a blind eye to it all but within a few hours I had a trade union rep. From Cambridge breathing heavily in my ear and telling me that I couldn't do it. That was red rag to a bull so I dismissed him with a flea in his ear but it was not over. A few hours later a chap from an Air Ministry department for civil relations or something was on the phone telling me that I couldn't do it, and quoted chapter and verse from the newly drawn up trade union rule book so I had no choice but to bow to that although I insisted that I had it in writing. Meanwhile the two men were re-instated as we were forced to apply the last in first out rule. As far as I was concerned it still was not over. Two could play that game.
I got hold of a copy of the union rule book and studied it at great length with the Mess Manager before we took our next step. Within a few days two people got their cards by reason of incompetence. (They had had plenty of verbal warnings over a period of time, and a written one as soon as they had been re-employed)......and immediately afterwards the two men that we wanted to keep were re-instated. Of course, there were immediate screams of protest from the union officials so I invited them to a face to face confrontation with both the Mess Manager and myself where they used every argument they could accusing us of `collusion',
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`unfair treatment' and `victimisation', but what they couldn't say was that it was illegal. It was right out of their own rule book but I was never entirely comfortable about the incident but I was damned if I was going to be told who and who not I could employ in certain circumstances. I quickly briefed the C.O. in case of repercussions but nothing further came of it.
It was about that time another incredibly wasteful practice came to light more or less by accident.
We were continually being exhorted to use less stationary and in particular duplicating paper and I had already done quite a lot to reduce the consumption by the registry arrangements. I had followed it up by reducing the supply to sub units and at the same time allocating more to the central registry for printing on behalf of the sub units although every job had to be vetted by my chief clerk. That had helped but we were still going through our allocation rather quickly and as H.M. Stationary Office were not always prepared to meet supplementary demands WE had to do something about it. WE equals ME in those circumstances as it fell into my lap once more as unit commanders complained to the Senior Admin Officer that they were being starved of certain stationary items. It was just about that time that Bourne, on the Cambridge to St.Neots road, for-which we were the parent unit, was in the late stages of closing down so I went over to see if they had anything in the stationary line that would be of any use to us. What I found was an Alladins cave as the stationary store was opened for me!.
There was an assortment of exotic stuff like the pale blue embossed pre-war paper for the exclusive use of unit commanders. Beautifully bound ledgers, some indexed. Note books, log books and all kinds of stuff that must have accumulated over a long period. It was stuff that if you were to order any of it in the present conditions you would be very lucky to have got any of it without putting up a special case. I was bugg eyed and it did not take long to transfer that lot to a three tonner and convey it to Oakington. Our stationary cupboard had to be re-arranged with the assistance of most of my staff and re-stocked until it was virtually bulging at the seams... ...and I held the key and a newly drawn up stock book!!
I think that I know how it was all accumulated. The same half yearly demand must have gone in as regular as clockwork irrespective of stocks but times were changing and so were the figures that showed that the Air Force was using even more paper per flying hour than ever before but no-one could say Oakington was not doing it's bit although there were still some items that we were short of so I phoned H.M. Stationary Office and did a deal. I don't think such a thing had ever happened before. There was a lot of huffing and puffing and expressions of "highly irregular" but they went along with it. We sent them a large packing case of what I considered was surplus to our requirements in exchange for a supplementary issue of items we were in urgent need of and everyone was happy but I just wondered how often that sort of wastefulness had been repeated by the hundreds of other units up and down the country during the war when every commodity was so precious to us and had often cost lives to import the raw materials. It was mind boggling.
Bit by bit life became a little more regulated although it was never without it's share of excitement and on occasions I even managed to tour around various other parts of the station including the airfield and the aircraft; Dakota's no less! It was not long after the snow and ice cleared and things started to warm up that the unsettled conditions usually associated with the end of April brought some savage weather including the most violent thunderstorms that I have only ever seen on one other occasion since.
In the late morning the sky darkened by degrees until it became as black as night and the wind increased by the minute to the point where it started to howl with the most savage gusts.....and then the rain came! It slashed and swirled and in no time all the roads were like rivers as the drains overloaded and I stood in my office window at the front of the HQ
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building thinking how lucky I was that I was not out in it. Anyone with any sense had taken cover and as I contemplated the violence of the storm I was astonished to see the striped pole barrier in front of the Guard Room suddenly whip into the vertical, snap off like a matchstick and disappear over the building. It occurred to me that that would be a job I would have to see to when the storm abated when the little Austin Seven which was parked outside and had been rocking about as each gust hit it; suddenly flipped on it's side. Oh well, I thought that can wait too.......then the phone rang.
Above a great deal of noise on the line an almost hysterical WAAF in the Post Office blurted out "please come at once sir, the roof has blown off”. My first reaction was "S..." but I had no choice so out I went, splashing my way through about four inches of water and was soaked in a matter of seconds. The Post Office looked a sorry sight minus it's roof which lay, completely wrecked, not far away but the poor girls were more concerned with the fact that as they had just set up the counter for business the contents of their trays had been sucked up, following the roof, and had been deposited far and wide. I don't remember having any lunch that day.
The clerks gathered up all the rest of their Post Office stocks and set up a temporary post room in the WAAF quarters and then I locked the place up! That was a laugh. I felt that I had to do that as only a week before I had had new mortice locks fitted and the safe securely embedded in brickwork. All that and now the place was roofless!
Although the clerks had set up the post room just inside the WAAF quarters they initially used the laundry room for sorting out their stock. A few telephone calls got some search parties organised as well as a broadcast on the PA system and before long some very soggy money and postal orders started coming in. It was rinsed, dried and ironed much to the amusement of all concerned but the amazing thing was that when I called off the search there was only one ten shilling (50p) postal order missing. When the inspectors arrived from Cambridge GPO (General Post Office) towards the end of the day they were agreeably surprised that that was all they had to write off after seeing the state of the Post Office. We were all somewhat relieved at that. I made may report to the C.O. later and followed up with a load of repair work including the barrier pole in front of the Guard Room.
I thought that was enough for one day until I got home. Dorothy had had her share as well. The downpour had filled up a balcony outside a full length window of one of the other flats and she had spent a lot of time baling out the balcony to stop the flow into the room whilst the storm was raging. We were both very relieved when that day was over.
Eventually things settled down as the year wore on and we experienced a most beautiful summer. Life in Cambridge with it's wonderful buildings and activities made life very interesting. Even the baby indulged us by winning first prize in a baby competition but as far as the job was concerned with most of the problems ironed out it was almost boring, but a great opportunity to develope [sic] family life to the full. Again it was too good to last!
I was asked to report to Transport Command HQ at Teddington, Middlesex for a job I [sic] interview and I was sure that the business was opening up for me. Out of the four candidates for the job I was offered it and I accepted. It was in the "P" Staff (Personnel) dept of the HQ so before long I was wrapping up and making the necessary arrangements to move the family. Although Teddington was not too far away Dorothy felt that she did not want to be on her own and preferred to go back to Worthing with her parents; [underlined] particularly as we had just found out that there was another addition to the family on the way! [/underlined] In hindsight it was a pity that we gave up the flat. I'm sure that we could have coped but Teddington was also convenient for Worthing but we settled for that.
The C.O. gave me the opportunity of nominating a suitable relief so a friend who was the Operation Wing Adjutant was acceptable and so it was goodbye Oakington. Here we go again!
23
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One or more pages is missing, apparently pages 24 – 86
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EXTRACT FROM
[underlined] NIL DESPERANUM…… [/underlined] OR
IF YOU CAN’T TAKE A JOKE ………
[underlined] BY [/underlined]
[underlined] A. GAMBLE [/underlined]
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knock. Pay awards had for some time been based on a flat rate rather than a percentage increase and the differential between ranks had closed up considerably. I now found that a Warrant Officer aircrew was in fact was in fact better off than a Flight Lieutenant!, which did not make a lot of sense. My situation was not improved by the Wolsley's rather extravagant use of oil and petrol and it eventually ran a big-end on the A5 just North of Birmingham on the way home one week-end so I didn't make it. Fortunately I had relatives at West Bromwich so I was able to stay with them until I could pick the car up in sufficient time to get back Sunday evening. That made another nasty hole in the accounts!.
That little episode put paid to a few week-ends at home. There was no-one at that time living anywhere around or on route that I could share with so I was obliged to stay in the mess with others in a similar state, although we often filled up a car and toured into Wales for a day to fill in the time.
A friend kindly offered me the use of his motor bike to go home one week-end and although it was only a clapped out 250cc side valve BSA I thought it was worth a try. That was a laugh and a half.
I dressed up in a selection of flying gear that I had with me and I was off into the wide blue yonder. I mounted the thing and kicked it into life and the first thing that was obviously wrong was the throttle which had a mind of it's own. I was not the sort of chap who could tolerate sloppy machinery so a quick investigation soon found that the top of the carburettor needed screwing back on and with a few other adjustments I set off. Before I had got to the main gate I was obliged to totter down to the MT yard to have the tyres inflated by as much as 20lbs both front and rear and then I was under way. Even then I was not feeling too happy about the machine. There were unpleasant noises from the engine and the first few bends caused the most peculiar sensations so another pit stop to tighten the head and forks dampers was taken. They had been very very loose and being forks with dampers gives some indication of it's great age. I was still feeling my way with it when I had to put the brakes on rather briskly when the lights went against me in Wellington and the back wheel locked up throwing me into
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gutter. Another pit stop to adjust primary and main chains and brake linkage was necessary before I could head East again. I very nearly threw my hand in then but surprisingly I found myself jogging along quite comfortably at between 45 and 50 but with still an ear tuned to the knocking from the engine until a convenient garage came in sight and it seemed an appropriate time to stop as there were signs of overheating. This is a bit of an understatement as she was almost red hot 'pinging' with excess heat. Whilst it was cooling down I dipped the oil tank and couldn't find a level so it took nearly two pints to top it up, then it was cool enough to change the spark plug and reset the points before the final test. I had so far done about 60 miles in three hours and it was decision time as I gingerly started up and carefully took off once more.
After a few more miles all was well so I decided to go for broke and head for home at speeds between 50 and 60 and finally arrived at Marham some 7 hours after departure much to the surprise of the rest of the family.
The return journey on Sunday took less than 4 hours so at breakfast on Monday morning I was able to tell the owner of the bike that all was well and I hope he didn’t mind that I had found it necessary to make a few adjustments which he was quite happy about.
He did not seem quite so happy later on that evening when he came into the bar with plasters on his face and a bandage on his hand. Before I could [inserted] say [/inserted] anything he hurled at me "you and your bloody adjustments", but laughed as he said it before telling that me what it was all about. Apparently, being so used to the machine that he had allowed to get so sloppy and gutless he had attempted to drive off in his usual way but it reared up, tore across a rose bed and threw him in another one!. Nevertheless, he was very impressed with the way it performed when he had got used to it so when the word got around I finished up with a few more machines to tinker with to keep me occupied.
The fastest I ever did that journey one way was 30 minutes. In a Canberra!. I was being 'dined out' at Marham and the aircraft was laid on for me one Friday afternoon. The pilot was the co-pilot of my last 90 Squadron crew and he showed Shawbury a few thing…and me. It was the: first time I had
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ever done a 'rotation' take-off although I had seen one or two demonstrated....I think I left my stomach on the runway when shortly after the kick up the backside by the tremendous acceleration he pulled it up almost vertical like a rocket and kept going until we got to around 10,000ft before levelling out and setting course for Marham. I was very impressed with that for an old bomber man who was more used to 500ft a minute climb hanging on the props with everything shaking and thundering. The return journey was done on the Monday morning a little more gently in an Oxford.
By that time a second course was running and another friend who had been an instructor on the Marham training Squadron had joined the course on transfer. He lived at Feltwell and was prepared to divert through Marham for a share of the running costs so until the end of the course that eased the burden a bit but as the course was nearing it's end like everyone else I was concerned to know about my posting. There was nothing notified so I was still hoping for a return to Marham but when the course results were made known after the final exams I was not pleased. Never mind about Marham...what what about Egypt?.
There was no point in making a fuss, one just had to accept those things so most of my embarkation leave was taken up settling the family back in Worthing as there was no way that I would be getting quarters out there in the 61 days after my effective posting to the Middle East and they would be obliged to move after that anyway.
I sailed on the RAF troopship Empire Ken out of Southampton in the Summer of 1954 and there were times that I wished I had taken up one of the jobs that I had been offered in Shell distribution.
I was the only one that had got an overseas posting and apparently it was almost unheard of. Overseas units usually wanted controllers with a bit of experience behind them but there I was, posted to the main terminal for the Canal Zone; Fayed. The only consolation was that it would be more or less in the centre of things and not stuck half way up a Wadi.
I soon found my sea legs and how to cope with bar prices which in today's money was less than 5p a double but it was the heat that took a lot of handling. The ship had canvas ducting to
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direct air down to the lower troop decks but it was ghastly even then and the troops, including Waafs used to have to come up on deck in shifts for a breather but it was one of those situations that could only be enjoyed for that period of time. With temperatures well over 100deg. the minute you went down below you started oozing again and just had to wait for the next turn on deck. The ship had never been built for that sort of climate anyway otherwise it might have had a more sophisticated ventilation system. The Empire Ken was a German ship built in the Blomm and Voss yards at Hamburg which we had taken as part of the war reparations and was more suited to the Baltic or the North Sea. I had had enough of it by the time the journey was finished anyway. We stopped at Algiers and subsequently arrived at Port Said to exchange sweaty discomfort for smelly and sweaty discomfort. It took a bit of getting used to. After disembarkation and sorting out of paperwork I was on my way by bus down the canal road wondering if I would ever get used to it with persperation [sic] pouring off me from top to bottom and to experience the further delights of the dust, flies, heat and smells of the Land of the Pharoes [sic] . Two minutes of that and I was quite willing to let them have it back!. At last I understood why my father used to get so incenced [sic] about flies. He had done it all both in India and Egypt many years before. My main concern was that I was entering a new phase of my career with a difference; as a Branch Officer, ie, Air Traffic Control, and no longer General Duties(Aircrew) and a dogsbody for a multitude of other jobs. It had been my experience that it had always been very difficult to detail such Branch Officers for extra duties, especially when they were so often shift workers and there were many units that maintained a 24 hour Air Traffic Control service. Fayed was one of them!.
Some of the most serious of local troubles in the Canal Zone had simmered down a bit and it was a lot safer than it had been a year earlier with the political unrest, mainly caused by the fact that there were elements in Egypt that wanted us out and Egypt for the Egyptions [sic] . They were talking, we were talking with an eye on the security of our oil supplies and trade routes through the Suez Canal. It was obvious that we were not going to give that up without favourable agreements after what it
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had cost us during the war in terms of blood sweat and tears.
So there I was. Arrival one day and to work the next although it was three weeks before I went on a solo watch after 'on the job training'; testing and certification. It was relatively simple and so was the set up. It was all very crude and temporary and had not changed a lot since the war but surprisingly enough it all worked efficiently albeit with the need for considerable local knowledge which was to be expected.
Fayed was the terminal for the Canal Zone with fighter airfields and other units to the North and the South and operated 24 hours a day with four short range Transport Squadrons that went out on scheduled flights in all directions, calling at Khartoum, Aden, Habbanyia (Iraq), Cyprus, Malta etc, with staging posts in between. It was a busy place. Fayed even supplied the neccesary [sic] control for the Great Bitter Lake for any flying boat that happened to be coming through although those services were nominal. In addition it was a staging post for the long haul types on the routes to and from the Far East. Our facilities were limited to VHF (Very High Frequency) and HF (High Frequency) direction finders and radio beacons and the airfield lighting was all lashed up stuff that had been modified to signal an alarm if any part became disconnected which had become necessary to discourage the natives from stealing the wire for it's copper content. Another discouragement was an anti-aircraft searchlight and a Bren gun on the roof of the control tower!.
The domestic and technical sites were separated from the airfield by being totally ringed in barbed wire and the access tracks leading from the airfield had wheeled barbed wire fences drawn across from sunset to sunrise as aircraft went in and out. It needed a small army to man the wire as well as an armed, mobile lighting repair squad standing by.
Air Traffic Control staff manned our searchlight and the gun and the searchlight generator was run at all times during the hours of darkness and I recall the night we used them with a vengeance.
The look-out reported movement on the airfield but I could not see much more than moving shadows through the glasses so it was "searchlight on" and on it came with a sizzling crackle as the switch was thrown. I could still see only vague shapes
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about 300 yards out from the tower in the reflection of the intense reflecting blaze of light, the man on the gun had already cocked it so I gave the order to fire. He loosed off a complete clip [inserted] s [/inserted] after which things seemed to have changed a bit so everything was put back to stand-by as the mobile patrol was ready to go out through the wire.
They very soon reported that we now had a dead camel on the airfield although it was clear of the runway and the question was; what to do next?. The Air Traffic Control course had not covered situations like that!. A quick call to the duty Engineering Officer produced a bulldozer and a working party to bury the thing but the problem did not go away for a long time. Every night for the next week the wild dogs uncovered it, and every day we covered it up again until eventually nature took it's normal course and there was no longer a meal to be had for the scavengers.
Although Married Quarters were available I went on to a very long list so I just settled down to sweating it out. In more ways than one. The Control Tower did not have the luxury of air conditioning and at the height of the day it was stifling with a shade temperature well over 100deg. One of the great delights of the night shift was to be able to sit outside on the roof of the Met. Office at about 3 o'clock in the morning when the temperature was down to about 70deg!, but that only lasted for about an hour before the sun zoomed up over the horizon.
Just as I thought that I could concentrate on being an Air Traffic Controller I was appointed Station Fire Officer and no sooner than I had mastered that I got loaded with another job but it all helped to pass the time anyway. Somehow I found time to qualify as a Desert Rescue Land Rover driver and then I figured that was enough as I devoted any other spare time to photography and accumulated my own processing equipment and soon found that my services were in great demand as the local processing was ghastly.
The photo processing did not start until I moved out of tented accommodation which was three months of absolute misery. Trying to sleep in a tent during the heat of the day after a night shift was virtually impossible.
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The permanent accommodation was limited so it was into a tent first and then wait your turn but sand seemed to get into everything despite the cat-walks laid on the sand. The bed feet stood in the usual pools of paraffin in boot polish tins to stop the creepy crawlies from invading the bed and mosquito nets, were hung from the ridge. I don't think I ever slept more than three hours at a time in those conditions before waking up absolutely soaked in persperation [sic] . The only thing to do then was to get up and shower; not that that did much good.
The water tanks were on the roof of the ablution block so they heated up well during the course of the day and never really cooled down but the best time to get a cold shower was normally between 4 & 5 in the morning!.
At least it was a happy unit. The rest of the controllers and staff made the best of it. Some of the controllers I already knew as well as some of the aircrew who I had met previously either at Marham or other units. One delightful character was a Czech who had been war-time RAF and had returned to his homeland to reach the rank of Air Commodore in the Czech Air Force until the political climate of the country had forced him to leave it. As a result he had rejoined the RAF as an Air Traffic Controller and was back to Flying Officer!. Nevertheless we all got on well and I found that copying his routine provided some limited relief from the heat.
Having completed the first few hours of sleep it was off to the Officers Club on the edge of Lake Timsa by bus equipped among other things with a sheet. At least it was possible to emerse [sic] one's-self in water even if it was in the eighties, wrap up in a wet sheet in the shade of a rush 'basha' and achieve a few more hours sleep until the evaporation process was complete and the 'cooking' process started again. Then it was back to camp to get ready for the night shift again. That was just part of the routine. It was all that happened within the routine that made life interesting.
I had been there a few months when I had two aircraft inbound from the UK. One a Hastings, the other a Canberra and just before their arrival a violent dust storm blew up. These could happen at any time given certain conditions and rising sand can make flying very dodgy. I just managed to get the Canberra in before
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visibility dropped to near zero and then the VHF direction finder went on the blink so I had to pull out a few stops after suggesting an indefinite holding or a diversion to Cyprus. The pilot was not keen on either and finally opted for a non-standard let-down using the H/F direction finder co-operating with his Wireless Op. and pilot together. It worked and he got down just about the time that the pilot of the Canberra had worked his way though Ops. and came up to the control room to find out what had happened to his baggage aircraft!
There were very few people that could have fixed up that sort of thing and it was of course the one and only 'Black Mac-The China Bull', on his way to take over command of Habbanyia, (Iraq). When we came face to face in the control room he was his usual bad mannered self. His comment of "I might have bloody well known it" was no more than one would have expected from him. As if it was my fault that a sand storm had blown up!. Had it occurred to me from the details on the flight plan that it was him I would definitely diverted him to Cyprus!. As it happened he only refuelled and fed and was off again after I had gone off duty. I thought that would be the last I would see of him but I was wrong.
Then we had a very interesting fire. Some damn fool army signals bloke exploded a primus stove by using the wrong fuel when brewing up so off went the fire party supplimented [sic] by the Army fire service and between them threw enough water at the signals hut to put out the fire but a lot of it drained away down the conduits in which the whole of the zone's land lines were trunked and out went the lot.
I could not get to the scene as I was duty controller and as all our mains facilities had failed all the stops had to be pulled out again to keep things moving. Going on to standby battery operated equipment I handled Approach control as best I could with no D/F facilities and the Senior Controller handled local traffic from the cockpit of a Valetta aircraft sitting on the tarmac not far from the control tower. Fortunately the weather was fine and all worked well with co-operation of the pilots who were able to carry out visual procedures.
The outcome of the enquiry was typical. The Fire Service, and that meant me; got half of the blame for the failure of all
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the radio, teleprinter, telephone and land lines!.
I got all the blame as the result of another enquiry that had taken place at Marham after I had left and I was kindly sent a copy of the findings. Shortly after leaving they could not find a Secret file although I know of no reason why it had not been in the cabinet if it had not been booked out. After my experience with registries I had been punctilious with the Secret Registry that had been under my direct control as well as the handling of the Top Secret files that always went in and out of the Wingco's office under sealed cover, and as far I recall everything had been handed over according to the laid down procedures. Nevertheless they could not find the handing over certificate, (I wish I had kept a copy), and I had to take responsibilty [sic] for the loss. I was a bit peeved at that. I had not been asked to give evidence even though the certificate would have been in the files now under the control of the bloke I had handed over to it seemed that the only avenue left was to appeal. After some thought I decided just to acknowledge receipt of the findings but with a very strong protest. After all, they couldn't shoot me for it!.
By this time the political infiltration into service life had almost died out and most things had returned to near normal as far as there is any normality in the forces. One just pressed on but at times one's shoulders had to be very broad to carry the load and it helped to have a thick skin as well!. At least there was the satisfaction that it would not last for ever. A lot of control was being passed back to the Egyptians and customs officials were getting very busy at Port Said placing import and export duty on almost all personal goods plus insistance [sic] on area Air Traffic Control by their services with a suggestion of imposing the same controls at Fayed. So far they had not been given access to Fayed but when they were we were very likely to have been deprived of one of our most advantages 'perks'.
We had a weekly 'training flight' to Malta locally known as the Whisky run which picked up supplies from a bonded warehouse and Fayed then acted as distribution agent for other units. The net result of that was that, as an example, a bottle of Whisky was 8s. 6d. in old money in the Mess. 42 pencel and
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cheaper than the Naafi who were obliged to make some declaration and payment to the Egyptian Government.
As a result of my involvement with the fire service I requested a Fire Officers course in the UK which I thought would kill two birds with one stone. It did not work so I took my accumulated [underlined] local [/underlined] leave with an itinerary of a round robin tour of the Middle East and hopped on the Whisky run to Malta and thence BEA to the UK. returning by the same process. At least I had 10 days at home with the family and then the misery started all over again.
There was still little hope of Married quarters but I kept a very close eye on the comings and goings.
Among the names that appeared on the list was that of the chap who had been the Station Adjutant at Marham, just one position below me, stationed somewhere in the zone at a Maintenance Unit. We met up on one occasion at Ismalia as I did with a number of people who had been at Marham with me. At one time there seven of us at Fayed. I had even met up with a long lost cousin who was in the Army at another unit so in one way and another occupied myself as time went by. What it must have been for my army cousin before the war I dread to think. He was in the ranks then when a tour of overseas duty was five years without family or home leave. I don't think I could have even contemplated it, but then perhaps neither did he when he signed on. After pre-war service in the Middle East and also a survivor of the Dunkirk withdrawal he was certainly earning his pension the hard way.
Being a shift worker gave me the opportunity to get away from the place on numerous 'flying' visits. Trips to Khartoum and Cyprus were fairly easy to arrange and I planned to go further East sometime when the opportunity arose.
Another advantage of Fayed was that it was the centre of all entertainment schedules. All visiting shows started off in our open air theatre/cinema and they could be sure of a critical audience too. It was usually packed to capacity and I enjoyed some of the very best shows on the circuit and had the priviledge [sic] of meeting many of the stars of those days when they were entertained in the Mess. Many are still around today. There was Harry Secombe, Lena Horne, Arthur English, Tommy Trinder
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(who got himself lost out on Lake Timsa in a small sailing boat), Ted Ray, Terry Thomas, to name but a few and it was there that Tesse O'Shea got one of her biggest laughs ever. The stage really did collapse and Two Ton Tesse had to be dragged out from underneath, still laughing. On the other hand there were turns that were not received so well. If Fayed didn't like them they knew it but it would be unkind to mention names. They tried and some of them are no longer with us.
In due course the Egyptian Air Force took over some of the zone fighter bases having been trained by British instructors at other airfields near Cairo and I began to wonder what sort of fun and games those instructors must have had in the process if the sort of flying that they were doing was anything to go by.
They seemed to put a great deal of effort into their flying but there never seemed to be such practical value in it if the commotion that went on at their nearest airfield was anything to go by.
I was on duty on one occasion when it became obvious that they were expecting an aircraft when all the ground radio checks started and in due course we heard the pilot calling Almaza (near Cairo), for back bearings every two or three minutes until he was obviously about half way when he started calling his destination.
The result was dead silence as the pilot called again and again with mounting urgency in his voice. He seemed so desperate that I chipped in and offered assistance as my D/F operator had been passing me his bearings anyway. The offer was accepted although it took some time before he was able to identify who was calling him and the rest was simple. He was homed to overhead us, descended to a lower height with instructions to steer a given heading for a number of minutes and he would find his destination which he did and despite his frantic calls to his destination we never did hear their control. Not even when he asked for landing clearance or when he reported landed!.
What all the fuss was about I do not know. It was only a 70 mile flight and a few minutes in what we identified as a Meteor when he came overhead. The sky was 100% blue with the Suez canal right under his nose a few miles from his destination so I can
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only think that he was a bit worried at missing it and getting lost in the Sinai desert. Later on we had a liaison visit from some of their controllers who had in fact been trained by International Air Radio and they were not backward in boasting about all the sophisticated equipment that they had. It was met with a diplomatic h'm, no comment. It was a pity that they did not know how to use it!. A lot of their questions were directed to where our radar unit was, suggesting that we had hidden it prior to their visit. That was time for some discreet tapping on the side of the nose. Radar!, we should be so lucky. I found out later that before I had arrived there had been a small final approach radar for evaluation but it had moved on somewhere. Despite the fact that there was liaison it was only one way and we could not get a visit to their unit. They were very mysterious and conspirital [sic] . They said that their bases were secret and it was very difficult to keep a straight face at that. We had even built them!.
Eventually they worked up their fighter units to the North and South of us and one day they decided to do a mass formation flight of about 30 aircaft [sic] up and down the canal. I wish I had recorded that R/T pantomime somehow although I suppose they were ding [sic] their best with limited training and experience.
The two formations never did get together as one. There was total confusion about heights, and everyone tried to talk at the same time when at one time they found that the two sub formations were on a collision course at the same height and then it was "break, break, break", and every man for himself. It was absolute pandemonium. All that in bright blue skies without a cloud in sight and the line of the canal and the lakes to navigate by. It was something to think about!.
No doubt they improved later on with practice and experience but I have often wondered how the Russians got on with them when they decided to re-arm with Russian equipment and of course, Russian instructors as well. They could not have found it easy by any standards.
Another serious Air Traffic matter came to light purely by chance shortly after had [sic] been appointed as Deputy Senior Controller. A lot of our inbound flights from the UK were chartered company aircraft, although at Malta the company livery was painted out
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and the crew changed uniforms and aircraft call-signs to become RAF. All very clever!. So we had a selection of those, RAF Yorks, Beverly's, Viscounts etc, both inbound and outbound. They were normally cleared by Cairo Delta control from Alexandria, descending and transferred to us but I was a bit concerned when more than one pilot reckoned they should report a confliction after they had been transferred, and even more so when I asked what traffic information they had been given. The answer was always nil so for about a week I asked all pilots to complete a questionaire [sic] relative to the hand over procedure and when it was complete the results of my investigation went through the Senior Controller and Operations. It resulted in some discreet enquiries with the Egyptian Ministry of aviation and a liaison visit by the Senior Controller and some rapid changes in prcedure [sic] . Many a pilot complained subsequently about the extra Easterly drag from Alex. to Port Said under airways control before being cleared to descend on the final leg to us. Little did they know that previously they had been descending blindly across three air routes out of Cairo. Phew.!.
There was an interesting situation early one evening when dust storms blew up unexpectedly around Cairo. I was only aware of it by listening to the one-sided R/T conversation but it was obvious that Cairo's controllers were getting in a bit of a 'tizzy' and some BOAC pilots were getting angry. They did not seem to be able to get an accurate weather report or saisfactory [sic] holding instructions and there was mention of diverting to Nicosia until one ex RAF BOAC pilot remembered us and gave us a call. Having checked our weather he then requested diversion facilities which Operations approved he was on his way, followed by another and another until we had accepted six until Ops. said "enough" before we were swamped.
It was a lovely collection. Constellations. Super Connie's, DC4's and Argonauts of BOAC, Air India, Air Italia, and SAA came swooping in and discharged about 300 passengers into the passenger lounge. They were not too happy about being limited to the reception area with an obvious presence of Service Police but the pilots were pleased enough when they came up to the control later to file their flight plans when Cairo had cleared.
It was just as well that I had had time to look up the
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regulations for charging landing fees, a subject that had not received much attention on the ATC course. Nevertheless, we got it sorted out and charged the grand total of £300. I could not repeat what some of the pilots said about Cairo control but it seemed to be about the same standard as Niarobi [sic] was at that time from what I was told.
In similar circumstances about that time a BOAC pilot had stood off at Nairobi and had taken control from the air to let down five others and himself when the controllers had actually lost control of the situation. I thought our training had been a bit rough and ready but I suppose that the fact that most of our controllers were ex aircrew was in our favour. We had grown up with it whilst other emerging nations were just finding their feet.
I had been in Egypt about nine months before I was allocated Married Quarters. It was a hiring on the canal road close to the officers club, and then the process of calling forward the family started.
The day after it was allocated it was reallocated to the chap who was just below me on the list on the strength of two extra points he had claimed by virtue of detachments overseas from Marham. (Returning B.29's to America he claimed). No way; I knew those regulations inside out and it didn't count so the 'phone lines were red hot before that got sorted out. There was no way that I was going to lose the [underlined] last [/underlined] allocation in the zone by default, not to that chap. (He was the one that knocked me off the greasy pole at Marham). He was not amused.
Everything was eventually worked out for the transportation of my family except for the date and then there was a dock strike at home which put thing back for several more agonising weeks. Meanwhile the quarter was being officially sub-let to another officer who in fact spent the best part of three months in it before my family eventually arrived at Port Said on an Army troopship, the S.S. Lancashire from Liverpool. There was only one snag. When they were half way across the Med. I got posted!. I think someone was using his influence-and putting the boot in.
I was stunned as I was required go to Amman in Jordan as soon as possible. When I protested pointing out that my family were
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half way across the Med. the answer was that they could easily wait in transit in the zone until I was-settled or they could take the next troopship back to the UK!. I really was getting the treatment!. I did eventually get a few days deferment by virtue of going sick, to hold me over until they arrived.
That put paid to any idea I had of taking them all on a visit to Cairo and the Pyramids. I had waited a year for the opportunity and it had slipped through my fingers.
There was great excitement when I met my wife and two daughters at Port Said and after the arrival formalities were completed we boarded the bus for Fayid via Ismalia down the canal road to be dropped off at the bungalow which was complete with a native servant who understood practically no English but understood the requirement and had been recommended. He was a glossy black Sudanese resplendent in galabere and tarboosh and displayed a permanent broad smile. He was a treasure. The girls did not quite know what to make of him at first but he was efficient as was unobtrusive. He made it plain the kitchen was his domain and Madam was not allowed in it. That suited us alright as there was not a lot time to get used to paraffin cooker, lamps and even paraffin fridge.
Of course my wife did not know just how much time she had until we had all settled in and I asked her if she knew where Amman was. Of course she did; in Jordan, but it wiped the smile off of everyone's face, including Abdul when they were told that we were off there in less than a week. Abdul cheered up a bit when I gave him a full month's pay and a reference and he looked after us well whilst I was busy about arranging passage to Amman. Of couse [sic] , it was too much to ask that it would be straightforward.. First of all my wife said she didn't want to fly but since the only alternative was camel she did not have much choice. Then all the deep sea baggage had to be chased up with some urgency from Port Said and then Air Movements insisted that it all be repacked as the size of the boxes were in excess of Air Freight dimensions. It was a good thing that I knew a few people in the right places and a compromise was reached where it could stay as it was. We finally went on a mixed freighter passenger flight in a Valetta. The Gamble special only had one other airman passenger on board and had to go via
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Aquaba and in fact overflew Amman to another of our bases at Mafraq.
Prior to our departure signals had been going to and fro' asking when I would arrive and in answer to one inquiry one confirmed that suitable accommodation was available and eventually when all of our baggage and boxes were unloaded we were bussed to Amman, about 35 mls away to make another new home. On arrival and after refreshments I reported to the Adjutant.
I was optimistic about what had been provided for us but knowing my luck I was not really surprised either when contrary to my expectations I found there was absolutely nothing. True they knew I was coming, but not with a family. There were no quarters available or accomodation [sic] other than by private arrangement plus the fact that as it was Friday and it was a Bank Holiday week-end nothing could be done until Tuesday. I nearly went spare. What had all the rush been about, etc, so I went to see the Accountant Officer, changed some money, drew some more and decided that I would have the Bank Holiday off as well since I could claim three days in transit at the expense of the Air Force so off we went to a hotel in the city and we had a good weekend familiarising ourselves with the area and a new currency. All I had done on the day of arrival was sign in so on the first working day I reported in and started the arrival procedure. All went well until I reported to the Senior Controller who actually accused me of being absent without leave when he found out that I had arrived on Friday. He was under the impression that I should have reported to him in the first place as he could have put me to work. It is not the best way to start a new job with a flaming great row with the boss but a flaming great row there was.
Obviously they had coped despite the alledged [sic] shortage of staff because he had not even known when I was due to arrive and I could not have just slipped into the routine without some preliminary training and certification. No allowance was made for my domestic circumstances and then whilst I started to absorb the local set-up another bombshell arrived. Air Headquarters Middle East at Habbanyia having received confirmation of my arrival signalled to the effect that I should have reported to that HQ for posting as required as they wanted me down in
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the Persian Gulf, and I was instructed to proceed accordingly. Then I really did blow my top!.
I had already found alternative accomodation [sic] ; more or less in the native quarter on Jebel Hashiem as the hotel was straining the finances somewhat, but at least it-was convenient for the base and the girls were about to start school. In [sic] was still scouting around for something better. I was not in a very good mood by the time I had worked my way through the Adjutant, Senior Admin. Officer and Wing Cdr. Admin. to the Station Commander for a showdown. At least he was sympathetic enough to listen to my greivance [sic] which I followed up with threats of resigning my commission there and then. Pretty strong stuff but a lengthy signal to AHQ produced the desired answer and I was at last allowed to get down to work with a bit more security than I had had for a long time. I don't think I was ever forgiven though for stirring things up for a change instead of accepting what was thrown in my direction. I was beginning to wish that I had transferred to the Secretarial Branch after all if that was a fore-taste of what could be expected in the future. Little did I know.
I found Amman very interesting. It was a joint Military and Civil International Airport with control exercised by the RAF. That included a locally based RAF fighter Squadron with Venoms, communication aircraft and Search and Rescue helicopter. The Royal Jordanian Air Force with Vampires. RAF transit traffic, two resident civil airlines and scheduled BOAC Argonaughts from London to Barhrein [sic] via Beruit [sic] on Monday's returning later in the week. Somehow that seemed more civilised as the crew always brought UK Sunday newspapers in for us when they brought their flight plans in. We had three parking aprons. One civil, one Jordanian Air Force and one RAF. Our facilities were the basics that I had been used to at Fayed plus; the Radar!. The very one that had been at Fayed, had gone to Cyprus and thence to Amman. It was a non standard equipment for the RAF which had received little more than a mention on the ATC course and on which in due course all Amman controllers were to be locally trained. And before you could say 'Bingo' I was appointed the Station Fire Officer as well!.
Within a matter of weeks I had found a more desirable residence
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on Jebel Taj nearer the city and things started to settle down. We soon got used to the amplified sounds from the mezzine calling the faithful to prayer....at 6 am!. it was better than an alarm clock. One could not possibly have slept through it. Not even on a day off and as I was still shift working it was inconvenient at times. However, we were comfortable and happy in our new accomodation [sic] and there were English families living around us so we did not feel as cut off as we had been before.
The new landlord was a Palestinian originally from Haifa and he and his family were very kind. They all spoke very good English and helped us with learning enough Arabic to get by on the buses and in the shops. In fact it was too easy to get lazy in learning Arabic as most people could speak English. It was the second language in all the schools.
The camp swimming pool was one of our main attractions and it was situated near the control tower. In fact when on duty I could look down on it which made it a little frustrating on those steaming days when the temperature in the 'glasshouse' was well over 100deg. and the family had come in by bus to make the most of those cooling waters.
A lot of people had written home to the tourist departments of their town halls to get posters of their favourite sea-side resort so it was not long before Worthing was also advertised on the fence. A little bit of home and of course that usually designated one's favourite spot in the area around the pool.
It was quite a small pool so sessions had to be allocated to prevent overcrowding and it was not unusual for members of the Jordanian Royal family to be mixed up with the officers families. When King Hussein flew as he did often being a pilot in his own right he insisted on going through the motions like any other pilot. He climbed the steps and presented his own flight plan for approval. and he was of course very pro-British. His army was to a great extent British financed and controlled through General Glub. His air force was similarly controlled and they were very good too having had their basic training in the UK and then finished off locally on Harvards before jet training. His senior Air Force Officer was a seconded Wing Commander and in fact there were quite a lot of secondments
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both Army and Air Force. His stable of racing cars was looked after by an ex Flight Sergeant and several- of his ponies were stabled in our pony club and looked after by us. It all seemed an innocent and comfortable arrangement. It was not always quite so comfortable on occasions when certain factions in his own country and those of neighbouring states would rather that the strongly pro-British monarch was deposed. After all, Jordan was in a peculiar geographical position. The Hashimite [sic] Kingdom of Jordan had been carved out of what used to be Palestine and some of the old Palestine was now Isreal [sic] which had produced something like a million refugees who were virtually stateless persons. The mandate that the British had had for many years had been repealed by the United Nations due to pressure to create the new state of Isreal [sic] after the war. The Arab/Jew conflict had not neccesarily [sic] been made any less of a problem and it was all tied up with the American owned IPC (Iraqi Petroleum Company) oil pipeline between Haifa and the Persian Cuff that dominated military and political thinking. Not that the pipe-line had delivered oil for a long time, but we still had an interest in it.
The King had a very close shave on one occasion when he was returning from Damascus whilst I was on duty. The Wing Cdr. was with him in the Royal De Haviland Dove and they found that they had a couple of Syrian jets on their tail. They produced some very spectacular low flying by all accounts until they were able to make contact with us for back up from anything we had flying in Jordanian air space before they were safe. It was the sort of chance he had to take in those days, even when he only used to fly half-way down the pipe-line towards Bagdad to meet his cousin King Feisal of Iraq at an air-strip on the border. Neither used to file flight plans for that. Both of them used to keep in touch through their own private shortwave radio link.
It was obvious that the senior captain of one of the resident airlines was ex-Luftwaffe by the cut of his coat and the set of his cap. Only the insignia had changed and he was an honourary [sic] member of our Mess!. We swapped a few yarns which ultimately led to the production of our respective log books which confirmed that he was the bloke that had shot up our Stirling very badly
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in October 1943 when we were on our way into Bremen. Our conversation after that provided answers to questions that we both had. Yes, he was flying a jet. An early prototype Me262, and had been scrambled for evaluation, but why had we only received small calibre shots?. The answer to that was sobering. He had used up all his cannon shooting down two other Stirlings...and the records show that three Stirlings of the force had indeed been lost that night, two of them to his guns. I can only thank my lucky stars that he had not been using cannon on us that night!. It did explain the tails of fire we had seen from his back end too. He was somewhat surprised that we had not incurred casualties and that we had in fact returned to base after all the stuff that had flowed back from us after the engagement which had obviously been the leaflets I had thrown out in a great hurry, especially as he had claimed us so badly damaged that we must have finished up in the North Sea as there had been no other crash report.
I was still negotiating for other accommodation as official quarters were still a long way off but before either came up Dorothy had to be hospitalised. She could have gone to Habbanyia or Cyprus to either of the military hospitals but she opted for an operation to be done locally at the RAF's expense in the Italian Hospital in Amman so in she went.
It was all very different from one's normal concept of hospitalisation. It was a private hospital and she did have a private ward. The head surgeon was Italian and the staff were mainly Italian nuns with some Arab cleaning staff. Catering was not normally provided but on this occasion two meals a day were provided under the terms of the contract, mainly rice and eggs. There was only one nun who spoke very limited English and with her very limited Arabic it was a bit of a pantomime. Altogether it was hardly conducive to rapid recovery.
The occupant of another adjacent private ward, a Sheik, spent most of the daylight hours out on the flat roof outside her window with all the accompaniment of a scene from the Arabian Nights. I don't know what was wrong with him but he seemed to end a lot of time trying to cough his lungs up, not that it stopped him smoking his hooka [sic] pipe.
he was well looked after by several retainers who brought him
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various kinds of food, including great bunches of grapes with which he was fed and when this circus was added to by his personal musician with his one string fiddle it was enough to drive anyone mad. That and visiting times in the afternoon for those in the dormitory wards where the sounds and smells of on the spot cooking on primus stoves wafted up were enough to have her out of there as soon as the M.O. would allow, to continue her convalescence at home.
When she was fit enough we moved house again and the process of the final negotiations for the tenancy was yet another pantomime; never to be forgotten.
Some of the locals, particularly the Sheiks, had made a packet out of the British a few years earlier when room was needed for the expansion of the airfield and other areas that were needed for the building of the Married Quarters. I suppose it was just another way of putting money into the country really but it seemed. that the criteria for receiving payment of £1000 for any sort of building on the land purchased was that it should have a door. As a result there had been a brisk trade with carpenters fitting a door to just about anything, and those that could not afford it naturally borrowed the money from the Sheiks at a premium or were forced to sell their property to the Sheiks. One way or another they were the blokes that finished up getting most of the 'ackers' which they had reinvested in properties that they let to the military. It was the process of bargaining and negotiating with these chaps that created another scene out of Arabian Nights. One must understand that bargaining is a way of life out in those parts and that to do business it was common courtesy to respect the fact that when in Rome you do as the Romans do.
One did not do business through agents as such. The only agents were the multitude of small boys who were always wandering about looking for opportunities of exercising their light fingered efforts to pick up something for nothing. A word in the ear of one of those suggesting that you were interested and an appointment would be very quickly fixed up and he would get his reward of a few fils for his trouble from both parties.
It was not the first time that I had gone through the procedure but that particular occasion sticks in my mind. At the appointed
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time we presented ourselves at the flats and were escorted to a plain unfurnished room with just cushions and a low table and then the 'person' arrived resplendent in robes of gold on black over white, with jewelled belt and sash and jewelled knife scabbard plus the butt of a pistol showing from an equally elaborate holster, and greetings were exchanged. With that over he clapped his hands and the glasses of tea appeared and the performance was on. I had been asked to bring my wife with me by one of the boys who turned out to be one of the Sheiks sons who was also acting as interpreter but it was obvious that the request had come from the Sheik. I had already been warned about him. Now the scene was set and his number one wife squatted in the dirt on the other side of the road from the flat. Women did [inserted] not [/inserted] pay [sic] a particularly important part in the routine except to keep an eye on things. No.1 wife's responsibility was managing the household and the other junior wives. So she had taken up her position.
I don't know that Dorothy was particularly happy with the situation as she sat opposite that imposing figure with the classical hooked nose and piercing eyes of the Bedouin. Pleasantries were exchanged with the first glass of tea; revolting stuff to our standards, then the second glass came up and by this time Dorothy was squirming a bit as the Sheik was not slow in examining what he seemed to be part of the deal. He played a bit of footy footy and proceeded to pinch the fleshy parts of her arm that were exposed under her shawl which she was obliged to wear in such circumstances. Their own women were covered in black from head to toe as well as wearing a yashmak. Nevertheless he examined her as if she was a chicken in the market and she winced a bit but stuck it out until the third glass of tea arrived. That was the one you did not finish and it was time to talk business. It was the way things were done and we were obliged to go along with it for about half an hour until we gave him our promise of a decision before the sun had set. We had made the decision before we made our escape from him with the eagle eye. Dorothy did not care to become part of a Hareem as part of the deal or having him inspecting his property too often with an eye to another 'wife' so the message was passed. "No thank you" and we looked elsewhere.
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We eventually rented a flat not far from the camp main gate and I suppose it could be said that it good views. It looked down on the Hadj railway station on the famous line from Damascus through Amman to a point where it fizzled out way down South towards Aquaba. A line that Lawrence of Arabia had played havoc with many years before when the Turks had control of the area. It also looked down on the main Damascus/Amman road and the prison but at least it was convenient. The landlord was the local butcher an [sic] he eventually brought along a young married chap who we were only to willing to take on as 'bearer'. He had never worked anywhere by virtue of being caught up in the net of the homeless refugees in the North but he was willing and learned fast and took no liberties. He found local accomodation [sic] and moved his family for the first ever now that he had a job which allowed him to face the world with a little more dignity instead of being dependent upon United Nations hand-outs.
He was an Abdul and replaced another Abdul who was reputed to have worked for the British Army but we were glad to see the back of him and his dirty habits plus the fact that I had found him drying out his tobacco in the gas oven on one occasion with only one side burner lit to save gas!. His English was also punctuated by a great deal of barrack room language and his final efforts in the kitchen seemed to be designed to feed his family on our left overs made sure that there was plenty for all!. Now the catering was firmly back in Dorothy's hands and Abdul looked after the rest. He needed a bit of training but it was well worth it.
My cousin that had been in Egypt was now down in Aquaba and an arrangement with the Jordanian Air Force brought him up to to [sic] spend a Christmas with us and some time later we flew down to Aquaba in the Kings personal aircraft for a couple of weeks holiday and that was a very interesting period.
Our accommodation was a holiday bungalow on the sea shore that had belonged to General Peake who had given it to the RAF for recreational purposes. It gave me an opportunity of spending more time with my cousin who I had not seen all that often in the past and to visit our limited Air Traffic Control staff and the firemen who manned the landing strip on rotational basis
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from Amman resources. The landing area was just a rolled strip in the wadi that led down almost to the waters edge and even the control cabin was only the cockpit of a Dakota that had crashed there many years before. It was no more than just another link in the chain of landing grounds that served the Army garrison tasked with keeping the peace in the area which they had been trying to do for years.
The geography was historical and had become even-more important since the creation of the State of Isreal[sic] . The Gulf of Aquaba was only three miles wide at the head and the town of Eilat in Isreal [sic] sat on one corner and the border with Egypt only a little further down. Three miles down the other side was the border with Saudi Arabia so it was quite a crossroads.
I suppose it was just my misfortune that a couple of my firemen went on a sight seeing tour whilst I was there and were absent two days as a result of straying into Isreal [sic] . No big diplomatic incident really but the Army did have to exert a little diplomacy to get them back and they were both charged for contravening standing orders. Still, one could laugh off seven days C.C. (confined to camp) in that place; there were few places to go. Anyway, the army dealt with it and I got on with my holiday. I wanted no part of. The weather was supurb [sic] , the bunglalow [sic] was on the waters edge and there was no tide to speak of. Unfortunately the glass bottomed boat that usually provided interesting views of the coral reefs had been damaged and was awaiting repair so we were not able to enjoy that experience.
Some people relate to being on holiday with being able to sleep in late but it was very rare that we were able to do that with the fishermen out in the early morning. Their fishing was accompanied by a succession of bangs resounding across the water. Lazy fishing that; with sticks of dynamite!. Then they netted the stunned fish afterwards. The girls were warned to keep well out of the way when they were close to the shore as obviously they were not all that clever. The dynamite thrower in one boat only had one arm and the girls had learned earlier on in Amman that when told to do things like that it was for a very good reason and they had to react without question. On that previous occasion in Amman we had gone into town on a little shopping expedition and had just reached the main shopping area where
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there seemed to be a lot of people and suddenly the whole crowd erupted as shots rang out, followed by a lot of panic stricken people running in our direction. When I grabbed them and said "run" they did. Hot foot down the road, into the Hotel Continental where we stayed until things had gone quiet before taking a taxi back home. I understood later that day that an order had been issued on camp putting the city out of bounds but then I had not been into camp and knew nothing about the possibility of trouble.
We managed to enjoy ourselves though, just lazing about, swimming, playing board games, reading, listening to London on the short wave overseas service but generally resting up wondering what was going to happen next. Something always did!. One morning we were having coffee out in front of the bungalow when we noticed that a Royal Navy destroyer had dropped anchor about half a mile out and it was not long before a boat with four ratings and a Petty Officer was rowed ashore. They tied up just few yards from us and were loaded with some metal trunking that they started to chip paint from so I figured that they were defaulters given a dirty job to do. Hard luck on the Petty Officer!.
I would have left them to it but there was a geat [sic] deal of lower deck language that was enough to blister the paint off without the use of elbow grease so two little girls had to be hauled out of earshot whilst I ambled across and asked them if they would like some refreshment. They nearly fell over with shock but the P.O. jumped at the opportunity. Beer for him please, anything but beer for the others and what the blue blazes were we doing in such a God forsaken hole and where the hell was he anyway?. He was quite happy to sit in the shade and chat for some time whilst the others chipped away until a winking light from the ship signalled that it was time to return. It had made his day and in the time we had spent chatting I had found out that he knew my brother from his days at HMS Vernon, the torpedo establishment at Portsmouth. It's a small world.
Later on as darkness fell the ship was dressed overall with lights and was an imposing sight out in the Gulf as small craft pIied to and fro' with the garrison Commander and his party to a social function on board. I think they may have stayed
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most of the night if what happened to us is anything to go by.
We had been invited by some Arab neighbours to coffee, cakes and social chat and there had been no mention of conditions outside when darkness fell. We found out as soon as we got outside. Everything was blacked out by rising sand. Not the sort of sand storm with horizontal wind but the sort in which sand is just lifted straight up and deposited somewhere else. We could hardly see our hand in front of our face. If it had not been for our hosts being more familiar with the area I doubt if we could have negotiated the fifty yards between the houses.
We put the shutters up as soon as we got back but it was too late and it took ages to clear the heavy layer of sand that had been deposited over and inside everything which included the beds and the pantry. Just something else to put down to experience. We were well rested by the time we flew back to Amman in an RAF Valetta and as I knew the pilot from Fayed days he kindly circled the ancient and amazing city of Petra virtually hidden in the desert which we would otherwise never have seen, and then it was back to the old routine. Not a dull one by any means. Among my activities I had a taste of some limited radar control on which I was locally trained. I found the process fairly easy to pick up as this was a 'one man band' and the initial pick up was assisted by a built in direction finder system. To an ex aircrew wireless op. it was no problem. It did not take long to become proficient and as the only other qualified controller was leaving I finished up being in charge of the thing and training others, not without some dissapointments [sic] . The Senior Controller, an ex navigator, couldn't cope with it and neither could another, an ex pilot, but enough did become proficient to ensure that there were sufficient people to rotate. It was not all that comfortable stuck out in a metal box at the end of the runway.
That particular radar unit was the one that had done the rounds. At one time it had been at Nicosia before it had been transferred to Fayed and then Amman and the original operator had travelled with it but it could only provide a very limited service and as far as the RAF was concerned it was a 'one-off'. It gave me some useful experience anyway that I made use of later on.
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By that time we had given up the idea of getting back to Egypt for a holiday. Fayed was just about handed over to the Egyptians so we could not get a passage that way and since holidays had to be planned well ahead it didn't seem worth the effort to go the long way around via Cyprus so that was ruled out. Haifa or some similar place was considered before we found that it was again impossible to go direct particularly as we would need a second passport to visit Arab countries and Israel. The tension was very real out there at the time. Even the Naafi could not import any goods that may have been a product of Israel and postings to a place like Amman ruled out anyone of Jewish name or origin.
It was the only place that I had come across where a parade commander was to say "Roman Catholics may fall out" before prayers. That order was usually "Roman Catholics and Jews....". In the end we figured that we would do better just to make the most of our immediate surroundings but we never got to Beruit [sic] or Damascus. Every time we made plans for a long break between shifts or a week-end those places were declared out of bounds.
It did seem as if we were hemmed in although we were in regular contact with neighbouring countries. Even our daily radio checks gave us two way communication with Nicosia and strangely enough Lod in Israel. We thought nothing of it, or of giving bearings to any Israeli aircraft that called us but the Jordanian Air Ministry were very sensitive and suspicious about it so we had to discontinue any contact with Israel.
We had a very interesting experience one afternoon when we were having tea in the flat when there was a shivering shaking sensation. The tea in my cup rippled an [sic] I immediately recalled something that my father had mentioned about his time in India. If in doubt look at the ceiling light, and there it was swinging gently to and fro' and then I knew that what I had felt was an earthquake tremor Dorothy looked at me and asked "why did you kick my chair?" and then nearly fell out of hers when I told her to look at the swinging lamp and the significance of it. It was a very light tremour [sic] really and we understood later that the centre had been around Damascus but there had been no damage.
One real highlight of Amman was my flight in a Venom jet trainer.
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Since my first jet experience in a Canberra I had been itching to have another go. It was not difficult to arrange and away we went into the wide blue yonder. It was the most exhilarating experience. The sky was bright blue well laced with towering cumulus cloud and at 25,000ft I was in my element when control was handed to me in the side by side trainer as I went cloud hopping. I was in my element and I always knew that I had an aptitude for it. I performed all the standard manoeuvres successfully which rather surprised the pilot. Wireless Ops. don't do things like that!, but he changed his mind when I attempted a roll. Then my old problem of disorientation reared it's head again and he had to take control to prevent us hurtling earthwards out of control. He reckoned that with formal training I would have had no real difficulty in becoming a pilot but it was too late for me to change direction at that time.
Our flat overlooked the prison just beyond the main road and an incident there created a lasting impression on Dorothy. I could understand that if conditions in the prison were as crude as those in the hospital then a lot of people went hungry most of the time if family and friends did not bring in food regularly or the inmates had not got the money to pay for it but that's the way it worked. Prison out there was real punishment and the ultimate was to be publicly hung in the city's amptheatre [sic] which were other occasions when the city was out of bounds.
The incident really upset her when some noisy activity started as protests were voiced and then the whole thing escalated rapidly.
There were hundreds of prisoners milling around the courtyard and the guards manning the walls were reinforced by the army. What sparked it off I could not say but there was a sudden crackle of rifle fire and prisoners went down like nine-pins for several minutes. When it stopped the army entered the courtyard and hearded [sic] the frantic mob to one side as dozens of bodies were dragged away and she could no longer watch the scene of such callus [sic] slaughter. She had some very bad dreams for a long while after that.
At last a married quarter became available after some ten months of waiting and moving around and we moved into a very large
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converted hut which many years before had been the Education Section. The original lettering on the doors was still visable [sic] under fresh paintwork. A friend of mind remembers the building from when he was out there in 1937!. However, it was spacious, convenient and comfortable. Just a stone's throw from the Mess and almost overlooking the flat that we had just left. In addition to our own servant who successfully passed his medical we were allocated an official one, shared with another family, so life took on a whole new style.
Typical of course was the fact that very British fire places had been installed but the cooker was still the parafin [sic] job so took our rented gas one with us. The water heater was the most diabolical hazard that I had ever come across. It was oil fired; with a difference!. We had got used to parafin [sic] fridges and cookers so one took such things in one's stride. To fire up the boiler you turned on the fuel to drip onto a metal plate, then set light to it. By turning the fuel tap on and off the plate eventually got hot enough to explode the drips as they fell on the plate and then it could be adjusted to give a series of continuous explosions and presto!, hot water!. A damn dangerous device though and as fire officer I made sure that everyone was reminded regularly of it's dangers. At least it was more civilised than what we had been recently used to. In our first place on Jebel Hasheem we had a bath that had to be filled with buckets of water that had to be heated by other means and the drain hole was positioned above nothing more than a hole in the floor. It was alright until the bath slipped off of the supporting bricks and flooded the floor. Perhaps it was better that way as it slowed down the activities of the toads, whacking great spiders and scorpians [sic] that tended to investigate the invasion of what they considered to be their territory. In the last flat, although new, we had always had trouble with the drains. The worst part being that when there was a blockage in the system. When we flushed everything came up in the next door neighbours bath!. Small problem….well, to us anyway. When the sanitory [sic] people were called in they pin-pointed the problem of blockages right away. Apparently toilet paper should not be flushed into 2" drains!. The alternative was most unhygenic [sic] to European standards.
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Now it seemed that we were home and dry. There was a bit of a garden which was overgrown so after I set my photo dark-room up I got to work terracing the garden so that we were able to grow tomatoes and sweet corn within a matter of months. The trouble was that it disturbed the habitat of several dangerous species of snakes and other creepy crawlies of which there were plenty. One had to be forever on the alert for them, checking footwear and clothing, and particularly bedding.
One of the strangest creatures was the sand beetle. This chap was about 1/2 ins. long and lived in the sand with the entrance to it's complex protected by a trap door. It had the most incredible technique of building a hinged trap door which was a perfect watertight fit. To see this thing nip down it's hole and pull the trap door down after him was quite amazing.
Another insect that surprised us one evening when we were having drinks on the veranda were the fireflies. For a moment I thought that I had made the drinks a little too strong when little bright lights started jumping around the table but then a little more light was produced they turned out to be little flying insects with little light bulbs in their tails.
Lizards of between four and five inches were common and quite harmless. We had one or two resident one's that had been given names and at one time we had a Chameleon that I had found in the garden but it died on us. Probably due to the rapid changes of colour that was expected of it when we put it on a multi coloured carpet. The poor thing probably got into a state of utter confusion and died of a heart attack.
Tortoises were common and I have never seen so many in a natural habitat as there were around the old Roman city of Jarash, and Jarash it'self [sic] was another incredible place that was right out of biblical times. It had been uncovered in the preceeding [sic] 20 years and I swear that if you just stood there and listened you could hear the ghosts of the past all around and the sounds of chariot wheels on the old Roman roads that still bore the marks of those wheels.
We paid a visit to the Dead Sea and it was well worth the frightening drive. The native taxy driver seemed quite oblivious to his surroundings as we swept along high mountain unmade roads that twisted and turned with sometimes as much as a sheer 1500ft
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drop on one side into a moonscape like valley. Mix that up with the dust, the heat and five fractous [sic] kids as we were sharing the journey with another family, the driver with only one hand on the wheel and the radio blasting native music at 99 decibals [sic] and you have all the ingredients for a very exciting time. It was. Our route took us through Jericoh [sic] and close to the old courthouse, where according to the scriptures Christ was tried and sentenced, until we eventually got to the banks of the Dead Sea, over 500ft [underlined] below [/underlined] sea level and where I subsequently was flown down to in a Jordanian Air Force aircraft. A most interesting experience.
After the journey the sight of so much water was a great temptation and in we all went but within minutes we were in trouble. The adults knew that it was impossible to sink in that sea due to it's high salt content but no-one had told us that it was just like acid if you got it in the eyes. The kids thrashed around screaming in pain and it was just as well that we had a plentiful supply of water in bottles that we were able to pour over their faces until all was well again. After the initial discomfort we were all very careful as we experimented in the very dense water. It was quite incredible. Even just walking into it, before one was waist deep it was impossible to keep your feet on the bottom. You couldn't swim in it either. There was just not enough of the body in water to be able to go through the normal motions. Arms and legs just thrashed around in the air and it really was possible just to float in the sitting position with head and shoulders out of the water.
That was alright until we came out and there was no-where we could rinse off as most of our precious bottles of water had been used up. Within minutes we dried off and were covered in a layer of salt crystals and that was the way we set off back via a different route.
On the way we came across a place by the name of Salt. Just a nameplace where the road crossed a small tumbling stream so we made a stop there to wash off the salt and freshen up. There was an old rusted cannon and a lot of other ironmongery in the stream left from battles of long ago but we did not have a lot time to investigate further. A Jordanian soldier appeared and warned us off by the process of pointing his rifle at us
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so one does not argue in a situation like that. We did a bit more splashing about after I had put my camera way [sic] whilst the driver and the soldier communicated. Some folding money changed hands and we were on our way. The driver told us that the small wooden bridge was guarded because of it's strategic importance and I suspect that it had been guarded ever since General Allenby had passed that way during the first World War. Rather like the Allenby bridge across the River Jordan that we also visited on another occasion. That was still guarded so we did not think it worth while trying to obtain a bottle of water that we had planned to do. I suppose that if we had approached the soldiers with a fistful of notes we could have done it as that is what seemed to smooth the way generally if you wanted to get things done as a friend of mine found out when he imported a car from the UK!.
God knows how long the preliminaries had taken to even order it but in due course it arrived at Beruit [sic] after months of waiting.
Then came the business of getting it into Jordan. First of all he could not do it himself and pay the fees. That was much too easy. It had to be imported by a recognised import/export firm and then negotiations were started with the appropriate Government department although he was entitled to it's import without tax, under current diplomatic arrangements. So it laid at Beruit [sic] for many months as palms were greased until it duly arrived in Amman. Having accumulated more fees by that time there were even more to pay. Several more months of negotiations had followed as the documentation kept getting held up until fistfull [sic] of Dinars smothed [sic] the way and it was finally HIS car. Not that he was able to tax and insure it and drive it away. Despite the fact that it was new it had to go through all the mechanical checks that all vehicles were required to go through before being given a registration. It was a sort of MOT test but set annually, and annually got a different registration number which also meant a new set of plates. More Dinars changed hands at each of the four stages of testing, shuffling and mis-laying of papers, passing the papers to the department that made the plates, (right next door to the registration office), more mis-laid papers, and at last, when
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the plates were ready, the production of the insurance documents before those plates could be fixed and sealed by the department. Plus of course the final bakshees before he could actually take the car on the road. In all it took just over a year. He never took it for a second test. Things happened that forced him to subsequently drive it across the desert nearly 500 miles to Habbanyia where it was eventually taken to Basra under service arrangements and it came back to the UK on the Ark Royal minus wing mirrors, screen wipers, wheel trims, slightly dented and rusted. Fortunately there was enough documentation with it to ensure that it was not subject to import duty....provided that he kept it for a year!. At that point in time he would rather have got rid of it when he eventually got back to the UK himself but despite all the hassle he made full use of it. That was a car with a history.
I eventually got my opportunity to go further East. Just far enough. I was detailed to go to Habbanyia in Iraq for Courts Martial duties as a member of the Court. Anything except defence or prosecution, but it was not quite the 'perk' that I thought it was going to be.
After flying in I reported to the Adjutant who I knew and had a been the Signals Leader of 138 Squadron at Wyton and subsequently 90 Squadron at Marham, (at the same time as the chap who had fun with the car had been there); only to find that the President of the Court was none other than 'Black Mac' himself.
Being the junior member I was the 'scribe' and Mac was his same old self. His Adjutant was having as rough a time with him as I had had at Coningsby. Anyway, the case was over in a day and sentance [sic] was pronounced so I immediately set about putting some distance between Black Mac and myself.
It took three days with the flight priority that I had and more than one argument with the Senior Air Traffic Controller at Habbanyia who wanted to put me to work there. No way!. I wasn't there for that and it was a good thing that I knew a few people, not the least the Adjutant, who kept me on a four hour stand-by for a seat on an aircraft back to Amman. Apart from anything else I wanted to see Habbanyia, the RAF's jewel in the desert.
There was plenty of it with the old plateau airfield and the new one that had been laid out on the plain; the former being
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used for the training of the Iraqi Air Force. The relatively new base on the plain was surrounded by masses of buildings, three swimming pools, a profusion of lawns and gardens that turned the place into a glittering oasis. I walked miles and miles around that place and marvelled at the engineering that had made full use of the waters of the Euphrates and numerous artisan wells. There was even a large lodgement compound for the hundreds of native workers and their families who seemed to enjoy quite reasonable amenities, and eventually a seat became available and I was on my way back to Amman. I was to go back there again in due course.
Meanwhile it was back to work. I was duty controller and the airfield had been shut for a couple of hours one evening as no traffic had been notified when one of the ATC assistants phoned from the duty but to tell me that there was an aircraft overhead flashing it's lights. There was a rapid call out for duty crews and I was off to the control tower. The aircraft was still circling when I went on the air and asked the pilot to identify himself. It turned out to be an Eagle Airlines York freighter on his way to India which had been routed to us but the signals office still had nothing so he had to circle until we lit the place up, inspected the runway and alerted all the other services before we let him in. Then there were a few more surprises as the pilot and the navigator turned out to be ex 207 Squadron, Marham, who I had known there.
It did not take long to find out why they had arrived before the notification. They had actually been routed via Cyprus and Beruit [sic] but had done a short cut across the Med. and smack across Isreal [sic] . It might have seemed logical at the time but with no diplomatic clearance such an unauthorised route could have had unpleasant results from a trigger happy Ack-Ack gunner.
There was never a dull moment although some of the things that happened were quite serious.
Our helicopter with the Station Commander and Station Warrant Officer on board went down the line of the old Hadj railway of Lawrence of Arabia fame; to a point where it petered out about half way to Aquaba. For some reason or other the SWO, contrary to standing orders relative to the safe areas around a helicopter made the mistake of backing into the tail rotor,
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and a military funeral was the order of the day and a few months afterwards the helicopter pilot's wife who had shared our taxi to Gerash died of natural causes and there was more sadness in our tightly knit community.
There was a snippet of information from Habbanyia that did me the world of good when I heard of it and had a little 'chortle' at Black Mac's expense. He had given orders for an enormous banquet to be laid on. Typical, it had to be big!, but to lay that on for around a thousand people was no mean task. I definitely would not have cared to be in his Adjutants shoes about that time. As usual he had a hand in everything, including the menu and I can imagine the raised eyebrows when he decided that among the many courses served to two Kings, Ambassadors and dignatories [sic] from all over the Middle East was; maise!,(corn on the cob). That's what they feed the chickens on out there! but that was not the end of his indiscretions.
There was King Feisal of Iraq and his cousin King Husein [sic] of Jordan so it didn't help matters when he proposed a toast to King Feisal of Jordan!. I could just imagine the diplomatic huffing and puffing that went on. I had been on the mat in front of him often enough. I would like to have been a fly on the wall when he was on the mat in front of the C in C later.
In the political turmoil of the area we still managed to carry on with a small degree of normallity [sic] .
We managed a sports day with inter service competition between the RAF, the Army and the Jordanian services finishing up with a flying display from both Air Forces and on more than one occasion we closed the airfield to suit the Kings convenience by turning it into a motor racing circuit. That was a bit of fun on one occasion when he wanted to try out his latest Mercedes sports car. I can't remember the model but I do remember that it had gull wing doors. I even had the privilege of belting it around in company with the rest of his fleet.
It was a dreadful shock when we heard later that there had been a political uprising in Iraq, something that seemed to be spreading right through the Middle East, and as a result of that particular incident King Feisal of Iraq and most of the Royal family has been massacred, and a republic had been declared.
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There was definitely a rot setting in and there was no doubt that there was a lot of outside influence behind it all. You didn't have to be a genious [sic] to work out the fact that oil and a power politics was still the key to the whole business in Egypt, the Suez Canal, Jordan, Iraq and as it was to turn out later, Aden, the Persian Gulf and Iran and all points East. It seemed that that area of the British Empire's influence was crumbling around us.
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Nevertheless, Air Traffic Control was the job and there were few occasions when a shift did not produce something out of the ordinary.
It was all quiet one sultry afternoon when I heard a very faint 'May-Day' call on the common frequency and immediately responded but found it difficult to achieve satisfactory contact. The direction finder bearing showed the aircraft to be to the North of us and although it was possible to pick out a call-sign the rest of the message seemed to be in German. After giving courses to steer to reach us the aircraft's transmissions were getting louder and the pilot was calming down although it was obvious that his English was very limited, as was our German and then one of the assistants came to the rescue. I was not aware that he was a Channel Islander but he asked me to find out if the pilot 'parlies vous francious [sic] '?. That brought forth a stream of French so I put the assistant on the radio and it did not take long to find out what it was all about. At least he was steering the headings he had been given and was getting louder which was the most important thing but he turned out be a Swiss. in a light aircraft en. route from Cyprus to Bagdad but had encountered head winds, was lost and getting low on fuel. Certainly he had done the right thing by declaring an emergency over that inhospitable terrain that looked like the surface of the moon and getting into a bit of a panic that caused him to lapse into non-standard procedure. The rest was easy. He followed our instructions until he found us after which he was directed to the civilian reception area for the rest of the
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formalities. By the time he came over later to file a flight plan he had calmed down and able to communicate in good English and certainly happy enough that he had finished up with the RAF in Jordan instead of being lost in the mountains. Another satisfied customer even if we did extract a small landing fee from him.
I had to respond very rapidly to another emergency situation one evening shortly before our normal shut-down time. One of the Venoms was still airborne and the C.O. was on his way back from Aquaba in a Pembroke. The helicoptor [sic] pilot had just put his chopper away in the hangar almost opposite the control tower and had given me a wave as he started to walk off when the Venom pilot came on the air reporting his position and the fact that he had just flamed out and would be ejecting in five seconds ...4..3...2...1 and he was gone. There was a quick shout to the chopper pilot and hand signals to wind it up, another quick call on the radio to the C.O. who was on a different frequency almost overhead, to tell him that we had 'one down about 25 mls to the North East of us, please investigate...chopper on the way' and everything swung into action from there. Suffice to say that the downed pilot was back on the airfield within 30 minutes of his first call. Not bad going. The same 'downed' pilot was the one that subsequently took the first Harrier on a non-stop transatlantic flight to New York.
There was another occurance [sic] one late afternoon when a Valetta had a burst tyre and ran off of the runway to get well and truly bogged down but things like that were only slight hic-ups in a day's routine and I must admit that I was getting a lot more out of life than if I had continued to push paper around in the Secretarial Branch. Not that there wasn't any paperwork but it was different.
I had not been in Quarters on camp for very long and I had an off-duty morning closeted in my dark room when I heard the fire alarm faintly in the distance but with all the stuff I had in the trays I decided to ignore it. There was a highly qualified
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Flight/Sergeant RAF Regiment fireman on duty and quite capable of handling any situation without me. I found out what it had all been about when I went on duty for the afternoon shift and in hind-sight figured that it might have been better if I had turned out.
The fire had been in a ventilation canopy over the airmens mess kitchen right next to the school, so the firemen and police had cleared the school and were tackling the fire quite successfully until the Wg/Cdr. Admin turned up and instructed then to lay foam on the roof. They did as they were told and the resultant mess took days to clear up as the foam slid off into the school. My daughters were delighted at the fun and a few days off but the kitchens and the mess and the school were in a hell of a state. Ox blood based foam is very sticky stuff but I found a bit of a problem in writing up the fire report. First of all I was in trouble for not being there and then because foam had been used. I think it took three drafts of the report before the Wg/Cdr found it acceptable to pass on without laying the blame for the mess at anyone's door.
Following the report were his own recommendation that I, as fire officer should be on the phone so a phone was installed,(not that it would be any good if I was in the control tower or off camp as anyone else was entitled to be when off duty, but that caused another storm in a tea cup.
Some time later I got the bill for the telephone installation and was hot foot down to see the Wg/Cdr. As far as he was concerned I had the facility and I should pay for it but there was one quick way out of that. I insisted that as it was a strictly a service requirement on his own recommendation it should be restricted for incoming calls only and the Air Force could pay for it...and that was that. As far as I was concerned it was a matter of principle but I was beginning to wonder if other people had the same sort of hassle over almost everything. I certainly seemed to be getting more than my share anyway.
We had another unfortunate incident one night when an aircraft of the local air line inbound from Jedda lost an engine on final approach and piled in about three miles out. There were no other aircraft scheduled so with all the alarms going we were straight
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into the crash procedure and I jumped aboard one of the back up water tenders to get to the scene. It was a very rough ride but all we had to do was to head straight for the fire and by the time we got there the aircraft was well alight. The first rescue crews on the scene had put water spray on the exits where the passengers had been scrambling out virtually being pushed along by the crew and the last of them had just got out a few minutes before I got there and the fire finally beat the water and the foam and was rapidly consuming the aircraft.
Nevertheless, the crew were uninjured and there were no serious injuries among the passengers no doubt due to the fact that the the [sic] pilot had whipped the undercarriage up smartly and had done a successful belly flop in the lights of his landing lights. I found the rather shaken Captain who told me that at least everyone was out until there was some hysterical screaming from one of the native passengers who had been assembled in a group to one side and ultimately some-one conveyed the message that she had left her baby an the luggage rack…..too late!. The aircraft was melting down and there was nothing that could be done until things cooled off. Meanwhile we started loading the passengers into an RAF bus and ambulance as well as some of the back-up fire vehicles that were no longer needed and they set off back to the medical centre. My problem was that due to the terrain our radio to the tower was virtually useless and produced little more than buzzes and crackles so no-one on the airfield knew what was going on. I did something that was a bit hit and miss but it worked. I got the Rescue Landrover up to the highest point I could looking down on the airfield and broadcast the information and in addition I used the headlights to morse a message to the tower. They got both and the medical centre was ready to receive them and attend to the injured. Typical of the way they did things out there was one of the final acts. The pilot was promptly placed under arrest by the civil authority even though he was still in a state of shock. Out there you were often guilty until you could prove your innocence. It was the way things were done and one got used to things that would have been outrageous at home. It was very similar to the manner in which I saw the public treat a taxi driver in Amman city after he had knocked over
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a small boy in the main street. The taxi had come to a screeching stop after the lad had nipped in front of him and got clipped. A howling mob descended upon the taxi driver and hauled him out of the vehicle and pulled, punched and kicked him in the direction of the nearest police post whilst in the meantime the small boy, who had only been bumped and had rolled into the gutter, got up, dusted himself off and scurried down a side ally. No doubt the taxi driver got thumped for his part in the incident and it seemed that no-ne [sic] was particularly interested in a slightly grazed little boy!.
The unit library was a place that most people used and contributed to quite regularly but most books had become dog-eared and certain types, mainly 'whodunits' very often had their story line ruined by the attentions of a certain elderly lady.
The lady was an ex school mistress who had taught in the local missionary schools since the days of Queen Victoria if her appearance was anything to go by. She wore Victorian type clothing that elderly ladies of that era would have worn. Voluminous skirt and blouse with tweed jacket, the whole ensemble, half moon steel rimmed glasses and all, topped off by a white brolly. She lived locally although retired, and had stayed on, greatly respected by the local population and permitted the privilege of an honourary [sic]membership of our mess. That was how she came to use the library but the margins of nearly every book contained some comment, like an Agatha Christie Miss Marples, in her unmistakable shaky scrawl such as, 'now I know who it is', or 'so and so did it', or 'it cannot be……' or 'I knew it was' etc, etc. but she was a great character and after a spot of bother on one occasion with some of the locals when she needed rescuing from an excitable crowd she was heard giving them some suitable comment in arabic about their behaviour whilst still retaining her dignity.
At one point in the late summer we got the first rains of the season and a most wonderful sight met our eyes when we looked p down the hill from the bungalow. The whole hillside was covered in a solid carpet of crocus in all shades of mauve. They had
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just popped up, and by the end of the day they had all gone again. Surprising what a bit of moisture will do in that part of the world where it did not usually rain between March and September.
As the weather became cooler we decided to have a fire lit in the lounge one evening. Coal was available in the outside storage bin supplied on payment through the stores and very expensive. As it was a most unlikely commodity in that part of the world I asked the storeman how the devil we got it to find that apparently it was supplied under a local contract and came from South Africa by boat to Aquaba and then was brought up by camel train. Very precious stuff that!. However, Abdul was instructed to light a fire. I suppose I should have shown him how to do it the first time but it never occurred to me that he would never have seen coal before so when he queried the method he was told, paper and wood with the coal on top and the black rock will burn. So he did as he was told but he had experimented somewhat. He mixed the lot up with about a pint of parafin [sic] , set light to it outside and then brought it all in in a bucket. There was certainly some pandemonium when he came staggering in with a bucket of fire on the end of a pole!. The Station Fire Officer had visions of his quarters going up in smoke but we did eventually manage to transfer it to the fireplace where he sat watching it for a long time before being convinced that the black rock really did burn.
Their usual method of producing heat was by some parafin [sic] appliance or charcoal or even scrub wood which further diminished what timber there was on the sparse hillsides.
There was always plenty of social activity with dances, parties, horse riding, tennis, swimming gala's, motor racing etc, etc but I will always remember one particular function that we attended. A reception at the British Embassy was about the dullest affair that I have ever been to. The drinks were so watered that even if you asked for a straight Whisky you still couldn't taste it, or the Gin or the Brandy for that matter. One thing was for sure, no-one was likely to have more than was good for him and let the side down. What other foreign
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nationals from other Embassies thought about I wouldn't know but I imagine that giving a Russian a Vodka similarly diluted would have raised an eyebrow, and precious little else!. However, as is so often said, it was all part of life's rich tapestry.
As a part time untrained fire officer I was certainly getting my share of 'on the job training' from the experiences of attending some quite spectacular fires.
Shortly after having the phone put in I had a call-out and had no option but to turn out since the call came direct from the C.O. The first one was in the Souk (market), in the city, and I mustered the maximum that was available, leaving the bare minimum for the airfield so we set off with four vehicles and when we arrived the area was an inferno. The source of the fire was right in the centre where there was a great deal of timber used by a small factory producing boxes for fruit and vegetable packing and although the native population were very agitated not a lot seemed to be happening. The municipal fire services were no-where to be seen and as my F/Sgt was on leave the two corporals soon assessed the situation and started to deploy the vehicles whilst I went in search of a person of some authority and to find a source of water replenishment. I was unfortunate in both respects and when I returned to the scene it was obvious that we were in trouble. A hord [sic] of uncontrollable natives were helping out in their own way by manhandling one hose and had pulled the pump off of the jacks and the suction hose out of the water bowser to such an extent that there was water everywhere except where we wanted it. It was a fine old mess until I managed to find a policeman with stripes on his arm and asked him to muster sufficient troops to protect the operation whilst my firemen were instructed to recover everything, stop pumping and to stand-by until we had control. Not easy as some people were absolutely frantic as it appeared that at least four people had been caught in the blaze. As I saw it they would have been well and truly roasted by that time and my main concern was to stop the fire from spreading and we started to pump water again as far as our tankerage would allow although we had found a supply source of our own at an ice factory back along the road and started
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a shuttle and that kept things going.
In due course the municipal fire brigade arrived and positioned themselves on the downwind side of the fire…..and the best of luck, then the Jordanian Air Force arrived with their pump but no water tender but very soon packed up as their hoses were perished and leaking but it didn't matter much as they then ran out of petrol!. At least we were putting on water..until the King arrived!.
The police lost control of the crowd again, everyone was bowing and scraping. We lost control of the pump for a while and stopped pumping which upset the King a little when he came to watch progress but was satisfied that we had a water problem and as the fire was almost under control we might as well allow the centre to burn out unless the city fire services still required us. That being established we wrapped it up and set off home in convoy with a salute to the King and clapping from the locals....but we were minus one brass hose nozzle; which had been stolen!.
The next fire I attended some time later was to a cinema up on Jebel Ammman overlooking the city. That time we took the big fire tender with back-up pump and tanker. I went with the big Mk.V. and half a dozen firemen and air traffic control assistants but we did not have the best of drivers for a job like that. There were some very steep hills to negotiate and that particular model as fas [sic] I was concerned had some built in design faults. Not the least of which was it's hill climbing capability with a full load of water and foam compound plus a few people. In the excitement the driver did not react properly to the possibility of an extended hill climb when he should have selected auxiliary low gear at the bottom of the hill, but instead he stuffed it at the hill until he ran out of steam and then muffed a gear change. That was a recipe for disaster.
We started to roll back. Neither footbrake or handbrake would hold it and with the prospect of a nasty situation arising I hollered to all the men on the back to bale out, crashed the gear lever into a forward gear and wrenched the wheel out of the drivers grasp so that our downhill run was stopped by our back end ramming a low wall. I got some stick for it of course but I am convinced that it saved the day. It saved the troops
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but it bent the tender and the wall but at least we did take off again and got to the scene of the fire. Unfortunately the pump outlets had been damaged and we could only use it as a back-up water tender to our trailer pump that got to work immediately on arrival. The cinema was nearly gutted anyway and the shell of the building itself had prevented any spread of fire to surrounding buildings so there was little that we could do. The city fire services were spraying water on the side wall, aiming for one small window quite high up, with very little success until one local fireman climbed an extending ladder with his 1 1/2 inch hose to put water directly into the window. I didn't think it was good idea as it was all very close to overhead power lines and the like so I went inside through the foyer with the city fire chief to asses the possibility of taking our hoses in through that way and promptly retreated. The fire had got a good hold so I immediately withdrew all of our appliances out of the roadway from below the wall of the building to the space under the inside balcony. The main wall was as hot as the side of a brick kiln and all that cooling water in my estimation was likely to cause a blow-out and collapse the wall. Despite putting this suggestion to the fire chief that his man up the ladder was in considerable danger he left him up there whilst we concentrated on the fire at the base of the inside wall.
Of course, in retrospect there is always another way of dealing with a situation although my report emphasised the need to keep my firemen out of the danger of a collapsing wall so as usual I got 'stick' for it. That is what officers in charge were for!!.
That's what the recently appointed C.O. thought anyway as for some reason he did not have a lot of time for Air Traffic Controllers, even though we were all ex aircrew. To him we were 'rock-apes', a term of endearment usually reserved for the RAF Regiment. There was very little that any of us could do right according to him, so there was the usual enquiry and a lot more caustic comment thrown around. I was used to it by that time so it was all water off of a ducks back.
I was paying a number of liaison visits to the civil airport
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by that time as parts of the civil terminal building were being up-dated with an Air Traffic Control facility although it was very basic. Almost every time I went there the man in charge was comfortably dressed in pyjamas and rather like the Egyptians had very limited knowledge and even less experience but most of their questions were answered. We never saw them in our Air Traffic Control tower though. They always declined the invitation as apparently they monitored all of our radio channels anyway!.
I have very good reason to remember the occasion that the terminal was officially opened by King Hussien [sic] . I had an official invitation to attend with a place on the viewing balcony so of course I had my camera at the ready when the King advanced along the red carpet towards the entrance just below and a perfect shot was presented....then my lens hood fell off and landed at the feet of P.M. with a gentle tinkle. There was instant reaction. H.M. stepped back smartly, surrounded by his escort whilst about ten weapons were aimed straight at me. Phew!. Fortunately I was immediately recognised by the King as the chap he saw quite regularly in the control tower when he presented his flight plan and with a wave the procession carried on. One thing I did not expect was a soldier clattering up the steps to hand me back my lens hood with the compliments of the King. Alright to laugh at later but a bit tense at the time.
The political situation in Jordan seemed to changing in a way that was very similar to that which had caused Britain to give up their protective role in Egypt under the mandate given to us by the United Nations. We had been obliged to get out of Egypt and our troops had been withdrawn from the Canal Zone. Now the power struggle had centred on Jordan and King Hussien [sic] being pro. British was having a spot of bother keeping control of the situation and on one occasion when I paid a liaison visit to the civil 'Air Traffic Control Centre' I had an extraordinary proposal put to me. Although one had to be very careful not to discuss sensitive political matters a mention was made of Colonel Nasser who was the current 'fly in the ointment' in Egypt. It was suggested that if I could arrange for the British Government to put up £1,000,000 in gold Nasser could easily
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be put out of business!.
Having done my best to confirm that it was not a joke I lost no time in passing the message along a discreet channel which dealt with such things and naturally heard no more about it.
It was not long after that incident that I was on duty in the control tower and soon after we had opened up in the morning a great deal of activity was observed over at the civil terminal building as well as in the Jordanian Air Force dispersals. Through the binoculars I was able to determine the figure of General Glub, C in C of the Jordanian Forces, (and controller of the purse strings for the British money that kept that force going), in amongst a large crowd of military people.
It all looked very excitable and not the usual situation that one expected to see the General in so I immediately opened the line to our intelligence officer to give him a running commentary on the activities as far as I could see. One of the Jordanian Air Force's De Haviland Dove's was run up and then started taxying as the pilot called for take-off clearance whilst on the move. He would not give his destination although he advised that his flight was diplomatically cleared and he duly took off heading North. So was the General and his Lady as we found out later!. There had been a coup. Out went the General and the Jordanians controlled their own purse military purse strings. The results of that were soon very obvious as the supply of British money was cut off.
The British seconded personnel were OK for their pay as they were seconded from their respective forces but pay for Jordanian Forces soon became unreliable. So did the supply and re-supply of military stores. Their uniforms became tatty. Their boots were wearing out and we were to find out later that the troops were selling their equipment to make both ends meet although the shortage of one commodity did not come to light for some time.
It was after attending another fire that we were able to put two and two together. The fire was in one of the typical concrete blockhouse native dwellings out in the scrub and there was a hell of a bang one night when it erupted in smoke and flame. When we got there it was obvious that there was little need
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for our services. For myself I had long given up trying to put out fires. The priority was to save lives, stop the spread of fire and last of all saving of property. What we were faced with was a blackened ruptured mess that had been a home but with very little combustable [sic] material left but the worst part of, it was that there were half a dozen pink, bloated, naked bodies spread around it, plus one on what was left of the roof. We dowsed the place well and truly with water and the locals recovered the body but it was even more terrible to find that most of the casualties were women. They all had to be very carefully handled so we left the clearing up job to the Jordanians.
The subsequent Investigations showed that the explosion was caused by the careless handling of some high grade cordite, from some .303ins. cartridge cases complete with percussion caps, all in the same area. A recipe for disaster.
Apparently cartridges were being emptied and the bullets replaced making a nice little earner for someone. But it did mean that most soldiers probably had only one in five usable rounds for his rifle!. It was just part of the corruption that was beginning to undermine the once proud and efficient Jordan Arab Army. It was going into decline rapidly after it's finance had been cut off.
From that point on we found ourselves facing more and more restrictions in our daily life. NAAFI supplies became limited as certain items which were produced by firms having any connection with Isreal [sic] were banned imports. That included of course Jaffa orange juice that had gone all the way to the UK and back again to their next door neighbours but we coped. The NAAFI bottling plant stepped up production of orange and lemon drinks from essence that came from Cyprus. Well, so the management said!.
Nothing that happened surprised me any more. We had some very unusual flight plans signalled in one day which immediately aroused suspicion so Intelligence was advised. I decided to go out to the radar truck situated at the edge of the runway to get the closest possible view of these four 'Egyptian Air
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Lines DC.3's when they came in. They came charging into the circuit totally ignoring all Air Traffic instructions, did a low level circuit in a 'gaggle' and then crunched onto the runway. I was watching carefully from a small ventilator in the van as they slowed down at my end of the runway and they were quite a sight. In the first place they were not DC.3's. They were Russian Ilushan [sic] 14's and not in very good condition either. They were very tatty with lop-sided undercarriage suspensions and their general appearance was not improved by the rough flaking paintwork only partially covered Egyptian Air Force markings by crudely painted civilian registration letters.
I kept in touch with the control tower and all of our observations were passed to Intelligence and of course as they were ostensibly civil aircraft they went to the civilian terminal.
There was a great deal of activity on their arrival and there was a fleet of lorries awaiting them but the unloading process was difficult to follow even from the control tower, although I have no doubt there were many pairs of eyes on these from various vantage points as there must have been from the moment they touched down.
As soon as the unloading was complete they were requesting taxy clearance, destination not notified and no flight plans filed. All very suspicious.
All the information that we had been passing back had filtered through to the right people, possibly through the Embassy to the King but someone was very quick off the mark. Jordanian military police forces intercepted the convoy of trucks on the main road out of the airfield and the cargoes were found to be arms and ammunition looted from the huge depots in Egypt that we had left in the care of the Egyptians. It was obvious that something really dodgy was going on and subsequently some very rough justice was meted out. There were more public hangings in the city which was becoming quite a regular event.
The daily routine still went on but there was an air of apprehension creeping in. It was not unfounded. The next thing that happened was that families were warned to get ready for
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repatriation to the UK, and not very much time was given. There were lots of tears and frenzied packing until eventually the airlift by Hastings aircraft out of Cyprus began. Every day there were more goodbye's. Some people had to go by 'casevac' aircraft as the medical centre was emptied. Mothers and one day old babies were included until eventually it was the turn of the Gamble family. Abdul cried and beat his chest in anguish and when they had gone and the married quarter had to be prepared for handing back as I took up residence in single quarters. What an end that was to what had been initially descibed [sic] as an accompanied posting!. [inserted] I [/inserted] was not amused, but work had to go on just the same.
Living out privileges were withdrawn and everyone moved into camp as our activities became more and more restricted by local events. We were confined to camp for days at a time and mess life became a very hectic round with little else to do. Even the cinema only opened two or three nights a week with the difficulty of getting new films in. I managed to get Abdul taken on by the mess as a steward and he was only too glad to have a reasonably well paid job having moved his family into the area to work for me he had considerable overheads.
On one of the numerous occasions that the city had erupted once again in political termoil [sic] the C.O. sent for me to do a nice little job for him. I was to be a courier to take a message to the British Embassy, which was virtually under siege, and our communications were no longer as discreet as they might have been. I was to go in civilian clothes by taxi. My answer to that was "thanks a lot, do I have any options" to which the answer was "no". Thanks again, although I did wring one concession from him, I was allowed to draw a pistol, with a full chamber, which I kept in my hand, in my brief case, all the way there and back. There was no way I was going to be at the mercy of a howling frenzied mob without being able to do a bit of damage first. Right or wrong, that's the way I felt about the situation at the time. After all the tight spots I had been in in my life I reckoned I was owed a chance but it went off without any fuss and I breathed easy again.
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One evening about six weeks after the families had gone there was a strange atmosphere permeating the normal activities. The cinema was closed. The Sgt's mess bar, and ours, as well as the Naafi canteen were ordered to close early and everyone was warned to be ready for an early start the following day.
Few of us thought that it would be as early as it was though At 5am the sirens started wailing. The PA system was busy giving orders for everyone to report to their normal places of work by 6am, phones were ringing madly and the whole station got into gear very quickly. At 6am roll-calls were made and instructions were passed for everyone to get back to quarters, pack personal belongings and back to the messes for breakfast. Breakfast was tea coffee, toast and boiled eggs...taken on the run as it would finish at 7pm precicely [sic] after which we were to report back to our sections. At 7pm the PA system was announcing the almost unbelievable news that we were evacuating the station. Today!...just like that!. We were going to Mafraq which was a few miles to the North and we had 12 hours to do it in, and the PA system was going almost non-stop. There was no written distributed plan to work to. It was all done on the PA from Ops. and on the telephone. Motor transport was allocated to all sections who provided their own drivers. Those sections that had no drivers had them allocated with the vehicles and every qualified driver was pressed into service. Workshops were emptied. Vehicles were put together, and those that could not be put on the road were loaded on the backs of others or prepared for towing.
The direction finder vehicle that had been up on the hill without wheels for years was fitted with wheels and brought down. Fuel tankers were filled from the storage tanks and vehicles were filled to the brim. Aircraft tanks were topped up to maximum. A Meteor that had been under repair in the hangar was hastily prepared and in fact took off later with almost flat tyres and was wheels down all the way with the locks in just to be safe.
The messes, offices, stores, the Naafi, the library and armoury were emptied. The armoury in particular was cleared by the simple expedient of issueing [sic] arms to everyone to save transport space so we all finished up with a selection of rifles, pistols, Sten guns, Bren guns, you name it, and as much ammunition as we could
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carry. Work pressed on at an incredible rate. The only refreshment was what one managed to cobble up in the departments and sections…..lunch was not even mentioned, although we were told that meals would be available at Mafraq where a skeleton crew had always provided minimum facilities there as a relief landing ground; even before a new runway had been built on a new site.
Everything that was not bolted down was packed…and some things were unbolted, and as each section was ready to move it was off to the Guard Room where convoys of a minimum of ten vehicles were put together and dispatched by the Service Police. The Squadron Venoms were being flown out followed by the chopper as soon as the Squadron was gone. The fighter control unit that had always operated from a remote site was wrapped up and that was on it's way independantly [sic] as were the British Military personnel on secondment to the Jordanian Government. The RAF Regiment airfield defence units just packed up and went, Bofors guns and all, everyone armed to the teeth and in many cases parties left a certain amount of damage and disruption behind them. Handsfull [sic] of salt and sand did guns and engines considerable damage. The Jordanian Air Force Vampires had all their guns de-harmonised so that they were likely to spray lead all over the place instead of in a concentrated pattern and the Kings personal Tiger Moth was tipped up on it's nose busting it's prop.
The Station thinned out fast. Air Traffic Control, the fire services and the signals cabin were the last to wrap up but the dead-line was met although aircraft were still going in and out with very limited services which pilots were advised of and as we approached the dead-line we lost control of the airfield.
The last civilian aircraft was the BOAC Argonaught from U.K. to Bahrain and although the captain accepted the limitation he had to be sent around again as half a dozen vehicles of the Jordan Arab Army appeared on the airfield weaving about all over the runway and he was obliged to circle whilst we tried to keep them off. The pilot landed eventually under his own responsibility, disembarked and embarked his passengers in double quick time and was off again without a flight plan.
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Our last action was to signal the airfield's closure and change of operating authority before the signals cabin was dismantled and the Pembroke flew out with as many as could be piled in leaving the remaining Air Traffic staff (including me) and the fire services to go by road as soon as the keys were deposited in the Guard Room, so off we set with RAF Police Landrover in the rear. Amman was no longer an RAF base!!!.
Our new home was the new Mafraq airfield being built as part of the NATO plan. It was on the North side of the old oil pipeline on the main route from Damascus to Bagdad opposite the old Mafraq (Dawsons Field), but it was in no way complete.
At least it had a long new runway, some new buildings which had in fact been built as married quarters although there were no barracks as such. Needless to say, they were allocated as barracks even though they lacked lighting, running water or toilet facilities. In fact, water was a very scarce commodity as there was no bore hole, and no water tower so water had to be brought in by a dubious civilian source which could not even be used for cooking until a filtration system was devised. But all these problems were only part of the getting sorted out plan. Later on we found that as we were not far from the foothills of the mountains of southern Syria a water diviner was expected from the UK to pin-point a source. That was put on hold although it should not have been difficult considering that 20 miles to the East there was a large area of marshland and vegetation which was fed by the flood waters from the mountains and some of that found it's way through the middle of the airfield. They had built a large conduit under the runway to take it away in the rainy season!.
However, limited water there was and that was a start. At least once a day we could draw a ration for washing and shaving. Drainage was a different matter. There were no drains so we resorted to the desert encampment method of doing things and the shovels had been at work allready [sic] . Everyone got 'stuck in' and were working like beavers.
The Officers Mess had been set up in an area of bungalows. The Sgts Mess was similarly set up in a clutch of houses and the airmen spread around the incomplete estate. A large wooden building with a kitchen, which had originally been provided
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for the contractors workers was turned into the main mess hall.
As with our departure from Amman there were very few questions asked. Then we had been told to pack up and go. At Mafraq we were just allocated space and it was up to us to set it up. It says a lot for the character of the British serviceman in the way it was done. There was no lack of initiative.
Air Traffic Control had already been set up in a suitable place about half way down the runway in a desert mobile office and our old runway control van. Emergency short range radios took very little time to fit and aerials were promtly [sic] rigged by the signals section as was the direction finder and radar truck although it was only as a radio back-up and even the homing beacon was tied to the side of it on with a lash-up of a mast. As the ATC services were outside the main camp area and main power supply we had our own mobile generator.
The Royal Signals Corp who were [deleted] a [/deleted] our telephone people out there were frantically running lines between departments in the main compound, linking everything through a small PBX in the hub of the whole system, the Ops. room but had saved a lot of cable by actually using the runway lighting cables as phone lines to the ATC centre. There were no lighting units installed anyway just the cables. It would be back to the old parafin [sic] goose-neck flares for a flare-path.
The RAF Regiment were whacking in stakes and spreading coils of barbed wire by the ton to surround the main area of activity which did not include ATC. It was an isolated outpost, but armed to the teeth as was everyone else. Representations had already been made to the CO to turn us in a defensive compound surrounded by wire as we were going to have to maintain a 24 hour watch but we had been given a low priority on that.
Within the stores area was another fleet of vehicles including workshops which had [deleted] previously [/deleted] been part of the Egyptian stores depot that I had previously known nothing about and that played it's part later. Then there was a complete [inserted] mobile [/inserted] fighter control unit but it was not sited or deployed so there were a lot of people without jobs that ops deployed as manpower to wherever it was needed.
Work had been going on at a furious pace and a lot had been done before we arrived in the late evening. To uproot about
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1400 people with all their goods and chatels [sic] , equipment of all kinds, transport, arms andammunition [sic] , fuel, food and cooking facilities plus communications equipment, and set it all up again was quite an achievement and must have given the CO and his senior officers more than a few headaches in planning it in secret the night before.
Work that first day did not stop at five o'clock. It just continued until most things were in place and reported operational before the troops staggered back to the mess hall for soup and sandwiches before drawing bedding and making up beds to finally flop into them; exhausted. What a day it had been although it should be pointed out that it did not all happen on the first day. It was an on going thing and a matter of priorities.
There were two items of private transport parked in the officers mess area. One, the car that had caused a colleague so much trouble to get into the country, and the other, a neat little bright red MG.B. belonging to the Station Commander, or to be precise, his wife. Some months previously King Hussein had made a present of it to the CO. but no sooner that the Embassy heard of it they invoked Queens Rules and Regulations about the acceptance of gifts by serving officers and it was 'no can do'. I do not know who squared it all up, but the King took it back and then presented it to Mrs.C.O. There was no argument with that!.
After a few hours sleep the second day was a memorable one as far as some of us were concerned. There was no need to push anyone and after a quick breakfast the hustle and bustle started again. I had not even had time to go to the airfield for the day shift although we were down to six controllers by that time with postings out and no replacements and having left ATC problems to another controller I had hardly had time to check out the fire services deployment when a message direct from the CO was delivered. It required two controllers, six firemen, two radio mechanics and two other technical trades to muster with tool kits as appropriate, small kit, (essential personal belongings), plus one major fire tender, to return immediately to Amman to put the services back on the air again. It had not taken long for everything to fizzle out and the King had made
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a personal appeal to the Group Captain for assistance. I had no problem in nominating my No.2. A New Zealander, an ex POW like myself who would know how to take care of himself. I went with the fire tender and the others went by air arriving more or less at the same time. I had been delayed a few minutes before setting off as I transferred a couple of cases of Brandy from the Mess stocks to the fire tender…..just in case of emergencies!!!!.
My colleague had already taken stock of the situation and was waiting at the foot of Air Traffic Control when we arrived and we quickly sorted out a plan. A young Jordanian pilot was 'in control' in the tower and was doing his best with a verey pistol and a stock of cartridges which was about to run out as there had been a total breakdown of communications despite, as I had understood, that the civilian terminal facilities were all in place if needed. A bit of 'know how' would have helped, but civil aircraft were still scheduled and something had to be done so everyone went about their business. Within two hours everything was ticking over again. The main generators were started up. Power was back on, batteries were being charged, verey cartridge stocks were replaced by scavenging among the Jordanian Air Force aircraft, tuning had been carried out and crash and rescue services were operational, with limitations, although the Jordanian Air Force appliances would not join ours on the hard-standing but 'control' remained in the hands of the Jordanians. We flatly refused to have anything to do with it....it was their airfield and that was that.
By late afternoon our activities slowed down as intercomms [sic] and radio communications were all back on line so we waited around for something to happen.
Eventually we were rounded up and taken to a mess hail in the Jordanian Air force compound where we were fed. We certainly needed it. We had had nothing for ten hours other than perhaps a small share of a bar of chocolate that someone had thoughtfully put in his kit.
After that we were taken to our accommodation. I could hardly believe it was happening. The keys of two married quarters had been produced from the Guard Room. One was my old quarter and the other the Station Commander's.
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My colleague and I took rooms in my old quarter and we put the men in the CO's residence as it was the larger building but after a good look around we decided that there was plenty of room for all of us in the big house and that we would move in the following day. There was room for us at one end and for the men the other with the lounge designated as a common room. Our stock of drink was added to what we found in the main house. The CO had lived in it right up to the moment we had moved out and hence his wine stocks were still there in his store and side-board. It was an Alladins [sic] cave!. Exactly as he had left it. Nice of him. We promptly appointed one of the Corporals as barman with the responsibilty [sic] of keeping it all secure and out of bounds during the working day. That way we could make it last so after a couple of rounds on the CO we retired for the night.
I must confess that it did seem strange sleeping .in my old quarter again especially as there remained a memento of the previous occupants. A jig-saw puzzle that one of my girls had left was still on the top of a wardrobe!.
We had been warned to be ready for a pick-up at 7:30 the following morning for an 8 o'clock breakfast so we were all formed up in a mini parade when the transport arrived on the dot and were duly conveyed to the same mess hall, where we had had supper the night before.
Most of us were hanging on to the little bit of kit that we had taken with us and had added a few eating and drinking utensils along the way. The quarters were still as they had been left by the last occupant, as per inventory; down to the last pepper pot... but who cared!. There were two ex POW's who had been obliged to eat with the fingers before, and were not taking any more chances.
We had a good breakfast and at 8:30 we were asked to wait for instructions as there was a great deal of activity ouside [sic] and we did not have to wait long before we found out what we were going to do next.
The mess hall was totally encircled by armed troops standing shoulder to shoulder and an officer told us that we were to stay put until things were sorted out. We were under house arrest!.
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By mid-morning the sorting out had been done as we just sat around twiddling our thumbs until we were asked to assemble outside as we were going to the airfield...but not before being asked for the keys to the fire tender!. There was no point in arguing so I reluctantly handed them over and then we were escorted to the airfield where we waited a little longer before our Pembroke came in so we all piled in. The pilot, who happened to be the Group Captain did not bother to shut down the engines. It was certainly not built to carry that many so it was a bit of a squeeze and it was even more of a squeeze to get it off the runway too. We used every bit of it and every bit of power that was available. We used all of the runway and just lifted off with everything straining all the way to land at Mafraq a few minutes later with some very hot engines. So much for that little expedition!!.
The CO did not say a lot apart from suggesting that there would have to be an enquiry into the loss of my fire engine and I think [deleted] g [/deleted] my answer was something to the effect that it might as well be done by the same board that would do the enquiry into the loss of his airfield!, but it was only a formality really in order to get it struck off and replaced.
In the meantime things had really been going on apace at our new base. The barbed wire had been strengthened. Trenches and gun pits had been dug. Sand bags were piled up all over the place including the fuel dump, the aircraft dispersals and other vulnerable places....including Air Traffic Control. That was at least no longer stuck out on a limb but a whole new pattern of life had emerged.
The station was on Red Alert permanently which was a rare situation for peace-time. Everyone was still armed to the teeth and the Amman party had reclaimed their weapons from the armoury. On reflection it was as well that we had not been armed when we had gone back otherwise I am sure that it would have meant another enquiry into the loss of our weapons.
The old Mafraq desert airfield had been completely deserted and everyone was confined to the new camp area. Aircraft had been shuttling to and from Cyprus and Habbanyia. Essential supplies were coming in and non-essential personnel were being flown out as a lot of adjustment was taking place.
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Air Traffic Control was still being maintained on a 24 hour shift system so the few that had been doing the job were only too pleased to spread the job out a bit. We all had secondary duties to perform as well so we were kept busy.
The Army had opened the Post Office again and some mail was already beginning to filter through from the UK but we had been advised that outgoing mail was being censored at Nicosia so there would be delays in that direction.
I was desperate for news of my wife who had not been well prior to leaving Amman and had had a dreadful time going through Cyprus, Stansted and subsequently through Hendon before being able to catch the first train out of Victoria in the cold early dawn of an English winter. She had caught a chill. Her nerves were shot to pieces and it was just as well that she had opted to go back to her parents home in Worthing where she could be looked after much better than if she had gone to a transit camp at Blackpool which had been one of the options.
From her most recent letters it was obvious that she was still unwell and was not being helped by the disruption of the mail from our part of the world either.
All our goods and chatels [sic] which had been flown out of Amman was somewhere en-route so a lot of new clothing had to be purchased and it was not easy but somehow she was coping. For the girls it had all been quite an experience although even they were glad to settle down in the local school once more.
Our daily routine developed into something like normality once more. There was plenty of ammunition and we could spend as much time as we wanted on the range which had been quickly set up but in a very short space of time we set up our own on the airfield with aid of a borrowed bulldozer. I had qualified as a range safety officer at Mareham [sic] so we soon got clearance to do our own thing. The targets were of the tin and bottle kind and there is nothing like practice to improve marksmanship!.
One also learns considerable respect in the handling of firearms provided that the basic rules are observed, and they were. No fooling about. A gun should always be handled as if it was loaded so loading and unloading and cleaning, going on and off duty never produced one incident of mis-handling...fortunately!.
Aircraft continued to go in and out, and in most instances we
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had notification as soon as our communication with the outside world had been re-established. It was all radio and radio teleprinters of course so with all the coding and de-coding that was required the signals cabin was going flat out.
We were very surprised one morning we we [sic] went off-duty after a busy night with Hasting's coming and going to find that we had several heavy artillery peices [sic] already dug in, sandbagged and manned by the R. A. ready for use. The question was, against who?.
We were not left in doubt for very long. Within 24 hours of their arrival the news hit us that combined French and British forces had invaded Egypt and the Suez Canal Zone and then we were immediately on a war readyness [sic] state.
News was limited to the personal radios that many still had but the fresh restrictions under which we were then placed gave us more to worry about.
Diplomatic relations with other Arab countries were broken off and we could no longer use the air route across Syria to Cyprus and all traffic had to be routed via Habbanyia(Iraq) and Turkey. Isreal [sic] was at war with Egypt and Jordan. Iraq was making protests in respect of our presence and Cyprus was suffering some internal unrest from a regigious [sic] rebel. And we were sitting in the middle!.
That particular episode is but another chapter of history, so it might as well be left to the historians to write it down. All I was aware of at the time was that it was another fine mess I was in.
The daily routine went on but perhaps the biggest headache of all was the acute shortage of water. Tanks, water carriers and bowsers of every sort were pressed into service for storage. There were no laundry facilities and it soon became neccesary [sic] to institute bathing parades for about twenty people at a time to strip wash at a water bowser and then dunk clothes at the same time. It was not very well received by some of the more sensitive youngsters, many of them national servicemen but thank goodness the weather was still fairly warm with the odd shower from time to time. At least when it did rain Air Traffic Control had a plentiful supply with the benefit of the stream that ran under the runway. More than enough on one occasion after a really
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heavy downpour when a great deal of rubbish was carried along in the flood which blocked the grating and then diverted the stream over the runway!. A useful job for the fire services.
The rain did bring some other problem though as the airfield had been built right across an age old camel route from the North right down into Saudi Arabia. Camel trains naturally followed the water supply and took years to go each way with many young being born en-route.
The older animals knew the route instinctively and invariably travelled in the cool of the night with the herders fast asleep in the saddle but it played merry hell when they blundered into barbed wire and other things like an airfield across their path. There was a great deal of growling, bellowing and other noises that camels make as some of them got tangled up.
Some wire had been strung out earlier to divert them from their route but it was a waste of time. You only had to look at a camel to realise that going around it was very far from their minds. The easiest way was to remove it and thoroughly inspect the runway at night before it was. I think it save a lot in compensation too!.
I had one piece of good news anyway. The two cases of Brandy that I had diverted from the bar stocks were written off and did not get charged to my mess bill, the paperwork for which had all been brought from Amman. It would not have cost much anyway. At approximately 50p a bottle it would not have been more than £12 in total in those days!.
Since we had moved to Mafraq our rations had been fairly basic although with the air supply we had been topped up and were adequate for several weeks if we had been completely bottled up. Nevertheless. the NAAFI manager, who was a member of our mess and in fact shared a room with me, decided that he would do something really special for one week-end and set to work with some 'surplus' stocks to make an enormous pie. In a bath tub!.
In went four chickens, obtained locally, followed by several pounds of bacon. The contents of several tins of pork and sausage meat. Corned beef, spices, all suitably spiced and sloshed into the tub with several dozen halves of boiled eggs. The pastry took umpteen pounds of flour and fat to make the lining and
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the lid and when finally decorated was a near masterpiece as the 60lb. pie was hoisted into the oven.
After hours of cooking and cooling it was finally brought ceremoniously into the dining room with all the solemnity usually reserved for a royal haggis. It really did look good with it's pastry leaves and rosettes all glistening with the overall glazing. It cut beautifully and tasted gorgoeus [sic] . Certainly it seemed worth all the effort that had been put into it….until the following day!.
Some people said it was due to a richness that we had not been used to, others reckoned it was over indulgence but the medical officer decided that as the medical centre was inundated with officers going sick that perhaps the ingredients were not as fresh as they might have been. The local chickens were suspect even though they had been bought live. (You did not normally buy anything of that sort out there unless it was on the hoof or still clucking). So the MO had the last word and condemned it to be consigned to the fire. I thought it was a great shame. I had had a double portion and I was OK, and so was the NAAFI manager who took out a large chunk before disposal. And we still did not come to any harm. Need one say more!.
There was one weekly event that many people turned out to see. It was the 'train' that went through from Damascus to Bagdad a few miles from us, usually on the far side of the old Dawsons Field, only it was not on rails. It was a huge Mercedes locomotive/coach with a trailer coach like a gigantic silver caterpillar. It's wheels were between 7 and 8 feet in height with great balloon tyres that looked as if they had come off of a Stirling. With a crew of drivers, engineers, radio operators navigators and stewards it just bored majestically along like the proverbial ship of the desert in a plume of exhaust smoke and a cloud of sand. It really was an impressive sight as it went through. Unfortunately I was never in a position to photograph it as zoom and telephoto lenses were not so readily available as they are today.
After [sic] while the rigid restrictions were eased a little although we were required to wear uniform all the time. Everything to the West of us and that included the town of Zerqua was still out of bounds but we could go in small parties Eastwards to
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the marshes where there was some wildfowl and some remnants of an ancient civilisation.
Among them were the ruins of an old Bysantine [sic] town which still bore the marks of the progress of the Crusaders that had passed that way hundreds of years before. The most amazing thing was the size of the building blocks. Something like 4ft square and there was still a lot of it standing. Mostly it was being used as a shelter for camels which were being looked after by a motley collection of very ragged boys who surprised us by having a smattering of broken English. In fact they even looked a little European and I will say no more about that other than to note that the British had been in those parts for a long time!.
The method of construction was to remain a mystery as we could find no books on the subject in our limited library but generally it must have followed the same ancient techniques used by the Romans and the Pharoes [sic] , who seemed to be able to move huge quantities of stone with only crude equipment…..and a lot of expendable manpower. In one wall there was a door of solid stone 18ins. thick, some 4ft by 5ft hung by 3ins. pegs, hewn out of the solid, which was perfect fit and capable of being swung to and fro' in balance by a finger touch. Quite remarkable, and a welcome outing in a place like that provided some relief from our normal routine.
I took the opportunity to fly down to Aquaba on one accasion [sic] . The firemen down there were on detachment originally from Amman on a rotational basis and some of them had been there overlong. I had been badgering the CO. for a long time and eventually got clearance to go down and swap three of them over, as well as taking what mail there was. Mail had been very spasmodic as the lines of communication kept changing.
When we were in Egypt the run out of Fayid to Amman used to parachute the mail into Aquaba and aircraft landed infrequently. When Egypt packed up some went by sea and some went via Amman and then it all got held up until it went via Cyprus and Amman and then the routing was changed to Cyprus/Habbanyia/Mafraq with the inevitable delays. With only limited communications between Mafraq and Aquaba three firemen had a nice surprise when they found that they were being relieved. I tried to find my cousin but learned that he had already returned to the UK.
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At his age he was due to end his long service with the army and at last get the sand out of his shoes. I could understand how he felt after all the years he had spent in Mesopotamia [sic] before the war and he was no doubt relieved to get out of another of many tight spots including the evacuation from Dunkirk.
We had a very nice surprise one day when a couple of young English nurses in an old banger presented themselves at the main gate asking for shelter for the night.
They were en-route from the UK to India the hard way. Right across the continent, a hop from Turkey to Cyprus. Another to Beruit [sic] and Damascus, then following the route of the old Hadj railway to Zerkqa before setting off across the desert for Bagdad they found an out-post of the British Empire on their route so it changed their plans a little.
Room and board was found for them. They were fed and rested and their old banger, which was actually in better condition than it looked, was serviced by the MT. section who were only too pleased to have something different to do. After spending a couple of nights with us they were given a resounding send off and good luck to them. There was still some spirit of adventure left that was for sure. They were not the only women to undertake such a daunting journey.
When the families were being evacuated from Amman there was one lady who decided to drive the family car back to the UK. If they had had as much trouble in getting the car into the country as my colleague then there some logic in it, but she took two youngsters as well.
We heard that she had made it after many weeks on the road and her route had taken her out of Jordan into Syria. Then further on into Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany and Belgium before it became neccesary [sic] to cross the last ditch...the Channel!. Some journey. Nearly 3000 miles. Who said that women were the weaker sex.
We were still losing controllers without replacement. The next one to go was the same chap who had imported the car and the NAAFI manager was being posted back home as well so they went together. They filled up the car with their kit, fuel and supplies and they set off for the 500 mile plus journey to Habbanyia following the pipe-line towards Bagdad and Basra.
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The pipe-line was the best possible navigational feature for crossing the desert as there was no road then. Just the pipe-line and a string of desert air-strips that were generally American oil company manned with their own system of communication. All that for a pipe-line that had not pumped oil for years!.
My wife was continuing to have a rough time of it and for some reason was not getting all of my letters. Her nerves were still bad and she was having a lot of treatment whilst I was still stuck in that place. True, we had the facilities of mess life and the Squadron pilots who were not doing much flying had set themselves the task of starting up a cinema in a marquee. The RAF Film Service had fallen down on the job and nothing was coming in other than privately arranged 16mm films from Habbanyia and using the 16mm projectors that were supplied for training films we managed some form of entertainment. Our original 35mm equipment in our cinema had been left behind in Amman but we coped even though we had to stop the programme to change reels and it very often went out of synchronization...accompanied by hoots of laughter.
A games night in the mess on one occasion provided a little distraction but it was a night that I fear I became a little unpopular with the organisers, The Squadron pilots of course. It was a games night with a difference as it was turned into a gambling den despite the fact that normal mess rules forbad the playing of games for money. Anyway, our conditions were far from normal and I recall that the bank was holding it's own at most tables but the roulette wheel favoured me to the extent that I broke the bank. The first time was not so bad and after they had raised more funds I broke it again!. They said it was only for fun so I gave all my winning back and retired but I am sure that I would not have got my shirt back if I had lost it....but it was still a lot of fun despite the fact that the CO made some very disapproving remarks. He and I were not on very good terms by that time.
Our relationship had not been improved by another incident when I was Duty officer one night and one of the patrols called in to report that there were suspicious noises on one section of the perimeter according to the Guard Sgt, like tank track noises. I was just a link in the chain and passed the report on to OPs.
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centre. The CO decided to go out with the Guard Commander and found that it was only echoes from a generator exhaust and I got the stick for it. Still, I would have got a lot more if it had been a tank probing our defences and I had not reported it. As usual it was a 'no-win' situation for me.
We still did not know quite what to expect or from where. The Suez invasion was all but over. We had driven a wedge between the Egyptians and the Isrealies [sic] and they had agreed to pull back. Our troops were withdrawing and it was a very tricky situation not improved by the recriminations and world opinion on our role in the whole affair, and all was not quite what it seemed on the surface.
We had been warned that the odd Canberra might be making a dash for us from Cyprus but we had a bit of a shock to learn that on one occasion an RAF Canberra out on a high photographic recce' over Syria had something on his tail that he had not quite expected. A Syrian, (Russian made.), SAM 7 heat seeking missile!, and unfortunately it found him. As far as I recall one member of the crew was killed, the other was captured and was returned some time later when the situation had eased a bit. Not a lot was said about it.
Christmas 1956 came and a great time was had by all. The Officers and NCO's served the men in time honoured fashion. There was too much to drink and rationing was forgotten for that day. Unknown talents emerged with a station concert and a station song with many bawdy verses was produced along with one or two daft acts on stage. I am not sure what time lunch finished that afternoon but I reckoned we owed ourselves that.
My tour of duty, 2 1/2 years, was coming to an end and like most people I cherished the date which was bodly [sic] marked on my calender [sic] . In the old days it would have been "roll on that bloody boat" as the song goes although in the circumstances it was roll on any form of transport when I reported to the Adjutant for confirmation that the repatriation procedure would soon be be [sic] put in motion. I was devestated [sic] when I was told that I was being deferred as they could no longer afford to lose people without replacement. It did not take long to arrange for an appointment to see the CO only to be told that there was no appeal, the decision had been made although after we had been
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closeted for a while with some man to man talking and the production of some letters from my wife and her Doctors he accepted the fact that I might have a good case so he would see what he could do. He owed me that at least after one incident that ocurred [sic] between us that needs no airing so I was left sweating it out for a while.
Fortunately it did not take too long and I was soon involved in the paperwork to clear the unit, obtain an air priority and wait for another week before, I at last found myself on an aircraft for Habbanyia.
As soon as I got into the transit mess there was my colleague who had driven there in his car still trying to get it down to Basra but otherwise enjoying himself.
I found it very difficult to enjoy myself even when every day was virtually a holiday whilst I waited for a seat on an aircraft when I was so desperate to get home. My priority rating was still the basic, the bottom of the list!, so all I had to do was wait.
Fortunately I knew a lot of people at Habbanyia and was invited out quite a lot. I also saw a lot more of Habbanyia and on one occasion a party of us got together for a day trip to Bagdad.
That was a forty mile taxi journey each way across the desert as there did not appear to be a road and the return journey was of course done at night. I can only think that those drivers navigated by the various clumps of rocks that loomed up from time to time as there was nothing else to indicate which way to go except the stars.
In Bagdad we broused [sic] around, up the street of the goldsmiths, down the street of the silversmiths and up the street of the ivory carvers and in an about sampling the sights.
It was not possible to photograph all that I would have liked to as it seemed that the Iraqi army was guarding almost every street corner. Photographs had to be taken very discreetly after the first occasion that a threatening rifle was pointed in our direction, but it was a good day just the same.
I was still kicking my heels after a week without having been called forward so I buttonholed a Valetta captain that I had known at Fayid who was flying a freighter to Cyprus the following day and he agreed to take me as supernumarary [sic] crew. Air Movements
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staff agreed and I was out on the airfield, baggage, hangover and all by 7am, after very little sleep. I wish I had had the good sense to have abstained but it had all developed into another fairwell [sic] party and I don't think I have ever felt so bad before. I almost signed the pledge [underlined] again!. [/underlined]
The thunder of the take-off just about scrambled every nerve in the brain-box but that was only half of it. We were of course taking the roundabout route going North-West to cross the Turkish border then West over the mountains and the Valetta thundered it's way up to 16,000ft with the crew on oxygen, all except the supernumary [sic] crew member who did not have an oxygen mask so I cupped a spare outlet hose in my hands with it on full flow I gulped and and [sic] gulped until the hammering in my head became a little more bearable. I was very glad when we turned South and started letting down clear of the mountains on the last leg to Cyprus. What a blessed relief it was to touch down at Nicosia and sample that first cup of coffee in the transit lounge.
With thanks to the pilot for the completion of one more leg of the journey behind me I reported for documentation and when that was done found myself signing for a Smith & Wesson .38 with six rounds and a printed set of instructions before being transported to a hotel in a quiet area of Nicosia. Basically the istructions [sic] were to the effect that if I was out in public I had to be prepared to defend myself although the natives seemed friendly enough on the surface there was still an undercurrent of dissent. Most of the troops that had invaded Egypt who had used Cyprus as a jumping off point had been withdrawn and I certainly had no intention of going very far on my first day in Cyprus. I was in need of a lot of sleep.
The following day, fully refreshed, I was off to re-visit Nicosia city centre and I was dammed if I wanted to take a pistol stuck in my belt like some bandit as all my webbing had been packed away in my 'deep-sea' kit so I left it in my room.
I was wandering along quite happily taking in the sights down a main street when a car pulled up alonside [sic] with a screech of brakes and my immediate thought was...'whoops-here is trouble' and I turned quickly to asses [sic] the situation only to see a chap that I had known in Amman who said with some urgency "Tom Gamble,
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get in you bloody fool", so I did.
It turned out that I had been strolling down 'murder mile' where more than one bloke had bitten the dust in recent months. He was more concerned afterwards that I was not armed but who knows, perhaps it was because I was not that I did not become a target. He lived in a bungalow not far from the Hotel so that's where we finished up for tea, dinner and drinks on more than one occasion.
He was a useful chap to know being one of the Air Movements and despite the fact that I had been told that I would be called forward when a flight became available I didn't think a daily visit to Air Movements would do me any harm, if only to be sure that I-was not overlooked. Not that he could expedite my passage. That was determined by my priority and a long waiting list but we chatted about this that and the other and he told me there was a compound in the freight area with all the Amman baggage in it so we went to have a look. Under a large tarpaulin was a huge pile of boxes and on investigation we found all the Gamble's unmistakable boxes on the edge of the pile. I couldn't mistake those boxes. One of them had been my father-in-law's tool chest and another had belonged to an Uncle who I had never known, who had been killed in France during WW1. He had had it made in India so it was certainly well travelled. Anyway, they had already been there three months and whether he exercised his perogotive [sic] or not they were back in the UK two weeks later.
I had many a pleasant time with his family for odd meals and parties as well as a couple of runs out into the country and to the coastal resorts of Limosol [sic] and Lanarca as the days went by.
Despite the fact that I checked daily with Air Movements the answer was getting monotonous, "sorry, not today" was not what I wanted to hear and seriously thought of using the knowledge of my wife's condition to 'up' the priority although I had already sent a cable to her to let her know I was in Cyprus and still waiting when, at last, after a week I was told that I was allocated for the following day so all the paperwork was done. I sent another cable to say I would be on my way and duly reported with baggage, ready to go. I actually got as far as the steps to the aircraft when a Service Policeman came rushing
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up with an Air Movements Cpl and a harassed looking airman with a suitcase. Papers were waived and I was taken off of the manifest to go back into transit. The airman had compassionate grounds for getting home in a hurry and that's the way it worked. He had a higher priority than I did and unless you were very senior it was usually an officer who had to give way. It cost me another cable to say I was further delayed.
Air Movements confirmed that I would be away the following day and I think I went to bed that night with everything crossed but it all went according to plan. There was another emergency boarding but that time it did not effect me as my priority had gone up one as a result of the previous day's cancellation, so I was off at last in a chartered Eagle Air Lines Viking stopping; at Nice for refuelling and thence to Stansted and finally to Hendon for disposal. After that I was on my way to Worthing, home and family.
That was the end of my Middle East tour. All that packed into two years and seven months!. By that time it was the beginning of February 1957 and I was not thinking too much about my next appointment. I would know all about that when I reported to the Air Ministry within the customary 48 hours of my arrival in the UK. Family business was of the highest priority as it was obvious that Dorothy was far from well with a nervous disorder so before I reported to Air Ministry I got a letter from her doctor and was prepared for any problems that might arise.
I need not have worried. The Personnel Staff could not have been more sympathetic and sorted out a posting for one that was beyond any wildest dreams. Tangmere, just 18 miles from Worthing so off I went with two weeks dis-embarkation leave to sort things out.
It did not take long to get a small car and we visited Tangmere to take a look at what was to be our new home and to complete an application for Married Quarters which we were told, would be available soon and another visit to the Senior Controller soon put me in the picture. There was one small problem. It was another 24 hour shift working Air Traffic Control situation. Another of the many geographically placed units that provided an emergency service although that would not present much of
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a problem once I was in quarters. I was used to sleeping away from home....although that did not mean that I liked it.
The two weeks went very quickly but at least we made the most of it. We got out and about visiting family as part of the process of rehabilitating my wife until it was time to report for duty and once again after the arrival formalities I was up in the control tower ready to start local training to bring me up to the very high standard required on such a busy unit.
There were two resident Squadrons. One of Meteor night fighters and the other of Hunter day fighters and their activities ensured that Tangmere was not going to be dull. A controllers handling capability had to be brought up to being able to cope with up to eight aircraft at a time....and that was pushing it!. What took a little time to get used to was the fact that every time I was up in the tower I was looking down on an area of tarmac where only 12 years previously I had been de-loused on repatriation from a German POW camp, but it was the general atmosphere of the place that I found so fascinating. To me it was like being on hallowed ground and all rather pleasant after my recent experiences and somewhat comforting to find that I had served previously with three of the controllers.
Within a matter of weeks I was put to the final test required by the Senior Controller and was certificated for solo watchkeeping and bit by bit I was also creeping up the married quarters waiting list until one day I was allocated a quarter.
Unfortunately it all went sour the following day when I was told that it had been re-allocated to the Medical Officer!. It was not very well received at home although I was told that another would be allocated in a few days so I was reluctant to have made the protest that I could have done. My knowledge of the regulations told me that as a National Serviceman the M.O. did not qualify for quarters!, but it was politic to let it ride.
Within a matter of days I was allocated a quarter for the second time and there was considerable excitement in the family when they were told that we would be moving soon.
It was either the next day or the following one when I went on duty that I was told, yet again, that it was being re-allocated. I could not believe it. If I had done that sort
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of thing when I had been looking after quarters at Coningsby I think I would have been lynched but that time I did not take it laying down. It did not take long to find out that it had been allocated to the new O.C Flying Wing, (my boss, two steps up) on ex officio grounds, meaning that the quarter goes with the post irrespective of the waiting list. That was the regulation and as such it was acceptable, apart from the fact that the out going Wing Commander was still occupying a Quarter!. As far as I was concerned that was not on and if I was go home and tell Dorothy once more that we were further delayed the next thing that I would be doing was resigning my commission. I had just about had enough too but after more consideration than I would have given most problems I asked to see the Station Commander, Group Captain Hughie Edwards.VC, among many other decorations, and with tounge [sic] in cheek put my case as succinctly as I could. A change from my usual bull at a gate tactic. Out came the relevant order, in came the OC Admin, and the S/Ldr Admin and the Station Adjutant, the order was taken apart with a decision in my favour and apologies for the cock-up. After that it was my turn to apologise for having the temerity to make such a protest and it all ended up without anyone being upset and within a week we were in quarters. I can think of one or two CO's who would not have reached a similar decision whatever the regulations but enough said about that.
Before we moved our boxes had at last been delivered to Worthing and we didn't know whether to laugh or cry when they were opened up. Customs had already been through some of them and they had been badly repacked. Crockery, glass and ornaments had been broken. Clothes had gone mouldy and had to be thrown away. Linen that we thought was white when we packed it was a nice shade of brown as a result of a couple of pounds of Jordanian and Cypriot sand in each box a lot of which had filtered into the sewing machine box requiring a complete overhaul of that to avoid further damage. Nevertheless, most of it was usable. Just one of the snags of living out of a suitcase and boxes for years but we settled into our new home and a comfortable routine was soon established. The girls were soon back to school and there was continual family movement to and from Worthing as we picked up the threads of a more settled life and Dorothy's
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health began to improve. It really was turning out to be a very a happy unit too, and I had become the Station Fire Officer again!. It was suggested that I should go on the Fire Officers short course at one time but I cast that one aside. "No thanks, Iv'e[sic] had enough on the job experience" and left it at that. I didn't protest when the phone was put in though. Being out of my bed every fourth night I could cope with but I was trying to avoid being away from home any longer than that for a while.
It was shortly after we had settled into the routine that I heard the sequel to the Mafraq situation. Not a lot was mentioned by the media and I got most of the information from my correspondence with friends but apparently within a few weeks of my departure we abandoned the place. It was quite an operation. Again, everything was made mobile. Vehicles got armour plating and Bren gun mountings. Some 400 vehicles that had been in the Maintenance Unit were made ready and loaded with all the other stores, preparations for which were going on before I left as that many vehicles require a lot of batteries but the distilation [sic] plant did not have the capacity to produce the required amount of distilled water. Even at that point a decision had been made to use any sort of water and throw the batteries away after a short life. All had been put together in a very large convoy of 600 vehicles were fuelled and provisioned for the 500 mile journey, armed to the teeth still, the aircraft were flown out so off they set off with air cover and air supply all the way to Habbanyia.
Quite an experience for a 'peace-time' operation. There was no real problem and eventually it all finished up at Basra for shipment.
I eventually heard from the chap who had had all the problem with his car. It did eventually get to Basra and subsequently back to the UK, as deck cargo on the Ark Royal, very scratched and bent with a lot of bits missing. There was a car with a history!,.
One of the biggest surprises that I got one day was a bill from the accounts department; for1s & 7d, (7 1/2 pence in today's money) for 'barrack damages' on the occasion of leaving my quarter in Amman. It was for the deficiency of one wash basin plug!. Absolutlely [sic] incredible after all the millions of pounds that
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the evacuations had cost the Government. And I get a bill for 7 1/2 pence!. When I approached the Accountant Officer with a suggestion that it ought to have been written off he was adament [sic] . It had to be cleared from the books and although it cost me more than 7 1/2 p in stamp duty I paid it by cheque just to make a point. How bloody silly!.
Secondary duties were always coming the way of Air Traffic Controllers and one that fell in my lap was an audit of the bedding store inventory. I had a full briefing for that one and the appropriate Air Ministry Order thrust under my nose to reinforce the importance of checking thoroughly. It was the first time that I seen the order and it was almost word for word of the paper that I had put forward years previously so obviously it was an successful system. I wonder who got a pat on the back for that?. Certainly not me.
On one fine day up in the top tower doing airfield control with a few Hunters flashing around the circuit I knew by the clatter of footsteps on the stairs behind me that the party of .Air Cadets that I had was expecting were about to descent upon me and on turning to meet them was astonished to find that Peter Hobbs who had been the Navigator in the same crew as myself on Stirlings in 1943 was the officer in charge. I don't know who was the most surprised and for a while I was far too busy for any conversation although later on when it was quieter we really did get down to business. I picked him up later in the day to come home for tea and later for a drink in the Mess and we had a lot to chat about but the extraordinary thing was that when we met umpteen years later he had no recollections of the meeting at all, although at least he could remember coming to my wedding. That is more than Paddy Martin the Flight Engineer could!.
As we got into the Summer I had a feeling that all was going too well to last. In July I was dispatched to Shawbury for an eight week Radar course. Just as the kids school holidays were coming up. Nevertheless, I took some local accommodation at Wem and managed to live out for nearly a month. That gave everyone a change and a chance to tour new areas and a great deal of Wales as well. It actually made a very nice break for us all and although it was my second visit try Shawbury it was not to be my last.
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I passed out of that course with possibly the best mark that I had ever achieved despite it's intensity and in due course reported back to Tangmere for duty.
There was of course the usual period under instruction but I was certificated after ten days and back on watchkeeping duties with the ability to be rotated anywhere in the control system.
Ground Controlled Approach as the radar system was called was most satisfying and there were many occasions when I was required to pull out all the stops. It was very demanding but rewarding nevertheless. Some of the highlights of my experiences in GCA are firmly imprinted on my mind.
One occasion that I remember well, and I think my younger brother will as well, was when I was on stand-by on the end of the telephone at home and he was staying with us as he was also recovering from a nervous disorder following a matrimonial problem. I took him with me when I was called out.
The alerting system had already brought the equipment up from the stand-by mode to full power as we raced for the operations truck and I made contact with the tower as I slid into my seat. I put him on a spare headset and was pointing out the significant blobs on the radar screen and after that concentrated on the job in had [sic] , showing him the progress of the blob from time to time. The customer was a diverted Hastings from abroad and although our weather was bad elsewhere was even worse so with 600 yards visibility and a 200ft cloud base I got stuck into my very first operational talk-down. I had been on the other end often enough and knew that it was not easy to handle an aeroplane completely on instruments, boring into the murk, descending at around 130mph. That was probably why I always projected myself into the cockpit when doing talk-downs and felt as if I was virtually holding hands with the pilot and everything went smoothly. The pilot had a full instrument rating and the rest was up to me. When we came to the critical bit, just in the bottom of the cloud at half a mile from the runway threshold he was as steady as a rock, still doing around 120mph, in contact with the approach lights through the murk to the point of touch-down when I flicked the transmitter switch off to hear the pilot report "on the runway" as I turned to where my brother should have been to as I said "I'll open the door
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and you will see him go by"....he was not there. The strain had been too much. He was flat out on the floor and although he did not take long to recover he vowed that would never place himself in that siuation [sic] again and was very glad to get back to the house where a drop of the hard stuff restored him. I don't know if it was the shock treatment but he made good progress after that and got his feet firmly on the ground again.
Another visitor to the tower one day sent a few people into a panic as the sight of a policeman' uniform will often do. Even if you have done nothing wrong. Nothing you can remember anyway!. It was my wife's cousin, a local police patrol Sgt who was making a courtesy call, and in the course of our conversation he conveyed his Inspectors compliments. It had come out during a chat that he was none other than the chap who had been in the same hut as me in Stalag 11d, Nuremburg POW camp. It certainly was a small world!.
Our Senior Controller had a unique talent. He was in great demand to perform party tricks with cards and the like but his best performance was as a Hynotist [sic] .
Like most-people I was sceptical even when I saw people doing quite remarkable things, under the 'influence' I was still not convinced. Not until I was included in a group session. When the preliminary process of selection and conditioning had been done and I was told that my right arm was heavy and I could not lift it I said to myself "rubbish', I will show him. But I couln't [sic] , or my leg when we got round to that any more than I could stop the daft answers to questions coming out of any mouth when I tried not to say them. After that I was convinced and knew that people who were. getting drunk on a glass of, water, acting like chickens and other animals were not just part of the act. I submitted myself to several sessions and it was to be the same every time. He really did have control and was very good but the CO. put a stop to group sessions particularly if any of the pilots were involved. He reckoned that pilots were too vulnerable and did not want any talked into the ground!. Although it was most unlikely as one has to submit oneself to hypnosis it was perhaps a wise move.
We were getting into the Autumn of that year when I collected another secondary duty, that of taking charge of the Corporals
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Club, and on the face of it it seemed easy enough. Like a lot of other things that had come my way!. I soon found out that picking up the takings every morning, and checking the books and cash in hand and stock-taking once a week was a job that I could do without. The takings were very small. There seemed to be no more than half-a-dozen people making use of the place on any night and as far as I was concerned it hardly justified the services of two part time volunteer barmen and yours truly putting in two hours every week when over a hundred Corporals never even bothered to stick their noses in the place. That's the bit that peeved me most and I was 'piggy in the middle' again. For all that if anything that went wrong I was the fall guy.
A survey showed that for the year that it had been operating the takings had never reached what I would call reasonable proportions, albeit it was a non-profit making set-up, and the NAAFI manager confirmed that when the Cpl's bar had been run by them it had not needed any extra staff. That was enough for me and called a general meeting of the club with only two items on the agenda. One, "do you regularly make use of the club facilities;" and two, "would it make any difference to you if it was to revert to NAAFI management", The vote was a unanimous NO to each item and armed with the results of my survey and the minutes of the meeting I presented my case to the CO. When he realised that an officer was spending more time on Cpl's club business than most of the Cpls made of the facilities he agreed immediately to it's disbandment. He did make the observation though that as I had not appeared to be keen on taking the job anyway was my action the easy way out. A straight "yes" surficed [sic] !.
We were still making the most of Tangmere and the area, there was always something going on. On one occasion the Mess laid on a Battle of Britain garden party with invitations to all and sundry including of course many of the 'Few' who had fought from Tangmere. The invitation list was very impressive and I was awed by the prospect of being in such illustrious company. It was a schoolboy's dream come true.
Douglas Bader was there doing his usual stomping around and chatting with his old chums and gold braid seemed to be dripping
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everywhere. I spotted one of the 'Few', a Group Captain who had been my boss when I had been at Transport Command HQ. If ever I am asked about my most embarressing [sic] incident what happened next is certainly one of many.
I tried several times to catch his eye if only to make my presence known so when he eventually looked in my direction and approached I thought it would be an opportunity to make small talk for a while. He never seemed to notice although I had my hand stuck out to grasp his he went right by and gabbed the hand of an elderly steward who was behind me. As I looked in amazement at him pumping the arm of the steward he looked around at me and said "sorry Gamble, I couldn't let this bloke go, d 'you know, he was my batman in 1940". Then I understood and I knew that he had got his priorities right so I retired to the refreshment tent.
With the winter approaching the GCA became more and more important to our activities. On one occasion we had a flight of three Hunters of the Royal Netherlands Air Force notified but our weather deteriorated very quickly as they were on there way and when they did arrive they only had a very limited fit of frequencies which were already cluttered up by other traffic using Ford and Hayling Island. They were also quite low on fuel and on that day I think I created a precedence in Air Traffic Control by declaring an emergency 'Mayday' on the frequency requesting all other users to clear the channel. Needless to say it worked and with the GCA operator monitoring their progress they poured down from the overhead and landed without a hitch in what were still very poor conditions but a quite oblivious to the fact that the situation could have been much more serious. Another less successful incident was the talk-down of a diverted Valetta from overseas. His destination was below his limits and ours were marginal but three times I talked him down to the half mile decision point but he would not go that little bit further and overshot each time. After the third time he asked for a further diversion and was sent to Manston. I felt very sad about the end result of that. I know he was in the right place to make a touch-down but either he was sticking to the rules or he was lacking confidence in me. We will never know. The runway at Manston was icy, he braked and slid after
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landing, dipped a wing and pranged in a ball of fire and all of the crew were killed.
On another occasion I was on duty on a dirty Saturday morning in what was our published availability time for the Radar. We had not been warned of any traffic, the equipment was in the stand-by mode and I was in the crew van with my feet up sipping a cup of coffee when the tower controller came on the intercom. He only said two words, "urgent...in" and I was off to the operations vehicle with the mechanic at the double.
The mechanic started building up to full power as fast as was permissable [sic] as I contacted the tower to be told that we were taking on a Sea Vixen from Ford as there [sic] radar had just packed up as they were recovering aircraft from the Victorious in the Channel. The tower controller was positioning the aircraft into the pattern on time and bearings as my picture was filling in and I had already been told that he was short of fuel. Why the Fleet Air Arm had to fly to such tight limits I do not know but as soon as I had him in contact and he had changed to my frequency I asked him to confirm his fuel state and he quite calmly said "I can't overshoot if that's what you mean", so it was going to have to be a first timer.
I suppose my voice was calm enough, my directions accurate enough and his flying precise enough for him to ignore any limitations to make a perfect touch-down and then he promptly ran out of fuel on the runway as he was saying his 'thank you's'. I wonder though, if he was anything like me absolutely saturated in persperation [sic] !. All part of a day's work.
y
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Part of ‘Nil Desperandum’
Wyton 1962. Dot had become paralized [sic] from the waist down.
we were managing; just!.
After Dorothy had been in Addenbrooks for three weeks her condition had deteriorated further with almost no control over the lower part of her body as they carried out test after test whilst we continued our prayers in our own way. There was no time to spare to attend church for formal services. We were much too busy. Then the ultimate test came up on a new machine that Addenbrooks had just installed. Dorothy was the first person to have ever been strapped into it. Normal X-Rays had failed to show anything but that machine was the very latest. The patient was strapped to the bench which was set in double gymbals [sic] which rotated the body in every possible angle to a number of X-Ray cameras. The contraption looped, rolled and twisted and turned until she was dizzy but when they interpreted the results they did at least find the problem, which was all that they told me at the time apart from the fact that are operation was necessary and everything had been arranged for it to be done at The London Hospital in Whitechapel which specialised in neurosurgery so I managed some more time off to go with her in the ambulance to see her settled in. That is all I could do....and pray some more!.
The operation was scheduled for a week later and the surgeon wanted to see me first so I knew the time had come. I had to find out sometime but when I was told I was just about bowled over. When you are told that an operation has a fifty fifty chance of success you draw your own conclusions as I did but although Dorothy had been told the same I was given some more priviledged [sic] information. The 50/50 chance was that, one she would die, or two, she would be a cripple for the rest of her life.
I have made a few decisions in any life but to give approval for an operation that could have such consequences was perhaps the most difficult I have ever had to make. That was my Dorothy they were talking about. The little schoolgirl that I had known since I was seven and who had never subsequently questioned my career decisions and had always supported everything I had done. I hoped and prayed that I would not let her down.
As far as I was concerned at that time that the end of my service career. There was no way that I would be able to carry on, my
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work was suffering too much already; and I signed on the dotted line. Dorothy never knew about that 50/50 chance for years and neither did the family. I left everyone to draw their own conclusions and not everyone realised the seriousness of the situation, and never have. As for me I was back to work, looking after the kids and trusting in the Lord.
Eventually the operation took place, all eleven hours of it in the hands of a most celebrated surgeon and as it was a teaching hospital it was all recorded by colour cine' camera's under the eyes of dozens of students in the galleries. I found it very difficult to concentrate on work but eventually I phoned to find that she was out of surgery, confortable [sic] , stable and all the normal things that the nursing staff are trained to say but it was a couple of days before I could get down to see her.
To aovoid [sic] upsetting the system too much I could only visit between shifts without landing myself in more trouble by asking for more time off. She looked pale, she had had three blood transfusions during the operation which had been to the area of the inside and around the back of the spinal column between the shoulders to remove a tumor [sic] . A very delicate job, and touch and go.
It would be three weeks before we would know whether it had been successful and in the meantime she was told not to move a muscle or even think about it. Every movement she wanted to make had to be assisted. About the only thing she could more without assistance were her eyes and mouth. Not easy.
Whilst she was in that state she developed some side effects like a sort of bronchitis that had everone [sic] baffled although it eventually got sorted. That was one time that we were able to do something for the hospital, they had done so much for us and she was not the only one suffering from the same congestion in the bronchial tubes. They had tried everything and Dorothy suggested that one of Grandma's cures might help so they went along with it. Off they went to the fruit and veg. market on the opposite side of the road to the hospital to buy lemons and then produced Grandma's mixture. Hot pure lemon juice and honey!. Two doses and a cough and up came the offending obstruction with a great deal of relief. It went down to the
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path. lab immediately and funds were promptly allocated to buy more lemons and honey from the market and everone [sic] received the 'cure'. That made some considerable improvement in Dorothy's condition and she began to get stronger. Family visits were allowed, all except the baby and after two weeks, although she was not supposed to move, came the moment we had both been praying for. She reckoned she had been static long enough and had experimented a little. It may not seem a lot, but when I made my next visit she said to watch the foot end of the bed. The bed clothes rippled. She could wriggle the toes of both feet so that was a good sign but we could do no more than hold hands in our excitement. We coudn't [sic] even embrace due to all the dressing and padding around her but that was the beginning of her recovery.
Within a couple of days she had experimented a little more to find that she could move her legs and there was feeling in them, a fact that she was able to tell the surgeon on his rounds. He and his staff were excited too and she had the all-clear to try, very gently, other movements, in a closely controlled situation, and what she was able to do caused even more excitement. Of course, she was prodded, pricked and scraped to test all the reflexes that had previously packed up and all the right signs were there.
At the end of the third week she was allowed off of the bed into the vertical position and most people will know what that is like, even if they have only taken to their bed for a few days. After fighting the nausea and using a walking frame for a few days she decided to go solo. No walking frame crutches or sticks and she did the length of the ward from bed to bed with a lot of encouragement from everyone in the ward.
Day by day she improved, doing a little more each time and getting her sea legs. Her wound had healed well and she could do most things by herself including turning over in bed. Even her vericose [sic] veins had improved due to the bed rest and the end of another week she was transferred back to Addenbrooks Hospital on a stretcher by train with private compartment!.
After a further week the hospital authorities were making arrangements for her to be transferred to Huntingdon hospital which would make it easier to visit when, out of the blue they
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changed their mind. She could come home for convalescence!. The relief was indescribable. It was an emotional time for all of us, and I can barely recall what went on apart from the fact that I was totally overcame when the strain of the last few months manifested itself and I had to go and lie down in a darkened room for a while to wait for my brain to simmer down. Eventually I was able to get myself together and bit by bit we were able to tackle the daily routine once more and re-establish the family unit that had been so disrupted.
Every day brought improvement and by the time she had been home a month Dorothy had not only managed to walk comfortably with the pram and to a certain extent unaided, after another few weeks she even managed to ride a bicycle again. That was quite an achievement and when she went back to Whitechapel to see the surgeon he and his colleagues could hardly believe that it was possible and were justifiably highly delighted. Dorothy turned down an invitation to appear in person to back up the film for a presentation at a later date. It would have been very good for the moral of the team but we had more important things to attend to by then.
Fortunately the tumor [sic] had been non-malignant and was in a place of honour in a pickle jar and we were only too happy to say our 'thank you’s' to all the ward staff and doctors who had made it possible, including a letter to Peterborough hospital staff who had started it off. But who had really made it all possible!?.
By what stroke of fate was it that she went to Peterborough hospital on that day when a particular nurse was there. What caused the surgeon to express such surprise at the supple state of Dorothy's spine if it had not been the dedicated work of the Chiropractor, and what guided his hand in a most hazardous operation which they considered to be a near miracle?. Who knows. When we wrote to the faith healing organisation telling them of the outcome we received a most beautiful letter and so we went on from there.
Not everything was as it had been before. The bits that they had taken out of Dorothy's spinal column to get at the tumor [sic] had left her a little shorter than she had been. She had to walk fairly fast to maintain her balance and her ankles were
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turned over slightly inwards. Small things really and as time went on they became less and less of a problem.
For me it was back to the routine again to try and make up lost ground. No more time off, full shiftworking again including night shift although we had lost the emergency service requirement we manned for 24 hours to cover USAF traffic. All throughout those months of anquish [sic] there had been a lot going on that I had still been involved in. We had got rid of our museum piece of radar and taken the new equipment into service and were beginning to shake it down as we were developing new, safer and more sophisticated systems of traffic handling. In such an environment everything was ongoing as problems were confronted and solved almost daily. It all directly involved me one way or another as at the same time I was working my way through the system to refresh my proficiency certificates until it all finally settled down and was running efficiently. At least, during that period I had not collected any secondary duties like Fire Officer!. The only certification I lacked was that of supervisor and no doubt if I stayed there a little longer I would have made but before you could say "Christmas 1962" my next posting was notified. To Laarbruch, Germany, effective from the following February!. I was a bit peeved as I had regularly requested to be trained for area radar which would have widened my scope but at the same time limit the units at which I could serve but it didn't work out that way. I found it somewhat frustrating at times that whilst I was bouncing around like the proverbial yo-yo every 2 1/2 years (or less), there were people around me in different professions who had been in the area for ten years and more. They had done the rounds of Wyton, Upwood and Brampton, bought houses and raised families all in the one area. I should be so lucky!!!.
At least we had plenty of time to organise ourselves. I knew a few people out there so I set the wheels in motion for renting a some private accomodation [sic] to hold us for a while until quarters came up and finished with a place in the town of Goch, about eight miles from the airfield and where the RAF had some married quarters. The two eldest girls were going to have to go to boarding school at Hamm in the Ruhr which was not entirely to our liking but local military schools only went up to junior
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grades, after which it was off to boarding school, either in the UK or Germany. to. A very limited choice so Hamm it was.
After some careful planning we made the move as painlessly as possible. I went privately two weeks in advance with the car loaded up to the hilt almost 16 years to the day that I had baled out of a crippled Lancaster over that country.
The car really was loaded. I only had a little cockpit left that was not stuffed with something and it wallowed somewhat, but I was not rushing anywhere. A gentle jog would get me there if the suspension held out and I got perhaps the best advice that I could have had from A NAAFI manager who was returning to Gutersloh, on what to look out for when driving with UK number plates out there.
We were on the Harwich to Hook route so I had the advantage of following him for a while as I settled in to driving on the opposite side of the road. In the first large town that we came across the very thing happened that he warned me about.
The rule of the road is such that you give way to traffic on the right, therefore if you are on the left of any conflict between two vehicles you are in the wrong and penalised accordingly. Cut and dried in Dutch and German law. So if you are a Dutchman driving a beat up banger that needs a new engine, and replacement panels what do you do?. You bounce an English registered car that you know has got to have good insurance cover and that's what very nearly happened!.
A couple of youths in an old Merc. made a bee-line for me from my right hand side and I had to work very smartly on two occasions to brake and weave away from his obvious intentions. Then he must have got angry and tried it a third time but I got out it by jinking around the wrong side of a tram which he promptly collided with so I had no further problem with him. Trams in Holland have absolute right of way so he was the one to finish up having to do a lot of explaining and no doubt a hefty repair bill.
I was even more wary after that but there was no further trouble after waiving [sic] goodbye to my 'pathfinder' friend and in due course crossed into Germany at Nijmegen. The loaded car caused considerable amusement among the German customs officers. I don't think that they had seen a vehicle quite so well packed,
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roof rack and all. The only room for any cigarettes was on top of the blankets that covered everything up to the sill line, but they got the message when they realised that it was all mainly household goods and I was away again without any hassle.
I was relieved when I finally arrived at my destination and although I had planned the route very carefully I made sure that I stayed on track by calling at numerous bars on the way. That had resulted in an intake of several beers which caused the interval between stops to become shorter and shorter. At the last port of call, in a bar just off of the market square in Goch I tried out my well rehearsed little bit of German on the lady behind the bar "Bitte, vo ist drei unt vierzig Weeze Strasse"?. It must have sounded alright as I had already asked for an "eine kleiner beer, bitte", but she came out with a torrent of German and then was amazed to be told "langsam, ich sprechen kliene Deutsch" and that was almost the limit of my German. It didn't matter a lot. After a good laugh, another beer and a lot of arm waving I only had a few hundred yards to go and there was 53 Weeze Street, a tall terrace house that looked a little battered with other houses each side still shored up or boarded up with panels of wood and galvanised sheeting. It was no palace but it was going to have to do.
The landlady was a charming elderly lady, almost Victorian, who managed only a few words of English but magically produced a cup of tea and over that I found that her husband had been a merchant sea captain and had been lost at sea but all was quite friendly when I told her that I had been more fortunate after being shot down not so far from where we were sitting. After that I started to unload the car with the tool box being one of the first things and then places were found for everything with shelves, brackets, hooks and the like with her permission. I wanted it to be as homely as possible, and it certainly needed the personal touch. There was basically only two rooms and nothing that could be called a kitchen, only a long passage off of the living room. It had a wash basin and a cold tap and at the far end was the toilet....unscreened and frozen up anyway!.
I could have done a lot with emulsion paint but I did not have time for that. I worked on it with what I had in terms of covers,
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screens, tacks and nails, pictures and plaques and it soon looked considerably brighter which rather surprised Frau Van Cooke who had kept me supplied with tea and cakes throughout the unloading and conversion process. The last last [sic] thing to install were various electric and gas cooking appliances and it was all done. It would not be too much of a shock to the family on first sight at least and then I was off to Laarbruch to stay the night with friends who had been at Tangmere with us before going down to Wildenwrath for the homeward journey.
I had arranged to leave the car at Wildenwrath in the care of friends who had fixed me up with a flight to Northolt in a Pembroke and it all clicked into place. Later that day I trained to Huntingdon and home. So far so good and a couple of days later we gave up the quarter and travelled as a family to Manston via a night stop in London where several of the family had congregated from Worthing, and then by air direct to Wildenwrath. The air movements staff were somewhat surprised when; as a family we by-passed all the normal transportation facilities, but all I had to do was pick up the car and set off for our new home. It was not much but we were together and we made the best of it. Frau van Cooke was a little concerned as she had obviously mis-understood that we were five in family until the eldest girls were off to boarding school but after some adjustment to the rent she made another small room available and we were fairly comfortable. Fortunately the weather had turned a little warmer and the toilet had thawed but the thing that seemed to bother Frau van Cooke most was that as the rating system in Germany was based on a poll tax the appropriate authorities had to be informed of changes as they occurred. We overcame it as we did most things. The day after arrival I was reporting for duty. The girls were enrolled at the camp school temporarily before their places at Hamm had been confirmed and we were very soon into a routine. It was different though. It was a long time since we had lived in anything but an Air Force community and in it's way it was very interesting. We soon integrated into the local environment and we had no problems in adapting. Frau van Cooke and our neighbours were kind and helpful [sic] . The local garage housed the car overnight for a modest fee when I was not on duty rather than park it in the main road and we
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soon got used to the the [sic] German way of doing things. First and foremost, the cleanliness of the area in front of a building was the reponsibility [sic] of the occupant so it seemed that there was competition to be the smartest although they were very reluctant to allow grass to grow on the verges. They were all raked and scratched into patterns. Bicycles were ridden on the footpath but always according to the direction of the road traffic and the bicycle bell was mandatory. Cars could be parked in the roads but only in the direction of the traffic but not both sides of the road at the same time. It was a very practical arrangement. Parking was relative to the date and the house numbering. Odd dates on odd numbers and visa versa. Cars were not washed in the street on Sundays and neither was washing hung on the line. Sundays was a day for visiting the family in Sunday best clothes and for church. How much that routine has changed over the years I would not know but at that time it seemed to be a comfortable arrangement. Another practical method of designating where speed restrictions started and stopped was by applying the standard 50k limit at the signpost at the town limits on the way in and at the signpost on the way outwhich [sic] gave the name of the next town or village on route. Very simple, economical and effective.
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The town of Goch was a market town very close to the Dutch border and more or less on the line of what had been at one time the old Seigfried line. It had suffered badly from savage fighting when the big push was launched on the 8th February 1945, the day after I failed to return, when the Allies attempted to reach the Rhine all along the front. The Canadians had forced a passage by the most bloody hand to hand fighting along the very road in which we were living after they had taken Weeze and most of the houses still bore the marks of the battles as did many places in the town centre. The houses adjacent to us were not the only one's that were boarded up skeletons and the Town Hall was still pock-marked with scars from shell and morter [sic] splinters as well as anti-tank and canon fire but despite it all life went on as near normal as one would have expected at home.
The attic rooms above us were not part of our let but we investigated at one time and I immediately regretted it as it upset the girls. The flimsy doors at the bottom and the top of the narrow winding stairs were both splintered with bullet holes and the walls were well and truly peppered with holes and some very nasty stains which obviously would not wash off. The attic itself was no better and there were still remnents [sic] of uniform scattered about and it would appear that nothing had been done other than to clear the casualties of the battle. It was not difficult to imagine the desperate and bloody fighting that had gone on in that place and we only ever went up there that one time.
Despite it all, the Germans had built a memorial to a British officer who had been appointed as Town Major to manage the civilian administration which was standard procedure after the battle had passed through. It was neccessary [sic] to get public facilities running properly as soon as possible and tie up the minimum number of fighting personnel. His job was to help to get things going again as smoothly as possible and to that end he applied himself in such a way that he became highly respected by the locals for his ability to be hard working, fair and just. Unfortunately, it had to be a memorial plaque as, once the town was capable of running itself again he had rejoined his unit up at the front and had been killed in action. It was something to think about that their appreciation was so recorded which
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was more than could be said for some of the German military whose presence in the area still showed…but in a different way. In the town of Kevelaer, which was renowned for it's manufacture of religious artifacts, there was a tall wall alongside a church absolutely riddled with bullet holes where a large number of the population had been lined up and shot..by the SS!, as apparently the battle raged to and fro they had been evacuated several times for their own safety until finally they refused to be moved. They were prepared to stay and take their chance and after seeing that terrible sight I could understand that the population of some German towns were prepared to show their appreciation for their deliverance from the yoke of Nazizm [sic] .
Eventually the time came for the two eldest girls to start at Hamm when the new term started and they set off by train with others who they had met between terms. It seemed better that way and probably allowed them to settle a bit quicker...but they did not like it that was for sure. Boarding school discipline was not to their liking and the school buildings were a bit grim. They were converted SS barracks and most of the pupils were quite certain that the matron had been left behind by the SS when they evacuated all those years ago!, but they coped.
We went to Hamm whenever the opportunity arose. Week-ends when they were allowed out and half-term so we took them about as much as we could to places of interest but there was invariably tears when we were obliged to leave.
Fortunately the journey through to Hamm was only just over two hours but it was an interesting route whether by autobahn or the 'scenic' route. The autobahn route was right through the 'Happy Valley' Ruhr industrial complex that had received such a pounding from Bomber Command and still showed it and the scenic route to the North was through some very badly damaged towns, including Wanne Eikle when we diverted to have a look at the place. Nevertheless, it was surprising how quickly the economy was recovering. When we first arrived a great deal of our transport and services were provided from local resources under the reperations [sic] agreement but as industry recovered that was was coming to an end and British products were taking over.
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We had plenty of friends in and around Laarbruch and at other RAF units in the area. There were plenty of places to visit and Arnhem and Nigmegen [sic] were near enough for shopping expeditions
as well as paying our respects at the military cemetary's [sic] both at Arnhem and the Reichwald. Despite the fact that the camp had very comprehensive facilities we got out and about as much as we could. If we were going to be stationed in Germany we were going to see it, particularly when the eldest girls were home from Hamm or we visited then there. I remember once asking the technical F/Sgt in charge of the radar how he liked the place and was surprised to find that he did not think much of it but after a little more discussion found that he had not been outside the main gate since he had arrived!. Even by the end of his tour he had only been 'outside' twice and his wife not at all. It seemed a bit 'head in the sand' to me as most people we knew got about as much as possible.
There was one place we found, a little different from when I first encountered it, and that was the spot where I had landed safely in 1945 and nearly got shot by the side of the road. The house where I was first interrogated was as it was imprinted on my mind. Only 22 miles from Laarbruch. I even entertained the thought when I scouted around the area that I might recover two soggy one pound notes and my old I.D. card. Some hope!. The area of small nursery pines had grown to some 50 to 60 feet high and although I looked around the area I could find no sign of the whacking great hole that 'D' Dog would have made if that was where she came down. I never have found the crash site. It was years later that I made a serious attempt to find it but MOD Historical Records could not help other than to say that they had information that they could not disclose. Possibly a cover up for the fact that they knew nothing although they were interested to know where we baled out and why. 'D' Dog was the only aircraft Bomber Command lost that day and the crash site is still listed………………..
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as 'unknown'. That local tour was one of many that we made to places that were engraved on my memory and noted in my diary. At Krefeld I couldn't even find the airfield!. At Dusseldorf the old airfield had been swallowed up or otherwise expanded although the ghosts of the past were swirling around when I surveyed the area on more than one occasion from the terminal buildings.
At Frankfurt although I followed the road out towards Ober-Orsal I could find no sign of what had once been the infamous interrogation centre of Dulag-Luft. Throughout the next two and a half years there were not many areas that we did not visit as we ranged far and wide with the benefit duty free pre-paid petrol coupons that were more than enough for our requirements. Shortly after starting the daily routine of setting off for the airfield one morning I picked up a Warrant Officer who was heading the same way. He too had only just arrived and lived not far from us. He was the Technical Wing Adjutant and his son was destined for Hamm school the same as our girls. That was the start of a long and deep seated friendship of the sort that one rarely made in the service as most friendships were like the ripples made by a stone in a puddle. They tended to dissipate when one or the other moved on but we are still in touch after 35 years.
I was soon certificated and operational. The work at Laarbruch was slightly different although it was not a continuous 24 hour shift system that I had become used to but we kept a skeleton crew on standby outside normal working hours to fulfill [sic] the requirements of 2nd Tactical Air Force. The aircraft were Canberra bombers and the more modern delta wing Javelin night fighter. A touch of both Bomber Command and Fighter Command which made for some very interesting procedures. Other than that the rest of the set-up was fairly standard. The GCA radar was the same type that I had used at Tangmere and I was promptly placed in charge of it for it's operation proficiency which included checking out other controllers and to train to a high standard of re-positioning and setting up of the equipment when the runway in use was changed. The requirement was to do it within an hour which was a tall order considering that there was the operations trailer, the power supply trailer and rest
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caravan weighing in all about 40 tons to be moved with great care considering that it contained some quite delicate equipment and cost around £250,000!. Bend that little lot and someone's head would roll........mine!.
The route to Hamm took us down to the new bridge at Vesel, slightly up river from the remnants of the ends of the-old bridge that had been destroyed during the war in that hottest of all hotspots. It was from that very area that massive armies had gathered to force a crossing of the river and where Churchill had fired one of the first shots of the assault by pulling the lanyard of a very big gun and where the biggest Airborne landing of 22,000 men had been landed by glider and parachute on the East side of the town. A very historical place militarily and a slightly battered one having been given a terrible pounding by Bomber Command prior to the attack by ground forces. Nevertheless, a lot had been rebuilt and the new system had taken advantage of a lot of open space and vast quantities of rubble. We usually swept through and in a few miles had linked up with the autobahn.
I got my first taste of motorway driving out there when they were were [sic] still building the M1 in the UK although the southern end was usable I had not used it but it was like a battlefield. 90% of the autobahn traffic seemed to be VW Beetles and the like with a top speed of a little over 70mph, about the same as mine, but it was the way they were driven that put the wind up me.
There was no speed limit and drivers just hurled themselves along at maximum possible speed with foot flat on the floor all the time, come what may. Nose to tail, bit between the teeth, no leeway whatsoever and no margin for error, just going like the clappers all the time. I really felt as if I was back in the Battle of the Ruhr and found it decidedly uncomfortable. I don't think that there was ever one journey that we did that we didn't see the results of what appeared to be suicidal driving so I started to try and prove that the MT instructors at the base were not going to include me when they quoted the statistics of 90% of drivers [underlined] will [/underlined] have an accident whilst in Germany. [underlined] They were right though [/underlined] !. I came unstuck eventually. In the meantime I just battled on. On one occasion we had just cleared the Ruhr
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area on the autobahn heading for Hamm with particularly heavy traffic developing into two solid streams doing around 60 to 70mph and I felt concerned enough to do as I still do today under such circumstances....get into the 'slow' lane where there was at least room to duck onto the hard shoulder if there was trouble. I was suddenly aware that way ahead stop lights were coming on like strobing airfield approach lights and was immediately on the alert. I suppose other drivers concentrating on the vehicles directly in front were not aware that the stop lights were coming on were getting closer and closer and then as it was obvious to me what was going to happen I jinked out onto the hard shoulder. I must have done it with split second to spare as some 200 vehicles shunted each other with the screeching of brakes, bangs, thumps and the sound of tearing metal and breaking glass. It was followed immediately by the cries of the injured when all other noises had stopped.
No-one in our immediate area was badly hurt although there were numerous head injuries and the odd broken limb with a fair bit of blood splashed around so it was out with the first aid kit and to the rescue. Fortunately, in addition to the mandatory first aid kit I had for years kept a large package of war-time wound packs in the car and they came in very useful although I what some people thought when they found that they were British Military packs dated 1943 I couldn't say. They did the job despite the fact that in most cases the safety pin was rusted!. Small matter. I had found them in an abandoned store in a pill box at Oakington in 1947…..I was not the sort of a bloke to waste things!. They lasted many years. In that instance we were luckier than the majority and it took an hour and a half before the autobahn ahead was cleared sufficienty [sic] for us to proceed past piles of smashed up vehicles, and then we came to the root cause of the pile-up. Unbelievable!. There were [underlined] two [/underlined] white police cars mangled together more or less standing on end up against a bridge support. We subsequently learned that they had been heading the long snake of cars to keep the speed down but had been playing 'tag' and had obviously not-been very clever.
I felt at the time that 'someone' was definitely out to get me having so far escaped all other intentions of the Germans to eliminate me and it did not improve Dorothy's attitude to
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sitting in what was often classified as the suicide seat, ie, the passenger seat of a right hand drive vehicle being driven on the right hand side of the road. There was even more apprehension by the time that particular week-end was over. We had just got into Hamm and rounding a corner had to duck to miss the car ahead that had lurched around the corner, bounced off of one of the large concrete cylinder things that were liberaly [sic] sprinkled around their street corners and then finished up with the front wheels over a small garden wall. It was a British Forces registered vehicle also heading for Hamm school but no-one was hurt and the driver declared that he needed no assistance so we pressed on. Nevertheless it was a great weekend with the girls who enjoyed their visit to Munster zoo we thought no more about driving and it's associated problems until we were on the return journey.
I was gaining slightly on a VW Beetle but held back for a while as it was lurching about over both lanes in very light traffic. It was some time before I ventured alongside and was somewhat shocked to find that all of the windows were closed and steamed up and all four occupants were asleep, including the driver, hunched over the wheel. I gave the horn as much as I could for as long as I could to rouse everyone, making signs to wind down the windows until it was safe to pass and felt after that that I had done my good deed for the day as that bloke was very close to running off of the road. He would not have known much about it though as he was doing what most beetle drivers did. Foot still flat on the floor regardless.
As always there was continual movement of personnel, most people having settled into a 2 1/2 year tour. We had with us people that we had known at many units including Amman and Egypt as well as Mareham [sic] and Wyton so of course the usual thing was happening with the married quarter waiting list as we went up and down like a yo-yo. There was one movement that had occurred just before we arrived although would not have made any difference to our quarters list, that of the Station Commander whose Adjutant I had been at Marham but he had gone on with more promotion. After that apparently almost every move he made was with further promotion until he eventually retired as an Air Marshall with a Knighthood and a handsome string of awards and
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decorations including; GCB, KCB, CB, CBE, OBE, DSO, DFC, AFC, and I must confess that I am proud to have received a great deal of instruction from him in the three years that I was his Adjutant.
The eventual allocation of married quarters at Laabruch could not have come at a better time. 53 Weeze Strasse was not the most suitable of places but it had enabled us to recover our finances to the satisfaction of both the bank manager and our-selves, and I hope, Frau van Cooke, so we moved into our comfortable centrally heated house shortly before the winter set in and had a damn good house warming party to celebrate.
Everything sailed along quite happily despite the girls dislike of boarding school and our youngest was soon into her third year but we were outgrowing the little Ford Popular and it's three speed gear box was a bit tedious at times. It was time for a change and we considered all the options. In the end I ordered the new Ford Classic (tax free) from a firm in Chichester in Sussex with a part exchange deal and it was all done when we went back to the UK for a holiday covering the school term break.
That was going to be the car that would see me through for the maximum number of miles before another change became neccessary [sic] . I ran it in carefully and the engine was treated with all the right things to achieve longevity and when our leave was up it was fully prepared to do anything asked of it, nevertheless, no sooner than we were back into Holland on the way back one of the first things we came across was a car upside down in a ditch at the side of the road with arms and legs hanging out of broken windows. I only stopped for a quick look and decided that there was little I could do that would not involve and upset the family so I pressed on for about half a mile until I saw a house with the sign outside denoting that they had a phone, nipped in and asked them to telephone ambulance and police to get to the scene, and then continued my journey. I've sometimes thought that I might have been able to do more at the scene but the inside of the car was like a butchers shop with not a lot of hope for the occupants.
The Classic was soon re-registered with British Forces plates and as it was a new model it always attracted a great deal of interest wherever we went. There was usually a crowd around
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it wherever it was parked.
There was one place just over the border in Holland that we visited regularly. The village of Well was an interesting little place and one of it's most comfortable establishments was a little restaurant and bar on the side of the River Maas. 'Auntie' Nellie was mine host and she was a remarkable person. She was well known for her resistance work and had been responsible for numerous evaders to pass along another link in the chain back to the safety of their own lines. It had obviously needed someone like that who was handy to assist in the river crossing. The Maas was quite wide and fast flowing at that point and the nearby bridge was a war-time Bailey built especially to carry military traffic from Eindhoven; still carrying heavy traffic. Our free week-ends were often spent there for shopping and for refreshments in the restaurant, watching the barges chugging by with all manner of goods piled on them and the bargees washing, bicyles [sic] , dogs, or watching a UK football match on the tele. but there was a bit of a problem with that. The football commentary was usually in Dutch so a radio was set up alongside and we had a commentary in English for the same match that suited the Dutch, English and German patrons who all gravitated to that place. Great fun greatly assisted by good strong Dutch beer, or possibly something hotter and stronger on cold days.
We visited the area many years later and it had not changed much and one of the girls plus her own family visited many years after that and it was still pretty much the same. We had a lot of time for the Dutch people and found no difficulty in integrating. In fact, we could quite happily have taken up residence there.
Crossing the Dutch/German border just North of Goch a few months after getting the new car the windscreen disintegrated in my lap and of course being a new model not yet on sale on the continent it took a week before a Dutch Ford agent could fit another but that was nothing to what happened later. With a new car I thought that I had overcome the love/hate relationship that I had always had with motor vehicles, but I was always
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to be in trouble with them one way or another.
Something else cropped out that I was not overjoyed about. The 'cold war' that was the very reason that we were out there demanded emergency establishment manning in the event of going to 'Red Alert' and on that deployment I would have been immediately on my way to my war establishment post. To Gatow, Berlin!!!, right in the middle of the contested Russian Zone. Just my luck. I would much rather have been going in the opposite direction!, away from any conflict but due to it's security classification I had to keep that possibility under wraps.
Life was anything but dull. The job of Station Fire Officer landed in my lap again almost as soon as I moved into quarters although it was the usual arrangement. A senior fireman did the work and 'Sir' was the dogsbody who took the flak if anything went wrong but it still helped to know as much as possible about the job. I had learned the hard way but the crash/rescue element was always under the operational control of Air Traffic Control and I thought that having got that job it would be enough---wrong again!.
There was plenty to occupy my mind and my hands. There were liaison visits of all sorts on a two way basis. The local German and Dutch fire services were entertained and visa versa (but not both at the same time). At one time I had two Luftwaffe NCO's for several weeks to polish off their GCA training although their initial training had been with the Americans and we all used the same procedures. Even our GCA was of standard American design. All very interesting!. A very daft situation arose with them on one occasion as naturally they were billeted with us and it seemed natural for them to use their camera's. It is true that we did have one very secure area in the vicinity of the Canberra dispersals on the far side of the airfield but the Service Police were I think a little over security concious [sic] when they pounced on them in the domestic area and ripped the film out of the camera's. Typical. I did have a word with the senior policeman but it was a waste of time. He reckoned that he was not having Germans photographing our installations. Bloody daft!. They had built the station for us in the first place!
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My interest in photography had developed further to the extent that I joined the unit photographic club, a move that I was to regret later and although the facilities were a bit run down I was able to widen the scope of my activities in that field as I had sold all my processing gear back at Wyton when finances were taking a bit of a hammering. What happened next was just waiting to happen. The current Officer I/C (in-charge) was posted and they did not look very far for his replacement. There were no terms of reference so I was instructed to write my own for approval and then my brief was simple. "It's a mess, put it back on it's feet". I knew it was a mess, the trouble was that I had told too many people. In the main it was used by people for standard processing at a profit, and who were not very interested in cleaning up. It did not take long to find out that there was about twice the number of people booking out the keys as there was on the register so it was a matter of going back to 'square one' to lock the place up and out of bounds to all but a selected few who were formed into a committee until a new system was set up I had the place refurbished with all the enlargers overhauled by a local German photographic supplier, new black-outs and racking resulting in four good booths. Eventually we agreed the maximum number of people that we could have on the register, all old membership cards were invalidated and new cards issued against the subscription register which was to be renewed annually and 'bingo'. With new rules, a studio and lecture room we opened up and it flourished. One feature I introduced was processing on certain nights only and a weekly 'beginners night' series of talks for the benefit of those, schoolchildren, wives and all, who wanted to know the basics. I well remember my own first efforts when every other word the 'experts' said was 'double dutch' to me so I was determined that each of the four talks was pitched as low as possible and repeated every month. It worked well and it was popular.
As we went into the first Winter we were glad of the design of the married quarters. Airmen's and Officers were all built along the same lines albeit to a different standard. The typical concrete box built on top a cellar and around the plumbing. There was no piping showing inside or outside. The cellar was
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the utility area, with concrete wash tubs, floor drainage and other mod. cons. and a store room. It all looked rather like the inside of a submarine with huge pipes and turn cocks along the passage…..but there was no boiler!. Hot water was provided by a huge boiler system to the whole station along deep insulated piping on a communal basis, the only base in Germany to have such a system and it made everything very comfortable and convenient. Especially when an Officers wife went 'down below' to see how the plumber was getting on with a job only to find that he was sitting in one of the wash tubs, in the buff, happily blowing bubbles in oodles of hot water. Now that's what I call initiative and it caused a bit of a giggle when the story got around.
Later on our store room became the 'Den' where the girls and their friends congrgated [sic] to get away from the 'oldies' but at least they had their own space. Goodness knows how many there were down there at times after we got fed up answering the door and fixed up a string and a bell system through the outside grating.
Being a house of concrete the attic had a concrete floor as well and all the roof beams had built in hooks for what I assumed to be hammocks if ever they were needed as barracks providing a very useful sleeping area particularly if anyone was overwhelmed with visiting friends and relations from the UK.
As it happened we never were and although my father-in-law expressed an interest to visit us and take the opportunity do the tour of the WW1 battlefields he found it more than he could bring himself to do and could not set foot on German soil; and he never did. The memories of his brother being blasted into eternity at his side, and his own wounds were too strong for him ever to forget that episode in his life.
Before the winter was out we skated and tobogganed. Everyone enjoyed themselves in the light fluffy snow of the kind that one did not normally see back home until at last Spring broke through and work and play took over the scene again. The Winter was a bit hard although nowhere near as bad as the one to follow but a lot happened in between.
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One tour we put together for the early Summer holidays came unstuck. It was planned as a round robin right down through Central and Southern Germany, into Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland, France and back home over at-out ten days. It did not quite work out like that although we were making the most of it until it went wrong.
We went to Nuremburg and found the site of Stalag X111b but there were no huts left, only a police Guard Post and we were allowed to browse around. Then on to Stalag V11a Mooseburg and back to Munich for a night stop. The memory plays funny tricks though. Despite my notes I found it very difficult to locate some places and even when I did positively identify places from the notes they were sometimes unrecognisable. We had already found the same problem around the UK!. However, our navigation went a bit haywire down in Austria when we took a wrong road up in the mountains and instead of going into Switzerland we found ourselves back in Germany again. Not that it mattered much. All of the scenery was absolutely splendid and eventually we were into and out of France crossing the border into Germany again near Strasburg. We were ahead of our schedule so we decided that we would head for home rather than go for another night stop and were about ten miles South of Heidleburg when some idiot driver pulled a stunt that upset a few people; us included and so we finished up with a night stop anyway.
I was the tail ender of seven or eight vehicles in convoy doing near enough 70mph in the 'fast' lane with no traffic in the other lane when a light truck going like a bat out of hell came up behind making angry signals with his lights for us to get out of the way, which I did and then I resumed the tail end position. I did not stay behind him long as obviously no-one else was going to move over for him so he pulled out and went through on the wrong side. No doubt he had worked himself into a frenzy of agressive [sic] behaviour, (what is called road rage today is nothing new) and as soon as he got to the head of the column he did something quite unexpected. I could see the whole thing happening as if in slow motion as he literally hurled his vehicle across the bows of the leaders and them stood on the brakes. What happened next was anything but slow motion but long before
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anything happened directly I was on the brakes and everyone on board slid up against something solid before each and everyone of the cars shunted one another with a series of thuds until despite my heavy breaking we slammed into the one in front with such a wallop that it shot forward again into the one in front and our roof rack landed in the road between us. It was very fortunate that I was 'tall end charlie' as I am quite sure that we would have had one in the back of us as well.
After a quick check to see if we had any injuries, to be very relieved to find that only the eldest had had a scratch from a broken Coke bottle I dispatched her immediately to about fifty yards back along the centre section to start waving her white cardigan like mad, and got everyone else out onto the central reservation in case some damn fool back-ended us. It was not difficult to get out of as the impact had given us a 'droop snoot' and the doors had sprung with an overlap of some four inches. One could see at a glance that that we were not going anywhere in that car for a long time.
Checking on the vehicle in front and recovering the roof rack disclosed that the middle aged couple in the BMW that I had hit were badly shaken but otherwise unhurt although their car was quite badly damaged. The front end was bent, the back end was scrunched, the boot lid had sprung, and the exhaust had fallen off. They were both in tears though as the car was absolutely brand new, direct from the factory on delivery with only 22km on the clock but that was the least of my worries.
Between listening to their tales of woe, refixing the roof rack and repacking some of our spilled goods with a very watchfull [sic] eye on the traffic that was still hurtling by I still had time to take a few photographs before the police arrived and my daughter could retire from her rather exposed position to the relative safety of the central reservation where all the damaged cars had been pushed once the police were satisfied with explanations and that the exchanges of insurance details had been attended to. That's the way German traffic law worked; 'he who does the bumping does the paying', so you dealt with the one in front and the law is satisfied.
Breakdown vehicles appeared as if by magic but we had to wait a lot longer than most to get cleared as I, being a member of
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the military, had to be dealt with by the appropriate military authority, in that area, the U.S. Army, who could not have been more sympathetic and helpfull [sic] . The car was eventually winched onto a civilian break-down vehicle, (which I subsequently had to pay for) and off it went with us following up in a staff car to see it settled in a field full of other wrecks. Our surplus goods were left in the care of the driver of the breakdown-truck before we were finally deposited at the steps of a very nice Hotel in Heidelburg.
In normal circumstances we would have enjoyed that visit to the beautiful city of Heidelburg but not that time. We were just about broke. I had a Hotel bill to consider as well as the train fare back to base. I did not have a German bank account and there were limits that one could do then with a UK chequebook. Nevertheless, we dredged up every mark and phenig [sic] that we could, including the kid's pocket money but it didn't allow for a meal so we just had to picnic on the bits and pieces that we had recovered from the car and ultimately went to bed very tired if not a little hungry. It still took a long time before sleep came to me. Here I was again, virtually stranded in Germany wondering what was going to happen next. Every piece of the day’s action kept floating in frost of my eyes. Of all the damn silly things. All those occasions of war-time flying over enemy territory escaping injury by the skin of my teeth, to finish up in Germany with a pranged car and very nearly a damaged family as well.
I made myself a promise before I want to sleep, to never, ever again put myself or my family in such a situation again. There had to be a way to adjust one’s driving technique to reduce the risks, so I was going to have to swallow my pride. Meanwhile I had become one of 2nd TAF's motoring statistics having been told that nine out of ten drivers would have an accident I had scoffed at the idea...but they were not wrong.
The following day after paying our bill and buying tickets there was not much left in the kitty so it was rolls, butter, sausage and fizzy drinks bought locally for breakfast and for the journey, then we were off.
That part of the journey was a tour to remember for it's sheer
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beauty but I think that I was the only one to remember it in detail. The weather was perfect. The scenery along the Rhine was picture postcard stuff of vinyards [sic] and castles perched high up on hillsides especially the area around Koblenz was too good to miss particularly as I had run out of film and could not even afford to buy another. I kept waking the family up to look at, it but at that stage of the game they were not too impressed although I was out to make the most of it. To hell with the car, insurance would take care of that and the most important thing was that we were all together and all in one piece. That's all that mattered. We eventually arrived back at Goch, a colleague picked us up and that was the end of that holiday and touring for a while. There were letters to write and reports to make as we eventually settled down to life without a car. I tried to negotiate for the car to be transferred to Holland for repair as it was a new model not yet available in Germany although it was filtering onto the Dutch market but the agents for the UK insurers who were based in Hamburg would not entertain the idea and weeks went by as they deliberated. In the meantime my neighbour who had just bought a new car agreed to run it in by driving me down to Heidelburg to pick up all the stuff that we had been obliged to leave behind. It had all been prepared and packed and even lunch was provided for us. He and his Frau earned our gratitude and their remuneration for their thoughtfulness. It helped me overcome my dismay when I went to see the car sitting forlornly among the wrecks. It had already been vandalised, possibly on the assumtion [sic] that it would be a write-off. All the wheel trims and the front wheels had gone as well as the wing mirrors. The battery had gone and the petrol had been drained off all ten gallons of it as we had only just fuelled up for the home run. I had been relying on some of that to help us to do the 300 mile round trip but someone had beaten me to it. Of course no-one knew anything about it. The yard did not belong to the recovery chap and there were notices around in German disclaiming responsibility for any losses etc. It was to be expected!.
The months went by and were particularly frustrating. Having looked the car over carefully on that visit I figured that it ought to be classified as a write-off but the insurance company
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disagreed. I tried to get it taken to Cologne, the German manufacturing centre for Fords but eventually it was transferred to Mannheim for repair. I found out later that the front was completely cut off and replaced, something that would not be acceptable today but that was it and they had the last say. I was without it for six months and a lot of annoyance which did little for my blood pressure.
I busied myself in work of one sort and another. We did not go out of camp much and the girls had settled themselves into local employment so it was the photographic club that received most of my attention which was soon flourishing financially and with a lot of enthusiastic new members. So much so that Laarbruch was selected as the venue for the Command Photographic Competition. It all went well with the cooperation of the Education Flight and the fact that I won two awards had nothing to do with the fact that one of the judges had been my neighbour at Wyton. All entries were coded which was standard practice.
Air Traffic Control was more or less routine. By that time I was convinced that I had covered just about every aspect and I was still making it known annually, that I wanted area radar training for the future. Nevertheless, I had one experience which I thought might have influenced a decision but it didn't.
I was doing stand-by shift in the radar track after I had been informed of a large formation practice of aircraft from 2nd TAP units to the South-East of us and I had been monitoring their progress when I was asked to take control of an aircraft being flown by the C in C who wanted see how the formation was shaping up.
It was really difficult after taking him on. I found out from the formation Ieader the detail's of the altimeter setting and then working him on a different frequency did a perfect fighter interception placing him just above and 100yds behind the formation. He even asked if I was a Fighter Controller and was somewhat surprised to find that he was being controlled by an airfield radar. He did say "as good as any fighter control interception" but he didn't bother to find out who I was!.
Our GCA was not without it's troubles though. There was one
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expensive internal item absolutely vital to it's operation that was costing dollars to replace and contracts had-been let to produce them in the UK under licence but they didn't always last for the expected running time but at least we had replacements. Our headphones were a different matter. Some of then were the original issue with the radar unit and were always in need of repair which was common in almost every similar equipment in the RAF. I found that intolerable. Aircrew helmets and associated communications equipment cost hundreds of pounds to ensure absolute reliability and safety and I was sometimes sweating a bit when we were obliged to operate in marginal conditions with our own equipment that could fail at any time. I indented for new head-sets to be told that they were too expensive and were to be repaired locally. I made a fuss and some were taken away by Command signals workshops for repair but very few people knew that I had got something else up my sleeve.
My contacts with my opposite number in the Dutch Air Force at Vokel was very helpful in finding out that their Bell helicoptors [sic] used the same sort of headset and were replaceable under a NATO agreement. A liaison visit exchanged three of them but I kept that quiet. The only time they came out was when we were operating in marginal conditions; and I kept up the pressure for total replacement much to the annoyance of the technical staff particularly when the refurbished sets proved to be unreliable. Eventually, wondering how long it would take to get something done before the next winter set in I really put the cat among the pigeons. I did a 'Douglas Bader' and signalled 2nd TAF HQ that the radar was declared 'non operational-training in visual conditions only due to technical problems'. Phew!, that really did get things moving. I knew through the 'grapevine' that new UK produced headsets were becoming available and that the C in C of Coastal Command had authorised the local purchase of replacements for his radars...that was good enough for me and was part of my argument and I flatly refused to change the status of our radar until something similar was done. As with Douglas Bader the result was dramatic. Within a week all the stops had been pulled out and I received replacements direct from the manufacturers completely by passing the normal stores
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procedure. All I had to do was to pass the invoices back through stores to confirm that I had got them and turn in the old one's for write off. We were operational immediately but I got a hell of a lot of 'stick' for it. Bader might have got away with it but I didn't. I had upset too many people along the line by taking a short cut and there were no thanks for my achievment [sic] .
In the late summer I did another liaison visit that was most interesting; to our Fighter Control Centre at Udem....in the war-time bunker that the Luftwaffe had used to track our bomber streams and direct their fighters although of course it had been modified to our sytem [sic] . It was similar to our UK fighter Control Centres that I had been in although it just felt different but what was interesting was the fact that there were a lot of Luftwaffe personnel around as a new generation was being trained by us. It led to to [sic] another liaison visit later when a few of us went to a radar controlled Luftwaffe ack-ack unit somewhere towards Wesel. Now that was interesting; less than ten miles from where a similar unit had shot us down in 1945 and very enlightening.
The winter was nearly upon us when I eventually received notice that the car was ready for collection so off I went to Mannheim only to find that as far as I was concerned it was not. It was lacking all sorts of bits and some parts were still unpainted so I returned without it. There was an angry exchange of letters between myself and Hamburg and claims for costs until I was eventually told it was positively ready so off I went again. Then the s……hit the fan. Hardly anything more had been done and although I phoned the Hamburg office and got the OK to take it subject to a settlement the repairers would not release it until it was paid for. Oh boy oh boy!, what fun and games. More phoning, Hamburg making arrangements to transfer money via banks, a night stop for me and eventually it was released so off set for the 230 mile return journey, and not before time. It was a good job that I had fuelled to the brim as the weather did not look at all promising. I soon connected with the Autobahn and had not gone more than 30 miles when I ran into a snowstorm that turned into a blizzard, just what I wanted!, although it
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slowed things down considerably and the traffic thinned out as snow came down in about the heaviest fall I had ever encountered. It was very soon some two or three inches deep and going was getting difficult although mostly I was in virgin snow and still getting a grip. I pressed on nevertheless having in mind that it looked as if I was going to have to make another night stop somewhere but then found that in the confusion of the poor visibility in the ten lane junction near Frankfurt I had picked up the wrong lane and was on my way North-East, towards Wuppertal!. There was only one thing to do and that was backtrack. Although the snow had stopped leaving a depth of about 4ins. it would have been quite impossible to go across country so it was back 20 miles and then find my way through the network of the ten lane junction again until I was on track for Cologne once more. By that time it had got dark and I was somewhat relieved to be heading in the right direction at last and was working out my ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) when there was a hold up. It took some time for the traffic to creep forward and over the brow of a hill before I could see what had caused it all. There was a large articulated lorry on it's side blocking most of the carriageway and the police were only allowing one vehicle at a time down the hill past it as by now the snow had become impacted and it was a bit like an ice rink. When my turn came to make the descent I was amazed to find that the firemen and the 'wreckers' were actually cutting the lorry to pieces with blow torches to remove it in sections and was very relieved when I was finally in the clear again and heading for home. It took a total of twelve hours to do the journey. I had left in daylight and arrived with the dawn feeling hungry and very very tired. It was just "Hello, don't ask qestions [sic] and Goodnight”.
I finally came too, refreshed, reported that I was back and started the negotiations with Hamburg to restore the car to it's new state which I estimated would cost another £300 and they paid up in full. That was not the end of it though....
Winter soon descended with a vengance [sic] . It got cold and then colder. The bottom fell out of the thermometer and one morning, in common with many others I found the car locks frozen. Possibly
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like others I poured almost boiling water on in an attempt to unlock it but it froze as it hit the car and it was several days before the temperature went up a little to allow everything to release. then a great deal of the new paintwork came away with the defrosting!. I was very cross to say the least but I had it all renewed within the allowance that had been made by the insurance company. That still was not the end of it………but then the winter really set in.
Even the underground pipes froze in places and the works department produced a device that had not been used for years. It was a mobile motor driven generator producing a low voltage high amperage current that was attached to the fire hydrants and when the power was switched on it virtually heated the pipes up and they thawed. I had never seen anything like it before but at least the Fire service was kept in business. Even in the readiness areas the immersion heaters in the fire vehicles were needed to avoid freezing up. I put the fire dept to work to flood and freeze a fairly large depression of grassed area which produced an ice rink for several weeks. The centre of it was nearly two feet of solid ice and it was so cold that even the moat around Well castle in Holland was frozen to a depth of over two feet. Nevertheless we were still in business until it snowed again. We had been waiting for it and all the snow clearing machinery had been brought out and made ready but when it did start it made what I had been through when I brought the car back look like a little flurry. It snowed and snowed continually until there was a good ten to twelve inches over the whole airfield; and not the sort that would go away!.
With no flying possible we started to tackle it with everything we could muster to get the airfield clear. One machine had flame heaters for melting an icy surface, a hopper with finely graded sand with a worm feed which distributed the sand on the melted surface before it froze again. Result; a sandpaper type surface that was ideal for braking on at the upwind end of the runway. That's the way I figured it but everyone had different ideas particularly among those who had taken charge of the operation. It was attempted on snow, it was overworked and eventually it had a major breakdown. The various teams pushed and shoved snow all over the place with the snow ploughs and one crew even
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managed to put a twelve foot bank right in the runway threshold!. The equipment was the best with four wheel drive MAM diesel trucks with chains, and the blades could be swung either way for a left or a right cut, two splendid 'Snow-go’s' with flail intakes and plume blowers but the whole lot was being used piecemeal. Some ploughs had been used as bulldozers and a lot of snow was just being shifted from one place to another without opening up areas. After 24 hours of quite useless effort I stuck my neck out and produced a sketch plan of my own and there was very little argument. Obviously I couldn't make a bigger cock-up than had already been made and it was accepted. I assembled six ploughs in echelon with a half blade overlap followed by the two Snow-go’s and working on a plan to shift the snow [underlined] away [/underlined] from the taxyways [sic] we were off. It worked like a charm and mountains of snow was being cleared without blocking up other access points. At the end of the first cut I took the whole lot into a dispersal to swing the blades for the next run in the opposite direction when the CO turned up and 'suggested' that I would be better employed clearing snow instead of messing about changing the angle of the blades. He was not amused when I 'suggested' that "I was doing it my way" but really, there was no basis for any argument. I had already cleared half of a mile long taxyway [sic] in one sweep which was more than anyone else had done in the last 24 hours so with his permission I would like to carry on and prove a point, and perhaps he should judge my efforts by the result, particularly as others had not achieved much. How to get on and influence people!!!!, but I was cold and tired and past caring.
However, it did work as I expected and we were the first 2nd TAF airfield to be declared 'open' despite the fact that after I had left a colleague in charge whilst I went for a meal on my return found that he had managed to put 200 tons of snow back where I had just cleared it from. At least I had justified my plan and we were invariably the first 2nd TAF airfield to be declared clear after subsequent falls of snow. There was only one way to do it and I spent hours out on the airfield in -15 to-20 degrees. I followed it up with a written 'Snow Clearing Plan' with sketches and techniques to show how the basic plan could be adapted for any airfield and it turned up
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[page break]
in print later. There were no thanks, just hard work and chilblains although there was a certain amount of satisfaction in having done something practical and useful. It was a relief when the deep freeze gave way to the first signs of Spring though and thoughts turned to planning the last holiday we were likely to get in that area. Before that happened an urgent problem put Dorothy into the Military Hospital at Vegberg near Rhiendalen for about ten days and we very nearly did not get the holiday but the planning was well advanced so we decided to go for it.
We had been fortunate in purchasing a slightly used but almost complete camping outfit so the destination was the Costa Brava in Spain. There were several dummy run exercises in the garden for putting up the tent until everyone knew what they had to do and the day came when all was assembled, loaded on the car and off we went.
Up to that point in time we had done no long distance travelling since the car had been repaired although there had been no problems. They started when we reached the area around Frankfurt when we were on long hill climbs when there were signs of overheating in the clutch and the most terrible noises from the gear box. With a little experimentation I found that the heat and the noise could be reduced by holding the highest gear for as long as possible which was not easy as the car was so heavily loaded. Eventually the decision was made after our first night stop at Frieburg that we would press on to the half way point at Geneva and that if it did not improve we would turn about. Strangely enough it was only lower gear hill climbs that produced the problem and in fact when we tried the odd run unloaded it was OK. We pressed on although I still had no idea what was causing it. I just wanted to be on holiday.
Actually we nearly abandoned it for other reasons. Dorothy did not like camping!. Not after our first night stop anyway. It was the way we had pitched the tent on a very slight slope in the semi-darkness and the natural movement in our sleep that found us up against the sides of the tent. That and the noises of the frogs at the lakeside did not exactly induce sleep.
Somehow we managed to retain some sense of humour even when in the early hours of the morning Dorothy had twisted herself up in her sleeping bag and I was awoken by gurgling noises and
202
[page break]
"get this b……zip out of my mouth"!!!!. That and the fact that it had started to rain heavily did not improve matters. It did not stop us moving out though. With a wet tent on top that then weighed twice as much as when we started!.
The next stop was Geneva where we were aiming for a camp site on the banks of Lake Lemon and it rained nearly all the way. What fun!. We had to put up a wet tent and I very nearly turned about at that point. Nevertheless, there was a pleasant little restaurant not far from the site and we indulged ourselves to the point of feeling a lot more comfortable by the time we turned in.
It had at least stopped raining but everywhere was clinging cold mist and these were the conditions when we packed up and moved out again, heading for Orange in the south of France where we were planning to stay with friends. We just ploughed on and on and on in those conditions through the Swiss mountains not seeing much more than the road is front of us until we got into France and the weather cleared up at last. We had a comfortable night stop in real beds and managed to get the tent up to dry out. We had arrived just in time for the May Day celebrations and had a great time dancing and drinking in the square on the fringe of the ampthitheatre [sic] . I think somehow that managed to bring us back to some sort of normallity [sic] .
Rested, well fed and with a dry tent packed off we went the following day heading for Spain and for a long time the weather was fine until shortly after we stopped for a break in Perpignan. Then it started to rain again. That was just what I wanted through the Pyrenees! and there was still a long way to go.
By the time we got to the border we were enjoying a full blown thunderstorm with lightning, thunder and lashing rain but the French customs just waived us on and we only made a short stop at the Spanish customs. Just long enough for the customs officer to determine that we were a British family on a camping holiday. That brought forth peals of laughter and he brought all his mates out to join in the fun. What's the Spanish for "blood silly British"??!!!!. We just laughed with them and pressed on but I was getting very very tired by that time and we had another good laugh before we finally stopped for the night.
Some time after we had left the border post we were being........
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[page break]
followed by a German registered mini-bus and the damn fool driver made several dangerous attempts to overtake. Why he could not have been satisfied in following someone who was doing the 'pathfinding' for him I do not know so when we came to the edge of a town I thought that I would give him the opportunity to pass as I groped my way through a left and a right turn and several inches of water which almost obscured the line of the road. The mini-bus driver thought his chance had come as he surged past on what he thought was the road straight ahead and finished up along a shopping boulevard and came to a grinding halt mixed up with cafe’ tables and chairs!. He certainly paid for his impatience but enough was enough. If we got to Tossa-de-Mar that night we would still have put the tent up so with about 60 mls to go we decided that a comfortable night stop in a Hotel in Gerona would be a good idea. It was!. A meal, a drink and I crashed out.
The weather had cleared up by the morning and it was only about 30 mls to our destination through the winding roads of the area lined with carbuncled cork oaks. We were on site, tent up, and prepared to stay for at least ten days.
I think it was worth the effort. With a family of five I don't think we could have done it any other way even though there had been a few problems on our 1062 mile journey. We were not the only people ever to have had problems. One of our neighbours in the previous year had undertaken a motoring holiday to the North through Hamburg and on to Denmark and Sweden but had lost most of their baggage when their roof rack had seperated [sic] from the car and was very nearly pulped. There is no guarantee that all will go according to plan even with the more modern form of air transport to exciting places; not when several days may be lost sitting around an airport lounge or the hotel has been double booked. We had ten supurb [sic] days bathing, taking in the sights, and cruising around. The strange thing was that the car behaved itself so it didn't seem worth doing anything about. Perhaps one of the most interesting roads that we took was the coastal mountainous route from Tossa de Mar to San Feli'u. Only about twelve miles as the crow fly's but with most spectacular scenery and [underlined] 365 [/underlined] hairpin bends which actually doubled the road miles but it was interesting to say the least. We cruised the
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[page break]
Costa Brava taking in the sights, eating and relaxing where it took our fancy, had a day in Barcelona and the scenic route through the Sierra de Montseny area to return stopping at numerous unspoiled villages where we were welcomed with open arms. Today there is always the tendency to want to dash from place to place along the new coastal motorway system and miss a great deal of the real Spain but we lapped it up. We even got used to the Spanish style of driving!. especially in the wrigly [sic] mountain areas. The locals had a tendency to maintain the maximum speed come what may, with the result that they approached blind corners at high speed, on the wrong side of the road, blasting away on the horn. The theory was that if there was no answering blast from anyone approaching from the opposite direction then it was safe to continue fast; and on the wrong side!!!. A bit dodgy nevertheless.
We have many recollections of that holiday, like the first time one of the girls took to the water in her new bikini only to find that as soon as it got wet it went transparent. A bit embarrassing for a sixteen year old, and we found that there were quite a few British on holiday there including one RAF couple who actually lived in Gogh. We made the most of it anyway and the day finally came when we had to be homeward bound.
The weather had generally improved and after getting back into France we took a different and very scenic route through the foothills of the Cevennes to Lyon and on to Bescancon and Belfort to finally pick up the motorway system northbound and home only making two stops en route. I was glad to get home. Being the only driver on a journey like that does impose a certain amount of strain but I was soon back to work and an opportunity to find out what had caused the heat and the noise but everything seemed OK until I checked the gear box oil level. Absolutely empty!!. I cross checked the detailed worksheet that the workshop had provided (in German of course) which showed that they had for some reason stripped both the engine and the gearbox and meticulously recorded every nut and bolt removed and/or replaced.....except the replacement of the gearbox oil. I think that possibly the only reason the gear box survived some 6000 miles without lubricant was because I had treated all the original lubricant with a propriety molybdenum after it's running
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[page break]
in but to say I was annoyed is an understatement. It resulted in an absolutely stinking letter to the insurance company, who typically, would not accept the complaint without comment from the workshop.....and the workshop made every excuse in the book to avoid the issue. I gave it up in the end as I had just been notified of my next posting with nearly six months notice. Unheard of for me. I was going to Valley in North Wales so there was not much more time to finish our touring. We did the area towards Berlin to visit friends at Gutersloh who had visited us previously. That was the chap that had also been a POW with me, and at Wyton, and Marham, who had visited the Reichwald War Cemetery with me and whilst walking around was telling me how he was the only survivor of his crew when they had been shot down a year earlier than myself in a Halifax, near Krefeld. Naturally he wondered where his crew had been buried as we viewed some of the 5000 aircrew graves when he stopped with a gasp. There they were, all six of them in one row!!. Talk about "There but for the Grace of God go I"!. I retired to a respectful distance to allow him to compose himself. Whilst we were that way we visited the Mohne Dam and the Sorp and back at Laarbruch we visited Amsterdam and did the tourist thing by canal bus. We visited the amazing scenic park of De Efteling and another place in Holland which was an inland sort of water park. Probably the for-runner of Centre Parks, Bad Boekelo. Inland but just like the sea-side with fine sand and lots and lots of safe water fun. The first time we had come across the wave making machine but it will always stick in my mind for one incident. Everyone was lolling about and Dorothy was returning with some ice-cream with her sandles [sic] producing spurts of sand as she walked. Just as she approached a young Dutchmen in a reclining position who was inspecting the inside of a sandwitch [sic] , one of the spurts of sand left the toe of her sandles [sic] and joined the mustard, splat!!!. He looked up in amazement and then burst into laughter as we all did. So much the easier way of dealing with it and he shared our sandwiches!. We finally found the area of the windmills. There is only one area where they are plentiful and that is in the canal area east of Rotterdam. Kinderdyke. One of the few areas where national dress is often worn and very photogenic. About the last interesting event that I recall
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[page break]
in Air Traffic Control matters was at the commencement of a flying excerise [sic] when our Javelins were sitting on the Operational Readiness platforms at the end of the runway hooked up to the Fighter Control network as we were so that we were able to listen out on the net but I was not prepared for what came out of the box…….. “Achtung……. Achtung……. XXXXXX(callsigns) shcramble [sic] ……shcramble [sic] ."…followed by the interception instructions. It was the first time the Luftwaffe controllers had been placed in the 'hot seat' and I must confess that it raised a few eyebrows among among [sic] a few of Bomber Harris's 'old lags" who formed about 50% of our controllers. As ironic as it was we had no option but to move with the times.
We were coming to the end of our visits to our favourite cafe at Nijmegen. A delightful family run establishment where no order was too much trouble for the somewhat rotund proprietor. We invariably topped off our shopping expeditions there and it was one place where I saw muscles [sic] served up as a meal on their own....in a large enamelled washing up bowl!. I like muscles [sic] but enough to fill a kit-bag in one go would be bit too much for me but one of the national dishes I believe. I wouldn't like to cope with that if any of then was a bit 'off'.
With plenty of time to sort things out and having been told that quarters would not be immediately available I managed to arrange a rental at Amlwych [sic] on the North side of Anglesey and our friends who were also posted to Valley more or less at the same tine arranged a rental in Holyhead. Of course there was packing to arrange. Goods in store in St.Ives to be transported to Amlwych [sic] , travel arrangements to be made etc, etc. The process was no longer a daunting prospect, we had done it often enough!, and eventually we cleared the station and we were on our way.
Dorothy and the girls went under service arrangements and flew from Wildenwrath on their way to Worthing and I set off with the car loaded to the hilt via the Hook and Harwich. It was an absolutely dreadful crossing in a Force 9 gale. People were being sick all over the place, and it was virtually impossible to sleep. All the berths had been booked and a good good [sic] many others and myself were making the best of deck chairs lashed to the decks. The usual seats and benches offered very little comfort as people were being thrown off of them all over the
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place and the bar and kitchens shut early as it was so difficult to cope with the pitching and the tossing. There were some very unhappy looking passengers around when we docked in the morning and I must confess that at times during the night it would not have worried me if we had foundered....I think I just wanted to die!. Nevertheless we started to dissembark [sic] and I was not in a hurry but one Army Officer who had obviously been well ahead of me had allowed his discomfort and his haste to get the better of him. It does not pay to get 'stroppy' with Custom Officials!.
He was standing by his car, tearing his hair out as they were removing absolutely everything from it which had been as loaded as mine. And I mean everything!. They had removed the seats, emptied every compartment and opened every package. It was strewn all around the car. I felt bad enough as it was so I declared every cigarette, gram of tobacco, and drop of booze and when they had deducted my allowance only asked for a nominal payment on the excess!: There was a little fuss over the car which I had already re-registered and re-placed the UK plates. They reckoned that I had jumped the gun but the documentation was all in order although there was some other documentation that was not quite right that at least we had a laugh about. I was bringing back our Budgie and [inserted] I [/inserted] had pinned it's import licence to the cage. Trouble was there was only half a licence, the other half was in the Budgie!. There was enough of to get by with and I was off to Worthing.
208
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
Water under the bridge
Description
An account of the resource
Part 1. "By the Seat of his Pants". Covers from Alan Gamble's years as a schoolboy in Worthing in the late 1930's, up to joining the RAF in 1943, where he trained as a wireless operator in Blackpool. He joined 620 Squadron, which was equipped mainly with Stirlings and based initially at Leicester East, then Chedburgh, before it moved to Fairford in 1944. He flew 29 bombing and mine laying sorties over Germany and elsewhere. At Fairford '620' also supported SOE and participated in the Horsa glider operation at Arnhem.
Part 2, "No Problem Sport".Covers Alan Gamble's short flying history over France in 1945 before being shot down, and his experiences as a POW in southern Germany and subsequent liberation. The manuscript of Part 2 appears to be complete except for one or more pages missing about two thirds of the way through. This is at the beginning or the end of a fragment bound by metal clips, and could easily have become detached as the outside pages of some fragments' in Part 3 were also lost. It is therefore possible that only one page is missing.
Part 3. "Nil Desperandum".Covers Alan Gamble's post war experiences up to about 1963. This has not been read.
The manuscript of Part 3 is missing pages 24-86, 120 and 170, the latter two being the outside pages of bound fragments. (Page numbering here has assisted in reconstruction).
Additional information about this item was kindly provided by the donor.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
A T Gamble
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Multipage printed document
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BGambleATGambleATv1
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
Wehrmacht
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Bedfordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Skegness
England--Suffolk
England--Lancashire
England--Blackpool
England--Wiltshire
England--Norfolk
Wales--Gwynedd
Wales--Porthmadog
England--Cumbria
England--Barrow-in-Furness
England--Oxfordshire
Germany
Germany--Krefeld
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Cologne
Germany--North Friesland Region
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Germany--Hamburg
England--Cambridgeshire
Germany--Nuremberg
Italy
Italy--Turin
Germany--Peenemünde
Germany--Berlin
France
France--Modane
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Jordan
Jordan--Amman
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-06-13
1943-06-17
1943-06-22
1943-07-03
1943-07-24
1943-08-10
1943-08-12
1943-08-17
1943-08-27
1943-08-31
1943-10-03
1943-11-03
1945-01
1945-02-03
1945-02-07
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Peter Bradbury
115 Squadron
149 Squadron
15 Squadron
214 Squadron
3 Group
620 Squadron
622 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
B-17
B-24
bale out
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
Botha
C-47
coping mechanism
crewing up
debriefing
Defiant
Do 217
Dominie
Dulag Luft
evading
fuelling
Fw 190
Gee
gremlin
ground personnel
Halifax
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Me 109
Me 110
meteorological officer
military discipline
military living conditions
military service conditions
mine laying
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
P-51
Pathfinders
petrol bowser
prisoner of war
Proctor
promotion
RAF Barrow in Furness
RAF Cardington
RAF Chedburgh
RAF Feltwell
RAF Marham
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Stradishall
RAF Turweston
RAF Waterbeach
RAF Yatesbury
recruitment
Red Cross
searchlight
service vehicle
Stirling
strafing
tractor
training
Wellington
Window
wireless operator
-
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/586/26622/MHorryM[Ser -DoB]-150520-030003.jpg
579a56d502ef18c4d6d2b0ca8fbbf05c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Horry, Margaret
M Horry
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Horry, MA
Description
An account of the resource
20 items. An oral history interview with Margaret Horry, and her brother, Gordon Prescott's log book (1582098 Royal Air Force), documents and family photographs. She discusses her brothers' and husband's service during the war. Gordon Prescott flew operations as a wireless operator / air gunner with 12 Squadron and was lost without trace 7 January 1945. <br /><br />Additional information on Gordon Prescott is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/119000/">IBCC Losses Database.</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Margaret Horry and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-08-19
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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
Telegrams awarding Arthur Horry the Distinguished Flying Medal
Description
An account of the resource
Two telegrams and a note awarding Arthur Horry the Distinguished Flying Medal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Air Vice Marshall 5 Group
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-11-21
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photocopied sheet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MHorryAH1332586-160818-010002,
MHorryM[Ser#-DoB]-150520-030003
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-11-01
5 Group
9 Squadron
Distinguished Flying Medal
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
RAF Waddington
-
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d4139b0ba70a29563d2e00741335bb71
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/975/11296/PMacintoshD1701.2.jpg
aa4e1956aa46ea8d7055920193709d30
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
MacIntosh, Donald
D MacIntosh
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Donald MacIntosh DFC (1922 - 2019, Royal Air Force).
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Donald MacIntosh and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
In accordance with the conditions stipulated by the donor, this item is available only at the International Bomber Command Centre / University of Lincoln.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-27
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MacIntosh, D
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Donald MacIntosh
Description
An account of the resource
Don MacIntosh was working as a policeman until he volunteered for the RAF. This was a Reserved Occupation and volunteering for aircrew was the only option available to him. He was posted to 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney and took part of the raid on the Tirpitz. After the war he continued flying in the civilian industry.
In accordance with the conditions stipulated by the donor, this item is available only at the University of Lincoln.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alastair Montgomery
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AMacIntoshD170901, PMacIntoshD1501
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:32:57 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Norway
Russia (Federation)
England--Lincolnshire
Russia (Federation)--Arkhangelʹskai︠a︡ oblastʹ
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
9 Squadron
aircrew
Lancaster
pilot
RAF Bardney
Tirpitz
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1132/11658/PSmithLeachGP1801.1.jpg
01401ca5a689ce618db9d9542bd38626
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1132/11658/ASmithLeachGP180608.2.mp3
931a30e4939b0edc1877013d978a6ebf
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
Smith-Leach, George Patrick
G P Smith-Leach
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with (5834234 British Army). He was stationed for a time near RAF Honnington.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-06-08
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SmithLeach, GP
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AM: George, anytime at all, if you want me to stop asking you questions, just say so
GSL: No, I’m fine, honestly, I’m used to it, in my [unclear] service
AM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Center in Lincoln. The interviewer is Alistair Montgomery and the interviewee is Mr. George Smith-Leach. The interview is taking place in George’s home in Troon, Ayrshire and his wife Margarite is also present. George, good afternoon
GSL: Good afternoon to you
AM: Right, well, just to get it going, tell me a little bit about your upbringing before the war?
GSL: Before the war, I was born in Chelmsford, Essex and then from there I moved to Clacton-on-Sea and then I went to school in Clacton-on-Sea and then I went to a seminary catholic college and after being there for about six years when war broke out, along with two others, we ran away from the college, went to Ipswich in Suffolk and the three of us said we were eighteen years of age, no questions were asked, no birth certificates was asked, and we joined the army.
AM: Right, and whereabouts did you join the army?
GSL: In Ipswich
AM: And did any of your family have a military background or [unclear]?
GSL: Yes my father, my father was in World War One, came right through World War One and then when war was declared, I think he was on the reserve or something, and he went back into the army about five weeks before me, he was fifty-two years of age, and was approaching the limit where he needn’t have gone back and I was the opposite way, I needed to exaggerate my age to make me older and before that his mother was married to a regimental sergeant major, I don’t, I really don’t know what regiment he was with and he served his time in India and she lived in India and then came home to Chelmsford and she lived in Chelmsford, Essex until she died but I don’t know enough about their background, my father never ever, when I used to say to him, well, is World War Two anything like World War One? He said, you just get on with World War Two and watch what you’re doing, never mind World War One. He would never speak about what he went through, all I do know, he was at Ypres and he was at Gallipoli, where there weren’t many British troops, they were nearly all I think Canadians but I know that when the World War Two finished, he was the second man demobbed in the British Army and he had about eight or nine medals which I think went to my great nephew.
AM: Right. And where was your first posting?
GSL: My first posting was, after Ipswich we did a bit of training there and then the battalion was split up into companies, A company which I was in went to Honington, C Company went to Martlesham Heath and D company went to Waddington and E Company was the what was now known as the company headquarters company and so I landed up at Honington where we were the ground defense troop, 70th Battalion the Young Soldiers Suffolk Regiment.
AM: So, were all Suffolk Regiment engaged in airfield defense?
GSL: Yes, that was primarily and I should say here categorically that this was Winston Churchill’s own idea that he didn’t like the idea of young men being in with older men who’d come back from Dunkirk who were complaining that they hadn’t had the backup that they should’ve received and they were saying well, Hitler will be over here before long and it wasn’t good for morale and he decided with Field Marshall Alanbrooke that these Young Soldiers Battalion should be formed and there was seven Young Soldiers Battalion formed, they received, were treated as men and got men’s pay and it should’ve been eighteen but the majority of us were all under eighteen, I was fifteen years and eleven months when I went to Honington as ground defense troops
AM: And just tell me what RAF Honington was like when you arrived as an airfield, probably never having seen one in your life before
GSL: No, when we arrived there, when we arrived at first, there was a lot of wooden huts and then the other side of the airfield were brick buildings where the RAF were but we were in these wooden huts, hadn’t been in I think since the airfield had been built but that was where we were stationed and the first day we arrived there, we’re marching up the road and the sergeant major is marching us along and the air raid siren went off and up went the red flag and the red flag would meant that the, that the air raid was imminent and the yellow flag that went off you can [clapping] I didn’t want to go [unclear], anyhow and so the yellow flag went up and he said, we were all looking around apprehensively, and keep marching, he said, and we march on and then the red flag went up and the next minute, I think it was a German Dornier we found out, flew over us, firing machine guns at the hangars and that was our baptism.
AM: So, what you, do you know which RAF units were based at Honington at that?
GSL: Yes, the main squadron there was number 9 Squadron which I understand at that time was one of the most experienced in the RAF, so we were told and then about ten months later the Czechs arrived and they were called the 311 Squadron but they were at a satellite airfield about five miles away from Honington and they were there in tents because there was no accommodation for them and they weren’t very happy about what went on there, in fact at one time there was nearly a mutiny and I think it was the prime, the minister in exile came down, I think he was Benes or somebody was called, he came down and spoke to them all and then they started as a squadron, an operational squadron but things were so bad that on their first raid they lost five aircraft and one aircraft actually landed in France and they never had time to destroy it and they ran away from the aircraft and were taken in by French resistance I think but the Nazis used that aircraft again, so we were told, so things got so bad that even when they were coming in to land or take off, there were crashes so in the end they were taken off operations and a chap who was my hero, Flight Lieutenant Pickard, was, took over the training of this particular squadron, along with the squadron leader whose name I can’t quite remember at the moment but I can get it, and between the two of them they took over the training of them but even in training there were some fatalities, crash landings and things like that, and then I think after about six months it was decided that they were ready then to go back on operations so they used to have to fly their planes from the satellite airfield, the name I’ve forgotten but it is somewhere in my records, and they would fly their plane to Honington, be bombed up et cetera and take off from Honington on the operation, land back at Honington and they’d have to fly the plane after debriefing back to the satellite airfield.
AM: And what airplanes were they operating?
GSL: Wellingtons, all Wellingtons
AM: Right, were 9 Squadron operating Wellingtons as well?
GSL: They were operating Wellingtons and Honington I understand, I can’t verify this, were the first squadron to not drop bombs, they went over and dropped leaflets over Germany and I think they were one of the first squadrons to do that but they all got back safely
AM: I better make a declaration of interest here, I’m an ex member of 9 Squadron and that story is absolutely true [laughs], right, ok, so there were two Wellington squadrons
GSL: Yes
AM: Based at Honington and your job was to act as a guard force
GSL: Yeah, we actually were the ground defense troops for the airfield and then we used to do two hours on and four hours off at this dispersal base, so we would guard the plane at night and during the day when they weren’t on operations and we got to know the crews of our particular plane very, very well indeed and all the time Flight Lieutenant Pickard would come round with the Czechs and the Czechs, the only thing most of them could say was wiz-o and they’d pat you on the back and say wiz-o, wiz-o and one of them who could speak English I remember he came up to me, patted me on the back, nearly knocked me over and said, why aren’t you at school? What are you doing here walking about with a rifle? They couldn’t understand these boys were guarding them. But one thing that did come across with them that the difficulty with the training of them, according to Flight Lieutenant Pickard was they would go in so low to bomb a machine gun such was their hatred of what the Germans had done to their country and so some of the planes would come back with bits flapping off them, some they couldn’t get the wheels down, so we experienced many, many crashes and things like that and the smell of burning flesh, I always remember that to this day would hang over the airfield.
AM: So, just tell me if you can, George, what the dispersal site where the aircraft was parked was like
GSL: Well, it was say a big cops of trees and in a horseshoe method, the whole tree in a horseshoe [unclear] would be cut out and the plane would be backed by a little tractor and then it was over to us, the army, to guard it during the night and then when they were ready, sometimes they would come during the day and the plane would go up, sometimes practice but sometimes it would go over the sea and fire the machine guns and then it would come back in and be put back in the bay and then the people would come up and bomb it up ready for night and at night, even if we’d off duty, we would go down and watch the plane one after the other going on the runway and up the flare path and there used to be a caravan towards the end of the flight path and a green light would go on and the plane would go, lumber off and get up in the sky and circle till they formed up and then off it would go and even if we were off duty sometimes we’d go down to the dispersal bay along with the fitters and people like that and they had a bit of a heart there and played darts and then one of them would say, it’s time for, and they’d name the plane to come back and we would go outside and these men were so good at engines they’d stand there and then one would look at the other and they’d say, she’s in trouble, and [unclear] the plane would be appear and [unclear] flying on one engine and then it would land, swivel about but finally come to rest and then the fire engine and the ambulance would go out to it and then I remember once they lifted the navigator out and his uniform, always remember that, soaked, absolutely soaked in blood, lifted him carefully out and the medical officer would come out, perhaps give him an injection I don’t know what it was, they’d put him in an ambulance and off he would go, then they would go round to perhaps the rear turret and I remember vividly this night, and put it round so they could get to the turret from inside the plane and they’d yank out the rear gunner and on this particular occasion he was dead and he went into another van thing and away it went but this wasn’t isolated, as the thing sort of hopped up, so it became a little more frequent. And then after the leaflets were dropped, then they went into bombing and at Honington they had underground network where when the train arrived with all the bombs, they would shunt the whole plane with bombs on it back into this tunnel and if the air raid came, obviously the Germans who I understand had visited Martlesham Heath Air Force and Honington before the war and must have known about this, they used to aim and try to get this underground place where all the bombs were stored and so sometimes if we weren’t on guard at the planes we’d be on guard at the bombing place, where they bombed up and things like that and they used to give us a bit of chalk and we would write obscenities about Hitler on the bombs before they went off to the plane, but so we got to know the aircrew very well indeed and when there was a raid gonna be on, then sometimes these young fellows would come down all kitted out, ready to get in the plane and we’d kick a ball about or they would say lend us your rifle, and they’d take our rifle and as their mates going down, they would jump out of the trees, point their rifle at them and say, halt? Who goes there? You know, laughing and things like that. And the things they did, superstition, one fellow I remember him, he was, I think he was an air gunner and his name was Ginger [unclear] and he used to come round and say, I’m bursting to urinate and he had to go round the plane to the off wheel and urinate over the wheel and he did this every time before he got on the plane, others would come down and they’d give you a book or something that they were reading and say, hang on to that, I’ll get it when I come back and this was them thing, well, I’m coming back and things like that and when they didn’t come back, if we called it our plane and when it didn’t come back I really and truly there was much sorrow round about the place, all these young blokes that we’ve been kicking the ball about with before they took off weren’t coming back anymore but I should say 9 Squadron didn’t loose an awful lot of planes and sometimes planes would come in because sometimes land weren’t at Honington but that’s where they used to come in to land and when they came in, they nearly almost crash landed. So and then, sometimes when they were going away and they’d handed you something, sometimes they would hand you a letter and tell you that a certain girl they were gonna meet at the dance hall in Bury St Edmunds, describe her and they would say, hey, if I’m a little bit late getting back here will you see that [unclear], she’s got red hair and sounds so and so and her name is Maisie or something and so only once did I have to try and find this young lady to give her this letter because he didn’t come back. So you got to know the aircrew very well so when it was foggy and they couldn’t go on a bombing raid, we all used to go down to the Bell and we used to say, there was the men that flew it, there was the men that crewed it and looked after it and there was the ass that guarded it and they would say, come on, drink up and about a pint of beer was my wack in those days and you would be sitting there with all this beer, come on young fellow, my lad, they used to look upon us I think as mascots, all these boys guarding them, men that were going out on a arduous duty like that and we were supposed to be guarding them, these bits of boys. So, and then the, station, I’ve forgotten his name but he’s in writing somewhere, you might to able to get hold of it, the station commander there was an ex flier and nearly every night he used to come down when a raid was on and stand there watching them taking off and things like that and sometimes the padre would come down and he would stand there too and give us all the blessing before the plane took off but they had all [unclear] another one that I got to know very well, I’ve forgotten his, his nickname was Taggy, and he had his girlfriend’s stocking tied round his neck, this was his mascot, and another one had one of those little yellow chickens, fluffy chickens they used to get on Easter eggs and he would have that as his mascot, and he’d be, I’ve lost my chicken and they’d try and say, come on and get, for God’s sake get in or something,up the little ladder to get in and he would insist on, we all had to go and look for this yellow fluffy chicken thing and then about six weeks after that he didn’t come back, the plane didn’t come back and about six weeks after that I was in the guard room and one of the lads came in, he said, look what I found out there, he said, chickens, he said, this is not gonna last an egg, and I looked at it and said, do you mind if I have that? And it was his chicken, that, this fluffy thing that he’d as a mascot and I had that up to about four years ago and I don’t know what happened to it. So there were thing but you had a terrific, you know, we were Army, they were RAF but you had a terrific camaraderie with them and when we came down sometimes, I’ve seen them, one of them going into the wood at the side of the plane and be violently sick and then come back and clamber in the plane and then they were all jostling and joking and pushing each other about but one of them, what the heck was his name, Tommy something, and he was nineteen and he was the pilot and the oldest aircrew ever I knew was only, he was only thirty-one, he was an air gunner and he was, they used to call him the old man, help the old man, you know, been kitted on, they were trying to help him up this little ladder to get him in, cause he was the old man at thirty-one.
AM: So [clears throat], how long did you serve at Honington in total?
GSL: I was at Honington for about twelve months and then was
AM: Right, so what, what did you, what kind of?
GSL: Arrived in July 1940, and we left in the November ’46, we were relieved by the King’s Royal Rifle Regiment
AM: So, November ’41 you left
GSL: Yeah, ‘40
AM: No, November ‘40
GSL: Yeah, were only there a year
AM: Right, ok
GSL: And then I went to Martlesham
AM: Let me just, kind, I don’t, when did you arrive, in 19?
GSL: July 1940
AM: July 1940?
GSL: Yeah
AM: And you left when?
GSL: We left in November 1940
AM: Right
GSL: We were there about a year
AM: Right, ok.
GSL: But, and on top of that, sometimes when they came back, they clambered out the plane with all it to go and get debriefed a little van would turn up with a WAAF driving and everyone had to kiss her, this was part about the thing as well that they were back or something like that, when [unclear] climbed out, hey, come on, where’s my book? You shouldn’t be reading that! And I looked at the title and it was Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I handed him the book back and but not just me, the others things like that went on as well, but they really were, well, I would only call them, I was only sixteen then but they were inspiring people when you saw them going off but all these different things had to do, urinating against the wheel or go around and touch certain parts of it, all this went on and but and then when sometimes when they came back, they’d say, it’s your lucky day, here’s my chocolate, cause they got a bar of chocolate and an apple or a banana or something, not a banana, an apple and they’d give me their rations and they’d say, ohm I couldn’t eat that, you know and I would say walking round, then I got to know Flight Lieutenant Pickard very well and I was always telling him about and he used to say to me, you know more about the bloody Wellington than I do and I used to say, yes, I want a transfer to the RAF, can you help me to do so? And he said, oh well, I don’t know, you can’t do that, now leave it with me or something and then I’d throw sticks for Ming and then he’d say to me,
AM: You got to explain, who’s Ming?
GSL: The dog, this big, old English sheep dog, there’s photographs of him with that as well and look after Ming for a minute, so I’d hold him by the collar, held his head off as he walked away, I’ve got to go to a meeting with the boss, he said and he doesn’t like Ming cluttering along in the room or whatever it was, so finally one day he said, yeah, ok, I’ll give you a flight up but I want it in writing from your commanding officer that he’s allowing you to do so. So I went to my commanding officer, company commander and he said, a flight in a Wellington? I said, yes, Flight Lieutenant Pickard here’s his extension number, if there is any problem you’ve gotta ring that, so anyhow I had to be at the, it’s all in there, I gotta book for you there, magazine and I went there at half past one and he turned up with a Czech crew and they were going up on some sort of flight, so I arrived and they kitted me out, parachute good as well now, and all the Czechs could keep patting me on the back, wiz-o, wiz-o, wiz-o, they kept saying, then we climbed in the plane, he was the pilot and the co-pilot with him, and I laid on that little bunk thing, and then I sat where the navigator sat, and all that, then I climbed through, and they put me in the rear gunners turret, and then we took off and that was in those days, 1940, it was like a trip to the moon. And we took, we flew off, you could look down, I’ve described it all in the article in the magazine, then we went over the sea and then, I was at the back at this time, navigator, was standing by the navigator and one of them came through, he goes, and took me through and sat in the co-pilot’s seat, and Pickard sitting there, still the hat at the back of his head and [unclear] and we went over, took across the shore and the co-pilot was standing behind me, no guns today, no guns, so when got down, sometimes these trigger happy anti-aircraft gunners used to fire at them so anyway we went over sea then I heard the rattling of guns and this was him testing the machine guns or something and then we turned round and flew back and the next thing I saw Pickard was out of the pilot’s seat and this, the Czech chap was in. Then we came back and landed in these, we’re going down occasionally taping like this and going like this or whatever I can’t you know control and it went in the flare path, touched down and that was us and then I got out and again they gave me bars of chocolate and [unclear] well I was the talk of the company, I was a hero, I’ve been up in a Wellington
AM: Wonderful experience
GSL: Yeah, it was, really, it was, but then after that, I went to apply for a transfer and the company commander said to me, I know your real age, he said, you’re only now coming up for seventeen, if I sanctioned you from here to the RAF, he said, my head would be on the block knowing that you’re not even aged to be in the army, he said, wait you live, wait till you’re eighteen. So I told Pickard this, he said, oh well, you know where I am or something, keep in touch and I used to watch as he got his promotions and where he went, the next thing I knew he’d taken over a new Mosquito squadron or something and then the next thing I heard that they went on this raid and after he’d dropped his bomb or whatever it was and knocked the wall down, he circled and was directing the others in and he got jumped and was shot down and killed and he’s buried in near that place wherever it was
AM: I think it’s Amiens
GSL: Is that where it was?
AM: I think so.
GSL: Yeah, and they made a film and I used to say to my then [unclear] oh, I knew him well, I used to throw sticks for his dog, oh yes, and pigs might fly or something, you know but I did keep in, I’d send him occasional Christmas card but he was so busy, you know then, I think he got to group captain rank I’m not sure. But I know when we left there was a great feeling of sorrow among us, you know, and I think we livened up the place with the [unclear] to get up to, that I mean, one Dornier that was shot down and we were mounting guard over or something the dead, the pilot had been shot through the head, he’s, the German pilot, he’s still in the plane and we had to guard it to make sure no one came up and took bits away for souvenirs, so yeah, and then Sam Costa, the great Sam Costa, he was there, there was a raid on one day and him and I were sitting at the same table
AM: And what was he doing there?
GSL: He was in the [unclear], he was a leading aircraftsman, him and Denny Dennis
AM: Right
GSL: Britain’s Bing Crosby and we’re under the table the raid came on, and kippers, I don’t know where they came from [unclear] and well, he said, I don’t think we’ve been introduced, a bomb, a raid going on, he said I’m Sam Costa, I said, I thought I knew your face, he reached up, got the kippers, and we’re eating the gats in my magazine, the full thing, eating these kippers and then the raid was over and we went outside, we’re standing talking and right beside the doorway was an unexploded bomb, so we all took off running in all directions and he was on there on the show one day and I said to my late wife, I had tea with him, she said, another one of your stories? So, in the end, I wrote to him and I got a photograph back which group captain Tate’s now got and in his own writing on the back, dear George, you are so right about Honington and the kippers as well. And I thought, well, it’s no use lying of in the attic and I gave group captain Tate that as well.
AM: Right
GSL: So, he’s got all that
AM: So, tell me a little bit more about the catering you were off duty in the Honington area [unclear]
GSL: Well, in Honington you couldn’t go far because there was still the threat of a German invasion so we had to, you couldn’t go far at all, only in the evening you’d go out and we’d go into the village and sometimes in there you might find some of the aircrew playing darts or things like that, young blokes and we all mingled together in the village we’d put on in a room or something they make it up, make tea and cakes for us, the women would sit there and darn your socks or stuff like that, and then on a weekend we got into Bury St Edmunds and there’d be a dance there at the Corn exchange I think you call it, so all the Czechs and people like that would be there as well, it was right mingling of these army boys, that’s all we were, there were some men, they were on Middlesex Regiment, on these guns, and one of those actually shot a Dornier down,
AM: Gosh!
GSL: Yeah, with a Lewis gun
AM: So, when you left Honington after a year, where did you go to [unclear]?
GSL: At Martlesham Heath
AM: Right
GSL: And they were all fighters there
AM: So, why were you transferred? Was it just a unit move or?
GSL: Well, it was a unit move but I think the authorities, you know, thought that as boys we were getting far too hero worshipping these people, it might do more harm than good and those, I mean, there was things went on like staff they shouldn’t have been taking out of the camp, you know, staff that, you know, they got hold of by unfair means, and we’re on guard supposed to stop all this
AM: Do you mean, black market stuff?
GSL: Yeah, and
AM: Sorry
GSL: But because we knew them so well, we would say, yeah
AM: This is the aircrew doing the black market this or?
GSL: No, sometimes some of the cookhouse people as well, you know
AM: Right, so groundcrew mainly
GSL: Yeah, there was all sorts going on but
AM: And what sort of contraband was been treated here?
GSL: Sometimes petrol, they’d take a couple of gallons of petrol or something?
AM: Right
GSL: Things like that or yeah, but not a lot of that went on you know they, I think they lived for the day, when they went off sometimes one might have a small car and you’d be on guard at the gate, the main gate, before the RAF regiment was formed, that was us, and you’d be beyond the main gate and this little car would come along about twelve of them in it, so hanging on it and everything, hey, hey, cheerio George! And all this and off they’d go and then they’d come back at night, worse for wear with the booze, you know
AM: So you went from
GSL: Honington to Martlesham Heath
AM: Right
GSL: And at Martlesham Heath we’re guard duty again
AM: Right
GSL: But by this time, we’ve taken over from, also taken over from the RAF police
AM: Great
GSL: You had an armband on and instead of your rifle they gave us a revolver and you show you’re on the main gates
AM: Right
GSL: And things like that but and it was where, when we were there, that the RAF Regiment was formed. They transferred some of our sergeants into the RAF Regiment
AM: Right
GSL: And then, after that off we went to Felixstowe as a battalion and gradually they disbanded the 70th Young Soldiers and put us out to other units.
AM: Right. So, what did you do for the rest of the war?
GSL: Rest of the war I was in the, finished up in the war in, what is known as the special service Combined Operations Bombardment unit
AM: Right
GSL: This was Mountbatten’s idea. What it used to be, there used to be an artillery captain, a NCO army sergeant and three naval telegraphists and that was the unit, number 4 unit I was in. Now, when the invasion took place, in Sicily, Italy and France, no heavy artillery was ashore and they were finding that these tank regiments, the German tank could come and knock hell out of the invasion, so what happened? Some of us would go in by air, these units but we were attached to a warship, so we went ashore in advance of the troops that were invading and a brigadier or somebody would come up and say, you bombardment unit chaps and our captain would say yes, and he’d say, right, over there, we’ve had information that a Tiger tank unit is forming up, can you knock hell out of them? Now the captain, through the telegraphist, they would sent back to the warship we were attached to the war spy and they would send back to that and on board the ship was an artillery captain as well and between him and the gunnery officer and we were called forward observation bombardment, our captain ashore, if he got killed, I would have to take over his duties, and then the first shot would be fired, a ton shell would come over and say it landed about quarter of a mile to the left of the target, he would have to correct that, another one would come over and perhaps that would straddle target and the next one would come over and land on it and then the war spy would do a broadside bombardment, you never heard a noise like that and when all the smoke and that had lifted there was nothing there but these huge craters and that was a special training we had to have for that, so some went in with the airborne unit, some went in with the sea units, but we had to have special training for the artillery side of it and then as an infantry man as well, as well as artillery I got an extra 2 and six a day I think. I had to make sure that the, you know, while he was doing all this, that it wouldn’t be because the Germans were keen to get hold of us cause they knew it was us [unclear] the RAF would come in and spot a plane, they were being shot down and they couldn’t give the precise area as well as what we could on the ground, so after they’d gone in out of range of the warships, out of range altogether and heavy artillery got ashore, we were then sent back to rejoin certain units.
AM: Right
GSL: And then, when the, the war was just about half over, in Germany, the Rhine, we got called back home to do airborne training for the invasion of Japan. So we went to India and joined the 44th Indian Airborne Division and luckily for us they dropped the atomic bomb
AM: Right
GSL: Or us and the American 101st Airborne Division were gonna be the first one to be in and [unclear] the Japanese there wouldn’t be many of us left on for sure. So that was my, but of all my service, the way I contributed to most I almost think was at Honington. Yeah
AM: So, how did you feel for you, did you leave Honington by coach or by train or did you march out? How did you feel when you left?
GSL: We left Honington, we went by three ton pickup truck to Martlesham.
AM: Right
GSL: And a lot of the RAF were out, you know, cheering and things like that. And when the, by that time of course, just after that, the Americans moved in and took over and put down concrete runways and God knows what else. But this, I’ll just get
AM: Have you ever been back to Honington since?
GSL: No, when David Tate was here, I did say, not quite, not intended anything, I’d say, oh yes, I’d really would love to go back because he said a lot of the things haven’t changed and he sent us an email that he’d been in the mess where I’d been with Sam Costa and he says, I looked round and saw the same tables and that, nothing’s changed and he said, I just looked and my mind wandered to when you and Sam Costa were having your tea during an air raid. And I did, while he was here, I did say, yes, I would like to go back and see but he didn’t say anything. If he’d said, yes, I’d like to go, I, yeah, you must come, I’d have gone. But most of my time over that period I had a great liaison with Flight Lieutenant Matheson who even gave me a big painting I’ve got upstairs and sent me this nice glass drinking mug, they only made fifty of them or something, and on top of that, he said, well, if your book’s ready for publication, bring all the books down to Honington and we’ll set up a stall and you can sell them here but no, by that time I’ve got it in the attic, gathering cobwebs.
AM: So just tell me what happened to you after the war
GSL: After the war, well, during the war here I was at Troon, up at Dundonald Camp we were training invading the isle of Arran and everything to invade Japanese islands and things like that and I met my late wife, met her, engaged and married in nine weeks and off I went to India. Well, because I’d done a bunk from the college, my education was sadly lacking because I’d done a bunk and ahead was some of the best education that you could get at these colleges, and by this time I married and war was over and I was in India waiting demob and I thought what am I gonna do now? And then my commanding officer said, you sign up for three years, I’ll get you to the Quetta, which was the Indian Sandhurst and I’ll get you, you’ll get a commission, by then I was a sergeant and he said, but you’ll have to sign up for three years and you might not get home for at least for another two years, so I’d just been married and I said, no, I won’t do it, so when I, while I was out there they were looking for police, the police were sadly depleted, so I sat the exam for Essex Constabulary and when I got demobbed, all I had to do was to go and get the medical, that made me a policeman. But the night I came home, my wife was at farming stock, her two brothers who ran the farm had a car accident, real car accident, bad accident, so I couldn’t take her away to Essex, so I had to let it go by, so I joined the police at Ayr and then while I was at Ayr, I then went to transfer to Kilmarnock and then I thought, I studied English law, because promotion in England was quicker and I went down to England to various forces there and rose from police constable up here in Ayr to assistant chief constable and then, after that, I was promoted up here to chief of police of the British Transport Police and that’s where I did thirty-six years, then I came out and did voluntary work at the Children’s Panel, chairman of advisory committee for Children’s Panel and that’s me here, still here. So, I’m now ninety-four years of age and I’ve been very lucky health wise and that was me and now I’ve been married for the second time to a lovely, really lovely lady and that’s it.
AM: Well, that’s more than it
GSL: Couple of years ago, I got a phone call to say they wanted to make me a something of,
AM: Legion d’honneur?
GSL: Knight of honor or something
AM: Legion d’honneur?
GSL: Yeah, of and I thought, I said, no, I don’t want anything to do with that, I got six medals from my own army, that’s it, enough for me, and I got a police medal as well, and I don’t want any more medals at seventy odd years ago and Margaret said, look, if you don’t go, I’m going. So finally, I went and they gave me this medal, I don’t know if you’d seen one, I got that, and that’s it. So me, I don’t, I was asked here to join the British Legion, I said, I’m sorry I don’t believe it, on D-Day I like to go to church, quietly in church and sit there, say a few prayers and meditate cause I lost a lot of good pals, I was on the D-Day landings, I landed five minutes after midnight on D-Day and saw a lot of [unclear], lost a lot of good pals, and then three weeks after that this side of Bayeux I was wounded in the leg and came home and with being young I suppose and fit I was ok again within about a fortnight, I thought of going back to my unit, and I didn’t, I went to Ringway, Manchester as an instructor, and I was desperately trying to get back to my unit and one day the sergeant major came in who didn’t like for some reason, why have you got two names, he said? Only officers have two names. I should call you Leach. So he came in, ah, Leach, you’re getting your transferred [unclear] I thought how wonderful and what happened? I was posted to India. Then I came home from India and that and went into the police, never regretted it, did thirty six years, which I enjoyed and then, when things were getting very political I could’ve gone on it that rank, I could’ve gone on to 65 and I said, no thank you, it was getting very political, I thought it was time I was out of here, thirty-six years is enough, by that time I was in my late fifties, so I came out. But I always look back vividly to my days at Honington with those aircrew, always. All these young men, they were there one day, gone the next and there was a WAAF sergeant and a senior NCO in the RAF that they used to go round when they never returned, put all their belongings in a bag or something, and a new lot moved in, you know.
AM: When a crew was lost
GSL: Yeah. So
AM: That must be a great upsetting
GSL: For them I should think yeah, very, but they used to say, when some of them climbed down out of the plane they would say, can’t stop, I’ll see you tonight or something, my bacon and eggs awaits me, they got bacon and eggs when they got back or something but sometimes we had, their first raid on Berlin, we all had to go to the briefing room on guard outside and anyhow after they’d gone they had a map up, there was a place where you could look through a crack, and a blackout with a big red tape, and they put this tape from Honington up to where it gotta go and then the weather officer, he would come and tell them all about what the weather was to be like, they’re all righting away and things like that and then finally the station commander, he would come up and tell them and the operations, there were these four important men before they went on a raid and then they’d come and they’d say, where’s’ the ball? And start kicking this ball about again
AM: How many times did you sneak to watch this briefing process?
GSL: Oh well, I shouldn’t be telling you that
AM: No, I’d like you to
GSL: Well, about six or seven times
AM: That must have been fascinating
GSL: Yeah, we had a place where there was a crack that very few of us knew about, but we were there on guard, even the RAF weren’t allowed in there
AM: Right, so this
GSL: And this day, this, I always remember, we had a bloke with us called Nobby Byer, a Londoner, was reputed he was only fourteen when he joined up and said he was eighteen, and he stole a pair of long trousers off a line to put on because he’d only got shorts and he was a so and so and there’s bits in there in your magazine you’ll read, anyhow he was on guard and this RAF officer came up and Nobby said, you can’t go in there, and he said, what do you mean, I can’t go in there? I’ve got the weather reports or so, you can’t go in there or something, I’m going in there, Nobby turned around with his rifle, you don’t you go trying going in there and in the end they chap with all these pipes, hammered on the door or something and they opened up, in, yeah, oh yes.
AM: Well, George Smith-Leach, to give you your proper name, or I should say, British Transport chief constable George Smith-Leach, thank you very much.
GSL: Right
AM: That’s a pleasure, I really enjoyed that, George, thank you
GSL: It’s an honor
AM: No, a pleasure
GSL: An honor
AM: [laughs], right, well, that’s gone alright I think
GSL: Well, that’s the first time I’ve spoken like that, I’ve told Margaret bits
AM: Yeah
GSL: Not even my first wife but to her I’ve told her bits like this
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with George Patrick Smith-Leach
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alistair Montgomery
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-06-08
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ASmithLeachGP180608, PSmithLeachGP1801
Format
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00:47:28 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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British Army
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Suffolk
England--Bury St. Edmunds
England--Felixstowe
India
Japan
Description
An account of the resource
George was born in Chelmsford, Essex. He then moved to Clacton-on-Sea where he went to school before going to a seminary catholic college. When war broke out, he and two other boys aged 15 or 16 ran away from college and went to Ipswich to join the army. George arrived at RAF Honington in July 1940 and stayed there about a year. Bombs were stored in an underground network. After training he joined A Company 70th Battalion for airfield defence, guarding 9 Squadron aircraft at night. 311 Squadron, flying Wellingtons, were later living in tents about five miles from the station. The squadron lost a few aircraft and underwent further training. George recalled the station commander and padre watching the aircraft take off.
George remembered an occasion when aircraft had come back damaged with a badly injured crew. He said the aircrews would touch part of the aircraft for luck before flying. He thought crews were inspiring and would have liked to be transferred to the Royal Air Force. The crew gave him the opportunity to have a flight in a Wellington, which he described. At weekends they would occasionally all go to Bury St Edmunds to a dance. After RAF Honington the unit was transferred to RAF Martlesham Heath on guard duty. They then went to Felixstowe as a battalion. After special training the unit joined the Combined Operations Bombardment Unit 4 which was attached to a warship. Next they did airborne training to go to India and Japan. He was demobbed in India, married and then became a policeman at Ayre. Finally he became Chief of Police for British Transport Police.
Contributor
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Sue Smith
Peter Schulze
Temporal Coverage
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1940
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
311 Squadron
9 Squadron
bombing
military living conditions
RAF Honington
RAF Martlesham Heath
superstition
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2563/44398/MParryWE1172401-220531-03.1.pdf
9c7a743718410b920ea1606373dcfa71
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
Parry, William Edward
Parry, W E
Description
An account of the resource
34 items. The collection concerns Pilot Officer William Edward Parry DFC (1912 - 1996, 1177401 Royal Air Force) and contains his decorations, documents and photographs. He flew operations as a pilot with 9 Squadron.
The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Frances Lee and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
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2022-05-31
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Parry, WE
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[underlined] Notes of interview with William Parry IX Sqn. Ground Crew 11.8.94 [underlined] – Andrew Hobley.
Born 1912. left school 1928. Lived in Birkenhead.
Moved to Church Streton to work for G.W.R. Reserved occupation. Left job and joined R.A.F.V.R., intending to become air crew (1940) At Cardington failed as air crew as night vision insuffient.
Offered chance to return to job (as not conscripted) but asked for job to do with aircraft and flying. Sent to Halton on engineering course. On 2 week leave pass went through Coventry on day after raid with Fellow “Halton Brat” who came from Coventry.
Joined a Sqn. Dec. 1940 as L.A.C. After 4/5 months sent back to do conversion course at Cosford. Applied to go on flying boat Squadron (as Sunderlands always carried a ground crew member) Posted back to 9 Sqn
9 Sqn. had Wellingtons till June ‘42
Manchesters June 42 – Aug ‘42
Lancasters after.
Main fault of Lancasters tendency to swing to port on take off, due to airflow from stbd inner. Saw one pilot (new) swing to port, overcompensate to sbd, aircraft u/c. collapsed port wing ripped, fire started. Never saw crew leave a/c so fast! After fire & bomb load want off no need for crane to pick up pieces!
Sent on two short courses with A V Roe at Woodford, saw Lancaster assembly shop & test field. Came of [sic] line (three line, one a/c per day) oiled & fueled [sic], taken straight up by pilot and air-tested.
[page break]
As Sergt. Supervised maintainence [sic] of 3 a/c. towards end of war was acting F/Sgt in B flight, supervising 9 – 10 a/c. Not yet involved with repair work himself, but served air worthy Form. Normaly [sic] 3 men per aircraft, two engine fitters, one airframe fitter.
For ED656 – Engine fitters. Bob Taylor
Alan Willgress (from Kings Lyn)
Airframe fitter. ‘pop’ [deleted] Burckell [/deleted] Burcknell (from Bourne, Lincs) Aged 44.
Stayed with 9 Sqd. till demobalised [sic] 1946 Serviced a/c with “Tallboys” – beautifully engineered bomb, shame to waste such skill on a bomb! Held in b’bay by sling – would sometimes drop back on take-off or landing – tail would break through bulkhead at rear of b’bay, this evening drop [two indecipherable words] 14.1.44. [two indecipherable words]
After leaving R.A.F. – (would have prefered [sic] to stay in but wife preferred him out) G.W.R. did not want to know him. Finaly got job with local electricity board in [deleted]Salop [/deleted] Shropshire.
Enjoyed the wartime years, inspite of the dangers.
Little interfearence [sic] from higher authority.
1) Not normal to take off of both magnetos as each engine not working. All landed off base – went to check as crew said mag. not working. One mag. dead. Sqd. Leader with him decided to take off & did (Normal to take Sgt as F/Eng)
[page break]
2) A/C dropped in at half finished airfield, only half a runway – landed O.K. but take off problem. Took out all armament & ammo, minimum fuel load, picked up boost to engine and got a/c off.
3) [indecipherable word] A/C landed little Snoring. All gone bar two. Final one motors and airframe O.K. rest duff. Pilot W/op & Parry took off. No wireless, no IFF. Murky day went up to 2000’, above cloud, and flew over Wash. Pilot suddenly noticed little black puffs ahead – flak!! Dived through cloud to be seen – was Navy.
4) End of war – flew to little airfield (just liberated) to set up POW shuttle. Aim to get servicing party established, took two Lancs loaded with equipment spare wheels loaded into bomb bay. Got to take off – pilot found b’bay doors would not close because of load – took off with doors open – very draftty [sic] – landed with feet frozen.
5) Close shave with John Evans. Had problem with a/c. Parry asked for air test. Evans asked for Bill to come up too as F/Eng. Went to Wainfleet, droped [sic] six practice bombs. Had permission to return at low level – went down low over sea of Skegness, then over land 200’. Came over [indecipherable word] nr. Spilsbury [sic]. Evans dropped a/c right down low – on pull out at end of run, took 12’ off fir tree. Temp. in Std outer shot up. Parry cut & feathered as smoke coming out, rest of engines to full power took up to 2000’. Engine still smoking. Evans suggested may have to jump Parry not amused as not wearing harness (too uncomfortable) and ‘chute back by entrance door!
[page break]
Smoke died off – was in fact steam. Got back to base sbd outer u/s, main spar damaged. Evans faced Court Martial – but lost in action before this.
6) superstitious Fl Lght [sic] Jim Lawn (NZ) devout R-Catholic always had St. Christopher medalion [sic] on instrument panel. (flew later WS-V.) Parry had to make sure medalion [sic] moved if flew other a/c.
Completed tour & went to training command at Swinderby, killed in accident caused by ground crew. It severed [indecipherable word] line [underlined] never [/underlined] just blocked with rag. A/C. engine Caught fire. a/c crashed. 7 crew, Cairns & 2 ground crew killed. [indecipherable word] line had been plugged with rag and engine over heated. Buried at Newark war cemetery. (also 1/2 crew had no chutes). Crashed nr. Lincoln.
13.4.45 moved to Bardney. Paddy joined soon after outstanding pilot – Could turn Lancaster [indecipherable word] up. Close friends. Shared many drinks in Sgts Mess, Saraus [sic] Head Lincoln & pub by railway station.
Came from Waterford, Irish National and proud of it. Joined up to fly. Only captain of aircraft still Non-Com. Group [deleted] Commander [/deleted] Captain called him in & said should apply for commision [sic] Delighted to meet an Irishman who was still patriotic. Paddy told him what to do with Commission! Never less commissioned later.
Fearlessness probably killed him. Q F I given was 250’ too low, so crashed. Would let down of clouds till could see trees above clouds. Presumably pressing on, not holding back. Originaly [sic] told 2 crew survived, then only one (rear gunner)
PTO
[indecipherable line]
[page break]
Paddy’s opinion of war – no qualm Bomb as many as can!
Photo (ED656 & crew) taken after air test soon after crashed & killed)
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
Notes of Interview with William Parry 9 Squadron Ground Crew
Description
An account of the resource
A biography of Bill covering his RAF years.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Andrew Hobley
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1994-08-11
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Format
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Five handwritten sheets
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MParryWE1172401-220531-03
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Steve Baldwin
9 Squadron
ground crew
ground personnel
Lancaster
Manchester
pilot
prisoner of war
RAF Cardington
RAF Cosford
RAF Halton
RAF Little Snoring
Sunderland
Tallboy
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/8752/PLucasWE1501.2.jpg
dc00f6a0e3e1fc69c5c9cdae6c5e637c
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/8752/ALucasB150405.1.mp3
08574ac4f1191f6ee013bbf1624927f9
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Lucas, Bill
William Ernest Lucas
W E Lucas
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lucas, WE
Description
An account of the resource
15 items. Two oral history interviews with Squadron Leader Bill Lucas DFC (1917 - 2018, 1255396 Royal Air Force), his log book, brief memoir and photographs. He served as a pilot with 9, 15, 139 and 162 Squadrons. After the war he ran in the 1948 Olympics.
The collection was catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
William (Bill) Ernest Lucas was born in Tooting Bec, London on the 16th January 1917, 3 years deep into World War One. Luckily for Bill he was not of age to endure with the fighting in the trenches. However, when Europe was engulfed into another worldwide conflict in 1939, this set way for Bill to become involved with the RAF and IBCC.
Growing up, Bill was an only child and left his school (Bec Grammar School) at the age of 15. He managed to get a job with a printers, which led to his second and only other job at an insurance company called the London and Lancashire. The company’s sports club enabled Bill to find his passion for athletics (especially running) and he was expected to participate in the 1940 Olympics until the war interfered. (https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/30884)
A photo of Bill in his running gear is shown in https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/30865 where he is running down 55 Graham Road in Surrey.
Bill instead competed in the 1948 Olympic Games as the games were also cancelled in 1944 due to World War Two. Luckily the games were hosted in London (https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/london-1948) and Bill had retired from IBCC meaning that he had time to participate.
As seen in ‘Bill Lucas and the 1948 London Olympics’ (1948) https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/30866 Bill managed to come 6th in the Second Heat meaning he was one position off of being in the final on the 2nd August 1948! This collection also includes Bill in his older prime wearing his 1948 Olympic Games jacket and the official Olympic Games programme from 1948.
When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1st 1939, Bill was 22 years old meaning that he was eligible to be part of Great Britain’s Army. Combining Bill’s hatred of the sea and his fathers recent experiences in the trenches, the RAF seemed to be the most compatible choice with Bill. (https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/30884/B[Author]LucasWEv10001.jpg)
Bill was not involved in Britain’s mightiest air conflict against Hitler’s Luftwaffe however, instead watching ‘The Few’ defeat the Nazi aircrafts and succeed. Being considered to be Nazi Germany’s first ‘major military defeat’, this allowed for Britain to continue fighting in the war (https://www.raf.mod.uk/our-organisation/our-history/anniversaries/battle-of-britain/ and to an extent, allowed Bill to continue his path of becoming an Squadron Leader.
It was November 1940 when Bill started his pilot training, but due to a bomber offensive being the only way to properly counter the Nazis, this was huge not just for Bill but Britain as a whole. There had never been a bomber offensive before in warfare. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/30884/B[Author]LucasWEv10001.jpg
As seen in Bill’s official Pilot’s Log Book: (https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/24264/LLucasWE122826v1.1.pdf) his training consisted of being part of 16 Elementary Flying School at RAF Derby from 1940 to 41 , 8 School of Flying Training at RAF Montrose in 1941 and 20 Operational Training Units at RAF Lossiemouth in 1941 . He flew three different types of aircraft during his training, Miles Magister, Miles Master and Wellington I’s.
Bill’s training finally finished in August 1941 and he was posted to his first official squadron, IX Squadron at Honington. Here he flew the Wellington Bomber.
Will Cragg
Record of Service:
4 November 1940- 4 January 1941: 16 Elementary Flying Training School at RAF Derby flying Miles Magisters
9 January- 4 May 1941: 8 School of Flying Training at RAF Montrose flying Miles Masters
31 May 1941- 13 August 1941: 20 Operational Training Units at RAF Lossiemouth flying Wellington I’s
14 August 1941- 4 November 1941: 9 Squadron at RAF Honington flying Wellington III’s
4 November 1941- 30 December 1941: 26 Conversion Fleet at RAF Waterbeach flying Stirling’s
30 December 1941- 1 August 1942: 15 Squadron at RAF Wyton flying Whitley V’s
1 August 1942- 3 August 1942: 218 Conversion Fleet at RAF Marham flying Airspeed Oxfords
4 August 1942- 18 August 1942: 19 Operational Training Units at RAF Kinloss flying Whitley IV’s
19 August 1942- 13 August 1942: 3 Fighter Instructor Schools at RAF Hullavington flying Ansons
17 September 1942- 18 September 1942: 19 Operational Training Units at RAF Kinloss flying Halifax II’s
18 September 1942- 24 October 1944: 19 Operational Training Units at RAF Forres flying Mosquito III’s
30 October 1942- 19 December 1944: 1655 Mosquito Training Unit at RAF Warboys flying Mosquito IV’s
30 October 1944- 19 December 1944: 1655 Squadron at RAF Bourn flying Mosquito XX’s
7 June 1945- 28 June 1945: 162 Squadron at RAF Blackbushe flying Mosquito XXV’S
28 June 1945- 29 January 1946: 139 Squadron at RAF Upwood flying Lancaster III’s
29 January 1946: Station Head Quarters at RAF Upwood flying Mosquito XVI’s
William Cragg
William (Bill) Lucas was born on January 16th, 1917 in Tooting Bec, London. He was educated at Bec Grammar School, and left at the age of 15 to work at a printing company before moving to the insurers London and Lancashire to work as an assessor. While working there, he developed his talent for athletics with the Belgrave Harriers, with his best discipline being the 5000 metres. His goal was to compete at the 1940 Olympic games. However, in 1940, Bill was called up to help the war effort and mindful of his father’s advice to avoid the army and his own dislike of the sea, he chose to join the RAF.
Initially he trained as a fighter pilot on Miles Magisters and Miles Masters, but by the time he had finished training, the Battle of Britain had been won and the need for bomber pilots was more urgent. So, he was reallocated to bombers and trained to fly the Wellington at RAF Lossiemouth. Bill Lucas · IBCC Digital Archive (lincoln.ac.uk)
Following completion of pilot training in August 1941, he was posted to RAF Honington and joined 9 Squadron flying Wellingtons. He flew 14 operational sorties – notably Cologne and Hamburg – before converting to Stirlings at RAF Waterbeach. He then joined 15 (Bomber) Squadron at RAF Wyton, flying the Short Stirling and, by August 1942, Bill had completed a full tour of 30 operational sorties (over 40 operations in total). Bill experienced tense encounters with German defences, having to take evasive action and also getting caught in a cone of five or six searchlights. To get out of the searchlight glare he had to do things with the aircraft which it was never meant to do. Returning from one mission they flew too close to Kiel and the airframe amassed a lot of bullet holes and an alarming loss of fuel. Crossing the North Sea, the tank indicators showed practically nothing and they had to divert into Woodbridge in Suffolk. The groundcrew estimated there was less than twenty-five gallons of fuel left (probably less than 6 minutes of flying time).
He was released from operational duties and was posted to RAF Lossiemouth as a flying instructor. Then in December 1944, he returned to operational flying and was posted to 162 Squadron, part of the Pathfinder force, to fly the Mosquito, an aircraft he described as “a bit quicker and more responsive; a nice aeroplane”. He completed a further 34 operational sorites with 162 Squadron, including missions over Kiel, Berlin, Hannover and Magdeburg. In recognition of his war services, Bill was awarded the DFC and was Mentioned in Despatches.
Squadron Leader Bill Lucas was released from the Service in January 1946 and returned to the insurance job he had left to join the RAF. Eventually, he left the company to become an insurance broker. He also returned to athletics and the Belgrave Harriers; he ran in various internationals and competed for Great Britain in the 5000m at the 1948 London Olympics. Athletics remained with him for the rest of his life and he gave his spare time freely, working in prominent roles in the administration of athletics. He remained a Belgrave Harrier committee member well into his 90s. He became known as “the golden voice of British Athletics” for his many years as stadium announcer at the White City .
In his later years, Bill remained prominent in RAF and Aircrew Associations. He, along with a small Band of Sussex veterans, was instrumental in helping to raise funds for the construction of the Bomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park and the International Bomber Command Centre.
Chris Cann
1940: Volunteered for the RAF
4 November 1940 – 4 January 1941: RAF Burnaston, No. 16 EFTS, flying Magister aircraft
9 January 1941 – 4 May 1941: RAF Montrose, No. 8 SFTS, flying Master aircraft
31 May 1941 – 13 August 1941: RAF Lossiemouth, No. 20 OTU, flying Wellington aircraft
14 August 1941 – 4 November 1941: RAF Honington, No. 9 Squadron, flying Wellington aircraft
1941: Commissioned into the officer ranks
4 November 1941 – 30 December 1941: RAF Waterbeach, No. 26 Conversion Flight, flying Stirling aircraft
30 December 1941 – 1 August 1942: RAF Wyton, No. 15 Squadron, flying Stirling aircraft
1 August 1942 – 3 August 1942: RAF Marham, 218 Conversion Flight
4 August 1942 – 18 August 1942: RAF Kinloss, No. 19 OTU, flying Whitley aircraft
19 August 1942 – 13 September 1942: RAF Hullavington, No. 3 FTS, flying Oxford aircraft
17 September 1942 – 18 September 1942: RAF Kinloss, No. 19 OTU, flying Whitley and Anson aircraft
18 September 1942 – 24 October 1944: RAF Foress, No. 19 OTU, flying Whitley and Anson aircraft
30 October 1944 – 19 December 1944: RAF Warboys, 1655 MTU, flying Mosquito and Oxford aircraft
19 December 1944 – 7 June 1945: RAF Bourn, 162 Squadron, flying Mosquito aircraft
7 June 1945 – 28 June 1945: RAF Blackbushe, 162 Squadron, flying Mosquito aircraft
28 June 1945 – 29 January 1946: RAF Upwood, 139 Squadron, flying Mosquito and Oxford aircraft
29 January 1946: Released from Service having attained the rank of Squadron Leader.
Chris Cann
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: The interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Andrew Panton, the Interviewee is Bill Lucas. Mr Lucas was a RAF pilot in various aircraft during World War Two. The interview is taking place at [redacted] Rustington, West Sussex on the 5th of April 2015.
WL: My name is W E (Bill) Lucas. I was called to the Forces in 1940, and my first introduction towards that was to be seen by a doctor in a Croydon school who, all intents and purposes, er, was to see which — whether I was capable of going in any of the services, that is, if I’d got flat feet or something like that. So we came to the point when he said, ‘Which service do you want to go in?’ So I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to go in the Army’, because my father put me off, had put me off going in to the trenches, et cetera. He himself had won a military medal saving his CO, he was a sergeant in the Northampton Regiment. So, I said, ‘no Army, I don’t like water, so I must go in the RAF’. ‘Oh, what do you want to do in the RAF?’ ‘Oh well,’ I said ‘what is there to do in the RAF other than fly?’ So he then wields his stethoscope and he then said, ‘you will never fly with the RAF’. So I said, ‘why not?’ He said, ‘you’ve got an enlarged heart’, I said, ‘I know that I’ve got an enlarged heart. I have been an athlete for a number of years and that developed the heart’. In fact, I was quite a good athlete, I was up to County standard at that stage, so he then said, ‘you’ve got an uneven heartbeat.’ Well, here I am, um, God knows how many years later, seventy-odd years later, and I’ve still got an enlarged heart and I’ve still got an uneven heartbeat. But anyway, he said, ‘well, I appreciate your enthusiasm. I’ll put you forward’. Well, having, um, escaped the doctor and, er, gone to Uxbridge and been interviewed again there for flying duties, they passed me without any bother at all, and then, having gone through all the introductory things, ground work et cetera, I was then trained as a fighter pilot, um, flying Miles Magisters and Miles Masters. That didn’t work, um, because they didn’t — well, the need for fighter pilots was over because we had won the Battle of Britain with the Spitfires, et cetera, et cetera, so I found myself at Lossiemouth, er, faced with flying a heavy bomber, the Wellington 1C.
AP: And what was it like to fly? How did you —
WL: Oh, the Wellington was a comparatively easy aircraft to fly. It was beautifully situated, it was low off the ground. You could do three-point landings in a Wellington, which you couldn’t do with some other aircraft, so it was quite enjoyable.
AP: And the kind of operations that you flew on?
WL: Operations were, at that time, were entirely over Germany, main cities and things in Germany but, but, er, if I had my log book here I could tell you where I went.
AP: What about —
WL: My first, my first one was, what happened was that when you, at Lossiemouth, you were trained and you finished up at a squadron, and I finished up at 9 Squadron, Honington, and did three trips, um, as a second pilot with a qualified pilot, and then you were given a crew of your own. So, er, I was sent off my first one as captain, they called it a making learner, and it was to Boulogne, so that wasn’t very far so we came back again. And from then onwards it was targets like Cologne and Magdeburg, all those sort of things.
AP: You said you were on thousand bomber raids.
WL: No, that was on the Stirling.
AP: The Stirling.
WL: So after a period of, of, you know, not very long, I completed fourteen operations with 9 Squadron, I was picked and given the honour, they called it the honour, of being one of the first pilots to fly a four engine aircraft, and that was the Stirling. Now, the Stirling was an entirely different aircraft to the Wellington, you’ve only got to see a Stirling to see how different it is. It had a very high undercarriage, you could not do three-point landings on a Stirling, you had to wheel them in. I soon learnt that, because otherwise you would be crashing aircraft all over the place. And then I was then moved to Wyton, W Y T O N, in, in Huntingdonshire, and I then did another full tour, of something like thirty-odd trips, with a crew and the Stirling. The main one of those that I can remember, is the first thousand bomber raid on the 30th of May 1942, er, when we went to Cologne. It was followed the following night with a similar raid on Essen. The Cologne one was quite successful, it was a beautiful clear night, moonlight night. Essen was a bit different, it was too cloudy, didn’t see the target very well, and then two more, two more nights later we did Essen again, still without a great deal of success.
AP: And did you encounter any fighters or —
WL: Oh well, that went without, thing that you either get flak or you get fighters, you know. They weren’t sort of buzzing around you all the time, but you would, you would get one at some time or other.
AP: Did you take evasive action, corkscrewing?
WL: Yes, and your, your rear gunner, if you’ve got a rear gunner coming to talk to you, oh [unclear], used his guns [slight laugh] his eight, eight 303’s.
AP: And was that the corkscrew?
WL: Oh, yes, you did evasive action and, of course, the other thing, which was even more terrifying, was getting caught in searchlights, because the German defences were all geared together that if, er, if a search, if a searchlight got you, then they could swing guns and other searchlights, and if you happened to get caught in a cone of five or six searchlights it was pretty grim. You could, then you started to do things with your aircraft which it was never meant to do, to get out. I had two experiences like that, but I recovered [slight laugh].
AP: And what about the blinding light [unclear]?
WL: Oh, of course, if you’re in the searchlights, you are blinded by them, but you, you hit back, because you got all your gunners to fire down the beam. We used to do a bit of destruction that way [slight laugh].
AP: When you’re coming up to the target now, coming up close to the target, the last couple of minutes, what’s that like?
WL: Well you had to do a straight and level, generally thought to be two minutes dead straight and level, but normally I used to, had a little pattern of my own, where I would weave, um, gently you know, never to be too long on any one thing, up a bit like that down a bit like that, and down a bit like that, still keeping the general thing and it seemed to work.
AP: And the bomb aimer, he’s in control?
WL: He takes over control in the last, um, last run in, yes. He’s the one that supposed to spot the target and set it up. Left, left, you know, right, right [slight laugh].
AP: And then once the bombs had gone, what happens then?
WL: Well, as soon as the bombs had gone, you moved away and headed home as quickly as you could and the thousand bomber raid on Cologne on 30th May, which was in a Stirling, I brought back a picture which, um, showed my stick of bombs going right across the front of the cathedral and the last one emanated at the bridge, the Hohen, the Hohenzollen bridge I think it’s called, in Cologne, so I claimed that. Now, whenever anybody goes to Cologne, I say, ‘stand in front of the cathedral and look at the front, and you’ll find it pockmarked. I claim those pockmarks’ [slight laugh]. Sort of bit of fun but probably quite true actually but, er, you know, I’ve not way of proving it.
AP: And that was a thousand bombers all targeting Cologne that one night?
WL: Well over a period of time, they weren’t all there at once [slight laugh] ‘cause it was done over, I don’t know, half an hour or so or more I should think.
AP: So you did Wellingtons, then Stirlings, and then —
WL: Oh we had Whitleys, and everything they could lay they hands on, so out of partly trained crews from OTUs, flown by qualified pilots, OTU instructors, um, but the crews were, you know, a bit dubious [slight laugh]. Well, you’d be lying if you said you weren’t scared to a degree, but, you know, being nervous and perhaps is something that helps you on your way, but if you gave in to it of course, you would never do it again, and some people did give in to it, and they got taken off, and it was called LMF, lack of moral fibre, so they got reduced to the ground, ground crews.
AP: And the support of the ground crews and all the other people?
WL: Oh terrific, they kept you in the air really. There’s no doubt about it.
AP: So can you say a little bit about all the people that supported you, the mechanics, the ground crew? What are your thoughts about that?
WL: Well I can’t praise them more you see, because it’s like when people say, ‘which aircraft do you like best?’ My answer to that is, ‘all of them, they brought me home’. So that’s what I say about the ground crew, you know, they got us there and back, they entered into the spirit of the thing as much as we did, you know. Their sort of hours were as queer like ours, they were there to see us off, they were there to see us back, see. Counting, you know, the aircraft as they come in. Was our aircraft going to come back in, see? They could be just as upset, I expect, with loss of the crew, their crew.
AP: Are there any memories in particular strike you from those years? You know, when you were flying, anything really vivid, or you feel you would like to relate to today, when you look back?
WL: What do you mean, things that happened to me?
AP: Yes.
WL: Oh, I had one or two scares. I had an engine failure on take-off on a Stirling, the engine went on fire. We had an, we had an engineer on board then and he dealt with it, but we were fully laden and gaining height was very, very difficult. This was out of Wyton, or Alconbury as we were flying from at that stage, um, so we had to get around and we had to lose some fuel, but we still had the bomb load on board, what to do with it? We weren’t getting any height at all so we decided, I decided that we were going to drop it. So it was a nice clear night so we managed to find fields, wide open fields, and we dropped the bomb load, et cetera, et cetera and thought nothing more about it, then came into land on three engines, which was no great problem. Later that, or a few days later, when we were all together, drinking in Huntingdon, we heard a bod way somewhere saying, ‘I was bombed by the Germans this week’, he said, ‘broke a lot of windows’. So we listened to this, and I thought that sounds very much like what we might have done, so we enlightened ourselves, we introduced ourselves to him and said it was us who, who broke his windows, so he was so delighted with that. We had free beer for the rest of the night.
AP: What was the Stirling like to fly in the air?
WL: In the air, I enjoyed flying in the air but it was a horror in the circuit with a big -, had an electric undercarriage too which was not a bad thing, but if the electrics failed, you lost your undercarriage. Well if you didn’t, there was a means of winding it down. Took about half an hour to do it.
AP: And, and this was night flying mainly was it?
WL: All night flying, yes, we did no daylight.
AP: Did you ever use the FIDO for, you know, fog?
WL: No but I might have done, but that was later in the war when I was on, on a Mosquito. I, I was first one back on my squadron and, unfortunately, we’d been sent out and been told we would be back long before weather came down, but we weren’t and when we came back fog was thick. It was really thick, so I made two or three approaches on, on, er, Bourn, which was by Cambridge, and, without effect, decided the last time that I would stay on the ground so we went on the ground, fairly well down the runway into a ditch, tail came over, and then we were upside down there. The ground crew arrived very, very quickly and turned it back up again, so we escaped that one.
AP: So you escaped that one.
WL: They’d been trained individually at various places, whether they were wireless operators, or gunners or navigators and in their own trade. I had a crew which I soon learnt to trust. I did not interfere with them, I let them get on with their job. When you were in the air you, you forbid chatter and you only contacted them if you thought need be, and that’s what the captain would do every so often, he’d say to the rear gunner, ‘are you still alive? Are you still awake’ even. The Met Office had no real means of knowing what was going on, other than outside the realms of the United Kingdom. They used to send an aircraft out sometimes before a raid took place to [unclear], it changed quickly and we had nights when we lost a lot of aircraft. I was on leave from my Stirling squadron, um, I was down in Epsom and I bought a paper, and we’d lost something like eighty-odd aircraft. When I got back to squadron, we’d lost three off my squadron and it was proved later that most of them were lost in weather. They went down in the Channel because wind changes, they weren’t able to, hadn’t got the equipment in those days. We flew with dead reckoning which means that, you know, it was what you could see —
AP: That was it. There was no —
WL: That was it. Then we started to get certain things like a Gee box, which was a sat nav I suppose in a way and —
AP: Did you fly with H2S?
WL: Well I flew with H2S in a Mosquito when my marking days were —
AP: Could you talk a bit about that, because I haven’t met anybody who used —
WL: Well having, let’s say having completed my main tour which consisted of forty, forty operations, um, I then went and spent two years with an OTU instructing others at Kinloss, instructing other people on Whitleys [slight laugh]. Two years later I was withdrawn, posted down south, to find myself allocated to a conversion unit on Mosquitos with a view to joining 8 Group, which materialised, um, I went to a squadron, 162 Squadron, which was a newly formed, newly formed squadron especially for the war-time only, flying Mosquitos. Half of us were markers and the other half did diversionaries and that sort of thing.
AP: So did you actually mark the targets?
WL: Yes, I marked. Not all the time but depending. Mosquitos could fly when the heavies couldn’t, see. We could compete with weather better than they did and in those last two years of the war, er, we did a lot of Baedeker raids. I think going out, we took four, five hundred pound bombs and did Hamburg, Magdeburg, Cologne and somewhere else, came back home, you know, having kept the Germans in their shelters all night [slight laugh]. We used to go out at quarter of an hour intervals you see.
AP: Where did you fly from?
WL: I flew from Wyton.
AP: Wyton? Okay. So —
WL: No, in Mosquitos, I flew from Bourn, Bourn without an ‘e’, just outside Cambridge.
AP: Could you talk a little about marking the targets with the Mosquitos?
WL: Well the basis was that we carried, er, flares which lasted quite a long time and varying colours. I never knew which colour I was going, going to be carrying but we were instructed to fly a course, which we were able to do using H2S, er, essentially to be perfectly accurate, and then at a nominated height, and at a certain point, we would drop these flares, which would burst near the ground if it was a clear night or quite high up if it was above cloud. The main force then comes in and bombs the flares and it’s all worked out that if they hit the flare, then their bombs would hit the target, see.
AP: And was there different colours of flares?
WL: Oh yes. Greens, reds, yellows, everything.
AP: And did they have different meanings?
WL: Well the bomber crew coming in behind knew what they had to do, which ones they shoot.
AP: So they could [unclear]
WL: Well they have some warning you see. They might have a yellow one as a warning, then a green one, that’s the one to bomb or something like that.
AP: Right. And H2S, is that the one you were using, that’s the —
WL: It was a forerunner, really, of television. We had a screen in the aircraft, we transmitted a beam or something like that, er, which picked up the ground. It didn’t pick up, er, sharpness but we could tell the difference between water, and built-up areas, and rivers, and all that sort of thing, and we were provided with a map in the aircraft so we were able to follow that by watching the screen. The screen should agree with the map and therefore we knew — it wasn’t until 1943, ‘44 that we began to get accuracy because of that. There was another means called Oboe, that was done by Mosquitos as well. That was arriving at a point, a cock, a cocked hat as they called it, three beams transmitting from this country, all crossing at one point. They used to have, they would have warnings and then they really did have to fly, er, two minutes straight and level. But Oboe, of course, was only useful, couldn’t be done at great distance. The Ruhr was about as far as we could do with Oboe. We used to drop from anything up to thirty thousand.
AP: Any kind of low level bombing?
WL: No, I didn’t do any of those.
AP: Right —
WL: Not, not in a Mosquito. I did some low level stuff in Stirlings, dropping, um, sea mines off the coast of France and Holland, in waterways.
AP: What kind of height would that be?
WL: Three hundred feet. Flying inside the islands off the coast of Holland and shot at. It was the same with Lorient, on the approach into Lorient we were dropping sea mines there. We used to treat these trips quite mundane really, you know. I was never on any sort of thing like Amiens or those specialised jobs. No, I would love to have done it, but I couldn’t. I mean they made a mess of that one so —
AP: Did you go as far as Berlin in the Mosquitos?
WL: Oh yes, fourteen times [slight laugh]. There’s a story about that because, um, we didn’t go to Berlin for a long time after the war, but off of a cruise, we were on in the Baltic, we stopped at Warnemünde and, and got taken into Berlin, see. Met by a young man who was to be our guide for the day, and I knew what he was going to say, he was going to say, at some time, had I been to Berlin before? So we left him to it. Eventually he got round to it, and I said, ‘Yes, yes. Fourteen times but never on the ground’. See, so he looks at me and he said, ‘I know all about that’, he said, ‘I commend you, you did exactly what you were told to do’, and we had a very good day together [laugh].
AP: There you go. As you look back, is there anything specific? Any memories of your wartime experience —
WL: Well yes, in a way. When you got a big crew on board, we used to have seven on a Stirling and I had the same crew from my Wellington and Stirling days, we got quite matey. We always went drinking together, see. Some were commissioned and others weren’t. I was commissioned during my period on 15 Squadron Stirlings and, er, but we always used to go out in the evenings, start off anyway [slight laugh] together what we got up to later was Legion. That crew was still left when I finished my tour of heavies, with three or four trips to do. The ruling when we first started bombing, was that you did thirty trips, then they changed it to two hundred operational hours, which meant that you probably did more than thirty. Anyway, they were left with, er, two or three to do and I departed up into Scotland, and I’m thinking I was never going to see them again, see. Then I heard that the first time out with a new captain, they’d been shot down. I was quite sorrowful about that, because I’d spent, oh, something like twelve months with them altogether and, er, that, you know, so I was sorrowful about it and nothing happened ‘till about four or five years ago. I was rung up by a young lad who said, ‘I’ve seen a picture of you with your crew in the Sunday Telegraph’, and he said, ‘I think one of them is my grandfather’. So I said, ‘which one?’ And he said, ‘Jack Tailor’. I said, ‘Yes, Jack Tailor was my engineer’. It then transpired that Jack Tailor had been withdrawn on the morning of that, of the time they were shot down. He was then a sergeant engineer. He finished the war as a warrant officer engineer, which was quite something. He won himself a DFC and he died in 1996 [slight laugh].
AP: That’s amazing.
WL: He obviously thought I hadn’t survived and I was absolutely certain that he hadn’t, see, but all the time he was living within a really close distance. I lived just outside Croydon for a time, he was there. I moved down and got remarried to a lady which you might meet later, um, in the Horsham area, he was there, and his daughter and the, and the young lad who rung me were at, um, a place about five miles along the road, on the 272 from us, at Shipley.
AP: Amazing.
WL: Coming home, we came a bit too near Kiel coming home, see, and got lots of holes. We lost a hell of a lot of fuel. There we were, crossing the North Sea, with the tank indicators showing practically nothing, down to nothing, and fortunately we made it, because in those days, they had a special airfield, Woodbridge was the one in Suffolk, where they had three runways. The left hand one was you could go in if there was nothing wrong with you, the middle one if you weren’t sure and the right hand one if you crash landed it, see, so I took the left hand one and the, and we stayed the night there. The ground crew there refuelled, and he came to me and said, ‘I hope you realise how short you were of fuel last night’. I said, ‘Yes sergeant. How much are you going to tell me was there?’ He said, ‘well, according to our estimation, you had twenty-five gallons’. Now a Hercules engine, which is in a Stirling, uses fifty gallons an hour, so that’s two hundred gallons in, you had four, how far would have I got on twenty-five? If I’d overshot at Woodbridge, we would not be here today. You see we never, you got called on, on the day and said, ‘well sir, there’s a crew meeting at 2 o’clock this afternoon’, and you would go to this. The navigators would be taken off, they went to learn the target and go through all their maps and things like that, which didn’t involve the captains and the bomb aimers and things. Well the bomb aimers, yes, he will tell you about or has told you about that, and then of course, you got a long period when you were taken off, 6 o’clock or 8 o’clock or 10 o’clock, and the worse ones were of course, were when, we had a, you know, abortive. All the nerves had built up, see, and then suddenly, oh no, back to the mess, see. Then we got a bit of relief then, so a few pints, we used to go down, and one station I was on, they had a piano like that and so, you know, we would spend most of the evening singing round the piano, so —
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Bill Lucas. One
Creator
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Andrew Panton
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-04-05
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ALucasB150405
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Format
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00:29:21 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
W E (Bill) Lucas joined the Royal Air Force in 1940, where he trained as a fighter pilot flying Miles Magisters and Miles Masters, before being posted to RAF Lossiemouth and moving into Bomber Command, flying the Vickers Wellington 1C.
Flew 14 operations with No 9 Squadron at Honnington flying the Short Stirling, before being posted to Wyton in Huntingdonshire where he did a full tour of over 40 operations on Short Stirlings.
He took part in operations to Cologne, Magdeburg and Essen, including taking part in the first 1000 bomber raid on the 30th May 1942.
He then spent 2 years with a Operational Training Unit at Kinloss, instructing on Armstrong Whitworth Whitleys and then he moved to 162 Squadron, flying De Havilland Mosquitos where he marked targets, and did 14 trips to Berlin.
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
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1940
1942
1944
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Huntingdonshire
England--Suffolk
Scotland--Lossiemouth
Germany--Cologne
15 Squadron
162 Squadron
8 Group
9 Squadron
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
fear
grief
ground crew
H2S
lack of moral fibre
military ethos
mine laying
Mosquito
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Bourn
RAF Honington
RAF Kinloss
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Woodbridge
RAF Wyton
searchlight
Stirling
target indicator
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1102/11561/ARogersH150409.1.mp3
dbd0ef512560ca7e34fc539235de3d90
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Rogers, Hugh
H Rogers
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Hugh Rogers (Royal Air Force). He was a film cameraman with 463 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-04-09
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Rogers, H
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Andrew Panton. The interviewee is Hugh Rogers. Mr. Rogers was one of the film cameramen on board a specially modified Lancaster from 463 Squadron Royal Australian Air Force that filmed the sinking of the Tirpitz on November the 12th 1944. The interview is taking place at [file missing], Bristol on the 9th of April 2015.
HR: I recall two memorable days seventy years ago, the eleventh and the twelfth of November 1944. On the morning of the eleventh I was instructed to report to headquarters at Bomber Command at High Wycombe. That surprised me because people like me didn’t go to the headquarters at Bomber Command and also I’d only recently been posted to the film production unit which I now served. In the event two cameramen reported at headquarters, the first Flight Lieutenant Loftus as a Canadian Airforce and secondly myself Flying Officer Rogers RAF of the film unit. We were briefed standing at a small, very small table in a very large room. We were both members of the number one film production unit RAF at that time. We were told at this briefing that we were to bomb the giant German battleship Tirpitz moored in the Arctic and that we were to join the main force of Lancasters at the RAF base in Lossiemouth, Scotland. We were briefed on the very precise route to be taken to reach the Arctic base of the Tirpitz. It was explained to us that following the bombing, the main force would fly west and return to Scotland. The camera Lancaster, which we should be flying, would fly south and return directly to Waddington. So the film could be transported to London by road, processed and as soon as possible, the pictures distributed. The propaganda value was important to the Allies and it was thought would be devastating to the German population morale. Late on the ninth or the eleventh, our Australian pilot, Flight Lieutenant Buckham completed the first part of the operation, flying Lancaster HD399 to RAF Lossiemouth, which is near Inverness, Scotland. HD399 was a Lancaster of the Australian Squadron 463 manned by an all-Australian crew and [unclear] us two cameramen. The aircraft had been modified for our special requirement, the first turret had, the front turret had the guns removed which were replaced with a mounted IMO 200-foot camera. In the fuselage area the mid upper turret with guns had been removed and the fuselage repaired so that the two areas in the fuselage were then available for the second cameraman. The opened panel at the rear of the bomb bay gave a vertical sighting and the second sight on the door edge to the starboard side of the fuselage, the top half of which opened at the time of filming hence required an electrical heated inner suit, I learned that the temperature at my station was minus nineteen ten Centigrade and confirmed my view that I had drawn the short straw. To sustain our fifteen hour flight we did not have a Tallboy bomb loaded but there was a large red fuel tank fitted in the space above the bomb bay. It contained about eighty tons of fuel which I rested on during the flight, my abiding [unclear] memory of the short time in Lossiemouth was to, was being in a badly-lit barnlike room with Wing Commander Tait giving his last remarks to the nineteen pilots on 617 Squadron. We were all standing in the group around Tait, I was standing at the back, he emphasized the importance of the prescribed course which had been designed to avoid detection by the enemy. Over the North Sea the course was to be at fifteen hundred feet and this was to be maintained until the Norwegian coast was approached. So in the early hours of Sunday the eleventh of November, there was a shattering noise as the engine started up in preparation for the three [unclear] take off. The course was to be across, north-east across the North Sea. Round about seven o’clock in the morning we changed course directly east, when we approached the snow covered mountains of Norway. We had been flying at about eight, fifteen hundred feet across the North Sea but the height was then maintained to cover the mountains and we flew direct west into Sweden. Where we turned north so that we could follow the boundary between Norway and Sweden at an altitude which would not expose us to the German radar. We, once we had crossed the mountains, we then reduced the altitude to a reasonably low level. We then had to fly north all along the route between Norway and Sweden until we reached the assembly point at Lake Tornea Trask east of Narvik, some one hundred miles from Tromso. In those Northern latitudes the daylight comes late and I remember, as it got daylight, climbing over the central spire of the aircraft and going into the cockpit. Now, I was very impressed looking out of the cockpit but even at that early hour I could see the path that we were to take, all the lakes were covered by small, lenticular clouds, these saucer like clouds could have been used by the observer to mark his route north to Narvik, that was another of my abiding memories, when all the aircraft had reached the lake Tait fired vary lights at which point all the aircraft then assembled into a battle station and followed Tait on the route to Tromso. As all the aircraft were assembling into position over the lake, we had all gained height to twelve thousand feet, at this height we were able to cross the mountain into the fjord where the Tirpitz was moored. Now, as we crossed the mountain, we were some twenty miles from the Tirpitz, it was a mere small speck at that distance, and of course it was in reverse, we were small specks to the Tirpitz. Now, we know later that it caused consternation on the Tirpitz, not expecting us they suddenly realised that they should call for help and this they immediately did apparently, so I learned later but there was no response to their call, to the call for help from the Messerschmitts. Soon after we were spotted by the Tirpitz they assembled their gun positions and their enormous guns, fifteen inch guns which fired shells of one ton, took a few seconds to get to elevation but in that time they realised that we were too high for the big guns firing one ton shells could reach us but the shells were fall exploding ahead of us and slightly below us. Now in our film Lancaster they were close enough to cause some vibration and movement to the plane, now we had to hold the camera steady in spite of that movement, I think we achieved this, as we got closer to the Tirpitz the ack-ack, small ack-ack guns started and actually it got presumed, because of the panic on board the ship they were not too accurate. As the operation developed John Loftus, lucky chap, was in the front turret and he was able from the front turret to swing the turret round and track the first Tallboys being delivered, being dropped from the aircraft. I couldn’t see that but I was able then to go from the side position and film the first, first few bombs exploding around the ship. As I was working through that open space over the door, I could feel myself getting colder but I wasn’t distracted from what I was doing but I could see the ship being hit, I could see the steam and the smoke coming up and I could see especially I remember at the time it impressed me, that what had happened to the guns on the island when Tallboy landed on the island on the starboard side of the operation. After the last aircraft had gone, I remember walking up or crawling up to the cockpit and looking out of the cockpit and the pilot had dived to the starboard to the right and he was about five thousand feet at the time he’d finished and we could see all the smoke and steam and then he immediately turned on a course which we left because we were going back to Waddington and the rest of the force had gone west of Scotland, but much to our surprise, as we started our course to Waddington, the rear gunner shouted out to the skipper, that he could see the Tirpitz turning over so we turned, the skipper, the pilot turned the aircraft to the starboard so we could see but the pilot was on the other side, sitting on the other side, he couldn’t see it so in order to see it, he dipped the starboard wing and again lowered his altitude and we could see in the distance that by that time [unclear] the smoke and the steam seemed to have gone or there was a haze over the aircraft and you could see that it was upside down. Now, I can’t remember how quickly it was done but the pilot knew that as a squadron Messerschmitts we didn’t know the Germans had been informed by radar but it was time to get out so from that time on we kept on our course back to Waddington. So after that unforgettable operation we headed south across the seas, Norwegian sea, The North Sea and down to Waddington. After a flight of close on fifteen hours where we were met by General [unclear] who collected the film as soon as possible but he was taking it to London to be processed and that was on the Prime Minister, I believe on the Prime Minister’s instruction to get the film out developed as soon as possible for propaganda reasons and also he thought the Prime Minister expected it to devastate the morale of the German people because Hitler had always told them that the Tirpitz was unsinkable. And once again 617 Squadron and 9 Squadron had proved Hitler wrong.
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Title
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Interview with Hugh Rogers
Creator
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Andrew Panton
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-04-09
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ARogersH150409
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
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00:13:45 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Hugh Rogers was a cameraman during the war and remembers filming the sinking of the Tirpitz in November 1944. Gives a vivid and detailed account of the operation, describing the briefing, the technical modifications to the aircraft and the unfolding of the events.
Contributor
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Peter Schulze
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Norway
England--Lincolnshire
Norway--Tromsø
Scotland--Moray
Scotland--Lossiemouth
Norway--Narvik
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-11-12
463 Squadron
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
Lancaster
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Waddington
Tallboy
Tirpitz
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/583/8852/PHolmesGH1604.2.jpg
134f273cd93e015a7d789b8e877b159b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/583/8852/AHolmesGH161016.1.mp3
cc225552ec17450d62364d1a1b362db0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Holmes, George
George Henry Holmes
G H Holmes
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Holmes, GH
Description
An account of the resource
Nine items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer George Holmes (b. 1922, 1579658, 187788 Royal Air Force) his log book, records of operation, newspaper cuttings and photographs of personnel. He flew operations as a wireless operator / air gunner with 9, 50 and 83 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by George Holmes and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Date
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2016-10-21
2017-01-14
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AH: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Anna Hoyles. The interviewee is Mr George Henry Holmes. The interview is taking place at Mr Holmes’ home [deleted] Lincolnshire on the 16th of October 2016.
GH: Yes. I had some very lucky escapes. We had, we were going to [pause] I’ve written it down. I’ve got a terrible memory.
[pause]
GH: Stuttgart in Germany. And of course they originated in France thinking possibly that there wouldn’t be many, many night fighters there but we got caught and we got shot and it took off the bomb bay doors. They fractured the starboard wheel, ruptured the main spar and left us with cannon shells stuck in the fuel tanks which is actually really instantaneous. And we did a belly landing when we got back and I was one of the first out and running. Somebody said, ‘Are you frightened?’ I said, ‘Have you seen a Lanc go up in flames?’ And the bloke said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well. Well, when you do you’ll run faster than I do.’ And actually they took these cannon shells away by the, if you handled the armament, whatever and emptied them they found out that the cannon shells actually had been filled with sand instead of explosives. Otherwise we would have gone up in one. And that was once. And another night someone on a circuit when we were coming, of course I was at Skellingthorpe at the time and there were about five or six airfields all around. And we had a bump and nearly got tipped over by the windstream of another aircraft. And when we landed there was about five foot off the end of the pit, of the end of the aeroplane gone. That was, I think we could call a very near miss. And all through my career they used to say you’ve got to get it right. The good crews survive and the bad crews don’t. But when you’re dealing with an aeroplane that’s attacking you at about between five and six hundred mile an hour you don’t have time to work out all the superlatives. You just learn how to, well you have to try to get him in to four hundred yards for the ammo to be, do any damage whatsoever. And these would wait about a thousand yards and pump these things in to you, you know. But, yes we lost a lot of young men at the time. Look back sometimes and I think how the hell did we get through it?
AH: How did you come to join the RAF?
GH: Mixed feelings. I was living in Kettering at the time and I would be about six years of age. I’d only just joined school which was a joining age in those days of about six years I think and I saw the R100 or the R101 in the sky. A most amazing sight. And of course everybody was reading Biggles books so I wanted to be a Biggles man. And my father wouldn’t sign any papers for me so when I was eighteen I went down and joined the RAF as an air gunner. But there were so many enlisting at the time it was over twelve months I think before I was called. And they wanted me to be a pilot or navigator. I said, ‘No. I want to be an air gunner W/Op.’ Anyway, I finished up there. They made me a wireless operator / air gunner. Well, up to going into the air force I’d hoped to be a semi-professional musician because I played the violin from seven years of age to when I went in the air force, eighteen. And I played the violin, trumpet and a mandolin. And the man who was teaching me he used to make instruments and he was going to teach me how to make them. And, you know when I went in the air force I was in the air force for just over five years. I couldn’t get back to the standard that I was in and work for a living at the same time because you’ve got to put about two to three hours a day in you know, to it. So I abandoned the musical stuff. And actually I was at an old miner’s school. A corrugated tin hut thing and when we moved to Leicester and I was a top boy at the school. The teaching, they taught us in that stinking little old tin hut was beyond their, what they were teaching us in there. They told me I couldn’t do joined up writing. We’d got to go back to scroll, you know. But I went to a school that was attached to the College of Art and Technology and I was studying textiles and hosiery. And I earned a very good living through the entire working life producing socks, stockings, knee socks and things like that. Of course you got paid in on production in those days. You didn’t get a standing wage. The more you made the more you got paid. And you were allowed ten needles per week and if you broke more than that you had to pay for them. Six pence each I think they were then. The unions would go bloody mad now wouldn’t they? [laughs] I had a very good education really. I was very fortunate. I was almost fluent in French. The French master said, ‘I can’t understand you, Holmes. You’re the worst pupil I’ve ever had. You’re always talking, take no notice, I can’t understand how you’ve got top of the class in French.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s simple. You gave us a half an hour’s homework and I always got an hour. So I worked harder than anybody else.’ [laughs] But I had a very good — my parents were not wealthy. My dad was a manager of a, the management of a grocery shop. You know these, what they were before the war. Several strains of food, food retailers and I really thought I was going to be a semi-professional musician. But I abandoned that scheme altogether and I got my sleeves rolled up and got stuck in this hosiery thing. ‘Til the war of course and then I couldn’t get, I couldn’t wait to get in the air force. And I finished up as a wireless operator / air gunner due to the fact, I always presumed, I don’t know whether it’s true or not but the fact that I had learned music, got some dashes and all like that. Morse code came easy and I was a very good operator. But apart from that I had a very happy marriage. I’ve got one son. He’s sixty seven now. And a he’s a fourth [unclear] at Judo. But life is a wonderful thing. Not to be wasted. And when you look at the war and see the number of thousands of young people who were wasted in the war. And the building and the costs. At the end of the day you have to sit around a table and talk it over from the first day. Save a lot of trouble and strife. But of course in those days Bomber Command was the thing.
AH: So you wanted to join Bomber Command?
GH: Oh yes. But then when you say wanted to join Bomber Command I’d always worked shifts. Night shifts and three shifts and things. I thought if I go in to the air force I’d be alright. And what did they do? They stuck me on Bomber Command. It was night work. But it wasn’t altogether good so as you look in the book you’ll see I did quite a number of daylight operations.
AH: Where did you train?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Where did you train? Where did you do your training?
GH: Where did I do my training? It was wonderful really. I I went to Blackpool first of all. That was the Number 10 RS something it was called. Signals Reserve or something. And they were all radio personnel in the air force up there. And we had a bloke called corporal [pause] I forget his name now. Corporal. Used to take us to the arm drill and foot drill. And his stage name was Max Wall. Can you imagine a man like Max Wall teaching you? Amazing. And then I went down to Yatesbury for a radio course. And I was posted then to Manby in the ground wireless op ‘til they could fit me into an air gunner’s course. Well, Manby in those days was number 1 AS. Air Armaments School and they taught bomb aimers and air gunners. We kept going to see the groupie and saying, ‘Get us on the course for air gunners.’ ‘No. You have to wait until you come through officially.’ When it did come through we was at a place called Evanton. About forty mile north of Inverness. First time I’d been to Scotland. In June it was. And it was a wonderful summer. And it was the first time I’d seen the shaggy Highland cattle. And I was taken by Scotland ever after that. Then after that, the gunnery course, I was sent to Market Harborough which is now a prison. And I used to push off home every night. After being there about three weeks the CO said, ‘We’re getting rid of you. You’re never here.’ It used to take me an hour to get home from Market Harborough on the local bus through all these villages. Little villages. And I was posted to Silverstone. And at Silverstone if you went in and out by railway you could get a train called the Master Cutler which was a high speed train from Sheffield to London and back. It used to do that in forty five minutes. That was quicker than being in [laughs] And I got crewed up there then and joined the [unclear] so to speak but I suppose if you were young men you had to be in something. You had no objection. I mean, no one wanted you to be a conscientious objector or anything. There we were. I joined Bomber Command and I was very lucky because I got with some good crews and I must admit I was commissioned towards the end of the war as a wireless op and I got operational strain and one thing or another. I was a bit of a drunkard. The only way of overcoming some of the strenuous [pause] I mean the beer we were drinking in those days I think was 1.2 percent alcohol. The water you washed the glasses in was stronger than the beer.
AH: So did you drink mainly beer? Or did you drink other stuff?
GH: No. No. The doc said, our doc on the squadron, ‘Go out and get pissed. It’ll do you good. Don’t go on spirits.’ And I was based around here. Around Louth. One way or another. It’s so that when my wife and I decided to come and live here it was after I’d retired. It was a home away from home really.
AH: Where were you first based? Where were you based first?
GH: Where was —?
AH: Where were you first based? Which was your first base? Where were you sent first?
GH: Oh. At a place called Bardney. Just outside Louth. And we got there. The place was, looked vacant and we got out the transport and looked around and looked in the ditches and it was full of bodies. We said, ‘What are you doing down there?’ They said, ‘Bugger off, there’s a fire in the bomb dump.’ So we said, ‘Oh, we’ll leave you to it then.’ But anyway a guy put it out. And then we went from that place. I did six ops there. And then we went to Skellingthorpe where the pilot was made up to a squadron leader. And we were only allowed two or three operations a month due to the losses of experienced crews. And by the time we’d done twenty trips together he, the pilot and the navigator went over to Pathfinders as the rest of the crew did. And the, the crew got sort of crewed up but the wireless, he didn’t want a wireless. He brought one with him, the pilot. So I was a spare bod and I went with an Aussie crew. His name was Cassidy and he’d got it painted on the side of a Lancaster. “Hop Along Cassidy’s Flying Circus.’ And I finished up at the one near Boston. What is it?
AH: Coningsby?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Coningsby?
GH: Coningsby. Yes. Yes.
AH: What squadron were you in first?
GH: 9. And then I went on to 50 at Skellingthorpe and then I went on to 83 at Coningsby.
AH: And what planes?
GH: Lancs. Well, after the war, if you look in the book look I went on a tour to South America. They sent three what were called Lancaster Mark 21s I think. But in actual fact they renamed them to Lincolns. It was a bigger aircraft that the Lancaster. Especially built for the war against the Japanese. And we went right down the west coast of Africa and then across over the Atlantic to Brazil and then right down to Santiago. Flew over the second highest mountain in the world I think it is. Aconcagua. But by then I’d decided I would take a course, this course on radiography, radio operating and get on to the public airlines. And I’d met my lady who I married and I found out that to be on public airlines you were away for home for anything from six weeks to three months. I thought well that’s not right. So I docked that and as I say I stayed in the hosiery trade. Yeah. Had quite a varied existence one way or another.
AH: What did you do in South America?
GH: Demonstrated the aircraft. I think they’d got that many four engine aircraft they didn’t know what to do with them and they were trying to flog them to anybody who’d buy them. God knows where all the aeroplanes went to. They just suddenly disappeared.
AH: And what was it like there?
GH: Pardon?
AH: And what was it like? Were they interested?
GH: Interesting.
AH: Were they interested in the aircraft?
GH: Oh very much so. Yes. Yes. Whilst we were there there was an earthquake in Peru and they wished us to send someone who would take some supplies over to Peru for the earthquake. And the air force said they couldn’t be allowed to do that because although we’d get to Peru and land they hadn’t got an air force runway long enough to take off so we’d be stuck. But yeah. Funny thing was we all decided when we were going to Brazil we would get together and learn Spanish. And when we got to Brazil they didn’t speak Spanish. They spoke Portuguese [laughs]
AH: How long were you out there for?
GH: Oh not very long. I should think, well if you look in the book it’ll tell you how long. About four weeks I think. We did one leg of the journey per day. And —
AH: And when were you demobbed?
GH: When? I think it was June of 1945.
AH: And how long were you in 9 Squadron?
GH: Pardon?
AH: How long were you in 9 Squadron?
GH: Only a few weeks. Not very long.
AH: What was it like?
GH: Quite an eye opener really. Mainly we were supporting the invasion. In fact that was the first time I’d ever seen the white cliffs of Dover coming back from France on D-Day. As I say all the boats going over.
AH: How did that feel?
GH: Have I —?
AH: How did that feel?
GH: Satisfied I would think would be the only expression. That we were doing something. And of course that’s another point. I mean I don’t know whether you’ve watched it on telly but they give you films of the actual landings in France and they chuck the blokes out into the water that was about six foot deep. They were drowned. Never got to France at all. Instead of waiting for the tide to go out. Some damned idiots in this military attitude.
AH: What did you think of Bomber Command?
GH: Well organised. To a certain extent they were very well organised. Many actual Bomber Command crews packed up before they’d completed a tour of course because it was a great strain. I remember doing a daylight on, I think it was at one of the flying bomb sites when they were launching flying bombs. And of course Bomber Command never flew in the way the Yanks did. They had three people from leading in and everybody was sort of doing what they called a gaggle at the back. And we were close up behind this three Bomber Command [pause] well, leaders I suppose and I looked up and saw an aircraft above was opening his bomb doors. I thought it’s going to drop on him shortly. Anyway he did. He dropped them and then it just floated down. Hit the aircraft on the right hand side, the starboard, knocked his wing off and he spun over and tipped the wing of the other who went that way and he tipped the wing of the other and went that way. And there were bodies without parachutes floating around and everything. And it was Cheshire who was controlling the raid. Called the raid off because he said the chaps didn’t stand a chance if we bombed it. So we flew back to the North Sea and dumped the bombs and went home. But the things like that they were happening every day. You know, I mean I’m afraid you accepted it.
AH: Do you remember where you were going on that raid?
GH: Not completely. No. Because there were one or two launch sites for flying bombs. I mean at one time as far as I know they were, they were launching something like ten thousand pound. Ten thousand flying bombs in a matter of a month or whatever, you know. I mean they were really showering the south of England with them. And —
AH: And how did you feel when you saw the bombs coming?
GH: I hope to God it misses me. To be truthful. But it was a sight, you know. Their only, these aircraft which they hit and damaged were only about a hundred, hundred and fifty yards in front of us. A matter of three seconds or something isn’t it? The speed we were flying at it could have been us. But many of the young lads who joined up when I joined up never finished. They were killed. A great deal of loss of human youngsters. Many of them technicians and people we missed after the war finished because of their experiences. And if you take that you promise me I will get it back?
AH: Yeah.
GH: Because I applied for the Aircrew Europe Star which was allotted to everybody who did two or more operations before D-Day which I did and I was told I didn’t, I hadn’t done enough. So when they issued the Bomber Command medal at the end of the war they said I couldn’t have that either because I’d got the 1939-45 Star or something. I don’t know. I thought well that’s great. I did twenty one ops and I never got a bomber medal. It’s unbelievable some fairy in Whitehall who was domineering the life span of the one doing the work. But the main thing I need at the present moment is some backup somewhere to get, I mean I mentioned to you earlier how much it cost. I was only getting two hundred and ninety pound a month. That’s about seventy pound a week towards the cost of being here and it was costing [pause] what was it? Well, a monthly, the monthly cost here is three thousand and forty one which is quite expensive. I think it’s a very good. I get my monies worth. But I think the company, the government or whoever, the Department of Works and Pension allow me something to help me pay for it and they want [coughs] they just knocked off the pension credit. I’m about two and a half thousand pound a month worse off when I got a pay rise of two pounds and fifteen pence [pause] In other words hard luck isn’t it? You know I mean I’m not the sort of person who is laid back and you handed something but I’ve worked all, all my own life. What I’ve got I’ve chased the work of one kind or another. Whether it was in the air force or out. And I’m disgusted actually to think the money that gets wasted.
AH: Could I just ask you a few more questions about the war?
GH: Yes.
AH: What did you think of the way Bomber Harris was treated?
GH: Disgustingly. As I said earlier he was blamed for bombing the population whereas the targets were selected by the War Committee. And the two leaders of that were Lord Portal and Winston Churchill. Bomber Harris was behind his crews all the way. Next question.
AH: Where did you go after 9 Squadron?
GH: With 50 Squadron at Skellingthorpe. That was, it was so far to the sergeant’s mess from where we were displayed in Nissen huts we used to go into Lincoln for breakfast [laughs]
AH: What sort of squadron was it?
GH: What 83? Er 50?
AH: 50.
GH: Very very compatible actually. The man who was my pilot took his place as flight commander was Metham. He finished up deputy leader of some bomber group. Was it Metham? He’s a well-known, established leader of the Royal Air Force.
AH: Was that a Pathfinder squadron?
GH: No. No. They only had two Pathfinder squadrons. They were both at Coningsby. 83 and 97.
AH: Were you in them at all?
GH: I was on 83. I did, I think nine trips with 83 Squadron. They said that it was easy on Pathfinders of course. You, if you’re first flare leaders putting the flares down you went over and laid your flares and shot off home but they didn’t tell you when you started laying your flares you had to put it in automatic pilot and you couldn’t drift. So by the time you got to the end of laying the flares the Germans had got all the information of what you were doing [pause]
GH: And I have the greatest admiration of the German people and Germany itself. Moreso than any other European country. I have a great ideal, great ideals of them. They’re a wonderful people. We should never have gone to war against them. Well, should we?
AH: What do you think we should have done?
GH: Pardon?
AH: What could, what could Britain have done instead?
GH: Shot Adolf Hitler. It was a dictator. A man who believes beyond his experience. I think, well what’s happening in the world today? I mean we’re now fighting the, oh ethnic crowds that we were fighting in the days of Christ. For two thousand years we’ve been fighting. Still doing it and we’ll lose in the end. Of course people say they mean good. If you read the Koran as far as I remember the first rule is thou shalt now kill. And I think the fourth one is thou shalt kill all non-believers. So it leaves you in a sticky mess. And they’re gaining popularity all the while.
AH: When did you read the Koran?
GH: I haven’t read the Koran. I’ve read extracts from it. I’m quite interested in reading other people’s religions and of course in actual fact I believe in the bible which says when you die it’s ashes to ashes and dust to dust. I don’t think there’s a heaven up there. I don’t think there’s anything like that. I think it’s just, you’re just dead meat. Unfortunately. And many many people leave their readings, writings and paintings to be perused over and you get the benefit of their experience.
AH: Have you written anything?
GH: Written anything? Only rude things on the wall [laughs]. No. I wish I could have written things. I was too busy with music. As I said I went to a school where we had possibly an hour to two hours homework every night of various kinds and I didn’t really get out amongst other young fellas of my age because I was doing one to two hours music training as well. Now, the school I went to had started a school orchestra. Violin, banjo and drums. And I loved music. But as I say when I went in the air force I didn’t take a violin with me and I should have done I suppose. After being in five years my fingers were all stiffened up with, didn’t work. So I abandoned it straightaway and got on with earning a living
[knocking on door]
GH: Come in.
Other: Sorry to disturb you.
AH: I’ll just put this on pause.
[recording paused]
GH: They don’t look like reading my writing for a start. But there’s a cutting in there I think I mentioned it earlier on from Stalin who stated he wanted the Bomber Command to burn Dresden because they were using it to refuel the battlefield. And it wasn’t so because after the war I were working with some of the replacement Polish people and they said they’d been in Dresden and there were no army facilities there at all. There was no reason for them to bomb it.
[pause]
GH: And I have a younger sister who’s ninety in October. Laurie. So we’re quite a long lived family aren’t we?
AH: How old are you?
GH: Ninety four. Feel a hundred and four [laughs] some mornings. Yes.
AH: You’ve got a picture here of Squadron Leader Munro.
GH: Yes. He wanted to crew up with us. He’s just recently died you know. A New Zealander. That was when I was at gunnery school at Scotland.
AH: Which one’s you?
GH: How dare you say that [laughs] I haven’t changed that much at all surely. I’m the shortest one. Yes. And that’s my favourite photograph of myself.
AH: That’s nice.
[pause]
GH: Yes. It’s a wonderful world and I’ve met some wonderful people and I’ve had some wonderful friends and relatives. It’s been enjoyment. Mixing the good with the bad makes you appreciate it all the more. We came out of there as you go in.
AH: You talked about the strain of it. What was the worst strain?
GH: Being with Bomber Command? Well, naturally the, the operations themselves. They were well organised, I don’t mean like that but I mean they always taught us the best crews will get through. Did I mention to you before luck has a lot to do with it? And I mean a matter of seconds in some cases. I never flew as an air gunner though. I was in the Home Guard before I went in the air force. In Leicester. Well a little village outside Leicester called Narborough. And they used to send me out on a railway bridge defending the bridge at night time with a bayonet fastened to a broomstick with string. I don’t know what you were supposed to do with it. I had a few thoughts. But by the time I went into the air force I was fully trained and I’d got a Canadian Ross rifle that was in a cloth bag with about two inches of grease all around it. And I cleaned it up and the stock of it was beautiful. Lovely gun. And one of the chaps, he was a sergeant. I think he must have been a sniper. He said, ‘I’ll teach you how to fire a gun George.’ Because,’ he said, ‘Let’s face it. Who’s the last person that knows when you’re going to pull the trigger?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Well you don’t pull the trigger. You squeeze your hand. And you don’t jolt it.’ And I could hit an eight hundred target, a bull at eight hundred yards. Which is quite good shooting I think. But I never did fly as a air gunner. I flew once as a tail gunner. And the tail one was like that. You knew all I got it I knew I wouldn’t have that for long.
AH: Did you get bombed yourself?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Did you get bombed yourself? In Leicester.
GH: Well, Leicester got bombed while I lived there. But we lived on the outskirts. And of course like most targets they usually go for the city centre first where all the main multiples are. And I was, I was quite happy in the Home Guard because we got very very good training. Initially it was useless. For the first two years. But when they got organised they got organised. And I sit and watch “Dad’s Army,” you know. And I I don’t know who picked the cast but it’s amazing to think [laughs] they look like real people [laughs] Anything else?
AH: Did you meet your wife during the war?
GH: No. I met her after the war. One of the boys who’s died in the last two years from Leicester was in training with me all the way through and he finished up at Coningsby on 97 Squadron and I finished up on 83. And his wife and my wife or future wife or his future wife, they used to go dancing Saturday nights together. And I met this girl one night in the RAF club. And I can’t understand that, I can’t explain the feeling but she was wonderful. And I said, ‘Can I see you again?’ And she said, ‘Well, I can’t see you for two weeks because I’m going up to Lincolnshire. To a town that you’ve never heard of.’ Well, I’d done all my training and everything here so I said, ‘Well, try me then.’ She said, ‘Louth.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got news for you. I can’t go to Louth again [laughs] They’d shoot me.’ And she was always dying her hair. I think after the first two months I knew her she must have had about six or seven changes of colour. She was lovely though.
AH: What was her name?
GH: Barbara. And when we first got married we had to live in the front room of my mum and dad’s house until we could get somewhere. Everyone does I suppose. And her uncle was a butcher and he used to do all the joints of meat for Leicester. And this friend of his, a friend of his or someone in the trade he dealt with was the housing minister for Leicester. And in those days you couldn’t get housed if you hadn’t got a wood licence. You had to have a timber licence. And he mentioned to this gent that I was having trouble with my wife’s breathing because my mother and father had a dog and she was allergic to dog hair. And he said to this young gent, ‘He’s just come out the air force and he definitely wants a house but, and his wife is allergic to dog hairs and has to get out, you know of home and have his own place.’ And the fellow twiddled it a little bit and got me a timber licence and away we went. We bought a semi for nineteen hundred quid. And then after a while we bought, we bought a complete des res like, you know what do you call it? A house on its own at, in Oadby near to Leicester at the back of the racecourse and you got a full view of the racecourse. And I used to say to people, ‘I’ve got a nice place. There’s about four furlongs of grass at the back and they came and cut it, you know regularly,’ [laughs] But as I say we had this problem with this hooligan who was threatening her so that’s how we moved to Louth. But I mean moving to Louth was like going next door to the pair of us because we’d both been here so many times.
AH: Did you like Louth?
GH: I think it’s very nice. And I think once you get into Louth the people will do anything but they’re a little offish at the start. But it’s a lovely little town. I was born in Mansfield. In the Sherwood Forest. But I did like Louth there. Very much.
AH: What was your home like there?
GH: Where?
AH: In Mansfield.
GH: Well, I was brought up with my grandparents. I wasn’t brought up with my mother and father. They couldn’t get anywhere to live in, although my sister had been born. They wouldn’t accept anyone with two children so they farmed me off with my grandparents. My grandmother Holmes, when I was six or seven or eight years of age taught me how to sew and darn and knit.
AH: Did you have use of that later?
GH: Yes. Because I went into the hosiery trade and it was the machines that knit things make exactly the same loop as you do a knitting pin. And of course as I say I, I had a quite a few jobs. The job I had at Byfords. The other chap working next to me who was in his forties hadn’t been taken to the army. Hadn’t been called up. With a wife and two children. He always used to go down smoking in the toilets about once every hour and I used to run his machines as well as mine. And one day, you used to put your earnings under the table where they kept all the yarns and everything. He had a sneaky look and he found out I was earning more than him. So he went to the manager and he said he didn’t see any reason why someone’s underage that were in machinery should be earning more than he did. So they said, ‘Oh alright, we’ll give you two of his machines. They had me in the office and they said, ‘You’ve been bragging.’ I said, ‘What about?’ They said, ‘What you earn.’ I said, ‘I daren’t tell my father what earn. He’d go mad.’ I was earning as much or twice as much as my dad. And they said, ‘Well, we’re going to take two of your machines off you and you’ll run them for him.’ So I said, ‘I have an idea now. You can stick them up your arse.’ And they gave him the bloody lot. I got sacked for insolence. I got another job. I was never out of work. I got training that was necessary and I could go anywhere. I worked at Byfords. They sacked me three times after that incident and a very good job. The only snag is when I went into it before the war you were using cotton and well, wool and the machines were covered in like a white powder from the cotton in the wool, you know. And after the war when they started using synthetic fibres I think the synthetic fibres were so small you swallowed them. And I have a difficulty with breathing actually which is due to that I think. But nobody would say so because you then would jump then and say I want paid for being. I don’t think, I don’t think there’s more than one or two hosiery factories left in Leicester and it used to be the main city for hosiery. But that was all, that was all shift work. Night work and not very conducive for family life. I used to go to work because I mean you were busy. It didn’t bother you but my wife was stuck at home on her own you know and I didn’t realise until after I’d lost her that that’s what the problem was really. Basically. But we had a good life together. Yeah.
AH: Was your father or your grandfather in the First World War?
GH: Both my father and my wife’s father were in the First World War. My wife’s father was stationed at Louth here. In the Leicester, what did they call it? It was a mountain brigade. And he was only a little bloke. Smaller than me. And he looked like, well you just couldn’t imagine him sat on a horse.
AH: What he was called?
GH: Pardon?
AH: What he was called?
GH: His surname? Evans. Evans. Good Evans. I went to Edmonton for my gunnery course and we had a group captain called Group Captain Evans Evans and he got awarded the French medal. The Croix de Guerre. And he said, ‘Although I flew in World War One I’ve not flown in World War Two and I don’t think I deserved it. So I shall get a crew together and fly.’ So I went to my CO and I said, ‘Look, old Evans Evans is getting a crew together.’ We had a chance to get in because at that time I was a spare. And he said, ‘No, I don’t think so. My wireless op is covering that because he’s one behind everyone else in the crew and we all want to finish together.’ And off they went and they were shot down by the Americans before they got to the war. Before they got to the war line they were shot down by the Americans. And the only one that got out was the rear gunner. So that was another lucky escape. Just how the penny drops isn’t it? Am I boring you? Say so if I am. Anyway [pause] I am suffering really from the breathing quite badly.
AH: Shall we finish?
GH: Pardon?
AH: Do you want us to finish?
GH: Yes.
AH: Thank you very much.
GH: Quite all right. If it’s been of any —
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with George Holmes
Creator
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Anna Hoyles
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-16
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AHolmesGH161016
Conforms To
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Pending review
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Contributor
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Cathie Hewitt
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Brazil
Chile
Germany
Great Britain
Peru
Chile--Santiago
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Stuttgart
Temporal Coverage
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1945
1946
Description
An account of the resource
George was born in Mansfield and was bought up by his Grandparents until he was seven when he moved back to his parents in Leicester where his Father ran a coffee shop. He was a semi-professional musician playing violin, trumpet and mandolin. He studied hosiery at college and worked in hosiery production his entire working life. He joined the Home Guard in Narborough, and recalls how he defended the railway bridge at night time with a bayonet fastened to a broom stick with string. After volunteering for the Air Force he was sent to Blackpool for training. The corporal who taught him foot drill went on to be the comedian Max Wall. He was then sent to RAF Yatesbury for his radio course, and then forwarded to the Air Armourers school. After completing the course, he was posted to RAF Evanton for a gunner’s course. His next posting was to RAF Market Harborough, but was only there for three weeks before he was sent to RAF Silverstone for crewing up. His first station was RAF Bardney with 9 Squadron for a few weeks. He remembers that when they arrived at Bardney it was deserted and they found everyone lying on the floor in the kitchen as the bomb dump was on fire. The crew were then posted to RAF Skellingthorpe in 50 Squadron and they completed 20 operations. George recalls a daylight operation on a V-1 site, and he witnessed the Lancaster that was above them blown up and seeing the bodies of the crew falling past their aircraft. The crew were then split up when the pilot and navigator joined the Pathfinders and he became a spare bod. He eventually joined an Australian crew in 83 Squadron at RAF Coningsby and completed a further nine operations. His pilot was called Cassidy and the nose art on the Lancaster was “Hop along Cassidy’s Flying Circus.” After the war he took part in a tour of South America and discusses an earthquake in Peru. He discusses his religious beliefs and how the war, Bomber Command, and Arthur Harris have been remembered. He met his wife Barbara after the war at a dance in the RAF club and they had one son.
Format
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01:08:02 audio recording
50 Squadron
83 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
bomb dump
bomb struck
bombing
civil defence
crewing up
faith
forced landing
Home Guard
Lancaster
mid-air collision
nose art
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
RAF Bardney
RAF Coningsby
RAF Evanton
RAF Market Harborough
RAF Silverstone
RAF Skellingthorpe
training
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/925/11168/ALenthallG160401.2.mp3
cec8de68d3c369542e86beed2c99b46b
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Lenthall, Geoffrey
G Lenthall
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Sergeant Geoffrey Lenthall (1925 - 2018, 3040138, Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a wireless operator.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-04-01
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Lenthall, G
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AH: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Anna Hoyles. The interviewee is Geoff Lenthall. The interview is taking place in Mr Lenthall’s home in Cleethorpes on the 1st April 2016. Could you tell me a bit about your background?
GL: Yes. I was, I was born in Langold in Nottinghamshire. Not many people have heard of that. Then moved to Brigg. And finished up at Scunthorpe where my father was a linotype operator. I went to school at the Henderson Avenue and then the Scunthorpe Grammar School. And I still in fact go to reunions there. They have them every two years and I am the oldest member there. And I still have my old school cap which is in great demand. People want to have their photographs taken in it. And we also have a get together at the Kingsway Hotel. Just a few of us of the local school boys or ex-schoolboys. I then, from the school I left when I was about sixteen as a, to get a job in a bank. I happened to know through my uncle who knew the bank manager said, ‘Oh, there’s a vacancy for a junior.’ So I went along there and they took me on but they said, ‘If you fail your school certificate you’re out.’ Well, fortunately I passed. And my uncle by the way was, he was the father of Joan Plowright who is now Lady Olivier. I did try to get her to come to the reunions because she was at the grammar school. But anyway I I worked in the bank for a while doing the usual boring jobs of answering the phone and fetching stamps from the post office and joined the Air Training Corps and I became sergeant there. We were doing continuity drill and studying aircraft recognition, Morse code, principle of flight. All the usual things. We were all eager to get in and have a go at the enemy and I volunteered around about seventeen and a quarter and, but unfortunately went on deferred service and I was gone eighteen by the time I joined up in July ’44. Went down to London, my first visit, to be greeted by bombs and flying bombs. Doodlebugs. V2s. And that was the Aircrew Receiving Centre and we lost quite a few casualties and so moved to Torquay which was much more peaceful. And from there I went to the Initial Training Wing of Bridlington. Another seaside resort where we did all sorts of continuity drill and exercises to toughen us up. Getting up early and all the rest of it. And from there I was misemployed unfortunately as a — in the pay accounts at Kirton Lindsey working on officer’s allowances. The funny thing was there I had a desk and the airmen used to come in and salute me thinking I was an officer but I was just a plain erk. Anyway, I then thought well I shall get on aircrew training soon. And I was then sent to Blackpool to learn to drive. They obviously thought that was a good idea. Anyway, I learned to drive in Blackpool and moved down to Melksham in Wiltshire to finish off the course and got my licence down there. And I was getting a bit fed up by this time. Frustrated. Disappointed at not getting in on to do aircrew training. And having read the papers and all this and seen all the raids that were taking place and thinking I should be up there instead of down here. But anyway I was sent to Sango which was way up in Scotland. At the top left hand corner and pretty isolated. I used to, to drive the mountain rescue people. And I remember seeing a German submarine which had been captured. It came in and we saw it in the bay down below. That was my first glimpse of anything of the enemy. And I was then, I volunteered to go overseas but they classified overseas as Northern Ireland which I suppose it was over a sea but [pause] there I was, I was billeted with an Irish family. He was a teacher. She was an excellent cook his wife. And they had two attractive daughters and there were two of us staying there with them. And we used to stay up into the early hours talking about religion. They were Catholics. And the father was very strict and you know there was, there was no hanky panky with the daughters or anything like that. He wouldn’t have that. But we got on very well. She was an excellent cook and we were living the life of Riley really. And it irked us a bit the fact that we were enjoying life while people were out there fighting. And anyway we duly carried on. I was driving the men to a radar camp about seven miles away. And this continued for a while and we got on well. I got to know, this was a bit of romance came then. I met a girl called Bernadette who was an Irish girl. Very attractive. We kept in touch even when I was sent, transferred to Manchester which was a transit camp. And that’s when things started to move and I actually moved from transit camp to radio school in Madley, near Hereford. From there we flew in Proctors which were just the pilot and radio operator doing these radio bearings etcetera. The usual stuff. And then we went into the De Havilland Dominies where they were, they were fitted with four or five positions for different radio operators. And eventually passed out and got my sergeant’s stripes as a qualified radio operator and then went to to Topcliffe in Yorkshire where, which was an air navigation school. Then the cadets, they were training to be navigators and the, most of the pilots were veteran. Polish veteran pilots. A lot of them were, were quite mad. I remember one. He, he had an excellent singing voice and he, he taught us a Polish song and he got us singing this and I got on well with him. Another one was [Zachiorski?] He was, he’d got a handlebar moustache and I went up with him for the first time. And on the way back there there was a Polish resettlement camp just near the airfield and he had a lot of friends there and he liked to do a bit of showing off. And so, I hadn’t realised this. Anyway, he got back to base and we got all the instructions for landing etcetera and then he put the, this was an Anson, put it in a steep climb and eventually the left wing dropped and it stalled. And this was deliberate apparently. Then it went spiralling down to near this Polish resettlement camp and eventually he landed at the airfield. Anyway, we got out, he said, ‘Did you enjoy that?’ I said, ‘Well, it was unexpected but I shall know next time.’ He did it every time apparently. He was an expert pilot. But I spent about four years, three or four years at Topcliffe and I know we lost a couple of planes. Wellingtons then. And one of them it stalled on take-off. And anyway the pilot — and he managed to survive. He baled out. The rest were killed. And the other one disappeared over the North Sea somewhere. Never found any wreckage anywhere. It even got in the local papers. And they never did find out what happened to it. So, and then we got to, I was then occasionally called on when there was no flying to drive the ambulance as I’d taken this MT course. And you had to be on call there and everything was timed to the minute. You had to get to, if there was an emergency you had to get there in a certain number of minutes. And I also had to drive a [pause] some airman had gone mad. We had to take him into a mental institution in York and this was quite interesting. He was in the back with with two other, two men. He was in handcuffs because he was quite violent. So, they got rid of him anyway. And we used to have nights out in York and I then, I became very friendly with with a Scotsman, Jock Campbell and a chap from Bournemouth. Bish we called him. He looked like a, he used to put a collar on back to front to look like a minister. We were great buddies and anyway they said, ‘Let’s, let’s go,’ he said, ‘I know a WAAF,’ he said, ‘Let’s meet up in York and get her to bring two friends.’ So off we went to York and I couldn’t believe that the one of the friends was one I’d met in York where, the transit centre there. Another Irish girl who lived in London. In Crouch End. And we became very friendly and retained that friendship until after I came out the RAF because she came to Cranwell and I went to see her down there. Anyway, I’m rambling on a bit am I? Anyway, from [pause] it became time for demob and we’d gone out on a usual demob party as we did, in Ripon. And we’d, we’d had a few drinks of course. A bit of a singsong. And on the way back to the station my friend Bish who was a bit mad, a very quiet man normally but if he had drink inside him he was a changed character, Jekyll and Hyde and he started to climb over a railway bridge on the way back to the station. Anyway, we managed to drag him down and then we got to the station. Got in the train. And it, as it was about to move off they [pause] Bish decided he wanted, he was going to get out on the wrong side. On the off side. So he climbed out. We yelled at him. I climbed out after him to bring him back. And he was trying of all things to try and unhitch the train so that it would go off with one carriage missing at the end. Anyway, he couldn’t unfasten it of course and so I dragged him out. Then the whistle went. Train started moving. There was my friend Jock peering out of the window shouting at us. We ran but we couldn’t get in and so the train went off. Left us on the track. And the, the guard, he was there, he was shouting at us so we set off walking down the track. It was only probably three or four miles to the station we wanted to be off at near the camp so we walked along the track. It’s a stupid thing to do but fortunately at that time of night there were no no trains. And we arrived exhausted back at this station getting on for midnight and there were celebrations going in the mess even at that time. Anyway, we found Jock and he said, ‘Oh, thank goodness you’re back. We wondered what had happened to you. We were going to send out a search party.’ Anyway, that was partly Bish was, was a strange man. He was a very good friend but he got this idea that one evening he he had this idea of getting on the phone because we had a station warrant officer who wasn’t very popular and anyway Bish got on the phone. He rang the fire brigade and he said, ‘Oh, the SWO’s house is on fire. Can you come immediately.’ We, anyway, put the phone down. We went off up to bed and we heard the fire engine going and the following morning two pilots had been arrested for ringing up the Fire Brigade. And anyway, we being gentlemen we confessed and said it wasn’t them it was us. And I was, I suppose aiding and abetting and so we finished up on a fizzer and went in jail for the weekend. We were escorted to the dining room by guards and of course all the other lads thought it great fun. You know. We, we, in fact I still have a card which they’d all signed and there was a fire on the front of it and it made some comment from all the lads there. And anyway we were, we were both duly not court martialled but we we had a good ticking off from the CO and said, ‘Don’t do it again.’ And so that went on our record. But on the final night of demob we decided to fly when we get back on that to base and for some reason we managed to persuade the three radio ops to take their places. And this would be about eleven or twelve in the evening and so I’m surprised that we were let on. We must have been reeking of beer. And we went in for briefing and we got all our gear and we went off. There were about a half a dozen planes went off and so my friends Bish and Jock they were in separate planes as they were both radio operators. And we went off on a six hour navigation trip somewhere over the North Sea and back again and with turning points. And eventually got back in the early hours. Back to Topcliffe. And there was thick fog. We couldn’t land. So we were redirected to Linton on Ouse and had a Polish pilot as most of them were. Anyway, we were heading for Yorkshire, this other aerodrome and all of a sudden I heard on the intercom, ‘Christ,’ or some, it might have been a Polish equivalent. The plane shot up like a lift. He pulled the stick back and apparently it was a place called Stanage Edge which was like an escarpment and he had been flying low and he had just spotted this. So he pulled the stick back and zoomed up. And anyway we were then redirected. Of course fog had come down at Linton on Ouse. We went down to Lakenheath in Suffolk and by then we were running short of fuel but anyway we made it to Lakenheath and fortunately there was no fog. We landed there and they found us accommodation in the hospital actually. Comfortable beds. And the following morning we woke up and would you believe it there was fog. So we couldn’t take off. And this, this we should have been at Demobilisaton Centre by this time. Anyway, we were detained there because of the weather for a week before we got back. So they weren’t very happy and they had to rearrange our demob. And we got another ticking off for that. And so we had about another three months where they seemed to punish us by making us fly every day but we didn’t mind that because we enjoyed it. And so eventually we we were properly demobbed and three of us we went down to London. Decided to celebrate and have a week there before we went back home. And we went, we’d had a few drinks as we’d normally do, went round the night clubs and did the usual things and we decided to visit the American Embassy and volunteered to join the US Army Air Force to fly in Korea. We thought we didn’t want to go back to Civvy Street, you know, it’s too boring. Anyway, we got all the information and forms to fill in. Went back home and all three of us decided we wouldn’t do that. We went back. I went back to banking. Jock went back on the railway. And Bish went back to the estate agent office. And I thought that was the end of that but poor old Bish. He [pause] he suffered from, he was a bit [pause] what shall I say? When he’d, I know when he’d had a few drinks he was a changed character. But the Morse code was affecting his mind and he eventually suffered from Morse Madness and which, which — you know the continuous noise on the brain of the dit dit dot and all this sort of thing. And anyway he, he had, he finished up in a mental institution and he died before he was thirty which, you know was very sad. We were great buddies and we’d been down to Bournemouth. Met his, met his family as well. And anyway, we [pause] we kept in touch for a while and we used to have reunions back at Topcliffe. Jock and I. And we managed to get a bed you know in the sergeant’s mess no problem. Meet the lads who were still there. And then as things happen we drifted apart. He went back, stayed with his job. I went back to banking. And it was only about three years ago that I I had a message. An email on Facebook saying, “Are you the Geoff Lenthall who was flying from Topcliffe in Wellingtons?” And I wrote back. I sent him an email. I said yes. And it was, it was my old friend Jock. And so we decided we got together and we, he came down. It didn’t cost him a penny because of his special rates on the railway, as he worked there. He came down to York and I travelled up there and we found a pub and we had a meal and well we had a few drinks but I couldn’t have many. I was driving. It was alright for him. He was on the train [laughs] He could have a dram or two on it. So it was good. You know. We talked. We had a lot to talk about of course and we met each year. But last year I had problems driving and so we didn’t meet up. But we’re still in touch. Which is great. So that was more or less the — oh I did join the Volunteer Reserve for five years. And this, it was, we used to get paid for it. And it didn’t go down very well with the bank because it took a fortnight. I’d still got my allowance from the bank for the holidays but I had to have two weeks at an RAF station. And that was when I went to Binbrook and flew in Avro Lincolns. Operation Bullseye I think they called it. Went out to practice bombing in Heligoland. And that was one of the trips. And other times, other times we went to Doncaster which is now a civil airport and we used to fly to Jersey. Went down for the Battle of the Flowers and things like that. We had a weekend in Germany. All on the RAF of course. And this was at a time when one of the English planes was shot down near the Russian border and I know there were emails flashing around saying, ‘Are you ok?’ You know. They thought it was that we were over there we’d been shot down. But anyway we, we were ok. And so five years with the Volunteer Reserve. And then, so I met my wife. So I was transferred to, from Scunthorpe to Grimsby and we, I know I joined this tennis club and there was this girl in bright red shorts. And anyway I got talking to her and we became friendly and I walked her home. And in due course we were married. And as I say she died nine years ago. We had a very happy marriage and when I retired we were able to do a bit of travelling around. And we went to Australia because the sort of friends who lived near us they decided to emigrate to Australia and said keep in touch. And so we went two or three times to stay in Melbourne and we were very fortunate really. And they had a big five bedroom house. They have four daughters. And anyway the daughters married out there and one went to live in Sydney so we called on the way down in Sydney to see them. And then we drove down in his car to Melbourne. And we had a great time because they had friends who had a boat on an island off the coast and we went down there and went on this boat around the islands. And they were, I know that they used to call us poms but we got on very well with the, with the Australians. And they tried to persuade us to go and live out there. And he said, oh, he said because I then was working on a magazine, Lincolnshire Life and they said, ‘You can start, start a magazine up out here. No problem. Come and join us.’ We never actually did but we went to see them. But I joined Lincolnshire Life after leaving the bank because I was getting nowhere. I finished up at Loughborough. I went to Leicester branch. Then they moved me to Loughborough. And I was getting a bit bored with banking. It didn’t seem to satisfy my yearnings at all and so I resigned. And I went of all places on the fish docks because my father had a fishing business. My father in law. And anyway, he said he could get me a job so I went back to Grimsby from Leicester and finished up at this this company owned by one of the trawler companies and I was going around visiting customers and getting new business for the company. It was a complete change from banking to fishing and I had to go down to the docks at seven in the morning to be amongst all the fish there to see what went on. And it was a real eye opener. And so I had to learn a bit about it before I went on my travels. And they gave me a car allowance and so it became, I used to leave Monday morning and come back Friday. My wife got used to it in due course and I worked, I did it for about two years. But I used to have a talk with the MD every Friday and he, I said to him, ‘Things are not really working out.’ He said — I said, ‘You know that there’s a resentment.’ Of course they’d made me a director of the company and this didn’t go down very well with the staff. They’d been in it probably from leaving school. Working their way up you know, and this this chap comes in, ex-banker, white collar worker and he’s there you know eighteen months they make him a director, you know it just wasn’t on. I could tell there was a resentment and I said this to the MD. And so I resigned. So at about forty then out of a job and so I looked around and saw this job advertised in Lincolnshire Life. Do you know Lincolnshire Life? And they wanted a sales representative or advertisement manager. Anyway, I applied and I got the job and I had one week with the previous ad man. And he said, ‘I don’t know whether you realise or not but not only will you be doing this but you’ll be also the motoring correspondent. And,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a car test lined up next week for you in Lincoln. An Alfa Romeo.’ I thought this sounds interesting. Anyway, he went off and I took over and I was given a car to run around the county in. I went to Lincoln. Picked up this Alfa Romeo and they just let me loose for a couple of hours on the roads. And that was fine. I enjoyed that. But then of course I had to write about it in the magazine which I’d never done before. So, this was a labour of love and I eventually got into it and enjoyed it. And from then on I got other motoring tests to do as well. But we were in, in Brewery Street I think it was there and we moved to Dudley Street. The magazine. And the owner Roy Faiers, he lived in Cheltenham and he’d started This England magazine which is a very worldwide and he would fly up from time to time. He had learned to fly in his forties and got his own plane and took me for a flight in it from Humberside. And anyway, this went on for a while and there were quite a few perks with working for a magazine and I I used to get invitations to [pause] I went to Sweden for the opening of a golf course by an Englishman and things like that. And I met a few celebrities. I don’t know whether you remember Crossroads. It was a television programme and two of the people on it, Meg and Benny, they were at this hotel that was newly opened and they were guests. So I met them. Had photographs taken. All the rest of it. But it was a totally different life from banking and fishing. And there was an end product every month when they, you looked at the magazine and you know you felt well we’ve helped to do something towards this. I used to go down with the editor at the end of every month to the printers to put it to bed so to speak. Do the proof reading. And it worked very well and I I was able to, I met a lot of interesting people and part of the driving part I mean I wasn’t an official motoring correspondent. I wasn’t even a member of the journalist’s Union. But they used to send me these invitations and we used to go to a place called, in Yorkshire called Sherburn in Elmet which was a testing ground for the Mintex people of the brake linings and things. And they had a track there on an old aerodrome circuit. And each year I used to go there and I used to take a friend of mine Brian Hammond who was in the choir. And we used to spend the night there in a hotel and then on the Sunday morning we’d go around the track. It was all very well organised. We had a pep talk before-hand saying, ‘This isn’t a racetrack,’ you know and all the rest of it. We had name tags with our photograph and all the rest of it. And so we used to drive around there. Test the cars and we, a second time I had a Rolls Royce and that was great fun because it wasn’t allowed on the track. There was a special ten mile course outside. And so we took the Rolls Royce. They briefly said this does that, that does that you know. The controls. So Brian and I used to drive this Rolls Royce waving to people you know like royalty and that was great fun. We got to test a lot of cars. The, the BMW, Mercedes and anything from Minis and things like that. That was an interesting part of the job. And I eventually decided to [pause] I’d had an offer. No. That’s right we took over because he wasn’t paying very well and I thought well am I going to leave again? Find another job. And I I mentioned about a rise but there was nothing forthcoming so I had a talk with my wife and my father in law and my banker. And in the end I made an offer to buy the magazine from, from him. And he accepted it. He wanted more than we wanted to pay but anyway we settled on a figure and got the first loan to organise and finished up as owning a magazine. And Joan used to do subscriptions. My father in law did the accounts. And I took on ladies in different parts of the county to sell advertising. You know, on a bonus basis part time, as I wasn’t able to get out and do it myself and I had a part time editor. David Rawlinson. He lived in Louth and he used to come in about two days a week and between us we put the magazine together and I’d get all the ads together and he would bring the editorial. And so we did that for a few years. And then I had an offer from one of the big companies. They owned Yorkshire Life and Lancashire Life and they wanted to buy Lincolnshire life. So they came up to Grimsby and took me out. Wined and dined me as they do. Made an offer. And I thought well I’m enjoying life really. I don’t want, I don’t want to give it up yet. So in the end I was reaching I think I was about sixty two when I had an offer from LSG. Lincolnshire Standard Group. And they made an offer and we decided to sell out and retire. And so we, we did that and that’s when we were able to travel around a bit more and enjoy life. I joined the Male Voice Choir. My father in law was in it. He was the one that persuaded me and so I had an audition and we [pause] a great bunch of lads. We had, at one time nearly seventy members and we travelled around. We went in various festivals and we also organised trips abroad. We went to Holland. Germany. Sweden. France. And they were very good. We had a week with the people. You know. The Swedes or Germans looked after us very well. Then they came back the following year and stayed with us. Then we’d have a joint concert and I’m still in touch with some of them which is good you know. We exchange cards at Christmas time and it worked out very well. And there was a tremendous spirit between singers of all nationalities because they organised at Cardiff Arms Park, a huge concert. Ten thousand male voices. There were about nine hundred and something in the end but actually there were choirs from all over and we were invited. It was a tremendous success and the feeling there singing at Cardiff Arms Park which is huge. We were alright. We were in the sheltered area. And I’ve got a video of it actually. And one year we had Tom Jones as the guest singer and the following year Shirley Bassey. And so I was able to put on my CV I have sung with Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey. And they were great occasions and there is a tremendous comradeship in the male voice of choirs. Of course there were people from all walks of life but you all get on well. They’ve all got this love of singing. And in due course I took over the, I’d started a newsletter for the choir and did that for about fifteen years and but I was finding I was having to write most of it as the contributions weren’t coming in very quickly. People seemed a bit reluctant to do this but I managed to get one or two in the choir to twist a few arms and I got some contributions coming in. And this used to come out once a quarter. And so I did this for a while and I enjoyed it. I was just paid the expenses of the, you know I used to do it on the computer and print it out. And had great fun. And then it got to the stage where I wasn’t getting enough in really to make a go of it. So by then I was getting on in years and I said well if no one else will take it over you know I’m calling it a day. And there weren’t any volunteers so it just stopped like that. Which was a pity. One man a year later said he’d take it over but he said, ‘I’ll come round to the house and we’ll talk about it.’ But that was it. No more was said. And I’m still in touch with the choir and still go to some of the concerts but unfortunately they’re down to oh about thirty from, you know. They’ve lost half their members. Old age. This is the, or they move away. I mean the average age must be well over sixty. Probably seventy. But you just can’t get youngsters to come and join. They don’t want, they don’t want to be with a lot of old fogeys you know. They’d rather be out enjoying themselves. It’s understandable. And so I gave that up and I joined the, or Joan and we both joined the U3A and I I decided to — she was interested in gardening, flower arranging. I went on a computing course and there are about thirty odd different groups in the U3A and you can choose whichever one appeals to you. It’s either a hobby or an educational thing. I went in computers and then learning German because I’d taken it at school and we’d had a refresher course when we went with the choir. And so I, there were only about a half dozen of us used to go every week to this house. She was a German. She’d come from near Cologne and lived in this country for many years. But then she, she’d done it for twenty odd years and she gave that up. And I joined armchair travel which was, we used to meet up and show films of where people had been and talked about the different places. Quite interesting. And, and there was a, I became interested in, we had our own website and anyway when the person who was doing it was retiring I offered my services. So, I took over the website which meant I had to join the committee as well which I wasn’t very happy about but I used to go to the meetings as well. I did that for a while. Are we ok? And —
[recording paused]
AH: So why did you want to join the RAF?
GL: Why? I always had a love of aircraft and obviously as a lad you know I’d read about the, and about the exploits not only of Bomber Command but fighter pilots as well. And its, I thought well this this is the one for me. I didn’t really fancy the army or the navy. The air force really was the only place and we all joined. All the friends of us. We got ourselves very fit. We used to go for morning runs at the Air Training Corps. And we had, went every week to classes for — well learning all about flying really. About the various navigation, Morse code, air craft recognition. I could recognise any of the German planes I thought at that time when our memories were good. And to me it was the only thing that I wanted to do was to get up and fly. And I did later on take a gliding course in Norfolk which was a great thrill but that was later on in life. But it was, I knew one by one we we either volunteered or were called up. All the aircrew were volunteers. And one of my friends he he went to the Fleet Air Arm and he got in before me. And also I met an air gunner who, about the same age as me and and he’d done about twelve operations and I thought how was that? Anyway, we talked about this and he said, ‘Well, I volunteered as tail gunner. Said I wanted to be in straight away.’ And had I known I would probably have done the same because as I say being the same age he got in quite quickly. They were short of air gunners because they were very vulnerable at the back end of the plane of course and so he he couldn’t understand this. He said, ‘Why don’t you do operations?’ he said. Of course that was so disappointing for me. I thought well had I known would I have done the same thing? Volunteered as a tail gunner? Probably not have even come back. I mean he was lucky. He managed to survive but I know there were fifty five thousand more than that who who never came back. Who just died. Which was a, you know was a tremendous casualty list. But even so you know it was the thought of getting up there and it’s, and the thing is, I know that people when they say when they bombed at Dresden. There was a lot of talk about that. And there were so many casualties but after all it was war. They were bombing us the same way as we were bombing them. They bombed Hull and London and all the big cities and so it was. I don’t know whether any, there was any Christianity came into that. I mean there were some people who’d say, ‘How could you possibly go up there and drop bombs on innocent people?’ But you were just, just doing your job. You thought no more about it than that. You couldn’t really do anything else. If, if you didn’t, I mean there was some on the training who, who refused to, to do the training. This was at Bridlington where they had to jump into this, off the edge into the quayside, about twenty foot and with a Mae West on. And they refused to do it. And so they, they wouldn’t do it so they, they were taken off aircrew training. That was all part of it. You had to jump down, swim to a dinghy and climb aboard. All part of the training. But you just had to do this if you wanted to be in aircrew and it was an ambition of mine. And I mean when I wrote the book eventually that was my — I wanted to be a pilot. I think which most youngsters did anyway. I did actually get behind the controls of a Wellington bomber with a pilot by my side. Dual control. And he said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘You can take over now,’ he said, ‘Piece of cake,’ he said, ‘Just get a compass bearing and hold the stick and keep it steady,’ and he said, ‘I will land it though when we get there.’ But he said, he said to me afterwards, ‘You can take off if you like.’ He said, ‘I’ll watch you.’ We managed to get off eventually. Not very, not an ideal take off but then he said, ‘Fly it up to Yorkshire and I’ll take over.’ But it was a great thrill and, and then the flying in the gliding course as well. And I did think when I retired that was another thing I will do. I will, I’ll learn to fly at the local flying school. But so many other things to do I never got around to it. So it was sad really. It was disappointing. I mean I’ve watched many films. I’ve read lots of books. And of course when Dambusters I mean which was a tremendous thing there. Incidentally, I’m having the Dambusters theme at my funeral. I’ve already got it planned and I’ve written all this out for my daughters and I said, ‘Play that when people are coming in and then we’ll have the hymns etcetera and then at the end I’m going to have Perry Como singing, “For the Good Times.” Which was one of my favourites. And it was one my wife’s as well. Anyway, I’m getting off the beaten track aren’t I?
AH: Could you tell me a bit more about the training? What you did.
GL: About the —?
AH: The training. The training.
GL: Trailer.
AH: The training.
GL: Training.
AH: Yeah.
GL: Oh yes. Well, most of that was well in London of course we were just avoiding the [pause] the V-1s. That was more or less Reception Centre but Bridlington was where we did the training. Where we, this was where we had to jump into the sea and swim to the dinghy. And you were, I think the expression was LMF. Lack of moral fibre if you refused to jump. But we had assault courses and things like that and of course we used to go into was it the, one of the big concert halls there to do the Morse training. And we had to pass out at eighteen words a minute. And at the radio school which was at Madley I remember there. This was when we first got into aircraft, you know. Until then I’d never seen an aircraft. And we, I know that several of us went to work at Hartleys Jam Factory which was quite nearby. We used to get paid for that. But I digress. The actual flying and learning the Morse code I I didn’t really have any great difficulty with. At the, as I say we passed out at eighteen words a minute and I still look back and if I’d go on short wave I’d try to take any Morse messages but some of them were very fast. But I remember we [pause] I got to know a chap who lived in Essex and he was a married man. One of the older ones. And he, I sort of, I looked I looked up to him because he’d been around and he was an older man and anyway sort of looked after the younger ones. But there were some who found out that when they went up flying they suffered from air sickness. That was another thing. Just unfortunate. They just couldn’t cope with it so they had to find a ground job then. But the, I was just trying to think of the [pause] from the Isle of Man when we were in Jurby we were on Ansons then and the wing commander he he lived in [pause] near Grimsby actually. And anyway I had a talk to him and I managed to get a flight. A flight back from Jurby to — we landed at Binbrook in this Anson and I got home from there. He went to his home and we had a weekend at home. I know my parents couldn’t believe it. But yeah there were perks like that in flying but I think, you know the sheer joy of being up there. I know that it wasn’t, it wasn’t so pleasant you know, having seen all these films. You know when you were on the air raids on Germany and the cities etcetera with all the flak coming up and anti-aircraft and the fighters attacking you it wasn’t a piece of cake at all, you know. They really went through it. I admire the — I look up to them. They were always my heroes really. I mean people like Alec whom you’ve met, you know. I mean he, he was flying a Spitfire with no armament at all. Just took photographs. But I mean people like that I’ve always looked up to. And in a way I suppose I thought well why wasn’t I one of them? You know. A sort of feeling of not inferiority but disappointment in the fact that I never made it there. But I know there were several of my own age who were, who were in the same position. You know they, because I have met them and they say, oh yeah, they felt the same way. It was just one of those things. So, so the next war I shall probably volunteer as a tail gunner to start with if there is such a thing. Of course times will have changed. They’ll all be jets now. And I mean this is one of the joys the reunions. I was an associate member of 9 Squadron because I’d met someone in Lincolnshire Life who came. We used to sell books. Aircraft books. That’s how I got an interest in it as well and he was a rear gunner and he put me on to the Aircrew Association in the first instance. And in fact he was a local man. I used to see him at Tesco. He’s gone now unfortunately. And this is it with, well they’re not all old aircrew at Aircrew Association. There are some younger ones that came in after the war of course. You know, the jet men. A different school. But we used to meet up at these 9 Squadron reunions. The older ones and the younger ones. It was interesting you know to have talks with the young jet men, you know. To see how different it was. But I’m just trying to think of anything else of interest which [pause] No. Better switch off now. I’ll have to have a think.
[recording paused]
AH: What was it like coming to London from Lincolnshire?
GL: It was quite different. I’d never been to London before and to be uprooted from the wilds of Lincolnshire to the big city was quite something and I remember going down on the train. And there were several servicemen there and I remember one saying to me, ‘Why aren’t you in the forces?’ I said, ‘I’m on the way to join.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Good for you mate.’ And I said I would join the RAF. And but approaching the city you could see all the ruined houses and everything there. I thought they’ve really, they’ve really had it pretty hard. And it was, it was so different. I mean in Lincolnshire we’d had the odd, the odd raid and I remember a Heinkel 111 shot down near the steel works and we went to see it as boys do. But in London the — everything was so different. And when we got out of the train the first thing I heard was an explosion. I thought well that’s the first one. And we had to, we had to be on every so often we’d be on duty to warn people of a coming raid or an approaching doodlebug. We used to have to go up on the roof. We were on St Johns Wood and we’d taken over a lot of the luxury flats and anyway if we saw a doodlebug coming we’d got a whistle with us and we used to go in. We were in pairs and anyway as soon as the engines stopped that’s when of course that’s when it went down. So we blew the whistle and run like mad to try to get down in the basement and all the others were there by then. But we used to march and we used to wear steel helmets when we went from place to place. Once we, we went to the zoo. We used to go to the zoo and I remember we, if we night watching, if we were watching the, we’d sleep on tables and the reason for that was when you got down you put your foot down you could hear the crunch of the beetles you know. Oh they were awful. There were so many of them there. And apart from that I mean we had raids pretty well every night. And we got used to the idea but we knew that you know eventually we’d have to move and this is why we went out to Torquay. But life in London was so much different. Rural Lincolnshire we, I suppose we were spoiled up here. We don’t, we don’t see a lot of it. we used to see the odd doodlebug. They used to launch them from planes apparently from the North Sea. But we never actually had any in Lincolnshire at all. As I say the, Hull used to get most of the bombing. We could tell. If we saw a red glow in the sky, ‘Hull’s getting it tonight.’ But considering we had two steelworks in Scunthorpe I’m surprised we didn’t get more raids really. My father was a warden, sector leader, and he used to come and see us you know in the shelter from time to time there. We had great fun building those. The old Anderson shelter with grass sods all over it and a stirrup pump if it got flooded and so cold we had these oil heaters. But we spent quite a bit of time in the shelters. And you could, there were Morrison shelters as well which were in the house. They were reinforced tables. Quite strong actually. Which I suppose were better than going out into a cold damp Anderson shelter. But it all seems such a long time ago now and you just wonder when the next one will be. I mean they’re talking World War Three with the Russians and all the rest of it, but it would be people like you and the grandchildren who are around. We shan’t be around that much longer. Well, I’m optimistic. I mean I hope to reach ninety one. We shall see. But yes I would, I tend to I say to my grandsons, you know ‘Whatever you do if the time comes, if you have to join up, join the RAF,’ I said, ‘It’s the only one.’ The Brylcreem boys as they used to call them. I know we did get a few comments about that. But it was a good life. I really was fortunate. I had about four years and I enjoyed my time which is more than a lot of people who’d been in the RAF. I mean they had a pretty tough time a lot of them. Some never came back. But I was very grateful for the fact that I, you know had served my country to some extent. Little though it was. But it was an enjoyable time and a good experience. And it broadens your mind certainly because you meet up with people from all walks of life and they all have different views etcetera. And I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Anything else you want to ask? No?
AH: What do you think about the way Bomber Command was treated after the war?
GL: Well, that was pretty awful I think. I mean Bomber Harris he took a lot of the brunt. I mean, partly because of Dresden. But they were only doing really what they had to do. They said they were, they were bombing civilians rather than bombing targets but I mean what happened in London or Birmingham or Hull? They weren’t just bombing targets. They were just indiscriminate. And I don’t really see why they was so much criticism of them. I mean after all they, they joined the air force. They joined Bomber Command to to go, take part in raids over Germany or wherever. Italy. And they, I know that the bomb aimer was the person responsible for dropping the bombs but I’m sure they didn’t have any, any feelings about what they were doing or what was happening down below. They had a job to do and it was, ‘Left. Left. Steady. Right a bit. Bombs gone.’ And that was it. They were just doing their job and I don’t really see how, how they can criticise. I know that they made a lot of Fighter Command. You know. Saving the country which, yeah but Bomber Command they certainly did their part and Bomber Harris was was respected by all the people who were in Bomber Command. Although he was heavily criticised afterwards but you’ll always find this. There will always be someone to criticise when its all happened. You know. Especially if they weren’t there and they don’t know what it was like. I mean it must be terrible when when you read of say ten thousand people killed in a raid on Dresden. Innocent people. You know, women, children. But that was war. And they were doing just the same to us and I see, I feel very strongly that there should be no criticism. What’s war is war and you do what you’re told to do and this is what they did. So [pause]
AH: What was your friend Bish’s name? Your friend Bish. What was his name?
GL: It was John Bartlett. Yes. We all called him Bish. He was always known as Bish but the poor devil he got the doolally tap I think they called it. Which was Morse Madness. But he was a great friend and as I say very quiet. Being a southerner I think you know we got on very well. He was rather reserved but he’d have a drink or two and he’d just be a changed character. He’d come back and he’d throw people out of their beds, you know. Tip the bed over. Things like that. I couldn’t believe the things he got up to but he got away with it because he’d got this smile and [pause] strange really. But it got to him in the end. You know. The Morse madness and it was so sad that he lived through the war and then just died like that. In such a way. But it did happen to quite a few people apparently. It didn’t affect me at all but I know some were badly affected. And one of these days I’m going to buy myself a Morse key and see if I haven’t lost the touch. No. I know that Jock he he was being a Scotsman he admitted to me once, he said, ‘I can get, I get a bit aggressive when I’ve had a drink or two.’ You know. Och aye tha noo and all that. And we did have one or two skirmishes I remember in London but he said, he apologised afterwards, you know. He said, oh he said, ‘We’re buddies,’ he said, ‘Don’t mind me. This is me. That’s how I am.’ Anyway, he’s now happily married with four, four sons. He’s way ahead of me. And he married the girl he was, he wasn’t a Catholic then but he took conversion lessons to be a Catholic and that’s what he wanted. We used to pull his leg about it of course as you do. When you’re out with the lads. Because I’d met this Irish girl and I said it’s love at first sight. Red hair and blue eyes. A beautiful girl and well I put in the book there you know we went on the balcony of this hotel we were in and I went to kiss her and would you believe it I asked her permission? You know. Would you find this these days? It’s straight in you know. But I was so naïve with, with girls particularly and it was so [pause] Anyway she put me at my ease and we had a kiss and that was it. But we did we did keep in touch. But she married her boyfriend. One she’d known from the Catholic from early days. Are you recording this as well? Oh dear. [laughs] I wonder if I’ve said anything I shouldn’t have said. Anyway, I haven’t sworn. But do you find this of interest really? Is this all going in the permanent thing at Lincoln? Is it? So who will listen to this then I wonder.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Geoffrey Lenthall
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Anna Hoyles
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-04-01
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ALenthallG160401
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Pending review
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Pending OH summary
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01:19:10 audio recording
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Geoffrey Lenthall was born in Nottinghamshire but spent most of his youth in Scunthorpe. He happily volunteered for aircrew but found himself working as ground personnel. He eventually trained as a wireless operator and was posted to 9 Squadron. He had a friend who suffered eventually from 'Morse madness' which led ultimately to a mental institution and an early death. After the war Geoffrey returned to banking and then to the fish markets and finally to the Lincolnshire Life magazine.
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
Temporal Coverage
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1944-07
9 Squadron
aircrew
demobilisation
Dominie
entertainment
ground personnel
military discipline
military service conditions
Proctor
RAF Madley
training
V-1
V-weapon
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/277/7906/PIronsH1501.2.jpg
62e8999adc6227a8e1dcf9d08e401fbc
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/277/7906/AIronsH150723.1.mp3
113b2cff64ef934152b89828f1ea404f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Irons, Harry
Harry Irons
H Irons
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Harry Irons (1924 - 2018). He was an apprentice tailor in London, but lied about his age and joined the RAF aged 16. He flew operations as a rear gunner with 158, 462 and 9 Squadrons.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-23
2016-07-30
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Irons, H
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AM: Okay so, this interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Annie Moodie and the interviewee is Harry Irons. The interview’s taking place at a hotel near Kings Lynn and we’re here for the 9 Squadron Association hundred year dinner.
HI: Yeah that’s right, yeah.
AM: And it’s the 23rd of July 2015. So, off you go Harry. Tell us –
HI: Er, actually I won a scholarship to go to a grammar school, but my father insisted that I left school at fourteen so I could go to work and earn a wage. So, being in the east end the only jobs you could get was either tailoring or cabinet making. There was a whole area that’s – it was a big Jewish area and the, most of the people were either tailors or cabinet makers, and they were good, very good, brilliant craftsmen. So I took a job on as a trainee tailor and I was doing that for two years until I was sixteen, nearly sixteen, and we lived in an area of London called Stamford Hill and one evening we, me and a few other chaps were on the hill, and we see the huge blitz on London, and we actually see the whole of the City of London literally ablaze. Enormous, as far as your eye could see was buildings all, all ablaze, that was the City of London. Actually, they weren’t after the City of London, what they was after was the Docks, and they just, their bombing, what we used to call creeping, crept back from the Docks into the City of London and once it hit the City of London course everything went up in flames so, two or three friends said ‘we’ll, we’re gonna join up.’ I was sixteen at the time, so we went up the recruiting office in Kings Cross, London, and I told ‘em I was seventeen and a quarter, how they believed me I don’t know but they said ‘alright you’re in,’ and that was at the end of 1941, and I was called up in January 1941 [unclear]. The blaze was – the bombing was in 1940 and we joined, we joined up at the end of 1940, and 1941 they called me up and I went to a place near where it was called Bridgnorth then six weeks square bashing [?] there and they said ‘you’ll have to wait to sele’ – they asked me what I wanted to be in the air force, I said ‘I wanna fly,’ they said ‘alright, we’ll put you down for either a pilot, navigator or an air gunner and we’ll sort that out later on.’ Anyway, I went to Bridgnorth, done my six weeks training, and they sent me to a RAF station, Wisbech in Cambridge and I had to do menial jobs there, in the cook house, in the stores, waiting for, to go on a course. In the mean while they told me I was gonna become a wireless operator air gunner, and I’ve got to wait for a course to come up, a vacancy for the course to come up, so I stayed at Wisbech ‘til August ’41, and then they posted me to Blackpool on a wireless course and everybody in the RAF went to Blackpool to do their wireless course, and you had to stay in a, all the border houses were commandeered, and all the aircrew used to live in these border houses and the thing was when you’re at Blackpool you got up to twelve words a minute which we all did, and then from there you’re posted to another sta, er, air force station to continue your study ‘til you become up to eighteen words a minute –
AM: When you say eighteen words a minute, doing what?
HI: Morse code.
AM: Morse code right, okay.
HI: Yeah, dit dah dit dah dit dah dit. Anyway, we was all queuing up to wait for postings and the sergeant came out just like that he said ‘you lot, over that side. You lot, that side,’ and fortunately or unfortunately I was in that lot on that side and we become airgunners. Not wireless operators, airgunners. Just airgunners. And the reason for that, I didn’t know at the time, was the heavy bombers, the Lancasters, were going on production, and there was, they were short of airgunners, because they had to carry another air gunner so they said ‘you lot over there, you become airgunners,’ and I went back to Wisbech – I was a bit cheesed off about it all anyway, couldn’t do much about it, and I waited another couple of months and then they sent me on a gunnery course, a place called Manby [emphasis] in Lincoln, it’s a big air force gunnery school there, and we done six weeks training there as gunners, gunnery, and I got the huge total flying hours of nineteen hours, that’s all I got, and they said – and from there you’re supposed to do a four month, five month operational training course, that’s getting accustomed to actually doing bombing raids on enemy territory. But then whatever happened they said to me ‘you’re being posted straight on a squadron’ and I tell you what, I was a greener than this.
AM: [Laughs] we’re sat on a green settee, for the record.
HI: Yeah, yeah. It was as green, I was as green as anything then. ‘Cause I got nineteen hours and I didn’t know what to expect. Anyway, I was posted to Waddington [emphasis] to Number 9 Squadron. And when I arrived there, as it was luck [exhale of breath] was in my favour because a flight lieutenant named Stubbs came up to me and said ‘you’re gonna fly with me as a mid-upper’ and I said ‘fair enough.’ They’d already, he was already on his second tour, he’d already done thirteen trips on Wellingtons [emphasis].
AM: So you didn’t do the usual crewing up thing?
HI: Never done anything like that, no.
AM: You just –
HI: No, no they just sent about ten of us to 9 Squadron, ‘cause I was just converting from Wellingtons onto Lancasters, and consequently they was one gunner short because the Lancaster carried a mid-upper. So he said to me, anyhow I didn’t know what it was all about actually, he said to me ‘the rear gunner I’ve got at the moment is a big Australian,’ he was about six foot three [unclear] ‘and he’s too tall for the turret’ he said ‘what we’re gonna do is you’re gonna do your first trip in the mid-upper and after that you’ll go in the rear turret, and the Australian will go’ –‘cause in the mid-upper you can pull your legs down, straighten you know, you’ve got plenty of room, so what we done then, we done – as time’s gone on, this was 1942, round about June 1942 and we started getting to used, well the crew getting used to flying a Wellington twin engine bomber onto a four engine bomber. And that, you use what they call conversion, and that’s pretty difficult ‘cause you learn how to fly an entirely different aircraft, land it, you got to find out all the different things, the different systems and the turrets, anyway we done about six weeks training, well not, training it was, well converting from the one engine to the Lancaster, and then September ’42 we was in a crew, we had a big crew and we used to lay and loll about smoking, swearing everything else [laughs] anyway, they said ‘ops tonight.’ So, before you went on operations you done what they call a night flying test [emphasis], you took the aircraft up, you tested the bomb site, you tested the, the bomb bays open and closing, you tested the turrets and you give a, you went outta sea and give the guns a little squirt, see everything was alright, the compass [emphasis], check the compass and the, the under carriage we’d dropped up and down a couple of time to make sure it was alright, and we landed, and as we landed, the bomb aimer had already done thirteen trips on Wellingtons, and this is vivid, and as we’d come out of the steps of the Lancaster, the bomb aimer’s behind me, and coming along the road was tractor carrying a four thousand pound bomb, and fourteen hundred incendiaries, and the bomb aimer said to me ‘oh, we’re going to Happy Valley tonight.’ He said ‘by that bomb load, we’re definitely going to Happy Valley,’ and I thought ‘well that don’t sound too bad, Happy Valley,’ I thought ‘well Happy Valley, that can’t be too bad,’ I didn’t know that that was a nickname for the Ruhr Valley. The whole of the Ruhr Valley was called Happy Valley, and I didn’t realise at the time but the Happy Valley, the Ruhr Valley, as you went in you got a brilliant [emphasis] reception and a better, a, what you say, a bye-bye on the way out, and I tell you what, right I’ll go on, anyway we – it was always ritual, always [emphasis] for bomber crews to have bacon and eggs before they went on ops, always. Didn’t matter where you were, all the time I was in the air force, I done sixty bombing trips, and every time we went on a bombing trip we got bacon and eggs [emphasis] and if we come back we got bacon and eggs. And that was a luxury in those, in wartime, and then of course the joke was, always the joke ‘if you don’t come back, can I have your bacon and eggs?’ you know. Anyway, we went to the, we got – there was a bit of a rigmarole getting ready, you had to, you had to have your bacon and eggs and you go down to – most, most aircrew wrote a last letter, most of ‘em. I think the majority of aircrew wrote a last letter home to their wives, and they used to put them on the bed, and I’m afraid to say, I seen many, many, many letters being collected by the padre, many, that’s why I never wrote one myself. Anyway, we had our food, our bacon and eggs, we were all laughing and joking, you know we were young blokes, and we went to the crew, to the briefing room and we all sat down to see who would come in, and the map [emphasis] had a huge sheet over it, and the CO always, always done it, come in, whipped the sheet off and there was the target. So the bomb aimer said to me ‘I told you.’ It was Dusseldorf, he said ‘there you are,’ he said ‘I knew we were going there’ he said, ‘we’re going to Happy Valley,’ and I still didn’t twig on, ‘oh well, that don’t sound too bad,’ thinking of German girls tryna start [?] kisses you know what I mean. Anyway, we went down to the crew room and the atmosphere changed completely [emphasis]. We went in the crew room and the whole squadron was in the crew room ‘cause we had cabinets for all our flying gear and used to get dressed in there, and as I walked in, all the crews were there, it was dead silence, and everybody was looking at each other, there was no jokes, no laughing, nothing. And there was simply a – the atmosphere was incredible [emphasis] to what it was in the mess having our egg and bacon. Anyway, we got dressed and it was – airgunners dressing was long underpants, pure silk, and a vest that was silk and then your shirt and then your pullover, and then a, over the shirt you put a, I think it was, no, before you put the shirt on, as we put the shirt on we put an electrical heated suit with gloves and electrical heated gloves and body and feet, which was really, really important. And over that we put our uniform ‘cause you had to wear a uniform, if you never wore a uniform, I never realised but at night if you’ve was parachuted out in civilian clothes you was likely to get executed, which many, quite a few boys did get executed, especially by the civilians. And over that we used to put a huge [emphasis] fur jacket and fur trousers, fur lined boots, and there we were –
AM: Fur trousers?
HI: Fur trousers, yeah [murmur from AM]. You know, thick, made of the same material as your jacket. Irvin jacket, you had Irvin trousers, thick Irvin trousers and they used to tuck them inside your boot, zip your boots up and there, you could hardly move by then, but – and I’ll tell you what, on a warm day you was walking out you was absolutely sweating [emphasis, laughs]. Anyway, we went out to the aircraft and everybody smoked, everybody smoked [emphasis] except the skipper, the skipper didn’t smoke, he never drunk, never went out with women, he was absolutely – they said in the officers mess that they couldn’t understand the man, he wouldn’t, he never swore, he never smoked. Anyway, he – a good pilot mind you. Anyway, we got in the aircraft and I was in the mid-upper, first time. And in the mid-upper turret of the Lancaster, I’ve got a picture of it, you had a fantastic [emphasis] view –
AM: Hmm, all round.
HI: All three hundred and eighty degree. You could see everything [emphasis]and I got in the mid-upper, and I never got, I was still raw, we done, only done six weeks training, and I plugged in the electricity for the heater ‘cause if we, even in the mid-upper the temperature was about forty-five, fifty below zero. Worse still in the turret, rear turret. Anyway, we got ready and then the crew room, nobody was talking, it was like that, nobody spoke, and off we went. We took off at Waddington, and the thing was at Waddington they had no runways at that time. There were two squadrons of Lancasters there and no runway. All we had was grass, and in the winter it was very, very difficult with full bomb loads to takeoff. Before that, when we arrived at Waddington there was a squadron there, 44 Squadron, a Rhodesian squadron, and apparently they was the first squadron in the RAF to be equipped with the Lancaster, in March, April, round about April. And what they’d done, they’d decided to do a daylight raid, a low level daylight raid on a town called Augsburg in Germany. They sent six Lancasters flying at zero feet right across France, right into Germany –
AM: At zero [emphasis] feet?
HI: Zero feet, I mean zero – well when I say zero feet, about half of these buildings.
AM: Right okay.
HI: Can you imagine six Lancasters –
AM: No [laughs] –
HI: At that height over, just ducking over the trees, going as low as low as they could, else they would have invade [?] the radar.
AM: Right.
HI: Anyway, what happened – unfortunately there was squadron of Messerschmitts flying, I don’t know if it was practicing or flying, and of course they see these six Lancasters, and they immediately they shot down five [noise of shock from AM]. So outta the six they sent, one come back badly, badly damaged, and his name was Nevillson [name unclear] and he got the VC. The other five that was shot down got nothing [emphasis] so, he was fortunate, he was leading the squadron from the front and they gradually cut the other five down and he managed to avoid and managed to get back badly damaged. So, I’m just telling you that because it deal with another operation I went on. Anyway, we all got ready to takeoff, and everything was quiet in the – nobody spoke, when we was on ops, very rarely we spoke. The only time we spoke is when we was being attacked, when the navigator was giving instructions to the pilot, or the bomb aimer or me or the mid-upper or the rear gunner could see something downstairs they could identify and then inform the navigator what we see, and that helped him to crack the course. ‘Cause in those days, 1942, we had no radar. We had what they called Gee-box up to the coast and once we hit the coast the Germans blocked it, so it was from then onwards it was the navigator used to have to go from one spot to another spot, estimate the time of arrival at the other spot before he made a correction to the course, and of course things improved later on in ’43, and the gunners helped a lot because they could, especially the rear gunner could see, or the mid-upper could see different –
AM: Rivers, train lines and stuff like that.
HI: -- objects, yeah. And sometimes that wasn’t possible, there’d be ten-Thames [?] cloud. And then navigation become very, very difficult. And don’t forget we didn’t have no radar help whatsoever, but we managed and we flew over, as we took off we flew over the Dutch coast and the bomb aimer, he used to lay pronged in the nose [very unsure about what was said here], he said ‘skipper, enemy air coast [?] ahead, flak, flak.’ Always gunfire was called flak [emphasis]. So I looked down and I see all these beautiful, indescribable [?] lights, every colour, reds, blues, greens, there all tracers [?] from what they call night flak. They went up to about eight or nine thousand feet and then it dropped down again. And that’s when flak –
AM: And how high were you at that point?
HI: We was about twelve thousand feet. So when I looked down from mid-upper and I see that flak below us and I thought to myself ‘if that’s flak, we’ve got nothing at all to worry about.’ So we flew over Holland, don’t forget this was the early phase of bombing. Before that the bombing was nothing ‘cause they had obsolete bombing, bombing aircraft and no idea whether they reached the target. It was only in beginning, half way through 1942 they was giving the apparatus so they didn’t really find the target. Anyway, you crossed the Dutch coast and I’m in the mid-upper, spinning it round, and for about, I should imagine it was about hour, hour and a quarter, then the bomb aimer said ‘target ahead skipper.’ So then I thought to myself ‘well I’ll have a look to see what this target is all about,’ and I swung the turret around and I had really [emphasis], really the shock of my life. In front of us, with no exaggeration, was one solid massive explosion of shells. Absolute whole area was full up of high explosive shell fire, and we gotta fly through that. And searchlights were creeping about, and they had one searchlight which was radar operated and it was a different colour, it was blue, very light blue. And that was a searchlight, never missed. It went up bang, like that, straight onto an aircraft. It was radar controlled [coughs] excuse me [pause to drink] so when I see this huge massive explosion ‘cause I had a beautiful view, so I thought to myself ‘cor blimey, surely we haven’t gotta go through all this.’ And I could hear it, and the plane was bumping up and down from the force of the explosions and the skipper said to me ‘mid-upper, keep an eye above you, because bombers above you will drop their bombs on you’ which happened many times. So I said ‘okay skipper,’ and – we called the pilot skipper, always called him a skipper. Doesn’t matter what rank he was, always a skipper. Anyway, we, I started looking up and there right above us was a Lanc, bomb bay open, ‘cause you know the bomb bays were enormous, I says ‘there’s a bomber above us skipper with his bomb bay open, dive port.’ We dived port, good job we did because he was ready to drop his load, so we slammed our bomb bay shut, because we was on a run as well and, and the bomb aimer said ‘we’ll have to make a correction on our way into the target.’ You must realise that all around us these huge [emphasis] explosions of shells, I’m telling you not few, hundreds [emphasis] of ‘em exploding into the sky. Anyway, as we were flying in, the skipper said ‘skipper, I’ve lost the target point,’ he said ‘we’ll have to round again.’ And I just told you, the skipper never swore. I’ll tell you what [laughs] he said to the bomb aimer ‘you are a silly chap’ [laughs]. There was a few more words. So we slammed the bomb bay shut, went right through that target, went all through that explosions and the plane was rocking about, could hear shrapnel hitting the bloody machine, in our machine, and we went round and we do a dogleg. We approached the target like that, and then we go like that, like that, in again. But you had to be very, very careful ‘cause when you left the target and you was gonna come in again, you was coming across the last of the bombers that was going in. And it was very, very, very dangerous. Anyway, when we went round, and by that time the German radar was on us and it was giving us a real, real shellacking [?] I’ll tell you. Anyway, we made our run round, opened the bomb bay, dropped our bombs, slammed the door, slammed the door shut and what we usually do then, you couldn’t – slammed the doors shut but you couldn’t get away, you had to stay straight and level for another forty seconds because the camera was turning around and at the same time you was dropping what they called a photo-flash [?]. That was in the fuselage. And as the photo-flash dropped down, the cameras turning over, and they took a picture, an actual picture, of you bombing the target, which was very, very important because if you didn’t bring back a picture the intelligence officers said to you ‘well it’s your word against mine that you went there,’ even if the aircraft was full of bloody holes, they still say ‘we don’t believe you,’ well, ‘not saying we don’t believe you but you’ve got no proof that you went to the target so it don’t count, so you can go all that way there and back for nothing,’ which happened several times. Anyway, we slammed the bomb bay down, we made a dived [emphasis] to the port, turned round and come back and that’s when your trouble started, the fighters. But that time they wasn’t so dangerous as what they were to be. They, we used to see the fighters flying about and straight away, I don’t know if it was instinct or not, when I see a fighter, I wouldn’t fire on him unless he was interfering with us, I let him go, because generally you’d find on a fighter he had huge [emphasis] canons and you had no chance, I tell you, you had no chance whatsoever.
AM: So you’re just causing trouble for yourself really –
HI: Yeah because they could stand off from two, three hundred yards and you couldn’t do nothing about it, ‘cause your 303 went about a hundred yards and started dropping what they called a gravity drop. They had canons and he could rake you [?] which happened a couple of times. Anyway, we slammed the bomb bay shut, and we started coming back, and the bomb aimer said to the skipper and the navigator, ‘skipper, we can’t breathe. We’ve got no oxygen.’ And what had happened, the shrapnel had cut through the oxygen lines, so the skipper said ‘alright, so what we have to do is dive down below ten thousand feet,’ which we did do, and coming home in the mid-upper I thought to myself, ‘if this is bloody Happy Valley, I hope we don’t go anywhere that’s miserable’[laughs]. And I’ll tell you what, it’s a terrible, terrible place. Anyway we got down to – we crossed the Dutch coast at about four thousand feet, and these beautiful lights we see were flashing past us like that, all over, and lucky enough we managed to get through a few bangs and we were damaged but not that bad. And we dropped down about two thousand feet and we headed home, and I thought to myself ‘dear oh dear, I got thirty of these, thirty trips to do like that before we get a rest.’ And we landed, and I was exhausted. Even at that age, at seventeen, I was exhausted. And we went into the briefing room and I stood there and we was asked a load of questions, and they said to me, it was only my first trip, they said to me ‘what do you think?’ And I said ‘I see four or five bombers exploding in the sky,’ I said ‘apart from that everything was alright.’ He said ‘you never seen no bombers’ – this was the officer, the briefing officer telling me that, he wasn’t even a flyer. He’s saying ‘you didn’t see no bombers blowing up, that was scarecrows.’ What the Germans were firing up shells to mimic a bomber exploding, and they kept this up right the way through the war.
AM: So it was true, you hadn’t, you’d seen the scarecrows, not a bomber blowing up.
HI: No, no they were actually aircraft blowing up in the sky. They did admit after the war there was no such thing as a scarecrow.
AM: Ah right.
HI: They admitted it, the Air Ministry, but they kept it a –
AM: So why did they say that?
HI: Well they – one of the reasons was they didn’t want us to duck and dive about. They wanted us to fly straight and level, ‘cause it was dangerous anyway, ducking and diving. But every time we went back we say we seen three or four, sometimes more than that, explosions, literally exploding in the sky. They said ‘no, that’s German scarecrows to demoralise you.’ Anyway, we got back and in the briefing room he said, he told me about the scarecrows so I thought ‘oh well, that’s it.’ Anyway, I didn’t know how exhausted I was, it was only a four and three-quarter hour trip. I went to bed and I felt absolutely exhausted. And I think the mental strain of the first trip. Anyway, we went back to the mess, we went to bed, and I think next morning we had a day off. The following day I think we went to Bremen, and the reason why went to Bremen, or Bremen [different pronunciation, shorter vowel sound] as they called it, they was building the submarines, the U-Boats there.
AM: Right.
HI: And we went across the Baltic that time. We didn’t see no flak until we hit Bremen, and the flak was unbelievable. It was worse than Dusseldorf.
AM: Were you in the rear gunner at this –
HI: I was in the rear turret, yeah.
AM: So you’d moved to the rear turret by this time?
HI: Yeah. And different position and the different visibility of the – when you’re in the rear turret you can see that way, see the bits you couldn’t see really above you or at the side of you –
AM: Or behind you.
HI: And at that time, the Germans were only attacking from dead astern, port over or starboard over . That was the method of attacking at that time [emphasis], things were getting much, much worse, but they had a little bit of a chance because if they come in close you had four guns here and you could – you had a bit of a chance, not a lot, but you had a bit of a chance. Anyway, I think it was after that trip, couple of trips, I complained to the engineering officer that the rear turret, that the oil for the Merlin engines was coating the Perspex in the rear turret, which obviously, the exhaust was coming out. So we was sitting in the crew room, the officer come in, he said ‘we solved the problem of the oil on the turrets,’ and I thought ‘well that’s good’ ‘cause after about two hours this oil used to go onto the Perspex, it was starting to be difficult to see outta it, and when we went out there [chuckles] what they had done, they had taken the whole Perspex out [chuckles]. So there we were in a rear turret with no bloody Perspex, and I tell you what, it was cold [emphasis].
AM: How did that – what so nothing between you –
HI: No, just – they took the whole of the front of the Perspex out. We used to look through, they took out because the oil.
AM: So it was just you [emphasis] and sky –
HI: Yeah, yeah.
AM: Nothing between you?
HI: No, no. Well the Perspex only stopped the slipstream but they took the Perspex out. Yeah, on all the Lancs, but they solved the problem [laughs]. Anyway, we –
AM: But the oil would just hit you in the face instead.
HI: Yeah, but it was, it wasn’t so bad because you could just wipe it with your glove with it [AM laughs]. But, we got rid of the – it wasn’t such a huge amount but it was enough oil to stop, to obscure your sight a bit, you know. And you had to be really, really on your toes all that time you was in that turret. It was bitterly cold in there, forty-five, fifty below zero, was nothing.
AM: Did you ever have an occasion when your suit didn’t work, or?
HI: Yes sometimes it, it didn’t work a couple of times. I burnt me foot ‘cause it was a new, new idea you know, they’d, after the war they made electric blankets [AM laughs] that was only through the electrical heated suits and it’s the short shirts – it’s like everything in the war, everything was crash, bang, wallop, get ready , but every gunner was issued with an electrical heated suit, and they were good when they worked. So I’d done my first op, and I thought I was proud of myself, but I had other twenty-nine to do. I mean, twenty-nine successful [emphasis] ones, so you can, you can go all the way there, and you get, you get engine trouble and you gotta come back, that don’t count. Even in respect of what you’ve gone through, it didn’t count.
AM: You had to drop your bombs on the target for it to count.
HI: Yeah, the gunner target, yeah. You see, what actually happened, I think at the beginning of the war, the few of them used to go to North Sea, drop their bombs and come back and say yeah they’ve, they’ve, and they – ‘cause they realised Germany wasn’t being bombed really, it was a, the most that we got to was five miles from the towns [?] so what they decide to put the camera in, and the photo-flash. And that stopped it all, ‘cause you had to bring back a picture. The first thing they asked for when you walked in, ‘have you got your picture?’ It was the first thing – [unclear] you’d land on the aircraft, there was a [unclear] photography unit come out and take the film out, and there’d be developed or they used to take it back to the crew, the, where we was being briefed, and they could see if we bombed the target or not. Anyway, so we went to Bremen, we gained a good shellacking [?] and we done a bit of damage there, and we come back, and I was blowing my chest out, I’d done two trips [laughs]. The following, following day, er day after that, we went to Wilhelmshaven, and that was worse. That’s where I was really in full, full strength of building submarines there, and we did – it was devastating the bombing we done there, it was very successful, they held up the submarine building for a long while, and then I’d done, I’d done three trips, and I was, you know, thinking to myself, well –
AM: Were you scared?
HI: Frightened outta my bloody life. The first one, I told you, that first one, Dusseldorf, I could not believe, I could not [emphasis] but everyone was the same –
AM: Did you talk about it?
HI: No, no we never talked about it, no. I’ll tell you one thing, we used to get crews coming straight from OTU into the squadron, ‘cause their losses were horrendous you know, we was losing so many aircraft, and they’d say ‘what’s the ops like?’ and we’d always used to say ‘you find out, you find out yourself.’ We never said ‘oh it’s terrible over there’ or nothing, never. And I don’t know if that helped them or not, but a lot of the crews only done one trip before they got shot down, hell of a lot of ‘em. Just one – in fact, what they used to do when a crew come from OTU, they used to let the pilot fly with an experienced crew on his first trip, so he’d understand what an actual raid was. Very often he never come back off his first trip, it happened time and time again. The crew used to be walking about the station with no, waiting for a new pilot. Yeah, happened many times. Anyway, after Wilhelmshaven we went back to Happy Valley again, and this time, I tell you what, I thought Dusseldorf was bad, we went to Essen [emphasis] and Essen was something out of this [noise of disbelief] something outta, I tell you what, it was absolutely ferocious. The flak was enormous, everywhere you look there was shells bursting, aircraft blowing up in the sky, aircraft going down in flames, and I had something with me because we just went through – we always got hit, always got hit with flak, big holes in the aircraft, but when we got back they used to bang ‘em and tap ‘em back and –
AM: Bodge [?] ‘em up.
HI: Yeah, that’s it [chuckles]. Anyway, we went to Essen, then we went to Munich, and I’ll tell you how my luck is, what happened, losses at Waddington on 9 Squadron, even those few weeks I was there, was horrendous. So they sent two scientists down from Cambridge with a new device to put into the rear turret so that when a fighter was five or six hundred yards away, which we couldn’t see, they could see us on their radar, this instrument was radar. It could pick up the fighter and warn us with a red light that there was a fighter in the close vicinity. Unfortunately the first time the squadron was equipped with them, we lost two aircraft and the Germans must have sorted the, must have examined the wreckage and seen this device in the rear turret and copied [unclear] a wavelength or whatever it was, anyway we went to Munich and that was a long trip, that was about eight and a half hours and we went over, and how the navigator found Munich I’ll never know ‘cause we went over in ten-tenths cloud, that means to say underneath you was solid cloud, but he found Munich as – before we reached Munich the cloud broke and there was Munich and we did, we did give it real good hiding.
AM: Is this day time or night?
HI: It’s night time –
AM: It’s night time isn’t it?
HI: Never, never done daylight.
AM: But you could still see it, so how come you could see it at night time?
HI: We could see it yeah because the – a couple of people had been bombing it and the searchlights –
AM: Right.
HI: And you could see the town anyway. You – but that’s why bombing – they, they said ‘well why did you bomb areas’ – the only way you can do night bombing was to, at that time was area bombing and in that area you probably got a load of factories you could destroy, but you couldn’t pick out – it was very, very difficult to pick out an individual target so you had to bomb an area, they used to pick an area out. This was before pathfinding [murmured agreement from AM] so we used to drop flares ourselves, we dropped a few flares as we was going in, or people before us would drop a few flares, and you’d sit and the bomb aimer would see the target.
AM: Who dropped the flares, the bomb aimer?
HI: The bomb aimer, yeah. Someone on the squadron [very unclear what was said here] would drop a few flares and then down they went, but that was the beginning, when we really first started bombing Germany, before that it was a joke. Anyway, we bombed Munich and we made a good frame [?] on it actually, and coming back the skipper said ‘I think we’ll fly through cloud’ because the fighter activity, we could see the fighter flares, and so he said ‘if we go through cloud we won’t meet any fighters,’ which we did do, so we was flying for about an hour in the cloud and all of a sudden the cloud broke clear, and believe it or not, right by my rear turret, as I looked outta my rear turret was a Ju-88. I tell you what he was no more than thirty yards [emphasis] behind us. And he opened fire with his cannons and the tracer went just above the aircraft, just missed us. The reason was that he was so close and we was up and down like that and I suppose as we went down he fired and he missed us. Anyway, we opened fire, me in the rear turret and the mid-upper ‘cause he was right close to us, and down he went, he spun over and down he went.
AM: So you got him?
HI: Yeah we got him, yeah.
AM: Which one of you got him, do you know?
HI: We don’t know, I think –
AM: Both of you?
HI: We both opened fire on him, and he was more surprised than what we were, he never expected it, and down he went. Lucky enough because usually once the night fighter got on your tail, it was very, very difficult. Anyway we, when we got back we told the intelligence officer that this night fighter had followed us through ten-tenths cloud for an hour ‘till the cloud broke. So they put two and two together and realised the apparatus they’d put in the turret was sending out a ray for the Germans to pick up and that’s what he was following us on. So what – immediately they took the radar thing out of the turret and I don’t know if it made any difference or not. After that we were talking and laughing about it and they said ‘you gonna do some low level formation flying in daylight,’ so we thought ‘well surely we’re not gonna have another daylight raid after the huge loss to 44 Squadron,’ and I mean we never even considered [emphasis] that they would do anymore daylight raids. So anyway, we done this practice formation, well it’s not formation flying – at that time there was over ninety Lancs in 5 Group, and there was ninety of us flying over Lincoln, around this area, right on the ground, well I don’t mean on the ground, as high as these buildings. Everyone was moaning down below because can you imagine ninety Lancasters flying about thirty or forty feet and they said ‘you’re gonna have to cut the squadron of Spitfires doing damning runs [?] on you.’ So I’m sitting in my turret, and the Spitfires come straight for me, and he was so close our slipstream hit his, hit his wings, and he turned like that, and being so low, he couldn’t, he couldn’t get outta the dive and he went straight in the deck. And I was ‘that don’t sound too bad, that’s gonna happen.’ Anyway –
AM: What happened to him? Crashed? Killed?
HI: Crashed, just crashed yeah. And when I looked along the road there was about three or four Spits on the deck, burning [emphasis] doing the same thing, come straight in –
AM: So they were killed?
HI: And the slipstream, they had no chance of correcting, correcting, ‘cause it’s too low on the ground. Anyway, on the Saturday they said ‘there’s gonna – report to your flights ‘cause there’s gonna be a daylight raid.’ So we went out to do the what they call a night flighting test, and when we landed there was the trailer, but all it had on it was six [emphasis] one thousand pounders. So we knew it was gonna be a long, long journey. We were – a bomb load like that was only a third of the weight of what we’d usually take to the Ruhr, so we were, obviously it was gonna be a long journey. We went to the briefing –
AM: Can I just ask, so why obviously, ‘cause that would conserve the fuel because you had a lighter load?
HI: Yeah we had to take more fuel and less bombs, so –
AM: Yep, okay.
HI: So actually we knew the distance when we see a big petrol load [emphasis] going in we knew we were on for a – we see a small bomb load we knew, the petrol, it was being loaded up for all the tanks and we knew we was on for a long trip. Anyway, we went and had our – even at that time, we’d already had breakfast, but they sent us out and said ‘we’re gonna have bleeding bacon and eggs’ [laughs]. That was always done, it don’t matter what time of the day it was bacon –
AM: Well what would happen if you didn’t like bacon?
HI: Well –
AM: What did they get, sausage?
HI: There were a few Jewish people who, they had to eat the bleeding bacon [laughs].
AM: Did they, they ate it?
HI: Yeah, well, by then I’d done five or six trips, and I thought ‘so I better eat the food, you never know what’s gonna happen.’ Anyway, we went to the briefing at about ten o’clock, Saturday morning, it was, in October, round about, I forget the date, about the tenth of October, and we went to the briefing, and the officer come in, pulled the blind down, and there it was. Place called Le Creusot. It was right on the other side of France, nearly on the Swiss border. It was a nearly ten and a half hour trip and we were looking at each other, and they said ‘you’re to fly as low as possible, even lower than that if you can,’ and they said ‘there’ll be two hundred Spitfires,’ or hundred, two or three hundred Spitfires ‘escorting you to the coast,’ but the trouble was the Spitfires went to the wrong bleeding place, we never see ‘em. So we crossed the French coast at about the height of these buildings, and then you imagine what a sight that must have been , ninety-two Lancasters flying –
AM: What a noise [emphasis] never mind a sight.
HI: Yeah, there was loads and loads of ‘em. And all we got was the French girls waving at us and I thought ‘that’s handy,’ and everybody was coming out and waving, it was a beautiful day, and we went right across France. I mean right across France, looking, wondering where the fighters was ‘cause there was thousands of by that time, ’42, there was hundreds and hundreds of fighters in France –
AM: German fighters?
HI: Yeah, German fighters in France. Anyway, we went right across France, there was no incidents, everybody was waving, and we approached the target [coughs] excuse me, and six of us had to break off and bomb the power station that was supplying the electricity to this huge armament factory in Le Creusot. It was a huge armament factory, nearly as big as what the Germans had, and they was producing armaments for the German army. So we broke off, telling you now there was six of us who broke off, Guy Gibson was with us, he was on our port side, and he was on 106 Squadron, Guy Gibson was on, and his second in command was flying the other Lanc, and on our starboard side was two Lancasters from 50 Squadron on the other side, we was in the centre and there was six of us. We broke off and went straight to this power station. Oh, and as we approached the power station, one of the Lancasters on our starboard side just went straight in the deck and exploded. We were – he had six one thousand pound bombs on it, and it literally went straight in the deck and exploded. What happened we don’t know.
AM: Don’t know.
HI: Anyway, the five of us carried on, Gibson was on our portside with his second in command and we was in the centre, and the last one of 50 Squadron was, was on our starboard side. Anyway, we bombed the power station and we absolutely flattened [emphasis] it. We was carrying six one thousand pounders, and we went and we climbed up a little bit and dropped ‘em, and we could see that the whole place was flattened. In fact, the factory was – actually I went back there last year, to the factory and it’s bombed, still bleeding bombed [unclear, laughs]. Anyway –
AM: Did you get your photo?
HI: Pardon?
AM: Did you get – not last year, I mean in 1942.
HI: No we didn’t, I don’t think we took a photo because it was daylight and everything –
AM: So they knew –
HI: Everyone was bombing the same target. Anyway, the ninety Lancs turned round, it was ninety-two ‘cause when we turned around there was only ninety-one, one had blown up in the sky, and we came back over the – by the time we’d got to the French coast it was getting dark –
AM: Still flying really low level?
HI: Yeah, and we started climbing when we got to the French coast, and as we passed the French coast it was getting dark, and we was flying for about another thirty or forty minutes, and all of a sudden the sky was smothered in bloody high explosive shells again. So the pilot said ‘where the bloody hell are we,’ so the skipper said ‘ I think we’ve, I’ve miscalculated and we’re flying over Jersey,’ and we were over Jersey with these huge explosions coming up, anyway the pilot called him a nice fella again, he said ‘stupid chap you are’ like that, and we branched out and come back, but that was a catch that, Jersey was very, very heavily armed, and anybody strayed off the course they wait for you. Shot down quite a few bombers over there. Anyway, we got back and went to the briefing, we were told exactly what had happened, and they confirmed that we done a good job there –
AM: Good.
HI: And I thought ‘there won’t be no more daylight raids after that.’ And we went to, in a week, we had a couple of days off and we went to Genoa [emphasis], and we couldn’t make out why we was going all the way to Italy, it was eleven hour trip to bomb Genoa, but we soon found out because on the Thursday [emphasis] they said, a briefing for Saturday, a daylight raid. So we said ‘surely we’re not having another daylight raid, we was lucky we got away with La Crusoe.’ Anyway, believe it or not, the target was Milan, and we was gonna bomb it, in daylight, taking it from a very, very low level ‘till we got to the Alps, we couldn’t go low level so we had to wander through the Alps, and there was ninety- two Lancasters, darting and diving through the Alps.
AM: Had the Spitfires turned up this time?
HI: No we never see no bloody Spitfires at all this time, and same again, we went right across France, no opposition whatsoever. We went through the Alps, and this is what I call a terror raid. We went across Lake Como about hundred feet then, we climbed to three hundred feet, and there was Milan waiting for us. No air raid shelter, no flak, they never expected British bombers to come all the way from England in daylight, never expected.
AM: Could you, were you low enough to actually see people in the –
HI: Pardon?
AM: Were you low enough to actually see people?
HI: It was, we was that low, we dropped down to about a hundred feet, hundred and fifty feet over Milan, we could see everybody in the streets, in the restaurants, we could see ‘em all. And we see ‘em started running about, there was no alarm given, and the city was completely open, and imagine ninety-two Lancs with six one thousand pounders on. We caused absolute havoc there, and a few of the boys I know were machine gunning, which I thought was wrong. Anyway, we climbed up again, came back, slid our way through the Alps, dropped down again to nought [?] feet and came right across France again.
AM: You missed Jersey that time.
HI: Yeah, we missed Jersey that time. We had our pullovers on [laughs].
AM: What did you feel about that then? The fact that you could actually see people?
HI: Oh we could see ‘em yeah, yeah because we –
AM: What did you, did you talk about it afterwards?
HI: No, we never talked about air raids, never mentioned it. Once you got back it was finished. No body, and same as the logbook, all we used to put in the logbook was the raid, the time, we never, what we should have done was put a little, exactly what happened, but when you put your books into the commanding officer to be signed once a month, [unclear] shooting, just put down what the raid was and that was it, that was what we used to do. But we should have done, we should have put the whole story of what exactly went on. And after that raid believe it or not the Ities [?] didn’t want to know anything more about the war, and there was huge – we had a big publicity the next day in the Daily Express, had a huge photo of Number 9 Squadron, coming back off the raid, and they reproduced it in Italy with, English Gangsters they called us, and there we are. I think we lost four aircraft that night, I don’t know where we lost them, might have been technical trouble, I don’t know, but, to go all that way in daylight and not see a German fighter was incredible. And after that we felt ourselves very, very, very lucky. It was about my ninth trip then, I was one of the top, experienced men then –
AM: And you’d shot somebody down by then.
HI: Yeah, yeah. But we’d, we were the top men in the squadron, we’d done about nine or ten trips.
AM: And you were seventeen.
HI: Yeah, yeah. And from then things got worse. Worse and worse and worse. The –
AM: In what way worse, Harry?
HI: The fighters got much more efficient, and their radar got much more efficient. Their guns got more efficient. Search lights got better, and more, and they had guns that fired with radar and they never missed. I remember later on in the year on my second tour we was bombing a place in the Ruhr Valley, and we was going in, our squadron, and as we was going in, there was people in front of us bombing, and they’d already turned starboard and coming out again, and for some reason, I don’t know, a Halifax [emphasis] I don’t know if it was in our squadron or the squadron beforehand, instead of going hitting the target, I don’t know what happened, he turned and joined the aircraft that was coming out of the, from the bombing run, which was in daylight, and there was a big gap between us going in and those coming out, and then he flew across, and as he flew across the flak went bang, bang, and the third shell hit him right underneath, and just exploded, yeah. Why he done that I don’t know, ‘cause we was all in the shadow of the silver paper we was dropping, and that helps with the – this one had got outta range with it going across and they shot him down straight away, yeah. And as it went on, we used to get leave every six weeks, and Lord [pause] what his name, Rank, Rank, wasn’t Rank, it was the er, the bloke that owned Morris, BMC, owned BMC, and he said, and he gave every aircrew bloke that was on ops, when he went on leave he doubled their pay, for a weeks leave yeah, he done that right through the war. Must have cost him a fortune.
AM: Every airman?
HI: Yeah, well it was in Bomber Command.
AM: In Bomber Command.
HI: Who was flying. He used to give ‘em – he used to, he used to double our pay, yeah.
AM: You know what, just going back to operations, you know the gaps between them, as in a day, a couple of days?
HI: All depending upon the weather. It was entirely dependent upon the weather. If the weather was, it was a bright – I’ll tell you one we went one, we went on one and I still think about it, it was a full light night, getting onto Christmas I think it was, and they said ‘there’ll be no ops tonight because there’s bright moonlight and no cloud,’ and it was suicide to go over there. Anyway, they said they’d picked out sixteen Lancasters, they’d picked out about eight from our squadron, four from 44 and I think four from another squadron, they said ‘we want you to do a low level night time raid on small towns just outside the Ruhr Valley.’ And the excuse they gave us was that the civilian population wasn’t getting any rest from the bombing raids on the Ruhr Valley and they was letting them come to these small towns to get rest. That’s why they wanted to go over there and liven ‘em up. So, it really was a terror raid and we carried sixteen one thousand pounders with a delayed charged of about half an hour, and we found this small town, we was after, just outside the Ruhr Valley, and we went right down, it was brilliant [emphasis] moonlight we were in, we went right down this village or small town and dropped the sixteen one thousand pounders right down the centre of the town. And I often wonder what happened about that, but I don’t, there was no need really to do that bombing really, but there you go, that was war.
AM: Well you called it a terror raid.
HI: Pardon?
AM: You called it a terror raid?
HI: Yeah, yeah, and that was Christmas, went home and had some leave, came back and we started again. And by that time, all the crews that I knew when I joined the squadron in June had all gone, they’d all gone. All been shot down.
AM: Every single one.
HI: Yeah, and they was all new recruits except us, and we was all NCOs.
AM: What do you think kept your plane – why your crew when all the rest of them got shot down? What can you say?
HI: I don’t know, I don’t know. I’ll tell you, shall I tell you?
AM: Go on.
HI: Well, what they used to do, before you went on a raid they used to give us a bag of sweets –
AM: Go on, keep going. I know the story, but keep going.
HI: Oh you know the story do you?
AM: You told me earlier on, but tell me again.
HI: And, we couldn’t undo the sweets with the cellophane, so we used to throw them out of the rear turret, and the Germans knew that and that’s why they never shot us down. ‘Cause they wanted the sweets [laughs]. That’s only a joke [both laugh]. I don’t know, I got no idea. Well, what actually happened, the crew I was with, I said they’d already done fourteen trips on Wellingtons when I joined them, they finished, and they finished, we finished our tour, was up to about sixteen, fifteen or sixteen trips, and I was left with no crew, and I was sitting in the mess, and a bloke walked in, I knew him as Sergeant Doolan, pilot, and he said ‘my rear gunner Robbie has just been killed, would you take his place?’ That was, that was luck really, so I said ‘alright, I’ll become your new rear gunner’ which I did do, and we was an NCO crew, and we was the only crew to, that I know of, all the time I was there, that finished the tour. And how many crews we lost, Lord knows.
AM: But you were the common denominator.
HI: Yeah, yeah –
AM: From the first sixteen and then fourteen and then the –
HI: Yeah, and then, we was all NCOs and we finished the tour, yeah. And I think the pilot got the DFM, and none of us got even a mention of a medal. And there was – but the thing was, what was happening by then was the Germans had come up with a new technique called Schräge Musik, that was what they’d come up with, they’d put two cannons at eighty degree, put the two cannons behind the cockpit at eight degrees so there was the aircraft, and these two guns stuck up like that –
AM: Okay.
HI: And all they had to do, they had radar, and all they had to do was coast [?] yourself underneath a bomber and just fly underneath him. You didn’t have to have no sight, no tracer, it just went underneath the aircraft, up to the petrol tanks, quick squirt, and we used to see ‘em blowing up but we couldn’t make out, we used to come back and tell ‘em that we seen aircraft blowing up in the sky, there was no flak and no fighters we could see, and the, and they literally shot down thousands [emphasis] of bombers, and not once did they ever mention what was going on at the briefing, not once. Never.
AM: Would there have been any way to avoid them if you’d have known about them?
HI: Well, if we knew and known about it, which they knew what we’d be doing, we’d start jiggling up and down, so they wouldn’t get a clean shot at us, but then when you think about it, you get five or six hundred bombers doing that in pitch darkness, you’re gonna get, gonna get a lot of problems. And that was it, but they were shooting them down, ah, unbelievable. Yeah, you had to be lucky really, because if you bowed out you had to be lucky, because if the civilians, you come out near a target and the civilians get hold of you they’d rip you to pieces. Yeah, and the Gestapo shot a few as well. If you was lucky the Luftwaffe got hold of you, was alright, but, or the army got you –
AM: But you never got shot down?
HI: No, I never got shot down, no.
AM: What happened at the end of your first tour, then?
HI: What happened then, finished my tour, didn’t get no bloody medal, don’t know why not –
AM: Even though you shot one down, ‘cause people got medals for that didn’t they?
HI: Yeah I know. Anyway, I went as an instructor, and then I realised how risky this business was, because all [emphasis] that was coming from OTUs were crews being trained in Canada. And when you think they were being trained on single engine aircraft in beautiful weather, all they had to do was follow the railway line from one point to another, everything was easy. Of course when they come to London, especially, and England, especially where, with the weather, and was OTU we had to train ‘em for three or four months before they went on operations, and hell of a lot of ‘em got killed on accidents, but they were very raw, they should have had much, much more training, but then again –
AM: And how old were you at this point? Eighteen?
HI: Yeah, eighteen, about eighteen and a half yeah. And I was an instructor, and apparently, I carried on for a little while and the, we had a bit of a go – oh they sent me up to a place up in Scotland to a gunnery school to do some – the instructors up there wanted to get on ops, don’t know why, but they said ‘you go up there and relieve them,’ about ten of us went up there, and we were in the mess one night, and we all got drunk and caused a bit of a havoc and we went in front of the CO next day, he said ‘I’ve had enough of you blokes, I’m posting you.’ So I thought ‘oh go on, I’ll be posted somewhere out in the Middle East’ or somewhere like that, and anyway I got posted to South End, about fifteen miles from where I lived, and I was thinking ‘be at home every night’ and while I was there, what we was doing there was flying drogues [?], the flak along the south coast, we had a big drogue pulled behind, and I tell you what, when I see that I knew we had no chance at all. They had these, we had to use a toeless drogue, and they used to fight, not at the drogue, a couple of degrees past the drogue, because they kept hitting the drogues and it was becoming expensive. So, but the flak [emphasis] to follow you, right, same height, would follow the drogue all the way along. Anyway, after a while they said ‘you’re posted,’ and this I knew was why the government knew what was going on in Germany with the fighters. They said ‘you’ve been posted to the 77 Squadron, Halifaxes.’ So I thought ‘alright,’ so and when I got up there –
AM: Where was that? Where was it?
HI: Er, Full Sutton I think, yeah Full Sutton. And when I got up there, the CO said he wanted to see me when I got up there, so I thought ‘that’s handy, the bloody warrant officer and the CO wants to see me, I must be important’ and he took me out to the, where the arment [?] officer, out to a Halifax, and what they had done they’d cut a big hole in the bottom of the Halifax and placed a point manual point five over the hole –
AM: Point five –
HI: Yeah, point five, point five machine gun.
AM: Okay.
HI: A much bigger shell than the 303. And they said ‘have you seen any German fighters coming, coming at you, you’ll be able to handle ‘em.’ So they knew what was going on. Anyway, we took off for Duisburg and I was sitting there – I was bleeding freezing, can you imagine there’s a big hole like that, about twenty thousand feet and –
AM: Hang on where’s this, is this in the middle of the plane?
HI: In the middle of the plane.
AM: Right, okay.
HI: A big hole.
AM: Where the bomb doors would have been?
HI: Er, it was different in the Halifax.
AM: Okay.
HI: It was different from the Lancaster. Most the bombs – up, further up and underneath the wings as well.
AM: Right.
HI: Anyway, they dug this hole, cut this hole in the Halifax and they had a point five there, and I sat there, and can you imagine it was about forty-five below, and it seemed the whole world was coming through that bloody hole. The pilot was moaning, the bomb aimer was moaning, and the – anyway, we’d done the bombing raid, come back and they complained bitterly about it, and that was the last that – and they said to me ‘we’re posting you to Driffield, to an Australian squadron’ and that’s where I went then, as a rear gunner at 462 Australian Squadron. I stayed there for a couple of months and I don’t know what happened there, I don’t know if I’d lost my logbook or – anyway, I done about eight or nine trips here and never even registered, and then they posted from there, from 64, er, 462 Squadron on Driffield to its other squadron which was at Driffield –
AM: Why did you keep, why did you keep getting posted to different ones?
HI: Well the pilot I went with in 462, bloke, Australian called Heurigen [unsure of spelling] – 462 they posted away completely [emphasis] but he, he stayed, he said ‘no I wanna stay here at Driffield’ and he went onto 466, and he took me with him. And when he finished, I was in, I didn’t know what to do, and they said ‘we want you to go to 158 Squadron at Lissett’ and that’s where I finished. I don about another ten trips there, and they said to me ‘you done enough, that’s it.’
AM: What was Lissett like?
HI: Nissan huts, terrible. Baking hot in the summer, freezing [emphasis] in the winter. And you come back off an op and you had to go in one of them bloody tin huts. The bedding was wet, yeah. But I survived.
AM: You did.
HI: Yeah, I really survived, yeah. All, most of them, all my friends went there, yeah, a lot.
AM: Was the DFC then for the number of operations you went on?
HI: Number of trips I done, sixty trips, yeah. Yeah, I done more now actually, but –
AM: Well the ones that didn’t yeah, didn’t get counted.
HI: Yeah.
AM: And then so from that point, when you did your last tour, sorry your last operation, then what happened, were you sent to demob?
HI: No, they said to me ‘what was your trade?’ The war had finished, and they said to me ‘what was your trade before the war? What did you do?’ and I said ‘I was an apprentice tailor,’ they said ‘we’ve got the job for you’ I thought – they sent me down to Newmarket on the racecourse, in charge of about eight or nine WAFs on sewing machines. I don’t know why they thought I was – they were making lorry covers on these machines, and they put me in charge of ‘em. Oh, when I was there.
AM: What was that like Harry?
HI: [Laughs] had a little giggle [laughter].
AM: So what, how old are you at this point you’re about twenty –
HI: About twenty, yes. Yeah, about, getting on for twenty.
AM: So go on, you had a little giggle [HI laughs], tell me [HI laughs] go on, tell me some stories.
HI: Yeah I was charge of them, that’s it [laughs].
AM: Right, alright then.
HI: Yeah and then I stayed in Newmarket – oh blimey, it’s, oh it’s only twenty past.
AM: No, we’re alright.
HI: Newmarket was a bombing station if you believe it or not. The Rowley Mile was a runway for 75 Squadron, a New Zealand squadron, and after the war they turned it into a Prussian [?] depot. They was dropping all the aircraft into Newmarket and crushing ‘em.
AM: Crushing them?
HI: Crushing ‘em. Hundreds of ‘em. Into this big machine they just went pfft like, just crushed ‘em up, piled ‘em up. As far as we could see was one huge pile of aluminium.
AM: Going back to you though, so you’ve had your giggle with your WAFs –
HI: Yeah.
AM: Then what? Did you get –
HI: I had a couple of giggles [laughter from both] but it was handy there because we could get up to London from Newmarket, they had a railway station –
AM: How long was it before you were demobbed then?
HI: Er, got demobbed in forty, 1946, August ’46.
AM: So quite early, a lot earlier than a lot of ‘em then? ‘Cause you’d been in the whole –
HI: I’d been in the whole, since [unclear] yeah. I come out, about to find a job, I couldn’t go back to tailoring, I’d missed it you know. Anyway, I tried, went back to tailoring and learnt a little bit. Things were very difficult when we come out, we had no houses, you can imagine London, there was all bloody roofs off the buildings, and then we had to wait for a house. I was married then.
AM: I was gonna say, where did, where did you meet your wife?
HI: I knew her from the, from the blackout. I was sitting on a seat in the blackout and she came along with her friend and we started talking and that’s how it started, and I, it was only when I [unclear] and we got married in forty, 1945, Christmas 1945, and I remember we, we done a couple of trips, and I remember I bombed Dresden, we bombed Dresden just after Christmas, February, but we got married on the Christmas, and I shouldn’t have got married ‘cause we had nowhere to bloody live, better than living with the mother-in-law for a little while, got fed up with that.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
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Annie Moody
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-23
Format
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01:15:35 audio recording
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AIronsH150723
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Conforms To
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Pending review
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
England--Lincolnshire
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Harry Irons. One
Description
An account of the resource
Harry Irons left a tailoring apprenticeship to join the Royal Air Force and trained as a wireless operator but actually became an air-gunner. He describes the uniform he wore and the unreliability of heated suits. Discusses the invention of scarecrows which crews believed were sent up by the Germans to distract and demoralise them. Also describes a number of operations including to the Ruhr Valley and a number of daylight operations including Le Creusot (17 October 1942) and Milan (24 October 1942). Goes on to discuss the removal of Perspex from Lancasters to prevent oil from exhausts from affecting visibility, the introduction of radar into the rear turret and it’s quick removal after it was found as used by Germany and Schrage Musik. He returned to tailoring following his retirement from the Royal Air Force.
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-10-24
1942-10-17
158 Squadron
462 Squadron
5 Group
50 Squadron
77 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Bombing of Augsburg (17 April 1942)
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
briefing
Distinguished Flying Cross
fear
Gee
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
Halifax
In the event of my death letter
Ju 88
Lancaster
military living conditions
military service conditions
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Nissen hut
radar
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Driffield
RAF Full Sutton
RAF Lissett
RAF Manby
Scarecrow
Spitfire
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/595/8864/PLashamB1501.2.jpg
da6d480d6a799fe46724652cc35229e9
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/595/8864/ALashamB150716.1.mp3
8a9d33f42649006ef03208c246e5f74a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Lasham, Bob
R L C Lasham
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lasham, RLC
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer R L C Lasham DFC and bar (1921 - 2017, 161609 Royal Air Force)and a photograph. After training in the United States and Canada he flew 53 operations as a pilot on 9 and 97 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Bob Lasham and catalogued by Nigel Huckins..
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AM: Okay, so this interview’s being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Annie Moody and the interviewee is Bob Lasham, and the interview’s taking place at Bob’s home in Wilmslow on today, the 16th of July 2015. So, thanks for agreeing, Bob, and if perhaps if we can start off and just tell me a little bit about early life, schooldays, et cetera?
BL: I’ll start at the beginning. I’m a Cockney; I came to be a Cockney because they say a Cockney’s someone who is, was born within the sound of Bow Bells, and I was born within two hundred yards of the Whittington Stone, where Dick is supposed to have heard the Bow Bells. Well, we had the Underground running underneath, tram running outside, I might not have done. But Laura and I [?] were on holiday to the Isle of Wight and the [unclear] Centre’s there, and I submitted their claim to them, they came to me [?] and they said ‘You’re trying to cheat, aren’t you?’ [slight laugh] So that was that. Elementary school, passed what they called a trade scholarship, so I went to a junior technical school in Kentish Town, travelling to and from on the Underground, penny return, yeah. [clock chimes]And – got my hearing aid in and it sounds so loud!
AM: And, as you can hear, it’s now eleven o’clock and the bells are chiming.
BL: Looking around for an apprenticeship, my parents said, ‘Look for a company which has a pension scheme.’ Went to three companies: Smiths, who used to make motorcars and instruments; a tool-making company in the middle of London, I would have liked to have gone there but they only had employed just over a hundred people, no pension scheme, so I went to British Thomson-Houston, very well-known company making heavy switchgear, electrical engineering. I realised later on I should have gone for mechanical engineering, but I wanted a reserved occupation. And, of course, the air raids started, and I realised ‘There’s a lot of work in this’. Whenever it was –
AM: [whispers] Sorry, carry on.
BL: Air raid one night, we all overlooked some playing fields, it was, like, a girls’ high school there, I used to look out of a window and watch them playing hockey, you know, dirty old, dirty old man, I was a young lad! [slight laugh] And the house directly opposite was bombed, we suffered some damage. If the bomb was at least a couple of seconds later, if it were coming from the east, it would probably hit our house. My parents were there, were in the Anderson shelter, I was asleep in the back bedroom, and I woke up covered with the ceiling. I think about that time I thought maybe it was safe to get out of London, and I think it was in about January or February ’41, signs were going up: people in reserved occupations can volunteer for flying duties in the Royal Air Force, the Fleet Air Arm, as part of [unclear]. So, couple of weeks later, I went down and volunteered, at somewhere near Euston it was, had an interview, very quick medical, and that was that. And three weeks later, had a letter from somebody or other saying would I go and report there again to register? I went in and saw the same people, said ‘Haven’t we seen you before?’ I said ‘Yes, you saw me about three weeks ago.’ ‘Oh, we’ve got all your details, you’d better go home.’ And I went home and waited, and finally called up in July, just after my twentieth birthday.
AM: So July 1940?
BL: 1941.
AM: ’41, sorry.
BL: ’41. By that time, well, production of air crew was like a Ford production line, it was running so smoothly. And [unclear] an Air Crew Reception Centre, AR – ACRC, known to everybody as Arsy Tarsy. Still to this days, you meet people, ‘Oh, were you at Arsy Tarsy?’ Yes. And er, there for, we were there for about ten days where we were kitted out, inoculations, FFI - Free From Infection. Look at the curly bits, make sure you’re not carrying livestock around. That continued as long I was an airman or an NCO, but once you were commissioned, they didn’t do it anymore; yeah, officers wouldn’t have to take their time with people [?], I suppose. While we were there – I can remember our first corporal – oh, we reported to Lord’s cricket ground, and there must have been an intake of, every week, about, I would say, three or four hundred, divided into flights of fifty, and the person in charge of our flight was Corporal Schubert. Whenever I hear a piece of grotty music, I always say ‘That sounds like Schubert’, and someone said ‘How’s that?’ I said ‘You’ve never met Corporal Schubert!’ But he was a good-hearted soul. A lot of the corporals had a grudge on their shoulder; they’d been in the Air Force for ten or fifteen years just being corporal, they knew we would be sergeants, you know, within no time at all. [Pause] Catering: we used to queue up in flights of fifty, eat in the London Zoo, and before we had a catering shed [?], knives and forks, as you walked out, you swirled about in a bucket of water and put them to dry; [stage whisper] I think the bucket of water was used for soup later on! But I seem to remember, we seemed to live mainly on kippers and sausages. Not many animals left in the zoo, but those that were, I’m sure, were fed a lot better than us. Still trying to think of the people I know; amongst the people I did know, a fellow called Harry Wilson, I’ll tell you about him later on. And we finally got our uniforms, and we used to have a little white flash in our caps to say you were a training air crew, and we all trooped off to, I think it was the Odeon in Leicester Square, to see “Target for Tonight”. I think we saw that and, when we came out, having made a big mistake. Anyway, next stop, Babbacombe Initial Training Wing: basic navigation, lots of keep-fit exercises, we had our own section on the beach, we could go swimming, were there for, I think it was about six weeks. Now, night train, next stop, Wilmslow [comical sotto voce] in the wild, woolly north, you know, and I can remember getting out of the station and walking through what is now Wilmslow Park – probably Wilmslow Park then– to the RAF camp, with carrying a kit bag very heavily loaded, and we were there for, again, for about couple of weeks. The second week there, we were all issued with civilian clothing, so we knew we were probably going to America. Two days later, they took them back again. I can - the only thing I can remember about it – the little belts children used to use with a sort of snake buckle on it, that was to keep the trousers up, yeah! Anyway, the Americans were not in the war, but they changed their laws so we could go into America in uniform – more of that later. And, once again, we travelled by night up to Gruddock /Grenock[?], all got on board the Louis Pasteur-it was a French cruise liner, French cruise liner. Some of us were sleeping on the floor, some on – stretching out on the tables with their heads up. I was a lucky one, I managed to get a hammock. We were there for about twenty-four hours, the boat was – in Gruddock [?], the boat was rocking up and down, and got up the next morning, there was a north westerly gale blowing, and a very small convoy, only about six, six vessels, and I was sick, practically everybody was sick, I should think. And then, that night, we left the convoy and sailed straight for Halifax. It was a fast boat like the Queen Mary, and we were there in eight, was it eight days, I think. Greeted at Halifax, a sort of [unclear] WVS, and they arranged to send telegrams to our folks in England saying that we’d arrived safely in Canada. Was a place called Malton in [pause] I’m not quite sure what the state was, except that it was a dry state, no alcohol for sale, and we were there not very long and, again, got on the train – four days. I couldn’t realise, no country could be that big, no! We had one stop in [pause] we stopped in Washington on the way down, that’s right, and we had some hours to spare, so some of us got hired a taxi, went to see the Washington Memorial and – Lincoln, sorry, the Lincoln Memorial –
AM: Lincoln Memorial.
BL: And then we arrived at Jacksonville in northern part of Florida. Again, we got off and we were taken out for dinner by the people of Jacksonville, I suppose, fifty of us by then. Was another night train and we arrived in Clewiston. I don’t know the geography of Clewi- Florida; at the bottom, there’s a very big lake-
AM: Yeah, I’m just working my way down.
BL: Lake Okeechobee, and we were just on the edge of Lake Okeechobee, in the middle of nowhere. Clewiston was a one-street town; they had a cinema, the Dixie Crystal – it’s funny how you remember these things – a bowling arrow – a bowling alley with a black boy to put the, ah, the skittles up afterwards, we did that. And they were surprised to see us in uniform because they had not been using it, and on the way down, someone enquired if we were an American football team ‘cause we were in uniform! [laughs] That’s beside the point. And we arrived overnight – seemed to have lost clothing overnight [?] – into breakfast, and there was this jug of light brown liquid to drink, it was cold tea! I never drink cold tea, but it was a great thirst-quencher. And we started flying on – it was called a Stearman, Stearman PT-17, and instructor was a chap called Tom Carpenter, and I was having trouble going solo – talk about luck! Half the course had gone solo and he hadn’t really told me what I was supposed to do, but on our desk – we had a big desk we used to use for swotting [?] – there was a book on flying training, and looked up landing. You – as you level out, you let the speed decay and finally your paces [?] down on three points; he didn’t tell me that I had to do that! Following day, I did three landings, he got out of the aeroplane and said ‘You can go solo’. [Unclear] he said ‘Look, Lasham, I was a bit bothered about seeing you doing that, sending you solo, but I’ve seen you recover from so many bad landings, I knew you’d recover from that.’ [laughs] And training proceeded. They had what they called a basic aeroplane then, a BT-13. My instructor was a Mr Dirigibus [?] - I think he had [unclear] – and he sent me solo very quickly; he didn’t like flying himself, I didn’t do much instruction with him. And then on to the Harvard afterwards, which was a nice aeroplane, and – remember the name of the – Charlie Miller was my instructor, he was a very nice fellow. Finally passed out, got my – we got our wings, I think it was in May.
AM: So how long had that taken?
BL: It took us about six months and quite a lot of the course failed. At that time, we were going out to America never, never having sat in an aeroplane at all, and usually about a dozen of the fifty would fail because they had no depth perception. And suddenly, someone in the UK realised we wasted a lot of money doing this, so they started getting people to start going solo in Tiger Moths over here before the sending them abroad, and the people in Canada, people in America, people in South Africa, people in Rhodesia, all over the world. And I finished me training, back to Canada, came back in a slower convoy, arrived in Liverpool. Liverpool was packed! [pause] I think that was the post, another charity appeal, I expect [sound of mail coming through the letterbox]. I’m sure you could have walked from Liverpool to Birkenhead just jumping from boat to boat. What a relief it was to get back in the UK! And down to Bournemouth, just two or three days in Bournemouth, we were sent on disembarkation leave, so I went home and saw my parents, saw my grandparents – they can bring you down – saw me granny, you know, sergeant’s, wing sergeant’s stripes, walked in, first thing she said: ‘Have you been up in an aeroplane by yourself yet?’ [laughs] Had no idea what was going on. Anyway, there’d be [unclear] an Advanced Flying Use, AFU, at Shorebury – you try saying ‘Shorebury, Shrewsbury, Shropshire’, which was the address, when you’ve had a couple of beers, you’re spitting over everybody! – and converted to Oxfords. And by that time, they’d ask you what you wanted to do, and, having been bombed in London, I thought ‘Oh, I’d like to be a night fighter pilot!’ So, came from there to RA – what was RAF Usworth, now, I think that’s the North East Air Museum now, just outside Sunderland. [Telephone rings] Forget it.
AM: You ignore the telephone, Bob?
BL: I, I do, yes; I can always pick it up later, see if there’s been a message. Err…Sunderland, near Sunderland. The, what they called the [unclear] side, the one hangar, was north of the Sunderland-Newcastle road. The southern part, which was the airfield, is now buried under the Nissan car factory.
AM: Right.
BL: Yes, yes. Anyway, they always had a medical when you arrived there, medical [?] inspection. I was in this chair, there was this beautiful, blue-eyed, young assistant, Joyce Farleigh [?] [pause, sounds of someone moving around the room]. Anyway, I saw her a couple of days later, we started going out together, and we were flying Avro Ansons, training radio observers. It was the airborne radar, preparation for going on to night fighters and, ah, [pause] were there for three or four months, so I got in quite a few more hours, which was useful later on, and then to Cranfield, for night fighter OTU, and enjoyed that, because we flew Blenheim 1’s, Blenheim 4’s, Blenheim 5’s, and then went on to Beaufighters. And taxied in one night, I put one beer on my Beaufighter whilst I was taxied [?] away onto the mud, put off the course [?] They were picky choosy, as my, as my grandchildren would say, and over half the course were failed. So I then went down to Brighton for what they called reselection, and [unclear] selection mark [?] ‘What would you like to go? Would you like to go to Air Transport Auxilliary, ATA?’ I said ‘No, I’d like to go to Bomber Command.’ So, finished up on Lancasters. Went to [pause] I – did I? No, I had to do another AFU on Oxfords, another few hours, and then finally to a place called Brigsley in Lincolnshire (that was really out in the sticks) and did my Lancaster conversion. One hour – two hours on Halifaxes and the rest on Lancasters, I’m glad I didn’t fly Halifaxes, I can’t remember the name of my instructor. Station commander there was a Group Captain Bonham-Carter. But basic radio receiver in the air force before that was called a TI-9 transmitter reception set, and he had a microphone in his battledress pocket ‘cause he was hard of hearing, and – I’m going aside a bit now – there was a museum at Winthorpe, just outside Newark; he founded it after the war.
AM: Oh, right.
BL: Back to where we were. He always made a point of [unclear] all the navigators, bomb aimers and pilots before they left. And I mentioned a chap called Harry, met up at ITW, he went to South Africa for his training, failed his pilot’s course, moved to old [?] Rhodesia and did his bomb aimer course. And we met up at Cottesmore when we were growing up; he said the first word he said to me was ‘Aren’t [?] you looking for a good pilot?’ and I said, you could [slight laugh] I said ‘Yes.’ He went in for an interview, Bonham-Carter, and got around that he’d failed his flying test, and Bonham-Carter said ‘What were you flying?’ He said ‘I was flying a Hawker Hart’ and that was the end of the conversation: Bonham-Carter deaf and a bloke who can’t fly a Hart. Switched off and Harry walked out! [laughs] What else happened there? Had a flight engineer - again, no flying experience. Waltzed through [?] his flight engineer’s course, airborne, and he was airsick every time he went up, so he had to be taken off-line. Now, a chap on the course with me was Mike Beetham [?].
AM: Oh, yes, yeah.
BL: Now, he’d gone off on a short course, I pinched his flight engineer, chap called Bill Gates [?], and he flew with me the rest of my operations. And then, from there to 9 Squadron, got there just before the Battle of Berlin. Not much happened there, oh, yeah, well, I suppose things did happen. Second, second dicky flight with a second pilot to fly it with – we didn’t, see, you just stood behind the chap who was flying – and it was the opening of the Berlin, Berlin and back, then, two or three nights later, going with my own crew, Berlin again, not, not a good start. And coming back – mind you, I was away [?] and new my first operation – Rear Gunner Eddie Clarke, now, he was an old man, he was in his thirties.
AM: Very old.
BL: Oh, ancient, yes, he’d been a driving instructor, and his oxygen had failed, and heating, obviously [?] had failed, and the net result was, he lost all the toes on his right foot, was taken off-line and we never communicated again, I think he pa – later on, when I was more experienced, I’d have come down to a lower altitude, but then they said ‘Stay with the stream’ and stay with the stream I did! [laughs] Great shame. I imagine, then, he probably had a job in the air force, he’d have kept his gunner’s badge, kept his sergeant’s stripes, possibly as a driving instructor. Incidentally, my wife did her driving at Liverpool – no, I’m sorry, Blackpool, yes, and passed her test there. [Pause] Anyway, 9 Squadron, again, luck. We used to do what was called bagging searches, so that I could look out my side and the flight engineer could look out his side, and we’d just started to roll and we were fired at, I don’t know, a [unclear], probably, so went into a corkscrew, and as we came up, I got another couple of bursts. If I’d have started that hanging search one second later, we’d have been shot out of the sky. My voice is going, isn’t it? [laughs] Anyway, we survived that. Again, rear gunner – from then on, we were getting any spare rear gunners – chap called Jack Swindlehurst, known as Jack Singleburst because he was a gunner, and a cannon shell hit the fire extinguisher behind his head and it peppered his shoulder with what was like gunshot wounds, but wasn’t seriously hurt, he was back flying again within a week. So, we carried on, and don’t think there were any other major, major instances there, and then Pathfinders.
AM: So this was 97 Squadron?
BL: 97 Squadron, yes, it was 9 Squadron before at Bardney. I wanted to go to Pathfinders, wireless operator said he’d be quite happy, so was my bomb aimer. Well, by that time, I’d collected another gunner, and a chap called Casson [?] (more on him later), and so off we went to Pathfinders. Now, a story goes around – I’m not sure this was my crew, which I suspect it was – three of them went to see Bennett and said ‘We don’t want to come to Pathfinders, we want to go back to your own squadron.’ He said ‘Well, I could post you back, but I’ll post every one of you to a different squadron.’ So they just decided to stick together. I made a promise, because people fell by the wayside, they’d be off flying, that I would carry on until everyone had finished his forty-five, which, that’s what took me up to fifty-three. So, off we went to Pathfinders. [Pause] Ah, luck again! I’ll come back to 9 Squadron: we were going to Leipzig, and I had a black navigator (my [unclear] chap was off with an appendix), Jamaican, the only black aircrew I ever met, very new, and they didn’t know anything about jet streams and so everyone arrived at the target early, apart from us, ‘cause he took us so far off track, we arrived there just as the raid was starting and came home, said there’ll be [unclear] there tonight, found out they’d lost sixty or seventy bombers that night. People were arriving early and circling, waiting for the Pathfinders to mark on time. They couldn’t mark early even if they arrived early, so again, luck came into it, yeah. Anyway, off to [pause] Warboys, that’s where we did three weeks’ Pathfinder training, including cross countries with an instructor, using the ground-marking equipment, H2S, and then to 97 Squadron at Bourn, and we were only at Bourn for three weeks, less than that, two weeks, didn’t operate from there, and we were posted back to 5 Group to do the marking for 5 Group, and Cochrane was CO, was Air Officer Commanding; it became known as Cochrane’s Private Air Force. Going back to Casson, my rear gunner. Just before leaving 9, I was allocated Casson, I think his crew had been killed, and he was unfortunate individual; he’d been a corporal physical training instructor, and I think he was rather keen to get the money of becoming a sergeant air gunner, but the only chap I’ve ever had had to have put on a charge. I felt he was – the crew used to go out to the aircraft every day, and the wireless operator was – wireless operator, rear gunner, [unclear] my upper gunner, and he never arrived on time and they had to clean his guns for him, so he was put on a charge that was modest and told not to do it again. But when we got to [pause] Warboys, doing our Pathfinder training, I was called to see Bennett himself, and my rear gunner had said he wasn’t going to – he was refusing to fly anymore, so Bennett said to me, ‘Well, when you get to squadron, don’t mention it to CO, because I think I’ve talked him out of it,’ but he hadn’t; when he got to Coningsby, he refused to fly, but I think he had more psychological problems. I gathered from my crew, amongst other things, he was incontinent, you know, he used to wet the bed, things like that, and he was taken off-line, what happened to him, I don’t know. Anyone who went – used to call it lack of moral fibre, anyone who had that disappeared quickly, because, in case it was catchy! Anyway, I was called in to see my CO, Wing Commander Carter, think it was, yes, and he told me what had happened, I said ‘Yes, I know.’ He said ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said ‘Well, Bennett told me not to,’ and I said ‘AOC tells you not to, you don’t,’ he understood that. And then I picked up a fellow called Edward Coke – Edward Cope, known as Joe to everybody, he was one of the fellows [?] before – he’d been on Sterlings, and he’d done with the [unclear] on Sterlings, and we flew together for the rest of the war. Not much happened at 97; we were very badly shot up over Bordeaux on one occasion in daylight, finished up diverting to Manston. Crew said they found over eighty holes in the aeroplane, mid upper gunner suffered some facial injuries; I think the Perspex surrounding us was shattered, bit went into his face, but even in later life, on certain days, you could just see the scars ‘round here, but he was very lucky, you know, all the rest of us got away with, without any problem at all. [Pause] Was that during the –
AM: How many operations did you do with –
BL: Fifty-three.
AM: Fifty-three.
BL: That was Bordeaux. [Pause] Collateral damage, we were bombing Munich, and I always used to make a point of going into the briefing room to find out where the latest searchlight belts were, used to do this at 9 Squadron. There was three of us used to be there: myself, Pilot Officer Blow and a chap called Bill Reid, we were the only three who ever did this and we all three survived our operations. So, we were over Munich, and we were coned by searchlights, you could see people weaving all over the sky to avoid it. I knew that it was clear to the near [?] south-east: full power, downhill as fast as we could go, and suddenly there was the most almighty clatter [coughs] we didn’t know what it was, and had to put one engine out of action, came back on three. We’d been hit by the small incendiary bombs, and they hadn’t burned; they made some holes in the wings, they knocked an engine out, and we came back –
AM: Came back on three engines.
BL: On three engines, they flew wonderfully well on three engines, and then [pause] I’m getting towards the end of my tour then. [Pause] D-Day; I remember D-Day very well. Wing Commander Carter, this target-if you can call it a target-we were over the French coast for about ten minutes, that was all, and we also had a Norwegian crew on board, chap called Jespersen. Lost two crews that night: Carter the CO and Jespersen. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, there was a Ju 88 patrolling there, got both of them. Everyone else thought it was a bit of a doddle, but on the way back, Harry was calling the H2S, he was, he’d become [?] my bomb aimer, there’s a set operator. Actually, because crews haven’t as a good a H2S, they just kind of scanned the channels; of course, it was full of ships, when we got back, we found it was D-Day.
AM: So you didn’t know it was D-Day, going to be D-Day?
BL: No, we were not told, we were – obviously, it was very important, because we always used to test our engines before we went to mix the magnesium – mag – magnetos were working, but the first time, there was a problem with two of the plugs, and the whole squadron, the squadron commander stationed and engineer were there, but – ground crew again: when the engine skipper ran the engine, switched it off, they knew which plugs it was, and we were on our way within five minutes and caught them up, so that was Operation D-Day. Operated again D-Day that night, I was rather pleased about that, and I think it went all fairly smoothly from there. I was off sick for a time, can’t remember what it was, and going back to a chap, Bill Reid, who’d driven across country, I said ‘Bill, do you think you could go up to Millfield, RAF Millfield?” That was where Joyce was stationed as an MT driver. I should say – go back again, when we – Joyce and I got engaged in 1941, and by nineteen-forty [pause] nineteen-forty – 1942, 1942, and then, when I went to Bomber Command, we decided to put it on hold – I mean, chances of surviving – so it was on hold. And we could [?] going up to Millfield, ‘Could you fly me up to Millfield?’ He said, ‘We could do that,’ he got the details there, he said ‘Well, I can get it, get it in, I think I can get it out’ – it was the middle of the, middle of the Cotswolds – not the Cotswolds, the, ah –
AM: Chilterns?
BL: No, meant up on Northumberland, the – ah, the Cotswolds, that’ll do, is it near Northumberland? No, the Cotswolds are lower.
AM: No, the –
BL: It’s the, ah [pause]
AM: Can’t remember.
BL: Should do it.
AM: It’s up above the Pennine Way.
BL: Oh, yes!
AM: It’s the – anyway, near Northumberland.
BL: And we arrived there. It was a fighter leaders’ school and they were training fighter leaders, and there was this great big aeroplane came in, and they were looking around at the great big bomb bay, and, sheer luck, Joyce was going on leave, so I waited for her. Went down to Newcastle, I spent the night in the YMCA, met her next day, went back to see her parents, and got [unclear] re-engaged. I only had two more to do, did the two ops, and then I finished. From the day going up to Millfield to see her to getting married, about three weeks went by. People now, saving up to get married, five thousand pounds, ten thousand. It cost me two pounds, three shillings and sixpence. And way I remember that, we had to – I went up with Joyce’s mother to arrange the wedding, saw the vicar, and he says, ‘That will be two pounds, three shillings and sixpence’, and two-three-six was also the phone box number of RAF Millfield where I used to talk to Joyce occasionally, and we spent the night in the same house; I slept with her father and Joyce slept with her mother.
AM: [laughs] This is the night before the wedding?
BL: The night before the wedding. We didn’t have a best man, but there was a, a relative who had a shoe shop, he was called in as best man; Joyce had an aunt, Aunt [pause] oh, I’ve forgotten her name now, her husband was in the air force but he was motor transport driver, he was a North hatter [?], she was Matron of Noffon [?], Matron of, ah, Honour. So, we walked down to the church, no taxis available – well, it was only just down the road, RAF Wooler – is it Wooler, in – what are those hills called, what would they be?
AM: Cheviots, it’s not the Cheviots?
BL: It is the Cheviots.
AM: Cheviots.
BL: Cheviots, of course, those are the big ones called the Cheviots.
AM: We got there between us!
BL: Yes! [slight laugh] And we walked back again and – where did we stay? It was an old lady we stayed with: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and she’d had Joyce a piece of lace done, and she wanted it back before we left, and we had our breakfast, caught the bus to Morpeth, stopped off and had tea, caught another bus to Newcastle, went to the cinema, the night train down to London packed like sardines. London – we, well, we were going to have our honeymoon in Exeter, the hotels were full, but Joyce’s parents knew someone who had a guest house down there, so booked us in there. So we had some – so I went up to see my mother, and she had met Joyce, and then down to Paddington Station, finally arrived in Torquay and met by somebody who took us to the house, absolutely shattered. Went to bed, we both fell fast asleep. [laughs] Anyway, I still remember the next day, I said to Joyce, ‘Well, what do you want to do now?’ She said ‘I’d like to buy a shopping basket, I won’t feel properly married ‘til I’ve got a shopping basket,’ and that was it, our honeymoon! Then back to the squadron, and they discovered I had a large spleen, so they were doing all sorts of investigations, I was at Coningsby for quite a long time; I thought I was on squadron strength and evidently I wasn’t, I was on station strength, so I finished [?] in October but I didn’t leave the squadron until beginning of January. They took me into Rawsby [?] Hospital. It had been what they used to call lunatic asylums, it was, yes, no privacy, all the doors opened both ways and the WCs, it was like the doors going into a Western saloon, know, they open both ways, so you – anyway, I had a, I still had a large spleen, so they gave me a temperate climate only better, ah, better category, which was just as well because it was about time they were thinking of going out to Japan and you would have had to go through tropical climates. Anyway, I was at Coningsby just doing nothing, you know, and eventually – oh, the commanding officer was a chap called Evans Evans, Tiny Evans, a Jimmy Edwards character - I’m going back, I’m going into reverse now. He decided he wanted to do some operations, so they said he could take my crew, and they did a couple of cross countries with him, so the first time, he put the aeroplane down and bounced over the [unclear] onto the aeroplane; the other time, he visited his brother, almost a twin, who was RAF commanding an American station, and he, he went down there with the crew and had a very liquid lunch, so he came back by taxi and the RAF took me down by transport to pick them up, and I met my crew outside the aeroplane, and the Americans were looking up at our bomb bay, their bomb bay was not as big as a sofa there, they could carry four thousand pounds, of course, we could carry eighteen thousand pounds, and to thrill them back [?]. One or two of them, they’d spent the night there, I think, had got these American woolly sheepskin hats on, one or two were smoking American cigars. Incidentally, people say that everybody smokes here, my crew didn’t smoke, I didn’t smoke.
AM: You didn’t smoke either?
BL: No, nope. And that was about the – oh [pause] Evans Evans, I got to know him quite well, very, very pleasant chap, and he wanted to sponsor me to go to Cranwell, he knew my background in engineering, to do an engineering course, and I said no, I wanted to carry on flying, so there was this vacancy going, Fighter [Unclear] Flight, flying Hurricanes. That was really good fun! Our CO was Les Munro –
AM: Oh, yes.
BL: Yes, he was New Zealander, wonderful character, and I remember when we were there, one night, we had a few drinks at the bar, and we knew we were operating, so we wouldn’t – the squadron was operating, we wouldn’t be working the next day, and I said ‘Would you mind if I took a Hurricane up to Millfield, to see my wife?’ and he said ‘Not at all.’ So, off, went off the next day, he’d forgotten: ‘Where have you been?’ ‘I’ve been to Millfield, you said I could go there!’ [disgruntled mutter-nonverbal]. One funny incident – well, funny for people who were watching it - at Metheringham was a FIDO station, you know, where they used to burn petrol and [pause] if you could imagine a triangle about so big with a metal pipe across, they used to pump petrol into it and that would clear the fog. I was waiting to take off in my little Hurricane, some other man [?] had a Spitfire: ‘Proceed to the end of the runway and use the taxiway.’ He started to turn off. ‘Proceed to the end of the runway and use the taxiway!’ Too late: there was the Spitfire standing on its tails [?]. Poor fellow, he spent the rest of his life trying to get, trying to explain why he did this, and everyone has heard that ‘cause he couldn’t say he couldn’t have heard the instruction. And then, about that time, maybe a bit earlier, an Air Ministry Order came out, an AMO: people who’d completed two operational tours and two non-operational tours could apply for secondment to BOAC or go to the Empire Test Pilots.
AM: So this is 1945.
BL: I’m in 1945 now, yes.
AM: Yeah.
BL: So, I applied for BOAC and got it and that was it, yeah. And I enjoyed it, I [pause] we did our training on Lanc – on Lancasters because we were going to fly Lancastrians, never came to anything-I had a Lancastrian on my pilot’s licence-and then we went down to Whitchurch, was a little aerodrome, it was the airport for Bristol in those days before they moved, and converted to Dakotas, and there was a couple of flights out as a second pilot to Cairo and back again and then they were, they were on a – just, what a lot of [unclear] – let’s say, anyway, I went to Northolt, where BEA – it was on land [?] BOAC, which was going to become-
AM: So they were just setting BOAC up at the time?
BL: Yes, but I was still in the air force on secondment and offered a contract with BOAC, and then BEA was formed, so I applied to fly for BEA and they offered me a contract, and they said, ‘You will never be worse off if you come to us instead of going to BOAC,’ flying out of Northolt. It was, it wasn’t no break going back to civvy life, it was like being on a squadron again, I knew half the people there, all second-tour people, and eventually, I got my command – Captain – and six hundred pounds a year. Six hundred pounds a year in 1946 was a lot of money; I remember when I was an apprentice, I was looking forward to the day when I’d be a rich man and earning five pounds a week! Six hundred pounds a year makes –
AM: In 1946!
BL: And, and then went into work one day and told I was going to Jersey. No choice in the matter, British Airways had nationalised Channel Island Airways and they wanted three Dakota crews out there, so myself, chap called Bill Hen, an ex-Battle of Britain pilot, and I can’t remember the third went out there with the three first officers, flying Dakotas and then flying de Havilland Rapid – de Havilland Rapide: [unclear] biplane, made of wood.
AM: Where were you flying to and who were the passengers? Were –
BL: Oh, this was civilians.
AM: So it’s a commercial airline by this time?
BL: Oh yeah, yeah, and became BEA, you see.
AM: But still on Dakotas, which had been flying in the war.
BL: Yes. Initially, BOAC would be carrying fifteen passengers and BEA were flying with eighteen passengers, and eventually they were modified, took the radio officer away, air officer away, and they called them Pioneers. We had thirty-two passengers, really squeezing them in in a Dakota.
AM: Thirty-two! So what was it like inside, then, for the passengers?
BL: Packed solid, yeah! The seats were about so wide –
AM: Bit like now, then, Ryanair.
BL: Yes, and flying Rapides, that was a – initially a seven-seater with a radio officer, and then a, and an eight-seater when you got rid of the radio officers. I must be one of the few people still living who flew Rapides into Croydon and into Gatwick, which was an, ah, a grass airfield.
AM: Oh, right! [laughs]
BL: A lot of grass airfields around at that time; Madrid, masses of runway, now, that used to be a grass airfield. And I carried on flying Dakotas in Jersey and –
AM: Did your - had your wife come over to live in Jersey?
BL: Oh, we’d all moved to Jersey.
AM: Okay.
BL: No NHS there; BEA paid my medical fees, I had to pay for Joyce and my son, quite expensive, ‘specially when you – antibiotics were a frightful price. We moved – we never bought anywhere in Jersey, we moved around in rented accommodation, and I quite enjoyed it there: come off a day’s flying, you know, and Joyce would meet me, have a swim before going home, and see so much more, know, you could swim from April through to September. I remember once, we come over on leave and up and gone to Druridge Bay in Northumberland, lovely summer’s day, I said ‘I’m gonna have a swim.’ I went off, I came back: ‘I thought you were gonna have a swim?’ I said ‘Yes, I got enough up to here, that was it!’
AM: So not cold up in Jersey?
BL: Well, yes. So, I think, in around Jersey, the tide doesn’t move in and out, it stays in the Gulf of Saint Malo, slowly, slowly warms up. My only accident occurred there; I stood a Rapide on its nose. No passengers on board, I put the brakes on too hard, it landed on its nose, bent propellers, and needless to say, there was a court of enquiry. But BEA was divided into two divisions then: British and Continental, and chief pilot of the British division was an old group captain I’d known in the air force, it was the old pals’ network.
AM: Old boys’ club.
BL: Yeah, he said ‘You can do’ – I spent the whole month doing [unclear], it was twelve flights a day, fifteen and twenty minutes, and nobody liked them because, it doesn’t sound very much, but twelve take-offs and landings, it was very tiring. [Pause] He was the chap – no, no, I was thinking of somebody else, at Northolt. There was one day, it had been snowing – this was nothing to do with me – and there was a Dakota took off and covered with snow and they’d had to clear the wings, and landed on top of a school and – sorry, landed on top of a house, just missed a school, and nobody was hurt, there was nobody in the house, all the crew got out. Needless to say, for the rest of his life, he was known as Rooftop Johnson, yeah, and he rose to great height and became a flight manager eventually. Viscounts, enjoyed flying those, and I – leaving Jersey, where did I want to go to? Well, my parents were living in London; Joyce’s mother, she was already by then in [unclear], so I chose Manchester, in the middle of nowhere, and –
AM: And that was Ringway Airport?
BL: Ringway Airport, yes, yes, little runways then, yes, passenger accommodation was in one of the hangars, and Smallman’s – was it Smallman’s – had the, had the restaurant there, the old RAF control tower, it was all very friendly. The crew hut was made of wood, you know.
AM: What year would – what year would that have been on now? Fifty -
BL: That would be 1953, yeah. And they booked me in at the Deanwater, Deanwater, just, just a room with a washbasin, no mod cons in those days, party on nearly every night, so getting to sleep was a bit difficult, and I was flying the next day, said to Joyce, ‘Go out and look for a house.’ Well, Joyce almost got lost, she picked me up, but we saw an advert, houses being built just the other side of Wilmslow, went to see one, saw the plot we liked and booked the house and [pause] by that time, I’d, was living in Baton [?] Road, Manchester, sharing a room with a wireless operator, he moved out and Joyce moved in with me, and we got the extra room, Michael was away at school, and we lived there ‘til we moved into the house, I quite enjoyed that. And then charge [?] came to convert to Tridents, which I did, yeah, lovely aeroplane, the Trident, and –
AM: How big is that, then? How big is the Trident?
BL: It was initially a ninety-seater with the –
AM: Ninety?
BL: Ninety.
AM: So much bigger.
BL: Much bigger, but the Viscount was about seventy or eighty, I think, I had the ninety-seater, and then there was the Trident 2 and the Trident 3, and the Trident 3 was – I think they’d gone up to about a hundred seats by then. They didn’t – it wasn’t really a commercial – they built a lot of them, though there’re many variants, I don’t think anybody made any money out of them, and [pause] back to Viscounts. Landing at Geneva, and, whilst I was with [unclear], and I was doing what we call a flapless landing ‘cause the [unclear] had been damaged, and landed, and as the nose wheel touched the runway, the whole back bit of the strut broke off, so we started to turn to the left and clear the runway, and there was a lot of smoke coming with the hot hydraulic oil. Passengers were evacuated, they didn’t use the chute, they got them out on the steps, and the fire was put out immediately. I’ve still got the headlines, was it ‘Bomber hero lands blazing aircraft [slight laugh] at Geneva’? And the reporters came ‘round to see Joyce, she knew nothing about it; well, she’d just had an airport – phone call from the airport saying ‘Bob, your husband, will be late coming home.’ The way they exaggerate these things!
AM: ‘Bomber Command hero’!
BL: Yeah, Bomber Command, oh, yes.
AM: Did they have air hostesses on the planes at this point? Did they have air hostesses and things like that on the planes at this point?
BL: No – oh yes, they did!
AM: Yeah.
BL: Yes, in Jersey, they were called flight clerks because they did all the paperwork as well.
AM: Okay.
BL: And all they did was hand out sick bags and barley, barley sugars, yes. [Pause] I’m trying to think of the funny incidents. When I was First Officer at Northolt, and I’d been flying – it was an unfurnished Dakota, the seats were there but nothing on the floor, and those days, the pilot had to brief the passengers, and chap called Panda Watson, he had a great big moustache, he was the skipper, and he went up to them all and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ and at that time, he slipped and fell on his –
AM: Oh, no!
BL: So, from then on, I – he kind of got me to do it. I remember doing briefing one day, just telling them where the escape exits were, where the life jackets were, I had one passenger say, ‘If I’d known it was so dangerous, I wouldn’t have, wouldn’t have flown!’ My parents used to come and see me in Jersey, but they wouldn’t fly; I would pay for their tickets, no, no, they came by boat, but Joyce’s mother came over several times and she was quite happy to fly. And, living in Jersey, we had a dear old neighbour, Mrs Brett, one of the old school, she lived next door, she was a widower for the second time, and she had some friends, and she used to go out, and going down to see her friends: hat on, folded umbrella or walking stick, upright, and she’d come back, hat on one side and a bit shaky on the stick. She liked – was it tonic red wine? I’ve forgotten what it was.
AM: Not, erm –
BL: It was – it wasn’t Sanatogen, it’s [pause] anyway, she was rather fond of it, and she was a dear old lady, she would knock on the door and say, ‘Are you at home?’ And we invited her in one day, we’d just got television in Jersey, and the Queen’s, Queen’s confrontation –
AM: Coronation, 1953.
BL: Queen’s coronation, not confrontation, she has many of those with her husband, I think! And she enjoyed that, and she used to talk about a wine she’d had in Italy called [stage whisper] Asti Spumante, a sparkling, sparkling, sweet, Italian wine, so we got a bottle of it and we had some sandwiches and she thoroughly enjoyed it. And when we moved from that house to another one, she gave Joyce a little silver napkin ring, and outside, this replica of sugar cane; her first husband was in trade, he was in sugar, yeah, and they lived in the Bahamas for many years, no children, but her second husband was a barrister, Mr Reginald Brett, so she always called herself Mrs Reginald Brett, never found out what her Christian name was, yeah. She died shortly before we left Jersey. Anyway, I wanted to get onto another type of aeroplane and we decided, like I tell you [?] to move to Manchester; people say ‘Why did you move?’ so I said ‘Well, we kept falling off the edge, so it was time to go.’ And that was almost the end, now: up to Manchester, converted to Tridents, and then on New Year’s Eve nineteen [pause] 1968, it must have been, Joyce had a – we were going out to a party, Joyce had a massive heart attack, went to Macclesfield. No – there was nothing there for heart attacks then, she was in a side room just receiving normal medical treatment, no, no resus units, no – what do they call them now?
AM: The – ah, the heart -
BL: Yes. Anyway, she survived, and that time, Manchester was converting to the Bac 1-11, the twin engine jet, and they were going to do a lot of, a lot of German internal flights, so I was going to be away for five or six days, or probably more than that, a month, five or six day tours in Germany, didn’t want to do that, so I stayed with the Trident and that did – I finished up going down to Heathrow for my last four years. [Pause] Nice little house in Windsor, it was a terraced house –
AM: In Windsor?
BL: In Windsor.
AM: Oh, very nice – oh well, so, sorry [?]
BL: Yes, it was, was nice, yes, we enjoyed it, Joy – but [unclear] Joyce never, apart from my working colleagues, she never got to know anybody there, they don’t speak to you there, we were living in Datchet initially, until we found somewhere to live. In Datchet, we were living in a 17th Century cottage, lovely old cottage, and it was run by two old dears next door, two ex-WAF who I think were both living together, if you know what I mean, yeah.
AM: I do.
BL: And then we got our own, own property, we saw a house in Datchet but decided against it; occasionally, the river would [?] slowly come into Datchet, then go out again, and we didn’t want a house that was going to be flooded.
AM: No.
BL: Whole thing, insurance premium would be very high, stayed in Windsor until I retired.
AM: So you flew all your working life?
BL: All my working life, yes, I retired in nineteen – retired from BEA in nineteen [pause] 1973, and moved back here, living in a very, very big house at Disley, almost a mansion, as someone called it, we were in, I think, four bedrooms, and, over the course of the year, made me bother [?] that they were used four, five times, so we cut our losses and moved here.
AM: And moved here. And it’s lovely, isn’t it?
BL: And got the Golden Wing [?], and then in nineteen-seventy – ’79 – through the old boy network, there was a job going, flying Viscounts up at Teesside, so I thought –
AM: So, after you’d retired –
BL: After I’d retired, the old boy network again, I knew the chap – it was a strange organisation, it was called Airbridge Carriers, so I was flying for Airbridge Carriers, being paid by Fields Aviation, and flying BenAir Viscounts, it was quite a mix-up. And so, we were flying out of Teesside, took the caravan up there, and that was it, we were quite enjoying that, ‘cause the people were friendly, Joyce wasn’t far from her mother, and then they decided we would have to go to Bristol. So, I decided I’d – I could have moved to Bristol, I couldn’t maintain my base where I was initially [?] at at Teesside, so I went down to Bristol, I was always accommodated in a hotel there, used to get [unclear] allowance, used to get so much an hour for being away from home, and flying the Viscount down to Bristol. Finally gave it all up and retired.
AM: And that’s it, you retired.
BL: I finally retired in nineteen – 1981, I finished flying, same year my father died, 1981, and that was it, end of flying career.
AM: Yeah. Blimey. The one thing I didn’t ask, go whizzing right back to the war years, was you’ve got the DFC?
BL: DFC and bar.
AM: And bar?
BL: Yes.
AM: So what did you get the DFC for?
BL: It was just end of, end of, end of tour.
AM: Okay, so doing a full tour.
BL: And the bar was end of second tour.
AM: And the bar was the second tour. Right.
BL: Yeah.
AM: Crikey.
BL: Yeah.
AM: There we are. I’m going to switch off now.
BL: Right, switch off now.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Bob Lasham
Creator
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Annie Moody
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-16
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ALashamB150716
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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00:57:50 audio recording
Contributor
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Richard Bracknall
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Bob Lasham began an electrical engineering apprenticeship with British Thomson-Houston before volunteering for the RAF in 1941, aged 20. He trained at Babbacombe and Wilmslow before continuing to Clewiston, Florida, to complete his training as a pilot. On return to the United Kingdom, he underwent further training before being transferred to Bomber Command where he converted to flying Lancasters. He joined 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney and participated in operations to Berlin and Leipzig. His aircraft was heavily attacked and his rear gunner lost the toes on one foot because of oxygen and heating problems. He transferred to 97 Squadron Pathfinders; his aircraft was badly damaged over Bordeaux, returning from an operation to Munich. He flew on D-Day and later joined a Bomber Defence Training Flight. After two tours, he became a civil pilot and flew with BOAC and BEA. He also relates his engagement and marriage; the role of luck in his survival; and the support of a veterans’ network after the war.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
United States
England--Lincolnshire
Florida--Lake Okeechobee
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Munich
France--Bordeaux (Nouvelle-Aquitaine)
Florida
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1944
5 BFTS
5 Group
9 Squadron
97 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
African heritage
aircrew
Beaufighter
Blenheim
bomb struck
bombing
British Flying Training School Program
C-47
Distinguished Flying Cross
Flying Training School
Harvard
Initial Training Wing
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
love and romance
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
pilot
RAF Bardney
RAF Cranfield
recruitment
searchlight
Stearman
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1169/18224/EHarriesDTurnerKW[Date]-010001.jpg
e445b2ff974aba4a246d14d44ca7e251
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1169/18224/EHarriesDTurnerKW[Date]-010002.jpg
969598fe4788e1d7fdc23150ab665a8d
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
Turner, John
Albion John Turner
A J Turner
Description
An account of the resource
<a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/228620/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"></a>116 items. Concerns Flight Sergeant Albion John Turner (1911 - 1939, 561939 Royal Air Force) who joined the RAF as an apprentice in 1927. After service as a fitter he re-mustered as a pilot in 1935 and after training served on 216 Squadron flying Vickers Victoria and Valentia before moving to 9 Squadron on Handley Page Heyfords in 1936. He converted to Wellingtons February 1939 and was killed when his aircraft was shot down on 4 September 1939 during operations against shipping at Brunsbüttel. Collection consists of an oral history interview with Penny Turner his daughter (b. 1938), correspondence, official documents, his logbook and photographs. <br /><br />Additional information on Albion John Turner <span>is available via the </span><a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/228620/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">IBCC Losses Database</a><br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Penny Turner and catalogued by Nigel Huckins
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-05-29
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Turner, J
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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Telephone No. : RUISLIP 3381 ;
and direct lines from Air Ministry.
Telegraphic Address :
RECORDS, RUISLIP.
Any communications on the
subject of this letter should
be addressed to :-
OFFICER i/c RECORDS,
ROYAL AIR FORCE,
RUISLIP, MIDDLESEX,
and the following number
quoted :-
C7/561939
Dear Madam,
With reference [missing text] 5th September 1939, it [missing text] you that according to [missing text] the International Red [missing text] No. 561939 Flight Serg[missing letters][missing text] No. 9 Squadron, Royal [missing text] considered as killed in [missing text] 4th September 1939.
It is further [missing text] in the Wilhelmshaven [missing text].
In conveying this information to you [missing text] Air Council desire me to express their deep [missing text] at your husband’s death in his Country’s service.
Any private effects which are under Royal Air Force control will be forwarded to this office, but some time must necessarily elapse before disposal can be effected.
Any communications regarding effects or the disposal of any monies that may eventually be found to be due to the airman’s estate, should be addressed to the “Under Secretary of State, Air Ministry, London, W.C.2”.
[underlined] /Should you wish [/underlined]
Mrs. K. W. Turner,
Fotherby Vicarage,
Fotherby, Nr. Louth.
[page break]
[missing text][missing letters]ou wish to make application for [missing text][missing letters]ocompanying Form should be completed [missing text] the envelope provided to the Ministry [missing text] the question of an award will be [missing text][missing letters]he result notified to you in due [missing text]
[missing text] you of the Air Council’s deepest [missing text] great loss.
I am,
Dear Madam,
Your obedient Servant,
[signature]
Air Commodore,
Officer i/c Records
ROYAL AIR FORCE
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
Letter to Mrs K Turner from Air Ministry Records Office
Description
An account of the resource
Notification that Flight Sergeant A J Turner was killed in action on operations in the Wilhelmshafen area on 4 September 1939.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
B Harries
Format
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One typewritten sheet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Text. Service material
Identifier
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EHarriesDTurnerKW[Date]-01
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939-09-04
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Georgie Donaldson
Steve Baldwin
9 Squadron
killed in action
RAF Ruislip
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1158/11717/PThorpJF1601.2.jpg
ff1f3350206f6261bc6dec0c3a9ef84c
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1158/11717/AThorpJF160412.1.mp3
fd9fa4392a3c236f3815a3bff1903dc9
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
Thorp, John Foster
J F Thorp
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. An oral history interview with Warrant Officer John Foster Thorp (1924 - 2018, 1623333 Royal Air Force), a list of his operations, a page from a log book and notes on 467 Squadron and Lancaster R5868. He flew completed a tour of operations as a rear gunner with 467 Squadron.
The collection was 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
2016-04-12
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Thorp, JF
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
BW: This is Brian Wright interviewing Warrant Officer John Foster Thorp of 467 Squadron at his home in Bamford, Rochdale at half past one on Tuesday the 12th April 2016. Also present with us are his eldest son Derek and his wife Betty. Warrant Officer Foster, excuse me, Warrant Officer Thorp if you can just describe for us please your family set up. Where you were born and grew up? How many people in your family? Please.
JT: Yes. I was born in Manchester and I grew up in Manchester. In Higher Blackley mainly. And I was there until I was eighteen years of age at which point I went into the RAF.
BW: Was there only you in the family? Did you have any brothers and sisters?
JT: I have. I had one sister. She’s now deceased. But no brothers. No.
BW: And where did you, whereabouts did you go to school?
JT: I went to the local school first until I was fourteen. Sorry. The local school until I was ten. And then I went to North Manchester Grammar School, Chain Bar, Moston. And I left there in September 1939 when the war broke out and the school was evacuated but my father wouldn’t let me be evacuated.
BW: And so you stayed in —
JT: So I stayed at home. And when I became seventeen years of age I joined the local Home Guard which gave me some insight into military training.
BW: And did your sister remain at home at the same, same time? She wasn’t evacuated either or did, did she leave?
JT: She was in a different school.
BW: I see.
JT: So — yeah.
BW: And what prompted you to join the Home Guard at first? Why? Why them?
JT: Just to be military I suppose and wear a uniform. My father was in the ’14/’18 war, in the army and he told me, ‘Don’t go in the army,’ he said, ‘When you’re eighteen.’ So I, I had visions like most eighteen year olds of flying a Spitfire. So, I went to the RAF station, RAF recruiting office in Manchester and volunteered for pilot training. I was accepted. I eventually had to go to Cardington in Bedfordshire to have the aircrew medical and written examination. And then I was waiting then. I was on deferred service until I became a full age for military service. That’s turning eighteen. And, when was it? September 1942 I was called up to the RAF. And they, they had a general course for pilots, navigators and bomb aimers. They called it the PNB Scheme. And you took a general course in navigation, elementary navigation, meteorology, signalling, Morse code and RAF law. And other odds. Engines. Engines. And I did that initial training at Scarborough, Yorkshire.
BW: How long were you there?
JT: About four months I think it was. And then from there I went up to Scone in Scotland, near Perth, where there was a flying, flying school.
[recording interrupted]
BW: So, just to pick up we were, we were saying that you joined the Home Guard and been selected for pilot training and that you’d then completed your initial training and been posted back to Heaton Park. Coincidentally just a mile away from where your parents actually lived.
JT: Yeah.
BW: And your home was in Manchester. So, you were waiting there for your name to come up on a, on a list to either be sent out to Canada, South Africa or where ever.
JT: Further training. Yes. That’s right. And while I was at Heaton Park we used to have a morning parade and a roll call to make sure nobody had buzzed off home with being so frustrated waiting at the, at the — [pause] And so, one morning at the morning parade the person in charge of us said a course had been started for air gunners. And if anybody would like to volunteer to go on to this course then report to the office. So, like a lot of others, they wanted three hundred volunteers and they got over two hundred for these. You see, the point was that Lancasters, Stirlings, Halifaxes carried two gunners and they needed, so they needed more gunners than that. Than any other trade. And so I went and volunteered for air gunner and I was posted to Andreas in the Isle of Man. And there was one of two, one of three airfield on the Isle of Man. There was Andreas was the gunnery school, Jurby was bomb aimer’s and the Royal Navy had taken over Douglas Airport for their, training their Fleet Air Arm people.
BW: Where? What was the first base called?
JT: Andreas.
BW: Andreas?
JT: Andreas. A N D R E A S.
BW: Ok. And that was specifically for air gunnery was it?
JT: Air gunnery training. Yes. Yes. Used to go up on an, in an Avro Anson which had an upper turret and about six of you would go up with the pilot and then an aircraft would come along towing a drogue and you fired from the turret at this drogue. And then when they dropped the drogue on the airfield when you’d finished the exercise they counted the number of holes. And there was six of us firing at it so they divided it by six and that was your score. So, whether you’d hit it or whether you peppered it, you know.
BW: Yeah.
JT: That was the way they worked it.
BW: Nowadays they use, they use coloured paint on the, on the bullets but they didn’t then.
JT: No. No.
BW: They just — right.
JT: So —
BW: This is interesting because at this time in your life you’ve joined the Home Guard. You volunteered for pilot training. You’d been accepted as a pilot.
JT: Yeah.
BW: As you say in your view you were going to fly Spitfires.
JT: I wanted to.
BW: What, what changed in your mind to go for air gunner? What, why the change from pilot?
JT: Frustration.
BW: Simple as that.
JT: Frustration. Not making progress. And that was what it really was. And the same with a lot of other people. And so I passed out on the basis of the number of shots in the, in the drogue. I passed out as an air gunner. As a, they gave me the rank of sergeant and the wing. I got my AG wing. And I was then posted to Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire which was a base where pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, radio operators and so on came there and they formed into crews. And what happened with the pilot this was the, of course the skipper of the crew and he used to be wondering around with a piece of paper and a pencil and he’d go up to a person and say, ‘Have you got a crew yet?’ ‘No sir.’ ‘Would you like to go in my crew?’ Well, an Australian, an Australian flying officer. Flying officer rank pilot said to me, ‘Would you like to join my crew?’ So, I said, ‘Yes. Yes.’ He seemed a nice fellow and I said, ‘I’ll join your crew.’ So he said, ‘First of all, before you definitely decide,’ he said, ‘I’m on retraining because I had a crash and my bomb aimer was killed. We were flying in a Wellington and one engine cut out’. The Wellington didn’t fly very well on one engine and that’s why he crashed. And so I said to him, ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Everybody is allowed one crash.’ So, I said, ‘I’ll join you.’ And I never regretted it. He was a smashing fellow. He was about, I think he was thirty years of age. Which was getting old in flying ranks you know, really. And he said, ‘Come on then. Now you’ve joined me,’ he said, ‘What’s your name?’ So I said, ‘John.’ ‘Right, Johnny.’ And I was Johnny from then on, ‘And, I’ll introduce you to the, I’ll introduce you to the crew. The other members of the crew,’ he said, ‘I’ve been looking for a rear gunner,’ he said, ‘And that’s the final one I wanted.’ So, I said, ‘Ok.’ And there was Herby Phillips the navigator, Canadian. Eric Clem was the mid-upper gunner. Poor Eric never, he didn’t last the war. He was killed. And then there was [pause] do you want the names if I can remember them? There’s Herby Phillips —
BW: Yeah.
JT: Who was the navigator. Canadian.
BW: Eric Clem was the Aussie.
JT: Pardon?
BW: Eric Clem was an Aussie. Is that right?
JT: Eric Clem was an Aussie. Yes. Eric. Yes.
DT: He was your mate wasn’t he?
JT: Pardon?
DT: Eric was your mate.
JT: Can you throw me that red book? That red book off there please.
DT: Yeah.
JT: I made a list of it the other day and — thank you very much.
BW: Was your pilot called MacLaughlin?
JT: David MacLaughlin was the pilot and when he introduced himself he said, ‘My name is David MacLaughlin,’ he said, ‘While we’re flying you call me skipper. But all other times it’s Mac.’ Showing the lack of rank. Not pulling rank you see. So, anyhow, oh dear. I damaged it [pages turning]
DT: Do you want to carry on talking dad?
JT: Here we are.
DT: And I’ll have a look for you.
JT: There we are, Derek.
DT: You’ve got it.
JT: David MacLaughlin pilot. Aussie. Herbert Phillips — navigator. He was Canadian Air Force. The bomb aimer I could never, I can’t remember his name. He was rather a fellow who didn’t mix very well.
BW: Was it Craven? Does that sound familiar? Craven.
JT: Yeah. It does. George Craven was it? Have you got a list of them somewhere? [laughs] Albert Smith, the radio operator. He was from the northeast of England. Reg Hodgkinson was the engineer. He was, he was from Warrington. Eric Clem was the mid-upper gunner. Australian. And myself then. Rear gunner.
DT: Didn’t you start out with another mid-upper?
JT: Pardon?
DT: You started out with another mid-upper gunner didn’t you but he wasn’t able to — ?
JT: Well, we had one. A Canadian. But he couldn’t, he couldn’t stand altitude flying. He used to pass out if he got up to altitude. So that’s when —
BW: And so you swapped him, did you?
JT: Pardon?
BW: You swapped him, did you?
JT: We swapped him. Yeah. Yeah.
DT: It was, was it his skull? His skull hadn’t closed up properly.
JT: That’s right. Yeah.
DT: And there was a hole in the middle of his skull. And when he went up to altitude he passed out. So he was —
JT: Medical problem.
DT: Medical. Yeah.
BW: Wow.
JT: He was a Canadian.
BW: And George Craven. Was he an Aussie or was he, was he British?
JT: George Craven. He was an Aussie. Yeah. But Eric Clem, I said he didn’t last the war. He, he’d done, he did twenty ops with us. Twenty trips with us. Eric. And then he was taken ill with tonsillitis. Went into the sick bay and when he came out he didn’t re-join our crew. And he joined another crew and went, he went to Stuttgart and didn’t, they didn’t come back. He was my room-mate actually. We shared a room. He was a very special little chap. He was twenty nine years of age which was getting on for aircrew really.
BW: Where did you live with the crew? Were you in a Nissen hut or were you in married quarters on the station?
JT: At Waddington? Waddington. Well, it was, was a peacetime base so they had proper built up accommodation over the sergeant’s mess. There’s accommodation for sergeants and like I say I shared a room with Eric until he was killed.
BW: And at this time, you, you’ve met the crew at Upper Heyford and you then were posted as a crew to 467 Squadron at Waddington.
JT: Well, well at first we were at Upper Heyford. We were flying Wellingtons in training. Crew getting, crew getting used to being a crew. Crew training.
BW: What did you think of Wellingtons?
JT: They were alright. Good solid aircraft. Yes. A bit heavy and all that but we didn’t fly in them operationally. It was purely cross-country flying. Bombing practice and things like that. Just straight general training. And then we went from there to Stirlings to swap on to four-engined mark types. Be on four engines then. And that’s where we picked up a navigator - flight engineer. And then from Stirlings we went on to Lancasters. Just a short session. Conversion on to Lancasters and then from there to Waddington.
BW: And do you recall the Conversion Unit where you flew Lancasters?
JT: Was it Wigsley? Was it Wigsley? I’m not sure. I thought it was Wigsley. We went around a bit. No. That was Stirlings. Not Syerston were it? [pages turning]
BW: But as you say you weren’t flying operations at this time. You were just learning to work together as a crew.
JT: To knit together as a crew. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody was still being trained to some extent. Syerston.
BW: I see.
JT: Syerston. That’s where we converted on to Lancasters.
BW: And how long was your course there? How long was your course there? Do you know?
JT: Syerston? Was about a fortnight. Three weeks. It was purely getting used to that type. I mean we’d converted from Wellingtons on to Stirlings for multi-engine. Four engines. And then we’d gone from Stirlings then on to Lancaster conversion because Lancasters were in short supply, you know. Being they were building up the Lancaster force on Bomber Command.
BW: So, so what time, what sort of stage of the war was this? Was this ’41, ’42? Or —
JT: That was in April 1944. That was before D-Day that was of course.
BW: And how did you rate the Stirling aircraft? How did you find them?
JT: It was fairly solid but it was a bit cumbersome. Lumbered along you know. And the thing that struck me really was I was, I was airborne before everybody else because it was quite a long fuselage. They put the tail up to keep the nose down while, while they’re going down the runway and I’m up in the air and everybody else is down on the ground.
BW: And so when you moved then to Waddington to join 467 and start on Lancasters what was your, your impression then? What was the feeling between you and the crew about getting on to Lancasters? Was it like moving from a biplane to a Spitfire? Or was it —
JT: No. From my point of view it was always the same because it was just a turret. Flying in a turret, you see. More and more different for the pilot really and the engineer and that. But from my point of view I just sat in the turret there.
BW: Did the aircraft itself feel different? Lancasters are notoriously cramped.
JT: Yes. It was a comfortable aircraft to fly in. Yes.
BW: You found it comfortable.
JT: Yeah. Found it comfortable. Yes.
BW: And you joined in April ’44. I suppose a similar time of year to what we’re in now but this is in the run up to D-Day which we know now.
JT: Yeah.
BW: Did you sense anything about the coming invasion? Invasion.
JT: No. Not really. What happened, there was a tannoy, you know. The tannoy loudspeaker system around the airfield and there was a tannoy message went out, ‘Will all crews of 467 Squadron report to the briefing room.’ That was one afternoon. And the commanding officer of the squadron told us that, they didn’t say it was D-Day of course because it was still secret then so much but he said, ‘You may be called for an early morning flight. Operation. So, get in to, get, get to bed early tonight and make sure you fully sleep.’ Slept like you see. And about 3 o’clock in the morning there was a hammering on the door and [unclear] much shouting on the corridor. People were being sent to waken all the crews up. And Eric and I got up, got dressed went down to the mess. Had a meal. The usual meal of bacon and egg and all that kind of thing. And, and then from there out to briefing and then we went out to the aircraft. And the thing we noticed as we were going out to the aircraft was they’d painted black and white stripes underneath the wings for recognition purposes. And we, we took off on D-Day morning about, I think it was about 3 or, about 3 o’clock in the morning or something like that. June the 6th [pause pages turning] D-Day. Excuse me. A bit slow.
BW: That’s alright.
DT: You’d done a few ops before then hadn’t you dad?
JT: Pardon?
DT: You’d done a few ops before then hadn’t you?
JT: What? Before D-Day?
DT: D-Day wasn’t your first.
JT: Oh, we’d only done a few before D-Day. Yeah. 2.40. Take off 2.40. St Pierre du Mont in France. That was 2.40 in the morning. And D-Day was quite a thing with us because we went, we went out at like I say 3 o’clock in the morning and as we were flying over, coming back, flying over the Channel — over the Channel there was a vast armada of ships going out. They were going to the landings. And I was going to say about them [pause] anyhow [pause] we flew back, we flew back to our base and they told us then that the D-Day landings, the landings had taken place. And, and again in the afternoon he said you’d be wanted again this evening for a flight. And that was midnight. Now, this was an interesting day. At midnight on D-day. And we took off and of course the Germans always anticipated that the invasion would take place from Dover to Calais. The shortest distance. And they’d stationed a lot of armour and troops south of Calais ready to repel the invasion but it came — it never came. And, so, we, we were detailed on that night of D-Day to bomb some railway, railway tracks. To stop this armour and these troops being transferred from south of Calais, taken over to, to Normandy to, to attack the British forces you see. Anyhow, as we rolled out about, just about midnight almost. Queued up to go on to the runway and then eventually our turn came. We went on the runway. We started, charged up the runway. We were about three quarters of the way along and heard a very loud bang like an explosion. Mac, Mac, in his Aussie twang said, ‘What the bloody hell was that?’ [laughs] And of course nobody knew. Anyway, he pulled it off the ground. We were about three quarters of the way down the runway so we couldn’t, couldn’t stop. We were too far. So, he pulled it off the ground and we carried on and after a few minutes he said there was no, whatever it was it hadn’t affected our controls. So, and the flight engineer said the engine readings are normal. So, Mac said, ‘Ok. We’ll carry on.’ And we carried on, we bombed and we started back and as we crossed the south coast Mac radioed to base and told them we’d got this. Oh no, sorry, before we got to there, as we got to the Channel Mac said, ‘We’d better check the undercarriage,’ and as the wheel went down a big black object flew past my turret. And the engineer looked out. He said, ‘We’ve lost our starboard tyre.’ That big bang was a tyre bursting as we were taking off. So Skip, Mac radioed base at Waddington and told them that we were having this problem. And another thing was as we were heading down towards, towards Waddington we got a constant speed unit in the propeller, in the propeller was, went faulty and we had to shut an engine down. So we were on three engines then. Anyhow, that was on the way to Woodbridge in Suffolk where there was an emergency landing place with a big runway and such. They were kitted out with ambulances and fire engines and all sorts there ready for emergency landings. And so I thought well how was Mac going to get this down, you know, with only one wheel? Anyhow, he went in. He kept this wing up with the dovetail, with the bad wheel and he landed on one wheel and the tail wheel and rolled down the runway and gradually, as we lost speed this wing dropped and the hub that was left after the tyre had gone, the hub hit the ground and we spun around and off the field. Off the strip on to the grass at the side. So, it was a marvellous bit of flying really. To fly a big aircraft like that on one wheel. Yes. So that was D-Day night.
BW: And so you didn’t, you didn’t get out to the target in France? You had to divert before you got there. Is that right? Or did you —
JT: Yeah. No. No. We got to the target. We bombed.
BW: You got to the target. Bombed the target.
JT: And on the way back but we didn’t, we didn’t know what the problem was then. It was only when we started on the way back and we started thinking about what was it? This noise and all that. And Mac put the wheels down and the engineer told us that we’d lost our starboard tyre. So, that was when we first knew about it.
BW: And did you get to find out how successful your attack on the target had been after all that?
JT: Sorry?
BW: Did the, did you get to find out how successful your attack on the target had been after all that?
JT: No. We never did. No. You’d usually get an aiming point photo. They had this, the camera and it was geared up with the bomb, bomb release and it switched, switched on when the, when your bombs had landed. And it should show your bombs. The effect of your bombs. A little camera.
BW: And this aircraft you were flying in at the time, I believe it was S Sugar. Is that right?
JT: Pardon?
BW: I believe the aircraft you were flying in at the time was S Sugar. Is that right?
JT: No. We flew in S for Sugar on our first operational flight.
BW: Just your first one.
JT: First one. June. 28th of May I think it was.
BW: Yeah.
JT: It was S for Sugar.
BT: Handy that log book, isn’t it?
JT: Hmmn?
BT: Handy that log book.
JT: Yes.
BT: Are you looking for something?
JT: July. May. June. What were we talking about? It’s got a W. It wasn’t W. That’s [pause]
BW: Yeah. So that, that’s your first, your first trip.
JT: Well, that was a special exercise, that was a —
BW: But then after that the aircraft you were in on D-Day wasn’t S Sugar then was it? It was, it was another one.
JT: Not D-Day. No.
BW: But that first one you flew in went on to be a well-known Lancaster didn’t it?
JT: It is. It’s, I’ll tell you something about that a bit more [pause] Oh yeah. There. 28th of the May. S for Sugar. 28th of May that.
BW: That’s it. Yeah. Bombing Cherbourg.
JT: Cherbourg. That’s it. So, actually it wasn’t our first. Yes. It was, it would be our first op that. First op because that was a special exercise. That was a special exercise when we flew in it. It was something to do with the radar check on something. And that’s our first trip. That was S for Sugar. Divert a little.
BW: And these are photos that you’ve got of the aircraft in the RAF Museum at Hendon. Is that right?
JT: These. No. No. No, these are Derek’s.
DT: My daughter.
JT: Two grandsons.
DT: My daughter and her husband and my grandsons went down to Hendon.
BW: I see.
DT: A few —
JT: Went down there and —
DT: Well, a few months ago and they took a load of photographs because of my dad’s association with it. They made a little booklet up for him and —
BW: Right.
JT: They allowed them, they allowed them in the prohibited area didn’t they?
DT: Yeah. They did. Yeah.
BW: Yeah. Well, that’s good of them.
JT: There they are.
BW: Yeah. That’s them in front of your turret.
JT: Yeah.
BW: And have you been to the same aircraft in Hendon? Have you seen it yourself?
JT: Well, I’ve been there a couple of times. Yes, and introduced myself. And they sent a young lad, a young chap with us who was on the section and he said he could he could take you to the aircraft. He took us down there and he undid the door and let us climb in. He said, ‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘I don’t know a lot about it,’ he said, ‘Because I’ve only just come on this section. So, I can’t tell you a lot about the Lancaster.’ I said, ‘Well I’ll tell you shall I?’ [laughs]
DT: Is that when you said it didn’t smell the same?
JT: Pardon?
DT: It didn’t smell the same.
JT: No. No. That was one thing that struck me was the smell. And then I realised a long time afterwards that there was no fuel in it, you see. It was an exhibition piece. There was no fuel in it for precautions. Safety precautions. So the aircraft didn’t smell the same [laughs]
BW: And when you were going on ops it presumably had a heavy smell of fuel in it.
JT: Oh yes. Yeah. Well, it always did when you were going on ops or not, you know. You could always smell the aircraft. Yeah.
BW: And when you were preparing for these early trips what sort of things did you have to do? What, what were you doing yourself to prepare for the, for the operations?
JT: Well, of course you had, you had your meal first and you were waited on by WAAFs. They volunteered to wait on us. A courtesy measure, you know for the lads that were going on ops. And anyhow then you went to, along to the, one of the hangars and they got to give you your flying rations. Which were boiled, a packet of boiled sweets, packets of chewing gum and [pause] what else was there? Boiled sweets, chewing gum, oh a block of chocolate. And depending on how, how long the flight was going to be depended on when you got two bags of chocolate [laughs] And then you went and picked up your parachute. You’d already picked up your flying gear from your locker and you picked up your parachute from the parachute store. And then you’d go out to the crew bus and they’d take you out to the aircraft. And that was the only preparation we did really. Picking up stuff we needed. Yeah.
BW: Did you attend the briefing with the rest of the crew?
JT: Oh yes. Yes. Oh yes. They had a long table. A long, you know, a collapsible table and benches, seat, chairs. And each crew used to gather around a table and the navigator usually had a map in front of him and he was already working on a flight plan. Yeah.
BW: And when you see it in films, where they unveil a map on a wall, was that the same kind of thing or different?
JT: Yes. Yes. Sometimes. I mean, once everybody was in they shut the door, the blinds were down and everything and then there was a map on the wall with a tape, a red tape going from your base down to where ever the target was. And the squadron commander would give, first give a chat about what the target was for and why it was picked for a target. What was being done there. Aircraft production or bombs or whatever. And then of course the Met officer. The meteorological officer would then give the weather report for the flight. What it was expected to be like over the target. Clear or not and, and what it would be like when you came back. And diversions. Possibly diversions if, if your airfield was fogged out. Of course Lincolnshire. You got quite a bit of mist in Lincolnshire. And you had to perhaps plan to be away from home when you come back.
BW: Most of your targets at this time are over France in preparation for D-Day. Did you get to fly over Germany at all?
JT: Oh yes. Yes. I’ve never logged precisely how many of each. Each way. But —
BW: Was there a difference in the operation between targets in France and Germany? Did you, did you feel one was more dangerous than the other? Or one was easier than the other?
JT: Well, Germany was obviously — particularly in what they called the Ruhr Valley. That, that was a bad place to go. And I can’t think what we used to call it now but I mean we were at Cherbourg, France which is only just on the coast you see. It isn’t so bad. We did one flight to Königsberg on the Baltic and the actual time was ten hours or something like that. So, it was a long flight. Down Stuttgart. That was where Eric was killed. But this wasn’t, he wasn’t on this flight. That was a eight hour. Eight hours. You notice, you notice the writing changes because Mac, the pilot’s, captain, the crew captain used to collect all the logbooks for his crew and he used to mess about with the logbook, you see. And Mac said to me, ‘You’re not putting enough information on. I’ll keep your logbook for you in the future.’ And that’s why. Why the writing changes.
BW: I see. So —
JT: I just used to put Ops — [unclear] Ops — St Pierre du Mont and then, but Mac put all sorts of, these sort of things down,
BW: What has he put on that one?
JT: Which one?
BW: What has he put on this one?
JT: “Ops Rennes. Landed at Skellingthorpe. Diversion was unsuitable.” Skellingthorpe was next door to our base. Next door to Waddington. There was Skellingthorpe, Bardney and Waddington were in a little group. That says, “Landed at Skellingthorpe.” It must have been fog. So, we were diverted there. I think we did about a third were German and the remainder were France because it would be about D-Day. Around about D-Day of course when we were very much involved in things. Königsberg, East Prussia. Ten hour fifty.
BW: And on such long trips like that how did you keep yourself occupied?
JT: Keeping my eyes open [laughs]. That was important. Yeah. Keep a look out you know. At night time of course. I remember one instance we were on a daylight operation actually. We were flying along and we were coming back and another aircraft just in front of us like that and I saw a Junkers 88. A fighter, German fighter, the 188 which had radar on the nose. And we were flying along and I saw this 188 so I told the skipper like, I said, ‘Junkers 88 starboard quarter. Starboard quarter level.’ So far, such a range. I forgot what it was now and so he said, ‘Keep your eye on it.’ Anyhow, the mid-upper gunner said, ‘I think he’s creeping up on this other Lancaster. And they don’t seem aware that he’s there. He’s coming up on them.’ I said, ‘Shall I fire a burst at him?’ So, the bomb aimer was a bit, you know. The bomb aimer said, George, he said, ‘No. No,’ he said, ‘Don’t you fire at him,’ he said, ‘He may come and turn on to us.’ I said, ‘Well we can’t sit here and watch. And watch him shoot that fellow down can we?’ I said, ‘Let’s give him a warning shot.’ And that’s what I did. Skipper said, ‘Yes. Go ahead.’ So, I gave a warning shot at this Junkers 88. And then the rear gunner of this other aircraft then opened up. And our mid-upper opened and he just dived away. The 88. And so then it was where had he gone to? Had he come around or was he coming around the other side. Where was he? Was he going to be a bit spiteful at us depriving him of his target? But we got away with it.
BW: And the other aircraft remained unscathed as well.
JT: Oh yes. Yeah. Yes.
BW: And when you fired that burst what, what sort of guns are you firing? Are they the 303s or did they change to the .5s at this time?
JT: The 303 Brownings. Four. Four 303 Brownings. And they were [pause] Yeah.
BW: How did you rate them? Did you find them effective weapons?
JT: Yes. Yes. I mean when I fired at this 88 I could see my bullets striking his [pause] they had the port. The port engines. They call it covers. Striking the cowlings on the, on the starboard. On the port engine. But how effective it was I don’t know. It didn’t shoot him down.
BW: But it winged him.
JT: Yes. It frightened him off perhaps.
BW: And was that the only time that you fired your guns at a target?
JT: No.
BW: Or did you get opportunity to use them on other occasions?
JT: Well, had one or two pops off at different ones. But we weren’t, we weren’t really, I wouldn’t say attacked. We were never attacked by a fighter. I got the impression if you fired at them and showed them that you were awake they went off. They weren’t interested. Yeah.
BW: So, just coming back to the start of a mission. When you get in to the aircraft to get into your turret what sort of actions are you going through then? What do you do to settle yourself into the turret?
JT: Well, just get in. Check the gunsight is lit up and of course plug into your intercom so that you’re in communication with the skipper and others. Couple up to the oxygen system. And you’re sitting on, in the latter part you were sitting on a parachute as a cushion of course.
BW: A seat pack.
JT: Yeah. A pilot, a pilot’s type pack they called it. Meaning the other one is the observer pack they called it. That was the one with the chest. Chest pack.
BW: But when you were carrying your ‘chute you had the seat pack. You, you sat on your chute. You didn’t stow it.
JT: Sat on it. Yes. Sat on the parachute. That was an advantage being in the rear turret really because if you had to bale out you turned the turret on the beam so that you were facing that way as you were going along this way say. Open the doors behind you, uncouple your, your plugs and pick your knees up and roll out backwards. And you sit on your parachute. So it was an easy place to get out of. Safest place. Safer than the mid-upper. I wouldn’t have liked sitting on the mid-upper turret.
BW: Did you ever, you never swapped positions?
JT: No. No.
BW: Or flew in that position at all.
JT: I didn’t want to.
BW: You stayed purely rear turret.
JT: No. As a mid-upper he’d got to come down out of from his turret. Down the roof of the bomb bay. Down on to the back. Back end. And then turn to the door, open the door. And if the aeroplane was going like that that, you know it was a bit of a job.
BW: But you never had to bale out.
JT: Oh no. No. I got it planned in my mind. I knew just what I would do.
BW: And what did you, what was your plan if you had to bale out?
JT: To bale out? Well like I say —
BW: You would turn the turret around and bale out but did you, did your plan extend to what you would do on the ground once you were down there?
JT: No. Well, some of the lectures you had were on escape procedures and all that kind of thing. To try and get what they called a home run. You’ve been aware of all this haven’t you? What’s your connection with the RAF?
BW: Me personally? I, I had a couple of years in pilot training in the mid-80s but it was, well for me personally, I was nineteen, twenty years old and, you know flying a jet at that age was ultimately not something I was cut out for so, you know, I left. But in the same manner that that you were briefed on escape and evasion procedures we had as well. And we had exercises in the country about things, you know. You were briefed on what you could expect. And of course flying over enemy territory you had escape kit as well, didn’t you? You had things like silk handkerchiefs with maps on them.
JT: Oh yeah. Yes.
BW: Compass in buttons and things like that.
JT: That’s right. A compass. Two buttons. Two buttons. You’d cut them off and one had a little pin in it like that in the middle and a dimple in the top one and that was, made a little compass in those. Yes.
BW: Thankfully you never had to use them.
JT: No.
BW: You had a good pilot who got you back every time.
JT: Oh yes. Got me back. Oh yes. He was a good pilot.
BW: You said you got on pretty well as a crew altogether.
JT: Hmmn?
BW: You said you got on pretty well as a crew altogether.
JT: Oh yeah. Yes. We got on.
BW: But did you socialise together after the operations?
JT: Not really. No. No. Didn’t [pause] That’s one thing I regretted really. That we didn’t have a sort of a get together after. When we’d finished. Mac was awarded a DFC and when he was going he came to me one day he said, ‘I’m going down to London,’ he said, ‘And he didn’t say about his DFC but I found out afterwards.’ He said, ‘I’m going down to London,’ he said, ‘And they’re flying me down there,’ he said, ‘I believe you’re going to — ’ what is it called? Near Market Harborough. He said, ‘I believe you’re going to,’ so and so, ‘Can we drop you off there?’ So, I said, ‘Oh yes. If you don’t mind.’ So, I got my two kit bags and my other pack and all that and he said, he said, ‘I’m in a hurry,’ he said, ‘So, as quickly as you can.’ And I never got time to say anything to the other lads before I went. And I thought afterwards, you know, it was a bit rotten after flying together all that time.
BW: And so that sounds as though it was the end of your tour when that happened. Is that right?
JT: End of the —
BW: Was it the end of your tour when that happened?
JT: Oh yes. Yes. See they stipulated that you were required to do thirty five ops. The squadron’s commander decided how many trips you had to do to complete what they called a tour of operations. And different squadrons had different numbers. Some had thirty. Some had thirty five and ours was thirty five. Mac, when the crew first arrived on the squadron from training the pilots of course had no operational experience so, they used to send them on a trip or two trips if possible with an experienced crew. And to get, see what, what the Pathfinders approach to things, you know. Over the target and that. And the, I was going to say [pause] anyhow I never got the chance to say goodbye to anybody or exchange addresses or anything. So completely lost touch with them. That was it.
DT: That’s why you did thirty three ops wasn’t it?
JT: Pardon?
DT: That’s why you did thirty three operations and not thirty five.
JT: Oh well, we did thirty three.
DT: Because Mac had done two.
JT: Out of thirty five. Well, Mac did two of these experience trips so we needed thirty five. They said that’s it. So we only did thirty three.
BW: And you, you didn’t go on to serve with another crew. You stopped at that point and finished altogether.
JT: That was it, yeah. Yeah.
BW: And in your log there are some targets that you attacked at the end of June which were V-1 sites. Do you recall what was briefed about those at all? Were they static sites or just storage areas or —
JT: Well, there was Peenemunde of course which was attacked. That was where the Germans were concentrating their rocket activities. But no it was at a targets, you know. You were given a target and that was it. You go and do the job. It’s rather strange you know because our last trip was, was to Mönchengladbach in Germany. And we bombed there one night. That last one and that was it. And 1956 I think it was, our swim, we belonged to a swimming club, the boys and Betty and myself belonged to a swimming club in Manchester. And one of the boys had been in the army at Mönchengladbach and he had formed a friendship with youngsters in the swimming club there [unclear] himself. And he formed this friendship and then the club, their club decided to come over to England and have a joint swimming competition with our club. And it was from Mönchengladbach. And they asked us to, would our members accommodate some youngsters? So we said we’d have two boys. Having three sons of our own. And Heinz and Hans Peter. Hans Peter has died since but Heinz and his wife Sabina, we’re still in touch with them. We’ve been over a few times. They’ve been over here. And I’m walking around Mönchengladbach and think well I bombed this place a few years ago, you know.
DT: Didn’t they take you to a hill dad?
JT: Pardon?
DT: They took you to a hill that was built out of rubble.
JT: Oh yes. Yes. At the back of Sabina and Heinz house there’s this mound. Big mound grassed over and a path leading up so you go up and seats and a garden on the top. A memorial garden. And Sabina said to me one time, she said, her English was very good. She said, ‘Do you know what this is, John?’ I said, ‘What? No.’ So she said, ‘This is rubble from when they were bombed during the war.’ So, I said, ‘Oh dear,’ you know. I didn’t tell her we’d made it, we helped to contribute to it because they were a smashing couple. Yeah.
BW: Did you ever get to see any of the V-1s that you were attacking the ground —
JT: No.
BW: Targets for.
JT: No.
BW: It was just another —
JT: Another target.
BW: Another target.
JT: Yeah.
BW: There were a couple of times where you flew in support of allied troops. One was over Caen and the other was over Königsberg. Did you get to see any of the troops on the ground or were you too high for that?
JT: Oh, too, we would be too high. Yes. Yes.
BW: Your CO, I believe was a Wing Commander Brill.
JT: Brill. Yes. Yes.
BW: What do you recall of him? He was Australian, wasn’t he?
JT: Australian. Yes. Wing Commander Brill. Yes. Deegdon was the flight commander. A fellow called Deegdon.
BW: Deedon?
JT: Flight commander.
BW: And which flight were you in on your squadron?
JT: I can’t remember.
BW: Ok.
JT: No. I can’t remember. He was Australian. Deegdon. I’m not sure whether Brill was killed later in a flying accident. I seem to remember.
BW: Your last trip in your log is to, is it Rheydt. R H E Y D T is that?
JT: Rheydt. Rheydt. Yeah.
BW: Rheydt.
JT: Yeah.
BW: And there was a notable incident on the, on that that raid. Do you recall what it was?
JT: To Rheydt. That was Mönchengladbach. Rheydt. Mönchengladbach.
BW: And who was the master bomber?
JT: Oh yes. Gibson. Guy Gibson. He was killed on that raid. Yeah.
BW: Was there any information given to you about what had happened to him?
JT: No. No. No. I don’t recall. Guy Gibson. Yeah. Wait a minute, yes. Just a minute. I saw, I could tell you something on that. As we were coming back over Holland, we were coming back over Holland and I saw, looking down I saw this twin-engined aircraft on fire. Flying on fire. And it was obviously under control because I thought it was trying to force land. And I saw it hit the ground and burst into flames. And when we got back to base they told us Guy Gibson hadn’t reported back. And I never connected the two facts of seeing this twin-engined, this twin-engined aircraft on fire. I never connected that with him at that time and it was a long time after that that it really hit home that it, there was a possibility.
BW: Because he was in a Mosquito.
JT: A Mosquito. That’s right. Yeah.
BW: And killed over Holland.
JT: Yeah.
BW: It was said that he was heard giving the crews on that raid a pat on the back before turning for home. Was that something that you recall and was it something that was broadcast to crews? Were you able to hear something like that or, or not?
JT: Well, we would have heard. We would perhaps would have heard it over the intercom but I don’t recall anything of that. No.
BW: Were messages broadcast between aircraft that you could hear on the intercom as well or was that only between the wireless operators on each aircraft? Could you? Could you hear exchanges on any raids with other aircraft?
JT: No. I don’t think there was never much communication between aircraft. The master bomber used to, used to communicate with the crews and you know, call in. You were in a flight. You were a wave. You know, you were wave one, two or three. You were told that when you were being briefed. You would be on such a wave. And timings were based on that and [pause] but the master bomber would, if the target, if the aiming of the target, you know, they dropped a marker to, as an aiming point. If it wasn’t accurate they’d say add two or three seconds or something like that to, for overshoot. If the targets, if the flare drops there and the target’s there and you’re coming this way he’d say three. Add three. And you’ve got your bombsight goes through, through the marker and then you’ve got the one, two, three - bang. Drop yours.
BW: Yeah. So, if the marker has fallen short of the target.
JT: Short of the target.
BW: And you’re heading in the direction of the marker you then add three seconds in order to hit the target.
JT: That’s right. To do that.
BW: And when the master bomber was giving you those kind of instructions could you as crew members hear that on the intercom?
JT: Oh yes. We’d hear that. Yes.
BW: And were there occasions when you recognised master bombers perhaps? Like Gibson. Had you heard him before?
JT: Not really. You knew who the master bomber was. And Willie Tait was another one. Willie Tait. Guy Gibson. One or two. One or two were a bit unpopular because they made a cock up of it sometimes. Some of these master bombers.
BW: And did you get to meet Gibson or —
JT: I saw him once. When I was at the Isle of Man. When I was in training. And there was a squadron was walking along, marching along to a lecture and the chappy who was in charge of us said, ‘Oh, here comes the CO.’ And they were coming, a group of about four or five people. Officers. And of course eyes right, you know. That kind of thing. And one of them was Guy Gibson. Yeah. And it was after the dams raid so he was known, you know, and that. And that was at, that was at Andreas. Want to see if it is in the logbook? I’ve got his logbook here. A copy.
BW: How did you come by that?
JT: I forget now. Somebody gave it me.
BW: And what was, this was after the dams but what was his reputation?
JT: I couldn’t really say. Supposed to be umpty, a bit huffy sometimes, you know. This is when I was at Andreas. It would be somewhere about [pause pages turning] Trying to pinpoint when Gibson was [pause] he had a friend on the camp. Some other officer. And he’d come to visit him and he’d flown in to —
BW: I see.
JT: Andreas. To see his friend. That would be August ’43.
BW: Right.
JT: It was round about that time but if it’s in his logbook I don’t know.
BW: Yeah. The log here that you’ve got a copy of says September 16th 1944. This is a copy of Gibson’s own logbook. It says his last recorded trip was in a Lightning. Which would be a P38.
JT: Yeah.
BW: From Langford Lodge. So, prior to that he’d been flying Oxfords but interspersed with Lightnings and Mosquitoes. So —
JT: It doesn’t say his destination does it?
BW: Langford Lodge. To and from Langford Lodge. That’s all. But —
JT: No. I mean I wouldn’t have —
BW: It seems he’s not been long on that op. On those, on that tour. But when you were out over the targets of these places particularly over, over Germany what was, what was the area like? I mean, were you able to see much or was there frequently heavy cloud or were you able to see a lot out of the —
JT: Well, you could see a lot. You could see the, you could see the fires and things like that. And we were too high to see, see much you know. You couldn’t see people or anything like that.
[pause]
BW: You’d done, in total thirty three ops in just over four months which was pretty consistent flying really. Did you want to continue and carry on and do another tour?
JT: Well, I did. I went from operational flying on to instructing at OTU. Operational Training Unit. And then one of the pilots [pause] I’m trying to think which one it was [pause] One of the pilot instructors said to me one day, ‘I’m getting a crew together to go back on ops. Do you want to come with me?’ So, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll come with you.’ So, and, well that must have been before, before June. June ’46 was it? ’45. Anyhow, he said, I said, ‘Alright, I’ll come with you.’ So, we went into the training and while we were in training we went to, we went to 100 Squadron for training and [pause] just casting my mind back and it developed then that the war was over. So, there was no point in us completing. And then he decided to cut down squadron strength and of course we were all old stages more or less — due for early de-mob. We were the first lots to be de-mobbed. So, so they made us redundant. Our crew. And, and then I was told I was going to 9 Squadron. At Waddington strangely enough. Back to Waddington. Of course, 9 Squadron was an old First World War squadron. Number 9. Oh and a chappy, Pete Langdon, he was the, he was the deputy commander of the squadron. And that’s when we went out to India. I went and reported to the 9 Squadron adjutant when I arrived. I was posted as a single, as an individual rather than with a crew. And I went in to the adjutant and he said, ‘Hello John, how are you?’ and he was, he’d been one of the instructors with me instructing. And so he said, ‘Did you come to join us?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘We’re going out to Hong Kong.’ So, I said, ‘Oh, I’ll come with you. I’ll join you on that.’ And anyhow, we finished up at Salbani in India. Which was a different place altogether.
BW: And what was it like out there?
JT: Pardon?
BW: What was it like out there?
JT: What? Salbani. Well, just, just out in the wilds. Out in the wilds really. There was, there was the airfield. The airfield, the railway station and that was about all.
BW: Did you get much time off? Off duty? Were you able to go off base into the nearby town?
JT: No. No. Didn’t go off. The nearest place was Calcutta. I went there twice. I went on the train and went twice. I got nose bleed and, I broke my nose when I was a kid you see and it used to bleed sometimes. They said it was the heat causing the rise in blood pressure. I went sick and they sent me to Calcutta to see the ear, nose and throat specialist. I went twice.
BW: How long were you out in India for?
JT: About four months. Yeah. Be four month. Yeah. January to April. January the 2nd we took off. Should have gone on the 1st but the weather wasn’t suitable. Flew to [pause] North Africa and then along over the desert to Karachi. Sorry. To Egypt. Egypt. Egypt to [pause] oh my mind’s going. From Egypt to —
BW: Would you fly to —
JT: Karachi. North Africa.
DT: You went to Italy first didn’t you?
JT: Pardon?
DT: Didn’t you go to Italy first?
JT: I went to Italy. I went to Italy on, that was Operation Dodge.
DT: Oh yeah. Yeah.
JT: Dodge they called it. The flying troops back. Flying the 8th Army chaps back. In fact, there’s a picture of them in. This aircraft was included in it.
BT: Are you warm enough love?
BW: I’m fine thank you, yes.
BT: Are you warm enough David?
DT: I’m fine, love. Yeah. No problem.
BW: Yeah. So they did. They did. Yeah, they did repatriate soldiers and POWs in Lancasters. Yeah. Operation Exodus.
JT: This wasn’t prisoners. This was the 8th Army.
BW: 8th Army. So, that’s an original photo of S Sugar with, as you say troops from the 8th Army about to board. And what were you? Were you still flying Lancasters out in India or were you flying something different?
JT: Oh yes. Lancasters. Yeah. Yeah. Glad. Yeah.
BW: And when you, when you returned back to the UK what, what happened then?
JT: Well, I got married. Didn’t we? [laughs] Yeah. 1946.
BW: And where had you both met?
JT: Hmmn?
BW: Where had you both met? Where did you meet each other?
JT: Oh, we grew up together. Lived in the same road, didn’t we?
BT: Lived on the same road.
JT: Yeah.
BW: So, you’d known each other for years before you joined up.
JT: Oh yeah.
DT: You lived at, what was it mum? You lived number 65.
BT: What?
DT: You lived at number 65 and dad lived at 57.
BT: 57.
JT: That’s right.
BT: So he knew all about me.
DT: And didn’t mess about.
BW: So he knew what he was getting in to.
BT: What love?
BW: He knew what he was letting himself in for.
BT: Oh, he knew what he was taking on. Yeah.
DT: There was no messing about because that was my mum’s dad.
BT: That was my dad. A policeman.
JT: A copper.
BW: I see.
DT: That was, that’s my grandad.
JT: She’s like her father.
BW: Yeah.
DT: He was a big man.
BT: Yeah.
JT: Thirty years. Thirty years in the police.
BT: Lovely fellow wasn’t he John? Really nice.
JT: Oh yeah.
BW: He looks like he, he’d had service too. Did he serve in the Second War or was he in the First?
JT: No. Well he’d got the defence —
BT: A policeman.
JT: He’d got, the policeman and ambulanceman and fireman all got the defence medal didn’t they?
BW: Alright. Thank you.
BT: He used to take the kids at that time you used to take the kids across, you know from, from the school to the other side of the road and they all used to run just so to take hold of his hand.
DT: He was huge. He was about — how tall was he? Six foot something.
BT: Six foot seven.
BW: Wow.
BT: Something like that.
DT: He was the police, the police tug of war team. He was the anchorman.
BW: I should hope so.
BT: Got some lovely presents. Some lovely prizes. Cups and things, you know.
BW: So, when you returned from India you got married and then you were demobbed.
JT: I was demobbed in, soon enough. I enrolled at St John’s Wood. Lord’s Cricket Ground, St John’s Wood. I was de-mobbed at Wembley Stadium.
DT: Didn’t you go on Lincolns dad?
JT: Pardon?
DT: Didn’t you go on to Lincolns?
JT: Ah yes. We went on to Lincolns for a short while. Yes.
BW: And where were you flying those from?
JT: Lincolns? [pause] Binbrook was it? Or Lindholme? Lindholme. Number 9 Squadron attached to Lindholme for —
BW: So, you wouldn’t have been months then doing that. Once you came back from India you wouldn’t be many months with 9 Squadron would you?
JT: Yes. I were with 9 Squadron until the end of the war. Until I was demobbed rather. When we were on Lincolns. I were demobbed from the 9 Squadron.
BW: I see.
JT: At Binbrook. Binbrook. When we came back from India.
BW: Once you left the RAF what did you go on to do then?
JT: I went, I worked for the CWS before. In Manchester. The Coop headquarters in Manchester. I worked for them before I went in the RAF and when I came out of course they had to give me my job back. And I went, I was in the sales accounts department.
BW: For the Co-op.
JT: For the Co-op. Yes. In their head office there and the chappy who was made the boss. The boss retired, the manager of the department. He’d stayed on extra years during the war and of course when peace came he, he opted for his retirement. And the chap who took over as boss, he’d married one of the CWS director’s daughters. So, of course he was a squadron leader in the RAF and when he came back he, they gave him, the boss gave him the bosses job when the boss retired. They gave him his job. And he said to me one day, I mean he had a bit of a soft spot for being ex-RAF as well. He said to me, he said, ‘There’s a vacancy in the taxation department,’ he said, ‘Are you interested?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘It will pay better than this department.’ So, I said, ‘Oh yeah. Certainly.’ So I got the job in taxation. Company tax work. And very interesting it was. Cut and thrust with the Inland Revenue you know and sending, we used to do audits for various Co-op societies and I used to do the tax work then. So, what they had to pay in tax from the profits or how money we got back from them for the losses and such. You know. And I finished up as managing the department at one time. And then they merged. They merged with the auditors and you’ve heard of KPMG have you?
BW: Accountants.
JT: On London Road. And they merged with them so I was just about due for retiring then so I got out. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the work. Interesting.
BW: I can think of a few people who’d be, who’d be asking for your skills. I can think of a few people who would be asking for your skills these days.
JT: Oh yeah.
BW: Somebody who lives at number 10 I think.
DT: Yours was company tax wasn’t it? You were company tax. Not personal tax.
BW: Yeah.
JT: Company tax. Not individuals. It was company tax. Yes.
DT: But you used to fill my tax forms in and you’d say, ‘Cross that out. Cross that out. Sign. Tick that, tick that, tick that. Sign that,’ he said, ‘That’ll be thirty guineas.’
[pause]
DT: You managed to fly Lancasters as well didn’t you dad?
JT: Pardon?
DT: You managed to fly Lancasters.
JT: Oh, I did fly a Lancaster once. Yeah.
DT: Yeah.
BW: How did you manage that?
JT: Well, we had a pilot who decided that it would be a good idea if different crew members interchanged. So, he said, ‘Here John,’ he said, ‘Fly this.’ I said, ‘Oh aye. Go on.’ I got in the pilot’s seat. Flew it. But just straight and level stuff, more or less, you know.
DT: He wanted to make sure you got home.
JT: Hmmn?
DT: He wanted to make sure he got home in case, if he was hurt.
JT: Well, no this was after.
DT: That was after was it?
JT: After all. Yeah.
DT: Oh, I thought it was —
JT: No. Mac didn’t. No. Mac was, Mac was the pilot.
DT: Yeah.
JT: He was in charge.
DT: Oh right.
BW: Was he pretty strict about that sort of thing?
JT: Yeah. He were a good pilot.
BW: There’s a photo here of your CO and the Duke of Gloucester. Duke of Gloucester’s on the left there.
JT: He became —
BW: And your CO —
JT: Yeah. He was at, he was made the Governor General of Australia wasn’t he. So he came to an Australian squadron to say, when he went to Australia there he could genuinely, could say, ‘I’ve met the lads in England,’ you know. That kind of thing. Yeah.
BW: Do you recall that visit taking place? It would be about the time you were on.
JT: No. No.
BW: Waddington.
JT: I do remember actually. We were told he was coming but I, we’d been on operation that previous night and I said, I’m not getting up to go and see him [laughs] Yes.
BW: There was a couple of Australian crewmen in that photo too.
JT: Yeah. Wing Commander Brill. Yeah.
BW: Did you happen to know them? The other, the other crewmen. They’re named.
JT: No. I don’t. Where did you get this from? Got secret information. Got me here.
BW: That’s from the Australian War Museum that particular photo. But you shared that that base at Waddington with 463 Squadron as well didn’t you?
JT: 463 and 467. That’s right. Yes. Yeah.
BW: And did you get to mix with them at all from the other?
JT: Not really. You didn’t really know. You know there was just a mass of fellows and you didn’t know whether they were 463 or 467. The only, the only near association and strangely enough it was, that was through Derek. That mate of yours who [pause] they formed [pause] what do you call it? Oh God. What’s his name? His father. Johnson.
DT: Johnson. Max Johnson.
JT: Johnson. Johnson. That’s right.
DT: Peter Johnson. Max Johnson was his father and Max Johnson was on 467 Squadron wasn’t he?
JT: That’s right, yeah.
DT: Yeah. And he’s actually listed as one of the pilots of POS at the time.
JT: Yeah.
DT: Yeah.
JT: That’s right. Yeah.
DT: Another coincidence, Brian. I worked for a company. I worked in the chemical research department and I was seconded to a university in Australia to do a research project over there. I was there for two months I think it was. My wife and my daughter came with us and and in the department there was, I was talking to some of the lads in the lab and in the research area and I was saying, ‘Oh, my dad was in the Royal Australian Air Force.’ And they said, ‘Oh you want to come and see Doc Pete. A fellow called Peter Brownall.’ And they said he was on Lancasters during the war. So, they took me along to see this elderly university lecturer and we got talking. A really nice guy you know. And he says, he says what squadron were you with? I said, ‘What squadron were you with?’ So he said 467. I said, ‘Oh that was my dad’s squadron. 467.’ But he was slightly after my dad and I think he was just there, he was there just as the war finished. He’d done his training and he got on to the squadron but 467 then was at Metheringham. And so he was absolutely hacked off because the war had ended and he hadn’t been able to —
BW: Yeah.
DT: Go on operations.
BW: Participate.
DT: So, he was flown, he flew back then to Australian and took up his post as, I think a botany lecturer. Some sort of science lecturer, you know.
BW: Yeah.
DT: So I was talking to him and it was interesting. And there was a not a DVD but a tape of that time. This was 1994. A tape had been produced about, called, “The Lancaster at war,” and I told him about this. So, when I got home I searched out a copy of it and posted it off for him. And I got a really nice letter back you know, thanking me for this. And he said he’d had to go out and buy a tape player and people had been coming around and he’d been, you know he’d been showing this Lancaster thing, Lancaster tape to all his, all his pals. But he was a nice chap. And do you remember that cartoon that he gave me? And it was —
[recording paused]
BW: Last, I think, section to, to cover. Since your retirement and since you left the RAF how does it feel to see Bomber Command being commemorated after all this time? There’s now the Hyde Park Memorial and there’s the Spire in Lincoln?
JT: It should be. It should be.
BW: Have you been to the unveiling of the Memorial Spire in Lincoln?
JT: No. No.
BW: Did you go last year?
JT: No. No.
BW: So, you —
JT: I don’t think that should have been built in London. It should have been built in Lincoln.
BW: Well, the Memorial in Green Park was unveiled a few years ago but they are, they have unveiled a Memorial Spire at Canwick Hill which is what the Bomber Command Centre are responsible for. Have you, have you seen that? Have you been?
JT: No.
BW: No.
JT: I haven’t. No.
BW: But it’s in, and certainly I’m sure you’d agree it’s in the right place. You know, it’s —
JT: Oh, it is. Yeah.
BW: So, there’s a spire which is the height of a Lancaster’s wingspan and it has memorial walls made of steel situated around it. And that’s where the Centre will be built. The Chadwick Centre which will house the digital archive which, you know, this information is going to go into. But you can —
JT: I don’t know if I’ll ever get over to Lincoln now.
BW: Well if you do it’s, it’s worth seeing.
JT: Yeah.
BW: They had a, they had a beautiful unveiling ceremony last year and a flypast. Unfortunately, the Lancaster couldn’t make it but they got the Vulcan instead. And that was, that was really special. If you do get the chance do go and have a look. So, are you, are you glad these sort of commemorations for Bomber Command are coming about now?
JT: Sorry?
BW: Are you glad these sorts of commemorations for Bomber Command are coming about?
JT: Oh yeah. I am glad. Yes. There’s, because there are so many uniques in the army and so on, and navy and they were specifically honoured. And Bomber Command, I think people regarded them as dirty words because of bombing civilians. I think that’s been a failing really.
[recording paused while John leaves the room for a moment]
JT: A while later. A few years later I went to see him. He said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘The firm’s selling up. They’re merging with someone else,’ he said, ‘I’m retiring.’ So, he said, ‘Good luck,’ and all that. So, anyhow a few days later a partner from the firm came with a parcel and he gave me that. Gave me that picture. And I rang this chappy up to thank him for sending it and he said, ‘Well, it belongs to you more than it belongs to me,’ he said, ‘You did some good work for us,’ and all that and so —
BW: And that’s —
JT: He gave it me.
BW: And that’s how you acquired the picture.
JT: That’s how it came. Yeah.
BW: And so you’ve always, you’ve always got that association now with.
JT: [unclear] yeah.
BW: POS and you know.
JT: Yeah.
BT: That was good of them wasn’t it?
BW: And it’s, you know, on permanent display now in the RAF Museum.
JT: Yeah.
BW: So, that’s brilliant. So, when you, when you look back over your career in the RAF has it given you good memories, and?
JT: Oh yes. I’ve got good memories. Some good mates, and you know it was, it’s alright. It’ll be alright. Yes. I never regretted going. Yeah.
BW: We’ll move on to other things like the photographs and whatever. So, you know, for the, for the audio anyway I’ll leave it there for now. So, thank you very much for your time. For the interview. And for giving the information to the International Bomber Command Centre. Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with John Foster Thorp
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Brian Wright
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-04-12
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AThorpJF160412, PThorpJF1601
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:38:37 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
John Thorp was born and raised in Manchester where he attended North Manchester Grammar School. At seventeen he joined the Home Guard. When he was eighteen he volunteered for the RAF with dreams of becoming a pilot. While waiting at Heaton Park to transfer to further training overseas he became increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress. When invited to volunteer to train as a gunner he decided to accept because he wanted to progress. After training he was posted with his crew to 467 Squadron at RAF Waddington. Returning from the operation on D-Day he saw the massed armada waiting to sail to the landing grounds in Normandy. On take-off to an operation there was a loud bang heard throughout the aircraft. When they returned from the target they tested the undercarriage and the wheel flew past John’s turret. They had to effect an emergency landing at Woodbridge and the pilot completed a remarkable landing.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
India
England--Lincolnshire
England--Suffolk
Germany--Mönchengladbach
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1942
1944
1944-06-05
1944-06-06
467 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
bombing of the Normandy coastal batteries (5/6 June 1944)
civil defence
crewing up
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
Home Guard
Ju 88
Lancaster
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operation Dodge (1945)
RAF Binbrook
RAF Heaton Park
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Waddington
RAF Woodbridge
Stirling
training
Wellington
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Title
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Teasdale, Audrey
Audrey Pitts
Description
An account of the resource
21 items. An oral history interview with Audrey Teasdale (b. 1923, 2135963 Royal Air Force) and photographs. She served as a WAAF in the officers' mess at RAF Waddington.
The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Audrey Teasdale and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
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2022-12-20
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IBCC Digital Archive
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Teasdale, A
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AT: Er, from my own point of view I, you know, after the exam had gone before I got my act together and so none of us really managed a qualification, but we were all very well educated. And my Harry, er my two eldest brothers, they both worked in the Coal Board, as I said, my father was a colliery manager and Fred was in administration with the local authority. My Tom, the middle brother, he finished up as a company secretary for the Coal Board. We did all our study after school, y'know, we did it all off our own bats and erm...
BW: So was it night school that you went to?
AT: Night school and as we progressed, you'll see what I did, y'know but er, so it was night school and it was, y'know, interesting things and, you know, getting on with life generally and we had this encouragement from home and...
BW: You say your Mother was Victorian, she worked in service.
AT: In service yes, yes...
BW: Whereabouts did she work, was it a grand house or something?
AT: Yes, she's worked, yes, cos there's photograph there, I think, with one of the people she was with. Oh no, yeah, yeah. She worked with gentry but she also, at one point, worked at the girls grammar school in Wakefield. Yes but lovely lady.
BW: And what age were you when you left school?
AT: 14.
BW: Which was standard at that time.
AT: Standard, yes. And, do you want to know my occupation from then on?
BW: Yeah, what did you go on to do?
AT: My first occupation, I used to walk to the station, which was a mile away, then get a train to Leeds. And I worked for a firm called Barrens and it was a tailoring firm and I worked in their offices and it all related to production and y'know, what they were using and the sort of stuff that went on to the actual finished product and that sort of thing. So I did clerical work with them and I followed on where I got a job in Wakefield. I worked with a jeweler, a very top shop jewelers, you know, it was Appleyard's, in a terrific arcade, terrific shop. So I went there and then from there I was always sort of in the retail business and I went to work at the Co-op, ha! And I worked in the furnishing department where I was first assistant and I did all the erm, now then, the word, you know when they can't afford to pay...
BW: Debt.
AT: Er, actually making out the agreements for them to sign, you know, when they'd got x number of years to pay it in, y'know, that sort of thing. The name just escapes me.
BW: Repayments?
AT: Er, yeah, it was, it was, y'know, basically the lay out of what they'd bought, the interest to be paid and, and the period that they were going to pay it in. Yes, and that was it, all official and then they made the payments to the [unclear] and I did that and I was first assistant for sales.
01:08:24
BW: How long were you doing that job for?
AT: Oh it was, y’know, it was sort of between the jobs, you know, between that and my service really and er, yeah, and I did sort of clerical work and I actually went into the WAAF from there.
BW: Do you remember where you were, where your family was, when war was declared?
AT: At home. Yes, yes, er my youngest brother, the two boys - the elder brothers, they obviously were in the Coal Board, working in the Coal Board, and of course, were exempt. Fred, the youngest one, was in administration with the local authority and of course, he was conscripted. And he was in the Green Howard Regiment and stationed in Northern Ireland. But he never went abroad. A great brother and we used to, when I was in the WAAF, we used to write to each other and he kept in touch with home, and y’know, we'd always continue, you know, keeping in touch.
BW: So how old were you then when war was dec... when war broke out?
AT: About 23 and it broke out in '39...
BW: So you [unclear].
AT: Yes and then I went to, went to, I was conscripted and then I actually went into the WAAF 15th December 1942.
BW: So, what sort of choice did you have? You mentioned you were conscripted, how did that work, particularly for women because we think of men as being primarily conscripted but...
AT: Yes. I sort of could have gone the fire brigade, which didn't appeal at all [laughs]. Land Army but I think what did it [laughs] I was out one day and I saw this advert [laughs] "Join the WAAF and work with the men who fly", and I thought, 'That's for Audrey' [laughs]. So that's what I did.
BW: OK
AT: And of course, I could have been anything then, I could have been a balloon operator - barrage balloon, doing anything, really. But basically, all my time I was in the officer's mess and my, all my work was generally clerical and y’know, relating to the crews and different things.
BW: So you decided to join the WAAF. Did you, ah, it may be perhaps too detailed but I'm just interested to understand did you have to go into the air force recruitment office to complete that or was it different, did you go in to sign up?
AT: Er, I remember, you made the decision to go and then of course it just took place after that. I remember going down to, I can't remember where it was but I was interviewed and it was discussed and yeah. That's very vague to me but I do remember that.
BW: I was going to ask you about your interview and whether there was a particular test that you sat for example, maths or English or anything like that?
AT: No, no qualifications. Basically it was the things you were interested in.
BW: And how long between you being conscripted did it take for you to actually get into training?
AT: More or less immediately.
BW: Right.
AT: Yes, I remember I, it was, 15th December '42 and I went, I think, to Innesworth in Gloucester, where I was kitted out then that didn't take long and then I came back to Morecambe to do my square bashing and I was there about a fortnight. We lived, I lived in billets in the West End of Morecambe and that was very funny.
BW: How long did you spend there?
AT: Just a fortnight. It was a training and it was so funny because obviously it was winter, it was December, it was icy. We had a flight sergeant who did a thing and I'll be [laughs], quite [unclear] what he said but we couldn't stand up and he said, "What do you want me to do? Whistle the bloody skater's waltz?" [laughs]. And the other thing that was interesting about the square bashing was, they'd horses on the promenade and there was poo all over the place and you were marching away merrily and if you got your foot in that everybody got it from behind. You used to be absolutely blathered sometimes. But, that was quite an experience, the icing and the horse poo [laughter].
BW: And I believe you would have your passing out parade on Morecambe prom, is that right?
AT: Yes, yes...yeah.
BW: And it must have been pretty close to Christmas when you passed out of your fortnight's training.
AT: Yes, yes...yeah.
BW: Or just past.
AT: Yes, yeah. I can't remember that but I do know I went from there to Lindholme, Doncaster. I didn't stay there very long. I don't know, really and there was a lot of army personnel there at that time. And I don't know what the purpose of that. I wasn't there that very long and then I got a posting to Waddington. And when I got to Waddington, my time at Waddington, I was actually with 9 Squadron, which was English, 44 Squadron, which was Rhodesian and 467 and 463 which were Australian and I sort of did my service there. And from the first day, you know, I sort of worked in the officer's mess and I did lots of clerical work relating to that. Occasionally I did waitressing and I always used to get the job of the VIPs who would have a special room and I would serve them. Like Wing Commander Nettleton VC. I met him. And lots of personalities, you know, they came through. You know, met a lot of people.
BW: You mentioned Wing Commander Nettleton.
AT: Yes.
BW: He led, I think, the raid on Augsburg, which was quite a famous raid.
AT; Yes.
BW: What were your recollections of him? Did you meet him often?
AT: Lovely man. And he married a WAAF officer. Yeah and I remember service tea for them when they came, when she came. Yeah, yeah.
BW: So you were on the base, there, at Waddington, in the officer's mess, were you there pretty much all of the time, were all your duties conducted in...?
AT: In the officer's mess, yes. I did, sort of, I used to get the, the battle orders, if you'd like to call them that and I knew the crews, where they were going and they used to get a special meal when they were going on a flight cos it was often a nine hour flight and I used to, you know, make sure that they got their flight [meal], you know. They all passed through the desk and I checked that they were there and that they should get this meal, and what have you and, so that was that and of course, when they came back and...
BW: So, because the orders were going through your desk as an admin clerk, you would probably know where they were going before they did.
AT: Yeah, yeah.
BW: And was it you that put the orders up on the board each night?
AT: No, no. I was just responsible for the crews, the crews that, you know, who was going through. And this was another funny thing, they were so funny, the life they were living and you know, it was a case of eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we, we'd be...they were so, so, you know. And so respectful that it wasn't like it is today, it was, the changes in men's [sic] because they'd so much. I think probably in the early days of the war, when the WAAFs and sort of, army, you know they got the women in, I think probably in the early days they got a lot of the rough but at the time that I was going in, in '42, we got the greatest respect. And they, the crews, knew exactly who was who and what was what and...you understand what I am saying? And, yes, they made an effort. But what I was saying, they were so funny cos, I remember one time, [they were returning] and I was sat at my desk and I looked up at this officer and he smelt beautiful [laughs] and you know, for one moment, I thought, "Anything I can help you with?" and I said, "Have you been flying, Sir?" He says, "No, I've been for a walk in the park!" [laughter]. Yes, so, needless to say, he hadn't but he'd obviously managed to shower and smell beautiful [chuckles].
BW: So, where were you, yourself, billeted?
AT: I were in the Waafery [sic], a beautiful house, I don't know if it's still there, a beautiful old building on the left as you went into the 'drome. Do you know the Waafery? I might have a photograph somewhere.
BW: That was the name of it - The Waafery?
AT: Yes, yeah, yeah. And there was, we used lovely bedrooms and I think I may remember, I was on the ground floor and there was three of us in most bedrooms and, there was a night when someone got through the window on the ground floor - he was obviously looking for a WAAF but [laughs] it wasn't one of us three [laughs]. So, yeah, I lived in there.
BW: So, did you make good friends with the other WAAFs there?
AT: Yes, very good, yes. I've got pictures of them. Yes, really good friendships. And all the staff I worked with, really, because there was the cooking staff and y’know, and everything that went with...and I used to go to some beautiful functions, you know, the officers used to have at The Bulls Head and I mean, the food wasn't a problem, y’know, you got beautiful food and everything and we were just on duty, basically, to see if everything was all going alright.
BW: So it wasn't just your room mates you got on well with, you got on well with the other...
AT: I got on well with the crews and everyone, hmm. Yes, there were, I mean, the English, y’know, were very much the stiff upper lip type and a little bit more serious, 'Yes sir and no sir, three bags full, sir', sort of thing but the, er, Rhodesian and the, y’know, Australian they were so laid back, you know. I mean, we didn't, we couldn't have hair on our shoulders and we were not supposed to fraternise with the officers but, you know, they were so completely different to our officers. Nevertheless, our officers were still very nice.
BW: So, the officer's mess wasn't segregated between squadrons presumably, it was a large - was it a large mess for all of them?
AT: It was a large mess and of course, you had your sergeant's mess and your other ranks, yeah but you know, if I, on my first day arriving back on camp I was in the other rank but I spent my...
BW: So what would a typical day look like?
AT: In what respect?
BW: Well, what would you, would you sort of be up maybe six in the morning and into work for eight or what? And would you spend, say, half the day in the office and the other time at mealtimes on shift? How would it work for you?
AT: No, it wasn’t.. I don't remember it being too specific because you had flights at different times and you know, it varied.
BW: So you were just required to serve meals at particular...?
AT: Times, yeah. And operational meals were separate of course, at a different time of the day but I don't even remember what sort of a shift I worked, you know, the hours I worked or anything. But it was all very normal to me, you know, nothing outrageous.
BW: So it seemed fairly regular hours and then would you have evenings off, most evenings?
AT: Oh yes, yes. Yes, you'd nothing after a meal was served, really. And, of course, at that time I could have been somewhere else, i.e. they weren't all going on operations, yeah.
BW: You mentioned, erm, serving meals to crews who would be out on the night raids, on the missions into Germany and occupied territory, did you ever get to hear what their targets were, did you get a sense of where they were going or was it only when they came back?
AT: Only when they came back, really, yes, yes and you know, it wasn't, that was unpleasant, really because we knew them so well and you know so many went for a burton and, you know their life span wasn't very long, was it? For a, y’know, a newly qualified pilot who would probably be 19 or 20, you know, going on their first ops and lifespan were about a fortnight, wasn't it.
BW: So, when the crew lists were up and there was a raid on for that night, would you be serving them their meal around lunchtime or mid afternoon?
AT: Well the night raids it would be going on, you know, towards you know and have the time to check in, you know, that sort of thing.
BW: Yeah. I was just thinking, because they'd have to allow, you know, you sort of work back from when they would have to be over the target and they've got to go to briefing
AT: Yes and they got to go to briefing, yes, all that, yeah. But, I didn't particularly clock all that because I worked to a timetable.
BW: And when you got the time off on the evenings, what kind of things were you able to do, socially?
AT: There were always something, I mixed with people then and you know, we used to get to dances in the sergeant's mess and there was sport, I used to play tennis and we were always going down to the local pub and celebrating something, y’know, someone had done their first trip or finished a tour of ops or it was somebody's 21st birthday or, y’know, something. We'd a nice social life and we used to go to the villages nearer and we had bikes and we used to cycle to the other villages and go to the village dances and we did a lot of dancing, ha! [chuckling].
BW: Did you get into Lincoln, itself?
AT: Yes. Now, at the weekends, we were allowed to wear civilian clothes and y’know, when we went dancing and there's an officer there in a crew, who, we won [chuckles], we won a jitterbugging competition [unclear]. You know, it was lovely, there was a lovely spirit, lovely. We'd lots of things to do, really.
BW: So who would you socialise more with because you were working in the officer's mess, dances in the sergeant's mess, so would you mix more with officers or with NCOs or with other ranks?
AT: I think I probably mixed more with the officers but I still enjoyed the company of the sergeant's mess so, or the other ranks, if it comes to that. But, Brian Fallon, one of the officers, actually come [sic] and spent a leave at my home in West Yorkshire. You know, I had a lot of contact with them and I suppose I was more inclined to have...but nevertheless, I did, er. I've got a thing there, somewhere, where it was an invitation to the last dance of the 467 Squadron or something like that, you know.
BW: And was Waddington where you stayed throughout your WAAF service?
AT: No, when, oh... nine squadron went to Bardney and the Rhodesian squadron moved on and so the last few years I was with 467 and 463 and er. What was the question there?
BW: Did you stay at Waddington or did you move on elsewhere?
AT: Ah, yeah, I went to, when I left Waddington, cos it was at the end of the war, I went down to Silverstone in Northants and that was, you know, there wasn't a great deal to do. It was almost like a civilian thing because we were preparing to be demobbed. But there again, we had a nice carry on, I remember being introduced to greyhound racing [chuckles], when I was in Silverstone. Now then, what was the name of the place, it begins a 'B'... Anyway, I can't remember it. And we used to go to this, and there was a chappie who worked with the greyhounds and the first race you could guarantee a 'cert' and he used to mark our cards for us [laughter]. I always remember thinking, "Oh, if I had only had just put my wedge on it..." but I didn't, I just put my pittance cos it was so little.
BW: So what did you get paid?
AT: I can't remember, but I do remember, at one point, I got an increase and instead of saluting and saying "963" I said, "Thank you!" [laughs]. I was so delighted! Not very popular! [laughter]
BW: So Silverstone was quite different to being at Waddington. You must have been at Waddington, probably, 18 months - two years, easily?
AT: Two years yes. I spent very little time at Lindholme.
BW: Were there particular raids or events that you remember at Waddington? Because the squadrons took part in them during that time but I wonder if anything came out through the talk with the squadrons or [unclear]
AT: No, no. I remember the experience, various experiences, because I remember seeing the greatest bonfire of my life when I was at Waddington because I was watching them come back and I was stood next to a WAAF officer, she was watching as well and they German, the Messerschmidt followed them back and they strafed the 'drome and they didn't hit a Lancaster bomber but beyond, which offices, was the incendiary dump and they hit that and poosh! You can imagine, the place was lit up, it was amazing. That was an experience. Different things happened, you know.
BW: When people look at photos and some film footage they would see, as the bombers took off, people gathered at the halt point waving them off...
AT: Yes, I personally and others, used to go and walk on the perimeter track and we were living very dangerous cos of the 1000 lb bombs but we used to go and wave them off cos, you know, we knew the crews and where they were going. We used to go onto the perimeter track.
BW: And did you watch them come back?
AT: Well, no, no because that could have been early hours, you know, whatever. Basically, we went to see them off.
BW: And, it might sound a daft question but, were you attached to a particular aircraft, did you recognise particular aircraft or did you just generally go and wave everybody off?
AT: Yes, yes, we knew the crews and different things and, of course, as you'll be aware, Hitler said that no enemy plane would ever fly over the German territory but at Waddington, we reach a hundred trips and I've got some classified photographs of the bombers, y'know and 'S' for Sugar, obviously there'd been more than one crew that did the hundred trips but that particular 'S' for Sugar did the hundredth trip [sic].
BW: Did you ever - you were obviously good friends with the pilots and crew - did you ever get shown around a Lancaster, did you ever get inside one?
AT: Yes, I've been inside one, yes.
BW: Did they ever take you flying on one?
AT: I never took, actually, after the war, the WAAFs, we could go to do a parachute jump and what have you and, it got off the ground and then I think there was an incident and the WAAFs panicked and it stopped. Yes, so we'd that opportunity. But I've obviously been in and I've sat in every seat, I've even been in the bomb aimer's part [chuckles], y'know. So I knew the aircraft very well.
BW: And at the time you were there they were mainly flying Lancasters, did you, did they fly anything else, were there other aircraft that came onto the base that you could go and see?
AT: No. Of course the Spitfire pilots were escorts, you know, for the bombers. A lot of Canadians and Polish people flew the Spitfires but generally, it was strictly Lancasters. I mean, you mentioned the Stirling, you know, I didn't see anything of those. Of course, I was around when there was all the talk about the Dambusters and Barnes Wallis and the bouncing bomb and, I didn't, I actually, I didn't personally meet, I wasn't personally introduced but, Gibson came to the 'drome at one point. So I was around when all this was happening.
BW: So when you heard about the dams raid, what was the atmosphere like, how did you feel when you heard about it?
AT: The Dambusters? Oh it was amazing because there was an awful lot of work went into it, you know, a lot of tests and then for them to actually crack it and flood everything I felt it was amazing. I mean, it was a serious business, I always say it was an experience I wouldn't have liked to have missed but there was a lot of sadness and, you know er and I mean, like its happening in Ukraine now but I mean we flattened Stuttgart and Berlin and y' know, but its all, but that was on targets, wasn't it, it wasn't on civilians but nevertheless, they got involved in it, didn't they? So there were lots of civilians.
BW: Did you hear about these raids when crews came back? What was the atmosphere like in the mess, I mean you'd served some of these guys before they went out. What happened when, you know, the crews perhaps didn't come back?
AT: Well, obviously, there were the sadness, you know, because people had got to...and there's crews, you know and of course, a lot of the...I knew a friend, actually, who flew and, he erm, they got shot down and, for a while I didn't personally get to know whether...anything but I did keep in touch with Peter's parents, he lived in Watford and I remember the number, Bushy Heath, 1428 [laughs]. And it was Peter Kimber and I think, actually they'd a hairdressing business in London and I think, family must still be running that. But for my 21st birthday he bought me a Mason & Pearson hair brush [laughs], which was very expensive for me then. [laughter]. Yeah, erm, no, they'd obviously, they'd, you know, the crews were all gelled together, you know, and, but er... [siren]
BW: Sorry about that. So, yeah, you said the crews were all gelled together.
AT: Yes, yes, and there wasn't a morbid, nothing morbid about it. It was a job, it was a duty and y'know, they got on with it.
BW: Did you...I'm just trying to picture the scene in the mess when the crews come back for their first meal after a raid and obviously you, as catering staff or general staff, you're serving in the mess, you'd be laying the places...
AT: I wouldn't be there when they came in, I'd not necessarily be there but there was no, nothing morbid or...I mean, they weren't throwing a party but y'know, it was a job.
BW; And you'd only find out later, of course, whether...
AT: The crews that had gone missing hadn't got back. You checked in everybody who was coming back, y'know but of course, the others...[unclear].
BW: And you mentioned earlier that fraternising with the aircrew, whether officers or other ranks, wasn't allowed but obviously it went on. Did you or your friends, your friends in particular, end up in serious relationships?
AT: No, no. I had, mine were friendships, y'know, I had some great friendships but, no, I came home and married someone from the village [chuckles]. But, y'know, I enjoyed the time and I had some respect for people and, yeah. I mean Brian Fallon came home but, well, we just, y'know, it was a friendship and we just, I was giving him the opportunity to come and have a civilian life, if you like, at my home.
00:32:38
BW: How did your parents feel about you being in the WAAF and on an operational base?
AT: My Mum was very worried initially but obviously, no objections to the decisions I made. But, obviously, I'd never been away from home, y'know and it was a big thing to do really, wasn't it?
BE: And did you, yourself, get leave, periodically?
AT: Oh yes, yes, it was about every six or eight weeks, leave, yeah, yeah. And yes, y'know, my parents always liked to see me. But my brother, Fred, my youngest brother, the one in Northern Ireland with the Green Howards, he used to write to me and of course he knew everything and the people I were meeting, and what have you and he wrote a letter to my mother and he says, "Mum," he says, "Audrey's life must be mangled something rotten." cos I was always telling him of someone, y'know, a friend, who had gone for a burton, y'know.
BW: And you were talking about Scampton, before we began recording, it had a reputation as a jinx base?
AT: Yes, we used to feel that, the jinx, because, yes, there was always some incident on take-off or something, y'know, we at Waddington always regarded it as a jinx. It was just, just happening there. And of course it was Lancaster bombers then.
BW: And were then any other bases that had a similar reputation or others that had a particularly strong reputation?
AT: No, Scampton was the only name that I remember ever being connected with anything like that, y'know, just felt that there was something...y'know? I never watched anything that weren't always airborne, y'know, they got off and they were away.
BW: And have you ever seen the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight since, have you seen the Lancaster fly, since?
AT: No.
BW: I was just curious if you'd seen it and whether it provoked any particular memories when you saw it fly. But if you've not seen it...
AT: I've only ever seen in parades like, in anything to do with London and armistice and what have you. In fact I, while I've been here, I've got back into art and doing things and for Remembrance Day I did a wall in the dining room and I had the Lancaster bomber and I had poppies coming out of the rear, just for...
BW: And that was just for the painting...
AT: Just for the painting, yes, yeah, yeah. Just for, y'know, for remembering. And we did a lovely wall this time, didn't we, for the armistice.
BW: So, you moved down to Silverstone in Northants, after Waddington and I'm assuming this would be around early '45, cos you said you were demobbed from there.
AT: Yes, it was about August-ish [sic] time, somewhere round about then.
BW: They started flying POWs back from Germany and Continental Europe, did you get to meet any POWs, did you see the Lancasters bringing them back at all?
AT: No, no, I was aware of, y'know, we had prisoners of war, they were actually on the camp, doing jobs, y'know, we had Germans, Italians, erm. I remember those two nationalities specifically, the prisoners were working on the camp.
BW: That's really interesting because I've not heard of that before. I've heard of, obviously, enemy POWs being held in the UK but not that they were working on RAF bases.
AT: Yeah, yeah, well I'm sure I'm right. Yeah.
BW: And what kind of things would they be doing?
AT: Nothing terribly important, they couldn't get themselves into trouble.
BW: Presumably they were just labouring.
AT: General labouring, I'd put it down like that. But I learned a few words of [chuckles] "Bellagambi" [belle gambe] was going round quite a lot.
Ann: Nice legs! [laughter].
AT: Nice legs! [laughter].
BW: That was from the Italian POWs.
AT: The Italians, yes, yeah [chuckles], yeah, yes. No, they were definitely on the camp because I can't imagine where else I'd have met any of them...[chuckling]. Are you learning something, Ann?
Ann: Oh yes, absolutely.
BW: So were you, I'm assuming you must have been at Silverstone when the war ended, when the news came through, what was the atmosphere like at that point?
AT: Well, of course, VE Day, I would be, that was first, wasn't it? And then of course we had Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, didn't we, and that brought it global and America came into it, didn't it? So that was the latest one to go...wasn't it the latest..?
BW: Well, I was thinking about the end of the war and you mentioned VE Day and then there'd be VJ Day in the August, as you were saying.
AT: Yes.
BW: What was the atmosphere like on the base when the news of the war's end came?
AT: Do you know, I don't remember.
BW: I just wondered if you might have had parties or celebrations or anything...
AT: No... no.
BW: Maybe you had extra leave?
AT: No...no...no.
Ann: Do you need your glasses on, Mum, if you're looking at photos? Your reading glasses?
AT: No, that was Matt O'Leary, an Aussie.
BW: So, we were just looking at that photo of the rear gunner but it's inscribed 'All My Love, Ken' but it's not someone who rings a bell with you?
AT: No, ha! I must have been drunk! [laughter]. I don't think so.
Ann: You have had lucid moments, Mum, about him! [laughter]
AT: I do recognise the face but do y'know, that's someone, he escapes me. I know this gentleman here, this is Terry King.
BW: Terry King?
AT: Terry King, yeah. He's the one where he's lent me his jacket when it was cold. I think he was a navigator [laughs].
BW: You wouldn't happen to know which squadron?
AT: It would be 467 or 463.
BW: OK, but he was definitely an Aussie?
AT: Definitely an Aussie.
Ann: And definitely Terry King? It's just remarkable, isn't it, remembering that, Mum. There was Matt O'Leary as well.
AT: Matt, Matt O'Leary. He's there and I think the big photograph...
BW: Which would be this one of seven aircrew in front of a Lancaster.
AT: [Pauses]. Look at the other two, can we?
Ann: Which one could have tempted you to live in Australia, Mum?, Was it Matt O'Leary, you did mention you could have been living in Australia.
AT: Mmm. I thought I had one of Matt with a crew.
BW: Erm.
Ann: I think you were looking at that one, Mum, excuse me, just let me [unclear] him at bottom right, yeah.
BW: So that's the four guys on the bottom right.
AT: That's him there, look and he's an Aussie. It was one weekend and we were dancing in Lincoln and we won a jitterbutty [sic], it wasn't the one where they threw you over the hedge, y'know, it was clever footwork [laughs].
BW: So was it a village dance?
AT: No, it was in the city centre.
BW: OK. And was it, were there a lot of RAF aircrew taking part?
AT: No, it was civilian and a mixture, yeah, yeah. But we cracked it!
BW: And you came top?
AT: We won it, yes, yeah.
BW: So, just as a general question, how easy was it to learn to dance in those days, because it seems everybody did it as a social activity but where did you learn?
AT: I danced with my three bothers from being that high because there was ten years between myself and the eldest and, you know, we used to go to the village dances and I could always go to village dances cos the others would always bring me home safely. So I've danced all my life, really. I love dancing.
BW: And it just happened that you paired up this particular...
AT: Yes, we were friends, y'know and we'd gone into Lincoln to the dance and, that was it.
BW: It was a spur of the moment thing, presumably.
AT: Not a spur of the moment, we'd intended going into Lincoln, which a lot of us did do.
BW: So this photo shows a Lancaster crew, seven guys in front of a Lancaster.
AT: And do you know, I don't know any names on there, I can't...
BW: No, there's none on the back, it just says.
AT: No, these were classified, I got, y'know, the pictures...
BW: But it says 'The crew of S for Sugar'.
AT: S for Sugar, yeah.
BW: So that, presumably, is the crew with 100 missions...
AT: A thousand... with... the missions, the last crew to crew it, presumably. Y'know, to get the hundred trips. There's one of the photographs, it shows quite clearly, doesn't it, that 'no enemy plane will ever...'
BW: Which is this one, there's a crowd in front of the aircraft.
AT: Yeah, yeah, that's, y'know, obviously, other ranks and whoever else was there.
BW: Do you remember that occasion?
AT: No, no, I wasn't among that but that was the... of course...I got the photographs.
BW: This particular one's a Lancaster being, what they called, 'being bombed up' also is S for Sugar.
AT: Yes, yeah.
BW: Did you ever get to see the crews bombing aircraft up?
AT: No, No.
BW; There are a couple of photos here, with friends, which one is you and who are the others?
AT: That's me, in the middle.
BW; OK. And who...?
AT: Do y'know, their name escapes me, I can't remember.
BW: And this one also shows you but this time you are on the right and there are a couple of names on the back. Do you recall those?
AT: I don't really, no, I don't.
BW: No problem.
AT: It was a long time ago and but, you know, we were friends.
BW: Do you know where they were taken? Were they taken during training or it looks like they might have been taken...
AT: Er, it was at Waddington, it was Waddington, it looks like first post thing.
BW: OK, did you keep in touch with your friends after the war at all?
AT: No, no. No, I y'know, got on with life again [laughs].
BW: And we were talking about the Australian crews earlier and obviously Matt was a good friend who you won the competition with, do you know if he survived the war?
AT: I don't know, no.
BW: OK.
AT: Obviously it'd be sometime in that period, y'know, the period, he was there most of the time I was there. But I don't know...Peter, Kimber, when I rang his Mum, she said, y'know, I sort of asked had she'd heard anything and she said, "I've heard this morning, he's been made a prisoner of war." So, obviously he survived and he would get home. That was another, y'know, just friendship.
BW: But you didn't hear anymore from Peter? You didn't hear where he was or what had happened to him?
AT: No. Nothing at all.
BW: How did you feel when you got the news, were you relieved?
AT: I was so pleased that, at least, he was safe cos he could have been blasted into eternity, couldn't he? Yes, I was very pleased and pleased for his Mum.
BW: were the rest of his crew captured?
AT: The concern was Peter, y'know, I was enquiring about him and she told me she was absolutely delighted, yes.
BW: And you were never tempted to move to Australia, having got to know some of these Australians. Did they ever try and tempt you with them?
AT: No, actually, there was one thing: a lot of them they [were] staunch Roman Catholics. Y'know, I thought it was one thing, leaving your country but also, being Church of England and being brought up in that way. But it didn't really, there was no one who meant that much to me, to do that, cos you've got to love and care to take that step, haven't you? And when I met my husband, that was it and I'd just 15 years of super marriage and y'know, short-lived but I didn't work during that period and, we weren't like ships that passed in the night. So, we'd a good life Ann, hadn't we?
Ann: Yes.
AT: And we just had the one daughter.
BW: You said earlier that you'd left the WAAF in August, around August '45.
AT: Yes.
BW: What happened next? You'd worked and had experience in administration, you'd worked at admin in the WAAF, what happened after you left?
AT: I came back...I think I went back to the Co-op, I had a decent position there. Er, do you know, I don't think I did anything then. And then I met Norman and y'know and the next thing was marriage.
BW: When was that, when did you meet?
AT: Er, well, he lived in the same village and I'd been friends with his sister, y'know, she'd been a good friend for many years. But, suddenly that was it. So, you know, obviously, that was after the war and... What year did I get married, Ann, was it '53?
Ann: 53.
AT: 53. And you were born in 56, weren't you? Yeah. But I never worked once I got married, I never worked. And then, of course, my husband died young, at the age of 39. You've spoken about this, have you, Ann?
Ann: Only briefly.
AT?: Yes, yes. It was tragic really, a minor operation and he got an infection in the hospital and the drug they had used damaged a kidney. And I travelled to Leeds with him from Wakefield, left Ann in the care of the nurses at the hospital and he died between Leeds and Wakefield, er Wakefield and Leeds. And I had to wait ten days for a post mortem, because the coroner wasn't happy but at that time the medical profession were very much round each other and it was brought in 'misadventure'. So that was it. So, about six months after that I hadn't the confidence to pick up a telephone. I was devastated, wasn't I, in a mess and you witnessed it, didn't you, unfortunately. When Norman died, Ann had just turned 12 months at grammar school, obviously very clever and y'know, Norman and I had plans and we saw great things in the future and so, in my mind, I just wanted to bring my daughter up, see her through university and I never had to decide [unclear] beyond her age of 18, when she could manage her money. It was a very sad time.
0:12:09
BW: And you just had that short time between, finishing with the WAAF and working in the Co-op where you went back to and then married life.
AT: Yes, yes, and, so when Norman died I had to get my act together and y'know, go out to work. So the first job I took, I got, was with the county council and it's statistics, erm...sorry, and I worked with the county, the fact that I needed to work and keep a roof over our heads, y'know and money, I wasn't averse to any change or anything I was asked to do, so consequently, over the time, I built up a, y'know, a lot of information about various things and then, I got involved with the director, who used to be appointed as a Guardian ad Litem in care related proceedings at the court either relating to children in care y'know, where there was a conflict of interests and er, and er, children who had probably been placed for adoption, and the putative father, y'know, was objecting. So I worked with the director getting reports to the director, it came to me, did all the documentation and I made sure that the social workers got out and saw every respondent that had the right to be seen and heard, regarding those proceedings. So I'd got that experience with the Guardian ad Litem and then, years later, the social service - they amalgamated the children's department and the county and [they] became Social Services and later, in '75, it's a long way ago, in't it? [The 19]75 Act the local authority said that the, all the...the government said that the Local Authorities had to become adoption agencies. So I had all this knowledge about, already, about adoption so I got all the White Papers from HMSO regarding the adoptions and proceedings and what the government expected and I studied it all and I got an interview for the post on the board of directors and I got the job. And one of the directors said, "I wish I knew as much as Audrey about the Children Act," [laughs]. And that's the sort of thing, I was saying, my brothers and I, that's what we've done, we've progressed but it's been our effort, you know. So that was it and I thoroughly enjoyed it cos it was so interesting, y'know we approved prospective adopters and we accepted children for adoption and lots of babies and some of the mums could only tell, all they knew about the father was, they could only tell you the colour. You know, they'd known these were one night stands and things - all very interesting. And of course we arranged placements and y'know, all the time we never had a problem and we got some really good placements. And then after, it came into force at 18 they could have knowledge of the prospective adopters so I did Section 26 counselling, which meant interviewing the mum because we didn't let anyone turn up on anybody's doorstep saying, "You're my Mum."or anything like that. We made sure that they, the natural mother, was happy with the decision that we were making and all that. I worked with professional people, y'know, solicitors, police and everybody, but thoroughly enjoyed it. And got a nice side of it, going to the pediatricians with babies [chuckles] and I did that till I retired and I could have stayed longer but my grandson was, [to Ann] you were pregnant, and I thought, " Oh, Norman's missed so much and I'm not going to miss these babies so I retired at 64. I had the ability to carry on but I didn't.
BW: And, just to, I suppose, come back to the RAF and Bomber Command, you've been to the IBCC at Lincoln, how do you feel, seeing that?
Ann: That was me.
BW: Oh, I beg your pardon.
AT: What was that?
Ann: You know I went down to the International Bomber Command Centre?
AT: Yes, you went, didn't you, yes. I've not been but I'd love to but I don't think I could make it down there.
Ann: No, they've offered to entertain [you] but no.
AT: Yeah but I've read the book. [to Ann] You got the book, didn't you. And I refresh my memory with it. Yes, yeah, it's very, very impressive, very impressive and it's amazing what they've done with the grounds. I was looking for the Waafery, [laughs] but I guess they've demolished it but it was a beautiful building. There was another nice thing in the village, I don't know the name of it, it was a nice pub, where we went, but there was a man in but it was only like a shed but he used to make jam and lemon curd tarts and we used to go and buy [laughs] them from this man in the village. Lovely time really.
BW: So, knowing about the memorial, how do you feel about there being a memorial to the crews of Bomber Command?
AT: I think it's wonderful, I don't think they should ever be forgotten. No. I think it's wonderful, I love the way they've got the walls with all the names, and the gardens, I think it's beautiful. And I think they deserve remembering, y'know, they've given their lives, and young lives.
BW: Cos, the guys were largely only around the same age as you were at the time, weren't they? The chaps in the RAF, the aircrew, they were only around your age.
AT: They were, yes, yes, very young, yes. That was the sad thing, it was so much in life going, y'know.
BW: Whereas you say, I think you summed it up well, you wouldn't have wanted to have missed the experience...
AT: Oh no, no, not for a moment. And I've often thought about it, haven't I?
Ann: Yeah.
AT: Yeah, I did not [unclear] it's an opportunity I wouldn't have missed. It was really good.
Ann: I think it's affected Mum's outlook on so many things because I think, for my Mum's age group and generation, you've got a very rounded, cosmopolitan attitude towards people of all nationalities and I think that's quite impressive.
AT: Hmm.
BW: And through all the things we've talked about this afternoon, are there any other aspects or recollections that you want to add from your time in the WAAF?
AT: No, I don't think so, I think I've covered it. You know I enjoyed the life, enjoyed the company of the people and the various things. Do you know, I'm 99 [unclear] but not very long ago I was, he was speaking to me on the phone and he said, "Mum, do you ever regret any of the decisions you've made in your life?" and I said "No, and I'd make them all again, all the same." Because, since my husband died I had this tunnel vision and it was family and I wanted to see Ann where, y'know [unclear] but then, you see, grandchildren came and then that was another life line and I've just, I had so much happiness with Ann and the children so I've not really wanted anything else. And strangely enough, when I came to this home and it was my decision but we chatted it over, didn't we, because Ann gave me 24/7 care when I came out of hospital, which was a near death experience and she gave that care and I could see what was happening and I, I mean, I had a good life, born into the right family, met the man I loved, enjoyed 15 good years and y'know, I wanted Ann to enjoy her children so I made the decision to come in here. But when, about the same time I met a man, he was upright and mobile but he'd had an accident, his wife had died and he'd scalded himself and he'd come in for respite care, initially and he was a professor of politics but he was such an interesting man I had a friendship with him while he was here, which was about five or six months, wasn't it Ann?
Ann: Yep.
AT: And it was a nice, good friendly relationship but he died just before Christmas but that was nice, y'see. But that's life, isn't it?
BW: Well, I've no other questions and you've answered everything very thoroughly and clearly so, thank you very much for your time.
AT: Yeah, thank you! Cos you been very tolerant and we haven't interrupted you very much, have we?
BW: Not at all.
[Audrey laughs]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Audrey Teasdale
Creator
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Brian Wright
Date
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2022-12-20
Language
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eng
Format
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01:12:25 Audio Recording
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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ATeasdaleA221220, PTeasdaleA22020002, PTeasdaleA22020003, PTeasdaleA22020004, PTeasdaleA22020005
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-12-15
1945-08
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lancashire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Northamptonshire
England--Yorkshire
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Type
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Sound
Description
An account of the resource
Audrey left school at 14 and began work as a clerical assistant for a tailoring firm in Leeds, then moving into furniture sales.
Audrey was 23 when the war started and was conscripted on 15 December 1942 electing to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. After her kitting out at RAF Innesworth she did some basic training at RAF Morecambe, then posted to RAF Lindholme and eventually to RAF Waddington where she worked as an administrator in the officer's mess. At that time there were four squadrons on the station: 9, 44, 463 and 467 Squadrons.
Audrey's duties in the officer's mess included checking the crews against the battle orders to ensure only crews flying that night got the special pre-flight meal and waiting on tables for VIP dinners, including Wing Commander Nettleton VC. She describes her friendships with the other staff and especially with bomber crews, mostly nice and respectful. Audrey and others would gather on the perimeter track to see them off. She and many others were billeted in a beautiful old building, known as "The Waafery”. Audrey describes her busy social life, dancing at many venues and winning jitterbug competitions. Remembers being called ‘belle gambe’ [beautiful legs] by Italian prisoners of war.
Audrey also describes the events of one night when an enemy fighter followed the aircraft home and strafed the airfield, hitting the incendiary dump, which exploded.
After the war, Audrey eventually worked for the local authority’s adoption service after the tragic death of her husband at a young age.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sally Coulter
Andy Fitter
44 Squadron
463 Squadron
467 Squadron
9 Squadron
animal
bombing
Eder Möhne and Sorpe operation (16–17 May 1943)
entertainment
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
ground personnel
Lancaster
mess
military living conditions
military service conditions
prisoner of war
RAF Lindholme
RAF Morecambe
RAF Silverstone
RAF Waddington
sport
Stirling
strafing
training
Wallis, Barnes Neville (1887-1979)
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/8753/ALucasWE170208.1.mp3
80ab136990a1e6cd2bf66c7acb839ff1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Lucas, Bill
William Ernest Lucas
W E Lucas
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Lucas, WE
Description
An account of the resource
15 items. Two oral history interviews with Squadron Leader Bill Lucas DFC (1917 - 2018, 1255396 Royal Air Force), his log book, brief memoir and photographs. He served as a pilot with 9, 15, 139 and 162 Squadrons. After the war he ran in the 1948 Olympics.
The collection was catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
William (Bill) Ernest Lucas was born in Tooting Bec, London on the 16th January 1917, 3 years deep into World War One. Luckily for Bill he was not of age to endure with the fighting in the trenches. However, when Europe was engulfed into another worldwide conflict in 1939, this set way for Bill to become involved with the RAF and IBCC.
Growing up, Bill was an only child and left his school (Bec Grammar School) at the age of 15. He managed to get a job with a printers, which led to his second and only other job at an insurance company called the London and Lancashire. The company’s sports club enabled Bill to find his passion for athletics (especially running) and he was expected to participate in the 1940 Olympics until the war interfered. (https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/30884)
A photo of Bill in his running gear is shown in https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/30865 where he is running down 55 Graham Road in Surrey.
Bill instead competed in the 1948 Olympic Games as the games were also cancelled in 1944 due to World War Two. Luckily the games were hosted in London (https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/london-1948) and Bill had retired from IBCC meaning that he had time to participate.
As seen in ‘Bill Lucas and the 1948 London Olympics’ (1948) https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/30866 Bill managed to come 6th in the Second Heat meaning he was one position off of being in the final on the 2nd August 1948! This collection also includes Bill in his older prime wearing his 1948 Olympic Games jacket and the official Olympic Games programme from 1948.
When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1st 1939, Bill was 22 years old meaning that he was eligible to be part of Great Britain’s Army. Combining Bill’s hatred of the sea and his fathers recent experiences in the trenches, the RAF seemed to be the most compatible choice with Bill. (https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/30884/B[Author]LucasWEv10001.jpg)
Bill was not involved in Britain’s mightiest air conflict against Hitler’s Luftwaffe however, instead watching ‘The Few’ defeat the Nazi aircrafts and succeed. Being considered to be Nazi Germany’s first ‘major military defeat’, this allowed for Britain to continue fighting in the war (https://www.raf.mod.uk/our-organisation/our-history/anniversaries/battle-of-britain/ and to an extent, allowed Bill to continue his path of becoming an Squadron Leader.
It was November 1940 when Bill started his pilot training, but due to a bomber offensive being the only way to properly counter the Nazis, this was huge not just for Bill but Britain as a whole. There had never been a bomber offensive before in warfare. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/30884/B[Author]LucasWEv10001.jpg
As seen in Bill’s official Pilot’s Log Book: (https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/520/24264/LLucasWE122826v1.1.pdf) his training consisted of being part of 16 Elementary Flying School at RAF Derby from 1940 to 41 , 8 School of Flying Training at RAF Montrose in 1941 and 20 Operational Training Units at RAF Lossiemouth in 1941 . He flew three different types of aircraft during his training, Miles Magister, Miles Master and Wellington I’s.
Bill’s training finally finished in August 1941 and he was posted to his first official squadron, IX Squadron at Honington. Here he flew the Wellington Bomber.
Will Cragg
Record of Service:
4 November 1940- 4 January 1941: 16 Elementary Flying Training School at RAF Derby flying Miles Magisters
9 January- 4 May 1941: 8 School of Flying Training at RAF Montrose flying Miles Masters
31 May 1941- 13 August 1941: 20 Operational Training Units at RAF Lossiemouth flying Wellington I’s
14 August 1941- 4 November 1941: 9 Squadron at RAF Honington flying Wellington III’s
4 November 1941- 30 December 1941: 26 Conversion Fleet at RAF Waterbeach flying Stirling’s
30 December 1941- 1 August 1942: 15 Squadron at RAF Wyton flying Whitley V’s
1 August 1942- 3 August 1942: 218 Conversion Fleet at RAF Marham flying Airspeed Oxfords
4 August 1942- 18 August 1942: 19 Operational Training Units at RAF Kinloss flying Whitley IV’s
19 August 1942- 13 August 1942: 3 Fighter Instructor Schools at RAF Hullavington flying Ansons
17 September 1942- 18 September 1942: 19 Operational Training Units at RAF Kinloss flying Halifax II’s
18 September 1942- 24 October 1944: 19 Operational Training Units at RAF Forres flying Mosquito III’s
30 October 1942- 19 December 1944: 1655 Mosquito Training Unit at RAF Warboys flying Mosquito IV’s
30 October 1944- 19 December 1944: 1655 Squadron at RAF Bourn flying Mosquito XX’s
7 June 1945- 28 June 1945: 162 Squadron at RAF Blackbushe flying Mosquito XXV’S
28 June 1945- 29 January 1946: 139 Squadron at RAF Upwood flying Lancaster III’s
29 January 1946: Station Head Quarters at RAF Upwood flying Mosquito XVI’s
William Cragg
William (Bill) Lucas was born on January 16th, 1917 in Tooting Bec, London. He was educated at Bec Grammar School, and left at the age of 15 to work at a printing company before moving to the insurers London and Lancashire to work as an assessor. While working there, he developed his talent for athletics with the Belgrave Harriers, with his best discipline being the 5000 metres. His goal was to compete at the 1940 Olympic games. However, in 1940, Bill was called up to help the war effort and mindful of his father’s advice to avoid the army and his own dislike of the sea, he chose to join the RAF.
Initially he trained as a fighter pilot on Miles Magisters and Miles Masters, but by the time he had finished training, the Battle of Britain had been won and the need for bomber pilots was more urgent. So, he was reallocated to bombers and trained to fly the Wellington at RAF Lossiemouth. Bill Lucas · IBCC Digital Archive (lincoln.ac.uk)
Following completion of pilot training in August 1941, he was posted to RAF Honington and joined 9 Squadron flying Wellingtons. He flew 14 operational sorties – notably Cologne and Hamburg – before converting to Stirlings at RAF Waterbeach. He then joined 15 (Bomber) Squadron at RAF Wyton, flying the Short Stirling and, by August 1942, Bill had completed a full tour of 30 operational sorties (over 40 operations in total). Bill experienced tense encounters with German defences, having to take evasive action and also getting caught in a cone of five or six searchlights. To get out of the searchlight glare he had to do things with the aircraft which it was never meant to do. Returning from one mission they flew too close to Kiel and the airframe amassed a lot of bullet holes and an alarming loss of fuel. Crossing the North Sea, the tank indicators showed practically nothing and they had to divert into Woodbridge in Suffolk. The groundcrew estimated there was less than twenty-five gallons of fuel left (probably less than 6 minutes of flying time).
He was released from operational duties and was posted to RAF Lossiemouth as a flying instructor. Then in December 1944, he returned to operational flying and was posted to 162 Squadron, part of the Pathfinder force, to fly the Mosquito, an aircraft he described as “a bit quicker and more responsive; a nice aeroplane”. He completed a further 34 operational sorites with 162 Squadron, including missions over Kiel, Berlin, Hannover and Magdeburg. In recognition of his war services, Bill was awarded the DFC and was Mentioned in Despatches.
Squadron Leader Bill Lucas was released from the Service in January 1946 and returned to the insurance job he had left to join the RAF. Eventually, he left the company to become an insurance broker. He also returned to athletics and the Belgrave Harriers; he ran in various internationals and competed for Great Britain in the 5000m at the 1948 London Olympics. Athletics remained with him for the rest of his life and he gave his spare time freely, working in prominent roles in the administration of athletics. He remained a Belgrave Harrier committee member well into his 90s. He became known as “the golden voice of British Athletics” for his many years as stadium announcer at the White City .
In his later years, Bill remained prominent in RAF and Aircrew Associations. He, along with a small Band of Sussex veterans, was instrumental in helping to raise funds for the construction of the Bomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park and the International Bomber Command Centre.
Chris Cann
1940: Volunteered for the RAF
4 November 1940 – 4 January 1941: RAF Burnaston, No. 16 EFTS, flying Magister aircraft
9 January 1941 – 4 May 1941: RAF Montrose, No. 8 SFTS, flying Master aircraft
31 May 1941 – 13 August 1941: RAF Lossiemouth, No. 20 OTU, flying Wellington aircraft
14 August 1941 – 4 November 1941: RAF Honington, No. 9 Squadron, flying Wellington aircraft
1941: Commissioned into the officer ranks
4 November 1941 – 30 December 1941: RAF Waterbeach, No. 26 Conversion Flight, flying Stirling aircraft
30 December 1941 – 1 August 1942: RAF Wyton, No. 15 Squadron, flying Stirling aircraft
1 August 1942 – 3 August 1942: RAF Marham, 218 Conversion Flight
4 August 1942 – 18 August 1942: RAF Kinloss, No. 19 OTU, flying Whitley aircraft
19 August 1942 – 13 September 1942: RAF Hullavington, No. 3 FTS, flying Oxford aircraft
17 September 1942 – 18 September 1942: RAF Kinloss, No. 19 OTU, flying Whitley and Anson aircraft
18 September 1942 – 24 October 1944: RAF Foress, No. 19 OTU, flying Whitley and Anson aircraft
30 October 1944 – 19 December 1944: RAF Warboys, 1655 MTU, flying Mosquito and Oxford aircraft
19 December 1944 – 7 June 1945: RAF Bourn, 162 Squadron, flying Mosquito aircraft
7 June 1945 – 28 June 1945: RAF Blackbushe, 162 Squadron, flying Mosquito aircraft
28 June 1945 – 29 January 1946: RAF Upwood, 139 Squadron, flying Mosquito and Oxford aircraft
29 January 1946: Released from Service having attained the rank of Squadron Leader.
Chris Cann
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 8th, Wednesday the 8th of February 2017, and I’m in Cowfold with Squadron Leader Bill Lucas DFC, and we’re gonna talk about his experiences of life, starting with what are your earliest recollections of life, Bill?
WL: Well, I was born on the 16th of January 1917 to poor parents and my father was a bricklayer, er, in Upper Tooting, er, we lived in Upper Tooting all the time. I went to a school, a primary school, and then I went to the Beck Grammar School, as it was then, in 1928 I think it was. I was there until 1942 and, er, that’s it [slight laugh].
CB: So, what age did you actually leave school?
WL: Oh, I was fifteen, was it?
CB: Okay.
WL: Fifteen.
CB: School leaving age was fourteen in those days.
WL: Yes.
CB: What did you do immediately after you left school?
WL: I, um, I worked for a firm down in Surrey somewhere and they were a printing firm, and I was there for about — oh, quite a few months, and then my mother, who had got me introduced to the insurance company, London Lancashire, um, Insurance Company, and I eventually joined them in — oh, don’t ask me the date but I, I did, yes.
CB: Yeah, and during that time you were quite an active, athletic youngster?
WL: Um, whilst I was in the insurance company yes. I was inured into athletics and became a good athlete with Belgrave Harriers, where I’ve just completed eighty-, eighty-one years.
CB: Brilliant. So, you were working for this insurance company and then doing your running in the evenings were you, and the weekends?
WL: Oh yes. Training at weekends.
CB: Training at the weekends.
WL: At weekends and the evenings. Yes.
CB: Yeah and, er, when the war started you were still with the insurance company, were you?
WL: Oh yes.
CB: Now, what made you choose to join the RAF rather than the Navy or the Army?
WL: Well, I was taken to a — or had to go to be seen by a doctor at some school in Croydon, and, er, he said to me, ‘which service do you want to go in?’ I said, ‘well, my father was in the Army and he said — he put me against that. I don’t like water so I’ve got to join the RAF’. So he said, ‘what do you want to do in the RAF?’ I said, ‘well, there’s only one thing to do in the RAF, that’s fly’ see. So he did a few probings around and said, ‘well, you’ll never fly’. I said, ‘oh, why not?’ He said, ‘well, you’ve got a large heart and you won’t pass the [unclear]’. So, you know, I persisted with, with this and said, ‘well, my large heart is because I’ve been an athlete and it doesn’t usually preclude anybody doing anything’. So — but, um, but eventually it worked out that I did.
CB: So, where did you report first?
WL: Oh, er, what first?
CB: For the RAF.
WL: Uxbridge I think it was.
CB: And what did you do there?
WL: Well, I was only just seen there, et cetera. Why did we go there? Now after that, we went down to Torquay.
CB: You didn’t go to Lord’s Cricket Ground?
WL: No, I don’t think so, no.
CB: Okay.
WL: I don’t remember that.
CB: And what happened at Torquay?
WL: We spent time doing ground work and that sort of thing.
CB: This was an ITW was it, Initial Training Wing?
WL: Yes, at Torquay and Babbacombe.
CB: What were the main activities there?
WL: Oh, it was going through ground work, weather, and all that sort of thing.
CB: And at what stage did you know that you were going to be trained as a pilot?
WL: What age was I then? Oh, you’ve got me on a bad day actually.
CB: Okay. Never mind. We can come back to that.
WL: What age was I? Could I have been?
CG: Twenty-one, twenty-two?
WL: Yes, something like that, yes.
CB: So, you joined up in ’39, did you?
CG: ’40.
WL: No.
CB: Not ’40?
WL: No, not ’39, no. I was dragged in in ’40.
CB: Okay. So, after Torquay, then where did you go?
WL: Where did I go?
CG: His log book will help.
WL: Oh, that’s what the log book’s for [slight laugh]. I went to, um, 16 EFTS at Derby.
CB: Right.
WL: That was flying little aeroplanes and then on to AFTS, Advanced Flying School, at Montrose, where we transferred onto a fighter type aircraft. That didn’t last long, and so we finished up at 20 OTU Lossiemouth on Wellingtons.
CB: So, what was your choice, really of — ideally would you have preferred to be in fighters or bombers?
WL: Well, seeing how I survived bombers, definitely that. I don’t think I’d have survived as a fighter pilot, I would probably kill myself.
CB: Too adventurous, were you?
WL: [slight laugh] Something like that.
CB: So, after you start, you did the OTU on Wellingtons. Where was that?
WL: That was in May ‘41.
CB: Yeah.
WL: Three months.
CB: Whereabouts?
WL: Mm?
CB: Whereabouts?
WL: Lossiemouth.
CB: Oh, that was Lossiemouth. Right. Which then took you to —
WL: 9 Squadron at Honington.
CB: What were the bombers there?
WL: We were there three months.
CB: What were you flying there?
WL: What was I flying? Um —
CG: The 1C.
WL: Wellington 1Cs, yeah, and 3s.
CB: But that was fairly short.
WL: Then to a conversion flight at Waterbeach, learning to fly the Stirling and then I went to 15 Squadron at Wyton.
CB: How did you like the Stirling?
WL: Oh, yes, I quite liked it. Bad on the ground, good in the air. Spending time with 15 Squadron at Wyton.
CB: Still on Stirlings, were you?
WL: I was on Stirlings, yes, and then with a conversion flight at Marham, onto Mosquitos.
CB: A bit different.
WL: Yeah. A bit quicker, a bit more responsive, nice aeroplane.
CB: And which role was the Mosquito operating in?
WL: Mm?
CB: Which role was the Mosquito operating in?
WL: Which role?
CB: Was it, was it as a bomber or was it as a anti-shipping or was it a night fighter or —
WL: Night fighter and a bomber, yes. Right. What next?
CB: Yes, I just wondered how you got on with the Mosquito and, er, what sort of raids?
WL: Oh, I got on very well with the Mosquito.
CB: What sort of ops did you do on them?
WL: I did marking for the main force and general, general bombing raids, yeah.
CB: This is before Pathfinders is it? Oh was it actually Pathfinders?
WL: During the Pathfinder period, yeah.
CB: Because Pathfinders gradually worked up, didn’t they?
WL: Oh yes. It was well run. It had a good leader and we did a lot of good work.
CB: On the Stirlings, were you on bombing raids with those or not?
WL: Mm?
CB: When you flew the Stirling —
WL: Yes.
CB: Were you — the raids? You went on ops with that did you?
WL: Oh yes.
CB: Bombing?
WL: Bombing raids.
CB: What sort of height?
WL: Night, night bombing raids.
CB: Yes. Was the Mosquito day and night or only night?
WL: Oh, only night. Yes.
CB: Okay.
Other: Apart from the three thousand bomber raid.
CB: In the thousand bomber raid.
CG: All three of them.
CB: Yes.
CG: In the Stirling.
CB: So what about — in the Stirling, did you go on the thousand bomber raid?
WL: Yes. 30th of May 1942.
CB: Mm. That was quite a busy —
WL: Cologne.
CB: Route.
WL: The thousand, yes. [slight laugh]
CB: To what extent could you see other aircraft when you were flying there?
WL: Oh, always.
CB: And then there were other large raids?
WL: Oh, yes. There were always more.
CB: What did you do after Mosquitos at Marham?
WL: What happened?
CB: Or, or was that a long tour?
WL: Well, it was only a two-day conversion course at Marham.
CB: Yes.
WL: I went to 19 OTU at Kinloss.
CB: Right.
WL: Oh my brain. It’s just not working.
CB: Do you want to have a break?
WL: I don’t think it will be any faster really.
CG: Have a break.
CB: We’ll just have a — stop there for a mo —
WL: I am a hundred years — [background noise] serving on two other four engine aircraft, squadrons, four of us, four squadrons up there doing that, and we were put in a newly built, um, building which was very damp et cetera and that’s where we slept. That was, that was —
CB: This was on operations?
WL: Well yes, yes.
CB: What were you flying then?
WL: I was flying — what was I flying? I was flying the Stirling, was I?
CB: You were flying the Stirling, yeah. And when the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau went through the Channel, what were you flying in order to —
WL: I wasn’t flying. I was just, um, I’d just joined 15 Squadron and on the same day that happened and the CO got everybody on board that could to look out —
CB: Look out for the ships?
WL: Yeah. As Cherry said, we —, I — we said that if we’d been — we did it from low down. If we’d emerged anywhere near them, we’d have been shot out, out of the sky.
CB: And what was the main attack? What aircraft were in the main attack?
WL: Er —
CB: So you were looking out but who was doing the bombing, supposedly?
WL: I was only just looking out, yes. The squadron were doing the bombing, if any.
CB: But this was with Stirlings?
WL: Mm?
CB: This was with Stirlings, was it?
WL: Yes.
CB: Right and the Navy were doing their bit as well.
WL: Oh yes, with what they call —
CB: Stringbags.
WL: Mm?
CB: Yeah. Stringbags, Swordfishes.
WL: Yes. Stringbags.
CB: Yes.
WL: Oh, you’re stretching my mind.
CB: Okay. We’ll stop again. So when you went to Kinloss, you were an instructor on the OTU?
WL: Oh yes, yes.
CB: So, how did that work? You —
WL: Well, you took crews out on night flights and all that sort of thing and cross country flights and, you know, trained them as, as bomber crews.
CB: Yes and, er, how, how dangerous was that?
WL: [slight laugh] Well, you were the passenger without any, any means of flying the aircraft.
CB: Where — so it had a full crew and the pilot, trainee pilot, was the captain —
WL: Well you trained the crew, you see?
CB: And so where would you be? Did it have dual controls?
WL: No, no, no.
CB: So you stood next to him did you?
WL: I sat next to him, yes.
CB: Oh, you sat next to him.
WL: Yes.
CB: Right.
WL: Well, on the step below the pilot’s seat. The pilot up, just up there and you sat down there.
CB: Could you see out, er, fairly well, or was it pretty difficult?
WL: Oh yes, yes. You’re stretching my mind.
CB: Yes. So did you have any hairy moments with the students?
WL: Not that I really recall, no.
CB: And those Wellingtons, were they new and up to date or —
WL: Oh, far from it.
CB: Were they old and knackered?
WL: Far from it. Old 1Cs.
CB: And could you fly on one engine with the, er, Wellington?
WL: Yeah, it flew on one engine. Yes. Most aircrew, most aircraft could fly on lesser engines. They were designed that way.
CB: How did you feel about being an instructor away from the front line?
WL: [slight laugh] I don’t know how I felt. I suppose, I suppose I was a good instructor and that was all they needed of you. [sigh]
CB: I’ll stop again.
CG: You had got a couple of ops more than the rest of your crew, hadn’t you?
WL: Oh yes, yes.
CG: And then his — the rest of his crew were taken on the next operation by another pilot and lost.
CB: This is on Stirlings?
CG: On Stirlings on 15 Squadron.
WL: All but one.
CG: But Bill didn’t know until about three years ago. He thought the whole crew had been lost and then through, um, Facebook and doing our Bomber Command things, somebody in the United States, somebody somewhere got to hear about it, and it transpired that —
WL: Well, I had a picture, I had a picture in one of the Sunday papers, Sunday Telegraph —
CB: Yes.
WL: And they picked it out and, and the boy, the boy said, ‘Oh, that was my father’, and, er, it followed from there.
CG: His — and his flight engineer had survived. He had been ill on this trip apparently and he’d survived and he —
WL: He did another trip. He was a sergeant as an engineer, he survived to do another tour and became a warrant officer and got a DFC.
CG: And Bill found out about three years ago and he was like a dog with two tails [laugh]. He was so thrilled and, and you had lunch with the grandson, didn’t you?
WL: Yes, we did.
CG: Bill, they’ll probably, they’ll want to record that so you’ll need to repeat it, but I just thought I’d jog it because, because this thing about losing your own, your crew. I mean, you was quite upset that another pilot had lost his life for him.
WL: Oh yes.
CG: That —
WL: I’d flown a number of trips with them so naturally to lose them was, was a great harrowing.
CB: What was it that caused you not to be on that particular op and another pilot had to do it?
WL: Because I’d done my stint. I’d, I’d come off, come off and left them to it.
CG: It was the stage when they did second dicky trips so he would do his — or he would do his dicky trips and those counted as ops, so the pilot was often two or three ops ahead of the rest of his crew, you see?
CB: Mm. Yes.
CG: Anyway, they will need to record that probably Bill, so —
WL: Mm?
CG: They’ll need to record it so you’ll have to say it all again [laugh].
WL: What exactly have I got to say?
CB: Okay. So the question — the point here I think is the trauma of —
WL: Of the loss of the crew?
CB: Losing a crew.
WL: Yes.
CB: And so if we could start, please, with why it happened. Is it, was it because you’d finished your tour of thirty ops?
WL: Yes.
CB: And then —
WL: Well bit more than thirty but —
CB: Okay. How many had you done by then, roughly? It doesn’t matter. You’d done your tour but the crew went on.
WL: That’s right.
CB: So what happened there?
WL: At the end of my period of —
CB: This is on Stirlings.
WL: Operational work on Stirlings, I finished my tour and, er, left the crew. The crew still had a few trips to do. Another captain took them over and, er, lost them, all but except the —
CB: The flight engineer.
WL: The — what is he?
CG: The flight engineer.
WL: Flight engineer, um, and lost them and, er, I was very sorry about that because, you know, we got very close together with a lot of trips behind us.
CB: Mm.
WL: Mm.
CB: How did the crew gel in general? So you did the full tour but how well did the crew gel during operations and —
WL: Oh very well, we went everywhere together.
CB: Yeah.
WL: Yeah.
CB: And what about on the social side?
WL: Yeah, and on social side. We all went drinking together.
CB: Yeah, and were — did you have a mixture of officers and NCOs or were, were all the crew at that point NCOs?
WL: No, no. I had a mixed lot, you know.
CB: What — when were you commissioned? Immediately you joined?
WL: When was I commissioned? I don’t know.
CG: May ’42.
CB: Some people were —
CG: May ’42.
WL: May ’42.
CB: Okay. Whilst you were on the squadron. That squadron?
WL: Must have been.
CB: Okay. Right, we’ll stop there.
WL: [background noise] Earlier in the war, um, he was there.
CB: Mahaddie?
WL: I didn’t know him well then but we got to know him very well later. And he remembered me, so he then put me forward to go onto Mosquitos.
CB: Mm. Right.
WL: That’s as how I see it anyway.
CB: And what was, what were, what were the main strengths that Mahaddie had? What was he particularly good at?
WL: He’d done God knows how many, um, bombing trips, early on. One hundred and twenty-odd of them.
CB: Mm and his role in Pathfinders was what?
WL: Mm?
CB: What was his role in the Pathfinders?
WL: Oh, I don’t know. I suppose he must have been second in command to the boss man, whose name I can’t think at the moment.
CB: But was his role to select suitable candidates for being Pathfinders?
WL: Oh, I think, I think he was, yes. That you’ll never know whether they were good, bad or indifferent.
CB: Right. So, in your OTU how did you grade some of these pilots because there must have been various different abilities? How did you find that?
WL: Well, they had to reach a standard before they could move on to go on to squadrons.
CB: Mm.
WL: That’s what we were teaching them to do.
CB: Yes and then you were required to grade between exceptional, good, average and below average.
WL: Was I? [slight laugh]
CB: [slight laugh] And I just wondered how you —
WL: I don’t think I did, I was. I think my, my CO did that. I certainly didn’t do it.
CB: No. I’m just intrigued to know whether you were consulted in that process in order for that assessment —
WL: Oh, no doubt I was but it was a long time back.
CB: Yeah, and some of the people didn’t complete the course, did they, or would you imagine?
WL: Oh, must have been plenty that didn’t. I can’t remember any of that.
CB: That’s okay. That’s okay. So after OTU where did you go then?
WL: Went to 3 FIS Hullavington. What did we do there? Oh, Hullavington was a training thing for, for, um, teaching and I had a course there on being able to fly and talk at the same time. [slight laugh] So —
CB: So was that before you went to OTU? Because you were learning to be an instructor?
WL: That’s right. That was learning to fly and talk.
CB: Yes.
WL: And then I went to 19 OTU Kinloss.
CB: Yeah. So after Kinloss?
WL: Oh, I had two years at 19 OTU Forres, part of Kinloss.
CB: Part of Kinloss, yeah, yeah. What was the accommodation like up there?
WL: It was quite good. We were in nice, nice huts. Yes, up the road from the mess really. We had to walk or we all had a bike and —.
CB: How were the instructors housed? Did you have two in a room or three or how did it work?
WL: Er, certainly more than one, two I think, yes.
CB: Wooden huts or Nissen huts?
WL: Oh, wooden huts.
CB: Suitable for officers.
WL: Now you put Nissen in? [slight laugh], it could, yeah, it could have been Nissen huts.
CB: I was thinking of the comfort.
WL: They were alright, yes, yes. We all had a stove in the middle of the floor et cetera, to keep you warm.
CB: Yeah, and what about the food? What was, what was the quality of the food like when you were at an OTU?
WL: It was acceptable, I suppose you could say.
CB: But on the operational stations it was different?
WL: Oh yes, they treated us well there. Had the expenses of giving you eggs and bacon before you went off and when you came back [slight laugh].
CB: Has that affected your long term interest in bacon and egg? [slight laugh]
WL: Hardly, I love bacon and egg.
CB: I do. Got to have fried bread though.
WL: Mm?
CB: You must have fried bread with it.
WL: Oh yes
CB: So after Kinloss, at the OTU for two years, and Forres where did you go?
WL: I went to an, the MTU at Warboys where I learnt to fly Mosquitos.
CB: Right [pause] and that was a fairly short course I imagine.
WL: Oh yes, a couple of days, that was all.
CB: Followed by?
WL: To be posted to 162 Squadron at Bourn, in Cambridgeshire.
CB: At where?
WL: Bourn.
CB: Oh, Bourn, yes.
WL: Bourn without an ‘e’.
CB: Yeah. Not to be confused with Lincolnshire. And what was your —
WL: And I was there for, er, six months.
CB: Right, and what was your role there?
WL: Oh, I was a bombing and marking pilot.
CB: Right.
CG: Pathfinder.
CB: So could you just talk us through a Pathfinder sortie? So the main force would be following, would be flying along and needing markers. Did you start — did you set off after the main force had already left because of your speed or did you integrate with it at the front? Or how did it work?
WL: Oh, we didn’t see the main force. We had to arrive at a time when we flew H2S on the Mosquito which —
CG: Did you have Oboe?
WL: Had Oboe, yes.
CB: You wouldn’t have had H2S on a Mosquito, would you?
CG: No, it was Oboe.
WL: H2S Mosquito. Yes. Yes.
CB: Oboe.
WL: Where you flew — where you flew — I forget what you did. You flew —
CB: Confluence of the lines.
WL: You flew a beam —
CB: Yes.
WL: Et cetera, and then photographs and et cetera, and you, you dropped the marker on that spot, yes.
CB: Did you have more than one colour marker so that you could go round again, or did you tend to just be in and out?
WL: Oh, in and out. Yes. I don’t think — I don’t remember any bombing raids where you went round a second time.
CB: Right. And I was think — yes. Okay. And was the — your sortie on its own or were there several Mosquitos together doing the marking on a single target?
WL: I can’t — I honestly wouldn’t know. It depended on what, what the bosses said.
CB: Mm. I was thinking —
WL: Funny question that.
CB: I was just thinking of the amount of flares that you’d be using, coloured markers I mean, um, whether your load would be enough?
WL: That’s all we had to do was fly the beam and then drop as instructed, so how many flares went Lord knows.
CB: Mm.
WL: Not within my remit.
CB: Okay. So you did that for six months.
WL: Yeah, something like that.
CB: How many ops were those roughly? Was it as many as when you were doing the —
CG: Forty.
WL: I haven’t a clue.
CG: It was forty Bill.
CB: Forty
WL: Forty-odd, yeah.
CB: Okay. So at the end of that six months, then what did you do after that? Did they think you needed a rest?
CG: It was the end of the war.
CB: Or did the war come to an end in Europe?
WL: Oh yes. It was finished and the, er, aircraft, we were flying did some trips round Europe dropping mail, um, where we landed at Blackbushe, and then I finished up at — you know, the squadron joined 139 Squadron at Upwood before being dismantled in January ’46.
CB: So this was all Mosquito flying was it?
WL: Yes.
CB: Yeah. So compared with the Stirling, which was clearly a different aeroplane, which one did you really prefer?
WL: When it comes to aircraft I love them all. They brought me home.
CB: Mm, people have different affections —
WL: Well —
CB: For different planes for different reasons.
WL: Well, you could hardly compare a Mosquito with a Stirling. So different aircrafts.
CB: Yes but my experience is that people have a huge allegiance to their aeroplanes.
WL: Oh we all loved them. [slight laugh]
CB: Yeah. Yes. Okay, we’ll stop for a mo.
Other: [unclear] Windows stuff.
CB: No, that’s different.
WL: Window was you’d have this strip stuff which —
CB: You didn’t drop Window —
WL: Big aircraft pumped down the chute.
CB: For jamming the radar, yes. You were with Pathfinders, but were you Pathfinding on every sortie, every op, or did you do other sorts of operations?
WL: Oh, I did plenty of others.
CB: And what would they be?
WL: Just dropping a — the cookie, yes.
CB: Yes, so could you describe the cookie?
WL: I can’t.
CB: It’s a four thousand pound barrel.
WL: Four — five thousand pound bomb.
CB: Yes. What’s in it?
WL: Something that explodes.
CB: [laugh] What about locations? What was the worst place to bomb?
WL: I suppose they all were because they were all, they were all protected, yes.
CB: Mm, and how many trips did you do to Berlin?
WL: Fourteen.
CB: What was your reaction to flying there compared with somewhere like Essen?
WL: It’s a target.
CB: The flak?
WL: Oh, well —
CB: The same everywhere, was it?
WL: Yes, it’s all —
CB: Or were they more organised?
WL: If you look at the picture there behind, that is what you see.
CB: Yeah.
WL: That is flak.
CB: Yeah. Were you pleased to move away from Wellingtons to bigger, more modern aircraft?
WL: Well, whether I was pleased or not, I was drawn off of Wellingtons and put on Stirlings, so that’s what the Bomber Command wanted, so that’s what they got.
CB: What were the limitations of the Stirling in your perception?
WL: Well, its speed wasn’t huge and it only had an operational height of about sort of twenty thousand.
CB: With the Mosquito, you could go —
WL: Oh well, you could go thirty-five thousand.
CB: So at what level would you normally fly on a typical Mosquito op?
WL: Oh, twenty thousand or something.
CB: And when you did the marking as a Pathfinder was there — how soon, how far ahead of the main stream were you to do the marking?
WL: Well, whatever the Bomber Command wanted.
CB: I was just thinking of —
WL: I didn’t have any say in it.
CB: No, no, but I wondered whether you could see them arriving almost immediately or there tended to be a, a lag.
WL: Well, it was flying home you could see the bombs dropping and well, you could see the explosions.
CB: Yeah and as the smoke got thicker, did another marker come along to re-set the target?
WL: I haven’t a clue.
CB: So you didn’t have to do that?
WL: No, no.
CB: No. I’m stopping for a mo. [Background noise]. So on a raid, as I understand it, there would be a master bomber. Would he be sometimes in a Mosquito, or always in a Lancaster or a Halifax?
WL: I couldn’t tell you.
CB: ‘Cause he was calling up what —
WL: Well, well you’d hear him but you wouldn’t see him.
CB: Yes. Right. What was your endurance on the Mosquito? Could you hold over the target if it was a long way away?
WL: Mm?
CB: Could you actually circle a target in a Mosquito if it was a long trip, or was the endurance not sufficient? ‘Cause the Lancaster master bomber would be circling, wouldn’t he?
WL: Well, you could. You are asking some impossible questions.
CB: That’s okay. I don’t mind if you can’t answer. I’m just curious because of some of the other bits that have come out. Yes. Thank you. Because we want to know what people’s perceptions were.
WL: It was a very long time ago.
CB: Yeah. I’m stopping again.
WL: [background noise] Scotland.
CB: Right.
WL: The Whitley was the aircraft at, er, Kinloss.
CB: Was it?
WL: Yes.
CB: Yes. So what was the Whitley like in terms of —
WL: Oh, a little worse than the Wellington. A slow aircraft.
CB: Yeah. They’d been all withdrawn from service some time before.
WL: Mm?
CB: They’d been withdrawn from frontline service.
WL: Oh yes. They were replaced by, by the Wellington I think, yes.
CB: Yes. What was the handling like because it was an old design?
WL: Very heavy.
CB: And, um, what about reliability?
WL: Of the Whitley?
CB: Of the Whitley, yeah.
WL: I haven’t a clue.
CB: It might have been its saving grace.
WL: The ground crews would look after them. They always seemed to be flying to me.
CB: Yeah. And on the topic of ground crew, what was your relationship on the — first of all on the Stirling squadrons, squadron, with the ground crew? How did that work?
WL: You had a ground crew, yes.
CB: Yes. How close did you — how closely did you liaise with them?
WL: Well you got quite friendly with the sergeant, yeah.
CB: Yeah, and you talked about the crew being very cohesive and social events as well as in the air. Did the sergeant, your chief, did he get involved in that or did the aircrew tend to —
WL: Not usually, no.
CB: No. Was he not invited or just not thought to be —
WL: Wasn’t protocol.
CB: Right. You also flew the Anson for a bit. Why was that?
WL: The Anson was only a transport aircraft, used when you wanted to transmit somebody or carry something, or, or go somewhere.
CB: Yeah. Now throughout the war people were supposed to be fit. You were a very fit person before you joined. How did you maintain your fitness during the war?
WL: Well, I tried to do a bit of running but I never really found time to do it.
CB: And your running was, um, well recognised before the war. What did the war do to it.
WL: [laugh] what did the war do to me? It deprived me of going to, er, two events 1940 and ‘44.
CG: The Olympics.
WL: The Olympics.
CB: Yeah, so what did you do instead?
WL: Mm?
CB: What did you do instead?
WL: I don’t know.
CB: Retribution.
CG: You bombed Hitler [laugh].
WL: I bombed Hitler instead, yeah. [slight laugh]
CB: So you missed those two Olympics, then what happened in ‘48?
WL: Well, I was in them.
CB: Were you in the Air Force at the time?
WL: No.
CB: Right. And what was it like at the Olympics in 1948?
WL: I don’t remember now.
CB: You — I mean it was a huge achievement to go there.
WL: Yes.
CB: But the winner that time was — in 1948?
WL: The what?
CB: Who was the winner?
WL: The winner?
CB: In your particular speciality in 1948?
WL: Oh —
CB: Emil Zatopek
WL: Zatopek. Yes.
CB: Did you meet him again afterwards? Or was that the end?
WL: Well, it was no good meeting him. He couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Czech so —
CB: Right. [slight laugh]
CG: Bill did actually run against Zapotek in his heat.
CB: Did he?
WL: Yes.
CB: Yes. And after those Olympics did you — you still kept up your running did you?
WL: Good Lord, yes. I did eighty-two years with Belgrave Harriers.
CB: Yeah. Right. And you were running the Harriers, weren’t you?
WL: Well, I wasn’t running all the time, but I was doing administrations.
CB: Yeah. Did you feel after the ’48 Olympics that you would have a go at the next one, or did you think that was one step too far?
WL: After?
CB: 1952 in other words.
WL: Have a go doing what?
CB: At the Olympics, enter the Olympics again in ’52.
WL: Oh, not to perform, no.
CB: No.
WL: I couldn’t possibly, could I? Think of the age I was.
CB: Well, some people go on and on, as you have.
WL: Well, it depends on your event.
CB: Yes.
WL: But you can’t do fifteen hundreds or five thousands unless you’re pretty fit. If you want to run a marathon, then you might do it.
CB: Yeah. And how did you fit in your running and all your activities with Belgrave Harriers with your job?
WL: Oh, it was all evenings and weekend work.
CB: Yes. And the company itself was sponsoring you, was it?
WL: I didn’t need sponsoring.
CB: Your employer? I was thinking for time off and —
WL: Oh no. I didn’t take any time off because of it.
CB: Everything was done in those days differently.
WL: They did indeed, yes.
CB: Yeah. How did you develop programmes with Belgrave Harriers for people in future? As time was moving on, did you run? Did you work out training programmes to improve people’s effectiveness?
WL: Oh no, no. They’d all do their own [pause], oh, um, Belgrave met up at Wimbledon on Saturdays and during the week if necessary. Otherwise you did your, did your work on your own from home, running round roads et cetera.
CB: Right. Changing back to, um, your occupation, you left the RAF at the end of the war or were they — did they keep you on for a while?
WL: You had your option of going on a short service commission, without any assurance that you would be kept at the end of that period so I didn’t.
CB: So your promotion had got you to where?
WL: My?
CB: Your promotions got you to what rank in the end?
WL: In the war?
CB: Yes.
WL: Squadron leader.
CB: Right, and what were your responsibilities as a squadron leader at that time?
CB: I looked after a flight, um, in the Pathfinder Force.
CB: Right. Okay. How many people —
WL: I was OC a Flight.
CB: Right. How many aircraft in the squadron? So how many in a flight?
WL: Twelve probably. There you are. So, twelve I think.
CB: In the squadron or the flight?
WL: The flight.
CB: Yeah. Right so three flights in the squadron or two.
WL: Two usually.
CB: Yeah. Right. So you left because you didn’t feel you wanted to continue your career, is that what you said?
WL: No guarantee to it.
CB: Yeah.
WL: I had a job to go to so I came back to the job.
CB: Mm, and took up where you left off, effectively?
WL: Yes, yes, exactly.
CB: How did it progress from there? Did you keep going with that or —
WL: Oh yeah, I did quite well in it.
CB: Yeah. Good. We’ll take a break. Thank you very much.
CG: What was the equipment you were given? A blazer?
WL: Blazer and, um, shorts.
CB: Who gave you those?
WL: And, er —
CG: A cap.
WL: A cap.
CB: What? The Olympic Committee did that, did they?
WL: Yes.
CG: Just minimal and he got the — didn’t you get the train from home to go and take part?
WL: Oh yes, yes.
CG: There was no Olympic village or anything.
CB: So how did this work then?
WL: I lived in Sanderstead, which is outside Croydon. I had to take a bus down to Croydon, a train to Victoria, Victoria to, to —
CG: White City, was it?
WL: No.
CB: Wembley?
CG: Wembley.
WL: Wembley. Walk in from there.
CB: This is all for the honour of serving your country in the Olympics.
WL: All for the honour of serving my country and what am I getting for it? Sweet —
CG: Carol enclosed those in an envelope [unclear]. [Background noise]
CB: Now just going back a bit. The first thousand bomber raid was an amazing achievement, however you look at it, but was there any significance about some of the aircraft? What about the one you flew? What was that?
WL: Stirling.
CB: Yeah. And did it have a significance in itself on — who had paid for it?
WL: Er, I don’t think so. We had a little bit better navigation equipment.
CG: MacRobert’s Reply. You flew MacRobert’s Reply.
WL: It might have been, yes.
CG: I think you said it was. It’s in your book.
WL: Yes.
CB: So, do you just want to describe that? What was it, the significance of MacRobert’s Reply?
WL: Well, Lady MacRoberts had two sons she lost during the war and in return for that, she bought replacement, um, aircraft.
CB: Right.
WL: That was the sig— significance.
CB: And they were Stirlings?
WL: Oh yes, yes.
CB: Appropriate. Scottish family, Scottish name of the aircraft.
WL: Yes. Bound to have been.
CB: And you flew one of them?
WL: I few one of them, yes.
CB: And it was on that raid was it?
WL: I think it was, yes.
CB: Yes. When you were on a squadron, did you tend to fly the same aircraft all the time or did you move around to different ones?
WL: Oh, you had your own aircraft and you flew it whenever you could, according to availability, you know, whether it was serviceable or not.
CB: Mm, and that would be checked out with you, er, you had to sign for the plane before you took off, did you?
WL: Well, that was part of the ground, um, operation, yes.
CB: Yes, with, and who was the person who handed over the aircraft?
WL: Sergeant.
CB: Of the ground crew?
CB: Yes.
CB: Right and if, if yours wasn’t serviceable they would rustle up another, is that it?
WL: They would try to but if they couldn’t then they couldn’t.
CB: And you didn’t go.
WL: Didn’t go.
CG: Are you sure you haven’t done enough though?
CB: Yes.
CB: This interview was cut short because Bill was clearly was getting too tired. He’s done an amazing job when one considers his recent car accident and also his hundredth birthday celebrations as well as all the media attention associated with that. The interview was in company with Cherry Greveson.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Bill Lucas. Two
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-02-08
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ALucasWE170208
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Format
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00:49:45 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Bill Lucas DFC was born on the 16th January in 1917 and lived in Upper Tooting.
He left school at the age of 15 and went to work in an Insurance Company, before joining the Royal Air Force in 1939.
Bill was sent to 16 EFTS at Derby and then to an Advanced Flying School at Montrose, before finally ending up at 20 OTU Lossiemouth in 1941 flying Wellington Bombers.
He also spent time learning to fly the Short Stirling before being posted to 15 Squadron at Wyton, where he transferred to Mosquitos becoming a Pathfinder for Bomber Command.
Bill completed over 40 operations with Bomber Command flying various aircraft and after the war, competed in the 1948 Olympics where he competed against Emil Zatopek.
Bill spent time after the war with the Belgrave Harriers and took part and organised activities for over 80 years.
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
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1940
1941
1942
1945
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Cambridgeshire
Scotland--Moray
Germany--Cologne
139 Squadron
15 Squadron
162 Squadron
19 OTU
20 OTU
9 Squadron
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
Distinguished Flying Cross
Flying Training School
Initial Training Wing
Mosquito
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Bourn
RAF Kinloss
RAF Torquay
RAF Upwood
RAF Wyton
sport
Stirling
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/540/8780/AGilbertAC161013.2.mp3
d34798a44bdedb497b506541d0fc1232
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Gilbert, Alexander Charles
A C Gilbert
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Gilbert, AC
Description
An account of the resource
21 items. An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Alexander Charles Gilbert DFC (b. 1921, 1336682, 186764 Royal Air Force) his log book, documents and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 9, 514 and 159 Squadrons. He was Awarded the Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 2020.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Alexander Gilbert and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
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2016-01-13
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 13th of October 2016 and we’re with Squadron Leader Alexander Gilbert DFC at Cheddington near Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire, and we’re going to talk about his career in the RAF, which was a long one. What do you remember in the earliest recollections then Alex?
AG: What do you mean? Going way, right back?
CB: Right from when you were really young.
AG: Ah, well, my father was a Hansom cab driver in London.
CB: Oh right.
AG: He joined the Army at the outbreak of World War One and served right through. And because he’d been a Hansom cab driver and knew all about horses they, he was assigned to what they called the Rough Riders, looking after horses, taking them across the Channel to France, and training horses and occasionally going down to Spain to purchase more horses and mules that were brought back for service in France. And at the end of the war, he was at this, this re-mount depot as it was called, at Swaythling in Southampton and he stayed there, and of course, he was married at the time. And from there, what could we say? I started school aged five, and I went to an elementary school and I left at fourteen, and then I was training or trying to become something in the art world, and I attended art school in Southampton. And then in November 1940, I volunteered to join the RAF and was called forward for service on the 7th of April 1941 and despatched to Uxbridge, where I spent three or four days being interviewed and processed, sworn in, all that sort of thing, and then assigned to a trade, and I was told I was to be trained as a Flight Mechanic Air Frames. From there, along with others, I proceeded to Blackpool where I carried out my recruit training on Blackpool sands, accommodated in one of the well-known Blackpool boarding houses. The training, as I remember it, lasted about four, four or five weeks. Recruit training and then we were moved to nearby Kirkham to, to carry out the trade training. The flight mechanics course lasted, as I remember, about eight, eight to ten weeks. At the end of the course, we had a final examination and the top third who passed out were retained to carry on to do a fitter’s course. I was in the top third so I stayed behind and completed the two courses, and at the end of it, I was a Group One Tradesman, Fitter 2A as they called them. I then had my, my first posting which was to what had been Exeter Airport, which was now a station that was occupied by a Spitfire squadron. I was only there about four weeks when the squadron was moved to an airfield near London. The air, the air, the ground crew were not required because the airfield that they’d gone to, already had ground crew, so we were dispersed and posted to various stations and I was posted to Calshot. Calshot was a very dreary place, it hadn’t changed, I don’t think, since World War One. The accommodation was pretty grim, I always remember the beds we had were iron plated, sort of, you know bedsteads. Very, very uncomfortable. The working hours, we worked, weekdays, every day, eight hours a day. We also worked weekends, Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings. We had the afternoons off at weekends, but because Calshot was rather isolated, there wasn’t anywhere to go anyway. So altogether it was a place that I, I really did not like at all. Anyway, apart from the work that we had to do, we also did guard duty at night along the Calshot foreshore, because there was the talk at the time about invasion and all this business, so we, we did these guard duties as well as our normal work. A very cold and uncomfortable place in winter time I can assure you, on the Calshot foreshore, very uncomfortable indeed. In early 1942, it was about March I suppose, a letter was pinned on the notice board. It said that the aircraft industry was expanding and there was a shortage of skilled tradesmen. RAF fitters were invited to volunteer for a short secondment to the aircraft industry. I thought to myself this is a way of getting away from Calshot so I volunteered. I didn’t really know what I was getting into actually. They told me I, yeah, I was to report to an office in Oxford, which I did. When I arrived there they said you will be working at the Cowley Motor Works. It was no longer a motor works of course, they were turning out parts for Lancaster aircraft, and they said, ‘You will work on permanent nightshift’. You start at 8 o’clock in the evening and you worked until 6 o’clock the next morning, with an hour’s break at night, and that was the routine. They gave me an address to go to where I would be accommodated. It was a house in the backstreets of Oxford that was owned by a young couple in their early thirties I suppose, and it was obvious from the start that they resented having a lodger, so there was no welcome at all. The woman took me up to what was to be my room, which had a bed, a table and a chair and that was it. It was a very depressing place altogether. I spent the night there, and the next morning, I had the same reception from this couple, not a friendly attitude at all, so I waited till they’d gone to work, packed my small bag and went back to the office I’d first reported to. The woman I saw, I explained to her about this place and I said, ‘I’m not going to stay there’, I said, ‘I am not going to stay in that place. Can you give me a new address? Another address to go to?’ So she said, ‘Yes, I’ll do that’. She said, ‘Here’s an address in Cowley’. I went there, a very nice street, the house very nice. Nice, nice couple, middle aged couple. The husband worked as a chef at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. She showed me to my room, very pleasant and comfortable, so that’s where I was whilst I worked at Cowley. The next day I reported to the Cowley Works to start work. The chap I saw said, ‘You will be working with a team of four’, there was already four there, ‘You’ll be, you’ll be number five, working with this team producing spars for the fuselage of Lancaster aircraft’. The four chaps turned out all to be Welshmen, they all came from the same place. They all knew one another well and I was taken into the team and we all got on quite well. That was it for the next five months or so. Then in early September, I received a letter to say that I was to be recalled and to report to Scampton, RAF Scampton, which I duly did, and on arrival at Scampton, I was told I was posted to 49 Bomber Squadron to work on Lancaster aircraft. I worked, I was on, on 49 Squadron through the winter of ’42/43, then in early ’43, I suppose it was about March time, a further letter appeared on a noticeboard to say that more and more four engine bomber squadrons were being formed, and there was a requirement for flight engineers, so I volunteered. At the time, there was no flight engineer training course and they said you would receive your training at the Rolls Royce works at Derby, and you would do a two week course on the Merlin engine and that would be it, which I did. After that, I was promoted to the rank of sergeant, given my flight engineer brevet, and then moved to Morton Hall where I would be crewed up. I got to Morton Hall and found that there were crews already there. There was the pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator and the two air gunners and now they wanted a flight engineer. The way we were crewed up was the other engineers and myself were put in to a hut and told to line up along one wall. The pilots then came in and lined themselves up on the opposite wall, and the procedure was that the pilot would look across at the engineers, look at one that he thought would, would be ok and ask him, and I was approached by a chap called Colin Payne who said to me, ‘How would you like to join my crew?’ And I said, ‘Yes please. I would’, because I liked the look of him, and then he took me outside to introduce me to the other crew members and that was it. We were then moved to Winthorpe to do our conversion course on the Lancaster, which we did, and from there, we had our first operational posting and we were posted to 9 Squadron at Bardney. While we were there, we did ten operations, including the three to Hamburg [pause]. At the time the squadrons, the Stirling squadrons in 3 Group were being converted to Lancasters, and new squadrons were starting to be formed. We were told that a new squadron was being formed at Foulsham, and was to be called 514 Squadron. It appears that they wanted two or three experienced crews to start the squadron off and then new crews would be added. So we duly reported to Foulsham where we did four operations with the newly formed 514 Squadron. The last of the four operations was to Berlin and when we were briefed, we were told that when we completed the operation, ‘You will not be returning to Foulsham. You will fly straight to Waterbeach’, which was to be the home of 514 Squadron, which was a rather odd thing to do because we had our belongings and all that sort of thing, and in, somebody wrote up afterwards what this was all about and there’s the letter there. Is that the one? The top one. “Get on your bike” or something, it says.
CB: “Posted via Berlin. Take [take] your bike”.
AG: That’s it. “Take your bike”, yeah. Yeah. I mean, this was the thing which you normally, they would never allow you to take anything.
CB: No.
AG: But we took all our stuff with us to Berlin and then to Waterbeach.
CB: Because you were moving airfield.
AG: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so that was that. So we arrived at Waterbeach, whilst we were at Waterbeach, we did another ten operations. So, so far we’d done ten at Bardney, ten at Waterbeach and I had done, and the four at Foulsham, a total of twenty four. The crew actually had done twenty five, there was one operation that I couldn’t go on because I had developed a nasty quinsy in my throat, and I couldn’t fly for three or four days, so I did one less operation than the rest of the crew. However, when they’d done twenty five and I’d done twenty four, we were then told that you had completed your first tour. Now this was five short of the normal thirty operations. The reason for this, I don’t know, whether it was because of the fourteen operations we’d done with 514 Squadron, ten of them had been to Berlin. Ten. Whether it was because of that, I don’t know but they said, ‘You have completed your first tour’ [pause]. The crew were then dispersed, of course, and posted to various training units. I stayed with Colin and we were posted as instructors to Number 3 LFS at Feltwell [pause], where we were until the, towards the end of the year. Well, we were, this was 1944, Colin said to me, ‘How would you like to go back on operations?’ I said, ‘Well I don’t mind’, so he said, ‘We will be posted to 149 Squadron at Methwold’, he said, ‘And I’ll try and contact some of the old crew members and ask them to join us’. He managed to contact the wireless operator and the rear gunner, and they duly arrived to join us at Methwold. We then picked up a new navigator, a new bomb aimer and a new gunner to replace the Australian. The Australian, by the way, was given a choice, having completed a tour of operations, either to stay in England or to go home to Australia, and he elected to go home. Now, among the operations we did with 149, we did the Dresden operation. We went to Dresden and we also did two Manna operations, dropping food. In our case, we dropped food to people in Rotterdam and The Hague [pause], and that was shortly before the war ended. At the end of the war, we started to get demobbed. I had been offered a four year extension, I didn’t know what I was going to do, by the way. I was married by that time, and my wife Dorothy had been a WAAF MT driver at Waterbeach. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and as I was offered this four year extension of service, I thought, I’ll take it and then make up my mind later about my future career or whatever. Anyway, I took the four year extension of service, stayed with the squadron until it was disbanded in January 1948, but during that time we did various exercises. We had a three, three, three or four day detachment to Trondheim in Norway, we did a trip to Juvincourt to bring back these chaps who’d been in the Army and been prisoners of war. We had an attachment to Gatow in Berlin, we did a tour of Germany by air, looking at some of the stations that we had bombed, some of the towns that we had bombed to see what it all looked like, and we had this trip to Pomigliano in Italy, and we had this two week detachment in the Canal Zone [pause]. And then, when the squadron was finally disbanded, there was no requirement, of course, for flight engineers, bomb aimers, air gunners or anything like that. The only aircrew they wanted to retain, were pilots and navigators, so I was transferred from the GD branch to the secretarial branch [pause]. I had two short, short postings, one to Watton and one to Bletchley Park which, at that time was the headquarters of Central Signals Area. You weren’t allowed in the house at that time, everything was all locked up and no one ever spoke about what, what was done at Bletchley during the war. No one ever said a word about it. One of the jobs I had to do whilst I was at Bletchley was opening the mail that came in, and one morning I opened the mail, opened this post gram, and found that I was posted to Hong Kong and I was posted to 367 Signals Unit, which was a Y station on Hong Kong Island. I travelled to Hong Kong by way of Singapore, on the troop ship Orbita, which took some five weeks to get to Singapore. I spent three of four days in Singapore and then boarded a Dakota aircraft to get to Hong Kong. We stopped on the way at Saigon to refuel and have something to eat, and the whole trip took eight and a half hours in this Dakota, and then arrived in Hong Kong. At the time, it was at the time that Chairman Mao was winning the war in China and people were flooding in to Hong Kong. Rich Chinese people who could afford anything, and any spare accommodation in Hong Kong was taken up by these people. So in our case, we were, I was occupied in the mess at Kai Tak, and it was a question of applying to get my wife to come and join me, which would take some time, and you just went on the married quarters waiting list, and again there were very few married quarters in Hong Kong, so you just had to wait a long time to get one. Anyway, my wife arrived in September with our newly born young girl, Janet, my daughter, and we were accommodated, like a lot of others, in one room in a hotel. Not, again, not very comfortable, waiting to be allocated a married quarter, but anyway, things in this hotel, it was hot, humid, again terribly uncomfortable, and every day I used to buy the China News, news, newspaper and see if there was any sort of accommodation being advertised. One day I bought the paper, and there was an advert in there which said there was an English family who worked in Hong Kong going home on leave, and their flat would be available. Offers were asked for, so I wrote, I sat down and wrote a letter which brought tears to the eyes of anyone who read it, and posted it off to this man called Alex MacLeod, who owned this flat. A couple of days later, he rang me up at the hotel and he said could I come over and have a chat with him and his wife, so Dorothy and I went across to the island, because our hotel was located in Kowloon on the mainland, and he took me up to the flat, introduced me to Joan, his wife, and after a short conversation they said, ‘We’re going to offer you the flat’. So we moved out of the hotel and into this flat, which we occupied for about two months whilst they were away in England. When they were due back, strangely enough, I rose to the top of the married quarters list and was offered a married quarter, so we moved in to the quarter and there we stayed until I completed my tour in Hong Kong in September 1953 [pause].
CB: We’ll just pause there for a mo.
AG: Do you want to go on there because we were now –?
CB: Yeah. Give you a –
[Recording paused]
CB: Ok.
AG: Right.
CB: So you’re in Hong Kong.
AG: In Hong Kong, completed nearly three years in Hong Kong, and when I came home, I was posted to 3513 FCU, Fighter Control Unit in Devonport as adjutant of the unit. We had an operational outstation at Hope Cove with a small staff at Hope Cove and [pause], I’m trying to get my thoughts right here. I completed a tour at 3513 and was then posted to 24 Group on the P staff. This was in Lincolnshire and –
CB: So what was P staff?
AG: P staff. P2 was Postings –
CB: Right.
AG: Postings of officers [pause]. I’d been there a short time and it was decided that the P staffs at Groups headquarters would be, would be closed down and they were no longer required, and so I was then posted to our headquarters, Technical Training Command at Brampton, again on the P staff [pause]. And whilst I was there my, I was then granted a permanent commission on the general list [pause]. From then I had various postings, I had two and a half years at SHAEF headquarters in Fontainebleau in France.
CB: What did you do there?
AG: I was the adjutant of the RAF support unit. Each of the nationalities at Fontainebleau, there were the British, the Americans, Canadians, French of course, they each had their own support staff and I was the adjutant of the RAF support staff [pause]. After that, my next posting was as recruiting officer at Brighton [pause], from there, I was posted to Headquarters Transport Command at Upavon, where I was the P1 staff officer responsible for courts martial boards of enquiry and all that sort of thing. I was there for only a few months when I was promoted to Squadron Leader and posted to the record office at Barnwood in Gloucester, where I was on the staff of the air commodore, the AOC [pause]. I did just over two years there and then I was posted to Aden on a twelve month unaccompanied tour of Aden. Whilst I was in Aden, they had a peculiar arrangement in Aden at the time. It was nearing the time when we were planning to get out of Aden anyway, to leave it and they had what they called continuity posts, which was a posting of two and a half years where you could be accompanied by your wife and family. A non-continuity post was a twelve month unaccompanied tour post which I, which I was in. Again, Aden, a dreadful place, we should have got out of Aden years ago but it wasn’t until 1967 that we finally left. I completed the twelve month unaccompanied tour, and on arrival back at the UK, was posted to Headquarters Strike Command at High Wycombe where I was on the aug staff [pause]. From there, I was posted to the Air Ministry on the staff of the director of manning. I did three and a half years at Adastral House in Holborn, which was part of the Air Ministry at the time. Nearing the end of my service, I had a final posting to Stanmore Park, where I was the deputy CO of Stanmore Park and that was my final posting, having then completed thirty five years in the service [pause]. Knowing that I was to be, leave the service in the October 1976, I had already started to formulate what I was going to do when I left the service, and I had applied for a job with the University of Buckingham, which I got. They had an offshoot of the University at Chalfont St Giles. By this time, of course, we’d bought this house in Cheddington, and the journey between here and Chalfont St Giles was twenty two miles. Anyway, which I had to do every day but I thought, well I’d got the job, and it seemed quite a good job looking after the admin side of the University of Buckingham at Chalfont. I had been interviewed for the job along with three others. They’d had a large number of applications to get this job, but anyway, there was three others and myself who were interviewed for this job. We spent a day at Chalfont, the morning we spent touring the place, and in the afternoon, the interviews were carried out, and the interview for each one of us lasted about three quarters of an hour or so, and we sat there then waiting to see who’d got the job, and at the end of the afternoon, the Vice Chancellor came in and said, ‘We’ve decided to give the job to Squadron Leader Gilbert’. So I thought, right. That was it. Now, this was before I had left the service. He said, ‘We will keep the job open for you until you leave the service in October’ [pause]. Shortly before I retired, I was in my office at, at Stanmore Park and I had a phone call from the Air Ministry, and they said, ‘We notice that you live near Halton’, they said, ‘Would you be interested in a retired officer job at Halton? The job would be for ten years after you leave the service and’, they said, ‘You’ll have to be interviewed of course, at Headquarters Air Cadets’. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll go there. I’m quite interested to find out what it’s all about’. So I, I went to Headquarters Air Cadets for this interview along, along with a number of others, and again at the end of the afternoon, the group captain, who was in charge of the interview board, came and said, ‘We’ve decided to offer the job to Squadron Leader Gilbert’. So I thought, right, I’ve got two jobs now. I’ve got the offer of a job at Halton and the job at Chalfont St Giles, and I thought, well to be very honest, Halton is quite close here, I would know all the routine of the service. I would still be in uniform as a squadron leader at Halton for ten years secure, secure employment, so I thought, well I will have to try, try and take this job. So I rang the Vice Chancellor at Chalfont and said, ‘Could I come down and see you?’ Which I did. I went down to him and explained what it was all about and I said, ‘To be quite honest, this job at Halton, I really know all about it. I know the routine of the service, it’s quite near my home and I feel that really, I ought to take this job’. He said, ‘I quite understand’, he said, ‘We will find somebody else’, and he said, ‘I wish you the best of luck’. So I started at Halton. I was the wing admin officer of Herts and Bucks Wing, Air Training Corps, and my job was taking care of all the ATC squadrons in Hertfordshire and in Bucks, and I completed that job for ten years. And that, I think, is the end of it.
CB: You decided to retire completely at age sixty five.
AG: At sixty five, I thought I have done enough. I have never been unemployed and I thought I’d, I’d done quite enough and that’s it.
CB: Very good. Let’s have a break.
[Recording paused]
CB: Geoff, thanks, sorry Alex. Thanks very much for all that stuff. What I want to do is run through some individual items. One of the things we touched on was Manna.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Now, this is quite important in a lot of ways, so could you just tell us how did you get involved in that and what, what happened and how did you feel?
AG: Well on the, towards the end of the war, we were told that the people in Holland were starving and a lot were dying. In fact, I was told eventually that twenty thousand Dutch people died of starvation, so we were told that we were to take part in what we was called Operation Manna. The word comes, you probably know –
CB: From heaven.
AG: The word comes from the bible, and when the Israelites and Moses were driven out of Egypt, they were starving and Moses prayed for them to get food, and it appears that a heavy dew descended on the land. This dew was sweet tasting and the Israelites were able to eat this stuff and so survive. And that is where, and Moses said, ‘This is Manna from heaven’, and that’s the way it came about. We did two food drops, one to Rotterdam, one to the Hague, flew to Holland with bomb bay laden with food and as we came in, in to the park at low level and dropped the food the people who’d gathered there all started shouting and cheering and all the rest of it. It was a sight that I will always remember, and it made us feel that we’d done something that was really worthwhile and that is the Manna story as far as I’m concerned.
CB: Then when you got back? So, you then got back and then what?
AG: Well got back and as I say, we did the two, two trips and then we just carried on with normal squadron duties.
CB: Right.
AG: But this happened, people don’t seem to realise that these drops took place while the war was still on. The Germans had agreed that they would not interfere with the Operation Manna.
CB: And what height and speed did you do this?
AG: We came in about five hundred feet, and the food was all in sacks on a wooden sort of arrangement. A pallet as they called it, a wooden pallet, and the food was all in sacks and the pallet was just dropped on to the park.
CB: A moving experience.
AG: Yeah. Very much so. Very much so. Never forget these people.
CB: No.
AG: Who were all so pleased to see us.
CB: And after the war did you ever go to Holland?
AG: No. No. No. Oh I went, when I was at Fontainebleau.
CB: Oh you did?
AG: I used to go, go up there occasionally. Oh yes. Yeah.
CB: Right.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Thank you.
[Recording paused]
CB: Now we’re just going on to your role as a flight engineer, because the flight engineer’s activities were actually quite busy. If we start with take-off, could you describe the take-off process and how the flight engineer gets involved in that, and what he does?
AG: Well at take-off, we go down the runway, the pilot takes the aircraft in to the air, and as he does so, the flight engineer gets the undercarriage up and adjusts the flaps, and that’s, that’s about it until you’re up. And er –
CB: But in fact, you take over the throttles at an early stage, so can you just describe that?
AG: And, and, yes, once you’re airborne at flying height, then you adjust the throttles to whatever speed, you know, the pilot wants, and the bombing height of course was between eighteen and twenty thousand feet each time. And that was it. Most of the trips took about four and a half to five hours, but of course, a trip like Dresden, we were airborne for eight and a half hours, and we went in across Germany but when we came out, we went north and flew over Denmark and came home, home that way.
CB: Right. So when you’re flying as an engineer, what do you do?
AG: Well, you’re doing really the log more than anything and anything else the pilots wants you to do, but normally, I mean, the whole crew would settle down really, and you were just airborne hoping you wouldn’t be attacked by a night fighter.
CB: Yeah. So when you fill in the log, what are you filling in and with what frequency?
AG: The frequency was about every half hour or so and you would put in what you thought was the fuel consumption at the time.
CB: So how –
AG: That sort of thing. Yes.
CB: How do you work out the transfer of fuel and what do you do?
AG: Yes. Well, you know that you’re on, say, a particular tank for a certain time and that it was time to transfer or refill that tank or whatever and you would do. It didn’t happen all that often of course, I forget now how many, how many petrol tanks there were on the Lancaster, I think it was two to three at each wing, something like that. I forget those details now, it’s too long ago and regrettably, all the booklets I had on the Lancaster I kept for many years, but with all my travels, eventually they were all discarded.
CB: I’ve got a pilot –
AG: Regrettably.
CB: I’ve got a –
AG: My daughter always swears at me, she says, ‘you should have kept all that stuff, Dad’.
CB: Yeah.
AG: You should have kept it all. Well I know that is true now but hindsight is all very well, isn’t it?
CB: Well perhaps it wasn’t so important then. I’ve got a –
AG: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: I’ve got a pilot’s notes, I’ll lend it to you.
AG: That’s right. Yeah. Well I had all the notes on the Lancaster, I could tell you all about it.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yes. Yeah.
CB: Now, why are you moving fuel?
AG: Because of weight, weight really, to get an evenly balanced aircraft.
CB: So you –
AG: That’s the only, only reason I can recall.
CB: So you’re moving it from the outer tanks to the inner ones, are you?
AG: That’s right, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So we finish the sortie and you’re coming in to land. What does the, what’s the tasks, the role of the flight engineer?
AG: Well once we’re on the circuit and we were called in, then it was undercarriage down and just standing by the pilot, and that was it really, making any engine adjustment as we came in. That was all. Yeah.
CB: So back on the stage of taking off, at what point and how do you balance the engines? Synchronise the engines.
AG: Once you’d got to a certain height.
CB: Right.
AG: Once you’d got to a certain height, yeah. Yeah.
CB: And the purpose of that is?
AG: Well you stayed on that, on that engine arrangement whilst, you know, whilst you were in flight. You could have been on that for some time.
CB: But –
AG: Some time without any change. You weren’t constantly changing. I mean, let’s be honest about it, with these operations, a lot of the time, a lot of the crew were doing nothing. Nothing. I mean the bomb aimer, he was doing nothing down in the front. The ones who were working the hardest were the pilot and the navigator. The wireless operator wasn’t allowed to transmit whilst you were over Germany, and the two gunners were just sat there, hoping that the aircraft wouldn’t be attacked. So there were long periods of inactivity let’s say, on the part of a lot of the crew.
CB: So you did a complete tour and other sorties as well.
AG: Yeah.
CB: How reliable was the aircraft and what sort of snags did you come up against?
AG: The aircraft was very reliable because your ground crew were the same people. You had the same engine fitter, the same air frame chap and the same armourer who looked after your aircraft. So after an operation, normally, you would go down to the flight lines, and they would say, ‘We’ve checked everything over. Will you give it an air test?’ So just Colin and I would clamber aboard the aircraft, go up for about twenty minutes, make sure that everything was working all right and land, and that was the air test after they’d serviced the aircraft, and that used to happen practically every time. Yeah.
CB: Now going back to the beginning of your career, in volunteering to join the forces, there was basically an option between the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. What prompted you to make the decision you did?
AG: I just didn’t want to join the Army or the Navy, and I thought I want to join, join the Air Force and that was it.
CB: To what extent did the Air Forces activities in the early part of the war, inspire people of your age? So, Battle of Britain, that sort of thing?
AG: Oh well, yes. You see our home was in Southampton, and out of interest, while I was training on that flight mechanics course at Kirkham, I had a phone call from my sister who said, ‘Last night, our house was destroyed’. It was bombed. She said, ‘We’re all alright, Dad and Mum because we were in an air raid shelter nearby, a service shelter and so we’re all alright’. And when I was in, told my flight commander, he said, ‘So you’re family are ok, are they? Nobody’s injured. No?’ I said, ‘No’. He said, ‘Then we can’t spare you any time off to go home’, so that was that. But in Southampton, before I joined the Air Force of course, the Battle of Britain was going on. The first RAF fighter pilot to get the VC got it over Southampton.
CB: Nicholson.
AG: Nicholson. And he was the first one and I saw him come down.
CB: Did you really?
AG: And he landed near where I lived, yeah, and it was all that sort of thing that inspired one. Oh yes, you know, join the RAF. That’s, that’s, that’s the place to join.
CB: Exciting.
AG: Exciting. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, just across the water, the Itchen, was the Supermarine Works.
CB: In the Isle of Wight.
AG: Was the first place to build the Spitfire aircraft, because the Spitfire, when the trials took place before the war, took place at Eastleigh Airport near Southampton.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah. So, and of course, the man who invented the Spitfire, RJ Mitchell, lived in Southampton at the time. In fact, there’s the plaque on the house now where he lived.
CB: What was the reaction of your parents to the destruction of their home?
AG: Ahh well, they, it was just one of the, I mean, this was happening all the time during the war and they rapidly found a place nearby. A house that they rented for the rest of the war.
CB: But they’d owned their own home before.
AG: No, it was a council house.
CB: Oh, was it? Right.
AG: It was a council, yes, it was a council house, and so that was that. So they rented this place whilst the war was on, and after the war, they rebuilt the council house where they’d lived and they went back to the same spot in a new house.
CB: Did they really?
AG: Yeah.
CB: And what about your sister’s reaction?
AG: [laughs] Well, well, you know it was all sorts of things. Strange things happening during the war and you just accepted it and, you see, you know in Southampton, I forget how many people were killed, between four and five hundred in air raids, and well this was what was going on. People, you know, in those days really didn’t complain as much as they complain today.
CB: Your sister is older than you or younger?
AG: Older.
CB: Older.
AG: Older. Yes.
CB: So did she have -?
AG: She, she, she, she, she was married and they lived in rooms in Southampton, because again, this question of accommodation, you know, wasn’t easy. Yes. And they lived in two rooms in Southampton.
CB: Was there a requirement by the government that people should give up space for people to live with them, because of the shortage of housing, or how did it work?
AG: I didn’t ever hear that was actually pressed all that much. No, no I didn’t, I didn’t. The only other thing I, I remember about the house being destroyed, was some of my belongings in it of course, and there was a compensation scheme and I got sixteen pounds compensation for the loss of my belongings in that.
CB: Right.
AG: When, when that happened.
CB: How did you feel about that?
AG: Sixteen. Well I thought, this isn’t much but in those days, again, sixteen pounds wasn’t bad.
CB: No.
AG: Wasn’t bad, no, so that was it.
CB: Changing now to when you joined the RAF and started your technical training.
AG: Yeah.
CB: How did that go? How was it set out, mapped out as a course and what did you do in the course?
AG: Well it, for each subject that you were taught, they had corporals as instructors, and you just attended this classroom and on a particular day or week they, you were, well they would talk about air frames or, or whatever. Yeah. I can’t, to be honest, I can’t remember a great deal about that.
CB: No.
AG: It was just that you attended class every day and that was it. Yes. Yeah.
CB: And then you went on to the more advanced operate, as a mechanics course.
AG: Yes. The –
CB: So how different was that?
AG: The fitter’s course was more advanced.
CB: Right.
AG: Yes, and again the detail, after seventy five years, I cannot remember.
CB: No.
AG: But we did this advanced fitter’s course and that lasted another six weeks or so, so altogether I was at Kirkham –
CB: Yeah.
AG: You know, for quite some time, doing the two courses.
CB: Yeah. Now when you were at Calshot then, on the board, a notice appeared saying they were looking for aircrew, what prompted you to –?
AG: No. At Calshot, they were looking for people to volunteer to work in the aircraft industry.
CB: Ah, that was the aircraft industry.
AG: That was the aircraft industry.
CB: Right. Ok.
AG: That’s right. Yes.
CB: So what prompted you to do that?
AG: Well I saw it as a way of getting out of Calshot.
CB: Yes.
AG: To be quite honest, I thought I’ll get away from this dreary place but I didn’t realise what I was getting in to, because the work in the aircraft industry was jolly hard. And long hours, long hours. I mean, 8 o’clock in the evening till 6 o’clock the next morning with an hour’s break in the middle of the night, and that was –
[phone ringing]
AG: Ah –
CB: Stop for a mo.
[Recording paused]
AG: Is that yours?
CB: No, it’s yours.
AG: That was, that was, that was as I said, I didn’t –
CB: This was at Cowley.
AG: I didn’t know what I‘d let myself in for.
CB: No.
AG: But if I’d, if I’d have known, I probably wouldn’t have volunteered.
CB: Yes.
AG: But however yeah, well it was because it was long hours.
CB: Yeah.
AG: And it was every night of the week except one. We had one night off at the end of the week.
CB: So, so what exactly were you making that was part of the Lancaster?
AG: These spars for the fuselage.
CB: Right.
AG: Yeah.
CB: So they’re effectively the circles of structure that hold the –
AG: That’s right.
CB: Skin together.
AG: Yeah. That hold the skin together. That’s it.
CB: Right.
AG: That was, yeah, yeah, along with these four Welshmen.
CB: But you got on well together so that was good.
AG: Oh we got along well together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So then you mentioned that you were recalled by the RAF to go back to a, to the front line as it were.
AG: Yeah.
CB: And you went to 49 Squadron. What did you do?
AG: Well I went to Scampton first.
CB: Scampton. What did you do there?
AG: Which was the base station.
CB: Yeah.
AG: As they called it.
CB: Ok.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Scampton so –
AG: One of the satellites was 49 Bomber Squadron.
CB: Right.
AG: And that’s where I went and –
CB: Doing what?
AG: Working on Lancasters.
CB: Right. What sort of things were you doing on the Lancaster?
AG: Well anything that needed doing to the fuselage or whatever, yeah, anything.
CB: How did the ground crews on the front line squadrons react to damage to the aircraft from flak and so on?
AG: Well, again, people just got on with it, you know. If there was damage, you just repaired it and that was it. Yeah.
CB: How did, how did you put patches on?
AG: Oh well with, with rivets or whatever, but again, getting into the detail of all this now, Chris, I’m afraid I can’t –
CB: That’s ok.
AG: I can’t remember it all.
CB: It’s ok. It’s simply that on some planes that had fabric.
AG: Oh yes, yeah, but certainly –
CB: So that I’m drawing a –
AG: But certainly not the –
CB: Differentiation.
AG: Lancaster.
CB: No.
AG: No.
CB: No.
AG: No.
CB: Ok. So there you are, working on the ground as a rigger.
AG: As a fitter.
CB: Fitter –
AG: Fitter.
CB: I should say.
AG: Fitter. Fitter Group 1 tradesman. Yes.
CB: Group 1 tradesman, and at that point, another letter appears inviting you to –
AG: At that point, another letter appears calling for volunteers.
CB: Yeah.
AG: To become flight engineers.
CB: What attracted you to that prospect?
AG: Well, I thought, well that sounds alright. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll give that a go. So I volunteered and as I say, after a very short interview, they said, ‘Right. There is no training course at the moment, at the present time for flight engineers, but you will do a two week training course at the Rolls Royce Works at Derby’, and that’s where I went.
CB: And that’s where you did your engine training.
AG: And I did on the Merlin engine. Price. Predominantly they talked about the Merlin engine.
CB: Yeah.
AG: And the engine handling characteristics and all this sort of thing. Yeah. That was quite good there, Derby, I mean two weeks wasn’t a long time really. It wasn’t a long training course, was it?
CB: No.
AG: But at the end of it, they said, ‘You’re now a sergeant, here’s your brevet’, and that’s it and, ‘You will be assigned to a crew’.
CB: So this officer selects you at the Heavy Conversion Unit did he?
AG: At, at the squadron.
CB: Yeah.
AG: At the squadron.
CB: At the squadron.
AG: You were just, you had this short interview.
CB: Straight to the squadron.
AG: A very short interview.
CB: ‘Cause they didn’t have a –
AG: Yes.
CB: Heavy Conversion Unit then.
AG: No. No.
CB: No.
AG: A short interview.
CB: Right.
AG: Whilst you were on the squadron
CB: Yeah.
AG: And then they said, ‘Right. You’re, yeah, we’ll take you as a flight engineer, and you’ll do your training at Derby’.
CB: Yeah.
AG: And that was it.
CB: So you join the squadron, you get in the aircraft. Now how do you feel about your situation?
AG: Once we’d started operations you mean?
CB: Yes.
AG: Ah. I think if you speak to anyone who’s done operations during the war, the first operation, you weren’t worried at all about it because you didn’t know anything about it, and off you went and you quickly, you quickly found out what it was all about, and it was thereafter that you felt a bit twingy at times. Yes. But not on the first operation because you didn’t know anything about it, about operations but thereafter, well. And of course, the whole thing about operations was luck. It was nothing to do with skill or anything else, it was pure luck if you got through a tour of operations. On 514, we were the first crew to complete a tour of operations. The first one.
CB: Right. Thank you.
[Recording paused]
AG: We were very lucky as I say.
CB: So, on, on operations then, these can last anything up to eight hours.
AG: Yeah.
CB: You did a whole tour and more.
AG: Yeah.
CB: So how would you describe the sort, the operations you went on? Were they eventful or quiet or what were they?
AG: No. The, to start with, the operations on Hamburg if you remember, there were three operations over a period of four days and we did three of the, we did all three of the four.
CB: Right.
AG: And after the first one, then a couple of days later, or perhaps it was the next night we went out again, but according to the logbook, you can see by the logbook, when you were a hundred miles away, you saw the light in the air, and that was Hamburg burning, and then you got near and you did your sortie and you did it. And then, as I say, we did three to Hamburg, three, three trips to Hamburg. Certainly you remember that well enough and –
CB: What was the reaction of the crew to that?
AG: Well, you know, they [laughs], we just thought, well there you are. In fact, in the logbook too, there’s the piece of paper which is a “News of the World” report who interviewed us. In the logbook.
CB: Yes.
AG: In the back there.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Somewhere. And that was after one of the Berlin trips, and I said to them, I said to this reporter at the time, ‘After the war, I’d like to go to Berlin and tour around to see what it looks like’, and it’s in the newspaper report.
CB: Right. So was it just a curiosity or –?
AG: Curiosity.
CB: Yeah.
CB: Yes. Yeah.
CB: To know how it had worked.
AG: That’s right.
CB: This, this article says, “Blood red pall –
AG: Yeah.
CB: Over the heart of Nazi Germany”. Right.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Ok.
AG: Yeah.
CB: And did you get attacked on any occasions or how did that work?
AG: No. No. Never, never got attacked. Never. No.
CB: So the gunners were keeping an eye out.
AG: The gunner was keeping an eye out, yeah, poor old Twinny in the, in the, the rear gunner, he often used to get off the aircraft with frost on his moustache. He was the only one who had a moustache and he had the frost on the moustache. It must have been pretty, pretty grim for him.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah. Especially when the flight was eight, eight, we, as I say, the longest flight was the Dresden one. That was eight and a half hours, but then there was the Nuremberg one which was quite a long flight, and the Munich one was a very long flight. So there were quite, quite a few long flights where poor old Twinny was freezing in the back.
CB: The Nurem –
AG: There was supposed to be some sort of heating but it’s quite often it wasn’t working. It didn’t work anyway. There you are.
CB: The Nuremberg one was clear weather and the loss rate was very high. What do you remember particularly about that?
AG: I remember that very, a great deal, the loss rate of aircraft was nearly a hundred. Nearly a hundred aircraft and so you’ll, you know, well there again, I thought, good God, you know. What are we doing, doing this? But there you are, but that was, that was the worst night of the war for the, for Bomber Command. Yeah.
CB: In what way did you feel –?
AG: Well because of the, the loss rate.
CB: Did you see bombers go down? Other bombers.
AG: At times, at times, at times you did, ‘cause over the target, you were sort of going in there about eighteen, eighteen to twenty thousand feet, but the German night fighters would fly above you and drop what they called candle flares, and these things slowly floated down and lit up the whole area.
CB: With a view to enabling them to see.
AG: With a view, with a view to them picking out the aircraft to attack.
CB: Right.
AG: And you were lucky that you weren’t attacked. Yeah. And again, the bombing run was the hair raising bit, because you came in and you had to go straight and level over the target so the bomb aimer could put his sights right and drop the bombs, but that again, was the hair raising bit, that bit where you had to go the same height for about three or four minutes.
CB: And then –
AG: Over the target.
CB: After the bomb release you still had to go straight and level.
AG: After the –
CB: To take the picture.
AG: Yeah. That’s right and then of course you got out as quickly as you could. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Always one way? Predictably always left or always right or what was it?
AG: Not always one way. Normally straight out and away, but I know the thought at the time was let’s get the hell out of here but again, you had to do your job.
CB: Yeah.
AG: And do that bombing run correctly.
CB: Yes. So you talked about Munich, what was partic, apart from the distance, what was particularly memorable about that.
AG: Again, I can’t, well, well no, I don’t. We just went to Munich, did the operation and that was it. Yeah.
CB: And then you mentioned Dresden. What’s memorable about Dresden?
AG: Dresden, I remember Dresden quite well because there was a lot of cloud over Dresden. A lot of cloud.
CB: At your height.
AG: At, at, at yes, well and below us, cloud below us. Yes, cloud below us. I do remember that quite, quite well, but again, we did the bombing run and of course, as you say, as you know with the bombing run, you were aiming your bombs at the Pathfinder markers.
CB: Yes.
AG: Yes. You know.
CB: Were they clearly visible?
AG: Yes. The red or the green markers and you were told at the briefing which ones to go for.
CB: Ah, right.
AG: To aim the bombs at.
CB: And on occasions did the, depending on where you were in the bombing stream, did the markers become obliterated by the fires and the smoke?
AG: Oh yes, yes, well they, yeah, that could happen quite easily. Yes, oh yes. The Pathfinders could drop the markers but then the fires would overcome them. Yes. That –
CB: And did they re-mark?
AG: No. Well, you heard of tales that they remarked, you know. You heard of Guy Gibson and how brave he was at doing this, and they used to hover around the target for some time but there you are. Yeah.
CB: So thinking of the war in total, what was the most memorable point in your perspective?
AG: Memorable points about the war. To start with getting away from Calshot was quite memorable I must say, working at the Cowley works was quite memorable. The Manna operation was, I suppose, one of the most memorable because to see the way that those people reacted when you dropped the food. I guess that was one of the most memorable.
CB: Their appreciation.
AG: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the way, the way they all responded when the thing hit the ground, you could tell. There was cheering and shouting and all waving their arms and all this business. Yeah.
CB: And –
AG: I remember that very well.
CB: Yes.
AG: Yeah.
CB: So when you got back from a sortie, there was always a de-brief. What was the de-brief after Manna flights?
AG: Well nothing very much, they just wanted to know whether the thing had gone, you know, because there wasn’t any hindrance as there would have been on an operation, a proper bombing operation. I mean, everything was there, quiet and you just came in to the park quietly and you did your drop. There was no interference from anybody. As I say the Germans had agreed that they would not interfere with Manna.
CB: And did you make the drop of the food at a reduced speed or the normal speed?
AG: No. At reduced speed, reduced speed. Yeah.
CB: To what?
AG: Yeah. Well I forget, but we reduced it so we were above stalling height, you know. To make the drop. If you were flying in too fast, you might, you might not drop it on the park, you might drop it on somebody’s house, so you reduced the speed coming in. Definitely, yes. Above stalling height.
CB: Good. Thank you.
[Recording paused]
AG: I forget where we’d been.
CB: Now one of the challenges in the bombing war was getting back to the airfield.
AG: That’s it.
CB: And the British weather with fog.
AG: Yeah.
CB: Was a pain.
AG: Yeah.
CB: So how did you deal with that?
AG: Yeah. Yeah. Well as I say, we were, we were, we were quite fortunate really but there was one time when we came back and there was this fog, and it was a question of, this fog was going to hang around for some time so FIDO came into operation each side of the runway, you know, these flames and things, so we landed that way. It only happened once.
CB: So it was a popular airfield that day.
AG: Yes [laughs]. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Because not many airfields had Fido, did they?
AG: No. No. No. No. FIDO.
CB: Right.
AG: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
CB: I forgot to ask you Alex, whether you had any links and what they were with the American Air Force or Army Air Force as it was.
AG: No.
CB: In those days.
AG: Nothing. Never. No.
CB: But their aircraft –
AG: No links whatsoever.
CB: No.
AG: No.
CB: But their aircraft, the Flying Fortress. What did you do there?
AG: What? Well he just took us up.
CB: So, so you went somewhere where you, what did you do? You flew somewhere.
AG: We flew to this base.
CB: Yeah.
AG: This American Flying Fortress base, met Colonel Jumper, the commanding officer and he, he gave us a flight in the Flying Fortress.
CB: So what was that like?
AG: Oh that, that was alright. Of course, he didn’t do anything drastic, we just went up and just flew, flew around for a while.
CB: Yes.
AG: Yeah. But we walked through, through the aircraft. Examined it, you know. Those, at the rear of the flying fortress each side, they had these machine guns, didn’t they?
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yes. Looked at all that and it was just a day out really.
CB: In terms of its sophistication and crew comfort compared with the RAF aircraft, what was that like?
AG: Oh I think that, I think we were slightly more comfortable than the flying fortress and the flying fortress crew, I forget how many there were, but I think –
CB: Eleven.
AG: There were about eight or nine of them.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah. In this what was regarded, compared to a Lancaster, was a smallish aircraft.
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah but they had all these gunners on –
CB: Yeah.
AG: On the Fortress didn’t they?
CB: Yeah.
AG: Yeah.
CB: That’s why the bomb load wasn’t very big.
AG: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As I say, there we are.
CB: Right.
AG: I’m trying to think of any other highlights.
CB: Well.
[Recording paused]
CB: That’s it.
AG: In about April 1945, the rear gunner and I were called in and we were told that we had also been awarded the DFC because of the number of operations. The ten trips to Berlin and all this business.
CB: Yeah.
AG: So that’s the way we got it. It was regrettable I thought, that the wireless operator didn’t get it for some reason. I don’t know why.
CB: No.
AG: But it was just the rear gunner and myself.
CB: So the pilot and the navigator already had –
AG: The pilot –
CB: The DFC.
AG: They already had it, yeah. At the end of the tour.
CB: Yeah.
AG: They had got the DFC.
CB: Right.
AG: The pilot and the navigator only. But in the April ’45, the rear gunner and myself also got it.
CB: Right. Ok. And bomb aimer, nothing either.
AG: The bomb aimer. Well, the bomb aimer, at the end of the first tour, as I say, was regarded as the old man of the tour.
CB: Yeah.
AG: He was aged thirty two. Once he went off to this training unit, having completed the tour, we never heard of him again.
CB: No.
AG: Stan Young, his name was.
CB: Right.
AG: Stan Young. The pilot was called Colin Payne.
CB: Yeah.
AG: The navigator was Ken Armstrong. Now that’s another strange story about Ken Armstrong. At the end of our first tour of operations, Ken went off to a training unit, but then I don’t know if you know this, they started training people to work on British Airways after the war, but they already started recruiting them whilst the war was still on. And he, he applied for this and was recruited to go on the staff of British Airways before the war ended, and after the war, he ended up at Hurn Airport near Bournemouth where he operated from with British Airways. Ken then rose up in British Airways, and British Airways eventually did away with navigators and just kept pilots and, strangely enough, flight engineers. They were the only two crew members. And Ken, they kept two navigators back at British Airways headquarters at Heathrow, and he became quite a star navigator with British Airways, and whenever there was a royal flight, even though they had all the navigation aids, they always took a navigator with them, and he went on a number of royal flights and he ended up with the MVO, Member of the Victorian Order. And he became quite well known in British, they all knew Ken Armstrong because he was one of the two navigators left in British Airways, because they didn’t want navigators anymore with all, with all the navigation aids on board. But he, he did become quite well known. Yes. I mean my wife’s husband, Clive, ‘Oh yes’, he said, ‘Ken Armstrong. We all knew Ken Armstrong’.
CB: Your daughter’s husband.
AG: Yes.
CB: Ok.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Alexander Charles Gilbert
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-10-13
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AGilbertAC161013
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
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01:22:03 audio recording
Description
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Alexander Gilbert, DFC, joined the Royal Air Force in November 1940, and was called forward for service on the 7th April 1941, rising to the rank of Squadron Leader. Alex had a very long and varied career for the Royal Air Force.
Upon his call up, he was trained as a Flight Engineer Air Frames where he passed in the top third of his class. He became a Group One Tradesman, Fitter 2A. He was posted to Calshot and then spent time working at Cowley Motor Works, manufacturing spars for the fuselage of Lancasters before being recalled and sent to Scampton.
He served with 49 Bomber Squadron before taking a Flight Engineers course and working on Merlin engines at Rolls Royce Works in Derby.
Alex was transferred to 9 Squadron at Bardney where he completed 10 operations, including 3 to Hamburg, then helped form 514 Squadron where he flew on missions to Berlin, and completed 14 operations. He became an instructor at No. 31 LFS at Feltwell, before returning to Operations at 149 Squadron in Methwold.
149 Squadron were involved in the Dresden operation and did 2 trips in Operation Manna, dropping supplies to Rotterdam and The Hague.
Alex had various other postings and completed 35 years’ service in the Royal Air Force, retiring at the age of 65.
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
149 Squadron
49 Squadron
514 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
B-17
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
Cook’s tour
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
fitter airframe
flight engineer
ground crew
Lancaster
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Bardney
RAF Calshot
RAF Feltwell
RAF Foulsham
RAF Halton
RAF Kirkham
RAF Methwold
RAF Morton Hall
RAF Scampton
RAF Waterbeach
RAF Winthorpe
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/546/8787/PJohnsonKA1507.1.jpg
a4899a68c46a58711c699203c30b2867
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/546/8787/AJohnsonKA170403.2.mp3
eb18c023f71add18db542da2c8c7f140
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Johnson, Ken
K A Johnson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Johnson, KA
Description
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Three items. Two oral history interviews with Ken Johnson (b. 1924, 1595311 Royal Air Force) and one photograph. He flew operations as an air gunner with 61 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
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2015-06-03
2017-04-03
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: We are now moving to another interview. My name is Chris Brockbank, and today is the 3rd of April 2017, and I’m in Doncaster with Ken Johnson who did two tours, and we’re going to talk about his life and times in the RAF. So, what’s your earliest recollection Ken? Of life.
KJ: In the RAF?
CB: No, in your family.
KJ: Oh, my family. Well, my father was a ironmonger, not an ironmonger, an iron moulder rather, by trade. So there was very little for that in Doncaster so he used to have to travel to Sheffield to work and he used to cycle there, do nine hours in the foundry and cycle home.
CB: Where were you living? In Doncaster?
KJ: Yeah. We lived, oh in that many parts of Doncaster it’s unbelievable. Hexthorpe, Doncaster, Balby, everywhere in Doncaster we’ve lived. I think he’d got a bit of gypsy in him, we never settled too far.
CB: Trying to be a moving target, was he?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Was he in the First World War?
KJ: No, no, he weren’t old enough.
CB: Right. And how many brothers and sisters did you have?
KJ: I had two brothers, no sisters. Both younger than myself and both have passed on.
CB: Right. Two brothers and two sisters.
KJ: No sisters.
CB: No sisters.
KJ: No.
CB: Just two brothers, yeah. And where did you go to school?
KJ: I started at Balby Infant’s School, I went to Hexthorpe, I went to Intake. I don’t think there’s many schools in Doncaster I haven’t been to.
CB: Why was that?
KJ: My dad, he’d got itchy feet. He could never settle at one place so we were always changing homes.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Aye. He’d brought a, he had it built, a bungalow at Finningley, a beautiful bungalow but my mother wouldn’t go to live there. She were a townie, she didn’t like countryside. Well we went, we lived there three days to be quite honest and that were it. She’d had enough.
CB: And what did you and your brothers think?
KJ: Pardon?
CB: What did you and your brothers think?
KJ: Well they were much younger than I. I was the eldest. There was one five years younger, and one ten years younger, so none of us really had any say in the matter. It was a bit unfortunate, keep having to change schools because you never got in to the ways of the school you were joining, but there you are. We had to knuckle under and put up with it.
CB: What did you do at school?
KJ: Just the ordinary schooling. No, er, I didn’t go to anything special you know, it was just the ordinary school.
CB: Yeah. And what did you do when you left school?
KJ: When I first left school we were living at Sheffield, which was just before the war, and I was a joiner’s apprentice, but when the war was, when the war started my dad said, ‘We’re going back to Doncaster. Sheffield will get bombed’, and he never said a truer word. It did. It got terribly bombed so we were back in Doncaster, and I was still in wood but it wasn’t a joiner’s apprentice, it were just a mundane. We were making clothes horses for people, for ladies to put their clothes to dry on. Clothes drier. And I stuck that for so long and then I went to work at British Ropes, down Carr Hill, in a reserved job which was making cables for barrage balloons. It was, it was a job that there were no joinings in the way. It had got to be a single wire and so it was classed as a reserved occupation. I only got in the RAF because I kept pestering them. I wanted to go and eventually they let me go. I always wanted to fly and I did plenty of that.
[pause]
CB: What type of flying did you want to do?
KJ: Anything. I were, I was prepared to do anything, and the quickest way — I mean a pilot and navigator and those sort of jobs, they were two or three years training and they had to go out to Canada and all like that. Well to be a gunner, it were only a matter of about eighteen months, so I chose the, oh at first it was like you said, wireless operator air gunner but that drove me mad that dit dit da dit dit da business, so I volunteered for a straight gunner and got away from it.
[pause]
CB: And what made you attracted to being a gunner particularly?
KJ: It was the easiest way of getting into aircrew. They needed two gunners to any other trade and I wouldn’t say my education were all that good anyway, so I chose the easy way, volunteered for a gunner.
CB: And when you started gunnery training, how did that go?
KJ: It went very well. I did that up at Dalcross in Scotland, so, yeah it went well. The flying part of it was exceptional ‘cause of the scenery, it was absolutely fantastic, the scenery we were flying over up in the north of Scotland. Aye. I never had any problems in that respect.
CB: What aircraft were you flying as training for that?
KJ: Originally Ansons, then we went on to Wellingtons and then finally Stirlings, and then finally Lancs, but I did all my operational flying on Lancs.
CB: So how did the gunnery course start? What did they do with you to begin with?
KJ: Well we used to go up in the aircraft. I think there were three, there might have been five, either three or five and your, your bullets that you would be firing had a different coloured paint on so they knew which, who had hit how many, and we flew up and then [pause], now I can’t remember the name of the aircraft. It was, it was originally supposed to be a fighter but it can’t have been fast enough so they used —
CB: And that was the Defiant.
KJ: Pardon?
CB: Defiant. With a turret on it.
KJ: No, these were the aircraft that towed the target.
CB: Oh right.
KJ: And I remember they were always Polish pilots, always Polish, which was a bit hectic at times.
CB: Did the tug ever get hit?
KJ: Oh yeah. It wasn’t as easy as you thought, but it, yeah, we, as I say these bullets had a different colour on so they could tell when the drogue came back who’d hit, how many times and so on.
CB: How well did you score?
KJ: Well I didn’t think it were very well. I usually averaged about .5, but there were some worse than me and some a heck of a lot better, so [pause], I mean when you got in a Lancaster and you were, you went into a corkscrew, it’s a wonder you hit anything because one minute you were upside down, the next minute you were stood on your toes. All over the place and you were supposed to — you’d sight. Gun sight was a coloured lit up small thing, and at certain points you were supposed to put the target, say a quarter of the way down or the other side of it, wherever you moved you were supposed to — well trying to remember that lot were impossible. All you could do were aim ahead of the enemy aircraft and just blaze away and let him come through your hail of bullets.
CB: But you had a means of targeting according to the type of aircraft. How did that work?
KJ: No, not really. No. You just had this —
CB: Based on wing span wasn’t it?
KJ: Pardon?
CB: Based on wing span.
KJ: Yeah, and as I say you just had this image, lit up image, and you were supposed, at any point where, same as if you saw the fighter coming from starboard, you’d, say, ‘Fighter starboard. Corkscrew starboard. Go’, and at that, he’d dive in toward the enemy fighter. Well you can imagine, the pilots used to really thrash the aircraft around to avoid being hit themselves and so it were very very difficult to go to the procedure that —
[banging noises]
Other: Sorry. I did that.
KJ: To go to the procedure that you were supposed to go through, but you just had to make, make the best of it as you went along.
CB: Yeah. So as you mentioned corkscrew.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: This was the way of evading an attacking fighter.
KJ: It’s what?
CB: So just talk us through. Who made the call for the corkscrew?
KJ: The gunner.
CB: Which one?
KJ: Which one? The one that saw the fighter coming first.
CB: Right.
KJ: He’d shout out, ‘Fighter starboard’, or port or upper or down, and you were supposed to wait ‘til they were two hundred yards away because if you did it too soon, they could follow you.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So you were, you judged when it were the right distance, and the, ‘Corkscrew starboard. Go’, and then the pilot would go towards the fighter that was after you.
CB: So that he would overshoot. Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So in the corkscrew, what exactly was the manoeuvre? He was pulling it round hard. Then what?
KJ: Well he dived.
CB: Right.
KJ: Then climbed.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Then climbed again, then down again, that’s where you got your corkscrew.
CB: Right.
KJ: It looked like a corkscrew going through the sky.
CB: Getting you back on track.
KJ: Yeah, and as soon as they broke away you stopped it and waited for them coming again and then started it all over again.
CB: How many times did you get attacked?
KJ: Oh quite a few times but we never, we got hit with bullets but we never got them in any vital places.
CB: Right. We’re ahead of ourselves in a way, but going back to training.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: In the first part of the training, you’re on the ground.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So how did they carry out that training? With what sort of weapon?
KJ: Well you had, you had the usual 303 Brownings that you’d be using in the aircraft, but there was a turret mounted on a railway track and you just went round this circuit, and the aircraft had come over with a drogue and you’d try to get as many shots in as you could. But they frowned on, there was some got, tried to be a bit crafty and waited till it was a dead shot and then you couldn’t miss, but they frowned on that. They wanted you to do it the hard way like.
CB: So what sort of height are these target tugs coming in at?
KJ: They’d be at same height as yourself but coming in from all different directions.
CB: I meant when you were on ground. You were on the railway tracks.
KJ: Oh.
CB: So, what height are they coming in?
KJ: Well the drogue was on the same track but ahead of you, and that’s where they didn’t like you waiting till they come to a corner, because then you could just bang away and ever hit, everyone had hit.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So they frowned on that, but it was tried to make it as realistic as possible, and then, on top of that, you’d got cameras in the ones that you were flying and you did the same thing with a camera.
CB: So how did they deal with deflection shooting training?
KJ: Well you were always in the, each position the plane was in, on your gun sight, there was a place you were supposed to put your, put your sight on this and then fire away there, but as you could imagine, when you were doing corkscrewing, you were up and down and one minute you was, your head was banging on the top of the turret. The next minute, you felt as though they’d put a tonne weight on your shoulders. It was very difficult to, to aim.
CB: Ok. Back at the training so after a certain amount of ground training, did you use shotguns for deflection training?
KJ: Yeah, yeah, did all that. Yeah.
CB: Right, and did you alternate between using the Browning 303?
KJ: Oh I did. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And the shotgun.
KJ: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So it was a clay pigeon.
KJ: Clay pigeon, yeah.
CB: Shot. Right. So then you come to the flying, so three of you in an Anson. Or five.
KJ: Aye. Yeah.
CB: How did that work?
KJ: And you took turns to climb in to the turret and do your, do your thing.
CB: Because it’s a mid-upper turret on the Anson.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Right.
KJ: Yeah, yeah, it was a twin engine. There were two very similar aircraft, Anson and Oxford, but I only ever heard of the Anson having the turret. Might have been Oxfords used for the same reason. There were no reason why not. They were almost alike aircraft [coughs] excuse me.
[pause]
CB: So in that aircraft, let’s say the Anson, you’ve got three or five students.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Who’s there guiding you?
KJ: Just the pilot.
CB: Was there another, an experienced air gunner?
KJ: Oh yeah, yeah, there would be, and he’d tell you when it was your turn to go in and come out.
CB: What sort of guidance did he give you?
KJ: Well he couldn’t do much at all except keep your eye on the target, and such tips as waiting while they were flying across you and getting ahead of them, and then really putting the bursts in. You were sure to hit something, but the thing that amused me — I thought these, when we got to that stage, I thought the people that were teaching us would have done operations but they hadn’t. They’d just, they’d been good in their training so they’d been held back as instructors.
CB: Was it actually a mix? Were there some people who were experienced?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Air gunners. Were there?
KJ: Well as I say there were, they’d done well in their training and they were held back.
CB: But there were people who’d been on operations there.
KJ: No. I thought there would be.
CB: But not at that time.
KJ: No.
CB: Ok. Right. And when you went up, how long was your go?
KJ: No more than half an hour. Yeah. From climbing in to climbing out of the turret. Yeah.
CB: Ok. And after Dalcross, then what happened?
KJ: After Dalcross, we were then went to OTU, our Operational Training Unit, and that was where you crewed up, but the normal thing was you’d get the same number of pilots, navigators etcetera, and they palled-up amongst themselves for a day or two, and then the pilot would say to one, navigators probably, ‘I want you as my navigator’. And that’s how it were crewed up, but I didn’t get that choice because when I went to OUT, there was so many crews ahead of us that hadn’t got gunners or they’d only got one gunner and needed another one, so we would, what would, what would you say, we were told which crew —
CB: Yeah.
KJ: We were going to be with.
CB: You didn’t get a choice.
KJ: I didn’t get a choice. I couldn’t have done better so. I remember we, we were, there’s Bruntinghorpe and Bitteswell. One was used for flying and the other was where you did your learning your other parts of the job, stripping guns down and all that sort of thing, and I remember I was told to go to the gatehouse where there was this navigator. He was going to be my navigator so he’d, I’d got to go see him and he would introduce me to the rest of the crew like. So we went, we went to the billets first the whole crew shared, well two crews shared a billet. There were fourteen beds in and he said, the navigator said, ‘Oh they’ll be going for lunch now to the sergeant’s mess so we’ll go meet the rest of the crew’. So we trooped off to the sergeant’s mess and there was a bit of a [pause] well I don’t know how to describe it, a bit of a hullaballoo going on. This pilot had gone in to the sergeant’s mess and he’d just picked out a gunner, a navigator and a wireless operator, ‘Come with me’, and he took them to a Wellington. They went off. He wanted to land at this aerodrome to meet a friend, but when they got there, they wouldn’t allow him, so he came back but he were in such a temper he tried to land without putting his wheels down. Made a mess of the undercarriage. Luckily, they all got away with it but he got put down in rank but lost about three ranks. And then we, we went into the mess and the navigator says, ‘Oh there’s the pilot’, and he were in a big armchair like this, with a sheet of newspaper over his face, away to the world, and this sheet of paper kept going up and down [laughs].
CB: As he puffed away.
KJ: As he were breathing. And he says, ‘There’s Harry’. His name was Harold really but he preferred being called Harry so, ‘There’s Harry there’, and I said, ‘Well don’t disturb him. He’s having a nice little nap there’. ‘Oh he’ll have to wake up for his lunch’, so he woke him up and introduced me. Shook hands with me, settled back down in his chair, pulled his paper down and went back to sleep [laughs], so that was my introduction to Harry Watkins.
CB: A flight sergeant.
KJ: Yeah. He’d, he was an amazing man he was. He was no bigger than me, no taller than me, maybe an inch but no more than that, but he’d got a chest on him like a barrel and he was strong as a bull. I’m sure he could have looped a Lancaster if he’d have wanted to, or if he’d been allowed to I should say, and he was a lot older than me. He’d gone to Finland to fight for the Fins against the Russians, and he were a fighter pilot and then when they signed a treaty, they sealed off the land borders so the only way they could get out, there was him and his friend, the only way they could get out was by sea, so they, they hired a trawler and they hit some very bad weather and almost drowned. A Russian gun boat picked them up, took them back to Russia and put them in a concentration camp. So he was ten, ten or eleven months in this concentration camp living on cabbage water. So by the time he got released, and the reason he’d got released was when the second front came, some of our soldiers that couldn’t get back to the beaches went to the Russians and they put them in this concentration camp, but the thing was, the British Consul had got a check on them. So they, as they were, they got them out, and these two other Britishers said, ‘When you get out, tell them there’s two more Englishmen in here wanting releasing’, and that’s how they got out. But he’d lost an amazing amount of weight, he’d, he had to go to Rhodesia to be built up before they’d let him sign up for the RAF. Aye. But he was an amazing man.
CB: But how did he come to go to Finland in the first place?
KJ: Well, you know, during the Spanish war.
CB: Ahh. The Spanish Civil War, yeah.
KJ: Some British were, well various —
CB: Yeah. The International Brigade.
KJ: That’s right.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Well, that’s how they did for Finland.
CB: Oh, did they?
KJ: Aye.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So, aye, anyway they got out and built him up and then let him join up.
CB: So how did the crew get together after they were, get on when they got together?
KJ: Well, at first you, all the different navigator, pilots etcetera, etcetera, they were all went in this big room and allowed to mingle and talk among themselves, and they palled up. That’s what it amounted to but as I say, I never had that choice.
CB: No.
KJ: Because I, they’d got, they were crewed up except for another gunner and they just said right, oh they gave us a test on aircraft recognition and the first ten I think it was, were allotted to crews that hadn’t got a gunner.
CB: Ok.
KJ: And I stayed with him. We did a tour. Well a lot just did the tour and then took a rest and probably they never got called on again, but we all volunteered to keep going.
CB: Oh. You all did? You all volunteered to keep going as a crew, did you?
KJ: All but two. One was the navigator and he’d got a wife and two kiddies and he didn’t think it were fair on them to just volunteer to keep going, and the other one was the wireless operator. He had a sick mother and there again, he thought it weren’t fair to her to, so, and as far as I know, they never did call them up again.
[pause].
KJ: I don’t know where any of the crew are. I know the pilot died ‘cause I got — it’s in the Midlands, his grave, but as far as I know, he just died of, well it wouldn’t be old age because he wouldn’t be all that old, but perhaps had some sort of illness.
CB: So we talked about the OTU and you’re getting together there.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: How long were you at the OTU and what were you doing?
KJ: We used to go on flights, cross country’s they called them, and you had, you were given a course that you had to take, and on the way, there’d be some bomb practice places and you’d call there and drop, drop a bomb. A four pound practice bomb on it and you got marks for that and you got marks for being at certain points at certain times. So we did very well at that because we’d got an excellent navigator and an excellent bomb aimer and an excellent skipper. And that, we went on these cross country’s, which could take ten or even twelve hours, and as I say, you’d had to call at it’d perhaps be a power station or something. It were a great big power station that became common afterwards, but it was the only one at the time in the Midlands somewhere and that was a favourite place for you to. Of course, you didn’t actually drop a bomb on there, it were just a case of photographing it as though you had bombed.
CB: So the OTU lasted?
KJ: Three months.
CB: Three months.
KJ: Yeah, perhaps more.
CB: And then you went to the HCU. So your OTU was at Bruntingthorpe.
KJ: Operationally, yeah.
CB: Then the Heavy Conversion Unit. The HCU.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Where was that?
KJ: That was at either Bruntingthorpe or Bitteswell, I can’t remember. The two B’s so I can’t remember which was which.
CB: But they were the OTUs weren’t they?
KJ: Yeah. Oh well we did us [pause], I can’t remember.
CB: Ok, but you said you moved to Stirling.
KJ: Yeah, we went on Stirlings. I hated them.
CB: Why didn’t you like that?
KJ: They weren’t very easy to fly in. They were, if you, if you had to, with a Lancaster, you drove towards the landing strip and then eased up so as you’d got a three point landing, but if you did that with a Stirling, it’d break it’s back and you’d be —
CB: Oh.
KJ: Yeah, and there was always plenty to let you know about it. Wreckage on the, on the airfield.
CB: Oh really. Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So how many, how long were you flying that before you changed to Lancaster?
KJ: Luckily it wasn’t too long. About six weeks that.
CB: And doing the same exercises or different?
KJ: Doing mostly the same things. Yeah.
CB: To what extent were you doing fighter affiliation?
KJ: Oh we were doing that. Every time we went up we’d have a bit of that in.
CB: Right.
KJ: You’d got to keep your eyes open in the gun turrets because they could come up on you anywhere, and you’d perhaps be like them cross country’s ten hours. Twelve hours in some cases.
CB: So that’s your HCU.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Then your first squadron you joined was?
KJ: 61.
CB: Where was that?
KJ: Skellingthorpe.
CB: Right.
KJ: Just outside Lincoln, and there were two squadrons shared the same airfield.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So when there was a bombing raid on, you’d get them coming from both sides but you used to take it in turns, 50, 61s and so on, until you’d got the two squadrons airborne. Yeah.
CB: And how many bombers in a squadron?
KJ: Eighteen. They’d usually aimed to have eighteen in the air.
CB: Oh in the air. Right. So not all of them flew, so how many aircraft were there?
KJ: Well no I mean, if there was anything serious like an engine change or anything like that, then one squadron or the other would be one down, but usually they aim for getting eighteen from each squadron on a raid.
CB: Ok. So when you got to the squadron then, when you got to the HCU, then the flight engineer and the rear gunner joined.
KJ: Yeah. Well only the flight engineer.
CB: Or the upper gunner which was you.
KJ: It was the upper gunner was the one that joined so far through.
CB: So you didn’t go to the OTU, or you did?
KJ: Yeah. Yeah. I joined them at —
CB: At the OTU.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And then —
CB: And at the HCU, then the flight engineer joined.
KJ: Joined us, yeah.
CB: Right.
KJ: And again, we didn’t have any choice, they just marched us on parade.
CB: Who was that?
KJ: They called him Fred Jowett.
CB: How did he gel? Bearing in mind you’d been together already?
KJ: It were, well he took up with the rear gunner, him and Fred were big friends, they used to go out.
CB: Carson Foy.
KJ: Yeah, used to go out drinking at night and all that sort of business, but he was married and I didn’t like the way he treated his wife, so I hadn’t got a lot of time for him.
CB: Oh.
KJ: He were good at this job but [pause] I always remember the parade when he was put in our crew, and he’d got a pair of trousers that he’d had widened like sailor’s trousers [laughs]. He got reprimanded for that and made to pay for them being put back to what they should be. And his, his cap, I think he must have cleaned engines with his cap, it were just one block of grease. He and his wife, whenever he got forty eight hour leave or anything like that, used to come home with me because his wife were in Army.
CB: Oh.
KJ: And she was stationed in Doncaster, she was a sergeant. And my mum and dad used to let them use their bedroom and I were kicked down to the sofa.
[long pause]
CB: So when you got to the squadron, what happened then?
KJ: Well not a lot of fuss made. All you, all you got at first, you did so many cross country’s to, with the aircraft affiliation also and bits thrown in to get used to what operational flying would be like. And then of course came the big day for the first op, and our first op was just after D-day and it was helping the Army. But they were so, the front lines were so close, we were given a signal to stop bombing, and I always remember it was “Billy Bunter” and we hadn’t bombed. We got to the target just ready to bomb, and this signal came. “Billy Bunter. Billy Bunter”, so we closed our bomb doors and changed back to go back home, but a lot of them kept bombing and the, the master bomber got fed up with them and he was really giving them a ticking off.
CB: For staying on.
KJ: For keep bombing.
CB: What was the target there?
KJ: Well, it were the enemy armoury. Tanks.
CB: Hitting Canadian troops were they?
KJ: Oh ours, yeah, a lot of ours were Canadian. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: No, I meant when the targets – they had, they had a friendly fire problem.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Was that why they stopped the bombing?
KJ: That’s right, yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Yeah, ‘cause when the two lines got too close, you couldn’t decide one from the other so. Aye.
[pause]
CB: What other, so in your first tour what other, what significant things happened there?
KJ: Well first tour, we were with the crowd, you know, with the main force, but our second tour, we carried the twelve thousand pound Tallboy bomb and it was chosen targets. The last one being Hitler’s guest house at Berchtesgaden.
CB: Right.
KJ: But he wasn’t there anyway so.
CB: Why were they bombing it then?
KJ: Well they didn’t know he weren’t. They thought he was there but apparently, he wasn’t when it —
CB: Still in Berlin.
KJ: Aye. In a bunker, underground bunker where he died anyway.
CB: So what significant events happened to you during the bombing raids? During the ops.
KJ: In what way do you mean?
CB: Well did you have any excitements or dangers? You got shot at a few times.
KJ: Oh we had some. I mean we got that time when aircraft above dropped his bombs on us.
CB: What happened there?
KJ: Three bombs hit us. One chopped off the starboard fin and rudder, one chopped off about five foot off the starboard wing, up to the starboard outer motor, and the third one hit the rear turret and took the rear turret away.
CB: And that’s why you needed a new rear gunner.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Did he get out?
KJ: Oh no. No. I’ve, I’ve been to his grave in Normandy.
CB: So this was a daylight operation was it?
KJ: Yeah. Yeah. I warned him about this, but the pilot says, ‘They’ll see us and they won’t drop them’, but almost as he said it, they were coming down on us.
CB: He couldn’t accelerate away.
KJ: No. He said, ‘There’s nothing I can do about it. We’re hemmed in’, so he just had to sit tight.
CB: So at night raids, you were in a stream. When you were bombing in daylight, how did you do that? Was it formation or still a stream?
KJ: Still a stream.
CB: Right.
KJ: You might get in a formation going backwards and forwards, but once you got near the target, you’re independent. You did as you want then.
CB: So without its turret, how did the plane behave? Rear turret.
KJ: Well we didn’t find any difference. In fact, he made a perfect landing when we got back, but it must have been, must have made a difference but he were a fantastic pilot so he dealt with it. When he got, when he got out the plane, his shirt was absolutely wet through. He must have fought it every inch of the way back.
CB: Because it had damaged the fin.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: One of them.
KJ: Well he’d only have part, part of his controls.
CB: And the wing. Which fin was hit?
KJ: Starboard fin.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And starboard wing.
CB: Oh it was, yeah.
KJ: So we were top heavy sort of thing.
CB: So you’re in the mid-upper turret.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: You’ve already warned the pilot about the plane above.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: What, what did you see when the bomb was coming down and the affect? How did this happen?
KJ: We’ll all I could see were these.
CB: A stick.
KJ: A full bomb bay full of bombs.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Coming down towards us and most of them slipping past on my left side.
CB: Right. You’re facing which way? Backwards?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Yeah. And I couldn’t help but see them because they were on top of me. It wasn’t a nice moment.
CB: So did some of them, they must have done, in a stick, some of them missed.
KJ: Yeah, quite a few of them went between the starboard wing.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And the starboard fin and rudder.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: More or less alongside me. Too close for comfort.
CB: So how much higher was this other plane?
KJ: It wasn’t too far above us because we were all supposed to be at the same height, but some used to go higher to avoid that happening to them, but the trouble is they did it to somebody else.
[pause]
CB: So you saw the bombs coming down.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: What, what was it like? Some were missing then. How many hit the turret?
KJ: There were three hit the aircraft.
CB: Right. Oh, three hit the aircraft. Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So one on the wing, one on the rudder.
KJ: And one on the rear turret.
CB: Yeah. So how did that come? That came straight down. Then how did you see it?
KJ: Well we got the, I’m getting mixed up with my starboard and, on the left hand side.
CB: On your left because you’re looking backwards.
KJ: They were all coming that side.
CB: Yes, the starboard side.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: And were you able to call out?
KJ: Well I did do, I warned him but he said, ‘Nothing I can do. We’re hemmed in’.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: So we just had to sit there and hope for the best.
CB: So where did the bomb, where did it hit the turret? The one that hit the turret, where?
KJ: Straight on top.
CB: Straight in the middle.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: And the effect of that?
KJ: Tore it away from –.
CB: The whole of the turret.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Right.
KJ: There was just a gaping hole where the rear turret should have been.
CB: So what chances of survival were there for the rear gunner?
KJ: Zero.
CB: Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: And they didn’t explode because the primer.
KJ: No you wouldn’t.
CB: Hadn’t gone into action then.
KJ: You’d got that little.
CB: The delay.
KJ: Propeller that unscrewed as it dropped down.
CB: Right.
KJ: But it wouldn’t be, it wouldn’t be live until it was, say, a thousand feet.
CB: Right.
KJ: Above the ground and then it would slowly become alive.
CB: Right. So how many other members of the crew saw that?
KJ: Nobody apart from me.
CB: What effect did that have on you afterwards?
KJ: Well I were very, very upset because he were a friend of mine, the rear gunner.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: But I didn’t realise ‘till it were very late on in the war. We were coming back from a raid and it were a daylight, and as we crossed the Rhine, I saw these Typhoons going up and down and releasing rockets, and I’d never seen anything like that. At the gun emplacements along the Rhine. And I suddenly realised I was sweating and it were cold. There were no reason to be sweating, but that must have been nerves I should imagine.
CB: Yeah.
[pause]
CB: So after the raid did you, that particular one, where you lost your friend, did you fly the next day? Or was there –
KJ: Yeah. We were on ops the very next night, yeah.
CB: So was that better than having a rest or worse?
KJ: Well they told you it was for your own benefit if you —
CB: Yeah. Get up again.
KJ: So yeah, we were on another raid the following night.
CB: And how did that work for you?
KJ: It went pretty well really. A bit strange with getting a new voice from the rear turret but — [pause]. He were a farmer, he’d no need to be in the forces at all but he’d got two brothers that had adjoining farms, and they were looking after it for him.
CB: Which part of the country was that?
KJ: It was in the Midlands somewhere that they came from.
CB: Ok [pause], so apart from that one on the Rhine crossing, did you have any reaction on any other sorties?
KJ: Well er the Rhine, I didn’t know just how close it had come to that, but we got hit by shrapnel and one piece had gone through about two inches above my head, the top of my head and buried in the fuselage at the other side. The, one of the ground crew dug it out but he wouldn’t, I wanted him to give it to me but he wouldn’t. He hung on to it so —
CB: He wanted it did he?
KJ: Aye.
CB: Was it a bullet or shrapnel from flak?
KJ: Shrapnel from flak.
CB: Right.
KJ: A jagged piece about that.
CB: Yeah. About two inches, three inches.
KJ: It would have done enough damage anyway.
CB: Yeah. So when it hit your canopy, did it go through or did it shatter it?
KJ: It went through and then through the other side. The hole was pretty neat but there was a few cracks from it, you know.
CB: That was after the turret experience was it?
KJ: Yeah. We did, we did a tour and then instead of having a rest, we carried on with another tour.
CB: So those were both in the first tour.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Right. What caused you to do another go?
KJ: The pilot. He were a keen type and I wouldn’t have flown with anybody else if I could avoid it.
CB: That was 9 Squadron.
KJ: Yeah. He used to have his own way of taking off ‘til they stopped him doing it. They said, ‘We know you’re capable but somebody might try it and not be as successful as you’. You’re still, as we took off, he’d only just got airborne and he’d tilt over. It looked very spectacular from the ground but, well it looked spectacular from the gunner’s point of view as well, but he was warned off not to do it again.
CB: What did he do then? Bring the undercarriage up quickly or what?
KJ: Yeah. Quickly undercarriage up and he was already tilting his, er tilting the wing until it was, well it must have been pretty near the ground.
CB: He was turning his wing.
KJ: Anyway, he was ordered not to do it again.
CB: How did he feel about that?
KJ: Oh he took it all in good part. He were, he were a nice man was Harry Watkins.
CB: When you got your second rear gunner, because of the first one being lost, how did he get in with the crew or not?
KJ: Well he palled up straight. The engineer was a big drinker and so was this new gunner, so them two got on well together. I once counted that they had twenty two pints of beer.
CB: Each.
KJ: Each. They must have floated [laughs].
CB: Amazing. So how often did the crew go out together? These two clearly wanted to get ahead of the game.
KJ: When we were, if we were landing back at base very rare. If I wanted a drink, I’d have it in the sergeant’s mess but if you landed away from base, the officers could sub money from the officer’s funds so they’d sub so much money and treat us out for the night.
CB: How often did you find the pubs short of beer?
KJ: Did we find?
CB: The pubs short of beer. How often?
KJ: Oh, not very often, not very often [paused], but I used to like to stick to the sergeant’s mess.
CB: So how did you manage to keep in touch with Joan? Your future wife.
KJ: By mail, that were all, and get home as soon as soon, as often as possible. I used to, I were stationed quite close to Lincoln in both —
CB: In Bardney.
KJ: Both Bardney and Skellinghorpe.
CB: Skellingtorpe, yeah.
KJ: So it was an easy matter to get a train to Doncaster from them places. So if I’d got, if we weren’t flying that night, I’d take a chance on it and go home for the night. Only once did we nearly come adrift and that was, that was at Skellingthorpe, and from the bus stop to the camp was about a mile walk and all the way along, we could hear this tannoy saying myself and the engineer to report to the flights immediately. They’d come on an early morning raid they were going to do. Well they’d got reserves to go in our places, but the lad that were going to be the rear gunner, he said, ‘No. I’m not bothered. You go on’, so I got my raid in. But the engineer, this young man that were standing in for him had only got that one raid to finish his tour, so he said, ‘Oh no. I’m going on it’, so, but we both got the same punishment. Grounded for so many days and, not much like. A good telling off. It were a funny thing that, because the skipper always knew where we were, my home address, and he swore he’d sent a telegram but we never got it. So —
CB: That’s why you were late.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: So what did they do to you?
KJ: We got a reprimand and confined to barracks for so long.
CB: How did the leave system work? How often did you get leave?
KJ: Oh with aircrew we were very lucky. We got a week’s leave every six weeks and you got a week’s pay from —
CB: Nuffield Fund.
KJ: Nuffield, aye. He also, when we went on leave, he gave us a week’s pay as well so a very popular man.
[pause]
CB: So you finished with 50 Squadron and went to 9.
KJ: Finished with 61.
CB: Finished with 61 Squadron and went to 9.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: How was the process and operation different from your previous experience?
KJ: Not a lot different really but we’d done more ops than others. We were senior crew like, ‘cause we’d done more than all the others, but it didn’t take long for somebody to overtake us, so —
CB: So here, you’re doing precision bombing.
KJ: Oh yeah.
CB: Tallboy, twelve thousand pounder.
KJ: Yeah
CB: So how did you do your training for that?
KJ: Well they did, I know the bomb aimers did have, we used to take up the bomb aimers to do this practice bombing and there were certain regulations laid down how they should treat this Tallboy bomb. ‘Course the Tallboy, you had to have special bomb doors. Normal bomb doors wouldn’t close over a Tallboy.
CB: How were the, what were these like?
KJ: They’d, they were shaped. Instead of just going around, they come down so far and then bellied out a bit and then came back in, so you could tell there was something different about them, and then, when them that carried the twenty two thousand pounder, they didn’t have any bomb doors on at all.
CB: The Grand Slam.
KJ: The Grand Slam. They just had a chain holding it up but I never carried that. We were, we stuck to Tallboys.
CB: How often did you have to, how often did you fail to drop the Tallboys or did you always drop them?
KJ: Well if we couldn’t be sure of the target, we’d orders to bring it back. Sometimes they changed their mind if conditions weren’t good and that, but as a rule, we brought them back because they cost so much to produce.
CB: And how did you feel about landing with such a heavy load on?
KJ: Well at first very tedious, very timid, but you got used to it like everything else.
CB: Your pilot was a good one so —
KJ: Oh a fantastic man, yeah.
CB: What sort of targets were you going for then?
KJ: With the Tallboy, they were chosen targets like dams or them viaducts.
CB: The U-Boat. Oh right.
KJ: And that type of thing. Things that you could knock down.
CB: So the Bielefeld Viaduct was brought down by a Grand Slam. Did you drop that?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Did that, was 9 Squadron involved in that?
KJ: Yeah. Always two squadrons. At first 617, like on the dam raid, there were only them.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: But subsequent raids they were losing more and more men, so they decided to lighten the load by putting two squadrons on these special targets rather than one, and the other squadron was Number 9, so it meant that 617 didn’t have to take it all.
CB: And how many ops did you do on your second tour?
KJ: Fifteen.
CB: And what, why did those stop?
KJ: Well, the war ended.
CB: It was the end of the war.
KJ: Yeah, thirty was a tour.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Well we did a tour but then we carried, agreed to carry straight on and we just carried on till the end of the war then, and the very last raid was Hitler’s guest house at Berchtesgaden.
[pause]
CB: So the war is over, now what did you do?
KJ: Well, they, they were getting ready to go to the Far East to carry the war to Japan, so I thought, well, I’ve done forty five ops, I’ve done my share. It wouldn’t be fair to the wife to carry on so I dropped out the race. But they never got there anyway, the war ended before they, they got to that point, so that was it.
CB: So the end of the war in Europe was the 8th of May, August was VJ day, so you were still in the RAF after that.
KJ: Oh yeah.
CB: What was going on? What were you doing then?
KJ: Well we were doing more or less the same things for so long, for about a year, and then we were put on ground staff jobs, and I got put on, well it were my choice, on driving. They were cook or drivers and I didn’t fancy cooking. I might have poisoned them all.
CB: Very likely. No, no, no. And what was, what determined the date of your demob?
KJ: It went on how old you were mainly ‘cause, and there was, the RAF for some reason was being held back ‘til last. So the Army and the Navy were getting demobbed, demobbed ahead of us but eventually the day came. But in that time, I’d been sent to Egypt and I was in charge of a lorry place which had forty five lorries, and I had to find loads for them going backwards and forwards. So, but eventually the day came when we came home [pause], and it was just a case of landing in Liverpool, going into this big hangar, big hangar and throwing my RAF kit into that, and walking out in a new suit. We got rigged out with civilian clothes.
CB: Right. What did they give you in civilian clothes?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: What did they give you?
KJ: A suit, shirt, tie, hat - which I never wore. I never wore a hat. The only time I wore a hat were in the RAF. And socks and shoes, the whole bag of tricks.
CB: So you came out of the RAF. Then what did you do?
KJ: Well my father had a little foundry and I went to work for him, but I did join the Observer Corps and I did another couple of years, part time of course, in the Observer Corps. We used to have exercises, mostly at weekends and we had a place out at Brampton.
CB: At Brampton.
KJ: Aye.
CB: Near Huntingdon.
KJ: Pardon?
CB: Brampton near Huntingdon [pause]. Where?
KJ: I thought it were Brampton. It was near Finningley.
CB: Ah.
KJ: Back side of Finningley. Actually we were in some gardens.
CB: Right.
KJ: There were like a hut there with a all glass top.
CB: Right.
KJ: So as you could see aircraft, and for a while it were interesting, ‘cause we did, we’d go on a weekend and we’d have to spot and record every aircraft we saw flying over. But then it got to nuclear business and the idea was you’d go out if there were a nuclear warning. We’d have to go out to the shelter and stay there till you got the all clear, but you were leaving your family behind. I said, ‘No. No. That’s not for me. If I go, we all go’, so I packed it in.
CB: In the Observer Corps, you were being paid as an employee were you?
KJ: In the Observer Corps? No. No, it were voluntary.
CB: So what was your job at the time?
KJ: I was working at er mining.
CB: In your father’s foundry.
KJ: Mining supplies. Engineering.
CB: Right. So you joined father’s foundry company.
KJ: Aye but –
CB: Then you changed from that.
KJ: I went to work for International Harvesters.
CB: Right. Oh right.
KJ: And learned more about machines, so I stayed at the Harvesters some years then. Twelve years I think.
CB: Did you? Right.
KJ: Aye, ‘cause my dad’s place – my mother was taken seriously ill. She died of cancer and my dad’s place had really gone to ruins. There was nobody knew how to run it like he did and he was at home all the time nursing mum, so I worked for Harvesters then for twelve year.
CB: And then what did you do? Did you do something after that?
KJ: I finished up at mining supplies.
CB: Right.
[phone ringing]
CB: We’ll stop it a mo.
[Recording paused]
CB: Where were the mining supplies? That was in Doncaster?
KJ: Carr Hill, yeah.
CB: In Carr Hill, yeah. And what were you doing there?
KJ: Engineering, running the machine.
CB: Oh right.
KJ: It was the, oh what did they call them?
CB: Milling.
KJ: Yeah. They were [pause]. Oh what did they call them? The machines that you put a programme in, and they —
CB: Yeah. CCN. Yeah
KJ: Yeah. So —
CB: CNC. CNC.
KJ: A lot of the young ones that were working there didn’t want to know, so I said I’d have a go at it, so I was taught how to run this machine and it fell in just natural, and that’s how I finished up working.
CB: How long were you with that one?
KJ: Oh a good, good, right to, after the war. I should say twelve, twelve years again.
CB: Right, and that brought you to retirement did it?
KJ: Yeah. Well I worked a long time after my retirement but eventually I had.
CB: Had to retire.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Right. I’m just going to pause.
[Recording paused]
CB: Right. So what would you say was the most memorable event in your time in the RAF?
KJ: I think obviously it would be I mean we’ve had some shaky dos as we used to call them, when we were being hit by flak and all that sort of thing, chased by fighters, but the worst experience was when we had the bombs dropped on us.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And we lost our rear gunner.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: That was the most memorable thing.
CB: Traumatic.
KJ: Traumatic, that’s a better word yeah. Yeah.
CB: Out of interest, what did the Air Force do about a memorial service after that? Did they do anything?
KJ: No.
CB: No, because it was just run of the mill.
KJ: That’s it, yeah, it was a risk you took.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: That were their thinking, yeah. I’ve been to, you know, the Spire in Lincoln.
CB: Yes.
KJ: Well I’ve been to that, and all the names of those that got killed are all on brass plaques around the Memorial, and where we used to call him Jack Foy, ‘cause his name was Carson Jack Foy, and if I stand up again at this particular plaque, his name just appears above my head.
CB: Does it really.
KJ: Aye.
CB: ‘Cause he’s one of the ones of the twenty six thousand two hundred in the rolls of honour. The three.
KJ: That’s right. Yeah.
CB: The three volumes.
KJ: His mother lost two sons within [pause] within a month anyway.
CB: Really.
KJ: We lost Jack and then a few days after it was D-day and his brother was in the Canadian Army and he was killed on D-day.
CB: Right.
KJ: So she lost two sons.
CB: Heartbreaking.
KJ: I used to write to his sister but I know, but, one time I weren’t well and I left it, and I thought oh it’s, I’ll leave it now so I didn’t bother after that.
CB: We didn’t really talk about the number of times you were actually attacked by fighters and your response to that in defence of the aircraft.
KJ: I should say at least a half a dozen times, and it depended which gunner spotted them first, because he would take over as the [pause], tell the skipper to go into a corkscrew, so you’d shout, ‘Corkscrew left. Corkscrew left. Go’, and off you would go.
CB: And everybody then held on.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: How many did you shoot down between you?
KJ: We only, we only claimed one but —
CB: Was that yours?
KJ: We, there were a few we discouraged shall we say.
CB: Yes. Did the, did the one you shot down, was that yours or was it Carson’s?
KJ: Well I said it was the rear gunner’s because he got better shots at it. I were only getting it as it whizzed by. Just get in front and blaze away and hope for the best, but the rear gunner was watching it from the time it started to come at us.
CB: What was it?
KJ: An ME109.
CB: Right. In the dark?
KJ: Yeah, it was dark. Yeah. We got chased with a ME101.
CB: 110.
KJ: 110. 110. But it were cloudy that day and we kept dodging into the clouds and losing him.
CB: Right.
KJ: But he persevered for a hell of a time. Every time we come out of the cloud, he were there.
CB: Yeah, because he’d got radar hadn’t he?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Yeah. Course we didn’t know that at that time.
CB: Was it possible for the mid-upper and the rear gunner to engage the target at the same time?
KJ: Oh yeah, yeah, no problem there. The rear turret as you were, you went on a duckboard from the, well it was the toilet there.
CB: At the back.
KJ: At the back, and from there to the turret, you’d got like a runway, thick plywood, and you walked along that to get into the rear turret. Well from there, right up to under my turret, the rear gunners had got four, well two each side, four rows of cartridges going on a conveyer belt.
CB: Twenty seven feet of them.
KJ: Pardon?
CB: Nine yards. Twenty seven feet.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Yeah, and mine were just in canisters either side of the guns.
CB: Right.
CB: So —
KJ: On the wall or on the floor?
CB: On the [pause] up, up same height as myself.
KJ: Right.
CB: So how many? You had obviously many less rounds. How many rounds did you have?
KJ: There were just a minute’s firing. One thousand something on each gun.
CB: Oh right.
KJ: So, but I mean the rear turret could go on for ages.
CB: How many rounds did the, that’s a lot of rounds on there stretched on the floor.
KJ: Oh yeah.
CB: For the rear gunner.
KJ: Yeah, yeah, coming right back from the rear turret to my turret and back again. Yeah, it was [pause] well it was about half way up the aircraft from the rear turret. Yeah. He’d a hell of a lot of cartridges, and you had incendiary bullets so you could see where you were, where your bullets were going.
CB: Tracer.
KJ: Tracer bullets.
CB: They were, they weren’t all tracer.
KJ: No.
CB: So it was, was one in how many?
KJ: One in every five, I think.
CB: Right.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: You needed that in the dark.
KJ: Yeah. Yeah. Then later on some of the rear turrets got .5s.
CB: Right at the end.
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Just 2.5s. Yeah.
KJ: Two instead of four 303s, yeah.
CB: So how did you feel about your reduced fire power of only two guns in the mid-upper?
KJ: Well you’d have been happier with more, but you just had to make do. I mean the rear, rear gunner had got a lot more fire power than you.
CB: When you were zeroing in on the attacking fighter, which part of the fighter would you actually be aiming to hit?
KJ: Well the easiest way was get in front of him and fire and let him come through your hail of bullets.
CB: Right.
KJ: But they had a laid down plan. You’d got the gun sight which was about that big. A circle.
CB: Right.
KJ: With a dot in the middle.
CB: Three inches.
KJ: And you were supposed, at different points, when you were in the corkscrew, trying to escape, different points where you were supposed to put your gun, aim you gun, but it was impossible.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: I mean, one minute you were head were in the top.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: The next minute it felt as though somebody had put a tonne weight on your shoulders. So a lot of it was using your own judgement.
CB: The final question on this is, you and the rear gunner are in a section that is completely unheated.
KJ: Oh yeah. Yeah.
CB: So how did you feel during the flight?
KJ: Well we were issued with heated suits but the trouble was, nine times out of every ten, they weren’t tended for and one minute they were too hot and the next, when you turned them off they were too cold. So they weren’t a lot of good to be quite honest, but you had an electrically heated suit and then an overall suit over the top of that.
CB: There were two circuits were there in the heated suit? One each side.
KJ: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So did they always both work?
KJ: Oh some of them failed. Some of them had got, they were, they got that hot, within minutes you had to take them off. You couldn’t stand that. It were better to not get used to it.
CB: So what sort of lengths were the flights? They varied but, to the target but what length in hours was a typical flight.
KJ: I should say on an average about six, seven hours but I’ve done some up to twelve hours.
CB: What that would be? The longest ones.
KJ: Stettin.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Would be one of the longest ones. Right up in, well it were Russia at that time.
CB: Right out on the Baltic coast.
KJ: Yeah, that’s right.
CB: Did you, because you were getting to the end of the war, but you didn’t have, the Tallboy wasn’t used so you weren’t on the, some of the later raids to the cities.
KJ: No. Although I did Tallboy raids.
CB: Yes.
KJ: Some, some of my raids we carried the Tallboy.
CB: Yeah.
KJ: But a lot of it was, at the beginning in particular, you were going for German cities and you’d drop incendiaries and then the bangers after that, if you call them that. But you lit the target up with incendiaries first.
CB: But the four thousand pounder.
KJ: Yeah. Strangely enough, a lot of aircrew didn’t trust them. They were, they were very touchy if they got disturbed. They were likely to go off.
CB: Really.
KJ: After say, an hour, because they got an hour’s timing on them and probably when they’d been put up under, in to the bomb bays, somebody might catch them and that started the timing off.
CB: Oh.
KJ: But you didn’t know but you’d, after an hour, as you were crossing the channel, you’d see suddenly one in front of you blow up.
CB: And that was why was it?
KJ: That were why. Yeah. Yes very —
CB: What did they have in them then, that made them so sensitive?
KJ: Well it was the timer.
CB: I meant the explosives. It was a combination was it? Explosives and incendiary?
KJ: Yeah.
CB: Was it?
KJ: No. High explosive bombs. No, I don’t think the incendiaries were as much to worry about.
CB: So you’re dropping Tallboys, and how accurate would you say you were doing that?
KJ: Well you’d got to be accurate because anybody that got outside the aiming point would get a real telling off. The bomb aimer would get, and of course the pilot wouldn’t be very pleased, so he’d put his two penneth in as well.
CB: And how well could you see the effect of those?
KJ: Oh on some raids you could see every bomb that dropped. See it hit the ground and see the explosion and everything, but, ‘cause the, with the Tallboy, when it hit the ground you’d get like throwing a pebble in water. You’d get them rings come up but they were pressure rings instead of —
CB: Yeah.
KJ: And if you got, if you were below eight thousand feet, they’d throw you all over the place if you got in that.
CB: Oh really.
CB: Oh yeah.
KJ: Yeah. Aye, ‘cause if we were dropping them, the rest of the force were told not to drop less than, not to go below eight thousand feet.
CB: But they didn’t explode on impact because they were designed for penetration weren’t they?
KJ: That’s right.
CB: So there was a delay?
KJ: Yeah. They’d an armour plating nose which buried in to the ground and then depending on the delay fuse, would depend on that when they went off.
CB: Now one of the targets for some time was U-boat pens. How well did they work on those?
KJ: With, I know we did U-boat, U-boat pens at Bergen in Norway and we’d got one hour timers on and they went through the top of the pen and they were half in the pen and the Germans thought they were duds but —
CB: Right.
KJ: On the hour they found out they weren’t.
CB: Right, but the hour delay was designed to get maximum effect of casualty.
KJ: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I say, they thought they were duds and by the time they found out they weren’t, it were too late.
CB: Viaducts. So you talked about those.
KJ: Pardon?
CB: With viaducts, were they effective on those?
KJ: Yeah. Oh yeah, because they used to bury under the, underneath and that caused them to crumble over.
CB: So how did you feel about it after you’d been on a raid?
KJ: [Laughs] Thankful that we’d come back. Yeah.
CB: I was thinking about your reaction to the result of your bombing.
KJ: Oh well, we were always pleased to see we, we’d made a mess of where we were bombing.
CB: Because unlike a normal raid, there wouldn’t be lots of smoke.
KJ: No. No. No.
CB: It would be clear cut, wouldn’t it? What you’d done.
KJ: Yeah. Yeah. As soon as a Tallboy hit the ground, you got those —
CB: Yeah.
KJ: Rings coming up.
CB: Shockwaves, yeah. And what about Grand Slams? Did you drop those as well?
KJ: We didn’t, no, there were only six. I think only three aircraft on 617 that were altered to carry them.
CB: Right.
KJ: Because they had no bomb doors on them.
CB: No.
KJ: Just they just went up, ‘cause the first time I saw them, I couldn’t believe my eyes. This damned great thing slung under an aircraft and no bomb doors. Aye.
CB: Did you do joint raids with 617, or were they all done separately?
KJ: No, the second tour, we were always with them, but the first tour was with general.
CB: Yeah, general bombing.
KJ: Bombing, yeah.
CB: Right. Thank you very much.
KJ: It’s a pleasure.
[Recording paused]
CB: Just one other thing, on the Tirpitz raids then, what happened there?
KJ: Well, they took the mid-upper turrets out altogether to lighten the load they were carrying, and they had a, they had a bigger bomb on, the twelve thousand pound bomb. But they were, they were special made bomb doors, they weren’t completely round, they’d got a dimple in them to go around the shape of the bomb.
CB: Right.
KJ: And every one of them bombs was turned in either Sheffield or Scotland, there were only two lathes big enough to do them. That’s why if we weren’t certain of the target, we had to bring them back.
CB: Expensive and scarce.
KJ: Oh yeah. Yeah.
CB: Right.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Ken Johnson. Two
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-04-03
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AJohnsonKA170403
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
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01:39:45 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Ken Johnson was born in Doncaster. At the start of the war the family was living in Sheffield but his father decided they should move back to Doncaster to avoid bombing. Ken started work as a joiner and later made cables for barrage balloons. Despite being in a reserved occupation, he volunteered to join the RAF and trained in Scotland as an air gunner. He describes gunnery practice against towed targets and corkscrewing the aircraft. He formed a crew in the Operational Training Unit at RAF Bruntingthorpe. He talks about his pilot, Flight Sergeant Harold “Harry” Watkins, who fought in the Finnish Army against the Russians at the start of the war. Ken joined 61 Squadron at RAF Skellingthorpe flying Lancasters. His first operation was just after D-Day to bomb German armour but as they were too close to allied troops, it was aborted. Ken’s most traumatic experience was during an operation in July 1944, when an aircraft above his dropped its bombs and three bombs hit the aircraft including the rear turret, carrying it away with the rear gunner. On another occasion, anti-aircraft shrapnel missed Ken’s head by two inches. After completing a tour of thirty operations, most of Ken’s crew volunteered for a second tour. Transferred to 9 Squadron, many of his fifteen operations involved dropping the 12,000 lb Tallboy bomb. Ken describes the differences between the rear and mid-upper turrets including their armament. After the war, he served as an RAF driver in Egypt before being demobilised and returning to civilian life. He volunteered with the Royal Observer Corps for a couple of years.
Contributor
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Nick Cornwell-Smith
Vivienne Tincombe
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
61 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bomb struck
Lancaster
Operational Training Unit
RAF Bardney
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Dalcross
RAF Skellingthorpe
service vehicle
Tallboy
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1186/11758/PWatsonC1704.1.jpg
cf1ce61de2dfa140b6b4109391b34f14
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1186/11758/AWatsonC170628.2.mp3
f97648ac89c80e5091c56c9c1787f1e1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Watson, Clifford
C Watson
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. Two oral history interviews with Flying Officer Clifford Watson DFC (1922 - 2018, 1384956, 188489 Royal Air Force), a memoir, his service and release book, and a scrapbook containing photographs and documents. He flew operations as an air gunner with 150 and 227 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Clifford Watson and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-06-28
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
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Watson, C
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 28th of June 2017 and I am with Clifford Watson at Fenstanton near Huntingdon to talk about his life and times in the RAF. So, what were your first recollections of life, Cliff?
CW: I was born in Barnoldswick, 1922 about three years after my father returned from the war, he opened a radio shop and was building radios and he was getting kits of radios from Pye in Cambridge and I went to the local infant school which was about fifty yards away from the shop. Two years later, my sister joined me there, that’s about the age of ten, my family moved to Keighley in Yorkshire, my father was engineer and manager of the radio relay system. Three years later we moved to Norwich where he established another radio relay firm rather, few years there we moved to London. Went to school at the age of ten, I was at the local elementary school in Norwich. At the age of thirteen, I went to the Norwich junior technical school and two years later to Unthank college in Norwich which a very different curriculum. I hated English literature there but I got a credit in the school’s certificate, by reading, another book overnight and I took the exam with a different book from the one I’ve been studying, I’d read it overnight and I got a credit. When I left the college at sixteen, I was, I was then, what’s the word? I was then with a firm of accountants in St Paul’s Churchyard and when I used to look out, yes, the war had just started and I used to look out through the window into that churchyard, there were a number of graves there and on one of them there was a double cross and it said neath this SOD, is another SOD, Adolf Hitler, it didn’t actually say SOD of course, it said it, yes, well, then the Blitz started and the family firm was in real trouble cause all the engineers had been called up, well, most of them, so I abandoned accountancy and went and helped the family firm in Battersea, I’d been there just a few months when four ladies came for a job, one of whom was a lady of eighteen and Hilda became my future wife, right from now.
CB: I stop, I stop for a minute. Just going back from your school days, what were the things you excelled at there?
CW: Well, at the elementary school, the age of thirteen, I wanted to get to the Norwich junior Tech but I needed recommendation for that, I had to do something and show that I was capable. My father got me a kit of parts for a radio, agreed it was a simple radio, it was from a [unclear] by Telecom, [unclear], I built the radio and gave a talk on it, demonstrating the thing working and I drew the circuit on the blackboard as I went along, told them how it worked, and that secured me a recommendation for the tech but there of course it was all physics, chemistry, mechanics and so on and two years there onto Unthank college, very different, I had, I carried on with tuition, with tuition in chemistry, physics I enjoyed, maths I enjoyed and all went well, that gave me five credits which gave me access to training as an accountant.
CB: Ok. You were talking a bit earlier about the shortage of engineers because they’ve been called up, so, your father tried to engage ladies, how did that go?
CW: Well, my father at that time was in Abyssinia and there was a manager there with little technical knowledge and instead of being a foreman with about six wiremen, there was me and four fourteen year old schoolboys and we were working on overhead lines, I was working about fifteen hours a day, I was earning, yes, fifty shillings a, yes, fifty shillings a week, at the end of the Blitz, well, almost the end of the Blitz, I’d had enough, and I thought the manager was, oh, I, one evening I was, I filled in my paperwork for the day, I put it in the secretary’s tray and there was an official looking document with my name on it and the manager was trying to, it was case it was the Ministry of Labour to get Clifford Watson exempt from callup. And I was furious, I tore the thing up, the next day, instead of going to work in overalls, I went in my best suit, well, my one and only suit and that’s when I went up town [unclear] made a beeline first for the Fleet Air Arm and things worked from there.
CB: So, when you went to, when you tried for the Fleet Air Arm, what happened? You went to the recruiting office.
CW: Well, I couldn’t get further than the door at the Fleet Air Arm.
CB: What did the man say?
CW: Can I help you, lad? That’s when I put on my Yorkshire accent [laughs] which wasn’t difficult at the time. The following, about a week later, I went to industrial house and there was very young [unclear] there, there’s a fairly big hall, half a dozen doors, each leading into a fairly small office and in each place there was I think five Lieutenant and a sergeant, when I went in, we were given a form which I filled in and I was given a card with a number on it and it was the number above the door or two numbers in fact, the doors were numbered and there was another number, when that number comes up on that [unclear] or those two numbers come up, you go through that door and I was interviewed by the officer and the sergeant and they said, this is a very, very preliminary interview, just want to give you some idea of how things go, and they asked a few questions: What did your father do? What do you do? Why do you want to join the RAF? And so on. Ok, there was an interview, there were about fifty people waiting and it was very pleasant, very pleasant too, they said, alright, we wish you luck, and you should hear from us within a few weeks. So I went back home, letter came, report to some place near Euston and I went there, we had three one-hour written papers and then an interview and a medical. At the interview I remember two questions, one was, which is colder, minus 40 Fahrenheit or minus 40 Centigrade? I pretended to work it out, I said, same thing, same temperature, well, I knew the answer, I didn’t need to work it out, but I pretended to do. Right, he said you’re, you know, in a flimsy belt, you’re half a mile offshore, a breeze is trying to take you, what was it [unclear] get it right, the breeze is trying to take you inshore, the tide is taking you out of shore, so in practice you stay put, you’re infested with alligators, all sorts of, animals in the sea but you’ve got to get ashore, what do you do? I said, I think the answer you want is that I lower the boat in the sea, increase the tide, the effect of the tide and reduce the windage, I think that’s your answer but I don’t like it and he laughed, yeah, he did laugh, he said, quite right. That was the two questions. [laughs] After that, that was about the interview, we already had the three written papers and there was nothing there particularly tricky and then there was a medical, half a dozen or so medical people, we went to each one and everything seemed alright, said, right, good show, we’ll let you know and I had a letter, a few weeks later, telling me to where to report but before I reported, I was to see a dentist for one filling and, two fillings and one extinct
CB: extraction
CW: One extraction. I did that and two fillings and one extraction at a cost of three shillings. Imagine today. Anyhow, I don’t question. And that was it. Eventually I was told where to report, meanwhile two other chaps locally had found that I was joining, I joined the RAF, so had they and the three of us got together and we travelled to Newquay together and in fact to Rhodesia together but years later, the one, the first one became captain of a Stirling and disappeared on his first trip. The other one, like me, came off the pilot’s course, I nearly said failed but I don’t agree with that term, I came off the pilot’s course with the other fellow and then carried on. He became a rear-gunner of a Stirling and they were shot up on all three trips which he did, different crew each time, first trip he ditched in the sea, two, he plus two survived, second trip they had to bail out, he and one other survived, third trip, they landed tail heavy, the turret came adrift with him in it, the aircraft bounced, blew up, killing everyone on board and Tommy woke up in hospital, that was there, carry on. [unclear] Whilst in Rhodesia, we were seven weeks at sea getting to Rhodesia, oh, getting to Durban and in Durban we had no money, we’d handed all the English currency in and they were to exchange it for local currency when we got to were [unclear] we were going and on the main track in Durban with no money and outside a Barclay’s bank was a rotary insignature, insignia and it said, Durban welcomes local visiting Rotarians, well, I wasn’t a Rotarian but my father was, I went in, could I see the manager please? I had an introduction card from Battersea Rotary. Let’s see the manager, please, well, the three of us walked in, saw the manager and I said, I’d like to borrow a couple of quid and send it back to you when we get to wherever it is we’re going. He reached into a drawer and gave each of us an envelope with the equivalent of ten pounds in each, he said, that with a compliment to a Rotary, don’t try to send it back, he said, you’re in Africa now, that was it.
CB: We’ll stop there just for a moment. Just quickly before we go on to your, more details of your flying training, Clifford, you mentioned the fact that you were interested in joining the Navy, as Fleet Air Arms, so-
CW: The reason, the reason I went to the Navy was the first one, all I wanted to do was fly and Fleet Air Arm needs pilots, it said, and as you’d heard, I got no further than the door, Fleet Air Arm pilots don’t work, that’s it, and I did, and that was the end of my naval experience. All I wanted to do was fly, that’s all, fighter pilot of course, but that didn’t matter, if anybody had said you prefer bombers or fighters, we’d seen plenty of fighters, it would have been fighters.
CB: There was a glamour in being a fighter pilot
CW: Mh?
CB: There was a glamour in being a fighter pilot at that time.
CW: Oh, everybody, all the boys wanted to be
CB: But, after being rejected
CW: Well, having seen bombers going down in flames and fighters getting away with it, fine, naturally they wanted to be fighter pilots
CB: Yeah. So, the effect of the rejection of the navy man, made you do what?
CW: So, the?
CB: The effect of talking with the man from the navy, that, what was the effect of that on you? You went home and then what?
CW: It didn’t worry me, except that I had this ridge across my nose, and I thought there’s no point in going into the RAF medical with a ridge on my nose
CB: From your glasses
CW: But, from the, yes, from the bridge as, but that disappeared, was only just a mark, so I left my glasses off and it made no difference, I passed the medical alright, in fact, quite often during the war I did wear glasses and I wore them flying in place of the goggles. The goggles were there but didn’t really need them, cause I did wear glasses, I remember a briefing one day and I put the glasses on and one of the officers was looking at that [laughs], a rear gunner wearing glasses? Oh, dear me! They made no difference,
CB: Just going to your experience in Rhodesia, so you did pilot training, how many hours did you do?
CW: Oh, I did eight hours flying with five different instructors and then, in six weeks, and a day or two before the end of six weeks, I got in a further three hours with a sergeant pilot who claimed to have been a Hurricane pilot in North Africa which we didn’t believe, so at eleven hours they were still, let’s get it right, yes, after six weeks, out of the course of fifty, there were still thirty on the course, only fifteen of whom had gone solo and I was one of the other fifteen who hadn’t and that fifteen had to see a fly test and everybody was scrubbed, everyone failed. Well, of that fifteen, twelve of us notified a grievance, we went through the grievance procedure, why had we failed? Why had I failed? And the CO pretended to look up his notebook, Watson you failed on two counts, a, you did wheel landings instead of three pointers, secondly you took off and climbed at half throttle. Well, I said, firstly, I landed exactly as I was instructed and secondly, if it took off and climbed at half throttle, I prefer a miracle and we could all do with one of them, I spoke twice out there, I remember and that was it, there was no appeal, everybody was taken off for some silly reason. A year later, Wing Commander Powell, Speedy Powell, who was in charge of all flying training became our group captain in North Africa and I was about to tell him it was a scam when he told me, he said, no, you didn’t fail, he said, they were just not in a SFTS, he says, to cope with the numbers from EFTS and there were hundreds of you waiting after EFTS to go to SFTS, so they established an air gunner training school and observer training school at Moffat near Gwelo. We were given the option of an observer course and they said, there’ll be a little, there could be a delay in getting on to the observer course, maybe a week or two delay, well, we’d already met people the previous night who’d been there for six months waiting for the thing, so they were not, they were dishonest, there was only one thing to do, and that was re-muster to air gunner and we, there were forty five of us on the course, there’s a picture of that with all those chaps in there.
CB: So, you became an air gunner
CW: Yes, it was an, I think it was an eight weeks course
CB: And where was that held?
CW: That was at Gwelo, aerodrome was called Moffat, at Gwelo near Marandellas in Rhodesia, I spent quite a lot of time on the farm at Marandellas, where there was a little girl called Wendy and I remember repairing a puncture on her bicycle, we had to do something in return for the hospitality. Everybody seemed to pass the air gunner course, I won’t comment too much on that [laughs]
CB: So, did you get your brevet at the end of that course or did you get it later?
CW: Oh, at the end of the course
CB: Then what?
CW: Yes, the two instructors there, they weren’t even qualified air gunners [laughs], I should delete that,
CB: What did you do the training on for air gunnery?
CW: They were Anson aircraft and Anson aircraft, yes, and there was a scarf ring with a Vickers gas operated guns and the only firing we did was on the beam at a drill [unclear] by a Miles Magister, Miles Master, which was, she was
CB: So, how did you get on with it?
CW: Oh, it’s rather, on the way back, we came via Cape Town and whilst we were in the transit camp the three of us went to, went to, oh my Gosh, I can’t recall the name, Muizenberg yes, we were in the beach in Muizenberg and a lady came to us about ten o’clock, she said, look, chaps, what are you doing for lunch? So, well, we’re not [laughs] see that big house over there? Come and see me there half past eleven, come and have lunch with us and we did, at the door ask for Mrs Macbeth. Ask for Mrs Macbeth, right, we duly went to the door and I asked for Mrs Shakespeare [laughs] Many, many years later I was on the [unclear] talking to an amateur in South Africa, I told him where I was and he said he was in Muizenberg and I said, I remember Muizenberg and I told him about that, he said, that place is now a guest house and that’s where I stay and that’s where I’m speaking from, not only that, but he said, whereabouts are you in Mbeya? And I told him, and I said, I’m in what’s the boys quarters at the back of the transferring station in the back of the cottage there in the boys quarters and he said, have a look through the, can you see the back door of the cottage? And I bent down, Yes, yeah, he said, is there a hole in the door, about a foot off the floor, in the middle? Yeah. He said, if you’d been down and looked through that hole, you’ll see a mark on the wall back, there’s a passageway, a mark on the wall. Have a look and I did, and it’d been, it had been plastered over, he said, that’s where my gun went off when I was careless, he was stationed there during the war. And, now, there were two coincidences, million to one, millions to one, infinitely to one, he was told about Mrs Shakespeare and we’d, he’d sat in the same seat during the war. Amazing. [unclear], Rhodesia was a wonderful place.
CB: And the local families, when you had time off, when you had time off from training, what did the local families do?
CW: Oh, on the farm? Oh, they were farmers, we tried to help out on farm, I did a bit of wiring whilst I was there, a lot of wires on pylons and they were in a bit of a state and I did a bit of tidying up there, I remember that
CB: Did they feed you?
CW: Oh yes, yes, was wonderful, Marandellas, that was. Yes, we were entertained quite royally in Rhodesia.
CB: So, we were talking about your holding point at Cape Town when that, what happened there? From Cape Town what happened?
CW: Well, from Cape Town we got on the boat and came back. It was a passenger liner, we’d gone out to Durban in the Mooltan, that was a cargo ship and we were down in, on the bottom deck, about three decks below, coming back we were on the Empress of Bermuda and there were people on it from the Middle East and quite a few Italian prisoners and we came back straight ten days, straight line ten days, the U-boats didn’t stand a chance, going out we had a terrific escort and must have been a dozen ships in that convoy, a dozen navy ships, coming back we were on our own and in a straight line [laughs]
CB: Cause it was fast
CW: It was fast, yes
CB: So, where did you dock?
CW: Where did we dock? Yes, Greenock, came back to Greenock, we had to carry our own kit bag, get our kit bag off the ship, we had full pack, a suitcase, and in fact we had two kit bags and we had to hang them over, one was for the flying kit, which was exactly as it was when we left, we didn’t even open the stuff, we didn’t need it in Rhodesia
CB: Because of the warmth.
CW: Mh?
CB: Because it was so warm.
CW: Yeah. We were and we lined up on the dock with all our kit and our red cap came along and recalled us to attention, right turn, double march, we just stood there with mouths open, double march, with all that clobber? there were no trollies, anything like that, we had to walk. I think we went straight to a train, I think the train is coming to the dock, I’ve got that picture, got on the train and we went back to West Kirby on the wirral. And that was it. From there, train down to Brighton and from, actually managed my pay book said I was, air gunner UT wireless op, which is what I said I wanted to do and he said, well, you can have the wireless op course if you wish, but it means going back to where they say, and you lose your tapes and you go back to where they say, forget that, he said, apply for another pilot’s course when you’ve done a couple of tours. Yes, oh yes, we were at Brighton, I was at Brighton for three weeks in a hotel, we would go in one direction, couple of miles and we’d have a lecture, then a few miles more and do a bit of swimming and that sort of thing, somewhere else do a bit of drill, bit of PT here there, just filling in time which all we wanted to do was get on. [pause] and we were posted straight to OTUs and I went to Finningley near Doncaster and that’s when I skivved off for Christmas and went to see my mother and got caught up in the time, was called out. Doncaster, there was an ENSA concert whilst we were there and the posters gave the impression that it was a real variety concert and they made it very clear, once you are in, you stay in, you don’t come out [unclear], you stay in, watch it, ok, it wasn’t a variety concert, it was an orchestra playing there, all playing classical music which was not really our kettle of fish. The only other ENSA concert I saw was at Kairouan when the Queen Mary came up, you know, the flat top thing, the Queen Mary came and there was a double grand piano on the back and a trailer where the pianist lived, it was Rawicz and Landauer and that was very good, I just sat there on my notebooks watching the, this on the piano and that was a real, they played stuff which appealed to us.
CB: Just to clarify the point, the Queen Mary is an aircraft recovery trailer.
CW: Yes, it was a big flat top carrying anything, tanks, aircraft
CB: So, you appreciated the music
CW: Yes, yes, it was good, was very good, but they were the only two ENSA concerts I saw
CB: So how long were you at the OTU?
CW: That’s a good point, about three months
CB: And you, what were you flying there?
CW: That was Wimpeys. Some Wimpey 1 Cs and then Wimpy 3s, mostly 3s.
CB: And from there where did you go?
CW: I gotta think.
CB: So, after the OTU you went to an HCU.
CW: No, no, we were on Wimpys. From 25 OTU Finningley we went to 30 OU, 30 OTU at Hickson, in Stafford and there we did more cross countries and whilst there we did three trips to France and then we were, then we joined, we went from there, we were there about three months, we went to 150 Squadron at Snaith. We didn’t do any flying from Snaith, one flight from Snaith was being detached overseas, they didn’t say where, we went to, one flight has to go, to go overseas, the other flight stays over Germany, so if you’d both give a preference of what you want to do and we opted to stay over Germany which meant of course that we went overseas. Our entire crew had trained overseas and we wanted to stay in England for a while but, no, from there we went back to West Kirby, back to West Kirby and we boarded a big, boarded a ship and on the deck there was some very big crates and the address Murmansk, it had been partly painted out, the name partly painted out. I said, Crickey, surely enough, we found later that they’d written Murmansk and partly rubbed it out so that the enemy looking at that thought we were going to Murmansk but that’s, that was what they said but we didn’t. We then from there down the Clyde, into the Med, then we went to Algiers, the troop ship just ahead of us was torpedoed and staggered into [unclear] and all the air gunners were on the deck of our troop ship, one air gunners, we’ve never seen the Oerlikon guns before, anyhow, that was it, and we disembarked in Algiers and in Algiers, yes, from Algiers we were stationed thirty miles south at Blida and there was a cargo ship unloading bombs and the bombs were put on ordinary bomb trolleys and trundled with tractors all the way to Blida and Blida is a very busy place, the Americans were there with all sorts of funny aircraft and we operated from Blida on Wimpys.
CB: Ok, we will stop there for a minute. Two, three disappointments in the RAF, yeah.
CW: No, two
CB: Two
CW: One was coming off the pilot’s course
CB: Yeah.
CW: [unclear] on 227 Squadron I was, the gunnery leader disappeared after a couple of weeks and I was a warrant officer then and I became acting gunnery leader and I stayed that way for six months as a flying officer doing the job and the wing commander commented on that and the adjutant oh, Cliff hadn’t done the gunnery leader course, so he said, better do the gunnery leader course. Couple of weeks later, I went up to Yorkshire somewhere and on the course thirty of us arrived to do it, we were given a test on arrival, we arrived on Sunday afternoon, Monday morning we all had a test and at the end of that we were divided into two flights, A and B, fifteen in each, I was in B flight and B flight was told to assemble in the hut next door, in the next hut, we did that, and we were each, we are not recording?
CB: Yeah, it’s ok.
CW: No, not.
CB: You don’t want to?
CW: No.
CB: No, ok. So you had a trip from Sir Archibald Sinclair. What did he say?
CW: Well, Archibald Sinclair thought we would be pleased at coming back through Sicily, Italy, France and so on, we weren’t amused but at Kairouan our diet was bully beef and biscuits. Each morning one member of the crew would go to the mess tent, collect two tins of bully and if we wanted, a few biscuits but they were big biscuits about six inches in diameter, but we used to go into the [unclear] city and I saw, we saw there once, oh, we had a Volkswagen there, a Volkswagen which had been abandoned, we shouldn’t really have gone anywhere near it, we were in big trouble for doing that, anyhow we went to this Volkswagen and one of the chaps fixed it, we more or less pinched the petrol, hundred octane petrol which didn’t do the engine any good and we used that at Kairouan, eventually it was confiscated by the military police, anyway in Kairouan, in
CB: Kairouan
CW: In Kairouan there was a vegetable stall in the market and there were some watermelons and we were admiring those, and the chap invited me to take one so I took it and gave it to him, he cut it up and we enjoyed this watermelon, it was lovely, I thought we could do with some of these back on camp, I bought two hundred of them [laughs] and oddly enough we could afford two hundred between us and we gave them in at the mess tent, some went over to the officer’s mess but when it came to use these watermelons, they were not watermelons at all, they were marrows, that didn’t matter to much because we stuffed them with bully beef, well the cooks did, how on earth, we loaded those watermelons into the Volkswagen but they turned out to be marrows we got there so, how that happened we don’t know, we just can’t understand. But, that was Kairouan, it was from Kairouan we saw this armada of Dakotas and gliders and they were going to Sicily and of course, soon after that we took off. A very interesting operations from, in North Africa, we felt we were dealing there with the Germans, with the military as apart from civilians, bombing them from four or five miles up, we were right down there with them, was a better feeling somehow, we felt we were a little bit nearer.
CB: What were your targets?
CW: Well, there’s a list of them here. In North Africa, all in North Africa, oh no, there’s a page full here.
CB: Ok.
CW: Tunis, Monserrato, Decimomannu, Tunis, Tunis again, Bizerta, Trapani and then there Villa Credo, Palermo, Napoli, Cagliari, Rome, Alghero, Castelvetrano, Chieti or something, Borezzo, Pantelleria, Sardinia, Sardinia, Sicily, Pantelleria, Napoli, Pantelleria, Pantelleria, that was in one night, twice to Pantelleria that night, Siracuse, Pantelleria, Messina, Napoli, Siracuse, Rome, Salerno, Bari, San Giovanni, Messina, Trapani.
CB: So, we are talking about largely mainland bombing, are we, what’s the balance between daylight and night bombing?
CW: This was all night bombing.
CB: All night bombing. Right.
CW: All night bombing.
CB: And how did you conduct the operations? Were you in a bomber’s stream or
CW: No.
CB: Were you in formation? Just as a gaggle.
CW: We’d take off one after the other independent to navigation all on the same route, ETA time on bombing, all the same, but operating independently, at maximum effort there, there were only twenty-six of us
CB: Right, how did you keep a sufficient spatial distance?
CW: What, from the others?
CB: Yeah.
CW: I didn’t even see them.
CB: Right. And you were all set the same height to operate from, were you?
CW: Yeah. Yes, yeah.
CB: And you, the speed was dictated in advance?
CW: Same, was the same, maximum economic cruising speed, it was the same for everybody.
CB: What would that be?
CW: I don’t know, it wasn’t my problem.
CB: No.
CW: One sixty-five knots. And, you can’t quote that, I’m not sure. I was the rear gunner.
CB: Right. Of course, yeah. So, in an operation, after dropping the bombs, you made your own way back
CW: Yes
CB: How easy was it to find the airfield that you started off from?
CW: Well, if, the navigator was pretty good, it was all dead reckoning now, there were no navigational leads at all or no electronic aids, then the navigator had a drift sight, I had a drift sight in the rear turret, I could, coming back over the sea, could drop a flame float, put the guns on that and of course, with the wind on the side and so on, we’re crabbing along, relative to the ground, the nose is not going straight forward, it’s on the
CB: You’d forward the deflection.
CW: There was a deflection
CB: To the navigator.
CW: And I could measure that deflection on the thing at the side and I would tell the navigator, we got sort of three degrees starboard drift or whatever and he would plot that, he could also measure the drift on his drift sight, and it was good, and of course, you hit the North Africa coast, and can see it and fly along if [unclear], if you’re too far east when you hit it but there were no other aids.
CB: So, the role of the gunner is to defend the aircraft. How many times were you attacked by German or Italian aircraft?
CW: No German aircraft, we saw a couple of Italian aircraft, one came up and we looked at it and looked as how it was, be a bit offensive, I fired at the bloke but he cleared off, we’d no trouble in North Africa. We got a bit closer to the enemy attacking, we were supposed to be strategic air force, that was the title but a lot of our work was tactical
CB: Supporting the army
CW: Supporting the army, attacking trains
CB: Yeah
CW: And so on. Low level stuff
CB: When you say, low level, what height are we talking about?
CW: Three hundred feet. Attacking a train at three hundred feet, there’d be three of us, we did two trips like that on the railway line from Suez up to Tunis, a German troop train on there, there’d be three of us, one aircraft would go directly above and bomb it and invariably stop it, stop the train. We would come upon the right, two hundred yards and strafing it, the train was stopped, the Jerries got off at the other side and they tried to get away a bit and that’s when the other fellow came in, number three, blazing with the front turret, and one beam gun and that was it, the three of us would carry on, turn round and then it depends what had to be done then, we didn’t want to derail, we didn’t try to derail the train, anything like that
CB: No, cause you needed the line
CW: We wanted the line for the army
CB: Army did, yeah, so
CW: One of the last things, in Tunis the Germans were evacuating from Bizerte, Bizerte?
CB: Yeah.
CW: Yes. And we was attacking the troop ships, we cut it down, well, I don’t know if it was us or one of them, anyway one of us caught a direct hit on a troop ship, which turned back and beached. And about a thousand British soldiers got off it. Three of them were killed, three British soldiers were killed by us but that was, that ship was full of POWs and it should have been lit up, by international law it should have been well illuminated
CB: Like a hospital ship
CW: But it wasn’t, there were no lights and there was nothing to tell us there were British on board, as far as we were concerned it was a German.
CB: Yeah.
CW: Anyhow, it beached, three thousand troops got off it and we met some of them in Tunis and we weren’t very popular
CB: No
CW: Because we’d killed three of their chaps but they didn’t think [unclear] the rest of us had done lucky [unclear] to be here, they did a good job and they didn’t think so
CB: Cause the Germans were evacuating with ships but also aircraft, so, did you have any role in trying to intercept the aircraft that were escaping? They had the big transport planes, the Arado
CW: We didn’t see any German aircraft, having said that I, I’ve got a vague idea we did once, there were two, one night we were on the way to Italy and at briefing they gave us position of a U-boat reported on, reported, a U-boat in that position and briefing officer, he said, if you see it, make it crash-dive, said, don’t try to bomb it, cause you won’t hit it, I wonder [unclear], speak for yourself, mate [laughs] just divert off normal track to that U-boat, if you see it, make it crash-dive, do a couple of circuits when you get to that spot and try and do that and we saw it and we went for it but we didn’t see it crash-dive but it, when we saw it, the bomb aimer saw the shape, it was just submerged, and he saw this cigar shape, we went down on it, and it’s big trouble when we got back. Can’t you tell a U-boat from a Royal Navy submarine? [laughs] How could we?
CB: No. No way. It’s a good thing you didn’t hit it then, with your bombs.
CW: The bloke was right. Don’t try to bomb it, you won’t hit it.
CB: No, Yeah. On that topic
CW: Speaking of submarines
CB: On that topic of U-boats, the U-boat base was at La Spezia in North West Italy, did you bomb La Spezia?
CW: I don’t think so. I don’t recall the name, no, it’s not here, we were told there was a refueling base, U-boat refueling at Alghero, refueling base, there’s a, oh dear, what do you call it?
CB: A long jetty
CW: A long jetty out, U-boat refuel at the end of the jetty and the oil is trundled down there, if there’s no U-boat there destroy the jetty, but try not to damage the town, strafe it but don’t, no, no bombs, use them on the jetty, and we did and we strafed the town but there was no U-boat there. It was an innocent fishing village but we were told that the U-boat refueling
CB: And this is before the Italian surrender of course, isn’t it?
CW: Oh yes, yes.
CB: In 1943. Yeah. Ok, so you, what else did you do during your tour?
CW: In Africa? Well, it was interesting, but we felt we were part of the war there. Between Sicily and mainland there are ferries going all the time and we bombed both terminals, we put [unclear] to the [unclear], to the, and we hit those terminals.
CB: You’d be flying at a higher level for that, what level would you be flying at?
CW: Six thousand feet was our normal bombing height. We were halfway there on Sunday, that was at three thousand feet.
CB: Were you? What sort of flak did you encounter?
CW: On Italy? A bit of light flak, that was all. On Rome, probably however six thousand and that was supposed to be an open city, we weren’t supposed to fight.
CB: What were you bombing? What were you bombing in Rome?
CW: On Rome, on the city, we dropped leaflets,
CB: Ah.
CW: Then we bombed the marshalling yards then down the Tiber to the Lido di Roma, seaplane base and we bombed that, we didn’t see any seaplanes, but we bombed the, we hit the hangars.
CB: So, what level of accuracy would you say you normally achieved?
CW: I would say pretty good, it wasn’t carpet bombing anywhere, we had, it was pinpoint bombing. Mind you, there were only twenty-six of us, maximum twenty-six.
CB: How many did you lose?
CW: We did lose one or two, we lost five percent, it was twenty-odd when maybe one wouldn’t get back, the losses were the same as over Europe, on average, which I know that’s surprising, probably for different reasons.
CB: So, you came to the end of your tours, then what?
CW: When we finished in, when we finished at Kairouan, we went on the Queen Mary up to Tunis, we had a spot of leave on one occasion, just after Tunis was liberated, or just after Jerry was kicked out, we went up to Tunis, there were several canteens and that’s where the bomb aimer ran into trouble, there were five of us, the canteen was crowded and four blokes got up just as we sort of got near the table, they got up and we sat down but there were five of us, so then the bomb aimer saw a spare chair a few yards away, picked it up, place was crowded, he put it over his head and walked towards our table and some happy soldier looked up, saw the chair hovering over his head, it went round and it gave such a [unclear], knocked him out, well, almost knocked him out, knocked him down, silly devil with a chair over his head.
CB: Yeah.
CW: And the red caps came and he was arrested and put in jail and the, was in at the police station and we moved from where we were staying to a hotel next to the police station, at 49 Rue De Serbie, I remember that address and Chadderton was in jail, was in prison, well we went into [unclear], the canteens were all crowded but there was another we came to, officers only, so, our tapes were just on one arm, on an elastic band, off with the tapes, off with the hat, and we went in, into the, into this posh hotel and sat there having a beer. About half an hour later, the bomb aimer, he almost turned white. I looked round and Speedy Powell was there, our group captain [laughs]. And of course, we got an [unclear], hello chaps, I didn’t realize you chaps were all commissioned [laughs], what are you drinking? [laughs] I thought, oh Crickey, we are in trouble here, so, I like to see a bit of initiative, jolly good, very good show, chaps [laughs], he spoke like that, Speedy Powell [laughs].
CB: How were you notified about
CW: He said, I’m going back, when you’re going back to Kairouan, he said, couple of days? He said, I’m going back tomorrow, give you a lift if you like and he did, he took us back to Kairouan. But first of all, we went to that prison, to the police station and he got Chadderton out, 49 Rue De Serbie, that’s where we were.
CB: So, you got back to camp, then what?
CW: Well, we got back and our tour was nearly finished, whilst at Blida we’d sleep, it was a question of crew but one aircraft per crew, you stuck to the same aircraft, that was yours whilst you’re here, well, there was no vacancy at the when we got there, we’d a spare week waiting for the aircraft and we went to a place called Setif on the coast, a big hotel there and we stayed in that hotel at RAF expense for a week, that was good. And the rooms were already occupied and there was real French entertainment, you see what I mean [laughs], that was, that shouldn’t have been really, anyhow sorry I digress.
CB: That’s alright. So, how did you know that you were at the end of your tour?
CW: We’d done two tours, we’d done, I think it was fifty four trips there, we could have come back after thirty five, it was normally thirty over Europe and thirty-five in the Med but we could opt to stay and do, carry on, which I preferred, and we did fifty-five, in fact we did more than that because a trip under three hours and there are quite a few, well, there are several, a trip under three hours only counted as a half [laughs], so you’d do trips to, well, like those trips to Pantelleria and Lampedusa just under three hours, but it was, you only, was credited with a half, and again you see, if you can’t take a joke, shouldn’t have joined [laughs], there was a Luftwaffe base on Lampedusa and we didn’t know it, we didn’t see it, we were bombing the harbour.
CB: So, did nobody attack the airfield?
CW: No, we didn’t do, I don’t think, I don’t know, we knew there was one, we were not told of any airfield, our job was the harbour
CB: So, you reached the end of the tour, what happened then?
CW: Well, we went on the Queen Mary to Tunis, then
CB: From Tunis, yeah
CW: And then in lorries to Algiers onto a troop ship and back to England, back to Greenock.
CB: What was it like on the troop ship?
CW: I’m just trying to think, yes, well, it was full of troops, I don’t think there were any Germans aboard
CB: Prisoners?
CW: I don’t, don’t remember much about it, the first troop ship coming back that was Empress of Bermuda, what was that airport we got from?
US: Bengasi?
CW: Down the road
US: Where are we?
CW: Mh?
US: Where are we?
CW: Monarch
US: Stansted?
CW: Monarch of Bermuda, that was, I think that was the, it was on that trip Monarch of Bermuda and they’re luxury airliners
CB: Right
CW: Luxury liners
CB: Yeah
CW: And it was good
CB: As a warrant officer, what facilities did you have? Sharing a room or four to a room?
CW: Oh, it didn’t make any difference,
CB: Right.
CW: Rank didn’t really mean very much and the skipper was the squadron leader, the only time we called him sir was if we had to, if there was any VIP nearby then, we might call him sir, otherwise it was Chess, his name was Chester, squadron leader Chester, he never did an OTU, he was- we’re on this thing.
CB: Yeah, go on. We’re stopping for a moment. We’ve restarted as you arrived in Greenock, what happened then?
CW: Well, we’ve come back from
CB: From Tunis. So, you’ve returned from North Africa to Greenock at the end of your two tours.
CW: Yes, from there we went by train down to Brighton, and of course and there it felt it split up and I was posted to, yes, I was posted to 84 OTU and second day I was there I was given a schedule of duties, lecture on the Browning gun, lecture on combat manoeuvre, the corkscrew and so on and I had this schedule, I said, I don’t like this, I haven’t done a course on the Browning gun, I’ve been using one for two tours but I’ve never done a course on it, what’s this corkscrew business? You’ve never heard of the corkscrew? No, what is it? The corkscrew, yes, on a bottle, well, I became an instructor on the corkscrew after I’d had some instruction and combat tactics, what can you do except move and fight it out, he said, what you need is an air gunner course, yes, I said, by all means, ok, I’ve done the job but that doesn’t make me a good instructor, no, I’m not instructing, so they gave me eight sprog air gunner trainees, to shepherd, I became a course shepherd and in doing that, I gradually picked up what really goes on and the corkscrew, you know about the corkscrew
CB: Yeah.
CW: I’d love to do another one [laughs], well, eventually we had, there was a complete crew and we went to Winthorpe and converted to Stirlings and on Stirlings we did a week of circuits and bumps and then cross-countries and then the first cross-country we went North towards Scotland to a bomb site, a bombing range rather, did an exercise there and on the way, or maybe the way back over Yorkshire, you’ll be attacked by a Hurricane, we need a good picture, make sure your guns are on safe and get a good picture of the Hurricane. We were attacked and the rear gunner hadn’t the vaguest idea, he said, weave skipper, weave, he was yelling, weave, it’s coming, it’s nearer and I thought, what the hell is that? He got no idea and the aircraft came from down starboard quarter, came right at us and then came in again and same again from the port quarter, nothing happened, and it came in, I was mid upper by that [unclear], it came in from the beam on the starboard and I gave, well by then was a textbook type of commentary winding up its corkscrew starboard go and nothing happened and the aircraft went underneath, came up on the quarter, more textbook but corkscrew port go, and that time we went dump up [unclear] up board, up starboard, down starboard, that was obviously the screen pilot the instructor.
CB: Ah.
CW: That was good. When, then, he said, on the way back, we’re going down on a raft off the Lincolnshire coast, we’re supposed to fire, strafe that raft but that’s what you’re supposed to do but don’t do that, there’ll be, there are seals on the raft, they live there, I knew that, they’ve been there dozens of times, just give a short burst in midair, fire at the moon, fire as it were , we did that and I just fired a short burst with one gun [laughs], cause they had to be cleaned afterwards, I fired a short burst, the rear gunner didn’t, ok, rear gunner, says the screen pilot, oh, no sir, the guns are faulty, I felt, Christ, was sort of physiology is that? They weren’t US, they were faulty, mid upper gunner, have a look, go and fix him. I went back to the rear turret, opened the flimsy door, and [unclear] pushed him aside, the guns weren’t even cocked, I said, where is your cocking toggle? He said, he didn’t understand, he didn’t know what a cocking toggle was, well, his hat was there, his fancy hat, remember that hat was there but took [unclear] the cockpit, number three gun I saw the thing, cause it was on safe, so I took the safety catch off and I yelled at him, now pull the trigger, botch the trigger, pull it, and he did, he nearly fell off the seat, he would have done if he hadn’t been tied down, said, now do the same as that to the other three, they’re the other two guns, cause one was a camera gun, and he hadn’t the vaguest idea so I did the same to the number four gun, fired that and he just, he hadn’t a clue, and ok but we’d fired from the rear turret. Next morning, the gunnery leader when I booked in as it were, he showed me a report from the screen pilot, do you agree with this? And it was that the rear gunner, he doubted if the rear gunner had had any operational training, did I agree? I said, not only I agree, I don’t believe he went to gunnery school, if he did, he didn’t learn anything literally and that’s what he wanted to know. I said, I’d like to see his logbook, well, it was the end of the month and the logbooks were in the flight office so I went to get them and I got them for the whole crew and I looked at this fellow’s logbook, he’d done no flying at all except at Winthorpe circuits and bumps, and the odd cross-country, that cross-country would have entered but there was nothing there except circuits and bumps but in the back was a certificate that he’d completed the air gunner course, very sad. Anyhow, we got rid of him, I said, he’s finished, that fellow, he’s not flying in my rear turret. I developed a little problem; would you mind if I?
CB: We’ll stop
CW: Nip up there for a second?
CB: So, you find the gunnery school
CW: Is that off?
CB: It’s on now, yeah, right
CW: Rear gunner had the faintest idea and he was sent to Eastchurch, he’d finished
CB: Now
CW: Now on the grapevine, all the information everybody seemed to know what was going on and the chap, the warrant officer on the clay pigeon shooting asked me what was happening, and in fact I didn’t know but he said, look, I want to join a crew and in fact he did, he joined our crew but he was a mid-upper gunner and I said, that’s fine, show me, you can have the mid-upper, I’ll have the rear, if they gunnery leader will agree and he did and the skipper agreed and we acquired a very good mid-upper gunner. Pete Foolkes, Pete Foolkes who eventually went to Canada, and stayed in and joined the Canadian Air Force, nice bloke.
CB: So that’s how you got into mid-upper, sorry, rear gunner, that’s how you became a rear gunner.
CW: I’ve always been a rear gunner.
CB: Yeah, quite.
CW: It was just that
CB: On the Stirling.
CW: I preferred the rear turret.
CB: Did you feel more comfortable with four guns?
CW: [laughs] That’s quite right, the mid upper did just have two, didn’t he, did?
CB: Yeah.
CW: I wasn’t too familiar with the mid-upper, I think you’re right, it’s bound to be [laughs].
CB: There was only space for two. There was only space for two guns.
CW: Yeah. Yes, yeah.
CB: So, you were at the OTU, after the OTU where did you go?
CW: Oh, OTU, right I’m with it again, we that was
CB: Winthorpe
CW: That was a conversion course
CB: Yes
CW: After an OTU.
CB: Alright, a conversion course
CW: A conversion course at Winthorpe
CB: Yes
CW: Well, from there, we went to Bardney
CB: Yeah.
CW: The skipper was promoted to squadron leader and he became flight commander, of A flight and A flight it worked in, with I think it was up at 9 squadron for a few weeks, I did the odd trips with, I think the first two trips from Bardney as part of 9 Squadron really at [unclear], from there we went to Strubby, did a couple from there and then on to Balderton, where the Americans had just left Balderton we moved in and B flight was already at Balderton. We then became a complete squadron of two flights and we operated from there, first trip was on Bergen, I did six trips with that squadron leader, first trip was on Bergen, and we were told to be a very careful run on a specific point in the docks, whatever’s there at that point, if anything, that’s the point to hit, be very careful and we went to the East and coming back, westerly course over Bergen, on the bombing run and there was an awful bang, a bit, wing went down, nose went down, we went down and the skipper, he was trying to hold back on the control column, nothing much was happening and we were going down and it was the navigator who went forward, crawled forward and turned it tail heavy, turned the elevator back and we came out and we came out at three thousand feet. What the bang was we’ve no idea, there was no damage anywhere but of course, the bomb doors were open and we came out at three thousand feet but we came out of it on quite a steep climb and we climbed up to eight thousand and the bomb aimer woke up, say skipper, can you go round again, we still got the goddam bomb [laughs] and Ted was the navigator, [unclear], oh, we are going round again and he pulled the jettison toggle and the bomb rolled [unclear], the bomb just went in the sea, complete waste of time the whole thing and we then came back and landed at Milltown and [unclear] Bergen.
CB: Where is Milltown in Scotland?
CW: Oh, Bergen, 28th of October 1944. Squadron leader Chester.
CB: So, this is with 9 Squadron.
CW: Oh no, no, that was all in the [unclear] of 227.
CB: Oh it was, right.
CW: Bergen, the next one was another fiasco to Walcheren. Walcheren, that was on the Zuiderzee and we were to bomb the sea wall, bomb the, not the sea wall, the, what it was called?
CB: The dikes.
CW: Dike, we were to bomb the dike and ahead of us, mind you, I’m in the rear, I didn’t see all this, there was another Lanc ahead and he went across the dike, stick the bombs right across and of course they all went in the sea, it only needed one bomb on the dike but they all went in the sea and our skipper, I can understand him, he thought, well what a ruddy silly way to destroy the dike, we were in the destruction business afterall, so we went round to the east and came in and went over the dike and dropped a whole stick of bombs all the way along the dike and destroyed it for half a mile, all they wanted us to do was make a hole in it so the water could come through, that’s what we were supposed to do, dug a hole in it and we were actually briefed to bomb a gun emplacement but that gun emplacement was already under water and the barrels were sticking out, there was no point in bombing that, we’d no secondary target so we decided, the skipper decided to do the job that he thought the others were going to do and we destroyed that wall for half a mile and it took, what was it? The pioneer corps I think it was, the pioneer corps took six months after the war to repair it and the skipper was in real trouble for doing that but that was a second trip on there. Next one was an ordinary trip to Hamburg and then Harburg which was a subsidiate, well, in the suburbs of Hamburg, that was long after the destruction of Hamburg, Heindbark, oh, that was a dam, Politz [laughs], Politz, a night raid of course, they were all night raids, Politz on the Baltic, night raid and the navigator, five minutes to Politz but everything was quiet, but by that time there should have been some action ahead, and two minutes to Politz, bomb doors open, ok, bomb doors open, and we, everybody thought, well, we are running up on Politz and we were over Politz and was absolute dead quiet, everything was quiet and then it started twenty miles to the south, fireworks below, twenty miles south and, oh Crickey, we’re twenty miles north of the target, and both the skipper, both the navigator and bomb aimer said, we are over Politz, we’re over the coast, but down there’s not over the coast, we are, we are over Politz, and the skipper wouldn’t have it, everybody is bombing there, we’ll join them and we did, and we destroyed an awful lot of good agricultural land. It was Pathfinder force, no, we weren’t using 5 Group Pathfinders, it was 8 Group Pathfinders, they put the markers down in the wrong place and that agricultural land was in a hell of a mess [laughs]
CB: [unclear]
CW: Many years later, I was talking to the air traffic controller in Nairobi, I was in charge of the con centre at night and we were having a little natter, and he mentioned the, he said, he told me, one night, when everybody bombed twenty miles south where they should have done, and I said, that was Politz was it? Politz! Yes, yeah! We were there at the same time and didn’t know it of course. But the interesting things like that you, happen, Politz, Houffalize, Houffalize, oh, that was the Falaise gap, yes, that’s when Jerry broke through, the Falaise gap, and it was very foggy, there was a film made with that raid, which was a lot of rubbish.
CB: Cause we are talking about France now in July ’44
CW: Yes, well, this was December ’44, Houffalize
CB: That’s not Falaise, is it?
CW: Mh?
CB: That’s not Falaise?
CW: Houffalize.
CB: Houffalize, right. Yeah.
CW: Wasn’t that the Falaise gap?
CB: No.
CW: Well, what was Houffalize?
CB: This is after Arnhem you are talking about now?
CB: [unclear] check it out. Yeah.
CW: Karlsruhe then Politz, Rositz, this is, can’t read that, these were spare boat trips, our skipper had finished by then
CB: Right.
CW: He did six and
CB: Where did he go?
CW: He went on a board of, no, he went on a summary of evidence, he was helpless, in fact at a reunion, many years later, the wing commander said, Chester was the biggest disaster that our squadron had, oh, he wouldn’t have said that if he didn’t mean it
CB: No.
CW: He got rid of him.
CB: Who was he replaced by?
CW: He was replaced with wing commander Balme, BALME, wing commander Balme, although he didn’t take up the point position of flight commander but he was there as a supernumerary, he did the job but didn’t sort of get recognition as a flight commander because he was more senior, I saw him in hospital in Nairobi, wing commander Balme.
CB: So, how many more ops did you do after that change?
CW: I did exactly twenty.
CB: Twenty, did you? Twenty more? Twenty in total? Ok.
CW: I was crazy to do with seventy-six, that was the number of ops, but I counted the halves as whole ones.
CB: Yeah.
CW: I don’t accept that it was half,
CB: It was a [unclear].
CW: Half a tour because
CB: Half an op. So, what caused the end of the twenty? Was it?
CW: Had finished D-Day.
CB: Right. No, ended the war, VE Day
CW: VE Day, sorry, VE Day.
CB: Yeah. So, from VE Day
CW: D-Day occurred when I was at OTU as instructor
CB: Yes
CW: VE Day, D Day, then we went to Molbice, Leipzig,
CB: Leipzig, yeah.
CW: With flight lieutenant Hobson to Leipzig, seven hours, Lutgendorf and Leipzig again, I went to Leipzig three times in all, twice on our own behalf and once with the Yanks [laughs]. Because we diverted to Norwich on one occasion, on one of those occasions, to, and Norwich, not Norwich airport as I knew it then but Horsham St Faith which became Norwich airport
CB: Which became Norwich airport, yeah.
CW: And that’s where I got the idea of a washing machine, that’s a different thing, and in Norwich, what a weird hang-up, I don’t know, not mentioned that have I?
CB: No
CW: No. We diverted to Norwich, and we were resting in a lounge, and very early morning a top sergeant came in, he said, say bud, who’s the headman? I said, him, woke up, what’s the problem? He said, we can’t get the overload tank off. Oh, don’t worry about that, the fighter engineer overload tank, we didn’t know what a tank, yeah, sure, it’s downgrade thing, and the bomb aimer woke up, I did describe it. Crikey that’s odd, that’s a four thousand pounder, no, don’t make bombs that big, that’s a four thousand pound bomb, what do you want, leave it! What are you doing? Anyhow, the skipper sent the flight engineer and the bomb aimer out to go out to look, they tried to take it off, it was, and the tannoy blared everybody to evacuate a mile from the Lancaster [laughs], oh dear, while we were three days in Norwich, which I’d welcomed because I’ve been to school there and I went to see an old girlfriend, Joyce, used to go to school with Joyce, and I went to see her in number one Chester Street and the warrant officer came to the door, I met Joyce and it was good, and he was flying Lysanders, anyhow and a crew came up from Balderton and moved the, took the bomb off [laughs]
CB: That’s why you were there so long because they hadn’t got anybody to move the bomb.
CW: No, they wouldn’t, they, the thing was on its own, they wouldn’t go near it after that.
CB: No
CW: But our own chaps came and shifted it
CB: Cause it would have been fused at that point, would it?
CW: No, it couldn’t have been, it wouldn’t have been.
CB: No. So, when you went on a, when you went
CW: The bomb aimer should have checked when we landed, make sure it’s got, in fact he should have checked before we landed,
CB: Before you landed, yeah.
CW: After we supposed we had dropped it, he should check
CB: So, thinking of fusing, when you got airborne with a full load, at what point were the bombs fused, ready for dropping?
CW: On the bombing run.
CB: Cause what I meant was that this bomb, if all the other bombs went, why would this one not be fused? So, there was a pin extraction job to do.
CW: [unclear] that’s a good point
CB: Cause the hang-up and the fusing are not related.
CW: I haven’t given thought to that one, I wouldn’t think it was fused, I don’t think it could have been
CB: I can’t see how it couldn’t have been, if you’ve dropped all the other bombs, but I don’t know of course, cause I wasn’t there.
CW: I think we bombed, I think we bombed out now, with the [unclear] if they were not fused, could be done,
CB: Yeah, the answer is I don’t know, something worth looking at but I would have thought that the fusing would’ve taken place in a, some time before release, all of them together, that’s what I meant
CW: Normally
CB: But had you dropped
CW: minutes to when you start the serious
CB: On the running
CW: left, left, steady business, yeah
CB: But on that particular op, did you drop bombs in earnest?
CW: I don’t remember, but I think we did
CB: Rather than dispose of them at sea?
CW: I’m not sure which raid it was actually was on
CB: Anyway, so, we’ve got to VE Day, what happened then?
CW: We got to VE Day
CB: You all stood down
CW: Oh, the war was about to end, isn’t it?
CB: Yeah.
CW: But Leipzig was the last raid,
CB: So, did you take part in Operation Manna to supply the Dutch civilians?
CW: No.
CB: And did you?
CW: [clears throat] long after the war I went to a reunion and there was a fellow there, he said he’d been shot down three months before the end of the war, he’d been shot down, he was looked after by a German family who was, didn’t like it. He was released, he left the family and joined when the Americans got close he joined the Americans and they got him back to Mildenhall by air and from there he hitchhiked back to Balderton, this is what he said, got back to Balderton and he said he arrived just in time to take part in Operation Manna and to bring prisoners back from Germany. And I listened to all this, he was a gunner, an air gunner, well, I didn’t recognize the bloke which that was not conclusive, I said, who was your skipper? Oh, he said, I didn’t have a permanent skipper, I did all the spare boat trips, remember Mcgilleyfrey, gunnery leader? Yeah, I said, who could forget? Mcgilleyfrey, I said, yeah, he said, who could forget old gilley. I said, remember Cliff Watson? No. I said, I was acting gunnery leader over that period, Mcgilleyfrey I’ve just invented, 5 group did not take part in Operation Manna, and what was the other point? And we didn’t bring prisoners, neither did we bring prisoners back from Germany, we didn’t take part in that and they came back from Belgium in any case, not Germany. I’d like to see your logbook, oh, he said, I’ll go and get it, he went out to his car and we never saw him again, but there’s lots of things like that going on. The navigator was at a reunion and he, there was a chap giving a talk on his experience in Malta, and one of the, he said, one of the chaps there was in Malta and he said that bloke’s talking an absolute load of rubbish, nothing of what he said actually happened. And I said, I was there, he’s challenged him, and he was on a lecture tour all over the place, lecturing on all this had happened to him in Malta and all a lot of nonsense
CB: Amazing.
CW: I worked with a chap in Nairobi like that, oh, he’d been everywhere, he’d flown Sunderlands from Belfast down to Southampton, from the factory in Belfast to Southampton, he’d been torpedoed in the Pacific, he’d done everything, he was working as a radio officer in Nairobi and we kept a card index system of his [unclear] [laughs]. It was a medical book, not a word of truth in any of it, he had on his briefcase, Slate VC, and he created the impression and deliberately set about to do so the impression that he had a VC, his name was Vivien Charles Slate, the VC was his initials, Slate VC, Vivien Charles [laughs] and everybody thought he had a VC, except some of us who knew better, oh, he’d flown everything, he wasn’t even a pilot, he’d been a pilot, a wireless op, he’d done it all, in actual fact he’d done nothing, he was a traffic control assistant, ok, might have done a good job, but [unclear] done [laughs], Slate VC
CB: Just quickly for background, the repatriation was Operation Exodus, just for the tape. That’s been fascinating, so I’m gonna stop the tape now. Thank you very much because you’ve had a good run and we’ll pick up the other bits later. Thank you very much indeed, Clifford.
CW: Oh, it’s a pleasure.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Clifford Watson. One
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-06-28
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AWatsonC170628, PWatsonC1704
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:57:17 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Clifford Watson at first wanted to join the navy because of a high demand in pilots. After being rejected, he joined the RAF and was sent to Rhodesia for pilot training, but then remustered to become an air gunner. He flew seventy-six ops in total. Was posted to North Africa and recounts various episodes: targeting enemy trains; flying operations over Italy; the accidental targeting of a ship full of British prisoners of war during the German evacuation of North Africa. Flew to Bergen with 9 Squadron and operations targeting dams in Holland. Recounts an operation to Politz on the Baltic, where they bombed the wrong target.
Contributor
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Peter Schulze
Steph Jackson
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Norway
Poland
South Africa
Netherlands
Tunisia--Qayrawān
Zimbabwe
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
Netherlands--Walcheren
Norway--Bergen
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
North Africa
Tunisia
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944-10-28
227 Squadron
25 OTU
30 OTU
84 OTU
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
entertainment
Operational Training Unit
RAF Balderton
RAF Bardney
RAF Finningley
RAF Hixon
RAF Strubby
RAF Winthorpe
training
Wellington
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/117/46467/SHarriganD[Ser -DoB]v330002.mp3
4ef11453b1a2f73ed4f05a602afc89ac
Dublin Core
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Title
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Cook, Kenneth
Kenneth Cook
Kenneth H Cook
Ken Cook
K H Cook
K Cook
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Wing Commander Kenneth Howell Cook DFC (b. 1923, 151017 Royal Air Force). Kenneth Cook flew 45 operations with 97 Squadron, Pathfinders.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-08-04
2016-07-25
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
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Cook, KHH
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Title
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Interview with Wing Commander Kenneth Cook DFC
1039-Cooke, Kenneth
Identifier
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SHarriganD[Ser#-DoB]v33
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
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eng
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Sound
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00:15:10 audio recording
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Pending OH transcription. Allocated
Pending OH summary. Allocated C Campbell
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Claire Bennett
This Interview was recorded by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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This item is being used for TOU9156 teaching. Do not publish transcription until June 2024.
Interviewer: Ok, Ken.
KC: Ok. Hello. This is Wing Commander Ken Cook DFC. I joined the Royal Air Force in October 1941, U/T air crew and after training in Canada I came, returned back to the UK, commissioned as a young pilot officer air bomber and went through various conversion training courses in the UK and eventually joined up with a crew. And our first squadron was Number 9 Squadron at Bardney in Lincolnshire flying Lancasters in Number 5 Group of Bomber Command. After about ten ops with 9 Squadron we were as a crew recruited by the Pathfinder Force which was based in Cambridgeshire and so we were as a crew posted to do additional specialised training as at that time new radar equipment was being brought in and introduced to Bomber Command and in my case it was my job to learn the gadgets known as H2S, Gee and Loran. So, my role changed from being a straightforward air bomber to becoming a radar navigator and air bomber and so it was my job particularly to work the H2S which had a capability for uses in airborne navigation device. And of course, also it’s main role with the Pathfinders was, was identifying German targets and it enabled the Pathfinder crews to find the German targets and to mark them with target indicators so that the main force crews of Bomber Command coming in behind us could identify where the target was and very often bombing on our markers. So we had to be very accurate how we dropped them and where we dropped them and I did this, I ended up doing a total of forty five ops, thirty five of those was as a member of a Pathfinder crew. We eventually having started out with the Pathfinders at Bourn in Cambridgeshire my squadron were then deployed in about April of ’44 to Coningsby in Lincolnshire to join with Number 83 Squadron that had been posted up there from Wyton. And our job was to work with the special force under Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire who was devising a system of finding the targets where the Germans where assembling V weapons on the French coast and in Belgium. And our job was to illuminate the target with parachute flares so that he trained a special force of Mosquito dive bombers that could lay the target markers in these tunnels so that our main force crews from 5 Group and other Groups could come over and do area or intensive accurate bombing as well on these targets. And I completed my forty fifth op in 1944 and was posted to RAF Fiskerton in Lincolnshire as the station radar nav officer. My job was to, we had two squadrons there, 49 and 189 and my job was to fly with these crews and check them out on their ability to use their radar equipment because now the main force were getting the same sort of radar gear that the Pathfinders had had for some time. And so it was my job to make sure the air crew when they, before they went on ops could operate their new radar equipment. And I stayed there for a year or two and eventually was posted to Headquarters, Number 1 Group at Bawtry as the Group radar navigation officer. My job was to oversee all the squadrons, all the Lancaster squadrons in 1 Group to ensure that the crews were properly trained in operating their radar equipment. Can I stop there? Right. Let’s carry on then.
[pause]
On some of the incidents that come to mind one in particular because the Lancaster bomber we all wear warm clothing because the, in the middle of winter the temperatures in the aircraft could become extremely low and in fact if you had to use the elsan at the back of the aircraft it would be extremely low and freezing. And on one occasion I was forced to go back there and use the elsan and I discovered the temperature was minus fifty three degrees Celsius and of course, in having to use the elsan and lower the clothing etcetera I found that my bottom was sticking to the seat to a little bit when I tried to stand up. But I had to stand up because at that time the skipper was calling me, ‘Come on, Ken. We’re only ten miles from the target.’ So I had to hurry up and get back. But in doing so I experienced a little a bit of pain [laughs] in certain lower regions. The other, some of the other aspects of my career was at having completed forty five ops I was then sent off to do jobs as I mentioned with other stations and other squadrons and taking me to the end of the war I applied for a Short Service Commission and this was granted. And after a couple of years the Air Ministry offered me a peacetime Permanent Commission which I accepted and I was down the rank of flight lieutenant and so I then was asked to move out from Bomber Command and become trained with peacetime navigation courses and I thought well, perhaps I’m going to shoot now into somewhere like Transport Command but none of it. Having completed my peacetime navigation course I was then asked by Air Ministry to go through the night fighter OCU at Leeming where I was then trained again to become a navigator radar operator with the AI equipment on night fighters. And so after the appropriate course at Leeming I was then posted to 23 Squadron at Coltishall on Mosquito Mark 36s and I flew with them for about two and a half years until one day I was told that I was to go back to Leeming as a squadron leader to set up the ground school for the introduction of the first jet night fighters. The Meteor NF11 was coming in and I was to head up the ground school with the expansion of the RAFs night fighter force both in the UK and Germany and also the odd squadron in Malta and Cyprus. And so I did that job for about two years and eventually was posted to RAF Newton which was then the headquarters of 12 Fighter Group as the Group navigation officer. And I did the staff duties there but also managed to keep on flying with some of the squadrons in 12 Group, night fighter squadrons until eventually one day the AOC asked me would I like to go back on a squadron as a flight commander. And so the AOC of 12 Group had me posted back to West Malling where I became a flight commander on number 85 Squadron as a navigator which was an unusual post which I enjoyed. And I did that for just over a year and one day the AOC of 11 Group sent for me and said, ‘Cook, do you think you could command a night fighter squadron?’ I said, 'Yes sir.’ He said, ‘Well, you’ve got one tomorrow. ‘You’re going to become a wing commander.’ And so I did that and I became the CO of one of the other squadrons at West Malling called 153 and I was made an acting wing commander and only had that job for about a couple of months when they decided to close the airfield because our flights were getting involved with civil aircraft flying in from the continent, particularly at night. And so they closed the airfield at West Malling and I, and I took 153 Squadron up to Waterbeach in Cambridgeshire and stayed with them for a while and eventually we changed our number to become 25 Squadron. And I completed my two years with the 25 squadron, 153/25 squadron and then one day I was told, ‘You’re going to the staff college.’ And I thought oh I’m going to learn to read and write again. But I did a one year course at the Staff College at Bracknell and after that the Air Ministry in their wisdom said, ‘You’ve done enough flying you’ve got to do an admin job.’ So they posted me and my wife to Aden as a wing commander in the organization branch which was concerned with improving the airfields throughout the Aden Protectorate and then up in the Gulf. So I did that for about two years and then I came back. I’m not quite sure what to do after that but I eventually did a job as the staff officer to the Home Commander, Home Defence Forces which was an organisation which has now been set up to deal with what would happen if there was a nuclear attack on Britain and what would the Air Force be doing to help out. And one of my jobs was to get involved with working out plans on that. And things have gradually moved along until eventually I decided to take early retirement and I left the RAF after twenty six years service in 1947.
Interviewer: And to go back to your, your Bomber Command days it’s always very interesting how the crews got together I think. Now, were you, how did you? I know you go into a sort of a hangar sort of thing and you mill around. There’s no organisation. Were you expecting that or, and did you know somebody? How did your crew come together?
KC: Well, when you got in the early stages of training you started to think about crewing up when you were flying on Wellingtons. You went, in my case I went to Cottesmore which was number 14 OTU and there you meet up with pilots, the wireless operator, straight navigator, air gunners. They were all brought in there and you’d chat with them and eventually you agreed to form a crew. And that’s what we did.
Interviewer: And it proved satisfactory.
KC: Yeah.
Interviewer: Didn’t it?
KC: For instance my skipper was an Australian.
Interviewer: Ah.
KC: Yeah. I was a West Country Gloucestershire man. The other navigator was a Yorkshire man. The mid-upper gunner was a Canadian. The wireless operator was a Londoner and the tail gunner was a Scotsman. That was my crew.
Interviewer: League of Nations.
KC: Yeah.
Interviewer: And you obviously all got on and you all gelled.
KC: We gelled. Yes. Yes. We stayed together for forty five trips. Yeah.
Interviewer: And you’ve mentioned Leonard Cheshire. Did you have much to do with him?
KC: Well, now Leonard Cheshire was based at Woodhall Spa but once we started and once my squadron had come up from 8 Group and we were now at Coningsby with alongside 83, the Pathfinder Squadron when we had briefings on a pre-briefing on a raid Cheshire would come in to see, hear to the breifing. But he particularly once we’d done the raid he would come back because often he would go on the raid himself. He would come back and listen to the debriefing and if things were not coming out clear from the debriefing of the crews he would cut in to explain what was going on where he was concerned in the air. To sort out any, so the intelligence people doing the debriefing could get a more accurate story of what was happening over the other side.
Interviewer: Did you form any opinions of him as a —
KC: Oh, he was the top boy really. Yes. He was, he had tremendous respect from all the all the, all the aircrew like myself.
Interviewer: Yes, so —
KC: What he was and what he did and of course he did a hundred ops, didn’t he?
Interviewer: He did.
KC: Yeah. Can I stop now?
Interviewer: Yeah [laughs] That was Wing Commander Kenneth Cook DFC, retired RAF Bomber Command talking at Thorpe Camp on the 24th Of September about his wartime experiences. Thank you, Wing Commander.
Ken Cook joined the RAF in 1941 and trained as a bomb aimer. He was posted to 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney. After approximately ten ops the crew were posted to the Pathfinder Force at RAF Bourn where he became radar navigator and air bomber. They were then posted to RAF Coningsby with 83 Squadron with the role of seeking V weapon launch sites. After forty five operations he was posted to RAF Fiskerton as station radar navigation officer. He then joined the HQ at RAF Bawtry as Group radar navigation officer. The 23 Squadron at Coltishall on Mosquitoes before being asked to form a ground school at RAF Leeming.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1944
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
23 Squadron
83 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
Lancaster
military living conditions
military service conditions
Mosquito
Pathfinders
radar
RAF Bardney
RAF Bawtry
RAF Bourn
RAF Coningsby
RAF Fiskerton
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1186/18578/SWatsonC188489v1-1.2.pdf
41dce93a36a706458878ffce711dc143
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1186/18578/SWatsonC188489v1-2.1.pdf
78bceef44f30c4e1a4f2d533cd690cd9
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Watson, Clifford
C Watson
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. Two oral history interviews with Flying Officer Clifford Watson DFC (1922 - 2018, 1384956, 188489 Royal Air Force), a memoir, his service and release book, and a scrapbook containing photographs and documents. He flew operations as an air gunner with 150 and 227 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Clifford Watson and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-06-28
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
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Watson, C
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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Photograph
JUST ANOTHER TAILEND CHARLIE
CLIFF WATSON DFC
HUNTINGDON
JUNE 1989
[page break]
[underlined] SEQUENCE [/underlined]
[underlined] File [/underlined] [underlined] Page [/underlined] [underlined] Location [/underlined]
[underlined] GROUP O [/underlined]
D 3 Joining up [underlined] AC2 [/underlined]
4 Babbacombe - 11 ITW Newquay [underlined] LAC [/underlined]
8 Troopship HMT Mooltan - Freetown - Capetown
G 7 Southern Rhodesia - Bulawayo [underlined] LAC [/underlined]
8 EFTS Belvedere Scrubbed TIGER MOTHS [underlined] AC2 [/underlined]
10 A/G Course, Moffat ANSONS [underlined] LAC-Sgt [/underlined]
11 Polsmoor Transit Camp [underlined] Sgt [/underlined]
J25 14 HMT Monarch of Bermuda
15 West Kirby - Bournmouth
17 25 OTU Finningley - Bircotes - WELLINGTONS
18 30 OTU Hixon - Sieghford
19 Leaflets to Paris
Wedding
J26 21 West Kirby - HMT Johan Van Vanderbilt
K1 23 Algiers - Blida - 150 Sqdn WELLINGTONS
K2 27 Fontaine Chaude (Batna) [underlined] FIt/Sgt [/underlined]
LT 32 Kairoaun
LU 35 On leave in Tunis, Chad in Jail
MT 46 End of First Tour - 47 raids
47 2 BPD Tunis - 500 mls. by lorry to Algiers
HXM Capetown Castle - Greenoch - West Kirby
NS 49 Screened 84 OTU Desborough
50 Norton, Sheffield Discip. course
53 W.O - 6th June D Day [underlined] W/O [/underlined]
OS 55 Aircrew Pool, Scampton - HCU Winthorpe STIRLING
56 Syerston Lanc. conversion LANCASTERS
P 57 227 Sqdn. Bardney – Balderton [underlined] P/O [/underlined]
60 DFC [underlined] F/O [/underlined]
63 End of Tour - VE Day
Q 67 Redundant - Photographic Officer, Farnborough
68 u/t Equipment Officer 61MU Handforth
[underlined] GROUP 4 [/underlined]
69 Lager Commandant, Poynton prison camp
2W 75 Civvy Street, Whitehaven Relay Service [underlined] MR [/underlined] .
79 Development Manager, Metropolitan Relays London
44 83 To Kenya, Kirksbridge Farm, Kiminini Kitale
48 85 HM Prison Service Asst. Supt. gr2
555 95 Civil Aviation Radio Officer
556 Mbeya Radio Supt.
557 103 UK leave PMG1 – Flt/RO lic. C. & G.
670 104 Eastleigh - Mwanza
107 Royal visit
680 113 UK leave
114 Entebbe Telecomm. Supt
115 Kisumu
700 123 Nairobi Comm. Centre Ast. Signals Officer
720 129 UK leave
750 134 Nairobi HQ & retirement
800 135 Laikipia Security Network
96 151 Pye Telecommunications, Cambridge Project Engineer
[page break]
[underlined] ILLUSTRATIONS [/underlined]
12A Air Gubber Coiurse 24 CAOS Moffat
15A Finningley Reg. Whellams
20A Bride & Groom 1/3/43
CW in flying kit
CW & HF at Richmond
26A Stan Rutherford with Hilda & Cliff at Richmond
Bill Willoughby (NAV) at Whimpey port gun position
Bill Willoughby & Stan Chatterton in their pits at Blinda
44A Pantelleria target photographs
48A CW with Mum, Barnoldswick
Skipper & B.A. with Hilda at Richmond
Skipper & Hilda at Richmond
48B Skipper& [sic] B.A. with Cliff at Richmond
Stan Rutherford in the snow, at Bircoates
Outside Chalet at Blida
Wimpey at Kaircan
48C At Richmond CW & Hilda
52A Warrant Officer parchment
54A three of Aircrew peeling spuds at Scampton incl. Frank Eaglestone
56A F/O Forster DFM 2nd tour Nav.
C.W.
W/O Foolkes at rear of NJ-P
64A Crashed Remains of 9J – O
64B F/O Cheale, F/O. Bates
S/Ldr Chester DFA with F/O Cheale, W/O Foolkes & F/O Forster DFM
64C More of 9J – O
64D F/O Ted (Ace) Forster DFM, CW & W/O Pete Foolkes
64E CW with rear turret of 9J – O
CW with motor-byke
Sgt. Geoff (Doogan) Hampson, Flight Engineer
64F Newspaper cutting
Start of Second Tour – Frank Eaglestone, Ted Forster & Pete Foolkes
More of 9J – O
64G Ted Forster Ready for Gerry?
Lunchtime over Homberg [sic]
64H P/O Bates (My last tour Skipper)
Part of F/O Bates’ usual crew
64J F/LT. Maxted (Gunnery Ldr) Pete Foolkes and F/O Sandford (spare gunner or Sqdn Adj?)
More of 9J – O
64K Doogan again
More of 9J – O
64L DFC Citation
64M Apology from H.M.
64N F/O Croker’s Lanc. on Torpedo dump at Wyke
Christmas Dinner at Wyke
Reverse of Pete’s Xmas Card 1989
Part of F/L Croker’s letter with Xmas Card
66A-H Examples of Battle Orders
[page break]
[underlined] DEDICATION [/underlined]
The section dealing with my R.A.F. career is dedicated to Lady Luck who shows no compassion, is completely immoral and yet cannot be bought.
After a remarkable interview on television recently, Raymond Baxter asked of Tom Sopwith "To what do you attribute your tremendous and unparalelled [sic] success over such a long period?” In his 94th. year he replied “Luck, pure luck”. His reply was the same when asked again at his 100th. birthday party.
This must apply to every aspiring aviator, and I was no exception.
[page break]
[underlined] THE EARLIEST YEARS [/underlined]
My first ten year or so were spent in Yorkshire, having been born on the [deleted] 22nd [/deleted] [inserted] 11th [/inserted] of February 1922, at 45 Federation Street [inserted] the home of my paternal Gt Grandparents [/inserted], Barnoldswick almost opposite nr. 26 where my Grandparents lived, and about two years after my father was demobbed from the Kings Own Yorkshire Light lnfantry after the Great War. My sister Winifred Sofia was born almost two years later on the 2nd. of January 1924. About that time the family moved to a shop at 33 Rainhall Road where my father established a wireless business. I attended the infants school only 50 yards away, often joined by Winifred.
At the shop, my father built radio receivers of the "Tuned Radio Frequency" type, (TRF), a good 10 years ahead of the superhet. At the same time he held one of the first radio amateur licences in Yorkshire, with the callsign 2ZA. His aerial was a wire to the top of a 50 ft. pole in the back yard and starting with a spark transmitter his first radio contact was with another amateur in Colne, whose transmitter output was connected between the gas and water pipes, He had no means of measuring his frequency but thought it was somewhere around 300 KHz. (1000 metres) He soon progressed to using valves and gradually higher frequencies, though almost everything was really trial and error. When communication progressed to "working" other countries the prefix G was added to UK call-signs. He once told me that his first telephony transmission was achieved using a GPO carbon microphone in the aerial circuit. The only receivable broadcast wireless station at that time was the BBC's 2LO and when people heard it for the first tine there was indeed great wonderment and excitement
In 1926 came the general strike. Money was very scarce and people were hungry. There was no money coming in and the shop closed down. The family moved to a house in Rook Street, close to the railway bridge and opposite the cobler's [sic] wooden workshop. Most of us wore clogs in those days, with leather tops and laces, and iron-shod wooden soles.
Before going to war my father had served an engineering apprentiship [sic] , and worked with steam engines. With outstanding debts at the shop and a wife and two small children to support, he volunteered to work with L.M.S. railway company, and drove a train between Barnoldswick and I think Skipton. The engine was pelted with stones at some of the bridges and he was very unpopular with the strikers, althought [sic] many of them were quite happy to use the train. Thus the family was sustained and he received a letter of thanks and a medalion [sic] from the chairman of L.M.S.
When things returned to normal the family moved again, to nr. 14 School Terrace in Dam Head Road and Winifred and I attended the infants and Junior Schools across the back street. My mother was able to resume working at the mill as a cotton weaver with her sisters Molly and Annie. Their brother Jim -my uncle- was a 'twister', that is he connected the cotton threads on the warp to tails ready for applying to the loom for weaving. The noise. in the weaving sheds was deafening and weavers were quite adept at lip reading. This had a great influence on their broad northern accent. Most weavers operated six looms, loading manually the weft into the shuttles before changing them. My uncle Charlie -the brother of my paternal grandfather=- was a manufacturer employing about a hundred people running 500 or so looms. I remember the big warehouse doors and the lift which was operated by water pressure. To go up, just turn on this tap!. Going down transfered [sic] the water back into a holding
[page break]
tank. There were two offices, large wooden boxes, one on each side of the big doors and just under the ceiling. Accessed by ladders. One office was for uncle Charlie and his clerk, and the other for the more junior staff. When I called to see them in 1941 I noted the intercom. system between the offices. It comprised, at each terminal, two empty Lyle Golden Syrup tins one for speaking into and the other for receiving. they were connected by two lengths of taught string which vibrated the diaphragms being the bottoms of the tins. I was surprised at their effectiveness. There was also a loop of string pulled manually between the two places with a small box attched [sic] for transferring documents. I was impressed. Uncle Charlie said he would consider changing the strings after the war.
At School Terrace my father carried on building wireless sets in the attic and also helped his friend Tom Shorrock who owned the local radio relay service. This comprised a wireless receiver and amplifiers connecting some hundreds of houses with a pair of bare wires to loudspeakers at a cost of ninepence per week for each loudspeaker. The idea appealed to my father and he was able to instigate some technical improvements. By then the wireless manufacturing industry had become well established and radios became readily available. My father had paid off his debts and was discharged from bancrupsy [sic].
At this stage we moved into a new house at 25 Melville Avenue. which was nearer to Fernbank Mill for my mother but also had an inside toilet and bathroom. It also had electricity mains in place of the more customery [sic] gas lighting. An electric soldering iron must have seemed luxurious after heating a copper bit on a gas ring.
Our school was only a few minutes walk from home. Gisburn Road Council School. I remember it and the teachers very well, Mr Alfred Green Petty.the Headmaster, Miss Housen who tought [sic] music english and poetry, and above all Mr Heaton who tought [sic] arithmetic, citizanship [sic] and physics. Miss Housen did not think much of my efforts, I couldn’t sing and disliked poetry, but I got on fine with Mr. Heaton, who also tought [sic] my father over 20 years earlier. Over a fairly long period he gave me extra homework in arithmetic most nights, generally a problem or two and he checked the results next day. It was almost private tuition and thanks largely to him, I excelled in the subject. I think children’s attitudes' in the main were very different to those of the present day. Discipline was strict by consent, not fear. Reward was achieved by effort alone and there was friendly competition between us. Most of us got the cane for some minor offence like climbing over the school wall, in my case refusing to stand in the front of the class and recite ‘the wreck of the Hesperus’. We did respect our teachers.
About this time we moved to a house in Headingley for just a few weeks and then on to. Fence, which we knew as wheatley Lane. During that period my father was working in London at Stag Lane fitting the electrics in Rolls Royces. My mother worked at the cotton mill nearby and Winifred & I were looked after partly by Mrs. Ingham who had a sweet shop. Our stay in Fence was also [deleted] m [/deleted] of short duration.
Tom Shorrock was a friend of Mr. Ramsbottom who was struggling with a one programme radio relay system in Keighley. He already had thriving electrical business and Tom introduced my father to him. So we moved yet again, to Keighley, and my father became Engineer and Manager of Ramsbottoms Radio Relay Service in the centre of Keighley. From 33 Lister Street, the Receiving and Amplifying Station the wires branched
[page break]
out on the roof tops in all directions. By then there were two BBC programmes, Home Service on 342 mtrs, and the Light Programme on 1500 mtrs, so they converted to two pairs for two programmes. We were living at 25 Lawnswood Road but soon moved to a new house at 21 Whittley Road. I recall helping Leslie Wright – Dad’s foreman to erect a garage which cost £7.10.0 to house the new Austin 7 which cost £75 taxed and insured. The other personality I remember well was Walter Spurgeon, chief wireman.
Winifred and I attended Holycroft Council School. Some of the lessons were by listening to the radio, an innovation in those days, and it was my job to check the radio was working, each morning.
It was in Keighley that Mrs. Alice Kilham, my father’s secretary came on the scene. She lived in Oakworth with her daughter Mary, her husband being in a sanitorium being treated for TB. During very cold winter around 1933 the snow was six feet deep and they came to live with us at Wittley Road.
Winifred and I were in the Girl Guides and Boy Scouts respectively and we decided to take the Signaller badge which meant sending and receiving the morse code. We were told the speed required was 12. Having established a battery and buzzer, and a morse key and headphones by the beds in each bedroom, we soon memorised the code and communicated with each other, quickly reaching 12 words per minute. Eventually we progressed to 18 words per minute and then went to take the test. Only then did we find that the speed required was 12 LETTERS per minute, not words. 12 letters is only 2 words per minute. However this faux pas proved very useful about eight years hence.
After just a few years in Keighley, the system was working well and no longer presented a challenge. My father was approached by a group of businessmen from Norwich who were interested in the “wired wireless” system. They were owners of radio busineses [sic] who felt they shouId have a stake in the competition and bank managers hoping to earn a quick buck. All the bank managers were Yorkshiremen. So Norwich Relays Ltd. came into being with premises in St. John Maddermarket, and my father became Engineer and manager, taking with him his secretary and foreman Lesley Wright from Keighley. Allan Moulton joined the firm and was responsible for obtaining wayleaves, that is obtaining permission from owners to put wires on their property. He was a popular figure in Norwich, his main qualification for the job was that he played cricket for Norfolk and knew most people who mattered. Leslie died whilst in his thirties in Norwich.
Once again we moved house, to 119 Unthank Road, and Mrs. Kilham and Mary moved into a cottage in Blickling Court near Norwich Cathedral. Winifred I went to the Avenues Council School initially but not for long. I remember getting a prize for my ‘lecture' on how a TRF wireless worked, showing them the working radio I had made. Probably not very accurate but there was no-one present who could contradict me, fortunately.
At 13 I changed to the Norwich Junior Technical School in St. Andrews. Soon after we moved house yet again to a new house, “Wayside", in Plumstead Road, on the boundary of Norwich Aerodrome. Winifred then joined Mary at St. Monicas private school. On Saturday mornings I attended Art School on the top floor. I achieved very little there, the art master quite rightly concentrating on pupils who showed some potential. For an enjoyable two years we concentrated on technical
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subjects, woodwork, maths, physics, Chemistry, mechanics, technical drawing, metal and woodwork etc. The masters I remember well, ‘Chemi’ Reed the principle, Mr. Abigail, Mr. McCracken and Mr. Lishman. At the end of two-year course I transfered [sic] to Unthank College in Newmarket Road, joining the 5th. form. This was big change for me, the emphasis was on classical subjects, in English literature we spent a whole year studying Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Spencer's Fairy Queen. I couldn't: get interested in either but I later achieved a credit in the School Certificate by answering questions on A.G. Street’s Farmers Glory which I read in bed the night before the exam. Mr. Bertwhistle the English Lit. master was furious. For Physics and Mechanics I had tuition from Mr. Horace, the Principal's son and on Wednesday afternoons I visited “Chemi” Reed's house at 33 Britannia Rd. for tuition.
In early 1939 my father, Mr. Moulton and Mrs. Kilham acquired six run-down relay firms and the Nuvolion loudspeaker factory in South London from a Mr. Olivisi, a Frenchman. My father moved to Stretham to a flat in Pullman Court and Mrs. Kilham and Mary and to duCane Court in Balham where the Moultons also had a flat. My mother and Winifred moved to a house in West Norwood and I became a boarder at Unthank College. Soon after taking the School Certificate I joined my mother in London and we moved to a flat in New Southgate. I became articled to George Eric Titley, a Chartered Accountant in St Paul’s Churchyard, commuting to the city 6 days a week by underground. Rail fare was tenpence return per day and I was paid ten shillings per week. Fifty pence in 2004 currency The firm was Gladstone Titley and Co. at 61-63 St. Pauls Churchyard and I was the junior with qualified accountants Joe Oliver, Clarke and Jenkins, and Miss Miller the Secretary. It was amusing 6 years hence when I barged into a Board Meeting at 69 Lavender Hill, Sqdn/Ldr Jenkins still in uniform was sitting there when F/O Cliff Watson appearedstill [sic] in Battledress. Jenkins was called up in 1940 as an Account Squadron Leader.
On the 3rd. of September 1939 War was declared and any plans we all had for the future were kiboshed. During the blitz in 1940 to be nearer my father and to help out at Relays we moved home to Ascot Court in Acre Lane, Clapham.
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[underlined] JOINING UP [/underlined] .
The outbreak of war found me as a clerk articled to a Chartered Accountant in St. Paul's Yard. London. At the age of 17 1/2 it went without saying that within a year or two my occupation would be changed way or another. In the family Radio Relay business men were already leaving to join to Forces. My father was on an army reserve and expected to be called up at any time. I felt my best course was to abandon accountancy for the time being and try and help out; so I joined the firm as a General Factotum. During the Blitz on London my job was fault-finding and replacing the overhead lines, knocked down by Jerry bombers where buildings and whole streets were destroyed. The Radio Relay Service, a two programme four wire system in those days, linked the BBC with some tens of thousands of homes in South London, homes where the radio was never switched off. The system carried air raid warnings also. All too frequently the radio was interrupted by an announcer at Scotland Yard with “Attention please, here is an important announcement, an air raid warning has just been officially circulated". There were occasions when bombs were dropped before the sirens sounded, but never before the announcement was made on our Radio Relay System.
September, aged 18 1/2, I found my employers were trying hard to register me as being in a reserved occupation. The Manager, Allan Moulton, had already been successful in his own case, which was reasonable. Someone had to run the firm and my father had sailed off to Abbysinia [sic] in March. At the time I was working literally 18 hours per day and my fifty bob per week hardly paid for digs.
On a very rare afternoon-off I was walking down Kingsway and tried my luck at the R.A.F. Recruiting office. One look at an applicant for aircrew wearing glasses brought an instant decision from the man at the door. I walked along the Strand and down Whitehall, and having removed my spectacles tried the Royal Navy. I completed the application form and was told that I would be called for interview eventually, but there was a very long waiting list.
I tried the R.A.F. again about a week later having left-off my spectacles for several days, and an application form for training as a pilot was completed. Had I previous flying experience? Yes. Fortunately I was not asked for details, as a passenger with Alan Cobham's Flying Circus might not have carried much weight. - In 1936 we had lived at a house called "Wayside” in Plumsted Road, Norwich, on the Mousehold aerodrome boundary, with a panoramic view of the aerodrome, and I was fascinated by it all like most boys of my age. It was to be three months before I heard from the R.A.F. - the Navy had missed the boat – I was to report to the Aircrew Selection Board near Euston station, on the appointed day about a week hence, for 'medical and academic examinations'. The letter added that in the maths exam `log tables but not slide rules are permissable [sic] ’.
The great day arrived, and at 8.30 am. with about 80 other applicants we were told there would be three one hour written exams, Maths, English and General Knowledge, followed by a medical and a brief interview. Maths was a typical 5th. form end of term test, and English an essay with a wide choice of subjects. General knowledge was mainly common-sense. One of the questions I recall; "Is the distance from London to Warsaw nearer 100, 600 or 2000 miles?”. The Medical Exam was carried out by about 6 examiners, probably Doctors, on a production Iine basis.
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Then the interview after a delay of some hours. Three uniformed R.A.F. officers who had obviously been places in previous wars. "Why do you want to fly"? I have forgotten the particular piece of flannel I used, but it brought no comment and another member of the Board fired his shot, "Which is colder, minus 40 Centigrade or minus forty farenheit [sic] ? Instant answer to that, I'd hear. it before somewhere. The third member asked "that does your Father do" I replied "He is an officer in the R.A.S.C. fighting the Italians in Abbysinia [sic] ". This brought a chuckle from two of them for some reason and the interview was over. I would be advised by post of their decision after the exam. results had been studied.
A week later I was told to report to Euston for attestation, actual reporting for duty would follow after some weeks. There was a brief ceremony and I was given a document which stated that " AC2 Clifford Watson 1384956 has been accepted for training as a pilot in the R. A. F. and is to be prepared to report for duty of a few days notice". It went on to state further that his teeth should receive the earliest attention, one extraction and two fillings.
About three months later my call-up papers arrived, and meanwhile I had met two other local lads whose paths had converged with my own and were to stay parallel for the next six months or so. Raymond Colin Chislett, the son of a Battersea butcher, .and Tom King., of Wandsworth. The three of us reported to the R.T.O. at Paddington and joined a party bound for Babbacombe near Torquay.
During the week at Babbacombe we were issued with uniforms, introduced to drill and Service discipline, lectured on the history of the R.A.F. and told something of what the future held for us. We were made to feel that we really belonged and were indeed priveleged [sic] to be chosen to follow in the footsteps of 'The Few'. We were perhaps more than a little naive to think that we were all destined to become fighter pilots, but we were made to feel that the fate of England and the empire rested entirely with us. The Bombers were taken for granted and were not in the forefront of than news at that time. In any case we Londoners had seen our Fighters in action and - we admit it - imagined ourselves in their shoes. There was a tremendous urge to get on with it and to make a success of it. A great sense of urgency prevailed. I remember well that first day in the Royal Air Force. We were advised to write down our Service numbers so we wouldn't forget them, and above all, we had strawberries and cream for tea. The last I saw of strawberries and cream for about eight years, and as for forgetting one's Service number...! Perhaps it was intended as a joke, but we were taking everything very seriously. At the end of the week there was another Pep talk, very well delivered by a Squadron Leader - and equally well received. He remarked that about Babbacombe, people will say "Never in the History of human conflict, have so many been burgered [sic] about by so few". A misquotation of those immortal words. He went on to say that the two most important weeks in your R.A.F. careers are the first and last, and "you have already survived 50% of them, Good Luck chaps, and have a good trip". There was probably a lot more feeling and sincerity behind those words than we realised at the time. He had seen it all and been there 'in the last lot'. "Have a good trip” was to have real meaning in due course.
A short journey by train took us to no. 10 Initial Training Wing at Newquay for 8 weeks of ground training. We were accommodated in
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Trenance Hotel, one of many taken over by the R.A.F. Another hotel was used for lectures in Navigation, Airmanship, Aerodynamics, Engines, Aircraft Recognition, Signalling, R.A.F. Law and Administration, etc. etc. some drill and P.T., and swimming in the local baths. The sea and beach were out of bounds due to mines and other surprises awaiting the enemy. I had to concentrate hard in the classroom on everything, except signalling. The required speed for sending and receiving morse was 12 words per minute and I had been happy at 18 w.p.m. in the Boy Scouts.
The 18 w.p.m. came about through a misunderstanding. My sister Winifred (a Girl Guide) and I were learning morse for our Signaller badges and were told that a speed of 15 was required, so we practiced until we were competent at 18. It was only when we took the test that we learned the required speed was 15 letters and not words per minute. However this mistake was now serving me well.
The only part I did not enjoy was the cross-country runs, but someone had to be in the last three. After two weeks we were told now that we had smartened-up a bit we would wear white flashes in our caps so we would not be mistaken for real airmen.
There was great speculation as to where we would go for flying training. Maybe stay in Britain, or was it to be Canada, U.S.A., South Africa or Rhodesia, and was there not a possibility of it being Australia?. Meanwhile we must concentrate on passing the current hurdle, it could not by any means be taken for granted that we would all pass the course. In fact after only four weeks, four out of the original 50 were "scrubbed" - a new word to add to our rapidly 'increasing vocabulary.
After about 5 weeks we were issued with some flying kit, boots and Sidcot suits, goggles, helmet and a full issue of gloves - silk, wool, chamois and gauntlets. 4 pairs worn together, and a fifth, electricalIy heated, yet to came. We were not to know that it would be 15 months before we wore any of this. I doubt whether our destination was known to anyone at I.T.W. except that it was overseas somewhere. Seven days embarkation leave and the entire course was posted to West Kirby, no. 1 P.D.C., near Birkenhead on the Wirral. We were joined by about 300 other u/t Pilots from other I.T.W.s and it was just a matter of waiting for the draft. There were parades each morning and we were allowed out of camp at mid-day. It was here that Tom, Ray and I teamed up with John Heggarty, a u/t Pilot who had been at 11 I.T.W. in Scarborough. He was from Birkenhead, of Anglo/French parentage. The four of us visited Liverpool every evening, a place crowded with Navy, Army and Air Force types mostly in transit to somewhere or other. Scores of ships were loading in the Mersey, but after a couple of weeks it was a special train for us to Greenock on the Clyde for immediate embarkation on the "Mooltan", a merchant ship of same 30,000 tons. Our 350 were accomodated [sic] on "D" Deck, just above the water-line, where we spent most of our time, not by choice but by order. Some slept on the mess tables, others under them, with the top layer of bodies in hammocks, a crippling device. To realise that hammocks were the traditional sleeping arrangements for British sailors left me unimpressed and I felt that something far more superior could have been devised. However, navies of many countries seem to favour them. Once aboard, there was no going back. On the second day aboard we were tugged down the Clyde and next morning counted over 40 big ships steaming very slowly in a north-
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westerly direction out at sea. Obviously we were bound for Canada, hence the heavy flying kit .and four pairs of gloves. A week ought to see us in the St. Lawrence. How wrong we were. the convoy was shepherded by some very impressive naval ships, Cruisers, destroyers etc. and Sunderland flying boats were in constant attendance for the first few days. After three weeks of steaming in all directions, first into the freezing cold, then warmer and finally very hot indeed, at 0500 one day the engines slowed and finally stopped; a rattling of chains and then silence. All very dramatic but a buzz on the P. A. system told us we had arrived in Freetown. Portholes were to remain closed. We may go up on deck but on no account were we to remove our shirts nor buy anything from the natives. By mid-day the temperature below decks was almost unbearable and there was no respite from that for a further two weeks. Salt water showers were available at all times, it was just a matter of stripping and walking through the shower. No need for a towel, but in any case that was reserved for absorbing perspiration and we became accustomed to the salt water. Food on board was very good under the circumstances. Two orderlies from each "table" would collect it from the galley (vocabulary still improving) and dish up, and after the meal two more orderlies would clean the tables and wash up. The chores were shared on a roster basis at each table, and each had some duty to perform every few days. We were very fortunate in that we were cadets and not yet real airmen we spent some of our time attending lectures in the second class lounge. We estimated there were about 3000 troops aboard. There was lots of talent for the almost daily concerts. A daily newssheet called "DER TAG”, together with the P.A. system kept us up-to-date with the news. The 9 o-clock news was a must.
Five weeks out of Liverpool it who getting cold again, even below decks, and greatcoats were essential deckwear for the endless lifeboat drills. There were lifeboats but for most of us it was a matter of parading on deck near a stack of Carley floats. The subject was better not discussed, there was no satisfactory answer to abandoning ship.
The Mooltan carried one gun mound at the stern above the propellers, manned by a RoyaI Artillery crew in transit. It seemed to be of about 4" calibre but was not fired during our voyage. It was said the deck would cave in, but this might have been an exaggeration. There were also two ramps off the stern for depth charges of which there was a supply near the ramps. The sixth week was really cold and wet and we estimated our position as somewhere in Antarctica. We then turned more or less north and after a total of seven weeks dropped anchor late one afternoon a few miles out at sea, with much speculation about our location. At about 7 pm. the shore was like Blackpool illuminations. Wherever we are, don`t they know there's a war on? A buzz on the P.A. system told us we would be disembarking next day and our British currency would be of no use to us in this foreign country. We should hand-in all currency, and get a receipt which would be exchanged for local currency when we got ashore. Next morning we entered the docks and disembarked. It was only then we found we were in Durban and were taken straight to the Transit Camp at Clairwood. The army contingent remained on-board and were understood to be bound for action in the Middle
East. So we had arrived in South Africa, and a very congenial and pleasant place it turned out to be.
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[underlined] SOUTHERN RHODESIA [/underlined] .
Clairwood Camp was just a few miles from Durban and there we spent 7 days, very enjoyable, but for the first two days, stoney broke. We had handed in all our money aboard ship but it was to be 10 days before it was exchanged for local currency. However, we seemed to get into Durban every day and we were made very welcome in the Service canteens and clubs.
Before I left England, I was given a card which stated that LAC Cliff. Watson was the son of a respected member of the Battersea Rotary Club and any co-operation afforded to him would be greatly appreciated. I noticed the Rotary insignia at the doorway of a Barclays bank in Durban and asked to see the manager. Could I please borrow £5 and I would refund it as soon as I was paid. 45 years later I would certainly not undertake such a venture. It happened to be the first Friday in the month which was the day of the monthly Rotary luncheon. The three lads from Battersea were invited to lunch and each given £10 on condition that we did not refund it. This was hospitality indeed. Several times in Durban we were entertained by the local people, and of course the environment was completely strange to us, so were the bunches of bananas, pawpaws and other fruits.
After about a week to regain our land legs, we embarked on a train and steamed north. The train was a coal burner and we were aboard for 3 days bound for Bulawayo. Food on the train was really first-class. At one stage we were told to disembark for a spot of exercise [sic] and whilst this was in progress the train moved off. We were marched in a direction at right-angles to that of the train and met up with it about an hour later. This was my first experience of African trains, and the 4-berth cabins, rather superior to even today's "sleepers" in Britain. Looking back on it 35 years later when I was concerned with radio communications between trains and stations in the U.K., - my firm was trying to Introduce a communications system-, I recalled chatting with the Radio Officer in his Radio Cabin on the train whist he was on the morse key in contact with the station at Mafeking. It was many years later that communication with trains in Britain was established.
After a very pleasant three-day journey, we arrived in Bulawayo and buses took us to Hillside Camp, formerly the Agricultural Show Ground. We were accommodated literally in what had been the Pig Sties. These were merely wattle poles supporting corrugated iron roofs with hessian round the poles to represent walls. The whole structure was whitewashed and with plenty of fresh air the accommodation was ideal. There must have been about 600 trainee pilots at Hillside Camp, and we embarked on a second I.T.W. course of ground training. There was however a single Tiger Moth on which we learned to swing the prop. and start the engine. So at last we had sat in an aeroplane although it wasn't going anywhere. At least it was supposed to be anchored down, but an Australian did taxi it a hundred yards or so after an evening of celebration.
Our stay in Bulawayo was certainly very pleasant, we visited Cecil Rhodes grave at Matopas, the ancient ruins of Zimbabwe, spent weekends on farms, enjoyed the swimming and so on, but our minds were on the war of which we were not feeling a part. Pearl Harbour had brought the
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Americans into the fray, several Capital Ships had been lost and things were going badly 'up north'.
In January came a very welcome posting, to 25 E.F.T.S. (Elementary Flying Training School) at Belvedere, on the outskirts of Salisbury. Here the day started at 0400 and we enjoyed tea and toast of our own making before assembling at 0425 for two-mile march to the airfield. By 0500 half the course would be standing-by for flying and the other half lectures and more ground training. Breakfast was between 0900 and 1030 hrs. which included the 2 mile march each way, and after breakfast the two halves of the course changed over. Flying started on the sixth of Jan. with what was to be a typical day, with 30 minutes of flying instruction at 0515, and lectures after breakfast. Addresses by two ex-fighter pilots F/O Newton and a Flight Sergeant whose left leg was in plaster. The following day I managed to get in an hour’s flying with P/O Bentley, concentrating on turns, glides and climbing. From the outset the instructor frequently cut the throttle without warning sometimes deliberately putting the aircraft into a spin. then telling the pupil to get on with it. My next flying session was with Ft/Sgt Oates as P/O Bentley was on leave and in six weeks of flying instruction managed 12 hours with 7 different instructors. A final three hours was spent with F/O Newton in one hour sessions and I was full of confidence and looking forward to the C.F.I.'s test the following day.
Maybe in retrospect I was over confident, even though most of my friends had been "scrubbed", including Hancocks, Robinson, Morgan, King, Barlow, Vivian, Bolton, Friend, Britton, Jones and Fry. Having made what I thought were two acceptable circuits and landings, the C.F.I.'s final remarks were "Sorry old lad, but as a Service Pilot you make a bloody good rear gunner". I did not regard these as being the words of the Prophet, but so ended my career as a u/t Pilot after 9 months in the R.A.F.
All was not lost however, like all the others whose Personal file was stamped "wastage", I found myself at Disposals Depot, which also happened to be at Belvedere, and in good company. All of us were sadly disillusioned and disappointed at failing the Pilot's Course, and the reasons given for the apparent failure were seldom accepted. Where do we go from here in the long term was the main question, and the opportunity to influence this came at an interview at Group H.Q. in Salisbury. The only guidance came from others who had already had their interviews and were awaiting a posting. The alternatives appeared to be many, we could opt out completely and remuster to ACH GD, reduced to the lowest rank of Airman 2nd. Class and thence take pot luck with no trade and no personal ambition. But we had joined the R.A.F. with too much purpose for this to be acceptable. We could apply for training as Observer which at that time embraced both Navigator and Bomb Aimer duties, but we were meeting chaps just starting that course who had waited six months for it after failing the pilot's course, and this indicated that it could be a year more before we qualified. The most logical answer appeared to be the Air Gunner Course which lasted only six weeks, and apparently with hardly any waiting list, so in less than two months it seemed we could become a sergeant with half a wing, not quite what we set out to achieve, but a far cry from where we stood at the time.
At the interview at Group H.Q. I asked why I had failed and was shown the comments made by my instructors. With the exception of the
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C.F.I.’s comment they were all favourable and I became a little argumentative. For the first time I learned that on the C.F.I. test I had climbed at less than full throttle but at the correct air speed with the normal rate of climb. What I should have done apparently was give it full throttle, keeping the correct air speed and letting the rate of climb take care of itself. On the training aircraft the emphasis had been on speed and rate of climb whereas it should have been on speed only and full throttle.
I remarked that the C.F.I.'s aircraft was more like a Gladiator than a Tiger Moth. The alternative careers were as we had deduced amongst ourselves and I applied to remuster to u/t Wireless Operator/Air Gunner and to do the A/G course as soon as possible. This was approved on the spot, and my file was endorsed “Watson requests an A/G course merely for the quickness in getting onto ops." I was supposed to start the course the following week.
It was to be three months before I was actively posted to Moffat to do the Air Gunner Course, and the greater part of this was spent on leave, returning to camp periodically to check progress. We had only to walk along the road away from town to be offered a lift which generally meant spending the rest of the day with new friends, and quite often arranging to spend a week or so with them. It was on the 15th. of Feb. Tom King and I were spending 10 days leave with our hosts Mr. & Mrs. Bedford at Poltimore Farm, Marandellas that we listened to Churchill's speech, with the dreadful news of the fall of Singapore. This led to a general discussion on the likely future plans of the war and it was generally felt there would be an allied landing at Dakar with the assistance of the French, and the forces would move north and then east to catch Rommel in a pincer movement. Not too far out in our argument, only 2000 miles, but we had the general scheme and timing right. Later we were shown around the tobacco "barns" where 12,000 leaves were drying in each of 10 barns. My diary records that "one of the most interesting things we were shown was the castrating of 300 pigs" A rather messy business", perhaps I was less squeamish in those days. Later about 2000 head of cattle were dipped including 3 wicked looking bulls. The two children tried to keep us amused, and with great success. We repaired their bicycles, small car, swing and dolls' house furniture, the dolls house being about 20 feet square. We carved out the names Wendy (8) and Cliff (20) on a tree and really began to enjoy the Rhodesian way of life. We cycled over to Chakadenga Farm and had tea with Mrs. Nash and also met the local jailer. We tried to repay all this kindness by making ourselves generally useful, and I recall changing the oil in Mrs. Nash's Chevrolet and repairing the lights. We also refitted the long-wire aerial on the house radio and refurbished the engine house which accommodated the lighting plant and batteries.
We tried to spend.as much time away from camp as possible, our idea being 'out of sight, out of mind'. Occasionally the S.W.O caught up with us and we were detailed for guard duty on the aerodrome, a 12 hour guard working 2 hours on and four off. The complete guard comprised 6 airmen, 4 on standby in the guard room, one cycling around the aerodrome and one standing in a sentry box at the side of the double gates which were normally closed. There were neither fences-nor ditches linking the gate posts and it was easier to drive a car onto the airfield on the wrong side of the gate posts than to bother with the gate. Generally the Orderly Officer carried out his inspection about 7.pm. but on one
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occasion suddenly appeared about 3 am. from the direction of the airfield and drove up to the main gate on his way out, parking so near the gate it could not be opened. I turned out the guard, which took about 5minutes and we were treated to a tirade and lecture covering several subjects including how utterly futile the guard was. One of the chaps said “you are absolutely right Sir" which made matters worse and he stormed back into his car. The headlights had been left on and the car wouldn't start, so we leaned our rifles against the sentry box and pushed the car backwards so we could open the gates. Finally the entire guard pushed the car forward and it started without trouble, but headed back towards camp. We decided to remain at the open gate, and a few minutes later the car returned at great speed, and disappeared through the gate in a tremendous cloud of dust without further formality. We had good laugh but it did little for the morale of chaps whose ambitions had been thwarted and who felt they were wasting their time in the R.A.F. and, even more so in guarding a gate which had no real purpose with blank ammunition and rifles which it would be too dangerous to fire. By the end of March the aerodrome guard was taken more seriously and comprised 24 Europeans and about 60 Africans, which meant the remustering aircrew trainees were on guard every few nights. I was given the job running the Post Office and Stores which exempted me from guard duties but also curtailed my leave periods.
On the 3rd. April Tom King and 20 others were posted to 24 C.A.O.S. at Moffat, near Gwelo, about half-way between Salisbury and Bulawayo, for their Air Gunner Course. The intake was 50 per month and we wondered where the other 40 had come from. Meanwhile Ray Chislett the other member of the Battersea trio- was doing extremely well at Cranbourne flying Oxfords. Root and Robertson were killed the previous day in a Harvard whilst officially on practice instrument flying but actually beating up a tree and misjudging matters
On the 1st. of May, I was posted to Moffat and started the A-G course. Things seemed to be happening in our favour at long last; and had been delayed because of a large influx of remustered ground crews who had got out of Singapore just in time, and also another large influx of Aussies for Air Gunner training. It was good to see Tommy King pass out as a Sgt. A-G and for Cpl. Luck to receive his commission.
On Sun. the 10th. of May there was a church parade in best blues and khaki topee, held in Gwelo. Two days later L.A.C. Chick Henbest, u/t A-G ex u/t Pilot shot a large hole in his own aircraft's tail. When he as charged with the offence he brought an expert witness, the Station Armament Officer ! - to state that such a thing was technically impossible. The Air-Gunner training was partly intergrated [sic] with that of the Navigator's, and on the 13th. May on such an occasion 'Ace' Buchanan and another A-G, piloted by Sgt. Reed, force-landed near QueQue and were missing for 5 hours
In the four weeks at Moffat we carried out 9 hours of Air firing in Anson aircraft using a Vickers Gas Operated gun of .303 calibre. This was mounted on a Scarfe ring with the gunner standing and firing at a drogue towed by a Miles Master aircraft. 200 rounds were fired during each exercise [sic] , the 3 "pans" of ammo. having been filled by the gunner and then 'doctored' by an armourer with faulty rounds, and other simulated faults. The only turrets available were on the ground, and comprised an ancient Frazer Nash, Daimler and electrical Boulton & Paul. A total of 4 hours was spent in them. We were supposed to swing the
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turret aiming at moving light images on the wall but in practice the bulbs in the ring-sights were all faulty.
On the 29th. May we graduated and were presented with brevets and tapes. The course was posted to Capetown but I had to report to Salisbury to give evidence at Gooding's Court Martial. Gooding had stolen my Agfa Carat camera and scores of other items in Bulawayo. Meanwhile on the news, 1000 Bombers over the Rhur [sic] again and 37 missing. A few days previously the very first raid on this scale was made on Cologne with 44 aircraft missing. The Middle-East war was becoming more intensive and in Russia Jerry was in real trouble, but we seemed a very long way from it all.
One of my friends on the Pilots course was Ian Smith who lived in Salisbury and with whom I used to go looking for buck in the early mornings. Ian had failed the course like most of us but being a Rhodesian had obtained his discharge locally and joined the Southern Rhodesia Light Battery currently at the K.G. VI barracks. I went to the barracks in the afternoon and saw Norman, and was introduced to Solomon, Slim and other Rhodesians in the S.R. Army Medical Corps. After tea in the mess we went to the local bioscope to see 'East of the River'. On the 13th. of June I managed to get another 19 days leave which was spent with Mr. & Mrs. James at their farm at Gilston, about 16 miles south of Salisbury. With three Aussies we had a wonderful holiday, riding, cycling, tennis, swimming, all at the farm. We rode up to the bushman's caves in a copje 4 miles into the bundu and photographed them. To the Aussies it was like being home and I concluded there was no alternative to this sort of life.
On my return to Disposals Depot my stolen camera was returned to me and I found that Gooding was on yet another charge,- stealing a W/T Set - . A few more days leave to say cheerio to all my friends in Salisbury, and I returned to Gwelo to find that I was posted to Bulawayo to give evidence at the Court Martial. I stayed with Mr. & Mrs. Rose for a week or so and spent some time at the Cement works where Mr. Rose was Manager. I was offered a job there if I would return after the war and for a long time this formed the basis of my post-war plan, but a great deal was to happen before that time came. The Court Martial was a very formal affair, and Gooding was charged with theft on about 45 counts. He had not disposed of anything he had stolen for personal gain, and pleaded Kleptomania. He was sentenced to dismissal from the R.A.F. after immediate return to U.K., and recommended for psychiatric observation. He survived the war, certified unfit for Military service and resumed his career with a firm of solicitors in Surrey. The case was finished just in time for me to join the rest of the course on the 1st. of July at Bulawayo station. In Gwelo I had bought a tin trunk which was now nearly full of presents, pyjamas for Hilda, stockings for Mum, embroidering material, tobacco, cigarettes, jam and so on.
After a 55 hour train journey we arrived in Kapstaad and enjoyed Iunch with John Heggarty before joining another train to Retreat and the drive to Polsmoor Transit Camp by bus. It rained heavily for a couple of days and the activity was just one big reunion. I met friends I had not seen since Newquay. Dicky Aires and Jack Frost were there as Sgt. pilots, Howard Iliffe (1090111) and Bob Hildred also, having trained as pilots at George, in the Union. Arthur Brittain a Sgt. Observer and Stewart Evans who was in the Officers Mess at Kumalo. In the next four
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weeks we spent most of our time in Capetown, making a beeline for the Soldiers Club. The welcome we received from the South Africans was positively overwhelming, and people were literally queueing up to entertain us. On the 4th. of July a group of four of us including Ray Chislett and two Maltese soldiers met Mrs. Williams and had tea at her flat. After tea we motored out to a vineyard and got quite merry on four glasses of their own wine. On the way out one of the tyres was punctured and it took us less than three minutes to change the wheel. In the evening we went to the Odeon Bioscope at Seapoint with complimentary tickets which appeared from out of the blue. Howard. Iliffe, John Heggarty and I spent a great deal of time together in Capetown where Howard & I met two young ladies. One of them, introduced as Cheri de la Chene said she was French and had spent five years in Paris, but she could not understand my efforts at speaking French. John Heggarty had quite a brainwave and I introduced him as a member of the Free French Forces,-L'Aviation Francais Libre-. John was absolutely fluent in native French and soon discovered that Cheri was neither French nor a University student, but a schoolgirl of 14 at the Convent. Whilst in Capetown I met Binedall with whom I used to correspond before the war, and he gave me a large matchbox which I left with Mrs. Williams' mother to be collected after the war. I have left it rather too late. The climb up Table Mountain with Ray was very interesting and from the top we had a wonderful view of Muizeuburg. This reminds me of one night during a trial blackout at Muizenburg, Heggarty and I met Mrs. Macbeth who invited us to dinner on the following day. We gladly accepted and on arrival at the house next day referred to her as Mrs. Shakespeare. This was laughed off and we spent a very enjoyable evening. After dinner we went to a show in Muizenburg and met a lady who had lived near Battersea Park. In 1952 in Mbeya in Tanganyika I was talking to another 'Radio Ham' in Muizenburg arid mentioned my faux pas with Mrs. Macbeth's name. He said he was living in Mrs. Macbeth's guest house and she had related the story at dinner only a few days previously. Stuttafords of Adderley Street provided a very interesting experience for Heggarty and me. We wandered into a tea-room the likes of which we had never seen before, it seemed the ultimate in luxury. We asked mildly for just two cups of tea but up came the whole works of silver teaset with lots of pastries and cakes. We said no thankyou, really, just two cups of tea, but the lady was adamant. We said it was jolly nice but funds were limited and the cakes were beyond our means. She said she would be very cross if we didn't have at least half a dozen cakes and then gave us a bill -for 1/3d. Fixed charge for two, she said. Wonderful people, it was embarrassing at times. We called in a Milk Bar for a milkshake and they insisted it was on the house. We would buy a bunch of grapes for a 'ticky', -3d- and they refused payment. One Saturday Ray and I spent the day with the Brandt family who lived at Rosebank . We went for a run with them in the car in the afternoon, round Table Mountain and took some very good photographs. They also drove us to the Lion Match Company's factory in Capetown, where we were given a tour - and quite a lot of labels- a wonderful finale to my first trip to Africa.
After meeting up with our old friends whose paths had taken many different ways and finally converged, but not without the loss of several due to accidents, the resentment at failing the pilot's course had just about worn off. The original crowd of rookies at Newquay were still basically together and covering all aircrew 'trades'. Someone had
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[photograph]
[underlined] AIR GUNNER COURSE [/underlined]
[underlined] APRIL 1942 [/underlined] [underlined] 24 C.A.O.S. MOFFAT, GWELO. [/underlined] [underlined] S. RHODESIA [/underlined]
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[underlined] POSTSCRIPT [/underlined]
The A/G course was rather an anti-climax after the concentration and determined outlook on the pilots course. Most of us felt we had wasted our time and had been let down.
During a "lecture" on the Browning gun by Cpl. Paddy Gilligan he noticed correctly that my eyes were closed and pointing to me, yelled "You, what was I saying?", I replied "You were saying 'as the breach block moves to the rear the cam on the rear sear rides along that on the barrel extention [sic] . . . ' There followed a discussion on my detailed phraselogy [sic] and he wound up by shouting "Your problem Watson is you don't speak effing english". I replied that I try to speak the King's english Cpl! and that did it, he swore to fix me. Study of the Browning gun comprised learning parrot-fashion the sequence of events and other odd statistics such as effective range and rate of fire. There was a drawing on the wall which gave us some idea of what it looked like, but the Browning was something for the future, the R.A.F. currently uses the V.G.O. or so we were told. The following day Gilligan told me to go to the billet and make sure the African had cleaned all the lampshades, including the one in his little room. This I did and two hours later reported they were all clean. The next day with no preamble I was told to report to the Orderly Room immediately. I was marched in to the C.O. and charged with failing to carry out an order, and also making a false report. Gilligan gave evidence and said the lampshade in his billet was filthy, I could not have checked it. The C. O. accepted this and I was given a severe rep. and 7 days jankers. I went straight away to the billet and I asked the S.W.O. to accompany me. He delegated a Sgt. Clerk and together we checked the offending lampshade. Sure enough it was filthy. I found the african cleaner and he swore that he had cleaned the shade but the Cpl. had then made him change it for one in the next but where they were all dirty. We all trooped next door and saw that all were indeed filthy except one.
The Sgt. could see what Gilligan was up to and endorsed my written report addressed to the C.O. which also applied for redress of grievance. The result was that my Severe Rep. was cancelled and so was the balance of the jankers.
At the end of the course the exam. papers were marked by Gilligan and he gave me 61% in all subjects which was the absolute minimum for a pass. Again I wrote to the C.O. and he agreed that Gilligan was up to his tricks again. He changed the exam. results to an average of 93% If I had not been so argumentative I could very well have "failed the course"
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to fly the thing, but there was a lot of other work to be done also. A cutting from the Rhodesia Herald whilst at Moffat spelt it out:-
I wished to be a pilot,
And you, along with me;
But if we all were pilots,
Where would the Air Force be?
It takes guts to be a gunner,
To sit out in the tail,
When the Messerschmitts are coming,
And the slugs begin to wail.
The plot's just a chauffeur;
It's his job to fly the plane;
But it's we who do the fighting,
Though we may not get the fame.
If we must all be gunners,
Then let us make this bet;
We'll be the best damn gunners
That have left this station yet
Nearly half a century later it does seem somewhat corny.
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[underlined] OPERATIONAL TRAINING. [/underlined]
And so to the 2nd. August 1942; we boarded HMT J/6, The Monarch of Bermuda and were shown to our cabins, stowed our kit and were issued with passes to go ashore until 1500 hrs. A last look at Table Mountain and Kapstaad and at 1630 on the 3rd. we left South Africa, hoping and firmly intending one day to return. The 10 day voyage to Freetown was a very pleasant cruise, escorted by two Battle Cruisers and three Corvettes and accompanied by The Empress of Russia, we ploughed along at a steady 12 knots. Our favourite pastime was reading the inter-ship messages on the Aldis lamps. Among other things we learned that one of the Empress's boilers was u/s and shut down. Which limited the speed of the whole convoy. There were several U Boat warnings during daylight and these coincided with lifeboat drills, which were taken very seriously.
The accommodation was very good, all the R.A.F. NCOs being accommodated six in each cabin. The cabins were equipped as they had been for luxury cruising pre-war, each with a toilet room with saltwater shower. The portholes remained open the whole time, but this time we were on 'A' and not 'D' Deck. In the Sgts Mess Italian P.O.W.'s waited upon us, and make a very good job of it. All fatigues are carried out by them and they caused no trouble at all. The vigilance of the Polish guards probably influenced that, their bayonets being fixed ALL the time, and there were few words passing between the guards and prisoners, just a few gestures with the bayonet. The Poles had been in action since August 1939 and were a long way from home, first defending their country, evacuating to Yugoslavia, and then making their way to Abadan to join the British. There were 1800 Italian prisoners aboard, mostly captured in Bardia and Tobruk about two years previously. They were a meek and miserable-looking lot. One of our 'stewards' who we called 'Grandpa' was a Cpl Major, and had medals for the Bolshevist and Abbysinian [sic] wars. He spoke very little English, but excellent French, and in return for a few cigarettes made me a bracelet in which he put photos of my fiancee [sic] , Hilda, and me. The material was similar to duralumin and he claimed it was a piece from a shot-down British Bomber in Abbysinia [sic] , a most unlikely story. His only tools were a pen-knife, a razor blade and a 4” nail for engraving. The Italians were confident the Axis would win the war and were expecting Stukas, Fokker Wolfe Condors and 'U' Boats to appear at any time.
There were several hundred European civilians aboard, mostly evacuees from Alexandria and Cairo, who seemed to think they owned the ship. Many of them were ducked during the Crossing the Line ceremony, we claimed exemption, being old timers at that sort of thing!!
There was some form of entertainment almost every evening; mainly variety concerts organised by the troops. During one of these I recall a wounded ex 8th-Army Soldier impersonating Stanley Holloway in his Northern accent with a poem,
"The Reason Why"
The unity of Empire .is seen in ships galore,
As they plough in convoy fashion, to Britain's island shore,
Across the world's big oceans, around continents as well,
The Bulldog breed keeps up the creed that history will tell.
We've roughed it on this convoy, we've lived like herded sheep,
Yet all can see, it's got to be, if freedom's cause we'll keep
We're mixed like breeded cattle, the R. A. F. as well,
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That R.A:F. who two .years ago Just drove the 'uns to 'ell.
They say the good ship Monarch, J6 her tag, goes back to Afric [sic] shortly,
but always behind that Flag.
The Flag we're fighting Jerry for,
the Flag of which we're proud,
the Flag which may be a tattered rag,
but with honoured blood endowed.
In that environment and atmosphere this was pretty stirring stuff.
On the 14th. of August we dropped anchor in Freetown. Just as a year ago, it was very hot and humid, with an overcast sky. This time we were not restricted to below decks, but enjoyed the freedom of the ship and were able to trade with the natives. Sunderland seaplanes were seen patrolling out to sea, with Walrus amphibeans [sic] doing about 60. m.p.h., around the harbour. There was lots of signalling between ships and we could cope with the morse, but the semaphore was too advanced and clever for us.
Sunday the 16th at 0600 the Monarch and the Empress slipped out of Freetown and rejoined the Royal Navy out at sea. We were a little concerned for an hour or two, as the sun was rising on the port beam, but we eventually turned right and the sun returned to it's proper place, astern. We expected to reach England by thursday, but rumours of the invasion of France were rife and my diary actually records that this might delay us a little!. The general topic of conversation was what would it be like going through Customs. We were advised on the P.A. system to hand in any unauthorised arms and ammunition, including loot taken from the enemy. I had 3 kitbags, a tin trunk, suitcase and issue R.A.F. webbing and packs, and somewhere in that lot was 25 lbs. of sugar, 10 lbs of tea, 8 pairs of silk stockings, 2 dress lengths, 15lbs. of jam, lady's pyjamas, 2000 cigarettes and other dutiable material. I also had a very small .22 revolver in my pocket and decided to risk it. It was really a toy, hardly a weapon of war. In the very early hours of the 26th. of August we docked at Greenoch. An hour later our party of 240 or so assembled on deck with a mountain of kit, all newly trained sprog aircrew sergeants. The train pulled in to within 100 yards of the ship and in less than 30 minutes we were on our way by train to Glasgow, then on to London. Whilst changing stations in London, I telephoned the office, BATtersea 8485, at 0730 and was disappointed that Hilda was not yet at work!
We arrived at no. 3 P.D.C. Bournemouth and moved into luxury hotels, expecting to be sent on leave immediately, hardly worth unpacking, but this was not to be. We were interviewed several times, medically examined, kit reorganised and generally messed about for a week. According to my pay book, I was a Sgt. Air Gunner, u/t Wireless Operator, and at one interview I was told that this could not be so. Either I could stay as a Sgt. A-G or lose my tapes and become an AC2 u/t Wireless op., eventually doing a wireless op. course. It was emphasised that the whole business of training was highly organised into streams, and once in the main stream it was better to drift with it rather than to try and change course. Streams could not cross, but only merge. All very academic and enlightening so it was agreed that u/t wireless op. would be deleted from my paybook, and of course, having done a couple of tours as a rear gunner I could always apply for a wireless course.
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That's what the man said and I was in no position to argue, 'Just a couple of tours'.
A week later we were on leave, and Hilda met me at Waterloo after just over a year apart. We had a few hours in London before going up to Barnoldswick to take my mother by surprise. After five rather hectic days of visiting relatives and friends we returned to London and met Hilda's parents and relatives, for just one day before returning to Bournemouth.
We were billeted in an attic at Ocean Lodge and took our meals at the Vale Royal. The food was the most unappetising and uninteresting we had seen in the R.A.F. so far. Life in Bournemouth consisted entirely of parades, square bashing, P.T. drill, lectures and swimming, each activity taking place some miles away from the previous one.
Bournemouth was full of sprog air crews, 90% Sergeants, few realised what the future might hold, and; in retrospect, I don't recall even thinking about it.
We were clear of Bournemouth on the 2nd. of October, and posted to 25 O.T.U., Finningley. near Doncaster.
The first 14 days were spent in lectures, practical work on guns in the armoury, and in firing on various ranges. We were introduced to the FN20 rear turret and relieved to have the opportunity of stripping the .303 Browning guns. We who had trained in Rhodesia did not advertise the fact that we had never actually seen a real Browning gun, only a wooden model, all our air-firing having been carried out on V.G.O.'s [Vickers Gas Operated) guns. We had spent several hours in a turret on the ground in Rhodesia. A Boulton & Paul electrically operated mid-upper type as fitted to a Defiant but bearing no resemblance to the rear turrets of Wellingtons and Whitleys.
11th. November was relatively peaceful at Finningley. In the world outside the Allies had landed in North Africa and occupied the coastal strip from Casablanca, through Oran to 50 miles east of Algiers where the big build-up was taking place. Jerry was being pushed towards Tunisia and Rommel's Afrika Corps was in full retreat in Libya, having been pushed out of Egypt, The Huns marched into hitherto unoccupied France and hard fighting was still going on in Stalingrad. Madagascar was in British hands. My diary records that Jerry lost over 600 aircraft in two days, according to the B.B.C. Nearer home I also recorded that "I flew today for the first time with my pilot, Sgt. Rutherford, and with Sgt. Bishop, W/optr., on circuits and bumps. Our Navigator Allan Willoughby is at Bircotes doing cross-countries". For some of us the pace was slow, and some of the time was spent in 'Brains Trust' sessions. Here a team of experts would sit on the platform and questions on any subject would be asked by the rest of us. In reply to the question "How do you think we should deal with the Huns after the war?", the M.O. replied "Castrate the bloody lot, the R.A.M.C. could do that in only a couple of weeks". Most of the discussions however were in a more serious vain. Over this period the weather was not very good. No 14 Course crews have been helping the Landgirls digging up potatoes and 12 Course chaps were heaving coal, We then had coal and coke allocated and delivered to our billets, which eliminated the need to pinch it from the Officers' Mess. we were accomodated [sic] in the peace-time married quarters close to their Mess.
One of our Wimpies from Bircotes crashed into a Beaufighter near Caernarvon where my sister was stationed in the W.A.A.F. There were no
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[photograph]
[photograph] [underlined] REG WHELLAMS [/underlined]] 1333520
[underlined] AT 25 OTU FINNINGLEY [/underlined]
(10 FORSTER RD. WALTHEMSTOW E.17 )
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survivors. A Defiant crashed near my home in Barnoldswick and we pressed on with the routine of local flying, stripping nothing more interesting than guns, and lectures and so on.
My diary records that on the 9th. December, after a little over two months we were taken by lorry to Bircotes to fly as a crew. Losses were high, on a Bullseye on London we lost three aircraft. One of them apparently ditched without trace near the French Coast, the only clue to this being their dinghy which would have been released automatically striking the water. A second crew headed by Ft/Lt. Anneckstein crashed into the watch office, killing the Bomb Aimer who was stretched out in the bombing position. A third crew crashed on landing at Bircotes, without fatality, but with the crew rather shaken-up. We were living Nissen huts about 2 miles from the 'hangars' and 3/4 mile from the in the other direction. The place was a sea of mud in parts and we generally washed AFTER breakfast for some reason which eludes me after 45 years
One point in favour of Bircotes, it was on the Great North Road and just before Christmas I enjoyed a 48 hr. leave with Hilda in London! I met Tommy King in Battersea who was a Rear Gunner on Halifaxes with three ops. to his credit, all to Italy. A brief respite and back to Bircotes. The flying aspect was proving more interesting now, I could see a little beyond my own situation and get involved to some extent in the general carry-on of working as a crew. We had a first-class Skipper, Sgt. Stan. Rutherford, a down-to-earth tough New Zealand sheep farmer. Our Navigator Allan Willoughby from the West country whom we regarded as the Academic member of the crew, but who suffered greatly from air sickness. On those occasions our Bomb Aimer Stan Chadderton from Liverpool took over the navigation without any problems. Stan trained as an Observer - which included both Bomb aiming and Navigating in the U.S.A. and we were thus very fortunate in having a standby navigator. Our Wireless Operator Harry Dyson was from Huddersfield possibly the socialite of the crew, and fancied his chances in the rear turret, giving me a welcome change on occasions.
I started the New Year well by having four runaway guns, over Missen, the bombing range, splattering a main road. The safety catches were 'off' and the guns ready for instant action almost all the time the air, and the reason the guns fired has not been fully explained. I vaguely put it down to a build-up of hydraulic pressure in the triggering system. This did not fool the Armourers who put it down finger trouble on my part - literally.
By the 7th. of Jan. we had completed all our day-flying details of cross-countries, bombing, air firing etc. and were suddenly posted to 30 O.T.U. Hixon, in Staffordshire to complete the night flying excercises [sic] . It took three days visiting various sections to obtain signatures on a Clearance Certificate before we were free of Finningly [sic] , and the after we arrived at Hixon, we were despatched to the satellite airfield at Seighford. A week later we were still without aircraft at Seighford and when the Skipper, Navigator and W/op went to Finningley to collect one, Stan Chadderton & I took French leave and shot off to see respective Hildas. It was on that leave that Hilda and I decided to get married and arranged for bans to be called in Seighford and Battersea.
On the 24th. Jan, our night-flying excercises [sic] almost completed we enjoyed a new experience. We were put on the battle order and briefed for an attack on Lorient. Everything was rushed and finally when
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boarding the aircraft -which was u/s-, the raid -or our part in it- was cancelled. We were to have dropped six 500 lb. bombs in 10/10ths cloud and were warned about the fighters and lots of flak. We found later that the Americans had bombed Lorient in the afternoon followed by 121 aircraft of Bomber Command that night. One Stirling was lost. In early Feb. we were doing a 6 hour cross-country operational excercise [sic] simulating a real trip and towards the end of it were joyfully bombing what was thought to be our target on the bombing range. After dropping two sticks of 11 1/2 lb. practice bombs the "target" lights were extinguished and although we remained over them for a further 20 minutes they did not come on again. Thirty minutes later "W" William landed at base amid great consternation. Apparently the O. C. Night Flying had thought we were lost and had been sending up rockets. These were seen by the Stafford Fire Brigade who came dashing out to Seighford expecting a major disaster. On reporting to the Watch Office the Skipper was congratulated upon a successful bombing attack on Hixon aerodrome.
A few nights previously Jock King and crew had crash-landed on the Yorkshire moors. They were over the North sea, badly iced up and losing height gradually until they ran out of it on the moor. The aircraft was a complete write-off and the Rear Gunner very badly injured by the Brownings crashing into his chest. On the 7th. Feb. the whole crew went to the local church and heard the Banns called. Two aircraft were lost from our unit the previous night, one piled straight in at Hixon, all killed, and Sgt. Browning bounced off the runway and finished upside down in the adjacent field. The 11th. Feb. was my 21st. Birthday and the Crew got absolutely sloshed in Eccleshall. It was a memorable party and the Skipper and Bomb Aimer got themselves lost on the way home and spent part of the night in a ditch. On the 14th. we completed the last of our cross-country details. The pages of my diary covering this trip are indistinct having been submerged in water in 1949, but there were problems. The first 4 hours were spent on accurately flown courses, but there was difficulty in keeping to specific heights. The aircraft seemed to climb and alternately lose height for no explicable reason and this distracted the Skipper from the required accuracy. Eventually with only 60 gallons of fuel indicated, the Skipper called "Darky Darky this is Nemo xx .....". Up came a 'gate' of two searchlights and signalled the direction of a friendly runway. 10 minutes later we all developed an instant inferiority complex, we had landed at Wyton, the home of 109 Squadron Pathfinders. One Wellington Mk.111 bombed up with four small practice bombs, was parked amid Lancasters, Mosquitoes and B17 Fortresses. However we were made very welcome and at 0400 hrs. thoroughly enjoyed the bacon, egg, fried sausages, toast and marmalade etc. Had I known then, that 40 years hence I would be retired and settled within 4 miles of Wyton I would have been a happier man. Aircraft on the first raid of the war had taken off from Wyton. The next two weeks were very active with little actually achieved. We were briefed almost every day for something which was cancelled every time but with one exception. We were told to do an air test on an aircraft which was parked near the perimeter fence. The rear turret was almost touching the fence at the other side of which was a haystack and chicken coop. The ground was muddy and rather more revs than usual were needed to free the wheels and move the aircraft forward. The hurricane strength wind created completely demolished the hen coop and the haystack, and many of the hens became airborne as never before. There
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was no time for recriminations however, on landing we went straight to the briefing room and learned we, were on a Nickel that night. The Oxford Dictionary gives a different meaning, but to Air Crews 'Nickel' is a generic term for a bum fodder or leaflet raid. It did imply that someone had some confidence in us, maybe. The target was Paris.
At last we were over enemy-occupied territory, still on our side of the Rhine, and still a long way from it, but we were getting nearer and there was no lack of confidence, at least initially. Problems developed, first my ring-sight ferrel broke off, so there was no hope of accurate aiming if attacked, then my intercom microphone ceased to function. The fault was later found in the Rotating Service Joint below the turret. We had a standby signalling system of push button and lamp, but that too was out of order for the same reason. I could hear the skipper calling me on a routine check but had no means of replying. Receiving no reply, Barry Dyson crawled back to the rear turret to check up, not knowing what to expect. He had overlooked the fact that we were at 15.000 feet - the highest we had been at that time- and almost passed out due to lack of oxygen. He reconnected his adapter to the system just in time. He was also inadequately clothed for a temperature of -18C but putting 1800 lbs of leaflets down the flare chute restored his circulation. Di banged on the turret door and we exchanged greetings. He returned to his office and reporting my situation to the Skipper. Meanwhile I was incommunicado for the rest of the trip, but I could hear the others conversing. Shortly after that I felt the rotation of the turret was becoming sluggish and I tried to fire a short burst. Three of the guns fired one round each and then stopped, but number one was working. I cocked and recocked the guns several times, tried firing them manually and eventually three were working. I fired a short burst and regained a little confidence. An hour after leaving Paris the turret rotation would not respond to the hydraulics so I ensured that manual operation was still possible. I knew that to bale out I would have to open the turret doors, then the aircraft bulkhead door, grab my parachute pack, drag it through both doors and into the turret, rotate the turret onto the beam, fit the 'chute, open the doors, disconnect the intercom and oxygen and go out backwards. I decided to give it a try except for actually bailing out - and decided it was probably not feasible in the time available, but I did get the parachute into the turret and tucked it down the side. I learned a lot that night, more had gone wrong in my department on that one trip than during all my training. Di learned the odd lesson too, to wear more clothing in case he had to move away from the hot air system under his table.
The following day we were advised that our O.T.U. course was completed and the Skipper was asked to state the crew's preference either to join a squadron bombing Germany or to go overseas. Our preference for Germany was unanimous; after all, I was getting married and most of us had already been overseas!. And so we went our separate ways on 7 days leave
March 1st, 1943 perhaps the most important day of my life, Hilda and I were married. Staying at Hilda's home I took my cousin Frank to Trafalgar Square and showed him the Lancaster bomber, then on to St. Pauls Churchyard where I used to work and showed him a Stirling Bomber. He was thrilled with London and with the aircraft in particular. At 1pm we met Mum and Topsy at duCane Court and lunched in Balham, and whilst Mum and the others went to meet Hilda's folks, I went on to the Church,
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St. Mary's in Battersea. Some years later when I saw the photographs I realised I was wearing a white shirt with my airman's uniform. Hilda joined me at the Alter [sic] and looked absolutely lovely in her white wedding dress. The service was grand and the organist played two hymns. The church bells remained silent, they were reserved for signalling a possible enemy invasion. We enjoyed a wonderful reception at Hilda's home and on Monday we went to Lancing on honeymoon, the guests of Mr. & Mrs. Pittock at 10 Orchard Avenue. After a few days at Lancing I returned to camp and somehow organised more leave. At 0300 on the 10th. however the police delivered a telegram-which stated "Report to Hixon immediately, posted overseas". I tried to convince them that it was a joke on the part of the crew, and I was not stationed at Hixon in any case. However, at 0700 Hilda accompanied me to Euston where we said goodbye on the platform for the last time for several months at least. One night spent at Hixon, and the following day we travelled by train with two other crews to no. 1 P.D.C. West Kirby.
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[photograph] [photograph]
1st. MARCH 1943 (WHITE SHIRT) 25 O.T.U. FINNINGLEY
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SECOND HONEYMOON SEPT ‘43
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[underlined] SECOND TIME TO AFRICA [/underlined]
At West Kirby we handed in our blue uniforms and were issued with army Khaki battle dress and tropical flying bowlers and helmets. Within a few days we embarked on a Dutch Vessel, the Johan van Vanderbilt in the Mersey, and were allocated first and second class cabins still equipped to. peace-time standards. Service in the Dining Hall was fabulous, staffed by natives from the Nederlands [sic] East Indies. The cuisine was superb, there was white bread and butter and sugar on the tables. A full breakfast at 0800, a peacetime lunch at 1300, tea at 1630 and dinner at 1900. Coffee was available in the Snr. N.C.O's lounge at any time during the morning. The Army Privates' quarters were similar to those we had experienced on the Moultan, sleeping in the same place as they eat, scrubbing everything by 0830 and with lots of bull. They had to wear greatcoats at all times whilst on deck and carry their life-jackets and water bottles. They not only manned the guns but were also detailed for lots of guard duties. Everything seemed to be guarded, but the reason was generally obscure. The cabins were shared with the Army Snr. N.C.O.s and they felt it quite a change to enjoy such comfort. The main topic of conversation was speculation about our destination, North Africa, Middle East or Far East? At a lecture on the 20th. March a senior Army Officer gave us a talk in the big second-class lounge, a very interesting run-down on the state of the war in all theatres. He dealt at some length with the North African campaign and said that very shortly the 1st. and 8th. Armies would meet and a few days after that Jerry would be slung right out of Africa. He wanted to dispel all rumours that we were part of a force invading the south of France. I cannot recall whether we were actually told in so many words, but we expected our destination was either Algiers or Bone.
The armourment [sic] on the Johann was comparatively small. We had about 10 Lewis guns, .303 calibre, and a naval gun at the stern, all manned by the army. There were about 16 ships in the convoy, with troops and cargo, protected by 5 Cruisers and Destroyers, and 2 Corvettes. Not as impressive perhaps as in August 1941, but a more wartime environment.
It was a feeling not entirely new to us, we knew by calculation that it was the 21st. of March and we were sitting comfortably in the First Class Lounge enjoying a coffee, but whereabouts on the Atlantic ocean was the ship? We know we had been heading east all morning so the chances. were we are heading for Gibralter [sic] , it was not warm enough for Freetown to be our destination. Where we were bound was open to speculation like most other vital factors affecting us. What were we going to do when we get to wherever it was? We were a Wellington crew which did not rule out finding ourselves on a Boston or Mitchell doing close army support work. And what after we had completed a tour of ops.? Chad the Bomb Aimer and Di the Wireless op. were both keen to remuster and train as Pilots. Allan Willoughby said he was 'marlish' and quite happy to carry on navigating. I felt the war would be over before we had finished our first tour. The Skipper said little but probably thought we were a bunch of dreamers, comparing us with his sheep back in N.Z.. We were not in fact approaching Gibralter [sic] , we had passed through the Straits during the night.
At 0300 on the 22nd. we were approaching the minefield off Algiers and were attacked by a Ju88 torpedo bomber. We heard the Johan's guns open up
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and the Windsor Castle received a direct hit from a torpedo on her stern, three members of her crew being killed. She also lost her steering and means of propulsion. Efforts were made to tow her into Oran without success but she sank at 1700 the same day. The Service personnel and remainder of the crew were taken aboard destroyers. Hurricanes arrived within minutes of the attack, but just too late and not ideal aircraft for the job at 0300 hrs. My diary - written up a few days after the event,- refered [sic] originally to The Duchess of Windsor and this was changed a few years later to the Windsor Castle.
There was no longer any secrecy about our destination. Di said the R.A.F. had opened an O.T.U. in Algiers, and we were destined to do another course. There were lots of rumours, but one fact was established, we had been in the R.A.F. over two years and we felt it was high time we did something towards the war effort.
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At 0300hrs. on the 23rd. March we were paraded on deck thankful for our greatcoats, which we were still wearing with great discomfort when we disembarked at 1100. A brief stop at an Aircrew Reception Centre, a large hotel on the sea-front, before going to the Aircrew Pool at Surcouf, about 30 miles from Algiers. There was no great feeling of urgency here, the Allies had landed at Algiers on the 6th. of November and the Germans had already been driven some hundreds of miles, to the East.
It was just a matter of waiting, something that most servicemen became very good at. We could not take the initiative and start our own war, but could only make the best of it. Quoting from my diary, "Life at Surcouf is perfect, we share the officers' mess and enjoy typical French peacetime meals. Lots of Bully Beef but the Chef - a French Civilian - certainly knows how to camouflage it. Our chalet is literally on the beach and the sea never more than 20 yards away. We could swim all day long without the formality of swimming trunks, or walk around the village. Sometimes we hitch-hike Into Algiers". There was very little to do in the village, and I recorded that I found the French very unhelpful and generally impolite. We all carried side-arms of course. There was practically nothing to buy except strange local booze, the Americans had seen to all that when they passed through, and the bars seemed to be open all the time. Algeria was, politically, a part of Metropolitan France in the eyes of the French, it was home to many Frenchmen, and they probably realised it might never be quite the same again. After a three-week rest at Surcouf we reported to 150 Squadron at Blida, about 30 miles south of Algiers. This place was most certainly at war, there were Wellingtons, Hudsons, Hurricanes, Commandoes and Albacores for squadrons of Bomber, Coastal, Fighter and Transport Commands, and the Fleet Air Arm. With the exception of Transports and 142 and 150 Wellington Squadrons, all aircraft were controlled by Coastal Command. We were part of the North Africa Striking Force - so we were told. Life was good at Blida, most of the food was tinned and we enjoyed eggs and bully beef every day in the mess. Generally in the evenings we would have a fry-up of eggs and bread with more bully on the primus stove in the billet. The Mess Hall was used as both dining hall and lounge. The arabs wandered round the camp selling eggs and oranges but prefered [sic] to exchange them for food -- more bully beef.
The currency in use was the French Franc with an exchange rate of 200 to the £1 sterling in which we were paid. BMA (British Military Authority) notes were also in use but the most popular currency outside the town was the tin of bully. We were billeted in chalets formerly the peacetime living quarters of the French Air Force. Each chalet had four large rooms-and accommodated two Wellington crews. It was very pleasant to sit out on the verandah [sic] . My rather battered diary records that on the 28th. March 1943 we were discussing what we proposed to do on completion of our first tour. Rather naive, we would have little or no say in the matter. We had been allocated an aircraft, "F" for Freddie, but it was a case of one crew to one aircraft and its present owners had not quite finished their tour and were reluctant to part with it. For two days they had been bombing and straffing [sic] a large German convoy bound for Bizerta which was not left alone even when part of it had docked. We finally took over the aircraft and for five days were airborne for several hours each day. On the afternoon of the 5th. April we took off
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in "F" for Freddie for an hour's fighter affiliation excercise [sic] with two Hurricanes. Employing violent evasive action to make things difficult for the fighters, we crossed the coast about 10 miles east of Algiers at 3000 feet and passed directly over a British destroyer. The Navy was wide awake and saw a heavy bomber being chased by two Hurricanes, immediately opened fire on us with considerable light flak. The pilot of a third Hurricane which was on an operational patrol saw the mini-battle and joined in. When he saw that one of his chums was only 100 yards from my rear turret and happy to stay there, he realised that we were in a different ball game, peeled off and, carried on with his patrol, finally returning to Maison Blanche.
On the night of the 6th. April we bombed the Marshelling [sic] yards at TUNIS, with 3500 lb. and 54 30 lb. incendiaries. We bombed in one stick from 8000 ft. and surprisingly were held in searchlights which we lost at 3000 feet. Not a very good effort on our part, the bombs overshot the target but hit the aerodrome 3 miles north according to the timing point photograph. All 28 aircraft returned safely, two of them damaged There was little light flak but some heavy stuff said to be radar controlled. For an hour on the return journey I changed places with Harry Dyson, our Wireless op. On the 7th. we attacked troop concentrations at night making several bombing passes at low level and finally coming in very low firing 7 Brownings. Chad the bomb aimer used the two guns in the front turret, I had four in the rear and we carried beam guns on these occasions. Only the front gunner could see what he was firing at. One aircraft of 142 Squadron, G George was shot down by light flak. On the 10th. we raided MONSERRATO aerodrome in Sardinia, an aircraft was seen over the target with navigation lights on, visibility was good and we moved away hoping the runway lights would be switched in. The aerodrome remained in darkness and we dropped our bombs singly. There was no light flack from the aerodrome to worry us, and the aircraft with lights on was not seen again. After a further 30 minutes of stooging about we returned to Blida. There was a reasonable amount of heavy flak which we learned on return had downed one aircraft of 142 Squadron. - 2 in 2 nights-. On the way back a searchlight opened up a few miles ahead and the skipper put the nose down so we were at 2000 ft. when we passed directly over the searchlight. Stan Chadderton in the front turret opened fire and the Skipper told me when to open up, aiming straight down. The light stayed on after we had passed, pointing vertically, maybe we did a little damage, probably not. Inside the aircraft however, the dive had caused the Elsan lavatory to come loose and scatter it's contents over the floor.
The following morning, fearing the wrath of the ground crew when they saw the Elsan, we stayed in bed until noon and breakfasted in the billet. Eggs and fried potatoes, fried bread and tinned pears and fresh oranges, served by the wireless op. and rear gunner to the Skipper and the rest of the crew still in bed. In the afternoon we were stood down and Joe Shields (Sgt. Rimmer's Rear Gunner) and I went into Blida to try and find presents to take back to England. The bigger French shops were all closed - no stocks- and we scrounged around the Arab quarters, without success. I mentioned earlier that we always carried side-arms and several times we were crowded by the Arabs. Production of the revolver dispersed them but it could have been very tricky.
On the 14th. April we raided MONSERRATO for the second time, the first run-in at 8000 feet and then 6000 feet. Direct hits were seen on
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the aerodrome this time with 1000 and 250 pounders. No incendiaries were dropped but 10 minutes was spent 8 miles north of the town dropping leaflets. The leaflets were the "laissez-passer" type printed in German instead of the more usual Italian. An aircraft over the target area sporting an orange light seemed to be signalling to a searchlight. We assumed it was acting as a decoy for a night-fighter and the only one of us keeping an eye on it was the navigator standing at the astrodome.
The rest of us searched the allocated parts of the sky according to the book!. All our aircraft returned safely and reported good aiming. Photographs confirmed the success, but we had borrowed "M" Mother which was without a camera. The return journey was uneventful and crossing Mare Nostrum Di tuned in to the 9 o-clock news from London. The announcer Alvar Lidell read "Algiers reports that the R.A.F. Strategical Airforce in North Africa has continued to batter aerodromes in Tunisia and Sardinia, damaging runways and destroying aircraft on the ground, without loss to themselves". Someone remarked "That's one way of looking at it"!. Actually a few nights ago 142 Sqdn. had lost 2 in 2 nights. 150 Squadron had lost one but the crew bailed out. Four of the crew managed to get through the enemy lines but the Rear Gunner was wounded and there was no news of him for several weeks.
The docks at TUNIS received our attention on the night of the 17th. April, with very careful placing of 500 and 250 pounders. Direct hits were observed in the docks area and there was concentrated heavy flack. It didn't worry us, we were well below it at 6000 feet. There was lots of light flack mostly concentrated on an aircraft displaying red and green navigation lights. At one stage this aircraft came to within 600 yards on the starboard beam and we converged to about 300 yards. We clearly identified it as a Wellington and gave it a long inaccurate burst from the rear turret. On this occasion every fourth round was a tracer. The nav. lights were extinguished and the aircraft was not seen again. There was no satisfactory explanation as to the identity of this aircraft. A captured Wellington perhaps acting as a decoy but attracting most of the flak. Possibly one of ours with the lights switched on accidentally, one shall never know. Two aircraft are missing, piloted by Sgt. Chandler of 150 and Sgt. Lee of 142. One sent out an SOS and ditched but there was no signal from the other. On our return to Blida there was a blanket of cloud over the whole area and our 23 aircraft were diverted to Maison Blanche. One aircraft was known to have a damaged undercarriage, which collapsed on touch-down and was a write-off but there were no injuries. Road Transport was waiting to take us the 30 miles or so back to Blida and we finally got to bed at 6 am. We shared the lorry with Sgt. Leckie's crew who had bailed out over Tunisia on the 14th. The Squadron Leader had flown to Sousse and brought them back to Algeria. Leckie had himself crash-landed the aircraft with no hydraulics and only one engine, somewhere in Allied-occupied Tunisia.
On the 23rd. April my diary records a tedious week of activity which achieved very little. Every day we were briefed for a night op. and every day we did our Daily Inspections and air tests, but in the late afternoon the Sirocco came up suddenly and the trips were cancelled. During the week, two Albemarles crashed on the runway, both from Gibralter [sic] carrying supplies which included mail from U.K.
Our uniform since leaving West Kirby has been British Army Khaki but with shoes and no putees. Our R.A.F. blue shirts with collar and tie and also blue forage caps were not exchanged. We have no tropical
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kit and it is getting very warm here. Our aircraft "F" for Freddie, has been grounded all week with "G" George, both with a trimming box problem. The policy is still one crew to an aircraft, and we enjoyed a very easy week. On the 28th. we managed to borrow "D" Donald and bombed DECIMONANU again, this time with a 4000 lb. 'blockbuster’ and a few incendiaries for good measure. After bombing we stooged around for 30 minutes having a close look at fires on the ground. Searchlights waved about apparently aimlessly and the light flack with tracer seemed equally haphazard. At 3000 feet we were caught by one searchlight and within seconds were held in a cone of five. The lights were dazzling and the three of us manning guns all fired point blank, it being impossible to aim. In theory a combined rate of fire of over 8000 rounds per minute should have hit something worth while, but after a very short burst my four guns jammed, a problem seldom experienced. At only 3000 feet we were quickly out of range of the searchlights. We were over Blida at 0700 hours which was covered in fog and diverted again to Mason Blanche. We were not very popular at Maison B, everyone had-their own problems which were not always appreciated by others on different types of aircraft performing widely differing types of work. We were in bed at Maison B. by 1000 hrs. probably without the knowledge of the 'owners' of the beds who had spent the night in then; and there we stayed until 1700. The tinned steak pie for tea made a very welcome change. Our aircraft "F" for Freddie still had a faulty-trimming box.
It was only in the air we were able to listen to the Radio News from London, although we had a reasonable supply of current newspapers brought out by the steady stream of aircraft from U.K. On the 29th. we logged another trip to BIZERTA, this time in "T" Tommy with a 4000 pounder. Take-off was at 0005 hours and the weather the worst for flying we had yet experienced in Africa. The target was the docks and all was unusually quiet. The coast-line was visible through about 4/10ths cloud and on our first run over the docks we dropped incendiaries. Positive identification of the target, so round again to release the 4000 pounder which the press were refering [sic] to as 'cookies'. It seemed that over Germany the lads were dropping 8000 pounders. The flak and searchlights opened up simultaneously and was relatively intense. We found later that we were the first to bomb. Some had difficulty in finding the target due to cloud and the enemy was trying not to attract our attention. Again there was low cloud at Blida and we were diverted to Maison Blanche. Two aircraft were lost on the Bizerta raid, one landed at Bone (now renamed Annaba) with one engine u/s, and a 142 Sqdn. aircraft did a belly-landing on the grass at Maison B. On our return we found that Sgt. Leckie, operational again after being shot down in Tunisia, had crashed into the mountain immediately after take-off. Another 150 Sqdn aircraft crashed on take-off, barely getting airborne, and it was assumed that he had engine failure. Two of the crew actually survived the explosion. It had been a fateful night, we were briefed for take-off from west to east, with a left turn onto course. Just before take-off a strong wind developed from the west causing the duty runway to be changed from 09 to 27 and we took off from east to west. Sgt. Leckie turned left instead of right, straight into. the Atlas mountains, all killed instantly. Our own Bomb Aimer Stan had flown on a raid with Sgt. Leckie only two nights previously. When I revisited Blida on business in 1978 I was astonished to appreciate just how near those mountains were to Blida aerodrome..
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[photograph] WITH HILDA & THE SKIPPER SEPT ’43 RICHMOND ON THAMES
[photograph] BILL WILLOUGHBY NAVIGATOR AT THE PORT BEAM GUN POSITION
[photograph] NAVIGATOR & BOMB AIMER IN THEIR PITS
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The following morning an aircraft of 142 was seen to be making a peculiar approach, and just before touchdown. one engine cut and the other was going flat out, resulting in a spectacular disintegration at the side of the runway, in which no-one was seriously hurt. By the end of April we had four aircraft all Wellington Mk.10s equipped for carrying 4000 pound bombs. Bomb doors had been removed and they were said to have a special main spar.
On the 5th. May it was farewell to Blida, the war was moving east. Each crew was issued with a First World War Bell tent and this together with official stores and personal effects was piled into the aircraft. I remember the Wireless Op. Di and I putting our (stolen) palliases [sic] aboard for our Ground-crew passengers to rest on during the flight. A very thoughtful act on our part said the Skipper. It was just that Di and I intended to sleep in the manner to which we were accustomed. Our destination was Fontaine Chaude, about 250 Kms. ESE of Blida. About half way in deference to our guests we opened a tin of spam and served slices of spam followed by stewed plums from a large tin we had been hoarding. Our destination was a stretch of desert near a tiny village. After landing we pitched our tent and organised our palliases [sic] into beds with the help of a dozen or so empty boxes. Meanwhile vehicles were arriving with our squadron personnel, more stores, aircraft and by late evening we had a small township. A small marquee served as a Sgts. Mess and on the first evening we enjoyed stew and green peas followed by pears and real cream. These had been provided by the Americans on an emergency basis. The following day was spent partly on an aerodrome inspection. The war had passed through Fontaine Chaude and it was possible the Arab scavengers had overlooked bits of war material which could do damage to aircraft, particularly the tyres. There were no runways, only sand with some coarse grass.
Back to war next day and Group Captain (Speedy) Powell briefed us for a raid on TRIPANI, a naval base in Sicily. We were 30 minutes late on take-off due to delays in bombing-up. We carried only six 500 pounders instead of eight, and some incendiaries. We were 20 minutes behind the bomber stream of 26 Wellingtons. 'The bomber stream'!. This was an expression used by a newly joined crew who were very displeased with having to finish their tour in North Africa after starting it over Europe. They treated our desert war with some contempt after their recent experiences over Germany, but were reported missing about three weeks after joining us. We were in cloud shortly after take-off and nearing the target came out of it at 12,000 feet. We moved over towards a concentration of heavy flak bursts and the bomb aimer thought he had found a pinpoint through breaks in the cloud. The bombs were dropped into the area of flashes and fires on the ground but it was not a satisfactory raid. We lost two aircraft. One was seen to go down in flames over the target having been coned by searchlights. Sgt. Pax Smith, a New Zealander and crew ran out of fuel in pitch darkness and had strayed too far to the west, over Algeria. My diary records "They bailed out in an airmanlike manner but the Bomb Aimer was concussed and the Rear Gunner broke both legs on hitting the ground and rolling down the side of a hill. Three of the crew are in the rest camp at Constantine and the two inured in hospital in Algiers".
The reader might be surprised at apparent navigation errors such as this, but the only nav. aid available was a QDM (course to steer) to reach in this case Algiers, which would not have helped. We had no M/F
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Beacons on which to take bearings. The Navigator worked on his dead reckoning plot backed up by a visual pinpoint from the bomb aimer map-reading if visibility was suitable. Quite often the only aid was the Rear Gunner taking a drift reading from his turret. Over the sea the Wireless op. would drop a flame-float down the flare chute, which would burst into flames on striking the sea. The Rear. gunner would rotate his turret and depress the guns, holding the flame in his ringsight for ten seconds, then read off the drift on the indicator by his side. There was sometimes a drift indicator in the 'Nav. Office' also. The same procedure was used over the desert during the day using a smoke bomb in place of a flamefloat.
We learned that Sgt. Leckie who was killed hitting the mountain was Commissioned two weeks before his death and had also been awarded a D.F.C. for his crash-landing in Tunisia. So Sgt. Leckie was really P/O Leckie D.F.C. and didn't know it, but the end result was the same. He and our own Skipper, Sgt. Rutherford 416170 R.N.Z.A.F. had been great buddies for a long time. (or what was regarded as a long time in those days)
May 10 my diary states, a Boomerang lastnight. We took-off with a 4500 pound payload for delivery to PALERMO, the Capital of Sicily. About 30 min. after take-off the petrol cover on the port fuel tank came open and the Skipper had great difficulty in keeping the left wing up. There was no option but to jettison half the bomb load in the sea and return to base. There was an enemy air-raid in progress at Bone and we kept a few miles to the east of it with the I.F.F. on. Our own night-fighters operating from Maison Blanche were known to be very active and we had great faith in our I.F.F. We were first back of course - not really having been anywhere!- and we waited for the others in the debriefing tent. To no avail, they had been diverted and returned the following afternoon. We enjoyed an afternoon and evening off, and went by lorry to Batna, a small town about 30 miles from our base. There was little to be seen and nothing to buy and no sign of any social activity. Conversation with the natives was difficult and they were not interested in the war.
On the night of the 12th. it was the turn of NAPLES again, 21 aircraft with 90,000 lbs. payload bombed within five minutes of each other. It was a lovely night, visibility 30 miles and not a cloud in the sky. As we approached Naples we could clearly see Mt. Vesuvius and convinced ourselves we could see the thin column of smoke drifting from it. Our last pinpoint on the way out was the Isle of Capri and we gave it a short burst of .303 for good measure. A futile act but the guns had to be fired occasionally. At NAPLES we went straight in, the target was clearly visible and the one stick straddled the railway yards and industrial area. My diary records that flak was intense and said to be some of the hottest in Europe, and reading that after a lapse of 45 years causes me to question the authority for such a statement. It was a small target compared to some of those in Central Europe, and the 40 searchlights at Napoli were quite effective, but would have been more so if it had been dark. All our aircraft returned safely after a 7 1/2 hour flight, not a bad effort for Wimpies with no overload tanks. As the W/op describes it, we climbed into our pits just as dawn was breaking. By 0900 we had the option of discarding our mosquito nets and being pestered by the insects, or enjoying a turkish bath due to the heat. Our 1916 vintage bell-tent was reasonable for our crew of five although in earlier times it accomodated [sic] , goodness knows how, 22 soldiers.
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At about 1400 we were happy to get airborne again on an air test where we could cool down, but at 1700 it was briefing again. A "maximum effort" - another phrase. imported from our colleagues bashing away in Central and Northern Europe, on CAGLIARI, a port and industrial town in Sardinia. All 26 aircraft were over the target area within minutes of each other, again visibility was near perfect. Bombing heights were staggered and we bombed from 6000 feet. Our 4000 pounder landed just north of the railway yards among some tall buildings and started a fire. Our W/op Harry Dyson claimed at debriefing that he could feel the heat from our own fire when we turned in again to see the damage. Di was prone to exaggeration by this time, perhaps due to frustration of monitoring broadcasts from Base and seldom touching the morse key. We came back over the target at 2000 feet and the flames were leaping high. We could still see the flames from 70 miles away at 8000 feet on our way home. Listening to the B.B.C. we learned that American bombers had raided Cagliari earlier that day, "wiping the place out". They also claimed they could still see fires burning when they reached the African coast. In daylight too; our W/op was not alone in the exaggeration stakes. However, it was a very satisfactory raid. We were in a shallow dive when the bomb was released and is thought to have scraped the fuselage under the aircraft where there was damage to the geodetics and six feet of fabric had been torn off.
On the 15th. our crew was stood down for 24 hours and I received four letters from Hilda, the first for many weeks. At this rate of completing ops I should be home in less than three months. It was very tiring night after night, particularly as is [sic] was not possible to sleep comfortably in the heat of the day. The target was PALERMO, and three of our 25 aircraft failed to return, including Sgt. Rimmer, and Sgt. Alazrachi, the latter a Free French pilot. It is not known what happened to any of them except that one aircraft was seen to go down in flames over the target. Rimer's Rear Gunner was Joe Shields, one of the best, and the crew had been with us since O.T.U. at Finningley. Polfrey the Navigator, Cave the Bombadier [sic] and Jack Waters the Wireless-op, all very keen types.
On the 16th. it was our turn to make a fragment of history. For the very first time, the R.A.F. bombed ROME. Rome, we were told was an open undefended city, and we were briefed to fly from the mouth of the River Tiber, over the city dropping leaflets, and return at 5000 feet dropping more leaflets, then bomb the LIDO DI ROMA near the mouth of the Tiber. Our first bomb went in the river and the last one in the sea, but the rest of the stick neatly straddled the buildings at the Seaplane Base. Over the city itself, there was considerable light flack with tracer, aiming point- blank without result. Not bad at all far an open undefended city, but we were forbidden to display any hostility except dropping leaflets. Even the lids of the Small Bomb Containers loaded with leaflets were secured with wire so as not to fall on the Romans. Later the B.B.C. claimed there was no flak over Rome.
An easier trip the following night which after the event gave me a slight suggestion of a guilty conscience for the the [sic] very first (and last) time.
"Your target" said the Group Captain, "is the German 'U' Boat refuelling Base at ALGHERO, in Sardinia, put paid to it". Our bomb load was 7 x 500 pounders, 4 S.B.C.'s of 30 lb. incendiaries and 2 x 250 pound bombs. We overflew the target at 4000 feet and first dropped several sacks of
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leaflets. These were in Italian and told the people of Alghera that when we very shortly occupied their country and liberated them from the beastly Germans, they would be treated better than ever before, provided with medical aid and food, and every other possible benefit. All we need is a little co-operation and understanding from them. Having spread the gospel, we made three bombing runs over Alghero, at 3000, 1500 and 700 feet, all perfect O.T.U. practice type runs. On the last bombing run, Allan Willoughby manned the port beam gun, Dyson the front turret and the [deleted] the [/deleted] three of us fired our 7 Brownings at point-blank range into the chaos below. The sole opposition comprised two small-calibre machine guns which were soon out of action. Maybe it was a U Boat refuelling base, but only in the sense that it was a small fishing village and happened to have a jetty where drums of oil could be trundled down to a U Boat at the end of it. Our vision of a Sardinian type Lorient or Brest was soon dispelled. The BBC reported 'our bombers based in North Africa attacked targets is Sardinia lastnight'.
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For a couple of days our conversation had centred around an incident over the Lido di Roma. A seaplane base consists mostly of water; on our first run over it we had difficulty in locating the buildings and were hoping to see a tidy straight line of parked seaplanes. The Skipper decided to drop a flare and asked the Wireless Op. to arm no. 1 of 4 already in position in the flarechute. As he removed the safety pin the flare ignited and the top part of it shot through the roof of the aircraft with flames pouring out of the lower end, streaking past the rear turret.
The blinding light startled Stan Chadderton at the Bombing panel and he instantly jettisoned all the flares, undoubtedly preventing a major disaster. How easy it was to be shot down by one's own flare.
According to Intellegence [sic] reports, there were 1,100 casualties in our raid on Cagliari on the 13th., most of them having been caught by a single bomb. This figure is highly suspect but it originated from an Italian report.
On the 21st. it was a stooge over Sicily with 18 250 lb. bombs.
A convoy was within range of the Ju88 Torpedo bombers based in Sicily and our task was to try and keep them on the ground, or if they did manage to take off, prevent them from making an airmanlike landing on return. Aircraft took off singly starting at 1700 hrs.; we were the 24th. at 2045 hrs., with two others to follow. A direct flight to Castelvetrano, identify the aerodrome and one bomb away, then set course for Ciacco, same procedure, and on to Borezzo. If a flare path is seen anywhere give it priority and stooge around in that area for a while. All the bombs were dropped on the three targets and no flarepaths were seen. We concluded there were no enemy landings or take-offs, but one aircraft was seen to go down in flames into the sea; probably Sgt. Williams of our squadron who was on his first mission from Africa, although he had done several over Germany. At Castelvetrano there was lots of light flak using tracer, and we felt the heavy flak in some areas was predicted. We were not experiencing the 'thick carpets' of flak ever-present over Germany, perhaps ours was more personal, just a few batteries carefully aiming at one or two Wimpies.
It was all go, and on the 23rd. we did an easy 3 1/2 hour trip. 2 hours of which was over Africa. We crossed the Tunisian coast and reached Pantelleria 20 minutes later, an island only 7 miles in length with an aerodrome on the western side. Visibility was poor, but we went straight in and dropped 4,500 lbs. in one stick. These were plotted later as just to the south of the aerodrome. We cruised around out at sea for 20 minutes at 7,000 feet, studying four barrage balloons clearly visible at 5000 feet. On our return however there was no support for this theory from anyone else and we were told it was only heavy flak. This was of course quite possible, in poor conditions and with tired eyes imagination can take over. Within a week however, it was generally accepted that the enemy were deploying barrage ballons [sic] although not in great numbers. Most of our aircraft were not fitted with cable cutters on the leading edge of the wings. Pantelleria was an easy trip and we were advised that it would count only as half a trip towards our 35. We had generally assumed the first tour was 30 trips but it did not seem to worry anyone. The day. after the Pantelleria trip, the Squadron mascot, Wompo, or Wimpy. a pedigree Heinz 69 was killed in action. Whilst he was
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merrily chasing some small creature he was accidentally hit by a jeep driven by F/O Langlois, a pilot of 150. He was so badly damaged that one of the lads put him down with his Smith & Wesson .38.
On the 24th. we staggered off the desert in "F" for Freddie heading for Sardinia carrying eight 500 pound bombs and some incendiaries and it seemed ages before we reached even 100 feet. I was not aware of the drama in the front office, both the Skipper and Bomb Air were struggling even to keep us airborne. At about 500 feet it was not possible to maintain height and the Skipper had no option but to lighten the load quickly. Two 500 pounders were released and seconds later there was a tremendous bang from down below, but the aircraft began to maintain height. We were just within sight of the Sardinian coast with the engines overheating when the Skipper jettisoned the remaining bombs and nursed the aircraft back to Fontain Chaude. That was our second boomerang. Had we been carrying a 4000 lb. cookie the episode would have had a very different ending. By the 2nd. of June we had completed 6 more trips and moved camp further east, to Kairouan. Our patch of desert was about 6 miles west of the walled City, said to be the fifth most holy in the Moslem world. The place was very dry, and the well 100 yards from our tent was out of bounds. The R.A.M.C. and the Afrika Korps had both marked it as poisoned by their repective [sic] enemies. It was said to contain human remains, but tests carried out just before we moved on showed the water had not been polluted and was 100% fit for drinking. Meanwhile our water was delivered by two water bowsers each of which travelled 30 miles east to Sousse several times each day. Many years later the record shows that neither the Germans nor the Allies polluted any water supplies. After all, both hoped to recapture them and put them back to their own use. On the first night from Kairouan we were credited with one more trip, having completed two halves! That is, two trips to PANTELLARIA.
We took off in waves of 3 or 4 throughout the night, arriving over the target 45 minutes later. Our aircraft was "C" Charlie which carried one 4000 pounder. On the first run in we overshot, but came round again and in a typical OTU practice run, Stan Chadderton placed the bomb neatly in the centre of the small town. A 45 minute flight back to base and an hour's respite whilst the aircraft was checked, refuelled and bombed up, then the mixture as before.
On the 27th. we were piling into a lorry to go out to the widely dispersed aircraft; the nightly German raid on Sousse was in full swing when a single Ju88 came over to look at our flare path. He was clearly visible and stooged around at will for about 10 minutes before making a run at about 1000 feet dropping 3 bombs in a salvo 300 yards from the Sgts. mess. Nothing was hurt except our feelings and there was no material damage. We had no A-A guns, so the Luftwaffe did not receive the same energetic welcome handed out to us. We relied on Beaufighter squadrons for defence. The R.A.F. policy was reasonable, as the aircraft were dispersed over a wide area and a single stick of bombs would be ineffective against a single aircraft as a target on the ground. We took-off half an hour later for a tour of Sardinia, again with a payload of eighteen 250 lb. bombs. Our only brief was to stooge around between aerodromes and generally make a nuisance of ourselves. There were no allied troops in Sardinia yet so no special care was called for. Our bombs were expected to be released on aerodromes, searchlights and guns. The
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main object was to keep the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica on the ground. These trips were not very popular and provided good practice for Ju88 night fighters. We were stood down on the 3rd. June after doing two ops the previous night. We slept all morning and in the afternoon crowded into a lorry and went to the seaside. Monastir, near Sousse and we had our first baths since leaving Blida. We were in good company and had Mare Nostrum to ourselves with tens of thousands of other Allied troops. I have been there several times since and always think of the mass of naked troops in the sea. A good target for the the [sic] German aircraft? Not really, the scores of light A-A guns made it a very dicey target. The Allies must have had well over a thousand aircraft of different types in the area. The Arab town of Monastir was out of bounds to the Army but not, for some probably invalid reason to the R.A.F. We had a 'shufti' and two of us invested in a sort of haircut. Most of the inhabitants seemed to be French, Monastir having been the fashionable part of the Sousse area,
The night of the 4th. June was an unlucky one for 150 Squadron. We lost three of our 16 aircraft on the ground without intervention from the enemy. The aircraft were bunched fairly close together, having been bombed-up and ready for take-off. During a final check, a Bombadier accidentally released a flare which lay on the ground. He dashed off to find an Armourer to make it safe but within minutes the flare ignited. Within 15 minutes the whole area was ablaze and three aircraft, M Mike, A Able and P Peter, each complete with over two tons of bombs and full petrol tanks blew up. Our aircraft which was to have taken us twice to Pantelleria that night 'N' Nuts, together with seven others, was severely damaged. About half the squadron went to Panteleria [sic] , 2 half-trips and in full moonlight reported a couple of Ju88's circling the island. One aircraft returned with about 40
square feet of fabric torn off.
The following night a new target was added to our growing list, SYRACUSE in eastern Sicily, only a little light flak was encountered, and it was just a matter of bombing the water front. Our main task was in fact to drop leaflets on several of the coastal towns, working our way anticlockwise round Sicily. We passed slightly to the west of Pantelleria on the return leg and saw the Wimpies from the Western Desert squadrons bombing the island.
The exact words written in my diary are "bashing hell out of the island".
Our own Group Captain - "Speedy" Powell also went to Pantelleria but complained that his bomb did not explode. We riled him that it went into the sea. We were now seeing a great deal more of the British army and the Americans and we were realising just what small cogs we were in all the activity. We had an American guest with us when he ran us over to the Ops. Room in his personal jeep to collect lastnight's aiming point photograph. He noticed in the caption at the bottom of the photograph "280 deg.T" and remarked "Geez, mighty hot up there aint [sic] it?". It refered [sic] to our course, not the temperature, but we did not add any further complication to trying to explain.
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in the next 12 days we carried out only two raids, the first an easy one to PANTALARIA [sic], which surrendered the following day, and the second to a new target, MESINA [sic], the straits between the toe of Italia and Sicile [sic] . on the way out we passed very close to our favourite island and across Sicily to the target. The target was already marked with 14 flares by the Western Desert squadrons, and for the first time in North Africa that part of the job was done for us. I noted at the time that "the A-A defences were baffled by the number of aircraft over the target at the same time. There were 34 aircraft and only F/Lt. Langlois ran into trouble. He was caught in the searchlights from both sides of the straits and dropped from 11,000 to 2,000 feet to escape them. In doing so he flew through the balloon barrage, but without further incident.
My diary has recently been opened for the first time in over 42 years, so I have not pondered over its accuracy. 34 aircraft simultaneously over the target probably did seem like a thousand bomber raid to us!. Our Bomb Aimer that night was Ft/Lt. Casky, our own being in jail in Tunis. After our last trip to 'the' island we went to Tunis on a 48 hr. verbal pass. The Skipper had the trots, which we all suffered from time to time, and he tried to rest in the tent nearest the toilet trench. Willoughby the Navigator, Stan Chadderton Bombadier [sic] , Harry Dyson the Wireless Op and myself, Rear Gunner. We were each issued with two boxes of American "K" rations, and hitch-hiked first to Sousse and then to Tunis. The first leg was in the back of an Army lorry and the main leg up the coast road by R.A.F. "Queen Mary" which carried about a hundred of us. The whole trip took only 6 hours. The town of Tunis had been in Allied hands for 4 days and there were still a few Germans in hiding. We had given no thought to accommodation which did not seem to be important. Leaving Stan and Di in a canteen abandoned by the Germans, Wally and I eventually found an hotel near the docks area where we were able to book two rooms. I cannot recall the name of the hotel, but the address was 49 Rue de Serbie. The hotel was in very poor condition, no water, all the windows had been blown out, doors smashed, walls cracked and so on. No catering but we had our 'K' rations. Opposite the hotel was a bombed church and all around the buildings were either destroyed or severely damaged. The docks had been our main target in Tunis, and they were destroyed, with all the warehouses practically levelled out. One cargo vessel was beached and two others rested on the bottom. The Arabs were mostly friendly and told us the bomb damage in town was done mainly by 4 engined bombers is daylight, which let us off the hook. The European French were not so friendly, possibly many of them having lost comfortable homes. Some were quite abusive verbally but to others we managed to explain that we flew Chasseurs, pas des bombardiers. In our minds we had liberated the people of Tunis - and the rest of North Africa - from the Germans. We did not fully appreciate that the Arabs saw it differently. The Inglisi and Americans were no different to the Germans and Italians, and they in turn did no less for them than the French. They lived for the day when they would be left to manage their own affairs. In our wanderings around town we met a Tommy who was a Prisoner of War on a ship which had. been bombed at night a few miles out of Tunis. The ship was Italian, homeward bound and had been straffed [sic] by Spitfires during the day. The ship was spotted by two Wellington crews during a night raid on the docks, and the ship was
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bombed, then straffed [sic] from a few hundred feet. The vessel came to a halt and the 20 or so Germans and Italians abandoned ship. Three of the several hundred British prisoners had been regrettably killed in the action and all the others managed to get ashore in lifeboats and floats in the final days of the Axis evacuation of North Africa. The ship was without lights which should have been carried. Another 8th. Army private told us he was a P.O.W. being transferred from a lorry onto a boat about a week ago when about 30 Spitfires and Kittyhawks arrived and caused chaos with their 20 and 40 mm. cannon. The guards were overpowered and most of the 500 or so P.O.W.’s managed to get away. He spoke highly of the fighter pilots, convinced the attack was a very well-planned sortie to release the P.O.W.'s., not just to blaze away at anything German that dared to move. He could very well have been correct,
On our last evening in Tunis the four of us shared a battle of wine with a meal at a roadside cafe. When we were paying the bill we found there was money left over and asked for another bottle of their excellent wine. As the wine was brought over, a Sgt. M.P. standing behind us shouted "no more wine for them", after which Stan told him to mind his own business. The M.P. then grabbed Stan's arm and held it to his back, but seeing threatening movements from the rest of us, released it. Stan then turned quickly and thumped the M.P. who promptly disappeared. Shortly afterwards two R.A.F. Sgt. S.P.'s came is and asked if we had had some trouble and if so would Stan like to put in a complaint to the Provost Marshal? This seemed like a good countermeasure to a possible charge made by the Sgt. M.P. and Stan accompanied the two R.A.F. S.P.’s to the Provost Marshal's office. In reality this was the jail and as they entered the door the Sgt. M.P. set about Stan who gave as good as he got. But this was inside the jail, Stan was at a big disadvantage and about to spend the first of three nights in it. The jail was is fact next door to our hotel is Rue de Serbie. Willy and I did not suspect that Stan was in trouble, we assumed our S.P.’s were just being helpful, so we sat down again with the bottle. Perhaps Di's conscience was not quite so clear, and when he saw the S.P.'s coming he made himself scarce. We caught up with him later asking an M.P. where he could pinch a Jeep. The M.P. humoured him and directed him to an American car park with lots of Jeeps, but Di had seen a tramcar and decided to pinch that instead. Fortunately the tramcar was off the rails, and he changed his attention to the French tricolour on top of a derelict building. He climbed the building and removed the flag, then Willy and I managed to get him back to the hotel. Di's condition was not due to a session of heavy drinking, we had seen very little of anything alcoholic for a long time and two glasses of local wine would have been more than enough to really get him going.
The three of us hitch-hiked back to Kairoaun and reported the loss of one Bomb Aimer to the Skipper. The following day Squadron Leader Miller D.F.C. flew to Tunis and demanded Stan's release from jail. He had a major row with the same Sgt. M.P. who started it all and who was asking what authority the Squadron Leader had. The Squadron Leader pointed to his 2 1/2 rings of rank and the D.F.C. and asked the M.P. whether he thought they were scotch mist. Stan was released and back at Kairoaun was charged with causing an affray, resulting in a Reprimand. The Sgt. M.P. was charged and given a Severe Reprimand and reduced to Corporal.
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By the 16th. of June we were operational again as a crew. the target was again NAPLES, a 6 hour 15 min. stooge and rather tiring. There was a full moon and visibility was 25 miles. We could clearly see Pantelaria [sic] to port, and later, north of Sicily, the small island of Maritimo, just the tip of a mountain sticking out of the sea. The Isle of Capri provided a good pin-point. Over the target area there was 9/10ths. cloud so we bombed from above the flares. Flak was moderate and widely spread. There was slight consternation when one of my turret doors fell off for no apparent reason. I wondered what else would fall off but everything else seemed to be intact so it was just a matter of strapping myself in - which according to the book should be so in any case. Just after "bombs gone" I reported a twin-engined aircraft starboard quarter up at 1000 yards. The Skipper started to weave gently. and Di went to the astrodome position to search above the horizontal whilst I -theoritically [sic] at least-- concentrated on below the horizontal. This is not an easy task when the rear gunner is expected to ignore one fighter leaving it to his colleague whilst searching for others. Di became somewhat emotional to say the least, said it was not a fighter but merely flak, and then went on to give a commentry [sic] on searchlight activity and flak at least - by then- five miles away, and of only historical interest. Whilst in a turn to port the other aircraft was directly astern and I identified it as twin engined and without the high tail fin of the Wellington. The Skipper did a diving turn to starboard and we lost the other aircraft. Di claimed it was another aircraft not to be confused with the one he identified as flak! Normally Di stayed at his radio position, it was better that way. On the return journey, either there was a raid on Trapani or someone had strayed off-course. On the 18th. it was again to SYRACUSE, an exceptionally clear night, almost no cloud and a full moon. We could have dispensed with the flarepath on take-off and we felt as if we were doing a day trip. Over the target there was tracered flak up to 7,000 feet and we were geared up to bomb from 5,000 feet. We expected night fighters, and even day fighters, so went straight in at 5000 feet, bombed and straight out again, down to 3,000 feet for a quick tour of several nearby small towns and villages where we dropped leaflets. We were glad to get home that night, such met. and lunar conditions were hazardous. SALERNO again on the 21st, a routine trip, but on the 24th. of June I got a message to call at the 'Orderly Room', which in reality was the bell tent next to the C.O.'s tent. There was great discussion on which particular crime had caught up with me, but it was all very innocent. I came out of the bell tent as a Flight Sargeant [sic] much to the annoyance of the Sgt. Skipper and the three other Sgts. in the crew. It didn't help very much when I told them they need not call me Flight Sgt. ALL the time, just once in the morning and again in the evening.
In the early hours of the 26th. June we bombed the naval base of BARI in S. E. Italy, and it was an almost complete fiasco. It was not possible to see the ground due to haze, and the Western Desert aircraft had dropped the marker flares in the wrong place. Fires were started over an area of about 60 square miles, maybe one or two on the target by sheer chance. The target was a small oil refinery built especially to deal with the crude oil from Albania. Important to the Axis because that particular oil needed special treatment which, we were advised, only Bari could provide. We were now spending more and more time over the Italian mainland, for the first time we were seeing concentrations of
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lights in the form of a triangle which were assumed to be Prison and Internment Camps. On the way out we saw Trapani being bombed by our colleagues from the Western desert. The following afternoon it was too hot to sleep and I flew with Sgt. Whitehouse, a new pilot from Britain, in a brand new aircraft, 'D' Donald. We traced the path of the 8th. Army to beyond the Mareth line, at about 2500 feet. There were few battle scars; It was hard to appreciate that this was a place of such dreadful carnage so recently.
Kairouan was placed out of bounds due to Typhus, and there was nothing in the walled city to tempt us to ignore the order. The Arabs were less friendly and our revolvers were not looked upon merely as a taken of authoriity [sic] . According to a report in a Daily Mirror which took a few weeks to arrive, the lads were reported to have been given a hearty welcome by the French people in the Holy City of Kairouan. Actually there were only a handful of French remaining. Another Daily Mirror headline we found amusing was "BLOCKBUSTERS ON BIZERTA". It went an to say that "Lastnight our Bombers based in North Africa again pounded Bizerta; During the entire raid, blockbusters were dropped at the rate of one every two minutes. Absolutely correct, it was a raid from Blida, but it did not say that the raid was of 2 minutes duration and that we had only two aircraft able to carry the blockbusters. However, we looked forward to reading even an old Daily Mirror and to listen to the B.B.C. when airborne. Some of the stock phrases brought a chuckle at times 'Fires were left burning..', "Rear Gunners straffed [sic] the target..." "All opposition was overcome.." "Many two ton blockbusters ...." etc. etc, It appeared far more impressive in print than in reality doing it. Generally all we saw were explosions and dull red glows, tracer coming up and curving away passed us, and being blinded sometimes by searchlights. We did not picture at the time the loss of life down below and the damage caused to factories and buildings of all descriptions, in any cases, mostly houses. Straffing [sic] was invigorating and served to let off steam, but the supporting arithmetic was disappointing. An aircraft travelling at 180 m.p.h. (264 feet per second) over a target 360 yards in length would take 4 seconds to traverse the target. A .303 Browning has a rate of fire of 1200 rounds per min., the four in the rear turret having a combined rate of 4800 per min., or 80 rounds per second. There is time only for a 4 second burst of 320 rounds - not a lot - The Reargunner sees nothing of the target until it is passed and needs to be told when to open fire by someone in the front office. On straffing [sic] details it is likely the front turret with two guns, and one beam gun would be in use, increasing fire power by 75%, Possibly even a four-second burst once experienced at the receiving end might cause the enemy to duck next time we come by. This was an acceptable technique along a straight road. The aircraft was often fitted with two beam guns, one on each side, but only one was manned. Vision was poor from the beam positions and normally we would pass to one side of the target with one wing low. The gun on the other beam would have been aiming upwards. On the 28th 150 Sqdn. was stood down for 24 hours, but the previous night we paid a visit to SANGIOVANI on the southern toe of the Italian mainland: This was a daylight trip with four squadrons of Wellingtons to the train ferry terminal, a dock or lock which the ferry would enter and the water level be adjusted such that the level of the rails on land and ferry coincided. The train would then be shunted an or off the ferry as required. Flack was intense for
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Italian targets and there were trains both on-the ferry in dock and onshore. The whole lot was successfully reduced to a shambles but 6 of our aircraft failed to return. Our heaviest loss yet in a single night.
The 30th. of June was Willie's birthday and we celebrated it over MESINA. According to the B.B.C. we are blitzing both sides of the straits, Mesina to the west in Sicily and Sangiovani on the Italian mainland. The straits are only 3 1/2 miles wide, and carry the greater part of all enemy traffic to Sicily, entirely in German control with concentrated light flack [sic] from both sides and from ships in the middle. A trip lasting 5 1/2 hours.
The whole crew is beginning to feel the strain of long periods of intense activity. Although most of the memories are of the actual bombing ops., that was only a part of it. Aircraft had to be inspected daily on the ground and also air tested ready for the next trip, before bombing up. The Navigator had to prepare his flight plan prior to take off and this was done also on the many occasions when trips were later cancelled. All of us spent at least some time in the Intellegence [sic] Section to keep up-to-date with the position of the front line and the general trend. It was perhaps in some ways easier for us than for our counterparts in Europe. We had fewer distractions. There was no looking forward to a pint in the local pub. nor getting home to the family for a day or two. Not even the local cinema. There was very little booze to be had, I seem to remember a ration of one bottle of beer per fortnight which I used to take up on an air test to cool it down, and then give to the Armourers after landing. The batman was not going to ask "which suit and shoes are you wearing tonight Sir? " as he did later at Spitalgate. Evening wear was the same as for the rest of the day, shorts, perhaps a shirt, certainly no socks, and sandals on the feet. On the few occasions when we went out of camp we generally wore khaki battledress which we wore also of course on ops. I was finding it increasingly difficult to keep my eyes open at night for long periods, and finding it very tempting to rest my head on the guns and have a doze, but to do so would be absolutely unforgiveable. The Skipper was under an even greater strain and a six hour trip was 6 hours of concentrated effort. On one or two occasions he dozed off for maybe just a few seconds, but fortunately by his side most of the time was Stan Chadderton the Bombardier who very quickly realised the position and watched points up front. The amount of nattering in the air was on the increase, also. It was standard procedure to use oxygen at night regardless of altitude, and the microphones with their electrical heaters were built-in to the mask. Everyone was connected to the intercom system all the time except for the Wireless op. who was able to switch out his own connection when using his radio. Microphones were switched as required by individual wearers. The Skipper's microphone was switched on all the time and so too was the Rear Gunner's in danger areas. Procedures were relaxed somewhat in our particular theatre of war; we could get along quite nicely without oxygen below 10,000 feet and I don't recollect flying much above that height. Whenever I reported anything Di dashed to the astradome [sic] and objected. If the rotation of my rear turret was not rythmical [sic] both the Skipper and Navigator objected. The turret and guns presented an assymetrical [sic] shape to the slipstream with a consequent rudder effect. If I kept the turret facing starboard for too long the aircraft would do a gentle flat turn to starboard. Meanwhile the Skipper was trying to maintain a course determined by the
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Navigator who was keeping a watchful eye on his compass, perhaps not appreciating that it was the rear gunner making things difficult. Although the sides of the turret were clad with perspex, it was difficult to see through it with the degree of clarity required. In fact the perspex in front of the turret had been removed to provide a clear vision panel. Even on the ground the whole crew was getting very irritable with each other. For almost a year we had lived worked, ate and near enough slept together almost without a break, the same endless routine, and anything to which we could look forward seemed an awful long way off. Whose turn to carry the water, became a very important issue at times and would lead to an argument [sic] . After some very harsh wards we would agree that it was stupid to argue about such a trivial issue, which in turn led to a bigger argument on who started the argument in the first place. I remember Chad the Bombardier putting paid to the row one day by getting off his bed - known as a pit - and announcing "Well, I've get to go for a **, anyone care to join me'? The loo comprised a trench, 20 feet long, several feet deep and about one foot wide over which one crouched. There was a choice of direction in which to face, and one or two of the bigger chaps preferred to straddle the trench. There was no need to interrupt a conversation in going to the toilet.
By the end of June the length of tour was clarified. First it was to have been 30 trips as in Britain, then it had been increased to 40 as some trips were not very hazardous, then some of the trips counted only as halves, and the tour was again changed to be 250 hours of operational flying. The Western Desert tour was said to be 40 trips or 250 hours, whichever was the less. However, there were other things to think about. Sgt. Lee and two other pilots were paraded before the whole squadron Air Crews and called "Saboteurs" by the Group Captain, having between them written off five aircraft in taxiing accidents. Group Captain 'Speedy' Powell was a very keen type and conducted all the briefings himself, was generally the first one off the ground and first back in time for debriefing. Whilst we were resting he would sometimes return to the target in an American twin boomed lightning to try and assess the damage - or find what we had actually bombed!
On the night of the 30th. June we were stood dawn and watched 142 Sqdn. take off for southern Italy. The starboard engine of one aircraft cut a few seconds before the aircraft should have get airborne. The aircraft swung and crashed into a jeep which was waiting to cross the 'runway', killing both American occupants and breaking it's back, a complete write-off. My diary makes no mention of the fate of the crew. We had just been issued with a new aircraft, 'B Beer' and I spent most of the day cleaning the guns and turret which were still all greased up as when they left England. Normally this work was carried out by the Armourers, but I was expected to take an active interest in the guns and turrets. The guns were removed, stripped, soaked in petrol, thoroughly cleaned and reassembled, replaced in the newly-cleaned turret and then harmonised. In Britain the harmonising of guns was carried out by placing a board at a predetermined distance in front of the turret and adjusting the ring-sight and guns to line up with specific paints or circles on the board. In North Africa we placed a can or any handy object on the ground 300 yards away and pointed the guns and ring-sight at it.
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Another day-off on the 2nd. July and Jumbo Cox, a Navigator on 150 Sqdn. and I hitch-hiked into Sousse and spent a few hours in the sea. After our dip we queued for 20 minutes at a huge marquee and enjoyed the most wonderful mug of tea of all time. I have thought many times in the last 40 years of that mug of tea.
The 4th. of July turned out to be the-hottest in temperature we had experienced for a long time. We had bombed TRAPANI in the very early morning. Intensive flack and searchlights with tracer up to 5000 feet. At 2000 feet the temperature was 95 Farenheit [sic] and not much lower at 9,000 feet, our bombing height. I was wearing only trousers and a shirt and was soaked in perspiration. Even the slipstream felt hot when I put one hand outside. Apart from the oppressive heat, it was a routine trip, and we managed to sleep most of the following afternoon, in 130 deg. in the shade. The wind was from the south-west, straight off the Sahara, and several airmen passed out with heatstroke. Metal parts of the aircraft were too hot to touch and a Wellington on the ground of 37 Squadron went up in flames. On the night of the 6th, we were briefed to attack aerodromes in Sardinia, and Sgt. Chandler piloted the first aircraft off. Both engines cut immediately after take-off whilst his undercarriage was still lowered. With full fuel and bomb load he somehow managed to avoid the inevitable and landed in a cultivated area at the end of the runway. Some of the crew suffered minor injuries, but it was 40 minutes before the rest of us were given a green to take-off. The wrecked aircraft was directly under the take-off path. Seven aircraft failed to get off the ground, including ours, all due to engines overheating after running for over 40 minutes on the ground. We had also lost air pressure for the brakes. Of the aircraft which did take off none was successful in finding the target, flouted by bad weather over Sardinia. Sgt. Valentine was above 10/10ths cloud with engines overheating and deemed it necessary to jettison his bombs "over the sea". We were not generally briefed with the positions of Allied shipping convoys, but were routed away from them without being given the reason. Sgt. Valentine decided to return by the shortest route and when has bombs whistled down on the convoy the Navies took a very poor view and let fly with everything they had. This was a well-established practice on the Navy's part, so there was no cause for complaint. In all, that night was a waste of 30 tons of bombs, 4000 gallons of petrol and over 150 flying hours.
On the 7th. we visited an aerodrome at COMISO in Southern Italy, delivering 4500 lbs, of bombs. It was a new target to the R.A.F., and apparently undefended, Only three of us managed to locate it and we were lucky in the timing of our 3 flares in obtaining a pinpoint. We obtained good aiming point photograph which showed our stick of bombs had straddled the dispersal area, with the last two landing in the olive groves.
Nearly half a century later I wonder why we did not use the radio for communicating with other aircraft in providing mutual assistance. We had no V.H.F. but the TR9 H.F. R/T would have been adequate. Observing Radio silence I feel was taken to extremes, our signals might indicate our presence to the enemy, but they were aware of that in any case. They might home onto us, but our transmissions would have been brief and on a frequency initially unknown to the enemy. They were not equipped to respond fast enough to information gleaned by monitoring, neither was the area covered with direction-finding
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stations. I feel this was one of the matters where a principle had been established and which was not reviewed often enough under changing circumstances.
On the evening of the tenth of July, just before briefing we heard aircraft engines and it was like being at a cinema show. Wave after wave of Dakota transports thundered overhead on their way to Sicily. It reminded me of the film "An Engishman`s Home" and the massive formations of German bombers, but these aircraft were American and British and were definitely not making a film. At briefing Groupie put us in the picture. "Accurate timing and accurate bombing, more so than ever before" was his opening phrase. We were briefed to bomb a specific part of SYRACUSE whilst paratroops were being dropped close by and other paras were already in position ready to capture our target immediately after the bombing. Flares were dropped accurately and the target successfully bombed, although some bombs went in the sea because of its close proximity. We noted a very large fire at Catania and "a number of queer lights which suggested fifth column activity" according to my diary. 45 years later I wonder how I reached that conclusion. Looking down from about 9,000 feet on the southern coast of Sicily on the return journey, we saw the Navy shelling the coast and several searchlights on shore began to sweep out to sea. One of the searchlights located a ship and held on to it, whilst the others went on sweeping. From another ship there were just three flashes of light, and seconds afterwards, three flashes on shore, one in front of the offending searchlight, one slap on it, and the third behind it. That was one searchlight out of action, and the others switched off in sympathy. The Navy carried on firing without further interruption. My panoramic view of the action from nearly two miles above gave no indication of the destruction and agony caused by those three shots.
The following, night it was the turn of MONTECORVlNO in western Italy, a new German aerodrome. Over the target we narrowly missed colliding with Jack Alazrachi in `Q' Queenie. His starboard wingtip scored our port wing and my diary records "a very shaky do". Our stick straddled the aircraft parking area and we took an excellent aiming point photograph of 15 aircraft an the ground. It was later confirmed officially that our two squadrons destroyed 40 aircraft and damaged many more.
On the 13th. at briefing, Group Captain Powell grinned and glanced down at his flying boots and said "Yes chaps, we are in for an interesting trip, Jerry is landing a massive convoy at MESINA and we are instructed to smash it." We went out at 6000 ft. above sea level which, over Sicily averaged about 2000 feet above ground. I found it difficult to concentrate on a formal rear-gunner type search, there was so much activity. Ground detail could be seen very easily and the Tactical Air Force was observed bombing all over the island. There were flares everywhere, bombs creating havoc, flak barrages and intensive shelling by the Navies. Over our target, the flak was intense but scattered. Sgt. "Pax" Smith's aircraft was holed, something went through his bombing panel and made two big holes in the front turret. This crew, like most did not include a full-time front gunner, the Bombardier occupied the turret as and when expedient and on this occasion had just returned to the second dickie seat when the aircraft was holed. One aircraft was seen to crash and another, in flames, exploded on hitting the ground. At debriefing we learned that one Wellington of 142 Squadron was missing,
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and this was manned by six officers, five of whom had completed one tour over Germany. The sixth, flying as 'second dickie' was on his very first trip.
Another new target to us, on the 15th, CROTONIA, an aerodrome on the east coast of the toe of Italy. A routine trip out, good visibility and straight in to the taget [sic] . There were four flak batteries, but Sgt, Mickie Mortimer was just ahead of us and his first stick silenced all four. Our single stick straddled the aerodrome and enlarged the existing fires among aircraft on the ground. We stooged around for a little while watching aircraft blowing up and more bombs adding to the havoc on the ground. When all was quiet we dropped to 250 feet and went in with guns blazing and between us fired about 4000 rounds into the fires, We must have hit something. There were dummy fires to the north and south-east of the aerodrome, very unreal and no-one was fooled by them. On the way out of the target area we were followed. by an aircraft sporting an orange light, and at one stage took light evasive action, but he did not attack. Several other rear gunners reported the same experience, non [sic] was actually engaged. We were routed back round northern Sicily, as usual Trapani was being attacked and other targets nearby were being bombed. We were hoping to see the 142 Sqdn. aircraft with the blue light which we nearly shot down returning from Salerno. The Bombardier in the second pilot's seat reported two aircraft ahead, one with a white light which we assumed to be a decoy. We expected the aircraft to allow us to overtake, and whilst the one with the light drew our attention his chum would sneak is from another dirction [sic] . We lost both the other aircraft for a minute or two, then the aircraft with the light - this time a blue one - reappeared on the starboard bow at about 500 yards. Meanwhile Chad had taken over the front turret, but held his fire. He identified it as a Wimpey. The Skipper altered course and we passed about 100 feet below the Wimpy. I got a plan view of him and confirmed the identification. As he fell behind I flashed dah dah dit, dit dit dit on my inspection lamp. There was no reply from the other aircraft but it landed 15 minutes after us and taxied towards 142 dispersal, On that same trip two of us saw an aircraft at 800 yards on our port quarter up which closed in to 500 yards. He was at too great a range for our .303s, but we were ready for an instant dive to port. He surprised us by turning away to port at about 400 yards, and again two of us identified it as a Wimpey.
Enemy aerodromes continued to take up most of our effort, and on the night of the 17th. it was three hours each way to POMIGLIANO near Naples, passing round Vesuvius with it's dull red glow. The target was initially very quiet and consequently not easy to locate. On our first run in at 6000 feet, we were a few minutes early, but dead on time at 4000 feet on our second run. We were caught and held in searchlights, and the light flak was point-blank. Allan Willoughby claimed he could smell it when the Skipper asked him for a course for home after the second run-in. When Stan the Bombardier announced that we still had nine 250 pound bombs aboard, someone suggested we should jettisson [sic] them on the town. Allan suggested we strike at a village a few miles ahead but Stan refused to drop them anywhere except the aerodrome at Pomigliano. The third run-in was at 5000 feet and the searchlights got us again as soon as the bomb doors were open. We were in a cone of eight and it seemed we had the aerodrome to ourselves. The bombing was accurate and we lost height to 2000 feet, all quiet again. My part in all this had
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really been that of a passenger listening to and witnessing the drama, and I was not popular when I suggested to the Skipper that we go back at low level and put a few lights out. Chad was in favour and had the front turret in mind, Allan was not keen and didn't like the smell of flak, and Dyson thought the idea was 'plain stupid'. Dyson was probably right for the wrong reason, but the Skipper was thinking we had got away with it for well over 30 trips so far, and there was no point in tempting providence. A three hour stooge back to Blida with nothing but silence on the intercom. Other aircraft were seen in the circuit and our TR9 radio was out of order. This was a very low power transmitter/receiver operating between 4 and 8 MHz. and used by the Skipper to contact Air Traffic Control at Base. If we still had an acceptable reserve of fuel we would have gone away and returned in 30 miniutes [sic] , but fuel was low and the Skipper decided to land without any formalities or delay. This aroused the wrath of the Flight Commander who tore a terrific strip off him next day. Our report at debriefing was very different to that of Sgt. Whitehouse and crew, who said it was a wizard O.T.U. run, bombs slap on the runway, no flak, no searchlights and the whole thing was 'a piece of cake'. He had in fact been to the wrong aerodrome, Crotone, which we had pranged on the 15th. where the defences stayed silent in order not to attract attention. - an old Italian custom -. The reason for the accuracy of the searchlights was a layer of cloud at 10,000 feet, a full moon and clear visibility. We were silhouetted against the cloud even without the searchlights.
Two nights later Sgt. Whitehouse, this time officially and with the rest of us, went again to CROTONE. We were all very tired and I found it difficult to keep awake. Visibility was 15 miles with a nearly full moon and on the way out for long periods we actually enjoyed the visible company of other Wimpies. On arrival at CROTONE we were surprised to see fires already started and spent a good five minutes in ensuring that it was indeed the target, Two bombing runs were made, at 3000 feet and 1500 feet, dropping nine 250 pounders each time. The bombs were seen bursting among aircraft on the ground, some of which were already ablaze. 400 yards from the burning aircraft was a small wood which had obviously been hit and was burning merrily. My diary records "from the ground it would have seemed like Nov. 5th.
Rockets were going up and verries by the score.
Someone had pranged a pyrotechnic store."
We made a third run at 200 feet and spent some 1500 rounds at the aircraft on the ground. Other gunners did the same. We were amazed to find everything so easy, and no opposition as far as we know, our raid on the 15th. should have given them a good idea of what to expect. There were no dummy fires and still they make no effort to disperse aircraft. The absence of fighters was strange; even day-fighters would have been very effective under those conditions. One crew reserved an odd bomb for the village south of the arodrome [sic] . It had a 36 hour delay and landed in the centre of the village. Not a very nice thing to do, and an act certainly not in accordance with our leaflets. Sgt. Pax Smith the intrepid Kiwi was on the last trip of his tour and elected to hit a railway bridge near the coast. It also had a' 36 hour delay fuse and missed the bridge by 50 yards. The British army was not at all happy with Smithy's effort, they planned to use the bridge within a week or two and were going to some considerable trouble to make sure the enemy
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didn't blow it up. They hadn’t counted on Smithy, but fortunately he wasn't quite up to scratch an that last trip.
One night off and then back try the 'Big City" , the capital of Italia, not to be confused with the really big one, the Capital city of Deutchland, with which there was absolutely no comparison. It was over two months since we had been to Rome, and it was still supposed to be an 'Open, undefended City'. Our specific target was PRACTICA DI MERE, an aerodrome just to the southwest of Rome. The Groupy had made it very clear at briefing, that nothing must be dropped on Rome itself. The target would be marked by flares positioned by W/O Coulson of 142 Squadron. We had no target map but the the [sic] aerodrome was plotted on the map of Central Italy - probably half million scale -. As we were passing the island of Maratimo, Chad was in the second dickie seat, map in hand and decided to get a clearer view of Maratimo by opening the sliding window at his side. The map disappeared out of the window, but with Allan's D. R. navigation we reached the target as Coulson's flares went down. Target marking at that stage of the war in Italy was in its infancy and was carried out with flares designed for lighting up the ground. These were very different from the coloured Target Indicators used to such great effect over Germany. Bombing was not particularly accurate, but well clear of Rome itself, where there was plenty of light flak and searchlight activity which exploded the myth about an undefended city. This activity extended down the Tiber to the Lido di Roma, where the Radio Station was still operating. The Vatican was blacked out very effectively
On the 25th. we started 8 days leave, taking an aircraft back to Blida for an engine change and major inspection. We took advantage of the stores at Blida and were issued with new uniforms, shoes and anything we wanted, just a matter of signing for it, it was two years before the system caught up with me and I was debited with the cost.
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[bearer document in English and arabic]
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[photograph]
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TWO OF OUR AIMING POINT PHOTOS
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The first three days were spent in Algiers with Harry Dyson at the Hotel Radio Grand but the inactivity - or something - was too much for Harry so we returned to Blida, only to find the rest of our party had adjourned to the rest camp at Surcouf. I spent most of my time in the next few days in Blida, partly with a French-Arab family Iloupcuse Moka Mourice Bijoutier, at 11 Rue Goly, Blida. 30 years later I was able to find the area but no-one recognised either the name or the address. Like most places, Blida had changed a lot in the intervening years. I remembered it as an almost typical French village, beautifully clean, tables and chairs outside the cafes, and a very pleasant atmosphere. After 20 years or so of independence it was a very different story, and I thought a rather sad one. I made several excursions into Algiers where the Yanks had become very well organised. They had-taken over and re-organised six cinemas, all with continuous shows for about 12 hours per day, and open house to Service personnel. I visited all six. The N.C.O.'s Club in Rue d'Isley was our base camp in Algiers, where we enjoyed endless cups of tea and cakes. The Malcolm Club, exclusive to R.A.F. personnel provided a good hot meat each evening. It was on this leave that I visited the local Match Factory at Caussemille, being an ardent Philumenist - collector of matchbox labels-. The factory was at that time owned and operated by the French and I was given a conducted tour of the factory. Most of the labels presented to me at the factory are in my collection to this day. My next visit to the factory was 37 years later, when I met with a very cool reception. The French had gone long ago, only their name remained. In that area of Algiers, all the street names were written on the street signs in Arabic except one, Caussemille. This was the name of an old French or Belgian family of match manufacturers possibly difficult to translate into Arabic. I met several of the chaps from the Rhodesia training days, one had joined Coastal Command and was detached from 'U.K. to Maison Blanche on White Wimpies. It had taken him six months to complete 100 hours and he was rather gloomy about the next four hundred to complete his tour. He was in fact rather nervous, his job being mine-sweeping; I asked him "what height do you fly at?" He replied that `it was a two-dimensional job, no such thing as height'. Causing magnetic mines to blow up by flying over them at very low level could not have been very pleasant. Maison Blanche is now known as El Beda, the International airport of Algeria, not so well organised as it was in 1943, and not half so busy! Blida aerodrome is the Headquarters of the Algerian Air Force and is a prohibited area to foreigners.
At the end of our 8 days in comparitive [sic] civilisation, we were glad to collect our newly serviced Wimpey and return to Kairouan. I was immediately recruited to fly with Sgt. Stone to MARINA DI PAOLA. We stooged over northern Sicily is daylight and very close to Trapani our old favourite which had been severely bashed about. During the invasion it was subjected also to heavy Naval shelling. Being with a different crew perhaps made things more interesting, seeing how they reacted to various aspects, and I thought they had a rather strange and formal appoach [sic] . We did not see our bombs burst and our photoflash failed to go off. There was none of the usual binding we experienced with our own crew, everyone was pleasant, courteous and cheerful. At debriefing Group Captain Powell said "Good Show chaps, I expect you are glad to get onto ops at last, and that's the first one done". I was speechless but thinking about their next 44, maybe they were also. I can see "Speedy Powell" very clearly making
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that statement, a memory revived recently in the film "Target for Tonight" in which he was the Flight Lieutenant taking the briefing; the same very distinctive and distinguished voice.
On the night of the 4th., the crew not feeling particularly refreshed after its leave, our target was BATTAPAGLIA. It was daylight almost to the Italian Coast and we arrived with 20 minutes to spare, circling the target area. 'Bang on time we dropped the flares, but there were no bright lights'. The twenty minutes of sight-seeing had upset the routine and the flares were dropped on 'safe', and therefore failed to go off. We still had two flares so went down to 3000 feet and dropped the bombs through 9/10ths cloud using individual flares. 90 seconds after bombing, Stan identified the target 4 miles ahead. We had neither bombs nor flares left, and were depressed at putting up such a rotten show on what turned out to be the last trip of our tour. We could have done a spot of straffing below cloud, but instead called it a day.
The following night we waved the boys off to MASINA, and we felt rather sad that we were no longer operational. Sqdn. Ldr Garrad and crew were also no longer operational, having failed to return from MASINA. Someone suggested staying and doing another tour, but Dyson thought the idea was "stupid" - like most other ideas - and with deep regrets we said cheerio to our friends on 150 and 142 Squadrons, and climbed in the back of a lorry bound for Tunis. Pax Smith and Mickey Mortimer and crews were with us and we sat back and enjoyed the scenery, some taking pot-shots at nothing in particular with their revolvers. We had in fact lots of unofficial ammunition of 9mm. calibre, captured from the enemy. This fitted nicely into our .38 Smith & Wessons and differed from the .38 ammo. only in that it had no ejection flange at the end of the cartridge. This had the effect that we could use captured enemy ammo. but they could not use ours because of the flange.
We arrived at no. 2BPD in Tunis just in time for dinner and a cold shower, the first shower for about nine months. During our week or so in the Transit Camp, we had a sort of parade each morning and then were free for the day. It was on one of these parades that our Skipper's name was called to approach the C.O. "Sir, 416170". With no prior warning, the citation was read out and he was presented with the D.F.M. Next it was the turn of Mickey Mortimer to march up and also receive a D.F.M. I seem to recall that he did a somersault before saluting in front of the C.O., or was it a back somersault after receiving the award? either of which today seems quite incredible. Pax Smith had already received a D.F.M for his earlier exploits. My one other recollection of the Transit Camp was an old Italian Water Tanker which was used as a static water tank. It held 10,000 gallons of water and must have weighed over 53 tons when full. All 24 wheels were firmly embedded in the sand up to their axles. It was when we departed from Tunis by lorry for Algiers that one of the Canadian officers decided to hitch-hike back to U.K. and to rejoin the party at the Reception Centre. I learned later that he flew first to Algiers with the R.A.F. and then flew to U.K. with the Yanks. He was an old hand at that sort of thing, having hitch-hiked from Blida to New York and back with a colleague in less than a week.
Meanwhile the rest of us travelled the 500 miles to Algiers by lorry along the coast road, and after a few days in the transit camp boarded a troopship, the Capetown Castle, a passenger liner of the Castle line. We were accommodated in 4-berth cabins with full peace-time fascilities [sic] .
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each cabin was allocated one Italian P.O.W. who slept outside the door, and attended to the cleaning, dhobi etc. We were not impressed by the Italians as fighting men, but had no complaints of their ability and willingness in the job they were then doing. It was a very comfortable voyage and we lived it up in a manner to which we were certainly not accustomed.
After a very pleasant and restful 10 days or so we disembarked at Greenoch and I recollect forming up on the key [sic] prior to joining a train for Liverpool and West Kirby. A rather pompous redcapped Military Policeman called us to attention, right turn, at the double, march! It was more astonishment than lack of discipline which caused everyone to stay put. He was told to get his knees brown and get a few other things too, and we walked to the train, deliberately out of step. Our first steps back in England were certainly not going to be at the double ordered by Red Caps.
This was my fourth visit to West Kirby, where we were rekitted, saying cheerio to our Khaki battledress and tropical kit, documents checked, medical exam. and then disembarkation leave. It was at West Kirby that our Crew was really disbanded, very sad after working as a team for so long, but another phase of our careers was completed.
Of the Crew? Stan Chadderton was commissioned on his second tour and we have met several times in the past 40 years, but I have no news of the Skipper and the rest of the crew. Stan met the Skipper, then a Flight Lieutenant at Brise [sic] Norton at the end of the war on his return from a German P.O.W. camp. We can only hope he returned safely to New Zealand and was able to return in the farm. Allan Willoughby is thought to have ended the war as a Squadron Leader.
My association with the Wimpy was not yet over, however, it was still in use in large numbers in the U.K. for operational training, and was to remain so until the end of the war. More "Wimpys" were built than any other operational. bomber.
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[document from C-in-C]
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[photograph] C.W WITH MUM BARNOLDSWICK
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[photograph] HILDA WITH THE SKIPPER AND BOMB AIMER
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[photograph] [underlined] WITH THE SKIPPER & BOMB AIMER – SECOND HONEYMOON SEPT. 1943 [/underlined]
[photograph] [photograph]
[underlined] AT OUR CHALET AT BLIDA [/underlined]
WATSON – RUTHERFORD- DYSON – CHADDERTON & PADDY (MORTIMER’S FRONT GUNNER)
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[underlined] OUR 150 SQDN. SKIPPER SGT. STAN RUTHERFORD 416170 RNZAF [/underlined] [underlined] A WIMPEY AT BLIDA [/underlined]
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[photograph] AT RICHMOND SECOND HONEYMOON
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[warrant officer parchment]
52A
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[underlined] Screened [/underlined] .
September 1943 saw me at 84 O.T.U. Desborough, a Flight Sgt. with 43 ops under my belt, and that wonderful feeling of being ex-operational. For the next six months or so I was to be a "Course Shepherd", responsible for 12 Air Gunners. Desborough was a typical Operational Training Unit where, in the main, newly-trained aircrew were introduced to operational aircraft and the techniques of dealing with the opposition which was by no means limited to the Germans. There were three courses running simultaneously which gave ample scope to the Captains in making one of their most important decisions, that of selecting their crews.
For the first two weeks or so the training comprised mainly lectures and familiarisation with equipment. Air Gunners were generally able to make an early start with the flying where even on circuits and bumps an extra pair of eyes was to advantage.
The Course Shepherd ensured the smooth-running of the Air-Gunners training. There were specialist instructors for lectures on subjects such as guns, turrets and tactics, but the C.S. supervised their flying aspects and work on the range, in detail.
I particularly enjoyed the Fighter Affiliation sessions, where trainee gunners would take over the rear turret whilst being attacked by one or two Miles Masters or any other "Playmate" who could be cajoled officially to co-operate.
I would stand at the astrodome guiding the gunner with the timing of his advice and instructions to the Pilot. The standard evasive action (referred to later in 5 Group as "Combat Manouvre [sic] ") was the corkscrew, well known to, and anticipated by, the enemy, I might add that until I arrived at 84 OTU I had never even heard of the corkscrew. During the OTU excercises [sic] the fighter pilots were generally sporting enough not to press home their attacks with too much determination, but to allow the bomber sometimes to 'escape', thus giving the rear gunners - or some of them-- the false impression that they actually stood some chance of survival.
I felt quite at home in the "Wimpy" and encouraged the pilot to throw the aircraft around, and make the corkscrews rather more violent to simulate a real attack, where a quick getaway was the only solution to survival. For fighter affiliation excercises [sic] , the turret was equipped with an 8mm. Camera Gun, fitted in place of one of the four .303 Browning machine guns, the remaining three Brownings being de-armed. Each gunner plugged-in his own personal film cassette, and results were assessed the following day in the cinema.
Air firing excercises [sic] were supervised, where the speed of the Wellington was reduced, and a Miles Master would overtake about 3 or 400 yards abeam, towing a drogue. The gunner would be authorised to fire when the towing aircraft was outside his field of fire. He would then fire off about 200 rounds from each gun (five 2-second bursts), at the drogue. It was more than likely that air firing during his initial training had been carried out using a single gun not mounted in a turret. Air to ground firing was limited to a single exercise on a range near the coast, there being little scope for this type of work for heavy bombers over Deutchland.
Not very popular with the coming of Winter weather were the exercises at the firing butts or range. Six trainees would each be given a rear turret, together with four belts each of 200 rounds. He would
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mount the guns and fit the ammunition belts. Take-off procedure with safety catches 'on', then firing a few short bursts, landing procedure, clear the guns, etc. . Generally a few faulty rounds were deliberately built-in to create gun stoppages which the trainee had to clear. Finally he removed the guns from the turret and stripped and cleaned them ready for the next trainee.
All this took about three hours and it was on one of these sessions that unpleasantness developed with one of the trainees. Of the 12 Air Gunners in my little flock, eleven were Sergeants and one was an Acting Pilot Officer on probation. Like the others, his previous flying experience was limited to about 8 hours, and he had not yet been within 10 miles of an operational aircraft. He had been top of his course at Gunnery School and granted a Commission. I found that one of the Sergeants had fitted the guns in the turret and armed them with the belts of ammunition for him whilst I was busy with the others. He had managed to fire-off the rounds, and eventually, with some assistance the guns were removed. He flatly refused to clean the guns, claiming that it was an inappropriate task for an officer. I put it to him that although on a squadron the guns would be lovingly cared for by the armourers, he must still be fully au-fait with every aspect of guns and gunnery. He firmly refused to touch the guns and soil his hands and I told him that unless he gets on with it, we should be late for lunch. Four of the sgts. each took a gun and cleaned them. Some very cryptic comments were made by the Sergeants and I told the Ag. P. O. he was foolish. Later that day, to my absolute astonishment, I was marched in front of the C.O. and charged on a form 252 with insubordination. I was advised that an N.C.O. does not give orders to officers and I replied with something to the effect that I was the instructor and the officer the pupil, giving orders was an essential part of the job. Nevertheless, I was severely reprimanded. I had on several occasions applied for a posting back to operations, and the following day the Station W.O. told me my request had been granted and I was going to a squadron at Norton, near Sheffield in Yorkshire. Which squadron and with what type of aircraft was unimportant. I had never heard of Norton, bit hush-hush they had said. I should have realised that something was amiss, I was not being posted, but only detached. On arrival at Norton I found I was on an Aircrew Refresher Course which I was slow to realise was a correction or discipline course, a form of punishment. There were about 150 aircrew at Norton, from Flt/Lts to Sgts, almost all operational or ex-operational. At least I was among friends.
The day started with a call at 0600, on parade at 0630 , march to breakfast and an inspection at 0730 with greatcoats, followed almost immediately by a further inspection without greatcoats. This was followed until 1800 by sessions of drill, P.T. and lectures, with a break for lunch. Drill was just ordinary uninspiring square -bashing, wearing aircrew-issue shoes, and not boots. The instructor, said to be an L.A.C. Ag-Sgt. shouted commands and abuse, and was indeed very smart and probably efficient at his job, but utterly ignorant and useless off the barrack square. There was no rifle drill, and requests to introduce it were rejected. It was too easy for us to obtain .303 ammunition. P. T. was equally uninspiring and great emphasis was placed on recording improvement in performance as the training progressed. Lectures were farcical and covered most aircrew subjects, including navigation, gunnery, bombing techniques, target marking, etc. etc. There was not a
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flying badge among the instructors and obviously none had any flying experience in any capacity. No-one could possibly take the lectures seriously and there must have been some hair-raising answers in the written tests. The main problem was that at the slightest provocation one could be put on C.O.'s report. This was not a formal charge - which would have been on record - but an interview with the C.O. which would generally wind-up with an award of an extra 3 weeks at Sheffield. My policy was to keep my head down, or in modern parlance, to maintain a low profile. I generally managed to be near the back of the classroom and in the rear ranks on the drill square trying to be invisible. We were allowed out of camp after 1900, with an inspection at the gate, but lights out was at 2200, not allowing much scope. Most evenings were spent in the mess comparing notes and discussing our "crimes"; the instructors were conspicuous by their absence. I recall no-one admitting to flying or taxiing accidents, or misdemeanours whilst flying. Most of the reasons seem to have been absence without leave probably through boredom-, saying the wrong thing in an off-guarded moment or making someone more senior look silly. There was no connection between Norton and aircrew who were alledgedly [sic] L.M.F. or those who were reluctant to fly. Rather than charge a man formally with an offence, the easy way out was to send him on a "refresher course" with no reference to alleged crime or punishment. Operational aircrew discipline is often quoted as having been unique. All jobs were carried out with the same degree of dexterity, and responsibilities in the air within a trade were the same irrespective of rank. The Pilot was the Head Man, whether Squadron Leader or Sergeant. In the air, there were no formalities. The Pilot was 'Skipper' and no-one called anyone 'Sir'. This was generally so on the ground within the confines of the crew, but if it was a non-crew matter or there were V.I.P.'s about, a low-level type of formality might be introduced. Neither was there time for formality in the air where an attack may start and finish - one way or another - in seconds or less. On sighting a fighter at 300 yards a Rear Gunner in a film picked up a microphone and was beard to say "I say Skipper, I think we are being followed". A Guardsman might come up with "Permission to speak Sir", but life's not like that in the air.
Nearing the end of the 3-week course at Sheffield came the farcical final exams. I sailed through everything except P.T. where we were required to run 100 yards in 14 seconds. I was feeling fitter than I had for many years, but that 100 yards took me 17 seconds. Not good enough, try again. The second attempt took 19 seconds and the third attempt 24. I was told that "we would keep doing it all bloody night until I achieved it in 14 seconds". I merely said there was no point in attempting the impossible and I refused to carry out an unlawful order. So for me it was C.O.'s report next day. The C.O. said it was within his power to grant me an indefinite extension to the length of my course. I realised that to argue was probably futile and I recall being contradictory by saying something to the effect that "I have nothing to say except to remind everyone there is a real war going an out there and the sooner some of us get on with it the better". I don't know why I said it or thought what it might achieve, but I was easily provoked. I was awarded an extra 3 weeks at Sheffield, and was very surprised next morning when I was issued with a railway warrant to leave that morning with the others on my "course". I was convinced this was a mistake and succeeded in remaining invisible until I was well clear of Sheffield.
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Most of us felt the invasion of Europe was imminent and we had discussed our plans in the mess within earshot of the 'instructors'. When the balloon goes up, we return to base regardless of the opposition on the grounds that it was our duty to escape from captivity. In retrospect this was not entirely logical thinking but it might have influenced the C.O., I don't know. As far as I know there was no mass exodus and I have no idea how or when R.A.F. Norton was finally closed down. Suffice to say that it was a disgrace and an insult to aircrew, it would have been far more British to charge a man if he had allegedly done something wrong rather than take this easy way out. In general, training and lectures were taken very seriously by air crew and it could be claimed that the type and standard of lectures at Norton were in fact dangerous. Most of us realised it was just a load of absolute rubbish and did not take it seriously, and we had learned long ago to assess the value of the spoken word relative to the background and qualifications of the speaker.
The question of L.M.F. is an even more deplorable but entirely separate subject. Books have been written about it and it became a highly controversial issue. There were indeed some chaps who took such a bashing they felt they had had enough and to continue would increase the risk to the aircraft and crew or even crews. Most other operational aircrew have no less respect for them for admitting it and asking to be excused. L.M.F. and R.A.F. Norton were totally unconnected.
However, feeling very fit physically, and mentally ready to deal with the Ag. P. O. who knew all about the form 252 but couldn't strip even a Browning gun, I returned to 84 O.T.U. Desborough. A written request for an interview with the C.O. was given to the S.W.O. within minutes of arrival. I saw the Gunnery Leader and learned that I was to resume charge of the same course but less the sprog officer who was last seen on his way to Eastchurch as L.M.F and unsuitable for operations. I found later that he had been reduced to the ranks. It seems the other instructors had given him a very hard time all round, and particularly with combat manouvres where he was sick every time he flew. It was just not done to issue 252's but his chances of survival were improved. The C.O. agreed later that a mistake had been made and on paper my case had been reconsidered and the severe rep. withdrawn. Sheffield could not be undone and would have to be written off to experience, but he would see if he could hasten my promotion to W.O. and a posting to a real squadron.
At this time, the O.T.U. instructors were all crewed up and ready to back up the operational squadrons if necessary. Many of us were getting restless seeing a great increase in ground activity to the south and southeast. Lots of real aircraft, Lancasters, Halifaxes, Mosquitoes, Gliders etc. etc. and our status with the Wimpies as ex operational did little for our ego, making us feel like the 'has beens' we really were.
At about 0200 on the 6th. June, now a Warrant Officer, I was Orderly Officer and asleep in the duty room. The Duty Officer, a Ft/Lt. was flat out in the other bunk. A message was delivered marked "Top Secret" and I awakened the Duty Officer. He told me to open it. The message caused his to open a sealed envelope from his pocket and his exact words were "Christ, it’s started". 'It' was "Operation Overlord". Within a minute the Tannoy was blaring "All Duty Flight personnel to their flights immediately" 'All sreened aircrews to the Briefing Room
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at 0500," and so on. There followed a day of intense activity; air tests, bombing up, briefing, changing the bomb load, rebriefing, and the job of Orderly Officer went completely by the board.
In July, the great moment arrived, and our complete second tour crew of five was posted to Aircrew Pool at Scampton en route ultimately to a 5 Group Squadron.
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[photograph]
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[photograph] AT AIRCREW POOL SCAMPTON AUG ‘44
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[underlined] SCAMPTON [/underlined]
For Wellingtons we were indeed a complete crew, but we were not destined for Wellingtons, but Lancasters, and we needed either a Navigator or Bomb-aimer and another Gunner. Our Pilot and Observer had already completed tours on Blenheims and were good material for Mosquitos. They said cheerio on our third day at Scampton and were posted to a Mosquito Conversion Unit. The remaining three of us had ceased to exist as a crew and had become “odd bods”. We began to feel like members of staff but eventually we went our individual ways. Indeed I was put in charge of the Night Vision Centre for two months, until I met a pilot who was a Flight Lieutenant with a tunic that had obviously seen some service, and he had over 3,000 flying hours to his credit. With him was a Flying Officer Observer plus DFM, obviously clued up and who looked the academic type, a cheerful Flying Officer Bomb aimer and a Pilot Officer Rear Gunner. Four clued-up characters forming the nucleus of a gen crew. Somehow or other I became their other gunner and we were joined by a second tour F/Sgt Wireless operator and a Sgt. Flight Engineer ex fitter. A few days later we were posted to Winthorpe to 1661 Heavy Conversion Unit and settled into a course on Stirlings, flying together for the first time as a crew.
Familiarisation with a four-engined aircraft was the main purpose of the course; important to the skipper F/Lt. Chester who had been a Flying Instructor on Tiger Moths in Canada for a long time. He was about 8 years older than the rest of us and we were happy with his rather more mature approach to the job. The Flight Engineer, Sgt. Hampson, whom we called Doogan for no apparent reason, had flown on Liberators over Burma and nothing seemed to worry him unduly. F/O Pete Cheale was successful on two or three practice bombing sessions, and to F/O Ted Foster DFM it was all just routine stuff. F/Sgt. Frank Eaglestone’s radio was the same as on his previous tour, the good old R1155 and T1154 (still in service in 1960). The Rear Gunner was P/O Harvey who nattered endlessly about a chunk of flack [sic] still embedded somewhere about his person, and his first tour in general. He knew it all, or thought he did, but it soon became apparent that his experience was very limited and he had yet to do his first trip against the enemy. Because of this I insisted that he should have the mid-upper turret, and as Senior gunner, pulling a negative seniority in rank, I would take over the rear turret. He didn’t like that at all, and he left the crew. What became of him I don’t know, but Flt/Sgt Foolkes appeared from somewhere and took his place. Pete was one to take everything in his stride and was welcome to either turret. He preferred the mid-upper, possibly finding it more comfortable, being much taller than the average rear gunner. As for me, one rear turret was very much like another, the same Frazer Nash FN120 we had used on the later Marks of Wellington. A few mod cons perhaps, such as Hot air central heating in the turret. I recall that when we touched down on the runway at Winthorpe, the rear turret was still over the graveyard on the other side of the main road.
Whilst at Winthorpe, I found that 150, my old squadron, was about 20 miles away at Hemswell. I paid them a visit, but their only real link with the 150 of North Africa was the squadron number. 150 Squadron had been disbanded in Algiers though it’s final station was Foggia in Italy. I left
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it at Kairouan just before the move to Italy. Later it was re-formed with Lancasters and in theory had been in action since the beginning of the war, having been at the forefront with Fairey Battles in 1939-40 in France.
After about three weeks of routine and not very demanding training we graduated to the “Lanc” Finishing School” at Syerston. There we converted to Lancasters with about 14 hours flying, circuits and bumps, the odd practice bombing exercises, fighter affiliation and a Bullseye over London, co-operating with searchlights. Just what the Londoners down below thought of this aerial activity without an air raid warning was probably misconstrued. We were still in one piece, feeling fit, very confident and ready to join a squadron.
Our next move was to Bardney, near Lincoln, about 160 bods, and judging by their ranks and gongs, a rather experienced bunch, mostly second tour types. Bardney was the home of 617 and 9 Squadrons, rumours were rife of course. Were we obvious replacements for 617, where prestige was high and directly proportionate to the losses, - the highest in the Command? Our luck held, we were to become a new squadron, 227, just an ordinary Lancaster Squadron to enhance the might of 5 Group. It transpired that we were to become “A” Flight, and the Skipper was promoted to Squadron Leader. Meanwhile “B” Flight was forming at Strubby.
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[underlined] 227 SQUADRON [/underlined]
The first op. by aircraft of the newly-formed 227 Squadron was on the 11th. of October 1944 and most of us at Bardney were not even aware of it. Only three aircraft of "B" Flight, forming up at Strubby, were involved, a short early afternoon trip to FLUSHING. Three nights later "A" Flight provided three aircraft and "B" Flight four aircraft on a more typical raid by 240 aircraft of 5 Group on BRUNSWICK. The Squadron was beginning to take shape and on the 17th., two aircraft of "B" Flight joined 47 others on a short excursion to breach the dyke at WESTKAPELL. Two nights later was a 5 Group effort to NUREMBURG, with "A" and "B" Flights providing seven and five aircraft respectively. This fourth raid by 227 aircraft was only "A' Flight's second involvement, the aircraft and crews really becoming attached for this purpose to 9 Squadron.
On the 21st. October we were transferred to Balderton, at the side of the A1 near Newark and joined the crews of "B" flight.
Our Skipper had been promoted to Sqdn/Ldr. in command of "A" Flight, and was very such absorbed in getting his half of the squadron organised and operational, with little time left for actual flying. Our crew was kept busy in their respective sections, particularly Navigation, Bombing and Wireless, but there was not a great deal to be done in the Gunnery office: The Gunnery Leader was Flt/Lt. Maxted who occupied a small office in a sectioned-off Nissen hut. It was barely furnished with a desk and a few chairs; posters on the wall amplifying the vital issues and a notice board. The state of readiness of each aircraft and gunner was displayed with a record of daily inspections completed. The D.I. 's were an important part of the routine, and the gunners generally took part in the air tests prior to bombing up.
Our first mission as a crew was to Bergen in Norway. It was also a personal first trip for the Skipper, Bomb aimer and Flight Engineer. It was my 46th. op. but also my first in the mighty Lancaster. The Navigator, Wireless op. and Mid-upper gunner were all veterans having carried out their first tours on Lancs.
Our flight out over the North Sea which used to be called the German Ocean by some was uneventful, and Bergen was approached from the east at 10,000 feet. With the target ahead and in sight to those in the front office, all was quiet except for engine noise through someones [sic] microphone which had been left switched on. Peace was shattered by an almighty bang and shudder, confirming we had been hit, and the nose of the aircaft [sic] went down. I was forced against the left side of the turret unable to move, and found later the speed had built-up to over 370 mph. The Skipper was shouting for assistance. Ace the Navigator somehow managed to crawl forward a few feet and found Doogan with his head in the observation blister admiring the view of Bergen above. The Skipper had both feet on the dash trying to pull the aircraft out of the dive. The only control Ace could reach was the trimming wheel on the right of the Skipper's seat and he turned this to make the aircraft tail heavy. The nose came up and so did the target. The Flight Engineer added his contribution by exclaiming "Coo, i'n' [sic] it wizard". That was his opinion, but we were heading straight up the fiord and Ace brought this to the attention of the Skipper very smartly. Our height was down to 1500 feet and Ace and the Skipper somehow managed to turn the aircraft through 180
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degrees without hitting either the sea or the hills. Still tail heavy, we gradually climbed away to the west, and for the first time I saw the target, dead astern, always a welcome sight, and I set about sorting myself out from the intercom. leads, electrical heating cable, oxygen pipe and also checking that the turret doors would still open. Silence was broken about 100 miles from Bergen by our brash young Canadian Bomb Aimer, Pete Chiele, "Skipper, we still have the bombs-aboard". I think It-was Ace, who pulled the jettison toggle. At least my turret seemed intact and I took the opportunity of the lull in the drama of opening the turret door with my elbows, leaning backwards into the fuselage and making sure I could reach my parachute pack. Then a quick reversal and I was again "on the job” after a break of less than ten seconds. On the Wimpey and Lanc. the Rear Gunner had a choice of exits, either through the rear escape hatch inside the fuselage, or direct from the rear turret. I was well rehearsed in the latter method, first to rotate the turret dead astern, using the manually operated handle if there was no hydaulic [sic] pressure, then to open the sliding doors. These never failed to open on practice sessions, but an axe was provided inside the turret just in case. Then to remove the parachute pack from its housing and drag it carefully into the turret, placing it above the control column. Off with the helmet complete with oxygen mask, intercom, 24 volt supply and associated pipes and cables and also the electrical heating cable connector. The parachute pack was then clipped on, the turret rotated onto either beam, lean backwards and push with the feet. The alternative exit gave one more room to manouvre [sic] , but the escape hatch itself was rather narrow for a Rear Gunner wearing his full flying kit, particularly the 1944 version of "Canary suit", so-called because of its colour. There was also the phsychological [sic] aspect of deliberately entering an aircraft which was probably on fire. On the Wellington Mk1C with an FN20 turret and only two guns, there was provision to stow the 'chute pack inside the turret. Also the doors were hinged, opening outwards and they could be jettisoned. Although I mentioned being well rehearsed, drill was carried out with the aircraft stationary and upright, not quite the same as in an anticipated emergency bale-out. My only excuse for claiming the checking of my 'chute as practice was that I felt I should be doing something more useful than just sitting there, whilst there seemed to be so much happening up front. There was even more drama unfolding, the Wireless op. had passed a coded message to the Navigator instructing us to divert to Holme on Spalding Moor in Yorkshire, but only the W/op was issued with the code-sheet of the day. The Skipper did not receive the message in plain language until we were in R/T contact with Balderton, which was closed due to thick fog or very low cloud. However, the Navigator knew our exact location and there was fuel in the tanks. Eventually we re-joined the tail-end of the gaggle and landed at Holme. I recall spending the rest of the night on the floor in the lounge of the Sgts. Mess. The following morning we took a walk around the hangars and Doogan chatted with some ground crews who were changing an engine on a Halifax. He actually told then they were not going about it properly and their reaction was quite startling and informative.
Our second trip as a crew was two days later, to WALCHEREN in daylight. This was more reminiscent of our raids from North Africa except that 110 aircraft, including 8 Mosquitoes, took part. From North Africa our "Maximum Effort" had been two squadrons, a total of 26 aircraft, which
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seemed a lot at the time!. 12 aircraft from 227 took part, each having its own specific target, ours being a gun battery which was already completely submerged in water when we arrived. Just ahead several aircaft [sic] were bombing the sea wall and the Skipper decided to back them up, bombing from 3500 feet. The wall was breached and the sea poured through, but our bombs were all fused for delayed action which would not have amused the natives. In fact too much damage was done which, according to a story in Readers Digest, took over six months to repair. However, the main object was to silence the German artillary [sic] and this was achieved. This particular trip had been our introduction to the "formation" known as the "5 Group Gaggle". Pilots were not very practiced at Straight and level flying, it had been seldom recommended, and it seemed to me as a Rear gunner that everyone weaved along in the same direction, taking great pains to stay as far away as possible from other aircraft, but remaining in the stream.
Two days later Ches. and Co. joined 16 other crews from 227 on an afternoon excusion [sic] to an oil plant at HOMBURG. The ground was mostly obscured by cloud and visibility at 17,000 feet was poor, about three miles. Approaching the target a Lancaster in front of us was hit by flak and one engine was on fire. The aircraft passed below us and the fire was extinguished, but its no. 2 engine was stopped. It remained just behind us until we were over the target. The target was marked by 8 Mosquitoes of 8 Group, but marking was scattered over a wide area and out of the 228 Lancasters only 159 bombed. Results were poor, a recce. next day showed that most of the bombs had hit the industrial and residential areas. One Lancaster was lost, due to flak.
The following night 15 aircraft of 227 joined a total force of 992 aircraft on DUSSELDORF. Our Skipper flew as Second Dickie to F/L Kilgour, and the rest of us kicked our heels. This was the last heavy raid on Dusseldorf by Bomber Command, and 18 aircraft were lost. F/O Croskell and crew failed to return, our first 227 Sqdn casualties, but news was received shortly afterward they were safe in Allied hands. They were operational with the squadron again in Feb.
On the 11th. of November, we surprisingly found ourselves on the Battle Order for an evening raid on the Rhenania-Ossag oil refinery at HARBURG, close to the battered Hamburg. This was a 5 Group effort with 237 Lancasters and 8 Mosquitoes. 7 Lancasters were lost, including 9J"S" with F/O Hooper and crew. F/O Bates' crew reported that "oil tanks were seen to explode at 1924 hrs". but German records make no reference to the oil tanks, only that 119 people were killed and 5205 others were bombed out. Flak was not intense and the bombing appeared to be mainly on target. There were fighters about but the return journey was uneventful for us. Once again we were beaten by the fog at Balderton, and as our new F.I.D.O. was not yet operational, we were diverted to Catfoss. The night was spent in the chairs in the Sgts. Mess, but the officers among us were luckier to find beds.
For most of the following four weeks we were without either a Skipper or a Navigator. The Skipper was detached "on a course" and then spent a couple of weeks on a Summary of Evidence. Ace the Navigator was detached to Newmarket racecourse to clue up on some new equipment or technique. For three days I was detatched [sic] to Waddington as a Witnessing Officer at a Court Martial, which I found depressing. It seemed that at Waddington there had been an old car which was used by anyone who could find some petrol to run it. It was the property of an unlucky aircrew
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member who failed to return one night. The car was very useful, but whilst having neither licence nor insurance it was eventually involved in a serious accident, and the R.A.F. took over where the civilian court left off.
0n the 6th. December I had a letter of complaint from my mother, enclosing a newspaper cutting from the Barnoldswick & Earby Pioneer, showing a photo of me and referring to my award of a D.F.C. Why had I not told her? I don't think she ever believed me when I claimed that her letter was the first I knew of it. On Dec. 11th., with Ace still at Newmarket, we became 'Dambusters' - of a sort - for the day. Bomber Command Diary states " "233 Lancasters of 5 Group and 5 Mosquitoes of 8 Group took part. Hits were scored on the dam but no breach was made. 1 Lancaster lost". The squadron diary reflects a successful sortie, in that direct hits on the dam wall were observed, but the 1000 lb. bombs were too small for the purpose. My own recollection of the raid was quite different. We were stooging along just above cloud in company with scores of other Lancasters when the others were seen to be doing a 180 degree turn. Within seconds the sky within my range of vision was empty and in all directions no-one could see another aircraft. The mid-upper and I advised the Skipper that we were now unaccompanied and for 20 minutes we tried to impress upon him that we were extremely vulneruble [sic] (or words to that effect). We were just a few hundred feet above and silhouetted against a layer of stratus and I asked him to fly just inside the cloud, or at least just to skim the tops, but he replied that it was too dangerous, too much risk of collision. The mid-upper gunner agreed, collision from Gerry fighters. Vocabulary worsened and finally the Skipper realised we were 40 minutes and over 200 miles from the rest of the gaggle, we turned round. It has been suggested that as Flight Commander he must display a press-on attitude, and we were all in favour of this, but there was no-one around to impress and it was pretty obvious to the gunners that either Frank had missed a diversion message or we were in the wrong gaggle. Bomber Command Diary disproves the latter, but there is still uncertainty in my mind about that particular operation. Both Pete in the mid-upper turret and I realised that if we were attacked by fighters the Skipper would not take the slightest notice of our requests or advice. We were not disputing that the Skipper was in charge and the one who makes the decissions [sic] , but in our situation he had no choice other than to take advantage of the cloud. We regarded this as an expression of no confidence in the gunners, and we made it very clear to him both then and later that it was no way to finish a tour.
It was 10 days before we flew again, our 6th. trip with 227 embarking on their 22nd. trip as a squadron. The target was the synthetic oil plant at POLITZ, in the Baltic. 207 Lancasters and 1 Mosquito were detailed, including 13 Lancasters of 227. Two from 227 experienced mechanical failure and aborted soon after take-off. This was a long stooge, and 3 Lancasters were lost, plus a further 5 which crash-landed in England. The raid was successful, the main chimneys having collapsed and other parts of the refinery being severely damaged. On return to eastern England we were again unable to land at Base due to weather, and were diverted to Milltown, in Scotland. Fuel gauges were reading zero or less when a weary Ches. and crew finally landed after a trip lasting 10 hrs. and 15 minutes. F/O Croker in 9J"K" wound up at Wick, in Morayshire, his aircraft being so badly shot-up it was declared
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a write-off. The following morning we flew to Wick to join F/O Croker and crew and give then a lift back to Balderton. Among others, there was a Met. Flight at Wick, equipped with B17s, Flying Fortresses. It was their job to climb to a great height, making Met. observations, and some of their trips exceeded 12 hours duration. I recall the armourers at Wick cleaned and polished our three turrets and 8 Browning guns without being asked, and making a very good job of it too. Everyone was provided with beds, and it seems the officers were so comfortable the Skipper decided to stay at Wick over Christmas. The town of Wick was "dry', no pubs, but among the N.C.O's, this made no difference, we had no money with us. Normally on a diversion we didn't need any money, but for a several day stop-over it was embarassing [sic] to be absolutely without. We would like to have taken our turn in paying for the drinks is the Mess. I seem to recall trying to obtain an advance from Pay accounts without success, accompanied by the other two W/Os in our crew. I was reminded of one incident at Wick by Ace, our Navigator; We were not like most other crews, sticking together as a crew. The Commissioned officers kept to themselves, the three Warrant Officers maintained their own little triangle, and Doogan prefered [sic] his own company despite the W/O's efforts to get him to join us. It seems that one night at Wick we carried him and his bed outside and he awoke next morning in the middle of the parade ground which was covered is snow. I have no personal recollection of this, but there it is in black and white in Ace's book, 'Just Another Flying Arsehole'. We returned to Balderton on the 27th., with 14 of us aboard, and did not see the ground until we actually touched down. For the first time we landed with the assistance of FIDO, which was probably very scary for the pilot. In the rear turret I just got an impression of landing in the middle of a fire.
The following night we missed a trip to OSLO, our squadron providing only 5 of the force of 67 Lancasters. On the afternoon of the 30th. we were briefed for an evening take-off to HOUFFALIZE, a total force of 154 Lancasters and 12 Mosquitoes. German Panzers had broken through the American lines in a desperate attempt to thwart the Allied advance, in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. The weather gave the Germans the advantage, low cloud and thick fog prevented the 2nd. Tactical Air Force from playing its part to the full. With almost 100% Allied air superiority in the area, Typhoons and other fighters operating on a cab-rank principle responding in seconds to detailed requests from the chaps below, Gerry was learning what it was like to be at the receiving end of the slaughter he started is 1939. But not for that few days at the end of 1944 in the Fallaise gap. The close proximity of Allied troops called for great accuracy in bombing and straffing [sic] , and this was not possible in the prevailing conditions. Because of the bad weather in the target area, take-off was postponed every few hours but we were eventually relieved to get airborne about 0230. Conditions over the target were quite impossible and the flares dropped into the murk below probably caused hearts on both sides to miss a few beats. Some crews did bomb, but Chas. quite rightly felt it was too risky. We had not been briefed for any secondary target so our bombs wound up in the Wash. Finally, we landed at about 0830 after 24 hours of effort of one sort or another. Nothing really achieved, but at least we had tried.
It was about this time that my father visited the Squadron for a few days. He was a Captain in the R.A.S.C. recently returned from East
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Africa and awaiting release on medical grounds. He was very impressed with what he saw but we could not obtain authority for him to actually fly with us. On the Sunday morning he watched our parade and later mentioned that as the W/O called out names, one Ft/Sgt responded to at least five of them. Also that some were in best blues, some in battledress, one or two with greatcoats and one even with a raincape. Two were actually standing on parade with bicycles ready to shoot off somewhere immediately after the parade. His thoughts at the time were how can such an undisciplined lot perform any serious task. Later that morning sitting in the Gunnery Office, gunners came in with more of a wave than a salute, a brief word from them and I would put a tick on the board against their aircraft. I explained to my father that this was their way of reporting that their turrets and guns had received and passed the daily inspection. After lunch in the mess he noticed a great deal of activity and movement, and a clear but quiet sense of urgency. He asked what was happening and I showed him the Battle Order.
The following day he said how wrong was his first impression. Everyone had a job to do, they know what was required of them and they got as with it without any shouting of orders or people stamping around. I was Duty Gunnery Leader that night, as was my lot quite often over that period, and was able to show my father what made a squadron tick. He thoroughly enjoyed his stay, but I don't think he met the Skipper. In fact I don't think we saw anything of our Skipper during the whole month of January, by the end of which 227 had completed 33 ops. "A” Flight Commander's crew had totted up only 7 as a crew and some of us were not at all happy with this performance. On the 2nd. Feb. F/O Bates was short of a Rear Gunner and I could have kissed him when he asked me to deputise for WO Bowman. This was an experienced and popular crew who had already completed 14 trips of their second tour. Bowman was in fact the only one outside our crew I had known a year ago. We had carried out our first tours together on 150 Sqdn. Wellingtons, and he was the only other 227 bod with an Africa Star. I cannot recollect why he was not available that night. Our target was KARLSRUHE, a 5 Group effort of 250 Lancasters and 11 Mosquitoes, of which 19 were from 227. Cloud up to 15000 feet and the consequent difficulty in marking caused the raid to be a failure. 14 Lancasters were lost, including 9J"D" with F/O Geddes and crew. The total effort of Bomber Command that night was 1252 sorties. Targets included Wiesbaden's only large raid of the war, and Wanne-Eickel, neither attack was regarded as a success. Very little was achieved that night for a loss of 21 aircraft.
On the night of the 7th. Feb., F/O Bates was airborne again with 11 others from Balderton in a total force of 188 aircraft, to the Dortmund-Ems Canal. All 227 Sqdn. a/c returned safely, but 3 were lost in all. I was not with him this time although W/O Bowman was not available. After about 5 hours sleep the Battle Order for the coming night showed 18 crews from 227 sqdn., including F/O Bates, with F/O Watson as Rear Gunner. It felt great to be doing something useful. The weather en route was clear and there were still fighters about, largely responsible for the loss of 12 Lancasters, but the bombing was extremely accurate. According to Speer, the German armaments minister, the oil refinery was kaput for the reminder of the war and a big setback to the German war effort. All 227 sqdn aircraft returned safely, one, F/O Edge's 9J"B" having aborted with problems on 2 engines and landed safely at a farm in Norfolk. It was in fact F/O Bates’ 18th. and final trip on
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227 sqdn., a very satisfactory finish. It was a satisfying night too for 'our own' Navigator, Ted Foster who flew as a 'spare Bod' Navigator with F//Lt [sic] Pond. On the 14th. Feb., 6 weeks into what surely must be the final year in the war against Germany, we were no doubt startled to see our Skipper and crew on the Battle Order. A 5 Group effort, the target was ROSITZ oil refinery near Leipsig [sic] , a force of 232 Lancasters and Mosquitoes, including 12 from Balderton. Our aircraft was 9J"H" and a couple of hours or so after take-off the Skipper found he could not come to terms with his magnetic compass, the performance of which was erratic. An hour or so later the Giro compass also started to play up and fortunately the Skipper did accept the advice of the Navigator and turned back, navigating solely on "Gee" back to base. It was not possible to carry-on navigating to the target on "Gee", we would have [inserted] 14/2/45 Rositz [/inserted] been out of range long before the target was reached. 9J"G" skippered by F/O Tate had engine trouble just after take-off and returned on three engines. We were the second aircraft to abort on that trip. There were some ribald comments next day when the Instrument Section reported there was nothing wrong with either compass. The comments were not facetious however, no-one would seriously accuse either the Skipper or an experienced Navigator like Ace of pulling a fast one. Both I am quite sure would have preferred to take part in the destruction of Rositz This was in fact the Skipper's final trip, although we did not realise it at the time and still regarded his as our Skipper for the next two months.
The record shows that in the following four weeks Ace did three spare bod trips whilst the rest of the crew passed the time somehow. The spell was broken for me when F/Lt Hodson asked me to take over his rear turret on the 14th. of March. Ace had already done his last bombing raid although he too might not have realised it at the time. His grand finale, quite fitting was a daylight 1000 plus Bomber raid on DORTMUND on the 12th. of March, as Wing Commander Millington's Navigator. It was also to be the Wingco's final trip before swapping his duralumin pilot's seat with a little steel armour plating at his back, for I think a wooden one in the House of Commons where his back was probably just as vulnerable.
Our target was another oil refinery, at LUTZKENDORF, a typical 5 Group effort of 244 Lancasters and 11 Mosquitoes, 15 of the former being from Balderton. We enjoyed the company of F/O Howard as 2nd. Pilot. In fact five aircraft from 227 Sqdn. carried 'Second Dickies' that night. Out of a total of 18 aircraft lost, two were from 227 Sqdn., both with Second pilots. It was feared by many that carrying a Second Pilot increased the risk, but I did not share this concern. The Second Pilot it is true would take the place of the Flight Engineer who would either stand between the two pilots or sit on the dickie-seat. Some drills had to be slightly modified for the occasion, but I would have thought the presence of an extra bod would tend to put the others more on their toes. The crew I was with were on their 18th. trip and had been with the Squadron from the outset. Nothing untoward happened to us, there was the usual flack and searchlights, maybe fighters but one saw none. Bombing seemed reasonable well concentrated and photo-reconnaissance next day showed that 'moderate damage' was caused.
On the 7th. of April the squadron completed its transfer to Strubby, and was detailed for action the same night. I was favoured to fly once more with F/Lt Hodson and crew, LEIPZIG again, this time to the
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Benzol plant at MOLBIS. 13 Lancasters of 227 joined 162 others and 11 Mosquitoes, all from 5 Group. The weather was good, bombing accurate, and the oil plant put completely out of action. No aircraft were lost and the raid was considered a 100% success.
After a few hours sleep we were briefed for an attack on LUTZKENDORF, the same target as on the 14th. March. It had been attacked the previous night by 272 aircraft from 1 and 8 Groups who caused only moderate damage. I was detailed to fly with W/O Clements and crew who were on the 5th. trip of their first tour, in 9J"Q". On take-off the starboard outer engine failed and Ace who waved us off said he saw the aircraft sink to within a few feet of the ground; but that few feet made all the difference and the Skipper was able to gain height gradually until it was safe to jettisson [sic] the bombs in the sea. The trip was aborted and a safe landing made at Strubby. Subsequent inspection showed a fuel leak from no.2 port tank and oil leaks from the two outer engines. 242 aircraft were on this raid, and 6 were lost, but another oil refinery was put out of action for the rest of the war. The 19 aircraft put up by 227 all returned safely and were diverted to the west because of weather.
Two nights later, on the 10th. I was again with W/O Clements, to the Wahren Railway yards at LEIPSIG. The force of 230 aircraft comprised 134 Lancasters, 90 Halifaxes, and 6 Mosquitoes, of which 1 Lancaster and 1 Halifax failed to return. Immediately prior to take off I had trouble with the turret sliding doors, they wouldn't close, but I rotated the turret onto the port beam as was general practice for take-off with the doors open. This was spotted from the ground and the Skipper was told on R/T soon after we were airborne. I had to get out of the turret and through the bulkhead door to fix them, but finally managed to get then to slide. If I had failed to fix then nothing would have made me admit it, it would just have been a little draughty. The trip went very well, the marking was accurate and the bombing concentrated. Some flak and plenty of fighter flares about but we saw no fighters. It was a quiet return trip and all 227 aircraft returned safely.
That was my last trip and also the last for W/O Clements and crew. It was the 57th. involvement by 227 Squadron which was to carry out 4 more bombing raids, terminating with BERCHTESGADEN itself, on the 25th. of April. The war in Europe was virtually over, but our impression was that 5 Group was to form the nucleus of Tiger Force to help finish the job in the Far East and we would be a part of it. It was with these thoughts that I went on leave on the 26th. April, a spare bod without a pilot, but still expecting to fly again with the squadron..
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[photograph]
[photograph]
[photograph]
64A
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[photograph] [photograph]
F/O. CHEERFUL CHEALE R.C.A.F.
[photograph] [photograph]
F/O BATES F/O PETE CHEALE (BA) W/O PETE FOOLKES
S/LDR CHESTER (PILOT) F/O FOSTER
64B
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[photograph]
[photograph]
[photograph]
64C
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[photograph] F/O. TED FOSTER D.F.M.
C.W. PETE FOOLKES MID-UPPER
[photograph] [photograph]
64D
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[photograph] CLIFF’S OFFICE
[photograph]
[photograph] OUTSIDE OUR DES. RES.
C.W. & GEOFF HAMPSON (FLIGHT ENG
64E
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[newspaper cutting of D.F.C. award] [photograph]
227 SQDN W/OP – NAV – MID- UPPER
[photograph]
64F
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[photograph] [underlined] TED (ACE NAV) FOSTER D.F.M. BALDERTON NOV 44 [/underlined]
[photograph] [underlined] RUNNING UP ON HOMBERG 1/11/44 AT LUNCHTIME [indecipherable word] [/underlined]
64G
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[photograph] [underlined] F/O. BATES [/underlined]
[photograph] [underlined] F/O BATES W/O JENNERY (NAV) SGT. WESTON (FLT. ENG) [/underlined]
FEB 45
64H
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[DFC citation]
64L
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[letter from HM George VI]
64M
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[Sgt Mess Wick Christmas Menus 1944]
[photograph]
F/O CROKER’S LANCASTER AT REST IN TORPEDO DUMP XMAS ‘44
64N
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[inside of christmas card]
CHRISTMAS CARD FROM PETE IN CANADA
64P
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[photograph]
STIRLING AT H.C.U. WINTHORPE
[photograph]
AT BLIDA
[photograph]
LANCASTER AT SYERSTON
74A
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[letter of introduction to airfield manager in Iran]
154A
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[photograph]
F/LT. MAXTED (GUNNERY LEADER) PETE FOOLKES & F/O SANDFORD (SPARE GUNNER OR SQDN ADJ)
[photograph]
TED FOSTER WITH BITS OF 9JO
[photograph]
64J
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[photograph]
GEOF. HAMPSON FLT. ENG.
[photograph of 9J-O]
[photograph of 9J-O]
64K
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[christmas card]
CHRISTMAS CARD FROM PETE IN CANADA
64P
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[typewritten letter]
[underlined] PART OF F/L CROKER’S LETTER WITH XMAS 1990 CARD [/underlined]
64Q
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[location map for 1994 reunion]
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[underlined] FINAL LEG [/underlined]
Recollections of events in my final 15 months in the R.A.F. are reasonably clear but somewhat hazy of detail and of the order in which they took place.
I was still with the Squadron on VE Day, the 5th. April, on leave in London with Hilda. I recall going up to Leicester Square by tube train with my father, Alice and Hilda to join the celebrations and actually walking back the five miles to Lavender Hill in the early hours. This would explain why I had no knowledge of the Victory Parade at Strubby until I was shown a photograph of it many years later. I was on leave again in London in early August when the Americans dropped the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and suddenly the war was over. I was still in uniform and had to await my turn for demob.
I have no recollection of attending a Reselection Board when I was made redundant from flying, nor of actually leaving the Squadron. I think my first posting after the Squadron was to Gravely, as a Squadron adjutant. I had always thought that the Squadron was 106, but according to the Bomber Command War Diaries 106 was never at Gravely [sic] !. There is no mistaking the actual station, however, it is only 4 miles from my present home and parts of it are still recogniseable [sic] . I was astonished to find many years later that 227 Sqdn had transferred to Graveley about the 8th. of June and was disbanded there on the 5th. of September. I was there for about 6 weeks during which time we closed the Sargeants’ [sic] Mess and did a very little paper-work. We had neither aircrews nor aircraft, it was just a matter of holding office and very little else!. I probably spent most of it on leave.
I then became a Photographic Officer u/t and did a very interesting course at Farnborough which lasted 8 weeks. One of the instructors was a Sgt. Peter Clark, a leading Saville Row fashion photographer before the war and Hilda’s first employer. I went on leave yet again and was eventually told to report to 61 M.U. at Handforth in Cheshire as a u/t Equipment Officer. I duly reported to the Station Adjutant at Handforth feeling very much out of place. Of the hundreds of service types around only the ex-Air-Crew were in battle dress, the others were either in best blues or dungarees. I had always thought that battledress was the working uniform of the R.A.F., but it was not so at Handforth. I felt more as if I was in the Luftwaffe. The Station Adj. took me to see the Chief Equipment Officer, who was a Wing Commander and this feeling became even stronger. I reported formally and the C.E.O. said “And what the hell are you supposed to be?”. Those were his exact words and I did really wonder whether we were in the same air force. I replied that “I am here as a u/t equipment officer Sir”. “MM what’s your trade?” “Rear Gunner” – without waiting for the ‘Sir’, he exploded and almost shouted “That’s not a trade, it’s General Duties”. He was technically right but raising his voice unduly went on to add “You are supposed to be able to sit here and do my job, you’d feel a bloody fool doing my job, wouldn’t you!”. Fascinated by the smirk on his face and hypnotised by the Defence medal on his breast I just stood there in disbelief at this outburst and quietly laughed. “Well?” He wanted an answer and I said in a rather light vane “Yes Sir I would, but less of a bloody fool than some would have felt doing my job for the last three years”. That was it, he stood up and said “Right, come”. We went along the corridor and straight in to see the Station Commander, a Group Captain. The WingCo[sic] was very agitated and without preamble
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told the Groupie of my ‘gross insubordination’. He recited the dialogue in accurate detail and the Group Captain asked for my account. I agreed with the C.E.O.’s account but said that I was provoked, there was no reason for his outburst and I grinned only because I didn’t think he was being serious. Invited to comment the WingCo said he had been affronted by my being improperly dressed. I made no further comment and the Groupy told the WingCo that he would deal with the matter. The WingCo saluted and left, and I thought I was for the chop. The Group Captain sported R.F.C. wings and had obviously seen his share of action. He stood up and extended his right hand in friendship. “Sorry old chap, I didn’t get your name, do sit down”. I was back in the R.A.F. He asked “Where were you in Africa?” Not an idle question, followed by “Did you know Group Captain Powell?” Yes Sir, he was our Base Commander of 142 and 150 Squadrons, Speedy Powell of “F” for Freddie”. Speedy had been the Briefing officer in the film ‘Target for Tonight’. I mentioned some of his exploits and finally his loss, and the Group Captain was distressed. He told me that like the other 12 ex-Air Crew on the station, I was a square peg in a round hole, but to make the best of it and to go back to see him if I had a problem. In the mess that evening I met the others and soon found we were all on duty every day and every night. u/t Orderly Officer, then Orderly Officer, and through the whole range of Asst. Duty Officer, Duty Officer, Fire Picket, in-line Fire picket, Cyphers, Security, etc. etc. Only the ex Air-Crew Officers performed these tasks and after two weeks of this we agreed something must be done. One period of 24 hours I was Duty Cyphers Officer. This was just a title, there was neither Cyphers Section nor Intellegence[sic] Section and I found that for almost all the duties we were allocated there were no instructions. Several of us individually addressed the Station Adjutant in writing and one even enquired whether he should draw-up his own set of procedures for inclusion in Station Standing Orders. For reasons that could only have been sour grapes, there was a measure of ill-feeling between the ‘permanent’ equipment and Admin officers, and the air-crew types. Many of the former had spent the entire war at places like Handforth, and there is no doubt they did a vital job, and maybe were still doing it. In our case, the war for us was over, and after our experiences of the last few years there was a limit to the amount of being messed around that we were willing to accept. We discussed having fire drills with real fires and creating a few incidents for practice, but finally we drew lots and two of us applied through the C.E.O. to see the Group Captain. The C.E.O. refused permission so we made our request through the Station Adjutant. This was approved and we told the C.O. what was happening, we were being “imposed” upon from a great height. He called in the Station Adj. and told him that all Air Crew Officers would go on indefinite leave the following day. He told the two of us to ensure that all application forms were with the Station Adj. by 3 pm. And for me, it was straight to Whitehaven, in battledress.
I had applied for release from the Service under “Class B”, having an immediate job to take up which would in itself create work for 5 other ex-Servicemen. Hilda was in fact holding the fort in Whitehaven, and nothing came of the application.
It was about four months before I was recalled to Handforth, and immediately detached to no. 7 Site at Poynton to take over as Equipment Officer i/c and also as Officer i/c. the Prison Camp. There was an Equipment W/O running the Stores with about 200 Airmen and I agreed with him that it could
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stay that way. The Stores comprised 8 massive hangars full of equipment. I regarded my main job as O.C. the Stalag with its 1000 P.O.W.’s (750 Italian and 250 German) and my staff of 15 Air Crew N.C.O.s who had all been kriegsgefangener themselves. The Senior German prisoner was a Warrant Officer who spoke excellent English having studied it for 5 years in prison camps. Most of the prisoners, including the Italians, had been taken in the Western Desert. The Germans were very smart indeed, in contrast to the Italians, and the two axis partners had as little to do with each other as they could arrange. Gangs of prisoners were guarded by some of the 200 Airmen, supervised by ex-AirCrew NCO.s. The prisoners were not interested in escape, there would have been no point, but I put an immediate stop to their sneaking out of camp at night to try their luck. The German and Italian messes were separate from each other and staffed by R.A.F. cooks. The Germans asked if they could do their own cooking and I agreed but with nominal supervision of two airmen in case we had visitors. I made the same arrangement for the Italians but initially they refused. I appointed one of the Corporal Majors as Senior Iti [sic] and made him responsible. I threatened to fully-integrate them with the Germans if there was any nonsense, and with that some of them nearly burst into tears. They were a lazy shower. I had the Officers’ Mess all to myself, but that’s another story. It was a very cosy three months, with most long week-ends spent in Whitehaven where Hilda had taken-over the Relay system. It was also a tremendous anti-climax to the previous five years.
Eventually when the magic number 26 came up, I reported to R.A.F. Uxbridge for demob. and collected my pin-striped suit and a cardboard box to put it in. I realised then that my career in the R.A.F. was initially over. Straight to Whitehaven by train, still in battledress.
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[underlined] FIRST TOUR TARGETS [/underlined]
[table of targets and bomb loads]
71
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[table of targets and bomb loads continued]
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[underlined] 2nd TOUR [/underlined] [underlined] 227 SQUADRON [/underlined]
[table of targets and bomb loads with additions]
[underlined] 227 SQUADRON [/underlined]
After flying Beaufighters from Malta the Squadron folded in August 1944. The new Squadron was formed in 5 Group on 7/10/1944. Flying Lancasters from Bardney, Balderton and Strubby. Flew 815 sorties and lost 15 aircraft (1.8%) in 61 raids. 2 were also destroyed in crashes.
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[underlined] Back to Civvy Street [/underlined]
By early 1946 the great transition from War to Peace was taking place and many of us were gradually realising that we could now plan some years ahead with a very good possibility of surviving to carry them out. Of my colleagues at Metropolitan Relays, only Reg. Weller had paid with his life, having been killed in action in Italy, with the army. Allan Cutbush had been taken prisoner at Tobruk and spent some time in a prison camp in Italy. Eventually he escaped and spent a couple of years as an Italian farm worker. Soon after the invasion at Anzio he rejoined the Allies and had the greatest difficulty in convincing them that he really was a Private in the Royal Signals. Alan was first to be demobbed and rejoined the firm as manager of a newly aquired [sic] group of branches in the Mansfield and Retford areas. George Holah had left in 1939 to join the army, and spent the next six years in India, returning as a Major in the Indian army complete with an Anglo-Indian wife and family. George did not return to Relays, but joined the Metropolitan Police, and in 1975 was a Clerk in the Central Registry at New Scotland Yard. How he managed to transfer from being a private in the British army to a Commissioned Officer in the Indian army I don’t know, assuming it actually happened. I have not met George since 1939.
In June 1945, my father, Mrs. Kilham and Mr. Moulton bought privately another run-down radio relay system, West Cumberland Relay Services, Ltd., in Whitehaven, and I was invited to develop it. Although Germany had capitulated, the war was not yet over. Japan might have seemed a long way off but was still our Enemy and the job had to be finished. Meanwhile Hilda moved to Whitehaven and set-up home in the flat above the shop at 49 Lowther Street. Colin was then 9 months old and it was a further year before I was demobbed, but during that period I seemed to have spent most of my time in Whitehaven. Hilda kept the Relay ticking over, with very limited assistance from the staff, until March 1946 when I was given indefinite leave on compassionate grounds.
The relay was well and truly run down, with about 400 subscribers each paying 1/3d per week for two radio programmes. It was losing money fast, the entire network needed rewiring and the amplifiers and other equipment were just about a write-off. I had with me the name-plate from my office door at Poynton. One of the German prisoners had made it for me, a notice which proclaimed in Gothic characters
Obr. Lnt. Cliff. Watson D.F.C.,
LAGER COMMANDANT EINTRITT VERBOTTEN
I put this on my new office door, but drew a line through the bottom line.
Sorting out a fault on a 100 watt amplifier, I asked the engineer, Joe, for a soldering iron, and he said he never used one but preferred the special solder in a tube, which he handed to me. In that single sentence he had proved to me that his technical knowledge was just about zero. I demonstrated the solder’s futility by proving that it was not even an electrical conductor. Consequently all the equipment was full of dry joints and I spent a whole night in soldering connections. The stuff Joe was using out of a tube was for repairing small holes in pans and kettles. I was very disappointed in Joe, his technical
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knowledge was effectively less than zero. The next weekend he claimed to have worked all day Sunday clearing a line fault. He had deliberately caused this fault on the previous morning and I traced and corrected it myself within an hour of his doing so. He had shorted out two wires on our own roof and on Monday morning went straight onto the roof to remove the short. I was there waiting for him and sacked him on the spot for sabotage and dishonesty.
I thus took over the technical side but also looked closely at the system of collecting and keeping records of accounts and customers. The only record of payments was in the collector’s field book and there was no record of where the customers or relay installations actually were. I spent a week with the collector who was very reluctant to assist, and Hilda and I drew up a set of records and established a working system. In the next two weeks I found so many fiddles and had proof of so much skulduggery that I sacked the collector without notice. I found installations where the user claimed to have made one outright payment to the collector who had pocketed the money, a hundred or so loudspeakers recorded as being “on loan” which had in fact been paid for and all manner of other private arrangements. The collector was easily replaced, and Mr. Fee joined us. I was fortunate too in meeting Bert Wise, ex Royal Navy P.O. Telegraphist who had been on Submarines, and who took over the technical aspect including the outside lines. Bill Campbell, ex Royal Army Service Corps driver/mechanic was very quickly trained on installations and line work, assisted by John Milburn, a school leaver. John had a very broad Cumbrian accent and initially I found communication difficult, “As gan yam nar marra” meant “I am going home now chum”. I felt I ought to be replying in French or something other than English.
Bill Campbell’s first job was to take the train to London and bring back a vehicle. It was a new Hudson NAAFI wagon completely fitted out by Met. Relays and full of cable, bracket insulators etc. My first act was to buy a set of maps covering the area to a scale of 1:10,000, and display it on the wall. The idea was that if we could establish exactly where we were we stood a better chance of knowing where we were going. A basic plan for the overhead lines was derived and we worked as a team, stripping out old wiring, checking and replacing where necessary, and keeping a record of installations connected. When an installation was serviced and documentation complete we fitted a capacitor in the loudspeaker for technical reasons and a new programme selector switch. The capacitors were to prove very useful later. The service we had to offer at that time was poor, and although it was gradually improving, we were spending far too much time on fault-finding, diverting us from the main program. Within a month it was very clear that our top priority was to rewire and re-equip. I managed to convince the London Office of this and they sent me a team of 3 wiremen from London, led by Dennis Horton who was inherited as a foreman at Mansfield, complete with two Dodge trucks and tons of installation materials. For four months this team concentrated on rewiring for four programmes, gradually reducing and finally almost eliminating the line faults.
The receivers and amplifiers were at Harras Moor in a cottage, but this was at the end of a two mile line, too far from our main load. We ran a 6-pair cable the whole distance and used these as 600 ohm lines, to feed five 1 KW amplifiers at Lowther Street. A bank of 6 AR88 receivers was installed at Harras Moor and two “straight sets” on loop antennas for the BBC Home and Light programmes. In town we had 210v. DC mains and had to fit rotary
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invertors. We also installed a 9KVA petrol/paraffin engine-driven alternator for use during power cuts, which were all too frequent. I could never understand how the grid system could sustain power through seven winters of wartime industrial production and as soon as the war was over we had to live with power cuts. Harras Moor was providing us with four good radio channels, Home, Light and Third BBC, Radio Eirein, Luxembourg, Paris, New York and others from around the world. We were getting organised and I was able to concentrate on sales, keeping our own gang of three busy on new installations. Within two years we had 2,200 installations, including the two Music Halls, cinemas, and all the factories. In addition we were doing more than 90% of all the Public Address work in Cumberland, some of which were quite memorable. At Grasmere Sports the events included a Fell Race and the first year we gave a running commentary over our P.A. system. The runners were out of sight near the top of the fell, so for the following year we applied to the Post Office for permission to use an H/F radio link to cover the gap. This was refused, “you will have to apply for a telephone”! The following year Bert Wise and John Milburn climbed the fell with an Aldis Lamp and battery, and established themselves where they could see the runners at the top and the ‘ops room’ on the showground. I too had an Aldis lamp and Bert flashed me the numbers of the runners as they reached the top of the fell. This delighted the spectators but completely upset the bookies who alone had the complete information in previous years.
The Post Office were also upset, claiming they had a monopoly on signalling, but declining to put it to test in court. I suggested that to try and licence boy scouts to signal in morse code with torches was ludicrous. I enjoyed the atmosphere of these events and went to quite some lengths to obtain the appropriate marshal music. At a Conservative Party fete one particular rather rousing piece was played several times and I was asked by a retired General why the Hell I kept playing the Red Army March Past.!!
A month after taking over, Hilda and I went for a walk - with the pram - to Hensingham, about three miles inland, and I was surprised to see Relay wires between chimneys and lots of downleads. I had not expected to find another system so close and I checked at some of the houses, asking who provided the system! I was told it was owned by a builder called Leslie but it hadn’t worked for several years. Leslie was the fellow from whom the company had bought West Cumberland Relays, and on checking with him I found it was part of the ‘system’ we had taken over. Further search showed a line of poles stretching for about two miles across the fields which had originally linked the village to the lines in Whitehaven. It also showed that a whole area of Hensingham had no electricity, ideal for relay. There was already a big housing estate and this was being extended, and I decided there was adequate potential in the village, but to replace the trunk route to it would be too expensive. We compromised by obtaining four modified 50 watt Vortexion Amplifiers and four receivers from London. Fred Wright brought them by road in his small van, the logo on the side of which was “Radio Trouble-shooting Service”. I did my very best to put up a case for keeping the van, to no avail. The next day we installed the equipment in an air-raid shelter at Hensingham, as a temporary measure, and immediately started connecting subscribers. Within a few weeks the wiring reached the side of the village where the lines from Whitehaven went across the fields, and we began to replace one pair all the way to link with Whitehaven. With this in operation on the third channel we were able to switch
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off one of the Hensingham amplifiers. Later all four programmes were fed from Whitehaven and the station in the air-raid shelter dismantled. The amplifiers were put to use at Whitehaven Hospital and the Workhouse. Both places were wired for 4 programme relay, but at the flick of a switch microphones could be switched in for announcements, and in the case of the latter, to broadcast concerts from the stage.
It was at Hensingham that I found a row of about 30 terraced houses, all without electricity and all wired with three twin cables of different sizes. This rather intrigued me and I enquired further. Most of the houses had battery driven wireless sets which used a 75 volt dry battery for H.T., a 2 volt accumulator for L.T. and a 9 volt grid bias battery, and in one case I found one of these sets without batteries but connected to the 3 pair cable. The old lady owner said it had not worked for several years. I quickly found the man who recharged the accumulators and he confirmed that the cables I had seen were once used for providing power supplies to radios. I think the system must have been quite unique. Shortly afterwards, the houses were connected to the relay system. My only regret is that I didn’t buy up those radios and store them for 50 years. As more and more installations were connected on the Woodhouse estate, the load on the five mile line gradually became too heavy with a corresponding reduction in line voltage and therefore volume. To overcome this we rented an air-raid shelter from the British Legion on the estate and fitted 4 amplifiers to take the load. These were fed from the incoming line itself, but for emergency use we also fitted receivers. Later the receivers came in useful for about three months during reconstruction of an area over which our main line had been fitted. One of the radio dealers found that we were using local receivers and that they were subject to radio interference from vacuum cleaners, so he had a sales drive in the immediate area of our receiving station with rental vacuum cleaners at 1/- per week. Reception gradually deteriorated but after three months of emergency operation our main line was again complete and the receivers switched off. Reception then was near perfect on our system and dreadful for the rest when the vacuum cleaners were being used. He had put a lot of time and money into trying to wreck our system, and had a double-fronted shop in Lowther Street, but I was sorry to see his shop with a bicycle in one window and a Bible in the other when I left Whitehaven..
On a new housing estate where 5 new houses were commissioned each week, we took a gamble and wired them all. When the first tenants moved in the loudspeaker was playing and the tenant’s radio problems were resolved. After 3 or 4 weeks I would go along and generally sign them up. Some of them of course compared it to their own ‘wireless’ if any, which could not possibly reach our standard of reproduction and reception. There are very few places in and around Whitehaven where we had not fitted microphones and radio, and after reaching near saturation in two years there was little scope for further development.
Whitehaven had been a very satisfying experience, but was marred by the Williams Pit disaster where 160 miners were trapped underground and lost their lives. John Milburn’s father was among them. It was traditional for the eldest son to take over where the Dad left off, and we were very sorry indeed to lose John. Hilda had run the office and “showroom” assisted later by Connie Sim from St. Bees. Bill Campbell was still our mainstay on the lines.
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I handed over to Bert Wise, still wearing his Navy P.O.’s hat, and moved to Wandsworth as Development Manager for Metropolitan Relays. A flat was available for us above the shop at 111 Garratt Lane, but on arrival we found it occupied by squatters. For several weeks we lived with Hilda’s parents until the squatters moved to the second floor and we took over the first floor. They were a decent couple in their forties, and had been desperate for accommodation. Our shop had been empty so they moved in, knowing that when an eviction order was issued by the court, they would be allocated a council house or flat. It was a short-cut to the top of the housing list, and the firm had to go through the motions of demanding court action. The ground floor was established as a showroom, even with T.V. in the window, an impressive amplifier room and an office with the same old sign on the door, Lager Commandant!
The original plan was to develop the area working outwards from Garrett Lane and to use the linesman from H.Q. at Lavender Hill, but there was line work to be done from the very outset and it was this part of the job which would be the limiting factor in our rate of progress. I insisted that we employed our own gang of wiremen. Bill Cutler was my wayleave expert, and having planned the main basic routes of our main lines, it was Bill’s job to find out who the landlords were and to obtain their formal permission to fit our wires on or over their property, generally between chimneys. The easiest way was first to sell the relay service to the tenants and their order was used as the reason for our request to fit the wires. We started to run four main lines, no.1 along Garrett Lane to link up with the Lavender Hill system at West Hill. No 2 made a beeline west along Garrett Lane to a Council-owned housing estate which at the time had no electricity. No 3 went due south to Southfields and along Merton Road, over the Redifon buildings and on to Putney, and No. 4 went north towards Wandsworth Common. Everyone on the staff except me, but including Bill Cutler and the linesmen was given five shillings commission for each new customer they signed up. The average wage at that time was £7 per week (in London) and there were few days when the gang did not hand in the paper-work and deposits for customers they had signed up and probably already installed in addition to the day’s work allocated to them. Quite often we would have thousands of leaflets distributed to houses in a particular area which was proving difficult but which they needed to cross.
At about this time, my father retired and went to East Africa, settling at Kirksbridge Farm, Kiminini, 10 miles west of Kitale on the Kakemega Road, and about 260 miles from Nairobi.. He sold his controlling interest in Metropolitan Relays to Seletar Industrial Holdings, Ltd. and their representative, Colonel Slaughter, took over as Chairman. Mr. Moulton became Director & General Manager and I was Development Manager with sufficient shares to qualify for a seat on the board. At the time T.V. was still in its infancy, though beginning to catch on, but the main background entertainment would be the wireless for some time to come. Transistors were still in the experimental stage and Radio Relay provided an alternative to cumbersome and relatively expensive valve radios, with near perfect and trouble-free reception. As Development Manager I made sure I was not bogged down with routine day to day running, and at the outset established a reliable Manager at Garrett Lane, Jack Thompson, whose knowledge of the business was gleaned entirely from Bill Cutler and myself with on-the-job training. Bill had been with Radio Relay since about
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1930, except for during the war when he was a technician in the R.A.F. on Link Trainers.
I was asked to have a look at Yeovil in Somerset and see whether it appeared suitable to establish a relay system, and if I felt it so justified, to spend some time there making a detailed study. I spent a week studying the layout of the town, types of housing, probabilities of future development, the people and their attitudes and in discussion with the Borough Surveyor and Town Clerk’s office staff. I realised that Colonel Slaughter had been a senior army officer and also a senior civil servant for a long time, and that my future relationship with him depended to a large extent on the impression he gained from my first formal report. I recommended that it was a border-line proposition and included a financial budget for 5 years. It would be three years before the system was breaking even and this was too long. The Capital required was too high unless the system was subsidised by another well-established branch. I felt we could find better places to apply our efforts. The Colonel decided to have a look for himself and I went with him to Somerset a week later. Alone, he met the Council officials concerned and one of them agreed to support our application if a relative of his was given a seat on the board of the new company!. I had known of that before the meeting but thought it better not to be involved, nor to include thoughts of that nature in my report. The Yeovil proposal was dropped and I turned my attention to Maryport.
Whilst Bert Wise was on holiday Bill Cutler and I went to Whitehaven for two weeks to relieve him and also to investigate Maryport.
I had known Maryport for some years and I already knew that it would be a goer from the outset. With lots of Council houses (no wayleave problems on them), a working type population, even with an element of communism. It had known major unemployment and soup kitchens and was still a little Bolshie.
We had many friends in the area and a good popular working system in Whitehaven as an example. In that two weeks I produced the same type of report as for Yeovil, but recommended we should go ahead immediately. We saw the Council Officials and agreed a draft agreement with them, found suitable accommodation for a shop in town and a receiving station just out of town to which we could run our own lines. Two weeks later I returned with the Colonel and together we met the Council Committee and completed formalities. From then on it was all systems go. Bill Cutler asked if he could get it organised and he did a very thorough job, using the labour and resources from Whitehaven. He stayed on as Manager and a few years later took-over Whitehaven also when Bert Wise ran-off with his secretary, Connie Sim.
Meanwhile Garratt Lane was running smoothly, and number 1 line had reached East Hill. In a junction box on the wall of a block of flats we had two four-pair cables, one from Lavender Hill, and the other from Garratt Lane, and on an experimental basis we linked the two together, isolating the line at Garratt Lane. We were thus able to monitor the Lavender Hill system in our Control Room, providing their service to our installations on the way. The Garratt Lane amplifiers were fed by Post Office line from Lavender Hill, and each amplifier could provide 1 kilowatt of audio power, sufficient for 3000 loudspeakers. Most of the loudspeakers were switched to no. 2 channel, the Light Programme, still referred to as the Forces programme by the majority. Channels 3 and 4 were very lightly loaded and we were able to switch off the Garratt Lane amplifiers on these channels for most of the time. At that time my family
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home was the flat above the showroom at Garratt Lane, and was guarded by Rex, a huge Great Dane/Alsation [sic] hybrid. Only Hilda and the children could handle it, presumably because they fed it regularly, but everyone else - including me - had to be very cautious.
Eventually it took a bite out of the Manager’s wife and was returned to Battersea Dogs’ Home.
I was spending more time at Garratt Lane where progress was losing momentum, and extending our no. 3 line over West Hill to East Putney was proving difficult. Near Putney Bridge, still a mile from our lines was a highly suitable area of small houses and it was going to take a year to reach them at our current speed. Without much fuss we established a station in the basement of a shop in the middle of this area, using 4 receivers built by Fred Wright’s dept. and 4 small 50 watt Vortexion amplifiers. This station was identical to the one fitted at Hensingham. We then had a sales drive in that part of Putney with the emphasis towards West Hill, and in 4 months were able to link the two systems.
I was interested to recall that for monitoring our four programmes we used a modified aircraft type automatic bomb release mechanism. This was a uniselector type of relay unit which clunked round and changed programme every 30 seconds instead of releasing bombs.
All my staff were ex-Servicemen and there was a dynamic no-nonsence [sic] approach. In contrast to this, our General Manager Allan Moulton based at Lavender Hill, had a stock answer to any serious proposal for action put to him, of “Wait a little while and see what happens”. My attitude was that we know what we want to happen and it wont unless we make it. He didn’t like my Lager Commandant notice on the door either but there it stayed. In 1948 the war was not forgotten by most of us and many satisfactory business deals were made in that spirit of comradeship and trust.
In Feb. 1949 I found that someone called Fry had studied Belfast on our firm’s behalf and had strongly recommended starting a relay service there. The report came to me quite by accident and at the same time I found he was surveying Bath, introducing himself as Development Manager in Relay Association circles. I tackled Colonel Slaughter about it and he said it was news to him, but he took it up with Moulton to whom Fry was reporting. I found that Moulton resented the fact that I was responsible direct to the Chairman, and also that my contract detailed my renumeration including commission which was the £1500 per year, 4 times the average wage. To clear the air we had a formal meeting and I put forward my prediction for future development. I forecast that within 2 or 3 years a general rundown of the system would be inevitable with the increase of television; further that it would be prudent to reduce expenditure on “wired wireless” and to develop the rental side of both radio and T.V., but to reconsider with Fred Wright - who was not at the meeting - the policy of manufacturing T.V. sets. My prediction became factual and was influenced also by transistor radios of which we had no knowledge at that time. There was 33% Purchase Tax on most things including T.V. sets. This was payable at the point of sale and not on rentals. As our sets were never sold but remained the property of Met. Radio & T.V. Rentals Ltd. no Purchase Tax was payable. This loophole was soon to be closed, as forecast, and tax was payable on the rental itself. It became cheaper to buy sets from the big manufactures than to actually make them.
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The Colonel remarked that as Development Manager I was really saying we should stop developing, and I agreed. This set the scene for further discussion well outside the intended scope of the meeting. The Chairman asked Moulton for his views on likely technological advances, but Moulton had none and said we can only try and stay afloat, seeking support from Fry. The Colonel shot down Moulton completely and asked Fry to detail his relevant qualifications. After a silence Moulton was told to study the content of my prediction and not to go off at a tangent on development nor without reference to him. Fry was sent packing and the meeting was closed. I learned quite a lot from Colonel Slaughter, he had spent a long time in the Royal Engineers and one of his attributes was building a flat-bottomed boat on the Nile, one of the biggest in service. His personality was such that when he looked up and down disapprovingly at an obvious ex-Serviceman leaning over a bar, the man immediately took his hand out of his pocket and squared himself up. I actually saw this happen in Maryport, he had that effect on people. (That was in 1948, it might not be the same over 40 years later).
No more was heard of Fry, and I never did join the Board, I was too busy getting on with the job, but it was time for reflection. I realised that when my father was Chairman he had the engineering and technical aspects at his fingertips and he took care of them. He was succeeded by the Colonel who was a business-man but who had no backing on the engineering side. My brief was the Development of the Radio Relay Systems, I regarded technological changes as a matter for the General Manager, Moulton, but I was not responsible to him.
I met the Colonel again privately and I said it seemed that I was Development Manager in a firm which was not going to develop any further. Although there was plenty of routine work to be done I felt the Electrical Trades Union would soon start making things very difficult as it was doing in the Post Office. In view of the probable technological changes, I felt that Colonel Slaughter would rather sell-out than try to steer a ship without a rudder. I was being rather outspoken but straightforward and the Colonel approved of this. I told him I would like to call it a day and try my luck in Africa, Kenya was said to be a land of opportunity. If that failed there was always a job in Bulawayo 2500 miles further south of the Cement Works with Mr. Rose.
The Colonel agreed I could leave when convenient but if I wanted to return within 6 months, to drop him a line. It was four years since the war in Europe had ended. Britain was changing and so was the attitude of many people some of who were very disillusioned. Hilda and I agreed it was time to make a move.
And so in July 1949 I went to Africa for the third time, but with Hilda and the two children, not knowing what sort of a career I was seeking, but nevertheless full of confidence, and still with my Lager Commandant board.
The following year, Colonel Slaughter retired and Seletar’s controlling interest in Metropolitan Relays was sold to British Relay Wireless which later became Vision-Hire. Within a further 12 years the wired-wireless or Relay industry in the U.K. closed, being overtaken by technology.
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[underlined] KENYA [/underlined]
The flight to Nairobi was a very pleasant trip by Argonaut, calling at Rome, Benina, - which we had known as Bengazi [sic] -, Cairo, Khartoum and Entebbe. On the last leg of the flight we flew very low at times, quite unofficially to give us our first views of big game from the air. The flight was very enjoyable, in very easy stages, and in retrospect the Argonaut was about the most comfortable aircraft we were to fly in, in our many subsequent flights to Africa. It was I think the first and only time we travelled in first class.
We were met in Nairobi by Duncan Fletcher, a friend of my fathers, and spent the night at Torr’s Hotel, in Delamere Avenue, the leading hotel at that time. The Stanley Hotel across the road was being refurbished to become the New Stanley, and within a few years Torr’s was closed and became the Ottaman [sic] Bank. I recall the strawberry and cream cake for tea at Torr’s for which it had been famous for many years. The following day we journeyed the 260 miles by bus to Kitale. This was a road we would take many times in the years to come. The first half was tarmac, 100 miles of which from the top of the Nairobi escarpment, through Naivasha to Nakuru, having been built by Italian prisoners of war. From the top of the escarpment there was a wonderful view of the Rift Valley and Mount Longenot [sic], an extinct volcano, and to the west over the plains towards Mau Forest and Kisumu. The bus took us down the escarpment, dropping about 2000 feet to the floor of the Rift Valley, passed the little Italian church built by P.O.W.’s, and northwards past Lake Elementita and Nakuru, then the rough murram road to Kitale. The journey took about 10 hours, but was far from tedius [sic], there was so much to be seen.
Kitale seemed like a typical american western type of small town, the roads were not made up and the sidewalks were made of wood. Many of the buildings were made of timber clad with mabati - corrugated iron - and most europeans wore khaki drill. We were met at the bus station by my father and completed the remaining 9 miles of our journey to our new home, Kirksbridge Farm, Kiminini where a guest house had been built for us, about 100 yards from the main house. Colin and Wendy, aged 6 and 4 were introduced to the Ayah, the african nurse, called Nadudu, who spoke only Swahili and her tribal language, Kitoshi, but within a matter of days was communicating without difficulty with the children. Nadudu had her own rondavel, a thatched roundhouse on the lawn at the side of the guest house, and took care of all the children’s needs.
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[underlined] Hoteli King George [/underlined]
Life on the farm had provided a welcome anticlimax to just about everything that had gone before, but it could hardly be a long-term solution for a young couple with a growing family. We did not appreciate at the time the serious effects of the political unrest and changes which were beginning to take place. We thought that common sense would prevail and most of us felt we had a good working relationship with the Africans; only a misguided few claimed to really understand them! Neither Hilda nor I felt we were achieving a great deal on the farm and we agreed it was time to look further afield.
In April 1950, after almost a year in Kitale, I responded to an advert in our national newspaper, the East African Standard, for Prison Officers. Salary £550 per year, uniform and furnished accomodation [sic] provided, generous leave etc. Military experience advantageous, with the rank of Asst. Supt. of Prisons. One pip! At least the job would get us to Nairobi where most of the action was, and we would have an opportunity to look around, but it was also to give me an insight into a very different and often sordid aspect of life. My application was successful. Our family, Hilda and myself, Colin and Wendy, with Paddy and Jeep our two Alsations all crowded into the Austin A70 and once again made the now familiar safari to Nairobi. 150 miles of murram road, through the Transnzoia, and the plains around Eldoret settled almost entirely by South Africans from the Union, winding around ravines to Mau Summit, up and over the 11,500 ft. mountains at Timbarua to Nakuru then 100 miles of luxurious tarmac through Naivasha with its flamingoes [sic] , passed Elementita an extinct volcano, up the escarpment to Nairobi. The tarmac road was built by Italian prisoners of war in W.W.2, the best stretch of road in East Africa. We also took with us Edward Ekeke, an African driver who had been with my father in Abbysinia [sic] during the war. Although a Kikuyu he was a trusted servant, and if left alone by the politicians and other agitators would have stayed loyal, but tribal and other pressures on chaps like Ekeke were great, and in retrospect it was foolish of us to trust them. Ekeke returned to Kitale with the Austin for more personal effects and re-joined us after a few days. I think he must have finally returned to the farm by 'taxi', as the african buses were called.
As it claimed in the advert., accomodation [sic] was provided. It could have been described as a three-bedroomed chalet, the walls and roof being of mabati (corrugated iron), and was built on stilts about a foot off the ground. We learned that is [sic] was originally built at the other side of the prison and had been carried to its current location by 200 prisoners. As far as I remember, we moved straight into the 'house', and roughed it until Hilda made it comfortable. There was a bathroom, but the loo was a 'thunderbox' at the end of the back garden with a bucket which a gang of prisoners dealt with about 5 am. every day. The kitchen was a Colonial type near the back door, with a wood stove, and an adequate supply of kuni (firewood) provided by more prisoners.
The prison was totally enclosed within a high stone wall, designed to hold 700 prisoners, but with a prison population of about 1900 Africans, 180 Asians, 20 Somalis and 12 Europeans. Quite separate was a small compound for the Wamawaki, (women), with about 20 African and 1 Asian inmate (in for murder but only men were eligible for hanging, so she was serving life). The whole 2000 or so were in the care of about 9 European officers and 200 African Askari. The
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Officer i/c was 'Major' Martin M.C., W.W.1 Veteran,as [sic] Snr. Supt., his number 2 was Henry Thacker with 3 pips as a Supt. Henry spoke fluent Kikuyu in addition to Swahili, and in fact had a Kikuyu 'wife'. He had been in the Prisons service for 36 years at that time and sported one medal ribbon, on his right breast. Legend had it that it was awarded by the Royal Humane Society after he saved a cat from drowning, but Henry was on a totally different wavelength to other Europeans. Sid Swan with 2 pips was i/c the stores and accounts, having spent the war in the Kings African Rifles, and having been demobbed as a Major. Other junior officers like myself included Bunty Lewis, rather effiminate [sic] but nevertheless an ex Royal Artillery officer who had a Kenya-born wife; Paddy McKinney, a large hairy ex Irish Guards Sergeant; Jimmie Vant, ex Kings African Rifles, the son of a Keswick lawyer turned Kenya farmer. Jimmie and his wife Dulcie regarded themselves as Kenya settlers and claimed to spend most of their time at the ranch on the Kinankop, hence their landrover vehicle. Another officer, Whitehouse who joined about the same time as me seemed to spend most of his time off sick and did not stay with us very long. There were three other officers whose names elude me but they were all ex-service, and all lived just outside the wall of the main prison.
The Duty Officers i/c worked a shift system, 0600 to 1800, assisted by a "day-duties" officer during more or less office hours. The Duty Officer was responsible for the day to day activity in the main prison. We were each armed with an enormous ancient revolver of 0.45 calibre and six rounds of ammo., issued by Mr. Thacker. I objected to the rounds of ammo., pointing out they were dum-dums, the bullets having been filed down to within 1/8" of the cartridge cases., and they contravened the Geneva convention. I remember Henry saying "there is nothing in the Prisons Ordinance about the Geneva Convention, and that's all that matters"! We were ordered in writing to wear the revolver in its holster at all times when on duty, and I thought of my four Brownings of long ago to deal with one enemy, compared to a ridiculous revolver in a compound with nearly 2000 potential enemies. It was in fact general practice, strictly unofficial, to carry the revolver but to leave the ammunition in the safe, and the prisoners knew this. I did carry a loaded Czech. .25 automatic in my pocket of which the prisoners were not aware. Some months after I joined, the Snr. Supt. inspected Paddy's revolver and put him on a charge for not carrying ammunition, "contrary to station standing order number something or other". Paddy was eventually charged before the Commissioner of Prisons and pleaded not guilty, asking to see the written order. This was produced and the charge dismissed. The order refered [sic] to the revolver only, and not ammunition. All very childish, but Paddy of the Irish Guards was not one to be messed about. He produced his dum-dum bullets to the Commissioner who was astonished, and all the dumdums were withdrawn. Paddy also pointed out how ludicrous it was for a lone officer to carry firearms in a crowd of hundreds of prisoners, but the order remained. He was a likeable fellow and when the C.O. quoted the book of rules, Paddy made a detailed study of it. In addition to the Prisons Ordnance, we also had Station Standing Orders which gave Paddy ample scope for playing the barrack-room lawyer. He was seen one night at a party in the Military Police Snr. N.C.O.'s mess, and was put on [deleted] a [/deleted] two charges by Martin. Before the Commissioner he was charged with sleeping off the station and drinking whilst on duty. Again Paddy asked for the rule-book and pleaded not guilty. The book stated that an officer would not sleep off the station whilst
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on duty. Paddy agreed he had been at the dance all night and did not in fact sleep anywhere! case [sic] dismissed. Station standing orders also stated that an officer would not partake of alcoholic drink whilst on duty, but a further order stated that an "officer was deemed to be on duty at all times". It therefore followed that all Prisons Officers were required to be completely teetotal, and that was an unlawful order. Martin had met his match and was told to edit Station Standing Orders.
The day started at 0630 by unlocking the European cells and counting the inmates, whilst the Askari dealt with all the other prisoners. There was no point in an escape attempt by Europeans, they would not have got very far before being picked up, but for other races it was a different matter. They were guarded very closely. The four main racial groups were quartered separately for sleeping and eating, their customs and diet and indeed their whole culture differing considerably. Only the Europeans slept on beds, the others were not interested and prefered [sic] the floor, some with very thin mattresses. The Europeans wore shoes, the Somalis heavy boots, Asians wore flipflops and the Africans stuck to their bare feet which were generally tougher than any footwear. European food was probably similar to that in U.K. prisons, and with each race having its own traditional food, this was not a case of discrimination, each prefered [sic] its own. Each group also provided its own cooks. Some of the Asians in fact opted out of Prison food and had it sent in, but it was very thoroughly checked. Uniforms differed too, some compromise between standard prison garb and ordinary native dress. Europeans wore K.D. slacks and shirts with arrows printed on them. Africans wore white shirt and white shorts held up by string.
Two or three hours were spent in the early morning preparing prisoners for court, generally about 50 of them. Some were on remand, and others were convicted prisoners who were required to give evidence in cases where they were involved as witnesses. In the late afternoon all were returned to the prison possibly with changed status. The paper-work had to be watched very carefully, confusion could arise where one prisoner might have a conviction warrant on one case, a remand warrant on another and possibly a production order to appear as a witness in an entirely different case. It was not unknown for a prisoner to be involved in two cases under different names. Language sometimes presented a problem. The courts conducted the business in English and Kiswahili, but there were many tribal languages and quite often interpreters had to be employed. One such case was when 60 prisoners of the Suk tribe were charged with murder having massacred the District Commissioner and his staff of 12. The only interpreter who could cope with the Suk language translated into Kitoshi, and a second one translated from Kitoshi into Swahili. All 60 were hanged at the prison in due course. They seemed very young to me and I doubt if they really knew what it was all about. They were the ones rounded up by the Police after spears had been thrown at the D.C.'s party from a crowd of 2000 whilst he was reading the Riot Act -literally-.
Relationships between officers at the prison were generally very good, with the exception of Martin who thought he was playing soldiers and Thacker for whom we felt rather sorry. 36 years as a prisons officer must have warped his mind somewhat. After about two months I decided to be like the other officers and wear my medal ribbons, and that was when I first fell foul of Major Martin. He asked me what the first medal was and I told him. He said he
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had not authorised me to wear it and I laughed and said I didn't need his authority, the King's was good enough. Shortly after this I was on duty when 45 new African prisoners were admitted, but there were 50 warrants. Some were convicted on Capital Charges, (murder, manslaughter, rape etc). My Chief Warder had signed for 50 bodies and 50 warrants, but there were only 45 bodies. It was 5 pm and my obvious priority was to determine which 5 prisoners were missing. It took until 6.30 to sort it out, no-one was missing, the Court was at fault in issuing two warrants each to five prisoners, instead of one warrant and one production order each. Only then did I get around to locking up the European prisoners for the night, 30 minutes late, and I entered this in the log. The next day an Asian prisoner complained to an Asian Official Prison Visitor that the Europeans were not locked up until 6.30 whereas the Asian prisoners were locked up on time. This was racial discrimination and the official visitor reported the matter direct to the Commissioner. I was charged by Martin for failing to carry out a particular standing order in that I failed to lock up the Europeans at 6 pm. 'How do you plead?' saith [sic] the Commiss. 'I don't', I replied, 'I request the case be taken by the Member for Law & Order'. He was the member of Legislative Council equivalent to the U.K. Attorney General, and this was a genuine option available to an officer charged before the Commissioner, same sort of procedure as an Airman on a 252 asking for a Court Martial rather than take his C.O.'s verdict. The Commissioner suspended the charge for the time being and asked Martin why the charge was brought. I was then asked why I had failed and I said that I was the Officer responsible and in unusual circumstances I concentrated my action in what I considered the most important aspect, which was resolving the problem of the 5 apparently missing prisoners. I consider I acted correctly, regardless of Station Standing Orders. Martin said he had not known that and I suggested that he should read the duty log before signing it as seen, next time. I also suggested that an amendment be made to the standing orders to the effect that nothing contained therein would prohibit an officer from using his initiative when he felt it necessary. Anyhow, I went on, it is an unlawful order in any case, and that will be my alternative defence with the Member for Law & Order. The commissioner was intrigued and read out the order "You will lock-up the European prisoners at 6 pm.", looking to me for comment. I said it was an impossible order, locking-up people involves work which takes time, 6pm is a moment of time in which by definition no work can be done. I said the whole set-up is childish and the Commissioner asked Martin to withdraw the charge. It seemed I had joined Paddy in his war of attrition against Martin.
Our two alsations, Paddy and Jeep had settled-in very nicely, with only their hereditary training. Their self-appointed task of guarding Hilda and the children was unending. When the family was inside the house, one guard would remain with them whilst the other maintained watch on the verandah [sic] and patrolled outside in the garden. When the children were in the garden whilst prisoners were working in the area, either Paddy or Jeep would deploy themselves between the two groups. Only by instinct our dogs knew the prisoners were not to be trusted and were watched very carefully, but the African askari were regarded as allies. The prison was very close to the boundary of Nairobi National Park, and grew cabbages two feet in diameter in what must have been some of the most fertile land in Kenya, receiving all the effluent from the 2000 odd inmates. Late one afternoon an african prisoner in a work gang fancied his
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chances and made a run for it, sprinting along the road passed [sic] the house hotly pursued by about six askari. The askari were at a disadvantage wearing heavy boots and jerseys, but they were joined by Paddy and Jeep who caught up with the prisoner and arrested him in the Game Park. When the askari caught up with them they found the prisoner literally with his pants down, leaning exhausted against a post supporting a notice "Stay in Your Car, Beware of Lion".
It was essential but sometimes difficult not to become involved emotionally with the prisoners, almost all of whom had in their eyes suffered a grave injustice by winding-up in jail. One afternoon whilst I was on duty the Chief Immigration Officer, a Mr. Pierce, came to the prison and required me to serve a Deportation Order on a European Prisoner, Major Melbourn. I read the document first and found that Melbourn had been declared an 'undesireable [sic] immigrant' and was therefore to be deported within 5 days. Melbourn had in fact served about 12 months of a three year sentance [sic] for bigamy and would be required to complete the term in the U.K. He was 'undesireable [sic] ' because he had changed his job without permission. I remarked that this was a very lame excuse for such drastic action. After an exchange of views I said I had not sought his permission when I joined the Prisons Service and he advised me to do so without delay! A few days later I was detailed to escort the prisoner to Mombasa, and hand him over to the officer i/c of the prison at Fort Jesus. Meanwhile I had studied all the Melbourn files and they showed a good example of how a fellow could slip up over small technicalities which produced major consequences. Melbourn was a British Army officer serving overseas for almost the entire war. During the Blitz, his wife was in a Convalascent [sic] home in Liverpool which received a direct hit and she disappeared without trace like many others. He had been drawing a marriage allowance in the normal way and eventually reported to his C.O. that it should be discontinued because he believed his wife had been killed in an air-raid. He was advised that until he had proof of this the allowance would continue. He should have applied to the courts for it to be deemed that his wife had been killed but the environment of the Burmese jungle and other wartime pressures were not conducive to that sort of logic and he let the matter rest. After the war he made enquiries in Liverpool without result, and was eventually released from the Army having served for 30 years. Several years later he became engaged to the daughter of the French Consol [sic] in Nairobi, and when they were married he declared that he was a bachelor. They were Catholics and had he referred to himself as a widower, there could have been difficulties and the authorities would have required proof in any case, which he could not provide. Soon after the wedding someone who had been a clerk in the Pay Corps spotted the reference to 'Bachelor' and thought it rather odd that Melbourn had claimed a marriage allowance during the war. He reported this and the subsequent enquiry led to Melbourn being charged with bigamy and convicted. Whilst it was essential that justice must be seen to apply equally to all races, Europeans were the Bwana Mkubwas and were supposed to set an example. White men in jail were an embarassment [sic] to Government and wherever possible they were returned to the U.K. Melbourn had slipped-up on a second trechnicality. [sic] In the U.K. After [sic] demob. he and two ex-Army colleagues, all of whom had served in East Africa in 1945, decided to establish a business in Kenya, and the three applied for Entry permits, Employment passes, Dependants [sic] passes in two cases, and Residence permits. Complete with ambitious plans for the future and proper documentation
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the trio arrived in Nairobi and set about organising their new enterprise, one of the first acts being an application to register the name of their company. Whilst this was 'going through channels' problems came to light which could not have been foreseen and their plans had to be abandoned. Melbourn remained in Nairobi and obtained employment, and his two colleagues returned to U.K., disillusioned by the red tape. Whilst looking for a reason to declare Melbourn an undesireable [sic] immigrant the application for permission to work with a firm which did not exist came to light and provided the necessary ammunition.
On the night train to Mombasa Melbourn was very chatty, we were both in civvies, he was allowed to use his own money and I felt the best policy would be to let him have a few drinks and to sleep it off. He undertook to behave and understood that at the first sign of being unco-operative he would be handcuffed to his bunk. He told me his story which was the same as gleaned from the files, and added that he had made arrangements to escape at Suez and join the sister of one of the Somali inmates. I handed him over at Fort Jesus, wished him luck and had a look around Mombasa before returning to Nairobi on the night train. About two months later we learned that he had indeed jumped ship at Suez and was working as a Newsreader at Oomdemaan on Egyptian International Radio Broadcasts. I bought some brass plates from him in Nairobi which today are displayed at Wendy's home in Cherryhinton [sic] , and which remind me of the injustice metered out to one who served for 30 years in the British Army.
Another European prisoner, on remand, had been arrested for vagrancy. He was a British merchant seaman who felt like a change, had legally entered Kenya with proper documentation and had taken a job driving a native bus. The authorities deemed this was not a suitable job for a white man, declared him undesireable [sic] and deported him, by ship. He would have been quite happy to have joined a ship at Mombasa as crew-member or paid his own passage. He most certainly did not meet the definition of vagrancy, he had more than adequate means of support. I recall his bitterness when he said it was fair enough to drive a bloody army lorry for five years but not an african bus.
For nearly six months I relieved Ron Woods as officer i/c the Tailoring section of Prison workshops, whilst he was on home leave. In the workshop 200 prisoners beavered away sewing and stitching, 100 with sewing machines and the other half working by hand. We produced uniforms for all Government departments and also for prisoners and were allowed to undertake private work for anyone willing to provide their own material. One of the European prisoners had been a tailor in civvy street and he was very helpful. There was also a 'mechanical workshop' employing about 100, mostly producing articles in metal for Gov't departments, but also repairing and generally working on motor-cars. I took the opportunity of turning them loose on my father's Packard and they did a very good job. The Tailoring section even produced some seat covers for it without being asked. Shortly after the car was finished, a Salvation Army Major came to me and said that Johnson, a European prisoner who had worked on the car, had seen the light after several months of Bible study and was now determined to go straight. He was serving five years for armed robbery, having held up a taxi in Mombasa. The Major asked for my support for his application to the Parole Board and was in fact going to great lengths to secure the Prisoner's release. I declined my support, and told the Major he had been spoofed, Johnson would never go straight. However, the appeal
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was successful and Johnson suggested to me the night before his release that for a small fee he could arrange to 'steal' the car and drop it over Nairobi escarpment for me. Such were the people we were dealing it, [sic] [inserted] with [/inserted] but what finally became of him I don't know.
After several months we moved to a much nicer house in the prison officers' compound. Hilda was doing photographic retouching and finishing work in the city for Arthur Firmin, and life was without undue pressures. On saturday [sic] evenings we occasionally went to see our friends George and Iris Dent at the Oasis pub. George was an engineer with the Army Kinema Corporation and a very keen 'ham', VQ4DO, ex ZS6DO. At their parents' Pub George showed films which provided entertainment. This was before the days of television in Kenya. It was on the evening of one of our visits we were sitting in the Dent's home, Wendy was stretched out asleep on the couch and Iris's little boy was playing with his toy cap-gun. This reminded me that the pain in my rear was caused by my .25 automatic in my trouser pocket, so I moved the gun to my jacket pocket. Iris saw this move and said it looked a far nicer gun than her .38 and asked to see it. I handed it over, having checked there was no round up the spout and it was on safe. To our absolute astonishment, Iris cocked it, off with the safety catch and fired. The bullet demolished the leg of the couch less than a foot from Wendy's head. The song "Pistol-packing mamma" didn't seem at all funny any more. Colin was with us and had attended Nairobi Primary School for about two months. Wendy was looked after during the day by Nadudu, the Kitoshi ayah we had taken with us from Kitale. The children called her Bundudu.
With the withdrawal of the British Army from Kenya, George and Iris returned to South Africa, George taking up employment with the S.A. Broadcasting Corporation. Today the Oasis pub is thriving, still on the main Mombassa [sic] Road and close to Nairobi airport at Embakasi.
I was concerned only with Nairobi prison, but there were prisons in 8 or so towns, backed up by several camps. Later when Mau Mau really got under way, there were many more much bigger 'internment' camps. Some of them in my day were known as rather tough places. Hard Labour was still the prerogative of the courts; It meant exactly that, and was invariably stone breaking. A gang would be given a task of smashing up a number of very large boulders and feeding the fragments through a screen before putting them onto a lorry. Only when the task was complete would they be marched back to the living area. One of our camps was at Lokitong, about 450 miles north of Nairobi, and it frequently happened that prisoners had to be returned from there to Nairobi to attend court. There was no telephone, the only communication with the camp was was [sic] by a telegram to Kitale prison and thence a letter by bus and camel to the camp. It was generally a three-week process, so six weeks was needed to produce a prisoner from Lokitong to a court in Nairobi. I put up a written suggestion that in the absence of telephones we should establish a number of radio stations. I could undertake to establish the stations myself using ex-army 21 sets, maintain them and also to train the operators. The suggestion was submitted through Mr. Martin but addressed to the Commissioner, and according to the Chief Clerk went straight into Martin's waste paper basket. A few days later I delivered a copy direct to the Commissioner's office with a covering letter with my estimate of costs, about £100 per station plus my time and travelling.
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I promised instant communication with the camps but it was too revolutionary and there was no provision in the budget for it. About four years later the job was done for them by the Police at a cost of £700,000 with recurring annual expenditure of over £100,000. A lot of money in those days. Jimmie Vant became the Prisons Dept. Telecommunications Officer with no knowledge whatsoever of the subject. He didn't really need any, all the work was carried out by the Police which was staffed entirely by technicians on secondment from the U.K. Home Office. Such is the price of progress and sophisticated over-engineering. No doubt in the 1990s they will be able to spend even more millions and do the job via satelite [sic] .
Returning home one afternoon having collected Hilda and two other ladies from the city, and Colin from school, we found the prison surrounded by armoured cars and light tanks with hundreds of Police and Army personnel. Apparently there was a rumour of a pending mass breakout, but it was only a rumour. I regarded it as a show of strength for the benifit [sic] of the unruly.
The job in the Prisons Service was like no other I have held either before or since. It was work which started and finished according to the duty roster and activity was determined and limited by the various orders laid down. For every minor detail there had to be a written authority. The Prisons Service had become established about the turn of the century and the antiquated system did nothing to inspire enthusiasm. On one occasion Paddy Mc.Kinney and I were taking a five minute breather in the office and enjoying a coca-cola, when Martin came in and without preamble ordered us to put leg-irons on Mchegi, then stormed out again. Mchegi was a "casi kubwa", a 6'3" Kikuyu in a condemned cell. The leg-irons were a reprisal for Mchegi's offensive the previous day. Martin, on his round of inspection had moved aside the 6" square observation panel in the door of Mchegi's cell to look inside, and received the full force of the contents of the choo (night soil!) bucket in his face. Mchegi was awaiting hanging and had nothing to lose. He was a very dangerous individual who had already killed and because of his violance [sic] often remained in his cell during excercise [sic] periods. Putting leg-irons on this tough character was a formidable task and Martin knew that. Paddy startled me by suggesting that I should open the door of Mchegi's cell, and he would wait at the open end of the corridor where it entered the prison yard. I replied that I would rather he opened Mchegi's door and I would wait in the yard. However, Mchegi had no personal animosity towards me and Paddy's complete plan appeared rational. I opened the cell door with the greeting "Mjambo Mchegi", and he stepped out of the cell, seeing a clear passage to the prison yard and beyond to the open gate in the outside perimeter wall of the prison, with neither officer nor askari in sight. Mchegi recognised his chance to escape and made a dash for it. It was at the end of the corridor that Paddy stepped out hit him and simultaneously an askari tripped him up. Before Mchegi recovered four askari had rivetted on the leg-irons and dragged him back to his cell. A few minutes later Paddy and I were finishing our cokes in the office when Martin came in and remonstrated, "why haven't you carried out my order?" Paddy said we had done so and Martin exclaimed "impossible". When Martin was told just how it had been done we were both on a charge once more. The Commissioner reminded us that striking a prisoner was a very serious matter but when Paddy said it was the preferred alternative to shooting him, there was no answer, and the matter was dropped. Mchegi gave no more trouble and apologised to Martin for his indiscretion, and
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Paddy saw to it that Mchegi received his full ration of excercise [sic] time in the prison yard. It was about three weeks after the choo bucket incident that Paddy was in the yard and attacked from the rear by a prisoner with a pair of 12" scissors. Fortunately Mchegi was watching and although still in leg-irons tackled the assailant, overcoming him just in time. Paddy was still cut, but there was no doubt that Mchegi had saved his life. He took a great interest in Mchegi and asked why he had been a condemned prisoner for so long, just waiting for the death sentance [sic] to be carried out. Paddy saw to it that the stabbing incident received a great deal of publicity, and eventually Mchegi was released from jail. Some years later I found he was a Snr. Warder at the prison.
About the same time, a new recruit joined us, with the same rank, Asst. Supt. Gr.2, but we found his salary was in fact 2 increments (£120 per annum) higher than ours and we wanted to know the reason why. We were told that he had been in the armed services and was awarded two increments for war service. We, apparently, had been under the average age of entry for the Prisons service at the time of our war service. Our next move was to try and compare our respective efforts during the war, but the new recruit was very reticent about his service career, and somehow didn't seem to speak the language of the soldier. It was several weeks later we found he had been in the German Army and the rest of us felt this really was too much. Regulations on war service increments however did refer to the "armed services" and made no mention of which side a fellow was on. We were not still fighting the [deleted] a [/deleted] war, but we were a uniformed service after all. The Gerry could see he was not wanted and resigned.
After 12 months as a Prison Officer I was very disgruntled with the way of life and went to see the Commissioner and gave him one month's notice. This he accepted and on my return to the prison I was handed a letter terminating my appointment with immediate effect, signed by Martin.
I then set about thinking of another job, there was lots of scope and on the air next morning my father suggested I should go and see Joe Furness who was Director of Civil Aviation. Later that day, in prison uniform, I called to see the Personnel Officer of D.C.A., one Bert Leaman, and found there might be a possibility of joining the Telecommunications section, and arranged an interview for the following day.
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[underlined] CIVIL AVIATION [/underlined]
In April 1951 I joined the E.A. Directorate of Civil Aviation as a Radio Officer on a salary of £610 per year. I had no relevant qualifications for this job but I could cope with the morse code at 25 words per minute and had aquired[sic] a general background of aviation during the war years! The first two weeks were spent at R.A.F. Eastleigh studying the workings of the Telecommunications and Air Traffic Control systems, after which I was posted to Mbeya near the Tanganyika/Northern Rhodesia border at 6500 feet above sea level. The journey down to Mbeya was by road, 900 miles, and in the middle of the rainy season. Much advice was received, “all the hotels are closed”, “the roads are waterlogged and blocked”, “there is no petrol beyond Arusha” and so on. We decided to do the trip in four short stages of between 200 and 300 miles per day, with night stops at Arusha, Dodoma and Iringa.
Our 1949 Ford Prefect, KCC13, with 60,000 miles on the clock was reshod at a cost of £10. Recapped tyres were the vogue at that time, a practice which has since stopped, being said to be dangerous. However, those recaps. did 22,000 miles on some of the worst roads in the world, without problems, before being replaced, a better performance than the original new tyres. With the car loaded with household equipment, and with Colin and Wendy lying on blankets near the roof of the car we headed south down “the Great North Road”. The first 100 miles was tarmac and no problem in the pouring tropical rain. Always to the south of us -dead on track- were towering thunderheads of cumulo [sic] -nimbus, but nearing the end of the tarmac the rain stopped. Indeed for the next three days the rain stopped falling about twelve hours ahead of us, but also remained on our tail. On the second day, deep ruts in the road caused a broken rear spring near Dodoma, but this was repaired overnight at George’s Garage; very well equipped with spare springs was George. Crossing the hundreds of fords, or drifts was exciting and at times quite hilarious, many being over 100 years wide and comprising merely a strip of concrete 10 feet wide on the bed of the river. Most of them were covered by water, hiding the concrete and the only clue to its location was provided by the poles at each side of the drift. More often than not the river bed at the side of the concrete was worn away creating a drop of a foot or so. A piece of thick wire fixed to the front of the car together with a vertical line on the windscreen, could be lined up with the centre of the two distant poles. By ignoring everything else and having implicit faith in the navigational instrument, we always reached the other side without going over the edge. Without this blind faith there would have been a tendency to keep a little to the up-stream side of the drift. To go over the edge on the other side could have been disastrous. In two places on the second day we were really bogged down in mud but we quickly mastered the technique of driving in reverse over the worst parts, thus becoming front-wheel drive. The most interesting village we passed was Kondor Arangi, between Dodoma and Iringa, on the third day. A beautifully painted and spotlessly clean Arab village, probably unchanged for centuries and almost completely independent of the world outside. After over 35 years I can still recall the aroma of freshly-baked bread, and the welcoming atmosphere of the village. On through Iringa and the final leg of 250 miles of the beautiful scenery of Southern Highlands, completely unspoilt by development. After a night at the Iringa Hotel, we had made our usual early-morning start and reached Mbeya by mid-day. Straight to the Railway station in
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Mbeya, a typical East African Railways and Harbours station complete with platforms, but the nearest railway lines and trains were over 400 miles away. A search for Paddy and Jeep, our two alsations, which had been put on the train five days previously in Nairobi, was to no avail. It was to be a further three days before they reached Mbeya, very hungry and very thirsty. After a night in ‘Links’ Salter’s Mbeya Hotel we inspected our new home at the airport. Known as Wilson Airways Rest House, built in 1932 for use by British Airways – before the change of name to Imperial Airways, and B.O.A.C. – It was ‘U’ shaped with 2 kitchens and 10 bedrooms. No electricity of course but a dozen or so paraffin lamps took care of the lighting problem. An african [sic] was provided to carry water from a tap about four hundred yards away to keep our small tank topped-up. The house was very convenient at the side of the runway, actually the grass landing area. It was very pleasant to sit on the verandah[sic] where there was a wonderful view of Mbeya Peak. We had only two neighbours, the Claytons from Burnley who were ‘refugees’ from the groundnut scheme at Kongwa and now in charge of a tipper unit with the Public Works Dept., and Bwana Grigg, an old-timer who had been a prospector and was then a Weights and Measures Inspector.
Mbeya was our home for 2 1/2 years, the aerodrome had been up-graded from a one-man to two-man station open from 0600 to 1800 hrs. every day. My colleague was George Hanson, who originally hailed from Selby in Yorkshire, an ex-wireless operator in Royal Signals during the war who had joined E.A. Posts and Telegraphs as a Radio Officer in 1947. George had spent 3 years in Burma during the war and returned to Selby in 1946. To find his fiance [sic] in the arms of two Italian prisoners. According to George he gave the Italians a thrashing – which would have been very true to character – and left them with their heads jammed in the railings, to be released later by the fire-brigade. The Law caught up with him and George was given a dressing -down by the magistrate who said “We don’t want ruffians like you in this country”. George claims he told the magistrate to get some service in and his knees brown and the case was adjourned. At that time the Crown Agents were recruiting for East African Posts & Telegraphs Dept. and George felt it was time to emigrate. All aeronautical communications were handled by E.A.P. & T. until the end of 1950 when they were taken over by the Directorate of Civil Aviation. George and I had to cover 84 hours each week between us, thoeoretically[sic] a 42 hour week, but there was no provision for sickness, local leave, and the many chores which required both of us, like being in three places simultaneously. We were assisted by an african [sic] wireless operator, a Kikuyu 1200 miles from his home, a cleaner, a watchman, and a diesel mechanic, Kundan Singh Babra, all of whom lived on the station. George and I agreed our individual responsibilities, we would each carry out our 42 hours per week on watches, which included R/T to aircraft on HF and VHF, an aerodrome control function, W/T to Nairobi as required, originating meteorological reports each hour and coding them into Aero format, and customs duties. In addition, he would deal with all the admin., and I would see to the technical aspect of keeping the station on the air.
The station had been established in 1932 and the original Marconi M/F Beacon, a type TA4A was still in use and in immaculate condition. We had a stock of MT16 valves enough to last for another 30 years. We also had an ex-South African Air Force T1190 of 1933 vintage, fitted in 1940, and four ET4336 transmitters for working aircraft on R/T and Nairobi on W/T. Everything was in very good condition and gave me no problems. Our “office” was at the D/F
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(direction finding) station, and was fitted with one of the original DFG10 Marconi recieivers [sic] .
We could not see the runway from the office, which rather limited our scope in controlling it.
Each week, Mbeya had only 4 East African Airways scheduled Dakotas and Loadstars, on the Nairobi-Dar es Salaam route, plus a Beaver of Central African Airways from Blantyre in Nyasaland and one R.A.F. transport from Johannesburg to Nairobi. There were also up to a dozen or so charters which sometimes arrived with little or no notice. Our M/F Beacon was the only navigation aid for some hundreds of miles in all directions. The D/F Receiver was not in use and had a faulty power unit. This I serviced and used the receiver for monitoring Tabora’s M/F Beacon. We were operating also on 6440 KHz, the Salisbury F.I.C. channel, unofficially, to keep in touch with the Beaver aircraft which were not fitted with Nairobi F.I.C. channels. This proved very useful and also gave us a rapid link with Salisbury Ndola and Blantyre. One day and R.A.F. Anson called on [underlined] 6440 [/underlined] and reported his MF/DF receiver, - in his only [inserted in margin] NOT 6440 BUT 5190[?] [/inserted in margin] navigational aid – out of order. He was over mountains, - he hoped – in cloud, could we give him QDM’s, (courses to steer) on M/F ?. I told him to transmit on 333 KHz, the standard frequency for this purpose, and it took only a few seconds to retune the DFG10 to this frequency. For the next 2 1/2 hrs. I gave him a QDM every three minutes. The weather was bad and the aircraft eventually landed at Mbeya, staying overnight. The Navigator was visibly shaken, he did not know his position, only that if he acted on the QDM,’s he would eventually reach Mbeya. Only after landing could he calculate his ground speed, about 70 knots. On arrival over Mbeya the crew were able to see Mbeya Peak above cloud, This was five miles to the North of us and with a cloud base of 3000 feet above the aerodrome they were able to descent and land. All this would of course have been totally unacceptable to a civilian aircraft which would have possibly returned to it’s starting point. The R.A.F. aircraft without any Nav. Aids had really no option. Some weeks later we received a letter from the R.A.F. thanking us for the assistance we had given the Anson crew in providing M/F bearings thus preventing a possible disaster, etc. etc. Unfortunately this letter was also copied to D.C.A. H.Q. with another asking if the facility could be retained. The next mail brought a letter from our own boss, the Director of Civil Aviation.. “Whilst complimenting and thanking you for taking the initiative on this occasion…”. The letter went on to point out the legal significance of giving information to pilots and of undertaking to provide a direction-finding facility with 20-year old equipment and no spares. I made sure I could provide an alternative power supply of 2 and 130 volts which did not take much imagination and adapted some modern valves – type 6C4 – with bases to replace the original 1930 vintage triodes. There were not used in my 2 1/2 years in Mbeya and we continued to give bearings to the R.A.F. unofficially. About 2 years later a Pye VHF set was fitted together with a D/F antenna and also a modern Redifon M/F Beacon, both with an effective range no better than 25% of the 1932 equipment. This was not the fault of the manufacturers. In the case of the D/F the reason was the difference in propagation characteristics and with the M/F Beacon it would have been better to retain the original 1932 Marconi type antenna.
I have no notes of this period, but memories are many. I recall seeing a Cheetah on the grass landing area we called a runway, whilst carrying
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out a runway inspection. As I approached, the cheetah ran off. My foot was hard down doing 58 m.p.h. just behind it, but the cheetah gradually drew away. Daily inspection of the ‘runway’ was necessary. Ant-Bear holes appeared quite often, and just one of these was sufficient to wreck an aircraft. Africans had free access to the runway except when aircraft were actually using it. One evening a grass fire started and swept first along the windward side of the runway where the grass was long, and then crossed it in a line of flame and black smoke the whole length of the runway. Hilda and I were on foot at the other side of the runway and witnessed literally hundreds of snakes fleeing from the fire. There were lots of snakes and other creatures in that area which after all was open African bush. This was again highlighted at 6 am one morning when I drove to the D/F station and opened up the radio. It was still dark and there was a very pungent smell of pigs. I assumed there was a dead animal outside but within a few minutes it was daylight and having established contact with Nairobi on w/t and confirmed there were no overnight disasters requiring my attention, I went outside to investigate. There were elephants all over the place, standing there, and looking just as surprised as I was. I made a strategic withdrawal smartly into the D/F station and bolted the door. On my way to the office I had met the African nightwatchman who was waving his arms about and saying something about ‘tembo mningi sani”. The word Tembo was generally associated with Elephant Brand Beer, which was more a part of everyday life in our immediate area than the animal after which it was named. I assumed he had been drinking and thought no more of it. The africans too were soon awake and trying to chase the elephants out of the maize, throwing tin cans, stones and even pangas at them. Three africans were killed in the process. Meanwhile I telephoned the police who said it was not their shouri (affair), “tell the Game Warden”. It was then 6.15am. and the Game Warden would not take the matter seriously, claiming I was drinking too much, “see the M.O.”! There was a scheduled Dakota due at 7 am. and I asked the pilot to overfly the runway and make sure there were no elephants on it, and this he agreed to do. I gave him the surface wind and QNH and landing clearance, and he came straight in and landed, without checking. He too thought I was not being serious about the elephants. It was mid-day before the elephants left of their own accord and moved back towards the mountains to the south. The Africans said the elephant movement was a sure sign that Rungwe, our local dormant volcano was about to erupt, and the elephants had already received warning. They took me to the fire trench round the Shell petrol dump which was 10 feet deep, and showed me the alternate layers of volcanic ash and sandy soil, starting at the bottom with four inch layers. At the 5’ level about 8” layers, gradually thickening as compression decreased to a 12” layer of ash and finally, 18” of soil at the top. There was no record of the date of the last erruption,[sic] probably some hundreds of years ago. We did experience several earth tremmors [sic] in Mbeya, but it was a nice life and we decided to stick it out!
Colin and Wendy were attending Mrs. Maugham-Brown’s infants school in the town and were making very good progress. Hilda was doing retouching of photographs for Arthur Firmin which were sent to and from his Nairobi office by air mail. It was in Mbeya that I built my first amateur transmitter with bits and pieces from the junk box, and was soon in daily contact with the outside world on the morse key.
On the sixth of Feb. 1952 I called my chum in Liverpool as usual and he told me that all U.K. stations were closed for the day in deference to King
[inserted] G6YQ George [/inserted]
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George VI who had died during the night. Later that day Hilda and I went to Mbeya School to see Colin, expecting the football match to have been cancelled. I expressed my surprise to the Provincial Commissioner (the King’s direct representative) that the Union Jacks were not at half mast and the game still on. He told me not to spread rumours and he would deal with me after the game. Just after half-time a Police askari despatch rider drove onto the field and gave the P.C., who was referee, a message. The P.C. stopped the game and announced that the King was dead. He was very annoyed indeed that I had received the message direct from U.K., many hours ahead of the official channels. Mbeya had a local telephone service which did not connect with any other. It was also at one end of a single-wire line of about 1000 miles which was used for passing telegraph messages. This linked about 30 places ‘up-country’ with Dar es Salaam, the Capital. There was no other way officially of telecommunicating with Mbeya. It so happened that I had a pair of ex-military amplified telephones, which were battery powered, press-to-talk operation and which gave an amplification each of 20 dB (100 times). I sent one of these to Jimmie Waldron in Dar es Salaam and by arrangement he called me one morning at 0545 on this line. We had a first-class conversation which was truly remarkable. This was possible only because the operators at the 30 or so other stations were still asleep, and not interfering. I have no doubt this particular exploit would compare very favourably with the record longest telephone conversation over a single wire and earth, if indeed a record has been established.
George Hanson and I got on very well with each other, both being from Yorkshire and both being ex-Service, but eventually his tour of 2 1/2 years was completed and he was succeeded by Doug. Clifton, who was ex-PTT and R.A.F. ground wireless operator. We moved into the cottage vacated by George and family, near to the transmitting station, and I ran a mains cable underground between the two. This gave us 230 ac. Power for 12 hours a day and at night whenever the radio beacon was required for overflying aircraft.
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One quiet morning the Provincial Commisioner [sic] asked me to his home to discuss a problem, and on arrival I was told that the Governor, Sir Edward Twining was convalescing in Mbeya, having just arrived, but could stay only if he could speak regularly with the Chief Secretary in Dar es Salaam. The Police and Posts & Telegraphs Departments had already been approached and could not assist. I was authorised to cut clean across any rules and regulations in order to set up a communications channel. Back at the D/F Station I sent an official message on the Aeronautical W/T channel to CHF ZHTD (Officer i/c Airport Dar-es-Salaam) asking him to pass a message to Jimmie Waldron, P.T.T. Chief Engineer’s office. I told Jimmie of the Governors request and the powers bestowed upon us, and that I would call him on 7151 KHz which was just above the upper limit of the amateur 40 meter band. I would install a receiver at the P.C.’s house. Would he advise me of his transmitting frequency. Meanwhile I got the local P.T.T. to connect my second aerodrome telephone line to the second line to the P.C.’s house. This automatically provided a microphone for the P.C. and enabled me to make a simple connection to my amateur transmitter at the airport. Half an hour later I received a message on the aeronautical channel “Loud and clear on 7175, Dar es salaam calling you on 8775. A check on my local receiver and indeed there was Jimmie. I then drove to the P.C.’s house and retuned the receiver to 8775, and we had first class duplex communication. A lady’s voice came on “Is that you George?” “No Love, this is Cliff”. “Oh dear, this is Lady Twining, is my husband George there please?” I handed him the telephone and restrained myself from saying “It’s for you George, I thought your name was Edward”. For the next two weeks the link was in constant use and another letter of thanks was sent from D.C.A. in Nairobi.
Why the fuss one might say, but in 1952 it was the very first time [inserted] H E [/inserted] H.H. the Governor had spoken by private radio telephone to his Chief Secretary from outside Dar es Salaam. This was another ‘first’, also on an amateur basis.
At Mbeya Post Office I was introduced to the Manager of New Saza Gold Mine, which was about 100 miles north of Mbeya. He said his radio link with Mbeya had not worked for four years although experts from all over East Africa had tried to fix it. It was a simple w/t link to Mbeya Post Office where there was an operating position and transmitter set up on 3900 KHz which seemed to be a reasonable frequency for the job. “Fix it and you can name your price”, and I agreed to have a go on a ‘no pass, no fee basis’. I first set up a spare DCA transmitter keyed from the D/F station, rather than rely upon co-operation from the Post office. My own DCA operator would monitor. I called the local Post office from the aerodrome but there was no reply. This was the rainy season and it would be a three hour drive through the bush to New Saza, so I lost no time over the Post Office and set off in my Ford Prefect complete with two amateur transmitters and two receivers, any combination of which could do the job if all else failed. On arrival, their station appeared to be working and with adequate output, but I soon found the output stage was doubling to 7.8 MHz. and not amplifying straight through 3.9. A higher tapping on the coil fixed that and I called Mbeya Post office. No reply. Then I called ZEQ3, my own office at the D/F Station and my operator came up trumps. We were in contact with
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Mbeya. I asked my operator to ring the Postmaster asking him to kick his wireless operator. He found the transmitter had the wrong crystal in it and the receiver was also detuned. Having corrected this, all three stations were in contact. The station receiver at New Saza was a pre-war ‘straight set’, that is, not a superhet, and was not ideal, so I added one of my own receivers. In addition, I fitted a second operating position, with my own equipment and separate aerial, as a standby. The manager was delighted and I was rewarded handsomely. Only once in the next 18 months did I need to visit New Saza for a minor fault. Electrical and mechanical power for the mine was derived from a very old wood-burning steam engine of pre-1914 vintage and German manufacture.
On the road about half way to the mine, was Chunya, a typical American-type western one-horse town, the main street being unpaved and 200 feet wide. The place was almost derelict, a few prospectors still panned for gold in the stream, but in years gone by it had supported a population of over 2000. There was a Police post which sported a telephone connected to Mbeya Post office. The overhead line ran at the side of the ‘road’ and I had this in mind for emergency use. A field telephone was part of my standard safari equipment in the car. Later on I carried a transmitter on the aeronautical H/F channels in addition. Communications was often the key to survival.
One very hot day, about noon, George Blodgett, an American tourist, took off from Mbeya in his Cessna 180 with his wife and another passenger, continuing their round-the-world holiday. The aircraft carried the same load as when it took off from Dar es salaam without problem a week or so previously. But Dar was at sea level, and Mbeya at 6500 feet. Dar had a proper concrete runway with a clear flight path. Mbeya had a grass ‘runway’, much shorter and with a small hill at one end and a mountain within 4 miles at the other end. It was the slight banking to avoid the small hill which caused the aircraft to stall and plough along the ground, writing itself off. It took me several minutes to reach the wreck, to find a bewildered trio shaken-up, but physically unhurt. There was a strong smell of petrol which came from a 5 gallon can INSIDE the aircraft. The can had a hand pump and hose which fitted on the drain cock of a fuel tank inside the port wing. Transferring the petrol was achieved by opening a window and leaning out to fix the pipe. This rather surprised me as George was a very experienced pilot and was in fact the first to cross the Andes in Peru, solo, where some years later he went missing without trace. His life-story was written up in Time & Life and referring to his accident in Mbeya, it said he had crashed in the bush and the Despatcher from Mbeya trecked [sic] all night to reach the aircraft, to find George and his passengers surrounded by lions and tigers. Lions were a possibility but the only tigers in Africa are [deleted] a few imported ones in captivity. [/deleted] [inserted] in West Africa and are not tigers as we know them. [/inserted]
Mbeya was a peaceful place, and to a large extent we were able to plan our lives. Occasionally we became involved with the local tribesmen, particularly after one of their frequent skirmishes. Generally a small group would appear at the house bearing the injured on bicycles with blood all over the place, and asking me to take the casualties to hospital. The first time this happened I took them by car to the African Hospital and not really knowing the system, gave them my name. Some weeks later I received the bill. Subsequent deliveries were made in the name of Ramsey Macdonald!
Soon after joining DCA I noticed on one of many flight plans received the name of Iliffe as Captain of an incoming Dakota. When the First Officer
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called me on VHF I requested him to ask the Captain if the number 1090111 meant anything to him. Back came the reply, affirmative. I gave him my first service number 1384956 and after he had landed, went over to the Terminal Building to see him. There wasn’t much time for reminiscing but he marvelled that I had remembered his first service number. It was on a pay parade in Bulawayo that Howard’s name was not called with the others in alphabetical order. It was called at the very end when he gave his ‘last three’, somewhat disgruntled, as “Sir, One one bloody one”.
We had seen a great deal of each other on the troopship going to Durban and until our ways parted at Belvedere where Howard got his wings and my records were stamped ‘Wastage’. After his training at Belvedere, he completed S.F.T.S. on Oxfords and in U.K. converted to Dakotas. His war was on Transport Command, flying Dakotas. We met several times in the next 15 years, the last time being in 1965 when Howard was the Captain of a Comet of East African Airways returning to the U.K.
After 2 1/2 years in Tanganyika our tour was finished and we were due for 6 months leave in U.K.. We opted to travel by air rather than sea but did not realise when making the decision that this referred to trunk travel to U.K. from the International Airport of the territory in which we finished our tour. It was unlikely that we would return to Mbeya after leave, my successor expecting to stay for the full 2 1/2 years. All our effects were crated up whilst we spent the last week in Mbeya Hotel. The car was left with the Postmaster and Paddy our Alsation [sic] boarded with Mrs. Maugham-Brown. And so with four children, Christopher a baby of 4 months, we said farewell to Mbeya at the railway station, not by train but by diesel-powered bus - referred to as a ‘taxi’ by the Africans. The first leg took us the 250 miles through Southern Highlands to Iringa, where accommodation was reserved at Iringa Hotel. The next day was very similar, by another ‘taxi’ to Dodoma. The drivers were Africans, probably ex-Kings African Rifles, and their driving was of a very high standard considering the state of the road. There was some tarmac in the towns, but otherwise the road surface was graded murram, a well-packed reddish sand. This was apt to become corrugated after rain and scarred with deep wheel ruts. Ruts made by lorries could be quite deep and dangerous to cars with little clearance below. The ‘taxi’ took us direct to the railway station at Dodoma where we had been advised to request compartments as near to the engine as possible, where the sway is minimum. The first job was to wash all the nappies and as we had two compartments it was easy to sling a couple of lines and hang up the nappies to dry. It was very hot in Dodoma, and the carriage windows were all open because of the heat. In the evening the engine got up steam and the train moved off amid clouds of thick black smoke, most of which seemed to come in at the windows. For 18 hours we chugged across the plains with its tens of thousands of many different types of wild animals, gradually descending to the coast and becoming progressively hotter. Arriving in Dar es Salaam at about 4 pm., the temperature in the shade was 120 deg.f. and it was a great relief to flop onto the beds in the air-conditioned hotel. The evening was spent in trying to clean up our clothing and indeed ourselves, with Christopher’s nappies hanging on lines in the hotel room. The nappies dried within an hour but were still filthy. After a browse around the big stores in Dar, we handed in our 480 lbs. of baggage and placed ourselves in the capable hands of B.O.A.C.
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Our flight home was by Arganaut, [sic] 16 hours flying, stopping at Nairobi, Entebbe, Khartoum, Benghazi and Rome. Plenty of seat room, excellent food and a very comfortable flight. One engine developed trouble approaching Italy and we were delayed for 24 hours in Rome. The Romans were hostile to the British at that time, I cannot remember why this was so, but we enjoyed a conducted tour of Rome and first-class hotel accommodation. At breakfast next morning I thought I recognised a fellow at the next table. He was under the same impression and when he spoke to us there was instant recognition. He was the B.O.A.C. Rep. in Rome and we had seen a great deal of each other on the squadron in North Africa. He was then W/O Woolston, a pilot on 150 Sqdn. We arrived in London 24 hours late, but there were no complaints. B.O.A.C. had made the trip very enjoyable.
The greater part of our leave was spent in London with Hilda’s parents, and I took the opportunity of spending 12 weeks at the School of Telegraphy in Brixton, for an Intermediate C. & G. in Telecomms and a P.M.G 1st. Class licence. I was also on a course of Dexedrine to reduce my weight, eating very little and actually losing it at the rate of 1lb. per day, for 44 days. Peter Gunns, another D.C.A., Radio Officer had been at the school for 6 months and was doing the complete 12 month course for a P.M.G. second class licence. I decided to give it three months and take the first class ticket. The Principal at the school advised against it, almost everyone first obtained a second-class ticket before trying for a first. For three months I swatted hard, long into the night and then went to Post Office H.Q. in St. Martin-le-Grand and applied to take the P.M.G.1 licence. The Chief examiner asked to see my second-class licence and when I said I didn’t have one, he said “look son, try for a second class and if you pass, come back in a few years time and try for a first”. I replied that I was not interested in anything second-class and he shrugged his shoulders and booked me to take the exam. three days hence. The exam. took from 9 am to 5 pm., written and practical and was quite intensive. The final part was the morse test at 25 w.p.m. and the examiner was wearing an R.S.G.B. tie. I took a chance at the end of the test and sent, on the key ‘QRA? De VQ4BM’ and after an exchange of greetings he asked me if I was returning to Kenya. I replied “yes, but only if I pass this exam”. He sent QRX3 and left the room, returning with a smile and said “strictly off the record, you could book your ticket”. The next three days were taken up with City & Guilds exams, and I was delighted when my P.M.G. licence arrived by post. The following day, feeling on top line, Hilda and I went to M.C.A. Headquarters at Berkeley Square and I applied to take the Flight Radio Officer’s exam. I found this was held only twice yearly and by sheer coincidence the next one was the following day. I was told to just fill in the form, pay £3 and come back at 0830 the next day. I saw the Chief examiner and told him I wasn’t quite prepared for the exam. at such short notice, it was many years since I had studied the S.B.A. and Navigational aids. He told me not to worry about them and to check through the last 5 exam. papers, copies of which he lent me. They could be bought openly from the “shop” downstairs, but this was already closed. He also said “bear in mind that everything has its own natural frequency”. I spent until 5 am next morning making sure I could answer all the questions on those papers, and doubly sure of the compulsory questions. I noticed that
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year 4 had the same compulsory questions as year 1, and year 5 the same as year 2. Year 6 was to be my lot and if this was to be the same as year 3, on cathode ray tubes, all would be well, and I had a couple of hours sleep. It had taken me a long time to realise what the Chief Examiner had meant by “it’s own natural frequency”.
The exams were spread over a period of two days and I failed two of them. The first was a three-minute test writing down the phonetic alphabet and I wrote “Alpha bravo coca delta foxtrot golf hotel etc.” The examiner looked over my shoulder and remarked “what on earth have we here, have you never heard of able baker Charlie?”. I thought this was a catch and I said “yes but that went out three years ago when I.C.A.O. introduced this one”. It seemed that Britain was three years behind the rest of the world on this simple issue. I had however quite rightly failed on R/T procedure. All went well on a simulated flight from Manchester to Jersey when I received a chitty that both engines had stopped and we were on fire. There was already a M’iadez in force from another aircraft and I broke radio silence and put out my own “M’aidez” without the Captain’s authority and that was the end of the exam. FAILED! on two counts. I had passed two three hour written papers, a two hour practical exam., an hour’s morse at 25 w.p.m. and failed on two ridiculous details. I said I was sufficiently experienced to anticipate the Captain’s instruction to send out an SOS but the book does say that only the Captain has the authority. However, I paid another £3 which I could by then ill-afford and resat the two parts the following morning. The licence came by post a few days later. The R/T Procedure test was the same as before, and when we reached the point where I had put out my M’aidez I just sat tight. I heard the other aircraft transmit his SOS again and it was acknowledged by Jersey Approach. Without authority to transmit an SOS I could not break radio silence according to the regulations and I continued to sit tight. One minute of real time was equivalent to 10 minutes of ‘flying’ and after 30 minutes of theoretical flying time I removed my headphones and placed them on the table. The examiner did likewise and asked me what I thought I was doing.
I just said “swimming to the surface”. He laughed and said O.K. at least you didn’t originate a M’aidez. In the practical M.C.A. exam the equipment in use was the T1154 and R1155 and the main object of the examiner seemed to me to be one of getting me confused, argumentative and thoroughly rattled. Thanks maybe to the dexedrine I realised what his game was and remained very calm indeed. He admitted afterwards that he was trying to get me rattled, remaining calm and composed was all important in the air!. I cast my mind back 10 years but said nothing.
Meanwhile Peter Gunns was still plodding on and becoming very discouraged. I urged him to take the PMG2 the following week, there was little point in further delay. I spent a week with him going through every paper set for 5 years, and he was successful in the exam. A few weeks later we returned to Nairobi together. About 10 years later Peter died of a heart attack whilst on night duty in the Nairobi Communications Centre. He was taking a short break and read in the newspaper that Pinnocks had folded up. He had £15,000 invested with them, and the loss was too much to bear. After a few weeks at Eastleigh I was posted to Mwanza on the southern shores of Lake Victoria, again in Tanganyika.
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Our car, a Ford Prefect KCC13 (new price £400) and Paddy our alsatian, were nearly 1000 miles away in Mbeya and I was able to scrounge a flight as supernumery [sic] crew with East African Airways. The return journey by road with Paddy took 30 hours non-stop except for refuelling and for half an hour at dawn when driving was dangerous. The work in Nairobi was operating air/ground channels on R/T and W/T and also at the D/F station giving H/F bearings to aircraft on the Khartoum and Johannesburg sectors where navigation aids were few and far between. It transpired later that the D/F station was adjacent to the Mau Mau graveyard. I recall one day looking out of the door and seeing the police askari guard fast asleep with his loaded rifle on the ground beside him. More for security reasons than mischief I took the rifle inside the building and it was still there when I closed the station at 1830. But there was no sign of the askari, so I put the rifle in the loft of the small building, intending to do something about it next day. Somehow I forgot all about it for two weeks and then handed in the rifle at the R.A.F. guardroom and questioned why the police had taken no action. The askari had just disappeared without trace.
Once again our household effects were packed into crates, and despatched by ‘rail’ to Mwanza. We had exchanged our Ford Prefect for an Austin A70 and motored via Kitale (my father’s farm) to Kisumu where we boarded the M.V. Rusinga. The Rusinga ploughed clockwise round the lake shore calling at Musoma, Mwanza, Bukoba, Entebbe, Jinja and complete circle to Kisumu. Her sister ship the M.V. Usoga called at the same ports, but went anti-clockwise round the lake. A third ship, the M.V. Sybil was smaller and more or less a reserve vessel. Lake Victoria was the second largest inland sea in the world, and became the largest when its level rose 8 feet with the building of the dam at Jinja a few years later. The voyage of about 200 miles took a very pleasant 30 hours with one halt at Musoma. We were met at Mwanza Port by Johnny King who I was relieving. He said he expected to return to Mwanza in 6 months as it was his station and his wife’s father was Government entomologist permanently stationed there. His wife’s family were German, very domineering and forceful. I didn’t mind the mother’s clay pipe but took an instant dislike to her Bavarian-type husband. I insisted upon a proper formal take-over at the airport which was just as well, and the proper storage of King’s personal effects at P.W.D and not in the transmitter room. For a couple of weeks we stayed at Mwanza Hotel and then moved to a delightful house at Bwiru, facing north with a wonderful view over Lake Victoria. Palm trees in the foreground, paw paw trees in the garden and - we discovered much later - leopard in the hills at the back of the house. The water supply came from a storage tank half a mile up the hill via a metal pipe on the surface of the ground, and was always hot enough for a bath without further heating. The water had to remain in our roof storage tank for some time before we could regard it as being a cold water supply. Water and electricity could not be taken for granted in East Africa, but the house was connected to the town electricity supply.
The airport was a fairly new one about 10 miles east of town, by the lake shore, the single runway 18/36 being of grass. It was a neat little place, the transmitters being in the room below the Control Tower with two diesel engines and fire station being in a custom-built building 50 yards away. The
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transmitters were two RCA ET4336s, a G54 Redifon M/F Beacon and an ex-R.A.F. T1154. In the Control Tower was a Pye PTC704 VHF set with a direction-finding antenna. There were only 6 scheduled aircraft per week and an average of about 10 charters. This was a ‘one man’ station and my working hours were long. Perhaps the highlight of the tour was the four-day visit of H.R.H. Princess Margaret. The ten mile road to town was ‘tarmaced’ [sic] a few days before her arrival. The original murrum (red sand) surface was first graded and then covered by a quarter inch layer of chippings and sprayed with tar. The cost was £11,000 which was charged to my aerodrome maintenance vote. For the few days of the visit the road looked really superb, and then just a few days later it rained and the remains of the “tarmac surface” were cleared away by grader, the surface reverting to murram once more.
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Every effort was being made by the Administration to make the Royal Visit a success and the costs were covered somehow. The M.V. Sybil was in dock for 6 months at Kisumu being completely refitted so the Princess could spend just a few hours on the lake. An R.A.F. Shackleton flew down from Aden to provide an escort for the Sybil. Four radio stations were established on the boat, each with an operator, to contact the Police on H/F W/T, Aircraft on VHF, Mwanza Airport on H/F R/T, and E. A. Railways & Harbours. Just about every vessel afloat on Lake Victoria seemed to be milling around outside the harbour waiting for the Sybil and the Princess. A Widgeon aircraft, the only amphibean [sic] in E. Africa, was detailed to position itself at the end of the runway at instant readiness for take-off. The Shackleton took-off to patrol an hour before the Sybil was due to leave harbour, Captain Chris Treen positioned his Widgeon and stayed put with engines idling. All the Sybil's radios were tested and people were getting excited. We were then advised that it was a case of not tonight Josephine, H.R.H. had a headache, the trip was cancelled. The Shackleton, looking remarkably like a real Lancaster landed on my murrum runway, and the Widgeon had to be towed in backwards, the engines having over-heated.
In company with all the other Colonial officials I had been given six pages of foolscap telling me how to address the Princess and how to conduct myself in the Royal presence. There was also an application form for a Permit to be at the airport for her arrival and another application form regarding my being presented to the Princess. It was the two application forms which bugged me. I refused to apply for a permit to enter the airport where every aspect was my responsibility, if anyone denied me access, be it on their own head. "Before applying to be presented", the write-up stated, "You must qualify under at least one of the following headings:-
1. Be a Government Servant on a salary exceeding '£x'
2. Be a serving officer of H. M. forces,
3. Be a retired officer having held a rank above 'Y'
4. Hold a Civil Decoration equivalent or senior to an M.B.E.
5. Hold a military decoration.
6. Have already been presented to another member of the Royal Family.
There was virtually an order to apply if one qualified and this decided me to ignore the whole issue. I was not in favour of the pomp and circumstance and the relatively vast expenditure involved, and I was never any good at playing charades and other party games.
Just before the Royal Visit a gang of workmen turned up at the airport and were starting to fit a toilet suite in the 'Crew Room'. This was a small room where aircrews could relax and enjoy a little privacy between flights. Toilet facilities were quite adequate without specially converting the crew room for the Princess. I vetoed the plan, and finally the toilet wing, already with four Asian type and four European type loos was enhanced with one new and rather superior loo. The superloo did come in useful however; whilst the Princess was inspecting the guard of honour, the bare-chested Engineer of the Widgeon aircraft appeared inside the Terminal building,
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looking quite incongruous in his filthy shorts and sandals. I told him to keep out of sight until Princes Margaret had left. He did, and hid in the superloo. After the visit, someone fixed a royal coat of arms an the door to which I had the only key. I was tempted to replace the heraldry with a replica of the board made for me by one of the German prisoners at Poynton. written in Gothic characters "Lager Kommandant, Eintritt Verbotten".
The Royal Visit was the highlight of the decade for Mwanza, the road to the aerodrome was closed for three hours and all the Police were concerned only with the visit. It was during that three hours the villains broke into many European houses. We lost all our shoes which were not actually being worn at the time, some clothing, and all our clocks including a time-switch I had just repaired for someone.
There was one charter aircraft based at Mwanza, the Widgeon piloted by Chris Treen. It was a very busy aircraft, being an amphibean [sic] , going relatively short flights mostly around the lake shore. Chris had a full-time engineer who was not very co-operative, and the operation proved to be uneconomical although Chris tried very hard. He was on Transport Command during the war and later flew in the Berlin Air Lift, then flew the Widgeon from U.K., 6000 miles to Mwanza. The airline had its moments, on one occasion the Provincial Commissioner was climbing out of the aircraft at Ukerewe Island into a dingy which collapsed and he was nearly drowned. Submerged rack. and crocodiles added to the excitement
One of the busiest aircraft at Mwanza was a Miles Magister which, was owned privately and which has also been flown out from England by its owner, an official of the Lint & Seed Marketing Board, who also had an Aircraft Maintenance Engineers' licence. It became the main asset of the Mwanza Aeroclub and was very active at weekends.
The tribe an Ukerewe Island had it's own language, and the story goes that the District Officer studied the language and wrote a dictionary and grammar for it. Having done so he applied for the £60 per year "language competency allowance", and to qualify had first to pass the Official Colonial Office exam. in the subject. The Colonial Office department which organised such matters was duly asked to prepare an exam. and find an invigilator for it, but was not given the identity of the candidate. There was no record of anyone being able to speak the language, and they approached the obvious source, the District Officer Ukerewe. As a part of his normal chores he was pleased to prepare the two papers as 2 hours of translation each way between English and the native language of Ukerewe. On arrival in U. K. on leave, he received a letter from another Colonial Office department, addressing him by name and asking him to invigilate at as examination, giving the venue and date. Shortly after, yet another office wrote to him advising him that an examination had been arranged and wishing him luck in the exam. He hardly needed it, reporting as directed in his official capacities as both invigilator and examinee. Not only that, but he had also prepared the examination papers. He was the only European who knew the language and he got his £60. per annum. The common language with the natives was of course an up-country impure Swahili, as in all parts of East Africa.
I had studied Kiswahili in the Prisons Service and from books, but the grammatical version was spoken only at the coast and on the radio. The
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Africans in the Prison Service and those I worked with spoke the up-country version, almost completely ungrammaticaI. The further one went from the coast the more it became a matter of joining words together. Nevertheless, it was an interesting and descriptive Ianguage. Beautiful words like 'maradadi' which in fact is an adjective meaning 'beautiful', and 'tafadahali', said to mean 'please' , but I never actually heard an African use it. ' Asanti' meaning thankyou was frequently used. Calling someone a "shenzi" hardly needs translation.
The Caspair Lake Service operated daily. Based at Entebbe, a DeHavilland Rapide flew to Kisumu, Musoma, Mzanza, Bukoba and back to Entebbe. It called at Mwanza three times weekly and remained on the ground for 4 hours. Paddy O'Reilly was the most colourful of the pilots and on one occasion was missing when the aircraft was due to take-off. He had borrowed a native canoe and paddled out into the lake for some peace and quiet. He was very soon asleep and when he awoke he found he was two miles off-shore without a paddle. He was soon rescued and took off two hours late.
I had a very good African Assistant at Mwanza, Zepherino Shija, and he was a tremendous help in making things run smoothly. In fact my African staff were all good types, far from home, politicians and the trouble-makers to be influenced by them.
It was at Mwanza that I really became involved with radio repairs, and once I had repaired a few, word quickly spread and I was inundated with them. Many of the 'dukes' -shops- in town sold radios but hadn't the vaguest idea how they worked or how to repair them. Most of the radio owned by the Africans were powered by dry batteries, using a 4-pin plug on the power lead which was very often forced the wrong way into the socket on the battery. This instantly blew all four valves for which the shops charged 25 shillings each. I bought valves for 3 shillings each in quantity and sold them in sets of 4 for forty shillings, throwing in a new and better type plug. I must have repaired over a thousand radios in two years, plus many bigger sets for Europeans. Before very long I met Mr. Manning, the American Head of the African Inland Mission in the Province, and he showed me a room full of equipment, domestic radios, car radios, record players, tape recorders, transmitters, P.A. ampIifiers etc. etc. Every item was faulty. I was invited to repair what I could, keep what I wanted and throw out anything that was past it. Three trans-receivers were very attractive and they needed only setting up. Independent transmitter and receiver units powered from 115v a.c. but with rather limited frequency coverage of 5 to 8 MHz. I used them on the air for a couple of weeks and they were then taken by road to African Inland Mission stations in the Belgium Congo where they had a network on 7150 KHz. These sets were to prove very useful within a few years during the Congo rebellion which came with "Independence". It took me 6 months to empty the room, and all except three or four units were returned to use within the Mission organisation. Those three or four units caused a misunderstanding with Mr. Manning. I said "These units are U/S, best place for them is in the lake", and I could see that I had upset him. He associated my expression 'U.S' . with Uncle Sam, or the United States, but when I explained it meant ‘unservicable’ in English Service jargon a crisis was avoided.
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I met a fellow called Nawotsey, supposed to be a Belgian, who was making a fortune killing crocodiles for their skins. He had just about wiped them out on Lake Rukwa. His technique was to use an infra-red lamp and sniperscope at very close range, typically six feet. His equipment gave a lot of trouble and I charged him well over the odds for repairs. In reality he was German, and ex-German army. There were many of them in ex-German Tanganyika but few had the guts to admit it, and there was not a nazi among them, in theory.
Eventually one of the dukas offered me £50 per month cash if would stop doing radio repairs. This was not far short of my salary and quite a compliment, but not accepted.
We became very friendly with one German, Dr. Schupler, who had been a wartime Medical Officer in the Luftwaffe. He was serving in Dresden the night of the 13th. of February 1945 when it was attacked by over 800 R.A.F. bombers, followed by over 300 American Fortresses the next day, causing between them 137,000 casualties including an estimated 50,000 killed. A doctor somehow seemed to be in a different and acceptable category, but our talks had reminded one of a period I had almost forgotten, and about which I had stopped thinking. One good point in East Africa's favour, there was very little to remind us of the war. A row of ribbons perhaps on a police uniform, or a retired senior type using his old rank, but there were few occasions when we compared, notes on our respective war efforts. The Germans were supposed to be super-efficient, a myth already exploded, but in the main they were still mostly distrusted.
Mwanza was a peaceful place, there was only one murder during our 2 years residence, and that was committed by a mad african from Dodoma, 400 miles away. I could not have visualised at the time that within twentyseven years this nice little airport would be bombed by the Uganda Air Force. I can picture now the little bakery where the murder was committed. It was in same road just before we left that a hyena was running down the road to meet us. We were in the Austin A70 which already had a damaged right. wing and I put on full speed. We met the hyena head-on, relative speed about 70 and he was thrown completely over the car. He lay on the road for about two minutes, then picked himself up and loped off into the bush. We had ringside seats watching an interesting battle between hyena and baboon one evening. Our bungalow was on the hillside and the bedroom windows on one side were 15 feet above ground, and level with the tops of the pawpaw trees, heavily laden with fruit. The baboon were taking the fruit and being attacked by about a dozen hyena which were being thrown around by the baboon. The fight finished suddenly for reasons best known to the combatants. They might have sensed the presence of a leopard, which was very likely, but we were not aware of the leopards ourselves until a few weeks later. In the middle of one night we were awakened by a scuffling outside the window and there was the most obnoxious stench. There was the so-called laugh of the hyena and a deep sawing sound which we were told was a leopard. It seemed that a hyena had been dragging an old carcass along when it was disturbed by a leopard. The carcass was dropped outside our bedroom window and later one of them returned to collect it. Apparently baboon are the favourite diet of the leopard and everything including baboon and leopard dislikes the hyena. One of them cornered a neighbour’s dog in our garage and
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chewed off it’s vital parts before help arrived too late. Snakes too were in abundance around Mwanza, and a European girl had been crushed, but not fatally by a python near the lake shore. One of the houseboys hacked a monitor lizard to death, thinking it was a snake. Hilda recalls the occasion when I encountered a leopard on the driveway to the house and I got out of the car to tell her!. There was the occasion too when Paddy, our Alsatian was aware of a leopard outside the front door and Paddy's hair literally bristled. The leopard was probably aware of Paddy's presence also. I was away in Nairobi at the time
Some months before the end of our tour, we received a telegram from Les with the sad news that Hilda's father had died. At about the same time the Kenya Education authorities informed us that as we were no longer resident in Kenya, Colin and Wendy would have to leave Kitale School. The alternative was Kongwa, a school established at the time of the groundnut scheme, a British Government fiasco then almost fully wound up after wasting eighteen million pounds. Kongwa was about 400 miles away and difficult to reach from Mwanza, and as it would be only a temporary measure in any case, we felt it better that Colin and Wendy should return to U.K. We saw them off on the Dakota on an hour's flight to Entebbe where they were met by Flossy and Pi Reed. The following day they flew to London and stayed with Mum at Korella Rd., in Wandsworth.
In early June `57 it was time for home leave again and once more we packed all our household effects into huge crates ready for shipping to our next station which had not yet been decided. I had been promoted to Radio Superintendant [sic] in Mbeya and later to Telecommunications Supt. having passed departmental exams for the two lots of promotion. I was finally relieved by Sailor Seaman who immediately objected to the long working hours. The way of life on the outstations had a great deal to commend it. There was no television but we always had a good radio set. There was not the pressure we were to experience in later life and we made our own entertainment. It would be nice to go round again.
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Before leaving Mwanza I had ordered a VW Beetle on the home leave scheme stipulating the date and time that I would collect it in London. This resulted in a considerable saving. The cost was £330 delivered London whilst the price in East Africa was £1250. Colin and Wendy were already in Britain, only John and Chris were with us on this trip. From Mwanza we should have returned via the capital, Dar es Salaam, as we did from Mbeya, but for some weeks I had been pointing out the futility of the extra 1600 miles via Dar, when the the [sic] aircraft would go via Entebbe in any case. Sanity prevailed and we flew by DC3 to Entebbe, a nice lunch at the Lake Vic. and a 10 hour flight to the U.K. with one stop at Benghazi. I think that was our first trip by Jet aircraft, a Comet. I have flown in many jets since then, but none as comfortable and roomy as the Comet. The following day we went to Lower Regent Street and collected our new VW Beetle, which came into the showroom one minute ahead of schedule. I was very impressed by the German organisation. I was taken into a workshop and given some useful tips about the car which was to serve us well for over 200,00 miles most of which was on murrum, our reddish East African sandy soil.
In the following six months we made good use of the car, visiting my mother in Barnoldswick, the Yorkshire Dales, and whilst up north had a rendezvous avec Ace (Ted) and Mary Foster, Ace having been our second tour Navigator. Ted recalled this many years later and remembered an incident in a Southport restaurant. We were sharing two tables with Ted and Mary and their three children, making a party of 4 adults and 7 children. Ted alleges the waitress exclaimed “By gum are these all yours?” and claims I replied “No, they are from the local orphanage, we are just taking them out for the day”. She said that was right champion and gave us a discount! I went to Liverpool also and en-route noticed that a Police car had been right behind me for several miles. I slowed down to 30 for the next five miles and eventually the blue light came on and I was stopped. “What speed were you doing Sir?” An instant reply, “29.5 m.p.h. “The officer agreed with that and said “Why, it’s a lovely road and there’s no speed limit. When you slowed down from 80 to 30 we thought you had a problem, enjoy your visit Sir”. I had a “Visitor to Britain” sticker on the back which was supposed to help a little. In Liverpool I met Stan Chadderton, our First tour Bomb Aimer. I called at Stan’s house and his wife Hilda directed me to the Gladstone Dock where Stan was working, I seem to remember being introduced to his boss and Stan was given the rest of the day off. We adjourned to the Lord Nelson Pub and reminisced well into the night about our efforts in North Africa.
We had made another acquisition whilst in Mwanza. Clearly a base was needed in Britain even if my work was to be in East Africa. Les told us of a house in Glyn Neath called Glaslyn going for £1850 on the balance of a 999 year lease. I offered to buy it if the freehold was available. It was very quickly ours at a total cost £1910 and £25 solicitor’s fees. Hilda’s Mum moved into Glaslyn and Colin and Wendy had already joined her. Glaslyn was a comfortable and handy sort of place, only a few hundred yards from Aunt Doll’s cottage.
In early December I was told to report direct to Entebbe Airport to relieve Henry Day in charge of Telecommunications. I wrote to P.W.D. in Mwanza and asked them to send on our boxes and car by Lake Steamer to
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Entebbe, and completed other arrangements. Just before Christmas I handed over the new car to the A.A. near Tower Bridge and paid £75 for shipping it to Mombassa [sic]. Then with our four children and a mass of baggage we once again booked-in at Victoria Air Terminal and shortly afterwards we realised we had just been home for six months and were then in Entebbe. The Comet aircraft was flown by Howard Iliffe, 109011! but I discovered this too late to meet him.
At Entebbe we were met by Henry Day who had been in charge for six months in an acting capacity and he made it clear that as he was now demoted – with loss of acting pay – I could not expect any co-operation from him. For 10 days we stayed in the Lake Victoria Hotel, luxurious but not at all homely and with it’s population of some hundreds of cats living on the roof. We then moved into a house with a red mbati (corrugated iron) roof. Between the ceiling and the roof was a foot of sand and if the builders had been designing an oven it would have taken some beating. The red iron absorbed the heat from a tropical sun and it was retained by the sand. Entebbe was a pretentious place, not the capital of Uganda, which was Kampala 20 miles north, but where most of the senior Gov’t officials lived. The airport was a minor one to U.K. standards but trying very had [sic] to appear important. I found the whole place docile and yet offensive, “toffee-nosed” is the phrase which comes to mind. The job itself was not at all demanding, I had a team of about 8 Engineers including Frank Unstead and Gibby. Also three Radio Officers including Henry Day and several Africans to operate the teleprinters and radio links to Nairobi. There was little for me to do personally. Airport Management was taken care of by Uganda Government officers. The East Africa High Commission, of which the Directorate of Civil Aviation was a part, was responsible for Air Traffic Control and telecommunications. About six airlines had their own Station Managers and there was a great deal of empire building which led to over-manning and inefficiency. An individual’s importance was determined by the number of his subordinates and the extent of his warrant to incur expenditure. There was a great deal of ill-feeling too, between the officers of Government and those of the High Commission, later more appropriately renamed the East Africa Common Services Organisation. The latter was responsible for all communications in Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika, except for the actual maintenance of roads. It included E.A. Posts & Telegraphs, Railways & Harbours, Fisheries, Meteorlogical [sic] Depts., Civil Aviation and several Medical Research establishments. Politically, the scene was complex, Kenya was a “Colony & Protectorate” – some of each – Tanganyika was a Protectorate with a United Nations mandate and Uganda a combination of twelve Kingdoms formed into a ‘State’ with 12 Kings, a Prime Minister and also a President. It had its political problems but they were not mine. Dickie Dixon was Senior Air Traffic Controller and therefore Officer i/c Navigational Services in which capacity I was his deputy. As I was not at that time a qualified Air Traffic Controller, this led to friction, and as I have already implied, Entebbe was not a happy place. The crunch came when I was told by Dickie to compile all the Annual Confidential reports, including those for Air Traffic Controllers. I told him that I did not think it proper that I should report on officers whose qualifications I did not hold myself. He should do them himself and I would write them for all the Telecommom [sic].
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staff. The previous year he had reported on the Telecomms staff and I disagreed strongly with his findings in one case, that of Gibby who, he wrote, “was slow in carrying out a job”. He was indeed slower than most, but was also the most thorough engineer in the Department. When repairing an equipment he not only repaired the current fault but also brought it right up to the manufacturer’s specification. My personal relationship with Dickie deteriorated rapidly, and rather than speak to me he would write me memos. In one of his many memos he “required” a technical explanation of a particular problem, and I replied to the effect that “as the conductivity between the two points was less than half a mho, this was inadequate for proper operation”. He wrote to my Chief in Nairobi complaining that I was taking the Mickey, and this brought him a rude reply. I could have referred to “a resistance greater than 2 ohms” instead of “a conductivity less than half a mho”, which would have been more helpful, but I made my point.
One major problem at Entebbe was the absence of schools for European children, and Colin and Wendy had to go to Nairobi and Kericho respectively, as boarders. This would have cost little had I been stationed in Kenya and paid the statutary [sic] Education Tax, but as I was stationed outside Kenya and had not paid the Kenya tax I had to pay the full boarding fees. I was not alone in this of course, it was a problem for all families of the E.A. High Commission living in Uganda.
However, I learned that in June 1958 Dinger Bell was finishing his four year tour at Kisumu in Kenya, and I managed a transfer for myself, handing-over Entebbe to an officer returning from a U.K. leave. At that time we had two cars, and I remember taking the Austin A70 to Kampala and selling it in a bar to a consortium of five Africans for £25, each chipping in with a hundred shillings. We travelled to Kisumu by road, our effects going by lake steamer. It was an easy day’s drive round the north-east shores of Lake Victoria, through Jinja, with its crocodiles at the source of the Nile. This was in the days before the level of the Owen Falls dam was raised by eight feet. It was refreshing to arrive at Kisumu, and we were pleased with everything we saw. We spent the first week in the hotel, then moved in to Dinger Bell’s house at 55 Mohammed Kassim Road, near the African Broadcasting Service transmitting Station.
Kisumu Airport had been established about 1932, and had, like Mbeya been a scheduled stop on the Empire Air Route of (the original) British Airways. The lake was ideal for the Empire Flying Boats and our staff pilot, Capt. Casperuthus had many stories of flying Hannibal biplanes into Kisumu. During the Second World War it was taken over by the R.A.F. and used extensively by Catalina amphibeans [sic] and Sunderland seaplanes. R.A.F. aircraft of most long and medium range types were regular visitors, together with the 3-motor Junkers 52 transports of the South African Air Force. With two excellent murrum runways and four hangars, it had seen some service one way and another.
The Control Tower was a small two storey building of 1932 vintage, the ground floor being taken up completely by the transmitting room. The first floor comprised the Control “tower”, a small office, and store. Originally there had been a second floor with a glass top for good all-round vision but this had been removed at the end of the war and replaced with a tiled roof. The second floor became the loft and housed the VDF antenna. I
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found the transmitters had been sadly neglected for many years. Two RCA 4336 types were used on R/T., a third on W/T., and a new Redifon GR49 NDB. There was also a dual transmitter which was not on the inventory and which had in fact been ‘liberated’ from a Catalina, before it joined the other two scuttled in the lake at the end of the war. This set was the best of the lot, and certainly my favourite. It was complete with a 110v ac supply of 600 Hz, not 60 and within a month I had modified an old T1190 power unit to drive it. The M/F section was put into use in place of the Redifon beacon, and the H/F section performed wonderfully on the amateur bands.
Being a ‘one-man station’ my working hours were long, 7 days a week and seldom a whole day off, but I had a workshop and bench and put my waiting-for-aircraft hours to very good use, mostly repairing domestic radios. The transmitters were giving a lot of trouble. As an example, whilst tuning a rotary inductance on a 4336, a two inch nail providing an electrical contact dropped out and had to be bodged up again. The GR49, although nearly new, was using modulator valves at the rate of a pair every two weeks due to a missing relay and associated wiring which had actually been left out at the factory during production. Fortunately there was a good old T1154 which acted as a standby for all transmitters except VHF, so I was able to take each transmitter in turn out of use for as long as was necessary whilst I overhauled them. As this progressed I was enjoying the practical work and decided to make use of a three-foot cabinet which was not on charge. (I inherited quite a lot of useful ‘junk’ at Kisumu!). At the Fisheries office on the lake shore, also on the airport, I found that a vehicle had demolished a rondaval (a 12 ft. diameter building constructed of aluminium). I volunteered the services of my crash-tender crew to clear up the mess and to take away the wreckage. A few days was spent by the crash crew in cutting the best of the aluminium into 19” panels of standard sizes, and suitable chassis. One of the ET4336 transmitters was going to be off the air for several weeks waiting for spares, and in order not to delay my overhaul programme I built a two-stage transmitter on one of the 3 1/2” panels. This was a 6V6 crystal oscillator driving an 807 to a dipole antenna. The operator at Nairobi reported our signals as very good and better than they had been for a long time. 20 Watts in place of 400, but it was the dipole antenna in place of a random length of wire which made all the difference. Within three weeks the 3’ cabinet contained 4 transmitters and was providing all services except VHF and M/F Beacon. The overhauling programme was completed, the official transmitters finally tested and then switched off. For the next 18 months we operated almost trouble-free. My monthly engineering reports to H.Q. in Nairobi were mainly negative and referred to “routine preventative maintenance only”. However, Sid Worthy, Chief Telecomms. Engineer was not fooled, and in due course he wrote and asked why my monthly electricity bill was only a quarter of what it had been for many years. Before I had plucked up enough courage to reply, Sid arrived unannounced and went direct to the Transmitter room, finding the four big transmitters switched off. In the Control Tower he saw my all-purpose cabinet, and to put it lightly, he was not amused. I suggested to Sid that we should make our own single-purpose transmitters and dispense with the old uneconomical general-purpose types. He agreed there was no good technical or financial argument against this but what would he do with his army of 50
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or so engineers? He compromised and allowed me to leave my own equipment in use provided I removed it a month before I left Kisumu.
One of our friends at Kisumu, Jimmie Sanson was a very keen constructor of model aircraft and several he had made were lost in the lake. His final model was a rather superior type with six-foot wingspan and single engine using alcohol as fuel. The rudder was radio-controlled on 27MHz. and the aircraft made some very impressive flights at the airport. On one occasion it went up to about 2000 feet before it ran out of fuel and for almost an hour Jimmie kept it turning over the airport. The aircraft was trimmed slightly nose-heavy but apart from turns, he had no other control. Eventually it was so far down-wind that it was lost to sight and last seen heading for the mountains. After a period of calm, the wind changed in the early evening and Jimmie and I were standing outside the Control Tower lamenting his sad loss when one of the crash Crew shouted “Bwana, Ndegi ndogo narudi”. His eyesight was far superior to ours, we saw nothing until the aircraft appeared over the end of the runway and actually landed, after a record flight of over three hours. Up-dating the radio control was the next stage and two months and about £200 later an eight function system was completed, giving control of the engine, elevators, ailerons and rudder. The machine could then be made to taxi out, take off and carry out aerobatics. The engine was used in short bursts and as there appeared to be a permanent thermal over the runways during the warm days, thirty minute flights were quite routine. Eventually the aircraft was lost over Lake Victoria and probably joined the three Catalinas on the bottom. Perhaps one day a Catalina will be recovered from their fresh-water grave, but the Sanson special was lost for ever..
My official work ran quite smoothly, with a little excitement occasionally. At 3 am one night, Nairobi Flight Information Centre phoned and asked me to open up the VHF and call Alitalia 541 which was three hours overdue in Nairobi, from Khartoum, and with no radio contact for four hours. I sped through town doing over 70 m.p.h. to my Control Tower, switched on and called the aircraft. There was a weak signal in reply and I managed to get a class C bearing of 270 degrees. A second transmission confirmed this and I told the operator he was probably over the Congo, but certainly well to the west of Kisumu. I told him QDM Kisumu 090, but the pilot would not agree and said he was east of Kisumu, not west, and approaching Mombassa [sic]! His signals faded right out and I telephoned F.I.C. asking them to log the QDM of 090C that I had passed to the aircraft. After half an hour, whilst F.I.C was sending frantic messages to all points west, I heard the aircraft calling Kisumu and was soon in good contact giving QDM’s, his signals gradually improving. It was just 0530, 20 minutes before first light when I heard the aircraft and sent out the boys to light-up the gooseneck flares. Then he was overhead and decided to carry on to Nairobi. This was rather disappointing, and in fact the wrong decision, his endurance being insufficient for any further diversion. I was told much later that the Captain and Navigator had a row before take-off and were not on speaking terms. The aircraft was a DC8 and the Italian crew and passengers had been very lucky indeed. The police followed me through town and I was charged with speeding, but the fine of 60 shillings was refunded later by the court when the urgency became known.
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Some weeks later Nairobi F.I.C. phoned again, about 4 am., an Air Liban DC6 from Cairo was lost and was not within the scope of Nairobi VDF. The aircraft had made a brief contact on the area cover VHF through Lodwa, and another aircraft north-east of Kisumu had heard the DC6, but of course had no idea of range or direction. This time I went through town at a more reasonable speed, opened up the radio, and called Air Liban. The crash crew was called out and the boys started dispensing paraffin and setting out the flares right away. I called Nairobi on 5680 H/F R/T to establish my station was on the ball, and every two minutes called the Lebanese Airlines aircraft. About 20 minutes later the aircraft replied to my call and I gave him a QDM of 225, and was satisfied there was no risk of it being the reciprocal. Three minutes later I measured 230 and then 235. He said his Giro compass was u/s and his magnetic compass erratic, and that he would use a standby giro, set to my figure. He turned 10 degrees to port and the QDM increased, 10 degrees to starboard and the figure decreased, so he was heading for Kisumu, and not going away from it. The bearings were given every two minutes and were reasonably steady, and after about 25 minutes the pilot said he thought he could see the coast, meaning the shores of Lake Victoria. It was still very dark but a clear night (not a contradiction of terms) and the boys hurtled out to light up the goosenecks. I told the pilot the wind was north-easterly at 15 knots, he was down wind, duty runway 06. I reminded him of the very high ground 2 miles to the north of the airport and he replied “O.K. Bud, Thanks a lot, I’ll come straight in on 24, hope youv’e [sic] got some gas, we shure [sic] ain’t [sic]”. A few minutes later he made a good landing and parked outside the 1932 wooden terminal building. The Captain of the Air Liban DC6 was an American pre-war Veteran. I had completely forgotten to tell the East African Airways agent but did so at 0545. There was no catering at the airport so he found some buses and the passengers were taken to the hotel. I was also late in phoning the police who dealt with immigration, but they hadn’t a clue how to deal with 60 international transit passengers. Similarly, it was a new experience for Customs, so both departments decided to pretend it hadn’t happened.
The Captain asked me to tell the non-English-speaking African Shell Assistant to put 3000 gallons of 100 octane into the tanks. I translated to the startled assistant “Bwana Mkubwa anataka gallon elfu tatu, pipa sabini na tano”. That was 75 drums of petrol to be pumped by hand. Finally he compromised with 400 gallons, but it was still quite a task, even with only 10 drums.
The Captain was concerned about the limited fuel and lack of a reliable compass and we double-checked that the met. conditions to Nairobi were near perfect. A scheduled DC3 of East African Airways came in at 10am. And was taking off for Nairobi at 11 am. The two pilots talked together at length and studied the map. The DC6 took-off three minutes after the Dakota and the two remained in visual contact until Nairobi was in sight. Surprisingly, the DC6 did not carry a radio compass for M/F but relied entirely on VHF, which, in East and Central Africa was quite inadequate.
I was criticised by DCA for not informing them in detail of progress, and was conscious of this at the time, but had I done so, they would have confused the issue with lots of advice. A civilian airliner without a reliable compass would be a major issue. I operated an “aerodrome
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advisory service”, not being an Air Traffic Controller. F.I.C. would have tried to control my detailed activity, but with a bit of common sense, things worked out well.
The visit of Her Majesty the Queen Mother to Kisumu went off smoothly except that two European Police Inspectors on the airport main gate refused permission for me to enter without a permit. One of my passengers, an R.A.F. Wing Commander leaned out and said he was the Queen’s Pilot, better open the gate old chap. Police had been drafted in for this event from hundreds of miles. I remember little else about the Royal Visit, or it’s main purpose. On these occasions most of the senior officials climbed in on the act, establishing their own importance.
I do remember in detail the visit of Billy Graham. My brief from the organising committee was to provide the Public Address systems. The main system had to cope with an audience of 30,000 people, with three microphones for which I borrowed a 300 watt amplifier from Twenche Overseas Trading Co. in Nairobi and used my four 100 watt loudspeakers. In addition there were six other systems for separate areas where the audience spoke only their tribal languages. Each of the six would hear Billie Graham plus one interpreter translating into the appropriate tribal language for that particular group. There were nine microphones on the platform for the evagelist [sic] and 8 interpretors [sic]. In addition the Post Office ran a special line about a mile at the end of which they connected a candlestick type of telephone with a carbon microphone and place it with my nine microphones. This relayed the proceedings to another mass meeting in Nairobi. The microphone was ineffective until I connected the P.O. line direct to the main amplifier output via a suitable transformer. Billie Graham had a very efficient team. Harley and Bonnie Richardson are two I remember, both very hard working and leaving nothing to chance. They were backed-up by representatives from most church denominations.
The following Christmas, the missionaries approached me again, could I use my loudspeakers at the Church to simulate bells on Christmas morning. An interesting proposition, and someone had written to Bradford Cathedral to scrounge a tape of the Cathedral bells. I had to edit the tape considerably, as every two a rich Yorkshire-accented voice was superimposed with “You are listening to the bells of Bradford Cathedral”. I set-up the amplifier and loudspeakers at the Church at about 7 pm. On Christmas-eve and tested the system with a record of carols. Within minutes, people began to gather and joined in. The Vicar asked if I could connect a microphone and in no time at all he was conducting an impromptu carol service with a bigger congregation than he had enjoyed for a long time, well over 1500. At 7 am next morning I relayed the bells of Bradford Cathedral, but could not resist pre-empting them with a verse of ‘Christians awake’. The loudspeakers were in constant demand and were in use every day for two weeks during H.H. the Aga Khan’s visit. Events included H.E. the Governor’s barazas, opening a ginnery and so on, all official requests from the Provincial Commissioner. I was spending so much time away from the airport that I fitted a TCS12 Transmitter and a good H/F receiver in the car to work aircraft and keep in touch with the airport. At the African hospital I fitted a receiver and 50 Watt Vortexion amplifier imported by my father, and installed 30 loudspeakers round the wards. This was followed by a similar
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job at an American mission hospital about 30 miles from Kisumu, but more ambitious with microphones, tape recorder and record player. At the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Kisumu I fitted an amplifier and loudspeakers with microphones on the Altar and pulpit. Another system was fitted at the African Community Centre in Kisumu and one way and another I was kept very busy indeed.
The transmitter in the car was used also on the 40 metre amateur band to keep in touch with my father and amateur chums in Nairobi and other parts of East Africa. On one occasion Tom Mboya took an interest in it and was quite impressed. Tom was a Luo by tribe and a party leader of the Kenya African Democratic Union, a very nice chap with an attractive wife Pamella [sic], daughter of Mr. Odede, a Kisumu lawyer. Tom wanted to buy the transmitter but for me to sell it to him would not have been wise. Later Tom was shot and killed in Nairobi.
Kisumu was fairly well populated and within 10 miles or so of town we saw very few wild animals. The two exceptions were the protected herd of impala in Kisumu township and the hippo which abounded on the lake shore. They came ashore at night to graze and I encountered them on the aerodrome several times. One rather amusing occurrence, the airport was wide in area and Africans frequently trekked across the runway and even drove their cattle over it at most inappropriate times. On several occasions I impounded the cattle after due warnings and charged the owners with trespass under section 69 of the Colonial Air Navigation Act. When I found the offenders were getting six month’s imprisonment and losing their cattle, I stopped charging them and the Police insisted upon taking over this task. Finally they agreed to drop the practice, when I told them that I doubted whether the Colonial Air Navigation Act really applied in Kenya and in any case I had invented the content of section 69. However, the runways had to be watched carefully and checked every time there was an aircraft movement.
One morning at Kisumu a uniformed Prisons Askari I had known at Nairobi Prison in 1950 came to my Control Tower and after a smart salute handed me a note saying it was from Bwana Mkubwa ya Ndegi. It was from Commander Stacey-Colles R.N. Ret’d., my former boss and previous Director of Civil Aviation. He had arrived at Kisumu Prison only two hours earlier, and was serving a three year sentence. He had been found guilty of receiving money, a refund of an airline ticket issued by the High Commission and which he did not use. At the time he was in Britain having travelled home on a complimentary ticket from Air France. The official ticket was handed in to East African Airways and a refund obtained which was paid into his bank instead of the High Commission’s account. He claimed no knowledge of this and most of us believed him. He would not prejudice his career and Navy pension in this way, someone had fixed him. The note was a list of things he wanted, which I soon assembled and took to him at Kisumu prison, where I found I knew the Prisons Officer from 1950. A very embarrassing situation. I met Stacey and gave him the radio, writing materials, money, cigarettes and cakes from Hilda, on the first of many visits. Three days later the Askari was back with a long message in code for Muriel Pardoe, his former secretary in Nairobi. I sent this off straight away on the aeronautical W/T channel, addressed to HKNCHQPA, the ICAO address which would reach Miss Pardoe from any airport in the western world. HK was Kenya, NC Nairobi City, HQ DCA
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Headquarters and PA Personal Ast. To the Director. The code was in five letter groups with a double substitution of letters, a similar system to that used during the war.
The message was decoded by Muriel who obtained whatever it was Stacey was asking for and gave it to Capt. Casperuthus who was DCA pilot of the Avro Anson. Casper gave it to the Controller at Wilson airport who passed it to a pilot about to depart for Kisumu. The pilot handed it to me at Kisumu and I delivered it – whatever it was – to Stacey in prison the same day. Three days later the radio set came back to me with the askari, not working. Two of the valves had been swapped over, and I noticed a piece of paxeline had been fitted neatly inside the bottom of the set, forming a false bottom. Under it was a note asking me if I could fit a B.F.O. into it. This was a beat frequency oscillator and Stacey could want it for only one reason, to monitor morse, probably on the Prisons channel, to see what was happening. There were two spare holes for valve holders on the chassis and plenty of space for fitting a mains power supply, vacant in this case because it was a dry-battery receiver. I fitted the B.F.O. as requested, and also another valve as a flea-power transmitter, using just a channel freq. crystal about 6.5 MHz and a tuned circuit on the anode. Maybe 50 mW output, I had no means of measuring it, but I tested the set at a range of 2 miles using 3 feet of wire for an aerial it was received at the control tower. The morse key was just a matter of touching a wire to the chassis. I returned the set to Stacey personally and explained the switching of the B.F.O. and transmitter keying. He was delighted and agreed to be very careful, taking absolutely no-one into his confidence. About six weeks later I met my former colleague the Prisons Officer in town and he told me there was some concern over the prisoners getting confidential information before he received it himself. He quoted that a week ago a prisoner asked if he could change cells and share with a particular prisoner who would be transferred to Kisumu with three others on a date a week hence. He said the four arrived that day, how could the prisoner have known a week ago? It should have been obvious, there were many ex-service personnel who were good W/T operators and the Prisons Radio on 7 MHz could be monitored by anyone, the signals being in plain language morse. I said nothing. Stacey’s frequency was monitored at my office where I had a similar tiny transmitter. It was used at a specific time of day on only two occasions for test purposes, but he found it satisfying and consoling to have a personal and totally clandestine link to the outside world. It gave him a great deal of satisfaction and from my point of view did no real harm. Stacey was a great organiser and motivator.
The African Inland Mission in Mwanza had colleagues in the Sudan [author indicates with X and page footnote that it is Kisumu not Mwanza] who visited Kisumu frequently in their Cessna aircraft. They desperately needed two transmitters in the Sudan but were not able to obtain import permits. They could however get a permit to re-import a transmitter if it had been sent out of the country for repair. I suggested to them that they should send me a piece of otherwise useless equipment which might look like a transmitter to the uninitiated and send it to me as a transmitter for repair, together with the appropriate paper work. This was done and in an antenna tuning unit they brought me, I built a 10 Watt transmitter without changing it’s outward appearance in any way. A few weeks later a second one was built and the two did a very useful job in the Sudan for about six
[KISUMU NOT MWANZA]
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months until the African Inland Mission stations there were closed, and the missionaries withdrawn. The missions’ aircraft were also licenced on that frequency and I contacted them occasionally. It is most reassuring to be able to communicate with someone in times of trouble, and plenty of folks in Africa were in that situation.
But trouble was also brewing in the Belgian Congo, just across the Lake. Six months earlier, the Belgian Government had advised the missionaries and other settlers to leave, but many were dedicated to their work and some felt they were quite indespensible [sic]. The Belgiauns [sic] had handed over the reins of Government and administration hurriedly to a totally ill-equipped and unprepared Congolese. The consequences of withdrawal by the Belgians were clearly predictable but they succumbed to political pressures from all directions. There was human slaughter on a big scale, and the only information coming out of the Congo was on the frequency of 7150 operated by Mission stations, and also shared with East African amateurs. It was in Kisumu that I received a message from a mission at an Agricultural Station which read:-
“We are being menaced by 100,000 hostile savages. We have their chief as hostage and expect annihilation within one hour. We have ammunition but no guns, please advise Kamina”.
The amateurs among the DCA staff in Nairobi, of whom Viv Slight was one, had set up a W/T link to the Belgian Coast Station at Ostend, using a communications booth in the D.C.A. Communications centre and a powerful DCA transmitter at R.A.F. Eastleigh.. I relayed the message direct to them on the aeronautical W/T channel, and Nairobi passed it straight to Ostend, with a steady flow of other messages. Ostend relayed it to Brussels who passed it to the Military where it was relayed on it’s final leg back to Africa, to the Belgian Paratroop Base at Kamina. Within 20 minutes of my receiving the message at Kisumu, the paratroopers were airborne and the Agricultural Station was liberated. Hardly had I cleared the message when I received a correction to it which advised:
“Not one hundred thousand savages, only ten thousand”
When I passed this to Nairobi, the reply was “What’s the bloody difference”
There were many such stories during the evacuation of Europeans from the Congo. Uganda was the main escape route and DCA Nairobi asked that any aircraft available and pilots who could make it, should get to Entebbe and help in the evacuation regardless of Certificates of Airworthiness and Pilot’s licences. One of my ex-pilot friends evacuated about thirty people in several trips in a Rapide aircraft. The last aircraft he had flown was a Beaufighter during the war. Some thousands were got out from the Congo, one way or another, mostly via Kampala and Kisumu. The Kenya Girls’ High School in Nairobi (known as the Boma) was turned into a Medical Reception Centre the records of which show the dreadful experiences and medical remedial action taken. Wendy reminded me that she and all the other girls who were not taking G.C.E..s were sent home a week before the term was due to end, to maked [sic] room for the refugees. At Kisumu I met many who came out by road. Two middle-aged ladies came to my Control Tower and one phoned her parents in
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the United States with a terrible story of pillage and rape. A third, more elderly, who had three American Doctorate degrees – Medicine, Divinity and a PhD. – had devoted her entire working life to helping and teaching Africans, but she said a lifetime had made only a superficial advance from their savagery.
Most of our memories of Kisumu were of happier days. There was an excellent social club but we were not members due only to the lack of time. The children made good use of the swimming pool, the lake being too dangerous, not only with its hippo and crocs. but with Bilharzia and hook worm. Hilda enjoyed her painting and drawing and we even managed to take a few photographs.
After nearly three years at Kisumu, Colin was still at the Prince of Wales School in Nairobi and with Wendy at the ‘Boma’ we were not seeing very much of either. And so a transfer was arranged and we packed up our household once again and moved to Nairobi, to a lovely house in Nairne Road, near Wendy’s school.
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[underlined] D.C.A. HEADQUARTERS [/underlined]
It was then June 1960, the Mau Mau emergency was still with us, but 84 Squadron had finished their bombing of the Aberdares which had raised the eyebrows of a few ‘hasbeens’ like myself. I had talked with the crews of the R.A.F. Lincolns some time earlier at R.A.F. Eastleigh and it all seemed very unreal to me. Perfect weather, ceiling and visibility generally unlimited and no enemy opposition from either the air or ground. Bombing over the bush was a matter of a timed run at a specific speed from a firmly identified point on the ground. Hardly a challenge for the Chaddertons and Fosters of this world and I don’t know what comprised a tour. It reminded me of O.T.U. where I saw the log book of a fellow-instructor with 40 ops. to his credit. His first tour ops were shown in the normal way, Benghazi 0340, Benghazi 0345, Benghazi 0342, Benghazi 0350, about 6 pages of Benghazi and no other target. But then, there are those among us who never bombed B.G., so the song goes. I could visualise the log books with several pages of ‘Aberdares 0125…”. Some of the Africans reckoned it was “mzuri sana” (very good) for the terrorists, the bombing just laid on a supply of fresh meat without their having to hunt for it, but there was probably more to it than that.
My place of work was the Communications Centre in the High Commission Building, on the top floor, above the Inland Revenue office. My duties were those of Telecomms. Supt. i/c a watch, responsible for the operation of the telecommunications system. We were not really concerned with aeroplanes, only messages about their movements. We had Radio Teleprinter circuits with Johannesburg, Khartoum, Der es Salaam, Entebbe, and Gan, and teleprinters on line to R.A.F. Eastleigh, Wilson Airport, Nairobi (Embakasi) and the Flight Information Centre next door. Our internal communications, that is within East Africa, were mainly by W/T links, to Iringa, Songea, Mbeya, Mwanza, Tanga, Dodoma, Arusha, Kisumu etc. Every teleprinter link had a standby W/T channel and most of these were resorted to in the early mornings, about 4 to 6 am. Brazaville [sic] and Leopoldville in the Congo were only on W/T but there was little traffic to the west and none to the east except Gan. With Gan, we operated an emergency channel with a test message every twenty minutes, to supplement the R.A.F. network if required, but they seemed to manage quite well without us. We handled about 20,000 incoming messages per day in the Tape Relay Centre, and apart from one or two all had to be relayed out again and logged. We also had three ground to Air operating booths, two of which were always manned, working aircraft, one on HF/RT and the other HF/WT. The European Radio Officers preferred the latter, where often three messages per minute were handled for long periods.
As soon as an aircraft left, say, Khartoum, a message would be sent on the Fixed Service by RTTY to the Tape Relay centre which should reach F.I.C. within a few minutes of being originated, requiring two relays, at Khartoum and Nairobi Tape Relay Centres. The system was that the pilot would not need to call Nairobi until he reached the Flight Information Region Boundry [inserted] Boundary [/inserted] at 4 degrees North, as Nairobi F.I.C. should have already received all the information by teleprinter. However, this being Africa and therefore supposedly not very efficient, the pilot would call Nairobi as soon as he could after take-off, on HF/RT. On the older propeller jobs, (the real aeroplanes), this would have been
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carried out by the Radio Officer on W/T., where just a few groups in code meant a great deal, for example:-.
ZGU de VPKKL Nairobi this is VPKKL
QTN STKM 0201Z I departed Khartoum at 0201 GMT
QAH 24 TTT QBH My height is 24,000 ft. below cloud
QRE HKNA 0718 I am estimating Nairobi Airport at 0718
QRX FIR I will call you again at the Flight Information Boundary
The Radio Officer would write those 14 groups onto a pad and his Clerk would put two copies through the hatch to the Air Traffic Controller.
The Clerk would spend most of his time putting carbon paper between the pages, it was fast going during the busy periods, but was even faster before HF/RT was introduced.
The aircraft would remain in constant contact with Khartoum on VHF until it reached 4 deg. N. when Nairobi would become responsible. Many aircraft were still using W/T at the time. There was no really conscious use of code, it was as commonplace as plain language and to a radio operator the two were synonimous, [sic] as were the many technical and other abbreviations. One example which comes to mind was at a Board of Enquiry into an accident where an aircraft had crashed into Mt. Kilimanjaro. An elderly judge asked the Ground Radio Officer if there had been any radio message, and the R/O replied “Yes, I last worked the aircraft on C.W. at 0247” “What is C.W.?” asked the Judge, and the reply “C.W. is Charlie Whisky your worship” and the Judge nearly gave up, maybe thinking whether Irish or Scotch.
Some Radio Officers preferred to transcribe the morse and speech messages straight onto a teleprinter which produced a simultaneous page copy in front of the controller, but this method was not very popular. With several aircraft calling at the same time it was easy to make a mistake but too slow to correct it on the teleprinter. The F.I.C. Controller operated the VHF himself. The whole set-up was very well thought out and we were very well equipped. Communications were our line of business and we were highly organised.
The tour of duty was rather longer in Nairobi, where one had to work for 4 years to earn 6 month’s leave, compared to only 2 1/2 years in Tanganyika. I believe there was some reduction for the Kenya coastal strip. These were the rules established when East Africa was supposed to be an unhealthy and hostile place, and most of the Europeans were Administration officials. I always felt the home leave terms were over-generous, as we also enjoyed three weeks of “local leave” each year with railway warrants provided to any part of east Africa. Where there was no railway to our particular ‘holiday resort’ or we chose to travel by car we could claim car mileage costs. Most people preferred to go on leave by sea, depending upon the time of year, possibly home on a 10 day voyage via suez, returning on a 3 week cruise via the Cape of Good Hope, on Union Castle liners. Some preferred the long way round both ways, spending as much time at sea as possible and thus economising
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on accommodation costs in the U.K. My only experience of sea travel had been the four troop-ships and Hilda claimed she couldn’t swim; we wanted to spend as much time as possible with the folks back home so we chose to travel by air every time.
Within a year of our return to Nairobi, June 1961, political unrest was well to the fore and getting worse. Alice, my step-mother, was a Senior Secretary to an African Minister in the Secretariat, and felt it was getting too dangerous to remain. Luigi and Mary had already retired to Italy and Alice was preparing to join them. Most of us were expecting the balloon to go up at any moment and people were getting jittery. We had been close to the hiatus in the Congo and the more recent mutinies of the armies of Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda, and Europeans were beginning to leave. The weight of evidence of impending disaster was overwhelming and towards the end of June Hilda returned with the four youngest children to U.K., Colin remaining at the Prince of Wales School as a boarder. Alice and Brian returned to Italy shortly after and my father moved in with me at Nairne Road. My father and I had become very involved with emergency communications for the settlers up-country, which dominated our lives for the next few years, but this is a story unto itself and is dealt with in the chapter “Laikipia Security Network”. The mutinies referred to occurred soon after the British Forces had left Kenya, and the emergency was declared officially over. Some European Service personnel remained as advisers to the Kenya army - there was no Kenya Navy and the Kenya Air Force existed mainly on paper but with a few light aircraft. We awoke one morning to the news that the three separate armies many hundreds of miles apart, had thrown out their European officers and declared themselves independent of any authority. Within 48 hours and before they could organise themselves and cause any damage, very small forces of British troops appeared simultaneously near Nairobi, Jinja and Dar es Salaam, subdued and disarmed the lot, without any loss of life or limb. I recall a cartoon in the East African Standard, showing Jomo Kenyatta with both arms raised to paratroopers dropping from aircraft and the caption “How good it is to welcome old friends” - His arch-enemies for 10 years or so. I saw several hundred African soldiers sitting on the grass at Wilson Airport with three European soldiers guarding them with machine guns. There was a large pile of rifles and other weapons nearby, also guarded.
Life was not all traumatic, however, we had the occasional laugh. One of our officers, MacDonald, was on official leave of absence quite frequently and we understood he was masterminding a very hush-hush communications link direct to U.K. from Government House and even satellites had been mentioned furtively. This was before the days of the Sputnik when satellites were a part of science fiction. He was one of the [underlined] firt [sic] [/underlined] to retire and as he was leaving he let us into the secret. Mac. had indeed spent a great deal of time at Government House. He was a master baker and was responsible literally for the icing of the cake. He told us also that when he joined the Dept. he stated that his qualifications included a final City & Guilds Certificate. They did, he confided, as a Master Baker, but not in telecommunications.
One Sunday morning in October on duty at the Comm. Centre I found my African Supervisor was monitoring Reuter on teleprinter, and looking over his shoulder I read on the page copy that thousands of Africans armed to the teeth were surrounding the High Commission building and holding hostage the
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Europeans working inside. The report gave more detail of riots and demonstrations and gave the impression that we were really in trouble. I went out through a window and onto the flat roof of the High Commission building and gingerly looked over the parapet entitled to expect a hail of bullets. On the road was a police car with two officers watching a group of about 20 Africans, some of them supporting two banners on which was written “Wazungu Rudi Uliya” (Europeans return to Europe). That was the extent of the demonstration reported to the entire world in Reuter’s message. Had it occured [sic] in Cambridge it would not even have received a mention in the free local papers.
My tour of duty ended in December and I relinquished the house, my father moving into Plums Hotel. A nine hour flight to London, and I was home for Christmas.
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[underlined] Dec. ’61 ON LEAVE [/underlined]
Hilda and Anne came to London and I met them at Paddington. We intend to spend a week with Joan and enjoy a holiday in London, but Hilda had a rather worrying cold so we limited our stay to two days.
The next six months or so were spent on leave. With the exception of Colin who was in the R.A.F., the whole family was together in Wales at Glaslyn. My father was in Nairobi, and his regular letters referred to increasing unrest. He was working flat-out in building the ‘Watson Wonders’ and he asked me to take back 500 B7G valve holders and 150 modulation chokes
In May ’62 I said goodbye to the family and returned to Kenya. As I was unaccompanied, Sid Worthy the Chief Engineer asked me if I would housewarm for him whilst he was on his 6 months leave. This meant that he paid the rent but could just walk out without packing up his household and walk back into the same apartment on his return. There was a tendency for senior officers who were permanently based in Nairobi to try and retain the same house or apartment once they had found the right one. Rent was in fact 10% of salary and it was well worth it. My father moved in with me and together we carried on with the transmitters, having rented a workshop next to Stephen Ellis in Victoria Street. After only 3 months in the apartment I received a letter from Sid telling me he was returning immediately, could he please have his flat only a few days hence!. The following morning we were going up-country and I could see my father was a more than little depressed. He was driving like a madman down the Nairobi escarpment and I insisted that he let me do the driving. He told me he had to go to Mombassa [sic] next day, having received a telegram from Alice that she and Brian were returning on the Union Castle. This was supposed to be a surprise to him and I did not doubt that it was so, but Alice admitted later that she had in fact booked return tickets on the homeward trip. She had been totally dishonest in her statements about her intentions which had resulted in Hilda and the children staying in Wales. Our safari was cut short and we returned to Nairobi the same day, a 500 mile round trip. Alice’s return meant a complete change in plan; clearly she and my father expected to share my accommodation but with Sid’s return they had no option but to move into an hotel again. They were lucky in obtaining a couple of rooms at Plums, after only two nights in the flat. I moved into Woodlands Hotel, but applied for a housing allocation as my family had decided to return to Kenya. Hilda and the children rejoined [sic] me and we moved into a house at Likoni Lane, resuming a normal life except that it was dominated by the Laikipia network and work at the Comm. Centre. Within a year of my return I was promoted to Asst. Signals Officer and took over from Mike Harding As [sic] Officer in charge of the Communications Centre. This I had tried to avoid for a long time, not the responsibility, but the working hours. The new post meant working office hours and for the first time in my life I was working a five-day-week. On watches it had been a four-day cycle of say monday afternoon, tuesday morning and all tuesday night, then off duty until friday afternoon. The 2 1/2 days off within every 4 days had suited me very well and was a very popular roster with everyone. Office hours curtailed my visits up-country except at week-ends, but I did have every evening free. Very soon, each European Radio Supt. In charge of a watch had an African trainee assistant. Shortly afterwards one joined me. They were all supposedly bright boys from Secondary School and we delegated the routine work to them as much as possible. Their presence was resented by the old-timers among the
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wireless operators, who knew what they were doing and were very good operators, but their educational background was inadequate for the senior posts. Africanisation was the policy dictated to us and we bowed to the inevitable. I trusted most of my Africans, and there were about 180 of them working on the 4-day Watch roster at the Communications centre. Although many of them had served with the British Army both during and after the war, I could not completely lose sight of the fact that some had taken part in the Lare massacre when an African village was set ablaze and almost everyone slaughtered as they tried to escape. The majority of my staff were from the three main problem tribes, the Kikuyu, Meru and Embu, and a few of the Luo tribe from Nyanza.
My father’s farm had been abandoned long ago. It was not possible to obtain reliable labour during the Emergency, and the whole of the European settled areas was to be handed over to the Africans. There were already very few farmers left in the Trans-Nzoia and the Eldoret areas, the latter being mainly from South Africa. The Laikipia farmers were the last to hold out, except perhaps for the bigger ranches near Athi River.
Our next home leave was in June 1964 and the story of my activity over the three years leading up to it is synonymous with that of the Laikipia Security Network. The network seemed to priority over everything, but lives were at stake. Occasionally Hilda and the Children would go up-country with me, and one memorable week-end was spent with Tony Dyer and Family at their lovely home facing Mount Kenya. One afternoon Tony asked the children if they would like to go to a polo match and they took off in Tony’s Cessna from their own front door, landing at the side of the pitch. One of Tony’s sons was killed some months later whilst taking a gun out of the back of his vehicle. It was never discovered how the gun came to be loaded and with the safety catch off. Hilda and the children stayed too at the farm of Dr. Anne Spoerry, at Ol Kalau. Anne’s loo was a traditional type in the bushes down the garden, very comfortable and lined with bookshelves, full of the Lancet and other medical journals. Anne was a wonderful character. Only once did we go to the coast for a holiday, and this was two weeks spent at Likoni, near Mombassa [sic]. Unfortunately we chose to go in the rainy season but it was a welcome break. We took Chippy, our cockerel, and it followed us around everywhere, afraid of absolutely nothing. Chippy returned home one day in Nairobi with a broken beak and was unable to peck for food. Fortunately Jean and Dick Chalcroft came to stay overnight with us and Dick fitted a new lower section to the beak with the plastic resin we used in making dipole aerials.. It took an hour to cure, or set, and Jean and Dick held Chippy during that period, and again whilst they filed down the surplus plastic and polished the result. Chippy was ravenous and began to feed straight away, but was very aggressive towards humans, except for Jean and Dick, who took him back to their farm at Molo. I saw Chippy several times after that at the farm, lording it over the hens, and not another cockerel in sight.
One day I bought a petrol/paraffin engine-driven alternator and a bank of batteries, a complete 32 volt lighting set in fact, too good to miss for £25 in Nairobi. The dealer said the engine wouldn’t start although it had just been thoroughly overhauled. I knew that Jean and Dick were without power on their farm although their house was wired for a 32 volt DC system such as this. I knew too of Jean’s prowess with anything mechanical and I took the whole lot straight up to the farm at Molo. At 10pm. on the Saturday Jean started stripping down the engine whilst I was linking together the 26 alkaline cells
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and checking the house wiring connected to my car battery. Jean, assisted by Dick slogged on until 5am. in the light of an Alladin lamp, but she had discovered the trouble long before that. The timing was exactly 180 degrees out of phase. At 5am, just before dawn, the batteries being flat, Jean cranked the engine which roared into life, literally, we were deficient of a silencer for the exhaust. The batteries were taking a charge and we changed from petrol to paraffin and switched on a few lights in the house. The following evening the Chalcrofts were very proud of their lighting system. That sort of effort and co-operation did give one a great deal of satisfaction.
My recollections of work in D.C.A. over that period are very few.
We seldom talked of the war, but in the middle of one night I somehow got chatting to the F.I.C. Controller, Sqdn Ldr. Anderson DFC & Bar, who had also been in 5 Group on Lancasters. Andy said we were sometimes like a lot of sheep, he recalled one night having reached his ETA, all was very quiet except that markers had been dropped 20 miles to the south. Within minutes bombs were crashing down so Andie turned south for five minutes and joined in. Next day it was found that the target was 20 miles north of where most of the bombing had taken place. My reply was just “Politz”, we had done exactly the same thing, followed the flock. We talked together of flying during the war, several times, but my memories of the actual events are more vivid now, after 45 years, than they were 25 years ago. Perhaps because there was not a great deal in East Africa to remind me of it, compared to today, living 4 miles from Wyton on the approach to Alconbury. To see the Lancaster of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight fly over gives me rather more than a lump in my throat at times. Pathfinder House is not what it was with Don Bennet, either, it is now the place where I pay my rates, but they at least have a picture of a Lancaster on the wall near the Cashier’s office. A couple of years ago I asked one of the cashiers why it was called Pathfinder House, she had no idea, I asked what the aeroplane was and the answer was the same. I let the matter drop.
I had taken over the comm. Centre from Mike Harding who had retired prematurely, and his immediate predecessor had been “Bing” Crosby, ex Royal Signals. Bing was in Headquarters just along the corridor and came into my office every day to inspect an object pickled in a sealed jar which he had left on the shelf when he was promoted. Although he urged us to take good care of it, he used to look at it and say to it “You useless ruddy thing”, or words to that effect. Finally, on retirement, he came and collected it and let us into the secret, with the parting words “Oh don’t worry, the other one’s fine, you only need one you know”.
Alice and my father had left in May for Italy, to stay with Mary and Luigi. My own feelings were that he should have stayed in Kenya, possibly up country with Jean or with one of his many other friends among the Settlers. He had worked unceasingly on the network for over 4 years, but Alice insisted upon their return to Europe. In June ’64 it was time for home leave again. We were reluctant this time because there was so much happening up country and we expected it to be our final tour in East Africa together, unless I returned and carried on with communications on a commercial basis. This was still an option, communications had kept me very busy and with lots of ‘job satisfaction’, but it was DCA who had paid my salary. I still had a family to support, and there was a great deal of uncertainty in Kenya. And so it was we flew to London yet again, and joined Hilda’s Mum at Glaslyn.
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[underlined] ON LEAVE June 1964 [/underlined]
Before leaving for Wales we bought a second-hand Vanguard from a dealer in Putney which was to prove very useful in the next few months. At the end of our leave it was sold to the local Policeman for the same price.
A month or two before we returned, the house next to Aunt Doll had become vacant and was put on the market for £500. It was small and in shocking state, but a real snip so we bought it. Five months was spent in refurbishing it, building a bathroom, kitchen, replastering, new fireplace, rewiring etc. I remember John mixing at least a ton of concrete manually, he was a tremendous help. Electricity at the house had not been used for many years, and what little wiring remained, mostly twin flex, we ripped out. Electrical contractors quoted £900 to rewire, which was totally ridiculous, and finally John and I did it in one day, having spent about £50 on materials through an advert in Exchange & Mart. We tried to buy the field - or even part of it - at the back - of the house, but our lawyer said it was quite impossible to find out who owned the land. Many years later it transpired that it had in fact been owned for at least a hundred years by members of his own family.
Visits were paid to my other in Barnoldswick and to Joan and Ken in London, but the greater part of my leave was spent on the ‘new house’.
At the end of April Hilda’s Mum moved into her new home and made comfortable. From the house there was a wonderful view of the mountain separating the Neath and Rhonda valleys, with the river within 25 yards in the foreground. Perhaps it is only fair to mention the road between the house and river, but when the bypass was built a few years later this road carried little traffic.
In November ’64 I returned to Kenya unaccompanied, and being so, moved into Woodlands Hotel. The following day I was in touch with Laikipia and also back at work. I relieved Mike Harding as Asst. Signals Officer in Headquarters, Deputy to ‘Spud’ Murphy who was Telecommunications Officer (Operations). The job was just a matter of dealing with the steady flow of paper-work. Every piece of paper coming in was registered in Central Registry and filed by the Clerk. If he couldn’t decide which file to put it, he would open a new one. The file was then delivered - and booked out - to the officer thought to be the one who should deal with it. The officer would either add his comments as a minute and pass on the file to someone he thought might not return it to him, or if he felt he was authorised to make a decision, draft a letter for his immediate superior. Very occasionally, on an external matter he might even sign the letter “for the Director of Civil Aviation”. I was expected to finalise all matters concerning the operational aspect of the Telecommunications side of DCA, including all staff problems, their examinations and promotions.
Europeans were leaving the Directorate almost every week and being replaced by Africans. Those with African proteges training to take over the senior posts were most vulnerable. The Africans thought it was easy to sit back and authorise someone to go on leave, or to promote or reprimand another. The newcomers could read the many returns and forms but whereas a European officer could do every job subordinate to his own, the assistant had neither the experience, qualifications nor ability to do those jobs. In some cases the African was promoted and his former boss remained as his assistant. It was
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obvious who did the actual work. I found the work uninteresting, mainly it seemed just a matter of going through the motions and staying out of trouble by being non-committal, which was completely out of character. My main thoughts were with the 5190 Network, something that really mattered.
Sqdn. Ldr. Anderson was still with us and when he went on two week’s leave to the coast he asked me to sleep at his house, which made a welcome change from staying at the hotel. At about 3am on the third night there was a hullabaloo outside and a pounding on the door. “Police, open up”. I opened up, 9mm. Mauser ready, to be greeted by an African Police Inspector and about 15 Askari with enough weaponry to start a rebellion. Andy had told the Police he would be away for two weeks and would they please keep an eye on the house? I told them he had asked me to sleep there but they were not convinced. All my documents were at the hotel and eventually the Inspector ‘phoned the Acting Director of Civil Aviation at his house - Dickie Dixon, my old antagonist from Entebbe. Dickie was not amused, he never was, with me, but the Inspector was satisfied. A few nights later, about 10pm. I was lying on the bed reading, the house in darkness except for a small reading lamp. I heard footsteps on the gravel outside and quickly extinguished the light. I heard a key turning in the lock of the pateo [sic] door. By this time I was off the bed and standing at the bedroom door, left hand on the hall light switch and my Mauser in the right, cocked and with the safety-catch off. When the outside door opened I switched on the light and was startled to identify the intruder as Jimmie Sanson, whom I had not seen since we were in Kisumu. If he had been carrying a gun I might have blown his head off before it became unrecognisable. Andy had done it again, asking Jimmie also to keep an eye on the house. That night my car had been in Andy’s garage. On the following nights I left the car in full view outside, and with the a few lights in the house switched on.
For several years I had held one of the very few Flight Radio Officer Licences in the Department and frequently flew as Radio Officer first on the Anson VPKKK and later on its replacement, the Heron. On my last trip on the Heron we did a “tour of inspection” with visiting officials from ICAO in Montreal. Whilst supposedly inspecting the runways here and the Met. Station there, a V.O.R., D.M.E. and other aids to Aviators, in reality we enjoyed a visit to Zanzibar, flew around inside the Ngoro-ngoro crater, an extinct volcano well stocked with wild life, witnessed a specially-staged lion kill in Tsavo West National Park, and entered into the spirit of a very expensive ‘Cook’s Tour’. A few weeks later I did another tour of airports, inspecting the Telecomm. aspect and also giving morse tests to operators who were otherwise already qualified for promotion. I knew most of the staff and the stations also. 16 years previously I had first visited Iringa, which was then run by ‘Blossom’, Mrs. Brown, the only lady Radio Officer in DCA. Blossom was an ex-WREN officer who had specialised during the war in Japanese morse. I think she told me there were about 120 characters in their morse alphabet, and she used to transcribe in Jap. characters for hours on end. It was someone else’s job to translate them into English. Blossom had left some years previously. The morse tests were interesting, first the candidate sent for 10 minutes at 25 w.p.m. of 5-letter and figure groups, which was recorded on tape. The second test was 10 minutes of plain language, and the third receiving for 10 minutes of automatic morse. The fourth test was for the candidate to receive the morse recorded in the first two tests, without telling them of it’s origin. Many complained that the
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fourth test was unfair, the morse being very poor and difficult to read. Some found it difficult to believe the poor morse was their own! In general, the morse was, in fact, very good, most of the old-timers having been British Army trained, during the war.
Soon after the invasion of Zanzibar I flew there in the DCA Anson piloted by Capt. Casperuthus. The two Air Traffic Controllers had been deported to Mombassa [sic] and almost all the Telecomms. equipment was faulty. The teleprinter on line to Dar es Salaam still worked, however, and this was taken over by an African from Tanganyika. Zanzibar and Tanganyika became known as Tanzania and for the very first time customs and immigration formalities were introduced between the two. I recall paying customs duty in Dar es Salaam on 200 cigarettes bought in Zanzibar, although the price was the same in both places, and duty had been paid already to the same authority, the new government of Tanzania. There was no rational explanation to some of the politics in East Africa. Rumours were rife that a huge Russian biplane bomber made secret trips at night without contacting DCA, the aviation authority, and the machine was said to be in a particular hangar. We were intrigued by this and taxied very close to the hangar, a ‘deliberate mistake’, and took photographs of the aircraft. It was a biplane about three times the wingspan of a Tiger Moth, but we were not able to find anyone who had actually seen it airborne.
By May 1965 I was recovering transmitters from Settlers who were leaving the country, and these sets were more than meeting the demand for new ones. I felt that by the end of the year there would be very few Europeans left, and in that atmosphere of intense anti-climax I gave 6 months notice of my retirement. The leave earned would take me to just over my 44th. birthday when compensation for loss of office would be at its peak. Looking at this in more detail, compensation would have been reduced by £2,000 per year of delay. There was really little choice but to go.
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[underlined] JOB HUNTING [/underlined]
I returned home finally on the 11th. of November 1965 and joined Hilda and the family at Glaslyn, except for Colin who was in the R.A.F. in Aden. My father and Alice were settled in Voghera in Northern Italy. There was plenty of time to look for a job, as I was on full pay for about six months and could not really afford to start work until April. Had I started before that, it would have meant paying income tax at the U.K. rate for the previous year on my world income, so I was advised, probably wrongly.
I wrote many letters, one offering my services to O’Dorian of Redeffusion [sic]. They were at that time considering establishing a Radio Relay system in the African areas of Nairobi. Other firms were also interested and the City Council was monitoring a pilot scheme which I.A.L. had fitted about a year previously. The pilot scheme had been put out to tender and my father had submitted a bid to provide for a four-program system. The contract went to I.A.L. on the grounds that they had shown confidence in Kenya by being established there for many years and were a reputable firm. My father was invited to comment and said I.A.L.’s presence was nothing to do with confidence, they were wholly-owned by B.O.A.C. and were there to do aircraft radio maintenance for E.A. Airways also owned by B.O.A.C. As for being a reputable company, so are Marks and Spencers but like I.A.L. they have no experience in Radio Relay. I had seen the pilot scheme at Kaloleni. Each house had a loudspeaker on the wall with volume control, and the system was wired in D8 cable and flex, with no protective devices. Reception was poor and quality was that of a typical bus station P.A. system. I gave O’dorian [sic] a detailed report of what I thought could be achieved in Nairobi and also the whole of Kenya, together with the engineering detail, resources required, budgets etc. The report was mainly the result of my father’s efforts of two years previously, updated. I included my report of I.A.L.’s one programme pilot scheme the performance of which could induce the Council to reach only one conclusion about Radio Relay. One of not to bother with it. Transistor radios were then on the market at 40 shillings giving good world-wide reception, Moscow being a necessity. I mentioned too the near to impossibility of collecting payment from individual subscribers. Payment would have to be made by the authorities. O’Dorian thanked me for my interest and appreciated the report and said he would be in touch. About a month later he wrote again and said they had decided not to pursue any interest in Kenya.
I also tried West London Telefusion who I knew at working level in 1947, and had an interview in Blackpool with their M.D., and Personnel Manager, for a new post as Development Manager in Taunton, Somerset. The job was to establish a cable T.V. system. I was offered the job after a prolonged interview and at a good salary. I accepted there and then and was advised to start looking for a house around Taunton. Only the starting date was uncertain, but they agreed to confirm the appointment in writing and provide a detailed Terms of Reference. I was very surprised indeed a few weeks later when a letter from Mr Wilkinson said he was very sorry but had decided not to proceed with the Taunton project and all development was under review. I realised that cable TV was popular in fringe areas but more and more repeaters were being provided and the need for cable was reducing all the time. I am writing this in 1993 and the concept of cable TV has developed from the 1966 “amplified aerial” to a single coaxial cable providing over 30 T.V. channels, radio and telephone, and
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most recently, scanned T.V. Security Systems. The technological advances in Relay since its inception in my father’s time, around 1928 have meant many fresh starts for the industry.
I had an interview with Aero Electronics at Crawley – to whom I had a letter of introduction, and was offered the job of Development Engineer & Manager! I felt this was aiming rather high. The interview took place in a large country house, alongside which was a fairly new factory with lots of activity, and a sketch of which appeared on Aero Electronics letter heading. I later found that the factory had no connection with Aero Electronics, which was in fact a one-man show. The job would have been responding to overseas enquiries received mainly via the Board of Trade, designing a system and providing equipment, winding up with a quotation. On the face of it a very interesting prospect, but with no back-up of any sort, and relying upon other firms’ equipment. I felt it to be somewhat dicey, particularly when I was asked if I could type! I had to say it was a job for a team, not one man.
From Crawley I went to see G.E.C. at Coventry for interview as a “Production Team Leader”. The job turned out to be the leader of a team of about 12 assemblers and wiremen constructing telephone exchanges – one at a time. I was shown one being assembled and spent an hour with the Team Leader on one particular exchange which comprised thirty 7’ racks of relay panels, counters uniselectors, jack fields etc. As far as I could see it was just a matter of ensuring each item was in the right place and wired-in correctly. Turning down the job was the right decission [sic] for the wrong reason. There seemed to be thousands of people around all moving at the same time, and the environment depressed me. Although I was only vaguely aware of it at the time, that type of system would be giving way to electronic exchanges within a year or two.
Next stop was Redifon in Wandsworth, who were advertising for Test and Installation engineers. The job was described accurately but was basically testing H/F and M/F equipment at the end of the production line, with very occasional trips into the field on installation and commissioning work. There was great competition for the field work. I was offered the job but the Personnel manager told me to think very carefully, Wandsworth was a terrible place to live in. I was given two weeks to think it over, and turned down the offer. I asked the Personnel Manager what happened to the job I was offered in 1957. The requirement was for an engineer who had a PMG1 licence to operate on ships and an MCA Flight Radio Officers Licence to operate on aircraft. He was to take equipment to sea and into the air to ensure there were no problems, and if there were, to resolve them. That job really appealed to me and could very well have become what I cared to make it. Maybe. He looked up my file and told me the vacancy was not filled and the post was withdrawn.
I saw a job advertised for a Telecommunications Engineer for Gambia, 18 month tour, £3500 per year + 25% gratuity, and applied for it. A week later I was called for interview. I didn’t think there was the slightest chance of this happening, having applied out of interest and an expences [sic] paid trip to London. The interview went well and soon after my return to Wales a letter arrived asking me to confirm my acceptance on a salary of £2500. I was in a quandry [sic], I didn’t really want to go to Zambia, but wrote to the Crown Agents and pointed out the discrepancy between the advert of £3500 and offer of £2500.
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They regretted their mistake in the advert, and on those grounds I was able to decline
I applied for an advertised post of Signals Officer at the Ministry of Aviation’s Communications Centre at Croydon for which my D.C.A. experience fitted me well. The interview went off very well and I found that in some respects E. Africa was more up to-date than was the practice at Croydon. At the end of the interview they said they would write to me. About a week later their letter arrived and advised that I had not been selected but only because a more senior post would shortly become available and I was already short-listed for it. Good news indeed, but having heard nothing further after four months by which time we had moved house to Cambridge, I wrote to them. In their reply I was told that the letter offering me the job had been returned to them marked “Gone away”. As Communications Officer in charge at Croydon life would have been rather different.
Becoming more and more disillusioned with U.K. I went to see the Overseas Services Resettlement Bureau at Eland House, Victoria. I saw a Mr. Williams who was ex-Malaysia P.& T and we chatted for a while about the prospects of settling down to a job in the U.K. I had to agree that after 18 years in East Africa I was not impressed with what I saw in Britain nor with the people who occupied it, it was a vastly different place to the one I had left in 1948. He was quite right in saying that I first had to decide whether I wanted to stay and if so to make the best of it. What job did I want? I told him I had hoped to join Pye Telecomm’s technical sales dept. I knew Pye aeronautical equipment and felt I could fit in there, but had written and been advised there were no vacancies. “Did I still want the job?”. Having replied yes please he picked up the phone, and said “get me Ernie Munns at Pye”. Moments later he greeted someone in what I assumed was Malay, then switched to English “look Ernie, I’ve another bloody Colonial here, thinks Pye’s the ultimate., When can you see him?” We agreed 2pm the following day at Pye Telecommunications, Newmarket Rd., Cambridge. More words in Malay between them and he wished me luck.
I liked the friendly environment at Pye and was interviewed by Ernie Munns, head of Systems Planning Dept. and his deputy, Cyril Foster. The interview was constantly interrupted by the telephone and people barging in for instant decisisons [sic]. I recall Ernie asking whether I would be prepared to write a paper for a semi-technical customer on the relative merits of conventional VHF links and Tropospheric scatter and I said “yes”! Fortunately the phone rang and both interviewers were involved, which gave me a few minutes to think about it. I had heard of Tropo-scatter, but that was about all. I awoke to the question of “how would you go about it?” I replied that I would read up the subject in the Pye library. It must have been written up many times, I would study it and probably be able to quote a learned authority. I agreed that I didn’t know all the answers, and Ernie said “Thank god for that, one or two around here think they do”. I was told that my application was opportune, if I joined them I would be in the Aeronautical team headed by Cyril, which was currently preparing a factory order for equipment to re-equip 22 airports and several other sites in Iran, plus a lot of other orders for aviation equipment. Basically the job was block-planning of systems to meet the customers’ operational requirement, prepare quotations, to engineer the job in detail and to project manage the order to its conclusion. This was the sort of job offered by
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Aero Electronics but at Pye there was full backing from experts in all fields. The second part of the interview was with Cyril and the Personnel manager who said he would write to me with the result. The letter arrived a few days later offering me the post at £1250 per year and to start preferably on the first of April. This was gladly accepted. Hilda and I went to Cambridge and after a week’s run around by Estate Agents we found a nice 4-bedroomed house at 14 Greystoke Rd. near Cherry Hinton which was to be ready by the end of March.
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[underlined] AT PYE TELECOMMUNICATIONS [/underlined]
The first two years at Pye were spent as a Project Engineer in Systems Planning Dept, not in the Aviation team as hoped, but in Duncan Kerr’s team doing general systems. Also in the team were Jim Bucknell, Ian Douglas, and Mike Bavistock who had also joined Pye on April first. Duncan was away most of the time drumming up contracts with the Scottish Police forces but on our first day Mike and I did meet him briefly and he gave us two pink files. ‘Take one each’ said Duncan. ‘Turkey 10th Slice is now an order and needs a flimsy, and the Libya quote needs revalidating’. Mike and I hadn’t a clue on Pye methods and we decided to work together, providing a mutual back-up. It quickly transpired that we had something in common, Mike had been in the Gambia for three tours whilst I was in East Africa. I told him of my experience with the Crown Agents for the Gambia job and he had seen the advert for what had in fact been his post. He was not amused when he saw his £2500 a year job advertised with a salary of £3500.
Of the 36 people in the department, no-one was particularly helpful, in retrospect mainly because they were themselves under great pressure and had problems of their own. I saw the Chief Clerk, - later known as the Admin Group Leader – and said ‘Duncan wants me to do a flimsy, what’s a flimsy?’ He was most unhelpful although he was responsible for the admin. aspect of many hundreds of them. His philosophy was that he wasn’t going to help anyone who was on a bigger salary than his own. I had to go to Export Sales to find out what a flimsy looked like. It turned out to be an all-singing and dancing instruction to every dept. detailing all the action required in designing, manufacturing inspecting packing shipping and invoicing and even installation of a customer’s order. All the information available was entered on the forms and circulated around the departments. The initial circulation was programmed to take six weeks. The system was designed in detail and all the engineering information added with ammendments. [sic] Eventually there were so many ammendments [sic] I had to completely rewrite the flimsy after six weeks, and finally there was an issue 4. The job was eventually engineered by Dickie Wainwright – ex East African P.& T., following a departmental re-organisation, and I picked it up again at the delivery stage having moved to the Systems Installation Dept.
My performance on my first task in Pye was not at all brilliant, and about 18 months later when the installation was finished I issued a memo entitled “Lessons Learned on Turkey 10th Slice”. I started with saying that a week of training in Pye methods would have saved a great deal of cost and misunderstanding and went on to discuss the contract itself. The contract stated that ‘The Turkish Version of the contract shall be deemed to be the official version’, and it seemed there were many anomalies all to the advantage of the Turks, in particular to our agent, a chap called Avidor, who in fact translated the Turkish contract into English!. The system originally quoted was for a microwave chain the length of Turkey with a dozen or so links carrying teleprinter and telephones. We were awarded only the links, the radio parts of which were main and standby. One rediculous [sic] requirement in the Turkish version was that they wanted the main link in one place and the standby in another. We were providing main and standby transmitters etc within a link, not a completely seperate [sic] standby link. The whole thing was quite rediculous, [sic] no
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wonder it was given to one of the new boys and everyone else steered clear. The title of the contract simply meant that it was the 10th slice – or part – of a multi-million dollar allocation of N.A.T.O. funds. I don’t know how many slices there were, but one was enough for us.
With Mike’s first job, revalidating a quotation might on the face of it seem more straight-forward. It is just a matter of extending the date on which the offer expires, or is it?! The engineers who did the quotation with many versions over a period of 10 years, and the half dozen salesmen involved over different periods had all either left or moved on somewhere. Now they were all out of picture, it was Mike’s job, and he was on his own. Revalidation implied that he must thoroughly understand the customer requirement. The quotation comprised 18 volumes of A4 size, each 2” thick, plus a mountain of minutes of meetings and correspondance [sic] over a period of 10 years. Undertakings made in good faith years ago could well be quite impossible to honour, requiring endless variations to the tender document. Every change required approval from others in Pye. Every aspect had to be checked. Equipment from other manufacturers was included and confirmation of availability and price had to be obtained, every move documented and absolutely every aspect of the tender was Mike’s direct responsibility. When I think back to those days, I remember how every letter and memo originated had to be written out in longhand for the team’s typist to action. I understand the office system did not change in the next 25 years although there is much less of it. Mike asked me to sit in at his very first meeting on this project, the main purpose of which was to put him in the picture and answer any queries he might have. One item in the quote was ‘2 years Bavister £2000’ What’s that asks Mike. The finance dept man said it’s an accountancy term, just leave it in but add 10%. Two others had totally different ideas and finally a fellow woke up and said “I’m Bavister, I’m supposed to go out there for two years to help the customer”. There followed a discussion on the price of whether it was 2 or should be 20 thousand and which department accepted the responsibility. Mike asked why we are using scramblers bought from Redifon at £1200 each when we can make them. It turned out they were actually ours, produced in Cambridge for T.M.C. who sold them to Redifon who in turn mounted them on a panel with their label, and sold them back to Pye at about 10 times the price.
The Libya communication system itself was very good, a policeman on a camel with a hand-held portable could talk through a local Base station and several UHF links and an HF SSB link to his HQ 3000 miles away if required. Mike Bavistock saw the project through two revalidations and the tender’s final acceptance, and the production stage, over a period of 4 years. He went on to do many other big projects before deciding to resign and return to Africa to try and regain his sanity.
When I joined the department, one half prepared quotations and everything else with the exception of the detailed engineering. The other half were responsible for engineering and nothing else. The system was sound, one person should not have to divert his thinking from conditions of sale to pricing to shipping to the specific connections on a 131 way socket. After a while the system was changed whereby one man did the lot, and with a dozen or more projects on hand at any one time constant re-orientation was getting me down and I asked for a transfer to Systems Installation Dept. Meanwhile I pressed on
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doing many quotations and made sure I did not get involved with detailed engineering design or anything else which could delay my transfer. In fact I feigned some excentricity [sic] and got away with it. The pressure however was high and there was a great deal of jeolousy [sic] and backbiting in the department.
At one stage I did a couple of Fireman’s callout schemes and these were done on the electric typewriter by a typist who normally did only the conditions of sale. The only difference was in the number of base stations and portables, and the finance. Together using the same basic tape we could rattle off a quotation in half an hour. We made about 20 spare copies and sent them to Home salesmen who were not already in the know, to help them secure orders from their local fire services. This was very rewarding to Pye.
One monday [sic] morning I was given the job of providing a quotation to meet a requirement for the Yugoslavian police, to be ready by 4 pm on friday [sic] . It was a big job and I would have three chaps to assist me but I was not to make a start until the go-ahead was received from International Marketing Dept. At 2.15 pm I was told to forget it, it would not be possible to complete it in time. On Wednesday at 10 am I was told the job was on and vital, top priority. Drop everything and get on wth [sic] it. I would not have any assistants and would have to complete it myself. So one man had two days and two nights to do a job which was too much for 4 men in 5 days and 4 nights. I worked almost non-stop, all day and all night, mostly at home, and on the thursday [sic] I asked for a typist to be available for friday [sic] night. By 5 pm on friday [sic] the document was ready for typing, a very long technical description and equipment schedules. The prices had not been agreed with the finance dept, so I used standard Export price with 15% mark-up for luck. No signatures of approval were obtained from Snr. Management although a quote for over £100,000 needed signatures from three Directors and finally the Company Secretary. I did ‘phone Bert Ship who was responsible for determining delivery time and I put 5 months instead of his 9. The typist did not materialise, and as a last resort I took an office typewriter to my daughter Wendy’s home and she typed it overnight.
At 7 am on the saturday [sic] I assembled a batch of relavant [sic] publicity material and technical leaflets, and made 10 copies of the whole document, four of which I signed and gave to the Salesman at 9 am. He translated the Technical Description and schedules into Italian on his way to London Airport by road and to Milan by air. It was retyped into Italian on the Sunday and presented to the client in Rome on the Monday [sic] , by Pye Italy. A month later the Salesman told me we had got the job and thanked me, but there was no other official recognition. I was amused to have signed it myself, having cut through all authorities and proceedures. [sic] One copy of the file was circulated around for approvals by Mike Loose and this was completed a few days before we got the contract. Not all jobs were like that.
One particular quotation was done for Frank Mills, a salesman responsible for dealing with government departments in Wales. I had first known Frank when he was Provincial Police Signals Officer at Mwanza in Tanganyika when I was in charge of the airport. Prior to that he had been a Radio Officer with D.C.A. in East Africa. Frank had told me of his lucky escape when he went to Musoma on a routine inspection. An african [sic] sold him a live snake in a sack for a shilling and Frank decided its skin would make a good present. An 8 foot python for a shilling. First the python had to be killed and whilst still in the sack was placed in an empty 40 gallon storage drum. A pipe was connected between his
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landrover [sic] exhaust and the drum, and the engine left running. After an hour the python was removed and made ready for skinning, but first let’s take a few photographs. Off came Frank’s bush jacket, and the python wound round his chest and neck, with Frank gripping the snake’s head and looking it square in the eyes. The photos were taken and the snake lowered to the ground. It was sweaty work and Frank sat on the back of the landrover [sic] drinking a cool beer. After a few minutes the python slid away into the bush. However, Frank had arranged to collect the quotation at 1.30 pm. and as the hour approached it was ready in triplicate except for the three front labels. All the typists and secretaries were enjoying their lunch break, most of them sitting at their desks knitting or reading. Not one of them would type the labels, so I used a spare manual machine and typed them myself. It was their right to stop work between 1 and 2 and they would excercise [sic] that right regardless of everything else. Most of them didn’t speak to me for weeks. This childish attitude was only too prevalant [sic] throughout the organisation and was completely foreign to me. However, Frank collected his quotation and we had a short chat about old times. Tragically he was killed in a road accident next day whilst on the way to see his customer with the quotation.
After my 2 years or so in Systems Planning, Bill Bainbridge one of the two Field Controllers in Systems resigned to start his own business, Cambridge Towers, and I was fortunate in succeeding him. At the same time Harry Langley Head of Systems Installation moved into Sales and D.A.D. Smith took over as Manager of Systems Installation Dept., (S.I.D.). I got on very well with Harry Langley, he had been with the Kenya Police as a Radio technician seconded from the Home Office. Howard (Jimmie) James was the other Field Controller and between us we managed all S.I.D. projects, mainly installing and commissioning systems in the field, about 60% being overseas. In theory we had a Project Engineer heading each Installation team but as each was involved in several jobs at any one time it was never possible just to sit back and let the P.E. get on with it. He was likely to be abroad when most required.
[underlined] IRAN [/underlined]
One of the first jobs allocated to me in S.I.D. was the Iranian Airports project, Pye being a member of a consortium with Marconi, C & S Antennas, Redifon, G.E.C. and S.T.C. All came together as the Irano-British Airports Consortium to re-equip the major airports and aviation facilities in Iran. This was the project mentioned to me at my interview when applying to join Pye and Cyril Foster and Allan Breeze had devoted their last two years entirely to it, and much of 5 years before that. Allan in fact eventually went to Iran to commission the F.I.C. console. I had a great respect for him when we went to Iran together and whilst I was struggling along in French he was talking in Farsi with the hotel staff. He had been quietly studying it in Cambridge and could even read it, which was a tremendous achievement.
I became suspicious when I received a memo from D.A.D. Smith the Departmental Manager enclosing a change-note and asking me to confirm that we could still carry out our installation committment [sic] in Iran for the £85,700 he had quoted. A change-note was a notification from a Lab. making a minor change in the design or manufacture of a piece of equipment. In this case it refered [sic] to a resistor which would make no difference to anything except the parts list.
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[photograph of the head and shoulders of a man]
[Arabic writing]
[stamp]
[Arabic writing] G. Watson [Arabic writing]
[signature]
[Arabic writing] JSB/100/14/6/T [Arabic writing]
154A
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Not “will the change-note make any difference?” His subtle phraseology was making me responsible for the whole installation amount, not just a possible minor differe [deleted r [/deleted] nce. His figure was derived by taking 5% of the factory transfer price of the equipment which had no real relationship to the cost of fitting it, and was totally unrealistic.
I studied the draft contract and drew up an installation plan, and after a few days replied to my manager that “if the work can be carried out in the 12 month time scale as in the contract my estimate of costs is not £87500 but £250,000. I believed the work would take at least 5 years, it would not be possible to co-ordinate the many scores of officials with their different loyalties and the organisations involved. The final cost could very well be double the £250K. The end customer was the Iranian Director General of Civil Aviation, represented by Aerodrome Development Consultants Ltd., (A.D.C.) apparently a private firm, but wholly-owned by the then British Board of Trade and staffed by their officials. They were more than loyal to their Iranian masters.
After a great deal of arguement [sic] with A.D.C. and other Consortium members about methods, division of responsibilies [sic] , consequential losses and costs etc., the quotation was accepted including my price of £250K, and the contract signed. I was to live with that contract for exactly 10 years and have been sorely tempted many times to record the frustrations, stupidities and almost impossible business of working with the Iranians whilst retaining any degree of sanity.
It was the custom in Pye at the time, and a very good one, that before work was started on a major quotation, the comments of people with recent similar experience were sought as to its desireability, [sic] and with the question “Do we want the job?”. The file, an informal one came to me and in answer to that question I wrote in a light-hearted moment, “pas avec un barge pole.” I didn’t know that our masters Philips in Holland were involved until a minute came from them asking ‘vos ist ein barge pole’? This surprised everyone as the Dutch generally have no sense of humour where money is concerned.
One year from the signing of the contract, bang on time, we airfreighted the 26 racks of equipment and a mass of other material for installation at Meherabad airport, a direct flight from Stansted to Teheran where it was to be fitted. The pilot spent 36 hours under armed guard first for not having a “Certificate of no objection” from Iranian Airlines and secondly for paying a parking fee for only a 12 hours stay. There were many problems with that first consignement [sic] which provided a good pointer to the difficulties to follow. It was 12 months before the equipment was released from Customs and then it was stored in the open air outside the Meherabad receiving station for 6 months. Soon after that first air shipment I returned to Iran and spent 6 weeks studying the first 12 airport installations, including Meherabad, and re-formulating detailed plans. Meherabad was the main International Airport and included the Flight Information Centre. One problem at the F.I.C. was how to fit a 24 ft control console manned by 6 people whilst maintaining a full service on the old console which occupied the same floor space. In addition the contract stated that 12 racks would be fitted in the old equipment room on the fourth floor and 14 in a new equipment room on the second floor. This really was quite impossible and I was keeping the problem to myself. When I was discussing with the Iranians the work involved in their own equiupment [sic] room,
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they became extremely worried because their wiring was an absolute shambles with hundreds of multipair cables actually threading their way in and out and through racks which we had to replace with no interuption [sic] in the service.
They finally startled me by laying down the law and insisting that we stay right out of their old equipment room, and they would knock down walls between six offices on the second floor to house all 26 racks. This area was very close to FIC and made our job not only possible, but easy. Also the change was their firm requirement and we charged them £17,500 extra for the priveledge [sic] .
On Kushi Nostrat mountain, Marconi were to fit a Radar scanner, which we were to link to Meherabad by a 7GHz link, but the only way to reach the site was by helicopter, unless one was a mountaineer. There were no civilian helicopters in Iran and it was only when I put the problem to A.D.C. that I found the Radar stn. was to be at Kushi Basm and not Kushi Nostrat, a totally different mountain. This had an access road and Meherabad was a line-of-sight path of 32 miles. At a critical distance was a salt pan and we were supposed to go round this desert on a dog leg using a microwave link repeater. There was no suitable location for the repeater because of the “change” in location of the Radar site. This resulted in another variation to contract for a frequency and space diversity single link, less equipment than in the original contract but we got away with charging £18,000 more. Some of the problems were pathetic, others amusing. When I checked the earthing and lightening arrestor system at Meherabad I found the one inch copper earth lead was terminated not with an earth mat in the ground but to a spike stuck in a concrete plantpot on the first floor verandah. That was and probably is still there and highly dangerous. Incredible but true.
At Bandar Abbas Airport I prepared a detailed installation plan which together with others was discussed later at a monthly progress meeting in London. It bore no resemblance to a plan prepared by Redifon two years previously and we realised that since Redifon’s visit a new airport had been built about 9 miles away. More variatons [sic] to contract. There were 260 of them finally. At Bandar Abbas, the port of which was the main base of the Iranian Navy, I was with the Provincial Governor, an Iranian Air Force General and the Airport Manager. All three agreed it was permissible for me to use my camera. Later when an army corporal confiscated the camera they all denied it and simultaneously lost their ability to speak fairly good english, resorting to french in discussion with me. I had already met the works manager in charge of the extensive building operations who spoke excellent english and was apparently all-powerful. He not only recovered my camera from the army but also gave me a fine selection of photographic prints together with detailed architect plans of all the buildings. I did not see the three senior chaps again but the works manager put a car and driver at my disposal. I think he must have been related to someone important, maybe the Shah-in-Shah, or maybe he was a member of the secret police, there is no knowing.
A consignment of Redifon transmitters was held up in Customs for over two years with a documentation problem, and even the fixer employed was quite ineffective. To clear through customs it was necessary to get 120 signatures and rubber stamp impressions on the release document and this had to be done in a single day. This was finally achieved after the Shah had decreed that the equipment must be released, but the chap on the gate seemed to resent this interferance [sic] and refused to release it. The document with the signatures was out
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of date the following day so the man’s boss supported him and the equipment remained a part of the scenery. A week or two later, another department came into the act and gave notice that if Redifon did not remove it within 7 days, it would be sold off by police auction. Redifon did not appreciate my suggestion that we should go to the auction. The problem had arisen because one small item of equipment was refered [sic] to as a “tone transmitter”, the word transmitter being anathma [sic] to Middle east types. It did not appear on the schedule [deleted] d [/deleted] of approved tranmitters [sic] and was regarded with grave suspicion.
It took four months to amend the contract to exclude the tone transmitter and substitute a tone oscillator, - the same thing -, but even then 36 copies of the invoice had to be changed and re-submitted.
The Consortium offices belonged to the G.E.C.O.S. agent who kindly trebbled [sic] the size of them at the Consortium’s expence [sic] . All the members’ staff in Iran moved in and made themselves comfortable. About three weeks later a gang of workmen with demolition equipment reduced the new buildings to rubble and said “sorry, no planning permission”. Two months later the lawyers proved that all the proper authority and permissions were completely in order. The gang returned and said “sorry, ok you build”.
Despite all the red tape in Iran it was generally possible to get results eventually, the main difficulty was often finding out just which palms had to be greased. Our man in Iran for three years was Mike Cherry and he was successful in getting an amateur radio licence, with the call-sign EP2MC. Mike fitted an SSB125 transceiver in the office in Teheran and I was in daily contact with him from both my house and the office in Cambridge. By using very carefull [sic] phraeseology [sic] I was kept right up to date with progress in the field.
I was talking with Mike from the office one evening on 14 MHz when Dr. Westhead the Chief Executive came in and asked who I was talking with. I replied “to Mike Cherry, our man in Teheran, Sir”. He grimaced and said “Ah well, ask a stupid question..” The public telephone system to Iran was diabolical most of the time. I used to book a call for 4.30 am the following day and take it from home, which saved a great deal of time in both places. Teheran time was 2 1/2 hours ahead of U.K. On most occasions the Post Office telephoned several times during the night to confirm the call or advise of delays, which was very tiresome.
Monthly progress meetings were held in London, and at one of them I was asked to quote for additional work at Esfahan during the 2500 year celebrations, which were to take place before the new equipment was fitted. They required to talk with aircraft and I suggested they should do so on a mobile set which would be quite adequate. Our team would already be on site with the mobiles so without any fuss I quoted £300 which was put forward. At a board meeting a week later this was confirmed and the Pye member of the Board, Pat Holden who was also our International Marketing Director promptly withdrew it as I had not gone through the proper channels. The next day he sent for me and instructed me to cancel my quotation, and with a great thumping of the table told me to increase it £3000. Then followed a lecture that “we are here to make money, add a nought”. I told him the job would take about an hour and £300 was more than adequate. £30,000 was utterly rediculous. [sic] I told him “I was doing no such thing, put it in writing through the head of my department and meanwhile you are clear to return to earth”. I then excused myself and left him
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to it. I returned to my own desk 20 minutes later to find a note asking me to go and see the boss, not surprisingly. I told him exactly what had happened and he laughed. I said I thought I had burned my boats with Pat Holden and David Smith my boss said “far from it, he admires you for standing up to him and asks you to forget it.” I took no further action in this and in the event there was no income at all, but the job took only 30 minutes for one engineer.
Another equally challenging job was the installation and commissio [deleted] m [/deleted] ning of a UHF system within the London Stock Exchange. This employed 520 adjascent [sic] channels. The Base Stations in the basement comprised a transmitter and receiver for each channel, all being combined into one “radiating feeder”. About 600 pocketphones on the Stock Exchange floor were used by dealers working into this system. An invitation to tender for this job had been received by Pye about two years previously and comments invited from all technical departments. It was unanimously agreed that the job was quite impossible and must not be attempted. Pye did not quote for it and the contract was awarded to S.T.C. Mobile division. Nearly two years later Pye or Philips aquired [sic] that organisation and half the installation had been fitted. About 60 channels were in use and very unsatisfactory. Dealers received messages intended for others and signals faded out at the crutial [sic] moment. Firms were receiving wrong messages and transfering [sic] and buying shares erroneously through these faults. The task of bringing the job to a conclusion was allocated to me and I chose my favourite team of Nick Fox, Aussie Peters and Jack Faulkener.
There was a local Service Dept. depot at the Stock Exchange of four engineers who were struggling to get the system working and we took over from them. On arrival there was a flap on, a dealer had acted on a false message and bought some tens of thousand shares for which he had no client and he was stuck with them. He said he was going to sue Pye for his loss. He dropped that idea next day when he sold them at a profit. The main problem was loss of signals into the pocketphones on the Stock Exchange floor but we were not allowed onto the floor during dealing times to make tests. Eventually we were given an ultimatum to either fix it or remove it and face an enormous claim for damages.
This was very serious indeed and I reported back to Cambridge. The Engineering Director, Frank Grimm showed me a copy of his comments of two years ago when he said the job was quite rediculous [sic] and impossible, and that was the end of it. No-one wanted to know, “It’s your problem Cliff, get on with it”. So it was back to the Stock Exchange, and I demanded permission to see for myself what was actually happening by being on the floor during dealing hours, otherwise there was nothing more we could do. The Chairman gave permission, quite unprecedented and we were then able to make a more scientific approach. We stayed on that evening and with Jack Faulkener in the basement at the transmitters we measured signal strengths which were astonishingly high and with no blind spots. Jack reduced the base station transmitter power at the input to the antenna system until even with the antenna completely isolated the signals were far more than adequate. This provide the mathematicians were all wrong and we were all barking up the wrong tree. We then carried out the most elementary test of all, whilst receiving properly on a pocketphone we transmitted on other pocketphones – on other channels – at a distance of ten feet. We had found the reason for the problem, simple R/F blocking which should have been checked in the Lab. at a very early stage. That evening we modified 6
[page break]
pocketfones [sic] , fitting a 2 pf. capacitor at the receiver input and completely bipassing [sic] the transmitter output stage. They worked perfectly, and with no blocking even at 2’ distance between portables. We had found the answer and the next day, friday, [sic] we recovered all the 160 pocketfones [sic] and over the weekend modified the lot. Everything worked as it should and the customers were delighted. We had received no co-operation from anyone in Cambridge but word soon reached Cambridge that all was well. We deliberately kept them in the dark until I issued a formal report. I had of course no authority to modify equipment but deliberately flouted this on the grounds that someone had to do something constructive or we would have been thrown out of the Stock Exchange. It did not improve my popularity with the people who could influence my career.
In 1979 after being responsible for some dozens of major projects three more Field Controllers were appointed, Dave Buller Mike Simpson and Clive Otley and I felt that a change was long overdue. Relationships with the Departmental Manager and his yes-man deputy Joe were deteriorating rapidly. I transfered [sic] back to Systems Planning Dept. and overnight became a specialist in Radio Frequency propagation. I was in a small team headed by Dave Warford, and including Lewis Wicker and John Ewbank, and a trainee. Our job was to plan Radio Links and area coverage systems, within the parameters laid down by D.T.I.
At the outset my knowledge of R/F propagation (or Electromagnetic Radiation) was limited to my practical experience of what had been achieved and what had failed to work. The theoretical aspect was highly mathematical but fortunatly [sic] the subject was well written up and the principles well established. Dave Warford and Lewis Wicker were a great help in getting me onto the right lines.
A typical job would be a request from a salesman asking whether a radio link on a particular frequency band would work between two specific sites and if so what aerial height would be required? The first step would be to study the Ordnance Survey maps of 1:50000 scale, and plotting all the contours on the direct line between the points. From this information a profile of the earth’s surface would be prepared including the earth’s curvature
[inserted] To be continued [/inserted]
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[underlined] Dresden 13 – 14 February 1945 [/underlined]
At the end of January 1945, the Royal Air Force and the USAF 8th Air Force were specifically requested by the Allied Joint Chiefs of Staff to carry out heavy raids on Dresden, Chemnitz and Leipzig. It was not a personal decision by Sir Arthur Harris. The campaign should have begun with an American daylight raid on Dresden on February 13th, but bad weather over Europe pre-vented [sic] any American operation. It thus fell to Bomber Command to carry out the first raid on the night of February 13th. 769 Lancasters and 9 Mosquitoes were dispatched in two separate attacks on Dresden and at the same time a further 368 R.A.F aircraft attacked the synthetic oil plant at Bohlen near Leipzig. A few hours after the RAF raids 311 bombers of the 8th US Air force attacked Dresden. The following day (15 February 1945) the USAF despatched 211 bombers to bomb Dresden and a further 406 bombers on the 2nd March.
As an economic centre, Dresden ranked sixth in importance in pre-war Germany. During the war several hundred industrial plants of various sizes worked full-time in Dresden for the German War machine, Among them were such industrial giants as the world famous Zeiss-Ikon AG (Optics and cameras). This plant alongside the plant in Jena was one of the principle centres of production of field glasses for the Armies, aiming sights for the Panzers and Artillery, periscopes for U-boats, bomb and gun sights f or the Luftwaffe. Dresden was also one of the key centres of the German postal and telegraphic system and a crucial East West transit point with its 7 bridges crossing the Elbe at its widest point.
In February 1945 the war was far from over. The Western Allies had not yet crossed the Rhine, Germany still controlled extensive territories, and Bomber Command lost more than 400 bombers after Dresden. The war was at its height, the Allies were preparing for the land battles which would follow their crossing the Rhine, the Russians were poised on the Oder. This destruction of Dresden meant a considerable reduction in the effectiveness of the German Armed forces.
The Germans followed Hitler even after the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945 when its horrors were broadcast to the world. They continued to follow Hitler even after they watched the thousands of living skeletons from concentration camps being herded westward in early 1945.
A quote from former POW Col H E Cook (USAAF Rtd) "on 13/14 Feb 1945 we POWs were shunted into the Dresden marshalling yards where for nearly 12 hours German troops and equipment rolled in and out of Dresden. I saw with my own eyes that Dresden was an armed camp: thousands of German troops, tanks and artillery and miles of freight cars …. transporting German logistics towards the East to meet the Russians.”
[signed] Jim[?] Broom [/signed]
[page break]
[curriculum vitae page 1]
[page break]
[curriculum vitae page 2]
[page break]
[autographed photograph of Lancaster bomber]
[page break]
[history of Jack Railton and Emma Sharpe]
[page break]
[history of George Henry Watson]
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[history of Herbert Kilham]
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[history of Herbert Kilham continued]
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[photograph of male]
[page break]
[history of George Henry Watson]
[page break]
[history of Jack Railton and family]
[page break]
[history of Jack Railton and family continued]
[page break]
[history of Cliff Stark’s early years]
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[letter from LMS railway to C.W. Watson page 1]
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[letter from LMS Railway to C.W.Watson page 2]
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[letter from LMS Railway to C.W. Watson]
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
Just Another Tailend Charlie
Description
An account of the resource
A memoir written by Cliff Watson divided into 20 chapters.
The Earliest Years.
Born in Barnoldswick, then in Yorkshire, now in Lancashire in 1922. His father ran a wireless business until 1926. He describes his years at schools and a move to Norwich. The family then moved to London where he started an apprenticeship as an accountant.
Joining Up.
Cliff left the accountants to work in his father's radio business. Initially he was rejected by the RAF because he wore spectacles. He reapplied and passed various written, oral and medical examinations. Initial training was at Torquay then Newquay. Once training was complete he sailed from Greenock to South Africa.
Southern Rhodesia.
After acclimatisation in South Africa, Cliff and his colleagues were put on a sleeper train to Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Training commenced on Tiger Moths but he was 'scrubbed' or rejected. He was reselected as an air gunner and completed a course in Moffat, also in South Rhodesia. Hospitality in Rhodesia and South Africa was described as generous and excellent.
Postscript.
Cliff describes a run-in with a training corporal who took a dislike to him. Despite faked evidence he proved his points and emerged with a clean record and passed his exams.
Operational Training.
In August 1942 he sailed back to the UK. He was sent to Bournemouth for assessment, then on to RAF Finningley for training then RAF Bircotes for operations. Next was a move to RAF Hixon and its satellite airfield at Seighford. He married Hilda on 1st March 1943 during a week's leave.
Second Time to Africa.
He was then sent to West Kirby, Liverpool to join a ship sailing to Algiers, for further training. Their destination became Blida where they started operations on Tunis and Monserrato airfield. They then moved to a desert strip to the east by 250 kms. From there they continued operations into Italy. Later they moved to Kairouan and continued operations into Italy, mainly Sardinia and Sicily. Each operation is described in great detail.
He has included a letter in Arabic with instructions to take the bearer to British soldiers for a reward. At the end of his tour they sailed back to Greenock.
Screened.
After some leave Cliff's next posting was at Operational Training Unit Desborough where he helped train new gunners. Due to an argument with an officer he was sent to RAF Norton for correctional training. On his return his case was reviewed and the severe reprimand was removed from his record.
Scampton.
Scampton was Cliff's next operational base then Winthorpe for its Heavy Conversion Unit on Stirlings, followed by Syerston on Lancasters then Bardney.
227 Squadron.
Cliff joined 227 squadron at Bardney. Again he covers in detail each operation. His flight was later transferred to Balderton. During this period he was awarded the DFC.
Final Leg.
His squadron was transferred to Gravely at the end of the war. He did a photography course and was transferred to Handforth. There was little work, some unpleasantness and eventually a period of extended leave, a spell at Poynton looking after prisoners then demob.
Back to Civvy Street.
Cliff returned to Whitehaven to revitalise a radio company. He gives great detail about the improvements made. Later he set up a similar enterprise at Maryport. Wired radio services were set to become less popular and financially worthwhile so seeing the writing on the wall he decided to emigrate.
Kenya.
Cliff and family flew to Nairobi, then bus to Kitale where his father was.
Hoteli King George.
Dissatisfied with life on his father's farm, Cliff took a job as a prison officer. He and his family moved to Nairobi. He relates several stories about prisoners and their better qualities but in the end he gets restless and leaves.
Civil Aviation.
Cliff joined the East African Directorate of Civil Aviation in April 1951 as a radio officer. He and his family were relocated to Mbeya, 900 miles from Nairobi. His skills as a radio engineer were well used in this remote location. After 2.5 years the family returned to UK on leave. On his return he was posted to Mwanza, also in Tanganyika. He describes in great detail a royal visit. They left on leave in June 1957 and collected a VW Beetle for transport to Kenya. Their next move was to Entebbe. This was not a happy posting and led to a transfer to Kisumu in Kenya. After three years they transferred to Nairobi to spend more time with their children, who were at boarding school there.
D.C.A. Headquarters.
His role here was Telecomms superintendent. He describes in detail the operations of his section. This was an unsettled period in Kenya with many Europeans returning home.
Dec' 61 on Leave.
Leave was spent at their house in Wales then in May 1962 Cliff returned alone to Nairobi. His family did return later. By this time his father had abandoned his farm and was building radios.
On Leave June 1964.
He bought another house in Wales and spent his leave restoring it. His wife's mother moved in. In November 1964 Cliff returned alone to Nairobi. he left within a year due to the worsening situation.
Job Hunting.
Several electronics firms were approached offering Cliff's services. He attended an interview with Pye who quickly offered him employment.
At Pye Telecommunications.
He found his colleagues unhelpful. A great deal of time was spent on a Turkish quotation that had been in progress for 10 years. A quotation to the Iranian Directorate of Civil Aviation contained complications leading to Cliff revising the quotation. Later there was a complicated installation job at the London Stock Exchange. Eventually Pye pulled out from the bid but a rival company won it, only to be taken over by Pye. At first the system was troubled but after a simple modification it worked perfectly.
Dresden 13-14 February 1945.
A one page description of the bombing of Dresden.
Curriculum Vitae.
Cliff Watson's CV, dated 1976.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Cliff Watson DFC
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1989-06
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
192 typewritten sheets and photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SWatsonC188489v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Huntingdon
England--Yorkshire
England--Norwich
England--London
England--Torquay
England--Newquay
England--Birkenhead
Scotland--Greenock
Sierra Leone--Freetown
South Africa--Durban
Zimbabwe--Bulawayo
South Africa--Mahikeng
Zimbabwe--Harare
Singapore
South Africa--Cape Town
England--Bournemouth
France--Paris
Algeria--Algiers
Algeria--Blida
Tunisia--Tunis
Italy--Sardinia
Italy--Cagliari
Tunisia--Bizerte
Italy--Monserrato
Italy--Decimomannu
Italy--Trapani
Italy--Palermo
Italy--Naples
Italy--Rome
Italy--Lido di Roma
Italy--Tiber River
Italy--Alghero
Italy--Castelvetrano
Italy--Pantelleria Island
Tunisia--Sūsah
Italy--Syracuse
Italy--Messina
Italy--Salerno
Italy--Bari
Italy--Comiso
Italy--Crotone
Italy--Pomigliano d'Arco
Italy--Paola
Italy--Battipaglia
England--Desborough
Norway--Bergen
Netherlands--Walcheren
Germany--Hamburg
Norway--Oslo
Belgium--Houffalize
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Berchtesgaden
England--Whitehaven
Kenya
England--Yeovil
Kenya--Nairobi
Kenya--Kitale
Tanzania--Mbeya
Tanzania--Mwanza
Uganda--Entebbe
Kenya--Kisumu
England--Cambridge
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Düsseldorf
Zimbabwe--Gweru
Zimbabwe
South Africa
Sierra Leone
France
Algeria
Tunisia
Italy
Netherlands
Germany
Norway
Poland
Belgium
Tanzania
Uganda
Iran
North Africa
Germany--Nuremberg
Iran--Tehran
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Netherlands--Vlissingen
Germany--Homburg (Saarland)
Tunisia--Munastīr
Tunisia--Qayrawān
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Cornwall (County)
England--Cumberland
England--Devon
England--Hampshire
England--Huntingdonshire
England--Norfolk
England--Northamptonshire
England--Somerset
England--Lancashire
Italy--Capri Island
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
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Peter Bradbury
109 Squadron
142 Squadron
150 Squadron
1661 HCU
227 Squadron
25 OTU
30 OTU
5 Group
617 Squadron
84 OTU
9 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Albemarle
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
B-17
B-24
Beaufighter
bomb aimer
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
C-47
Defiant
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Flying Medal
ditching
FIDO
flight engineer
Flying Training School
Gee
ground personnel
Halifax
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hudson
Hurricane
Initial Training Wing
Ju 87
Ju 88
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
mess
military discipline
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Mosquito
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
prisoner of war
RAF Balderton
RAF Bardney
RAF Bawtry
RAF Catfoss
RAF Desborough
RAF Eastleigh
RAF Farnborough
RAF Finningley
RAF Graveley
RAF Hemswell
RAF Hixon
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Milltown
RAF Norton
RAF Scampton
RAF Seighford
RAF Strubby
RAF Syerston
RAF Waddington
RAF Wick
RAF Winthorpe
RAF Wyton
searchlight
Spitfire
sport
Stirling
Sunderland
Tiger force
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1895/35627/SGillK1438901v20027.2.pdf
4e1b16d68628369bb390ad6492ed4bdf
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
Gill, Kenneth
K Gill
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-07-09
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Gill, K
Description
An account of the resource
One hundred and sixty-four items plus another one hundred and fifteen in two sub-ciollections. The collection concerns Flying Officer Kenneth Gill DFC (1922 - 1945, 1438901, 155097 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, documents, photographs and family and other correspondence. <br />He flew operations as a navigator with 9 Squadron before starting a second tour with 617 Squadron. He was killed 21 March 1945 having completed 45 operations.<br /><br />The collection also contains two albums. <br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2114">Kenneth Gill. Album One</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2117">Kenneth Gill. Album Two</a><br /><br />Additional information on Kenneth Gill is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/108654/">IBCC Losses Database.</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Derek Gill and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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My name is Derek Gill and I was born on the 20th April 1944 (same birthday as Adolph Hitler). So I am 67 years old.
I was 11 months old when my father was killed on Wednesday 21 March 1945.
My father F/O Kenneth Gill DFC was born on the 19 November 1922, when he died he was 22yrs and 4 months old.
He joined the RAF on 18 June 1941 aged 18 as a Volunteer Reserve and after initial training was transferred by Troopship on 6 Jan 1942 arriving in [inserted] Pan American Flying School Florida [/inserted] Monkton USA on the 20 January 1942 for initial Flying Training and then transferred to Canada in May 1942 until he qualified as an Air Navigator on 11 Sept 1942. [inserted] EMPIRE TRAINING COURSE. [/inserted]
On his return to the UK he joined No 29 Operational Training Unit at RAF Station North Luffenham flying Wellington Mk3's during December 1942. His first Operation was on the night of 25 Feb 1943 bombing Clermont Ferrand in France this operation took 7 hrs.
In March 1943 he was transferred to 1660 Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Swinderby flying Halifax Mk5's and then Lancaster's.
His second Operation was in a Lancaster Mk3 on the night of 18 April 1943 flying to La Spezia in Italy Mine Laying this flight lasted 9.5 Hrs.
On 20 April 1943 he was transferred to No 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney where he flew 26 Operational Flights with the same crew except for 3 ops Pilot F/LT Derbyshire, Flight Eng. Sgt Sullivan, Navigator Sgt Gill, Wireless Operator Sgt Overend, Bomb Aimer/Front Gunner Sgt Oakes, Mid Upper Gunner Sgt Cole and Rear Gunner Sgt Parsons. In Lancaster's. Targets were: Dortmund, Duisberg, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Essen, Wuppertal, Dusseldorf, Bochum, Oberhausen, Krefeld, Mulheim (returned early as Port outer was u/s), Gelsenkirchen, Cologne (Returned early rear turret u/s bomb load jettisoned, 21 miles from target, whilst testing rear turret a twin engine enemy aircraft made three attacks), Cologne, Essen, Milan, Nurnburg, Nurnberg(54 flak holes), Rheydt, Berlin, Munich, Kassel, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Dusseldorf, Berlin. completed on 19 November 1943 his 21st Birthday.
During these Operations was commissioned from Flt Sgt to P/O. on the 27 June 1943
On the 8 December 1943 he was awarded the DFC for his service with No 9 Squadron.
27 Dec 1943 promoted to F/O.
After completing the above missions he was transferred to No 5 Lancaster Finishing School at RAF Syerston as a Navigation Instructor (Bringing new
[page break]
Navigators up to speed on the different navigational aids being used on the Lancaster and also retraining older Navigators who where [sic] having difficulties with the new innovations.
Whilst at Syerston he met up with F/Lt Gumbley (pilot) and F/O Barnett (Flt Engineer) and at the end of their time at Syerston they were asked to join No 617 Squadron, so went around and completed the rest of the crew asking people who they new [sic] that had completed a Tour and were training new crews.
On the 27 September the New crew were transferred to No 617 Sqd RAF Woodhall Spa (Commanded by W/Cdr J B (Willie) Tait)
Pilot: Flt/Lt B.A. Gumbley DFM RNZAF Aged 29 Hawks Bay NZ.
Flt Eng: F/O E.A. Barnett (Men in Desp) Aged 21 Thorp Bay Essex.
Navigator: F/O K. Gill DFC Aged 22 Halton Leeds.
W/Op: P/O S.V. Grimes Aged 22 Suffolk.
B/A: F/O J.C. Randon Aged 23 Chesterfield Derbyshire.
A/G Mid Upper: F/Sgt J. Penswick Aged 23 London.
A/G Rear: F/Sgt G Bell Aged 23 Hull.
After training with the other crews from 30 Sept 1944 to 26 Oct 1944 they went on their first Operation with 617 flying to Lossiemouth and on the next day took off with a Tallboy Deep penetration 12000 lb Bomb, on board to attack the Tirpitz. They flew to Tromso Fjord (Norway) and after 4 runs over the Target decided that the cloud made accurate bombing impossible. For this operation the Mid-upper turret was removed in order to install the extra fuel tanks required to achieve the range to make the return flight. Even so they landed at Skatska (Coastal Command Airfield) in the Shetlands to top up with fuel as they had not allowed for returning with the Bomb on board (C/O was not impressed as if the bomb had gone off it could have wiped out the airfield), then flew to Lossiemouth returning to Woodhall Spa on the 30 Oct 1944. (Bringing the Tallboy all the way back). Top secret and scarce) 12 hrs
Only a crew of 6 as no mid-upper turret.
On the 11 November 617 and 9 Sqd returned to Lossiemouth and on the 12 flew back to Tromso Fjord and sunk the Tirpitz, bombing at 08:43 from 15400ft a Tallboy was seen to enter the water about 20 yds off the Tirpitz which capsized. (Still a crew of 6 but on this trip the mid-upper gunner was in the rear turret) 12.15 hrs
[page break]
Full Crew of 7
8 Dec Urft Dam. Not bombed as cloud cover was over target.
205 Lancs from 5 Grp carrying 1000lb bombs and 19 from 617 carrying Tallboys. 3.35 hrs
11 Dec Urft Dam Bombed from 6000 ft (Tallboy) could not see bomb burst because of cloud aircraft received minor damage to Tailplain. 5.30 hrs
15 Dec Ijmuiden E&R Boat Pens Bombed at 10000 ft hit NW corner of the Pens. 2.35 hrs
21 Dec Politz-Oil Refineries Bombed at 16900 ft (Tallboy) significant damage to target, landed at Metheringham using FIDO, transferred to Base by road and collected Aircraft on 23 Dec after fog had lifted. 9.45 hrs
24 Dec Command of 617 transferred from W/Cdr Tait to G/C Fauquier
29 Dec Rotterdam E&R Boat Pens Bombed at 16660 ft (Tallboy) Bomb unobserved owing to smoke, a good many near misses, no direct hits seen. 2.50 hrs
30 Dec Ijmuiden E&R Boat Pens Solid cloud over target did not bomb.
Tallboy returned. 2.20 hrs
31 Dec Horten (Oslo Fjord) Cruisers Kolin and Emden Ships travelling at up to 30 Knots difficult to bomb accurately, later on Crews were forced to bomb by moonlight or aim at the source of Flak some crews returned with their Tallboys. Bombed at 00.15 hrs from 10200 ft (Tallboy) near miss on port side of ship, ship appeared to stop. Later identified as a 10000 ton transport ship.
7.45 hrs.
3 Feb 1945 Pootershaven E&R Boat Pens (Midget Submarines) Bombed at 1552 from 13500 ft (Tallboy), bombed into smoke over the aiming point, Aircraft hit by Flak, fuselage and rear turret damaged, not seriously, no casualties.
2.50 hrs.
[page break]
6 Feb Bielefeld (Vielesible Viaduct) Aborted Aircraft targeted by accurate Flak on return route no damage suffered
5.45 hrs
14 Feb Bielefeld (Vielesible Viaduct) Aborted Flak encountered as the aircraft crossed the Rhine.
4.50 hrs
22 Feb Bielefeld (Vielesible (Viaduct) Target comprised two parallel twin track Railway Viaducts. Bombed at 16.10 (Second run Tallboy) 13700 ft. 3 arches at the western viaduct collapsed, but rail link remained on the other two tracks.
4.30 hrs.
24 Feb Dortmund-Ems Canal Aborted Recalled 30 miles from target because of unfavourable weather conditions.
4.40 hrs
13 Mar Bielefeld (Vieiesible Viaduct) Aborted 2 Aircraft were B1 (Specials) carrying the new 22000 lb Grand Slam Bomb (G/C Fauquier & S/L Calder). The aircraft were modified to carry the Grand Slam, Bomb doors removed and the fairings of the bomb bay, deletion of the Mid-Upper Turret and also the Main Radio and the Wireless Operator
4.20 hrs
14 Mar Bielifeld [sic] (Vieiesible Viaduct) Bombed at 1628 hrs from 11600 ft (Tallboy) Bomb believed to be a direct hit, S/L Calder Grand Slam falling 30 yds from viaduct (G/C Fauquier aircraft went u/s at start up. 460 ft of both Viaducts Destroyed Rail link severed completely.
5.00 hrs
19 Mar Arnberg Viaduct Bombed at 10.54 hrs from 12700 ft (Grand Slam) Bomb fell 50 yds south of aiming point as Pilots Bomb Aiming Indicator was not recording the Bomb Aimers alterations. Two or Three Spans of the Viaduct were brought down.
5.20 hrs
21 Mar Arbergen Railway Bridge near Bremen. The bridge was a double track Rail link across the river Weser 200 yds long.
[page break]
On this occasion Flak in the area was more intense and a number of Aircraft were damaged. A number of Me262 Jet Fighters were also encountered after bombing. The Target was rendered unusable although the main bridge was still intact.
The aircraft was a B1 Special although it was carrying a Tallboy, on this mission there were only 5 crew members onboard.
The Aircraft was hit by Flak during its run up to the target and dropped out of formation, causing F/Lt Price to take avoiding action. British records state that the aircraft received a direct hit and dived down out of control.
Witnesses on the ground gave a different account "The aircraft went down passing over the village of Okel heading in the direction of Riede at a hight [sic] of 2000ft. They do not mention that the aircraft was on fire at this stage, but state that it seemed to be flying extremely slow. As it flew over Riede the locale Flak Battery went into action, hitting one of the engines and setting the fuselage on fire. The aircraft made a 180 degree turn back towards Okel and crashed into a field. The witnesses said the aircraft did not explode immediately, but before it could be reached there was a violent explosion, reducing the aircraft to fragments and creating a crater 50ft deep by 100ft diameter.
The RAF Missing Research and Enquiry Service failed to find any German documentation regarding the incident or trace any burial for the crew. The identity of Fl/Lt Randon was established from a document found at the crash site leaving no doubt about the identity of the aircraft. Having no known grave the crew are commemorated on the RAF Memorial at Runnymede, my fathers name appears on Panel 267 and also on the 617 Sqd Memorial at Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire.
The Crew Comprised of:-
Pilot F/Lt B.A. Gumbly DFM RNZAF,
Flt Eng F/O A.E. Barnett (Men in Desp)
Navigator F/O K. Gill DFC CdG
Bomb Aimer F/Lt J.C. Randon
Rear-Gunner P/O G. Bell.
F/O K. Gill Total Flying Time Day Time 388.10hrs (74.45 Operations)
Night Time 279.15hrs (171.30 Operations)
Total Time 667.25hrs (246.15 Operations)
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
Biography of Kenneth Gill by son Derek
Description
An account of the resource
Gives service history of Kenneth Gill including training in Canada as navigator, training in England, operations on 9 Squadron with list of his crew. Details targets attacked. Commissioned and awarded Distinguished Flying Cross. After tour on Lancaster finishing school transferred to 617 Squadron, lists crew. Details operations and targets while on 617 Squadron. Includes attack on Tirpitz with tallboy bombs and list other attacks with this weapon. Describes final operation where Me 262s encountered but his aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed when unreleased weapons exploded, All crew killed. Lists crew.
Creator
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D Gill
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-04-20
1941-06-08
1942-01-06
1941-01-20
1942-09-11
1943-02-25
1943-03
1943-04-20
1943-11-19
1943-06-27
1943-12-27
1944-09-27
1944-10
1944-11-11
1944-12
1945-01
1945-02
1945-03
1945-03-21
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
New Brunswick--Moncton
United States
Florida
France
France--Clermont-Ferrand
England--Rutland
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
Italy
Italy--La Spezia
Germany
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Essen
Germany--Wuppertal
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Mülheim an der Ruhr
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Cologne
Italy--Milan
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Rheydt
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Munich
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Leipzig
Scotland--Moray
Norway
Norway--Tromsø
Germany--Euskirchen (Kreis)
Netherlands
Netherlands--IJmuiden
Poland
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Atlantic Ocean--Oslofjorden
Germany--Bielefeld
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Bremen
Great Britain
New Brunswick
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Text. Personal research
Format
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Five page printed document
Identifier
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SGillK1438901v20027
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2011
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sue Smith
1660 HCU
29 OTU
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bomb aimer
bombing
crash
Distinguished Flying Cross
flight engineer
Grand Slam
Halifax
Halifax Mk 5
Heavy Conversion Unit
killed in action
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 3
Me 262
memorial
navigator
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Bardney
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Woodhall Spa
Tallboy
Tirpitz
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/232/3409/GolledgeG.1.JPG
3eaabae8d3beba7a6b44941651e0f3e7
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/232/3409/AGolledgeG150511.1.mp3
28a517d650bbda702216fb03e4ebb847
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Golledge, Geoff
G Golledge
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Geoffrey Golledge (- 2016). Geoff Golledge served as ground personnel with 44 Squadron at RAF Waddington before training as an air gunner and flying operations in Wellingtons with 205 Group in North Africa and Italy.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-05-11
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Golledge, G
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DE: And that should be recording. So, this is an interview with Geoff Golledge by Daniel Ellin. It’s the 11th of May 2015 and it’s in Lincoln. Geoff if I can just start with some really sensible, silly questions like where were you born and brought up?
GG: I was born in Walthamstow.
DE: Ahum.
GG: In London.
DE: Yes.
GG: I lived a fairly ordinary life. Went to the local Church of England school and, I left school at fourteen and went into a factory doing engineering. There main job was supposed to be shop fronts and that all that sort of thing but I’d have been only about a year in business when the war broke out. So at fifteen immediately I was on war work. They started making parts of a tail plane of an aircraft that was supposed to be a super new bomber but in actual fact turned out to be a complete flop called the Albemarle and er I was sent round to a parent factory round the corner from the one I was working in and I became an AID inspector. I had to inspect parts, see they were ok and then get a hammer and er something and banged on a number on it to say that it had been inspected and the part number and everything and I did that. And er at seventeen and a quarter I volunteered for the Royal Air Force. Went for the test in Euston, was accepted as wireless operator / air gunner. At eighteen, or just after eighteen, I was called up, went to Blackpool and I did my preliminary training. All the usual stuff. Teach you how to use a rifle and drill and all the rest of it and giving public displays of drill in front of holiday makers who stood there clapping and cheering while we were learning to do drill. And er I got on quite well until I got to the wireless and like so many people there I got up to about twelve words a minute and that was about as fast as I could go. Well at that time the RAF wanted sixteen words a minute before you could go on to stage two of wireless training. Later on, after I’d turned off on to something else they brought it back to twelve but by that time I had been refused wireless so I was then put forward for a straight air gunner and of course there was a long waiting list for a gunnery training school so I was put on to RAF Waddington on the ground staff. That was at the beginning of 1943. Ah, my, I was allocated to 44 Rhodesia Squadron and I was put on the flare path. I was in a crew of four and our job was to look after the flare path, which in those days Waddington had grass runways not, they didn’t have the concrete runways of today and the lighting was gooseneck flares which is like a sort of low on the ground type watering can. It didn’t stand any height at all and there was a long piece of wick in it and some spirit, that was lit and you had a line, two lines of them and that was your runway lights.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And that was my job on a crew of four and I did that until about the end of March when they finally decided to open up the new aerodromes at Dunholme Lodge where my squadron went to and Bardney where 9 Squadron went to. They was the two squadrons at Waddington at the time and as I was waiting to go on a gunnery course they didn’t bother with sending me to Dunholme Lodge with the 44. So I was kept there to keep an eye on the Wimpey men who were the Irish labourers who were doing the runway. Waiting till they picked a few wild mushrooms and then I had to go out, confiscate them and bring them back so the squadron leader could have them for his tea [laughs]. And I stayed there until about the end of June when eventually of course I was posted on a gunnery course which meant going a couple of weeks at Bridlington.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And a couple of weeks at Bridgwater.
DE: Ok.
GG: [unclear] And um, then I went to County Down, Northern Ireland for my flying training and eventually I passed out and became a fully-fledged sergeant, air gunner after which of course I was sent home on leave for a week and then up to Morecambe where I had my yellow fever jabs and all the other jabs they wanted to give you and of course got all my tropical kit. Up to Glasgow on a troop ship and out to the Middle East.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: And I went out to Egypt first of all and eventually went to Palestine to Jerusalem where I was kept there for couple of weeks until finally we got posted to an airfield near the Egyptian border at a place called Aqir.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And we flew from there. We crewed up and that’s where I flew from.
DE: What were you flying?
GG: Wellingtons.
DE: Ok.
GG: Wellingtons Mark 1Cs
DE: Ahum.
GG: I had quite a good time there for a few weeks and um then we got posted to Italy to 205 Group which was part of the Central Mediterranean Air Force but we were given a week’s leave so the whole crew went to Alexandria for a week and er I didn’t feel too well towards the end of the week and in fact coming back to Cairo to the point where we were going to be informed about going to Italy and where we were sent off from there um, I didn’t feel too well and people had to carry some of my cases and, 'cause we had something like three kit bags, one for ordinary kit, one for flying kit and one for tropical kit. And I couldn’t carry anything, I felt so ill. The next morning we got there late at night um went into the tent and had a sleep and the next morning I was on parade there very early because the sun used to get up and get very hot and um I could feel myself swaying there while I was on parade so as soon as the parade finished and we’d been told what to do I went sick.
DE: Ahum.
GG: I went and saw the MOD, the MO rather, and um he immediately sent me off to the sick bay where I spent twenty four hours. They pushed M&B [?] I think it was. They said it had done wonders for Churchill. It was a new drug but unfortunately as fast as they put it in me it came out again. They tried it all ways and in the end, the next day, I was rushed to Number One RAF hospital in Cairo where I spent the next six weeks.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: And then from there of course eventually they said there’s a hospital ship coming in and so, to Port Said, so they took me on a hospital train down to Port Said, put me on a lovely hospital ship and we were brought back to England and eventually of course, after some months hanging about, um, I was discharged in February ’45.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: From the RAF. That was it.
DE: So you were demobbed before the end of the war in effect.
GG: Yeah.
DE: Yeah.
GG: And on VE Day of course I was actually working and I was in working at a job. We were doing er, burglar alarm just off er, Oxford Street.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And so we saw all the celebrations going on.
DE: But you didn’t get involved yourself?
GG: No I didn’t get involved myself because, you know I wasn’t a well man and of course eventually thanks to the inefficiency of a doctor at the chest clinic I was suddenly, the doctor suddenly realised I was dying and he rushed me into a sanatorium. In fact it's the same one that Jimmy Greaves has just been put into.
DE: Oh.
GG: Broomfield Hospital.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: It was a sanatorium in those days and I spent two and a quarter years there. I lost a lung as a result of it, had an operation, and er, eventually I came out and got back to normal life after about, I had what five years I wasn’t allowed to work.
DE: I see.
GG: They wouldn’t let me work.
DE: Ahum.
GG: So, eventually I did get to work and carried on civvy [?] life until I was in me forties when I found that I could get back into the RAF in a training branch where I became squadron warrant officer on a cadet squadron where I used to teach lads how to fly and everything and did a lot of flying myself of course.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And um, until I got to fifty eight when they said you’re too old. There’s your cap, go [laughter]. So I had to get out.
DE: I see.
GG: So unfortunately I didn’t want to go but I had to leave the RAF at fifty eight.
DE: What was it that made you want to get back in the RAF when you discovered that you could?
GG: Well I loved the RAF. I liked, I’m a service, I mean some people like service life.
DE: Ahum.
GG: All the ordering and all the rest of it. I, I’m not one of those that dislike it. I love it. You know, on parades and all that sort of thing. And of course as you see from the photograph up there on the desk, I’ll show it to you – under the birthday cards. Er, I was er, standard bearer for about thirty five years. This is my thirty fifth year as a standard bearer. I retired last Christmas but I’ve come out of retirement to do one or two jobs. So, I still wear a uniform of sorts.
DE: That’s smashing. And you still get involved in events like Where Were We.
GG: Yes.
DE: And that.
GG: I’ve, I've agreed. I’ve just come back from the Netherlands where I did, I went into training to make sure I could do the march 'cause I have to lead a parade in the Netherlands for their Liberation Day.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And I lead the parade you know. I were determined to do it one more time [laughter].
DE: Smashing.
GG: So I did it. And er, there’s 50/61 Squadron, they have a memorial service in June. I shall do that and if they want me for the ceremony of the memorial for Bomber Command I’ll be prepared to do that. I will also, if they would like it, to do what I’ve done for the last about four years do the Priory Academy. They have a ceremony on the 11th of December in the school hall.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And I have provided a standard to do the dip so I shall do that and after that of course we will probably lay out the standard in the school at Welton.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And that will be it.
DE: I see. Ok. So you think it’s important that, that stories like these are remembered then?
GG: Yeah, yeah, yeah I mean it's I think it’s extremely important because if you look at the way the Dutch look it, it’s hammered in to the children in Holland because we Brits are their liberators.
DE: Ahum.
GG: You know, because it was the Dutch, err it was the British Army and also the Canadians who cleared the Germans out of Holland and of course every night there was the RAF going over and of course there was Manna where we dropped food on them and they never forget.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And so they hammer it into the children, make sure the children don’t forget it. In fact, one ceremony we used to do, we've stopped doing it er, recently, er, in a wood in, um, near a town called er, or village called Vaassen where it was one of the first places involved in the war. There was, in the woods nearby there was an aircraft T Tommy of 15 Squadron, a Stirling bomber, crashed and all but one were killed and they have a memorial there, little pile of stones with a cross on it and that is looked after by the local children.
DE: Ahum.
GG: Yeah it's eh, they do this sort of thing and of course the children get involved in Drompton [?] where I go every year which is literally my second home now I’ve been going there so long. Um, there are various organisations, embassies and people like that as well as the services they all lay wreaths at the memorial in Drompton [?].
DE: Ahum.
GG: Which happens to be the propeller off of, or one of the propellers off of F for Freddie 12th Squadron stationed at Wickenby and that that’s been recovered, cleaned up.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And it’s in reasonable condition and that’s been stuck into the wall with some inscription and there’s er, one of these Olympic type flame bowls on one end and they have flag staffs everywhere and the children, there's a whole load of boy scouts and that, carry the wreaths and then when somebody is due to go forward to lay a wreath the scouts go up to it and then wait for the, whoever's going to lay it comes along, they hand it to them and they lay it.
DE: Ahum.
GG: So the children get involved in that way and it’s very, very good.
DE: Why do you think it’s different in this country?
GG: Well I don’t know. I suppose it’s the fact that we Brits don’t look at things in quite the same way as the Dutch do because you know we weren’t invaded. We didn’t suffer. Alright, we got bombed I know but we didn’t suffer the way the Dutch did. I mean, it’s a different thing.
DE: Ahum.
GG: To not be bombed but to be imprisoned the way they were. Starved and they were starving.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And they remember it all.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And they want the children to remember.
DE: Ahum. Smashing thank you. If we can, can I go back and ask a few more questions about your time when you were working on the flare path at Waddington.
GG: Yeah that was um, quite a good job. You had to lay out the flames, flame, well er, I suppose really they were like a watering can. That’s all they were. Virtually a watering can.
DE: Ahum.
GG: One of these low ones you know with the long spout and um, we used to have to lay them out and light them and of course sometimes you got a Dornier long range fighter would drone overhead waiting for the bombers to come back. When they were coming in to land and their speed had got down to about a hundred mile an hour, coming into land, they would shoot them up.
DE: Ahum.
GG: They never ever did while I was there fortunately although we had Dorniers buzzing around because it meant that we had a Bedford thirty [?] hundred weight truck with a canvas over the back and another chap and myself used to hang on the back, go down the middle of the runway, stop at each light, one would go one way one would go the other way just tip the thing and then put it in the lorry.
DE: Ahum.
GG: Well we went down doing this well of course when you tip it the spirit comes down and knocks the flame out. Not all the time though [laughter]. So it wasn’t long before we had swimming in, the back of the lorry was swimming in turps or paraffin whatever it was and you know one of these things on there caught light and we were in our old flying suits and welly boots and we used to have to try and stamp the flames out and there’s a Dornier circling and here you are trying to put out all the flames. Eventually we used to do it and manage it alright. And er, we got over it. But of course the worst one was er, one night we did what we’d always done which wasn’t strictly according the rules. The whole crew should have been in the chequered caravan at the end of the runway but what they’d done they took off[?]. We don’t need four of us so three used to go back downstairs in the control room and go to sleep in their beds and leave one in the caravan. Well this particular night they'd ordered a maximum effort and I, there was eighteen aircraft on 9 and eighteen on 44. Well I think that night there were about thirty five aircraft went off. They all came back and I was there[unclear]. It was my turn to be Joe Soap out there with a great big flagon of cocoa and some bread and sard — I think it was sardines or something you know and um about two o’clock in the morning when I knew they’d be coming back, I’m sitting there in the caravan when suddenly the, we had a — outside on the tractor we had a box. I don’t know what they call it. It was both microphone and loudspeaker combined and suddenly it woke up and said that they wanted to talk to me and so I went out there and apparently an aircraft had crossed the coast, the first one back had crossed the coast near Grimsby. It was G George 44 Squadron I think and he called up and asked for permission to join the circuit at Waddington. Well when the girl pressed the key to answer, the radio just died. They tried and couldn’t get it back so they called me up and said would I talk to him because we had a very ancient radio in the corner of this caravan which nobody had ever, we all knew how it worked but we'd never ever tried it. So, I went in there, fingers crossed and I tried, did the necessary and you know spoke to the G George 44 and to my utter amazement, 'cause I didn’t expect it, as though he was standing beside me I got this pilot calling me back and I, got over my surprise and told him to join the circuit at fifteen hundred feet. Well no sooner had he called back and I nipped outside and told them I’d put him on the circuit then somebody else came over the coast and called up and so I was in and out and, ‘cause with thirty five aircraft as it turned out they all came back that night. We didn’t lose one. We got a piece of paper, a pencilled column down there and a pencilled column down there with ABC.....XY and you know whatever aircraft had gone off and all I had time to do when one landed was to run a pencil through A 44 or B 9 Squadron you know whatever and er, you had no time then 'cause they were coming in thick and fast. The radio was going. I had to give them a running commentary and just to add to it all I had to take the coloured light off the Aldis lamp and do a cinema usherettes job and you know point them which way they had got to taxi to go to their dispersal. Well I’m running in and out, here [unclear] everywhere doing about five jobs all at once, I somehow, I managed at eighteen years old. I managed to bring in thirty five aircraft, put them all to bed and nobody ever found out that all their lives had been hanging on the reliance of an eighteen year old. How I did it I don’t know and I, somebody must have been sitting up there I think, on my shoulder and um, you know I often think about it and my blood runs cold when I think what could have happened because if I’d have made a mistake and brought the wrong, I had, ‘cause when an aircraft is at fifteen hundred feet when it’s clear you tell them to land. You’ve then got to bring the aircraft at two thousand feet down to fifteen hundred, the one at two and a half thousands got to come down to two thousand, and you’ve got to remember who is where and you’ve got two squadrons.
DE: Ahum.
GG: You know two As, two Bs, two Cs. I somehow got it all right. They all finished up in the right place and there was no accidents. You know my blood runs cold when I think about it, what could have happened. I mean if anybody had made a mistake.
DE: Ahum. But it did happen didn’t it? Yeah.
GG: Yeah because you don’t realise what it's like. To give you some idea. At night when they took off if it was still light and you could just see the light of the sky you’d look up and you know when you get these flocks of birds that go around you know. A whole, multitude of them just suddenly go off one way or another, well it’s like that looking at all these aircraft. There’s dozens of them. Well there’s hundreds of them up there all circling round and you think how on earth are they managing not to hit one another, you know. And you see all that going on you realise how easy it is you know with — 'cause there’s aerodromes all round Lincoln, you know. It could quite easily have an accident. Quite easy. And the fact that I got them all down and 'course I daren’t say anything because they’d have been court martials right, left and centre.
DE: Because you should have had three other people helping?
GG: There should have been four of us out there not one. I daren’t say anything ‘cause once I accepted the 44 G George that was it. I was — I was committed then.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: I couldn’t go back and.
DE: How long did it take do you think?
GG: I don’t know. It didn’t take long because they all came back fairly quickly. I mean you didn’t have time to look at the watch and see what the time was. You were too busy in and out, in and out, you know.
DE: So, so the, the tannoy thing to, for you to talk to the control tower was outside in a box and the radio for you.....
GG: Yeah.
DE: .... to talk to the aircraft was inside.
GG: Was inside in the caravan so I’m running in and out, in and out like a lunatic and then you had to get the light and you know you had to know which one went where you know ‘cause one lot were parked there and another lot were parked here. 44 were here and 9 were over there.
DE: So they had their separate dispersals?
GG: Yeah.
DE: Was there somebody waiting to meet them at their [unclear]?
GG: Oh yeah you could see men with little hand torches and they just used to go round and round and guide them, on to their spots, but I had to show them which way to, which road to take as it were.
DE: I see.
GG: And once they get on that road of course there's the airmen there to guide them.
DE: So correct me if I’m wrong where was the chequered caravan? It was at the end of the runway?
GG: Always at the end of the run — at the beginning.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: Yeah.
DE: Ok thank you.
GG: I did.
DE: Sorry?
GG: I did have one other incident there. It was funny. One night they were due to come back and they were circling and they were ready, the first one to come in and suddenly we noticed the leading light had gone out so the corporal said to me 'Oh nip over and get that one lit again'. So I ran across, got it alight. I came back the shortest way between the two lights. I got about halfway across the runway or the grass there, that served as a runway, and I got stuck in the mud. I couldn’t, and there was a plane coming in at me and I couldn’t get me feet out. Now these wellies we used to wear old flying suits and then the wellies on top and the only way you could get the wellies off was to sit on a bed, hang on to the frame and somebody grabbed two hands and pull it off, that's the only way you could get it off. And I’m there and there’s this Lanc coming in and fortunately he'd made a mistake. He was coming in too low and he’s coming straight at me at about a hundred odd mile an hour and I’m, can’t get my feet out and my pals are all going [unclear] like that, and um, there’s a little light at the side of the runway just before the lights start. It’s like a tool box. About that long and about that high but it’s, it’s not set level it’s set at an angle for aircraft coming in and in the end there’s a glass. Now if you’re coming in at the right height all you see is a little green light. It’s only a little green light, not very big, 'bout that — 'bout that round.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And if you’re coming in too low it shows red, if you’re coming in too high it’s white and this plane was coming in and the old Merlins were all spitting and coughing as they shut down and at the, what must have been literally the last second the pilot suddenly spotted the red light, realised he was too low, suddenly the four Merlins burst into life, the nose of the Lanc went up and it went over my head and the tailplane, which obviously came down, missed me by about ten feet I suppose and he went over the top of me and he went round. Course my pals all ran out and pulled me out the mud. So that, that’s another thing that could happen.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: So, you got a bit of life and excitement doing that.
DE: Yeah wow. So was it really very, very muddy or, or it must have been if you got stuck?
GG: No it wasn’t muddy. It was just an odd spot, just an odd spot where there was no grass.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: And it was muddy there and course you can’t get your feet out the wellies and you can’t get the welly out the mud you know. Just holding me.
DE: Crikey. You said when you were telling me the story about talking down the aircraft. The two squadrons. You called yourself something. You called yourself Joe Soap. Can you explain that?
GG: Oh I was the, it’s an old saying you know. You, you’re the mug.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: You’re the one that’s got lumbered with it. You know it could have been Cyril or Fred you know. It was me that night. I was Joe Soap.
DE: So it's a nickname.
GG: Yeah it’s a nickname. You’re the mug.
DE: Right.
GG: And the other thing of course after the two squadrons moved we built these four, well the builders put four towers up, scaffolding.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And a red light was hung on it. Well these lights they weren’t modern things they were old fashioned. They weighed half a ton. And these heavy things, and I used to have to, how — how my belt on my uniform stood the weight I don’t know, it’s a wonder it didn’t rip the belt off. Used to have to tie one on my belt, a fresh one and I used to have to go all the way up these scaffolding and it was you know you had gaps like that between bars and you had to somehow get up.
DE: Three or four foot gaps yeah.
GG: I had to climb all the way up the top, take the old one off, hang it up somewhere, get the other one off, hang the new one on, switch the light on and put the other one on my belt and then climb down and I had four of these things to do.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: And I had to do it morning and night.
DE: What were the towers for?
GG: Well you have to have to have a red light on any tall tower, you know.
DE: Yes.
GG: For aircraft.
DE: Yes.
GG: And any tall tower or a church steeple, anything got to have a red light on it.
DE: Ahum.
GG: So.
DE: Well the scaffolding you say they were scaffolding towers. What were the scaffolding, what was the scaffolding for?
GG: Well the scaffolding really was just to put the lights up really. They didn’t serve any other purpose.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: Because you couldn’t land on the airfield. You see if you got those four red lights people knew that the airfield wasn’t in use. Also of course there is a recognition, station recognition.
DE: Ahum.
GG: There’s a light in one corner of the airfield which flashes a letter. Every airfield's got its own letter and it kept flashing S or R or J or whatever, whatever the station one was.
DE: Yes. Oh so, so the towers with the lights on were to tell aircrew not to land because –
GG: Yes.
DE: New runways were being put in.
GG: Yeah.
DE: I see. Ok.
GG: That’s to warn them off.
DE: Yeah.
GG: And I used to have to go up there morning and night.
DE: So you were Joe Soap again.
GG: Talk about feeling like a mountaineer.
DE: How long did it take them to put the runways in?
GG: I don’t know because they were halfway through. Well I say halfway through. They were a fair way through before I got my posting and I went off to Bridgnorth for a couple of weeks then Bridlington for a couple of weeks and then off to Ireland for my flying training.
DE: So this was your air gunning, air gunnery posting?
GG: Air gunnery training yeah. We learned to fly you know went on the planes out there. Oh used to have fun out there you know. We used to go round 'cause all the pilots were all pilots who'd done a tour of ops. A lot of them were gun happy to be honest and they used to do the daftest things and we used to be flying around just off the coast where we were there was a lighthouse. And I’m in it one day, in the plane, and er we're flying around, round this lighthouse and the pilot said, ‘go on pepper ‘em’. And we were blazing away with the machine gun in the sea all around the lighthouse and the old lighthouse keeper was on the phone [laughs] mad. Then another time one of the planes — the local village had a very wide high street and down one side of it was a sort of big store with a bit of a tower in the middle with a clock in it and the pilot flew that low, it was so wide he could fly low just to see what the time was [laughs]. The phone [laughs]. Oh dear. They were mad as march hares. It was really funny. But um, I remember when we passed out we stood out there and we'd all got our stripes and our wings and the station commander made a speech. He called us all the showers he could name and we were the, we were the pits. We all standing there smiling. We couldn’t have cared less. Oh it was hilarious but I enjoyed the time in Ireland. It was good. Yeah lovely. And then of course we all went out to the Middle East.
DE: Ahuh yeah.
GG: Yeah.
DE: You mentioned before when we were talking just before the interview that you got your driving licence. Did they use you as a driver as well then?
GG: Well I used to drive ‘cause um, I did, I don’t think I had my driving licence with me but I, they expect you to drive. I used to have to drive a tractor pulling a four wheeled caravan, pulling a light, a great big like searchlight thing.
DE: Ahum.
GG: Which stood up on this trailer and then behind that was a flat trailer which we put our lamps and that on, so I used to have to drive this train around. I hadn’t got a licence, only this temporary thing. And then sometimes I’d have the van, we had a little Hillman ten hundred weight and I used to perhaps drive the CO down to the station if he was going on leave, you know and drive around the camp, you know.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: It was fun.
DE: Did you have a close group of friends at Waddington then?
GG: Well I didn’t have many friends there because I had a second home there. Some friends of mine, well some people I knew, they were related to people who lived a few doors from me in London, they had a newspaper shop in Bracebridge. Down in the town there.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And their son had gone in the army and he was their only son. Got nobody and they missed him and they said, 'Oh come and stay here when you’re off duty'. Well I used to do twenty four hours on. Twenty four hours off, so on my off time I had my bike there.
DE: Ahum.
GG: I used to ride down into Bracebridge, I used to stay at there so I spent a lot of time there so, and course being out in the airfield I never saw anybody much on the camp. Only my own crew.
DE: Right.
GG: So I didn’t have many friends there really in that respect.
DE: So you didn’t associate much with anyone else there?
GG: No ‘cause soon as I was off duty I was down to Bracebridge.
DE: Did you get into Lincoln much?
GG: Not a lot really because as I say it was Bracebridge and that was it.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: I went in a few times but not a lot. I didn’t really get to know Lincoln until I moved here.
DE: Ahuh ok. I’m just slightly curious about the three people who were asleep when you were doing your, your deeds and talking down the aircraft. Was it a thing you took in turns to do or um.
GG: Well we had, there’s a flying control tower up on the top obviously. There’s the officers and the girls with the radio. Down below was our restroom and that’s where we were, down there. We had half of it and the rescue squad, whose garage was just a few yards away, they had the other half of the thing.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: So, upstairs, they never ever came downstairs which is just as well [laughs] ‘cause they’d have been court martials right, left and centre.
DE: So the three people were actually in the control tower and it was just you on your own in the caravan.
GG: Yeah.
DE: Yeah. I see. Ok.
GG: It was alright if, if things went well, you know.
DE: Ahum.
GG: Had no problems. Occasionally, you, you’d see somebody making a mistake and you'd, you'd have to flash a red light at him, you know. You could see he was coming down too low. Keep up your, not your turn.
DE: Ahum.
GG: But otherwise it was fairly easy thing to do and all we did was to stand there and say G George landing, clear of runway and then, you know, wait for the next one to come in. That’s um, it was a fairly easy job it was just that, that one night it all went pear shaped.
DE: Yeah. Did they have, did you have any other duties that you had to do or was it just that job?
GG: Well that was your job. Flare path. And that's what, all you did was the flare path.
DE: And how long were you at Waddington doing that for?
GG: Er, six months from January to June in ’43.
DE: Ahuh. Did you ever get into trouble for anything? You say you got away with that, that night but did you ever get into trouble for –.
GG: No. No. I never got in any trouble. No. The only time I ever got in trouble I got my name taken in London by a SP, that’s the station police in the RAF, coming out of a tube station. I shouldn’t have been there. I got my name taken.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: But by the time it got to the office I’d moved. I’d been posted from London back up to, I think, Waddington or somewhere, so I never got into any [unclear].
DE: Oh that’s ok then. Yeah. Smashing. I think, I think that’s ok for me unless you have any other, other stories that suddenly spring to mind?
GG: Yeah a couple that, when we were flying out of Aqir in Palestine. We’re on a, we did a couple of air tests while I was there. Both of 'em turned out to be near disasters. On one, the first one we’re circling around and of course the first time I’d seen the place in daylight I’d only been flying at night so I’m looking all round and having a good look and I thought well that’s it we’ll be landing in a minute so I turned my turret on the beam which you do for landing.
DE: Ahum.
GG: So you can get out the back, you see. And I turned it on the beam and I crossed my arms and I leant back. I was going to rest on the doors behind me. What I didn’t know was there’s like a hook thing on the door and with the vibration it was loose and eventually it come up and so the doors had gone.
DE: It opened.
GG: I lean back and the next minute this from here to here is hanging out the aircraft.
DE: Oh.
GG: And of course parachute, you haven’t got a parachute. That’s inside the aircraft. So I’m hanging out there. I managed to get hold of the gun toggles[?] and pull myself back in.
DE: Crikey.
GG: But of course at that age, nineteen, it’s not danger. You laugh. You laugh at it ‘cause you don’t see danger when you’re nineteen you know. It’s all a laugh. And the next time I did an airlift err air test the plane had just come out from the workshops and the armourers hadn’t had time to put any guns in it so I thought well [unclear], so I grabbed hold of a couple of guns which were lying on top of the oil drums, they used to oil them and leave them on top of these oil drum to dry in the sun, so I grabbed a couple, just shoved them in, you know. For the look of the thing. Not for any, ’cause I just chucked them in, I didn’t even look to see what they were. It just looked two guns poking out.
DE: Ahum
GG: Fair enough. We took off and er, we’re circling around and I could see Haifa in the distance and there were a little black dot circling round and I thought I wonder what that aircraft is. And as I thought that, over the microphone, earphones came 'Bandit over Haifa'. I knew what it was, it was a Junkers 88 ‘cause there was a squadron of them on Rhodes which is not far away.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: So I knew what it was. I looked at the guns. Horror upon horror I’d got a left hand gun in a right hand hole and a right hand gun in the left hand hole. I thought, oh no, so I had to straighten the turret up, open the doors, get hold of the left hand one and of course a machine gun is a very heavy thing when you’re cramped in a turret it makes it heavier. You can’t, you haven’t got the strength to move it and there I am struggling to get the gun out of the hole to put it in the other side ’cause they sit in a flat tray with like a lip all round and there’s a bolt goes through one side.
DE: Ahum.
GG: So you’ve got to have a right hand gun in a right hand hole and a left in the left hand hole. Otherwise you can’t put the bolt through.
DE: I see, yes.
GG: There I’m struggling with one eye on what I’m doing and one eye on the black dot but fortunately I think the German pilot must have gone, ‘hmmn, time we were back to the mess for lunch lads’, 'cause he suddenly beetled off in the direction of Rhodes.
DE: That was fortunate.
GG: Phew hah. And then the other time, when you used to take off we were only what ten miles from the coast so you had no sooner took off then you were over the Med. And you always had to take a wind drift.
DE: Yes.
GG: The gunner has to, the rear gunner has to take a wind drift. So you pass it to the navigator so the navigator can set his course according to the drift of the wind. What degree of strength it is and whether it's starboard or port. Well I, you could guarantee, you could literally guarantee every penny you got it would be three degrees either starboard or port. Occasionally, very rarely it would go down to two or go up to four but it was nearly always three. Well I get up. We got in the plane and I’m sitting there waiting for the engine to start so I can test me guns. You know, the turret works. The engine started and immediately it shut down again and the pilot said, 'All out. Aircraft US'. So we all clambered out so the ground crew said well take the one next to it 'cause there was always more aircraft than there were crews.
DE: Yeah.
GG: So we got in this next aircraft and I’m, sitting there waiting. Eventually the first engine started so immediately I try and — ‘cause that operates the hydraulic system for the turret. Nothing. I knew what had happened. We’d got a hydraulic leak, so immediately I called up and said, 'Aircraft US' and we all pile out again. So the ground crew said oh well there’s one over there left. The only one left. Take that. So we walked across the dispersal to the other one and we got in and it worked alright. Well we took off a quarter of an hour or so after everybody else and as soon as we got airborne, we passed over the coast, so immediately I got out the turret and dropped a flame float down, got like a chute there.
DE: Ahuh.
GG: Hopped back in the turret to take. You see a little light bobbing about in the sea and I got my gun sight on it, took my first test. I looked down. Ten degrees. I thought - ten degrees? It can’t be. Not if I’ve done it right. So I did it again and I was ultra careful.
DE: Ahum.
GG: Nine. Did a third one ‘cause you have to do three and take the average and that was nine so I thought well I know it’s crazy but I’d done my job properly and I know what it is so I gave the navigator nine degrees. And you do what's known as a dog leg. You don’t go from there to there. You go - and then there.
DE: Yes.
GG: And you do the same coming back. So when we got to the dog leg, that’s what it’s known as, I took another one. Got an average of eight. When we got up to the Italian coast and coming back took another one - seven. And then halfway dogleg - six. Gradually getting down, down. And when we came back the light, a big light like a big searchlight it was. Like a lighthouse type of thing on the north end of the Gaza strip known as the Gaza light and it should have been dead in front of us and there it was dead in front of us. So we were absolutely –
DE: Ahuh spot on.
GG: – spot on. So it was Heathrow navigation. Heathrow, Heath Robinson rather.
DE: Yes.
GG: Navigation but it got us there.
DE: It worked. Yeah
GG: And we landed. We were the quarter of an hour after everybody taking off but we were the first ones back.
DE: Because you’d got the wind, wind.
GG: We’d got it right. I later found out when the others came back the gunners had all gone - can’t be that. No. And they squeezed it and squeezed it got the lowest figure they could and squeezed it all the time. Result was they were a few miles out.
DE: Ahum.
GG: And they had to keep changing course and that’s why they were all late. In fact one didn’t come back at all. That, from radio messages they got we reckon he crashed in the Qattara Depression which was the salt marsh on the Egyptian / Libyan border and they went in there. If you go in there, disappear. You’re never seen again. So we lost that one. But um, it was amazing. But when we taxied, when we taxied in incidentally, as we taxied in the two engines just cut.
DE: Really?
GG: They were dead. There weren’t a drop of petrol in them.
DE: Phew. Someone was looking after you that night.
GG: Apparently the thing should have been filled up.
DE: Topped up yeah.
GG: You're supposed to have about twenty five percent extra fuel to what you need well this one hadn’t been topped up so the fact that we got back really depended on my navigation with the navigator. So if I’d had made a mistake like the other gunners did and squeezed it, we’d have finished up in the Med.
DE: Yeah.
GG: And that would have been our lot but um, so that was a near squeak but that’s the sort of thing that could happen you know 'cause we used to have a saying in wartime - "we flew by the seat of our pants" which meant it was all hit and miss. That’s what it meant.
DE: Yeah.
GG: And we did and I mean you talk to anybody who flew during the war and they'll all tell you the same. You flew by the seat of your pants because you never knew what was going to happen 'cause aircraft weren’t as well serviced as they are today and of course they're not as perfect as they are today, you know so you never knew so you, you, to some extent you took your life in your hands a bit.
DE: Yeah.
GG: You didn’t think about it. You just got on with it you had a war to fight and that was it.
DE: So you didn’t feel particularly brave or?
GG: No, no, no, no I was just doing my job the same as everybody else. I didn’t feel I was being brave or anything. No bravery concerned. You were just doing your job.
DE: Smashing. That’s wonderful. Thank you ever so much.
GG: I think that’s about all I can tell you.
DE: No that’s great. Thank you very much. That’s bang on an hour.
GG: Oh. [laughs]
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AGolledgeG150511
Title
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Interview with Geoff Golledge
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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1:00:00 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Geoff Golledge volunteered for the Royal Air Force and trained as a wireless operator / air gunner. For a time he served as ground personnel with 44 Squadron at RAF Waddington, on the flare path. One night he brought thirty five aircraft safely in to land, on another occasion he found himself stuck in mud right in the path of a landing Lancaster. He then completed air gunnery training in County Down, Northern Ireland. He served in the Middle East, flying Wellingtons, until he was invalided out due to severe illness. After a time in civilian life, he rejoined the Royal Air Force as a warrant officer on a cadet squadron, where he spent the rest of his career. He also discusses the memorial work in which he has participated in the United Kingdom and in the Netherlands.
RAF Waddington, Middle East, County Down, Wellington, flare path, gooseneck flare, 44 Squadron, Broomfield Hospital, Operation Manna, Vaassen, 15 Squadron, Stirling, 12 Squadron, RAF Wickenby
Creator
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Dan Ellin
Date
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2015-05-11
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Italy
Northern Ireland
Mediterranean Sea
Middle East
Northern Ireland--Down (County)
England--Lincolnshire
Great Britain
Great Britain
Temporal Coverage
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1943
Conforms To
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Pending review
44 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
ground personnel
Lancaster
memorial
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Aqir
RAF Waddington
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/733/9288/PCarswellA1702.1.jpg
6a021403a718f2d9ad8a17280e5548de
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/733/9288/ACarswellA170614.1.mp3
ea881ccab4c5a417073323e2bfde14f7
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Carswell, Andrew
A Carswell
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Andrew Carswell AFC (b. 1923). He flew operations as a pilot with 9 Squadron but was shot down and became a prisoner of war.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-06-14
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Carswell, A
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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DK: Ok. So, I’ll just introduce myself. This is David Kavanagh for the International Bomber Command Centre interviewing Andy Carswell on the 14th of June, I always get the dates wrong. 2017.
AC: 13th. Isn’t it March the 13th?
DC: 14th.
DK: Oh, it’s the 14th . Yeah.
AC: 14th eh?
DK: 14th. 14th of June 2017 at his home in Toronto. I’ll just make sure that I said Toronto. Make sure everybody knows I’m here. So, if I just put that there.
AC: Now, you have the address of the home in Toronto and all that.
DK: Yeah. I’ve got all the address. Yeah.
AC: That’s good.
DK: If I keep looking down I’m not being rude I’m just making sure it’s working. There’s been a couple of occasions when I’ve been beaten by the technology when the battery has just stopped or something.
AC: I see.
DK: Right. Yeah. I think we’re ok.
AC: Do I have to speak any louder than normal or —
DK: No. Just, just speak normally. Just sound like that.
AC: That’s good. That’s good.
DK: Firstly, what I wanted to ask you was what were you doing immediately before the war started?
AC: Ok. I was going to high school. I was, immediately before the war started I guess I would be about sixteen years old or so. And just before my eighteenth birthday the principal of the high school I was going to — I was in Grade 12 and in those days you needed twelve grades in order to graduate in to university.
DK: Right.
AC: But they changed it. The timing on the thing so that you had to have thirteen grades. So, I was at the end of my twelfth grade. I was just coming up to eighteen years old and the principal, in one of his lectures said, ‘Anybody who wants to do war work can get off early.’ And so of course I stuck my hand up and said, ‘Yes, I want to do war work.’ And so I got off early and the first thing I did was I went downtown to the RCAF Recruiting Unit.
DK: Right.
AC: On my eighteen birthday. I was eighteen years old and I walked in there and they said, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘I want to join the Air Force.’ They said, ‘Oh. What do you want to be?’ And of course everybody watched the movies. I said, ‘I want to be a pilot.’ So they said, ‘Ok.’ And they put me in and I went to, to the local unit in the Toronto International Exhibition there and, at Upper Avenue Road, and they sent me to, to Belleville. They had taken a school for the deaf and dumb and kicked everybody out.
DK: Right.
AC: And I don’t know what they did with them. And they put us in there and some of us were sort of dumb too [laughs] but anyway we were selected there on the basis of various tests to be pilots, air gunners, or navigators.
DK: Right.
AC: And you had to be smart to be a navigator. And you had to, you had to be, I guess a good shot to be an air gunner so I was trained as a pilot. So, they selected me as a pilot and they sent me to, right off the bat to what’s the name of the place?
DC: Goderich.
AC: Goderich. Yeah. A little town on the Lake Huron and where there was a civil airport operating and there were volunteer instructors at that time. And there I soloed. Learned to fly an aeroplane. And then they sent me a couple of hundred miles away. Down to a place called Bradford which is also in Ontario. And they, they were flying Avro Ansons.
DK: Yeah.
AC: The very first order of Avro Ansons where you had to crank the undercarriage up and down by hand. And so I graduated from there as a pilot and I got to wear a pair of wings and I was a sergeant pilot.
DK: Did you, did you find learning to fly easy? Is it something that came naturally to you?
AC: Oh yes. It was very easy for me because I had spent most of my time outdoors. I was in the Boys Scouts.
DK: Right.
AC: And I did a lot of hiking and that kind of thing. And so they gave me a couple of weeks leave and then they sent me to England. Here I was, still just a little over eighteen by then I guess. And, and in England I went to Bournemouth where all the Canadians went.
DK: Just, just going back a bit how did you come over to England? Were you on one of the —
AC: On a ship. A boat.
DK: Right. Yeah.
AC: I forget the name of it. It was a — had normally been a freighter, I think.
DK: Oh right.
AC: And I was not too, not too — my memory is kind of clogged there with all the other things that are in it. But anyhow I went over by ship, you know. Evading the German submarines and so forth.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And eventually we ended up in Bournemouth. And in Bournemouth they sent me to, on more training. And I took three or four different courses on different kinds of aircraft. Getting larger, larger and larger from the smallest multi-engine aircraft to, to things like the DC3 and whatnot. And finally they put me on the Lincoln. Which was the brother of the Lancaster but it had different engines in it and it would only fly on one engine if one engine quit.
DK: Was that the Manchester?
AC: The Manchester. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
AC: They put me on the Manchester.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And nobody liked the Manchester because they knew that if one engine quit the other one wasn’t enough to keep it going.
DK: Right.
AC: So, anyway and then they graduated me up to the Lancaster.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And I spent several weeks or a month or two flying the Lancaster and then they sent me up to number 9 Squadron.
DK: What did, what did you think of the Lancaster as an aircraft? Was it —
AC: Oh, great. The Lancaster itself was a very good aircraft and it was as easy to fly as the Avro Anson or any of the other aircraft. It wasn’t very cosy inside like the American aircraft. The Americans had lots of nice cushions in their front seats [laughs] And all kinds of good lighting and whatnot. And the Lancaster was just basically the controls that you needed and the — that was, that was basically all there was. You had your rudders. And there was no, no engine activated controls, you know. Everything was done.
DK: Manually.
AC: By force of —
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
AC: Force of habit.
DK: Had you, had you joined up with your crew at this point?
AC: No. No.
DK: Oh. Right then.
AC: They sent me to number 9 Squadron. And then they had a [pause] I’ve been trying to — that’s a good question. I’m trying to remember where they had the — I think we had the crew selection before I got to 9 Squadron.
DK: Right.
AC: And then people would go around saying, ‘Look. I’m a navigator. Do you want a navigator?’
DK: Was that then —
AC: ‘I’m a rear gunner,’ and all that.
DK: Right.
AC: So, anyway that was supposed to be my selection but I didn’t know any of the other people involved. I just picked people who looked like nice fellows [laughs] and we ended up with a crew of seven or so.
DK: And was the rest of your crew, were they Canadian or were they British?
AC: They were a mixture. The flight engineer was Scottish.
DK: Right.
AC: Jock Martin his name was and —
DC: Paddy Hipson.
AC: Paddy Hipson was Irish. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And what else have I got? I had a couple of English guys. My wife’s got a better memory than I have. She, she, we’ve been married seventy years and she can still remember every bad thing I ever did [laughs]
DC: There was three Canadians besides you.
AC: Who, who were they? Three Canadian besides me eh?
DC: [unclear] The fellow that froze to death.
AC: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DC: And —
AC: That was my navigator.
DC: And then there was —
AC: That navigator was a Canadian and he was just —
DC: Claude Clemens.
AC: Claude Clemens was a Canadian. He was a rear gunner. Yeah.
DC: West Ontario.
AC: That’s right.
DK: Was that — I’ve got your crew here as yourself. Sergeant Martin.
AC: Martin. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
AC: That’s Scottish.
DC: Martin.
DK: Scottish. And what was he then?
AC: He was the flight engineer.
DK: Flight engineer. Galbraith. Galbraith.
AC: Galbraith. Yeah.
DC: He’s the one that froze to death.
AC: Yeah. Galbraith was the navigator. He was a Canadian.
DK: He was the navigator. Hipson?
AC: Harry Hipson was English.
DC: Irish.
DK: English. Irish?
AC: Scottish.
DK: He was Scottish.
AC: Scottish. And what was he then? The wireless operator?
AC: Hipson [pause] Oh, I know. He was the, not the — bombardier.
DK: Ah bombardier. Yeah. And then Sergeant Phillips.
AC: Sergeant Phillips.
DK: Yeah.
AC: Sergeant Phillips.
DC: Eddy Phillips.
AC: Eddy Phillips.
DC: The one that got a leg broken on the march.
AC: Yeah. That was Eddy Phillips was, I’m glad you’re here Dot to remind me of these things. Eddy Phillips was a part of our crew and he broke his leg after we landed.
DK: Right.
AC: And he moved about in different hospitals. I never saw him again.
DK: Oh right.
AC: But he didn’t die. He got home ok apparently.
DC: What did he do in the aircraft?
AC: Eddie Phillips was a mid-upper gunner.
DK: Air gunner.
AC: I think that’s what he was.
DK: And I’ve got Sergeant De Silva.
AC: De Silva. Yeah.
DC: English fellow.
AC: Oh. He was a mid-upper gunner. Yeah. Sergeant De Silva.
DC: De Silva. Yes.
AC: De Silva. And —
DC: His parachute didn’t open.
AC: And he was killed because his parachute didn’t open.
DK: Right.
AC: With him improperly loaded up into the aircraft, I guess.
DK: And then Sergeant Clemens, I think it says.
AC: Claude.
DC: Yes.
AC: Claude Clemens was the rear gunner. Yeah.
DK: He was the rear gunner. Ok.
AC: And he was a Canadian.
DK: Right. Ok.
AC: He just died a while ago.
DK: Ok.
AC: Big talker.
DC: Twelve years ago.
AC: I’m surprised that they’re still sending people out because I’m one of the youngest of the whole lot and I’m ninety four and Dorothy is ninety five. We’ve been married seventy years.
DK: Years. Well, congratulations.
AC: She remembers every year of it [laughs] Sometimes that’s not a good thing.
DK: Don’t ask me how long I’ve been married. Twenty two years. There you are.
AC: Twenty two years eh. Well, there you go.
Other: We’ve got a long way to go.
DK: [unclear]
AC: Anyway, so that’s, that’s how we got crewed up.
DK: Right. So, you were —
AC: As you know, that they normally the captain of the aircraft was normally commissioned and he was —
DK: Yeah.
AC: Started off as flying officer and then went to flight lieutenant and so forth. Well, on my first trip I was a sergeant pilot. I was the only pilot on board a Lancaster and I was only a sergeant. And there was no other, no other officers in the crew of course.
DK: Right.
AC: And they sent me on a couple of trips with other people just to see how I did and I would take the flight engineer’s spot because they only had one pilot in those aeroplanes. And then they put me on operations fairly shortly after that. And the first trip was fairly normal, I think.
DK: Can you remember where that was too?
AC: To, to Berlin.
DK: So, your first trip was to Berlin.
AC: And the second trip was to Berlin.
DK: Right.
AC: And then they stopped it. They lost so many aircraft that they stopped it for a while. They had aircraft going down all over the place. In fact when we were shot down we were about half way between [pause] what’s the name of that little town? I can’t remember now.
DC: Well, John took you on that trip.
AC: Yeah.
DC: To retrace your steps.
AC: Yeah. I’m just thinking yeah. But anyway, it was about half way between the [pause]
DC: Do you have any? You can look.
No. No. I don’t have any notes.
DC: Yeah.
AC: We weren’t supposed to take notes.
DC: We went to the wrong place when we were in Germany.
AC: Yeah. We went down to that town.
DC: You sat opposite.
AC: Where I got shot down.
DK: So, so this was the fourth operation then was it? You were shot down.
AC: Yeah.
DK: Can, can you say a little about what actually happened on that particular operation?
AC: Well, we were, we were at twenty thousand feet or so and a, and a barrage of flak came up around us and the next thing I noticed the navigator was pointing at the right hand engine. And the right hand engine was on fire and the fire was creeping towards the gas tanks. It still had a thousand gallons or more gasoline in them. So, I, I gave the order to bale out and so the rear gunner baled out, and the mid-upper gunner baled out and the mid-upper gunner’s parachute didn’t open as you know. The rear gunner, he only died a few years ago. And the rest of the crew all got out but my navigator who had recently been married and he was so anxious to get home he didn’t care what was wrong with the aeroplane. He kept saying, ‘You should go. Take — ’ such and such a course. And so we had a bit of an argument and I said, ‘If you don’t go out I’ll go out ahead of you because we’re going straight down.’ The aeroplane was on fire by then. And so he finally went out and I went out and that was it. And then I found myself in a tree and I [pause] that’s all in that book anyway, I think.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And I decided I’d walk towards Switzerland [laughs] which was a stupid idea. But I was walking pretty well all night and eventually I realised that I had two choices. Either give myself up or just hide in the woods until I froze to death. And I didn’t think that was a very good thing to do so I walked a little farther and I saw a farmhouse in the distance, down a side road. And I went down there and I knocked on the door of the farmhouse. Some woman opened a, opened a window up above and yelled something at me. And I just said, ‘It’s pretty cold out here. Let me in.’ [laughs] The next thing I know I hear is a crunching noise in the side driveway and this little old guy with a gun almost as big as himself came out, pointed it at me. And I said, ‘Don’t shoot.’ And then the wife came out and yelled something at him. And they decided to take me in. And I went into their living room and they had a Chesterfield about that size there and they told me to sit down there. And I sat down there and fell asleep. When I woke up again there was a great crowd of people wandering around and looking at me. And a little boy was looking at my arm here. It said Canada on it. He said, ‘Oh, Canada.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And then everybody sort of thought that I understood German. Which I didn’t. And eventually a car pulled up with a couple of Nazi soldiers in it and they made sure that I didn’t have a weapon on me. And then they put me on the car. They took me down to the town hall which was — oh it’s in that book there anyway.
DK: That’s all right. Christine, can you have a look through there and see if you can find out the town he parachuted into? Just see if you can find it.
AC: I was trying to think of the name. I had a beer there too. Not after I got shot down but after.
DK: Yeah. When you went back.
AC: When I went back with me wife.
DK: You didn’t get a beer the day you were shot down then.
DC: He went back with John.
DK: Yeah.
DC: Our son took Andy back.
Oh yeah. That’s right. You weren’t with me on that one were you?
DC: And John has a very very good memory [unclear]
CK: Was it Zerbst?
AC: Pardon?
CK: Zerbst Town Hall. Z E R B S T.
AC: Zerbst.
CK: Zerbst.
AC: Yeah. Z E R B S T. Zerbst.
DK: Yeah.
AC: We were quite close to there when we got shot down. And so, I was, I was kept in a private room with a young fellow with a gun sitting there. And finally he went out to get something to eat and he came back and said something to me and he offered me some food too. So, he gave me something to eat. I had a sandwich along with him. And then I stayed there for a day. And the next day a bunch of soldiers came in and marched me out into the parade square where they had a crowd of people around. And they were all looking at this strange guy that had just got shot down nearby. And from there we went to a Luftwaffe station where they put us all in cells and various people came in and interviewed us and whatnot. And they were fairly decent, you know about the whole thing. And after that they put us all together except for the dead people. They couldn’t find the navigator. They didn’t know where he was. And neither did I. I suspected he was hiding in the woods, you know. Which would be not a very smart thing to do in sub-zero temperatures. But so they eventually found him. He’s buried near Berlin right now.
DK: Right.
AC: And —
DK: So, he had frozen to death then.
AC: Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
AC: He just stayed out until he froze to death. It wasn’t a very smart thing to do either. But he was so much in love with this woman he’d just married that he figured he could get home. Sad eh? So, anyway that was, that was the beginning of my two years and three months in a POW camp. And they moved me to a place called Lamsdorf.
DK: Yeah.
AC: The rest of the crew was there and I spent the next [pause] And what did I do there? I figured I should do something useful so I escaped a couple of times and I got caught a couple of times. Let’s see. Three times I escaped, I think. Two. Must be. You’re right, Dot. Two times I escaped. Lucky I’ve got somebody to correct me. So, I escaped twice. I got caught twice. I spent time in three different prisons.
DK: ‘Cause reading your book what you seem to have done is exchange places with an army —
AC: Oh yeah.
DK: Was that how it was?
AC: Swapped over. Yeah. That was the, the theory that the people running the place you know. The RAF people decided that that was the way to go. We didn’t dig tunnels or anything like that. We swapped over. And I swapped over with a couple of different fellows.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And they went up into my barracks and wore my uniform. And I went down into their barracks and waited for my name to be called. My fake name. And then I got marched out with the rest of the people and —
DK: And the Germans never cottoned on to this then. That this was what was going on.
AC: Oh, I think they, they suspected. But I mean to them a POW was a POW. You know, they all looked the same.
DK: Yeah. Because I was very surprised when, when you were captured you were still that army person.
AC: That’s right.
DK: And even they took you back they still didn’t realise that you were —
AC: That’s right.
DK: Air Force.
AC: That’s right.
[background noise]
DK: Can, can I just stop?
[recording paused]
AC: I didn’t have much of a record as a bomber pilot.
DK: Yeah.
AC: I got shot down on my second trip really as captain. And it was all very sad. And after that I don’t remember anybody who ever flew a Lancaster who was below the rank of flying officer or flight lieutenant, you know. They automatically commissioned people to be captain of a huge aircraft like that. But anyway, that’s the basic. The rest of the story is in the book.
DK: I see with your second escape you were actually captured and held by the Gestapo.
AC: The Gestapo.
DK: It was the Gestapo?
AC: Yeah. We were, we were arrested [laughs] for eating lunch in a park. And you got —
DK: So, what was your plan of escape because you’re —
AC: We were going to Stettin and we were going to —
DK: Right.
AC: Get on to a Swedish ship to go to Sweden.
DK: Right.
AC: And that was, if I’d known more about it I would have gone to Denmark I guess because there they hated the Nazis.
DK: Yeah.
AC: They were driving people over to Sweden all the time.
DK: So, you’ve got false documentation now, presumably.
AC: Yeah.
DK: And you’re taking the part of, of foreign workers.
AC: That’s right.
DK: Is that the idea?
AC: That’s right. And they didn’t, nobody knew we weren’t foreign workers. We didn’t tell anybody.
DK: Yeah.
AC: The thing about the Gestapo was that they were just a mean bunch. I think they had to be mean to be selected. Our own guards were nice people, you know. Basically —
DK: Yeah.
AC: And some of the people, some of the Germans we met like you may remember a part where we had just got to Czechoslovakia and we were being taken back to our camp by a guard and he was quite friendly. And he, and he spoke to the other fellow a lot because the other fellow spoke German. You know. Had been a prisoner since Dunkirk. And any time an official looking German walked by, you know he’d change his story and be talking about something else. And, but he asked why we took a freight train. Because when we took a friend train all the way to, you know from where we jumped. Where we escaped the working party.
DK: Yeah.
AC: We jumped on a freight train. And I was pretty good at that because I used to do that as a kid. I had, when I went to high school you know. We went out to the freight yards. We’d jump on a freight train and go —
DK: Yeah.
AC: For a couple of miles and then jump off again. But anyway, so we came down in a freight train because we jumped on it. We were at a slight slope uphill and the freight train was going at a fairly slow rate, you know. And we’d run along beside it and jump on. And the guard said, ‘Well, why didn’t you jump on an ordinary train?’ And my friend who spoke German said, ‘Yeah. We, we took a freight train because the ordinary trains have got all these Gestapo people on them.’ And they, they said, ‘Oh, that’s, that’s not true,’ he said, ‘Most of our trains are full of people. Workers.’
DK: So the German guard was giving you advice on how to escape.
AC: Yeah. So, the German, the German guard was telling us how we, so, he said, ‘The next time you escape you should go on a passenger train.’ You know, this is a German guard.
DK: Yeah.
AC: Yet the Gestapo guys they were really mean. If you put your head out of line to look down you get hit on the back of the head with a rifle butt. You know. They just amused themselves and they’d take the women in there and march them around. Make them sing patriotic songs. And then they would take the men down there, march them around and make them go on their hands and knees. You know. Just —
DK: So, how long were you held by the Gestapo then?
AC: Oh, a couple of weeks.
DK: A couple of weeks.
AC: I think it was. I think it was more than a week anyway. Two weeks.
DK: Right.
AC: And, and then a guard came and rescued us you might say. He —
DK: So, had you, had you been trying to explain to the Gestapo that you were escaped prisoners then? Prisoners of War.
AC: Oh yeah. They — but they didn’t bother them.
DK: No.
AC: They, they didn’t give any particular respect to Prisoners of War or anybody else. But anyway the, the guard who came down who was very nice. As a matter of fact, on our way out the main, the main part of the prison I mentioned to the guard that they had taken my watch away from me. I had a Rolex Oyster. And that’s about a two thousand dollar watch, you know. And he said, ‘Oh. Ok.’ So, he went to the fellow on the desk and he started yelling at him in German and telling give me back my watch. The guy opened the drawer.
DK: Wow.
AC: And gave me back my watch.
DK: Wow.
AC: So there was, there was a guard. An ordinary, an ordinary soldier giving the Gestapo a hard time. And we had to give him advice on how to get back the best way because he didn’t know the railroads as well as we did.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And so we went back there. That was my last attempt at escape. And then after that I got back. And nobody ever caught us in the form of our, nobody ever proved it or even suspected that we had changed identities a couple of times.
DK: So you went back to the camp then as this army person.
AC: That’s right.
DK: And then you swapped over again.
AC: I swapped over again. I re-swapped over and I —
DK: I’m just amazed that the Germans never quite cottoned on to this.
AC: So am I but the like I said the average guard there would be a postman or something who would just as soon be a guard in a prison camp then fight the Russians. You know, the Russians were really mean. They were even meaner than the Germans. They still are I think but —
CK: Can I just ask which camp this was? Was this Stalag 8?
AC: Stalag 8B. And then they changed the name to 344, nearer the end for some reason.
CK: You mentioned in your book about a couple of coincidences. You met a couple of chums from Canada or something.
AC: Oh yeah. That’s right. I met a, I met a couple of chums who had gone to the same high school that I went to.
DC: When you first went in the camp.
AC: When I first went in the camp. Yeah. That was my first visit to the camp where they unloaded the train and then they marched us all down to the camp. And a couple of these fellows actually met us and said, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’ I said, ‘Same thing as you. What are you doing here?’ That camp had a maximum capacity of about twenty five thousand. There were a lot of people there. So, and you can imagine the guard’s problem.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
AC: You know. Keeping track of all these people. In fact they had a compound which, where they supposedly punished people who were trying to escape and what not. I’m trying to think of the name of the compound. Anyway, it’s in, it’s in my book. And, and we never saw the inside of that but we heard about it, you know. If you were caught climbing a fence or trying to beat up a guard or something then you go in to that camp and get punished. So, anyway that was my, my whole period there. And then the, the end came when the Russians were so close you could hear the guns firing and they decided to take us off out of the camp and they tipped the whole Air Force compound at once. They marched us out about 3 o’clock in the morning and we were going west on the, on the side roads. And we were sleeping in barns and so forth.
DK: Had you been expected to be evacuated as the Russians advanced?
AC: Well, we didn’t know. Nobody told us everything. And they decided they were going to take it because having a bunch of prisoners in fairly good condition was a good thing to do when the British were obviously winning the war.
DK: Yeah.
AC: I think most Germans knew that the war was pretty well lost by then. And they marched us all the way there. And the most interesting place we stopped at a train pulled over, stopped because there was going to be an air raid. And the name of the place was Halberstadt, which means half a town. Halbe is half and stadt is town. And the RAF came and bombed the place. Shot up the place quite, and some of our own people were killed there which was fairly normal for wartime you know.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And they and so the next morning they gathered up, they buried the people that were killed and they put the rest —
DK: So, you’ve been both. You’ve been both dropping bombs and on the receiving end of them.
AC: Oh yeah. That’s right. I was on the receiving end.
DK: Right.
AC: And so they put us back into another train and they took us all the way to West Germany. And, and in West Germany we were in a camp that had just been evacuated. They had taken a bunch of officers and people out of there that they wanted us to hang on to and they put us in the camp. And then we were in that camp when what was his name? Not Montgomery. Montgomery. Yeah. Montgomery and his army came by that area.
DK: Right.
AC: And they, they released us. I was quite disappointed because I met a couple of British soldiers that were telling us where we could go to steal things from houses. You know. How you can loot houses. They’d just walk into a place with the guns and start to look around.
DK: Really?
AC: And take stuff off the mantelpiece and whatever.
DK: And this is, this is —
AC: I was quite disappointed with that, you know.
DK: Yeah.
AC: After the way we had been treated. But you’ve got to remember we also knew that the Poles and the Jews and the Russians and a few other people like that were treated really terribly by the Germans.
DK: Yeah.
AC: The Germans. I guess we were the best treated, treated of the lot because we were connected with the Red Cross.
DK: Yeah.
AC: And you know what Germans are like. They go by the book and the book said the Red Cross was in charge of us. And so the Germans —
DK: So, just going back a bit to your time in the camp would you say you were fairly well treated then?
AC: Yes. I think we were fairly well treated and any, anybody who wrote a book saying we weren’t well treated I think they were probably stretching the truth a little bit.
DK: Do you think the Red Cross parcels made a big difference then?
AC: Oh yeah. They made a big difference because we would get an average of maybe one, one or two Red Cross parcels a month and one Red Cross parcel particularly the Canadian ones were full of butter and jam and all kinds of things that you didn’t get. Because our normal food, God only knows what was in but you know, dead horses and whatever. And that is why I’m so old, I think. I’ve eaten so much crappy stuff. I’m, I just had my eighty fourth birthday and Dorothy —
DC: Eighty fourth? Ninety.
AC: Oh, ninety fourth. Yeah.
DK: Ninety fourth. Yeah.
AC: Ninety fourth. Yeah. And Dorothy’s birthday is coming up. Her ninety fifth is coming up at the end of next month.
DC: Ninety six.
AC: Yeah. She’s going to be, she’s going to be ninety six. Well, she’s got a much better, better memory than I have. So, I didn’t meet Dorothy until after the war.
DK: Right.
AC: And she was working for a big oil company. Imperial Oil. And she was, had a pretty good job too. I didn’t marry her for her money of course but —
DC: Oh yes you did.
AC: So, but anyway and I was a starving student, you know. I had to go back to school and get my grade thirteen. And then I went to university and I got admitted in to university as an architectural student. And in the second year I realised that this would be a pretty boring occupation doing stairways and tall buildings and things like that after what I’d been through. So, on top of that I didn’t have a job or anything and didn’t have any money. Dorothy had some money. But anyway we got married and, and I re-joined the Air Force. Did I join the Air Force after we got married?
DC: [unclear]
AC: Yeah. And I re-joined the Air Force and that was about — 1945.
DC: 1949.
AC: ’49. Yeah. And I was in the Air Force for the next twenty odd years. And then I was too young to start over again then so I went to Transport Canada. And in the same capacity as a pilot.
DK: Right.
AC: And doing safety work. And my job there was to look after the safety programmes in the Province.
DK: Oh right.
AC: I was the head safety officer. Anyway, so, and that’s, so I’ve been a pilot all my life. From, from age nineteen to, to now.
DK: And could I just take you back a bit? When Montgomery’s armies turned up and you’d been liberated how did you then get back to England from there? Or Canada really?
AC: Well, actually they took us by truck down to the nearest airport and then they flew us back in Dakotas, you know.
DK: Right.
AC: You know what a Dakota looks like. And there they sorted us all out and like an idiot I said I want to go back to Canada when I should have stayed and looked around England a bit first. But anyway, so I went back to Canada pretty well —
DK: Right.
AC: Shortly after. Before the war was even over. And that was the end of, that was the end of my military experience. And I got a, I got a private pilots or a commercial pilot’s licence and I got an instructor’s job at the local airport.
DK: Right.
AC: Then I joined the Air Force, and —
DK: So, what were you flying between 1949 and the twenty years you were back in the Air Force.
AC: Well, they didn’t put me on Lancasters. They put me on Cansos.
DK: Right.
AC: I was flying Cansos and, and the first year I was flying as a co-pilot with another chap whose name was [pause] I can’t think of it right now. But he’s probably dead anyway. But anyway he was flying all over the Arctic and looking for the North Magnetic Pole and this and that.
DC: The [unclear] Magnetic Pole.
AC: Do you remember his name, Dot?
DC: Just a minute. [pause] I have to think about it for a minute.
AC: Yeah. Anyway, anyway, so his job was, you know relocating the North Magnetic Pole and a few things like that. And the following, the following year they decided to make me a captain so they moved me to Vancouver.
DK: Right.
AC: Where I took a course on the Canso. I thought I was going to be flying the Lancaster but no I went on to the Canso and I must have done fairly well on that because when I came back I was a captain on a Canso for the next couple of years. And then after that just to make things different they moved me on to Cansos in Vancouver. And I spent another five or how many years were we in Vancouver.
DC: Seven years.
AC: Seven years in Vancouver. There you go.
DK: Yeah.
AC: So, I was seven years in Vancouver. And most of our work was rescue work, you know.
DK: Yeah.
AC: Locating crashed aeroplanes and things like that and that’s where I got that medal from the Queen there.
DK: Oh right.
AC: See the picture of me and the Queen.
DK: Yeah. Oh yeah.
AC: I sent her a picture. I sent her a letter asking her if she would sign the picture. She said —
DC: Oh no.
AC: She said, I got a letter back from her assistant saying sorry but we can’t do things like that. You can imagine the problem we’d have writing to everybody who wanted our signature. So, she said, “I appreciate your enquiry,” and so forth and so on. It was the same as the Air Force Cross except it was a peacetime medal.
DK: Oh right.
AC: And it was for rescuing a guy who was having a, some kind of a heart attack in his head out on a weather ship. You know.
DK: Oh right.
AC: In those days they had weather ships way out.
DK: Yeah. Yeah.
AC: In the middle of the ocean. And so I went out there and landed close by and they brought this sick guy over on a life boat and loaded him into the back of the aeroplane where there was a couple of nurses there. And then this guy was loaded in to the aircraft I’d got to take off in fairly rough water. But I had put two JATO bottles in the aeroplane.
DK: Right.
AC: One on each side. And do you know what a JATO bottle is?
DK: Is it a —
AC: It’s a rocket.
DK: Jet Assisted Take Off
AC: And it lasts for two or three minutes and so we managed to get off at about the second bounce. We got off and stayed in the air and flew this guy to Victoria where he was sent to a hospital and apparently lived to tell about it. So, anyway that was one of the more spectacular ones I did but I did lots of picking guys out of the water and flying them home and things like that. So, that was my job in Vancouver. And then they sent me to Toronto. A staff college again wasn’t it?
DC: You went to Goose Bay, Labrador first.
AC: Oh yeah. I went to Goose Bay, Labrador as a chief operations officer there. I was a squadron leader by then. And then I was told that there were so many people due for promotion that they were going to have to pass me over and start promoting some younger people otherwise everybody would be retiring at about the same time. Which was fair enough. So, I never got any higher than squadron leader.
DK: Yeah.
AC: But it was a pretty good job anyway doing that.
DK: So, so you never flew the Lancaster again post war.
AC: Oh, I flew the Lancaster again in Vancouver.
DK: Oh.
AC: Having been a Lancaster pilot they chose me to check people out in the Lancaster.
DK: Oh right.
AC: And so, I checked quite a few people out in the Lancaster. I flew a few tours myself looking for various crashed aircraft and whatnot.
DK: You didn’t, you didn’t fly the one that’s still flying did you?
AC: No. I didn’t.
DK: No.
AC: I didn’t fly that but no, I’m, I’m listed as a Canso pilot. I got thousands of hours in a Canso. And my son, one of my sons started a business which he called Canso. And he’s got the whole, and it’s doing pretty well.
DK: Yeah.
AC: So, and he’s got his whole office full of Canso pictures and parts and things like that. So, it’s quite flattering to see.
DK: Yeah.
AC: All these Canso things are out. So, anyway that’s my story. It’s not much of a story.
DK: Oh, it’s a great story. Just going, looking back now after all these years. How do you feel about your time, you know in the Air Force during the war and particularly as a POW? How do you look back on that now? Your feelings.
AC: Well, considering the fact that my father and mother both died in their 60s. My older brother died many years ago and he was a couple of years older than I was. My younger sister, who was quite a few years younger than me died just last year. I figure, and I may be wrong but I figure that the bad food that I got used to in the camp and the good treatment I got, pretty well, you know went together and made me sort of, I’m still, despite what my wife may think I’m still fairly healthy.
DC: I watch his diet.
AC: Just, my recent call to the doctor, he said, ‘You’re very slightly on the diabetic line.’
DK: Right. Yeah.
AC: And so I —
DK: So, you think it —
AC: I told Dot this and now she gives me hell every time I have a cup of sugar.
DK: So, you think it made you a stronger person. Is that what you’re saying?
DC: Yes.
AC: Yes. I think —
DK: Yeah.
AC: I think it, I think it made me stronger. The fact that, you know, some of the people like my rear gunner Claude Clemens he never went outside the camp once, you know. He just sat there and played bridge and played cards and had a good time and then got released. And I and a number of other people thought that we should be doing something useful like trying to escape.
DK: Did you see it as your duty then to escape?
AC: I thought so. Yeah.
DK: Yeah.
AC: So, I mean I was a young fellow I’d believe anything in those days. But —
DK: Was it partly then to stop the boredom? You know. That you were doing something. This was —
AC: I was doing something yeah. And I was hoping to get to, to get out, you know. Actually have a successful escape. And they never did send the escapers back on operations. They used to send them back to Canada or someplace.
DK: Right.
AC: So they could propagandise the other people. So anyway, that was my reason for trying to escape but I think that it actually did me some good because I can eat almost any kind of food. Can’t I Dot?
DC: Yes. You don’t like certain kinds of green vegetables.
AC: So, anyway that’s, that’s my story.
DK: Ok.
CK: Did you keep in touch with some of your crew?
AC: They’re all dead.
CK: After the war.
CK: Ah.
DC: Well, we did keep in touch with them.
AC: We kept in touch with them. Yeah.
DC: But there’s none of them left.
AC: Claude Clemens was one of them.
DC: And Mac.
AC: And, yeah.
DC: And John Marchant, he’s dead.
AC: Yeah. They’re all dead now.
DC: And —
AC: And I’ll probably be dead in a couple of years. That’s why I wondered about you guys waiting ‘til, waiting so long to do this. There’s all kinds of —
DK: It’s taken a while. Yeah.
DC: De Silva’s grandson keeps in touch with us. Michael de Silva. His father got killed at [unclear]
AC: Who are you talking about?
DC: De Silva’s. You know the —
AC: Oh, the son of the fellow.
DC: That was the grandson.
AC: The grandson. Yeah.
DK: So, that’s de Silva’s grandson is still in touch with you.
AC: Can I make a cup of tea?
DK: Oh, I’d love one, I think. What I’ll do is —
AC: Let me make the tea, Dot. You just sit down.
DK: What I’ll do is I’ll just stop this now.
AC: Yeah.
DK: But thanks very much for that. That’s been —
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Andrew Carswell
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Kavanagh
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-06-14
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ACarswellA170614, PCarswellA1702
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:44:31 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Poland
England--Lincolnshire
Poland--Łambinowice
Germany--Berlin
Description
An account of the resource
Andrew Carswell volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force in his native Toronto. He trained as a pilot and on arrival in the UK and completion of his further training he was posted to 9 Squadron. His first operation was to Berlin. On their final operation they were attacked by a night fighter and in the subsequent departure from the aircraft one member of the crew broke his leg, one crew member’s parachute didn’t open and another had resisted all prompts to leave the aircraft. Andy was taken as a Prisoner of War and was sent to Stalag 8B which he escaped from twice before being recaptured.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
9 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
bombing
escaping
final resting place
Lancaster
Manchester
navigator
pilot
prisoner of war
Red Cross
shot down
Stalag 8B