2
25
297
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1446/PBanksP15010035.2.jpg
b4fb8645ef5c64d56f4397931b852b86
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Hamilcar gliders near Wesel
Germany Hamilcar gliders near Wesel
Description
An account of the resource
Aerial inclined photograph showing open countryside with fields, woods and occasional buildings. In the bottom left is a field containing a large number of gliders gathered and parked close together in a corner at the far end. There are a number of prominent tire tracks at the near end of this field and a wood with four buildings beyond it. Captioned 'Germany "Hamilcar" Gliders Nr Wesel'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010035
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending geolocation
aerial photograph
Cook’s tour
Hamilcar
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1447/PBanksP15010036.2.jpg
226f7fbd7d785fd1df742a87117bb85c
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Flooded area around Walcheren
Description
An account of the resource
Aerial inclined photograph showing snow covered flat open countryside with a few marked field boundaries. In the foreground on the left part of a fenced field with a few boundary trees. In the distance more wooded countryside. Captioned 'Flooded area around Walcheren after sea walls had been breeched [sic]'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010036
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.
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Netherlands--Walcheren
Netherlands
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1448/PBanksP15010037.2.jpg
e9cb69f890122d9eca871dfe67ff1905
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Flooded areas around Walcheren
Description
An account of the resource
Aerial inclined photograph showing flooded fields with some boundary hedges and isolated buildings in the foreground. In the middle is a village orientated left to right across the scene. At the left end is a church surrounded by houses. In the background more open countryside with wooded areas on the horizon. Captioned 'Flooded areas around Walcheren after the sea walls had been breeched [sic]'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010037
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Netherlands--Walcheren
Netherlands
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1449/PBanksP15010038.1.jpg
f9b8ac9e7f497f1181ff44f4b6e94ef5
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Flooded areas around Walcheren
Description
An account of the resource
Aerial inclined photograph showing flooded farmland. In the foreground a farmhouse with hedge lined fields/orchards to the right. A flooded road runs from bottom left towards the middle when it bends back towards the top left. Along the road are scattered farms with small woods and fields. Either side of the road are flooded fields. Captioned 'Flooded areas around Walcheren after the sea walls had been breeched [sic]'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph mounted on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010038
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.
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Netherlands--Walcheren
Netherlands
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1452/PBanksP15010041.1.jpg
71b2090da9507937b220176ce380b6e1
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Holland Flushing
Description
An account of the resource
Aerial inclined photograph showing flat flooded land in the foreground and a coastal town in the distance. On the left side a inlet open into open sea. A river runs from middle right side towards the sea on the left. Beyond the river is a town on a spit of land with more sea beyond. In the middle foreground the open fields have a number of unidentified thin vertical objects. Captioned 'Holland Flushing on the Isle of Walcheren'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010041
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.
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Netherlands--Vlissingen
Netherlands
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1453/PBanksP15010042.1.jpg
bda68c17f98b94f8e7c91eb0f6eb4ecd
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Essen
Description
An account of the resource
On the left an aerial inclined photograph showing a city landscape with many multistory buildings. In the foreground several scattered damaged multistory buildings surrounded by rubble. In the centre buildings are more contiguous and intact but several roofs show damage. On the right side half way up is a church and in the distance on the right a railway marshalling yard. In the distance on the left are three chimneys and associated factory. Captioned 'Essen'.
On the right an aerial inclined photograph showing a railway line running up to a marshalling yard in the centre. To the left are destroyed buildings and rubble and to the right long factory buildings with damaged roofs. In the distance city buildings and just beyond the marshalling yard a factory chimney. Captioned 'Essen'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two b/w photograph mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010042
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany--Essen
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Geolocated (cumulative polygon)
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1454/PBanksP15010043.2.jpg
4f2b1057c1ab48c297e4ee9ec3f18263
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Cologne and Essen
Description
An account of the resource
On the left an aerial inclined photograph looking north showing a city with a river on the right. In the centre Cologne Cathedral with the railway station just beyond. In the foreground several damaged multistory buildings and areas of rubble. In the centre on the right a span of a bridge with the right end fallen into the water. Captioned 'Cologne'.
On the right an aerial inclined photograph showing the industrial area of a city. In the foreground an area of rubble with a few damaged buildings and bomb craters. Beyond this are two large factory complexes with damaged buildings. In the distance more indistinct industrial and city buildings. Captioned 'Essen'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two b/w photograph mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010043
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--Cologne
Germany--Essen
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Geolocated (cumulative polygon)
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1455/PBanksP15010044.1.jpg
9ee369a460dfec76d082e140c8dc4cf1
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Cologne
Description
An account of the resource
On the left an aerial inclined photograph showing a wide river flowing right to left through the centre of a city of Cologne, In the centre the Hohenzollern railway bridge with the centre spans collapsed into the river. On the far side the railway station and Cologne Cathedral. In the foreground multistory buildings with some signs of damage. Captioned 'Cologne'.
On the right an aerial inclined photograph showing Cologne city with the cathedral in the centre. To the left of the cathedral is the railway station and beyond it the Hohenzollern railway bridge with the centre sections collapsed into the river. To the right is another destroyed bridge with a temporary bridge just beyond it. Captioned 'Cologne'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two b/w photograph mounted on an album page
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--Cologne
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Geolocated (cumulative polygon)
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010044
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1456/PBanksP15010045.2.jpg
c7559f8147da1cb78ec84863d0a8cf7e
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Düren and Duisburg
Description
An account of the resource
On the left an aerial inclined photograph showing a destroyed city area. In the foreground a long thin body of water is surrounded by destroyed and damaged buildings. In the centre buildings have almost completed been reduced to rubble with just a few standing walls. Captioned 'Duren'.
On the right an aerial inclined photograph showing a river running from centre left to right. On the left side two bridges, an intact narrow long low bridge and an iron girder bridge which has collapsed into the river. To the right a further bridge with the far bank section lying in the river and the near bank part totally missing. At the far right possibly a very narrow temporary bridge. In the foreground on the left a factory complex on the river banks with town buildings in front. Captioned 'Duisburg'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two b/w photograph mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010045
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--Düren (Cologne)
Germany--Duisburg
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Geolocated
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1458/PBanksP15010046.2.jpg
f494f8b2deaf62d8ce3d5438cfb5544b
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Wesel
Description
An account of the resource
On the left an aerial inclined photograph of a badly damaged town. The the foreground a open area with few standing buildings, large areas of rubble and occasional bomb craters. In the bottom right quadrant a road circles a small wooded area. There are a number of vehicles on the road. In the centre a tower stands amidst badly damaged buildings. In the distance open countryside. Captioned 'Wesel'.
On the right an aerial inclined photograph of a badly damaged town. At the bottom left a damaged two story building stands alone. To its right open ground with areas of rubble. In the centre the main part of the town has a few standing buildings but is mostly rubble. Beyond the town is open countryside. Captioned 'Wesel'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Tow b/w photographs mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010046
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Geolocated
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1459/PBanksP15010047.1.jpg
94df2b4822aee9cc15b42eb5fbb89105
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Hamburg
Description
An account of the resource
On the left an aerial inclined photograph of a city on two sides of a river. The river flows from centre right to left with three inlets leading to two waterways on the far side. The whole land area is covered with buildings with some in the foreground showing signs of damage. Just left of centre at the bottom is the top of a tower. Captioned 'Hamburg'.
On the right an aerial inclined photograph of two waterways leading to a river with industrial buildings in the foreground and a city on the far bank. Buildings in the foreground are badly damaged. A road running parallel to the left waterway has a few vehicles on it. On the far bank, four towers/church spires, one in the centre and three to the right stand above the city buildings. There are some large metal structures on the nearside of the river. Captioned 'Hamburg'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two b/w photographs mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010047
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--Hamburg
Germany
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Geolocated (cumulative polygon)
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1460/PBanksP15010048.2.jpg
c0eb7dd69b43a2e6e47c9ef45b1ec632
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Hamburg and Bremen
Description
An account of the resource
On the left an aerial inclined photograph of a river with city on the far bank. At the bottom two waterways divided by a split of land lead up to a river which runs left to right. There are long low buildings on the spit of land. On the far bank to the right are some industrial buildings with a tower and chimneys. To the left a waterway runs parallel to the river terminating in the centre. Beyond the waterway is a city with three prominent church spires. In the distance is an area of water. Captioned 'Hamburg'.
On the right an aerial inclined photograph of a river running from bottom to top with town on both sides. The river is divided into two by a narrow strip of partially submerged land before separating into two branches in the middle of the photograph. In the centre a bridge crosses both branches with the left hand side collapsed into the river. Further up the left branch is another bridge with the centre section missing. On the left bank at the bottom is a church with a damaged roof. Many city buildings line the left bank. There are further built up areas on the right bank and between the two river branches. In the distance open countryside. Captioned 'Bremen'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two b/w photographs mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010048
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--Hamburg
Germany--Bremen
Germany
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1461/PBanksP15010049.1.jpg
267624f3186ce29942b76af51620a4ad
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Bremen
Description
An account of the resource
On the left an aerial inclined photograph of a city on the left bank of a river. At the bottom left a park with trees and lakes. To the right of the park a road curves around a large built up area with a twin spire church at its centre. There is a convoy of vehicles on this road adjacent to the park. Buildings on the far side of the road appear damaged. A river curves around the far side of the built up area with some built up areas and open countryside beyond. Captioned 'Bremen'.
On the right an aerial inclined photograph of a town with damaged buildings. In the bottom left roads in a grid pattern are lined with multistory buildings, some missing roofs or showing other signs of damage. In the centre a large white square building. A railway runs from centre right towards top left. A prominent road runs from bottom/middle right, parallel to railway before curving and passing under the railway. Beyond the railway line are further built up areas and open countryside. Captioned 'Bremen'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two b/w photographs mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010049
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--Bremen
Germany
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Geolocated (cumulative polygon)
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1462/PBanksP15010050.2.jpg
f5e4efcc9b8546144ca4b72a27cdfe4c
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Hanover
Description
An account of the resource
On the left an oblique aerial photograph of a city. In the foreground many multistory buildings some showing signs of damage or missing roofs and a a few having been reduced to rubble. On the right a railway runs along the side with a multi-platform station half way up. This is Hannover Central Station. On the left side just over half way up is a large municipal building, the Staatsoper Hannover with a prominent road running to the top of the photograph from its right. In the far distance open countryside and a small section of the River Leine. Captioned 'Hanover'.
On the right an oblique aerial photograph showing a very badly damaged city. In the foreground most of the buildings have been reduced to rubble with just a few standing badly damaged on the right. In the middle left a church, the Marktkirche Hannover with several damaged multistory buildings to its left. Beyond the church are more city buildings with another church towards the top right. In the distance open countryside, the Georgengarten and straight avenue running through it. Captioned 'Hanover'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two b/w photographs mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010050
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Germany--Hannover
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Stuart Cummins
aerial photograph
bombing
Cook’s tour
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/141/1464/PBanksP15010051.2.jpg
832911a9bc3c280a436150c917f4bbc5
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
Banks, Peter. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
134 items. The album contains pictures taken at RAF Methwold and Feltwell, Battles in France as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force in 1940, 2 Group target photographs, and Venturas and Photographic Reconnaissance Unit Spitfires. There are also a number of aerial photographs of cities and targets in the Ruhr and the Low countries taken at low level during a sightseeing Cooks tour after VE Day. <br /><br />Return to the <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/140">main collection</a>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP1501
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
Kassel and a Bridge near Coblenz
Description
An account of the resource
On the left an oblique aerial photograph of the River Rhine with a destroyed steel girder bridge with both spans collapsed into the river. This is the Raiffeisen road bridge. The Rhine which is running left to right, is split at this point into two channels. The spit of land runs from mid left to bottom right. On the far bank are a few buildings including a factory with a chimney. On the near bank, level with the end of the spit is a colonnaded tower, the Pegelturm. In the middle distance are some small built up areas beyond which is open countryside. Electricity pylons run from right to left three quarters way up. Captioned 'Bridge near Coblenz'.
On the right an oblique aerial photograph of a badly damaged town on a river, This is Kassel looking east, with the River Fulda zigzaging from middle left toward the bottom right. On the nearside buildings have mostly been reduced to rubble with just some standing walls. On the right is part of a multistory building. A road runs from bottom centre up through a roundabout to the river where the road bridge has totally disappeared. This is the Fuldabrucke bridge. Towards the left end of the river is a weir, the Staustufe Kassel, and lock with another intact bow string girder bridge beyond, the Ysenburgstrasse. On the far bank are more blocks of destroyed buildings and industrial areas. Beyond is open countryside with a few built up areas including various chimneys towards the top. Captioned 'Kassel'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Tow b/w photographs mounted on an album page
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBanksP15010051
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany--Koblenz
Germany--Kassel
Germany
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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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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Photograph
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Geolocated
Language
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eng
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Stuart Cummins
aerial photograph
bombing
bombing of Kassel (22/23 October 1943)
Cook’s tour
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/147/1566/PColeC1601.1.jpg
1bf8921fe4149a2ba534e67eb3ce33db
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/147/1566/AColeC150727.2.mp3
dc94a957b0efc83699d429a24c84684d
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Title
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Cole, Colin
C Cole
Colin Cole
Description
An account of the resource
31 items. The collection relates to Warrant Officer Colin Cole (1924 – 2015 RAF Volunteer Reserve 1605385) who served with 617 Squadron. The collection contains two oral history interviews his, logbook, service documents, medals, memorabilia from the Tirpitz and six photographs.
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. Six items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties or to comply with intellectual property regulations. 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
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2016-01-27
2015-07-27
Identifier
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Cole, C
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
NM: This is Nigel Moore interviewing Colin Cole on the 27th of July. So, we’re at Colin’s address in, in -
Other: Willan House in Stainfield.
NM: Thank you very much. And Colin’s starting to look through a box of his, his photographs and other, other documents.
CC: Yes I’m just trying, I remember, I remember showing these you know
Other: ‘Cause there’s all sorts of
CC: Probably one of the oldest ones at Willan (?) and, yes.
Other: Take it out of the box Colin.
CC: Sorry?
Other: We’ll take out of this box the ones that are pertaining to the Lancaster like that one which is obviously a picture of you with it. Ok?
NM: So what we’ll do, in the end is I’ll inform the people at the Bomber Command Centre that all this documentation is available and if they want to scan it
Other: Yeah.
NM: They will contact Colin separately.
Other: Right.
NM: And they’ll be informed and we’ll get them to contact Colin directly.
Inaudible
NM: Is Colin’s logbook in there?
Other: No it’s in the safe.
NM: OK. It’s a very valuable document.
Other: That’s you with some twins. You carry on and I’ll have a quick look through and grab the ones
NM: Well no it’s going to make a noise and it’ll catch on the
Other: Oh right
NM: We need to sort of try and catch pure form of Colin’s voice. So what I suggest is that we conduct the interview.
Other: Do you want me to look through this at a separate time then?
NM: Yeah I think so.
Other: I think
NM: That might be better yes. I would, sort of trying to do it at random right now. ‘Cause what we’re trying to get is, is mostly Colin’s voice.
Other: Right.
NM: These, these recordings I know are very sensitive. We practice with them and you can pick up.
Other: In that case Colin we’ll go through these later on.
CC: Oh righto, yes. Ok.
Other: And I shall disappear.
NM: I wouldn’t mind looking at Colin’s logbook later if that’s alright.
Other: Right.
NM: But we’ll
Other: And we’ve got his medals and things like that as well.
NM: Yes I’d like to look at those as well, absolutely. I appreciate your help.
Other: I’ll leave that lot down there.
CC: Yeah ok.
NM: Right, so you’ve had lunch haven’t you Colin? Everything’s
Other: Yeah.
NM: Ready to
Other: Just waiting for the beach party this afternoon.
NM: Alright, thanks very much for your help.
Other: See you later. Call If you want anything, just press the yellow button.
NM: Ok. Oh right, fine, brilliant. Thank you very much indeed.
So, hello again Colin and thank you for seeing me again. Can you hear me all right?
CC: Just yeah.
NM: Ok I’ll speak up. What I’d, what I’d like to do
CC: Yes that’s better
NM: You’re ok with that? What I’d like to do Colin is, is ask you a series of very simple questions and you can just talk to me about your life, your experiences and just, just as, as you remember it. Is that alright? Are you happy to do that?
CC: Yes, if I can go back far enough [laughs].
NM: Well if you can brilliant. Ok, well, we’ll just, as it comes alright.
CC: Yes.
NM: So, so tell me a bit about your very early life up to the age of eighteen.
CC: Ahum.
NM: So what about your upbringing and childhood?
CC: Right. Let’s think now. What’s
[Pause]
CC: My upbringing and childhood as a, sort of, very young days, from what I can remember, this is going back, getting a bit old now isn’t it? It’s, yes what can I, what I can remember of it is that my father worked for WH Smith and Sons and which meant that we were, we were all up and running and the irons going and everything else. He had a pretty good job so it was that year and subsequent years, I mean we weren’t rich but I was quite well off you know. We had a comfortable childhood. And when I say an early life I mean, it’s life. We had breakfast at about seven o’clock in the morning you know because of his work, you know. He used to go and we had contacts with the railway which I suppose would be the, the most sort of idea of the, of my childhood you know.
So I had an interest in railways and all that sort of thing going, going to that. And childhood in those days, which in those days, was you know I had a good childhood. Sort of well brought up and, you know, tried to bring you up one thing and another and from that point of view, you know, it was a long time ago you see because I’m now what past my 101th birthday which, and you’re talking about an awful long time ago and the sort memories that, you know that, I did have memories of early train life ‘cause we went around various stations where he was manager and all that sort of thing and I wasn’t concerned with newspapers they were dull and mystery things. So, and had a jolly good time sort of looking at railways how they were formed and you know what they provided and all that sort of thing. I suppose that really was the early, it was not particularly connected with the RAF at all you know, sort of that was something which came along later I suppose you could say
NM: What about school days?
CC: Sorry
NM: What about school days? Your schooling?
CC: Schooling. I, I was at Twickenham. My dad was so, ‘cause I was as well cause we moved around various counties you know sort of and places and that but, yeah Twickenham was school time. Yes it was. I was more or less brought up in Twickenham so yeah it was just an ordinary sort of classroom membership at the time I suppose. Can’t think of anything else that I thought that was different from anybody else’s you know, sort of, learn the sort of tables and all that sort of thing, generally worked our way through to the various classrooms you know and that sort of thing and that was it you know.
NM: What age were you when you left school and what did you do straight after school?
CC: I, I, ages, age when I left school was a customary age was at fourteen, no fifteen. There was always
[background noises].
CC: [unclear]
NM: So Colin you were saying about leaving school at fifteen?
CC: [unclear] Fifteen [laughs]
NM: So what did you do after you left school?
CC: Yes and generally speaking at that time of the year you know, that time of my career such as it was you know sort of just had to take what everybody else took, you know, sort of. Oh dear, what can I say. Just, just really the usual customary schooling, you know. Sang the class tune in every class whatever it was, fourteen, fifteen, you know, so and, nothing very out of the ordinary.
NM: But after school when you left school, Colin, after, after you left aged fifteen what did you do?
CC: Well funnily for a short time I, one of the managers at WH Smith’s from London you know he persuaded Dad to enlist me in WH Smith and Sons so I had a job straightaway, you know. There was no question about that you know. I was always keen to get it right and keen for, to do the job right, you know, sort of thing and which made it easy going if you know what I mean, yeah. It was [unclear]. Now, when, I was trying to think when war started. 1940 was it?
[pause]
I can’t remember. Can you? [laugh]
NM: So tell me how you
CC: It’s a bit of a mix up you know, sort of. I don’t think anybody’s ever asked me that question before, any questions before and I’m afraid my memory’s not as good as it might be if you know what I mean. Sort of summarise and general sort of glance of it you know. Nobody’s really asked me anything about it you know.
NM: So tell me how you came to join the RAF?
CC: Ahh now of course aero, aeroplanes were new and, you know, exciting and all the rest of it, you know and yes I wanted to join the RAF and, and my father said well he wouldn’t stop me you know so, so really, I was trying to think now what I know I was, let me get this right when I was
[pause]
I was eighteen I think when I first joined or put in to join the RAF. Went for examination and one thing and another, both physical and, sort of, more physical than anything else I suppose you know sort of to see if I was fit you know. I had a two day sort of what’s the name to sort of make sure I was ok you know and one thing and another and yes got the ok and that was it. Oh what did the, what, dear oh dear [laughs] funny isn’t it when you go to go back you know.
[pause]
All I can really say I suppose was there was, there was always a job available you know, sort of thing which was what my parents wanted to make sure that I’d got, you know, you have pay from a very early age you know a few pence a week sort of keep going and one thing and another like that and I was just quite happy about it and just feet up you know and there wasn’t much else I can say outstanding.
NM: So when you, when you joined the RAF how did you go into the wireless operator/air gunner route as opposed to any of the other routes. Tell me a little about that.
CC: That, the wireless operator/air gun, well not the air gunner bit because that fell in to the, I was keener at doing the wireless bit. If you went in for a wireless operator you always had - there was always wireless operator stroke air gunner, because if you look at the setup of the crew, and one thing and another the wireless operator was farther back as, as any of the crew but from the pilot and that would be, and they, it was the wireless operator that took over from the air gunner if he was shot down or shot at that sort of thing. So it was really the wireless operator that I was, I was keen on.
The reason of going in for that I suppose really would be that I thought if it was sort of idealistic move you know that if you could do Morse, Morse code and one thing and another and oh and in the first place I joined the, what was the
[pause]
What oh dear trying to think of the word now, joined as a - you know - oh a cadet. You sort of, you had a peacetime job and you had a part in the RAF, you know, that you could take part in, you know, which gave you a better chance of getting into the RAF that you wouldn’t normally have got, you know. And we had a chappie that was he, he was retired then and he took tuition over to cadets you know and was talking and teaching them and that sort of thing and he was a master well mastermind in - what’s the name - you know, sort of, what’s the name of, what’s the name, Morse code you know and the thing I can remember mostly was that I sat in that, sat in that hearing him doing Morse code you know and he was trying to see, to sort of teach people Morse and that sort of thing and I can always think oh I can do that you know. I don’t know why but anyway I thought I could do and it turned out that I could, you know. I easily learned Morse code and one thing and another and I was keen you know on doing that sort of thing. And naturally when I was what eighteen and called up, sort of permanent RAF, went in for sort of wireless operator which I got, you know.
There was a quite lot of what shall we say you know you had quite a job to get into the RAF then. There was a lot of, all the kids used to, you know, it was always like wow sort of (cough) pardon me. You know, you was in the RAF and could fly an aircraft and all that sort of thing which was always new about that time and you know not everyday sort of stuff and, you know, you were looked at. That’s how I got in the RAF. You know, went in for examinations and all that and passed that and it was just a job you know and that’s how I got in the RAF.
NM: Tell me a little bit about the training you had to go through before you went operational. What was your training like?
CC: Well then you, then you went into training once they accepted you. You had a preliminary course which we did nothing else but you stood to attention and stood at ease and all, all the, I don’t know, the job and one thing and another. You didn’t start doing Morse code although I could do it, you know, sort of thing, since I was - the fact that I could do it made absolutely sure that you know I could get it you know but that didn’t come to the second half of the, when they started. Then they, you took the wireless set oh you know sort of a tin box thing you know, sort of thing. I’m talking now, from what I can remember, you know, sort of thing it’s, it’s long, long since this is and yeah got three, it was a three month course which I passed, passed quite easily you know and, sort of and then once you passed the ground staff they wanted me to, one thing I do remember they wanted me to stay in the RAF but the chappie that was teaching all this stuff coming through which I was at, where was I at the time, I’m trying to think. I was around the, oh – Yatesbury that was, there was a big tour at Yatesbury - would I like to stay on as, as an instructor you see, So, which, no I wouldn’t, I wanted to fly in the end, you know so I turned that down and then they sent you, the thing at Yatesbury was like a two sided thing you know if they wanted you as air crew you went along one side and if ground crew you went on the other. So I got on aircrew and just went on and trained on and on you know.
I can’t think of anything of, [pause] nothing’s, nothing sort of I could really talk about. It was all straightforward you know. Take it from there onwards, you know. The difficult things was up until then had a memory in the head you know and that was it you know sort of joining the RAF and end of story you know and got one or two bits and pieces and I tried to remember I’m sure I missed some but
NM: How far into your training did you meet your crew? At what point in your training did you meet your crew?
CC: What trying sorry.
NM: At what point did you meet up with the rest of your crew? John Leavitt and the rest of your crew?
CC: Oh right, John Leavitt and, and crew yeah. Where did we, (pause) well I guess [pause] I know they made up crews over there , now then [pause], [laughs] have a biscuit [laughs]
[pause]
CC: I’m trying to [unclear]
[pause]
CC: Yeah the thing that I do remember that was different if you like, as I say, was we formed up with a crew and John Leavitt was American. He’d been, he was older then we were you know. Two or three, four years older than what we were as normally pilots would be you know and so we - I was trying to think where we were sort of formed up as a crew.
[pause]
Do you know, I can’t really think. Nobody’s ever asked me these question before. It’s one of those things that, you know, what do you tell somebody well not what tell them what do you tell the truth yeah that’s what I want to try and do. Oh dear.
NM: Can you tell me something about the rest of your, the rest of the crew?
CC: Well the rest of the crew well yeah we, there were two gunners posted. Rear gunner and the, and the mid upper gunner they who we who have we got, we’ve got
[pause]
There was what, seven of us altogether wasn’t there? There was two gunners, myself as wireless operator we were called wireless operator/air gunner because we, we first of all had to take a sort of short flying trip you know as a sort of be able to shoot down somebody else which I never used. We never had any trouble with losing a member of the crew or anything like that you know it was quite straight, more or less straightforward, you know.
[pause]
What else can I tell you?
[Pause]
CC: You see we didn’t run into any particular trouble.
NM: So
CC: So it’s all rather
NM: So after you were crewed up you were posted to 617.
CC: 617 at
NM: Squadron
CC: Yeah. What’s the name of it? Yeah, see now where
NM: Tell me a little about life on 617 at Woodhall Spa.
CC: Err
NM: What was life like?
CC: I was at Woodhall Spa yes.
NM: So tell me about squadron life?
CC: Tell you about?
NM: What was your experience of serving with 617 squadron at Woodhall Spa? Just tell me what you remember.
CC: Well I sort of remember, you know, sort of meeting with the lads that I hadn’t met before, you know, one thing and, oh dear.
[pause]
I’m trying to think if there was something different and there wasn’t really. It was, you know, sort of quite straightforward and we got along alright together if you know what I mean. We didn’t see much of the gunners (?) until we went on ops you know and
[pause]
CC: That sort of, putting on operation, that’s when you sort of formed up at Woodhall Spa if you know what I mean, you know. Nothing, nothing outstanding you know sort of thing and
[pause]
CC: And we, we never, once we were a flying team if you like call it that you know it was, it was nothing untoward about it you know. We were sort of flying on operations, you know so.
NM: So what operations can you remember?
CC: I remember, well I was, well of course I remember Tirpitz operation of course
NM: Tell me about that.
[pause]
CC: From what I remember about the Tirpitz operation it was we, it was a very long trip on a Sunday morning that when, well we had one or two goes at that you know, sort of thing. The final one - we sort of, sort of, what can I say about it. Now once we’d flown over, dropped the bombs and away for home as quick as you can you know sort of thing [cough] but and we were just passing over the - just dropped bombs and one thing I can remember and others would remember as well that our rear gunner, he’d gone to the back of the plane you see ‘cause normally when, when we took the final run over the operating aircraft or forward of the aircraft he came towards the front you know sort of anyway he ran over the back of it and he, because it was a special op he kept an eye on the what’s the, on the operation and we, we all remember him saying that he was looking down and he says “Oh” he says, used to call him skipper, always called the pilot, “Oh skip” he said “We’ve hit the bugg, hit the” and everybody cheered [laughs] so I thank God for that sort of, you know and that was that, you know. I remember that part.
[pause]
CC: There was one other I can’t remember where it was when we went to it, we were only talking about it the other week you know, sort of, I’m trying to remember the name of the place we went to. It was in the Baltic, you know, in that area. And what was I going to say about it? Oh it took place on the, on the 13th of April and I said oh this is [laughs] oh we didn’t do anything with it because it clouded over you know, kind of thing but we went on the op you know and had a look at it and one thing and another I did remark that it was my twenty first birthday. Nothing very exciting. I thought it was for me but, you know
[pause]
There really wasn’t anything sort of very exciting about the whole thing, you know. Nobody was shot down or anything like that, you know.
[pause]
I can’t think of anything else.
NM: Was the
CC: I’d rather leave the questions to you.
NM: That’s fine. That’s what I’m here for Colin.
CC: Yes.
NM: When you served on 617 did it feel like a special squadron to you? Did it feel like a main line, main force squadron?
CC: It just felt like a main line you know sort of thing you know. Nothing you know, nothing, nothing particularly special. I mean, in all the, all the operations we took part on that were sort of special if you know what I mean, you know. We realised that, you know, so, but not really, no. 617 was, I probably couldn’t have told you then what the squadron number was if you know what I mean, you know, sort of thing but it didn’t have a particular ring about it, you know. Sort of, just, yes 617 squadron which just happened to be 617 I think, you know.
NM: The fact they trusted you with bombs like Tallboy and Grand Slam - did it feel different to any of the other squadrons?
CC: Oh what they, when they, sort of aye they did, did carry the extra bomb wasn’t it? That was right yes. Took it all in its, all in its day you know. Never thought of it as anything very special if you know what I mean. You know, just another wartime thing that had gone on if you know what I mean, you know, that sort of -nothing, nothing very special about - there was a, when I get hold of the air book there was - I mean there was a date in there that I can’t remember what it was now but nothing particularly special. No, not really ‘cause we weren’t shot down or anything like that you know. We were
[pause]
CC: No, can’t think of anything that’s
NM: What was it, what was it like as an NCO rather than an officer? ‘Cause the officers were all at the Petwood but what was it like for you as an NCO on Woodhall Spa?
CC: Well the funny part was that, that we only saw the officers on operations. There was, you know, like they were sort of, [unclear] what’s the name quartered in the quarters, you know, sort of thing and we, we were the bottom end of 617 squadron if you know what I - nobody bothered, sort of thing. All our nights out were always NCOs and all that sort of thing, you know, sort of thing. Very, only very, very seldom - I think one was at the beginning - one was at the, one of them, the war was, we went and had a few pints on the fact the war was over you know, sort of thing like that and we all went together, you know. It was the most unusual thing of the, of the lot, you know. They used to do their own thing and we used to do our own thing. We used to go into sort of various civilian places and you know sort of do them, them bits and pieces out of duty if you know what I mean, yeah. I can’t think of anything very exciting you know. I was trying to, you know, I was trying to
NM: So how about after, after the war finished and, what happened to 617 and you at that point?
CC: So we more or less, apart from when we met up to either do a practice operation or something like that did we see everybody, you know. It was just [pause] sorry. No one has ever asked me before and I can’t think of anything that was, there was nothing very exciting about it.
NM: Tell me a little about the Tiger Force.
CC: Oh the Tiger Force. Yeah well of course that was special you know. That, if there was one thing I did do funnily enough that somebody grabbed the, sort of, the photographs of that. While we were flying out to the east you know, sort of thing I had a camera, only a sort of little camera you know, sort of Browning type of thing, nothing, nothing very, I took photographs of one thing and another and they are or I hope they still are, but they were in this went in sort of talked about very much later and they were, what was I going to say. I’ve forgotten what I was going to say now. Blast. Nothing, nothing very sort of special except that was, I think I gave them to the, let’s see where were we assigned [?] where? Can’t even
[pause]
CC: I’m trying to think
[pause]
CC: No can’t think I shall have to try and think about that so
NM: Can you remember what you, can you remember where you were posted when you came back from India when the Tiger Force was deployed back to the UK. What happened after that?
CC: We ended back in the slippery slopes of Cornwall actually, you know and then formed up together, you know sort of, I’m trying to think what we did next. It’s almost a question of sort of detaching the crew altogether you know. ‘Cause I think, I say that because I think from what I can recall as it had is that I thought, you know, this would be the end of us, the old form of the 617 you know, sort of, crew if you like yeah and took some pictures of it and you know and made a little write up and that. And that, it’s hanging in if you like, sort of around somewhere or other. God know where but it was brought up, where did I give it to, one of the RAF stations you know so that should still be there. Should be a sort of, ‘cause I think they made quite a thing of it sort of photographs of where we landed and where we took off and all that sort of thing. I don’t know where it is now. It should, should be alright. Is there anything? Have you come across anything or you haven’t?
NM: I’m sure someone will know.
CC: Sorry
NM: I’m sure someone will know where that is.
CC: Well they ought to. Yes, so.
NM: Were you in, I understood you were involved in the disposal of the old upkeep Dambuster mines. Can you tell me?
CC: Oh yes
NM: Something about that?
CC: I was in a different station. I was called in to, they formed up a crew you know, to get, now what did they, oh dear. I’ve got all these things you know ticking about in my mind but when it comes down to putting them into – I can’t [cough] I can’t think of them. Yes we were sort of recalled and, you know after the coming back from India, you know, sort of thing, we were recalled and then you know disposing of the mines weren’t there, sort of. That’s one of things that we just did and end of story if you know what I mean, I’m afraid.
NM: So what happened to you? What did you do with your, after you left the RAF? At what point did you leave the RAF?
CC: Now when did I leave the RAF? Well generally speaking going, going back to civvy life you know. Nothing more, nothing less you know so I worked for the [pause], all I can remember you know when I went back to civvy life and onwards like that was that I picked out or I found out that if you worked for government place of any sort they paid your, oh my God I can’t remember, pension that’s what I was trying to think. They paid your pension and I thought oh you know sort of if I kept on till pensionable age you know and that would help to retirement which it did you know tremendously so you know very much so. I’ve never paid anything else since [laughs]. Oh dear, yeah.
NM: So you worked for the local government or council?
CC: Local government. The council. Then for some reason, I can’t remember why or how it was, I became clerk to the council of - cause I was living at, I was living at Waddington then I became clerk of the council at Waddington Parish Council. I was there for quite a long time you know. Yeah. What happened after then you know, for the life of me nothing of, sort of nothing to report on. Nothing at all that was
NM: Did you keep in touch with your crew at all after the war?
CC: Yes we did for, ‘cause I went, when our skipper died which was only, not so, not so long ago you know, sort of, well don’t know how much now but time marches on doesn’t it but yes we did in parts you know but we never really sort of got together as a crew if you know what I mean, you know, sort of. It’s all very misty that one is [laughs].
NM: You were very heavily involved with the Lincolnshire Lancaster Association weren’t you?
CC: Ahh yes.
NM: Tell me.
CC: Yes, yes, yeah, yes.
[pause]
I think that was all part of parcel of sort of keeping the connection going if you know what I mean, you know, sort of.
[pause]
I don’t know whether it did any, anything to keep it going but, because I often still, when I say recently I mean alright a few years have gone passed now and since the starting years that yes that was one of the things that did keep going. I was secretary to the Lincolnshire Lancaster Association for quite some, that, and then that became for some reason just couldn’t tell you why [unclear] associate sort of thing you know but it’s just all these things kept trying along, you know. When somebody asked me and nobody ever has you know apart from, I mean, I suppose that up to in inverted commas quite recently the, you know the chairman, you know we used to keep in touch with one another and one thing and another [unclear] died now died recently but apart from that that was it, you know. So of certainly until [unclear] asked questions about it I thought the thing had sort of died and [laughs]
NM: When you, when you look back on your time at Bomber
CC: [cough] sorry [cough]
NM: Are you alright
[cough]
[pause]
CC: Pass me that [cough]
[pause]
Sorry about that. I wasn’t
NM: Don’t worry. Don’t worry
CC: Talking a lot
NM: We’ll stop in just a minute.
[pause]
CC: That’s better
[pause]
CC: Sorry What, what was the last question?
NM: I was wondering what your thoughts are when you look back on your time at Bomber Command. What are your reflections?
CC: Nothing, nothing anything particular, you know. Had to be done [cough] Oh blast. No. Took it on as part and parcel as life’s, you know. A lot of it’s, I suppose, took on, you know, I really took it on sort of well thinking about what I did through the years was really what was concerned with the war and when there wasn’t the war and all that sort of thing, you know and it was that that was leading from one sort paragraph to another if you know what I mean. Yeah.
[pause]
CC: Yeah can’t think of anything else.
NM: How do you think Bomber Command has been treated since the war?
CC: Sorry
NM: How do you think Bomber Command has been treated since the war?
CC: Oh [pause] I’ve never really thought of anything in particular you know. It was just the sort of [unclear] what they wouldn’t have done today and then tomorrow and yesterday and, you know sort of just formed and reformed and put this and put that and that just, just things that just suited them you know. I suppose there must have been things that, I can’t remember any you know, that they did or didn’t do or this that and the other. Just took them for granted that it was it’s what you get when you’re in a certain position sort of plays around with, you know.
NM: Ok Colin thanks very much we’ll
CC: I’m sorry.
NM: Shall we, shall we’ll leave it there. No, that’s absolutely fine.
CC: Yeah. Nobody, nobody’s ever really asked me before you know. I suppose when I’m in bed tonight I shall think of all sorts of things. Well I don’t think I will. You know, oh dear, I’d have liked to have been a bit more precise but I don’t really know [unclear].
[pause]
[unclear]
NM: Can you say that again Colin.
Other: What did you qualify for Colin?
NM: What did you just say Colin?
CC: The naval quite a recent one though. The naval star. Running up to the North Pole and all that sort of thing.
NM: Oh the arctic convoys.
CC: Arctic convoys. Yeah
NM: And you qualified for that because?
CC: Yes I have.
NM: Because of the Tirpitz raid?
CC: Because of the Tirpitz well mainly because of the Tirpitz raid yes
Other: The Arctic Star
CC: Yeah
NM: So you qualified for the Arctic Star because of the raid on the Tirpitz?
[pause]
NM: So you joined in 1942 at Yatesbury.
CC: Oh yes, yes I went to the flying
NM: Yeah
CC: ‘Cause they wouldn’t have us, from what I remember we wouldn’t have a flying logbook of course until we started flying
NM: So Yatesbury. Barrow in Furness.
CC: Oh Barrow in Furness yes we did a gunnery course in Barrow in Furness.
NM: Market Harborough.
CC: Market Harborough and that was what was it [unclear] one of the train for aircrew, yes. Yes.
NM: That’s where you met up with John Leavitt?
CC: Yes
NM: John Leavitt.
CC: Yes it would be, yeah.
NM: Flying Wellingtons.
[pause]
CC: That was, that what’s its name has been kicked around well not kicked around ‘cause I used to keep it in the box on the hall of the house on the, you know sort of.
[pause]
CC: I kept them close. I didn’t think there would be other but other people were worried about it and I could understand that really because I understand they fetch a lot of money you see. Whatever they are you know [laughs].
NM: There was, so that was your first operation.
CC: Sorry?
NM: That was your first operation.
CC: Oh yes it was [laughs].
NM: The Tirpitz raid.
CC: Yes [laughs]
NM: Thirteen hours. Can you remember any other of your operations?
CC: I can’t just one or two odd ones. The funny part was that we, you see because there was that one and then the ones in between weren’t all that in number because we used to have to train for a lot of them you know.
[pause]
NM: Here’s the one on your 21st birthday.
CC: Sorry?
NM: Here’s the one on your 21st birthday. It was Lutz.
CC: Oh yes, Lutzow. Lutzow, that’s right.
NM: And you didn’t fly with John Leavitt that day you drove, you flew with Flight Lieutenant Price
CC: Oh there were probably other people as well of course ahum. Yeah there was that sort of officers
[pause]
I would probably go with some with quite a number probably you know.
NM: I see you took part in Exodus, the
CC: Sorry?
NM: I see you took part in Operation Exodus to recover prisoners of war.
CC: Oh yes there was that as well ahum.
[pause]
CC: You know I forgot about, well not forgotten about but at the back of my mind.
NM: Can you remember what the prisoners of war how they reacted when they saw you or were being flown home by you?
CC: I can’t actually no. I think they were, were the most had had enough of it, you know and were glad to get back.
NM: What about the Cooks tours. Did you take some of the ground crew?
CC: What was?
NM: Did you take some of the ground crews on some of the Cooks tours of some the targets?
CC: Oh Cooks tours.
NM: Yeah
CC: Oh yeah we used to go on those didn’t we yes.
NM: Can’t remember too much about it?
[pause]
CC: No. If somebody was going to come along twenty thirty forty years later you’d more write a journal wouldn’t you. It was more or less a blinking nuisance, you know
[pause]
I’m not trying to hide anything it was just a blooming nuisance. Having to lock up a log book up oh
[pause]
NM: So Operation Guzzle. Is that when you had to dispose of the Dams mines?
CC: Operation?
NM: Guzzle?
CC: Yes it was. Ahum.
NM: Ok.
CC: Aye Guzzle ahum.
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 Colin Cole
Description
An account of the resource
Colin Cole was brought up and schooled at Twickenham, and worked for a time at W H Smith before joining the Royal Air Force. He trained as a wireless operator/air gunner at RAF Yatesbury and RAF Barrow in Furness. He then served with 617 Squadron, stationed at RAF Woodhall Spa and took part in the sinking of the Tirpitz. He was also involved in a number of other operations during and immediately after the war, in particular Tiger Force, Operation Exodus, Operation Guzzle and the Cook’s Tours.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Nigel Moore
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-24
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:17:44 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AColeC150727
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.
England--Stainfield
England--London
England--Yatesbury
England--Waddington
England--Market Harborough
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Barrow-in-Furness
England--Lancashire
England--Leicestershire
England--Wiltshire
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
Julie Williams
Heather Hughes
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
617 Squadron
aircrew
Cook’s tour
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Guzzle
RAF Woodhall Spa
RAF Yatesbury
Tiger force
Tirpitz
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/150/1567/LBellinghamPF1397635v1.2.pdf
1fbc8b7942f76eed3db897aeedc910f4
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
Bellingham, Peter
Peter F Bellingham
Peter Bellingham
P F Bellingham
P Bellingham
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer Peter Frederick Bellingham (b. 1923, 1391638 Royal Air Force), a photograph and his log book. Peter Bellingham trained in South Africa as a bomb aimer and flew 30 Special Operations Executive operations in Halifaxes and Stirlings with 138 Squadron from RAF Tempsford.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Peter Bellingham and 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
2016-11-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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
Bellingham, PF
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
Peter Bellingham’s observer's and air gunner's flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
The log book covers the training and operational career of bomb aimer Peter Bellingham from 10 March 1943 to 21 February 1946. After training in South Africa he flew Halifaxes and Stirlings with 138 Squadron, taking part in 30 night operations over Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway. These were special operations involving the dropping of containers, packages and pigeons to agents, outcome logged either as ‘Joy’ or ‘No joy’. His pilots on operations were Strathearn and Flight Lieutenant Moffat. Landed with FIDO once, did a Cook’s tour over the Netherlands and Germany before becoming an instructor. Aircraft flown included: Oxford, Anson, Wellington, Stirling, Halifax and Warwick.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LBellinghamPF1397635v1
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
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1946
1944-07-03
1944-07-04
1944-07-05
1944-07-07
1944-07-08
1944-07-09
1944-07-10
1944-07-11
1944-07-23
1944-07-24
1944-07-25
1944-07-26
1944-07-27
1944-07-28
1944-07-30
1944-07-31
1944-08-04
1944-08-05
1944-08-06
1944-08-07
1944-08-08
1944-08-09
1944-08-10
1944-08-11
1944-08-12
1944-08-29
1944-08-30
1944-09-28
1944-09-29
1944-09-30
1944-10-01
1944-10-04
1944-10-05
1944-10-15
1944-10-16
1944-11-01
1944-11-02
1944-11-07
1944-11-08
1944-11-26
1944-11-27
1944-11-29
1944-11-30
1944-12-24
1944-12-25
1945-02-21
1945-02-22
1945-02-23
1945-02-25
1945-02-26
1945-02-27
1945-03-04
1945-03-05
1945-06-19
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
France
Germany
Great Britain
Norway
South Africa
England--Bedfordshire
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Suffolk
South Africa--Port Elizabeth
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.
11 OTU
138 Squadron
1657 HCU
17 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
animal
Anson
bomb aimer
bombing
Cook’s tour
FIDO
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Manby
RAF Oakley
RAF Silverstone
RAF Tempsford
RAF Turweston
RAF Westcott
RAF Woodbridge
Special Operations Executive
Stirling
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/147/1572/LColeC1605385v1.2.pdf
146cc1c3261e10e2ec1fd6bc26ecd692
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
Cole, Colin
C Cole
Colin Cole
Description
An account of the resource
31 items. The collection relates to Warrant Officer Colin Cole (1924 – 2015 RAF Volunteer Reserve 1605385) who served with 617 Squadron. The collection contains two oral history interviews his, logbook, service documents, medals, memorabilia from the Tirpitz and six photographs.
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. Six items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties or to comply with intellectual property regulations. 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
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-27
2015-07-27
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Cole, C
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
Colin Cole's navigator's, air bomber's, air gunner's and flight engineer's flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Navigator’s, air bomber’s, air gunner’s and flight engineer’s flying log book for Warrant Officer Colin Cole from 5 August 1943 to 23 September 1946. Detailing training schedule and operations flown. Served at RAF Yatesbury, RAF Mona, RAF Barrow in Furness, RAF Market Harborough, RAF Winthorpe, RAF Syerston, RAF Woodhall Spa, RAF Digri (Bengal) and RAF Scampton. Aircraft flown were Anson, Proctor, Dominie, Wellington, Stirling, Lancaster and Lincoln. He carried out a total of ten daylight and one night-time operations with 617 Squadron at RAF Woodhall Spa as a wireless operator on the following targets in Germany, Netherlands, Norway and Poland: Bergen, Dortmund-Ems Canal, Hamburg, Ijmuiden, Lützow, Oslo Fjord, Rotterdam, Tirpitz Tromsø, Urft Dam and Viesleble [sic] (actually Bielefeld) viaduct. <span>His pilots on operations were </span><span data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559739":200,"335559740":276}">Flight Lieutenant Leavitt and Flight Lieutenant Price. </span>Annotations include bombing the Tirpitz and an attack by an enemy jet aircraft. Operation Exodus and Cook’s tour flights are included, as is a tour of India in 1946.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LColeC1605385v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Pakistan
Norway
Pakistan
Poland
Wales
England--Cumbria
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Wiltshire
Wales--Anglesey
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Atlantic Ocean--Oslofjorden
Germany--Bielefeld
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Schleiden (Kreis)
Pakistan--Digri
Netherlands--Ijmuiden
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Norway--Bergen
Norway--Oslo
Norway--Tromsø
Pakistan--Digri
Poland--Świnoujście
Germany--Urft Dam
Netherlands
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1946
1944-11-12
1944-11-13
1944-12-08
1944-12-11
1944-12-29
1944-12-30
1945-01-12
1945-02-14
1945-02-22
1945-02-24
1945-04-09
1945-04-13
1945-05-08
1945-05-10
1945-05-15
1945-09-27
1945-09-29
14 OTU
1661 HCU
617 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
bombing
Cook’s tour
Dominie
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lincoln
Me 262
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Guzzle
Operational Training Unit
Proctor
RAF Barrow in Furness
RAF Market Harborough
RAF Mona
RAF Scampton
RAF Syerston
RAF Waddington
RAF Winthorpe
RAF Woodhall Spa
RAF Yatesbury
Stirling
submarine
Tiger force
Tirpitz
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/87/2205/LWoolgarRLA139398v1.2.pdf
35b154fb1d680686ee063c2241368776
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
Woolgar, Reg
Reg Woolgar
R L A Woolgar
Jimmy Woolgar
Subject
The topic of the resource
World War (1939-1945)
Bombing, Aerial
Description
An account of the resource
<a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/browse?collection=87">17 items</a>. The collection consists of an oral history <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/2148">interview</a> with air gunner Reginald Woolgar DFC (139398 Royal Air Force), correspondence to his father about him being missing in action and subsequently rescued from the sea, his <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/2205">log book</a>, <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/854">service and release book</a> and nine photographs.<br /><br /> He flew operations as an air gunner with 49 and 192 Squadrons.<br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Reg Woolgar and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle. <br /><br />This collection also contains items concerning John William Wilkinson. Additional information on John William Wilkinson is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/125319/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Woolgar, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-04
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.
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
Please scroll down to see all X items in this collection.
Reg ‘Jimmy’ Woolgar was born and schooled in Hove. He began working life as a valuations assistant and was training to be a surveyor, which was interrupted when, in December 1939, he joined the RAF. Although he had aspirations to become a pilot, he trained as a wireless operator/air gunner instead. His wireless operator training was carried out at the wireless training school, RAF Yatesbury. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/87/849/PWoolgarRLA1609.2.jpg His air gunnery training on Fairy Battle aircraft was conducted at RAF West Freugh. On 15 November 1940 he was promoted to sergeant and posted to No 10 OTU at RAF Upper Heyford. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/87/845/PWoolgarRLA1601.2.jpg Initially flying Anson aircraft and then Hampdens with C Flight, he had his first ‘Lucky Jim’ moment, on 6 February 1941, when his Hampden aircraft was forced to crash land in a field near Cottesmore, in Lincolnshire. The aircraft was written off, but he and the pilot survived with minor injuries. At the end of operational training, instead of going directly onto operasations, he spent the next 5 months as a screen operator instructor. Eventually, on 1 September 1941, he was posted to 49 Squadron, Hampdens, at RAF Scampton https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/852 where his very first operational trip (described as a baptism of fire) was to Berlin. With headwinds going out and coming back, and nil visibility, it was likely the crew would have to bail out. Fortunately, the skipper found a break in the clouds and the aircraft landed wheels down in a field near Louth. The aircraft had to be recovered back to base, transported by road, on a low loader. On another occasion, on a mine laying operation to Oslo Fjord, his aircraft was peppered with anti-aircraft fire, it returned to base with 36 bullet holes in the fuselage and mainplane. A bullet had also passed through the upright of his gun sight while he was looking through it, whilst another tore through his flying suit. The nickname ‘Lucky Jim’ was beginning to stick.
In February 1942, on an operation to Manheim, the port engine, hit by flak, cut dead. Despite jettisoning all superfluous weight, which unfortunately included all the navigation equipment, the aircraft rapidly lost height, and the pilot ditched the aircraft in the English Channel. Whilst the crew had struggled to keep the aircraft airborne, (on a single engine), it had steered on a massive curve and unbeknown to them was headed down the English Channel, before it ditched. The crew scrambled out onto the wing and managed to inflate the dingy, then had to cut the cord attaching the dingy to the aircraft using a pair of nail scissors, moments before it sunk. In the water for hours, the crew thought they were drifting near the Yorkshire coast, but were rescued by a motor anti-submarine boat, much to their surprise, near the Isle of Wight.
Operational flying was intense, Reg would feel wound up before take-off and there was much apprehension on the way out to the target. Often, they flew through intense flak that was sometimes so close they could smell it. There was always a sense of sense of relief once they came away from the target. In between operations, each day was treated as it came along with many off-duty hours spent socialising in the local hostelries https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/853
After his first operational tour (he completed two) he was commissioned and became gunnery leader with 192 Squadron in 100 Group.
After the war ended, he signed on for an extra two years and was posted to Palestine as an air movements staff officer. Luck was again on his side when, one day, he was on his way to an Air Priorities Board Meeting at the King David Hotel when the hotel was bombed, resulting in many army and civilian casualties.
After a short tour in Kenya, as Senior Movements Staff Officer, he returned to Palestine flying with 38 Squadron until August 1947. In his flying career he amassed over 1000 flying hours. For services to his country Reg was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/858
He was released from the RAF in September 1947. Initially employed as an assistant valuations officer, he studied to become a Chartered Surveyor and secured a job as a senior valuer with the City of London. He later became the planning valuer of the city. After 14 years he was made a partner at the firm St Quintin Son and Stanley. Reg retired in 1971.
08 December 1939: Joined RAF as a wireless operator/air gunner
28 August 1940: 145, 3 Wing, RAF Yatesbury - Wireless Operator training
29 October 1940 - 15 November 1940: RAF West Freugh, No 4 Bombing and Gunnery School, flying Battle aircraft
November 1940: Promoted to Sergeant
15 November 1940 - 20 August 1941: RAF Upper Heyford, No 10 Operational Training Unit flying Anson and Hampden aircraft
02 September 1941 - 24 March 1942: RAF Scampton, 49 Squadron, flying Hampden aircraft
28 April 1942 - 24 June 1942: 1485 Target Towing and Gunnery Flight flying Whitley and Wellington aircraft
02 July 1942 – 3 July 1942: RAF Manby, Air Gunnery Instructor Course
4 July – 10 July 1942: RAF Scampton, Air Gunnery Instructor flying Manchester and Oxford aircraft
25 July 1942 – 10 August 1942: RAF Wigsley, Air Gunnery Instructor flying Lancaster aircraft
3 October – 27 October 1942: RAF Sutton Bridge flying Wellington and Hampden aircraft
28 October 1942: RAF Sutton Bridge, Gunnery Leader Course
End of 1942: Awarded RAF Commission
09 Nov 1942 – 18 March 1943: RAF Fulbeck flying Manchester aircraft
14 May 1943 – 11 June 1944: RAF Sutton Bridge flying Wellington aircraft
20 June 1944 – 27 July 1945 RAF Foulsham, 192 Squadron flying Halifax and Wellington aircraft
29 April 1946 – 30 August 1946: Palestine, Air Movements Staff Officer
01 September 1946 – 21 January 1947: Kenya, Senior Movements Staff Officer
30 January1947 – 10 June 1947: Ein Shemer, Palestine, 38 Squadron flying Lancaster aircraft
13 July 1947 139398 Flt Lt RLA Woolgar released from Service.
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
Reg Woolgar's observer's and air gunner's flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Observer's and air gunner's flying log book for Flight Lieutenant Reg Woolgar from 29 November 1940 to 21 July 1947. Detailing training schedule, instructional duties and operations flown. Served at RAF Yatesbury, RAF West Freugh, RAF Upper Heyford, RAF Weston, RAF Peterborough, RAF Scampton, RAF Barrow, RAF Manby, RAF Wigsley, RAF Sutton Bridge, RAF Fulbeck, RAF Catfoss, RAF Foulsham, Levant AHQ, Nairobi AHQ and RAF Ein Shemer. Aircraft flown were Dominie I, Fairey Battle, Anson, Hampden, Hereford, Whitley, Wellington, Manchester, Lancaster Mk 1, Mk 3, Mk 7, Oxford, B17, Master, Martinet, Halifax Mk 3, Tiger Moth, York, Dakota, Lodestar, Hudson and Argus. He carried out a total of 43 operations on two tours with 49 and 192 Squadrons as a wireless operator / air gunner on the following targets in France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Sweden: Aachen, battleships in Channel, Berlin, Bremen, Brest, Cologne, Emden, Essen, Frankfurt, Fresians, Halse, Hamburg, Kassel, Kiel Bay, Le Havre, Lorient, Mannheim, Helsingborg, Oslo Fjord, Rostock, Wilhelmshaven, Flensburg, Frankfurt, Gdynia, Mainz, Munster, S.D. operations, S.D. patrol, St Leu, Stade, Stuttgart, Walcheren and Wiesbaden. His pilots on operations were Pilot Officer Falconer, Pilot Officer Allsebrook, Sergeant Davis, Pilot Officer Ellis, Pilot Officer Hazelhurst, Pilot Officer Thomsett, Wing Commander David Donaldson, Flight Lieutenant Hayter-Preston, Flight Lieutenant Stephens, Flight Lieutenant Ford and Squadron Leader Fawkes. Includes notes on crash landings and forced landings, ditching off the Isle of Wight, infra-red trials and a Cook’s tour in the Ruhr Hamburg area. Reg was assessed as having exceptional night vision, had proficiency record above average and received air officer commanding commendation on second tour.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Kenya
Norway
Poland
Scotland
Sweden
Middle East--Palestine
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--Oslofjorden
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
Europe--Frisian Islands
France--Brest
France--Creil
France--Le Havre
France--Lorient
Germany--Aachen
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Essen
Germany--Flensburg
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Mainz (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Rostock
Germany--Stade (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Wiesbaden
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Netherlands--Walcheren
Norway--Halse
Poland--Gdynia
Scotland--Wigtownshire
Sweden--Helsingborg
Netherlands
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Atlantic Ocean--Kiel Bay
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-09-02
1941-09-03
1941-09-06
1941-09-07
1941-09-08
1941-09-09
1941-09-12
1941-09-13
1941-09-16
1941-09-17
1941-09-28
1941-09-29
1941-09-30
1941-10-01
1941-01-13
1941-01-14
1941-11-07
1941-11-08
1941-11-09
1941-11-10
1941-11-23
1941-11-23
1941-11-26
1941-11-27
1941-11-30
1941-12-01
1941-12-07
1941-12-08
1941-12-16
1941-12-17
1942-01-14
1942-01-15
1942-01-17
1942-01-18
1942-01-25
1942-01-26
1942-02-07
1942-02-10
1942-02-11
1942-02-12
1942-02-14
1942-02-15
1942-03-10
1942-03-11
1944-06-30
1942-03-31
1944-07-04
1942-03-05
1944-08-07
1944-08-20
1944-09-13
1944-09-15
1944-09-17
1944-09-19
1944-10-03
1944-11-18
1944-12-12
1944-12-13
1944-12-15
1944-12-16
1944-12-18
1944-12-19
1945-01-16
1945-01-17
1945-01-22
1945-01-28
1945-01-29
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-03-30
1945-03-31
1945-05-02
1945-05-03
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
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Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LWoolgarRLA139398v1
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
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One booklet
16 OTU
192 Squadron
49 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
B-17
Battle
bombing
bombing of the Creil/St Leu d’Esserent V-1 storage areas (4/5 July 1944)
C-47
Cook’s tour
crash
ditching
Dominie
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Hampden
Hudson
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Manchester
Martinet
mine laying
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Barrow in Furness
RAF Foulsham
RAF Fulbeck
RAF Manby
RAF Peterborough
RAF Scampton
RAF Sutton Bridge
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF West Freugh
RAF Wigsley
RAF Yatesbury
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Whitley
wireless operator / air gunner
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/178/2341/PBriggsR1613.2.jpg
21d447364bbb0c33d44abf36914a71a4
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/178/2341/ABriggsR160128.1.mp3
03beb9ecd0a2c80b649bf4291792a9a5
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
Briggs, Roy
R Briggs
Description
An account of the resource
24 items. One oral history interview with Roy Briggs (1893726 Royal Air Force), his logbook, service material, training material, official documents and 12 photographs. Roy Briggs trained as a wireless operator and flew four operations with 576 Squadron from RAF Fiskerton. He also took took part in Operation Manna and Operation Exodus as well as Cook’s tours over Germany.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Roy Briggs and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-28
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Briggs, R
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
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 I am in Hemel Hempstead with Roy Briggs who was a wireless operator in the war and we’re going to start talking about his earliest days and right through to his working life as a civilian. So, Roy, where did it all start?
RB: In Battersea. I was lucky but we lived in a London terrace which was by the side of Clapham Junction Station, and Mac in number 3, my dad in number 5 married two girls from 17. There was still a girl and a boy left there. One, one aunt was married and one of the sons was married but they only lived locally so when I was born we moved to Balmoral [?] Street opposite Price’s Candle Factory alongside the Thames. We lived in a downstairs flat. This, what I’m saying now I’ve got vague remembrance but it’s mainly from the family talking. When the Thames got high the water come up the manholes and come down in the basement where we were and the police knocked us up and we, we went upstairs. We weren’t there long. My grandmother on my father’s side had diabetes and lost both her legs so mum, dad and me moved back to help grandad with nan so from then on I saw my two grandfathers and my grandmother every day. My grandad, who had come from the country, had rabbits, chickens and racing pigeons and I was very involved with him with the racing pigeons from an early age. He died by the time I was ten and I used to put rings on the, on the young birds. They used, he also got fairly bed ridden and he instructed me from the bed on what to do. I matched them up, pairing them up for mating and so I rung them. I took them up to Clapham Common and released them. We had a friend who used to race our pigeons so I was down there most days. My aunts, on Saturday afternoon, used to go to Battersea High Street and Northrop Road shopping and they used to come in to see grandad and grandad so on a Saturday afternoon it was, in the summer, it was the men playing darts in the garden and the girls chatting with nan and drinking tea indoors. [mild laughter] The only time that I went away I think I went to Westward Ho! I think it was only for a week, what they called in those days school journeys. We had an undertaker’s opposite us on the corner and horses. The Chapel of Rest was opposite us and the horses used to be there in those days when they went I went and picked up the manure and put it in buckets of water for grandad for watering his flowers and stuff. And in Battersea in those days that was sort of the life. My father worked at South Kensington Museum. The highlights in the summer used to be when he used to cycle home and come in to Battersea Park and mum used to take us down and we met in the park and had a picnic and played games before we came home. When I got bigger we used to go as far as Clapham Common and Wandsworth Common during the summer holidays but that was about it. I went to Shillington Street School at first until I was, till I was ten and then I went to Latchmere, Latchmere Road. I broke me thigh when I was ten, I didn’t realise it, playing football. On a Sunday morning going down to get the chicken food and the pigeon food I took the dog with me and on the way home I collapsed and got up and didn’t realise at the time but when I got up I shot the bones up. Somebody come to help me and that they hopped home and told me dad and he came down and got an ambulance and took me in to Battersea General Hospital where I was, where I was put on traction for weeks, for some weeks to pull me leg down and then when they took me down to plaster me they measured both my legs and the one that they hadn’t pulled down had grown so they put me up again to pull the other, the leg that had broken down to get it to the same length. My uncle worked for Battersea Borough Council, driving. Used to come and look over the wall, get on the back of the van and wave to me [laughs]. My grandad looked after the horses for Battersea Borough Council and he used to go in early of a morning and feed them and clean them, get them ready to take the dustcarts and that out so he used to come home about half past nine to have his breakfast. So, he, he was around during the day. He used to then go back in the evening to feed them and look after them in the evening. [pause] Yeah. That —
CB: What about school?
RB: Pardon?
CB: What about school? So, when did you leave school?
RB: 1939. I was, I’d put in for going to the, be a telegraph boy but went and had tests and that but there was people at sixteen who’d left Grammar School going for the same job because it was thought to be a fairly good job [laughs] in those days and I did not get accepted so I then started at Quickflows [?] it was supposed to be a good little engineering firm. So the Labour Exchange told me. They did Spitfire cockpits and also the sliding windows on London Transport buses. I got the job of cleaning the Bostik off round the glass that went in the frames to slide and as there was somebody there about nineteen and had been there since he was fourteen and he was still cleaning Bostik off the glass I did not [laughs] think it was a very good job. Luckily my mum had worked with somebody in the 14/18 war and her son worked for Benham and Sons, a catering company, and she had a word and he’d just finished his apprenticeship and he had a word and got me a job there. I think, I think it was somewhere about May ’45, er ‘39 I started there. They were starting to expand because they were getting contracts for the Ministry for cooking equipment and that because they’d started re-arming with cooking equipment if not the aircraft [laughs]. They were in, in Garratt Lane and they went over the River Wandle and they were having an extension built. They, they dug down and took half the Wandle up and built an air raid shelter in level with, in the Wandle [laughs] really and then built on top of it more workshops which were finished probably late, late ’39. Yeah. ‘39/’40. Yeah. I, first of all, started building dish washers and then I got in with Jimmy Thurgood who was a good all-rounder in his, in his thirties and he was the odd job man and with him I got a lot of experience and when I did sinks and drainers and boiling pans with him but, yeah he, if there was maintenance trouble quite often he used to get involved in it. Getting on in to, in to 1940 and Dunkirk our first Ministry contract was for hold fasts. It was one about half inch six steel plate and one about three quarters and they were somewhere about four foot square and they had, I believe, thirteen holes in them with thirteen tie rods about three foot long I believe. We made the tie rods and the nuts and one went either side. Being a catering firm we didn’t really have big lifting gear and somehow or other we got permission to use the Wandsworth Greyhound Stadium car park and Jimmy Thurgood and me went down there and we met a low loader with sixteen foot by eight foot sheets of steel. We took some crowbars with us and we crowbarred these sheets off the low loader on to the ground and at the same time, all very organised the [laughs] British Oxygen Lead [?] came with Oxy Acetylene boards which they unloaded there for us. We went back I suppose about a quarter of a mile away to the works and we picked up gauges and hoses and cutting equipment and went back down there and connected up and we cut these sheets into eight pieces, four foot square which was still not really handable [?] but a lot better. We, we put these on a trolley and pulled them along Garratt Lane to the works. They went in and they, they flame cut them to the shapes on the outside and then they went to the machine shop where there was only one machine. It cut, it drilled the thirteen holes which I think were somewhere about three quarters. As soon as they were done they were assembled and taken to Clapham Junction Railway Station and put on, in the guards van and they went straight down to the south coast but they were set in concrete for coastal guns to be connected to. The first contract was done in about seventeen days. A manager or director of the firm afterwards said to me said to me when I said about this ‘oh it didn’t matter what it cost’, but cost wasn’t in it. People just worked on it. They drilled the holes. If somebody went for a break then somebody else stepped in. The drills. There was a stock of them. When they needed re-sharpening they went to the tool room and re-sharpened and it it it just kept going all the time. After the first contract we got lots more and then we started, which was something very new, rocket [emphasis] launchers and Jimmy Thurgood and me were on, on the first of the rocket launchers. They, we had the sheets come in and there was lots of holes punched in them so that the heat could go through and, but they were made in to a half round with rolled edges either side and the rockets were just placed on them and fired. Fired. There was the back of it rested on the ground and there was two, like a tripod, fixed half way up. After the first ones other people started getting involved and Jimmy Thurgood and me we got involved in the firing gear, because the heat that came out of the end of the rocket melted [emphasis] the first firing gears [laughs] and [background laugh] we, we devised a, a nose which we did an [abrasion?] at the end which touched the contacts and it went back down on to a spindle with a, with a, a spring on it, and, I worked or we worked till about 1 o’clock the first time we were on this and there was a despatch rider waiting there and he took it down, I believe, to Aldershot where the rest was already down there and they fixed it on to try it out. The night superintendent came along and said, ‘What are doing here?’ We said, ‘We’ve been working here.’ Well he said, ‘Are you Roy Briggs?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Your dad’s been on wanting to know if you were still working and I told him no.’ Of course there’d been an air raid and I wasn’t home [laughs]. So he said, ‘You’d better go.’ So, [laughing] as we’d finished I went home and dad was on the doorstep waiting for me. Yeah. We went in about 10 o’clock in the morning and by then we’d found out that it had been partly successful but not successful. We made a little bit of alteration to the shape but the main trouble was the springs. Anyway, we got, we’d, they’d got on to the spring manufacturers and we, we made two of these contacts during the day with the U shaped and in the evening the springs came and we fitted them and once again it went down to Aldershot. I think this lasted three or four days, three or four nights by which time we had a successful job and it went in to mass production. Yeah. But in ‘39 in the summer they had started calling people up and, to do I think it was six months National Service but because the war started before they got out and they were still in the services but after Dunkirk these people came back out of the forces because as they’d all sort of finished their apprenticeships it was easier to train soldiers to fire a gun than it did to make engineers which took much longer. Yeah, what, in fact one of them he come out and he got the chief, he was the chief Ministry inspector. A couple of others. We then started building rocket, anti-aircraft rocket launchers. I don’t know whether they have a name. When they were, they went into parks they were known as Z batteries. There was, they started off as singles and then there was four, doubles. The doubles were long tubes with about five holes drilled in them which had studs go through them and they were welded and cleaned off on the top and those studs held them on the framework. The base was, was round and went down and then these went on and we, we took over a printing works at Colliers Wood and they were made, all made over there. They went into the parks. Wormwood Scrubs there was no and I think, I think it was about sixty odd in a battery which fired about a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty rockets. They weren’t very accurate but they put a barrage up [background ‘Hmm’]. They carried on until 1943, when the army was getting short of people they took the people off these guns and ATS went on there and the Home Guard which were not really needed, they thought, then. There wasn’t much chance of invasion. They, they took over at nights as well. I do know one or two of the Home Guards who, who fired them. This, this time probably because I could, I could make simple tool jobs and we had half a dozen fly presses with ladies on them and I was more or less looking after them. It was, it was of a range. We had everybody from an actress to a lady whose father was a doctor and had never been out to work. Quite a shock for her to see what life was like. We had a prostitute. We had Kath whose husband had been killed at Dunkirk and yeah I more or less looked after them. Made sure the parts that they were putting through the fly presses were there and cleared away afterwards and if anything went wrong sorted it out. When I went to, yeah, the same time we’d taken over cheaper garages at northside, Wandsworth Common which we were, we were producing cooking equipment in. At Clapham Junction the milk depot closed down just before the war and we took over the milk depot at Clapham Junction and there ovens and stuff was made. There was, round Wandsworth High Street there was a dump or you could call it [laughs] you had a bit of a shelter, and not much but people worked in there doing sinks and drainers and by that time we were involved with the City and Guilds and their training rooms and that, professors and that were actually producing for us mass produced parts and that. Well there was one of the theatres. They took that over and that. It was a general office for getting war work done and we had gone from somewhere about five hundred people to, I think, about sixteen hundred people in that time. Colin. Colin Benham was quite well educated in engineering. His cousin, who was a commander in the navy, came out to help with us in the war work. There again, thought he had, with his, he had an engineering background I think, but, it was more useful. Miss Benham came and she, she looked after people who, who’d been bombed out and that and did things what she could for them and generally did work for them. Yeah. They had, they did their own ventilation stuff and sterilising. Big sterilisers. When it come to register I can’t remember which it was now. If you registered as a sheet metal worker you weren’t, you weren’t reserved occupation. If you were registered as a sheet arm worker you were. Or it was the other way around. Anyway, as I wanted to go in the air force, I’d been in the ATC, I registered as the one that went. I didn’t tell them that I’d put it down. And yeah while I was in the ATC we were attached to the Home Guard. We went down to Bisley throwing hand grenades and firing. We actually, in the ATC we actually had 1914/18 Lewis guns which they’d got out the dungeons from somewhere. I started off as number three but by the time I was going in the air force I got up to number one. Number three was, as they fired up to six hundred rounds or more a minute you know, you had to have a supply going. One fired and the other one fed it through I think and I, I got it up and then gradually we went up. Yeah. There was talk at the time that if we were invaded there was holes in the ground on Wimbledon common and that and some of us would go up there and come out to try and kill Germans. I thought afterwards that when, after Dunkirk, a little while afterwards there used to be reports come in that in villages in France somebody had come out and killed a German and they had killed all the, all the men and that over fourteen and things like that and then there were reports that they’d killed everybody in the villages, you know, I thought if I’d have come out and killed somebody how many of English and Londoners might have been wiped out by it. I had that in my mind all my life and glad it never happened. Yeah. We, we, we had a stick of bombs dropped around our road in October ’45. We’d had brick air raid shelters built in our back gardens. We had one and next door had one and there was just a three foot square hole which we could have got in to them or them in to us. I think there was about nine bombs came down. One of them had blown up and dad and me ran out and we went down the road and as I passed the house with somebody I used to go to school with he said, ‘Roy we’ve got a great big hole in our passage’ and I said, possibly a bomb by the side of it, probably a bomb had gone down so I said, ‘You’d better, better grab some clothes and get out in case it goes up.’ Before the war I used to help a green grocer setting up his stall before, before I went to school and on the way back home to get washed I used to take the vegetables into the fire station, Este [?] Road fire station which was in the next road to us. It was only half a dozen houses down so I did know the firemen in there. The fire engine from there came, came around and somebody I knew said, ‘Roy we’re here now. You go back home.’ So dad and me went back home, I was in the shelter and dad was in the doorway. We were talking to mum and there was a big bang and the bomb which was in this house had gone off. Dad and me raced down there. The fire engine was more or less wrecked and I couldn’t see the firemen I knew but anyway the other, other people were coming then. As we walked back home the moon was out and we saw a hole in the Flatt’s house. Jean, my sister was friendly with Jean, the daughter, and dad and me went and started banging on the door and couldn’t get any reply and next door come and said, ‘What are you banging on there for?’ We said, ‘The Flatt’s have got a hole in it, in their roof. Probably a bomb’s gone through it.’ So she said, ‘Oh. We’ll, we’ll go and tell them.’ They were in the shelter at the back and they went and told them and they came out and they grabbed some stuff and we helped them take it over outside in the car park at Clapham Station. They’d built an air raid shelter and we took it over but they went in the shelter and then we went back home. The, what we didn’t know that one of the bombs was on the shelter at the other end and later on it went off and killed, I think it killed two people in the shelter but [unclear] Jean and that. Yeah this must have been on the Friday night. On the Saturday morning I cycled over to the Beverly at North Cheam and my mum had had a friend over there who she’d worked with during the war and I said, said to ‘em, ‘Any chance of mum and my sister and me coming over?’ And they said, ‘Yeah come over.’ Her son was in the marines. ‘We got a four foot bed.’ So mum, me and my sister went over there and we slept together in the four foot bed [mild laughter] but dad stopped at home more or less. Dad patched up the windows and that that had gone, to look after the house really during the night. We had some old [unclear] but they didn’t bother to put, they didn’t bother to replace the windows. They put like a muslin over it, there was just the downstairs in the front that had a window in because people could have broken the, got through the muslin quite easy. The glass was a bit more difficult. Yeah and I cycled from North Cheam to Wandsworth in the morning. The raids were still on sometimes and the guns on Cannon Common were blazing away, shrapnel was coming down and when we went home of a night it was still, they were still firing and the shrapnel was still coming down. I’ve got a feeling that I did that for three or four months before we went back home. Yeah. March ‘43 I went for the first medical at North Cheam. I think some, early April, went to Euston House for the aircrew medical and selection board which I passed and got me number and the, and the King’s shillin’ and got deferred for two or three months but there was a great demand to get in as pilots but I think some of them were deferred for about a year there was, they had that many. Yeah. And in fact I was called up for going to Lord’s Cricket Ground on the 21st of June 1943. As I, as I went there I met Len Spratt who I spent the day with at, at Euston House and we went in and we, we got our injections at the same time in the long room. We dropped our trousers in the long room. W G Grace was on the, a picture of him was on the wall. [phone rings in background] I don’t remember but they, they said that they used to turn W G Grace’s around.
[phone ringing and then phone conversation]
CB: So we —
RB: It’s a bit —
CB: We’re just on W G Grace and when you were at um when —
RB: Yeah.
CB: You went to Lords and he was looking down on you.
RB: Yeah but they do say that they used to, used to turn him around when we dropped our trousers but in all of it I don’t remember that [laughs]. Yeah. We, we were in flats opposite Regents Park Zoo. Len and me were in the same room and, in fact, I can cut it short, we were always in the same room or the same hut for the next year. We, we went in to the zoo four times a day to eat. In the restaurants not in, not in the cages. Along by our flats were Stockleigh Hall and another posh one. I must be getting old I can’t remember their names. Yeah, and they had a garage underneath and they did put a canteen in there but we still we were talking to people afterwards who were at Lords they that they were still using the zoo for quite some time. We went to Seymour Hall for lectures and swimming. You could march down there and have a lecture in the morning and go in the afternoon and they’d removed the flooring and you were in, in for swimming. There was a garage at the roundabout at St Johns Wood and they took that over and that’s where we got kitted out. In, in the park was [pause] anyway I can’t remember at the moment. They used that as the hospital. The normal run was to stop at Lords for nineteen days. Some, some things were, activities took place in Lords. They had the gas mask room built there and you went in and tested your gas mask. You got paid there, sat on the seats in Lords till you got called out for your pay. We did our first marching in Regents Park and in the back streets there. First four, three nights were spent putting your names on all your clothes and that. After that you were allowed out where most of the Londoners took their civvy kit home and sort of saw their parents. Unless you were on guard most evenings were free. Yeah, after the nineteen days we went to the railway at Olympia. I think it was called Olympia and there was another name for it where there was a troop train in there and it was just the one train and all the different trades went on and they dropped off a couple of carriages every, every here and there going along. We used to then, got taken to, either pilots or navigators, where they were going. We went to Bridgenorth which was up on the high level. There was a lift to go down to get on the street level down by the river. Yeah. Yeah. We went out to, there was 18 and 19 ITWs which was mainly wireless operators and air gunners. I, I had actually gone in as wireless operator/air gunner and at that stage I was still a wireless operator/air gunner. Probably jumping the gun a bit. Early in oh probably the decision had already been made and hadn’t got through that to stop training wireless operators as WOPAGS for Bomber Command. The, the thought was that if your gunner got killed or anything and you had to go back, by the time you got back, operated the dead man’s handle which lined the turret up with the fuselage, opened the doors at the back, disconnected his oxygen, his intercom and got that out of the way. Got hold of him and pulled him in and if he needed first aid badly to stop it and then we’d have got in to the turret we would probably have been shot down anyway so after that ruling come out we stopped doing the full air gunner’s course although we did enough that we could have got in and fired them. If the wireless operators were going to Coastal Command they then went on and did the air gunner’s course because all the gunners I believe and wireless operators operated air gunners and they did a swap around on sixteen hour flights that they all had a break from whatever they were doing. Yeah. I, I stopped with Len for all that time and then they said he had webbed feet and got to go to Coastal Command. We don’t believe it [laughs] and I’ve still kept in touch till today. Yeah. We, at, at Madley after ITW we went to Madley where we flew on Dominies where you could have an instructor and a number of you went in there and you had the one set and went through it, after that you went into Percival Proctors which is just well, [?] you and the pilot in the main although there were some three seaters if anybody was having trouble and they needed an instructor up with them. Most of the, most of the flights were about fifty five minutes but the most dangerous part was coming back to land because they used to see the NAAFI van leaving the site and they had Lyons fruit pies which were delicious but there was a very limited number and they all wanted to get in to get their pies. There were one or two collisions when the airfield controller fired Very cartridges to tell people not to land. They always thought he was firing at somebody else I think. Yeah. It was, it was pretty hard work on, on training. You, we had Morse. At the same time we did things which health and safety and things because I suppose they thought we were all going to end up as officers and NCOs. We did things like setting up camps by a river and taking the water for cooking from the top and washing and using the ablutions down the way the water was lying. [laughs] Yes. We had to do fault finding on, on the radios, coding and things and you used to get a test on these. Some were about every fortnight or so. If you did not do very well then you went to evening classes and I believe a week was eight days so that the schools were used every day. You had a different day off every week. If you went on evening school and then on the next time you hadn’t picked up or perhaps it was a couple of times you then went to FT which was Further Training and you didn’t want to do that ‘cause you lost all your mates. You went back a few courses. I, I was nearly always on extra training but I never went to FT. The people who went to FT if they went back a few courses and then didn’t succeed they were then ceased training and well the only place for them really was to go as air gunners. We had people who, who joined us at Madley who had been to America and failed as pilots and then go on the training as navigators and had failed at, failed as navigators. I believe some of them after that went, went as bomb aimers. Yeah, in fact we had one chap who reckoned he’d worked it that he’d fail his pilot’s and failed as a navigator. I don’t know whether the air force had caught, caught on to him but when he took his wireless operator’s exams he just scraped through and I don’t know whether the air force had done that deliberately and he was the first one that had to bale out [laughs]. Yes, well I got me, got my sergeant’s stripes about a fortnight before I was nineteen, went on leave and then we went back and then we still did another about three months wireless operator’s training. After that we went to Llandwrog, North Wales. Number 9 OAFU I think it was. They were flying Ansons and we got bearings for the navigators who were really having more, more experience of flying and training where they were going but I believe sometimes we used to fly two or three times a day with different crews. I think we were only there about a month. After that we went to 30 OTU at Hixon and we got crewed up. We, we got Reg, Reg Featherstone as a pilot, Johnny Smale as the navigator, Roy Briggs as wireless operator, Benny Benson as a rear gunner and me and the navigator disagreed afterwards about whether we got Taffy Jones as a mid-upper. He seems to think that we didn’t get a mid-upper until we went to Heavy Conversion Unit but I’m sure he’s wrong. Oh and we got a bomb aimer. This is bad [laughs]. He was an Indian civil servant. I can’t, I can’t believe I can’t remember his name. [laughs].
[pause]
Right. We’ll have to come back to that. After doing ground training we started flying. Reg was struggling rather and he, we soon sort of always had another pilot in with us and I think it was probably only after a couple of weeks we had the chief flying instructor in with us for a couple of times and Reg got grounded. Unfit for heavy aircraft. So, we become a headless crew. Robbie Roberts had, had joined the air force before the war. He had been seconded to the Royal Navy and had spent some time on the Ark Royal. He then re-mustered for pilot training and went to South Africa, and I believe South Africa and Rhodesia for pilot training and ended up, I can’t remember what the, what aircraft he flew but he did a tour in the Middle East before coming back to England. He was then at Hixon as a headless crew and we got together and luckily because he’d got this mass experience it didn’t lose us too much time because he had twin engine experience. So we, we swapped between Hixon and Seighford. Spent some of the time over at Seighford for OTU. When we were at Hixon they were a rotten lot. They said as we got in the plane, we were on circuits and bumps at Seighford and they said, ‘Roy take us back to Hixon will you?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ full of confidence and I got in and we took off and I worked like mad to get Hixon to recognise my call sign amongst the other three hundred who were trying to get it. Eventually I got through and I got a bearing and all proud I said fly so, so and so and so and they were all looking at me and laughing and they went like that and we were about two foot off the ground [laughs]. Yeah talking about like that when we were on Lancs the navigator used to call the sign out for the, to get the speed out for the pilot. Of course the pilots didn’t do anything. Only drive. I mean the engineer used to push the throttles up with him. He used to do what I told him. He used to do what the navigator told him and the gunners if they wanted him to do something he had to do what they told him. Yeah and Johnny was calling out the speeds and I, it was getting slower and slower and I was looking at him and he looked at me with panic in his eyes because we shouldn’t be up in the air and we weren’t. Rob had made that good a landing we were on the ground. We were all looking at the, on the other hand Rob did a rotten landing and we bounced and Len said, ‘Oxygen going on skipper.’ [laughs, including background laugh] They were a few of the, yeah, from, we were, we were actually in a field at Hixon by the side of the railway. I don’t know whether you remember but in the, in the ‘40s after Hixon packed up English Electrics took over the hangers and they were taking one of their big transformers and it got stuck on the level crossing and a train hit it. There was a loss of life but that was actually at that level crossing in the field that we used to stop in. Yeah.
[pause]
Yes. We then went on to a holding unit I think, for a couple of weeks before going to Swinderby. We started heavy conversion on, on Stirlings. After Stirlings and when you were used to four engines you used to then go to Lancaster Finishing School if you were going on Lancasters but a couple of weeks into our course there was enough Lancs available and they phased, the courses in front of us carried on on the Stirlings but we were the first at Lancaster course to go right through on, on Lancasters. Yeah, we picked up Len Piddington as the, he was a pilot flight engineer. In 1944 they had trained that many pilots they didn’t know what to do with them so they sent a complete courses of flight engineers from St Athans to the army ‘cause the army was shorter, short of people and these pilots went to St Athans and did an engineer’s course on the promise that if they completed a tour on Lancs on Bomber Command they could then go back and re-muster and finish and carry on as a pilot for Lancs then but of course the war finished and none of them had finished a course by the time, I don’t think, a tour by then. I have met one person who carried on flying on Lancasters and finished his tour and went back and then trained as a pilot and he went into Lancs. We then, I think we went to a holding unit, Balderton I believe, because there wasn’t all that much flying. There was a lot of snow around in Lincolnshire but it wasn’t, it wasn’t too long because we went to Fiskerton. The pilot and I think the navigator, some of the crews went second [?] dicky on tour with an experienced crew, they never entrusted me with anybody [laughs]. They, on the day after me twentieth, yeah my twentieth birthday because I was the only teenager in the crew by this time, Benny who was a teenager when we first crewed up had had his twentieth birthday. I, [pause] we, I don’t think I went out drinking because we were on an air test of N-Nan which had completed a hundred ops so we flew around N for Nan. I think it was an air test. Afterwards we flew, N-Nan did a hundred and thirteen ops and we took it on its hundred and tenth and the hundred and eleventh. Yeah. We then had a week’s leave to, which they used to say to go and say goodbye to your family and before starting ops and went back. We got called for an op which I think they called us about midnight which got cancelled and then we, we got called back to the briefing room for an attack at Plauen on the German Czech border. This was one of the targets that the, Churchill and Stalin had agreed needed bombing. It was er, we took off just after 6 o’clock and got back something like I think it was nine hours. Nine hours trip, which seeing we’d been up for an op the day before and we then had to go in for the debriefing and a meal. Carried on for quite a while and I think it was four days later we got called to do a daylight on Potsdam on the outskirts of Berlin. We were all briefed and ready to go and the Met Flight said that the weather was too bad over there so it got cancelled. We got called back to the briefing room later on and the stream was told us it was still Potsdam but there was still one going around Germany. They told us that the Potsdam raid was still on. This was the first time Berlin had been bombed for about a year. The last time by Lancasters. The last time they’d lost about forty two I think. Mosquitos had carried on bombing Berlin of the night, light night bomber force. They used to bomb regular with their one four thousand pounder. In fact in the darkest days Mosquitos used to do two flights a night. A crew would take off in light over here, bomb Berlin, come back, a new crew, new bomb and another crew would take off and it would be light by the time they got back. Anyway, we were told we weren’t going to Potsdam. We were going on a daylight training aircraft were going to have OTUs and heavy conversions were going to fly towards Germany to pick up the fighters like this was just going to be our squadron. I’m not sure if we had one or two Mosquitos and we were going to fly around Germany and bomb Cuxhaven on the way back and I don’t know whether it was because we had an experienced captain we could then go back in and see what we could see on fires and that and then I could send a message which I didn’t want to do because the German fighters could pick up on your radio. But they, we felt that they were risking our lives unnecessarily because if there had have been fires we were going to be home in an hour and a half. We could have told them. [laughs] Anyway, we went back in, didn’t really see anything. I mean we didn’t have enough aircraft really to get any fires going and I did code a message up and send it, send it back. Oh yes and on the nine hours to Plauen it was an extra long night because somebody had a puncture in front of us and we couldn’t get back to, to our dispersal and had to stop and wait there until they organised somebody to come and pick us up and a ground crew to come and take over the aircraft because we had to sign to say that any faults and that was on it. Yeah so yes so that was it. After that we had, yeah on the 18th of April we, we were briefed to bomb Heligoland. The main reason for this was that the Royal Navy were going along the North German coast supporting the army and Heligoland had U-boats and E-boats and submarines which they felt could come back and attack the navy by the rear. Yeah. There was approximately eight hundred Lancasters and two hundred Halifaxes on the raid. We, I think we bombed Sylt. It was an island by the side of, with a little airfield on it or an airfield on it. I don’t think they’d been using the aircraft from there for some time. Somebody hit the oil storage tanks and the master bomber didn’t have much, a chance of directing bomber. I think he said, ‘Bomb the smoke, under bomb the smoke as you get in and then over bomb the centre of the smoke and port and starboard of the smoke’ you know so yeah there was only a couple of Halifaxes lost I think. It’s probably the only time I saw the thousand aircraft ‘cause we bombed and we went over we turned around to come back and we either saw the aircraft that bombed in front of us or those that were still going in to bomb you know because normally on nights you didn’t see them anyway and on other daylights if they went and bombed and carried on you didn’t see them. After that we started, mixed up with a briefing for the 20th for Hitler’s birthday to bomb Berchtesgaden, we were also being briefed and I believe we had something like twenty briefings for Bremen. Bremen, the army was having trouble in some places to advance and in other places were going easy and we kept going back to the briefing room and eventually we got, we got briefed for Berchtesgaden and we, I think we got out to the aircraft and the Met Flight said the weather over the Alps was too bad so it got cancelled. I’m not sure if the next day or the day after, yeah, the 22nd I think we went to Bremen. Yeah, in the end we went to the briefing room and they said that they were gonna withdraw troops to a certain line for, in the evening and they were ordered to come back to that line and we were going to bomb in front of it. As it was I think when we got there and we were going in as we got along there, there was some cloud and the master bomber said, ‘Apple Tart,’ which was don’t bomb. So we went there and we didn’t bomb. I think whether some aircraft earlier or after went and bombed but we didn’t bomb. The, a couple of days afterwards I think it was about eleven thousand garrison surrendered. [pause] And, oh yeah and then the squadron, we didn’t go, I think about the 25th they bombed Berchtesgaden but as we bombed, as we’d done four or five we were on a stand down and the Berchtesgaden one, that was the last one on the squadron. We, we somewhere amongst then we got a cross country looking for [pause] windmills [laughs] sorry. Sorry I had a job to remember the word. Yeah. We went around Norfolk looking for windmills not knowing what it was but on the 29th we got called to the briefing room to say that we weren’t going to drop bombs. We were going to drop food over Holland. And that was the first of our six trips over, over Holland. When we come they said that we, they hadn’t got permission for us to drop the food and they weren’t sure how the Germans were going to take it. They were going to tell them we were going to go and were hoping they were going to get away with it. Nobody got fired on although there were reports that some of the Germans were still with their guns and that but so we, so we came back and we got called to the briefing room on the 30th and were told that as we had got away with it the day before they were going to do it again and send some more aircraft in the hopes that the Germans wouldn’t think that we would do that and then they would open fire. We did it on the second and then the next, the next, the next day we got called and were more or less told the same although I believe later on that day that the, they did agree that we could go over and do it so, yeah. So we did another three we did six drops to I think, the Hague, Rotterdam, Delft and Valkenburg airfield. Amongst the children there was a girl who now works in our charity shop up the shops and we’ve got chatting and I’ve, I’ve taken her to an aircrew buffet and told her that I was feeding her sixty nine years ago. I didn’t still think I’d be feeding her sixty nine years afterwards. We’re great, we’re great friends.
CB: What height were you flying when you dropped —
RB: Oh I should think about two fifty foot or something like that wasn’t it? About two hundred miles an hour I think.
CB: And was the food in the bomb bay or how was it released?
RB: It was in the bomb bay. It was in nets. Yeah.
CB: So how did they, how were they released?
RB: By the bomb aimer on, as though he was dropping —
CB: In a sequence was it?
RB: He just dropped the lot you know and they, but they, you know, you could see the targets anyway but they had pathfinders had put targets, targets down. Yeah,
CB: Could you see the locals?
RB: Pardon?
CB: Could you see the local?
RB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah you could see, you were close enough to see them. Yeah.
CB: What were they doing?
RB: Pardon?
CB: What were they doing?
RB: Waving and, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah and they by the end they had put in flowers “Thank you RAF” Yeah. Because they, it was about nineteen thousand extra people died during that winter which they take it was you know the starvation and that. They were eating bulbs and things. The, the Germans weren’t really feeding them and the Dutch had gone on strike to help for their bit for the war effort. Yeah. I think this lady I talked to I think she was fairly well off and they had a maid and they, they, they took some of their valuables. They got her to take them in a pram out in to the country where people were a bit well off to try and sell it, you know.
CB: What’s her name?
RB: Ellen, Ellen.
[pause]
CB: I think we’ll take a break there.
RB: Right.
CB: Thank you.
[pause]
CB: We’ve just had a break for one or two things. By the way this is the 28th of January and we’re now going to carry on with Roy. We’re close to the end of the war, right at the end of the war but we’re talking about Operation Manna. So Roy how did you get briefed about this and what were your reactions as a crew?
RB: Well we went to the briefing room and were told that we weren’t going to drop bombs we were going to drop food. I don’t, I think it was a shock really that there was, they’d said that they’d tried to get permission from the Germans but they weren’t playing you know and that the Dutch were in such a state that they’d offered to let a ship go in but the, I believe but the Germans had said no. Yeah, it was a bit of shock yeah that I, I know that I’ve read that a CO wasn’t pleased that he was telling his crews to go in at about two hundred miles an hour and two hundred and fifty feet or something like that and there was no, no agreement and that they were going to tell the Germans that we were coming, you know, over the radio yeah. But as, I mean I could never really have imagined myself dropping bombs over Germany. In fact, as a little titbit, you know when we got, I think it was over Bremen or somewhere. I thought, is this me? A boy from Battersea doing this, you know. There wasn’t much flying before the war. It was a different world. And everything it’s just when it all starts it’s all far away and it just goes one step at a time, you know and then all of a sudden you’re on a squadron and then all of a sudden your skipper goes on a second dicky and that and it’s getting nearer and you’ve been trained for it for twenty one months you know and it’s, it is all, it is all a case of doing one step and somehow thinking that what, if anything bad is going to happen it’s going to happen to somebody else. Not you. Yeah. No. I mean even the second day there was a thought of oh when they said they were going to send more we thought are they going to let us build up you know, to, before they fired at us. They just, I think when we got over there glad that those in front of us if they, well if they’d have been firing on them we’d have no doubt turned around and come back. Yeah. Because you know I mean they could have virtually fired at you with rifles couldn’t they, I mean. Because the Dutch people had been good to aircrew that had come down over their land. They were good ‘cause the Manna Association went over there for years after the war and took part in their, I think it’s their Freedom Day or something isn’t it?
CB: And when you got back from the sorties what discussions did you have as a crew?
RB: Well, we, we’d got away, you know. They hadn’t fired on us, you know and we sort of accepted it. That we had got away with it. But there was, there was that thought that the next day was, was going to be a build up but no. That was—
CB: So you’d done two. Now you get to number three. What are you feeling now?
RB: Yeah well after that we did, I think it was after the third that we were told when we come back from our third that they had agreed that we could —
CB: No.
RB: Go on dropping there. Yeah.
CB: So you stopped at six.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So what was the reason for that?
RB: VE day I think.
CB: Right. OK
RB: Yeah.
CB: Ok. So in the beginning you’ got the apprehension. What was the briefing about? If the Germans did fire on any of the aircraft ahead what were you going to do?
RB: I don’t know that there was much, you know, that they were just hoping that they wouldn’t.
CB: Just go in —
RB: I think we were about the third squadron in you know so we were in the early stages of it.
CB: Right.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Ok. So fast forward now to the last raid and we’ve got the end of the war. So can we carry on the narrative there? What happened then?
RB: We, Bomber Command brought, I think, something like seventy two thousand released prisoners of war back in twenty seven days. We took Uncle over to B58 at Rotterdam. No. Was it Rotter?
CB: Melsbroek?
RB: What?
CB: Melsboek?
RB: No, B58 at, Holland anyway. We took a service aircraft over. We had a spare wheel and a ground crew and we went over and landed there. It was no air traffic control. I think from, from, from H hour to twenty five past aircraft landed. From H30 to 55, aircraft took off and that’s how it was. You know, there was discipline and it went, and they they came in and they landed and loaded them up with troops and away they went.
CB: So this was Operation Exodus. Where did you fly into with these POWs?
[pause]
CB: Because Westcott here —
RB: Pardon?
CB: Westcott up the road here?
RB: No. No, we didn’t bring any back. Although they say we did we didn’t bring anybody back, in my actual log I’ve got them asking me whether flight sergeant somebody of, did we have him on board.
CB: Ah.
RB: He was on compassionate leave.
CB: Oh right.
RB: And we brought him home but the squadron records say that we didn’t bring anybody home.
CB: Right.
RB: We one of the other aircraft brought some Red Cross.
CB: So as such you weren’t part of Operation Exodus.
RB: Pardon?
CB: As such —
RB: No. No.
CB: The squadron wasn’t part of Operation Exodus.
RB: No. No. No.
CB: Ok. Well don’t worry about that. So we’ve got to the end of the war. Then what?
RB: We took, I think we took some people around Germany. Some ground crew. To see. And then we went to Bari and Naples bringing troops home.
CB: Oh you did.
RB: Yeah. We, yeah.
CB: So just on the round robins, the Cooks tours they called them. What height did you fly over the cities? Cause that’s what you were doing.
RB: Not very high so people could see. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And what was your relationship with your ground crew during the, during hostilities anyway.
RB: Yeah we got on alright with them all but seeing as we flew a number of different aircraft you know you didn’t get the same ground crew all the time.
CB: Oh right.
RB: I mean some, some people seemed to do twenty, twenty trips in the same aircraft.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and more.
RB: No. All I got here is Exodus. Service aircraft to B58
CB: Right. Anyway, on the Cooks tours where did you fly then?
RB: Essen, Cologne, Aachen and Antwerp.
CB: Right.
RB: I think that might have been the only one we did. Yeah ‘cause in, in May ‘45 by the end of the month all Australians, Canadians and foreign people had gone out of the, out the crews, you know.
CB: Oh right.
CB: They went home immediately.
RB: Yeah they yeah they got out. So, I mean, I know a pilot, he was the only Englishman. He was on leave and went back and they’d all gone. [laughs]
CB: Didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.
RB: No. No. No. No.
CB: I bet he, yeah, what was the relationship in your crew like?
RB: Yeah alright there was only one snag was the mid upper gunner.
CB: Oh go on. What about him.
RB: He had a girlfriend in Leicester.
CB: Taffy Jones.
RB: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So he went there a lot.
RB: Yeah and you know we covered for him when we were more or less in briefings and he didn’t get back till the last minute and things. Yeah.
CB: So what, so did the crew socialise a lot.
RB: Yeah well you really had to because other crews were doing things at the time.
CB: Yeah.
RB: We basically knew our crew and then I knew wireless operators, the navigator knew navigators because they had —
CB: Yeah.
RB: Sessions together, you know. I might, if you got friendly with another wireless operator there was a, chances are that you might get sort of a bit friendly with the other crew but they would be flying other times so you know other than being in the mess —
CB: So how did the crew feel about Taffy Jones going off all the time?
RB: Yeah [laughs] We’d know that there was, there was —
CB: What did the crew say to him?
RB: Well at times we felt as we should dump him, you know.
CB: Did you?
RB: Yeah. Yeah. The rest of us were, were alright you know.
CB: Commonly known as pee’d off.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Because the flight engineers didn’t join till after OTU how was Len Piddington selected? Or did he just appear?
RB: I think, I think he just appeared. I can’t remember now, you know but yeah.
CB: Yeah and how, how did he get on?
RB: Yeah he was a Londoner you know and we had, yeah.
CB: So now we are at the end of the war what happened then?
RB: We went down to Wyton. No we went down to Upwood. Upwood was due for a clean up after the war so we went, we got transferred to Wyton. By the end of August 576 and 156 were being disbanded. Alan Craig was CO of 35 err 156. He was ex- Halton he’d done a number of master bomber trips and they, they did six Lancasters with Lincoln engines in to try them out and he did master bomber trips on them trying them out. I suppose because he had an engineering background because of Halton.
CB: What was his name?
RB: Alan Craig.
CB: Oh Alan Craig. Ok.
RB: He was well known and he got picked to take 35 Squadron around America in 1946. He, as the squadron was being disbanded he went over there to Graveley. He grounded some of their crews and they not very, they weren’t very pleased with him and he sent over to 156. My skipper was in line for going but he, his, he got married in ‘44. Joan who lived in Stratford on Avon and I take it there were a lot pilots around there she had been engaged twice and both got killed and when they got married she thought flying was dangerous and when the war finished he was to give up flying. As he’d been in before the war he was due for demob by the time they were going to America so he would have had to sign on and he wouldn’t sign on so that wiped our crew out. Flight Lieutenant Jenkinson DFM he, I don’t know how, he didn’t have a wireless operator and I’d kept me nose clean. Nothing special but you know just did as I should do. The signals officer, we got on alright but he got on alright with lots of them you know and him and Jenkinson asked whether I would like to go with them so I said yes because my crew had well I think a couple of them had already been posted to other places. Me navigator was on his way out to the Middle East. He was an accountant and he was going on ground crew in the accounts somewhere. The bomb aimer’s going. Len they sent over to, to another squadron. I mean why they, why they took him and put on another squadron. Benny, the rear gunner he went to another squadron. Yeah. So I went over to Graveley. We got our white Lancs and started flying and we were going to be Alan Craig’s crew. We spent hours in the crew room waiting for him to take us up to fly but he never did because he had other things to do and then a signal came through from High Wycombe that it was all pathfinder crews and it had got, been remade with crews from each of the bomber groups so you’ve heard of Sir Mike Beetham have you?
CB: Absolutely.
RB: He come from East Kirkby down to Graveley and swapped with a crew. We swapped with a crew from 138 at Tuddenham and, I was, I was torn. When he come he didn’t have a wireless operator and I said did I [?] want to stop with him and you know I didn’t want to lose my crew so I said no. It was the worst thing I ever did really because when they got us over there to Tuddenham we were a new crew and they were grounding crews left, right and centre. They sent. They us on leave. I got recalled the next day and got posted so I never saw any of Jenks crew. The day after I left the two gunners come back and got posted. So I found out. By the time the pilot come back he didn’t have a crew. They’d all gone, you know [laughs]. So yeah at Tuddenham we were doing photographic work for town and country planning. We didn’t do much because we were making maps over bombed areas but quite often you know with cloud and that we didn’t get all that much photographic work done. And anyway I don’t know whether I would have gone because Flight Lieutenant Koreen [?] had a mid-air crash. He had a nose and he went into somebody’s tail and the wireless operator had frostbite and I never did find out whether he went around America.
CB: So they took their Lancasters with them did they?
RB: Yeah they did.
CB: To America.
RB: Yeah they went around. Sixteen —
CB: Good Lord.
RB: Sixteen went around America. Yeah. Yeah. I did, I did have all the cuttings and that.
CB: Yeah.
RB: And um —
CB: But you never went.
RB: No. I didn’t go but I knew the people, a lot of the people, and I thought of, and when I saw Mark Beetham up at Hendon once I said ‘I got them’ and he said ‘I didn’t ‘ave it cause I was there’ so I handed over to him all the photos and that that I had. Yeah. Yeah it’s like. How far are we going to go on?
CB: No, we’re just, it’s just a question of what you did at the end of the war.
RB: Yeah.
CB: ‘Cause you came out in ’47.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So what did you do between the end of the war and when you were demobbed?
RB: I went to Cranwell on a, on a course for VHF Homer. Do you know?
CB: Yeah.
RB: VHF Homers? I operated a VHF Homer at Wyton. Only for a day or two. I was on air traffic control as an RT operator giving aircraft permission to take off and land. I, I was on duty now, now, now I’m going to do a bit of a shine [?] I was on darkie watch. Darkie watch. Anybody know darkie watch?
CB: That’s, no. No
Other: No. No.
RB: It was on channel 4. The transmission was I think was ten to twelve miles maximum so if you were in trouble during the war you could use plain language.
CB: Yeah.
RB: And you could say —
CB: Oh it could only go twelve miles.
RB: Eh?
CB: Yeah.
RB: You could say Lancaster of 576 squadron I’m lost.
CB: Right.
RB: They could put searchlights up and things like that.
CB: Oh right.
RB: If you had trouble they could get somebody to talk if he was injured or in trouble and things like that. Anyway, I was the only one, there was no flying so I was the only one on air traffic control for the night. I took a —
[pause]
CB: We’re just pausing to look at documents.
RB: I took a call from Group in the night that the Americans had lost a Dakota in the Alps. Oh I’ve already told you every, every three weeks we were duty Air Sea Rescue [?] Squadron and had to have an aircraft standing by all the time. I think we had airborne life boats which had come in. We had one of those. We never used it as far as I know and I switched on the tannoy and said, ‘Emergency air sea rescue. Emergency air sea rescue. Emergency air sea rescue. All air and ground crews report immediately. All duty air and ground crew should report immediately.’ I rung up the crash crew to make sure they’d heard me. The Met girl had come up before she’d gone off. I knew the winds. I’d put the runway lights on, I’d put the perimeter lights on and by the time the, I can’t believe it now but I believe it only took somewhere, something about just over a quarter of an hour for a crew to come ready to take off and by that time ‘cause I wasn’t supposed to give the aircraft permission the flying control officer was supposed to be there. I mean when I was on an airfield by meself overnight I wondered whether if it had ever happened you know if someone had said, ‘I’m in trouble.’ I had to [?] switch the lights on for them to land. What would have happened —
CB: Yeah.
RB: You know, but officially?
CB: What rank —
RB: So —
CB: What rank are you now for authority?
RB: I’m warrant officer.
CB: You are. Right.
RB: Yeah. Yeah the, anyway we got them off and they went to the Alps and they did find the Lanc but I think they —
CB: The Dakota.
RB: Pardon?
CB: The Dakota.
RB: Yeah, they found the Dakota. They saw it a number of times. In fact I can probably tell you how many times they found it. [pause] Anyway, in the Alps, flying, they’d saw it a number of times and there was a crash crew from Milan sent to find them and I think they went across to Castel Benito for the night and then went back the next day.
CB: Right.
RB: I suppose being the nearest —
CB: Yeah.
RB: Anyway they went over and —
CB: This was a daylight operation?
RB: This is looking for daylight in the Alps, yeah. I have got the cuttings here.
CB: So why didn’t the Americans send a plane to search?
RB: I don’t know. I don’t know. In fact, in fact I think afterwards they did sort of say that —
CB: Can we look at those in a minute?
RB: Yeah. Yeah well yeah well that —
CB: Yeah.
RB: That is the paper reports.
CB: Yeah.
RB: And it’s in focus and we diverted the Lanc to what is now London Airport to be interviewed by the BBC.
CB: Right. Amazing.
RB: And I’ve here got the signal from the American air force. Message received as follows from the USA Air Force in Europe, ‘Please convey our deep appreciation for the efforts in finding our aircraft and the hard work put in.’
CB: Brilliant.
RB: And when we were clearing up they said, ‘Roy you did most of it. You’d better take that with you.’
CB: Very gratifying.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So when are we talking about? 1946 is this?
RB: This is ‘46.
CB: Ok. And you were at Cranwell.
RB: No. No, I’d come from Cranwell. I’d done the course at Cranwell.
CB: Oh right.
RB: I’m back at Upwood.
CB: Back at Upwood. Ok.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So you’ve done, you’re still flying intermittently.
RB: No. No.
CB: Not at all.
RB: No. No.
CB: Ok so how did you come so we’re in ‘46 but you didn’t leave till ‘47 so what did you do in the rest of the time?
RB: RT at Upwood.
CB: Ok and how did your demob come about?
RB: You got a demob number. Your age and when you went in and mine was 45 and that was due out but it varied on trades because believe it or not in some trades they were short. Trades which had been built up at the beginning of the war were due for demobbing and if they hadn’t, if they didn’t need more along the line yeah and I did while I was at Upwood the only other highlight was I went over to Wyton because they were short of an RT operator over there and somebody on the VHF Homer and I did, I did a day or two on the VHF Homer over there. Yeah.
CB: So your demob date was actually 1945 but you didn’t take it till ’46?
RB: No, no, no that was 45 was the number.
CB: Oh sorry.
RB: But it came up —
CB: Beg your pardon.
RB: It came up. Wireless operators. It was due March ’47.
CB: Right.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Ok so then you knew that in advance.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Where did you go for demob?
RB: Lytham St Anne’s at Blackpool.
CB: Ok and what happened then?
RB: They said did I want to go back in? [laughs]
CB: Yeah. And you said —
RB: No. Well those, at that time well pre-war the air force spent a lot of time overseas. In actual fact about that time squadrons of Lancs used to go to the Middle East and that for a month and come back, you know so it would have been a whole different ball game then if, from the —
CB: So when did you meet your wife Joyce? What was she doing?
RB: 1943.
CB: Right. Where was she?
RB: Um she was in Battersea. Yeah, she worked for the Red Cross and St Johns Joint Organisation [?]
CB: And so you saw her intermittently or how did you —
RB: It was intermittently, yeah. Yeah, yeah I mean I was only coming home once every three months for leave sort of thing or —
CB: Yeah.
RB: An odd weekend.
CB: So that was another motivation for leaving the RAF was it?
RB: Yeah and to really I suppose to start doing something for, for me life you know.
CB: Yeah. So what had you chosen to do when leaving the RAF?
RB: I didn’t choose it. I got a job in engineering didn’t I?
CB: And you went back to it.
RB: I went back to it yeah.
CB: Ok. And they had to, it was a reserved —
RB: Pardon?
CB: Place? They had to take you back.
RB: Well yeah when I went back in there he said, ‘I’m not taking you back. I didn’t want you to go and you went.’ He was joking he was. [laughs]
CB: Oh right.
RB: Yeah. I I didn’t really have any young life, you know, even social life ‘cause I went to evening school for three years and evening school was evening school. There was no day release in those days you know. I used to work till 6 o’clock and race home and drink a cup of tea and race to be at Wandsworth Tech by quarter to seven, you know.
CB: And what was the course?
RB: Sheet metal plate work.
CB: Right.
RB: And after I passed it I went back in to work and said I passed my course and they said, ‘Right, Roy, we will give you a rise. We will put you up from one and seven pence farthing to one and seven pence three [emphasis] farthings.’
CB: Fantastic.
RB: And a little while later they said we’ve got a contract for Kirkup [?] Oil Pipeline and their cooking equipment as they’ve got so much oil they want it oil [?] fired so the boiling pans if we give you a half a dozen people to work with you you control it [laughs] ‘cause you’re getting the extra money. I’m getting the extra ha’penny an hour. So you know thinking back on it that probably they’d charge on [?] it got ten bob a week extra so you know yeah so I I organised it that the iron framework had to be, go and be hot dipped and galvanised so I sort of got that organised. The outer panels were going to be vitreous enamelled but we didn’t have a plant in those days we had to send it out to get it vitreoused [?] so the bits that had to go you got done in the hopes that when they come back all the in-house bits, the pans in stainless steel and the tops and that and the bits and pieces you were making you kept it going and it all ended up, yeah.
CB: So you spent the rest of your working life with that company did you?
RB: No. No I well we couldn’t get a house, you know. We were, we were in the mother in laws front room and then we managed to get two rooms and there was no chance of getting a place in London, I mean and Bartlett’s were in the same line but they, they were moving from Bell Steet because they thought they were going to be pulled down for the Harrow Road Flyover and they were having a place built out here so I applied for a job there and got it.
CB: In Aylesbury.
RB: No Hemel.
CB: In Hemel.
RB: Hemel, yeah, yeah and in fact we got a house and were down here before the factory. We had to travel up every day you know to, the next job I got when I was at Benham’s they got the contract for the ventilation for the House of Lords and the Commons what had been bombed during the war and they were used to galvanised and aluminium but underneath the fancy plasterwork they wanted stainless steel because they didn’t want it to rot and after all the cost of all the plasterwork so I got the job of the stainless steel because it all had to be welded and I could weld stainless steel when it was all curves and that. Yeah.
CB: So you know the House of Commons backwards.
RB: No. No, I didn’t, I didn’t go up there at all. I just made it and it all fitted so I didn’t have to go up there. Yeah. I got, I got in with the, the gang that places in London, the restaurants and that hadn’t been, hadn’t had any building work done on them during the war and we went to places like Derry and Toms to, to update their service counters. We used to, at this time we were working eight to eight because we were busy and we used to go up there Friday dinnertime and the counters were red hot. The counters in the pre-war used to be galvanised pipes going back with steam going through them and they would be red hot and we’d start stripping down from as soon as they’d finished serving dinnertime and we’d carry on stripping down and the stainless steel tops and that in the early days there wasn’t welding on stainless steel. It was riveting and various means and er but we used to put that on the lorry which used to go back to the works. We used to go home and then go in at 8 o’clock on Saturday morning. Our outside fitters used to be pulling out the pipes because at this time copper pipes were going in to replace the galvanised which were some had like rusted and that you know so we used to go in to the works and replace the tops and anything that needed to be. Sometime during Saturday night we’d load it on to the wagon and we’d go back and we’d go straight in and we’d start putting it up but there was no break because you didn’t know what snags you were going to come. Until it was finished you just kept so you worked from Saturday morning all the way through Saturday night round and it usually used to be sometime Sunday afternoon that used to get finished and you’d say ‘right we think we’re there’ you know, we ‘ave to, we used to have to make sure there were no leaks or nothing so there wasn’t too many of them but there was one. Barclays bank had a terrific long counter and it was decided that it was hopeless to try and do it all in one weekend so we did it in three weekends all running on so for four weekends I didn’t have a weekend off. I was out working eight till eight. Luckily it was, it was during the summer so I wasn’t at evening school. My son was born and I daren’t, my wife went into hospital. I daren’t say I’m not going because you were in that gang and if you didn’t go you were frightened that they wouldn’t have you next time you know but er
CB: When were you married?
RB: 1950.
CB: And how old are, well who are your children?
RB: Roger.
CB: Yeah and how old is he?
RB: He’s about sixty —
CB: No. He was born when?
RB: Er ’52.
CB: 19, and the next one?
RB: Peter ’53.
CB: Yep.
RB: Trevor ’56.
CB: Yeah.
RB: Andrew about ’59, I think.
CB: And then you adopted.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Who? What’s her name?
RB: Elizabeth.
CB: And how old is she? When was she born?
RB: About ‘69 I think.
CB: Right. So you needed to get over the others a bit before you took her on [laughs]
RB: Yeah. Well [laughs] Roger was working, you know.
CB: Oh was he?
RB: Bringing money in.
CB: Yeah. Right. Ok. We’ve done amazingly well. 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 Roy Briggs
Description
An account of the resource
Roy Briggs was born in Battersea, London. After leaving school he undertook an engineering apprenticeship with Benham and Sons, producing equipment for the war. He describes his life during the Blitz. When he joined the Royal Air Force he trained as a wireless operator and served at RAF Fiskerton. He was on operations to Plauen, Cuxhaven and Potsdam. He also took part in Operation Manna and Operation Exodus as well as Cook’s tours over Germany. Until he was demobilised in 1947, he served at RAF Upwood. After the war he returned to a career in engineering.
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-28
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Janet McGreevy
Format
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01:58:03 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ABriggsR160128
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
Germany
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Cambridgeshire
Germany--Plauen
Germany--Cuxhaven
Germany--Berlin
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
30 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
air sea rescue
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
Cook’s tour
demobilisation
Dominie
Goodwill tour of the United States (1946)
Initial Training Wing
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Proctor
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Hixon
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Madley
RAF Swinderby
RAF Upwood
training
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/160/2368/LTolleyFS1152777v1.1.pdf
c7db9254cabe25a1f53d8d80eb6653ce
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
Tolley, Frank
F S Tolley
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. An oral history interview with Sergeant Frank Stanley Tolley (b. 1921, 1152777 Royal Air Force), his log book and four photographs. Frank Tolley was a Lancaster bomb aimer with 625 Squadron at RAF Kelstern. He completed 22 daylight and night time operations before the end of the war in Europe and also flew on Operation Manna, Operation Dodge and Cook's tours.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Frank Tolley and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-07-02
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
Tolley, FS
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
Frank Tolley's Royal Canadian Air Force flying log book for aircrew other than pilot
Description
An account of the resource
Frank Tolley's log book covers the period 29 December 1943 to 27 August 1945 and details his training schedule and operations flown. He served at RAF Fingal, RAF Malton, RAF Moreton-in-Marsh, RAF Sandtoft and RAF Kelstern. Aircraft flown in were Anson, Bollingbroke, Wellington, Halifax and Lancaster. He carried out 22 daylight and night time operations with 625 Squadron to the following targets in Germany: Bremen, Bremen rail bridge, Chemnitz, Cleve, Dessau aircraft factories, Dortmund, Dresden, Hamburg, Hanau, Hannover, Heligoland, Kassel aircraft factories, Lutzkendorf, Mannheim docks, Misberg oil refineries, Nordhausen, Nuremberg and Wiesbaden. His pilots on operations were Flight Lieutenant Russell and Pilot Officer Windrim. He also took part in Operation Manna supply drops to The Hague and Rotterdam, Operation Dodge and Cook’s tours.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LTolleyFS1152777v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Lincolnshire
England--Gloucestershire
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Kleve (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Dessau (Dessau)
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Flensburg
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hanau
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Nordhausen (Thuringia)
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Wiesbaden
Italy--Pomigliano d'Arco
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Ontario
Netherlands--Hague
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-02-07
1945-02-08
1945-02-13
1945-02-14
1945-02-15
1945-02-20
1945-02-21
1945-03-02
1945-03-05
1945-03-06
1945-03-07
1945-03-08
1945-03-09
1945-03-12
1945-03-15
1945-03-16
1945-03-17
1945-03-19
1945-03-23
1945-03-25
1945-03-27
1945-03-31
1945-04-03
1945-04-04
1945-04-05
1945-04-18
1945-04-22
1945-04-29
1945-04-30
1945-05-03
1945-06-25
1945-06-28
1945-08-28
1667 HCU
21 OTU
625 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
Air Observers School
aircrew
Anson
Bolingbroke
bomb aimer
bombing
Bombing and Gunnery School
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
Cook’s tour
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Glatton
RAF Kelstern
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Sandtoft
RCAF Fingal
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/183/2381/LWoodC1451225v1.1.pdf
216ec66745b3d4c0ff1f52309fe0300c
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
Wood, Colin
Description
An account of the resource
15 items. An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Colin Wood (1922 - 2021, 1451225 Royal Air Force), his log book, service record and seven photographs including pictures of some of his crew. Colin Wood trained in Canada and flew operations as a navigator with 106 Squadron from RAF Metheringham. His crew were:
428289 - Andy A Anderson, pilot
1593692 - D Evans, flight engineer
1451225 - Colin Wood, navigator
1564707 - G H McElhone, bomb aimer
1873924 - P Thomas Tobin, wireless operator
1584474 - Vernon R Grogan, mid upper gunner
1595586 - R O Day, rear gunner.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Colin Wood and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-25
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Wood, C
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
Colin Wood's Royal Canadian Air Force flying log book for aircrew other than pilot
Description
An account of the resource
The log book covers the training, operational career and and post war flying of Colin Wood from 8 July 1943 to 7 February 1946. He trained in Canada and in Great Britain and was stationed at RAF Metheringham, RAF Coningsby and RAF Full Sutton. Aircraft flown in were Anson, Wellington, Stirling X, Lancaster I and III, Lancastrian, Dominie. He flew 25 night operations with 106 and 83 Squadrons to targets in Germany, Norway, Poland, Italy, and Czechoslovakia: Bergen, Bohlen-Leipzig, Brunswick, Cham, Danzig, Dortmund-Ems canal, Dusseldorf, Harburg, Horten harbour, Kaiserslautern, Karlsruhe, Komatau, Lutzkendorf-Leipzig, Molbis-Leipzig, Munich, Trondheim and Wurtzberg, His pilot on operations was Flying Officer Anderson. Colin Wood also flew operation Exodus to Rheine and two operation Dodge to Bari. Additional remarks include corkscrew training, H2S, and stowaway Olive on cross country flight. Post-war 231 Squadron.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LWoodC1451225v1
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
Italy
Norway
Poland
Scotland
Czech Republic--Chomutov
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kaiserslautern
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Munich
Germany--Rheine
Germany--Würzburg
Italy--Bari
Manitoba--Winnipeg
Norway--Bergen
Norway--Horten
Norway--Trondheim
Poland--Gdańsk
Scotland--Wigtownshire
Czech Republic
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Manitoba
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1944-09-23
1944-09-24
1944-09-26
1944-09-27
1944-09-28
1944-10-14
1944-10-15
1944-10-28
1944-10-29
1944-11-03
1944-11-04
1944-11-05
1944-11-11
1944-11-12
1944-11-21
1944-11-22
1944-11-23
1944-11-26
1944-11-27
1944-12-14
1944-12-15
1944-12-16
1944-12-17
1945-02-19
1945-02-20
1945-02-21
1945-02-23
1945-02-24
1945-03-03
1945-03-04
1945-03-05
1945-03-06
1945-03-07
1945-03-08
1945-03-14
1945-03-15
1945-03-16
1945-03-17
1945-04-07
1945-04-08
1945-04-09
1945-04-17
1945-04-18
1945-04-19
1945-05-10
1945-05-31
1945-09-13
1945-09-15
1945-09-29
1945-10-01
106 Squadron
1661 HCU
29 OTU
83 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bombing
Cook’s tour
Dominie
H2S
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Lancastrian
navigator
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Bitteswell
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Coningsby
RAF Full Sutton
RAF Metheringham
RAF Syerston
RAF Warboys
RAF West Freugh
RAF Winthorpe
Stirling
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/109/2425/LGreenLC1318527v.1.pdf
b5e686d98ddbb0320085b55c6d541553
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
Green, Leonard
Len Green
L C Green
Description
An account of the resource
Twelve items. The collection relates to the service of Warrant Officer Leonard C Green (1318527 Royal Air Force) and consists of his log book, correspondence, a newspaper cuttings, four photographs and a foreign languages phrase book. Leonard Green flew Lancasters with 50 and 61 Squadrons from RAF Skellingthorpe and completed 19 daylight and night time operations.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Mark Boother and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-01
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Green, LC
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
Leonard Green’s navigator’s, air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LGreenLC1318527v1
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
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Description
An account of the resource
Navigator's air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book for Flight Sergeant Leonard Green, wireless operator, covering the period from 15 December 1942 to 20 January 1946. He was stationed at RAF Manby, RAF Wigtown, RAF Bitteswell, RAF Bruntingthorpe, RAF Swinderby, RAF Syerston, RAF Skellingthorpe and RAF Coningsby. Aircraft flown in were, Dominie, Proctor, Anson, Wellington, Manchester and Lancaster. He flew a total of 23 operations, 13 night with 50 Squadron and 3 day and 7 night with 61 Squadron. He also flew operations Exodus with 61 Squadron and Dodge to Bari, Italy with 83 Squadron. Targets were, Hannover, Dusseldorf, Modane, Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Brunswick, Magdeburg, Bohlen, Gravenhorst, Dortmund-Emms Canal, Lutzkendorf, Wurzburg, Bremen, Wesel, Nordhausen and Molbis. His pilots on operations were Pilot Officer Lundy and Flight Lieutenant Phillips. The log book also contains many newspaper clippings relating to the targets attacked, aircraft flown in and events of the war and post war. It also contains pictures of the crew positions of Navigator, Bomb Aimer and Wireless Operator.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Scotland
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
France--Modane
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Magdeburg
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Würzburg
Italy--Bari
Scotland--Dumfries and Galloway
Germany--Böhlen
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Nordhausen (Thuringia)
France
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1943-10-18
1943-11-03
1943-11-10
1943-11-11
1943-11-18
1943-11-19
1943-11-22
1943-11-26
1943-11-27
1943-12-02
1943-12-03
1943-12-20
1943-12-21
1943-12-29
1943-12-30
1944-01-02
1944-01-03
1944-01-14
1944-01-15
1944-01-20
1944-01-21
1944-01-21
1944-01-22
1945-02-19
1945-02-20
1945-02-21
1945-02-24
1945-03-14
1945-03-15
1945-03-16
1945-03-17
1945-03-22
1945-03-23
1945-04-04
1945-04-05
1945-04-06
1945-04-08
1945-04-09
1945-04-26
1945-05-06
1945-05-12
1945-05-14
1945-07-17
1945-09-09
1945-10-16
1945-10-20
1945-12-14
1945-12-20
1660 HCU
29 OTU
50 Squadron
61 Squadron
83 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing up
Cook’s tour
Dominie
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Manchester
military service conditions
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
Proctor
RAF Bitteswell
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Coningsby
RAF Manby
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Wigtown
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/189/2493/LCaseyJ2219470v1.1.pdf
620c98aafe151a45e5c4968e353df57d
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
Casey, John
J Casey
John Casey
Description
An account of the resource
14 items. Collection contains an oral history interview with Sergeant John Casey (- 2016, 2217470, Royal Air Force), an escape map, logbook, service documentation, a wallet and photographs. John Casey served as an air gunner on 61 Squadron in 1944-45.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by John Casey and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-10
2015-11-19
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Casey, J
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
John Casey's flying log book for navigators, air bombers, air gunners and flight engineers
Description
An account of the resource
Navigators, air bombers, air gunners and flight engineers flying log book for Sergeant John Casey from 26 February 1944 to 8 October 1945. Detailing training schedule and operations flown. Served at 7 Air Gunnery School followed by training at 29 Operational Training Unit on Wellington, 1654 Heavy Conversion Unit on Stirling and No 5 Lancaster Finishing School. Aircraft flown were Anson, Martinet, Wellington, Stirling and Lancaster. He carried out a total of 22 daylight and night-time operations with 61 Squadron at RAF Skellingthorpe as an air gunner on the following targets in Germany, Netherlands, and Norway: Bergen, Bohlen, Dortmund-Ems Canal, Dresden, Flushing, Giessen, Heilbronn, Leuna, Lutzkendorf, Mittelland Canal, Munich, Nordhausen, Nuremberg, Politz, Rositz, Tønsberg and Würzburg. His pilot on operations was Flight Lieutenant Bain. The log book records a Cook's tour and Operation Dodge flights. Also contained is a newspaper cutting on the history of 61 Squadron and two pages of calculations.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LCaseyJ2219470v1
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
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
1944-10-19
1944-10-20
1944-10-23
1944-10-28
1944-10-29
1944-11-16
1944-11-21
1944-11-22
1944-11-26
1944-11-27
1944-12-04
1944-12-05
1944-12-06
1944-12-07
1945-01-07
1945-01-08
1945-01-13
1945-01-14
1945-01-16
1945-01-17
1945-02-08
1945-02-09
1945-02-13
1945-02-14
1945-02-19
1945-02-20
1945-02-21
1945-02-22
1945-02-24
1945-03-14
1945-03-15
1945-03-16
1945-03-17
1945-04-04
1945-04-08
1945-04-09
1945-04-25
1945-04-26
1945-05-16
1945-09-13
1945-09-15
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Norway
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Giessen (Hesse)
Germany--Heilbronn
Germany--Leuna
Germany--Mittelland Canal
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nordhausen (Thuringia)
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Würzburg
Netherlands--Vlissingen
Norway--Bergen
Norway--Tønsberg
England--Lincolnshire
1654 HCU
29 OTU
61 Squadron
83 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
Cook’s tour
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Martinet
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Coningsby
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Stormy Down
RAF Syerston
RAF Wigsley
Stirling
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/194/3326/PAdamsHG1704.1.jpg
980d8be504d2da9355ce447405cd8c1f
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/194/3326/AAdamsHG170215.1.mp3
041f97f2eedf07da91f07fc45cf06065
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
Adams, Herbert
Herbert Adams
H Adams
Herbert G Adams
Description
An account of the resource
88 items. Collection concerns Herbert George Adams DFC, Legion d'Honour (b. 1924, 424509 Royal Australian Air Force). He flew operations as a navigator with 467 Squadron. Collection contains an oral history interview, photographs of people and places, several memoirs about his training and bombing operations, letters to his family, his flying logbook and notes on navigation.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Herbert Adams and catalogued by Nigel Huckins and Trevor Hardcastle.
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
2017-02-15
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Adams, HG
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
RG: This is an interview with Herbert Adams for the International Bomber Command Centre on Wednesday the 15th of February 2017 at his home in Kooringal, Wagga, New South Wales, Australia.
LD: The name of the interviewers.
RG: Interviewers are Rob Gray and Lucie Davison.
LD: Alright. All good. Ok.
RG: Off you go.
LD: So, you were born near Gulgong.
HA: That’s right.
LD: New South Wales.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Were you born in town or on a farm? Or where?
HA: No.
LD: What kind of area did you grow up in?
HA: My father had a stock and station agency and carrying business in Birriwa.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Very small. You wouldn’t see it now if you went through it [laughs] but it was a prosperous little district. I went to primary school there. One teacher school.
LD: And did you work there or did you leave?
HA: No.
LD: Leave home to go to work before you signed up?
HA: When I was old enough I went to high school at Mudgee for five years — where I boarded. And in 1938 dad sold the agency and bought a farm at Mendooran.
LD: Oh yes.
HA: And that’s where I reckoned I lived for a while because after I came back from the war they were still on the farm. And in fact, they sold the farm at the end of the 1946 drought and moved into town. And my brother and I took up share farming at Mendooran.
LD: Right.
RG: That town being Mudgee or —? That town being Mudgee or —?
HA: Not Mudgee. It was Mendooran, sort of east of Dubbo. South of Coonabarabran.
RG: Right. Ok. Yeah.
HA: We did that for three years and then I took on carrying for about a year and a half. Carting cement from Kandos to Sydney.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And then I bought a sports store in Mudgee.
LD: Oh right.
RG: Ok.
HA: Where I strung tennis rackets and fixed cricket bats, sold toys and stuff like that for seven or eight years. Got married and had three kids there. Didn’t know what to do with myself when I sold the sports store so I went to teacher’s college in Sydney for a year.
LD: Oh. Wow.
RG: Ok.
HA: Boarded with me sister. Left my family at Mudgee and got appointed to Mudgee to teach.
LD: Well that was handy wasn’t it?
HA: Well [laughs] we were asked to give preferences of where we wanted to teach and I said ‘Mudgee. Mudgee. Mudgee.’ And they said, ‘Well you’re married and an ex-serviceman and you live there. If necessary we’ll move someone.’ Which they did.
LD: Oh.
RG: Oh. yeah. Very good.
HA: They moved a first year out. A young fella.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Our From Mudgee to Muswellbrook or Maitland or somewhere over there.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I taught junior maths and, senior and junior biology for five years.
RG: Right. Ok.
HA: At the same time, I did a degree from Armidale by correspondence.
RG: A degree in —?
HA: Just a BA degree with a major in maths and education. Tried to get a science degree out of them but they wouldn’t agree to an external student.
RG: Oh for science.
HA: Getting a science degree even though I could have had more science units.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Than what they could provide from Armidale.
RG: It’s odd isn’t it? Perhaps it required laboratory work or something at Armidale or something like that.
HA: I don’t know, just one of those regulations.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Regulations you can’t undo.
RG: Yeah. I was going to say with your service background to put down Mudgee, Mudgee Mudgee you were liable to be sent to Coonabarabran or somewhere. Anyway.
HA: Yeah. So, I taught at Mudgee there for five years and then I resigned and joined the air force a second time. Came to Wagga.
RG: Oh. Ok.
LD: Oh right.
HA: As an education officer out here at Forest Hill.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Oh excellent.
HA: Which I did for just on three years.
RG: What were you teaching in the air force?
HA: First two years — adult trainees.
RG: Yeah.
HA: It was basic maths, physics and [Electrical] tech.
RG: Yeah.
HA: In the second year I was teaching fellas who didn’t want to be instructors to be instructors [laughs]
RG: Yeah. I was one of those. Yeah.
HA: It was an experience.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I learnt more about teaching in that year than I did at teacher college. For sure.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And then —
LD: That must have been most interesting. Going back into the air force again after all that time.
HA: It was, yeah, because I was straight away a flight lieutenant.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I did Anzac Day addresses and things like that.
RG: When was that? When did you go back into the air force?
HA: ’65 ‘66. ’67.
RG: Right. So, twenty years after you left.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
LD: That would have been fascinating.
RG: Have we got — sorry. Have we got Bert’s date of birth? Anywhere?
LD: Oh. No. What’s your date of birth, Bert?
HA: 23rd of the 2nd ’24.
LD: Ok.
HA: So, I’ll be ninety three next week.
LD: Wow. So, did you work before joining the air force the first time?
HA: Yes. I worked in Sydney for a year and a half. The local government department in Bridge Street.
LD: Oh yes. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Didn’t like it much. Didn’t get much money.
RG: This was as a clerk or —
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Junior clerk. And when they brought in compulsory service for the army I was very keen to get in because six shillings a day was big money.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Like, I was paying board in Sydney and train fares and had nothing left. I couldn’t even play hockey because I didn’t have enough money to go and play hockey every weekend.
RG: Right. Yeah. So that, what year was that that you —?
HA: 1941 and 1942.
RG: So, so you were called up in —
HA: ’42.
RG: ’42.
HA: Yeah.
LD: So, you were called up in to the army initially.
HA: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: Where did you go to?
HA: Went to Dubbo and did the infantry training for a month and then was invited, if you could drive a truck, to go to Moorebank near Liverpool and do a motor-school for a month.
RG: Right.
HA: A lot of stuff with Bren gun carriers.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And internal, whatever you call it. A written exam at the end of it. We had lectures at night and that sort of thing. Some of the fellas could barely read and write and they were in the army. I’d finished High School with good passes.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yes.
HA: I came top of the course.
LD: Yeah.
HA: I was invited to go to Sydney Tech College for six months and come out as a warrant officer instructor.
RG: Right.
HA: At aged eighteen.
RG: Ok. That was advanced promotion.
HA: I thought about it very seriously.
RG: You would have done. We’re talking about six shillings being good money.
HA: Anyway, I was already on the reserve for aircrew so when that came up I got out of the army.
LD: Oh right.
RG: So, did you volunteer for the reserve for the aircrew? Did you do that before you joined up? Or —
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: As a matter of fact, when Air Training Corps first formed, late in 1941 I think it was.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I was one of the first in.
RG: Right.
HA: And that was supposed to get you a month or two precedence on the, on the waiting list. There was a big waiting list for aircrew.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Eight months. Something like that.
RG: So did you do — we’ve read Andy, sorry, Adrian Child, sorry Ray child — Charlwood sorry.
HA: I’ve read two of his books.
RG: Yeah. And his way, he did it he came in through the ATS got assessed, got accepted, sent home and then came back later and did some training and then got sent home again and then went and did his specialist — his navigator’s training was it? Did something similar happen to you? Did you like get accepted and sent home again?
HA: No. Air Training Corps was only part time stuff up at Ashfield. Never got any uniform.
RG: Oh. This is not the ATS —this is Air Training Corps. Yeah. Ok. Sorry. Yeah. Different.
HA: Sorry. Wrong thing.
RG: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking of the ATS. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. Where we were up to?
RG: So, Ashfield.
HA: Ashfield.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
LD: So, which ITS did you end up going to?
HA: Bradfield.
LD: Oh right.
HA: Number 2.
LD: Oh my God. That’s where Ken was.
RG: That’s where Ken was. Yeah.
LD: I have a relative who was there.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Ken Glover.
HA: I’ve got an idea as I can remember that name. I was in 32 course for a start.
LD: I’m not sure what course he was in.
RG: No. He —
LD: I haven’t been able to find that out.
RG: He became a rear gunner. He was in 463. And he was killed on Christmas Eve ‘43 over Berlin.
LD: He started out in 207 Squadron.
RG: Yeah. He started out in 207 RAF.
HA: Yeah. He was a bit earlier at Bradfield than me if he was on Berlin raids.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah. He left [pause] he left Australia like January ’42.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
RG: ‘43. He was killed at the end of ’43.
LD: Oh, I’m getting mixed up.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.
HA: Yeah. There may have been another Glover that I met somewhere along the way.
RG: I’m sure there were scads of them really. Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: I actually had a time. I got the mumps while I was there and went out to Prince Henry Hospital. Came back and I found myself in 33 course. And then they said, ‘They need more fellas at the training places. We’re going to do a rushed course so that you can go out with 32 course again.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: ‘Providing you’re quick enough at Morse.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: And because I’d been in the Air Training Corps I was fast enough at Morse.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: So, I ended up with 32 course at Bradfield. And then came to Cootamundra.
LD: Yes.
HA: 1 AOS. I didn’t even get inside the gate. We were throwing kit bags up on to a truck and I collapsed and found myself in hospital.
RG: As a result of the mumps?
HA: Woke up the next day with terrible trouble with appendicitis.
RG: Oh, ok. Yeah.
HA: I was delirious for a few days and a bit lucky to survive I think because penicillin was, luckily, available.
LD: Yeah.
HA: In those days.
RG: Yeah. And only just available too. Yeah.
LD: Yes.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And so, I was in the hospital for a month with a hole with a rubber tube gushing out rubbish. Finally sent home, I think for Christmas, still with a hole in my belly. And —
RG: So, this is Christmas ‘41
HA: ‘42
RG: ‘42.
HA: ‘42. Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And they said, ‘By the way you will have to come back to hospital next year and have your appendix out.’
LD: What?
RG: They hadn’t done it.
HA: They didn’t take it out. All they’d done was drain all the muck out of it to treat it.
LD: Oh of course. They needed to drain everything ‘cause if they tried to operate with —
RG: The poison would have got into the bloodstream. Yeah.
LD: Yes. Yes.
RG: Lucie is an ex-nurse so.
HA: Yeah.
HA: My wife’s an ex-nurse too.
LD: We’re good people [laughs]
HA: So, I came out of hospital and did some time with 35 course and helped in the sick quarters for a while.
RG: This is filling in time before the next observers course.
HA: Yeah. Then I came down to Wagga.
RG: So, you didn’t actually get to Cootamundra at all. You were posted there but didn’t get there.
HA: Oh yes. When I come out of hospital I was put on to 35 course.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I went to lectures and did one flight with them. And then they said but you’ve got to go and get your appendix out so I came to the RAAF hospital out here at Forest Hill which hadn’t long been opened and had my appendix out. And went back and fooled around until 38 course started.
LD: [laughs] They must have been wondering if they were ever going to get rid of you.
RG: Yeah. So instead of three months it was nine months.
LD: Oh right.
HA: At Cootamundra.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Mind you that kept you out of the worst of it.
HA: It may have kept me out of going to the islands or somewhere like that, you know.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yes. Yeah.
RG: Or the Battle of Berlin as well. Yeah.
LD: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Anyway —
LD: Did you end up doing any of your training overseas or was it all done in Australia?
HA: Up to the wing stage — in Australia.
LD: Right.
HA: I did bomb aiming and gunnery at Evans Head for two months and then astro nav at Parkes for a month. And then after a bit of leave we got on a boat and went to San Francisco.
LD: Do you remember the name of the ship?
HA: The Mount Vernon. I think.
LD: Ok. Yeah. Did you go via New Zealand?
HA: No. Non-stop.
LD: Oh. Ok.
HA: And we got our sea legs I think because it was calm for the first week or so and then there was a big storm.
LD: Yeah.
HA: There were logs floating around in San Francisco harbour.
LD: Right.
RG: Did you leave from Sydney or Melbourne?
HA: From Sydney.
RG: Sydney. Yeah. By the way when you said you did one flight with 38 course.
HA: 35.
RG: 35. What sort of aircraft?
HA: Ansons.
RG: Ansons. Yeah. Ok.
HA: It was Fairey Battles at Evans Head and it was Ansons again at Parkes.
RG: Right. Yeah.
HA: Astro.
RG: Yeah.
LD: So were you happy to be a navigator or would you have preferred some other role? Because you said you did the gunnery course as well. Did you have any choice in this or —
HA: While we were at Bradfield park they asked us towards the end of the business which you’d like to be and nearly everybody wanted to be a pilot of course. The day that they did the coordination test I was at the dentist and so I missed that.
RG: [laughs] You had bad medical trouble there didn’t you [laughs]
HA: I had a lot of trouble with my teeth.
RG: Oh dear.
HA: And the test was to sit in a seat with rudder pedals and a joystick with a screen where somebody made a dot move around the screen at random and you had to chase it with your feet.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I knew I’d made a terrible mess of it. Partly because when I was a kid I had a flivver which you steered with your feet. If you wanted to go to the right you did that which is just the opposite.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: To what you want to do in an aeroplane.
RG: Sorry a flivver.
HA: A flivver.
RG: What’s a flivver? What —
HA: Well it had a handle on it like the trikes that they had on the railway.
RG: The ones that you cranked. Yes.
HA: Yes.
RG: Oh ok. I didn’t know they were called flivvers.
HA: Yeah. Anyway, so, I knew I made a mess of it so when they came to ask me what I wanted to do I said navigator. They said, ‘Why don’t you want to be a pilot?’ And I said, ‘Well I made a mess of the coordination test and I’m pretty good at maths and stuff.’ I didn’t tell them that a lot of fellas say, ‘I want to be a pilot,’ and they say, ‘Oh well. You can be a rear gunner.’
RG: Yeah. [laughs] Ok.
LD: Yes.
HA: So, I got in first.
RG: That was a smart move.
LD: Yes. Yeah. They were getting to be short of rear gunners, weren’t they? Very sadly.
HA: So, we got on a, oh there was only six hundred of us on the ship. Most of the people were American servicemen who were either ill or wounded. Coming back from the Pacific.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And so, when we got to San Francisco they said, ‘There’s sixty of you navigators,’ or observers as we were then. We had an O wing, ‘Who thought you were going to Canada to do a six months reconnaissance course. That’s been scrubbed. You are now going across to Britain for Bomber Command.’ So, we had to —
RG: Oh. So you might have ended up doing reconnaissance flights in Mosquitos, I presume. Or something of that nature.
HA: Probably in Liberators across the Atlantic I would think.
RG: Oh ok. Ok.
LD: Right.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Anyhow.
RG: Yeah.
HA: That was scrubbed and we got on a troop train and went across America to New York and got on a ship called the Isle de France.
RG: Ah yes. Famous vessel.
HA: On Christmas Eve.
RG: That’s Christmas Eve forty.
HA: ’43.
RG: ‘43 yeah.
LD: Oh right. Yeah.
RG: That was the night Ken was killed.
LD: Yes. Yeah.
HA: It got as far as the Statue of Liberty and broke down.
RG: [laughs] That was the French.
HA: And we thought thank goodness because we were right down below the waterline at the stern with the sides coming down like that.
RG: Oh yes. Yeah.
HA: And had to climb through round portholes all around.
RG: Hatches. Yeah.
HA: Vertical ladders to get up to the next deck.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Anyhow, they kept us there overnight. They gave us some sandwiches I think and then the next morning they said, ‘You can wait until we give you some more sandwiches and some pay. Or you can do without that. Go straight into New York where there’s likely to be people taking you home for Christmas dinner.’
LD: Well there’s an option isn’t there?
HA: So, three of us went out to a very nice double decker house in Mount Vernon for lunch. We thought Christmas lunch, you know. Christmas lunch came time and there were plenty of little nibbles and plenty of drinks. This went on all the whole afternoon until about 7 o’clock at night and they brought out the turkey. Us three all said, ‘Well yes, we wouldn’t mind a second helping,’ [laughs]. He took us to his factory the next day. He had a factory that made, amongst other things, handkerchiefs. He gave us some handkerchiefs each.
RG: You don’t happen to remember the family name by any chance, do you? A big ask I know but —
HA: Richie, I think. Richie.
RG: Richie. Ok.
HA: And took us to his club. We offered to buy a drink after he’d bought us one. Everything’s done with chips.
RG: So, you can’t possibly. That’s a polite way to do it isn’t it?
HA: Took us back to our camp at Fort McDowell or Fort Slocum or something. I’ve forgotten the name and we had a few more days in New York. Went to Madison Square Garden and saw an ice hockey match for the first time.
LD: Oh wow.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Went to Jack Dempsey’s Spaghetti Bar.
RG: Ok. Yes. Sorry. Sorry Bert, I was just going to say, I know you said it was a camp. Fort Slocum or wherever it was. Was that like a transit camp for Commonwealth personnel or was it a US army camp or —?
HA: I can’t remember.
RG: Ok.
HA: I can’t remember. It seemed to be a useful sort of a camp.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Could have been [unclear] or that sort of thing.
RG: Yeah.
LD: I have read that Australian servicemen in the States, because there were a lot of people like you who were, you know, kind of in between places who ended up staying there for a couple of weeks or something were very welcome and, you know, never had to buy a drink and so on. Is that — is that your experience?
HA: They were very generous. The Americans.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Yeah. We didn’t buy a drink the time that we were with him of course. I can’t remember other Americans shouting us drinks while we were in New York but in Denver one day, we had a couple of hours in Denver and a fellow came up to us and said, ‘You’ve strange uniforms.’ We had Australia across here. ‘I didn’t know Austria was on our side.’ [laughs]
RG: [laughs] Did you point out that Hitler was an Austrian [laughs] Anyway, yeah.
HA: So, we talked to him a bit about Australia then and [pause]
LD: I have, I’ve also read about the Australians being mistaken for German POWs. Did you, did you have that experience?
HA: I think that could happen. I got mistaken for a policeman a couple of times in London. In the blue uniform.
RG: The blue uniform, yeah. Of course.
LD: Oh of course. The darker blue.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Yes.
HA: And because we’d been to London a few times and used the Underground I knew my way around London fairly well as far as the Underground was concerned. So if somebody said, ‘How do I get to —,’ such and such. I was able to say, ‘That way.’ [laughs] Didn’t let on I wasn’t a policeman.
LD: Fair enough.
HA: Yeah.
LD: So, did you have a safe trip across to Britain after all that. Did you have any problems?
HA: No. No. On New Year’s Eve we boarded the Queen Elizabeth.
LD: Oh. Right.
HA: And it had, it had been partly furnished for passengers before the war but it hadn’t been finished.
RG: No.
HA: There were parts of it were still open hold.
RG: Yeah.
HA: With stacks of —
RG: She came straight from the shipyard. Straight in as a troopship. Yeah.
HA: We got a cabin and there was —
LD: Lucky you.
HA: Eighteen of us, I think, in a cabin, with a little toilet corner in it. Most everywhere there was six feet on a wall with three bunks.
RG: Three bunks. Yeah.
LD: Ah yes.
HA: There were six walls altogether including the corner of it.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: We had a great time there. Used to sit on the floor and play cards.
LD: Did you have to — did you have to act as lookouts on the Queen Elizabeth?
HA: No.
LD: Right.
HA: No. We did boat drill which was a bit of a hassle because there was over twenty thousand troops on it. Two or three of the top decks that were open to the weather had three bunks up the wall. Bolted on.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Americans took twelve hours on, twelve hours off on those bunks.
RG: Wow.
HA: So they could fit more people in.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Oh my goodness. Yeah. I’ve read about the hot-bunking. I didn’t realise it was to that extent.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Two meals a day because it took four hours to feed them all.
LD: Yes. Yeah.
HA: Four hours to clean up and then another one.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
LD: I also read that the meals were more than a bit basic.
HA: They were, they were alright.
RG: This was a British, this was a British ship. Not an American one. Different. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. We had good meals on the boat. On the trains across America too. It was a bit strange. They’d ask for volunteers to go and count the stuff through the corridor sort of thing. I never had to do that. But they’d arrive with a stainless streel tray, plate, with five compartments on it. You’d put meat there and vegetables there, vegetables there, vegetables there, fruit salad there. And then they’d get a ladle and put what we reckoned was plum jam and put it all over the plate [laughs]
LD: Oh.
HA: It may have been chutney I don’t know.
LD: It sounds awful.
RG: You’re right to separate everything and then join it up with — yeah.
LD: So, did you have the Pullman carriages?
HA: Yes.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Yes. A little compartment with enough people for four. And yet they only put three in it because at night time they had a negro porter came in and made up a double bed at the bottom.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And pulled down —
LD: Yeah.
HA: One at the top which I got in. Being wintertime, each morning I’d find icicles hanging down from the ceiling where the fellas underneath would be warm because they were steam heated.
RG: Yeah. Oh right. Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yeah. So did you get to see snow on that trip as well?
HA: Yes. For the first time. We pulled up in marshalling yards at Chicago for about an hour and a half, I suppose. Nowhere near the platform but there was railway lines forever.
RG: Yeah.
HA: We saw it was snow on the ground so, ‘Oh, we’ll get out and have a snow fight.’ So, we got out and had the snow fight for about five minutes and it was minus thirty.
RG: Yeah. Chicago in the winter.
HA: We got back in again pretty quick.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah. No. That’s, that’s my relative’s experience as well. Was seeing the snow for the first time.
HA: Yeah. It was the first time I’d seen snow.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Going across the Atlantic in the Queen Elizabeth after about three days they said, ‘There’s reputed to be a U-boat pack waiting out there somewhere so we’re going to go up near Iceland somewhere and we’re going to go flat out.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So, put your warm clothes on.’ We’re not going to — we’re going to turn the heating off and go as fast as we can.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: We met some of the crew in Glasgow. Greenock. They took us for a tour of the ship later and said that they got over forty knots.
RG: Wow.
HA: That night going up.
RG: She was fast. I didn’t realise she was that fast though.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Wow.
LD: So, did you, did you land in Greenock?
HA: Yeah.
LD: Yeah. Ok. Yeah.
RG: Yes, I suppose if you’ve got the threat of U-boats you’ll find the, you’ll find the extra knots.
HA: Yeah, they put all the steam they could get in to it.
LD: So, once you arrived in the UK where did you go to then?
HA: By train to Brighton.
LD: Brighton. Ok. And were you there for long?
HA: I think about three weeks.
LD: Right. Yeah.
HA: We did a little bit of training. I think the main thing we did was learn the stars of the northern hemisphere.
RG: Oh course. Yeah.
LD: Of course. Absolutely. Yeah.
RG: They didn’t teach you that while you were here?
HA: No. No.
RG: I mean even theoretically. That’s funny. I suppose a lot of you would have ended up in the Pacific theatre so, yeah.
HA: There’s enough to learn one lot at a time.
RG: Yeah. True enough. Yeah.
LD: Yeah. No. I remember the first time I went to Europe, you know, looking up at the sky and going —
RG: It’s all different.
LD: All the bases of my life were gone. It’s quite strange and it would have been even more so for you because that’s —
RG: Your trade.
LD: Yeah . That would have been really interesting for you.
HA: At Brighton there was two big hotels. The Metropole and The Grand that were taken over by the RAAF as a holding centre. And again, when we left to come home. Same place.
LD: Oh right.
RG: They’re both on the seafront aren’t they?
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah. I can remember the Metropole.
HA: When I went back to Europe in ‘94 and took a trip down to Brighton and had a look at them and they’ve dolled them up. They’re both nice looking hotels.
RG: Yeah. They’re both there though. Yeah.
HA: They were very basic then.
RG: Yeah.
LD: And was Brighton all — ‘cause I know Bournemouth had all the razor wire on the beaches and things like that. Was the same sort of protections there in Brighton?
HA: Yes. One of the, I think both of the piers had a hole cut in the middle of them so that they couldn’t —
RG: Couldn’t land on the end.
HA: Get on to one end and come ashore sort of thing.
LD: Were there any air raids or anything while you were there?
HA: Yes. There were air raids while we were there.
LD: Yeah.
HA: For a start we used to go down to the basement and they didn’t seem to do much harm so after that we didn’t bother. We just stayed in our bedroom.
RG: That would have been also around the time of the V1s and V2s.
HA: Yes.
RG: Did you have any experience of those? Or —
HA: Once or twice when I was in London on leave we heard one or two come over and we actually heard one stop one night and thought oh, this is going to be a bang.
RG: Oh dear.
HA: And sure, enough there was a bang not far away.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard people, Londoner’s I’ve met, who said that they were far more frightened of the V1s than the V2s because of that. You’d hear. In the buildings you couldn’t see them. You could hear them and when they stopped it was, ‘Where is it going to fall?’
HA: Yeah.
RG: Whereas the V2 was the crash and if you heard the crash — well you were still alive. So that was —
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I don’t think there was any V2s ever landed when I was in London. They were frightening.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And I don’t think there was any of the London guns landed in London when I was there either. You’ve heard about the London guns. The V3.
RG: That’s the V3. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I have heard about it. I didn’t know they actually fired on —
HA: Yeah. They fired a few.
RG: Oh ok.
HA: But nowhere near what they wanted to.
RG: No.
HA: They were going to finish Britain off with the V2s and V3s.
RG: Well by that point they were disappearing back away from the French coast weren’t they?
HA: Yeah. That’s right.
RG: Yeah. You’re talking January ‘45.
HA: Yeah. So the London gun got bypassed.
RG: Shuffled back. Yeah. Became a Calais gun or something [laughs] as far as you could reach.
LD: So which OTU did you end up being sent to?
HA: Lichfield.
LD: Yeah.
HA: Before that we went to an AFU At Llandwrog. In North Wales.
RG: Wales.
LD: What was an AFU?
HA: They called it an Advanced Flying Unit.
LD: Oh right. Yeah.
HA: Avro Ansons again. That was mainly to familiarise navigators and bomb aimers I think with map reading in Britain.
LD: Oh right.
HA: Which was altogether different to the Riverina
LD: Just a little [laughs]
RG: [unclear]
LD: Not to mention the stars.
RG: Yeah. And at Lichfield — that was an OTU.
HA: Lichfield it was a fairly popular OTU where we crewed up and —
LD: Yeah.
HA: Flew Wellingtons.
LD: Right.
RG: For training.
HA: For training.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
LD: So how did they crew you guys up? It seems to have been a little different in different places.
HA: They gave us two days to hang around in the hangar and hang around in the mess drinking beer and find ourselves a crew.
LD: Right.
RG: Right. But that was a five man crew wasn’t it?
HA: Six.
RG: Six. In a Wellington.
HA: Six I think.
RG: Six. Yeah. Ok.
HA: Yeah. Even though Wellingtons only had five in the crew.
RG: Yeah.
HA: You crewed up with six and the rear gunner and the mid-upper gunner took turns in the rear turret to practice.
RG: Oh ok.
LD: Oh right. Ok. Yeah.
RG: But you’re still one down from a Lancaster though ‘cause that was seven.
HA: Yeah. No engineer.
RG: No engineer. Right.
HA: So, Syd Payne and I who’d done our training in Australia together as observers and he had been a — started off as a pilot. Did Tiger Moths at Narromine and got scrubbed on Wirraways at Uranquinty I think. So, he looked like a valuable bloke to have in a crew. Somebody who could fly.
RG: Fly. Yes. Of course.
HA: And we were both navigator — bomb aimer, sort of thing and he trained.
RG: Tossed a coin to see who did what.
HA: He trained as a bomb aimer just across Anglesey from where Llandwrog was. So, we’re looking around for a pilot.
RG: Sorry. Did you two decide between yourselves who was going to be the bomb aimer and who was going to be the navigator?
HA: Before we’d even got there because he trained as a bomb aimer AFU.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I trained as a navigator AFU.
RG: Yes. Oh of course. That was before Lichfield yes. Of course. Yeah.
HA: Before Lichfield.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: So we got together and we found a pilot with a wireless op attached. And they were both Queenslanders. Both same age as us. All twenty years old. And after looking at a few others, sort of thing, I think the pilot decided that, yes, we would do him sort of thing and so we were thinking about a rear gunner. And a pair of gunners. Looking around and then a pair of gunners came and found us [emphasis] They turned out to be fellas who came first and second in their gunnery course.
RG: Nice.
HA: So, they, they had the pick of the mob sort of thing. So they picked us luckily. We got on well with them so —
RG: Both Australians. So —
HA: Yes. All Australians.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The rear gunner was from Sydney. In fact, we had a connection. I don’t know whether he’d married already a girl that I knew in Mudgee.
RG: Oh. Ok.
HA: Or married her after.
RG: After the war.
HA: One or the other. And the other fella was a farm worker from Western Australia who was elderly. He was twenty five.
RG: Oh gosh.
LD: Oh. Poor old man. You’d have to help him on with a stick.
HA: And they were both teetotallers.
RG: Oh. Ok. Ok. Maybe that’s why they came first and second in their gunnery course.
HA: And they were good shots. The bloke from Western Australia had done a bit of clay pigeon shooting, well live pigeon shooting against kangaroos and stuff.
RG: Yeah.
HA: You know. So, he knew about leading.
RG: Yeah. And they used clay pigeons to the train the gunners. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. So, they were good shots by the time we got together and of course we did a lot more training. One of the things we did at Lichfield in our training was do a bullseye.
RG: Yes.
HA: Several reckoned it counted as an operation. Others reckoned it counted as half an operation. Yeah. They got all the training planes together. Not only from Lichfield but a heap of them and flew up as if you were going to Wilhelmshaven or something like that. Up in the Baltic. When you got nearly there you turned around and came back while the rest of Bomber Command went to Munich or somewhere.
RG: Oh, you were the decoy force.
HA: Diversion decoy. Yeah.
RG: Diversion. Of course. Yeah.
LD: This is the first time I’ve actually been able to confirm what a command bullseye was.
RG: Yeah. Lucie’s relative, Ken mentions in his logbook about a command bullseye but they did these over London.
LD: But they did these over London. Yes.
RG: But and he just says command bullseye and we’ve asked the other veterans and none of them have known what it was. They didn’t do it. So —
LD: I’ve only found one reference to it in the research.
RG: Yeah.
LD: That’s really good. I’m really pleased [laughs]
HA: We did another one when we were on Stirlings. We did another bullseye.
RG: Oh that was still on Wellingtons wasn’t it?
HA: This was still on Wellingtons. Yeah.
RG: Yeah. And then you went over to Stirlings did you?
HA: Yes. Our next move after Lichfield was Swinderby.
RG: Oh yes.
HA: Near Lincoln. And I was on Stirlings.
RG: Yeah. Where you found an engineer at that point.
HA: Yeah. That’s where we got our engineer.
RG: Was he appointed or did you find him?
HA: He was just appointed to us and he was a man of forty four.
RG: Wow.
LD: Really.
HA: He’d been a policeman for years.
RG: Yeah.
HA: In Birmingham and Coventry.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And those sorts of places.
RG: So he was RAF.
HA: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: I didn’t realise.
HA: He was born in Scotland. His parents lived in Ireland. When we went on leave he had to change in to civvies to go over to Ireland.
RG: To go to Ireland [laughs]
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yes.
LD: So, did you do anything other than kind of like a spoof raid on the bullseye. Did you drop leaflets?
HA: No.
LD: Or anything like that?
HA: No. We just stayed over the sea all the time.
LD: Right. Ok.
RG: Ok.
HA: And the other one we did in the Stirlings I think we only went about as far as the Dutch coast. It was quite a short trip compared with the one that went nearly to Wilhelmshaven.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah.
RG: So how long were you on Stirlings for? And again, this is just training isn’t it? On the Stirlings.
HA: Training. Yeah. We trained there for about a month I think.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: It was mainly circuits and bumps and that sort of thing for the pilot more than —
RG: Get used to the four engines.
HA: Probably did about a couple of cross country’s and that sort of thing.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Some bombing. Fighter affiliation for the gunners.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: So, the bullseyes. Were they both at night?
HA: Yes.
LD: Yeah. So that would have been training for you as a navigator as well wouldn’t it?
HA: Oh yeah.
LD: Sort of doing the real thing. Yeah.
HA: Oh yeah. Had to find our way there and back. But when we got to Lichfield I think, on OTU, on the Wellingtons we first had Gee.
LD: Yes.
HA: Which was a tremendous help for navigators. You could get accurate fixes whenever you wanted them.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Up as far as the enemy frontier sort of thing. They jammed it after that. If we could get an hour or two when we were on an operations of good fixes before Gee gave up. And they also had APIs which you don’t seem to be in the literature much. Air Position Indicators.
RG: No.
HA: They were the best thing going for —
RG: How did that work?
HA: When we were at Cootamundra or AFU we were expected to keep a manual air plot. Every change of direction or speed or height made a difference to the air plot each time.
LD: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Then if you found a fix you could find a wind.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And that depended on the pilot sticking to the course that he was told to be on.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The speed he was told to be on and the height he was supposed —
RG: So pilot’s actually —
LD: Pilots don’t always do that.
HA: Navigation was very much a — perhaps. But with API they had a distance reading compass down the back that was half gyro and half magnetic.
RG: Yeah. Gyro magnetic compass. I know those. Yeah.
HA: And that came via the nav table through a control called a Variation Setting Control so you could set the variation on that.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And change it as you went across Europe.
RG: Yeah.
HA: From 11 around Lincoln to about 3 at Berlin or something like that.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: And deviations.
RG: Yeah.
HA: They’d swing the compass every now and again on the ground. Give you a deviation card.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Generally only one or two degrees.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So the true directions would come out on the repeater compasses for the navigator and the pilot.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And the bomb aimer.
LD: Right.
HA: And the API had true directions going to it and then from the air speed indicator which didn’t give true airspeed by any means when you, as you went higher. The indicated air speed might be a hundred and sixty mile an hour and the true air speed be two hundred miles an hour.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Thinner air. That’s going to —
HA: Thinner air. So that was accounted for as well.
RG: Wow. That’s —
HA: So the API had got true directions and true speed.
RG: Yeah. And altitude to make that variation. Yeah.
HA: Just had two knobs on it.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Two little windows.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And the normal thing we did for a start was to set the latitude and longitude of the airfield and as you flew along any time you wanted to find out where your air position was it was there. You just wrote it down. Latitude and longitude. Popped it down on your chart.
RG: And that was quite accurate.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Wow. Ok. So that were, that were in Lancs and Stirlings obviously. And Wellingtons.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Ok. So was this must have been, was this something that sort of came along later in the war? Do you know?
HA: I think it probably came in in late ’43.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I would imagine.
RG: Ok. Yeah. You’re right. I haven’t come across that either, but, yeah.
LD: Did you get — because from what I’ve read there was a lot of technology happening there around all sorts of things but, you know, including navigation.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Did you find there was a lot of changes in the equipment that you used and were you actually trained in those changes?
HA: Yes.
LD: Or did you just kind of wake up one morning and get on the aircraft and find it was new.
HA: We had — Lancasters were fitted with H2S when we got to Waddington.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And we used them in training on [pause] between — between the Stirlings and going in to the squadron we did a Lanc Finishing School. I think that’s where we first saw H2S on the planes.
RG: Yeah.
HA: All the planes had H2S at Waddington. And we used them for training exercises but we were forbidden to use them on operations because the Germans could home in on them with their fighters.
RG: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
HA: And so the only time we ever used H2S over Germany was on a daylight trip to Wilhelmshaven when they expected to have a lot of cloud over the target and so for the first time we ever got directions like this — ‘If you can’t see the target you can use H2S or you can drop your bombs when you see another one drop their bombs.’ [laughs]
RG: [laughs] Gosh.
LD: That’s precision bombing.
RG: Yeah.
LD: So you’re all sitting there going can any of us see the target? Who’s going to drop a bomb first?
HA: In our training with H2S the bomb aimer used to come and sit alongside the navigator. Both fiddled with H2S and so he came up and we were deliberating about where we were going to aim at sort of thing and we finally said, ‘Oh well, that’ll do.’ When we pressed the bombing tit two other Lancs dropped theirs.
RG: [laughs] Not sort of what you’d expect is it?
HA: We don’t know what harm we did.
LD: Might have killed a couple of sheep.
HA: Anyway, that was H2S. Gee didn’t change except as, as the allies crept up through France and so forth.
RG: Went further out.
HA: They opened up two more Gee chains besides the ones that were based in England.
RG: Yeah.
HA: One was called the Reims. One was called the Ruhr. And the other thing was after about two months, I think, Loran was fitted to the Lancs.
LD: Sorry. What was that?
RG: Loran.
HA: L O R A N long range air navigation.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Which related to Gee in that it measured time differences between the emitter and the plane. And that chart with curved lines in different colours. Same as Gee. But apparently it was only effective at night time because instead of getting direct radio signals they were bounced off the ionosphere at night time.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: It had an extremely long range. Covered all of Europe. And when they came out to the Pacific it covered all the Pacific area.
RG: Really important in the Pacific. Yeah.
HA: So we trained with Loran while we were on the squadron and actually used it about halfway through our tour. Used Loran when Gee ran out.
RG: But was it as accurate as Gee?
HA: Not as accurate.
RG: No.
HA: And a bit more cumbersome to use because you tuned into one station and got one partition line at a time and then you had to tune into a second one.
RG: Get the second position line.
HA: Get the different and then transfer further along.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Parallel ruler and muck around. So it was a bit slower. I think it was accurate enough. Good enough to find the target anyway.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Were you mostly on, at 467, on daylight operations at that point or still mostly night time? Night operations?
HA: We got back to mostly back to night time by that time. This was September when we started and D-day was back in June.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Sorry that was September. What year?
HA: ‘44.
LD: Thank you. Just to –
HA: We finished in January ’45.
LD: Right. Yeah.
HA: So we did a few daylight trips. The first and third ones were fairly big raids on le Havre and Boulogne in daylight. Big armies.
RG: Army support. Yeah.
HA: In both those places and they had side-tracked or bypassed them with the Canadians and British armies.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And finally, they decided it was about time they cleaned them out, sort of thing. So dropped a lot of bombs on various parts.
RG: Yeah.
HA: It wasn’t area bombing like there was on towns in Britain, in Germany. It was specific things.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Like oil dumps, E-boat pens. Stuff like this.
RG: Transport links and stuff like that. Yeah. Tactical. More tactical.
HA: Tactical stuff.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: They didn’t want to kill too many Frenchmen.
RG: No. No. Exactly.
LD: No. One doesn’t.
HA: So, we did that in daylight.
LD: That’s right.
RG: So that was on your first and third trip.
HA: First and third trips. Yeah.
LD: How many ops did you complete?
HA: Twenty nine.
LD: That’s a good number.
HA: Pardon?
LD: That’s a very good number.
HA: Yeah. Well I think the bullseyes might have counted to make it thirty.
RG: I was going to say, Bert, it varied over time we noticed that the number of ops you had to do to do a, you know, to do a tour.
HA: A tour varied.
RG: Yeah. In your period it was how many?
HA: Thirty to finish.
RG: It was thirty still. Yeah. Ok.
HA: When we started it was thirty six because it had been made thirty six around D-day.
RG: Ok.
HA: With so many short trips.
RG: Of course. Yeah. Yes.
HA: And then a month or two after D-day they broke it back to thirty three.
RG: ‘Cause you were going back on the raids on Germany then.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And then after we’d done about fifteen or twenty trips or something like that they said you only have to do thirty from now on.
RG: That was a bit of a relief.
HA: Yeah. But there was some longer trips coming up.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: We did one long trip to Trondheim in Norway.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Wow.
HA: Almost eleven hours.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And they put a smokescreen over the target and so the master bomber said, ‘Well, you can take your bombs home.’ So we did almost eleven hours with a full bomb load.
RG: Wow.
LD: Did that count as an op for you?
HA: That counted as an op. Yeah.
LD: Because you didn’t drop any bombs.
HA: You’d only to go to the target and be on the op. Yeah. We did a couple of —
RG: You said you brought the bombs home.
LD: Yeah.
RG: You didn’t land with them did you?
LD: Yes. That’s what I was thinking.
HA: Yeah.
RG: You did.
LD: Wow.
RG: I thought the standard practice was to ditch them in the sea if you were —
HA: Only if you had too much weight.
RG: So —
HA: I think earlier in the war they might have ditched them but we brought our bombs back three times I think.
RG: Ok.
LD: Oh my goodness.
RG: So when you say too much weight you had too much fuel still in and there was like a maximum weight that a Lanc could land with.
HA: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: Oh. I see.
LD: Well, you wouldn’t have had much fuel left after a trip to Norway. Would you?
RG: No. That’s right. It would have been light enough I suppose.
HA: I wrote a bit about this later one time. We were the only one to get back to Waddington with our bombs on. The others either landed in Scotland or ditched their bombs in the Atlantic.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And then got back to Waddington. But we didn’t bother. We came all the way back and had eighty gallons left.
RG: Eighty gallons. Don’t go around the circuit once or twice [laughs]
HA: It’s not really enough to go around again.
RG: No.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Wow. Ok.
LD: It doesn’t kind of sound very safe landing with the bombs but —
RG: No. No.
LD: But obviously you managed it.
HA: Yes. I believe —
LD: And the big one would have only been a cookie in that case wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t have had —
HA: Yeah. I don’t think we had a cookie even then. I think we only had about eight or ten one thousand pounders. I could find out in the logbook.
RG: Yeah for that range you would have only had a small one. You’d need more fuel and less bombs for that range.
HA: They actually, like, we were two squadrons taking off from Waddington. So there would have been about forty planes. As you turned at the end of the runway, on the perimeter track to get on to the runway they had a petrol tanker there to top up the tanks.
RG: [laughs] Fair dinkum.
LD: Oh my goodness.
HA: They knew it was going to be touch and go you see.
RG: Wow.
LD: Wow.
RG: That must have been close to one of the longest return — one of the longest return raids of the war surely.
HA: For ordinary squadrons.
RG: Yeah.
HA: But the fellas who did the Tirpitz raids —
RG: Yeah.
HA: They did thirteen, fourteen hour trips.
RG: Yeah. They had modified aircraft though too didn’t they? Yeah.
HA: They threw out the turrets.
RG: Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
LD: Because that’s what I was going to ask with these raids was the crew or the aircraft modified in any way for those, for that long trip.
HA: No. No.
RG: The standard. Still must have come close. I mean there were some squadrons, some raids I believe where they flew across, dropped their bombs in east bloc Poland and then went on and landed at Russian airfields, refuelled and came back out.
HA: Yeah. They did the same with some of the Italians targets early in the war I think.
RG: Yeah. Flew down to North Africa. Yeah. Yeah.
LD: So did you guys know, well no, you didn’t know in advance did you? About where you were going? But how did you feel when you realised you were going to Norway?
HA: We feel pretty happy about it because we thought that’s going to be a safe target.
RG: Yeah.
HA: There’s not going to be anybody shooting at you all the way.
LD: Fair enough.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Actually it was a nasty trip for navigation. There was what they called an occlusion up in the North Sea where a cold front and a warm front got together.
RG: Yeah.
HA: It was raining. And the wind was variable and we were supposed to find our way up there after Gee ran out. For about another two or three hours flying after that. The bomb aimer gave what we thought was a pinpoint crossing the coast of Norway that turned out to be wrong. And he gave another one later on and he thinks it was right. But anyway we finally found the target. Then we had to fly for two or three hours without any aids coming back because it was ten tenths cloud. Still raining.
RG: And you were over the sea the whole way.
HA: When I finally got the first Gee fix we were fifty miles north west of where we should have been.
RG: That’s not bad.
HA: The wind had changed that much.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: In four or five hours.
RG: Yeah. But you’re over the sea almost the whole way too.
HA: Over the sea most of the time.
RG: So if you ditched —
LD: You’ve got no points of reference have you?
RG: No. And if you ditched, you had to ditch you were in deep trouble.
HA: Yeah. Anyhow. We were heading, had a slight headwind at that stage which had been pushing us up that way. We increased the speed a bit because of the headwind and then after about an hour of finding Gee fixes I found the wind had changed to almost the opposite. Anyway, we said, ‘Skipper you can slow the plane down a bit now. We’ve got a bit of a tailwind.’ And so he and I and the engineer did some calculations. We’d already decided we’d land at Lossiemouth or Leuchars or somewhere. In Scotland. But after we did the calculations the skipper said, ‘I think we can give it a go to get back to base because of the tailwind.’ Maybe the other fellas didn’t do that workings. But anyhow we cut it fine.
RG: Yeah. So you started ops with 467 in September.
HA: Yeah.
RG: First and third raid. On your second raid. Where was that to?
HA: Stuttgart. Night raid. In between the skipper did a second dickie to Pforzheim. I forgotten where he went. Somewhere like Stuttgart I think.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And then the next night he went.
RG: Went out on a —
HA: Stuttgart on his own with us.
RG: What was your, how did you, what was your experience of the first raid? You know. The first German raid really. First. Stuttgart. How did you —?
HA: No problem much. The navigator stayed in his blackout curtained room with the light on and I seldom went out and looked at the target.
RG: Ok.
HA: So I left it to the rest of them to do all the looking out and so forth. Our gunners, bomb aimer and engineer all were very good at keeping a lookout.
RG: Good lookout. Yeah. I suppose the resistance from fighters and so forth was slowing down a bit by then wasn’t it? It was still there but —
HA: You’ve heard about Schrage musik.
RG: Schrage musik. Yes. Yes.
HA: That was something that took a great toll of bombers.
RG: Bombers. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Right up to the end of the war I think. When we finished our tour. In the next two months Waddington lost both their COs and one of their flight commanders. All experienced fellas on second tours.
RG: Ok.
HA: Sort of thing and, we think, all to night fighters with their upward firing guns.
RG: The guns. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Some of the some of the German aces were reputed to have shot down over a hundred, sort of thing.
RG: There were a few who got — yeah. Yeah.
HA: It was pretty dangerous.
RG: Yes. Yeah.
LD: I have seen — I think it was a Lanc with, there were modifications, not official ones but just ones that were done in particular squadrons with like, an observation point underneath. I remember seeing the ones with like the little round dome underneath.
RG: Yeah. Like an astrodome.
LD: Yes.
RG: But on the bottom of the fuselage.
LD: Yes, but underneath. So, I have read about you know some aircraft that had these unofficial modifications to watch out for Schrage musik. Did you have anything like that in your — ?
HA: No. We weren’t even told about it.
LD: Ah. That’s what I was wondering as well.
HA: You know, I’m sure the authorities knew about it. Probably months, maybe more, before we flew. They didn’t tell us about it. I think it was probably to keep the morale up.
RG: Morale. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: What they did tell us to do was to do banking searches and —
LD: Banking searches?
HA: Banking searches.
LD: Yes.
HA: Like earlier in the war, before Window, the searchlights and ack-ack were mostly radar controlled and so if you flew straight they would drop onto you and so the technique was to —
RG: Swerve.
HA: Just weave. Go a few — half a minute this way.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Half a minute that way. Sort of thing.
RG: So, predictors couldn’t predict in curves.
HA: Window came in and their radar wasn’t able to lock onto planes. The technique was to put up a barrage of flak and in daytime it looked pretty horrible with all these black puffs in the air. They’d hang in the air for a long time so it looked —
RG: Looked worse than it probably was. Yeah.
HA: So anyway, the technique was to straight, go straight. Don’t weave. Get through it as quick as you can. And all the time we were over enemy territory our pilot was quite religious about the banking searches. They could make the plane do that. Without it changing direction.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yes.
HA: He’d say, ‘Down port.’ The gunners would have a good look underneath and say, ‘All clear port.’ Roll it over.
LD: Right. Yeah.
HA: ‘All clear starboard.’
RG: Ah ok.
HA: We would do that for hours.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: And we never got shot at by a fighter.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: A couple or three times a gunner saw a fighter and we started corkscrewing and we weren’t chased on any of those occasions.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The general opinion was that if a German fighter saw you doing a corkscrew they’d give up and look for somebody else.
RG: Someone easier. So, you never actually got attacked by a fighter.
HA: Never. No.
LD: Were you ever hit by flak?
HA: Oh yeah. Lots and lots of times. Sometimes a lot of holes. A couple of daylight lowish level ones we got holes from machine guns from the ground.
RG: Wow. Ok.
HA: Walcheren Island. We bombed Walcheren Island three times. Short daylight raids.
RG: Sorry? Whereabout?
HA: Walcheren Island.
RG: Oh sorry. Yeah.
HA: Scheldt Estuary. The first time this was what I was going to tell you about. 617 Squadron landing with their bombs on. I think they did there. We went. 5 Group sent about a hundred planes to Walcheren Island and the aim was to break the sea wall and flood the island and we did a run at about, I think about six thousand feet or something like that and drop seven bombs in a close stick and come around again and did another seven. In the same place. Hopefully.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And a hundred planes did that and they opened it up, the front of the island. Got a picture in The Sun and the next day, sort of thing, “The RAF floods an island.” Apparently 617 Squadron was standing by with tallboy bombs.
RG: Yeah.
HA: In case.
RG: Just in case you didn’t manage it.
HA: And they brought them home.
RG: Wow.
LD: They brought home Tallboys.
HA: Twelve thousand pounds.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Wow.
RG: I’d be terrified landing with a bloody Tallboy underneath.
HA: Yeah. Well, I don’t know if they brought them home and landed with them or whether they junked them somewhere else, you know but they didn’t need to use them on Walcheren Island.
RG: Actually sorry, one of the first chaps we interviewed — Arthur. He was, he did, he finished his tour in ‘45 and then was posted to an experimental unit experimenting with a blind landing aid which he told us a bit about and he said it was very very effective. He was there when the war ended.
HA: Yeah.
RG: But he, before he left his squadron he went down to the intelligence officer’s hut and nicked some of the photographs that he had taken himself on one of those raids and he gave us the photos and you could see the bombs striking the seawall. That was in Holland though. There was another one trying to break a dyke in Holland but at low level and — yeah. Arthur’s photos. Yeah. I forget what squadron he was with now but —
HA: The next two raids we did on Walcheren Island, they were both daylight, were on the big guns that were stopping the Canadians from going along the bank.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And stopping the navy probably from coming in as well although the estuary was mined and the navy had one go at it before and said, ‘No. It’s too dangerous.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: So, we were trying to bomb these big guns and they were pretty impervious to bombs I think but it ended up being a fairly hairy sort of a thing because we would go over and they’d say, ‘Oh yes, well the weather’s not too good. You might have to fly at six thousand,’ and you’d get there and have to fly at four thousand or something like that. And so, there was a lot of anti-aircraft fire.
RG: A lot of flak. Yeah.
HA: Small arms stuff even.
RG: Yeah. Four thousand feet. You’re not very high are you?
LD: I’ve read about bomb aimers keeping some of the Window and putting the Window on the bottom of their aircraft and lying on the Window to stop —
RG: A bit of armour.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Using the Window.
LD: To protect them from the flak.
HA: I’ve never heard of that.
LD: I I guess these were kind of individual things that people —
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah
LD: Systems that people developed themselves.
RG: Did you have a mascot or a, you know, a token or anything.
HA: On the side of the plane.
RG: No. A personal one. A personal one.
HA: That one of us carried? No. None of us seem to have been too superstitious.
RG: Ok.
HA: A lot of them were but —
RG: Do you know of all the chaps we’ve spoken to most of them have said that? That they didn’t do it.
HA: No.
RG: Yeah.
LD: And yet you read such a lot about it don’t you?
RG: Yeah.
HA: About the only superstitious thing we did was we’d all pee on the tail wheel before we took off.
RG: [laughs] Yeah. I believe that was a common one.
LD: Was that very easy? In those flying suits.
HA: It was not. No. I can’t, I can’t ever remember using the toilet down the back of the plane during any of our trips.
RG: The Elsan.
HA: The pilot did it once.
LD: From the sound of things, you wouldn’t have wanted to use it if you could avoid it.
HA: Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you were above ten thousand feet you’d have your oxygen on for a start. So, you’d have to disconnect that. Get a hold of a portable oxygen bottle, go down, climb over the main spar which was about this high.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The pilot went down once on a daylight trip. I forget where it was to. So, I got to fly the plane for half an hour.
RG: Oh right.
HA: Straight and level.
RG: Yeah.
LD: And what kind of, we’ve heard about the — that the meal you’d had before an op. Was that still happening for you?
HA: Yes. Yes. But one of the early things you find out about being on an op on a night somebody would have said 2154 and that would be the number of gallons that a plane would hold and you’d say, ‘Oh well, it’s a long trip.’ And then the next thing they’d announce that the flying meal would be on at 3 o’clock. Something like that. And then a briefing at about 5 o’clock. That sort of thing. It would all lead up to actually take off time.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. It was quite a long period.
LD: So how far ahead would they kind of lock down the station? You know, set the security measures in place.
HA: I’m not too sure. I think it would probably be twelve, fifteen hours. Something like that.
LD: Right.
HA: Maybe a bit longer.
LD: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
LD: And did you guys get the wakey wakey pills too?
HA: Yeah. They gave them to us and I never used them once I don’t think. I don’t know if anybody else in the crew ever used them. Maybe the gunners did because they’d be tested on some of the long trips for staying awake.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: In the dark.
RG: Yeah.
LD: How did they do that? Test them,
HA: They’d be stressed.
RG: And tested as in stressed.
LD: Oh right. Ok. Not examined.
HA: I used the wrong word.
LD: No. No. That’s fine. I just took it the wrong way. Yeah. Yeah. Examined. Yeah. That’s what I meant.
RG: So, your crew. You had the same crew throughout all twenty nine?
HA: Throughout. Yeah. No replacements. No.
RG: Yeah. Have you got their names and so forth?
HA: Yeah.
RG: I mean you probably almost certainly remember them.
LD: Yeah. But it’s got all this. Maybe it’s written in there.
HA: Our pilot was Peter Gray-Buchannan. With a hyphen. His elder brother had done two tours as a rear gunner earlier.
RG: Wow.
HA: Over there.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Gosh. He was a lucky man wasn’t he?
HA: Have you heard of Doubleday and Brill?
RG: No.
HA: From Ganmain. They’re both fairly famous men. They both enlisted from Ganmain early in the war. Both went over there and did at least two tours. Maybe three. Both were wing commanders with the DSO and a couple of DFCs. That sort of thing. Billy Brill was CO of our squadron when we arrived. And I’ll tell you about the DFC now.
RG: Yes. I was just about to come to that eventually.
LD: Yes, it’s on my list.
HA: When we got to the squadron Bill called all eight of the new crews that had arrived from training into his office and amongst other things said, because we were all, nearly all flight sergeants, ‘All you flight sergeants who were thinking of applying for a commission don’t bother until you’ve done twenty trips. And then if you keep your nose clean you get recommended.’ He didn’t say, ‘Most of you won’t make twenty.’ [laughs] But anyway, that was his — so when I had done twenty trips I applied for a commission and Bill — Bill had been moved on and we had a new younger CO called Douglas. And he took it upon himself to sort of decide who was officer material and who wasn’t, sort of thing. One of the questions he asked me was, ‘Are you going to be any more use to the air force with a commission?’ And I said, ‘No. I can’t say that I will.’ I didn’t give him the right answers anyway and he didn’t recommend me.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So —
RG: That’s a fair answer though Bert. I’ve got to say. I have to say.
HA: When we got towards the end of our tour. I think probably only with one trip to go. It may have been two. The group captain called me in one day and said, ‘I’ve a bit of a problem. I’ve got one CO who recommends you fellas when you’ve done twenty trips and you’ve looked after yourself. And the other fella says yes or no to some of them.’ And he said, ‘The RAAF hierarchy requires that even if the CO says no it has to come to me. It’s not final.’
RG: Yeah.
HA: ‘So that’s my problem. Are you a good navigator?’ ‘Oh, I think so. I’ve lasted this long.’
LD: You’d done at least twenty trips.
RG: Yeah.
LD: You must be good.
HA: That was the end of the interview. So apparently on that day he approved me for a commission and so sometime later I got, in the mail, a letter saying that I’d got a DFC and I was a pilot officer.
LD: Oh.
RG: So, you didn’t make pilot officer or —
HA: Yeah.
RG: Oh. Ok
HA: Yeah. So I was a pilot officer dated from the day that I saw the group captain.
RG: Because as an airman you would have got the DFM wouldn’t you?
HA: Yeah.
RG: So, maybe they were going to give you the DFM and they went, ‘Oh God, he’s a pilot officer, we have to — [laughs] Did you get the DFM DFC for any particular —
HA: No.
RG: Just —
HA: I could show you the citation but it’s just a standard one that they gave to most people. The pilot got one with the same wording apparently.
RG: Right.
[pause]
HA: That’s fairly standard I think. There’d be hundreds of those. Came in a nice little case.
LD: Oh, it’s not there anymore though.
HA: It’s there.
RG: It’s on there.
LD: Oh, it’s a beautiful box isn’t it? It’s lovely.
HA: Yeah.
RG: You’ve got the Bomber Command clasp.
HA: Yes. I only got that one last year.
RG: It’s recent isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah.
HA: It was a bit of a hassle because I filled in all the forms and so forth. Sent it to England. And they sent it back, they sent back word, ‘No. You don’t apply there. You apply at Canberra.’ So, I had to go through it all again. Copies of stuff from the logbook and all that.
LD: So how, how was it presented to you?
HA: It was just sent in the mail. It wasn’t. There was no, no ceremony at all.
LD: Right.
RG: There’s an interesting thing on the back of it I’ve just noticed. It’s got on it that it was obviously first issued in 1918 and it’s got George Rex on it and then 1945 is just stamped in at the bottom.
HA: Yeah.
RG: That’s you know, that’s interesting that they keep — yeah.
HA: Yeah.
RG: I suppose originally when they did they first design they didn’t think they’d need it again.
HA: Yeah.
[pause]
HA: A local federal MP gave out those sort of things at one stage.
RG: Oh, the sixtieth. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. Just a medal .
RG: Yeah. World War Two. Yeah.
HA: And I was sitting with some other fellas that day and they had a Bomber Command medal on their chest. And I said, I asked them, I said, ‘Where did you get that?’ And they said, ‘We bought it.’ You can’t get a Bomber Command medal. They haggled with the government over there for years about getting one and they were never approved. The best they could do was a clasp. But apparently —
RG: Did Fighter Command get one? They got one, didn’t they? Fighter Command.
HA: I don’t know. Battle of Britain got one I think.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Yeah. The Bomber Command one. That sort of — there were problems with that with the political ramifications of Bomber Command. After the war.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: That became quite unpleasant.
HA: Yeah.
LD: To say the least.
HA: Yeah.
LD: I just checked out the squadron before we came.
HA: Yeah.
LD: And — yeah. So, you talked about the support of ground operations during the D-day landings at that time and so on. It said that 467 participated in the raids on Peenemunde.
HA: Yeah.
LD: Were you there then?
HA: No.
LD: Ok.
HA: It was a research station for the V2s and V1s.
RG: And V1s. Yeah.
LD: Yes. It was a fascinating raid. I’ve read a book about it. it’s pretty amazing. And were you involved in Operation Manna and bringing the POWs back from Europe?
HA: No.
LD: And dropping supplies and so on.
RG: No. You’d finished by then, hadn’t you? You finished in January.
HA: I’ll tell you why I wasn’t. As soon as I finished my tour our pilot got transferred to Transport Command and I got transferred to Training Command. And I was an instructor at a Con Unit.
RG: Whereabouts?
HA: At Wigsley. Near Waddington.
RG: Yeah. Ok.
HA: And we were getting crews ready to go to squadrons that were going to be in Tiger Force.
RG: Tiger Force. Yeah.
LD: Right. That’s what else I was going to ask about because it said 467 was involved in that.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So, I was an instructor right up until they dropped the atom bomb.
LD: Right. Right. Fair enough.
HA: Yeah.
RG: And were you still at Wigsley right to the end?
HA: Still at Wigsley.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And I stayed on at Wigsley for another couple of months after that and did a bit of ferrying. We ferried some Stirlings over to Northern Ireland and some Lancasters down to Southern Britain. Did a Cook’s Tour over some of the targets we’d been in Germany. But generally sort of loafed around.
RG: Cook’s tour.
HA: Alex talked about that. Yeah.
RG: Yeah. With a Cook’s Tour? Was that. Ok. Yeah. Well Alex was going over, he was a pilot. He’s living up at Orange. He was going over specifically to photograph the damage. Is that the same thing? Yeah.
HA: No. No. They just put a heap — a heap of interested fellas.
RG: It was literally a sightseeing tour.
HA: Like a real Cook’s Tour. I don’t know how many. A dozen or something like that in a Lancaster. I took my box brownie and took a few photographs.
RG: But did you land anywhere on the continent or just went out and came back or —?
HA: Somewhere I’ve got where we went. I think it’s probably in the logbook where we went.
RG: Oh. Bound to be. Yeah. Yeah. No. Alex said they were photographing the damage for analysis purposes. Cook’s tour. Base — Brentwood. [unclear] [ Cape Gris Nez, [ unclear] Aachen. Turin. Cologne. Krefeld, Duisberg — it was a tour wasn’t it? Ham. Munster. Wesel. Eindhoven.
LD: Ray, can you read them out loudly for the tape?
RG: Oh yes. Ok.
HA: Start at the with the ones inside Europe.
RG: Yeah. Well, Cape Gris Nez, [unclear] Maastricht. Aachen. Turin. Cologne. Krefeld. Duisburg. Essen. Ham. Munster. Wesel. Eindhoven. Turnhout. Ostende. [unclear] Calais. Cap Gris Nez,
LD: Wow.
RG: Yeah.
LD: That’s comprehensive.
HA: Yeah. It was good. Yeah.
RG: It must have been an odd feeling flying over and knowing that no one was going to shoot at you.
HA: Yeah. Oh yeah. We had a look at the Dortmund Ems Canal. I don’t know if that’s even mentioned there but —
RG: Dortmund. Not the canal itself is mentioned but no.
HA: The Dortmund Ems Canal was a place where Bomber Command did a lot of damage. I think we might have been one of the first raids where they actually breached the canal walls and let the water out and stranded the barges but there was ten attempts at it I think. Altogether. Some of them didn’t work. We did two on the Dortmund Ems Canal itself and another one the Ems Wesel Canal which was nearby. Both night-time raids. And because of its importance it was a very dangerous target to go to. The ack-ack was fierce. Had plenty of searchlights and usually we seemed to have to, for one reason or another, do orbits when we got to the target. Either because cloud was too — we had to come down through cloud to find it or one time they had trouble with the marking and so, they said, ‘Do an orbit until we can get it properly marked.’ ‘Do another orbit.’ ‘Now you can come and do it,’ sort of thing. That sort of business happened.
RG: Yeah.
HA: So, and we did, finally did a daylight one on New Year’s Day to the Dortmund Ems Canal. And I met a fella after the war, playing golf, who’d been in our same squadron and was on the same raid and they got one engine on fire for a start and I wrote in my logbook, log and chart of the day, not the logbook, I’ve got a lot of logs and charts.
RG: Oh ok.
LD: Wow.
HA: “Aircraft on the starboard beam going down on fire. “ Dot dot dot. “Gone.” That was them.
RG: Oh right. Ok.
HA: They didn’t go down. They got down to about four thousand feet and got control of the plane and started off staggering back. Then it got another engine on the same side on fire and kept going. This fella was the bomb aimer and he said he put a piece of rope around the rudder pedal to help the pilot try and keep it straight. They staggered along and got fired at repeatedly because they were on fire but they got as far as the front line. To where the Americans were. And all bailed out successfully.
RG: Wow. Ok.
HA: The pilot was last out and he managed to get out apparently and got a DSO for it. Straightaway.
RG: Well, it sounds like he deserved it too. Yeah. You also did a raid here on the Lützow the battleship?
HA: Oh yes that was probably something special.
RG: Yeah [unclear] special target.
[LD excuses herself]
RG: Well there’s a daytime raid. Bergen as well.
HA: Yeah. Bergen was an interesting one. That was one of the ones where they said, ‘Bert, you ought to come out and have a look at it.’ This target. Most targets I didn’t want to come out of my blackout curtains. But Bergen there was four thousand feet mountains.
RG: On either side.
HA: And in between there was a valley where I, as navigator, was able to get on a Gee position line and keep between the two mountains and come down because we were supposed to bomb at twelve thousand or something but they said come down to the cloud base. Four thousand. We came down to three thousand eight hundred I think before we got out of the clouds. And then we snuck up a little bit. Just skimming under the clouds to the target and they’re shooting from downstairs. They’re shooting —
RG: From above. Yeah. Wow.
HA: He said, ‘You ought to come and see this. We’re being shot at from above as well as below.’
RG: God. Return from Marston Moor. So yeah, I was going to ask that. On any of your trips did you come down somewhere else?
HA: Yeah.
RG: Come back
HA: Quite a few times. I don’t know how many. Two or three perhaps. You come back from Europe and Waddington and all the inland bases would be covered with fog.
RG: Ah ok.
HA: So, they send you somewhere on the coast to land there.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I remember one time we got in a tender then and they drove us back and got lost. And so, we wondered around. It was a really cold night. Looking for, looking for Waddington.
LD: That’s just what you need I imagine.
HA: No signs up anywhere, you know.
RG: I can just imagine some of the conversations you guys would have with the drivers of the tenders, you know. We got all the way back from Germany and you can’t find bloody [laughs] Waddington.
HA: I think one of the navigators finally got in the front with him [laughs] I remember there was a town with a five way intersection where he didn’t know which one to take and he went backwards and bumped into a lamppost and about two hours later he bumped into the same lamp post [laughs] So, we were lost.
LD: Oh dear. Might have been easier to leave it ‘til daytime.
HA: Other times you’d stay. We stayed the night at one of those places too and then just flew back the next day.
RG: Yeah. I had a friend in Canberra. He’s dead now. He was a pilot in Stirlings and then — he was a flight sergeant and his navigator was a sergeant and he said there was a notice up one day saying volunteers for special operations. Instant promotion. Up one rank and he thought, ‘This is a good idea. What do you reckon?’ It was Pathfinder force.
HA: Yeah.
RG: So he converted over to Lancs for that. But he said when he was on Stirlings they were doing a navigation exercise. And it was a daytime one and they flew over another field and one of the, one of the crew was an RAF guy. He lived in the village nearby and he said, ‘Skipper can you put us down there?’ He said. So, they did. They put him down at the airfield. Went and had lunch in the mess and went back out. Ducked off home to see his mum, you know. Came back. And he said it would have been all perfect. He said, ‘I was taxiing up the runway, got to the end to turn on to the runway and clipped his wingtip and broke the navigational knob at the end on a post at the end of the runway. So, when he got back he had to explain how he managed to break it in the air.
HA: Yeah. He was in big trouble.
RG: Did you ever do anything like that? Your —
HA: No.
RG: No.
HA: We came back from a trip one time. I forget which one it was but when we got back to Waddington you couldn’t see the circuit lights. You could see the runway. It was very bad visibility and so the pilot said, ‘I’ve got to land this like a Tiger Moth. We’ll just get around the runway and then come in like that.’
RG: Side.
HA: And the fella that was in the caravan with the green and red light, sort of thing, at the end of the runway. He said afterwards, he said, ‘You fellas almost took my caravan off. Coming down like that.’ And then they closed the, they closed the place down. After that everybody else had to go over to the coast.
RG: Bert could you explain, sorry. The circuit lights. Can you explain how that, that worked?
HA: Yeah. They would have the runway with the runway lights and then they’d have circuit lights going. I don’t know. Half a mile. A mile around or something like that.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Almost touching somebody else’s.
LD: Right.
HA: ‘Cause there were so many of them.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And when you came back wanting to land you’d come in on the right hand side, sort of thing. And you’d call up the girl on the microphone. Tell them who you were. “Mozart dog to slagwort.” They’d say, ‘Go to channel two,’ or something like that. She’d tell you to stay at four thousand. So you’d go around again. Then she’d say, ‘Prepare to land.’ You’d go around. You’d have to say, ‘Wheels,’ at a certain place and come around and then lining up with the runway. You’d say, ‘Funnel.’
RG: Funnel.
HA: Yeah. And if you got the green light from the bloke in the caravan you could land.
RG: Right. Ok. Ok. So with the circuit it was the same diameter with the aircraft stacked in the altitude?
HA: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: So, you had a whole bunch of aircraft circling.
HA: She used to stack you up at four thousand or three thousand. Something like that.
RG: Ok.
HA: So, you wouldn’t run into one other.
RG: And you were all going anti clockwise, I guess.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Well it’s a very responsible position isn’t it?
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah. All done by WAAFs.
RG: Yeah. ‘Cause you would have had aircraft coming back and straggling back really wouldn’t you? All over the place.
HA: Yeah. Sometimes.
LD: And she would potentially be triaging to see who’s going to land before others because of problems.
HA: If somebody had damage they would get priority and they’d leave you stacked up there.
RG: Yeah. I heard, I heard, sorry, it was earlier in the war. I think it was about ‘42 that the Germans were using intruders raids. They tried to get in to the circuits. Get an intruder in to the circuit. A night fighter. Was that happening later in the —?
HA: Yes. When I was at Wigsley. I was duty navigator up in the tower one night and some ME110s came in with the bomber stream coming back and got across the coast without —
RG: Without being detected because they were in the stream. Yeah.
HA: And they came to Wigsley and a couple of the other Con Units. They shot down two training planes at Wigsley.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I don’t know how many they shot down altogether. Five or six I think. They went to Waddington and machine gunned the mess. Had a go at the bomb dump without [laughs] without any damage. Bomb dumps are hard to —
RG: Yeah. They’re well protected.
HA: That was some experience.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Because the people in the control tower — it was probably a duty pilot and a duty wireless op as well as a duty navigator and somebody in charge of it. A bit of a flap on. You know, what do you do with planes being shot down?
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Turn the runway lights off for a start.
RG: Yeah. And then what do you do with the stacked aircraft in the air. Redirect them?
HA: Tell them to look out.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah. That was, that was a strange one.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause I thought later in the war I wondered whether that still happened because the Germans had lost so many aircraft.
HA: Yeah. That would have been, that would have been probably March or something like that. 1945.
RG: Yeah. It was between January and May so, yeah. Wow. So still that late.
LD: So were they using FIDO for you to land with at night?
HA: Only on certain ‘dromes. We didn’t have it on every drome.
LD: Oh right.
HA: There was only a few FIDO ‘dromes.
LD: Yeah.
HA: It was terribly expensive.
LD: Oh, that’s, that’s what I thought. Looking at it it must have been just in terms of fuel.
RG: Did Waddington? Did Waddington have it?
HA: Used up hundreds of gallons of petrol.
RG: Waddington didn’t have it?
HA: No.
RG: No.
LD: No. I sort of wondered how effective it was too. With all that petrol burning there’d be smoke and everything as well as well as, as well as the lights.
HA: Probably turbulence. I should think it’s probably very difficult for pilots to land in.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Hence what, hence what Arthur was doing. Yeah. [unclear] he said it was very accurate by the way.
LD: Yeah.
RG: He said you could land a Lancaster almost hands off at night without any trouble whatsoever.
HA: Oh well.
RG: Then the war ended.
HA: Good planes to fly apparently.
RG: I’ve heard that. Yes. The pilot. A couple of pilots we’ve spoken to have said that. Yeah. They really liked them. Arthur all this stuff. This is obviously very precious. Have they got copies in Evans Head or anywhere else? Or are there any copies of it?
LD: I think there’s a book here too Rob.
RG: Oh. Ok.
LD: Yeah.
RG: Because what I was going to say was if we can manage to get copies of all this stuff — if you’re happy to do that. Put them in the archive as well.
HA: I’ve got the other logbook here somewhere I think. Yeah. I might have it down here. I have another logbook that you could take perhaps. It’s got all the stuff in it for the operations. I copied them out. I’ll find it for you. Probably downstairs somewhere.
RG: If we could copy them. I mean we could copy them here before we go and bring them back to you today.
HA: Well you’re welcome. Yeah.
RG: Yeah. Thank you. I guess we could go to the library or somewhere.
LD: Office Works. If they’re open.
HA: That book right there.
LD: This would be fabulous.
HA: I was telling you about the crew that got shot, well they caught on fire.
RG: Yes.
HA: Their navigator produced this book afterwards about their experiences.
LD: Oh. It’s not yours. I just saw it was from a navigator. I didn’t realise it wasn’t yours.
HA: No. It’s not mine. It’s about their crew’s experience and so forth.
RG: [unclear]
LD: Oh, is this is what you were talking about?
HA: It’s got little bits. See. That’s some of —
LD: A copy of the logbook.
HA: Some stuff out of my log and charts of the day. I lent it to him and he got it put it into the book.
LD: Is that what you were talking about with the copy of the logbook?
HA: No.
LD: Ok.
HA: No. That was just to emphasise that our tour — I think twenty four out of our twenty nine trips were just with 5 Group. We only did about five trips with, big trips with seven or eight hundred of Bomber Command.
LD: Oh yes. Oh you weren’t part of those really huge bomber streams then.
HA: Not as, not as a rule. Mostly we were just 5 Group.
LD: Yeah.
HA: And on some of those little daylight trips only half of 5 Group, you know, about a hundred planes.
LD: Right. That’s a big change from earlier in the war, isn’t it?
HA: Yeah. Yes.
LD: Yeah. Arthur. Sorry Bert. That’s Rob getting the names mixed up when we arrived.
RG: Yeah. Sorry. And I just called you Arthur a minute ago. Sorry about that.
LD: Very bad of me. What sort of experience did you have with the Committee of Adjustment. Did you, within —
HA: Were they the fellas that decided on LMF and that sort of thing?
LD: Yes. Yeah.
HA: Never had any experience of it. No. I heard about it.
RG: Oh, Committee of Adjustment were the guys who cleared the crews who were missing. Cleared their possessions and stuff out.
HA: Oh yes. Yeah. We had another crew in the same room as us. Sixty on one side and sixty on the other side. Both about the same time. And the navigator of the other crew was a good friend of mine because he came from Tooraweenah and he said I’m the only fella that’s ever, he’d ever met in the air force that had ever heard of Tooraweenah let alone been there and had a drink in his father’s pub. And they got shot down on their twentieth trip. So, we got woken up a couple of hours after we went to bed by the service police coming in and asking us if we would just mind looking on when they were sorting out their belongings.
RG: Witnessing that. Yeah.
HA: If there was anything that we particularly wanted to do something with to send to their parents or something like that. But we didn’t find anything that we wanted to. They just took the lot.
RG: Ok. So they just bundled everything together and took it.
HA: In the middle of the night sort of thing. It would have been 4 o’clock in the morning or something it was.
RG: Right. Ok. ‘Cause we’ve heard different — different stations seemed to do it very differently.
HA: Yeah. They were Air Force Military Police.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause other stations they used just airmen and —
LD: Sometimes the chaplain.
RG: Sometimes the chaplain. Yeah. Alex Jenkins, the pilot from Orange. He got shot down and he was the sole survivor. He was in a German military hospital, a Luftwaffe military hospital. Only for a few weeks actually before the British army overran the place in Holland and so he was sent back and he said when he got back all his kit was gone and he had to go down to London.
LD: At the dead meat factory, he described it as.
RG: Yeah. The dead meat factory with all these steel boxes with all the kit in it. He said there were just thousands of them in this warehouse. He had to go in and say, ‘That’s mine. Get it out.’ Yeah.
HA: There’s a few things that I’ve put aside that might be worth your while copying if you want to.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Because you could maybe photograph.
RG: Photograph these but — yeah.
LD: Those. Yeah.
RG: [what I could do with it] actually, we will take copies of those. Thanks. Bert, this chap because this is his book not yours is he still around or is he —
HA: No. He was four or five years older than me. I played golf with him for a few years here at Wagga.
RG: Right.
HA: But he’s gone now. He’d be a hundred, I think, nearly, now. Sam Nelson.
RG: Is there family around or anybody because what would be good is if we could get a copy of the book for the archive but the other thing too for books like this and we did it for another chap at Orange who was a navigator. An RAF guy. He’d written a book about his time in a prison camp and we’re trying to get these things into the National Library because they’ll take them just like that.
HA: You can take that as long as you like.
RG: Would it be alright though ‘cause it’s not you know.
HA: I’ve read it.
RG: No. I was thinking like, if the family might object. I don’t know. Should we notify the family that it’s? Is there any way to contact?
HA: The navigator himself. I think he’s probably gone.
RG: Yeah. He’s gone but — the family —
HA: I could tell you one little snippet about them. His crew were part RAF and part Australian.
RG: Yeah.
HA: At one time they had a reunion in Australia. Went over to Canberra. At the time that the G for George had just been refurbished.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Put back in to the museum and was all roped off. And they went up and I think Sam himself said to one of the attendants, ‘This is our crew that flew in Lancasters and we’ve just had a reunion. How about letting us get in?’ And they held it up and let them get in.
RG: Yeah. Actually, this chap from, Alex from Orange. He did the same thing. It was only – we spoke to him last year and only a month or so before he’d been down to the war memorial. It was the last time he could go down because he was getting a bit frail and he got down there and they put on a lift thing to get him up to the door. He got into the fuselage and he got up to the main spar and the two young guys were in attendance, and they said, ‘Do you want to go any further?’ And he said, ‘Yeah. I want to get over that main spar just one more time.’ And he said, ‘It took quite a while,’ he said, ‘But I got over the damned thing and he got up to the cockpit.’ [And he got the gun ] in the cockpit and he stood on it but on his way out he was coming down. He looked through one of the windows on the side and there’s an ME262 over in the corner. And that was the aircraft that shot him down. Not the same aircraft obviously but yeah and he said that was a bit of an odd feeling. But he said that anybody who had ever flown in Lancasters would understand that. That he just wanted to get over the main spar just once more. They had to help him back across but if he could only get over one way. You know. Yeah.
HA: I can remember — one thing I didn’t mention before. You asked me about damage to the plane. Quite a lot of holes sometimes. If they weren’t too big they just patched them over, you know, But down where the rear gunner slid in to his turret there was a piece of, probably a piece of plywood or something like that that he sat on and then slid in to his turret. One time we came back there was a hole the size of your fist through that. It would have missed the rear gunner by that much. And another time the pilot put his ‘chute in and they inspected it. I don’t know if they always inspected it. Probably they did but anyway there was a lump of shrapnel.
RG: Wedged in the parachute.
HA: In his seat parachute.
RG: And he was sitting on that.
HA: He was sitting on it. It didn’t get through the parachute [laughs]
RG: So none of your crew was ever wounded?
HA: No.
RG: No.
HA: No.
RG: Lucky.
HA: We were lucky.
RG: Yeah. So, with your time at Training Command — because the training losses were really high weren’t they? Guys killed in training. But in, was that with, was there a squadron that you were with at Wigsley or was it a training squadron that was, or just an ATU?
HA: I don’t think they called them a squadron. It was just a unit.
RG: Yeah. Ok. But did you lose any aircraft or any people under training? Apart from the ones shot down by the ME110s?
HA: I don’t think so. When we were on Stirlings we had a hairy experience. There had been a lot of rain and dirt alongsides of the runway was soft and there was a Stirling came in trying to land in a crosswind. Put one wheel off the runway, skidded out into the mud and we went out and helped to dig the bomb aimer out of his turret which he shouldn’t have been in because the mud had pushed him up over the guns.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: Like a bulldozer.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Not much space in there at the best of times is there?
HA: No. So the next day we’re doing a three engine practice landing in a Stirling with, obviously no bombs and not much petrol sort of thing. So you can understand what happened. You’re not supposed to come, once you get below a thousand feet for a three engine landing you should land. So our skipper’s coming in. Same cross wind. Knows about what happened the day before. Got down almost to the deck and said, ‘I’m going around again.’ Pushed the three throttles forward. Told the engineer to start the other engine. The navigator’s doing his usual job calling out the airspeed so he doesn’t have to worry about that.
RG: Yeah.
HA: The stalling speed is about eighty apparently and I’m calling out, ‘Sixty five.’ [laughs] ‘Sixty five.’ ‘Sixty five.’ The pilot’s hanging on.
RG: [laughs] Jesus.
HA: By the time I got to the end of the runway the other engine had started up and because we had flaps down too it took a while to get up in to the air again.
RG: To get the speed up. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: That was touch and go.
RG: Yes. I should say so. So, what about when you were — the other time in the UK between ops. On leave. Did you have any leave as such while you were there?
HA: Oh yes.
RG: On your squadron
HA: Yes. You normally got six days leave every six weeks while you were on ops.
RG: Oh ok. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: A bit less if a few others got killed because they had a waiting list, you know. It was your turn.
RG: Oh yes. I heard about that. Yes. Yes.
HA: So it might be only five weeks.
RG: Yeah. I’ve heard about that. So where did you do on your leaves? You went in to London obviously a few times.
HA: Oh I’ve been to London. Yeah. I went up to Edinburgh one time. Took a girl to the pictures one time in the middle of summer. I was thinking I might have a kiss afterwards. It was still bloody sunny. The sun was up at 9 o’clock 10 o’clock at night. They had double summer time on.
RG: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, you’re not trying to photograph that logbook are you?
LD: Yeah.
RG: Oh it’ll take forever.
LD: No. It wouldn’t take that long but I can’t, the shadow of the camera keeps, the shadow of the phone keeps going over it.
RG: Bert, if we could borrow this stuff.
HA: Yeah sure.
RG: We’ll photograph it and or copy it and then bring it all back to you today.
HA: Ok. That’s fine. Yeah.
RG: We can do that. That’s cool.
HA: I was going to say about leave.
RG: Leave. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.
HA: I think after about our twenty trips we had leave and by that time I had a car and the skipper had a car. His was twenty pounds. Mine, I think, was thirty or something like that.
RG: What was yours?
HA: A Morris. Morris Minor. No. A bit bigger than a Morris Minor. It was a little narrow thing but a sedan with high windows.
RG: Oh yeah. Yeah.
HA: Morris something or other.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
HA: A Morris Ten I think it was called. He had a Ford. And we decided we would do some touring down towards Devon and that sort of thing. Together. So we found somebody. I think the engineer might have put us on to an aunt or a niece or something like that and an address we could give down there. Where you couldn’t get to it by train.
RG: Yeah.
HA: And so you could petrol coupons to go.
RG: Oh ok. I was wondering. I was going to ask you about that. Yeah.
HA: Yeah. So we took off and we stayed at places like Stow in the Wold.
LD: They have such funny names some of them don’t they?
HA: Yeah. So we had a nice tour down that way.
LD: Did you have any family in the UK or anything? That you were able to visit?
HA: No. No. Some people did. Like Charlwood.
RG: Charlwood. Yeah. He went to the town of Charlwood to look up his ancestors. Yeah.
HA: When we first got to Brighton the first lot of leave we had there from there they had a scheme called the Lady Ryder Scheme.
LD: Oh yes. I’ve heard of that.
HA: Where they would send you for a week to somebody just to let you settle in to Britain, sort of thing and so I was sent up to a place not far from Windsor to a lady’s who was Mrs Adams.
RG: There you go.
HA: That’s probably why they picked her.
RG: Yeah.
HA: When I got there she’s got this lovely two storey house and she said, ‘I’ll just show you around the house and you can look after yourself. I’ll give you the key because my daughter’s having a daughter or a son or something and I won’t be here. Just help yourself.’ I never saw her again sort of thing.
RG: A bit pointless wasn’t it really. Not helping you to settle you in but still.
HA: But she said, ‘If you go to this little village. I think it was Taplow or somewhere there’s a woman here who likes seeing Australians. Margaret Vyner. Was that the name of the, yeah that’s right. Margaret Vyner was this Australian actress who liked seeing Australians.
RG: Ah ok.
HA: So she gave me her address and I went around there and was made welcome and she was married to an English actor called Hugh Marlowe who was a big handsome fella who’d played The Saint in one of the movies.
RG: Oh ok. Yeah. Yeah.
HA: I hadn’t been there very long and in comes an army captain with a case of brandy that they knew. I can’t just pick his name out from memory now but he was a very famous English actor.
RG: Not David Niven.
HA: David Niven.
RG: You’re kidding.
LD: Oh really.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Right.
HA: Back from North Africa.
RG: Yeah. Yeah.
LD: Handsomest man in the universe I think.
HA: Yeah. A big name. So they got stuck in to the brandy and started talking about acting and all this sort of stuff and I said, you know, like, you don’t want me in the way. I snuck off back to Mrs Adam’s place.
RG: Oh well. You could say you met David Niven anyway.
HA: Yeah. And then the next day I decided to go to London. Got into a carriage. David Niven and a heap of others were in the same carriage. And he was there — [laughs] I said, ‘G’day,’ and he said, ‘G’day.’ And that was it [laughs}
LD: He’d had a big night had he?
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
RG: What about demob? What happened with demob? So you were there for a couple of months. You were there right up to VJ Day you said. In Training Command.
HA: Yeah. Finally we, we got sent to Brighton to spend some time waiting for a ship to come home. Got in a game of hockey at one stage which was the first time I had a game of hockey over there. I was very keen on hockey at high school. We played at Bournemouth in snow. Sago snow or something. They used a red ball instead of a white one [laughs] But yeah we put in some time at Brighton and then finally got on the Aquitania.
RG: Oh yes. Ok.
HA: Came home around South Africa.
RG: So that was what September or something? Or October. In 1945 still though.
HA: Late 1945.
RG: Yeah.
HA: About November or December ’45 or something like that I think.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Fair bit of waiting around for a ship.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. They were pretty busy. A lot of people to move.
HA: I went home to Mendooran and somewhere on the demob business in Sydney they did aptitude tests and that sort of thing. IQ tests I suppose and said — [pause] It’s lunchtime.
Other: Yes.
HA: In a bit I suppose. Well these people are going to leave very shortly.
RG: We’ll finish this off very quickly and you can have your lunch. We’ll just finish it off very quickly now.
Other: Ok.
RG: We’ve got to the end now.
Other: That’s alright.
RG: Five — ten minutes.
RG: Yeah.
Other: He can talk.
HA: I’ve got a pretty good memory.
RG: You do actually. Yeah.
HA: Where were we up to?
RG: Aptitude tests and IQ tests.
HA: ‘Oh yes,’ they said, ‘You can go to university and do virtually what you want to. Whatever you like.’ I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go back to the public service. That’s one thing. So I elected to do Ag Science. Which I did. And I think only forty of the one hundred or so people who lined up for it passed because half of them were ex-servicemen and the place was overcrowded and they weren’t — didn’t have the facilities for big numbers that they should have had.
RG: Whereabouts was that? Sorry. That was at —?
HA: Sydney Uni.
RG: Sydney Uni. You said you only did a year of that.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
HA: I thought to myself it’s a four year course. I’d used up nearly all the money I’d kept from the end of the war. What am I going to do for the next three years? Talked to a couple of fellas who had just finished fourth year Ag Science. They said, ‘The best we seem to be able to do is get a job with the Agricultural Department at about eight pounds a week.’ I said, ‘No.’ Dad had just sold the farm because of the drought and he had a bit of spare money. He said, ‘I could stake you some the money to start share farming.’
RG: That’s you and your brother did that.
HA: So we went share farming and made some money.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. And that was it.
HA: That was it. I did a bit of truck driving and had a sports store and then went back to, oh, went back to uni by correspondence while I was teaching at Mudgee.
RG: Yeah.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Is there anything else you’d like to add or any questions for us?
HA: If you’d like to read through those you’ll find some interesting stuff. I’ve written some three pages in the last couple of days of things that I’ve sort of —
RG: Ok.
HA: Thought were important.
RG: Yeah. Well we’ll definitely, we’ll take copies of those definitely. But we’ll let you have your lunch now.
HA: Yeah.
RG: Thank you very much for that.
LD: Can you just sign this here. This is just to say 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/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AAdamsHG170215
PAdamsHG1704
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Herbert Adams
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:53:42 audio recording
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rob Gray
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-02-15
Description
An account of the resource
Herbert Adams grew up in New South Wales Australia and joined the Air Training Corps as soon as it was established. He later joined the Royal Australian Air Force and after training, he completed a tour of operations as a navigator with 467 Squadron. He describes crewing up, flying operations in Lancasters and his experience of avoiding aerial attack. He recalls the use of navigational aids including Gee, API and H2S. He then became an instructor at RAF Wigsley. He discusses an occasion when Me 110s attacked the airfield. He talks of a Cook's Tour over Germany when others photographed the after effects of the war. He was demobilised back to New South Wales and later taught for the RAAF.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
California--San Francisco
United States
California
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
467 Squadron
5 Group
aircrew
Anson
bombing
control caravan
Cook’s tour
crewing up
demobilisation
Distinguished Flying Cross
fuelling
Gee
ground personnel
H2S
Lancaster
Me 110
military living conditions
navigator
Operational Training Unit
promotion
RAF Lichfield
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Swinderby
RAF Waddington
RAF Wigsley
sanitation
service vehicle
Stirling
superstition
Tiger force
training
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force