1
25
421
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/53/640/PBoldyDA15010082.1.jpg
4194457157cde93b3bd32e529f0352df
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
Boldy, David
Dave Boldy
D A Boldy
Description
An account of the resource
334 items. The collection concerns Flight Sergeant David Adrian Boldy (1918 – 1942, 923995 Royal Air Force) and consists of his school reports, letters from school and photographs of family and locations in India, letters from training and service, and photographs from his social life and time training. It also includes newspaper cuttings and letters about him being missing in action. David Boldy was born and attended school in India and studied law at Kings College London. He volunteered for the Royal Air Force and trained as an air gunner in South Africa. He flew operations in Manchesters and Lancasters with 207 Squadron from RAF Bottesford. His aircraft failed to return from an operation to Gdańsk 11 July 1942. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by David Boldy and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.<br /><br />Additional information on David Boldy is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/102182/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
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. 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
Boldy, DA
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
Oxford in flight
Description
An account of the resource
Air-to-air view of an Oxford.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PBoldyDA15010082
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
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
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
Boldy, David. Folder PBoldyDA1501
Oxford
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/89/876/LCalvertRA1488619v1.1.pdf
a4d74b59eb8d89a89607ee6b934e1006
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
Calvert, Roger
R A Calvert
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. The collection consists of an oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Roger Alfred Calvert (b. 1923, 1488619; 152814), his logbook, navigators training course class book and 3 photographs. Roger Calvert was a navigator with 141 Squadron at RAF West Raynham flying Mosquitos on night intruder operations. For most of his operational career his pilot was Flight Lieutenant John Thatcher.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Roger Calvert and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-04-24
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
Calvert, R
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Roger Calvert's Royal Canadian Air Force flying log book for aircrew other than pilot
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
LCalvertRA1488619v1
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
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Ontario--London
England--Bedfordshire
England--Herefordshire
England--Norfolk
England--Northumberland
France--Dieppe
France--Paris
France--Pas-de-Calais
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Darmstadt
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Mainz (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany--Merseburg
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Rüsselsheim
Germany--Schleswig-Holstein
Poland--Szczecin
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Wiesbaden
Netherlands--IJssel Lake
Netherlands--Zeist
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Poland
Ontario
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Description
An account of the resource
Royal Canadian Air Force flying log book for aircrew other than pilot of Flight Lieutenant Roger Calvert from 25 March 1943 to 6 July 1945. Detailing training and operations flown. Served at RAF Cranfield, RAF Great Massingham, RAF Ouston, RAF Twinwood Farm and RAF West Raynham. Aircraft flown were Anson, Beaufighter, Mosquito, Oxford, Tiger Moth and Wellington. He carried out a total of 32 intruder operations as a navigator with 141 Squadron from RAF West Raynham on the following targets in France, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands: Bochum, Bremen, Darmstadt, Dieppe, Dortmund, Dresden, Emden, Frankfurt, Gelsenkirchen, Hamburg, Kiel, Mainz, Merseberg (Leipzig), Nuremberg, Oberhausen, Osnabruck, Pante-Lunne airfield, Paris, Pas de Calais, Politz, the Ruhr, Russelhelm, Schlesvig, Steenwjik aerodrome, Stettin, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, Zeist and Zuider Zee. His pilots on operations were Squadron Leader Thatcher and Flying Officer Rimer. The log book is well annotated and contains a green endorsement and several photographs of aircraft flown and attacked. Notes include an air sea rescue sortie, the sighting of a V-2 and one Me-110 claimed.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944-07-18
1944-07-19
1944-07-20
1944-07-21
1944-08-07
1944-08-08
1944-08-09
1944-08-10
1944-08-11
1944-08-12
1944-08-12
1944-08-13
1944-08-16
1944-08-17
1944-08-18
1944-08-19
1944-08-25
1944-08-26
1944-08-26
1944-08-27
1944-08-30
1944-09-11
1944-09-12
1944-09-12
1944-09-13
1944-09-15
1944-09-16
1944-09-17
1944-10-04
1944-10-06
1944-10-09
1944-10-19
1944-10-26
1944-10-29
1944-11-01
1944-11-04
1944-11-06
1944-11-10
1945-01-13
1945-01-14
1945-01-15
1945-01-16
1945-01-17
1945-01-28
1945-01-29
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-02-04
1945-02-08
1945-02-09
1945-02-13
1945-02-14
1945-04-22
1945-04-23
1945
141 Squadron
21 Squadron
Air Gunnery School
Air Observers School
air sea rescue
aircrew
Anson
Beaufighter
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
Initial Training Wing
Me 110
Mosquito
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Cranfield
RAF Great Massingham
RAF Ouston
RAF Padgate
RAF Torquay
RAF Twinwood Farm
RAF West Raynham
Tiger Moth
training
V-2
V-weapon
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/128/1278/AAbbottsC151015.2.mp3
cc3222384b5959170d324f9b72e8d83f
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
Abbotts, Cyril
C Abbotts
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. The collection consists of one oral history interview and one service and release book related to Warrant Officer Cyril Abbots (b. 1924, 1583753 Royal Air Force). Cyril Abbotts volunteered for the Royal Air Force and trained as a pilot in Canada. On his return to Great Britain he flew operations as a flight engineer with 57 Squadron from RAF East Kirkby in 1945 and later converted from Lancasters to Lincolns. The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Cyril Abbot and catalogued by IBCC staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-15
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Abbots, C
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: So today I’m with Cyril Abbott and we are at Malvern in Worcestershire and it is the 15th of October 2015 and we’re just going to talk about his time in the RAF. Cyril, could you start off by talking please about your, family early, your earliest times you recollect?
CA: I was born in 1924 in a place called Princes’ End, Tipton. I lived with father and mother, with my grandparents. My mother was one of a large family, unfortunately she died when I was six and for the next two years we were looked after by my Grandma until Dad remarried. My mother and father were, had a house built in a village Coseley, which was about two miles away but we never moved there because of my Mum’s death. But having remarried we moved as a family, mother, or I should say step-mother, and father and my sister Doris who was four years older than myself. And we moved to a house in Bradleys Lane Coseley. I went to junior schools in Princes End, Tipton and at the age of eleven I passed scholarship and entered Dudley Grammar School where I was educated for the next five, six years. I left school in ‘39 and went out to work with W and T Avery at Smethwick as a engineering apprentice. I didn’t like work so at the first opportunity I volunteered for the Air Force, for aircrew, and having had all the two days of tests at Digbeth, Birmingham, I was accepted as a recruit and sent home and told to wait until I heard from the RAF. I was a bit of a nuisance to my father and mother because every day I used to come home from work and say ‘Has the letter arrived?’ and nothing had appeared and I really caused a bit of grief. But eventually the letter arrived ordering me to report to ACRC at Lords’ Cricket Ground, London. I travelled to, down to London with a fellow from the village who was also joining up, I think it was the first time we’d ever been away from home by ourselves in the whole of our lives but we arrived at Lords’ and the cricket ground was full of recruits, you couldn’t see a blade of grass basically. But they formed us up in groups of about forty and marched us off to Seymour Hall baths where they told us to strip off and swim a hundred yards. This rather shook us I believe ‘cause having to swim without a costume, but we did this and those who could swim the hundred yards were pushed to one side of the bath, and those who couldn’t swim went to the other side. We found out later that the non-swimmers were sent off to RAF Cosford to learn to swim, if I’d have known that I would have done the same [laughs] because Cosford was within about twenty miles of home. But still, we, we were billeted in flats around St John’s Wood, waiting for postings to ITW. Eventually I was posted to 8 Wing ITW at Newquay, Cornwall where I spent the next three to four months school work. In actual fact I can remember the flight commander was a Flight Lieutenant Paine, he was an ex solicitor and the Squadron Leader I think was a man named Fabian, who was a English international footballer amateur. But, and the two PTIs was Corporal White and Corporal Beasley, one was a Londoner, a real Cockney, and they used to take us out on cross country runs. Because one day I, I decided I didn’t want to go, so we had to get changed and set off and I drifted to the back and at the nearest public toilets I disappeared into it, little realising that Corporal White was running right at the back and he caught me [laughs] and I was taken in front of the squadron commander and given three days CB, confined to barracks, but at the end of the, I think it was about twelve weeks of school work were finished and we were waiting then to, for postings and I eventually was posted to RAF Sywell for familiarisation, twelve hours in a Tiger Moth. Again, I remember the instructor was a Flight Lieutenant Bush, I think he could have owned the flying school which had been taken over by the RAF, but we did, we did about ten to twelve hours flying around in Tiger Moths to see if whether we were compatible with flying and then at the end we were posted to Heaton Park, Manchester which was a receiving centre for people waiting basically to go overseas. I mean there were literally hundreds of UT aircrew there and we used to have to attend in the morning when they would read out lists of people with the postings and you had to answer in a certain manner to signify that you’d understood the shouted instructions. Initially I’d received a posting to South Africa, Rhodesia for flying training and we went up to Blackpool to receive the inoculations required, and having received these inoculations we were sent back to Heaton Park where we found out that we weren’t going to South Africa after all. I was sent to Canada and we, we sailed from the River Clyde, Greenock, or something similar on the Queen Elizabeth, the original Queen Elizabeth one, and I think it was about three days and four nights journey which I didn’t like, I don’t, I’m not a, I don’t like sailing, I don’t like water and it was a welcome sight to go through the harbour bar at New York to get inside the docks because as we went through the bar and they closed it the ship lit up because we’d sailed in darkness over, through the Atlantic, and as soon as we entered the, the New York dock area all the lights came on the ship. I mean New York was lit up as you see it on the films, I mean we hadn’t seen lights for three years. Eventually we, we docked in Pier 91 next to the burnt-out Normandy which had been, it had gone on fire and had capsized in the dock next to us, and it was still there. But eventually we were taken off the boat and we went under the river to New Jersey to get a train to go up to Monkton, RAF Monkton in Canada. We had to pass through the customs between America and Canada, and we stopped on the American side and one or two of us shot off because we were near to a small town and got a glass of beer, and we’d got to drink this very quickly and we didn’t realise the American beer was practically frosty, it was very, very cold. But we, eventually we arrived in Monkton, and we were there for maybe a week or so before we were sent west to the flying schools and I finished up at 32 EFTS, RAF Bowden in Alberta, I mean we could see the Rockies on the horizon, as we drove from the station, Innisfail was the station, why I know that is because I was reading a book by an ex Worcestershire cricketer, Cheston, who had trained there as well, and I picked up the name Innisfail I’d forgotten, but as we drove up from the station to the aerodrome all the training planes were lined up with their tails towards us and we all thought God, we’re all going to be fighter pilots, they looked like fighter ‘planes ‘cause they were all Fairchild Cornell which was a low wing plane. We were there for a period of time, I think we got in about seventy or eighty hours, and I soloed quite quickly after about five hours and during the training I realised that I would never become a fighter pilot because I didn’t like aerobatics. I always remember being sent up to practice spins and to do this you climbed to about three or four thousand feet and then spun down, and pulled out and climbed back and did it again. But every time I went to do it I’d get practically to the point of stall, at which point I was supposed to kick in rudder to go right or left and my nerve went so I pushed the nose down and climbed another thousand feet until I finished up at about ten thousand feet before I forced myself to spin. But having done it the first time and realised I could get out of trouble it wasn’t so bad, but aerobatics I just did not like. So I made my mind up then that I would never become a fighter pilot, I’d go for twins or multi engines. Having completed the elementary training we were posted to service flying training and I was posted to a place called RAF Estevan in Saskatchewan it was right on the American border just a few miles on the Canadian side but it was more or less in the middle of the dustpan, everything was covered with dust, there was a wind at all times and it was just blowing this dust and coating everything. The dormitories had got double-glazing with a mesh screen to try to keep this dust out, but they were flying Ansons there for training and we had to have a check to see whether our leg length was sufficient to be able to apply full rudder in the event of an engine failure. Well I didn’t like the station I thought I’m going to do my best to get away from here, so when I came to do my test I put, extending my to get full rudder and I gradually slipped down in the pilots’ seat so that I couldn’t see over the top of the board, dashboard, so that I failed the test. I didn’t realise that I could have been washed out of pilot training but I was posted away from Estevan to RAF Moose Jaw at Saskatchewan to fly Tiger Moths. The Anson hadn’t got a moveable rudder pedal whereas the Oxford had, you could wind them in to suit your leg length. The Oxford had got a bad reputation for killing people. It was a very difficult aeroplane to fly and they said that if you could fly an Oxford you could fly anything. And I took to the Oxford, I soloed after about five hours again and from then on it was just train, train, train until we eventually finished, I think we did something like about a hundred and fifty hours flying, and it came, the wings, the graduation ceremony, and I believe we were presented with our wings by Air Vice-Marshal Billy Bishop who was a Canadian fighter pilot in the First World War. I believe that it was him but we had already sewn wings on our uniforms and stripes on our arms if we were becoming sergeants, but we had to parade without, without wings or stripes on. But then having graduated, we had, we were given a posting back to Halifax, to get the boat back to England. We were allowed, I think, forty eight hours to have a leave in either Quebec or Montreal on the way back. I can’t remember now whether we were in Quebec or Montreal, but we eventually got back to Halifax and boarded the French liner, Louis Pasteur, to come back and it was a terrible journey. Since we were now supposed sergeants capable of looking after ourselves on the ship some of us were posted as assistant gunners on the anti-aircraft guns which were put about ten feet above the boat deck on a little platform with a rail around it to stop you falling off. And we had an Oerlikon cannon to look after. I mean we’d never seen a firearm but we’d got a naval man as the gunner and we were just there to help, But we always said the Louis Pasteur was a flat bottomed boat because it rolled and rocked like nobody’s business and there were literally thousands on the boat, the conditions were terrible, but every morning at about twelve o’clock if I remember rightly, we had a rendezvous with a Coastal Command aircraft so that when it came time we had to close up the guns in case it wasn’t an RAF plane, but bang on the dot it would appear out of the clouds, circle round for about half an hour, and then off it would go and we’d plough on. I mean we were not escorted it was just a, a quick dash across and I must admit I saw more U boats in the sea, that on that journey, than the German’s had got, every wave was a U boat. [laugh] But eventually we arrived at Liverpool, and we disembarked and were shipped to RAF Harrogate, the Majestic Hotel we were billeted in, and there were literally thousands of pilots, bomb aimers and navigators there. We just, we just didn’t know what was going to happen to us. I mean they came round I think twice, once asking for volunteers to change to glider pilot training. I mean those that did, that accepted it, I think most probably went in at Arnhem. But I being frightened, I decided I would stay and get an aeroplane with engines. So I was there for quite some time and eventually I was sent, we had um, because we’d been in Canada, living the life of luxury, they sent us up to Whitley Bay, Newcastle under the Army to have a month toughening up, and everything was done at the double. I was given a rifle and a band to cover my sergeant’s stripes, we used to have to wear these because the instructors were corporals and privates of the commandos and they gave us a real tough time. Route marches of about twelve miles, my feet were sore, but that was completed and we came back to Harrogate. They just didn’t know what to do with us. So we, eventually I ended up at RAF Bridgenorth, under canvas, and we always said we were draining an air commodore’s farm because we were digging ditches all the time and there were, there were Australians, and other Commonwealth aircrew with us and they used to, to show how tough they were, they’d sleep out in the open without a tent, until they got wet once or twice, [laugh] but we were there most probably two or three weeks and back again to Harrogate. And then I went on airfield control at RAF Gamston, just outside Worksop, acting as traffic control watching the Wellingtons, it was an OTU unit, and we were there [indistinct] at night on flare path duty and the control hut flashing greens or reds as required with an Aldis lamp. While I was there, I became friends with one or two of the screened pilots so I managed to get a few hours in on a Wellington. At the end of the, at the end of the time Gamston was closed down and the ‘planes moved to other OTUs so I got a few hours flying with the screen people taking these aeroplanes to the stations. The funniest part was we landed at one, we had a plane which went round all the aerodromes picking up the screened crews to take them back to Gamston, a Wellington, and it was very funny we landed one control, or pulled up at the control tower and shut the engines down waiting for the people to be picked up and out trooped from the Wellington, about eighteen people and the control officer’s jaw dropped when he saw all these people coming out [laugh] but it was quite, we stood, down the Wellington hanging onto the geo, geodetic structure, it was quite funny. From Gamston, I eventually was posted, oh yeah, I think I went back to Harrogate again and there I was volunteered to do an engineers’ course at St Athan down in South Wales. There was no chance of becoming an official pilot because they hadn’t got enough aeroplanes and there was too many people. So we were volunteered to do an engineers’ course at St Athan on the Lancaster systems, which we did about six weeks just to get the fundamentals of the system. And having completed that I was posted to sixteen 54 HCU at RAF Wigsley in Lincolnshire, where I was going to get crewed up with an ex OTU pilot and crew who wanted an Engineer, so we walked in, as engineers we walked into an office where there were pilots sitting around and the first person I saw was a man who’d been on the course immediately in front of me at Moose Jaw, a flying officer, he was a Pilot Officer Coates and we made contact and starting talking, he said ‘Well I’m looking for an engineer’ I said, ‘Well I’m an engineer but I’m also a pilot’ he said ‘Do you want to come and fly with me?’ ‘Yep’, and that’s how I joined Pilot Officer Coates’ crew because we knew each other. We completed a number of hours on the, at the heavy con unit, the conversion unit, and we were posted as a crew to 57 Squadron at East Kirkby.
CB: So when was this exactly?
CA: Well I think it was in either February ’45, because I wasn’t on the squadron long enough to be able to be awarded the Bomber Command Clasp which I thought was a bit em, bit naughty of them, I can come to that later. Well we were introduced to Wing Commander Tomes who was the Squadron Commander and I think Squadron Leader Astall although I’m not sure about that name. And we were more or less sent off to go and do some practice flying which we thought we’d done enough with the heavy con unit but it wasn’t good enough for the squadron. So we did quite a few cross countries and bombing practice at Wainfleet. And one day I was, I think most likely the last one in the engineer’s office and I was about to go for tea, and as I was walking out the engineer officer shouts, ‘Cyril, what are you doing tonight?’ I said ‘I’m going to have a beer why?’ he said ‘No you’re not, you’re flying.’ He said so and so has called in, his engineer’s gone sick, so they want an engineer so you’re flying as a spare bod on Flying Officer Jack Curran, who was an Australian pilot, he was short of an engineer so I was going with him and that night we went to Luetzkendorf which was the first operation, our rear gunner had also been made a spare bod and he went as a rear gunner with another crew. But Jack, Jack Curran had been shot down about two months previously and had got back so he was, he was a bit nervous as a pilot, he gave me a bit of jitters, because once we crossed, if I remember rightly, once we crossed over the Channel and got to the other side he proceeded to weave all the time and it made a heck of a mess of my petrol consumptions. But the thing that I always remember, was having got to the target, was the different colours or shades of red that there are, or were, I’d never seen so many different shades. Of course I mean I didn’t realise what was happening I mean I was, I’d got bags and bags of window which I was pushing [unclear] down the chute like nobody’s business thinking they were saving me but they weren’t they were saving the people coming behind me. But I pushed packets of it down, I even jammed the ‘chute once I had to get a big file from out of my kit, my tool kit and try and clear it and the file went down the ‘chute as well so that if that hit anybody downstairs they would have had a headache. But eventually we got, we came back and as we neared East Kirkby, Jack had called in to ask for landing instructions and we were told to vamoose, scatter, it was either an intruder in the circuit or something but we scattered like nobody’s business heading towards Wales, and on the way, we were told to make for RAF Bruntingthorpe which we eventually reached and Jack landed the Lanc’ alright, we parked it and were taken into a room for a bit of a debrief, given something to eat and then we were taken to beds in the dorms, in the Nissen huts. And I was, I was lying there on the bed, I couldn’t get to sleep, I suppose it was the adrenalin still coursing through the veins, but I was smoking away like nobody’s business, and I woke up the man in the bed next to where I was and he sat up and he saw I was a flight sergeant, he saw my tunic on the bed, so he said ‘What’s happened?’ so I just explained that we’d been diverted there and we were talking, he was a corporal engine fitter and he looked at me and I looked at him quite intently as if we knew each other. So eventually one or other said ‘Were you ever in Canada?’ and I said ‘Yes, you were at Moose Jaw, were you at Moose Jaw?’ ‘Yes’, he’d been an Engine Fitter out on the flights at Moose Jaw and had been posted back to, from Canada and he was working, was working at Bruntingthorpe on the Wellingtons. Well eventually we were given the all clear to go back to East Kirkby and, although it was forbidden, the squadron pilots always shot up the aerodrome having taken off. So we, we took off and joined a queue of people waiting to go down the runway and ignored it which we did. The station commander went mad and by the time we got back to East Kirkby the squadron commander was waiting for us and he proceeded to tear us off a strip. ‘They were OTU pilots being taught to fly safely and you people go down and show them what not to do’ [laugh] still it was Lancaster below zero feet going at about two hundred miles an hour is something, it’s really exhilarating, but still. Um, oh yeah, a few days later we went to Pilsen as a crew, Fred Coates the pilot and the rest of the crew, I mean he’d already done two spare bods as a pilot getting the idea of what happened, and Johnny the rear gunner had been, but the, I’d been but the others hadn’t so it was all new to them, but us old hands [laugh]. Well we went to Pilsen and our navigator was a graduate and he was a very meticulous navigator, very good, but very meticulous. I mean when we were flying you’d hear his voice come over the, the intercom, ‘What speed are we supposed to be flying at?’ ‘About two hundred and twenty, why?’ he said ‘I want two hundred and twenty five, nothing else, two twenty five is the airspeed.’ So I spent minutes trying to get the, the right speed. And he’d come through, ‘What course are you steering?’ ‘Why?’ He said ‘You’re two degrees out’, oh he was a, he was a menace [laugh]. But on the way, it’s only in latter life that I’ve realised this, but it was his first trip, it was most of us second or third and he was navigating and he said ‘We’re too early, we’re going to get to target too early’ so Fred said ‘Well what do you want to do?’ So Marsh says ‘We’ll do a dog leg, turn, and he gave us a course to turn to the left, to port, and flew out for a few minutes and then to come back into the, into the stream and go, head toward the target again, we’d lose the required minutes. And like fools Fred and I did this, but during the flight we were getting, we were getting, bumped about a bit and we couldn’t understand this because there was no flak to blow us around but we’d get jumped up and down, it would last a minute and then die down and then about a few minutes later again. We couldn’t fathom out what it was, but it’s only in latter life that I’ve realised what it was, because we got to Pilsen and back okay, and then we were put on a daylight to go to Flensburg, and I mean the RAF didn’t flew, didn’t fly in formation, they just got into a gaggle and went. So we joined the bunch and the idea was to get into the middle of the stream, so you kept lifting yourself up a bit, move over and then gradually drop down and force the man underneath to move out of the way so that you were doing this all the time. And occasionally we’d get this bump and it’s only as I say in latter life that I realised that at night when we got these bumps it was the slipstream of planes in front of us, that I never, I never saw a plane during flying at night but we must have been very, very close because it showed up during this daylight. But we went to Flensburg and it was aborted we couldn’t bomb, why we were never told but I did see a Messerschmitt 262 I think was the jet fighter, something came, went through the formation like nobody’s business but we’d got Mustang fighter escort they were most probably about ten thousand feet above us, but we did see them come down and go through the formation, on the way down to the deck whether they’d, they went down to er, hit some of these two five twos taking off, two six twos, but that was quite a sight to see these little, little bits going through the, through the formation. But my war ended with that aborted raid on Flensburg. We were thinking we should be going to Berchtesgaden but all the, the higher ups of the squadron did that, they didn’t let the lower lads do it. Then after the , after the war I flew on Lincolns, 57 Squadron were given three Lincolns initially to carry out service trials on them and by this time our pilot, Fred Coates, had departed. He’d been a police constable before the war and since they wanted the police in peace time to build up again they got Class B releases, or they were allowed to take Class B release. So Fred had just married his Canadian girlfriend who’d come over here to marry and 57 Squadron was one of the squadrons that were going out on Tiger Force to the Far East but Fred said no he wasn’t going to go, he’d get his Class B which he did. And we had another pilot, a Flight Lieutenant Strickland, who was posted into us to take over the crew. He came up I think from Mildenhall, I can’t remember which group they were, but he’d been an instructor in Canada for a number of years and he was very meticulous with his flying, everything was perfect and he kept the rest of us on top line. We flew the Lincolns, we’d got three and I think Mildenhall station they’d got three, we had lots of trouble with engine failures where as Mildenhall had airframe failures, rivets popping and things like that so it was quite, it was quite stressful flying these Lincolns. I’ve got a write up.
CB: We’ll stop there just for a moment.
CA: Yeah, I’ve got a write up actually,
CB: So we’ve stopped for a comfort break, and you were talking about Lincolns, you took on Lincolns?
CA: Oh yeah.
CB: You took on Lincolns. What happened then?
CA: Well, with the Lincolns, we as I say we’d got three and I since found that there was a Flight Lieutenant, Flight Lieutenant Jones who was one of the leading lights in the flight, I can’t recall him really, but erm.
CB: This is still war time before the Japanese surrender isn’t it?
CA: It was, yeah, but it was after the European war –
CB: Yep.
CA: And it was in the time between May and August -
CB: Right.
’45. The Lincoln was, was being produced to go overseas with the Tiger Force because the Lanc’ hadn’t got the range that was required and the Lincoln was supposed to have. But it wasn’t, in our eyes, it wasn’t as good as the Lancaster, I mean we were in love with the Lanc’ whereas the Lincoln was, was something different. I fully remember on one flight, I was sitting down on the right hand side and Pete was flying and I looked out of the starboard side and looked at the wing and I could see the skin rippling and I nearly collapsed with fear because I could see the wing moving up and down, and when it lifted up, so it rippled the skin at the join between the mid-section and the wing section, and for the rest of the flight my eyes never left that section [laugh] that part, but I found out when we got down that the wings moved five feet between the bottom and top and this was due to the weight of them and the, the fuel. And it was only after then that I noticed that when the Lincoln sat on the ground the wings appeared to be drooped and they moved up during the take off period to obtain the flying attitude. But it was a frightening sight I will admit.
CB: So it was a bigger aeroplane?
CA: It was a bigger aeroplane, it was heavier, I don’t know about the bomb load. I don’t think it was any different.
CB: But they were bigger engines and could fly higher and the span was a hundred and twenty four feet?
CA: A hundred and twenty.
CB: Hundred and twenty.
CA: About a hundred and twenty feet, yeah.
CB: Now when did you get promoted to warrant officer?
CA: Two years after I graduated. You were made, when you got your wings, you were a sergeant for about nine to twelve months and then flight sergeant for a year and then you became warrant officer. I mean a lot of the ground crew, senior NCO’s didn’t like this, I mean there were us youngsters who were up to sergeants after about eighteen months and they’d been in the Air Force for years and had just made corporal. So there was a bit of resentment between the ground crew NCO’s and the aircrews. But of course I mean we were only as aircrew given stripes, or officers in case you were ever shot down and taken prisoner, you got better treatment as a NCO, but that was the only reason.
CB: OK, so fast forward again to the Lincolns, your time in the RAF finished when, 1946?
CA: 1946 November.
CB: Right, so what did you do?
CA: What did I do afterwards?
CB: After the war, after the war finished?
CA: Well, I came back and as I said previously, I’d been an apprentice with Avery’s, and my apprenticeship had been cancelled when I joined up. So I went back to Avery’s and recommenced my apprenticeship but due to my service, instead of having to do a further length of time, because I was apprenticed for about five years and I had only done about twelve months, they reduced the remaining time by about twelve months and they concluded my apprenticeship about twelve months, having served and I’d done a four year apprenticeship instead of five, and that would have been somewhere around about 1947, ‘48 when I, they transferred me into the drawing office at Avery’s and I became a draughtsman.
CB: How long did you work as a draughtsman?
CA: Well I left Avery’s in 1951 and I was employed by the Cannon Iron Foundries for a year and then I, I went to Thompson Brothers in Bilsden for about three years and finally finished at ICI Marston Excelsior in ’56.
CB: What did you do there?
CA: I was a design draughtsman there and I, I did design, design work on, I always remember my first job was designing a heat exchanger for the Folland Gnat , just a small one, I can’t remember what it was for, I believe it was for the pilot cooling system to keep him cool. But this was on heat exchange. I finished up actually on heavy fabrication work, in aluminium work, and I became a section leader. I did various jobs, I engineered a liquid ethylene storage plant for ICI organic, organic section I think, or one of the sections at Billingham where we stored surplus liquid ethylene. And we stored it in a big container like a gasometer and I, I was given a piece of ground on the side of the river and put a storage plant there. I must admit that my initial estimate of costs was way down, [laugh] I made a hell of a bloomer, I think I estimated about a hundred and fifty thousand and it finished up at about, eight hundred thousand [laugh] we had quite a, an argument, not argument, discussion why [laugh]. But then I went onto production, onto the production side of the factory, as chief planning officer on fabrications which I, I did until the work started to peter out so I went onto development work on cold rolling of noble alloys for jet engines.
CB: This is all for ICI?
CA: All, yes, it’s all under ICI’s name, we bought in a cold rolling machine from Holland and we used to roll to very, very close tolerances. Rolls Royce were trying to reduce their costs by getting in components where they didn’t really have to do any work on, and I mean the jet engines required diameters to a thou’ in tolerance and we were supposed to try to do this by rolling them, which we did eventually, I mean we bought this machine. I went out to G, GE the American counterpart of Rolls Royce. GEC?
CB: GE yeah, General Electric.
CA: And I spent a fortnight out there getting some idea of how they tackled it but I mean they’d got a different idea I mean where here we had to justify spending sixpence, there the engineer, development engineer said ‘I want a machine it costs two hundred thousand pounds’ and he was given the money and they got the machine. Whereas we were trying to do it on one machine they’d got a battery of them, about ten. I mean this is the reason why they are the world beaters. Money is no object.
CB: When did you finally retire?
CA: I retired in March ’86 having completed thirty years.
CB: OK, thank you, I’ll stop there. So we’re restarting, we’re restarting just on a flashback. So you’re back from Canada as a qualified pilot.
CA: Yeah. I should have said then that I went up to, we were asked where we wanted postings to go to for flying. I never realised that there was a flying school at Wolverhampton otherwise I would have asked, instead I got posted up to RAF Carlisle on Tiger Moths where we did about a month flying a Tiger Moth around getting used to flying in English conditions. We used to take a navigator or a bomb aimer as a passenger for them to practice map reading while we flew it. We did a lot of flying around the Lake District, we were flying over Maryport and Workington I think is the other port, on the coast there. And we, we used to go down and count the number of ships that were in the harbour and things like this, and then having to fly back over the Lake District which was very, which could be quite treacherous with the down draughts and the winds whistling over the hills. It used to bounce the Tiger Moths around like nobody’s business. But we did that for about a month and then we were posted again hoping we were going to get posted to OTUs but it never, never, I was, you asked how I felt. I felt disappointed having made my mind up I was never going to fly single engine fighters I put down for twin engines or multis. The onus was on providing crews for four engine planes. So to get there I’d got to go to an OTU and that was never going to happen. So when I was posted to the engineers’ course I accepted it and it, I was still flying, that was what I wanted to do, I wanted to fly. So that, I made the best of a bad job. I thoroughly enjoyed it I mean, I enjoyed the, being on a squadron, being a crew, being a member of a crew and we’d got a good crew. I mean our mid upper gunner was the only one who could shoot through the aerial leading to the rudders which he did time and time again, it used to cost him half a crown a time when he pierced them, I mean this was when we were doing air to air gunnery and he was firing at a drogue and he’d traverse and ‘ping’ and Andy the wireless operator would say ‘You’ve done it again’ [laugh], but um.
CB: So, how long did you keep your pilots brevet?
CA: All the time.
CB: Oh did you, throughout the war?
CA: Yes, yes we were never forced to change them. That is why I always say I was a PFE rather than a flight engineer, I was a pilot flight engineer. And the pilots that I flew with gave me the opportunity to fly, to pilot. I mean Peter who was the ex-instructor, he was always within reach of pulling me out of the seat if necessary, but Fred he used to go and wander down to the Elsan at the back and leave me in charge. I mean I was playing about one day above the clouds and I was following the, the shape of the clouds up and down and Johnny who was sitting with his turret doors open, fore and aft, and it, it started to get a bit robust, the movement of the up and down movement and the Elsan lid which was tied down with a bungee rubber broke and the contents of the Elsan came up, [laugh], oh dear, and it covered him [laugh], he didn’t speak to me for days [laugh] because he knew it was me and not Fred [laugh].
CB: How did the crew get on together socially?
CA: Very good, very good we never went anywhere unless we went as a six. I mean, we bought our beer in the mess, we bought it by the bucket and helped ourselves with dipping the glass into the bucket rather than separate. No, it was a very good crew, very good.
CB: So in those days you could buy beer in a bucket could you?
CA: In the mess.
CB: In the mess, right.
CA: In the mess yeah.
CB: OK, and as a crew you worked well together?
CA: Oh yes, yes.
CB: And er.
CA: Well Marsh, he was working, he wanted to get onto pathfinders.
CB: Marsh being?
CA: The navigator. He was a very good navigator but, Mac, the bomb aimer, he was more of, an easy come, easy go.
CB: So.
CA: That second or the first raid as a crew to Pilsen we went through the target twice because Mac he wouldn’t drop because he couldn’t line it up properly so he said ‘I’ll send you round again’ and the rest of us shouted ‘What the hell, will you pull them’ and Fred said ‘If you don’t I shall jettison’. So he says ‘Go round again!’ So we had to make our way round and come back and get it back in the stream and fly it through but on the second time he let them go.
CB: This is a daylight raid?
CA: No, this was a night raid —
CB: This was in the night. So the reason I said that is because that sounds a particularly dangerous thing to do when you can’t see anything —
CA: It was a, well this is it, I mean what with trying to get in, slip into the stream, I mean you, I never saw another Lancaster in the stream. And I mean we went through the target we were only given somewhere maybe half an hour from the start to the end of the squadron’s time over the target so I mean God knows how close we were, but we were very close when we were getting buffeted by slipstream. But I mean a, when Marsh sent us on a dog leg when we turned out of the stream and then had to come back and join it again. We didn’t realise the stupidity of it, but Marsh being Marsh he’d got to have it down on his chart.
CB: Why would it have mattered if you had arrived early?
CA: Well a, the target may not have been indicated, or they were down below marking it, so you, I mean er.
CB: You could have bombed your own people —
CA: You could have bombed them, yeah —
CB: Right OK.
CA: And since the Lancaster was always the top flight, I mean it was Lancasters, Halifaxes, Stirlings.
CB: Right, there’s a ranking.
CA: So.
CB: And how did the crew feel, and you feel, about what you were doing as bombers?
CA: I don’t think we thought about it.
CB: OK.
CA: I don’t think we thought about it. I mean the first one — we had been bombed at home in 1940. We’d had a landmine dropped within about a hundred yards of home and our house is most probably still standing with the back, back wall bulged where the roof lifted and the walls started to move and it dropped down and it held. So I wanted to do something back but having that I don’t think you, we never talked about whether there was a right or wrong, it was a job.
CB: My wife was born in a bombing raid in Birmingham.
CA: Eh hum.
CB: What about LMF, did you know anything about that, or experience.
CA: We knew of it.
CB: Yes.
CA: We knew of it but we never met anyone who was accused of it or anything like that. But we didn’t like the idea because it wasn’t nice when you were over there. A funny tale, we had a man on the squadron, he was a dark, a Negro, and he was as black as the ace of spades, colour. And he’d got perfectly white teeth and he was known as twenty three fifty nine, that was his nickname, because twenty three fifty nine is the darkest part of the night, or supposed to be, a minute before midnight. And he was a rear gunner and when he was in his turret at night and you walked past it all you could see was these white teeth. It was really funny, but he was a good lad.
CB: What about other aspects of the work? When you boarded the aircraft what did you have with you to eat or drink?
CA: I think the only thing I can remember is boiled sweets. I mean I can’t ever remember fruit, or anything like that. I don’t think we ever took, I never took a drink at all. I mean I can tell the tale where, I mean, we used, sometimes to remember to take a bottle to use and one day Fred had forgotten his, the pilot, and he was in, he was in dire trouble. So he said ‘I’ve got to have something, I’ve got to have something’ so I was scooting round trying to, what the hell can he have? And I went and took the cover off the G George instrument, gyro, which was a pan of about eight or nine inch diameter and about three or four inches deep held on with four screws. So I took this off and gave him this to use, which he used. So he used it and said ‘Here get rid of it’ so I said ‘How?’ he says ‘Throw it out the window’ so I pulled my sliding window back —
CB: [laugh] —
CA: and threw it out, threw the contents. Of course, I mean as soon as the contents went out the slipstream took it all the way down the canopy, the Perspex, and we, I couldn’t see out of that side all the way back, and I also lost the G cover [laugh] which cost me five shillings and a telling off from the engineer officer. How, why was the G cover uncovered. ‘I can’t remember’ [laugh].
CB: Now what about the ground crew because you relied on them so, what was the relationship with them?
CA: Very good, other than the first time I went, we joined the squadron, and I don’t know whether I ought to say this, can I, can I not get up?
CB: Um.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Cyril Abbotts
Description
An account of the resource
Cyril Abbotts volunteered for the Royal Air Force while he was an engineering apprentice with W T Avery at Smethwick. After his reception at Lord’s Cricket Ground and initial training,he trained as a pilot at RAF Bowden and Moose Jaw in Canada. On his return to Great Britain, he spent some time in holding units, before being posted to retrain as a flight engineer at RAF St Athan. He flew operations with 57 Squadron from RAF East Kirkby in 1945 and later converted from Lancasters to Lincolns. Post-war he completed his apprenticeship, becoming a draughtsman for various companies including ICI. He retired after 30 years of service with them.
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2015-10-15
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Dawn Studd
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01:18:53 audio recording
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eng
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AAbbottsC151015
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Canada
Saskatchewan--Moose Jaw
England--London
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Great Britain
Germany
Wales
Saskatchewan
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
1654 HCU
57 Squadron
African heritage
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
bomb aimer
bombing
Cornell
crewing up
demobilisation
fear
flight engineer
Flying Training School
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
Lancaster
Lincoln
Me 262
military discipline
military living conditions
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
P-51
physical training
pilot
promotion
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Carlisle
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Gamston
RAF Heaton Park
RAF St Athan
RAF Sywell
RAF Wigsley
RCAF Bowden
RCAF Estevan
recruitment
sanitation
Tiger force
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Window
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/143/1365/MHawkinsD158602-151002-01.1.pdf
59c7d92b5ad6fd4b0acb191dac0c6bd5
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Title
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Hawkins, Des
Des Hawkins
Desmond Hawkins
D H Hawkins
D Hawkins
Description
An account of the resource
Four items. An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Desmond Howard Hawkins DFC (158602 Royal Air Force), one photograph, a diagram and notes about his service. Des Hawkins volunteered for the Royal Air Force in 1941. He trained as a navigator in Canada and flew 47 operations in Lancasters with 44, 625 and 630 Squadrons from RAF Waddington, RAF Dunholme Lodge, RAF East Kirkby and RAF Kirmington.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Des Hawkins and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-10-20
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
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Hawkins, DH
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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[underlined] 630 SQUADRON LANCASERS [sic] [/UNDERLINED]
[underlined] NIGHT [/underlined] [underlined] PILOT /[underlined] [underlined]FLYING
TIMES [/underlined/
18 NOV. 1943 FLT/SGT BURNESS BERLIN 7.55
̎ 22 NOV ̎ FLT/SGT BURNESS BERLIN 5.50
̎ 23 NOV ̎ FLT/SGT BURNESS BERLIN 6.10
ABOVE OPERATIONS — FT/LT D.H. HAWKINS
[underlined] WAS NAVIGATOR 158602 [/underlined]
625 SQUADRON — LANCASTERS
NIGHT 14 JAN 1945 F/LT CONNOR MERSEBURG 8.10
̎ 16 JAN ̎ F/LT CONNOR ZEITZ 7.50
̎ 8 FEB ̎ F/LT CONNOR POLITZ 8.25
̎ 14 FEB ̎ F/LT CONNOR CHEMNITZ 8.40
̎ 21 FEB ̎ F/LT CONNOR DUISBURG 6.05
DAY 1 MAR ̎ F/LT CONNOR MANNHEIM 6.15
DAY 2 MAR ̎ F/LT CONNOR COLOGNE 5.10
NIGHT 5 MAR ̎ F/LT CONNOR CHEMNITZ 9.35
DAY 23 MAR ̎ F/LT CONNOR BREMEN 4.05
DAY 27 MAR ̎ F/LT CONNOR PADERBORN 4.45
DAY 31 MAR ̎ F/LT CONNOR HAMBURG 5.05
DAY 3 APRIL ̎ F/LT CONNOR NORDHAUSEN 6.15
NIGHT 9 APRIL {GARDENING (MINING)
{KIEL HARBOUR 6.00
NIGHT 16 APRIL POTSDAM 8.55
DAY 18 APRIL HELIGOLAND 4.30
DAY 22 APRIL BREMEN 4.40
DAY 1ST MAY ROTTERDAM 3.05
(DROPPING FOOD)
ABOVE OPERATIONS
FLT/LT D.H. HAWKINS 158602
WAS NAVIGATOR
END
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
Des Hawkins' service history and list of operations
Description
An account of the resource
Account of the 1941-1946 service history of Flight Lieutenant Des Hawkins with 44, 625 and 630 Squadrons.
Format
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Three handwritten sheets
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
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Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
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MHawkinsD158602-151002-01, MHawkinsD158602-151002-02
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
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Germany
Italy
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Des Hawkins
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Karl Williams
David Bloomfield
44 Squadron
625 Squadron
630 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
C-47
Distinguished Flying Cross
mine laying
navigator
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Dunholme Lodge
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Kelstern
RAF Kirmington
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Waddington
training
Wellington
-
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/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
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
LWoolgarRLA139398v1
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
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
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/171/2319/AtkinsAH1501.1.jpg
830d36dbb0e2983788b5232c59af5c29
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/171/2319/AAtkinsA151121.1.mp3
a335b230e07e85171cab65215eb6d2d2
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
Atkins, Arthur
A H Atkins
Description
An account of the resource
24 items. An oral history interview with Arthur Atkins DFC (d. 2022, Royal Australian Air Force), his logbook and 23 photographs. Arthur Atkins grew up in Melbourne, Australia and joined the RAAF. After training he flew 32 operations as a pilot with 625 Squadron from RAF Kelstern.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Arthur Atkins and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-01-05
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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
Atkins, A
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending additional content
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: So this interview for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive is with Arthur Atkins, a 625 squadron Lancaster pilot during the Second World War. The interview is taking place at Arthur’s house in Kew in Melbourne. My name’s Adam Purcell. It’s the 21st of November 2015. Arthur we’ll start from the beginning if you don’t mind.
AA: Right.
AP: Tell us something of your early life, what you were doing growing up, and what you did before the war.
AA: Yeah well I was born at 212 Prospect Hill Road in, Prospect Hill Road oh what was the suburb? Surrey Hills, Surrey Hills. Then we moved to Canterbury when I was about eight or nine and I attended the Canterbury state school up to grade six. Then the equivalent of grade seven I started Scotch College. I was there for six years and I mainly concentrated on business subjects because that’s what I thought I would be going into and I did. I worked in an insurance company for about three or four years. I didn’t do any flying then but I, when I was a small boy and I was in the Cubs, you know, the junior Boy Scouts, they, one Saturday afternoon, we went down to the old airfield on Coode Island and I had my first flight in an aeroplane at about the age of nine, I should think. Eight or nine. Two cubs in the one cockpit. I don’t know who sat on whose knee. I can’t remember that but we were both in the cockpit half standing looking out over each side I should imagine but that was my first experience of flying and then I entered the Sun News Pictorial’s competition for someone most likely to fly, be able to fly an aeroplane and they’d get a free instruction to pilot licence but I didn’t, I didn’t win. There was, I think there was about a hundred people went for it and I was just one of them. I flew the aeroplane, an old Avro Avian I think it was. Single engine thing. I flew it for a little while because I’d flown model planes a lot and I knew exactly what it should do. I thought I did alright but no, I didn’t win it but then in my last year at Scotch I went in, tried to get in to the Point Cook pilot’s training system. I think there was about twenty vacancies or something and I think there was about two thousand people volunteered for it so I didn’t get that one either. However, when the war broke out I got in to the army militia I think in the middle of 1944. Well, that was alright. I didn’t mind it. September ‘44 it was and I had three months. September, October, November. I decided I’d get out so one day when I was on leave I called in to the recruiting office in Russell Street, for the Air Force that is, and they immediately signed me up. Gave me a piece of paper showing that I was a member of the RAAF and my rank was AC2. Aircraftman class 2. And then I had to attend about three times a week at various places to fit me for going into the initial training school. Mathematics and so on. Anyway, I got in and I, that was in nineteen, but the thing was going on to the reserve where I had to do these exercises and so on, lectures, about a fortnight before Pearl Harbour. This. About two weeks before that and the date of that is, December the 7th. I think it was about November the 20th or something that I enlisted in the Air Force. Just as well because I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the, the army as easily as I did and I was unfortunately of course it was mid-winter at Somers. Coldest place I’ve been in my life and some people used to wear their pyjamas under everything else because they only gave us very sort of flimsy one-piece overalls to wear in the midwinter at Somers. By September things were looking up a bit and I finished the course then and they called me in to tell me where I’d be going to next as everyone had depending on your results and they said, ‘We want to make you a navigator,’ because I was very good at mathematics at that stage and I was also a qualified accountant at that stage but I said, ‘No. I don’t want to be a navigator. I want to fly the aeroplanes. Thanks.’ And they said, ‘Well, you came top of your course.’ Course number 28 at Somers. ‘So you actually have a choice of what you’re going to do.’ They didn’t tell me that at first. Only when I objected to being a navigator. And they said well seeing you came top you can choose to train as a pilot and I went up to Benalla and flew Tiger Moths. I was there for two or three months. It’s all there in the logbook but Benalla was good fun flying the Tigers. I never broke one or landed one badly or anything like that and I came out of that alright and they sent me then after about three months, around about Christmastime ’44, ‘44 I suppose it would have been. No, no, would have been Christmas, Christmas ‘43 because I got to England in, in ‘43. Yeah, it would have been ’42. Yeah. Christmas ‘42 would have been the date I finished at Benalla and went to Mallala, South Australia about forty miles north of Adelaide. Looked like the desert and felt like it. I think it was a hundred and eight degrees for three or four days on one occasion and the beds inside the iron huts were that hot you couldn’t sit on the iron bedsteads because they were too hot to be comfortable. But anyway that was, it was quite good. I was there for, until about April or May. Mallala, South Australia, yeah, I’ll put my glasses on. I can read what I’ve written. Yeah. Yeah so I left Mallala on the, in April ‘43 and went to Ascot Vale showgrounds and I was there, only there for two or three weeks with, and fortunately I had a friend I was with, a fella named David Browne and we used to just wander around the city for a while doing nothing just waiting for something to happen and then finally in May, about the middle of April, 25th of April I was sent to Point Cook to do a course on blind approach. That is flying the beam in to land and had quite a bit of other, other work too. In fact, for about ten days I was in charge of the control tower at Point Cook. Not that any accidents ever happened so I wasn’t tested there. I just looked out the window and talked to the, the blokes from the fire cart and the ambulance from down below the control tower and I remember saying, ‘What happens if something goes wrong? What am I supposed to do?’ They said, ‘Send a signal.’ ‘Signal?’ I said. ‘What’s a signal?’ Apparently they meant send some sort of a telegram to, to someone or other. The boss of the group, of that particular group. Anyway, that only lasted a little while and then I was on flying there on Oxfords. Airspeed Oxfords. Mostly under the hood, you know, blind flying on the beam. After that I went to Bradfield Park in Sydney just prior to catching a boat to San Francisco and they put us on a, an American, converted to troopship so a small, sort of, it had been a coastal [trader] I think or something like that. Proper steam steamship called the Mount Vernon which was something to do with George Washington’s home town or something like that and we headed out across towards New Zealand. I was seasick but my friend David Browne wasn’t. I was a bit envious of him. He could still eat these rather sickly, sickly looking thick drinks that he used to get from the canteen while I was chuntering out over the rail. And we got in, finally we got in to New Zealand on the North Island. Auckland. And that was quite interesting. We got off the ship. We were allowed to stay to see New Zealand in four hours so we did that and two or three, there was a group of two or three of us just walking along in Auckland somewhere and we got picked up by a couple of girls who said, ‘Come home and have dinner with us.’ You know, and being generous to the troops so we followed them and went home and spoke to all their family and had a very nice dinner, the three of us, for nothing, you know, just because we happened to be in navy blue uniforms and the New Zealanders had the grey blue uniform of the RAF. But a funny thing happened. While we were just lolling around after dinner the fiancé or boyfriend of one of the girls arrived at the front door and everyone was a little bit embarrassed about that, picking up strange troops, you know, foreign troops, on in the street. So we said, ‘Oh well, we’re off now anyway. Thank you very much,’ we went back to the boat but the bloke who came to the front door was wearing a New Zealand Air Force uniform. He’d been on some island, I think, just north of New Zealand somewhere on duty and he’d just got some leave to come back to Auckland. Anyway, we got back on the boat and then the next thing we knew we’d, we were pulling into San Francisco harbour and sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge escorted in the last part of the trip to there by a blimp and we also saw a submarine. And there was a bloke working on a ship unloading it or loading it. An American ship alongside where we were and a couple of blokes sang out to him, ‘What are you doing sport?’ or something like that. He said, ‘Go home limey.’ [laughs] He thought we were British. He’d probably never heard of Australia. And while we were, we had about a month in America which was one of the most delightful times of my whole life because the Americans were very generous at handing out food, lifts here and there. We went down to New York on one occasion and we had a weekend in New York, in New York in 1943 which not many people from Australia ever experienced. And up, up the, up all the skyscrapers, the Empire State, and we went around to the theatre where the Rockets were dancing around the stage, about a dozen of them, high kicking on the stage. That that was sort of interesting. But then we, we found out that we could go in to any of the night clubs and just have a drink at the bar, and pay for it but you couldn’t sit down. You didn’t have to pay fifty dollars like the Yanks had to, to go in and sit down at a table. We could just go in and stand at the, at the bar and have a drink and watch what was going on and at one stage we were in the Astor Roof Nightclub and the band leader who was Harry, someone or other. Betty Grable, his girlfriend or wife, was sitting in the front row near the band. We were in the table a bit further back. We’d been, we were standing at the bar, a couple of friends and myself, air force people, and this bloke came over and said, ‘Would you like to sit at our table.’ I think there must have been just the two of us by that stage. One of them had gone off somewhere else and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s alright,’ and he sat us down at a table. He had his wife and two women. Married women probably. And we made up a nice party of six people all at his expense. Very good. Then we went back to his hotel afterwards and had a few whiskies I think, if I remember rightly. But that was how the Americans were with us. They asked some funny questions like, ‘Where did you learn to speak English?’ at times. I think they thought we came from Austria or something. Confused Austria with Australia. So, they didn’t know much about Australia, the Americans but we had, in New York, we had all the, comforts like free food, free breakfasts and so on that they had. Then a little later we got on to the Queen Elizabeth which was to take us to England or Scotland actually and it set off and I think there was a half a dozen of us together got into the, into the cabin which was allocated to us. Seven of us got into the cabin but there were only four, four, four bunks in it but fortunately I was one of the early ones getting in. I got one of the bunks. The last man in got the floor. Four days. The Queen Elizabeth mark one it was of course at that stage zigzagged all the way across the Pacific, the, sorry, the Atlantic to Scotland, one way, alternate turning movements you know with not all exactly the same but, so that was to fool any submarines that were watching and I think they, they said the speed they were doing at one stage was forty knots, the Queen Elizabeth. Well that’s about what forty five miles an hour or something like that. Not bad for a big boat like that. Anyway, nothing happened to us. We didn’t even see any submarines. Oh but yes that boat we travelled to in New Zealand and San Francisco on got sunk about three trips later by a Japanese torpedo so I’m lucky to be here. Anyway, the boat pulled in and then we went down to Brighton on the train. The same day the boat pulled in in the morning we got, all climbed on a train and went straight to Brighton in Sussex on the south coast. That was a beautiful time too. I liked Brighton. I could have stayed there for years but they only left us there for weeks and sent us to an RAF station at Andover. There wasn’t much flying going on there. I didn’t notice any. We were only there for, what, a couple of weeks doing ground subjects. Learning the way the RAF worked but the one thing I did notice we had a very nice room to sleep in and we had, we were all sergeants then by the way. The RAF conditions were way and above anything the Australian Air Force had ever thought of and you know we had people to clean the huts, sweep the floors out, make the beds and it was just like officers would have got in Australia if they were lucky and then and weren’t living in New Guinea or something like that but that was okay and then the next move was to Greenham Common where we were once again flying Airspeed Oxfords and an interesting thing happened the first day we were there. We got there in the afternoon and a couple of us, a couple of other fellas and myself walked out across the airfield the airfield a bit. Down one end of it where they, and they weren’t flying at the time we walked there. Must have been late in the afternoon. Anyway, we got to the runway and there was a big black patch about fifty or sixty feet across and we went and had a look at the black patch and we could see someone’s braces ends here and a bit of red meat there and so on. Someone had crashed an Oxford the night before and had burned out and they hadn’t scraped everything off the runway. They’d got most of him but they probably put a few bricks in the coffin because I was detailed because my name started with A and I was just taken off the top of the list and told, ‘You’re going to carry this coffin and load it on the train this morning.’ And that was my introduction to RAF flying, carrying what remained of the pilot to the local railway station where we shoved it into the guards van and said, ‘Goodbye Sport,’ and that was it. After that there was no accidents that I can remember at Greenham Common. We were flying, practicing flying on Oxfords and I got a, above average rating for flying Oxfords there because I’d had all that practice flying them at Point Cook. A bit unfair but I didn’t knock it back but then we went to a little place from Greenham to an airfield called Long Newnton. Long Newnton N E W N T O N. A pilots’ advanced flying unit. Well so was Greenham Common. That was 15 PAFU. They moved out, moved them all out because the Americans wanted somewhere to land, to store their invasion gliders so they shifted us from Greenham Common to Long Newnton and I remember we all got loaded into a bus or train or something and got out at the local station or was dumped off at the airfield at Long Newnton. Of course we didn’t hang around there. We thought we’d wander down and have a beer at the local pub. It wasn’t very far from the airfield. We walked in to the pub in the Cotswolds it was. The Cotswolds. And as we, we went into the bar and there was a couple of blokes in there. They must have been farmers. They were wearing just ordinary clothes which was a bit unusual in England at that time to find ordinary civilians in odd little clubs, they were mostly in uniform of some sort. And one of them said to me, ‘What do you think of the Cotswolds?’ I said, ‘Cotswolds? Is that where we are?’ And we were in the Cotswolds. I’d heard of them of course. I knew almost as much about the geography of England as I did of Victoria because I’d, you know, been buying books when I was a kid. All English comics and so on and a book called “Modern Boy” or something which consisted mostly of aeroplanes and steam trains and so on and we found it was quite a pleasant place, Long Newnton and we just continued to fly our Airspeed Oxfords there and train on them but we had one bad experience. We had to do night flying. Night, night cross-countries. A triangular course. You’d fly north, then northwest, then south west and bring yourself back to the, to the base. Navigating in the dark. Just flying on instruments and if you missed, missed one of the beacons, they had beacons were flashing lights like A for one of, one of the turning points and perhaps F or something for the next turning points. You had to know your Morse code so you knew where you were and then you knew where you were and one of our blokes didn’t come back. You know, it was all at night. Black as night. And England was black as pitch most of the places except for the odd airfields and the beacons, air force beacons like that. I think they were red but I can’t quite remember. There were two types. There was red beacons and white beacons and we were flying on the, I think the red beacons but he didn’t come back and we were just waiting around. Waited around for about another hour or so and someone came out and said, ‘You can all go home now. We’re cancelling the, the, the rest of the exercise tonight. That bloke’s crashed his Oxford and killed himself and we won’t be doing any more flying tonight.’ But it didn’t stop all the flying the next day. But after we’d spent a fair bit of time flying Oxfords we were put on to Wellingtons at um where was it? Lichfield, in the Midlands. 27 OTU. We never flew them. They, some, they split this particular group I was in into two parts. One of them, one part stayed at Lichfield and did all the practising on Wellingtons and the rest and the other half of the group did the Wellington flying at a place called Church Broughton. Church Broughton. And that was where I had my experience with one engine and when we were doing practicing circuits and bumps on approaches on one engine. Then you’d fire both of them up together and not actually land. Just practicing flying around on the one engine on the port engine. The starboard engine was, let me see, no, I think we had to, yeah, we had to power off on the port engine and just use the starboard engine for getting around. On the Wellington you weren’t supposed to fly against the good engine because, I don’t know, there was some reason for it. The Wellington didn’t have enough spare [?] in it to just fly very well on one engine and if you flew against the good engine you could be giving yourself a bit of bother. You mightn’t be able to control it. So, when the starboard engine went out and I was doing a left hand circuit as usual I didn’t quite know what to do and because, according to the rules we should have done a very big circuit around to starboard and landed and done a clockwise circuit. It was always anti-clockwise normal landing circuits in the RAF except on special occasions when the airfield mightn’t have suited a clock, an anti-clockwise approach. After that, well I was on Halifaxes. Halifaxes. Yeah, I haven’t got a picture of one of those here. They, they were quite good. We were flying Halifaxes for a month and, oh yes because I, with this engine off getting back to the Wellington with the crook starboard engine it was still giving some half power but there were sparks and things and black smoke coming out the back of it from somewhere and it had it there. We knew the engine had had it but I just, because it was giving us a little bit of power, I kept going on the anti-clockwise circuit and landed. Did a quite good landing too. Smooth landing but when we came to a stop on the runway and I tried to fire the engines up to taxi back to our parking spot I couldn’t do that. It just kept going around in circuits on the, on the good engine so we had to, we were all fitted with radio of course so I called up the control tower and said, ‘Send us out a tractor. You’re going to have to drag us in. We can’t taxi,’ and I got into trouble for not bailing the crew out which I’d never heard of them doing just because they had lost an engine and what else didn’t I do right? Oh I should have feathered the, feathered the propeller on the starboard engine. All good experience and I said, ‘Well it was still giving me a bit of power so I used it to pull us around into, into the landing, landing position.’ They said, ‘Oh that’s no good. You should have, you should have bailed the crew out and feathered the engine.’ Well I’d never had those instructions. I didn’t argue after that because he was, Australian he was the flight commander. He was a sour puss, I noticed, always. He got sourer than ever when I came back next day and he found the engine had to be changed but at least he didn’t have to change the bloody Wellington and he didn’t have to change the crew. They, we wouldn’t if I had bailed them out by the time they all got out I don’t think all their parachutes would have held them, held them up off, would have opened quickly enough to save them but that didn’t oh worry him. He just didn’t like, didn’t like the rest of us I think for coming in safely and not feathering one engine but I’ve read a lot of stories about Wellingtons trying to land on one engine and about fifty percent of them crashed and killed the crew. It’s probably through the wrong engine going or something like that. I don’t know. Anyway, after that we were on the Halifaxes. They were alright but we had a few worrying moments. The Halifax had four engines of course and there were a lot of Halifax squadrons flying at that time but they were mostly flying on the radial engine Halifaxes. What, we were training on the ones that had been rejected for operations and had the old early model Merlin V12 engines, you know and they had various faults. The Halifax used to have a bad habit of swinging to the left when you landed it. I was warned about that. Then I found out afterwards that they ran out of brakes. If you did, if you did a fair bit of taxiing you found you couldn’t, your brakes had ran out of air or vacuum or something. I don’t know whether they were vacuum brakes or air brakes but the brakes didn’t work if you’d run out of certain, certain distance. Anyway, the first landing I did in a Halifax, they were still using it for bombing here and there, the first landing I did in a Halifax I did a very smooth landing. I always did smooth landings and I was very pleased with myself. We just coasted down the runway just about, you know, ready to turn off in a cross runway and back to the parking area and suddenly the Halifax, I was quite relaxed, suddenly it swung around to the left like I’d been warned about, ‘Don’t let it swing on you.’ Well, I took that with a grain of salt and didn’t take a great deal of notice but fortunately, the, er the instructor who’d actually had done a couple of circuits with me on this practising single engine flying had got out and he wasn’t watching us. He saw us come in to land and he thought that was very good, got on his bike and rode off to the mess and then by the time the, the Halifax swung around to the left and did a circle, a half a circle on the grass he was in the mess on his pushbike, with his pushbike and no one in the control tower said a word to us about it afterwards. Anyway, it swung so far we went down the runaway and swung right around and was facing the way we came, on the grass. It swung to the left. The, I think the Lancasters had a, a tendency to swing to the right. You had to, when you, when you flew a Lancaster with the four throttles in your hand you had to push one further forward to, to stop the thing turning or running off the runway. When you were taking off that was. They were alright when you were landing her but they had a little tendency when you put the full power on to go one way or the other so you had the four throttles in one hand. You pushed one throttle ahead of the other. I don’t know whether it was the little finger or the first finger. I think the Lancaster tended to swing to the right. Well if it did you’d have to put a bit more power on the, on the outer, starboard outer engine to prevent that swing. But anyway, I, I just taxied the Halifax which was on the grass facing the way we’d come in, taxied on, got it back on the runway, took it down to where we parked it, got the truck back to the or our bikes probably at that stage, bikes back to the mess and nothing was said by anyone. Not even flying control. They hadn’t seen it and the instructor hadn’t seen it so we didn’t say anything to anyone about it but it was good experience though and I never did it again. I landed Halifaxes practically every day for the next month but I never swung off the runway again. I was watching it. You couldn’t relax until the thing had stopped, stopped rolling at your, at your parking spot. Then we went to a place called, I was commissioned by that time. I, I started off as a flight sergeant at, on the Halifaxes at, at Blyton which is in Lincolnshire and I was a sergeant pilot for a couple of weeks and then I was, I went to London and got my uniform as a pilot officer and lived in the officers’ mess which was not, nothing very special but it was better than, better than the sergeants’ mess but not much. Not much better but I liked that and I didn’t have to hand in my old uniform either. I’ve still got it. I think it’s in a trunk upstairs in the roof, roof space with a couple of officers’ uniforms. But I did alright with Halifaxes and the next move was to Lancasters at what was known as Number 1 Lancaster Finishing School at, at, Hemswell, Hemswell in Lincolnshire and we had about a fortnight there I think at Hemswell and then we were given a bit of a run-around at various holding units for a couple of days until we were, we’d finished our ten-day course at at Hemswell. Eleven days to be precise. Number 1 Lancaster Finishing School. No problems there at all. I’d had my problems with the Halifax and the Wellington. Hemswell was a piece of cake until we got to our operational station called erm Kelstern. I should remember that. It’s on the front of the house. Kelstern. And we were immediately given leave to go to London. You know, they probably had their hands full at the time. It was a busy station so we had a week in London on leave. Of course all this other stuff we had, weeks in London or the countryside and I went, used to get a ticket to Scotland, the northernmost railway station in Scotland so I could go anywhere between Lincolnshire or wherever I was. I wasn’t necessarily even in Lincolnshire. I could have been in the Midlands and I would just get a train. I think it was third class while I was a sergeant and first class when I was a pilot officer but I normally travelled third class because I found there were more interesting people to talk to in third class than in first class on those trains. And, um where was I? Oh yes when we finished our London, London leave on Kelstern which was 625 squadron they sent me up on a flying, on a, just a flight around the local neighbourhood to get used to the area and the approach to landing and so on. In a Lancaster of course because I was fully qualified Lancaster pilot by that time. Ten days at the Number 1 Lancaster Finishing School. Ten days instruction on Lancasters and low and behold we were just flying around the countryside admiring the scenery and then the flight engineer says to me. ‘The starboard outer engine is overheating.’ Cheers. [laughs] I’d learned my lesson so I just said, ‘Well feather the engine. Feather the prop. Turn it off and feather it.’ So we continued our flying on three engines, two on the left side and one on the starboard side and I had flown them on three engines. In fact I’d flown them at LFS on two engines and I knew they handled perfectly well on three engines so I didn’t hesitate to feather the, to shut that starboard engine down and feather the props so we just landed and I can remember the Lanc flew almost exactly the same on three engines, two on one side and one on the other, you know, on the approach to the strip, to the runway and just did a normal landing, and we just taxied it on the two inner engines to its parking spot and I, I said to the flight sergeant in charge, ‘You’d better have a look at that engine. It’s not working.’ He said, ‘Ok.’ The next day I went out to see how he’d got on with it and he said, ‘Oh there was nothing wrong with the engine. It was just the sender on the, and it wasn’t overheating it was just a sender on the, on the engine itself was faulty and it was sending out the wrong message to the gauge on the, the, um flight engineers panel.’ He had, he had the gauges in front of him. He could, he used to watch. And then I knew I’d got on to a good aeroplane. A couple of days later we were on our first operation because we’d had our leave. It didn’t take long for them to put us on to ops and about half of our crew flew with the remains of another crew piloted by a bloke called Flight Officer Slade and flight officer is not an RAF rank. It’s an American Air Force rank and he was an American and he wore a khaki uniform, the American flying uniform and when he was around in the mess or something he had on the American officer’s uniform. A flight officer, an American flight officer, was the equivalent of a pilot officer in the RAF. But that, that trip, oh when we were flying Wellingtons of course we did a lot of night flying too and we did fly over, over France one night with a load of leaflets and this was in the Wellington and that was all we carried. We had two cans. Two small bomb container cans which were about six foot long by eighteen inches high and wide packed tight with leaflets and when you got to the correct spot the bomb aimer who was down in the nose pressed the right button and the bottom of the canister after he’d opened the bomb doors of course and all the leaflets fluttered down below. Well, for some reason or other he had a nervous attack just before he, he had to release the leaflets over Chartres was the town about forty miles south, southwest of France. Anyway, we got to Chartres alright or the bomb aimer reckoned we were over Chartres so he pressed the button and in his haste he pressed the wrong button and this great canister, six foot long canister packed tight with leaflets hanging on a bomb hook disappeared from the aeroplane and went down with all its leaflets packed tight. When we got back they wanted to know where the, where the other canister was. I mean it could have killed someone, that canister, if it had landed on someone or put a big hole in the roof of the Chartres cathedral. I believe they have a cathedral in Chartres but we never heard any more about that apart from the bombing, bombing leader quizzing the, our bomb aimer as to why he’d just come back with one empty container and he had to explain what had happened. One of the reasons it might have happened because when we were crossing just before we were crossing the French coast heading for Chartres, this was at night of course, someone in the crew said, ‘There’s a searchlight on us.’ Well of course that rattled everyone including the bomb aimer. Searchlights. And after a while we found the searchlight was following us. Well searchlights are not mobile. Not that mobile.
AP: [not that fast] anyway.
AA: And I found someone had knocked the switch. It could have been me. It could have been anyone else on the crew. It could have been the ground staff left it switched on and knocked the switch that turned the landing lights on. Well, in the Wellington the landing light normally, not being used, points straight down. When you want to use it you pull a lever and it swings the landing light forward on a hinge so that it points forward where you’re going to land. We never used it, we never used landing lights all the time, the RAF weren’t using them at the time because they had such good flare paths. Electric flare paths. Anyway, this light followed us and it wasn’t until we were well over the coast, flying over German occupied France with this bright light shining straight down and all I can think was the Germans must have looked at that and said, ‘Oh well that’s someone practicing. It wouldn’t be a foreign plane you know, flying with a light like, on like that,’ so they didn’t bother sending anyone up to investigate. I was lucky. Every now and again someone got shot down on those exploits. They called them nickels. N I C K E L S. Nickels. Dropping leaflets and practically everyone had to do a nickel as part of their course on the Wellingtons so we did ours. Anyway, we, he got the right switch for the second one, he didn’t drop that. He just opened the bottom and all the leaflets went flutter, flutter, flutter down to, down to the cathedral underneath, hopefully. Or just the town of Chartres, I don’t know where they went. Might have all gone down on someone’s farm. That was a bit nerve-wracking especially when we found the searchlight was on us. The next time I found a searchlight was on us when we were bombing um a town in Germany. It was the, er, near Frankfurt, just a little town southwest of Frankfurt where there was a General Motors factory. General Motors, USA. Opel. It was just described as an Opel factory which was still a General Motors subsidiary at that, well it was had been a subsidiary of German motors for some time. The Opels. Opel cars. And we had to do a turn on a town south, south of Frankfurt. It turned out to be a fairly hot town because approaching this town of, let’s see. I’ll just um [shuffling of papers] yeah I started my tour on Bomber Command in, in July. On the 4th of July, that was my first, with Flight Officer Slade. There, just trying to work oh Russelsheim. The Opel works at Russelsheim. That’s where the factory was and we had a turning point of probably about sixty or eighty miles south of Rüsselsheim. We were flying eastward. Basically directly east and then we had to turn north and fly north to Rüsselsheim. That’s right. Rüsselsheim and the turning point was over a town called Mannheim. Now, it was a stupid place to have a turning point because that had been bombed quite a few times and it was full of anti-aircraft guns and searchlights and we could see the searchlights and we could see anti-aircraft fire bursting in front of us as we approached, approached Mannheim and it wasn’t very long before we got picked up by a blue tinged searchlight, radar controlled from what we were told. We’d heard about these blue tinged searchlights, blue lights, and they were directly controlled by radar from the ground and if the radar picked up a Lancaster flying they could just about pinpoint it with the searchlights but they would have needed about five, about five hundred radar controllers down below to pick up every one but they used to pick out one and have a go at it. Well, instead of everything being black we got his blinding light lighting up the whole plane. I could hardly see the instruments because I was blinded. I had, you know, flying through the night to get your night vision then suddenly a thousand candle power light’s shining in your face practically and I remember thinking, ‘Jesus I’ve done all this training and now I’m going to be killed,’ I thought to myself. I pushed the stick forward fortunately and she dived quickly and I immediately lost the blue tinged searchlights. You see, when they, when they put that blue tinged light had about another half a dozen focussed on you. They could see the blue light and they, they, we had about six searchlights altogether lighting us up but we lost the light. Immediately black as pitch. And we went into a manoeuvre called the corkscrew and you sort of fly in a down to your left. Then when you are half way down to where you’re going you turn to the right and keep diving. You’re diving. You’re going very fast and then when you get down over to the right you swing it to the left and come up again and do two or three of those. Well, we were basically told that they were, you know, to evade, avoid if you get a fighter behind you if you get the words from the rear gunner, ‘There’s a fighter on you. Go into a corkscrew,’ at night and mostly we flew at night anyway. Half the time we flew at night and half the time I flew in daylight. That was, that was a different thing altogether but and you could go into the corkscrew. That was all I could think to do and I looked at the instrument panel, the airspeed indicator, just as we got near the bottom of where I was going to pull out and I think I was doing four hundred miles an hour. The top diving speed of a Lancaster at that time was three hundred and sixty miles an hour. So we were doing four hundred miles an hour. Actually, it was calibrated in knots. I’ve converted it to miles an hour and we had a full bomb load on. Rüsselheim, yeah we had a four thousand pound bomb on. That’s the high explosive one. What did they call that? They used to have a nickname for that one. Blockbuster or something like that and I don’t know what the other ones were but um oh yes we had just one high explosive bomb, one four thousand and the rest were incendiaries. It made a nasty mess if it landed on you. Anyway, it was a total of, oh I don’t know what it would be, about six or seven thousand pounds sitting underneath us so I was very careful to pull out gently from the bottom of the dive. I didn’t want to leave the wings behind which could have happened to us if you did it quickly. I think on that same raid I saw a picture of a Lancaster that came back with, with both of its ailerons useless. He’d dived too fast and pulled out to fast like the same thing I did but I pulled out fairly gently. I knew quite a bit about flying aeroplanes theoretically as well as, as well as practically and I knew you couldn’t pull out quickly ‘cause I knew what could happen but it didn’t so we just carried on and bombed the, bombed the General Motors plant and then came home again. That was one of the most interesting ones. Another interesting trip I did much later though. We did, did this trip out over the Bay of Biscay. There was an estuary, the Gironde Estuary not far from the, what would have been the Spanish border of Spain and, and the Bay of Biscay, French coast but anyway this Gironde Estuary, oh there’s some wineries up there, up the Gironde. Someone heard I’d bombed near the wineries. He said, ‘Well you’re lucky you didn’t bomb the wineries because I wouldn’t be speaking to you if you’d spoilt my, spilt my wine.’ But we didn’t. We flew from Kelstern almost due south right down to the south coast, then turned right, south, just before the south coast and flew down out to Lands End and at that stage flying to Lands End we took it down to fifty feet going over Lands End and we flew all the way around out into the Atlantic at fifty feet. Fortunately, it was a very fine day and not much wind and round in a big wide circle fifty feet all the way. I think we had four hundred Lancasters on that one. Something like that. And we had an escort though to fly over the Bay of Biscay, escorted of long range Mosquitos, fighters, in case some German type decided to have a go at us but, no one, no one showed up because we were flying at fifty feet. That was to be under the German radar of course and they never spotted us till us we were over, over the river and then they didn’t have time to get, get there and do anything. We’d gone by the time they woke up to what happened but I remember we did this two days running. We did it was the same, same town almost, almost the same spot in the Gironde Estuary. We came hammering over the Bay of Biscay at fifty feet. As we got to the coast we had to rise up a bit because there was about a thirty foot lump of hillocks and trees and stuff there so we went up a bit and as we crossed the beach I looked down and there was an old horse. You could see it was an old horse because we were only fifty or thirty feet from him looking down. It was slightly to my left just plodding along. An old draft horse it was and the driver was sitting up on the cart. He didn’t look up and the horse didn’t look up. No one, neither of them looked up. We just shot over the top of them at about thirty feet above them because they had come up on this slight rise, this twenty foot rise from the, from the sand where the estuary started and I don’t know what happened to them afterwards. We didn’t drop anything or do anything nasty to them. They were probably French anyway. Not that that would have stopped me if I’d, if I’d had to bomb them but we didn’t have to bomb them. We just went along the estuary until we found the fuel oil tanks that we were going to do a bit of damage to. They were, they were used from time to time by submarines that’d sail up this estuary at night and fill up there. We were, this flight was in daylight of course. Beautiful day. No wind hardly. Blue skies. Not a cloud in the sky. A delightful day. I think I had my twenty sixth birthday that day so I got a nice birthday present. A nice trip to southern of France to the Gironde Estuary at fifty feet over the Bay of Biscay and we dropped bombs on it and I’ve got photographs of the, of the target area with a ship lying on its side. It wouldn’t have been our bomb because it was someone in front of me rolled the ship over with a bomb. He was supposed to bomb the tanks but he might have just bombed the ship instead. Now that was, that was August the 5th. I know that because it was my birthday the next day. No. August the 4th that’s right. August the 5th was my birthday. The second, the next day we, we did exactly the same route. Flew down to the south coast of England, turned right, almost to the south coast, and went down through Somerset and all those places to Lands End and off the end of Lands End at fifty feet, gradually taking it down to fifty feet as we got near Lands End. And this was the second day and we were all going hell for leather towards the er the Gironde Estuary as usual at a little town call Pauillac. P A U I L L A C. Pauillac. This was the second day and they were both, both in Pauillac but slightly different positions in Pauillac and we had ten thousand pounds of bombs on board approximately. Ten thousand five hundred pounds of bombs carrying on that one and it took us seven hours fifty five minutes altogether but as we were approaching the estuary out over the bay the rear gunner called up, ‘Someone’s going in.’ I looked around and there was a great splash of water still hanging in the air. One of the Lancs had dived into the, into the water but what had happened he’d collided with one of his friends from the same squadron. They were showing how close they could fly together which was the last thing they ever did. One of them survived but one didn’t. Anyway, on that, that, that occasion we, we didn’t go back to Kelstern because there was something wrong with the weather by the time we’d gone. To have two bright, sunny days over England in a row was a bit unusual and it was just the usual thing you know. It had clouded over or something. This was August. Well August can be cloudy or it can be very nice in England. Yeah but anyway it was too cloudy or foggy or something to land there so we landed at a different airfield, a place called Gamston. Gamston. That was a Wellington training base I think, at the time. Gamston. So they had a nice, nice long runway. One interesting thing happened with that. We had to just fly back to our base next door. We just had one night there sitting in chairs, sleeping in chairs, in the mess. Well the next day we returned, the weather cleared at Kelstern. Took us fifteen minutes to get from Gamston in the Midlands, more or less, to Kelstern in Lincolnshire and I remember taking off. I didn’t think, didn’t think of it at the time but we didn’t need to take off like we had nine thousand pounds of bombs on board at all. You know, we had very little fuel. See, that trip was a fairly long trip. Took us almost eight hours in the air and we didn’t have much petrol left when we got back and they didn’t fill it up. They said, ‘Oh you’ve got enough fuel to get back to’ [Gamston], or to ‘Kelstern alright.’ I just took off as usual and as usual was I usually took off in a Lancaster with about fifteen thousand pounds of bombs on it something like that and about two thousand gallons of petrol which I carried on a short trip and I just opened the throttles up and she lifted off, off the ground in about two hundred yards or less, a hundred and seventy, a hundred and eighty yards or something. Just floated up in to the air. I realised then that I didn’t need to open it up to full bore really. I could have probably opened up and we’d never been trained to take off a Lancaster when it was a light load. You were always shown how to take off in a Lancaster as fast as possible with the load that you’d got but of course I flew it a few times with only a light load and I knew what I was doing but the excitement of the trip and seeing the Lancasters behind us causing a great splash in the Bay of Biscay had changed, took my mind off what I was doing I suppose but up she went and we were home in about ten minutes or fifteen minutes I put down here I think. Fifteen minutes trip back to Kelstern. That includes landing it too. And that was about halfway through my tour but we kept going various places. Le Havre, that’s right on the French coast when they, they were trying to get Germans out of the forts that they had or buildings they had taken over in Le Havre which is on the coast of France opposite England. We bombed them in daylight of course. Half of my trips were in daylight. Sixteen. I did thirty two altogether. I did one more than I really needed to so sixteen night and fifteen day or something like that and I used to like the daylight ones because you’d look up and you’d see about two hundred spitfires and about a hundred something else, American fighters, sitting above you, about one or two thousand feet just above where you were flying so we mostly did our, our operations at about fifteen thousand feet. Frankfurt for instance. We did that at about seventeen thousand eight hundred feet. That was a good one. I liked Frankfurt. That was the night one of my best friends on 467 squadron, which is an Australian squadron near, near the town of Lincoln. Just south, south east I think of Lincoln. 467 squadron. I think you mentioned you had a friend in 467 squadron. Yeah, Bomber Command, 467 squadron crew. A relative of yours -
AP: Correct
AA: Flew. Right?
AP: Yeah. A few months before that but yes.
AA: Yeah. Yeah. So he was in March or April.
AP: May, it was.
AA: Yeah, 10th of May that’s right. Yeah, well I had this friend of mine in, in, in 467 squadron he was a deputy flight commander and he said they’re having a very rough time at the moment because people are getting shot down all the time including our flight commanders and they made him a deputy flight commander as a flight lieutenant which was one rank higher than I was. I was a flying officer but fortunately for us I wasn’t in a, in a squadron where they were having a lot of calamities. It was just a little less than average. I think it was because I think it was because it was a more disciplined squadron. The RAF was a lot more disciplined than the RAAF. Particularly the RAAF squadrons in England. They were noted for a bit of a lack of doing the right thing a lot of the time. I know they didn’t do the right thing by me because I visited, that Australian squadron, 460 squadron at Binbrook two or three times for various reasons. Sometimes to deliver a Lancaster there or bring one back from there. It was only about four miles from us because the, the, and the circuits interlinked so you had to be a bit careful that you didn’t fly into a 460 squadron Lancaster going in the opposite direction. But what I didn’t like about it I hung my cap, fortunately it wasn’t the round cap just the four and a half cap on the hook in the hall like I, in the, in the ante room like I did in my own squadron and I found someone had stolen it immediately. I wasn’t there that long. I just had lunch there. Took about half an hour. I thought I was doing alright. I go back and no cap. Well, I didn’t need it to fly a Lancaster because I had a flying helmet which I still had that in the, in the Lancaster or something like that but anyway you had to have a flying helmet. I hadn’t lost that. Just the ‘fore and aft’ cap. So I reckon the Australian squadron of [inclined] to be full of ill-disciplined, bloody thieves in a large, large section of them and that was, that was my opinion of the RAF as against the Australians like comparing the Australians were like a bloody Boy Scout troops except not quite so honest as the Scouts would be. And I didn’t like them. My, my old friend Dave Browne was, he had a bit of bad luck. He was, he got to his twenty sixth operation. I think they’d just made him a flight lieutenant, second in command of his flight and he did a couple of operations the same night as I did. I bombed Frankfurt September the, September the 12th 1944 Frankfurt and Dave Browne got shot down on that same night so it wasn’t much good him being a flight lieutenant and second in charge of the flight. It didn’t do him any good. Frankfurt. We bombed from seventeen thousand eight hundred feet and one thing I noticed about Frankfurt as we flew over it in a, in a sort of south easterly direction and came around, swung around to the left and flew back past it and you could look down and see Frankfurt and it looked just like Melbourne at night with the streets were all lit up but it wasn’t lights it was the burning buildings on each side of, of the street. Frankfurt was on fire that night and I set fire to most of it. Or a lot of it. Anyway, we had a good one on that. Frankfurt. Yeah. You probably think it’s a bit rough to think of burning people alive but it didn’t worry us. I’d seen, I’d seen Coventry in England. I’d seen Brighton. I’d seen a street in London where I used to go past and walk down part of. It was there from the first time I got to England in 1943, about July ‘43 and I’d seen this little street. Very attractive houses still intact and one night around about this time I happened to be in London again and it was a complete shambles. The Germans had sent up a special, special group of planes, probably not very many and bombed the hell out of it or it could have been those flying bombs I don’t know. Probably more likely to be that. The buzz bombs. They would do that. They were quite erratic. You never knew where they were going to land. I was in London when the first ones came over on leave. I looked out of the window of the hotel I was on the third floor of. A private hotel. It was the top floor and I heard this bop bopbopbopbop sound going across the sky. Just sounded just like my old motorbike. My 350 Calthorpe. Same sound except that there was this light at the back of it. My Calthorpe never had a light at the back of it. Oh it had a little red light you could hardly see but never had a big white glow at the back of it and it certainly didn’t go as fast as the buzz bombs but I can remember the anti-aircraft guns in London were firing at the thing but they never hit it and I could see what was happening. I could hear shrapnel starting from the, the exploding bomb started to land on the roof. I was up on the top floor and I could hear the things clang clanging on the top of the roof. Steel pieces from the, from the shells that they were shooting up at the flying bomb and not getting anywhere near it. I got under the bed for a while but I thought, ‘What will I do?’ There was no air raid shelter there so I just stayed under the bed till things quietened down and stopped firing. You could hear the guns going off as well as the buzz bomb flying over London. Everything went quiet after a while and I heard where it landed. It landed somewhere near a railway station up in er it would have been north east London a bit. North east somewhere. I’ve used that station afterwards when on my trips. I went, I did about half a dozen trips to, back to Europe, after the war, after I was married, with my wife and we went all over England and Scotland and Germany too. France and Germany. I liked the Germans. We got on very well with them. My last trip to Germany was in 1993, 1993 I think it was. We went with a group from the RAF association over in, it was in South Yarrow then. Frank. A bloke called Frank someone or other was the leader and apart from a lot of trips around England which we did which was very nice that included a visit to the Victory ship down on the south coast somewhere. We cruised, we visited the battle areas in France and then when we got to Germany we got to, I think we flew to Berlin and they had a, a small bus waiting for us and with two German air force pilots as drivers. One’s the driver. One’s the, one’s the navigator. Very nice blokes and they drove us all over middle Germany and East Germany, Not the north and not the very south either but the middle Germany. Berlin and then over to the French border where the southwest part of Germany is and they took it in turns to drive and navigate and when we got back to Frankfurt where I had done so much damage they’ve got a new, big new wide boulevard through the centre of Frankfurt. I knew the name of it at one stage but I can’t remember it now but they can thank me for putting that there. I removed a lot of old scruffy houses from a great strip in the middle of Frankfurt and they’ve got a big boulevard like St Kilda Road runs through it. Well, I did that, half the work for them. But anyway these two German blokes we got on very well with them and they took us to a couple of their airfields on the east border of Germany which used to be East Germany. It had just been changed, just amalgamated with West Germany in about 1995 or something like that.
AP: Before that. 1990
AA: 1990 was it?
AP: ’89 or – [? Just.]
AA: Oh that’s right ‘93 when I was there and the remains of the war were still there the West German wall but we went to the West German border somewhere near a town called Cottbus I think and there was a, air force station. They gave us a very good reception. Nice light lunch and so on and showed us the latest airplanes they had and we climbed all over the latest fighter the Germans had. In fact, the leader, the leader of the expedition Frank Wilson, that’s his name, he was a Lancaster pilot, he managed to get inside in the cockpit and wriggle the controls of one of them which was in the, in the hangar we were standing in. Then they did a bit of a demonstration flight for us. Low flying and a few aerobatics and so on.
AP: Beautiful.
AA: That was good. Then after that they drove us, the two blokes in this small bus drove us to the river which is the border I think between France and Germany on the west somewhere near the Rhine yeah it’s on the Rhine town Wesel W E S E L Wesel and we were taken as guests, honoured guests to a annual meeting of the ex-fighter pilots association.
AP: Wow.
AA: And they were all, had all these long tables in this room there with these pots of beer and they were singing songs, you know, bouncing these songs around. Our leader, Frank, he had to make a speech. He got up on the, on the stage and spoke to them and I suppose about three quarters of them would understand. They speak a lot of English in Germany and they were bouncing their big pots on the, on the ground and I turned back to the bloke next to me, he was German but he spoke English, they made sure we had a English speaking people sprinkled amongst our travel lot so we could ask any questions. I said, ‘What are they singing now?’ You know they were stamping their feet and banging their pots on the table, wooden tables and they said, ‘Oh that’s, “We’re marching against England.” ’ That’s what he said [laughs] and I said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ Yeah and oh I got that plaque there from him, yeah.
AP: Nice.
AA: I got, we got a couple of pictures from him I don’t think they’re here. No. Mind your feet. I’ll just get the plaque down show you we got from him. From the opposition. There you are. How’s your German? Any good?
AP: Fair, Fair [?] it’s like an association of um fighter flyers associations.
AA: That’s right. Fighter.
AP: Yeah.
AA: They’re called flyers.
AP: [? ]That’s fantastic. I might take a photo of that later.
AA: Yeah. Well that’s come out its plug.
AP: Yeah that’s alright. It’s coming through the internal microphone now.
AA: Oh.
AP: Yeah, I couldn’t make it work so.
AA: That’s one of my favourite aircraft.
AP: Ah that’s an Anson.
AA: I used to like, I could fly them at night. Anytime. They’re good. Avro Anson.
AP: Yeah. Fantastic.
AA: And that’s the uniform we used to wear. That round cap beret with a sort of a what we called a goon skins they were, sort of one piece overalls and they used to try and make us wear them at, in mid-summer, at that place in South Australia where it was a hundred and eight degrees three days running and it was so hot you couldn’t sit on the metal beds inside the huts because they send they heat out more than the hut itself but anyway we talked, talked the boss into letting us wear shorts and shirts after a while. So, we weren’t so bad. And what else? On my last operation was on Cologne. Ah yes I, when I finished my tour in, here you are on, as a middle multi engine and that’s -
AP: above average yeah I read that.
AA: Well I got that for the Airspeed Oxford too but that was for being a good pilot but I think if you got back from thirty two trips he reckoned you must be above the average so he always gave that to someone who finished a tour which I did. Not everyone finished the tour. Old Dave Browne didn’t.
AP: Many of them didn’t.
AA: When my last operation was October the 31st on Cologne. What did we carry there? One four thousand. One blockbuster four thousand pounder and the rest in high explosive bombs but a lot of the times we carried about fifteen thousand pounds of bombs. Here’s one. Oh that’s fourteen thousand feet. Here’s another one thirteen, thirteen thousand pound bombs plus four five hundred pounders. Well that’s fifteen thousand pounds altogether which is about six and three quarter tons isn’t it?
AP: [?] yeah
AA: Divided by 2240 you get about six tons, six and a quarter tonnes. That’s a lot of weight you’re carrying and then there’s the petrol as well as that. Course that’s, that’s fairly high loaded. That was in Calais. We took part really in the invasion of Germany, of Europe. A lot of our work was supporting the, the British army. When they came up against a rather sticky situation they’d call for help from the RAF and we’d do a daylight trip on them so we wouldn’t bomb them instead of the opposition that they were complaining about and you know you killed a lot of Germans that way without killing any British. We never killed any British. We knocked off a lot of Frogs working with the Germans. Mostly in a little town just on the invasion coast. Where was it? [shuffling papers]. I don’t know. Another interesting thing was I’d flown over about eight different countries in Europe in a Lancaster. Eight. Including Sweden and Switzerland and Norway and Denmark and of course France and Germany and England and Wales and Scotland. I’ve been around in that Lancaster and that was a beautiful thing to fly. It was like flying, driving a Mercedes Benz. Beautiful. And probably your motorbike. Get as much enjoyment out of it except that that’s got a smaller engine than I had in my 350. Oh, yes, here you are. Have a look at this. There’s my motorbike.
AP: Oh fantastic. When’s that?
AA: Er that was -
AP: July 1938.
AA: ’38. I got that bike in ‘36. 1936. I wish I still had the damned thing. I shouldn’t have sold these things but I wanted to buy a car so I got a few shekels for that when I sold it, not very many and then bought a Singer Le Mans. A 1938 Singer.
AP: Fantastic.
AA: I haven’t got a picture of that but up there see those two top pictures.
AP: Yep.
AA: They’re of a car I had in England. That’s a Singer Le Mans. A nineteen, they’re both pictures of a restored, one’s been restored perfectly and the other is a lash up job um restored 1934 model Singer. Singer Le Mans because they did a lot of racing of Singer Le Mans and had a lot of victories and beat the MGs but then the next year in 1935 and, or ‘36 or something they had a lot of trouble with their brakes and they didn’t do any good at all but that, see that little black one.
AP: Yeah.
AA: In the corner? That’s the real one. That’s the one I had.
AP: That’s the one.
AA: In England.
AP: Was? As in this is when you were serving in England?
AA: Oh yeah. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. So, how did you get that car and what happened to it?
AA: Well it cost me sixty pounds. It was in the, just advertised in the local paper in Louth which is the local town for Kelstern and I just went along and bought it for sixty pounds. I had sixty pounds. We were fairly well paid and I didn’t gamble like, like most of my crew. They seemed to lose all their money but I never lent them anything. No. I was thinking if they’re going to lose their bloody money it’s their own fault. One of the blokes in the crew wanted to get married and he sent me a telegram. Unfortunately he wanted to borrow twenty pounds off me but fortunately I was on leave at the time so I never got that telegram until I got back from leave after his marriage day so that got me out of that. But that had two exhaust pipes like, like your bike out there but they just came out of one cylinder, one 350cc cylinder. Now, that was a beauty. One of the most thrilling experiences in my whole life and that includes Lancasters and anything, any other bloody thing was when I got that bloody bike.
AP: That motorbike. Fantastic.
AA: Yeah.
AP: Carrying on for a moment with the car. How did you fuel it?
AA: Oh we got an issue of four gallons a month if you were operational air crew. Well, I was an operational aircrew for six months because I was still on the squadron and I did four months actual, four months actual flying in Lancasters but then the CO decided to keep me on the squadron because I had an above-average rating for flying Airspeed Oxfords. Well, he had an Airspeed Oxford at his disposal and he used to like to go to visit other squadrons and perhaps his girlfriend’s town, I don’t know, and he like me to come along the next day, with a navigator of course, and bring him and bring him his aeroplane back and he’d fly it back. So he’d fly it to from Kelstern to Westcott or somewhere like that get out there at that airfield and I’d fly it back until I heard from him.
AP: That’s not a bad job is it?
AA: Well, he, he kept me on the station from the end of October, November, December till about half way through January doing that and he gave me a DFC for it. For being a good boy. Actually, most skippers of Lancasters if they completed a tour successfully got a DFC but he made sure I got one and I used to fly him everywhere. I even did a couple of trips to London with him I think. Or at least one anyway. And most of that would be around Lincolnshire somewhere and oh yes I had to investigate a crash on one occasion and I was, this was the first time I’d flown his Lanc, his Airspeed Oxford. We had to go to a station on the, on the south east coast, the south east coast of England, you know, and one of our Lancasters, it was a very bad night. Where were we bombing that night? I don’t know. Anyway, we were coming back from the middle of Germany somewhere and we were all told to fly over, over the top of a cold front that was approaching to get home again. As they said, ‘You’re going out you don’t have to worry about the trip to’ wherever you’re going ‘but when you’re coming back fly at twenty three thousand feet to get over the top of this electrical storm which you’ll run into.’
AP: Higher than that
AA: Well I was flying at twenty four thousand feet and it was very comfortable. We had a very nice bombing trip, killed a lot of nice Germans and we were flying back and there was no chance of the Luftwaffe chasing us at that stage because the weather down below looked pretty crook at times. It was nice and clear upside where we were until the rear gunner called out, ‘Hey skipper, my oxygen has gone out. I can’t get any oxygen.’ Well, he wanted me to say, ‘Well, oh well leave your turret and come inside,’ and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted the protection from him at the back as the most vulnerable side for us. The rear. The Germans liked to follow us up from the back. If possible shoot the rear gunner and shoot the rest of us and I said, ‘Look Ron.’ Ron smith his name was. ‘Look, I’ll take you down five thousand feet and that’ll get us down to eighteen, seventeen or eighteen thousand feet. You’ll be alright there.’ And he lived. I took it down to eighteen, seventeen thousand feet and we went through the top of this electrical storm. It worried me a little bit because it was pretty rough you know. The old Lanc was bouncing around a lot and fortunately we didn’t have any load on at this stage. We were empty. Just the petrol to get home and the four propellers each had a blue ring around the tip. You could see the big round blue circle around the tip and on the windscreen this little zigzag all over the windscreen. Sparks coming down the windscreen from the lightning. We were loaded. Loaded with lightning. However, we got past there. We got through it. It was a bit rough, you know. It was a bit bouncy but that didn’t worry me much. I was, I was more concerned about what the lightning was going to do. Whether it was going to get any worse than it was but we got back and he didn’t say much when we got back. I think he was reasonably grateful but at least he could breathe on the way home. He got out of there and plugged himself in to, no, he didn’t, he stopped in the turret. That’s right. I think what he wanted me to tell him to get out and plug himself in to one of the other outlets inside not in his, he was right in the back stuck in the glass with a big opening on the back so he could see clearly and er but he stopped there and he didn’t have to warn us that there was anyone else coming up behind us. I didn’t think there would be. Not through that storm. They would have, they would have corkscrewed into the ground I reckon if a fighter had tried to fly through there. It was bad enough in a Lancaster but that day, why I’m telling you that story, we lost a couple of Lancasters and one of them that didn’t come back they found it had dived into the sand, and into the sandy soil off the beach on the, in Norfolk somewhere and I was detailed by the CO with the knowledge that I hadn’t started flying him around to his girlfriend’s houses or anything at this stage but he’d seen the logbook. He used to read through everyone’s logbook. We had to put this in every month you see and he used to read everything in it. Better than reading the “Sporting Globe” I suppose but anyway he read that something like the same thing, you know, the competition the Germans and the British but we got, we got I was just detailed to fly this Oxford which I hadn’t forgotten how to fly to this American airfield on the, on the east, southeast coast there somewhere in Norfolk or Suffolk or, no, I think it would be Norfolk really but anyway we found the spot where the Lancaster had crashed and it had dived straight down apparently and the engines were twelve feet under the ground we estimated. Just an estimate by what was left of the Lancaster sticking up out of the back of it and as we were looking at er, looking at it a farmer wandered up and said to us, ‘Good day.’ He said, ‘There’s more remains over in the trees there.’ and I said, ‘Well, look we’re just inspecting the wreckage of the Lancaster. Someone else will be coming for the remains.’ So, I didn’t want to get stirred up with the remains of the, of the crew but that was his greeting to us, ‘there’s remains over in the trees there.’ So in, at the hit, Lancaster bits and pieces including the tree must have flown in every direction to have hit and got the engines that far underground. Must have been a bad one. It must have dived down from about ten thousand feet or something. Fifteen thousand. I don’t know. Twenty thousand. I don’t know but I was very glad we missed that thing ourselves but that was the closest thing I think we had to get into trouble. But no I’ve been to Poland twice. We went across the North Sea as usual. Across Norway. Now, this trip took about nine hours. Crossed in to Sweden which was neutral. As we got to the central of the Swedish, you know, it’s a long thing, goes up and down and I think the best parts are down low somewhere on the Baltic. Turned right there and headed south and on the way down the Swedes sent up a whole lot of Bofors shells but they only go to sixteen thousand feet. We were at about eighteen or nineteen thousand and it was a very pretty show actually. They come up in their bright colours reds and greens sometimes. Mostly reds. They used come up and you could see them coming up and bending gracefully over, starting to fall and blow up there. Bofors, 40mm but every now and again some keen type of Swede or someone who didn’t like the British, in the Swedish army, would send up a shot from a German 88mm high explosive shell but fortunately they were about four hundred yards on my left as I was flying south to Stettin in er in what is now Poland and I don’t think they hit anyone on that night but certainly I never saw them hit anyone there with their shells. I think they might have been trying though. As I say there was a keen type on the end of a German 88mm gun or a Swedish 88mm gun but that’s just the same sort of explosion as the Germans had at about, you know, we were at about eighteen thousand feet. And Bofors were 40mm guns which most of the Swedes were just sending up to let the British know that they weren’t allowed to fly over Sweden on the, in the rules, I don’t know what rules ruled most in those days but they let us know that we weren’t particularly welcome unless we had plenty of money to spend sort of thing. The Swedes used to sell steel to both the Germans and the British.
AP: But they were neutral.
AA: Well so did I. So were the Switzerland Swiss but we went over a corner of Switzerland at one stage. Where else did we go? I think they were the only neutral, neutral countries we flew over. I went to Stettin. That’s in Poland now. Used to be spelled S T E T T I N when the Germans had it. Now it’s spelt S C H E and something else, you know, Polish.
AP: A Polish name.
AA: Yeah.
AP: Makes sense.
AA: That’s about it.
AP: Were there any, I’ve got a couple, a couple more specific questions that I’d like to ask if -
AA: Yeah.
AP: If you don’t mind. Were there any hoodoos or superstitions with your squadron?
AA: No. There was no superstition. Just hope. Just hope that it doesn’t happen to you.
AP: Fair enough.
AA: Yeah. Oh no. We didn’t actually think about that much because we, when I look back I think we didn’t worry. We were used to going to town. Drink all the beer in Louth which was the local pub. I had a nice girlfriend, a WAAF, I used to go around with all the time. We used to go down to Binbrook in that black Singer. The black, the little black one in the corner there. It was the Plough Inn in Binbrook. We used to go down there and drink bottled beer. She liked bottled beer. I remember we went to, there was a dance in the sergeants’ mess. I wasn’t allowed to go. Officers weren’t allowed to go to that and I knew she was going to be there so I said, ‘Oh I think I’ll see you there.’ So, I borrowed the rear gunners, well he owed it to me for saving his life. I borrowed his, one of his spare tunics. He was a sergeant and I went along to the sergeants’ mess in it, just wearing the same blue pants that I normally had on and with his jacket on with the one wing and I’m dancing around with my girlfriend and the flight lieutenant um he was the orderly officer or something. He was, no, the squadron, the squadron something. He had some official position anyway. His job was to sort of get around and make sure everything was going all right and also collect the belongings of the people who got shot down, which happened from time to time. They used to come in at about 3am in the morning and wake me up while I was asleep and collecting all someone’s belongings. Which was, I didn’t like my sleep being disturbed like that. But what was he? Anyway, I got the job as assistant to him so that I could stay in the assistant, not orderly officer, some other name they used to use for this particular job and he used to, his main office was in the same little building as the CO’s office. And anyway, he said to me, he was allowed to be there because he’s the orderly bloke or the, what did they call him? I was, they actually made me the assistant something or other. I might think about it later. Anyway, I was being groomed to be in his, in his place when he went on leave in about three weeks’ time and we got on very well together and he looked across to me and said, ‘Ah,’ wearing my gunners uniform, ‘Ah Flying Officer Atkins,’ he says, ‘Are you enjoying the dance?’ I said, ‘Yes thanks, sir.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Oh well that’s good. I’ll see you in the morning.’ Well of course he didn’t give a damn anyway. If no one else complained he wasn’t going to complain. Fortunately, the boss, Cocky, the wing commander, wasn’t attending the dance. He was probably attending his girlfriends, girlfriend in the local pub. He used to have her stashed up in the pub at times because I, I was very friendly with one of the telephone operators and she used to tell me who he used to ring up. She just, oh that was the life. That was the one I used to take down to the Plough Inn at Binbrook and drink bottled beer with and of course it was mid-winter when I was visiting Binbrook. Very icy roads and where it went down in to a bit of a dip it was icier than ever. I remember we drifted down in to this dip, this girl and I, and only a two seater of course. There, you can see that. There’s only room for two people in those, those cars and anyway it did a complete, it slipped around did a complete circuit around this -
AP: Just like a -
AA: Black ice.
AP: Just like a Halifax.
AA: Oh yeah. Yeah but when it went right around with a Halifax I had to drive it around. This one spun around like bloody top on the ice. I must have pressed the wrong buttons or something. Anyway, we, we just drove out of it, drove out very carefully, very slowly. Drove out and parked in its usual spot outside the side of the Plough Inn in Binbrook village.
AP: Nothing happened to you.
AA: Good.
AP: You said the circuits with Binbrook and Kelstern interlinked.
AA: They crossed.
AP: Yeah.
AA: Interlinked.
AP: Were they separated in some way like levels or something like that? Or was it just a case of -
AA: No. We always used to do the circuit at a thousand feet and as far as I know no one’s ever said to me, ‘Binbrook’s going to be doing it at the same time.’
AP: Sounds a bit terrifying. I should, I should declare an interest here. I’m an air traffic controller so that sounds terrifying to me.
AA: Oh, well, if you saw a Lancaster operation that would be terrifying just to look at.
AP: I think you’re probably right. I think you’re probably right. What five miles?
AA: Talk about fireworks. My first navigator, I had him until about the middle of the tour until his nerve gave out. After he, after I, after the war I met the, my wireless operator a few times. A fellow named Trevor something. Trevor Jones. A very nice bloke and an excellent wireless operator. Never missed a beat. He got all the messages out and all, sent them all back as they should have and that had a lot to do with surviving. If there was a shift in the wind he’d know that. And this navigator was very accurate. We used to, I used to time it in minutes the time arriving at the target. I used to think back, ‘Now will these bastards be asleep or will they be open or will they be up having their breakfast or what will they be doing?’ And that would depend on whether I was there three minutes before the bombing started or about two minutes after it. After they’d, after they’d dropped their first few shots off and were loading their guns again. And he told me that when we were, every target we were over instead of, he used to say, ‘Tom,’ Tom was the navigator, ‘Tom, have a look out. It’s beautiful,’ you know. ‘There’s fireworks everywhere,’ he used to say. Well there were too. You’d see them going off. Red, green, blue, black everything. Mostly, mostly red and green. And the man in charge of the operation would be circling this town. Say it’s Stuttgart or something, circling around saying, ‘Bomb the greens, bomb the greens. The reds are too far south,’ or something like that and giving us instructions. Then, ‘Go home now,’ or something or, ‘Wait,’ wait till we get to bomb the markers in or something. That didn’t, fortunately, the waiting thing didn’t happen but I used to hear him say, and sometimes he’d just tell us to take our bombs home. He said, ‘I can’t see the target. There’s too much dust and smoke. Take your bombs home and return to base.’ That was very annoying because I liked to drop the bombs. I didn’t like to land with a load of bombs on but sometimes we had to land with six and a half tonnes underneath you.
AP: Of high explosive. Thanks.
AA: Well -
AP: Question I like asking pilots. Your first solo. What happened?
AA: What the, the first solo in what?
AP: Your first ever solo. So the Tiger Moth.
AA: Oh the Tiger Moth. I did a very good landing. That’s all I can say about it. It was nice. I was, I knew a lot about aeroplanes because I used to fly, you know, model aeroplanes. Light aeroplanes. You could, you would wind the thing up, run along the concrete path and rise up in the air. Little ones. I did that for five or six years when I was a kid. I was very interested in them so I knew what they did. I knew how you bent the wings and how you bent the tail plane to make them level and that helped me a lot. A lot of these blokes had never been in an aeroplane or never seen a toy aeroplane even and had certainly never driven a car half the time. This bloke Dave Browne who was a friend of mine I was going to go and visit him and show him my, my new car, new car [laughs] a 1934 model at, at that place near Lincoln. I don’t think he had a driver’s licence. He’d never had one. He was eighteen. Just eighteen when he, he would have been when he left school. He left school and joined the air force. Got on the reserve. Nice bloke. What question did you ask me then?
AP: First solo.
AA: Oh first solo. Yeah. Well there wasn’t anything special. I liked flying. I liked, I liked flying the Tiger Moth. I knew I could fly it alright. I knew just how to fly it. So when my first solo came up he said, ‘Ok off you go.’ I just flew it up and around exactly the same as I did when I was with him. Did just the one circuit and landed it without bouncing it unduly. Some people bounced those Tigers fifteen feet into the air.
AP: I’ve done it myself.
AA: Oh have you?
AP: I have.
AA: Oh God. Well I never did. I never bounced it more than a foot or two feet at the most I don’t think.
AP: I’ve had shockers.
AA: But er I, I have flown them since the war.
AP: Yes [that was my next question]
AA: But only with an instructor. In the, in the back seat I think the instructor was. The funny thing when we were under instruction on Tigers during the war I was in the back seat and the instructor was in the front.
AP: Yeah.
AA: Well, when I flew them for a fifty dollar flight or something I was in the front seat and it was a bit unusual and the instructor was in the back. I remember on one occasion I went up in a flight in a Tiger and I was talking to the pilot and the instructor first before we went in and said, ‘I hope you’ll let me have a go at flying this thing.’ and he said, ‘Oh, yeah. Well, have you flown them before?’ I said, ‘Oh yes. Yes, I’ve flown them plenty of times.’ He said ‘Oh? Where were you flying them?’ I said, ‘Oh at Benalla.’ ‘Oh Benalla,’ he said ,’Oh.’ He didn’t seem to know what the, Benalla was the, the head office for Tiger flying in the RAF, RAAF I mean, in nineteen, what would it have been? 1942, yeah when I was flying them in Benalla.
AP: Have you flown them much?
AA: ’42 ‘43 ‘42 ‘41
AP: Have you flown much since the war?
AA: Only in passenger planes.
AP: Yeah. [?]
AA: No. I’ve never flown anything except a Tiger Moth since the war but I have flown in the Concorde from -
AP: Oh lovely.
AA: From London to, my wife too with me, Heathrow to that big airfield near New York. What is it?
AP: JFK.
AA: Hmmn?
AP: JFK.
AA: Yeah, that’s it. Yeah and we were booked to fly in a helicopter from JFK to somewhere near the centre of New York and that was because we were doing a first class trip all around the world. I didn’t intend to do it actually do it first class but the way it happened I said, ‘Oh well first class will do,’ because they said it’ll only be about, what you’ve got to pay it will only be about five hundred dollars difference from flying first class all the way from Australia to around the world. So we went first class. I think the next time I we went first class too it wasn’t that bad it wasn’t that much difference to business class really. We used to fly business class mostly. I think we did six, six trips to England. First of all cattle class and then business class and then first class but Quantas’ first class was, it was the pits.
AP: Still, still more comfortable I imagine than a Lancaster.
AA: No. The Lancaster was very comfortable. I felt more comfortable in a Lancaster than I ever felt in a Quantas first class. Do you know where they put us? As close to the toilet door as that. The two of us. Right, right opposite the toilets. The blokes used to come in and out of the toilet doing their flies up and we were sitting, sitting there. Well that was the finish. I’ve never flown in Quantas since.
AP: Oh really?
AA: That’s right.
AP: There you go.
AA: You can tell them that. You can tell them as much as you like.
AP: I have one more question for you. It’s probably the most important one.
AA: Yeah.
AP: How, what do you think Bomber Command’s legacy is and how do you want to see it remembered.
AA: I think it will all be remembered by the people who were in it alright but well I think they’ve got this new place in the Green Park. That, that does a lot for them but I can understand why the people in, up the north decided to have a memorial. They’ve probably got relatives or sons or something or fathers or grandfathers who’ve been in it and they want to make a point of it. That they get remembered for what they did and you know the fifty thousand I think RAF types who got killed in Bomber Command. I think it was a figure something like that. I think it was about three thousand Australians in Bomber Command that were killed and I’m doing something to remember them in Melbourne. I’ve organised a new boat to be built by the rowing club in the city that I’m interested in and I’m putting David Browne’s name on it.
AP: [Beautiful].
AA: Instead of mine. They usually, if someone gives them a boat, they usually put their name on it. I had, I’ve given them a boat about twenty years ago, thirty years ago with my hard earned cash and I had my name on it. Arthur Atkins, on both sides of the point. Well they’re going to put David Browne’s name on it because he was a nice bloke. Well, that’s why I think the people in Lincolnshire are doing a good thing. North Lincolnshire? Where is it again? Where are they putting this memorial? Do you know?
AP: It’s, it’s within sight of Lincoln Cathedral.
AA: Oh.
AP: It’s on a hill. I don’t know the direction. I haven’t been there myself yet unfortunately.
AA: Ah yeah.
AP: But it’s on a hill within sight of the cathedral.
AA: That’s, that’s not in the freezing north of Lincolnshire.
AP: No. I don’t think it is.
AA: No. Well that’s where I was. Lincolnshire. Well Yorkshire was worse, of course. I drove my car from, all over England. Only one thing wrong with it. Oh well no, wrong, the most, the most, the worst thing that was wrong with it was the fact that it never had a hand brake and of course on one occasion the hydraulic main operating thing busted it’s rubber washer so I had no brakes and the funniest thing was I was going along a street and you know I just used to rev the engine and drop it down a couple of cogs if I wanted to stop it. Coming around, I came down the street like I was driving the car down here with just, fairly gently and I wanted to turn right here and just as I got turning right, you know, at about ten miles an hour or something a bloke with about four, four greyhounds were walking down the street crossed right in front of me.
AP: No brakes.
AA: No brakes at all and I wasn’t in a low enough gear to make any difference and I wouldn’t have time. So do you know what I did? I put my foot out like that and dragged it along ground and that stopped it. The foot stopped it.
AP: Like a motorbike.
AA: Eh?
AP: Like a motorbike.
AA: Well I had a motorbike once. I knew how to stop that. I knew what to do with that.
AP: Very good. Well I think that’s, you’ve been talking pretty well nonstop for two and a quarter hours now.
AA: Have I?
AP: That’s a pretty good effort.
AA: I’m sorry.
AP: No. That’s excellent. There’s some really good stuff in there. This, this is one of the easiest interviews I’ve said, I’ve done because I asked you one question at the start.
AA: Yeah.
AP: And then I sat back and just listened.
AA: Yeah.
AP: And it went. I timed it. It went for an hour and fifty before you took a break.
AA: Goodness
AP: So, thank you very much.
AA: No. I’m very, very interested
AP: Very, very much.
AA: In the air force and Bomber Command. I had a, it was the best job I ever had in my life was the air force. Especially the part when I was working for the RAF.
AP: Good.
AA: They were the real air force as they said. Not the Boy Scout air force like the RAAF.
AP: Fantastic.
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 Arthur Atkins
Description
An account of the resource
Arthur Atkins grew up in Melbourne, Australia. As a Boy Scout, he experienced a flight in an aircraft and knew he wanted to be a pilot. He transferred from the army to the Royal Australian Air Force and started pilot training in Australia. He travelled to Britain in 1943, via New Zealand and the United States of America. After further training at various stations, he was posted to 625 Squadron at RAF Kelstern. Among the operations he describes are leaflet drops over Chartres, the bombing of the Opel factory at Rüsselsheim, the Gironde Estuary, Le Havre, Frankfurt, Cologne and Stettin. He completed 32 operations. While stationed at RAF Kelstern he often visited the Plough Inn at Binbrook.
Creator
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Adam Purcell
Date
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2015-11-21
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Mal Prissick
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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02:13:42 audio recording
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AAtkinsA151121
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.
Great Britain
Australia
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Rüsselsheim
Poland--Szczecin
France--Chartres
France--Gironde Estuary
France--Le Havre
United States
Germany
France
Poland
California--San Francisco
California
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
27 OTU
625 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
control tower
entertainment
Halifax
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
promotion
propaganda
RAF Church Broughton
RAF Hemswell
RAF Kelstern
RAF Lichfield
searchlight
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/185/2417/LSayerT591744v20039.2.jpg
e7a8b831a4b4a7668148c2c1a0a6af6a
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
Sayer, Tom
Tom Sayer
T Sayer
Description
An account of the resource
13 items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer Thomas Sayer DFM (1922 - 2021, 591744 54901 Royal Air Force), two log books, service material, newspaper cuttings and photographs. After training as a pilot in the United States of America, Tom Sayer flew Halifaxes with 102 Squadron at RAF Pocklington. He was commissioned in 1944 and became an instructor.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Tom Sayer and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-02-17
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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
Sayer, T
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
Tom Sayer flying instructor's certificate
RAF Form 414 (F.I. Cort)
Description
An account of the resource
Made out for Flying Officer T Sayer for Category 'C' on 3 Jan 44 and 'B' on 25 July 45 as flying instructor for aircraft types Oxford, Whitley and Wellington.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-07-03
1945-07-25
Language
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eng
Identifier
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LSayerT591744v20039
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Text
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
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One sheet
aircrew
Oxford
pilot
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/195/3328/AAllenRM160809.2.mp3
0e0b76b16f6cef1602bcaf97be83a19b
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
Allen, Richard Murray
Richard Allen
Richard Murray Allen
R Allen
Richard M Allen
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Richard Murray Allen (b. 1925, 435362 Royal Australian Air Force).
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
2016-08-09
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Allen, RM
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DG: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre; my name is Donald Gould, and I'm interviewing Richard Allen at his home in Pymble, a suburb of Sydney in New Souith Wales, Australia. How old are you, Richard?
RA: Ninety one.
DG: And where were you born?
RA: In Brisbane in Queensland (pause).
DG: Where did you go to school?
RA: Well, actually I went to primary school in Mount Iza because my father went there during the depression, he was an engineer in the power house there. We spent eight years there. I did my primary schooling there, and I did my secondary schooling, two years of it in those days, which would be the equivelent of about year ten now, I did that at the State Commercial High School in Brisbane.
DG: And er, Mount Isa's a mining town, isn't it?
RA: That's correct.
DG: What was your father doing there?
RA: He was an engineer in the power house.
DG: Oh, I'm sorry, yeah (chuckles). When war broke out can you remember where you were, what you were doing, how old you were?
RA: Yes, I was fourteen. Nineteen thirty nine it was, and I was still at school.
DG: And when you were at, when you were at school did you have any thought that you might end up in the war?
RA: Yes. I joined the Air Training Corps as soon as it was formed. From memory that would have been about nineteen forty one, and I joined the Air Training Corps, and we were given, apart from marching and drilling, and all that sort of thing, we were given certain instructions in morse code, sending and receiving of course, and meteor-, meteorological education, and other things relative to the Air Force. And I was in the Air Training Corps until April nineteen forty three, and on the tenth of April, which is my birthday, I er was actually accepted by the Air Force and ten days later I was in camp at the initial training school.
DG: Now you left, you finished school in forty three?
RA: No, I finished school actually in nineteen thirty nine.
DG: Oh, I beg your pardon. Oh you, oh you had finished then?
RA: Oh yes.
DG: Oh I see. Right, right. Okay then.
RA: I finished school at fourteen, which was a bit young in those days. Most kids would have finished high school at fifteen or sixteen, but I'd had primary school, because it was a small country town I'd done two years in one, which meant I could finish school a bit younger than most people. So, I joined the Air Training Corps which was formed during the war, about nineteen forty one. Because I always wanted to get into the Air Force rather than the Army, and I knew that when I turned eighteen I would be put into either the Air Force or the Army because there was conscription for home service, but I thought I might as well volunteer and go wherever they told me to go.
DG: Why the Air Force and not the Army?
RA: Oh, I suppose because (chuckles) it appealed to me more. I can't think of any other reason.
DG: No? And did you erm, when you, when you then, when you then joined the er, the Air Force did you have any, any idea as to what you, what you wanted to do?
RA: Oh yes. Everybody wanted to be a pilot (both laugh). But on initial training course there were about a hundred and eighty on the course. Courses were going in about once a month in those days, and there were about a hunudred and eighty of us. I think there were about ten pilots and about, picked from the course, and about er perhaps ten or fifteen navigators, and the rest, the rest were, were appointed as wireless air gunners for further training. Well wireless was easy to me because I could send and receive, er twenty five, thirty words a minute because of my training in the Air Training Corps. Ah. So the wireless course, which was six months, was pretty easy, actually. The gunnery course only lasted a month, then our training was completed in Victoria, and within a month we were on a troop ship to England.
DG: So what place you, you, was all your training in Victoria?
RA: No. The initial training and the wireless training, which was a total of, initial training was one month, wireless course about six months, that was all done in Queensland. The wireless course, the initial training course, my pardon, was at Kingeroy, a country town in Queensland, and Merriburra in Queensland was the wireless course, and then in Victoria was the gunnery course, which was at West Sale. There was an Air Force station at East Sale, that's why I distinguish one from the other.
DG: So, you were then in the Air Force and receiving this training. Did you have any idea where you might end up? Did you know you might go to Europe, or-
RA: Oh yes, almost certainly, almost certainly. Actually, I was selected as a navigator on the initial training course, and then the next day they sent for me and said, 'look, I'm sorry, you were selected as a navigator but we find that you can't go overseas until you're nineteen. That's against the law. So you're going to have to be a wireless operator.' So, I was a bit peeved by that, but, you know, you have to accept your fate from these people.
DG: Yes. And so, when, when did you-
RA: Actually, I got to England before I was nineteen. I reached England in April, I beg your pardon, in March nineteen forty four, before I was nineteen. It didn't seem to matter then.
DG: No. So, you went from Victoria. Where did you go from -
RA: I went on leave for a few weeks, and then got on the troop ship. I came on leave back to Bradfield Park, Sydney, which you'd know well, and we were there for about three days.
DG: Right.
RA: And then on to the troop ship.
DG: And where did you, where did you, where did you disembark?
RA: In England?
DG: Are you- You didn't go, you didn't have training in Canada?
RA: No.
DG: No?
RA: No navigators -
DG: Ah, of course yes, yes. That's right. Yes. (DG talking across RA throughout this exchange)
RA: Navigators went there, and I think the odd pilot, but mostly the navigators. I guess because it was pretty flat.
DG: And what, and what places did you do further training in the UK?
RA: Well, when I got to UK I was given a staff job, at a Pilot's Advanced Flying Unit, up in the Cotswolds, a place called erm, Windrush, and our job up there was to fly at night time with pilots who were converting from single engined to multi engined aircraft. They were actually converting on Oxfords, which weren't a very pleasant aircraft, but we used to fly with the trainee pilots at night time, so if they got lost we could get them a bearing on the wireless to get them back to, to Windrush. I was there for a couple of months and back to Brighton, which was the RAAF holding unit, and then I was posted to operational training at a place called Kinloss in Scotland, and er, just near Fin- which was the aeordrome, just near Findhorne Bay, I believe there's a permanent base there now, and from there we went to Bottesford for operational training, and converting from, from Wellingtons which we'd flown in at operational training, and er (pause) we then went to heavy conversion unit at Bottesford. Perhaps that's not what I said originally, but it was a heavy conversion unit where we converted onto Lancasters, and then we went to, we were there I guess for about a month, maybe a bit more, then over to 101 Squadron, Ludford Magna.
DG: When you arrived -, and what er, you were a wireless operator, what rank were you at that stage?
RA: I landed in England as a Sergeant, and I, after six months you were automatically promoted to Flight Sergeant, and after tweve months automatically promoted to Warrant Officer, unless you'd kicked a Squadron Commander in the shins, or something. (pause)
DG: And er, 101, and that was at Ludford Magna?
RA: That's correct.
DG: And what type of aircraft were you flying there?
RA: Lancasters
DG: Can you tell me just a little bit about your dialy life at the base? What, what did you do?
RA: Not a lot. I'm blowed if I know. I often think about that. (DG laughs) I don't think we did much at all. Unless the, the, the unit was shut down because there was going to be an operation on, and the mess was closed twelve hours before that, I believe it was twelve hours, I think we used to hang about the hut, or talk, or play cards. Occassionally, if we weren't wanted, we'd go into Louth, er, for a few drinks. But, I can't remember what we did normally, other than that.
DG: The rest of your crew, were they, er what nationalities were they?
RA: An English captain, English engineer, I had an Australian navigator, me wireless operator, a Canadian bomb aimer, and two Scottish gunners, mid upper and rear.
DG: I believe that Ludford Magna wasn't, the airfield, wasn't very well drained.
RA: I don't remember, the strip itself was bitumen, I know that, but off the- I think it was commonly called Mudford Magna. Mudford Magna, because it was pretty sloppy, I clearly remember that.
DG: What sort of problems did that cause?
RA: The same problems as slopping about in muddy circumstances normally.
DG: And I understand that there was a fog dispersal system that was initiated there, or trialed.
RA: Yeah. They were still testing it. After May the eighth when the war was finished in Europe, I recall that aircrew was called upon, I think more than one day, to do circuits and bumps and testing this FIDO thing, Fog Intesnsive Dispersal Of, um FIDO, and it was a system where there were two pipelines, one on each side of the runway, and at intervals, at least, the pipelines had oil in them, I presume, wouldn't have been petrol, would have been oil, and they were lit, and the idea was so that if there was a fog the heat would disperse the fog. But I remember that on a couple of foggy days we were given the task of trying this thing, or testing it, or anyway, it hasn't, it couldn't have been a great success because I don't remember ever hearing of it being used anywhere else.
DG: So how, there were lines along the side of the airfield.
RA: Two pipes along the strip.
DG: And, obviously outlets for the oil. How did, how was that lit?
RA: No idea. No idea, I was concerned with, you know, getting set up to do my part on the aircraft while somebody else did that. Some of the ground staff, no doubt, were handling that while we did what we had to do.
DG: If it was a day where you were going to fly a mission, presumably that night, what was that day like, what, what was your routine then?
RA: Well, I can't clearly remember then because, you know, I only did, according to the log book, which is long since list because I, we've moved, according to my log book I only officially did one operation.
DG: Ah, right.
RA: And, er although there was some discussion about that, they wouldn't let us count a couple which we did (pause) which the Flight Commander or Squadron Leader said, no, they didn't count, but anyway. So I have very little memory of what we did, what the day was like. I remember that we had to be at the briefing at a certain time, I remember that we had to pick up our parachutes, I remember being driven out to the aircraft, I remember that we would have been er, you know, I remember putting on my harness, the parachute harness, I can remember putting on my Mae West, and I can remember standing up when the officer came in to brief us, and lots of funny little things, but er, what I clearly remember though on coming back, that was the important, well perhaps before, the important part for me was that we got a little, a ration to take with us on the aircraft for when we were flying, so we had something to nibble, you know, something to eat, whether it was a sandwich, or also Mars bar, and of course I'd never seen a Mars bar, because we didn't have Mars bars in Australia pre-war, that I ever saw, and as a kid I knew a lot about lollies, and so the Mars bar became very important, and that was where I was introduced to them.
DG: Can you remember what the target was?
RA: Yeah, Rotterdam. We were dropping food at Rotterdam.
DG: Ah, right. At what, well what, what, do you remember the date? Or month, year, whatever?
RA: Yeah, it was May the seventh, nineteen forty five.
DG: Ah right. So yes, that would have been very near-
RA: I can clearly remember part of the briefing was that if you fired, er if you were fired on you're not to return the fire, the gunners were not to return the fire, because we were only at five hundred feet, or thereabout, five hundred seems to stick in my mind, which seems pretty low. But I clearly remember as we crossed the Dutch coast, I was standing in the astrodome and shortly after that, and I could see the German light arm placements along the top of a dyke. They were looking at us, and we were looking back at them, sort of thing, but we'd been instructed that we wouldn't be fired on, but in the event that we were the gunners were not to return fire, which er, you know, I didn't approve of much, and nor did the gunners, but nobody fired on us anyway.
DG: Oh that was just as well, it would have made things a bit difficult under those circumstances. There were some, some people who, who had bad nerves, did you ever, and they, they were, they might have said they couldn't, didn't want to fly a mission, or something, and they were accused of having a lack of moral fibre. Did you come across any of that?
RA: When we, when we were at operational training in Scotland we had initially an Irish bomb aimer, and suddenly he seemed to disappear and he was replaced by a Canadian, a Canadian bloke, and it was always a mystery to me because it all, all happened so quickly, and I have since reflected on it and thought well, maybe he did turn it in then because we were constantly asked, or told, that if we didn't want to go on, now was the time to stop. 'Cause later on, you know, would be no good. You'd be letting the other fellows down.
DG: Yes. Yes. Did you, did you? So you didn't have any real first hand knowledge of that?
RA: No.
DG: No. Did you hear about, hear any stories about -?
RA: Ah, we heard stories about it, yes.
DG: How were they treated?
RA: Oh, pretty badly, you know, they weren't shot, but, you know, they were, lost their rank, and were sort of drummed out of the, out of the service, well out of sight anyway. Yes it was well known that if you went LMF you were in big trouble. Yeah.
DG: So, you didn't er, your mission was (pause) pretty uneventful, nothing -
RA: Pretty uneventful except that we were dropping, amongst other things, bags of flour, which was very exciting, but no, we were pretty low, and as we, they, they weren't too sure that when the bomb aimer released flour as he would release the bombs, they didn't seem to be too sure it would release properly, and my job that day, I'd been given a sort of a toggle. I had to lie on the floor of the aircraft as we approached the field that we were dropping the stuff in, and if they thought, if it held up, I was to work this toggle somehow to make it release, and I remember lying on the floor and when the bags of flour hit the airstream the, the, the flour all, well you know what flour's like, it went everywhere and I was covered in flour from the top of my head to the tip of my toes.
DG: Presumably some of the bags got out alright.
RA: They all got out, but it was the rush of air, you know, flour goes everywhere, you can imagine dropping a bag a flour, it hitting a gale.
DG: They weren't in some sort of canisters or anything?
RA: No, just hessian.
DG: But-
RA: We were very low. We were very low, we were right down below the five hundred feet.
DG: Oh, right. Ok.
RA: We were down below the height of the spires and the buildings.
DG: Oh, I see. But still, you know, a bag of flour hitting the ground, even from that height- (unclear, talking over one another)
RA: But when it hit the flip, the slipstream, I can tell you, it went, (chuckles) didn't burst a bag but-
DG: Oh, I see, the bag, yeah, oh, right, because some gets through the hessian. Yes, of course, I see. It's not the (unclear) it's not airtight, I see. Did you drop anything else, or was it just-
RA: No. Well, there may have been, but it was the flour that got me.
DG: Did you see people out coming to-
RA: Oh the field, the edge of the field was stacked with people. Crowds, of people. So certainly saw people, yes. Apart from the Germans we'd seen, we saw.
DG: Were Germans still at their post?
RA: Yes, yes.
DG: They'd just been told to stop firing? They hadn't been-
RA: The armistice hadn't been settled, you see.
DG: Yes, so they hadn't actually been officially captured or under control of-
RA: No, they were debating, they were debating the terms, I suppose.
DG: And it was just a ceasefire.
RA: They were debating what was to happen and there was a ceasefire.
DG: Yes.
RA: Which was a good thing, I suppose, from my point of view.
DG: Oh yes, you'd have been, you'd have really been a sitting duck.
RA: Well, we probably wouldn't have been doing it, at that height, anyway.
DG: Yes, yes. So ah, did, did you, when you were, do, on that mi, on that flight, on that mission, did you know that, that would be the last one you'd fly?
RA: No, no. No.
DG: You didn't know?
RA: No, we got out of the aircraft when we got back in the afternoon, and the groundcrew said, 'the war's over'. It had by then been announced. The armistice was-
DG: You had flown some other missions? That weren't counted? What were they?
RA: Well, we don't know, we were told, we just flew down over France somewhere. I think they were diversions of some sort.
DG: Oh, I see.
RA: You know, making the Germans think there was going to be an attack there, or an attack here. But anyway, they didn't let us count those.
DG: And did anything happen on those?
RA: Ah, no, we saw other aircraft, other Lancasters, which at one stage I remember we were tri- we were having our first experience of a thing called Fishpond, which I was operating, which was a screen which, with wiping, there was sort of a wiper going round at all times. It was supposed to pick up any other aircraft, beneath you, of course, wouldn't do it above, and I remember operating that. It wasn't very efficient. I remember saying to the gunners, 'look I can see something that looks to be suspicious'. I've forgotten whether it was below us or off to one side. But they said, 'ah, yes, it's another Lancaster. We've been watching it for ten minutes', so, you know, I was pretty slow on the Fishpond (chuckles). Anyway.
DG: But of course in those days that sort of technology was all very new, and it wasn't terribly easy to operate, or accurate or, I don't suppose.
RA: No. I seemed to be seeing things all the time, you know (chuckles) I suppose being a bit nervous.
DG: So when, when you'd flown your last mission, erm, what happened to you after that?
RA: Erm, some weeks later we were, we officially came out, see we'd been testing FIDO, we'd, I think we'd ferried an aircraft up to Lossiemouth, er, for, we'd taken an aircraft up to Lossiemouth, and then we brought it back with a couple of other crews that had also taken a couple of aircraft up there. And the RAAF announced, we were told that Australian, all the Australian air force, or air crew, were to be grounded, and they were calling for volunteers to form an Australian squadron to go to Burma. And you could volunteer for that squadron, or you could wait and get the troop ship home, and then go North, because the Japanese war, the Pacific war was still on. So I though, no, I been away from home now for, you know, sort of, eighteen months, more or less, I thought well I'll go home first and then let them do what they want to do with me.
DG: One fellow told me that some people in Bomber Command had received white feathers from the people in Australia. Did you ever hear about that?
RA: No.
DG: No. When you, when did you come back to Australia?
RA: October nineteen forty five.
DG: And what, what happened to you then?
RA: I was sent, I was given leave, told to report after about two or three weeks to Sandgate, RAAF Sandgate holding unit, and I was discharged. December nineteen forty five.
DG: And what did you do then? What did you do for work?
RA: I went back to work.
DG: Right.
RA: We were offered a rehab course, I took a rehab course, in accounting, so, and that was by correspondence so that took me, that was forty five, that took me another five years to complete that, night time, part time, an so on.
DG: Right. And where did you meet your wife?
RA: At work.
DG: Ah, right. What, what, so you, you an accountant or?
RA:Well, I was doing my accountancy, but I was working for a company that sold machines that did accounting, you know, they were accounting machines. Machinery that could handle ledgers, and most accounting is a ledger, so I was working for them, and she was working for them, and there we are (chuckles).
DG: And do you keep in touch with any people from Bomber Command?
RA: They're all gone, they're all gone, as far as I can see. The only had one, the only one in Australia was the navigator, he did, I probably shouln't mention his name, he did law, he'd been a policeman, he did law, and I picked up the paper one day, The Australian, and here his name was, he'd, he'd tickled the trust fund, I believe, so I think he finished in gaol.
DG: Oh dear. How did you, how were you treated after the war? As being with Bomber Command
RA: Alright. No problems.
DG: Yeah, yeah, right. Well thank you very much. That's much appreciated.
RA: Oh, pretty easy, pretty painless.
DG: Thank you.
RA: Not very interesting.
DG: Always interesting. Finish.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AAllenRM160809
Title
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Interview with Richard Murray Allen
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:28:57 audio recording
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Pending review
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Donald Gould
Date
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2016-08-09
Description
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Richard Murray Allen was born in Queensland, Australia. He joined the Air Training Corps and later volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force on his eighteenth birthday. He trained as a wireless operator in Australia, before being posted to England, where after further training, he flew one operation with 101 Squadron from RAF Ludford Magna. He went home to Australia in October 1945, before being discharged in the December that year.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Great Britain
Netherlands
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
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1945-04
1945-05
Contributor
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Peter Adams
101 Squadron
aircrew
FIDO
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Oxford
promotion
RAF Bottesford
RAF Kinloss
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Windrush
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/202/3337/PBartonER1701.2.jpg
071666ab6479ce7a37ce4cb7127bc494
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/202/3337/ABartonER170121.2.mp3
3cddedabe14a45c9452ae83e436c2bba
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Barton, Eric Reginald
Eric Reginald Barton
Flying Officer Eric Reginald Barton DFC LdH
Eric Barton DFC
Eric Barton
Eric R Barton
E R Barton
Description
An account of the resource
One interview with Eric Reginald Barton DFC (423589 Royal Australian Air Force).
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-01-21
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Barton, ER
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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BJ: Ok. It’s Barry Jackson continuing the interview with Eric Barton. Eric, we spoke before about your training and, and where you came from and all that sort of stuff. When you were flying different types of aircraft were there the good, the bad, what was the good things about the good aeroplanes and what was the bad things and was there anything that you thought was, that you remember about the different types of aeroplanes?
EB: Yes Barry. Well first up of course was the Tiger Moth and mastering the art of flying and I can recall nearly getting scrubbed as a pilot because I used to land about twenty feet up high and the CFI said where do you look and I said straight ahead and he said that’s wrong look out to the side you’ll see exactly where you are at forty-five degrees. And I did a first one it was a greaser, a three pointer and he said OK you’re off, away you go. And I remember that all throughout my flying years that no matter where, what sort of aircraft, if you looked out to the side you’d see exactly where you were and I was able to do, what we call then, three pointers. Just as a side comes to my mind, we had a thing with the crew my rear gunner used to come up on the intercom after we’d like come back from a raid and he’d say we’d land back at base and he’d say excuse me skipper but tell me have we landed and I [laughs]
BJ: Showing off now [laughs]
EB: That got to be a real line shoot you know. So —
BJ: Yes. Yes.
EB: Never, never forgotten that.
BJ: And what about —
EB: We, going from the little Tiger to a war plane type situation like with the Anson was the next one. Which was a twin engine, Canadian Ansons. Finally, when we went to Canada in Macleod and Alberto which was we went through winter and summer but the early twin engines, that our first twin engine aircraft the old Ansons was a wind up under carriage so it was about, I don’t know about sixty or seventy winds of the crank handle to wind the wheels up and sixty or seventy to put them down. And, of course, when you are doing circuits and bumps you were supposed to take off, flying the wheels up do your circuit and wind your wheels down to land. Well, being Aussies we didn’t take too kindly to all that bull, bull dust so we would give her a couple of turns and the wheels were still there. Half way through our training they, they replaced those aircrafts with the, the Canadian built Ansons which I see had Jacobs L6 motors and they were hydraulic and that was, they were then constant speed propellers, the early ones were fixed speed which entails a different way of flying. Constant prop and hydraulic landing so that was our, our thing to a, a good war type aeroplane. From Ansons we went to Oxfords and then we did our final training as far as twins are concerns then a little bit more into Wellingtons. Wellington was of course and ex, early bomber in the early RAF days that was a very good bomber and very, very good aircraft to fly. A beautiful aircraft to fly. From there we went, we went, we went to, to OTU. That’s where we crewed up. You’ve probably have heard stories about how you crewed up. Very briefly you were — pilot would be told OK you go and select your crew and go and get yourself a cup of coffee or something I don’t think it was a lager or beer. Go to this big hanger and there was milling around a lot of chaps, find yourself a navigator a wireless operator, bomb aimers and so on and so forth. The first crewing up situation was the pilot, would be select your navigator, your wireless operator and later on, further you would select your bomb aimer and your air gunners. The air gunners were the, were the last to be selected. At, at the point of first selection you were put in with New Zealanders, Aussies, Canadians, South, South Africans, all the, the British Empire chaps. They were the ones that were that supplied the pilot, navigator, wireless op, bomb aimer, if you like, the highly technical like people. The gunners were all British, RAF they were. There was no gunners from the Empire outside. So [clears throat] I was fortunate, I think, to get together a bunch of fellows that all filled in together. The thing that comes to my mind just now I’m thinking, when you first made your selection as a pilot you started to be accepting some responsibly. Up until that time I was just a bit of a wild boy I, I was living for myself doing whatever the hell I wanted to do and it was lovely flying airplanes and so on and so forth. When I got to get a crew I thought, I remember thinking to myself, my god I’m going to be responsible for these fellows’ lives for the next what, however long we live.
BJ: And how old were you then?
EB: I was then just turning nineteen
BJ: Right.
EB: And I’d never accepted any responsibility for anything.
BJ: Yes.
EB: And it was when. I can still remember the first time I sat in a Lancaster ready to go I thought this is it, this is where the whole thing starts from now.
BJ: Big responsibility?
EB: Yes. There by, their lives are in my hands.
BJ: Yes. Can I ask you —
EB: Banff in Scotland. There were two Banff I was at actually one was Banff, Calgary, Alberto which was up in the Rockies and the other Banff was in Scotland which was the Northern most part of —
BJ: Was probably just as cold [laughs]
EB: Lands End, Lands End to John O’Groats. But anyway, we were at Banff in Scotland and we were doing a night flying exercise at the end of my training there. We did start to do a cross countries we came back in with I think two, two crew, a navigator and myself. I can’t remember if it was more. Anyway, we came in and we put the thing down a perfect three pointer on the runway but the Oxford had a, sort of a nose, it’s three pointer was the wheel in the front and two wheels under the wing so it was a tricycle sort of under carriage. We landed and the front tyre blew out and with the result that it ended up on its nose and I can remember sitting, the Oxford has a plexiglass nose you can look through it from the pilot seat. You look between your legs and down through the instrument panel you see the runway and I can remember flying and hearing next to you and I’m on the runway and I can see sparks and I thought what a pretty sight.
BJ: [laughs]
EB: Here’s, here’s two wheels and I’m sliding along on the thing on the runway until it finally came to a halt. Fortunately, it didn’t go off to one side and stick it’s nose in and turn ourselves upside down but we’re still strapped in and I thought now, what do I do now. How the hell do I get out of this jolly thing? First time I’d had a really good prang in an aircraft and I thought perhaps I better get out of this quick smart as there’s bloody petrol and all that which I did. And later on, I got castigated from my mates who were sent flying around and around and around in circles until they got Barton off the end of the bloody runway to make room. Cause there was only one runway [laughs]. So that was that. Now then we went to Stirlings and throughout [phone ringing] now you know you are going to ops and how good a pilot I am I’m still a pilot and flying and [long pause]. The Stirling was a very difficult thing to taxi and take off. It had breaks and a, and the, the steering wheel had clamps which is how you steered it. Taxi wise it was absolutely terrible. Very difficult but once you got it up in the air it was, it was – no we were talking about the Stirling actually and its way of taxiing but once you got it up in the air it was a beautiful aircraft
BJ: Yep.
EB: But we didn’t do too much, too many hours in the Wellington but that was my first four engine aircraft and I can see in my log book that we only did about a month in training of a four engine then we went straight onto Lancs because they needed pilots very quick smart.
BJ: Yes.
EB: So, we didn’t get too much training as far as going from twin engines to four engines. The, the Stirling had huge [unclear] legs and you could drop, drop it in from a great height so it didn’t matter very much.
BJ: Yes.
EB: But going from twins to four engines wasn’t to my mind, wasn’t as difficult as I thought it might be. You had to have a flight engineer. Be aware that the Aussie RAF and I think most of the RAF we didn’t have second pilots. We had a pilot and we had a flight engineer. The engineer was responsible for checking your mechanics of, of the thing, how much fuel you got and motors were ticking over alright, etcetera, etcetera. So [pause] going from twins to four engines taxiing wise you, you used your two outer motors because that was, so to enable it to be manoeuvred easily rather than the inner motors. So, you’d land with four engines, get off the runway with four engines and shut, not shut down but idle the inners and use the outers for steering and so forth. Very quick. The important thing was you had to manoeuvre and get yourself off the runway very quickly because you had mates coming in behind you. Some needed urgently to land, pretty much I, I was never in a bind or a problem in landing. Two or three times I had to land on three motors, couple of times I ended up with two motors which is something that is very, very difficult to do. Talking about three motors, the [laughs] I’m trying to remember which motor was the worst. If you lost an inner it wasn’t too bad, losing an outer was bad enough. I’m sorry but I forget which ones had the hydraulics and which ones didn’t. The inners had hydraulics to them I think, some of the outers had [pause] dynamos charging, charging your batteries, charging things. The, an occasion I can recall we lost one motor we were hit by flak on one motor and it burst into flames and I said to the flight engineer, a fellow of the, the port outer and it’s on fire, further put it outer and pull the tip. Which is pull the fire extinguisher. In his panic, and we were over, we were under, under attack from various sources, in his panic he fell at the port inner but when I told him to pull the tip on the port inner, the fire extinguisher, he pulled the wrong one, so the fire extinguisher went off on the starboard inner, so with the result that we ended up with two motors instead of three. Fortunately, they were on either side.
BJ: Yes.
EB: Rather than two on one side. We were able to fly, just to maintain height and things with two motors. From memory I think we were pretty close to the target, but I can’t remember where the target was but if I look in here I can find where the target was, but we were able to get to the target on two motors and get rid of the bombs and then gradually come home. I don’t whether we’ve touched on one of the raids I did on Skagerrak in Norway. Did we do that? Did we touch on that one?
BJ: No.
EB: When you, when you done your briefing and all the rest of it and all the crews are all clued up and ready to go. We probably, mostly we did night time trips and usually we’d do our briefing early, sometimes it was put back a little bit so we’d end up at the pub and we’d have quite a, I reckon I used to fly better when I had a few beers in, pretty damned happy than when I didn’t. Traditional thing is as you know is to piddle on the tyre, as you kick the tyre and piddle on that’s for luck. Everybody climbs on board so by enlarge you, you [unclear] on board personally and a fair amount of liquid inside [laughs]. A pilot cannot, he has a parachute which he sits on, he can’t easily leave the stick but operations, the reason is the pilot, you kept, you did, the Lancaster does have an automatic pilot but the automatic pilot is hydraulic so any pilot worth his salt never ever left it or engaged the automatic pilot because it was a) too hard to get rid of the jolly thing if you wanted to cancel it out and b) by the time you sorted it out if somebody was attacking you and had a good go at you before so you always flew with your hands on and you [phone ringing] always sat. So, on one occasion I can recall having a need to do a whizzer in fifteen, sixteen thousand feet and icy conditions and I had an ability that I adopted through my pilots window just to slide it back a bit. They were sliding windows, we call them windows and I used to be able to in those days being much younger, quite easy to get the proverbial, necessary things organised and I’d let the whiz go just, must beside the venturi and out, the liquid would be sucked out quite easily.
BJ: [laughs]
EB: So, we’re flying along in icy conditions in a very nice clear lovely night and the mid upper gunner came up and he said skipper, skipper please get down quickly, get down we’re icing up, we’re icing up and I looked out my, my cockpit, my window and I said what’s wrong Jordy you’re crazy man, there’s nothing wrong it’s beautiful up here. Oh, my cockpit’s all covered in ice, I’m iced, I’m iced up I said oh my god I’m sorry mate I just let, let go. He said I’m all covered in, in brown ice, oh my god. Oh, I said I had to let it go. Oh, you dirty rotten nasty skipper, you’ve [laughs]. That was that sort of a situation
BJ: [laughing]
EB: As I say a couple of times we lost loaders we got shot at a few times. The three main things. The three main areas of, shall we say, activity that you were very aware of. One was searchlights. We were routed to go zig zag routes towards the target never in a straight line for the reason that a) the, the in the wisdom the bosses had planned out that the track to be taken to dodge searchlight, known searchlight stations, known pockets of searchlights, anti-aircraft guns, fighter aerodromes and so forth. So, you had to zig zag right a sort of a zig zag situation and, and [pause]. So, yes, the three main things were searchlights. Now there’s two types of searchlights, the blue searchlight and the normal white searchlight. You got caught with a searchlight it’d shine in your eyes and most uncomfortable you couldn’t see instruments and so on and so forth so, you’d immediately do a zig zag or take evasive action to get out of the, the white of the searchlight. Now if you were caught with a blue searchlight however, that’s the master searchlight and if you got caught with that, which is, they are all electronically controlled and he fixed onto you it was very, very difficult to get away from him but more importantly he controlled probably eight to ten other searchlights so the key searchlight the blue one. So, if ever you got caught in a blue one you could start counting where, where you might be or where you might not be. To get a searchlight whether blue or white, evasive action could be called for importantly and a Lanc had a, a very nice aircraft to fly in in all respects and it was easy to, to do evasive action. I’m trying to think of evasive action you used to just about every facet of your, your hands, your ability, your feet, your rudders, ailerons, throttles, pull the throttles up, stall the aircraft pretty near. Do everything but stick it on its back. Some people got stuck on their back and that was very difficult with a loaded aircraft. I can recall a guy in one, one of our aircraft, XYG, it had, had a bad back door a crook lock on the back door and they were trying to fix it but eventually they did but on this occasion they didn’t and so I said to wireless op, I said Johnny, go down and shut the jolly back door and so he went down to shut the back door and as soon as he did we got caught in the searchlight and I remember taking evasive action [clears throat] and half way through that there was an almighty scream on the intercom and Johnny said what the bloody hell are you doing I’m, I;, shutting the back door and next minute half I’m out of the aircraft and the next minute I’m back in again oh Jesus Johnny I’m sorry mate I forgot you were down there, so that felt, was not accepted very well either but anyway. So, the searchlights are the other thing, fighters were always around. I had pretty good gunners we used to do a lot of training, air gunnery training though at the attack from above or behind and often you, you knew when you were going to get attacked, my other mates would let you know they would see you in a, in a stream. You would sometimes still see your mates from one side or the other so we kept, kept lookout for each other but the worst fighter, and I’ll talk about a raid we did which was [pause] in a moment, but the worst fighters was called the Schlarge[?] fighter which is a Messerschmitt, or [unclear] or one of those twin engine things with a, a vertical firing cannon, gun. So, he would fly under your belly and pull his trigger firing straight upwards and it was very, very difficult to get out of those they were responsible for many, many losses of our mates. If you didn’t know you had a fighter under your belly you were pretty near had it.
BJ: You were relying on your crew to spot it weren’t you?
EB: Yes, and more importantly of course the, they gunners were the ones and the bomb aimer when the bomb aimer is also the front gunner and he was also a gunner to look down.
BJ: Yes.
EB: So, he was pretty near the only one that would, could spot a fighter under your belly. Of course, the mid upper obviously can’t and the rear gunner can’t they were looking out for aircraft attacking from either side anyway.
BJ: Yeah, yeah.
EB: Shall we, shall we talk about, one raid which was, was quite important and I was chosen, myself and two other aircraft to lay mines in the Skagerrak in Norway in the Norwegian Fjords. A special very heavy parachute mines to trap the, the two German battleships, the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau and also the Emden later but the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were in dock, they were in, they were our target. The idea was they’d send three of us to Skagerrak in Norway which are in the Fjords where these battleships, German battleships would hide and rest at night. They would rest rather. They would come out of the Fjords into the Atlantic and pounce on the, on the convoys coming from the States full of aircraft and, and supplies and these two battleships would wreak havoc very badly to the, the [pause] supply ships, shall we call them. So, we were sent to Lossiemouth north of Scotland. My aircraft was a newly issued, I’d bent the other one [laughs] and they gave us another new one and she had beautiful motors. She had a, a, the Lancaster Merlins Mark 12, Mark 14’s.
BJ: Wow.
EB: Packard Merlins not Rolls Royce. No sorry Rolls Royce Merlins the previous one was a Packard the American Merlin but the Rolls Royce Merlin was a much better Lancaster. There was three of us we were recruited to go across to the Skagerrak and lay two mines. We had very good navigators who were trained to be Pathfinder navigators. We did some raids but not many we weren’t proper Pathfinders we were attached to go on some of their raids. So, our navigator was pretty good, and we were to fly at two hundred feet from Lossiemouth across the North Sea to the Skagerrak, lay our mines exactly latitude and longitude where they said they were because it had to be exactly, because the British Navy had to know exactly where the mines were.
BJ: Um.
EB: So here we go, night time, they fitted us with lay lights, twin lights similar to the technology of the Dambusters. Two hundred feet, black, pitch black, no lights no nothing starring down your, your front nose because your altimeter was no good to fly at two hundred, two hundred and fifty feet across. Four and a half hours, I think it was about an eight-hour trip there and back, about four hours across the North Sea. It wasn’t too bad going across but later on, I’ll come back to it, it started to get a bit blowy and bumpy but we got to the coast, up, up to three thousand, four thousand feet over the, the mountains, the ridge, down to about three thousand, lay your mines exactly where they were and get rid of them and climb up, out and, and off ideally straight back home at full pelt. But we did lay the mines and all the rest of it, however what we didn’t know was that it was near a German fighter base just over the other hill. We got hit with one fighter, it got one of our motors just as we got to the top of the ridge so it wasn’t too bad we were able to come down on the three. The Lanc can climb on three.
BJ: Right.
EB: Which we, we basically did pretty much but anyway we got down onto the thing so I thought oh well, ok. Now I was planning on going back home at about five or six thousand feet, you know just literally a quick thing back home. But I thought now hang on this thing is a Schräge fighter which is the first time I’d been attacked by a Schräge fighter well if that bugger is going to have another go at us we better get down on the Sea again so it can’t get under our belly, so we did. Well that was alright until we got about half way across, not far, not too far away from home, and the other motor packed up because the, the wind had blown up and the water had, had we’d got hit by the spurt or something and had buggered up the carburettor. So, we ended up with two motors. And so, I said to the fellas, well we’ve only got two I don’t know whether, we can, we got, you got two or three chances what should we do. We could throw out, we could ditch it but not too good at ditching a Lanc or an aircraft. We could be successful or we could not. We could, it’s too low to jump out with a parachute, so that’s, that’s out. The only other thing is I’ll try to make and go for base should you join me I’ll take the aircraft back, yes, they say, they all said yes, yes, yes. So, we threw, throw everything out and anyway cut a long story we did and we got back home quite safely on two motors. We landed at the big drome, I think it was called Manston or something, where you can just put any sort of an aircraft down and it’ll, it’ll got plenty of room to land. So that was showing you what fighters can do and what a good Lanc can do.
BJ: Yeah. OK Eric, one last question. How do you think Bomber Command and the sacrifices of the men who served in it should be remembered by future generations?
EB: Um, Barry that’s a very good, a very good question and I can just answer that in a, in a couple of little fashions. One we know today and some of the, our, our people, the Vets, who are, we’re still alive we feel very, very bad, very disappointed that the British Government that the British didn’t remember Bomber Command. You’ll know from your history that there was never a Bomber Command medal struck whereas there were for other services. After the war because of our, our ability to wage a very good war, we wiped out a lot of targets and that was necessary. I didn’t touch too much on the Dresden raid, but we did the Dresden raid and I saw the, that devastation so there is, hasn’t been a proper memorial until now. I think it is very, very important that a, a, a solid memorial is, is struck and, and erected, shall we say, a, a physical thing that children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and generations can look to and say well what, I, I understand my grandfather, my heritage goes to a man who served in Bomber Command and he achieved certain things and he and he’s, a lot of his mates gave their lives for safety of a country that we now have. If it wasn’t for the sacrifices that, that our people made we wouldn’t have the country we’ve got. Now we talk about Bomber Command. Bomber Command waged a war which was very successful. We carried out our duties, our duties very successfully. Its been written up in history how effective it was. I’m not forgetting of course there are a lot of fellows in the Navy and lots of fellows in the Army who did likewise sacrifices, but for the fifty-five thousand people in Bomber Command that didn’t come back, their contribution far exceeds the blood, sweat and tears, shall we say. So, they gave to wage the war and so I, I think it’s terribly important that we have a physical memorial and that once a year is recognised and there’s a dedication carried out in, in any, every little part of Australia in particular and other countries that I think the Australians we do it very well compared to a lot of other countries. So, I think that’s terribly important too.
BJ: Well done.
EB: Is that sufficient?
BJ: Yeah, no that’s good.
Dublin Core
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ABartonER170121
Title
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Interview with Eric Reginald Barton
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
Format
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00:38:52 audio recording
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Pending review
Creator
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Barry Jackson
Date
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2017-01-21
Description
An account of the resource
Flying Officer Eric Barton flew operations with Bomber Command. Eric Barton talks about the various aircraft he flew in, and recalls an incident at Banff in Scotland where following a night exercise his tyre blew out on landing. He gives an account of an operation to at Skagerrak in Norway where they were sent from Lossiemouth to drop mines on the German battleships; Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the return journey where they ended up flying back on two engines. He talks about the losses of Bomber Command and how he feels they should be remembered.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
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Australia
Canada
Great Britain
Norway
Atlantic Ocean--Skagerrak
Scotland--Moray
Contributor
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Tracy Johnson
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
crewing up
Gneisenau
Lancaster
memorial
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
perception of bombing war
pilot
RAF Lossiemouth
sanitation
Scharnhorst
Stirling
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/235/3378/PConacherG1701.1.jpg
1abb9d4268fb6cb9872a86d3d0d927bc
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/235/3378/AConacherG170411.2.mp3
e612302f57e8a4a63c3d121033230c2c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Conacher, Geoff
Geoffrey Conacher
Geoff Conacher
G Conacher
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Geoff Conacher (419799 Royal Australian Air Force) and a course photograph. He flew operations as a pilot with 622 Squadron.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Geoff Conacher and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-04-11
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Conacher, G
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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DM: Ok. We’re off. So the microphone is just up there.
GC: Right.
DM: So, I don’t know exactly how you want to do this.
GC: No. I don’t know what, what you want really.
DM: I just want a story from where to go. So starting on maybe why you joined up and when you joined up and so the reasoning behind it. And then what happened to you.
GC: Oh, I see. I see.
DM: Maybe that’s a good start.
GC: Yeah. Well I could talk for a while on that I guess. Well, I joined up mainly because — well the war was on and if you didn’t join up the army called you up and that was it. So I had a [pause] I always wanted to join the air force. I thought I’d join the air force. I knew that eighteen was coming up and I’d be called up so and I told my mother and father that, ‘If you don’t sign these papers I’ll finish up in the army.’ But they wouldn’t sign the papers. They didn’t want me to go overseas so they didn’t want me to fly. So, I did finish up in the army for about, oh it must have been about eight months I think before I could get out and get into the air force which I went in to in November 1942. Went down to Somers where the ITS was. Number 1, I think it was. Number 1 ITS. And did the three months course down there and was fortunate enough to be categorised as suitable for pilot training. And then I went to Western Junction in Tasmania and learned to fly Tiger Moths there.
DM: Ok.
GC: I was just, I was just turned nineteen then ‘cause I was in the army for most of my eighteenth year. Yeah, and so that all sort of went ok. Went well and I managed a solo and then the required seven hours I think it was. Or seven and a half hours tuition. And then when we graduated from SFTS as they called it — no. Not SFTS. EFTS. Elementary Flying Training School I was posted to Point Cook here in Victoria. Where it was number 1 SFTS and we flew multi engine, two-engined Oxfords down there and learned to fly those and graduated in July, I think it was, of 1943. And was fortunate enough to be posted to embarkation depot which meant you were going overseas and we went to [pause] went to England and went across. Went across to America actually by ship. American ship. USS Mount Vernon I think it was. And that took about two or three weeks. And then we went by train across to the east coast of America in, to Massachusetts. A place called Camp Myles Standish. Unfortunately on the train journey across I contracted scarlet fever and when I lobbed there I was put straight into hospital. I was the first or second of what was an epidemic that went right through the, through the camp and which upset everybody who was looking forward to going on leave to New York which didn’t, didn’t happen for most of them. But for those that did get scarlet fever we served our three weeks in hospital. Then we came out and went on leave to New York so —
DM: Right.
GC: It worked all right for us. We were, we were the main cause of other people missing out. But anyway, then we went by, by ship across the Atlantic on the Aquitania. USS Aquitania. No. Not USS — SS Aquitania and landed at Greenock in Scotland. And from there we travelled down to Brighton on the south coast where we were domiciled. All Australians when they arrived, initially they were, they were going to Bournemouth but then they changed it. Due to some enemy action they changed it to Brighton and so we all went to Brighton and stayed in either the Grand or the Metropole Hotel.
DM: Very flash hotels.
GC: Which were lovely hotels.
DM: Nice.
GC: Right on the, right on the waterfront. And we were there for oh [pause] see the trouble was when you went to England the weather got crook. At that time in the year — November, December, January. And of course all the training starts to bank up because they can’t fly. But anyway we eventually got back in to the air. It was about three months afterwards though since we arrived. After we arrived. And we did our training there which was mainly on [pause] we went on Oxfords again and did a course there. And then we went to OTU which was Operational Training Unit on to, on to Wellington bombers. And did our training there. It was whilst I was there my navigator who — we selected our own crews. They put you in, in a big hangar with umpteen aircrew and said, ‘Well now find yourselves a crew.’ So that went on and anyway it turns out that the little navigator that I got was English. They were all Englishmen. He, he obviously well didn’t make the grade. I didn’t have anything to do with it but the leaders, the navigation leader said, ‘He’s just not up to scratch so we’re going to remove him. So they took him away and I had to wait about six weeks before I got another navigator. And that put me all back right through the [pause] all the fellas I’d trained with, they all went ahead.
DM: Right.
GC: And so it was upsetting at the time. But anyway, to offset that I managed to meet a girl who made some sort of an impression on me and I must have done the same to her because we married within six months.
DM: Crikey. Yeah.
GC: And in ’44 that was. Late ’44. And so when I did get training again, when I did get a new navigator we got through there went on to our next training school which was over in Yorkshire. Which was, they called it a Heavy Conversion Unit. We went on to Halifaxes. Learned to fly Halifaxes. They were four-engined aircraft and from there we were posted to a squadron. Or they did another little course in between called Lancaster Finishing School but that was only about ten hours of flying and then I went to the squadron and it wasn’t until January 1945 that I got to the squadron whereas most of the fellows that I trained with they were, they were operational in November.
DM: Ok.
GC: But because of my holdup — but anyway that’s beside the point I suppose. But so I got, I was operational. I had a bit of bad luck on my first trip which — it was the custom to do what they used to call a second dickie. When a new pilot went [pause] and somehow or other I didn’t do one. I just went straight on to operations and had a bit of bad luck. Not through enemy action but just through mechanical problems and the aircraft finished up catching fire and we had to bale out.
DM: Crikey.
GC: So that was [pause] that caused a bit of an upheaval of course and we got back to the squadron about. We were posted missing but that was only because we didn’t get back in time. And we got back about two or three days later and flew the same. We baled out in liberated France.
DM: Ok.
GC: So we flew back to, we knew we were across the border and then we got out there so that was alright.
DM: So what sort of aircraft was that?
GC: Lancasters.
DM: Lancaster. Right.
GC: Yes. So that was a Lancaster squadron. 622 Squadron. And so then I just kept on. Well that was [unclear] they sent us on survivors leave which was the general practice. And that was a few days leave and we came back and we went operational again of course. I finished up doing another — I think I did fourteen. Fourteen or fifteen trips. And war finished for which we were all truly thankful.
DM: Very happy.
GC: Yeah. And so and then of course we, when the war finished we flew for a few days we were flying across to Europe and flying back POWs from, from France. The Americans were flying them out to France and then we were flying them from a place called Juvincourt in France back to aerodromes in Kent mainly where we unloaded them. And we did, I did about eight of those I think. Which was, you know was very rewarding.
DM: It would be. Those guys.
GC: To see those guys who had been POWs for up to five years. Some of the English army fellas had. And they just couldn’t believe it, you know. I don’t think they were all that impressed with all these young looking kids that were flying them [laughs] that were flying them over there. Because we were all about, you know, twenty one.
DM: That’s right.
GC: Twenty two. That sort of age. But they — to see the smiles on their faces when they got to England was just incredible yeah.
DM: [unclear]
GC: Yeah. And then, you know, we went on leave of course. That was one long leave for months until we got ships to bring us home. I came home. I think the war finished in May and we, we all left for Australia in the October I think. We got back in November.
DM: Quite a long time.
GC: Yeah. We got back in November. But of course those of us that were married it didn’t matter whether we were, but anyway the wives were not allowed to travel with you. We had to leave them behind and it was six months after that before they came out.
DM: Right. They came separately. Yeah.
GC: And so then when that happened of course we were getting back to Civvy Street. Back to living life as whichever way we found it. Yeah.
DM: To normality.
GC: Yeah.
DM: So what the base that you flew from?
GC: Mildenhall.
DM: Mildenhall. Whereabouts is that?
GC: Mildenhall’s near Cambridge. Newmarket. Closer to Newmarket. Yeah. Suffolk.
DM: There’s a flat bit there of course.
GC: Yes. It’s all very flat. Yeah. Yeah. I think they, what do they call it? The Fens, don’t they?
DM: Yeah, I think so.
GC: Yeah.
DM: So was that a proper RAF base? Or was it —
GC: Yeah.
DM: It was.
GC: It was a permanent RAF base.
DM: Yeah.
GC: It was built it was quite interesting really. It was built in about 1935 and was, and was opened by the [pause] the, well it was Goering anyway that opened it. And he was, he was chief of the German air force.
DM: Oh right.
GC: Luftwaffe. So and —
DM: That’s a claim to fame.
GC: Yes. Yes. And it was also the start of the Melbourne Centenary Air Race which was a race from England to Australia in 1934 or ’35 to celebrate the [pause] the — Melbourne was a hundred years old so it was the hundredth anniversary of Melbourne.
DM: Right.
GC: They flew from London to Australia. The race was won by a couple of Englishmen. Black and Scott. And they flew in a — it was like an early [pause] early Mosquito type of aircraft. A Comet.
DM: Oh yes. I know the Comet.
GC: Yeah. The Comet. And I think it was about two days and twenty hours it took them to and they won the race.
DM: Right.
GC: Of course a bit slow compared to what they do now.
DM: So there would have been a fair few squadrons at Mildenhall together would there not?
GC: Only two.
DM: Only two.
GC: Only two at Mildenhall. There was 15 Squadron and 622 Squadron.
DM: So you never flew the Stirling because that was what they originally had.
GC: No. I didn’t fly the Stirling. Yeah. That’s right. They did at Mildenhall.
DM: Yeah.
GC: They were, they did have Stirlings and then they converted to Lancasters I think in about ‘43 I think it was.
DM: Ok.
GC: They all, they all converted from Stirlings. So they all had —
DM: Yeah. They gave them away.
GC: They flew throughout the war but Stirlings didn’t have, they had a bit of a height problem. They couldn’t get up. Beautiful aircraft. People who flew them said they were just a lovely aircraft to fly. But I can’t imagine it being better than a Lancaster.
DM: No. Certainly the Lancaster has the reputation as the best. So when you found a crew what sort of a process was it that you — I mean how did you get on? How did you connect with people?
GC: Well we were — course you stood around with other pilots, we were. Because they were pilots and, ‘Who are we going to get? Do you know anybody?’ ‘No I don’t know anybody.’ So you’re just sort of standing there and looking around didnt quite knowing how to go about it.
DM: Like a dance almost.
GC: Yeah. And then these, these couple of young blokes came up to me and they said, ‘Have you got a crew skip?’ So I said, ‘No. I haven’t got a crew. I haven’t got anybody.’ They said, ‘Well we’re a couple of gunners. We’d come with you,’ you know. Or, ‘We’ll go with you.’ And I said, ‘ Oh well we’ll see about that,’ but we’ll, you know. I met them and so and then they said, ‘Well we know a bloke who’s a navigator,’ or a bloke who’s a bomb aimer. I forget which. Anyway they rustled around and found these fellows and brought them up and we finished up getting, getting a crew and apart from the navigator that I said we lost, unfortunately the wireless operator when we got to a squadron or just before we got to the squadron actually and we were using oxygen, oxygen masks, he had a problem with a rash. He used to get a rash all around his mouth.
DM: Oh so he was allergic to the rubber.
GC: Allergic to it.
DM: Right. Yeah.
GC: So they, you know they had to scrub him which was very sad. He was an officer too. A young officer. He’d been commissioned of course and so he had to go but anyway we got another one and away we went. Yeah.
DM: Ok. So I guess the training you did together was fairly limited then, so you’d done virtually all your training as individuals and then you gather at the end.
GC: Well, yes you do. You, you, we formed up as a crew in [pause] I think it would have been May. May I think it would have been in 1943 and we flew together in training until the January before we went to a squadron?
DM: Right. Ok.
GC: Yeah. So, and so and you probably did a fair bit of flying in those.
DM: So a lot of training flights.
GC: A lot of training flights. Yeah.
DM: So by the time you got on operations you knew each other pretty well.
GC: Oh yeah. Yes. We did. Yeah. And I’ve got, there’s only one of them left. The flight engineer who came to us. Flight engineers joined the crew only when you got into four-engined aircraft. And he was only a young bloke and he’s still alive. He’s —
DM: Ok.
GC: He’s ninety, ninety one I think he must be. Yeah. Ninety one. Lives in Manchester and we still are in contact with one another.
DM: Ok. So you kept in contact with all of them over that.
GC: Well I tried to. Yes. I tried to. I went across. We went back to England in 1956. We had a couple of children then and my wife’s parents hadn’t seen them of course. So we took them back to England and we were going to stay for, oh you know, a while. Twelve months or a couple of years or whatever. It didn’t work out anyway. My English wife — all she wanted to do was get back to Australia.
DM: [laughs] right.
GC: As quick as she could. And that particular year, in the December I think it was or the November, the Suez Crisis came up and she couldn’t get out of there quick enough because she thought there’d be another war.
DM: Yes. That’s right.
GC: So anyway —
DM: So have you don’t any flying since those days?
GC: No.
DM: No.
GC: No. I didn’t do any flying. I just went back. I worked in the bank. In a savings bank in Victoria before the war or early in the war. When I turned sixteen I suppose it was. Yeah. And I went back to the bank. Stayed there for four or five years and so and then I resigned. I thought, you know, I can do better than this. I can make more money doing something else.
DM: Right.
GC: But I fiddled around and went into retail. General stores in the country. [unclear] Port Welshpool down here. Victoria. But I didn’t, didn’t make any fortunes.
DM: Right.
GC: I went to work for a living and sold, sold biscuits with Arnotts Biscuit Company for about nine years. And then I switched over to wine. And we sold wine in Victoria for Seppelts.
DM: Ok. And is that why you live in Wine View Street or is [laughs] that accidental?
GC: No. It’s just sheer coincidence. Yeah.
DM: Right.
GC: And I’m still very interested in wine.
DM: Right. Ok. So when you joined the air force and you said you would prefer that to the army. Was that the principal reason? That you just didn’t want to be in the army or was there something else that attracted you to the air force?
GC: Well it wasn’t, I wasn’t sort of, you know, very keen to be a flyer.
DM: Right.
GC: It wasn’t that. It was just that I thought that, I thought the army was a pretty uncouth sort of outfit.
DM: You’re quite correct, I think [laughs]
GC: And that being, being in the air force, you know, you wore shoes and wore respectable clothing. So I guess it was that that influenced most of us to join the air force. There were some that were, you know, really wanted to fly.
DM: Yeah.
GC: But as far as I was concerned you had to do something in the war and I thought well you might as well choose what you like. You think you’d like.
DM: That’s right.
GC: And that was the air force. Which, I was very happy in the air force — it was. The whole, the whole period, you know for nearly four years I suppose it was. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I know we, you know, and of course I enjoyed all the more because the war finished early and I didn’t have to complete a tour or try and complete a tour. So it was, it was a very happy part of my life. Yeah.
DM: Which parts of Europe did you fly to on the operations you did?
GC: Mainly, mainly Germany.
DM: Right.
GC: Pretty well. I didn’t do many into France because that was, that was sort of after D-Day which was June the 6th ’44 and I didn’t get to the squadron until the end of the year. And so it was mainly the Ruhr.
DM: Right.
GC: And places further east.
DM: Ok.
GC: I didn’t do the infamous Dresden raid because I was on leave.
DM: Right.
GC: That particular time. We used to get, you’d fly, you’d be operational for six weeks and then you would get six days leave.
DM: Ok.
GC: So it happened that my six days leave was up and I went. When I came back I heard all about, about Dresden.
DM: Yeah. So even at that point people talked about it a bit.
GC: There was a bit of talk about it. Yeah. There was a bit of talk about it and you know I feel that at that part of the, that time in the war there was a quite a lot of feeling amongst some pilots anyway that they [pause] it was becoming almost abhorrent to them, you know. To go over and drop all these bombs on and there was no, there was no, well there may have been an attempt to say this is the aiming point and what it is but it was just an exercise in, as far as we were concerned in obliteration.
DM: Pure destruction. Yeah.
GC: Yeah. And that, that got to a lot of the fellows you know. They –
DM: Yeah.
GC: I know I had quite good friends that, after the war it played on their minds and to the extent that they eventually they didn’t deny it because it happened but they, they never talked about the war. They didn’t, you know, so —
DM: Right.
GC: And a couple of them had DFCs but they wouldn’t, wouldn’t face them. Wouldn’t acknowledge them even.
DM; Right
GC: So it was, it did [pause] but you know. It was still the air force and you were, you were, you did what you were told.
DM: Yeah. That’s right.
GC: Yeah.
DM: The rules of the game.
GC: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah.
DM: Right. So mostly over Germany. Ok. I guess that last few months of the war they were concentrating back on the German cities.
GC: Yes, they were. They were. Especially in the Ruhr, you know. Oil plants. Synthetic oil plants in, in the Ruhr. Gelsenkirchen. Oh I forget the name of them all. And occasionally there would be something else. You know. We did a raid. A night raid I remember on Potsdam.
DM: Ok. Yeah.
GC: And I don’t know what that was for. Why they picked Potsdam but anyway they did.
DM: There were no raids down into Italy by that time were there? Or —
GC: No. No. They’d all finished. Yeah. They’d all finished. That would have been in ’43 I think they were going down there.
DM: Right.
GC: Yeah. I think ’43.
DM: And I guess when you went on leave because you were married at that stage you went to your wife.
GC: Yes.
DM: While these other guys –
GC: Oh they all went home to their –
DM: Because they were all English I guess –
GC: Yeah and they would, they had their homes.
DM: Yeah.
GC: A couple of them were married fellows, but four of them weren’t. Three or four of them I suppose. And they used to go home. Have their leave at home and then come back.
DM: Yeah.
GC: We didn’t go off on leave together.
DM: Right.
GC: Because it was circumstances. Yeah. I was married and that’s where I went on leave. To Wolverhampton where I was married and where Alice lived. And I was there for [pause] ‘cause we got weeks and weeks and weeks of leave, you know while we were waiting for ships.
DM: Yeah.
GC: And I spent a lot of time in Wolverhampton. Yeah.
DM: Ok. So where was your favourite place in England apart from –? Would Brighton be a sort of highlight?
GC: Well, you know, Brighton always, always had an attraction for me yeah. But certainly, you know, down, down the south of England but of course you got, you know we were posted to Operational Training Unit was a place in, in [pause] called Hixon which was in Staffordshire.
DM: Ok.
GC: Not far out of Stafford and it was from there that I got to Wolverhampton and met my first wife. Yeah.
DM: Ok. So —
GC: They used to have, they used to have a dance at the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton every Thursday night and aircrew came from far and wide to this, to this dance which was, had a reputation and was one to be looked forward to so —
DM: Ok. Was there much competition between army and air force?
GC: Not a lot.
DM: No.
GC: Not a lot. I didn’t strike it anyway. The army was evident but not [pause] and Americans of course. They were [pause] they could be dominant in an area. But no, I never really, we certainly didn’t, never got into fisticuffs or anything like that.
DM: Not like that.
GC: It was like a reputedly did here in Melbourne between the Americans and the —
DM: Yeah.
GC: And the Australians.
DM: There was a little bit of history there.
GC: Yeah. But no, nothing like that.
DM: Ok. So generally everybody got on fairly well under wartime conditions.
GC: Yes. I think so. Yeah. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience, you know. From mainly because I was fortunate in that I met this girl and got to live with an English family.
DM: Yeah. You got to know people.
GC: And spent time with them and you just got such an understanding of the nature and the calibre of the English person. They were just incredible. Just accepted everything that was dished out to them without [pause] well that’s the way it is, you know. That’s the war. It was, it was a great experience. Yes. So, that’s, you know.
DM: I think I’ve run out of questions.
GC: You’ve run out of questions. Oh well. Yeah, well that’s alright.
DM: I don’t know enough about it though. I see you’ve got a model up on the [unclear]
GC: I had, it’s been for years. Yeah. There’s a couple up there I think. But isn’t that a nice painting?
DM: Yes. My dad had that one.
GC: Did he?
DM: Yeah.
GC: Yeah. That’s Cheshire.
DM: Yeah.
GC: Signed. Autographed. Signed. Signed by Cheshire.
DM: I’m not sure if his was signed.
GC: Yeah.
DM: But it had the same colour.
GC: Had the same. Yeah. Yeah. Was your dad in the air force?
DM: Yeah he was on Lancasters as well.
GC: Oh was he?
DM: He was a gunner.
GC: Maybe I’ll just —
DM: Oh right.
GC: Stop the recording.
[recording paused]
GC: We had to take some of these aircraft, not very many but we had one on the squadron I think where they had a hole cut in the floor and a .5 machine gun used to be mounted on this.
DM: Yeah.
GC: And we, you had to take a spare gunner if you happened to be allotted that aircraft. And this particular trip, which was our furthest, we got that aircraft. Q-Queenie. And the, the gunner was a fellow named Edwards. Flight Sergeant Edwards. Didn’t know him really at all, you know. We just, we were allotted him and he turned up at briefing and that was our first trip and it was his last trip.
DM: Oh right.
GC: Which I thought was most unfair. The flying commander to sort of work it that way that surely [pause] but anyway he came with us and we ran in to trouble with an oil leak which we didn’t know where it was coming from. It was coming from an engine. From the port inner engine. But I kept saying to the flight, the flight engineer, you know, ‘Is everything alright?’ He said, well the revs are this, this and that and the other. He said, ‘I don’t know where the oil is leaking from.’ And because we didn’t have the experience, you know. Perhaps I should have known but I didn’t and it turned out that it was coming from the constant speed unit which is a motor type arrangement which governs the pitch on your propeller.
DM: Oh yeah.
GC: But I didn’t know that at that time. I couldn’t work out where the oil was coming from. And it got to such a state that we had to turn back. We were only, we weren’t that far from the target but the outside of the aircraft where the turrets were covered in oil. So we decided we’d have to turn back and we’d feather, we’d feather the engine. As soon as we touched the feathering button the engine just was, you know, the propelling part of it just ran up to four thousand revs a minute and we couldn’t control it in any way.
DM: Right.
GC: So and obviously there was, we thought it was going to overheat. It was going to get hot and with all this oil around. So — and it became uncontrollable, it was – the vibration was so bad that I couldn’t control it. Couldn’t do anything about it. Anyway, we got back to, as I said over liberated territory and we got out. But the Flight Sergeant Edwards wouldn’t jump. This is what the crew tell me.
DM: Right.
GC: Because he was lined up with them to go but he kept stepping back and saying, ‘No, you go.’ Because they were going out the back door and I must admit when you stand at the back door of a Lancaster in flight you’d swear that if you jump out you’ll smash into the tail plane.
DM: Right.
GC: And he must have had that in his head plus the fact that the recommended drill was to – if you had one of these .5 machine guns that you released the gun and went out the bottom.
DM: Right.
GC: They couldn’t release it for some reason or other. I don’t know what the problem was but they couldn’t. He couldn’t release the guns so of course he kept going back to the door. And he wouldn’t jump. I didn’t know anything about this until [pause] well until we got down to the ground. The drill is of course that you, you keep in communication with the pilot.
DM: Yeah.
GC: You plug in to, and he must have not done that. He must have come back to the .5 machine gun again to try and of course from, when you turn around in your seat and look down the back of the aircraft you couldn’t see down there because it was down the step that the main spar ran across and you couldn’t see. And I didn’t know he was there. When I got out I called up, you know, ‘Anybody here?’ ‘Anybody here?’ And I knew there was nobody there because I knew the others had gone. I’d seen them go. So I got out and he was still in there.
DM: Right.
GC: And but he hadn’t plugged in. I didn’t know he was there. Nor could I see him. And he did jump eventually but his parachute was on fire.
DM: Oh dear.
GC: When he jumped. Yeah. So that was a really sad occasion.
DM: Yeah. On his last trip
GC: On his last trip. Yeah. His last trip. He’d just got married. And only a young bloke like we were all young.
DM: Yeah. That’s right.
GC: He was, he was only in his early twenties I think. And we were over, went over to England again in 2012 and we were touring around through France and the area that we baled out in. He’s in [pause] buried in a cemetery in Belgium. Cemetery, [unclear] Mille, Mille, M I L L E.
DM: Yeah. It could be. Yeah.
GC: So anyway we went to the cemetery and found it. Found it. I had the engineer was with me and we found his grave in the War Cemetery there. So, you know it was all sad. That was sixty years ago. You know, not sixty but fifty years after it happened.
DM: Yeah.
GC: Anyway that’s war.
DM: That’s right. So the reason for that machine gun was because of the night fighters that had the cannon that fired up.
GC: That’s right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
DM: To combat that.
GC: It was supposed to help combat that.
DM: Yeah.
GC: Not that we saw any of those up-firing machine gun cannons that they were using but that was the idea.
DM: Yeah.
GC: Yeah. Yeah.
DM: Yeah. I hadn’t recognised that somehow. I’ll have to look up again to see what his extra trips were.
GC: Yeah. Yeah.
DM: I did record that.
GC: Oh did you. Yeah.
DM: So you’re happy with that?
GC: Yes. That’s alright. Yeah.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AConacherG170411
PConacherG1701
Title
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Interview with Geoffrey Conacher
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:41:18 audio recording
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Creator
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Donald McNaughton
Date
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2017-04-11
Description
An account of the resource
Geoffrey Conacher grew up in Australia and after a few months in the army he joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1942. After training he flew 14 operations as a pilot with 622 Squadron. His aircraft was shot down and he bailed out over liberated France.
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
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Australia
France
Great Britain
United States
England--Suffolk
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
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Julie Williams
622 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
crewing up
final resting place
Halifax
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
love and romance
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Mildenhall
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/238/3383/PCooperS1501.1.jpg
2a23a039a4e935255b71c83868fe4af0
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/238/3383/ACooperSF170913.1.mp3
f5ab974b220266502dd18f4c17ee7b44
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
Cooper, Sydney Foster
Sydney Foster Cooper
Sydney F Cooper
Sydney Cooper
Syd Cooper
S F Cooper
S Cooper
Description
An account of the resource
12 items. Two oral history interviews with Sydney Foster "Syd" Cooper (b. 1921, 1528331 Royal Air Force), photographs and other items.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Syd Cooper and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-25
2015-10-28
2017-09-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Cooper, SF
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SP: So this is Suzanne Pescott and I’m interviewing Syd Foster Cooper today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We are at Syd’s home and it’s the 13th of September 2017. So, Syd do you want to tell me a little about life before the war?
SC: Well, I lived in Blackpool and Blackpool is a peculiar thing, I’ve worked on the Promenade, I’ve sold black puddings for threepence, with mustard on, and I’ve run errands, I’ve demonstrated yo-yos: anything for money. I was money mad. Run errands for people and that was my, that was my life, which I enjoyed and I used give everything to my mother, I never kept any money. But I really enjoyed it, but of course times were hard in those days, you know. People used, mill girls walking arm in arm singing the tunes. You see Trevor MacGoff, a friend of mine, we knew all the tunes when they came out you see, and we went past the singing rooms – there was about four singing rooms in Blackpool – they said, ‘hey do you know Shepherd of the Hills?’ ‘Yeah, aye.’ [Indecipherable] They said ‘can you sing it for us?’ And we’d sing it for ‘em and they’d say aye, they do! And these’d just come out! So they got us to sing, he and I, we’d be about twelve, or ten, and we sang it and we knew all the popular songs immediately they were published, you see. So we said eh, we’ve got some money here so we’d go to one singing room and say do you want any singing? Yeah, aye, and we’d sing a couple of songs, they’d give us tuppence, we’d go to another and do the same and that was anyway that was a way we earned money. Well of course the, we used to go to the air shows of course, at Squires Gate, and we, I don’t know, we joined it of course, there’s a war, I’m doing this, I’m doing that, I’m doing, and what they were going to do, you see, and some were going in the navy, I’m weren’t going in the navy, I didn’t fancy it – I couldn’t swim anyway - so I lost them during the war. Well I’m working for this, in the Air Force, I’ll go now and this, [whisper] see I’ve forgotten what they called it, it was 1521 BAT Flight, 1521 B A T and this B A T stand for, er, B A, I don’t know, anyway, they had curtains, had to fly by instruments, and one evening, this is just an isolated incident, one evening I was on night flying, would be about half past three in the morning, and an officer came up to me and said ‘where’s this so and so gone?’, I says, ‘he’s gone’, ‘how long’s he been gone’, ‘oh about fifteen minutes’. ‘Right’ - and the wind was ferocious [emphasis]. Of course Blackpool’s always windy, particularly the airport you see, and I’d got a big can of oil with me, and I was taking it to another part that required it, and I’m stood like this, and I was stood like this and he was saying ‘where’s so and so and what are you doing’ and ‘well, I’m finished in the short term’ and the oil was dripping out of the can. Not only was it dripping out of the can, the wind was taking it on to his trousers! [Laugh] Course you see I was only what, twenty and I got the wind up, so that was an incident, I never heard anything but I don’t know whether he ever knew where he got that oil from. Anyway, it was a nice place there and I’ll tell you an incident that is remarkable. There was an aircraft taking off, it had been raining a bit and the main planes were wet, wet, well the whole situation was wet, this was at Stradishall, I’ve just remembered, Stradishall in Suffolk, where the 214 Squadron or 138 Squadron, anyway, Bill come, said ‘I’m going up’, I said ‘are you going up?’, so he said ‘yeah, right’. So the Airspeed Oxford is hand started; you have to wind it up, you see. That’s on, you know, I don’t know whether you know aircraft at all, but on the nacelle, that’s where the engines, on the inside, you get what they call a dzus, that’s D Z U S, turn it a hundred and eighty degrees and flap comes up revealing place where you can put your starting handle. So I was doing this, this was on the port side. Anyway, I’m winding this, got it going, got the starboard going and said ‘you’re all right now’ and he throttled back, in the car, and pointing, so I looked and the flap had come up from where the starting handle goes in, enters. Oh Christ, so I go come back, you know, to lower your engine speed, you see, they’re not much, the, not automatic, someone at the front door, post, mail [pause] yeah, [door closing] so I tried you see, they couldn’t make the engine, no air coming, you see, because they weren’t variable propellers, they were just ordinary wooden propellers, so it was still a draught coming apart from the elements and so I tried to get up there. [Chuckle] I went up there and my feet come from under me - it was only a little to get to help you and anyway I stood right back until my calves were touching the leading edge of the tail plane and I ran right and I got to the top and I just get at the top and my bloody feet come from under me, over the top I went and the engines are running and I fell on the ground. There’s only a little distance between the rotating propellers and the leading edge, but anyway I was all right, and he was like this - the pilot - like that with his eyes, but I’ll never forget that, I’ll never forget that. I don’t think he will either! Anyway so, I left there, what did I do? Oh yeah. [Pause] Right, think it, trying to think what I, where I went after that. Oh, I was, that’s at Stradishall, righto, so I thought right I’m not stopping here, I’d gone to the top of me tree, so I’m going in for a flight engineer, that’ll be my bloody thing. So I went in to be a flight engineer; flight engineer I became, and I did pretty well on it and er, [whisper] and it was something new you see, there were very few flight engineers and it was the, went, had to go somewhere for stock, for stores procedure and all sorts of things that really wouldn’t be there, but anyway, we left there and went to er, to Cardiff and went to a place, Brays in Wales, and it's the Number 1 Gunnery School in Wales, and we had to, on an air gunner’s course. We arrived at Pembrey and went to, there’s a place, I don’t know the town but it was locally known by the blokes as Slash, we went there and had a few drinks and went in, next morning we paraded. ‘Well gentlemen you know this is going to be a very concentrated course, you’ve got to be full gunners when you leave here and it will last about eight to ten days. We’ve got a cinema here but there’s just one thing that well, you won’t be pleasant about and that is that you’re not allowed out, you cannot go out of the airport at all’ [emphasis]. So I said, so we started there about nine o’clock in the morning and sometimes we were still doing something at nine o’clock at night, and going on the beach and firing, firing different guns. See we had, we did really a condensed air gunner’s course, which we weren’t too bloomin’ happy. So, anyway we left there, oh, and my memory, we had to pass a course of aircraft identification, you see, because you don’t want to shoot anyone that’s your friend, [chuckle] and some aircraft are quite similar to the British aircraft and little bits of things that you recognise, so, I was bad on them so the chap said ‘well I’m going to cough every time it’s English, so come on’ [cough] English, friend, friend. Anyway we passed there and we came out and we went, went on the train and ended up in Yorkshire, that’s right. No, no, no, we didn’t, no, we went to er, there used to be, is there, huge place, Christ. We got off and marched up to this airport in Wales, and of course it was the training ground for flight engineers, and we marched in and anyway, in the morning we were got together and we were dictated which we were going to be: Lancaster, Halifax or, the English one, the big one, yeah, or Stirlings, and we didn’t have any option, we were told, and I was going on them. Anyway, that was fair enough and I did very well on that, I think. And so we were nominated, we were then flight engineers, right, see, and people were busy sewing sergeant’s stripes on and brevets; brevets were scarce was the flight engineers, I don’t think they got to making many of them but however we, whatever we would do and we went our different ways and we arrived in Yorkshire, and I can’t remember the name of the airport but it was a Con Unit - that’s a Conversion Unit - and along came some people we were just learners for the flight engineer’s point of view we knew all about the aircraft, or at least we thought we did, well we did, we came in, and it was some Canadians and they’d been on Wellingtons which only have a crew of five, now they need a crew of seven: an extra gunner and a flight engineer. And they did something which I think was very, very good, in as much as we went up with various people, you know, and we were, they were watching us do the job and that, you see, and they were converting from Wellingtons to the big aircraft. Well, we’d been there about five days and a chap came up to me - I knew him because I’d been flying with him – and he said ‘Syd’, he says, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to take this’ he says, ‘but we’ve been watching different people that we’ve met, people that with whom we’ve flown and it’s been unanimous: we want you to be our flight engineer.’ Well, [indecipherable] Christ, you know, yeah, and so I became their flight engineer. We’re there, we went up one day, we come down and we crashed, not badly, just undercarriage come away, and went to the doctor’s, went to the hospital straight away, nothing wrong with us so we got in, got up, went up in another aeroplane, anyway we did our Con Unit business there and I was directed to go to, well the number that were there, went to Leeming, Leeming in Yorkshire, and they were forming, then, 6 Group, because they hadn’t got their own Air Force on then, and so we were, 427 Squadron, was the first of the 6 Group, Canadians, and I flew with them. Well, and we had some fun, fun there. The first time we went I was a busy bee. You see you can have nothing to do but you can make yourself work, when you’re flying, you go and say how do to somebody and this that and the other, and that’s quite all right. Well, on the, I used to stand up on take off and I, the wheels, there is a signal in, there’s a lever inside the cockpit that you lift up and the undercarriage will come up, but it's governed that it must be airborne, [laugh] but I could put my finger in and lift it, lift it and bring the undercarriage up, but it shouldn’t be. Well I used to stand to his right hand doings, and quite often in the speed, you got chatter, chatter, and you put them fully forward for maximum take off weight but the vibration and chatter they would start travelling back and you had to hold them together, or sometimes I’d get up there and I’d hold them together, hold them by the fingers there and he’s again this, because we were taking over the Great North Road, and rumour had it, I don’t know [emphasis] but rumour had it that they stopped large vehicles going, taking off, passing there while we were using that runway. While, one occasion I’m there, we wore goggles in case you’ve got a window closed, open, well he, the pilot, Hank, would hold the control column fully, er, driving that, and watching the doings, don’t chatter, hah, he used to put his thumb up, right, okay, up with the bloody undercarriage straight away you see, because you gather speed because they had, they reckoned it was as bad as thirty degrees of flap, undercarriage down, anyway and I pulled them up. Well we’d done this several times like that he goes like that, I goes oh, oh with the bloody undercarriage you see. Well then, I felt sure it went like that, and I looked up, and it wasn’t that, it was because his goggles had fallen over his eyes [laugh] and to this day now, there’s only me knows that I brought the undercarriage up too early! Anyway, this was just the first trip of which I’ll tell you about, and it was a place called Bochum, but anyway, everything went okay and bloody navigator said to me ‘what you doing Syd?’, I said ‘I’m just having a look out’, so he says ‘come here, that’s where we’re going.’ [laughs] [indecipherable] I thought, well bloody hell. Anyway I was really excited and I used to do a lot of work and run backwards and forwards and I used to stand up see if I could see anything you know and help in that respect. It really took it out of me because, I don’t know why, ah well when we disembarked on arrival back to town, back to home, we were allocated to certain tables and we were talked to by the, by intelligence officers and making notes and what was it like, so and so, did you see this, you see, I suppose and then they’d compare them with others, and where’s he? Oh, and you could have coffee and rum – I was asleep on the floor! So, it had took something out of me. Anyway, that was it and we had a, quite a good doings. You see, now, the trouble is, I get embarrassed by your novels and people that write books and stories about Bomber Command and this that and the other because a lot of it’s not true, and you know, like they say, ‘oh Commander to tail end Charlie, are you there, Ned?’ [Laugh] I said all that rubbish ‘cause they don’t do that, no rank on the aircraft. The pilot, Henry, that was his surname, Henry, Henry was a sergeant, I was a sergeant, bomb aimer was a sergeant – he was Canadian - mid upper was English, he was a sergeant and the tail gunner was a flight sergeant, but however, and we’re on one occasion we were having trouble, we’d been what they called coned when you get a lot of searchlights on you at the same time and by jove it’s light and of course, I don’t understand artillery, but there’s some means that they can do something to the guns where the explosion takes, occurs, on a predetermined altitude. Well when there’s a do you go in waves, you see, well we know that eighteen thousand, they set the guns to fire at eighteen, but you see you get a wave and you might be going in at twenty thousand feet, you see, well the Germans – height twenty thousand feet, get ‘em up, but before the guns, they’d, twenty have gone over and someone’s come and they’re flying at sixteen thousand feet and they’ve got to readjust the guns and that’s the idea and in consequence you have to be on, over the target on time [emphasis] or otherwise you would be dropping bombs on your fellows or they’d be having a go at you! So it was very essential that you were there on time. Well, we’d had a do and we’d been evading, evading artillery and searchlights, successfully, and obviously we weren’t on course and he called me, ‘Syd, here, come here, what do you reckon that is?’ So I just got just across, you know, from here to that table, so I went, I says ‘it’s a lake, innit.’ So he says ‘yeah, what is it? Do you reckon it’s so and so so and so?’ I says, ‘Christ,’ I says, ‘I don’t know’, I says ‘I’m not geography, I don’t know.’ He says ‘I reckon it is.’ Well of course, I hadn’t thought, but you see you cannot navigate until you know where you are to start, you see, and of course when you have a few minutes of diving and climbing and that, of course you don’t, you’re not on course. Anyway we had to, we hadn’t been over the target, but anyway we did our job and came away and he managed to calculate where we’d been and he did a fine job, and that was it, but I’ll never forget that day. Deviating somewhat, I’ll tell you this: this is surprising. Well no, it’s a shame really, [cough] my wife and I, not at the airport, at home - this is after the war - and we went to a place and we were having a lunch and she says ‘I’ll go and get, I don’t know what I want, I’ll see what I want’, so I said, so I sat in a chair, I said I’ve got two chairs, you see, and I was guarding those and how you look around and up at the other end of the restaurant room, I saw a man, biggish chap, and he’d got the diabolical table manners, he appeared to me, and I’d seen that but I felt that I wanted to have another look and I kept looking. Anyway, this feller stands up and he comes wobbling down to me, I thought now I’m for it, you know, I mean I was eight stone wet through and he was about sixteen stone and I thought well we’re in for it! He says ‘do you know me?’ I said to him, ‘well I thought I did’. He says ‘only you was looking.’ I says ‘I know I was, I thought I knew you.’ He says: ‘well?’ I says ‘well I don’t know you.’ So he says ‘oh’, he says ‘I wondered why you kept looking up and I were getting a bit annoyed’ or embarrassed. ‘Oh’, he says, ‘that’s a Bomber Command badge in your doings’, so I says ‘yes’. He says ‘are you in the Air Force?’ I says ‘I was’, ‘oh’ he says ‘yeah, oh right!’ And of course we were buddies then. We were buddies then. So he says ‘where you go? I said ‘I go to the Cheshire Aircrew Association’ so he says ‘do yer?’ He says ‘it’s supposed to be a bit smooth there.’ So he says ‘aye, well I go to Barton, you see, that’s at the aerodrome’, I said ‘do yer?’, so he says ‘I’d like you to come’, he said ‘and you’ll like it and you’ll probably want to start coming with us.’ So I said - you see well he hadn’t mentioned anything about me looking at him - so he says well, I forget, he said ‘I’m known there, everybody knows me there’, you see, you see, he says me name’s. I said ‘what is your name?’ he says Morgan, he says, ‘better still, they call me No Fingers Morgan.’ I says pardon, No Fingers Morgan that’s the reason why he couldn’t manipulate his eating, so he says ‘they all know me: No Fingers Morgan.’ So I says okay and he was one of the New Zealander, the New Zealander surgeon that looked after the RAF and he’d been there and seen him and his hands finished there. So I says ‘Christ’ I says, ‘did you jump?, I didn’t know that till then, so did you fall out?’ So he says no. I thought he’d parachuted you see, and you could get frostbite, so he says no, I went there, and he was the flight engineer to see the damage and the door was just hanging on the hinges this that and the other, and of course he’d did what he had no right to do: he’d gone without oxygen, because we used to carry oxygen with us. That was, I’ll never forget that. But after a time they’d finished their operations because they’d all been on Wellingtons, they left there and I, now where did I bloody go then? I left there and oh, and er, oh, and oh, er, I’d been, well I went direct from there, I think I went direct from there to 514. Oh yeah, I went there to 514.
SP: So you went from Halifaxes at Leeming, you’re flying Halifaxes, to 514.
SC: Yes, yes. Now, I’d had an option to say would I like to be an engineer, I says I am a bloody engineer! So she says but would you like to do all the lot, so I says yeah, yeah. So I was an engineer, but I wasn’t sergeant, but that to come. Well I went to, oh, I went to Foulsham, that’s F O U L S H A M: pronounced wrong and spelt right, it was foul, terrible! Anyway we went there but 514 hadn’t started, they didn’t have an aeroplane. I think they had one or two, maybe, and they were doing what they call acceptance, you see you just don’t have aeroplane and go flying, you check everything’s on right you see. And they were just forming in Foulsham and they had, just prior to them forming this, but there would be [muttering] er, anyway, Foulsham and getting parts together and one thing and another, and I worked there on the aircraft, then, we’d only been there about maybe a month and we moved to Waterbeach. Well, who should be, no, I was a sergeant when I went there, anyway, it don’t matter, but chap come, Orderly Sergeant, Giles, him that I knew at the other place, and Jones, they were there, but they had to gather people from anywhere to form because, you see that shows you, those are just engineers, no, that picture there, the R and I – Repair and Inspection - he was a marvel was, that’s him there, he was just my size him, Squadron Leader, and well that shows, all these were associated with the maintenance of the aircraft.
SP: So what you’re showing me is a plane with about-
SC: Pardon?
SP: So you’re showing me a plane that’s got crew the width of the plane and about seven deep, so there’s a lot of people on there, so.
SC: Well, you can have the photograph if you want.
SP: We’ll photograph it and put it with the recordings, there’ll be a photograph of this, but we’re talking about the Technical Wing, commanded by Squadron Leader.
SC: That’s him. Jim Healey, yeah.
SP: Jim Healey, and this was at Waterbeach.
SC: He was a smashing, you see, and they were running short of engineers who could do the job, you see. I don’t know whether they blame the schools or not, but it was just the job. So I went there as an engineer and they didn’t have Halifaxes, they had Lancasters, and I never had anything to do with the, well you have to have aircraft as they come. Some have radial engines, some have in line engines, they don’t say pop ‘em on, we’re short of an in line, we’re not going to bother until we can get one, you know, so radial like a Hercules they’re a different thing, I never had much to do with them. Anyway, and Giles there, Giles in’t it, fancy seeing you anyway. Now, you see I’m just interrupting meself now, and there is too [emphasis] much emphasis laid on aircrew at the expense of groundcrew. Now Giles, we used to call him Farmer Giles, miserable bugger he was, but I got on well with him, and he didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke and he never did but work and he was a marvellous worker, sergeant, and he come and he’d lost an eye, I don’t know what happened, but in the meantime of me going other place he lost an eye, and him, he got on his knees to let him still join, keep the Air Force, and he stayed until he was chucked out and he’d only got one eye. I must tell you this before I go any further, well eyes, in those days went to Moorfields which is supposed to be the epitome of good eye people in London: Moorfields. He went to, sent him to Moorfields and they measured it or whatever they do, and he had that eye, but of course in those days they were glass eyes, plastic hadn’t got, I’m going forward, well I’ll leave that there, and he was a good worker was Giles, so that was fair enough. Of course I got promoted to corporal, I got promoted to sergeant you see, so that suited me, suited Giles and everyone, and I would say this, I don’t know why, but I was the only person ever [emphasis], as far as I know [sound of steps then drawer opening and cutlery] who they had a whip round for their marriage and they bought me cutlery and that, and Giles organised it and I’d never come across him before.
SP: And you’ve still got that one today – you’re just showing me the cutlery.
SC: And that was very, very, I was grateful of that, not because of the doings, anyway, I had that. Anyway, we went and we had our, oh, and bloody hell, 19, we went there in ’94. We left there and went to another station.
SP: 1944.
SC: And that was, they’d gone, coming to block one night, well in later days bleedin’, bloody Waterbeach, there’s limited flying and that, they says right, you’re doing, looking at, assessing equipment, so because we didn’t need it any more, finished, 514 wasn’t flying no more and you know. Service, you had different coloured labels and I had to sign them that: fit for reissue, beyond repair and this that and the other. Anyway, so we goes to this bloody place and there’s a Squadron Leader Knight was in charge and he says, ‘are you Cooper?’ I said yeah, he said ‘right, I’ve got a job for you’, he said. I said ‘bloody hell what’s that?’ See ‘cause they’d finished, and he’d just men there, so he says ‘we’re packing up and you can do that and you’ll be at hangar number three.’ So anyway that went by and Christmas time, no I’m going back a year because they had an explosion at Christmas in C Flight did 514, and there was about eleven killed, at Christmas time, but I was away on leave at the time so I missed that.
SP: Do you know actually happened?
SC: Pardon?
SP: Do you know what caused it?
SC: Well a bomb came off, bomb, I don’t, well you see, you never know you see, because they were loading bombs on and anyone that has an idea weren’t there! They were killed.
SP: So this was as they were loading the loading bombs for an operation.
SC: Yeah, I think there was about seventeen killed. But anyway, that was very sad. Anyway, where the hell was I? I got posted from there to there, I was there, I was only there two days and going there, and I can’t remember the place but it was a nice, nice place to go but I never went. They called me in says we’ve got a job for you, I says oh, so I said ‘where is it?’ He said, oh, previous to this, the, a Flight Lieutenant Wand tried to get me to go to this Spain, and Healey thought the world of me, I don’t know why, then he says, called for me, Squadron Leader, so he says ‘look do you know, would you like to go to Italy?’ I says ‘Italy?’ So he says yeah, he says ‘Wand’s put you to Italy’, he said ‘you don’t want to go there, there’s bloody mosquitos and that, do you still want to go?’ so I says no, so he says, ‘right, you’re off.’ Anyway, of course they all caught up with me, Healey goes, posted off somewhere else ‘cause this man he hadn’t got a job and then come and said ‘oh we’ve got a job for you – Italy.’ I says ‘Italy? But the war’s over’, so I says ‘well how come’, so he said ‘oh you’ll see. Anyway, you’re going to 1 or 2 LSU’, that’s Lancaster Servicing Units in Italy. So, bloody hell, so I went to Italy and unbeknownst to lots of people, I venture to suggest, is that there was a chance of a war breaking out between Yugoslavia and Italy over, it’s not called Siles, what they call it, the big city up north? I’ll think of it later, over this city. It had gone from one to another over the years and of course Italy had recently transferred their [cough] favours to England rather than Germany you see, so right. But of course you never get a hundred percent, yes there was still, for reasons best known to themselves, sooner be in with the Germans, but anyway, so I’m on my bloody way to Germany, to Italy. It was good in Italy, we did a lot there. The services had took the palace – apparently there used to be a king of Italy, king of this palace - you could go there and have a shower or something like that, press your suit for you or something, and in Sorrento, have you been to Italy? Sorrento, well the main hotel in the square, near where the YMCA was, they took that over as well so we could go there, I went there about three times for the weekend, free, and of course we could go over to er, Capri, Capri they had a Capri backwards and forwards. Well, I’ll come to that later. Anyway, Brown, who was a bit up, I mean I remember his telephone number, Weston 1368, plenty of money, I thought I’d got them in here [paper rustling].
SP: You went to the opera, yeah.
SC: And he made these for us, for, see these are all things that I’ve seen. They’re in English.
SP: So you’re showing me all the programmes 1945 to ‘46.
SC: Yeah, I mean with them being Italian, the one thing, Italian talk, all the time and you don’t know what’s going on, but that helps you.
SP: Yeah. Details for the British Military Authorities of Naples, all transcribed, the actual operas of La Boheme, Rigoletto, and you got invited to all of these.
SC: Well we went regularly, well we had to pay, but this chap was familiar with, something a bit highbrow. Brown they called him; he had a beautiful case like that, with seven razors in it, he says, ‘Oh no, I’ll use Wednesday today’, [chuckle] but he was nice chap. They won’t be interested in those, would they?
SP: I’ll photograph them so they’re with, I’ll photograph one of them so we’ve got it with it.
SC: Oh right. But it’s quite a thing isn’t it.
SP: It is, yeah.
SC: And we were at the piano which is on the first floor which is next to the Royal Box. You couldn’t have the Royal Box but we’d be one side or the other side. Of course we had to pay, and I thought perhaps that might, you might want that.
SP: So you’re showing me here your operational records for all of 514 Squadron, again we’ll put these, I’ll photograph this for the Archives and leave everything with you and take the photograph.
SC: I thought perhaps that was of some interest, the Opera House.
SP: Yeah, very much so. So obviously, after your time in Italy did you then return to England?
SC: Yeah. Well, I went backwards and forwards. It was hard work, but these bombers came in to let these, look we know what’s going on, but it was never published. I’ve never come across anyone that knows. There was between eight and twelve bombers, every day [emphasis] went there, somewhere, there to Bari, Bari’s on the Adriatic, that’s LS2, LSU2, on the Adriatic coast, Bari, B A R I. Funny part was, that railway line crossed the landing, coming in across the landing coming in, that’s aircraft there, but I enjoyed it but it put me back so I didn’t get released, but there’s no medal for that, no medal for that, no, not to this day there isn’t, because lots of people don’t know that it existed. I mean and they was nine months, backwards and forwards, these bombers, just to let them know that we were a force to be contended with, still, in spite of the war finishing; that’s what we heard. Well, I’ll just tell you this, it was there you never bothered about nothing, saluting or anything there. [Chuckle] Came up hey, there was going to be a parade. Parade! A parade, [emphasis] no bloody Parade! Oh aye there is, there’s a parade. Now, a strike had broke out in Far East and they thought it was coming right through, so they’d block it there and then. I’ll never forget, so we just stood there, you know, for this doings and bloody Wing Commander, er Squadron Leader Wright came out and said, you know, he knew about it, I suppose they had advised the Station Commander and he came and a bloke said there can’t be a strike, and Lapthorne, Lapthorne was the MT, Motor Transport, in charge. I suppose he was a Flight Lieutenant or sommat, but he was a rough ‘un, so bloke says there’s something going on cause Lapthorne’s had a bloody haircut! [Laughter] So anyway, that’s what happened and it didn’t develop. But we had a good time in Italy really, and that, but I mean lots of people decided to go home. Spent the first time, the first Christmas in Italy and there was going, there was something non, non, I forget the name they gave to it, you’re not to associate with Germans, English people, and of course it went with the staff. Well on this place we had what used to be a very big olive grove and we turned it into an RAF camp. We had German prisoners of war and - poor souls - they’d gone out the desert and they’d got shorts on, and cotton tops, and this was Christmas 19, Christmas 1965.
SP: ’45.
SC: Christmas 1965.
SP: ’45, yeah.
SP: Yeah. ’45 and so we said, and some of them, and some of them were nasty people because they belonged to German, Hitler Youth, and waiters in the sergeant’s ess, what bloke can do, can’t give them jobs. Anyway we held a little, I think I’ve seen a bloody picture short time ago of the, [drawer opening] oh that’s it, that’s behind the bar at, it’s the sergeants mess, but I’ve got one of the mess somewhere, and the waiters, and we held a little meeting, there was only about fourteen of us, senior NCOs, and said yeah but they’re bloody Germans, what do we do with them? They were in tents [emphasis] and this is Christmas and snowing. Yeah, oh Christ, it was cold. There was a fellow from Glossop, a sergeant, and he says, excuse me, you know, we were chatting amongst ourselves, what can we do you know, chatting amongst ourselves, what can we do, and this that and the other, we can’t talk, we can’t have nowt to do with ‘em, and he got the bloody real people moaning, because we wanted them to enjoy Christmas as we did - to a lesser extent - and anyway he says, the quiet bloody, this chap in from Glossop, the sergeant, he says ‘from now on we’ll call you’ -what bloody hell did they call him? Ferodo, - he says ‘your bloody behaviour would stop a bloody eight ton truck’, you know, Ferodo, the bloody battery works out there. Anyway, they enjoyed themselves to some extent. I used to walk to work, about from here maybe to the main road, which was quite way, taking chocolates for kids and sweets and they’d come and meet you on the way down. But anyway I come up, got, it closed. Oh Christ, we came up on the train, oh Jesus, through the Apennines and through Austria, took us about six or seven days to get home, on the trains! Bridges broken down and one thing and another. [Laugh] Senior NCOs, there was six to each carriage, so how the hell we’re going to bloody sleep? I says don’t know. We’d got all our clobber with us, he says he’s at it again, he’s going to organise this, be nothing when he’s bloody finished! So I says ‘right, seats across, one on each. One on the floor between the two seats, on the floor. Right’, I says, ‘and two of us on the luggage rack’, you see, luggage rack each. So says, ‘oh right, we’ll put on there now’, says there’s bloody seven, ‘there’s six of us’, ‘oh yeah’, I says, ‘I’ll make a bloody hammock!’ So I got some rope off the kit bags and this that and the other, emptied hammock, put it on the door, that like that and I was up swinging in this and it pulled the bloody door off the hinges! So I landed on him on the bottom! But anyway, you know, we had some really good times, I mean just didn’t, you see we, of course you can’t put it down he was with me, and he and I a very short, very [emphasis] short of people like us, not because it was us, but engineers and that, and someone had let ‘em go, you know, released, and I was, and both of us were sent, well I didn’t know, I was at Rugby station and he turned up. I says where you going and he says so and so, I says so am I! So anyway we’d gone to this here squadron, it was No 1, No 1 Advanced, it was letters, headlines, No 1 Advanced Flying Training School, so he and I were there.
SP: Who was with you?
SC: Well, he was with us in Italy. But I meet him, I met him on the platform.
SP: What was his name?
SC: Pardon?
SP: What was his name?
SC: Don’t know, he comes from Darlington, Ginger he was known as, he comes from Darlington. We goes there and we arrive there and there were Harvards, you’ve heard of Harvards, haven’t you, well they’re American. But of course, I mean they had American single bank bloody radials, made no difference to us. We got there and they was waiting, and it was said [emphasis] that one of the, the engineer, who I relieved, he’d been a Japanese prisoner of war! But he said right, I’m off and buggered off. Anyway I was in charge, he was in, and Ginger was in charge and there should have been about, there should have been a Warrant Officer, we’ll say two, four, four, er, sergeants and four flight sergeants with a crown over the top and four ordinary sergeants like we were, him and me, but that’s all there was, only him and me. Anyway, I must tell you this, although perhaps you won’t do it, but in the Air Force lots of people, you go on your own somewhere, you know, they needed so and so to go, right. Well you have an Arrival Form to have filled, with the various departments. Likewise, when you leave the station you have a Departure Form of which you must have endorsed for every place: doctor, dentist, fire brigade, gas, you had to have gas, and sergeants mess and so on and so on, so you can’t walk away with stuff. Well you see, of course if you’re going away maybe you want to, can’t get away quick enough, but [emphasis] to arrive is a different kettle of fish. We thought oh Christ, it’s going to be murder, it’s going to be bloody murder here, [cough] so we get this thing this thing, it’s about that size, got to go [laugh] and this that and the other. So, course when you arrive there you see, I mean I’d come a sweat then, I know what was going, a sergeant, you know, but I’d been there six years, and you live and learn, so course there’s this list and you go and get them to sign that you’ve reported, you see. Course the first one, where do we go? Pay Accounts, so you get bloody paid, second place you go: sergeants mess you want to get your head down you know, and all that. You see. Where’s the last? The last is where you’re going to work you see, so you go there. [Chuckle] So anyway, and [muttering] and we went there, I noticed, now I can’t remember his name and I know you wouldn’t be able to find it, it was a shame, but he was a Wing Commander over the engineering, Wing Commander White, just one syllable his name, but it’ll come some time, anyway [laughter] we goes to the, goes there, well I’d had to come, you know, polish your boots, extra [rubbing sound] buttons, you know and this that and the other. Anyway, knocks at the door. Well it’s a funny thing, but from the engineering point, senior NCOs, I mean because a lot of the officers knew nothing about the bloody job and they relied on you, you see, you usually knock on the door and open it, and say only a few minutes, er, girl will come, you know, secretary will come and let you in, so you while, so obviously, you see, so we gets up there, knocks on this, bloody Wing Commander that must have come across, right, knocks at the door, no, knocks at the door, no. So [laugh] Ginger says ‘there’s nobody in, bloody hell, come on, let’s go to the mess.’ I says ‘there is somebody in.’ He says ‘how the bloody hell do you know?’ I says ‘I can hear ‘em writing’, biros hadn’t been invented, I could hear [scraping sound], and course I went like this. I says ‘there’s somebody in there, I says, ‘I can hear them writing’, so knocks on the door, opens the door and there’s this fellow sat at the desk, looks up, carries on, so goes in. Ginger, there’s somebody, I say told you. So we goes in, so he says ‘did you hear me say come in sergeant?’ so I says no sir. He says [laugh] ‘well, eff off, get out!’ Ginge says ‘No, I didn’t hear you either’, says ‘well you can eff off and get out.’ So went outside then he come out and girl come and says Wing Commander so and so would like to see you. So we goes in and he was smart as paint. Oh, you couldn’t, and I would guess him to be at least fifty odd, fifty five, Wing Commander. He says well, he says, you’ve got a lot of work to do, and this that and the other, you see, bloody hell, I was, so I yes I understand that, he said do you know Harvards he says. No, I said, but I know the bloody engine. Oh right, so he goes there. I’ll tell you this, out of it, he’s walking round, and he’s got a, he was an officer, with a mil board to write down anything he tells him. So he comes to me, says Cooper, always called me bloody Cooper, Cooper he says, right yeah, and he got this feller, this officer, and he was knocking on as well, so he says ‘‘scuse me sir, ‘scuse me’ - I don’t know his name – ‘but what do you want Johnson?’ He says ‘you’ve got some white chalk on your trousers.’ So he looks this, imagine he’s tall, he’s about six foot two, and he looks this: ‘white, yes, chalk, you don’t bloody know’, he said, and he dusted it off, and anyway, he said, ‘you were right, it is bloody chalk.’ I thought, Christ, work with him. Anyway I know on one occasion he come there and said how are things going, oh they’re all right, and he knew everything that went on, so he says so and so and so and so, he says not working on this? I says no, I says it’s only just come in. It hasn’t, he says, I saw it yesterday, oh Christ! But anyway, he was always, and he’d shout full length of the doings for me, you know, are you there and that. Anyway, I can’t remember how much, but I had a sum of money offered if I’d stay on, it was about four hundred pound if I’d join, but of course I mean I was married, I had no home to go to, she was in with the mother in law and all that, so you know I don’t like going, but I enjoyed it really, I was you know, some days, important, aye. Well if you broke anything you see, anything like a drill, you had to take the shank, but the shank, not the twisted part, and give it them you see or otherwise you could take the other part next and get two! [Chuckle] Bloody Giles, he says to the doctor, ‘I don’t suppose it’s any much point in the stores’, so he says ‘why, what’s wrong Giles?’ He says ‘I dropped me eye’, dropped it. He says ‘you what?’ He says ‘me eye.’ His false eye, he’d dropped it on the floor: smashed to bits. So he said ‘I didn’t know you’d have to bring the bloody bits for an eye!’ So anyway they did, they sent him to Med, well you just can’t buy an eye. Now this is a bit embarrassing: [laugh] we was going on the bloody train, this is at Waterbeach, we were going to London. I was going to see my wife to come but, and he was going to Moorfields for another eye, well you just can’t order one, you know, it’s really. So imagine that’s the [paper rustling] carriage, goes that way. There was a lady there and a lady there, and they looked matronly, if that’s the right thing, well Giles gets in and gets there and I get there but, separate spaces, and right, off it’s going, so he’s going to Moorfields and I’m going to Welwyn Garden City over the, [laugh] and hustle and bustle, a man come in, big man, big man about fifty, fifty something, sits between me and that woman over there and [blowing sound], so opens his attaché case and gets papers, drops ‘em [banging on paper] thought we’re going to have a bloody good time then. [Cough] Anyway, it was obvious to me he wanted to go to the bloody toilet. So I, he, Giles, never told him, but anyway, he goes to the toilet, and he goes to the toilet through the bloody window of the, as the train’s going along. People won’t believe this but it’s true as true, and he come back, you see, dead smart he was, mac and bowler hat and this attaché case, and says er: ‘Well ladies and gentlemen, ladies, you must, I must apologise, what else can you do,’ he said, ‘and you too gentlemen’ he says, ‘but I wouldn’t burst my bladder if I was dining with the Queen of England!’ [Laugh] Bloody hell, people will not [emphasis] believe that! Now I used to be able to get hold of Giles. Giles lived till he was about ninety seven! I used to go to his house to see him in the Lakes. Now Jones lived in Birmingham, it’s really sad you see, and it’s coming to lots of people, could be me if I’m not careful, as he had to go into a home, he came from Wigan. I knew his son and he’s gone, but I didn’t know where he’d gone or anything and Wigan’s a big place really, and so I phoned his son up, so he said, well he said, leave it, I won’t tell you over the phone, call and I’ll give you, I’ll write it for you, letters, but he says but I must warn you, he says, he does a lot of sleeping and I think it is, I said to him across road, says, I mean if I’m here and this that and the other, there’s a, so that was it. So I went with British Airways for twenty eight years and then of course I got a job as a clerk and here I am, fed up! [Laugh]
SP: And you worked quite a long time didn’t you? Was it, what age did you retire from your clerking?
SC: Well I wanted to go till I was ninety but I was taken ill when I was ninety, eighty nine, eighty nine and I had to be brought home three weeks running, but it’s.
SP: So you worked as a clerk until you were eighty nine. That’s fantastic!
SC: Yeah, I used to do everything at home, but I can’t do a thing, can’t even go up the loft now. But it’s very, very upsetting really, you know, I mean to say, as I said to Albert across the road, I said we are not living, we’re just existing, till you know, till the final day. See I won’t go in a home.
SP: I think Syd, you’ve done remarkably well to work until you’re eighty nine and you’ve got a fantastic home so I’d just like to thank you on behalf of International Bomber Command Centre for your time today and all the stories that you’ve told us.
SC: Do you think they’ll accept the manner which we’ve done it?
SP: Absolutely, you’ve just told us exactly your story and that’s what we’re after at the International Bomber Command Centre, so thank you.
SC: Yeah.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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ACooperSF170913, PCooperS1501
Title
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Interview with Syd Cooper. Two
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:14:46 audio recording
Creator
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Susanne Pescott
Date
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2017-09-13
Description
An account of the resource
Sidney Cooper was born in Blackpool and speaks about his early life there. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1941. He first served as an engine fitter in Fighter Command before remustering as aircrew. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 427 Squadron from RAF Leeming. He later served as ground crew with 514 Squadron. On leaving the Air Force in 1946 he worked for Standard Telephones and British Airways. Syd finally retired at eighty nine.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Fighter Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
Italy
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Norfolk
England--Suffolk
England--Yorkshire
England--Blackpool
Italy--Bari
England--Lancashire
Temporal Coverage
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1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
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Anne-Marie Watson
Carolyn Emery
427 Squadron
514 Squadron
aircrew
entertainment
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
Halifax
Harvard
Lancaster
military living conditions
Operation Dodge (1945)
Oxford
RAF Foulsham
RAF Leeming
RAF Stradishall
RAF Waterbeach
training
Wellington
-
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1bcdedc530fd2f872407ddab9e936c8e
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/240/3385/ACoxJ160321.1.mp3
06100ff099a07721ae8e49ba1bd5acd8
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
Cox, John
John Cox
J Cox
Description
An account of the resource
Seven Items. Includes an oral history interview with John Cox (133397 Royal Air Force), his logbooks and photographs. He flew operations as a pilot with 626 Squadron before becoming a prisoner of war.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by John Cox and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-14
2016-03-21
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
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Cox, J
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is David Meanwell the interviewee is John Cox .The interview is taking place at Mr Cox’ home at Old Oxted in Surrey on the 21st of March 2016. Right could you perhaps tell us a little bit about your, like where you were born and your up bringing.
JC. Yes I was born in a town called Bourne actually, in Lincolnshire, that was spelt Bourne on the 15th of November 1922 and I was brought up there, I had two brothers one younger, one older than me we all went to the local grammar school and eventually each of us went into the services my elder brother went into the Army, he became a captain in the Army and was posted to India for a good time in of the war. My younger brother was, didn’t join up because of his, he wasn’t old enough until shortly before the war finished. As far as I was concerned I was always anxious to get into the Air Force and I looked forward to it with some relish. My, we all went to the local grammar school, we all enjoyed sports, I particularly enjoyed cricket. I used to cycle to Nottingham, to Trent Bridge some forty miles away to see a game of cricket when I was about fifteen. So, and I used to play cricket locally, then I decided that, well it was decided for me after I left school that I had to earn a living and I considered myself fortunate to be, to receive an entry into the Midland Bank. Now in those days it was not customary for anyone in the Bank to be allowed to work in the town in which they were born. So I was sent in fact about some sixty miles away to at the age of sixteen to a town in Norfolk it was called Wymondham, it was spelt Wymondham but locally pronounced ‘Windham’ and I went there into a small branch of the bank and I enjoyed a very, a very nice period there, I was only there for about four months I suppose before war was declared and I clearly remember the Sunday morning when we listened to the broadcast to say that we were at war with Germany. Whilst I was there in Wymondham I again played a lot of cricket for the local teams, I was staying in a nice boarding house together with some of the younger people who required accommodation like I did. I was entirely happy, it was only when war was declared I of course that I had to look at things rather more seriously. I wasn’t old enough to go into the Forces at that stage I was only sixteen but nevertheless it was looming in the distance that I was eventually got to join up and I was looking forward to joining the Air Force.
DM. So what was the route you followed into the Air Force, how, how did you come to join the Air Force?
JC. Well before the war I was interested in gliding as well as other things. I did a bit of gliding which gave me which gave me a lot of encouragement that I might be accepted in aircrew I didn’t know whether it was or not. But after that and when my time came to be called up I had an initial interview at Cardington I think near Bedford that is where they used to keep the R101 I do believe, the airship in the hangars there or outside the hangars and there we had a medical examination and a very brief interview with three Air Force officers who asked very simple questions which any idiot could have answered and I was accepted in as potential aircrew. Sent back home again and then eventually I got the call to report down to London where, which was the general reception area for aircrew and I found myself living in some very expensive flats in St John‘s Wood, all the furniture and important articles had been removed from the flats and we were just sleeping on the floor of the flats. Incidentally I found myself in a troop of thirty chaps, I was the only Englishman, all the rest were from the West Indies and they had just come over to England for the first time and very anxious to see London and with the result that we didn’t see much of them for quite a time because they were absent without leave. However eventually they came to heel and we went through the usual motions of being marched round the streets of that part of London by the corporal in little troops of about twenty or so and he would stop us at some little tea shop where he got his free tea and we had to pay thrupence for a cup of tea. And then we had our medical examination in the Lord‘s Cricket Ground in the Long Room at Lord‘s, which was absolute sacrilege for a for a cricketer but nevertheless we had our examinations, medical exams there and then we proceeded to be issued with our uniforms. I remember the big boots we were issued which took a little bit of breaking in. We used to have our lunch each day, be marched to the zoo and we had our lunch in the zoo, the animals were still there, we could hear the sounds of all the various animals as we were having our lunch. From there we I was transferred to an Initial Training Wing at Cambridge to Pembroke College. We had the College had been placed at the disposal of the Forces during the war. I remember it was very cold indeed we used to have to wash outside in the mornings in a sort of a little tub, the living was a bit sparse but nevertheless it was very interesting we then began to enter into our studies, aircraft recognition and everything applying to flying. We used to spend a lot of time at Cambridge being marched from one university to another where we had the privilege of receiving our studies in some of the well known universities. And we, the idea was at the end of our initial training there we should be sent to an Air Force Station where we would commence our flying. The course in Cambridge covered learning the morse code and many matters concerning RAF law et cetera, et cetera. Anyway I found myself being sent up to Scotland to an aerodrome called Scone which is near Perth. This was in the middle of winter. It was in January and when we got there we were suppose to do some initial flying to see if we were going to be airsick and that sort of thing otherwise we would have been thrown out. However when we got there it began to snow, we were only going to be there for three weeks but in three weeks we got one hours flying, because each day it snowed, or each night it snowed and each day we were spent clearing the snow off the runways. However the three weeks went by reasonably quickly and I found myself flying I think a couple of hours in a Tiger Moth. They satisfied themselves that I wasn’t subject to airsickness and so I was then delegated or instructed to go to America. We went over to the Clyde and boarded a relatively small American ship I think it was called the USS Neville it was a small one. We went in convoy then over to the State everybody was seasick without a shadow of doubt but we had a, went over in convoy and we didn’t have any, meet any trouble from the enemy at all. But when we got to New York that was that was a very pleasant environment in which to find oneself. Well the Americans had only just, that week I think it was just come into the war, Pearl Harbour had just occurred and they were forced into the war. They were then, as Americans are, very “gung ho” and everything was everything was sort of orientated to ensure that the troops were being prepared for war. Great celebrations, well not celebrations but incidents of patriotism in Times Square, New York where there were banners all over saying ‘let‘s go USA’ that sort of thing, it was all, they hadn’t experienced any war themselves at that moment. They were extremely kind to us, extremely generous, they enabled us to and provided us with tickets to go to any function almost, free of charge in New York whilst we were there. Personally I went to, I chose to go one night to a boxing match between Joe Louis and man called Abe Simmons at Madison Square Gardens. That was just one of the things I went to, but after a few days there they then arranged for us to board into trains to go to the Southern states of America, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana et cetera.
DM. So after you left New York where did you end up.
JC. Well we then went by train to the Southern states, I was very much looking forward to getting, starting to fly because I remembered in about 1935 when I was about thirteen years old I went to Sir Alan Cobham’s Air Circus which was, which came to my local town in Lincolnshire and I was absolutely thrilled to go and also very anxious to fly in the future. So anyway we got down to Tosca Alabama initially on the train. There we were well received by the local population, they hadn’t experienced any war at all down there or in America at all at that stage and they couldn’t have been kinder to us they really gave us a warm welcome and in Tosca, Louis or Alabama. I was attached to the local aerodrome where we started our primary training, we were flying Steersman aircraft. I remember I had an instructor called Mister Allan who was a very good pilot, not an awfully nice man but a very good pilot. I think before he started working for the US Air Force he had been a crop sprayer flying, flying low level and he was a very good pilot indeed. Well I managed to survive the six weeks course there in Alabama having gone solo after a few hours and I think when we done sixty hours we moved on to Turner Field in Georgia where we were then flying a rather heavier type of single engined aircraft. We did sixty hours or so there. After that we went to our Finishing School at Ellington Field in Houston in Texas. There we were flying twin engined aircraft, the Cessna 89 and some much more sophisticated aircraft after about sixty hours there we qualified to receive our wings. I was one of the fortunate ones who was invited to remain there as an instructor of the American Air Force. The Americans of course had a war forced upon them unexpectedly after Pearl Harbour and they hadn’t got enough instructors to cope with the large influx of pupil pilots of their own. So a few of us were asked if we would remain as instructors for the American pilots.
DM. How did you feel about that, were you pleased to stay or were you keen sort of to get into the fray back in Europe?
JC. Well no, I was desperately anxious to get home quite honestly. But I got messages from my home saying please take this opportunity to be an instructor in America because they realised the dangers were less over there than they were back home.
DM. You were out of harm‘s way.
JC. Yes I was out of harm’s way. In any event it was a, it was a very pleasant experience we had a course, courses lasted about six weeks and each of us had six pupils and they, I think I did about four or five courses there until the end of the year. It was a very interesting assignment and we knew we were eventually going to come back into the general fray of things in England but we did enjoy it over there.
DM. How did the young Americans I assume they were mainly young take to an equally young Englishman teaching them how to fly an aeroplane?
JC. They looked upon us with great respect strangely enough. I think it was because we had come from England where the war had been going on for some time and somehow they thought they they.
DM. You were the experts.
JC. Yeah they thought we knew all about it, in fact we didn’t we had only just trained ourselves but I suppose we had been selected because perhaps we had done reasonably well in out training and we were commissioned and generally speaking we, we did enjoy it. I, we had lots of privileges there too, for instance we were enabled if we wished to have an aircraft each weekend and we could go anywhere within a thousand miles as long as we were back by Monday morning and that was fine. We could take anybody with us if they were in uniform and so each weekend, not every weekend but many weekends we did make use of this great advantage. I remember one weekend I flew from Houston in Texas to the Grand Canyon in Arizona and, and back again. There was one restriction which was placed upon us that was that we were not supposed to fly more than a thousand miles away from base. Well the Grand Canyon was in fact one thousand two hundred and ninety miles away. So what I had to do was to fly to an aerodrome called Winslow, Arizona and land there and that was about three hundred miles short of the Grand Canyon. I had to refuel there, fly into the Grand Canyon, we flew around I took a Sergeant with me who was my Flight Sergeant on the aircraft, on the ground staff and we flew in the Grand Canyon and then flew back to Winslow, Arizona to refuel. So in fact I hadn’t exceeded the thousand mile limit [laughs] but had cheated a little bit and it was a very pleasant experience.
DM. Did you have to do your own navigation for that?
JC, Oh yes, there was just the two of us in a twin engined aircraft and they were lovely aircraft Cessna’s very much heavier aircraft than our Airspeed Oxfords and over here over in England, a fine aircraft. Anyway but that was a privilege, that sort of privilege made life very congenial over there and I exercised it quite a lot. We used to go to New Orleans and Kansas City and Memphis Tennessee, each weekend if we wished, we didn’t do it every weekend, but if we wished we could make use of that facility.
DM. So you were flying around the United States visiting places like New Orleans and having quite a good time. Eventually all good things come to an end and you had to come back to England. So what, what was the journey like, how did that go?
JC. Well, the journey back from America was interesting; we actually came back on the Queen Mary. Now the Queen Mary at that time was plying backwards and forwards to New York, without, without any support, without any military support or naval support because it was so fast in relation to the other ships. And so when we came back there were only about twenty of us I think on the Queen Mary from the RAF. All the rest were German, were American Soldiers and there were sixteen thousand on board. It annoyed us immensely because they all thought it was an American ship as it was so large, the biggest in the world at the time they thought it must be American. It took a lot of convincing them it was in fact an English ship. My colleagues and I in the Air Force were invited or requested via the ships’ crew by the Captain to go onto the flying bridge I think they call it in the fore end of the ship and spreads right across the whole ship and we had to keep our eyes scanned for enemy shipping or anything which needed reporting to the Captain. We had eight on the bridge at the same time each of us had in front of him a disc which had a segment marked out for us and we had to survey that particular segment looking out for enemy activity. Another, occasionally we had the extreme edge of this bridge to do our observations from and that was right over the sea, it was over the sides of the ships. The object, the objective of having those observation points was that we could look back along the side of the ship to see if there were any portholes being opened or flashing of enemies or flashing of lights to the enemy. Of course we didn’t, all the port holes were in fact locked and so it would be a problem for anybody to make any signals to anybody, but that was the object of that particular exercise. It kept us busy, we used to, used to do it about one night in three on the way back but it, I think it took us about twelve days to get back which was a long time for the Queen Mary then, it was going across in about three and half days in normal conditions, but we came back via the Azores which for security reasons apparently we did came, did a long circuit that way, that way home. That’s why we took so long, but it was an eventful journey. The reason it was restricted to sixteen thousand on board was that they could only serve thirty two thousand meals a day. So we all had two meals a day but they were very good meals.
DM. What was the accommodation like?
JC. The accommodation, we were, we were housed in the cabins and they were probably about ten in each two man cabin. We had bunks there to sleep in and they were stacked up the walls of the cabins we had about three or four cabins, three or four bunks on each wall of the cabin, so we were very crowded. Nevertheless the food was, although we only got two meals a day they were absolutely marvellous meals for war time conditions.
DM. What port did you come back to?
JC. We came, we came back into Gourock I think in Scotland and then we would ship down to somewhere near Liverpool overnight and then we came, I think we were allowed some time to go home. We had a bit of leave, that was, that was before we started on any serious flying in England again.
DM.So at this time you have been trained, you have been a trainer, you have come back to Britain. You have obviously not been allocated a squadron or anything yet.
JC. No, no we hadn’t. We were allocated to our squadrons we had all done about a thousand hours of flying already. So we didn’t need a lot of flying training I would suggest but we had to obviously had to get used to the Wellington and the Halifax and then onto Lancasters. We went to different aerodromes for that purpose. We had a reception centre at Scarborough in Yorkshire where and, and we were billeted in hotels there till such time as we we were allocated to our next station for training. First of all, then a Wellington a rather heavy aircraft, I didn’t care much for them, but that was the first English aircraft that I flew really. I had flown Airspeed Oxfords and lighter aircraft but that was the first heavy one that I had flown. Then we went onto Halifax’s at another station and then further on, finally Lancasters. From that of course we were allocated a squadron and that is the begetting of another story.
DM. How did the crewing up for the Lancaster come about.
JC. Well the crewing was a bit haphazard in my mind. We were just let loose with the aircrew, potential aircrew and they said well ‘just sort yourselves out’, you know, ’pick somebody you like the look of and, and if you want him he’s yours.’ So It really was a hit and miss affair fortunately I picked a very good crew, they were all friends of friends they were all very capable at their jobs. They weren’t truculent or boastful or cocky they were just very good crew members. We didn’t have a lot of jollity while we were flying in fact we had none at all. I used to make sure that there wasn’t a lot of idle chatter over the intercom ‘cause that was a bit disturbing and I, I stopped any of that, but we, we always worked well together. When we were on the ground we would go out together, possibly into Lincoln to whoop it up a bit. I’d got a motor cycle I remember that was a great help to me, I could get into Lincoln in about twenty minutes time. One night I was coming home after having probably a spot of liquid refreshment and I hit the railway gates which were closed [laugh] and went right over the railway gates much to the. The signalman came out and admonished me, I told him ‘he hadn’t got his light on the gates’ and he said ‘of course you haven’t got it on because you have knocked it off.’ I threatened to report him to the authorities he said ‘you can do what you like’ [laughs] I didn’t get very far with him. Anyway in Lincoln itself the squadron there was 626 Squadron I joined at Wickenby eight miles outside Lincoln we also had the 12 Squadron on the same aerodrome and but by and large we kept to our own squadrons for community reasons, friendships but it was a well run aerodrome.
DM. When did you receive your commission because I assume -
JC. I got my commission in America.
DM. You did? While you were training?
JC. Well, at the end of training, yes, those who became instructors also were commissioned at the same time. So I had my commission and I was a Flight Lieutenant when I was flying from the squadron in Wickenby.
DM. Were all your crew British or?
JC. They were, there was a Scotsman but they were British as you say. But on the night that we were, we were shot down my rear gunner who was a Scot was injured on his motor cycle, he had been into Lincoln and he was coming home he he had a crash and he was injured so on that particular night of our, of our operations, when, when it was a bit fatal for us, I had another gunner allocated to me and he was a Belgian. I had never met him before but as far as I was concerned, he was a good gunner and but otherwise they were all English. Eh I’m sure they were all English, yes.
DM. So can you remember anything about your first mission what your thoughts were, how you felt.
JC. Well, I didn’t have any apprehensions at all in, in flying certainly early on my own crew were well trained by then we done a lot of practice flying together we were, we were a good happy combined unit. No I didn’t have any apprehensions about it, no.
DM. Now you were based at Wickenby and you came from Bourne so you were sort of a local lad to all intents and purposes but did that mean you were able to see more of your family than perhaps your colleagues at all?
JC. In fact it didn’t because we had, we had to remain on the station whenever there was a possibility of any flying and we didn’t know what the weather conditions were going to be so they couldn’t give us leave and the tour of operations would normally be relatively short. Either you got shot down or you finished your thirty tours, thirty operations and it wasn’t going to be spread over a long period. No it was nice to have my family close at hand but I don’t think I ever visited them whilst I was operating.
DM. So where were some of the places you flew over?
JC. You mean.
DM. Where were your missions to?
JC. Well my first mission was to Karlstad [?] and that was in December of that year. And then I went to Essen and to Ludwigshafen to Ulla and Bonne and quite a few more that was in about two or three weeks we covered those few. Subsequently I went to Gelsenkirchen, Nuremberg, Munich, Ludwigshafen, Wiesbaden, Kleve, [sound of papers rustling] Dresden, Chemnitz, Dortmund, Duisburg, Flashier, Dessau, Kassel, Essen, Dortmund and finally shot down over Nuremberg.
DM. Before that fatal, so to speak twenty-first mission when you were shot down had you had encounters with enemy aircraft or bad, bad experiences with flak?
JC. Yeah, yes on each occasion usually there was some, some enemy action which was, was a bit disturbing, on occasions we had a clear run. But places like Nuremberg and Munich and Chemnitz, was a long distances to go and Dresden was a long way to go. Off course there was a lot of criticism about our bombing of Dresden. We didn’t know before we went we were going to cause so much damage. It was of course because Dresden was built mainly of wood and burned rather readily. It was a great shame about that but it did help the Russians to get into East Germany and quite a lot sooner than they would otherwise have done. Because the Dresden railway yards were being used by the Germans to bring their troops up and the Russians were complaining that we weren’t doing much to help them. They had come back from Moscow driven the Germans back from the doors of Moscow almost to the borders of Germany again, but their lines of communication were so long it was causing them problems. Just as it had caused the Germans problems when they got were attacked Moscow. They got to the gates of Moscow virtually but the weather and the long lines of communication caused them to be defeated there.
DM. The criticism about Dresden, I have always assumed it was after the war. Was there any criticism at the time, do you remember, I suppose people didn’t know what had happened then?
JC. There was no criticism in the British press I don’t think, in fact it was hailed as a great success probably. When I was shot down which was not too long after my trip to Dresden it was shouted at me by the Germans, ‘Dresden, Dresden, Dresden’ and it had obviously hit home very hard there. And it was a, it was a very unfortunate affair that so many were killed. But at least it did help to shorten the war because within about a month or so the Germans, the Russians were in Berlin.
DM. So turning now to that mission to Nuremberg when you were shot down what, what led to your demise?
JC. Well, Nuremberg, we’d been before we thought we knew the way there, we did know the way there quite well. We had, we got caught in searchlights which was a frightening experience. The master searchlight got us at twenty thousand feet earlier on then all the other searchlights coned in on us and it was at twenty thousand feet the inside of the aircraft was lit up as though it was daylight. One felt very vulnerable because there was nothing you could do to get out of the searchlights. If you weaved about the master searchlight seemed to follow you then all the other searchlights coned in on you and for a few minutes it was, that was quite a frightening experience. But the last mission to Nuremberg when we were shot down, we were attacked by a Junkers 88 and we were about, we were on the bombing run in, we were the bomb aimer, the bomb aimer was at his gun sights giving instructions to the pilot who was me to change direction very slightly here and there as we went in and it was at that time that we were attacked by this Junkers 88, yeah.
DM. So can you tell us a bit about the night when you were attacked by the Junkers 88 and shot down?
JC. Yes indeed we had completed about two thirds, two thirds of our tour and we were therefore quite experienced we had been to Nuremberg on the 2nd of January 1945 and we had moments of excitement but were not unduly concerned about the second trip. My regular rear gunner had a motor car, motor cycle accident the day before and he was replaced by a Belgium that we hadn’t met before but he had been well recommended to us. The notes I made at the pre flight briefing show that we were to bomb in three waves, commencing at three minute intervals and our aircraft was to fly the second wave from 21:33 hours to 21:36 hours we were at twenty thousand feet and our bombs, we were dropping our bombs on a heading of 084 degrees. Mosc, Mosquito Pathfinders with illuminating flares would be available at 21:26 and then they would follow up with red and green flares. If the target was vis, if the target was visual then red target indicators would be backed up with green target indicators. The aircraft would be staggered between eighteen and twenty thousand feet and the bomb load was one four thousand pound bomb and six thousand four hundred pounds of incendiaries. The, we witnessed considerable night fighter activity on the way there particularly south of Stuttgart where we had seen one or two aircraft going down and they were shot down by heavy flak. We were not concerned with night fighters and we successfully took evasive action when the rear gunner reported the Junkers 88 on our tail but it was out of range. The searchlights were plentiful as we approached Nuremberg but not too troublesome except to the extent that it made our silhouettes more easily seen. At 21:24 hours we were just short of the target and contemplating our bombing run although our bomb bays were not yet open. Without any warning we were attacked from underneath and set on fire in the centre section flames and choking smoke funnel, funnelling forward to the cockpit. I had no intercom response from the crew. Almost immediately I, the Lanc went out of control and into a steep dive and I am convinced some part of it must have fallen off or a control linkage severed. Having regard to the nature of our bomb load I still cannot understand why we did not explode as it appeared to me that the incendiaries were on fire. Immediately I gave instructions to bale out, not knowing if my order was received but mid upper gunner and wireless operator were presumably either injured or prevented by the fire from escaping. The bomb aimer and rear gunner were captured on landing about thirty miles from the crash site. The flight engineer did not survive and I can only assume that after he jumped he was caught up by some sort, part of the aircraft which was in a very steep dive. The parachute of the navigator failed to open and he was buried in the neighbouring village of Burgoberbach. For my part I must have been no more than a few hundred feet up when I baled out. I saw the Lanc explode on the ground just below me and within seconds I landed about three hundred yards from the burning aircraft. A compound fracture of the right leg resulted in a series of bone graft operations in various RAF hospitals for the next, for the next three years and I was eventually invalided out of the Air Force at the end of 1948. The exceptionally large losses that night I think could be attributed to the fact that the German night fighters were able to penetrate the bomber stream at an early stage and on a clear night. From Stuttgart onwards we were very vulnerable. Nuremburg was always a hot target.
DM. Ok so you you you parachuted, you managed to escape the aircraft, you baled out, you landed near to the aircraft, it was obviously night. What what happened after that once you were on the ground. Did you hide, you were injured clearly so you weren’t very mobile.
JC. It wasn’t a question of hiding, it was a question of, I fell in a pine forest and the trees were very close together. Looking at it from as you parachuted down it looked like a pin cushion that you were going to fall into which I did fall into it and my leg, I could see that as I parachuting down my right leg was bleeding and that and my boots had come off both, both boots had come off and it was my fault because I hadn’t got the straps tied sufficiently tightly around them. So that was a mistake on my part but I, when I landed and crashed through the trees, there was no way which I could avoid crashing through the trees. I was there with a, with a shell wound in my leg, no boots on at all, my feet were absolutely bare and I was lying at the bottom of a pine tree in the middle of the forest. I thought my chances of escape from there were pretty limited. After that I didn’t know, I couldn’t do anything for myself, I couldn’t my leg was busted, broken completely with a shell wound and I was, I thought that was going to be my end because there was no way I could attract attention of anyone being in the middle of a forest. It was the next morning probably about six o clock or six thirty in the morning when it was just daylight I could see just through the trees the silhouette of an old lady who was gathering firewood. The Germans were very short of any sort of fuel and she was obviously thinking about her fires at home and gathering firewood. Well I, I hailed her through the trees and she didn’t see me initially because the trees were so closely together but then she did see me and she scuttled off. Well I thought at least somebody knows I am here. Then I was waiting then, I could only wait to see what happened. There was no way I could move with my leg as it was, no shoes, there was no way of escaping and I just had to trust to the Lord for my future. Well after about an hour I saw a soldier coming through the trees towards me. He was a very well dressed soldier and he was part of the, we were to call it the Home Guard in our country but had a much, much more military style about him and he had two guns in his belt but he came, he didn’t take the guns out of his belt or anything like that, he saw that I was helpless lying at the bottom of this tree and he looked at me and then indicated that he would come back. Well he went away and I didn’t know how long it was but an hour or two later he came back again and this time hauled me to the side of the forest that we were in and he had a hay cart there. Well, and he helped me onto this hay cart and started trotting away back towards the village. On the way back he, he also picked up the body of my navigator who was dead and I notice that the navigator had no parachute and I can only assume that he had not attached properly his parachute when he clipped it on, leaving the aircraft. I saw him leave the aircraft and I thought he’d got the parachute with him then but obviously somehow or other he he lost it on the way out. So I am afraid he was dead and they put him on the side, on the straw in this hay cart that I was on alongside me and trotted into the neighbouring village of Burgoberbach.
DM. Where did you go from there, what happened after that?
JC. Well after I got there of course they were very hostile, the local inhabitants and they continued to shout the name of Dresden to me quite frequently. I couldn’t do anything by way of response except look a little bit contrite and they took my, the body of my navigator off the hay cart and decided that the local hospital where they took me wasn’t appropriate for my particular wound which was quite serious, they couldn’t deal with me and so they transferred me to a pony and trap, put me on this trap and the same soldier who had picked me up out of the forest drove me about probably four or five miles to a German hospital and left me there. There is no doubt about it they were pretty hostile towards me and I wasn’t in a position to do much arguing with them.
DM. Was the hospital you ended up in, was it a military hospital or a civil hospital?
JC. It was a German, it was a military hospital, it was housed entirely with German soldiers and a place called Troisdorf and they, they received me there and they took me into the operating theatre, they looked at the leg and they put a plaster cast, plaster cast on it and they left a hole in the side of the plaster cast where the shell had gone in so they could treat that. In fact it, it was a good idea but it didn’t really work because of the leg didn’t improve. They weren’t antagonistic towards me in the hospital they were I thought reasonably, not friendly that would be stretching it too much, but they tolerated me and put me in a ward of soldiers. There were forty in the ward the beds were so closely packed, they were all injured German soldiers except me. There was a gap between each bed of no more than six, eighteen inches just enough so the doctor could come round between each bed but they were very, very, very closely parked the beds in the hospital. They I wasn’t treated badly, they didn’t give me a very warm reception. The soldiers in the ward strangely enough were not antagonistic. They were in the same boat as I was, they were all injured and I received a daily visit from the doctor, he couldn’t do anything because they probably got more important things to do. I was there for some weeks in the hospital hoping that one day the Americans would come along and release me.
DM. Did you receive any information as to what was going on in the war, did you manage to glean anything when you were there?
JC. The only, no, I had a, I was concerned that nobody knew where I was and furthermore the Red Cross weren’t aware of where I was so I couldn’t be reported as a prisoner of war. I was concerned my parents back home would assume that I had been killed because the Red Cross were normally pretty good within twenty four hours or so indicating that either members alive or he wasn’t. And there was no way in which I could ask the Germans to do anything for me in that regard no I felt very lonely and I was more concerned about my parents at home must be believing I had been killed and I wasn’t able to communicate with them and that happened, that applied for quite some weeks afterwards, so I was very sorry about that.
DM. Did, did you get a chance to write a letter before, before you left to your parents or you never had a chance to communicate with them?
JC. Oh there was no way at all, there was no question of writing letters it was a question of surviving really and this was on my mind the whole time that my parents would believe that I was dead because normally when one was shot down they went to a prisoner of war camp. The Red Cross would immediately take action to ensure the parents was advised that the son was still alive at least and in a prisoner of war camp. And of course the food in a prisoner of war camp would have been better than we were getting in the hospital. Our meals were very very sparse, mind all the German soldiers were getting the same food as I was. But we used to live on sort of a very watery soup if I remember and I lost quite a bit of weight there, yeah.
DM. When did you come to leave the hospital what happened?
JC. Well, I think it must have been about six weeks or so that I was there before the Germans, before the Americans came in.
DM. So was the hospital evacuated or ?
JC. Well they were on the brink of it and there was a lot of disturbance and I wasn’t quite clear what was going to happen. Certainly there was a lot of activity at the local railway station and I suspected that they, the patients were going to be evacuated, but on the other hand there wasn’t much sense in evacuating the only way they could go was further into Germany and into that part of Germany and the Americans were going to follow them anyway, so there wasn’t much point in it. So in the end I waited until I could hear the guns coming of the Americans I could hear them in the distance a couple of days before they actually arrived. They were approaching at about fifteen miles a day and when they got to the hospital they were, they had a man come, I managed to contact them. The hospital wasn’t evacuated and the Americans were not delighted to see me, I was just a nuisance to them. I got my leg in a full length plaster, they didn’t know what to do with me, but the only thing they could do was take me along with them. And I went along [laugh] with General Paton [laugh] and his officers for quite some days but I was going in the wrong direction, they were approaching at about fifteen miles a day into Germany and I was going the wrong way with them, but my main concern was still that I couldn’t get a message to my parents. I couldn’t ask couldn’t ask the Germans to do anything, they weren’t interested and General Paton was too busy with his troops and not of, not of an inclined nature to be helpful. It was interesting to see how they were progressing, they would do about fifteen miles a day and they would go through three of four villages during that time and there was no resistance of any substance at all for them they were just rumbling through. They would ring up the next village and say ‘we want to see the white sheets coming out of the windows by way of surrender otherwise we will come in shooting’. In no time at all you could see the white, look at the next village, and the sheets were coming out of the bedroom windows and they had pretty well a free run. But they had bypassed so many Germans on the way through and this is why they couldn’t do anything with me, they couldn’t send me back by ambulance. So many Germans had been by passed and there was still a great danger, well nuisance anyway, but General Paton was only anxious to, plough on through, through that part of Germany and he had no, virtually no opposition at all. We went, they always used to choose the best building in the village that they were going to stop in that night and kick anybody out if they were, if they were residing there and make that the Officers Mess. Every now and again they would pick up a village halls one night we stayed in a school the village school and I was interested to walk round the school. I thought whilst I was there I might as well walk round the classrooms and I was, it was very interesting to see that their style of education was obviously very much similar to ours. On one occasion I saw that there was a map on the wall and it was the south coast of England and the north coast of Europe there the English Channel between them, but I notice they called that the German Channel. I thought this was a bit off side, [laugh] I thought it was the English Channel but no it was the German Channel, never mind.
DM. How did you eventually come to leave General Paton’s army.
JC. Well eventually they began to get the Germans cleared behind them so that it made it, it made it possible to bring ambulances forward and eventually I, I was put in an ambulance together with about six of their own soldiers that were injured and brought back. I was about a fortnight day by day moving backwards from one medical station to another, Russian, American medical stations to another and I saw some. The Americans were treating the German injured as well as their own. I remember on one occasion there was a nurse giving a blood drip to an American to a German soldier and he was, he was in agony, crying out and she slapped him across the face and she said ‘shut up will you’ she said, ‘you should be grateful to get good American blood’ [laugh]. Anyway eventually I, I got back by ambulance to Rheims, “did I tell you this?”
DM. “No you didn’t.”
JC. Went there, Rheims where there was a very big American camp and these chaps were being sent back to England to go on to America the war was over as far, they weren’t, they were just American soldiers, they were surplus to requirements then in France and I was the only Englishman in this camp there must have been a thousand American troops there. Very basic. They were living in tents in the middle of Rheims and from there they were flying them back to England, the Americans were flying their own troops back to England and I, I eventually came back with them. On one occasion I looked along the line and I saw outside one tent a table, it was a big tent a table was displaying lots of little parcels on it. There was a master sergeant there sitting by this table and these, the soldiers were lined up receiving one of these little parcels and I so said to one of them ‘what are they queuing for?’ and he said ‘they are queuing to get their Purple Hearts.’ So I said ‘oh yes so I will try and get a Purple Heart’. I was the only Englishman in the camp it was all various Americans. So [laughs] I went, I got in the queue they were lined up and signing and taking their Purple Heart away and I, when I got there the master sergeant looked me up and down and said ‘what outfit are you in?’ you see and I said I was in the Royal Air Force and he said ‘well I shall have to see the colonel about you’ “I said, ‘don’t bother’ [laughs] and passed on. I didn’t get my Purple Heart.
DM. So did you fly home from Rheims?
JC. Yes they, I was the only Englishman on the flight it was especially for the Americans really they all, the pilot asked me to go and sit with him in the cockpit so that I could see the White Cliffs of Dover as we came over. We landed at an aerodrome in the south of England its name just escapes me, but I was there for a fortnight and it was only there that I could arrange for a phone call to made to my parents to say I have landed in England and that was a happy release for me. Then I went from there to Cosford near Wolverhampton which was the general reception area of all RAF prisoners of war as they came back. Whether they were injured or whether they didn’t, they went there. The prisoners of war went to Cosford where they had an absolutely marvellous organisation. These chaps came back like I did with ragged clothes, and that sort of thing, and they were fitted out with new uniforms. If they got brevets to put on their uniforms they were put on, and if, they were fitted up with new boots, fully fitted up and after a medical examination they were sent off home, to their homes which they were anxious to get to of course but as far as I was concerned I went and there was no way they could get me home immediately but I was there for about a fortnight being looked, having my leg looked after, put in another splint and then they did allow me to go home. There were some very good natured people about at that time who were prepared to drive these ex prisoners of war from Cosford Hospital to their homes where ever their homes may be. I was in Lincolnshire, my home was in Lincolnshire a long way from the hospital but some kind chap drove me all the way there all the way home. And he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t stay, with my parents to have a chat with or anything, he said ‘I must now turn round and go back’ and he went all the way back to Wolverhampton very nice of him. But I suppose that in those days there was rationing of petrol but these people who were prepared to do this, the transfer to patients back home to their homes obviously got a special allowance of petrol to do that. Yes, that was pretty much the end of my story.
DM. You didn’t stay on in the Air Force after the war?
JC. I stayed on for three and a half years not because I wanted to but because my leg, was needed treatment and, I was in hospital, Cosford Hospital for two years with various operations on my leg. I had bone grafts and that sort of things the first ones wouldn’t, wouldn’t heal l so I had new ones and it was a very long winded job. And then they sent me or allowed me to go to an RAF Regiment camp near my home in Lincolnshire where I was assistant administrating officer or something like that not having to do any work but it was a place to put me whilst my leg was continuing to heal. Anyway it was three and a half years before I actually left the Air Force. Meanwhile they paid me all the time which was good of them, in the Officers Mess.
DM. Did you go back into banking?
JC. Yes I went back into banking, first of all I went to the Lincoln branch of the bank. I couldn’t accept any pay from them because I was getting Air Force pay, so I was working for nothing but as far as I was concerned I was getting back into my line of business. From then on I, I took up various appointments in the bank I went to Northamptonshire, I went to Birmingham, I went to Coventry and different branches each time receiving a bit of an uplift in by way of promotion, eventually I, I, I managed a big branch in Birmingham and then I went to London and I was reluctant to go back to London because I was so happy in Birmingham. We lived in a nice house and got well settled but I had to go back to London. When I got there I objected in a mild manner, I know I agreed to the move, but they said be patient and within six months they had made me Manager of the largest branch in the bank in Threadneedle Street which was a surprise to me and obviously they had moved me around with this in mind from Birmingham. But I was there for about five years and then was eventually made a General Manager of the bank from which I retired.
DM. Did you keep in touch with colleagues from the war?
JC. No, well my Canadian bomb aimer he, he went back to Canada, I lost touch with him. The remainder, of course I lost four of the crew for one reason and another and the Belgian he went back he went straight back to Belgium he didn’t come back to England before going home, I don’t blame him either he went straight back home. So I,I didn’t have any more contact. I did have a lot of contact with the Germans afterwards at various reunions and entirely different.
DM. That’s the Germans that shot you down basically?
JC. Oh yes, I met them, they turned out to be quite nice chaps really, yes there we are. They visited me in England, came over and had a holiday then they went on to Ireland to extend the holiday a little bit and I took them round the RAF Museum. They wanted to look inside the Lancaster but they wouldn’t open, they wouldn’t allow them to open the door.
DM. That was mean.
JC. [laugh] So that is more or less the end of my story.
DM. Do have any thoughts, opinions about how Bomber Command were treated after the war. About the public reaction or lack of recognition?
JC. It didn’t unduly concern me but I, I agree that they did justify rather more publicity than they got publicity of a favourable nature, but that’s the way it is they weren’t, I don’t think people understood for a long time just the percentage of losses which were really incurred it seemed to be about one in two that were likely to not survive. No I didn’t get worked up about it, it was one of those things. Now of course some attention is being paid to that remission, yeah.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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ACoxJ160321
PCoxJ1606
Title
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Interview with John Cox
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:08:49 audio recording
Creator
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David Meanwell
Date
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2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
John Cox grew up in Lincolnshire and worked in banking before he joined the Royal Air Force. After training as a pilot in the United States, he served as an instructor for almost three years. He flew 20 operations as a pilot with 626 Squadron,from RAF Wickenby, before his aircraft was shot down and he became a prisoner of war. He was repatriated from a German military hospital by American forces and returned to England. Spending two years in hospital at RAF Cosford, he received treatment and bone grafts to his leg. After the war he returned to banking.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
United States
England--Lincolnshire
England--Shropshire
Alabama
Georgia
Texas
France
France--Reims
Germany--Troisdorf
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
Contributor
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Hugh Donnelly
Carolyn Emery
626 Squadron
Absent Without Leave
African heritage
aircrew
bale out
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
crewing up
final resting place
Halifax
Ju 88
Lancaster
Oxford
pilot
prisoner of war
RAF Cosford
RAF Wickenby
Red Cross
searchlight
shot down
training
Wellington
-
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/244/3389/ACuttsE151001.1.mp3
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Cutts, Ernest
Ernest Cutts
Ernie Cutts
E Cutts
Description
An account of the resource
14 Items. One oral history interview with Ernest Cutts. Ernest Cutts enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force, and trained as an air gunner in Australia. He flew on 34 operations as a rear gunner with 466 Squadron from RAF Driffield, flying Halifaxes.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Ernest Cutts and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2015-10-01
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Cutts, E
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AP: This interview for the Bomber Command the International Bomber Command Centre is with Mr. Ern Cutts who is a 466 and 467 Squadron rear gunner, the interview is taking place at Mr. Cutts’s home in Doncaster, Eastern Victoria on 1st October 2015. Ern we might start at the beginning tell me something about your early life growing up, farm, family that sort of thing?
EC: I was born in the Mallee in Victoria I was born in Birchip um very proud of that I’m a Mallee boy and um still very fond of the country up there. Then I went to school in Birchip and at the age of um be about fifteen there was an advertisement in the local paper for the, from the Postmaster General’s Department advertising for staff and for young people to sit for the Commonwealth Public Service Exam which I did. I passed the exam and was then posted um straight from the the Mallee in Birchip which is quite a cultural shock and the next thing I knew I was living in a boarding house in or just off Fitzroy Street, St. Kilda so I don’t know how I actually handled it but I suppose the resilience of youth, um and I had various postings then err military post office as a civilian. I was a junior postal officer, in other words a glorified telegram boy really, um my first posting was the telephone exchange in Lonsdale Street, Melbourne from there I went to the St. Kilda Post Office, from there I went to the Military Post Office in Rowville outside Dandenong and the Military Post Office in Mount Martha outside um Frankston. By this time of course I was starting to become of the age where I could sign up and like all young blokes I couldn’t wait to join one of the services, right from the start I had um I am the youngest or was and am the youngest of seven children um of my mother and father’s and of the seven children five of us all enlisted um and we enlisted across various services. Um two of us enlisted in the Air Force I was aircrew my brother Ron was ground crew or ground staff as they were known then, er one of my sisters was um an RAAF nursing sister, two of my brothers joined the AIF and the remaining two girls of the family were wireless service people so I had a fairly interesting service life. By this time of course I’d have been eighteen as I just mentioned before and I had already decided that I want to be in aircrew and aircrew after a lot of hassle with my father he didn’t want me to go aircrew because he felt that five out of the seven of his children were already occupied in the forces and he thought that I perhaps could go into something less less strenuous or whatever I wanted to join aircrew and I did it.
AP: Did you have any family history in the First World War perhaps, did you know of anyone who was in the First World War and had they?
EC: Well I know one of my uncles er my father’s brothers on my father’s side Aubrey, Aubrey Cutts I know he was in the war and another brother who lived in Sydney I can’t I’m not hundred per cent where Aubrey lived but I think he was um after the First World War I think he was a blockie in other words a farmer a soldier settler allocated a fruit growing block, um the other brother the only other one that I know of that was in the services was employed by the Sydney municipal council and he was um his name was Ray but I I really didn’t know either of them.
AP: So there wasn’t any sort of influencing you all joining up it was more, there’s another war let’s go?
EC: No no.
AP: Okay.
EC: My father was one of eleven or twelve children I think like they all were in those days and um by the time I came on the scene they were all well scattered all over the Commonwealth so I didn’t even know them except that one uncle, Uncle Ray in Sydney and the only reason I knew him was that um we embarked from Sydney on the troop ship New Amsterdam um to go overseas and of course he had me at his house and all that you know all that company and looking after me and all that business.
AP: You specifically chose the Air Force or were you open to any service?
EC: No I think now I can’t remember but looking back I think I wanted to be aircrew.
AP: Specifically aircrew well you got there.
EC: Specifically aircrew and I wanted to be aircrew and, and I was.
AP: Can you remember much of the actual enlistment process you know you go and you put your name down somewhere can you remember that that process where and how did that happen?
EC: I can’t remember, I can’t remember the actual, I can remember going to a big building on the corner of I think it was the Main Road and St. Kilda Road and that was commandeered I think would be the word it was taken over by the Air Force as their recruitment centre and it was called Kellow-Falkiner, any people of my age would know Kellow-Falkiner for it was a very big motor company selling motor cars, servicing motor cars and very big I think it was either on the corner of St. Kilda Road and the Main Road or St. Kilda Road and Commercial Road but I feel pretty sure it was the Main Road in fact I think the building is still there today.
AP: What happened when you went there?
EC: Well the rest is a bit of a blank it was I can’t really remember, I remember we had to go in and I suppose we were interviewed and I think we were given a quick medical and signed this piece of paper and then that was it and I think we went on our various ways home and all that sort of thing and waited to be called up.
AP: How long did it take from that until you were called up?
EC: I can’t remember.
AP: Oh right.
EC: I can’t remember I really can’t remember er um and during that time while I was waiting for my call up I just went back as a junior post office as a junior postal officer at St. Kilda Post Office.
AP: Did you already know Morse code out of interest doing that job?
EC: Yeah well sort but I was never as good at it as I would have liked er and I, I regretted that very very much because I should have been a wireless air gunner which was I wanted to be a wireless air gunner but I wasn’t good enough at Morse code.
AP: Despite the prior experience?
EC: Beg your pardon?
AP: Despite the prior experience?
EC: Yeah but I never, I didn’t really have enough experience.
AP: Fair enough.
EC: Some of those, those in the days of telegraphy some of those telegraphers were absolutely brilliant, brilliant you had to be you had to be brilliant to be a telegraphist.
AP: Fair enough. Your ITS training your initial training where was that and what did you do?
EC: One in that logbook here somewhere.
AP: There it is.
EC: Yeah over there well when I first ITC initial training see that would be initial training centre that won’t be in here.
AP: I don’t think you would have done any flying there.
EC: No, no you don’t that was the [looking through book] initial training ITC [pause] I just saw the photo a minute a go here but which side I was, there it is there. First posting was to Number 1 Recruit Training School at Summers, Victoria for six weeks. From Summers I proceeded to West Sale, Victoria with the 3 BAGS, which is bombing and gunnery school for three weeks, this is a part of the course thirty nine gunners at Sale and yours truly, yours truly is um somewhere there.
AP: Hopefully we will scan this photo later.
EC: Er just trying to see which is me . . . there!
AP: Back there, excellent. So at, at West Sale you were flying in Fairey Battles according to your logbook, what memories of that if any do you have?
EC: I don’t want memories of that.
AP: You don’t want memories of that [laughs].
EC: I don’t memories of that [background noise] that was the most, that was bloody hideous things they were, they were glycol-cooled engines, inline engines, Fairey Battles and I’ve never smelt glycol like that. They, they sort of make you sick before you took off, the smell of the hot glycol which was a cooling agent and um beside that they were old they were rickety there was only you and the pilot in them and to step out on the first day for your first time in your life of ever being airborne to step out of one of those Fairey Battles really was asking really asking too much. But that’s how they did the gunnery schools because they were very reliable aircraft, very reliable aircraft. They had to tow drogues which were really targets like a like an air sock on an airfield the drogue. One Fairey Battle would drag the drogue and then you would be in the other one and you’d practice all that you put into practice all that you’d learned in theory that day, but they were awful, it was awful I hated every minute of it, hated. Beside being violently airsick all the time which you were because the pilot had to do manoeuvring and they were er well we just weren’t prepared for it just not prepared for it. We were young blokes who’d who’d never even seen an aircraft before and um plonked in this awful aircraft the Fairey Battle then and er you just had to cope the best you could.
AP: And so after something like ten hours in your logbook your next step is embarkation depot and a boat presumably to er?
EC: No then.
AP: After BAGS.
EC: 3 BAGS, which is bomber and gunnery school oh and I see it will be initial training was learning to be a discipline, discipline you know that was here initial training and then 3 BAGS bomber, bombers and air gunners school, then I went to now in that one we flew Oxford aircraft which were comparatively luxurious I mean they had two engines for a start off that were pretty hard and clamped down but at least they had two engines and um you weren’t out in the elements like you were in the Fairey Battles I think I might have a photo of one.
AP: So in the Oxford you were bombing training or was that in gunnery?
EC: Gunnery.
AP: Gunnery training as well.
EC: Yes.
AP: How did they do that in an Oxford? Was there a turret or just a hole with a gun? Where did you do your– ?
EC: You had to know how to stand in the turret there it is there 3 BAGS, West Sale gunnery there it is there as I said yeah Oxford that one’s Fairey Battle, Fairey Battle, Fairey Battle [examining photographs].
AP: Ah so you flew both of them?
EC: Yeah Battle, Battle, Battle, but mostly it was um.
AP: Now we’re at Lichfield? So how did you get from West Sale to Lichfield?
EC: From West Sale to Lichfield, I can’t remember a great amount about it except that when we finished 3 BAGS we would have been sent on pre-embarkation leave and I think we perhaps had ten days perhaps three weeks of pre-embarkation leave and we were er towards the end of that we were in Brad I think it was the suburb of Bradfield or Bradfield Park in Sydney and it was there that I contacted the brother of my father’s Ray that’s how I came to know him and um I suppose we did whatever young blokes did while we were sitting in the embarkation you know perhaps went down for a few beers went out perhaps saw all the pretty girls and did all those things and um then that was time say for the embarkation actual embarkation and we were then bussed along with hundreds and hundreds of others down to the troop ship which was um commandeered by the British navy and was a liner, pre-war liner and it was the flagship of the Dutch merchant navy, the Royal Dutch Merchant Navy and it was the New Amsterdam and in those days it was not quite to the standard of the Queen Mary but going that way which to be the flagship of the Dutch merchant navy pre-war well it had to be it had to be a beautiful liner and then from there we went overseas.
AP: Can you remember which direction you went?
EC: Yes we went from um Sydney and one of the most one of the most beautiful sights I ever saw in my life was um we didn’t, we didn’t come down to Melbourne we left Sydney and but we came down in the Bass Strait and then across to Perth. One of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in my life was a late afternoon we passed um Wilsons Promontory and the sun was setting and this it was and I’ve never never, never ever forgot it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life, I was a young eighteen year old bloke very impressionable and um I’ve never forgotten that, then um we went direct then to Cape Town in South Africa. Now we were in Cape Town for a while I distinctly remember going ashore and with all the boys and we used to go down to the canteen and have a few beers and um I remember I remember distinctly Cape Town, and from there we went round to Freetown, which is the capital of Sierra Leone and is still the capital today er I’ve got an idea we went to another place not too sure and all this time of course if there were in the big shipping lanes all over the world and they didn’t like calling in and embarking and disembarking too much because the German submarines were really, really, on the ball and um it was better that you were at sea and under convoy protection and big liners like the New Amsterdam we didn’t we had protection but that was only to keep us with the rest of the convoy didn’t really need the protection because the New Amsterdam could outrun German submarines and so we went from Cape Town round to Freetown the capital of Sierra Leone oh yeah that’s right then we went up to the Gold the Gold Coast could it be called the Gold Coast?
AP: The Ivory Coast?
EC: The Ivory Coast yes that’s the next one up I think from Sierra Leone [pause] and from there we went we must have picked up I remember distinctly remember picking up hundreds of Italian prisoners of war and we learnt later that they were from the Italian cruiser the Bartolliomi Colomanie, Bartolomeo Colleoni, which had just been sunk over Sydney and they had all the prisoners, all the Italian naval prisoners of war and we loaded them they were loaded on pretty quickly and then we set sail and went straight up to um Firth of Forth, which is in Scotland, Grannick is it Grannick [?Greenock], all the Scotch [sic] people that’s all they ever talk about the Firth of Forth so that’s where they’ll know it, beautiful part of the world, from there like all Australians we were um we disembarked and joined the troop train which took us directly to Brighton, um in Sussex?
AP: England, over in England, South of England.
EC: Yes and so that’s my tale of how I got to England.
AP: Can you remember much of Brighton, were you there for long was there much to do did you see any enemy activity or anything like that?
EC: No there was not a lot to do and um it was and still is er where most English people spend some holiday sometime because you haven’t been anywhere as an English person if you hadn’t been to Brighton. Even today it’s, it’s um a mecca for those that come, it’s a beautiful place. We expected to see being on the sea like that we expected the sea and perhaps swim on nice beaches but there is no beaches there, it’s on the sea alright, but no beaches so we were quite disappointed [laughs] they just had all pebbles and they don’t sort of have beaches.
AP: Did you see much um sign of the war when you had just arrived in England?
EC: Yeah, yeah well we um Brighton itself wasn’t bombed much, least I don’t think it was and if it was it wasn’t when I was there it was never bombed while I was there, but London was still being bombed while I was there and um yeah and things were pretty crook, pretty crook um but we were treated like kings you know because the English people were so pleased any, anyone in Bomber Command were treated with the utmost respect, treated like kings because the only people in the war in those days, until D-Day was Bomber Command there was no other um and in the Middle East of course but in Europe there was no war on Europe it was only air war because it was only Bomber Command and going over every night and doing what we had to do it every night [phone ringing], but I remember something stuck in my mind I remember when I was a young a bloke at this time and I was pretty keen on a young English girl and I noticed I’d been invited to her home quite a few times and I noticed that she and I always got fed, Cassandra she was the only daughter so there was no one other than her mother and her and myself and mother said she and I always got fed but the mother never ate anything and I said to her one day and I questioned her about it one day she said ‘no, no, no, no, no’ she got very embarrassed and I said ‘why you know are, are you so embarrassed? Is it illegal food or something?’ she said ‘no it’s actually my mother’s ration she’s giving it to you’.
AP: Wow.
EC: Well that’s, that’s, that’s the English people you know they were really tops.
AP: Wow . . . all right we’ll move on a bit tell me how you met your crew, how did you meet the people that you flew with?
EC: Well that was at 27 OTU and we were all um we’d have been taken there by by rail or road motor, would have been transported there from Brighton to Lichfield anyhow, somehow maybe by train um and then taken out to the station, out to Driffield and I think they gave us a couple of days to acclimatise and [coughs] wander round and see what was what and just sort of filled in to I don’t remember, all I remember is I met a guy his name was Gordon Dalton and he was born and bred in Nilma which is outside of Warragul and I think Gordon’s now dead but I remember he and I got along particularly well and he always looked for a mate so you had someone to talk to and I remember him saying to me one day ‘they’re looking for crews they want a gunner’ I said ‘yeah but we gotta get a pilot’ I said ‘it takes a week to find this’ he said ‘no we’ve got a half-filled now’ I think we only wanted a navigator and two gunners something like that and he said ‘now are you interested?’ I said ‘course I’m interested that’s what we are here for [phone ringing] let’s get into a crew and get this thing [unclear]’ that’s how it happened he said ‘OK I’ve got the pilot‘ Alan McKellem and the rest of the blokes from there on I don’t know, I don’t remember how we all gelled then [unclear].
AP: So it wasn’t like everyone in one big room and pick your room it sort of happened naturally?
EC: Naturally, yeah yeah.
AP: Suddenly you were flying?
EC: I was yes I mentioned that Gordon Dalton actually I made a mistake there, that’s how I was paired up on the second crew the first crew um I think it was the bomb aimer, Brian Seaton from Sydney, I think it was him that mentioned one day he said this ‘Cuttsy we are looking for a gunner if we get two gunners and a navigator’ or it might have been a flight engineer he was looking for but he said ‘we’ve got the crew mate will you be in ours?’ I said ‘yeah gotta be in [unclear] that’s what we are here for’ and that’s how that happened.
AP: What um what sort of things happened at OTU at Lichfield what were you actually doing in the aeroplanes and what were you doing on the ground?
EC: Operational Training Unit 27 OTU now at Lichfield. 27 OTU was at Lichfield Operational Training Unit that was switching over to what you called today medium bombers, in those days they were heavy bombers but they were Wellingtons, two engine radial cooled and we went across and we learnt cross country navigation, we practiced bombing, we practiced gunnery um that was all down there, cine camera gun exercise, a lot of that was gunners doing their training we had cine cameras attached to the um machine guns and when you fired they would sort of um show where you were going so they could check up on you the instructors could check up on you so there I’ve done about one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, nine flights [looking at his logbook] there all of them averaging um an hour and a half er and that was on cine camera gun exercise, now down here still in 27 OTU solo cross country that would have been the first time that our skipper would have flown with his crew at night, solo bombing runs, solo cross country, solo cross country, dual circuits and landing, dual circuits and landing.
AP: You even had gunners for circuits?
EC: So that the aircraft was fully loaded.
AP: Ah of course.
EC: And so that you got used to you know circuits and bumps we you used to call it circuits and landing.
AP: It would have been quite bumpy in rear turret I imagine?
EC: [Laughs] No actually the rear turret was quite okay um um but this was really for the skipper circuits and landing it’s all for the skipper here’s it well here [unclear] air test self-towed drogue in other words the aircraft that I was in had a towed drogue and we towed that, a number of rounds fired fifty two, cross country, all those things, so still still on Operational Training Unit, solo bombing, um simulated fighter attacks using your own fighter aircraft using Mosquitoes no it wouldn’t have been Mosquitoes um Spitfires or Hurricanes and they would come in and attack us no, no firing or anything but they would come in and attack us we would fire at them with the cine cameras and then they’d be taken away by the instructors if you weren’t hitting them they’d put you back to school [laughs].
AP: What sort of ground training was involved at OTU for you guys if any?
EC: Um aircraft recognition er there was never any, except for initial training, there was never any um training like the army those you know army drill and backpacks we didn’t have to be we all were particularly fit young blokes but we didn’t have to be super fit like the young infantry blokes because we never walked anywhere we were driven everywhere.
AP: Having someone say you sat down to go to war?
EC: Yeah well that’s right yeah I mean we were, well the aircraft were always parked out on the aprons of the airfields and they’d always be in those times say three quarters of a mile away well we’d all be bussed out there because you couldn’t go out there with your flying gear on and your and your parachute harness you just couldn’t do it and your Mae West you could hardly walk let alone go out there so we were always picked up and driven driven to the aircraft, we got out and the ground crew had the aircraft all ready for us the ladders would be in the position we’d climb up the ladders and get inside, the ground crews were absolutely fantastic blokes typical Australian servicemen you know really top blokes looked after us like spoiled us they did.
AP: What did you think of the Wellington as an aircraft?
EC: Well it was yeah it was all right but um it fitted the bill it was all right when it was being flown it really wasn’t a heavy bomber you know compared to the Halifax and the Lancaster they were good yeah the blokes that flew them did equally as good or better jobs as we did as we did with four engines the four engine Halifax and the Lancaster were superb aircraft you know so all the good things they learnt about Wellingtons they learned to drop them aside and all the good parts went into the Halifax, Handley Page Halifax and Avro Lancaster.
AP: Beautiful.
EC: It was like it was like using um it was like using a Holden or a Falcon against a Merc or a BMW both all of them beautiful cars but [telephone ringing in and slight disturbance in the background].
AP: What did you do to relax when you were in England when you weren’t on duty?
EC: Er um get on the grog [laughs].
AP: [Laughs]
EC: I hate to say.
AP: You have entered pubs a few times?
EC: I think we I think we drank more than the average young bloke um and I think we smoked more than the average young bloke none of us I’m quite sure none of us have ever touched them since because we realised that there was yeah I know what you mean [laughs].
AP: From my experience of aircrew mmm [laughs].
EC: But the smoking part anyhow we all realised that that that was no good and er I think that’s why when we go before the Appeals Board for the Department of Veterans Affairs and you mention like I did I did thirty four operations and went back as an instructor and what not, I think I knew straight away that that they’d you know that there was no that I was gonna have my appeal carried out and I was subsequently um my appeal was subsequently allowed, I appealed against my pension and then I was because they realised that aircrew was spent most of your life behind the enemy lines and um it was pretty tough going you know pretty tough I think aircrew has the highest per capita of death and injuries I think aircrew has I stand to be corrected but I’m sure that aircrew does have the highest so.
AP: So so dealing with that sort of stress you end up in the pub frequently [laughs]?
EC: More frequently than we should have.
AP: Can you -
EC: Being behind the enemy lines all the time nearly all the time you are behind except flying there and flying home but even then the German night fighters would follow you home all the time in fact at one stage of the game they had this marvellous idea and they were very very successful at it. That they didn’t attack us over the target they waited till we crossed the English Channel coming home as this is, they waited they’d be stationed in France and then take off when we passed overhead they just they wouldn’t take us they’d just wait till we got into England and then we started fanning out our squadrons to wherever you came from I you know we had to go up to Yorkshire, your grand uncle would be going down to Lincoln and that, and they’d attack then because half the aircraft were shot up and limping home I mention and half of them not flying too well and they that’s when they wait and they’d attack when we got home they fixed that up later on the R the RAF fixed that up later on they patrolled the aircraft near the aerodromes and they fixed that up but they took a lot of a hell of a beating before they really did fix it up.
AP: So when you were on squadron at um Driffield where and how did you live like what were your living arrangements?
EC: In those um I forget what they call them they still have them today those.
AP: Nissen huts.
EC: Nissen that’s the word, Nissen huts Nissen huts except on the old former RAF regular squadrons where they had proper administrative buildings you know brick buildings and all that sort of thing um but all the squadrons were Nissen huts.
AP: What was that like in the winter of 1944-45?
EC: [Laughs] Yeah it was pretty cold, bitterly cold I think I honestly can’t remember but a lot of the times we spent a lot of times in the mess or in the sergeants’ mess or the officers’ mess whichever you were in and they were all heated, I guess in those days it would have been heated but um kerosene I suppose or diesel or something I just can’t remember.
AP: Gas?
EC: Lot of that well some or most likely we kept pretty warm but we were very much looked after very much spoilt.
AP: [Laughs]. So do any of your operations stand out in your memory?
EC: The first one I ever did in my life was to Sterkrade I think which a day might have been oh there’s when I got to Driffield there’s 46 Squadron [examining logbook] see we even tried it when we got the squadron there’s mine but after Lichfield they all became 1652 Heavy Conversion Unit which was only converting us from two engine Wellingtons to four engine whatever in my case Halifaxes so that was HCU which is Heavy Conversion Unit and even then we practiced, um practiced and trained and trained but not a great amount because all we were doing all we did was change from twin engine to four engine everything else was pretty much the same you know the only person who really got the benefit out of it um Heavy Conversion Unit was the navigator and the pilot the rest of us watching one aircraft and the next except the pilots had four engines and an additional member of the crew because when it went from um two dual engine to four engine you gained an extra crew member you’d have the um flight engineer.
AP: So he had to get used to you guys as well I suppose, was the flight engineer sort of, did you choose him or was he here’s your flight engineer off you go just like that?
EC: Yeah ‘cos he was RAF all flight engineers are RAF I don’t know why that is but it is something I suppose Australia said look we you’ve asked us for say ten thousand men or something will try and train ten thousand gunners, navigators, bomb aimers and pilots and wireless operators but we we’re too small a country we just haven’t got the men to train as flight engineers so all your flight engineers were Poms.
AP: I’ve only ever met one he’s a Scotsman.
EC: Flight engineer?
AP: Yep yep flight engineer he was a Stirling flight engineer of all things he flew Stirlings on ops.
EC: Was he was he what nationality?
AP: Scottish.
EC: RAF?
AP: Yep yeah he came out to Australia in the 1950s.
EC: Stirlings.
AP: Did you ever fly in Stirlings?
EC: No I didn’t . . . thanks [laughs].
AP: Those who did, loved them.
EC: Yes.
AP: Tommy Toy loved them but um but those who didn’t probably way down there [unclear].
EC: I was bloody glad I never ‘cos I never liked the look of them I used to think I did, awful looking things. Here I am [unclear].
AP: Yes I think we were talking about your first operation we were going to get into that.
EC: Yes as soon as you get to the squadron you’re fighter affiliation that’s that would have been settling in, that’s the first thing you ever did.
AP: Number nine that’s further back.
EC: Yes that’s number nine op so we gotta go back oh here we are Sterkrade there you are prior to that we’d done bombing exercise, three bombing exercise, a fighter affiliation exercise, that was at night when they used to attack your own aircraft your own aircraft attack us at night so so that they test your eyes testing how you operate in the darkness you know there you are Sterkrade number one Sterkrade it was in the Ruhr valley synthetic oil and it was a day trip and took flying time was five hours so be two and a half to Sterkrade and two and a half home and I’ve never lived this down [laughs] I saw these black puffs in the air black things you know [background unassociated conversation] and I said to someone I said the crew ‘cos everyone was excited you know our first op and it was a daylight op which was good because they did try and give you a daylight give you a bit of an idea what you were going to do I said ‘what’s all those black things out there skipper what are all the black things?’ and everyone started laughing it was bloody anti-aircraft exploding that’s how raw and I by the time I got to the thirty fourth op I didn’t need to ask [laughs]. So there you are that was my first op Sterkrade and then another daylight Cologne then a night now see still look we’d done eight operations there, I went to Cologne again in the Ruhr valley six hours ten at night then the next day on the 31st we were out practising beam approach that’s the forerunner of um er you know the pilots flew on the beam.
AP: Instrument landing system is what it’s called now.
EC: It’s what?
AP: Instrument landing system ILS.
EC: That’s it yes, yes but–
AP: I see here –
EC: But you are out there doing your operations but it’s still training.
AP: Yes, yes. There’s an early return here can you remember much of that?
EC: Um early recall.
AP: Early return Essen on recall ok?
EC: Recall from Hannover that now because there’d be a few of them through here early recall from Hannover it would either be a fault in the aircraft, a fault with um pathfinders going in and couldn’t operate because it was ten tenths cloud so they’d say recall there’s no good carrying on, or um perhaps it was a wrong meteorological reading and they’ve given us two tenths cloud when we got there was ten tenths so they recalled ‘em you know, no good dropping ten thousand or two thousand tons of bombs on a city.
AP: It might not be there?
EC: Yes you can’t see it you know ‘cos all you do is spray bombs all over the countryside no one gets . . . [unclear]
AP: Um okay cool.
EC: Practice bombing detail there’s another one see in amongst all one minute I’m over Hannover and Essen both prize German things.
AP: Wondering what those black clouds are yeah.
EC: The next thing you’re gonna see one I’ve never really noticed that, number nine.
AP: With another early return as well?
EC: There’s another one there Bochum early return that was three hours forty five minutes which means we’d have been pretty close to Bochum then because Bochum’s in about um you know central Germany so it’s not it had been you know so I don’t know why we’d have been recalled then but a lot of it’s crook aircraft so not a lot of it but some of it is crook aircraft you know they’d say ’well return return’ the boys saying at the second time we’re already trying to turn round [laughs] and go back. I’m thinking [unclear]. See now started to do a lot of night ones here Duisburg, Cologne, and then after you’d done your month’s flying you had to put that in [a logbook monthly summary] and that was Noel Helpmann [?] who was a flight lieutenant um who was commanding the flight in other words that that means that that’s true we had a lot of blokes putting in things that they shouldn’t have put in.
AP: Extra ops? So I saw earlier there there’s a citation for your pilot looks like an immediate DFC?
EC: Yeah.
AP: Tell me about that trip from your perspective what do you remember of that trip?
EC: Oh no it’s not Flying Officer Alan Bircham recall the McKellam, South Lismore, New South Wales this officer [unclear] courage and determination. In November 1944 he was detailed to attack Gelsenkirchen when was that in November ‘44 there it is there the Ruhr valley, ten minutes before reaching the target the aircraft was attacked by heavy anti-aircraft fire target which wait a minute, which caused extensive damage Flying Officer McKellam flew on to the target which was attacked successfully his coolness, devotion to duty were worthy of the highest praise well um.
AP: What can you remember of that they are pretty terse words.
EC: No no a lot of these blokes, a lot of it you know I’m not saying that they the thing with the Distinguished Flying Cross what it says you know Distinguished Flying but it just happened to be on that Gelsenkirchen every pilot by the time he had done thirty four ops got a DFC I shouldn’t say it, a DFM is a different medal altogether you get ten DFCs and one DFM and that was what the DFM is I always thought if I ever get a medal I hope it’s a DFM because I wouldn’t get a DFM anyhow because I was only a sergeant when I say I was only a sergeant, I was a sergeant.
AP: So what you’re saying is there was nothing particularly different about that trip compared to other ones it just happened that they’ve got to put something?
EC: Otherwise I would have had it in.
AP: Yeah that’s a fair point it’s not in the logbook, yeah that’s a fair point it’s not in the logbook.
EC: Not in mine not for Gelsenkirchen, Ruhr valley I wasn’t recalled and I haven’t got up there return to base early um because we were shot up I sound as though I am detracting I’m not I’m just saying if you did thirty four ops doesn’t matter if you were recalled fifty not thirty times um you’d get the DFC.
AP: Fair enough [laughs].
EC: DFM though you’d be lucky if you got one [pause] where shall we go [pause]. Now the last of my flying things for days [looking through logbook] I’ll show you something in a minute still I can’t Cologne, Chemnitz, now there was one perhaps where he should have got a DFC Chemnitz we landed at Benson which was not our, it was an RAF um squadron station and we landed there because we couldn’t get home because the aircraft has because we had had an um been attacked heavily and um we were ordered to go, not ordered but we had to go there because we wouldn’t have made it back to Driffield so if he should have got the DFC that’s where he should have got it.
AP: How how were you attacked there what sort of damage to you remember that?
EC: Anti-aircraft fire.
AP: Was it over the target or on the way in or on the way out?
EC: Over the target, over the target I don’t remember I remember landing at Benson and I remember Chemnitz was a very [unclear] I’ll tell you another reason why we landed at Benson I reckon. Benson to base was only one hour so if we couldn’t have made one hour extra flying must have landed it must have been fuel perhaps we might have got hit in one of the tanks and lost all the fuel and the skipper said ‘claimed from control you’ve got to let me down you’ve got to put me down because I won’t make Driffield’ so they put us down um Benson.
AP: And then the next day you fly home?
EC: Then we flew home the next day on 6th March ‘44 on 7th March ‘44 we flew home.
AP: And your last trip?
EC: Number thirty four was Bottrop the last one thirty four was daylight that was five hours thirty minutes I’ll show you something now that I haven’t mentioned before now when I got to thirty four that was it you know they pulled us off then and we all went our different ways as instructors I think the wireless operator came home but that’s another story I think one of them came home and I went to 27 OTU as a um instructor, now we went, [examines logbook] here we are Berlin now when I told you about the CO at Lichfield at the time happened to be looking for a crew to go to group five [No. 5 Group] to learn to crew Lancasters which were going to be replaced by the super Lancaster which was the Lincoln and we were all picked crews and we were to come to Australia and instruct everyone here in Australia all the all [unclear] Australia on Lincoln aircraft and luckily [laughs] they dropped the atomic bomb so that we didn’t have to come, but whilst there at at um Metheringham which I am now um it’s a place er rear gunner Operation Spasm there’s Berlin there’s Berlin there’s er I don’t know what must have landed somewhere because it’s got returned by air safely.
AP: Operation Dodge?
EC: You’re going to say what were you doing flying over Berlin when the war’s finished.
AP: What was Operation Spasm? That’s what I’m interested in.
EC: Yeah I’m just going to show you where we all I don’t know why this hasn’t got Bari in there the first one we did was um Bari in Italy, [unclear] Spasm, Gatow, Gatow in Germany is equivalent to er er what’s the big one in London the big airport?
AP: Heathrow.
EC: Heathrow, Gatow is to Germany what Heathrow is to London, here we are Operation Dodge and Operation Spasm, Operation Spasm was Germany Gatau [spells it out] and Operation Dodge was Bari [spells it out] in Italy and you’ll notice um three hours it took us to fly to Berlin where in the bombers the actual bombers during the war that was a round trip of eight nine hours because they were loaded to absolutely loaded to the hilts.
AP: And you went the long way to, to try and– ?
EC: And went there and Bari took seven hours um there again both were non-stop I’m not sure what this one um the aircraft was stripped we stripped all the aircraft and we flew the English prisoners of war when they were released from the Middle East they went to Bari in Italy we flew them home and those that were captured in Europe they went to Berlin and we flew them home.
AP: That was Dodge and Spasm?
EC: Pretty marvellous really to fly those poor prisoners of war home and er but people said ‘well how did you do it so quick?’ but we never had we had no guns no ammunition no nothing because the war was over we just flew in in beautiful super aircraft like that how and how the others felt Lancaster picked them up and brought them home and they thought it was the most marvellous thing in the world, I think I’ve got a piece of newspaper, have we got that newspaper cutting there? Just the one about . . . that looks like it.
Other: Coming back in bombers?
EC: That’s right yeah give that to um thank you.
AP: Oh gold, I might scan that later too. Only fully trained crews many with one or two tours of thirty operations were picked for the job.
EC: You had to be experienced crews.
AP: So if they’ve got no guns in the aeroplane why did they have gunners?
EC: No this this now you are talking about going to.
AP: This one coming back when you are doing this operation when you are doing this Operation Dodge there are no guns.
EC: Dodge and Bari well I haven’t told you this [laughs] why did they didn’t have guns everything was stripped out of the aircraft it was filled all up with no seating because it was wartime just hundreds of pillows and blankets and anything sick POWs could use to collapse on you know and [laughs] believe it or not we were just air hostesses [laughs] someone had to, the ground crews would have all the ladders in position the ground crews helped them up when they got up the top there we’d take the poor bloke and say to them ‘well you sit there, you move up mate put someone else there’ and they used to almost fight over who got to sit in the mid upper turret and the rear turret and then there were those who kind of had never been in an aircraft before [laughs] flew like that all the way home to England you know had white knuckles so that’s why yeah.
AP: That’s why gunners were [laughs].
EC: So we came from, from glory to um nursemaid in a way [laughs].
AP: Someone had to do it.
EC: Well someone had do it yeah they were all crook you know and they’d just been taken out of prisoner of war and they’re thrust in one of these things they’d never ever been in an aircraft before they had no idea what was ahead of them.
AP: So after this is that the last flight in your logbook?
EC: Yeah Bari oh no here you are there’s one back to Waddington there.
AP: Waddington base and that’s the end of that so that’s where your logbook finishes on.
EC: Yeah.
AP: 21st September 1945. What happened next?
EC: Oh what?
AP: What happened after that?
EC: Like all RAAF aircrew went back to Brighton, everyone went back to Brighton every Australian whether ground crew, aircrew, whatever, they sail away if only all went through Brighton into England and out of England so Brighton was really an Australian town it was Brighton was just like we walking down the street in Melbourne and there would be a RAAF navy blue uniform of the war and to see any other uniform in Brighton was quite strange so we went back there and I don’t know how long I was in Brighton I can’t remember that clearly and I returned home on the um it was Athlone Castle and I can’t think what–
Other: Castle
EC: Yeah I know Athone Castle I’m just thinking it would be a commandeered liner again the Athlone Castle there was a big a big um oh line during the war and after the war and is still today such as Windsor Castle, the Athlone Castle, the Edinburgh Castle, they were all troop carriers but very top grade troop carriers not old cattle troop carriers like a lot of the poor people had to endure but none of them to the standard of the Athlone Castle very close to the standard of the Athlone Castle very close to the standard not the Athlone the New Amsterdam I mean the New Amsterdam was a beautiful ship as I said getting towards the Queen Mary stage, these Castle Lines were overseas liners but not quite as good so then we came home on the Athlone Castle and um stopped at um pulled in to Melbourne at Port Port Albert I think I might have a bill in there somewhere, so that’s about me talked out.
AP: Excellent. I still have one more question for you.
EC: Right.
AP: How do you think Bomber Command is remembered you know what sort of legacy has it left?
EC: Um I I think the British people um Churchill expressed it perfectly when he said first of all remember he said during the fighters that saved London ‘never have so many done so much for so few’ or whatever it was but then he also said of Bomber Command ‘that was the greatest force ever ever concentrated ever found’ because during all of our days right up till D-Day which was nearly all the war before D-Day um the only people active the only people affected by the enemy and affecting the enemy was Bomber Command there was no one else because all the armies were locked away I’m talking air force when I say all this not talking about the soldiers in the Middle East and all that they were still fighting their wars but when it came to Europe no one ranked with Bomber Command and I think they were respected and treated by the English people with the same admiration that they had for the um freedom fighters that’s not their name but the resistance the French resistance those French resistance behind the lines risking their lives all the time because when they were shot and found that was that was the worst thing that French and Belgian and all those other countries their resistance fighters could do was to rescue aircrew and bring them back through the underground ‘cause when they caught them if the Germans caught them they shot them straight away that was frightful so the freedom fighters so the resistance fighters not freedom fighters and the RAF the RAF call it the RAF because most of it was RAF I don’t think the English have got ever you mention we mention anyone today you know oh I go to RSL and blokes say ‘what did what were you in were you in the navy or army?’ I say ‘No I was in Bomber Command’ and if he was an English person ‘oh were you? Oh were you? Oh you blokes yeah‘, so makes you kind of feel very humble very proud and very humble.
AP: That’s a very nice note to finish on I think thank you very much.
EC: Okay, thanks Adam.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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ACuttsE151001
Title
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Interview with Ernest Cutts
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:16:59 audio recording
Creator
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Adam Purcell
Date
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2015-10-01
Description
An account of the resource
Ernest Cutts was born in Mallee in Victoria and at the age of fifteen he passed the Commonwealth Public Service Exam, joining the Military Post Office as a civilian junior postal officer. At eighteen he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force and went to 1 Recruit Training School at Summers and then to 3 Bombing and Gunnery School at West Sale, training as a rear gunner. He then sailed from Sydney to Great Britain, landing in Scotland and travelling to Brighton. He was posted to 27 Operational Training Unit and then to RAF Driffield, flying Halifax's. He took part in 34 operations over Germany. On one operation, his aircraft was so badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire that it was unable to return to its own station. In September 1945 he took part in Operation Spasm and Operation Dodge, repatriating prisoners of war from Europe and the Middle East. Subsequently he returned to Brighton en route for Australia. He remembers that the British people treated the personnel of Bomber Command very well and he felt proud to have been part of it.
Contributor
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Jackie Simpson
Brian May
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Germany
Great Britain
Scotland
England--Brighton
England--Yorkshire
New South Wales--Sydney
Victoria
Victoria--Mallee
Victoria
Victoria--Mount Martha
Victoria
New South Wales
England--Sussex
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-03-06
1944-03-07
1944
1945
1652 HCU
27 OTU
466 Squadron
467 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
Battle
coping mechanism
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Driffield
RAF Lichfield
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/246/3392/PDenverI1704.2.jpg
333052530a5ff31f1299a9657b634587
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/246/3392/ADenverI170221.2.mp3
9763d77aca3da4289606b069f644e294
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
Denver, Ian
Ian Denver
I Denver
Description
An account of the resource
Five items, Collection concerns Ian Denver (422844 Royal Australian Air Force) and contains an oral history interview, extracts from his log book and photographs.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Ian Denver and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-02-21
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Denver, I
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JP: We’ll just start the interview now. This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer — myself. Miss Jean MacCartney.
ID: Is this the one that they’re building out at Louth.
JP: Lincoln.
ID: Lincoln.
JP: Yes.
ID: Well — near Louth.
JP: Yes. That’s right. And the interviewee is Mr Ian Denver. The interview is taking place at Mr Denver’s home in Robina in Queensland on the 21st of February 2017.
ID: Yeah.
JP: Also present is Mr Denver’s daughter — Louise. Ok. Ian. We’ll start right back at the beginning. July 1923. And I believe you were born in Maitland.
ID: That’s right.
JP: And you spent most of your early years up until the intermediate certificate in Maitland. Is that right?
ID: I went to high school in Maitland ‘til I then did my leaving certificate.
JP: Leaving certificate.
ID: But then I finished early. Right.
JP: Yes.
ID: In [pause] I said finished early. I wasn’t allowed to go into the air force ‘til I was eighteen.
JP: No.
ID: And I did my leaving at seventeen.
JP: Seventeen. Yes. Well just tell me a little bit about your time in Maitland because without being too personal I believe you were actually born as Ian Deramore - Denver.
ID: That’s true.
JP: And you’ve, you’ve dropped the —
ID: Yeah.
JP: The first part of —
ID: I think my father just adopted the word Deramore because he liked it. Also, he, he was very badly wounded Gallipoli and he spent a lot of time in hospital in London and he met a lady who was very kind to him and she lived just off the edge of the estate that was Lord Deramore’s estate which is at a place called Acomb in York. Just out of York itself and [pause] well that was it. After the war of course he did all sorts of things. And he was, initially he was constantly in and out of hospital because he was hit here. Went in there and out the other side and his bleeding internally was very bad.
JP: Right. And so —
ID: Louise. Get me my hearing aids and I’ll see if —
LD: That would be a very good idea. Well done dad.
JP: Dad. Ok. Well we’ll pause for a minute while you —
ID: They should be in there.
[recording paused]
JP: Ok. We’re resuming now. Ian’s now got his hearing aids in so that makes it a little bit easier for him. So, we were just talking about your father and his war injuries and your time when you were at Maitland and I think I’ve seen something that when you, when you were a young boy or in your, at school and that you were involved in a lot of sports and competition. Would you like to tell me a little bit about those? You were in diving and —
ID: Well I did —
JP: Athletics.
ID: On the swimming, diving side there was a fellow named Ron Tubman whom was called —my son Michael that was killed in an accident. We named him after Ron Tubman. Ok. Who came from Maitland. Went to the same school same as me. The other pilot Geoff Jones who was called Michael Geoffrey then, but Geoff was from Pymble. Came out of Sydney. Nothing much to tell you about as far as sports are concerned.
JP: Did you compete in a lot of competitions?
ID: Well, yes and no. Yes, in that I competed a lot but I didn’t win that much, you know. I was a bit too small to compete for some of the things. But in the diving for example Ron and I were always competing against each other to see who would, well to see who would win the school diving championship. That sort of thing. As far as cricket and football was concerned rugby league it was. We played that. And I suppose my most exciting period was the last game I had with the school. We played the combined Newcastle High Schools. And, in the process I scored all the points which happened to be —I can’t to remember the numbers. Two tries and four, four goals and it came to about sixteen points or so. But the teacher didn’t like my dad so instead of covering it in the school magazine or anywhere he just ignored it. Bill Bates was his name.
JP: That’s unfortunate.
ID: Yeah. I thought so too because I didn’t really — I worked hard.
JP: Yes.
ID: And I tried hard and did well.
JP: That’s right and that’s an outstanding result
ID: Yeah.
JP: To beat the other team.
ID: And we won —
JP: That’s right. That’s right.
ID: The Newcastle area which in those days included [unclear ] and everywhere and we competed against them.
JP: Yes. And —
LD: And the reason that Ron is important is that dad went to the war with Ron.
JP: With Ron. Yes. I know. That’s right. Yes. And your father, I know he was not well but is —he was doing some editing of the local paper at that time as well. Is that right?
ID: Yes. He —he was the sports editor for the Maitland Mercury and was the editor of a magazine called Golfing Australia.
JP: Oh right.
ID: So, he did a fair amount of writing. He was a very good writer, my father. And I can see him today sitting at a butcher’s table we used to call it. He’d sit at the butchers table and rip of this bunch of paper and word after word and it was given to me. I would get it typed.
JP: That’s and and so did he write up that? Your match in the local paper then so that you at least had some coverage.
ID: Yeah. Well he would then send it to the local paper but then he would edit it himself too. So he wasn’t only writing it. He was editing it.
JP: Yes. That’s right.
ID: But a big problem was that his wounding. There was a hospital at Sydney, a slight royal, Randwick anyhow and it was a Repat hospital at Randwick.
JP: Yep.
ID: And we’d go down there and see him occasionally. But he’d often be two or three months at a time in hospital. So, we had a fair period without a father.
JP: Father.
ID: Supervising and [lying up?] so everything was left to my mother.
JP: Mother.
ID: And we had three boys and a girl.
JP: Goodness. And she, she wasn’t working, was she? She was —
ID: Well in those days women really didn’t work.
JP: Really didn’t work. No. That’s right.
ID: And she had four kids to look after anyway.
JP: Look after.
ID: And the only income a lot of the time was a pension that he got from his war wound. Which we lived on. Sometimes for years.
LD: So, we’re talking 1920s. The end of the twenties and early thirties here.
ID: About 1930 there.
JP: Yeah.
ID: I was seven then.
JP: Yes. That’s right. And then of course then the Depression came, years came along. So you had, you as a family had to go through that. So, you were still in Maitland during the Depression years.
ID: Well, my father and mother and my sister June —they all moved to Sydney. Mainly for dad to get a job. He was offered a good job down at Sydney. And because I had two years or so to go to do my leaving certificate I stayed on in Maitland. Living with my grandparents and went to school there.
JP: Right. And so, then they were living in Sydney. You were in Maitland. You finished your leaving certificate and then at the end of that I think you then went because you was too young to go in the air force at that stage.
ID: That’s right. Yeah.
JP: You went into the bank.
ID: You had to be eighteen.
JP: Eighteen. That’s right. But you also I think were in Air Training Corps. Had you joined the air training corps?
ID: Yes.
JP: Yes.
ID: The ATC.
JP: And what, what age did you join the Air Training Corps?
ID: Quite young. You know. Maybe I was only about thirteen or something like that. I was always interested in flying. The first time I saw a plane fly was a Lockheed Electra that came out to Australia and came up to Newcastle and was putting on exhibitions at Newcastle. And so, we went to Newcastle Airport and had a look at that.
JP: Good.
ID: But not my dad or my mum or anybody in the family didn’t particularly encouraged me to go into the services.
JP: No.
ID: My elder brother Peter had already been through the initial campaigns in Libya. In Benghazi. And fought the rear — guard action in Greece and Crete and so on. And then as soon as I turned eighteen the bank had been opposing it but as soon as I turned eighteen I said, ‘I’m going.’
JP: Going. And what, what did you learn? Any skills in the Air Training Corps that gave you, you felt an advantage of initial training for the air force when you came into that?
ID: I — when I [pause] when I was in the ATC.
JP: C .
ID: We went through things like the theory of flight at that time so that by the time I actually did get in to the air force I was fairly well off. You know, what went on in aeroplanes and engines and hydraulics and so on.
JP: And did you actually get taken up in a flight at all when you were in the ATC? Did you do any flights whatsoever? Or they just left you on the ground and got you to do all the theory.
ID: I did have a flight. But I think it was a Rapide or something. But it was, you know, as a passenger, it wasn’t –
JP: Oh yes. Yes. Just as a sort of a joy flight type thing. Yeah.
ID: Just to have a look and see what goes on.
LD: How old were you when you went up in the Rapide?
ID: How old was I? Well I’d been really keen when I was about sixteen.
JP: Right.
ID: And from then on it was just a matter of waiting ‘til I got eighteen because the war started and I wasn’t allowed to go into the war until I turned eighteen.
JP: Eighteen.
LD: So, this was 1941.
JP: Well he enlisted, he enlisted in May 1942. In Sydney. You went down to Sydney because obviously your parents were still there in Sydney so —
ID: Yeah, they went down to Sydney and stayed there.
JP: Yes. That’s right.
ID: And lived in Potts Point.
JP: Potts Point. Yes. Now, one thing one other thing before we move into what was your initial training were you — when the Japanese mini subs came into Sydney harbour were you in Sydney with your parents at that stage or were you up in Maitland still?
ID: When the submarines — the Japanese submarines came in?
JP: Yeah.
ID: No. As a matter of fact I was in Sydney.
JP: You were in Sydney.
ID: They went up and we lived only a hundred yards or so from where the bombing took place.
JP: So, did you, were you at home at the time? Did you feel the —any, you know. Reverberations.
ID: You didn’t give you any news in those days.
JP: No. But I just —
ID: You found out in the newspaper what happened.
JP: Yes. But you — but you didn’t feel, there was no vibration from the bombs.
ID: No.
JP: No. No. No. Or any noise. You didn’t hear any noise.
ID: No. It was night time.
JP: Night time.
ID: And also, I don’t, I don’t think they bombed as such.
JP: No.
ID: They just fired a few guns and went off. It was a submarine.
JP: Submarines.
ID: Japanese submarines.
JP: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Ok well we’ll move along now to your enlistment and you did your initial. Where did you do your initial training?
ID: In Bradfield Park.
JP: Bradfield Park. Right. And then when when did you start your flying?
ID: Not [pause] about three or four months later. What actually happened was that they enrolled too many people and they couldn’t place them all, so we had no choice but to — you either get out of the air force or you wait ‘til we can find room for you. And then I was made, as was quite a few other people who were with me, made an aircrew guards they were called. And I was placed in Richmond. So, I spent about four months or so out at Richmond. Which suited me because Richmond was, you know, in Sydney and I could get into town without any real trouble. But —
JP: So, if you —
ID: My father was very much involved in the war activities as such. He started, or helped to start the Gallipoli Legion of Anzacs which was a club that was formed under the Harbour Bridge at Milson’s Point there. That’s gone. Since gone. But he was the founding secretary.
JP: Secretary.
ID: And I think president. Ran about two or three jobs.
JP: Right.
ID: But he was a very good bloke my father.
JP: Sounds like it. To be so —
ID: And he was very very proud of any kind of service that we’d done.
JP: Done. Yes.
ID: And my elder brother had a very tough time, you know. And yet he got out and went up to Darwin and he was bombed in Darwin and then they sent him from there to train in Queensland and on to New Guinea.
JP: Gosh.
ID: And he fought hand to hand battles against the Japanese.
JP: Japanese. Up on Kokoda.
ID: Yeah and my younger brother joined the navy. And he was in the [pause] I don’t know [ASDE?] it was called. Anti—submarine warfare. He was in that section. He was an able seaman.
JP: Right.
ID: And he did a good job.
JP: Job.
ID: And they liked him, and he was earmarked for future promotion but the war ended before they got around to —
JP: Ended.
ID: He was younger than me.
JP: Ok. Let’s go back to your that your first flying and when you were getting your wings and that time. Were — you were doing some flying down around Urana. The Rock. And there was —
ID: The rock near Uranquinty.
JP: Uranquinty yes because you were doing your flying. That was where you were doing your —
ID: That was where I got my wings.
JP: Your wings. Yeah.
ID: In Nerrandera on Tiger Moths.
JP: Yes.
ID: And then when I did that initial flying training then switched to Uranquinty.
JP: Uranquinty.
ID: To Wirraways which —
JP: Wirraways. Yes.
ID: I used to land. That’s all we had as far as fighters, or fighter bombers were concerned.
JP: Yeah.
ID: So, I was getting ready to go on those and then all of a sudden there was a demand for pilots in England and so I was allowed to transfer and went across to the UK.
JP: Yeah. Did you have some little near miss at one time?
ID: Some bit of what?
JP: A bit of a near miss when you were doing one of your training flights down near The Rock.
ID: Well I had one experience which I’ve not forgotten was that The Rock sticks up. Not like Ayers Rock. Not nearly as big.
JP: Not as big but it still sticks up. That’s right.
ID: Sticks up and gets in the way and also a wind came across from the south west and it made a wave and I remember very well even to this day as you were climbing towards The Rock instead of going up you weren’t. You were coming down and you had no control. So, I was able to very luckily to well luckily and I suppose well trained and —
JP: Skilled.
ID: To do a hard turn and get away out of that wave.
JP: And so —
ID: That was one of the few experiences I had at the time in Australia. I had many more in the UK.
JP: In the UK. Which we’ll come to very shortly. In fact, yes, we’ll go then. We’ll start getting there. So, you then — you got — they said they needed pilots over in the UK so you went up to Brisbane and you sailed out of Brisbane. Is that right?
ID: Yes. We sailed out of Brisbane.
JP: When was — when?
ID: Through the Panama Canal.
JP: Yes. When did you leave Brisbane? Do you remember?
ID: Well not the day but —
JP: No. But roughly.
ID: Roughly it would have been I went in to the air force 1942.
JP: Two.
ID: I was being trained in 1943.
JP: So it was in —
ID: So somewhere around Christmas 1942.
JP: Ok. And so you went through to the, through the Panama which would have been an interesting experience.
ID: It was very exciting. I’ve never seen anything so green.
JP: Yeah.
ID: I remember it today. You look out there and it’s not this type of green which is tinges of brown. This was pure green. Jungle green. And it was very interesting. Very exciting. I enjoyed it. And then we sailed through steam through the Caribbean. We didn’t stop in any particular place but we did pull over outside Havana.
JP: Right.
ID: And for a very short period.
JP: Were you able to disembark at all or you had to stay on board all the time?
ID: On there we stayed on board. And then when we went up to New York and when I got to New York we were only supposed to be there about two weeks or so and what in actual fact happened was we instead of going straight across the Atlantic the ship we were supposed to be going on was sunk. So, we were told that you’d better stay here and —do you know New York at all?
JP: No. I’ve not, not been to New York.
ID: Yeah well —
JP: I’ve only been to the west coast. Not the east coast.
ID: North of New York was an HMS British navy base and they used that to house us until a ship would be available to take us across the Atlantic and then when that ship became available because I’d trained as a pilot, as a fighter pilot, they presumed that I had good eyesight and so we stood, we did a period all the way across the Atlantic on submarine watch.
JP: Up on the bridge.
ID: Up on the bridge.
JP: Oh, my goodness.
LD: Wow.
ID: It was very interesting. Very exciting. We landed in Glasgow. The Clyde. On the Clyde and then from Glasgow we hopped on a train.
JP: Train.
ID: The train took us. We were on our way to Bournemouth.
JP: Right.
ID: But Bournemouth was bombed.
JP: Bombed. Yeah.
ID: So instead of switching us, leaving us at Bournemouth they switched us across to Brighton.
JP: Brighton.
ID: And it was at Brighton then that I was chosen to do multi engine training. And I was good to go on Oxfords. Airspeed Oxfords. And the first place I went to was at [pause] I’m not sure if I can remember the names and getting them correct. Anyhow, we went up around the Doncaster area.
JP: Yeah.
ID: And Doncaster then. This was a satellite. A training satellite. And we were sent out to [unclear] and I was based at a satellite station called Snitterfield which was really only about ten miles from Shakespeare’s country.
JP: Oh, right yes.
ID: Near Stratford on Avon.
JP: Yes.
ID: So we were there and when this was — by now it was winter and it was very very hard to get any training done because of weather conditions.
JP: Weather conditions were —
ID: Weather conditions. And I had one or two frights there. Ran into barrage balloon there one time. found out how easy that was. I didn’t. Thank God.
JP: And so this is what? Only a two, this is a two engine plane at this stage or four?
ID: Two engine.
JP: Two engines. And how many crew were — you hadn’t, you were all just, were you just pilot and one other or —
ID: We were just training to be pilots.
JP: Pilots. Yeah. Pilot and instructor basically.
ID: I was, I would have been the trainee pilot.
JP: Pilot.
ID: And there would be an instructor. And he was a fully qualified pilot.
JP: Fully qualified. Yeah. Ok and was that what a couple or three or four weeks. A couple of months. What? Roughly. Just roughly what time frame do you think?
ID: Well I would say roughly about three to four months.
JP: Three or four months.
ID: Simply because it was so —
JP: Because the weather conditions were slowing the training down.
ID: It was bad. It wasn’t good for training.
LD: What was the flight? What was the plane?
ID: It was an Airspeed Oxford is was called.
JP: Oh the Oxford. Yeah. Yeah. And ok so from there where — is that when where did you go from that? Did you then go to 625 or did you do another — oh you probably did another conversion in between that.
ID: No I —
JP: Or an OTU. An OTU.
ID: We went from —this was initial training.
JP: Training yeah. So you had to go, you had to do an OTU.
ID: An OTU.
JP: Yeah.
ID: And the OTU I went to was near Doncaster.
JP: Yeah.
ID: Finningley.
JP: Right.
ID: And then they put us into a base at Finningley just along the road from the Robin Hood’s trees.
JP: Trees [laughs] Shakespeare. Robin Hood. Yeah.
ID: So we did our training there with Wimpies we called them. Wellington was a difficult aircraft. It was a geotetic aircraft which was the design of the fuselage but it meant the control was hard. You know you put the flap down and you get power. Respond much more radically then you would think it would. Anyhow, the point is we went to OTU and I got through OTU ok. And went then, went from there to Halifaxes.
JP: Right.
ID: The Halifaxes were at the Doncaster area.
JP: Right.
ID: A place called Sandtoft. We called —
JP: Right. So this is like a conversion course then.
ID: Yeah. We called it Prangtoft.
JP: Oh I see. Right. Right. Obviously there’s a story or two here. Yes.
ID: The engines were underpowered for the aircraft so it wasn’t —
JP: Particularly the earlier. I assume this was an earlier Halifax. The later Halifaxes were a bit better but the early Halifaxes were, yeah.
ID: But the Halifax, later on Halifaxes with Hercules engines was a good aircraft. Very good aircraft.
JP: So what sort of little stories come to light at this time? When you’re doing this early Halifax training.
ID: You were really concentrating on your RAF training. What you wanted to do was be the best pilot in the air force so I spent all my spare time studying the aircraft. Getting to know it completely only to be posted away from them. Which was good because the Lancaster was unbeatable as an aircraft.
LD: But I thought you wanted to be a fighter pilot when you first started.
ID: Well I did. Yeah. But we all did and when we left Australia they told us, ‘Sorry, there’s no room for you. We don’t need you as a fighter pilot. There’s plenty of fighter pilots available in England. There are no bomber pilots. So we switched to bomber training. And then I went from there to what’s called a Lancaster Finishing School and I was at Hemswell which is just next to Lincoln. And [pause] what happened there was exciting.
LD: Were you with Ron and Geoffrey still?
JP: Were you with Ron and —?
ID: I was with Ron and Geoffrey until we finished Operational Training Unit and Heavy Conversion. But we separated from then. Ron, I believe, was killed on return from a flight. And Geoff was shot down on his sixth mission.
JP: Sixth mission.
ID: On the sixth. And it was at a place called Gelsenkirchen which, in German I think probably means many churches. The point was that we were there. We, we’d separated by this stage because they’d posted us to different directions.
JP: Directions. That’s right.
ID: They didn’t like us all to stick together. Form an Australian clique or something.
JP: Yeah.
ID: So we were switched around.
JP: Switched around. Yeah.
LD: You did tell me that you had done some, you had to do night flying and you heard there was good surf in Cornwall.
ID: Say that again.
LD: You told me once that you, being a few Aussies that you had to practice your training and your night flying and you heard there was some good surf in Cornwall.
ID: Well, I went down to Cornwall to surf but it was freezing. I’ll never forget going in. The first time I decided to put my toe on the water.
JP: Toe in the water.
ID: It went numb.
JP: Numb. That’s right. Yes. That’s, that’s exactly right. And so you finished this training and that’s when you went to 625. You were posted to 625.
ID: 625 yeah.
JP: And was that, when you went to 625 is that when you did your crewing up? Or did you do the crewing up before you went to 625?
ID: Most of it was done before we went. At the end of OTU.
JP: OT.
ID: When we went to Wellingtons. We only had one pilot of course but we had our gunners..
JP: Yeah.
ID: We had a radio operator.
JP: Right.
ID: We had a navigator.
JP: Right. Ok. So that, so that, you got that crew together.
ID: Yeah.
JP: Back then. At OTU.
ID: I remember —
JP: Yeah. So who did you have then?
ID: By this time there was only one pilot at a time to plane.
JP: Right. Yeah.
ID: Geoff and Ron had gone off in their own directions.
JP: Direction. Yeah. So who was your navigator?
ID: His name was Carpenter. Stanley Carpenter.
JP: Stanley Carpenter. He was an Australian.
ID: He was a bank manager out of Durham.
JP: Oh an Englishman.
ID: Yeah.
JP: Right. Ok. What about the other chaps?
ID: Well, the radio operator I think I mentioned who came from Toowoomba.
JP: Yeah.
ID: And then I had a bomb aimer named Ron Jacobs who came from Sydney but he was quiet and quiet after. I never really got to him after the war. He just kept quiet. Disappeared.
JP: Ok. And he was your bomb aimer you said?
ID: They were called bomb aimer navigator.
JP: Right.
ID: And they were called an Observer.
JP: Yeah. Ok.
ID: And they would stand by in case something happened to the navigator. Also, I had, in my case, I gave mine special training so that if anything happened to me he’d be able to fly the aeroplane back.
JP: Plane. Yeah. Ok and what about your gunners? Did you have some gunners at that stage?
ID: One came from the Newcastle area. Do you know the northeast of England?
JP: Roughly. A bit further up around Aldwick and yeah.
ID: Yeah. Around. Well one of them came from the area that was known as —they have a special name for it and [unclear] anyhow it was near on Newcastle and the other gunner came from Scotland.
JP: Oh ok. Whereabouts? Do you remember roughly where in Scotland?
ID: No. And not only that there was no way to track him after the war.
JP: After right.
ID: He just disappeared.
JP: Ok. So the –
ID: But the mid upper gunner [McClowsky?] migrated to Australia and died only just recently at a, at a home down in the south coast at Sydney.
JP: Oh really.
ID: Yeah.
JP: Goodness. Ok. Ok so this is your crew and you’ve been together basically since OTU and so now you’ve been posted to 625.
ID: Yeah.
JP: And you start your ops. That’s right. So I think you did about eighteen ops with this crew at 625.
ID: That’s right.
JP: What particular, any –
ID: In actual fact nineteen.
JP: Nineteen yeah.
ID: You see the first, the first two you flew as what’s called second dickey and in my particular case one was an American pilot. The other was an English pilot. And they had I thought rather mild problems with it. Enough so turned back. So we didn’t really count them yet they were over German.
JP: Territory.
ID: Territory. So they really did count. But —
JP: So, what — what stands out in in those various ops? Any particular near misses or little events that, stories that you can tell me about from any of those ops?
ID: Well, they were particular times. I was I suppose you could say poetic. Sorry for what but I was fascinated by Robin Hood, England and, you know. The Sherwood Oaks. So I did lots of exploration.
JP: Yes, but in —
ID: Every chance I got.
JP: Yeah.
ID: I went and had a look at some new place.
JP: Ok.
LD: Did you fly there dad. Did you do extra training or did you go —
ID: No. No. I was fine in training.
JP: Yeah. But with, when you — with the op [pause] in the raids that you were doing when you were at 625 —those eighteen, nineteen, twenty raids.
ID: They were very scary raids.
JP: Scary raids. Why were they scary?
ID: That was a very rough time flying. We lost more aircraft at that particular period than at any other period. And it was just that, well the Germans had enough aircraft to put in the air.
JP: Yeah.
ID: To shoot you down.
JP: Yeah.
ID: So we were you trying to dodge them all the while.
JP: Were you flying always more or less to the same area? Were you flying in to the Ruhr? Was that the main or were you flying elsewhere?
ID: The Ruhr Valley as it was called or Happy Valley. We used to get it. Was our main target area because it was Germany’s main industrial area. So, most of our raids were on places like Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Cologne, Essen. And then on the edges of there. Places like Frankfurt and Stuttgart which wasn’t too far from the Ruhr.
JP: Ruhr. Yeah.
ID: But they were on the River Rhine.
JP: Yeah.
LD: How was it when you were flying dad. Was it very loud. How long did it take you? How many hours. Was it really cold?
ID: Well that depended on where. Which particular target you were on. But it could go from about four hours to about six hours. That’s the length. The duration of the flight.
JP: Yeah. But always you were dealing with a lot of German fighter planes.
ID: Yeah.
JP: Sort of up there creating trouble.
ID: I wasn’t. I wasn’t doing much dealing with them because it seemed somehow or other they dodged me and let me get on with the job of bombing [laughs]
JP: So, you were able to successfully drop quite a lot of bombs in those.
ID: Yeah. I always. I never turned back, and you know I did some very fine raids I thought at the time. Particularly some with winds that hadn’t been forecast. You turned around and come back and you had a howling headwind and you wondered if you were going to get back.
JP: Get back and have enough juice in the tank to get you home.
ID: This was, this was where I met Pat. When she — and what happened there was that we tried to get back into our base . The whole of the south of England was fogged in and we were given a diversionary. Numbers like three or four figures. That meant it was a certain base. I was given a base. And the navigator got the base and they said, ‘You’re going to Wymeswold.’ We got to Wymeswold and that was fogged in. We were running low on gas. There is only one other place for you to go to and that was Fort Ellen. Which was a little island off the coast of Scotland. And I said, ‘We’ve got no choice we’ve got to get in there.’ So, we waited will we landed at Fort Ellen. I was reported missing. Pat was at that stage we were starting to get fond of each other. So, we came back the next day and we carried on.
JP: And did they — the senior officers have anything to say about you having to divert so far or or –
ID: No. Not really.
JP: Not really.
ID: The closest I got, I got what? A DFC. And that was an award for fighting.
JP: Yeah. Well we’ll come, we’ll come back to that.
ID: I also was told by the wing commander I myself when the war ended we were going to go out to Japan. If I stayed and not get married that he would make sure I got the DSO. I’d done sixty missions by this time and some of the [unclear ] squadron leader but you know by that stage I think starry eyes take over and I was too fond of Pat to think of giving her up to go and fight. So —
JP: You didn’t.
ID: So, I thought about it for a while and then I decided, well, what am I going to do when I got back? I didn’t like the bank, but I worked in a bank so —
JP: Ok. Well we’ll come to that bit later because we need to go from 625 to 156.
ID: Yeah.
JP: To the Pathfinder. So how did you persuade your crew to —
ID: With great difficulty.
JP: With great difficulty. What special —
ID: No. No.
JP: Charms did you exert?
ID: None of them wanted to go.
JP: No.
ID: We’d done our tour and then they, you know, by rights they could then take at least six months without having to operate again. But in actual fact I said I’m going to stay on for forty five. Do forty five trips until ’45 at that stage and stay on until ‘45 and [unclear] put it to them. I said, ‘Well I’m going to go to Pathfinders. If you want to come with me you come. If you don’t want to come, I’ll go off on my own and pick up another crew,’ because there were crews available and places for good pilots like me if I wanted. So, every one of them volunteered to stay.
JP: Volunteered.
ID: So, the whole crew continued on and by the time I’d done nineteen operations and also it was a very difficult period as far as getting shot at was concerned. But well I think [unclear] Although we got [unclear] somewhere that there was two hundred and seventy two holes in the aircraft and it didn’t come down.
JP: Amazing.
ID: Yeah.
JP: So, when did you actually start with Bomber —Bomber Command — with Pathfinders? Do you remember roughly what month that you —?
ID: By this stage it was’44. In the, out in the middle of 1944.
JP: Right.
ID: I switched to Pathfinders.
JP: Yeah. Ok.
ID: And then we had to do further training.
JP: Right.
ID: It was called a Pathfinder night training unit where we had to do a lot of day time training and a lot of low level flying. We did all sorts of training.
JP: Yes. Because of training.
ID: The flying programme was specialised. In case you were called upon to do it.
JP: Do it.
LD: And all on Lancaster.
ID: We were lucky. We were lucky and we worked hard.
JP: Yes.
ID: We planned.
JP: Planned. Yes.
ID: And I think I would say that I was a good pilot and I was able to dodge incoming but I could still today do that [sniff] and still smell the cordite of shells exploding around the aeroplane.
JP: That’s right.
ID: So, I was very very close.
JP: Close. Yes.
ID: I think I was on the raid Geoff Jones was shot down.
JP: Right. And the raids, the ops that you did as part of the Pathfinders. What, what particular raids — do they stand out to you that you can tell me about?
ID: Raids.
JP: Yeah. What. You know— the missions that you did. Any. Any. I mean I know, I know there is a bit of —
ID: Well right at the end of the war when I was, I’d been made a Master Bomber.
JP: Right.
ID: Which meant you took control of the whole of the bomber force. But you do a period as deputy master first and I’d completed two of those and then I was given my call sign. That was not very romantic. Plate Rack it was called.
JP: Plate Racket.
ID: Plate Rack.
JP: Oh my goodness.
ID: I was Plate Rack 1.
JP: Plate Rack 1. Right. Ok.
ID: Plate Rack 1 would be telling the, you know, the main force on what they had to do.
Other: With his crew.
ID: Bomb forward and so on and so forth.
JP: And you say they were scary because of the amount of the combination of factors being low level flying, lots of German aircraft. What would you say was the most scary factor?
Other: [unclear]
ID: Being shot down by the fighters. Because they’d creep in from behind you and you didn’t know they were there. We had no way of establishing.
JP: Establishing.
Other: Yes. He’s not in this one.
ID: Am I in that picture?
JP: Yeah. That’s right.
Other: Eight of them.
ID: That’s me.
JP: Yeah. And the operation. When you were — you mentioned and I said I’d come back to. You were awarded the DFC. Can you tell me about which operation?
ID: It wasn’t anything —
JP: No one operation. It was an accumulation of —
ID: It was over a period of time.
JP: Time.
ID: A number of very hairy operations that I did but you know I had —
JP: Was this in Pathfinder? As part of the Pathfinder ops or —
ID: Well, I was in Pathfinders by this time.
JP: Yes, right, yeah.
ID: And what actually happened was that when I went down to Pathfinders they just said forget what you’ve done up till now. So, I had to start all over again. And it was a bit, well it wasn’t scary [unclear ] because I was well trained for it. It was frightening. And as long as you planned well and trained well you had as good a chance as anybody. You know, we lost at that particular stage, we lost about half the, half of the people that took place in the raids.
JP: Yes. That’s a very, a very significant loss ratio. It’s, it is quite amazing.
ID: The raids on the Ruhr were always difficult because every one of those places I’ve mentioned had their own particular ack-ack batteries of flak and they were constantly shooting at you. So, dodging that was always scary. I mean there’s nothing much you can do about it.
JP: Except stick together and follow and do —
ID: Yeah.
JP: Follow all your planning and make use of all your preparation.
ID: Yeah but you know you didn’t fly in formation like the Yanks did.
JP: Oh no. No. No.
ID: We went independently. Navigated independently.
JP: Independently.
ID: To the target and that way, we were able to adjust. And I think it’s probably one of the reasons why they accepted me in the Pathfinders. That I was able to make decisions. Life affecting decisions that always worked out right.
JP: And I mean, and the flying conditions were never easy anyway with, with your own squadron members because there, there were so many if you needed to take quick evasive action there was always one of your own planes not that far away that you were trying to avoid as well. Is the situation.
ID: Always was that fact. Normally was no problem.
JP: Right.
ID: But if you got weather fogged in which you can get. Particularly during that Christmas of 1944 was a very very difficult period weather wise.
JP: Wise.
ID: Yeah. Had to be able to get in. Get landed.
JP: Yes. And so —
LD: This photo is at the end of March 1944.
JP: ‘44. ok right. We’ll come back to that one then. That’s good. And so all of these forty two ops take you through to forty —
ID: Sixty if you count. If I counted those two as one.
JP: Yeah. One. Ah yes.
ID: Do you know what I mean?
JP: By the time you add in the 625 yeah. The sixty.
ID: Of which thirty nine were with Pathfinders.
JP: Path. Yeah. Yeah. And —
ID: And remember you worked your way through. I had a very good navigator so the navigator wanted him to be chosen to do what we called sky marking. It was operating, marking in the blind, in the cloud because his work on radar was good. He was able to give me directions which meant I always got through.
JP: So, your navigator was doing this blind sky marking.
ID: Yes.
JP: Yes.
ID: He was, he, you know you’d fly the aeroplane but as you got nearer the target was under his direction for ten miles to the left and so on and so forth because as we got further into the Ruhr there was nowhere to go, you know. Because when you went to Duisburg or Dusseldorf one flak battery was shooting at you. As was the other one.
JP: And were you taking photographs as well during the —
ID: No. I did have a camera which I got in New York which was stolen in Cornwall of all places. Newton Abbot. All my baggage disappeared.
JP: Oh dear. Right. And so —
ID: And I bought a leather jacket in New York. And a camera.
JP: Right.
ID: But I’ve never been like my younger brother. Spent his life taking pictures. I never bothered that much.
JP: No. Right.
ID: Still don’t. I can remember it pretty well.
JP: Yeah. You can. You can remember it very well. And with the — so the crew then. You mentioned your navigator, so your entire crew was still all the same. You hadn’t changed any of your personnel at this stage. So, all your crew —
ID: No. I never lost any crew members.
JP: No.
ID: They all stayed with me until —
JP: The end .
ID: The end of their tour.
JP: Stayed until the end of the operation. The end of that tour, that’s —
ID: With the exception of the rear gunner who stayed on.
JP: Who stayed on.
ID: And I stayed on to go on my third tour.
JP: Oh, my goodness.
ID: He stayed on with me.
JP: Right.
ID: So, we could have very easily been shot down but we weren’t.
JP: You weren’t. No.
ID: That’s the way it goes.
JP: Well as we say there’s, that’s —
ID: And when you do it sixty times you know, you get your frights from time to time.
JP: And what — obviously you had a very close crew at this point because you’d been together for so long.
ID: Yes.
JP: Did any of them have any particular good luck charms or anything like that? Or superstitions that they always —
ID: Well let me just say one thing here. That our crew — we stuck together as a group even though I was an officer and the others were all other ranks or flight sergeants more or less. We went out together. We went to the local pub together. That sort of thing. And we just didn’t separate out and go off in different directions. It was only when I definitely decided to get married that we started to spend a bit of time occasionally with ourselves.
JP: So, when you did —
ID: What I used to do, for instance, we used to go to Cambridge. We were based near Cambridge. And in Cambridge there was a swimming pool and you could practice your dinghy drop. So, we were, this was where we signed up. I’d sign and they’d provide a dinghy for me and then I’d take the whole crew along and we would do a dinghy drill which was good because if we got shot down we’d get some practice.
JP: Practice.
ID: We’d be in the water.
JP: Yeah.
ID: So, we did that and then after we’d done the dinghy drill Pat and I would go off to explore Cambridge for example.
JP: Right. So, when you had periods of leave you would have sort of gone your own separate ways a little bit then from the rest of your crew. Or even when you were on leave did you all stay together?
ID: No. When I met Pat — when we decided to become engaged after we’d done our training then we’d go our own way and then most of the crew accepted that I was with Pat so we did our own thing. And the pictures that you see of my wife in the canoe there. She — I’ve got a picture of her there.
JP: That’s good. And —
LD: Because my mother used to interpret the photos.
JP: Oh ok.
ID: So, she would debrief the crews.
JP: Debrief. That’s right.
LD: So dad got his crew to wait so that he could be specifically debriefed by Pat.
JP: Very good. Very well done. But this was while you were at 625 so I presume she stayed at — around with the 625 base to do the debrief. The intelligence work there. She didn’t —
ID: No. No.
JP: She moved did she? When you moved to Pathfinders.
ID: When I moved to Pathfinders.
JP: Did she move?
ID: She got —
JP: She got herself another job did she?
ID: She tried to get down. She was the senior female officer in intelligence. Female officer that is. And so she tried to pull a few strings.
JP: Pull a few strings.
ID: And get as close to me as she could. And she was fairly successful. She was based at Wing and she was based at Wratting Common. And when she was at Wratting Common I was able to take the Oxford on beam training and I’d called in to Ratting Common for tea.
LD: You told me you couldn’t drive a car, but you could fly a plane. Drove over for tea and took mum out on a bicycle made for two.
ID: That’s true. I was flying an aeroplane before I —
JP: Got your licence.
ID: Drove a car.
JP: Well that’s, that’s good. And —
ID: And of course, people like Pat, in those days they didn’t have cars. They were allowed to have cars.
JP: No. No. So what would you say your best experiences were from — what would you say were the best I mean there’s an awful lot of bad parts associated with all of those ops and all the rest of it. Are there any, would you say there were some good parts to come out of that? Can you identify any good parts?
ID: Well —
JP: Apart from Pat I mean. I’m not talking about your —
ID: No. No, I know that.
JP: Yeah.
ID: One thing I’ll still — I’ll often go to bed and fall asleep thinking about or reeling about it. And that’s when I was deputy master bomber. Right. That meant that I had to orbit the target the same as the master bomber in case he was shot down. I had to take over. And we were doing a raid on a place called Plauen which is a between Berlin and Leipzig. And I’ll never forget the next day. I suppose it were really a freighter carrying ammunition or something but we hit it and it jack-knifed and you could see in the air the train coming together. The front and the back and the rest of it up in the sky like that. That was a scary period.
LD: You mustn’t have been very high up.
JP: No. They were never high up.
ID: No. No. Not on that one. It was a strange one because the master bomber had said to me there was too much cloud there, ‘Go down and find a level we can bomb at.’ So, you did as you were told so I went eighteen thousand where I was at and had to get down to ten thousand and then eventually eight thousand. I was underneath the cloud base and able to direct the raid and saw this go on.
JM: Amazing. And so, when you decided not to go — go on with the flying and you got you then sort of went in to discharge mode. You got that you were married in England.
ID: Yeah.
JM: First in what about —?
ID: Well remember the first thing was the wing commander offered me a job.
JM: Yeah.
ID: As a flight commander with the Tiger Force which was coming out to fight the Japanese. I had that choice, or I could get married.
JM: And you chose to get married.
ID: Chose to get married.
JM: Yes.
ID: And Pat and I was quite close as far as bases were concerned at that particular time.
LD: You also helped drop some of the provisions in Holland didn’t you? I seem to remember.
ID: Yes. Well that was after that.
JM: After VE day. After —
ID: It wasn’t after the war so much. It was after the area where we were operating. And I know I had to mark the target.
JM: Target.
ID: That was a field. And we had a field that — in the middle. It was Rotterdam.
JM: Right.
ID: And we went to Rotterdam and you found the field and you put markers. These are very powerful lights that shine and allow the Pathfinders to see it. So, we did that, and I controlled that particular [unclear] it was done properly and we were very successful.
JM: So how?
ID: And the Dutch were very happy about it.
JM: Yes. How many trips did you do for that?
ID: Two. I think.
JM: Two. Ok. So, when did you and Pat get married?
ID: On June the [pause] June the 20th I think it was. 1944.
JM: ‘44 or ’45?
ID: ‘45 sorry.
JM: Yeah. And that was up in Scotland was it?
ID: We were married actually in Scotland but it was, was a bit unusual. The wing commander as I told you wanted to [pause] me to go and be his flight commander but I chose to stay and then I had to do something. But Pat had some influence and she introduced me to a wing commander in London that controlled the postings and I told him that QANTAS had just got Lancastrians and that if I wanted to get a job with a Lancastrian it would be a good idea to to do the initial training in England and go back to Australia with a licence. And so what happened — I did the pilot’s training initially and to do that I had to go special course on hydraulics and a special course on electrics because they were different on the Lancastrian than they were on the Lancaster.
JM: Right.
ID: So, what actually happened was that I went to — I’ll never forget it to this day. I went to — I think it was called Woodford. Woodford and Chatterton. I went to both of them. And he said, ‘What do you want?’ — the fellow in charge of security at the gate. And I said, I’ve come — ‘I want to see Roy Derbeau‘ ‘Who?’ ‘Roy Derbeau.’ I don’t think we have anybody named that but I’ll have a look. So, he had a look and then a message came down from headquarters. They sent him up to see me and so I went up to see him and then —
LD: Because, Do you mean Sir Roy.’
ID: Secretary that I saw and he said, ‘You couldn’t possibly mean Sir Roy [laughs] I’ll never forget it. ‘You couldn’t possibly mean Sir Roy.’ I said, ‘Is he the fellow in charge of Avro’s production?’ Which he was and he said, ‘Yeah. That’s the bloke.’ The next thing I knew they had provided me with a Humber car.
JM: Oh.
ID: And put me up in the Midland Hotel where they kept some spare room and I stayed in that room for three weeks doing these two courses.
JM: Marvellous.
ID: I showed that I had the necessary equipment now and knowledge to get a first class — first class licence.
JM: First class licence.
ID: Air transport licence.
JM: Licence. Yeah.
ID: And then because nothing was happening we didn’t really know whether Tiger Force was going to get away.
JM: Get away.
ID: So, what I did was go went down to Southampton University and told them what my problem was. They said, ‘Well, you’ll have to learn about the tides. And I said, ‘What do you mean the tides? I’m flying an aeroplane. Landing a plane.’ ‘It doesn’t matter. The rules say you’ve got to have a knowledge of the tides around the shores of England.’
JM: Right.
ID: So, they put me on a special course for that.
JM: Right.
ID: So I got out of that and I’d now a first class pilot’s licence. Now, I got a second class navigator’s licence and then a radio operator’s licence that I went and did in between.
JM: Goodness.
ID: So I thought that’s fine ,and that’s basically where I was.
JM: Basically was. Yes.
ID: Until I came back.
JM: Back to Australia.
ID: To Australia.
JM: Ok. Well we’ll —
ID: I convinced them that I’d done enough.
JM: You’d done enough. Ok. Well we’ll follow that up in a moment. We’ll pause there so you can have your pills. Ok.
[recording paused]
JM: I was obviously lucky because I got shot at many many times.
ID: Many times. That’s right. As somebody else said to me it’s the luck of the draw.
JM: Yeah.
ID: Yeah. If you were in the wrong position at the wrong time you got shot down.
JM: That’s right. Very hard. So, you’re doing this training. You’ve got married to Pat and so then you — what about your return to Australia at this point? When? Where? When did you leave?
ID: Well when I came back —
JM: When did you leave because you and Pat came back separately didn’t you?
ID: Yeah.
JM: Yeah so —
ID: I came back on the Aquitania via Cape Town.
JM: Right. When did you leave? What —
ID: When I got here about two months. Three months later Pat arrived. Very, very pregnant at this stage. But she was — everything was above board.
JM: Yeah.
ID: We were brought up, well I was brought up the old fashioned way. You didn’t go flirting around with your wife to be. You waited. In our case we waited and we got married. We got married in Ely.
JM: In —
ID: Ely Cathedral.
JM: Ely. Oh right.
ID: Yeah.
JM: Right. Lovely.
ID: And the thing with that was that the crew that was supposed to be bringing up the best man. You know, my close friend —
JM: Yes. I was going to say were most of your crew at the wedding?
ID: Yeah and they didn’t come.
JM: They couldn’t come.
ID: No. They couldn’t come. Couldn’t.
JM: They had to go off and —
ID: Well I think what actually happened was that they, they’d been on a raid and they’d got back and they didn’t have enough time.
JM: Time.
ID: To get ready to come up to Glasgow. It was a bit of distance to do that so I remember walking along. I didn’t know because I had a phone call. I was staying at a hotel that and it was Pat’s mother saying, ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘I’m having a shower.’ And she said, ‘You’re supposed to be getting married in a few minutes.’ ‘Don’t be silly our wedding’s at 11 o’clock and its only about half past eight.’ She said, ‘The priest changed the time.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Oh he wanted a bottle of whisky.’ So, I had to find this bottle of whisky for him and then he put the wedding off.
JM: Oh dear.
ID: Fella on the street that I got and there was a sergeant in the RAF. ‘Sergeant. You’re under orders. You are to attend this church.’ It was about twenty minutes by then. ‘In about twenty minutes you are to be the best man at my wedding.’ He said, ‘I don’t know you.’ What does that matter?’ I said, ‘I’m going off in a different direction.’ So that’s what happened.
JM: That’s what happened.
ID: I never, I never even knew his name.
JM: Name. So, Pat’s mother was there at the wedding. Was there any other family there or not?
ID: Yes. Pat’s sister. Sister [pause] And this was us just leaving on our honeymoon.
JM: Right. Ok. And where did you go for your honeymoon?
ID: A place called the Trossachs.
JM: Oh yes up in the middle there —
ID: In Scotland.
JM: Yes. There’s an old castle with — yes, I know the Trossachs very well.
ID: Do you?
JM: Yes. Yes, I do.
ID: Well, in those days that hotel was put aside especially for people who had had a very risky life in the war and particularly submarines. They seemed to go there. Anyhow, somehow or other I got through Pat. We got a room at this hotel. I’ll never forget to this day because we decided to go for a swim in that area. And there’s three lakes. Loch Venachar, Loch Katrine and Loch Achray. And there’s a great song that goes, “The copsewood grey that swept the banks of Loch Achray.” And we went for a swim and so I was last to go. And it was second last, she dived in and she didn’t really have a proper bathing suit. She’d tied some sort of bandage around her top and of course she came over the top of the water, I saw her and I thought oh God she’s drowning so I dived in. I’ll never forget it. I got her out of the water and we went in to — we had separate rooms at this stage and a basement and we warmed ourselves up there.
JM: So I guess Pat then went back and finished up work when you were on the boat coming out to Australia. Is that right?
ID: I didn’t work coming back to Australia. No.
JM: Sorry?
ID: I was just a passenger.
JM: No. No. Yes. I said Pat finished work.
ID: Yeah. Pat
JM: Finished work.
ID: What she did was she spent whatever time she had as near to me as she could.
JM: Could. Yeah. Yeah.
ID: But you very quickly ran out of money in those days.
JM: No.
ID: I had the paybook and didn’t have too much in it.
JM: No.
ID: Then we ended up at the, it was called the Abbot or something hotel at Brighton and we between us had about four or five pounds left and had about two weeks leave left to use up at that time as well. So I said, ‘Let’s go up and watch the races at Palace Court.’ And there was a horse there called The Reel and we put the whole our money on The Reel that won and we got fifty pounds out of that.
JM: Wow. Oh, that was good.
ID: For fifty pounds then we had a lovely last week or so in England.
JM: Yeah.
ID: And then of course I came home.
JM: Yeah.
ID: From Southampton.
JM: Southampton and you came back. Did you come back to Sydney or Brisbane? Where did you — or did you have to —
ID: On the way back, we came back through Cape Town. Stopped over in Cape Town for a couple of days and then we just dropped off troops in Perth and then the train. I think the plane or a train The ship stopped in Melbourne.
JM: Melbourne. And you had to come up by train from Melbourne.
ID: Up by train. I’ll never forget it because Pat had made herself a dress and it was big polka dots and she [unclear ] the polka dots. it looked really quite weird and out of place and she was pregnant by this time.
JM: But you, but she didn’t come out, but she came out after you didn’t she?
ID: Yeah.
JM: So, you came in to Melbourne, came up to Sydney. Met up —
ID: We came up together.
JM: Oh. You oh she was not that far behind you. You stayed in Melbourne did you, till she came?
ID: I was lucky in that things were and still are, you know, I’m ninety three, ninety four now they fall my way and this was what actually happened. We were able to get tickets on the Spirit of Progress, and it was [unclear] black something or other the temperature was about a hundred and ten at Melbourne. And we came up through the heat and then the air conditioning broke down. We had to change train at Wagga. Not Wagga.
JM: At Wagga Aubrey wasn’t it?
ID: Aubrey.
LD: So, dad you actually came before mum though didn’t you?
ID: Yes. Sure.
LD: How long before mum did you arrive?
ID: About two months.
LD: Yeah.
JM: Two months. Yeah. So you came up to Sydney but then you went back down, and you caught up with your parents in Sydney. And then —
ID: No, I came straight back, and I was staying at my parents’ house.
JM: Yeah. Ok. So, you were staying at your parent’s house and then Pat landed in Melbourne so you went back down to Melbourne to meet her.
ID: We came back by train.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
ID: And then we both stayed.
JM: Yeah.
ID: And it was at that stage my sister was just about to get married or had just got married and Jack, it was, had won the military medal in the Solomons. He moved out and June moved out to make sure there was a nice big room for Pat and I.
JM: That’s good. So, so now we’re in to right, right. Ok so this is, which into January ‘46 by this stage. So you then set about getting into your working life I guess. At this point.
ID: Well, what happened was obviously after I’d done this study in England, to get a licence so I could get a job with QANTAS. I went to see the QANTAS people and they said, ‘No way. We’ve got twenty thousand pilots all looking for jobs.
JM: Jobs.
ID: All of them wing commanders. and I said, ‘Well I’ve got licences they don’t have.’ ‘Well sorry.’ When I went down to Melbourne strangely enough and I managed to get a flight out with the air force and I went to see the A&A people ‘cause they were —
JM: Yes.
ID: And they offered me a job straightaway. So when I went home again I had a call from QANTAS to say we’re still a little bit interested in. Yeah. And I said well interested back. And I said well interested had better harden straightaway because I’ve just accepted an offer for a job for A&A. Within an hour they phoned me and asked, ‘If you’re here at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning we’ll put you in your uniform.’
LD: Pretty good. There’s the Aquitania arriving in Woolloomooloo.
JM: Right.
LD: In 1945.
JM: Oh ok.
LD: And that’s taken from your mum dad’s, parent’s house. Flat.
JM: Oh, my goodness. Goodness. Right. Right. Ok. So, so, then you actually started with QUANTAS then and how many years were you with QANTAS?
ID: I joined QUANTAS on the [pause] January 19 –
JM: 1946.
ID: ’46, it was back then.
JM: Yeah.
ID: And I stayed with them until the April 1st 1954.
JM: Right. Ok. So, eight years. A bit over eight years. Yeah.
ID: Yeah. I — at the age of twenty four I was a captain with QANTAS.
JM: Gosh.
ID: And I think the youngest international captain in Australia.
JM: Youngest. Australia. So, you were doing international flights then. You –
ID: Yeah. Oh yes. Straight away.
JM: Did you do the Kangaroo Route or —
ID: Straight into international flying.
JM: Flying.
ID: On the Lancastrians.
JM: Yeah.
ID: And true to this day, and main reason was that they didn’t have anybody to fly in an aircraft. And there was a Liberator had lost an engine. They had to get an engine across to Learmonth of all places.
JM: Right.
ID: So I now had a licence. It was easier in those days just to switch it over and have — endorsed to fly Liberators. They took me up in an afternoon. Put me through like four hours flying. They said right you go and fly the Lancaster. So didn’t go as captain of course but as first officer.
JM: No but at least that meant they then had a crew to be able to solve their engine problem.
ID: They did.
JM The replacement engine problem
ID: Of course, they had the Lanc engine fixed up and that took off, going to the Cocos Island I think it was.
JM: Right. Right.
ID: And left me abandoned if you like at Port [unclear], they used to call it.
JM: Right. So, any particular experiences that stand out for you during your time at QANTAS? Your eight years at QANTAS? Any particular trips or particular important people that you might have carried.
ID: Well, one thing but I don’t want to put it in print. One of the first officers, you see, we only had two pilots and a flight time of nine to ten hours and we were coming back from Hong Kong. Trying to get in to Darwin and then there was a cyclone. And the cyclone forced us to dodge trying to land in Darwin. So we were sent to Cloncurry and I couldn’t get the plane down on the ground it was so hot. It started fluttering along there. That was one scary time.
JM: That must have been one scary experience. So, what did you do? Did you get it. Did you have to give up and go somewhere else. Or where else did you go?
ID: There was nowhere else to go.
JM: There was nowhere else, you just had to get it down.
ID: What actually happened to it was [unclear] Cloncurry I went back to Darwin. I was still on the outskirts. [unclear] We couldn’t land at Darwin, so we went back to a place called [unclear]
JM: Right.
ID: We went on to and the [unclear] I loaded up with gas. Headed back towards Darwin. By this time I was getting pretty tired so I thought I’d have a rest. I had to have a rest. Anyhow, I got up after my very brief rest to look out and see mountain peaks just there. By that house. As close as that. And it was all part of the ranges that went through. [unclear] Papua New Guinea. And the first officer who was supposed to fly in the aircraft had fallen asleep and they had a special recording compass which would — you put the thing in George and George followed the thing around on one, and I looked up and we seemed to be heading in the wrong direction. And I looked again and sure enough we were. We were very very lucky. We could have gone straight into that mountain. He quit inside a week.
LD: Golly gosh. You also told me that you helped to open up the air route to Christchurch.
ID: Yes. I did a lot of flights.
JM: Yeah.
ID: I did the [pause] Melbourne to Christchurch. That was on DC4s.
JM: Right. And so, moving along. Just summarising after you finished up at QANTAS you decided — did you have an approach to move to your next job or did you decide you wanted to give up QANTAS.
ID: Firstly, QANTAS paid very poorly in those days and I had a bunch of kids at home always looking for Christmas presents. Anyhow, I had the opportunity. I was in Singapore. I was introduced to the head of Caltex in Singapore and he said, ‘We’re looking for a chief pilot who’ll take on the job of training the Indonesians and then hand over to them.’ And they were willing to pay more than twice what I was getting.
JM: Gosh.
ID: So I said yes please. I went back and on the 1st of April 1954 I left QANTAS and joined Caltex.
JM: Caltex.
ID: And it was Caltex Pacific Petroleum it was called. And I’ll never forget it. Because when I got there, you know they put all this panic on, ‘You’ve got to be there tomorrow.’ So and so [pause] when I got there, they put me up in the Captain’s Room in the Raffles Hotel where I stayed for six weeks. Doing nothing.
JM: How nice.
ID: Except playing golf.
JM: Oh, my goodness me. Oh goodness. That must have been a tough life. But still, I mean, apart from the fact that your away from your family or had any of your family come up at that point or you were up there by yourself at that —
LD: When did we all go to Indonesia dad?
JM: In that six weeks at — when you were in Raffles Hotel were you by yourself?
ID: I was by myself.
JM: Self. Right. Yeah.
ID: I was staying at the Raffles.
JM: Yeah.
ID: But Pat and Louise and Mary came up by ship.
JM: Right.
ID: Norwegian ship. And they flew them in and then I had two or three days staying in a place not far from the actual airport itself in Singapore [unclear] The fact we were being based in Jakarta.
JM: Right.
ID: Because they reckoned that would be the best place to do their training from.
JM: Right.
ID: So I went to Jakarta to pick them up. One thing mind you was though I had no training on DC3 at this stage. I hadn’t really flown the aircraft at all and all of a sudden I’m the chief pilot.
JM: Pilot.
ID: I’m the chief training captain.
JM: Right. So, you had some, had to do some reading up quick smart then I guess to just be able to do the bit of pick up the bits and pieces you needed for the different plane.
ID: Well, flying is like riding a bicycle. You don’t forget how to do it.
JM: No but there would have been. Each plane has its own idiosyncrasies doesn’t it?
ID: As long as everything goes alright you have no trouble.
JM: Yeah.
ID: If something goes wrong then you’re in trouble.
JM: Yeah. That’s true.
ID: So I flew off and picked them up and went to Jakarta and we stayed in a place called [unclear] and then we moved out to [unclear] which a very nice house actually we had. Had up to eleven servants.
JM: Gosh.
ID: What actually happened was I was a pretty good golfer and the president of the golf club was the British Ambassador.
JM: Oh ok.
ID: And the club captain was an Australian. The Australian ambassador and when they said to me, ‘You fly pretty well. Do you want a job?’ I told them what I was doing. You leave tomorrow. Tomorrow I was on the way to Jakarta.
JM: Gosh.
ID: In those days it was, you know, who you knew.
JM: That’s right.
ID: [unclear]
JM: Well I don’t know as it’s all that different today quite frankly but yes, so you had six, six years in Indonesia.
ID: Well I was.
JM: Roundabout.
ID: I was there from April 1st again. 19—
JM: 1960.
ID: 1960.
JM: Yeah. And then from there you had a big change of scenery. You went off to Bahrain.
ID: I went there. What actually happened was that I decided that once I was going to go away from QUANTAS. I mean I was already doing very very well in QANTAS. I’d better get something worthwhile. So I was offered this job as chief training captain which I took up but then part of the job was to train the Indonesians to take over. And it took six years, but remember we had full crews and needed pilots or radio operators and whatnot, so I stayed there as supervisor. So that was done and then I got Type B Hepatitis and I remember I was pretty ill. Down in Melbourne. Royal Prince Albert Hospital.
JM: Hospital. That would have knocked you around a bit.
ID: Yes. It was a bit scary because I was in constant fever there for a while. But whatever.
LD: We used to go and visit him in hospital and there was the man next to him and he was always [flailing about?] for water.
ID: And the deputy chief of Caltex Petroleum was [unclear] who came down to Melbourne to see me. [unclear] coming to visit me. [unclear] and he said what do you want? And I said well I left QANTAS to try and further myself. I wish to go at marketing. I wish I did have, probably still have, to a degree. Anyway, the point is that they decided that they’d send me to Bahrain to do some brief training in marketing because in Bahrain we had marketing as shipping producing exploration and a full gamut of the oil business and they thought that was a good place for me to learn. So, I was sent there. Well basically to be there for six weeks. But the chap was superintendent of transport operations and remember we had a big transport operation was [pause] he was, I forget his name. A British major. You know One of the old fashioned types.
JM: Right. Right.
ID: So, I went in there and met [unclear] and he said, ‘Sorry. There’s no place for you.’
JM: Oh yeah.
ID: And I said, ‘Come on.’ Anyhow, a couple of days later HH Arnold Junior descended on them. He was President of them, and he said, ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I’m playing golf.’ He said, ‘Why aren’t you learning?’ And I said, ‘What’s to learn’ Not that I know anything immediately. So he said, ‘Leave it with me.’ And within an hour I’d had a call to say to come up to the President’s office. The local president’s office saying that, ‘We want you to go to Bahrain and to train in Bahrain for six weeks and then we’ll see where we’ll place you. We have in mind the head of marketing in Beirut.’ But in actual fact the fella that was in charge of transport got there ahead of me, being British and being very pompous. He took advantage and they sent him off to Beirut and left me. And I had to fight my way through.
JM: Through.
ID: But I did every job I could get. Every time they gave me a job they said you take this fella and you learn about it. So everybody they gave me I learned his job. Could do it in a week or so because it was fairly simple jobs basically. It was just a matter of following up.
JM: Well, being used to organising yourself as a pilot and being responsible and organising others I mean, you know, you’ve got the basic skills there for any management role that you would need to do so I mean.
ID: Yeah. It came quite easily to me to be a manager. And so I was, apparently, I had and still have at ninety four a gift for working with people and I was able to [noise on microphone] oh I wondered what that was —
Others: Just loosening them up.
JM: So, you ended up with ten years all up.
ID: Ten years in Bahrain.
JM: Bahrain.
ID: And then in Bahrain I did all kinds of jobs but most were with maintenance planning of major shut downs. Many millions of dollars being spent and I was in planning. That was well before the days of computers and laptops.
JM: Yeah. That’s right. A very different work environment.
ID: You had to be able to do it. Worked out this is what will happen if you do this. So —
JM: Yeah. So then from Bahrain you went to New York. You had fifteen years in America.
ID: Hang on. I went to New York. I was in Bahrain for ten years.
JM: Ten years and then from there to —
ID: From there I’m sure I went to [pause] oh I know what happened. I won the first two Bahrain Opens at golf.
JM: You won the —
ID: What’s called the Bahrain Open it was then.
JM: Oh ok.
ID: That was the Bahrain open golf champion.
JM: Oh yeah. Yeah.
ID: And because I won them I think I got to know the president better.
JM: Yeah.
ID: And he called me up and said, ‘What are your plans?’ And I said, here it is what I’d done so far, ‘And really, I expected to be long since to be marketing somewhere.’ And then you know in a matter of days the call came forward to ask would I like to be head of training and development for Caltex Worldwide.
JM: Right. Gosh.
ID: Based in New York.
JM: New York.
ID: And I was there in New York for I think it was about ten years. Give or take six months or so. In which time I did a lot of travelling for Caltex. And I ran maintenance courses. Management training. Mostly as a organiser really and doing it but in many cases the organisation ones I liked. I used to do them myself.
JM: Yes, well that —
ID: That was just a small part. Right. Then they came with up a — when I was in New York I decided to come away with a golden handshake to cut back on everyone and I said I’ll take that and they said, ‘No we don’t mean you.’
JM: Oh ok.
ID: I said, ‘Well this is what it says. It’s all written down there anybody and everybody is allowed to apply.’ So that’s what actually happened, I applied and they said, ‘Well, you can’t go.’ And I said, ‘Well you shouldn’t have put it on paper like that.’
JM: Yeah.
ID: Because everybody else sees that I was turned down for being too good rather than I’d got a right.’ So, I did that.
JM: You did that and as you say you did a lot of travelling and a lot of courses.
ID: I’d done quite a few organisational development programmes as such.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
ID: Training enroute in different countries.
JM: Countries yeah.
ID: And I ended up going to Kenya for the best part of a year.
JM: Yeah.
ID: And I was at Nairobi.
JM: That would have been a very different experience because I mean.
ID: It was indeed.
JM: We’re talking about you know mid to late [pause] mid–eighties. I mean it was a very different.
ID: Well it was most unusual in the firstly I was in the jungles in Sumatra and then I was in the desert of Bahrain and then I went to New York and then from New York. Well I obviously did well, or I wouldn’t have been selected to —
JM: To go to Kenya to –. Do, to run the.
LD: I remember as a little girl flying with you in the DC3 to Sumatra dad. Along the line. And then we went down into the oil caps high in Sumatra. Down that, on a small punt through the river and then there had been this — because you guys had gone shooting tigers.
ID: We had to go by boat from the airport where the plane landed to a terminal along the river. Siak River it was called. Along the Siak. I’ll never forget it because the river was the same colour as tea.
JM: Oh, my goodness.
ID: Funny that. That was stained. The water was stained.
JM: Stained.
ID: Run off the mountains and that. Anyhow, the point was I was trying to make that after that I was offered this, not offered. I took this golden handshake. Wasn’t much money in those days but I took it and I hadn’t been away from there for more than six weeks and I was down here in Sydney. And a phone call came and they said they want you to go to Indonesia for a year.’ I said how long?’ A year. What will they want for a year? Oh you’ll find out there. You’ll go there for a year. Your job is basically to train the Indonesians to take over completely. So, it took me six years, but I got it done. And [pause]
JM: So that was in Malaysia. Indonesia. Then from there you got another call and had to go off to Oman for twelve — for about a year. Is that right?
ID: Yeah. Well what actually happened was we were going to go and build a refinery in Bangkok. But if you remember back there was a big fire in a place called Bhopal in India.
JM: Oh yes. Yes. Yes.
ID: Ok. And the insurers withdrew the money that they’d put up for us to build that refinery.
JM: Yeah.
ID: So, I was suddenly without a job.
JM: Right.
ID: So, they said they were establishing a Tiger Force and would I be part of the Tiger Force? And the first place to go would be Oman for six months.
JM: Two months.
ID: Which turned out to be two and a half years. Which turned out to be very nice. I enjoyed Oman. We both liked it.
JM: Right. Right. Because I guess at this stage it would just be you and Pat. The children would be off doing their own things well and truly by this stage.
ID: Yeah.
JM: And then so you had the time in Oman and then a short break again and then Thailand.
ID: Well a short break. I can’t remember the exact time but certainly I’d already done the job.
JM: Yeah.
ID: In Oman and I’d come home. I think I was home for about six months and the phone goes. New York. New York wants you.
JM: Yeah.
ID: What for [unclear] and I’ll tell you and then they turned around and said we want you to go to Thailand to open up training manager.
JM: Right.
ID: Whilst in charge of development. All levels of people who wanted, who knew, and it was what we called a star petroleum refining company.
JM: Right.
ID: And the actual — the actual running of the place was done by a couple of engineers, a managing director and his vice president but I was responsible for human aspects of it.
JM: Right. Right. And then finally you went to Japan.
ID: In between I did quite a few.
JM: A few bits. Yes.
ID: Specialised trips.
JM: Specialised short trips. Yeah.
ID: Trained on.
JM: Sort something out.
ID: We were the first people who engineered simulated management programme and because it was so successful they decided I could stay on doing that and I had one computer specialist who was very good and myself and we were the mainstays behind this Tiger Force and somewhere between Oman and Thailand. Yeah. Oman to Thailand. And then Thailand we built a new refinery completely and I had the responsibility of manpower training and providing the man power and basically trying to stop Shell who had been there for quite a bit longer from stealing the only trained people in the country. And we did, and I got that job done and went home and I thought it was all over because by this time I was about seventy six or so. And —
JM: Amazing.
ID: I got a call again and, ‘We want you to go to Japan.’ And I said, because I liked Japan, and I looked forward to that, ‘Can my wife come?’ ‘Cause I took Pat out to all these places.
JM: Places. Yeah.
ID: Yeah. Well, they said, ‘Yeah. Alright.’ I said, ‘When do we go?’ ‘Tomorrow.’
JM: Nothing like a bit of notice.
ID: Yeah. So, I went off with — with [pause]
LD: [unclear]
ID: Having done the job in Thailand I then was involved in this Tiger Force group and was busy trying to downsize the way the Japanese run their refineries and what was happening was they were buying you know twice as much as they should have done and they had far too, far too many people for what work there was. And the men would stay back till 8 o’clock at night shuffling paperwork from one to the other. But Pat and I were there for — oh I don’t know — fourteen months. Something like that. We thoroughly enjoyed it. We like japan very much.
JM: That’s good.
ID: Of course the men aren’t nearly as nice as the women. And the women helped Pat a lot.
JM: You’ve had an incredible life and it’s just amazing to think you continued to work in such influential positions for so long. it’s just a tribute to your whole —
ID: Well an attitude to work. And of course —
JM: Well attitude to work but it’s the skills. It’s the ability to relate to people. It’s the ability to deliver. It’s the ability to manage. It’s all of those things and I think that comes back.
ID: Well they all —
JM: And explains why you survived. You know, I mean, it’s the people —
ID: They came all together again and well I was successful was I wouldn’t have been working till I was seventy eight.
JM: That’s right. Amazing. So there’s just one other thing that I would ask out of an interest in your golf. So, you when did you first start to play golf? When you were a boy back in Maitland or —?
ID: My father was a very good golfer.
JM: Right. So —
ID: Played [off scratch?]. ]
JM: Right.
ID: Back in Maitland
JM: Right.
ID: But he wouldn’t let us you know play because he didn’t want us around when he was having his booze and God knows what. But the point was I did get a few hits in so I knew which end of the club to hold kind of thing.
JM: Yeah. Did you caddy for him at any time? Did you caddy for him at any time?
ID: No. I don’t think so.
JM: So, you didn’t get a chance to see him.
ID: I played with him.
JM: You played with him but —
ID: But not against him.
JM: Not against him. Yeah. Yeah.
ID: The last time we played together was in Avalon in Sydney.
JM: Oh ok.
ID: A course there.
JM: Yeah. A little public course yeah. Yeah. Because again being a good golfer often works very well in the corporate world. And I think that’s evidenced by the fact that –
ID: That corporate role as such but the fact that you could go to a place and then meet with the managing director of the company.
JM: That’s right. Yes.
ID: And talk about golf.
JM: That’s right.
ID: And not about anything else.
JM: Exactly.
ID: That was enough to get you through the front door. Put it that way.
JM: That’s right. Well as I say and the perfect example is when you were saying about Bahrain.
ID: Yeah.
JM: That’s right.
ID: You kind of soon found that you were capable. What you were capable of.
JM: Yes.
ID: And you concentrated on that.
JM: That’s right. Well I think we’ve covered an enormous amount of territory today and I appreciate so much the effort that you’ve made because I know you’ve not been well. And it’s just to put –
ID: My main problem is just sitting down.
JM: To sit down for too long. That’s right. That’s why I want you to be able to have a little time —
ID: They tell me I’ve got –
JM: To finish up. So, I think we’ll conclude there and as I say thank you very very much Ian for all.
ID: Jean. It’s been a pleasure to have you here.
JM: Thank you.
ID: And feel welcome to call by any time.
JM: Thank you very much.
ID: And ask any questions you want and I’ll give the right answer.
JM: I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Thank you. So, we’ll finish it off there now. Ok.
ID: Ok.
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ADenverI170221
PDenverI1704
Title
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Interview with Ian Denver
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
Language
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eng
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01:59:04 audio recording
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Pending review
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Jean Macartney
Date
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2017-02-21
Description
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Ian Denver grew up in Australia and joined the Royal Australian Air Force as soon as he was old enough. After training he completed 60 operations with 625 Squadron and 156 Squadron. He met and married his wife, Pat who was an intelligence officer at 625 Squadron and returned to Australia after the war. He joined QANTAS and became the youngest international captain with the company.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Kenya
Kenya--Nairobi
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1943
1944
1945
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Julie Williams
156 Squadron
625 Squadron
aircrew
Halifax
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancastrian
love and romance
Master Bomber
military ethos
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
pilot
sport
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/250/3398/PEllisMW1701.1.jpg
fe0a9e98f23972969b5aa03159b3c69e
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/250/3398/AEllisMW170703.1.mp3
9a9db74325a0256a11c8b95b9a2f864e
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Ellis, Mary Wilkins
Mary Wilkins Ellis
Mary W Ellis
Mary Ellis
M W Ellis
M Ellis
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Mary Wilkins Ellis (1917 - 2018). Mary Ellis was an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-07-03
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Ellis, MW
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 3rd of July 2017 and I’m in Sandown with Mary Wilkins Ellis who was a delivery pilot during the war and has a variety of tales associated with that. So, starting off then Mary what were your earliest recollections of life.
ME: Well I come from a farm in Oxfordshire. My father was a farmer and I had three brothers. And I can remember looking at aeroplanes when I was eight, six, eight and thinking how lovely. And then Alan Cobham came along with one of his circus planes to Witney Airfield which is in Oxfordshire. Which is quite close to Brize Norton actually. And so, I had the urge to be more interested in aeroplanes more and more. And then I went for a flight with Alan Cobham’s Circus and this set me off even more. And then I talked with my Pa who also liked flying and he thought it was a good idea that I was interested in flying. And when I was at school in Burford I wasn’t very good at playing hockey so, I was allowed that hockey time to go to Witney Airfield and have a flight and that’s how I started flying aeroplanes.
CB: What age are we talking about here?
ME: We’re talking about [pause] I suppose twelve when I started flying. Well, I don’t know but it was very early on.
CB: What was the reaction of the school to your giving up hockey and going to flying?
ME: Each one was allowed to do their own thing so it didn’t register that I was flying. Other girls were doing probably far more important things but we didn’t talk about it. We just went on with our lessons during the other time.
CB: What did the other girls think about your flying? What did the other girls think about your flying?
ME: We didn’t talk about it. So I don’t know.
CB: No. Interesting. Yeah.
ME: But I learned to fly at Witney and, as I’ve just said and I was flying and I got my licence just in 1938. And then the war came and so all civil flying was stopped and I thought that’s the end of my flying life. So, I went home and I was at home doing precious little [laughs] as girls do, you know. Play tennis and all that sort of thing. And then one day I heard on the radio that girls who had licence, flight licence and were able to fly aeroplanes would they please contact the Air Transport Auxiliary because girls were badly needed to fly aeroplanes. So, I applied and I was taken on almost immediately. And I joined Air Transport Auxiliary on the 1st of October. Now, there’s another car coming. I think this is —
CB: We’ll stop there a mo.
[recording paused]
ME: To fly aeroplanes you have to be trained.
CB: Yes. So, when the radio announcement came looking for girls who had got flying experience then there was a process you went through. So you said you joined the 1st of October 1941. Then what happened?
ME: I went to Hatfield. And I was at Hatfield with three other girls who also joined at the same time and we had to — none of us had very much experience so we had to learn to be able to fly aeroplanes without any radio or any help whatsoever. And so, we were, each day we went off on cross country’s from Hatfield to learn the countryside as it was. You know. Woods here, rivers there, churches there. Something else. Like that. And then I was posted to, I was posted to cross country flight at White Waltham in December.
[pause]
CB: Yeah.
ME: And that was at White Waltham which was — White Waltham was the HQ. Did you know that?
CB: Of the ATA. Yes.
ME: And so there I had to go through all the procedures of finding out how an aeroplane works. How the undercarriages works. And what to do in emergencies. It went on and on and I had to learn about the weather conditions. Had to learn Morse code. And it really was fantastic — the amount of learning that one had to do before starting ferrying. And I was flying in the flying training. All the single aeroplanes and I was ferrying these around. And [pause] what happened next?
CB: So, at White Waltham they had a number of different aeroplanes to fly.
ME: Yes. They had a Harvard something or other. And I flew all these light aeroplanes including Hurricanes and I flew fifteen Hurricanes. And then one day I had a little chitty which said I must fly a Spitfire. Just like that. And I thought, ‘Oh my goodness. How can I do that?’ I haven’t been near one because they didn’t have any spare Spitfires at White Waltham for one to look at. And so, I was taken by taxi aircraft to Swindon. South Marston. And there —
CB: The factory.
ME: Yes. And there I — a Spitfire was, came out of the hangar and it was the one that was on my little chitty. So this, I had to fly this aeroplane. The first ferry Spitfire I’d ever flown. And in uniform, you know, when you’re very young one can look quite attractive [laughs] which is rather different today. And so, the hangar doors were opened and out came this Spitfire and I eventually climbed in. Someone put my parachute in because we always wore parachutes and then I got in myself and I thought, ‘Oh gracious me. How lovely.’ And then a chappy that was fastening my parachute and all the other things inside, he said, ‘How many of these have you flown? You look like a schoolgirl.’ And I said, ‘I haven’t flown one before. This is the very first one.’ And he simply could not believe it. And the people around, they were staggered to see this schoolgirl about to fly a Spitfire. However, I managed very well and I taxied out and took off and I got up in the air and I thought I must play with this aeroplane just a little to find out how it flies. What it can do. What I can do with it. And so I did. I flew around for quite some time and I was only going to Lyneham but it took me a long time because I was flying around in this beautiful Spitfire. I landed it at Lyneham. All was well. My taxi aeroplane was waiting for me so I got out of this Spitfire into the taxi aeroplane which took me straight back to Swindon for the second Spitfire in the same day. And they couldn’t believe it when I got there and they said, ‘Oh you’re back again.’ [laughs] I went through all this paraphernalia you do. As one does. At this time I had to do some cross country to fly to Little Rissington — which I did. And I was almost killed at that time because they were flying Oxfords and as I was going in to land I just landed and an Oxford came and landed just in front of me. I still have the letter of apology [laughs] It nearly killed me.
LS: That’s incredible.
ME: But I’m still here. So, that was the beginning of the Spitfire. As you know I flew four hundred and one Spitfires on ferry flights. So —
CB: Were they consecutive or they tended to be interspersed with others?
ME: Interspersed. I’ll show you if you want to know.
CB: Yes. I’d be interested.
ME: Are you a pilot?
CB: Yes.
[Pause. Packet rustling]
ME: These are very precious so I have to keep them.
CB: Of course.
ME: This is D-day. If you’d like to look at my book.
CB: Thank you. Just while I’m just looking at this, going back to your comment about going to South Marston, the factory, to pick up the Spitfire you then did a handling trial. How much would you throw the aeroplane around?
ME: For ten minutes I was, probably, yes, getting used to it. Marvellous.
CB: So you were doing aerobatics in it.
ME: No. We were told never to do aerobatics or fly at night.
CB: Steep turns. Were you, to what extent were you able to —
ME: Everything else.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Well you can see there were all sorts of different aeroplanes in the same day. I could fly a bomber or a Spitfire. All on the same day.
CB: I’ll stop this for a mo.
[recording paused]
CB: We’re talking about the variety of planes you flew, Mary, but in the early training —
ME: No.
CB: At White Waltham they had Hurricanes there. Did you deliver many Hurricanes later?
ME: Well, it’s all in the logbook.
CB: You’ve got a variety here but the Hurricanes aren’t a major item. I’m just curious to know whether you —
ME: Well, if you give me I’ll tell you.
CB: Yeah. Because you’ve got Albacores, you’ve got Spitfire, you’ve got Wellingtons. All sorts of things in there.
ME: There you are.
CB: Oh, there we are.
ME: Those are the ones I flew.
CB: Yeah. At the back. Thank you. So, you’ve got a Tiger Moth as a starter. How did you like the Tiger Moth after what you’d been training on?
ME: I didn’t fly Tiger Moths after I’d been doing my training.
CB: Right.
ME: Silly questions.
CB: Yeah. So, we’ll stop there just for a mo.
[recording paused]
ME: Different types in fourteen days.
CB: Right.
ME: It’s all down there.
CB: Yes. So, did you end up with a preference for certain aircraft and ones that you’d like to avoid. If you had the choice.
ME: We were not given a choice.
CB: No.
ME: We were told each day which aeroplane to fly and where from and to.
CB: Yes.
ME: We had no choice.
CB: No.
ME: But we had a choice as to whether we were flying or not. We had no radio. If we chose not to fly because the weather wasn’t what we wanted then we didn’t. I didn’t. And another thing is there are two or three different aeroplanes all in the same day, different places.
CB: Yes. And what’s it like switching from one plane to another when they are different in the way they handle?
ME: [laughs] Well I don’t know. We had a little book with ferrying pilot’s notes. Read the book. Get in the aeroplane and fly.
CB: And what are the most significant points in the ferry pilot’s notes that they’re making you aware of? Some of them had flaps and some didn’t I presume for instance. Did they?
ME: Oh, I don’t want to go into the technical pieces of —
CB: Ok. Doesn’t matter. I’ll stop just for a mo.
[recording paused]
ME: Garlands or whatever it was.
CB: Right. So I suppose —
ME: It was all, it was all different.
CB: Yes.
ME: But you had to know this.
CB: Yes. That’s what I was getting at really because —
ME: Have you seen the ferry pilot’s notes?
CB: I haven’t. No.
ME: You haven’t.
CB: No.
[recording paused]
CB: So, what you have there is a book of pilot’s notes. Ferry pilot’s notes. Could you just do what you did just then? Tell me what variety have you got in there of planes because it’s just significant in terms of how you had to handle this extraordinary change of aeroplane.
ME: It wasn’t, it wasn’t only the aeroplanes. We had no radio whatsoever. We had nothing except our own thing. And to go from one place to another and when one gets to an airfield that is flying Oxfords and then you have to go around and sit in somewhere. Or another place. I’d go to Shawbury and take a Wellington. And I go around and I have to fit in with all the others because they are talking with the RAF. But I have no radio and they don’t know really I’m there except by looking and I have to choose when to go in and land. And it wasn’t easy.
CB: So, you’re talking about fitting into the circuit.
ME: I’m flying a Wellington all by myself, with nobody else there. So I couldn’t ask. They’re all there.
CB: Yeah. So a huge range in there and the number, the notes are simply on a single sheet. Yeah. So, in here we’ve got Catalina. Buckmaster. Blenheim. Huge variety. Albacore. Tutor.
ME: They’re in alphabetical order.
CB: Yes. And Firefly. Did you do any four engine bombers?
ME: Yes. As a second pilot.
CB: What was that?
ME: In a Stirling. And a Halifax. And a Lancaster.
CB: Right. So, in those four-engined planes were there just the two of you or would there be another person as well.
ME: No. There was also an engineer.
CB: Right. Right. And the engineer was there because of them being multi-engined. Right.
ME: That’s right.
CB: So, in the circumstances of this navigation challenge it’s amazing that you managed to find places. What was the way that you planned a route to get there with no radio.
ME: We just had a map.
CB: Yeah.
ME: And don’t forget all these places were — what’s the word?
Other: Camouflaged.
ME: Camouflaged. And they were not easy to find.
CB: No.
ME: And some of them were secret and so they were very difficult to find but we did it. Didn’t we?
CB: Extraordinary. Yeah. What about the night flying? You said you weren’t normally going to do that.
ME: No.
CB: Were some people —
ME: The whole idea of the Air Transport Auxiliary was to get the aeroplane safely from the factory to where they were needed in the RAF and the RNAS. It was no good breaking them because the country at one time was almost without aeroplanes. And so we had to be very careful.
CB: Yeah.
ME: But we were very much on our own. We could fly or if we didn’t like the weather or we didn’t like the aeroplane then we were not pressurised at all.
CB: Which sort of aeroplane would you not like, really?
ME: Which what?
CB: Which sort of aeroplane would you not like?
ME: I didn’t like the Walrus. I know it was a very useful aeroplane.
CB: Seaplane.
ME: But it had a mind of its own and once it clattered about like a lot of bags of old things and something and it made a terrible noise on the ground [laughs] and in the air it just did what it wanted to do no matter what. It was terrible [laughs] but I flew quite a lot of them.
CB: Did you land them all on land? Or did you land some on water?
ME: Yes. They were made at Cowes and I took them from Cowes and landed them wherever I had to.
CB: Yeah. If the weather deteriorated what would you do while you were flying?
ME: Either put down at some aerodrome. It didn’t matter where. Or turn around and go back. Just depended on what weather was coming.
CB: And the people on the [pause] your destination were all expecting you.
ME: No. They didn’t know.
CB: Sounds interestingly challenging.
ME: Very challenging.
CB: Yeah. So, when you landed in your Wellington and got out — what happened next?
ME: Well [laughs] I can tell you the story which everybody already knows. You can tell the story couldn’t you Frank?
CB: Well it’s just we can’t hear it on there. Yes. Could you tell it please?
ME: This, yes, this Wellington I delivered. I can’t remember where it was but I delivered it to some station and I taxied to dispersal and switched off and then opened the door and let the ladder down. I went down with my parachute and the crowd of people on the ground who were there they were amazed. This schoolgirl, you know, flying these big aeroplanes. And they just stood there. And I said, ‘Can we go to control. I must have my chitty signed.’ And they said, ‘We’re waiting for the pilot.’ I said, ‘I am the pilot.’ There I was, you know, young and lovely uniform and they wouldn’t believe me so two men went inside to search the aeroplane to find the pilot. And they came out and they said, ‘No.’ There was no sign of anybody else so they accepted that I was the pilot. And I was. But I was unusual for one small girl to be flying these bombers. Hampdens and things like that.
CB: The fact a girl was doing it or just on her own?
ME: Without any radio. Without anything else at all.
CB: So was there a rule that if it was a bomber there would normally be two pilots?
ME: In the RAF they would have five.
CB: Yes, but —
ME: I think.
CB: In delivery. On delivery, when you were doing, delivering bombers was there a rule that normally there would be two for bombers or just one pilot.
ME: No. There was only two when they were four-engined ones.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Or if I flew an aeroplane like a Mitchell, I think, if you couldn’t get to the emergency you had to carry an engineer but not another pilot.
CB: You mentioned uniform. So how did you feel about your uniform?
ME: Well we were so used to having a uniform we were so pleased when we had two days off because we worked for two weeks and then had two days off and it was nice to get into civilian clothes and rush off all around one’s friends and go home.
CB: Were you based, yourself, always at White Waltham or did you move elsewhere?
ME: I wasn’t based at White Waltham. I was based at Ferrypool 15 which is Hamble.
CB: Right. And what sort of accommodation did you get there?
ME: It was very good. Everywhere I went was very very good because the ATA sorted it all out and we were just taken from one place to another to another. And I was stationed at Basildon and lived with a family in this big, big house, you know, and they looked after me frightfully well. And each girl had some other place. So, we were all well looked after. We had to be ‘cause we were flying each day and all day.
CB: So, when you got to your destination for the delivery you were picked up by the taxi were you?
ME: Usually. But sometimes I had to fly an aeroplane up to Prestwick and maybe it took two or three days to get there depending on the weather and something. And then I had to come back by night train to London. Back to White Waltham and there they would give me another aeroplane to fly back to Hamble.
CB: Right.
ME: A delivery flight. So, very complicated but it was marvellously operated.
CB: Well, very well organised. What were the taxi planes? Predominantly.
ME: The Anson or the Fairchild.
CB: And they went to various places. They picked up pilots from various places did they? On the way back.
ME: Yes. It’s usually a junior would fly the empty aeroplane and whoever got in the other aeroplane the senior pilot would take over.
CB: On the way back.
ME: So if someone went to pick me up then I would have to fly the aeroplane back or wherever it was going. Probably to another delivery place.
CB: We talked about your initial training at White Waltham which was single-engine. Was it? Where did you do your twin engine training?
ME: Pardon?
CB: Where did you do your twin engine training?
ME: I went to Thame for two hours. And that was on light twins. I flew an Oxford for several hours. And when I’d flown lots and lots of different aeroplanes like twins I then went back to White Waltham and I was given a few hours training on a Wellington which put me in the league of all these bombers. And so it was. And from having training on five different aeroplanes I was able to fly a hundred and seventy six aeroplanes.
CB: Right. What was the most daunting thing about switching to a thing like the Wellington because it’s quite a big aeroplane.
ME: I know but [laughs] you don’t need strength really to fly the big aeroplanes, do you?
Other: Not these days you don’t.
CB: No.
Other: It was a bit more difficult in those days.
ME: I’ll tell you one thing that happened in the Spitfire. Two of us girls were going from Southampton one morning. Quite short. And it was quite hazy. Very thick hazy. You couldn’t see. You could see straight down like that and my friend went off in her aeroplane and I thought yes, I’ll go off in mine and took off and it was, I went above the haze as much as I could and I never saw another aeroplane. But we were both going to Wroughton which is Swindon and the thick haze was so great that I managed to look down because I’d judged on the time and what have you that it was — Wroughton was there. And I looked down and it was there. And I didn’t see any other aeroplane. I couldn’t see anyway. Only straight down. So, I did a circuit and came in to land and she must have done exactly the same. I don’t know. But she did a circuit the other way and we actually passed on the runway. We were actually wheels on the runway. She was going one way and I was going the other. We must have missed by inches [pause] and we didn’t see each other. Not even, not even at the end, coming in to land.
CB: Amazing.
ME: We only saw each other as she was going that way or I was going that way and suddenly there was another aeroplane and then I discovered later it was her and she discovered it was me. So we decided we mustn’t tell anybody.
CB: What conversation did you have about that?
ME: Oh, it frightens me. Lots of lovely stories like that.
CB: Yes.
ME: But we can’t go on forever.
CB: Well. Finding the airfields, I thought, was an interesting point because your navigation clearly was very good but in certain circumstances it must be difficult. So how did you? When you got near to an airfield that you weren’t right on course how did you deal with that? You weren’t quite sure where it was. Did you do a square search or what would you do?
ME: Well we just had the maps.
CB: Yes.
ME: And hoped to get there. Whether we went straight or went that way and like that but we got there and then the map said this is the one. So then you had to operate in between the other aeroplanes which were being driven, piloted by the RAF. And the RAF didn’t know that we were coming.
CB: So, what was the technique? Would you fly overhead and then they would communicate with you by —
ME: How could they? We had no radio.
CB: By — no, no. By lamp. They would signal.
ME: No.
CB: They wouldn’t do anything.
ME: They were doing what they had to do and I would —
CB: You just joined the circuit.
ME: Well I couldn’t really join it because probably it was a different sort of aeroplane. Mine might be a Spitfire and somebody else’s might be an Anson or something.
CB: As time went on the planes became more powerful and sophisticated. How did you feel about that? Did you enjoy that?
ME: I loved the fast and furious ones [laughs]
CB: Tempest.
ME: The Tempest. The Typhoon. What was it? All those fast ones. The American one. What’s that?
Other: Mustang.
CB: Mustang.
ME: Pardon?
CB: The Mustang.
ME: Mustang. That was it. I did, I loved those. But then if you’re flying every day then it’s not as difficult as if you’re flying once a week.
CB: No.
ME: But it is difficult when you have three or four different types.
CB: In a day.
ME: In a day.
CB: Let alone in a week.
ME: And then being taken to somewhere else. [pause] Here you are. A Hudson. A Barracuda. A Boston. A Fairchild and a Spitfire.
CB: Three twins and two singles. Yeah.
ME: [laughs] I find it’s, it’s difficult to talk to anyone unless they are a pilot because they don’t appreciate the dangers we were in all the time. It’s amazing really that we did so well.
CB: Yes. What did you regard as your biggest danger when you were doing deliveries?
ME: Weather. Because the weather could clamp down at any time and the amount of meteorology that we knew was very little. It’s not much better today anyway [laughs]
CB: No. So you talked about going above the haze but would you sometimes put them really low in order to be able to see where you were going?
ME: Would I what?
CB: Would you fly really low sometimes in order to —
ME: Yes.
CB: Under the cloud.
ME: I liked to fly in a fast machine. I liked to fly so that I could see the church steeples and go from one to the other and I knew the country so well that I could do that on a flight. That was lovely [laughs]
CB: So where —
ME: I was still working of course.
CB: So, you did a bit of beating up occasionally.
ME: Yes.
CB: Airfields as well?
ME: Not, not airfields but if you were on track and you thought, ‘Oh my friend lives down there,’ I’d go [whoop] you know. Why not? As long as we kept the aeroplanes safe that was the thing.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Because a broken aeroplane was no good to anybody.
CB: No. How did you feel about when you were picked up by the taxies? How did you feel about being flown up by somebody else?
ME: In the Anson. There were sometimes five of us in the Anson. That was perfectly alright because we would go — whose duty it was that day to pick up. The Anson would go around and pick up until there were five or six of us in the aeroplane and then back to base probably.
CB: If the weather was bad you would have to stay at an airfield I presume. Would you?
ME: We did. Yes. We were well looked after if we had to stay.
CB: Because you had effectively an officer rank so they put you in the officer’s mess did they?
ME: Oh yes, we were. Yes. We were.
CB: And what happened in the social side of the officer’s mess activities? Off duty.
ME: Off duty. I wouldn’t know. If we stayed overnight we would have an evening meal and then obviously one was tired and I used to go to bed in the officer’s — wherever it was. I don’t know. They allowed us a very special officer’s place. What do you call them? In the officer’s mess or somewhere.
Other: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Anyway, we were well looked after.
CB: Well looked after.
ME: I was well looked after. Yes.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
ME: But what I didn’t like. I landed somewhere, I remember, and I had to stay the night and I stayed and ate in the evening with a lot of these RAF officers and then went to bed. And the next morning I got up and went to have breakfast and there were only one or two officers there. So, I said to one of them, ‘What has happened to everybody this morning?’ And they said, ‘They didn’t come back last night.’ And that really hurt. That was terrible. I couldn’t bear that. But I had to get in my aeroplane and go off.
CB: Are we talking about a bomber delivery here?
ME: So [pause] it wasn’t all fun.
CB: No. And did —
ME: Because I lost several friends, you know. The girls. They were there and then the next day at Hamble, when we went, they weren’t there. And we had to carry on. There was a war on.
CB: And what sort of things would cause the girls not to be there?
ME: Because they’d been killed.
CB: But flying in bad weather would it be, or aircraft breaking down?
ME: It was usually bad weather. As ATA.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Yes. It wasn’t, that wasn’t very nice.
CB: Did you strike up some really strong friendships with other ATA people?
ME: Yes. We were all fifteen, twenty girls together. We were all great pals. Some were high rank and some were low but it didn’t make any difference socially. We were quite happy to be together.
CB: And what rank did you start at?
ME: I started as a cadet. And then I skipped third officer and I became a second officer and I was a second officer for about a year and then I became a first officer. And after that, if one went higher, it meant you had to have a job on a desk as well as flying. I didn’t particularly want that.
CB: No.
ME: So, I tried to keep as a first officer.
CB: So that’s equivalent to flight lieutenant.
ME: No. It’s equivalent to squadron leader.
CB: Right.
ME: Isn’t that right?
Other: [unclear]
ME: Well I was told it was.
CB: So your real interest was to fly all the time. Were you marking?
ME: Rather than sit.
CB: Yes. Were you marking up your score of the number of different planes.
ME: No. No.
CB: Or was it just coincidence that it —?
ME: No. Each day one had to put in the log book.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
ME: Because they all had numbers and so you had to put them in the logbook.
CB: Yeah. Apart from the meeting on the runway in opposite directions what other scary moments did you have?
ME: [Laughs] Too numerous to say.
CB: Give us a sample.
ME: I — no I’m not going to say that. [pause] Yes. There were always little incidents rather. Especially with Spitfires when the tail wheel wouldn’t either go up or go down. I can’t remember. Do you remember?
Other: You’re probably thinking about the main wheels because the tail wheel, first, the very early ones had a skid and then they got the tail wheel very early on but it was not retractable. I think they did have some on the PR aeroplanes that were retractable. I’m not sure.
ME: I’ve got a lot of things in one or two of my books.
CB: Was the Spitfire rather temperamental or was it just you needed to drive with caution?
ME: Here’s a Headquarters, Finding Accidents Committee. “The aircraft landed at its destination with the tail wheel retracted.”
CB: Right. The later model.
ME: “The pilot is held not responsible for this incident.”
CB: Right. Right.
ME: Or accident.
CB: Right. So, which aircraft was that?
ME: This? What?
CB: Which aircraft was that?
ME: It was a Spitfire.
CB: Right.
Other: Interesting.
ME: I don’t know where it was. I’ve got [unclear] [pause] yes, I had [laughs] I was flying over the New Forest one day. I was going to pick someone up from Stoney Cross. I was flying a taxi aeroplane and the engine clipped so, as you know, you can’t stay up there too long when you’ve got no engine. Fortunately, I found a space and I managed to get down in this space which was very very small and I didn’t damage the aeroplane. But there I was. Stranded. And from out of all the trees and bushes came a herd of cows and I’m terrified of cows. And so I had to be rescued [laughs] myself. Somebody passing by or doing something saw an aeroplane and so they came and rescued me from these cows which is extraordinary. To land an aeroplane quite safely and then have to be rescued from the cows [laughs]
CB: And as a farming girl that was quite interesting.
ME: [laughs] yes. There was a reason why I was not very [laughs] intimate with the cows.
CB: In the early days of farming was it?
ME: [laughs]
CB: So, what was that plane you were flying that day? A single engine was it?
ME: There you are. Eleven types in fourteen days. Did I tell you that?
CB: No. That’s good.
ME: I did.
CB: You did.
ME: That was that one. Well, there was ten types in fifteen days.
CB: Right. What’s the predominant one there?
ME: On July the 6th I flew a Wellington.
CB: Yeah.
ME: A Defiant, a Wellington, a Spitfire and a Swordfish. All in the same day.
CB: Quite a bit of variety. What was the Swordfish like to fly?
ME: It was lovely.
CB: Draughty.
ME: I liked being out in the open for a change. It was. It really was lovely. It was like a ginormous Tiger Moth.
Other: It was big.
CB: Apart from the Walrus which you didn’t like what other plane would you rather have avoided?
ME: I think I told you. The Walrus.
CB: No. Apart from the Walrus.
ME: There isn’t one I disliked but several I found rather more difficult to handle than others.
CB: Would that be twin engines more difficult to handle or some of the very fast?
ME: Some of the bigger ones.
CB: Yes.
ME: Like a Hampden. And you know when you fly a Hampden you have to put a special thing on to get the undercarriage down. If you forget to press this little knob —
CB: Pneumatic.
ME: Then the undercarriage won’t go down and so you circle around and think why can’t I get the undercarriage down? Eventually you just remember to poke this thing [laughs]
Other: Yeah.
CB: Did you ever have a wheels-up landing?
ME: Yes. I did [laughs] I hesitate because I don’t really like answering it but Chattis Hill was a secret place for making Spitfires.
CB: Oh.
ME: And it was in [pause] what’s it near? Chattis Hill. What’s it near?
Other: [unclear]
CB: I don’t know where that is.
ME: Anyway, it was a secret and it was on a side of a hill. And I took this Spitfire off down to where they’d been training horses. So I went down to get a good look and I took off quite happily and one day I forgot that it was a different engine and [laughs] I hadn’t changed the trim the right way and I took off and I went zoom. Like that [laughs] and missed the trees by that much. ‘Cause you know there’s a Merlin engine and a Griffon engine. Now, I forgot so that was my fault. But shortly before or after that I took off from Chattis Hill, this secret place and I went up and I couldn’t get my green lights. In fact, I couldn’t get any lights at all and so I didn’t know what was happening with this Spitfire. And then it started getting warm and I thought I can’t stay up here so I flew around this place and these people in this secret place, I saw them bring out the fire engine and I saw them bring out the ambulance and I thought, oh. And I then went back around and I knew I had to land somehow and so I did. I came in to land and I switched an engine off as I crossed into the field.
CB: On the boundary.
ME: And then sat it down without any, without the undercarriage, without more ado.
Other: [unclear]
ME: It, because I’d switched off everything I could it wasn’t too bad. I got a few bruises myself. But they soon mended the aeroplane I think. A couple of weeks afterwards.
CB: Yeah.
ME: It was flying again.
CB: So, did you come in at a lower speed in order to make sure that you stuck well or how did you do it?
ME: When?
CB: When you were on finals did you actually come in slower than you would have done with the undercarriage down?
ME: What do you mean finals?
CB: Final approach.
ME: Are you talking about this aeroplane?
CB: Yes. As you came in.
ME: It wasn’t [laughs] There was no case of finals. It was just a racecourse.
CB: Right.
ME: [laughs] And I knew if something — obviously I would come in as slowly and safely as I could.
CB: Yeah.
ME: All my learnings came into my head in a fraction of a second and that’s why I didn’t break it very much.
CB: Just bent the propeller.
ME: So all my learning was very good [laughs]
CB: You clearly had a huge number of experiences. What would you say was your proudest event?
ME: Oh, I don’t know [laughs]
CB: I should think that was one of them. Getting it down undamaged.
ME: Pardon?
CB: I should think that was one. Getting it down undamaged.
ME: Ahum.
[pause]
CB: Now, there were men in the ATA as pilots as well as women. So how did that fit?
ME: We were all girls at Hamble.
CB: Right.
ME: We didn’t have any men.
CB: Right.
ME: Just one engineer man. That’s right.
CB: So, at Hamble you were picking up brand new aeroplanes.
ME: We were not always picking up brand new aeroplanes. Quite often we were picking up aeroplanes that had been damaged that had to be flown to the MUs to be fixed again to carry on flying. Quite often we did that. It wasn’t always new ones.
CB: So were you delivering the damaged ones as well as picking up the ones that had been mended?
ME: Yes.
CB: Right. And when you landed at the airfields there was a simple — they weren’t expecting you but there was a simple procedure that you went through was there? To hand over the aircraft.
ME: No. We went and put the aeroplane where they asked us to put it. And then we had this little chitty which we took back with us to Hamble and put it in so they knew that we had delivered that particular aeroplane safely.
CB: Yeah. I’m going to stop there for a mo.
[recording paused]
ME: Meteor flight.
CB: No. So tell us. The first jet.
[pause]
ME: This —
CB: So, this was —
ME: That’s what you wanted.
CB: Thank you.
[pause]
CB: This is a letter from November 1945 saying, “Dear Miss Wilkins, I’d like to add to the expressions conveyed to you by my commanding officer my own appreciation of your good work you’ve done for the Air Transport Auxiliary as a ferry pilot. I wish you every happiness in the future and success in any work you may undertake. Yours sincerely, Senior Commander, Director of Women Personnel, Air Transport Association.” Amazing.
ME: Thank you.
CB: So, the Meteor. Where was that being collected from?
ME: Yes. When ATA really closed in ’45 I was seconded with a few other men to fly in 41 Group. The RAF.
CB: Yes.
ME: So, I was posted to White Waltham and during that time I was asked — given a Meteor to fly. [pause] And so I flew it [laughs]
CB: So where did you take off from?
ME: I was flown to Gloucester. Where we were the other day.
CB: Yeah. Staverton.
ME: I flew it from Gloucester to Exeter. I’d never seen one before and I remember saying to the pilot, ‘I can’t fly it because it doesn’t have any propellers.’ [laughs] And so, I said, ‘Can you tell me any of its characteristics or something.’ And he said, ‘All I can tell you is that you must watch the fuel gauges because they go from full to empty in thirty,’ something, ‘Minutes so you’d better be on the ground in that. Before that.’ And that’s all the instructions I had on a Meteor [laughs]
CB: So, what did they explain about the engines and how they operated?
ME: I’ve no idea.
[pause]
CB: Extraordinary. Because one of the interesting —
ME: I just had to fly it and I had my book.
CB: Yeah.
ME: I looked in the book.
CB: Pilot’s handbook.
ME: What it said.
CB: Yeah.
ME: This, that and the other and I just flew it.
CB: Did it tell you you had to keep the revs above a certain level?
ME: No. It didn’t [laughs]
CB: ‘Cause one of the interesting —
ME: How would I know? Because it was entirely different from an ordinary aeroplane.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
ME: So, I just looked in the book and there it told me and so I did what it said.
CB: What height did you fly on that?
ME: Oh. I can’t remember but I remember going off and I thought oh I’m up here. Where am I? I’m lost [laughs] but I soon found myself. Oh and the pilot had told me it would drop like a stone when I took the power off but I didn’t find that at all. I did, it could be a perfect landing and all the people at Exeter were there to greet it and they couldn’t believe this female [laughs] this young female driving this. And the CO said, ‘Oh that’s wonderful. We’ll have a party,’ [laughs] and he said he would keep it for his own because they were changing from Spitfires to Meteors or the other way around. I don’t know which. Anyway, that was my experience which was fantastic. I thought it was wonderful.
CB: And how did you feel the acceleration and speed on that compared with a Spitfire?
ME: Well it was nothing like a Spitfire. A Meteor’s got two engines. A Spitfire’s only got one. So [laughs]
Other: Very fast.
ME: Oh, dear.
CB: Yes.
ME: I’ll tell you what.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Someone said you wanted to know how many Wellingtons I’d flown.
CB: Yes.
ME: And so, I put it out at one, two, three, four to be continued. I got tired of doing it so I —
CB: Right. That’s very good.
ME: And there it is. I copied from my logbook.
CB: That’s lots of Wellingtons. Yeah.
ME: Hard work that was.
CB: Thank you.
ME: Four engines were Lancaster, Lancaster, Liberator, Stirling and Halifax.
CB: Did you fly as first pilot in any of those?
ME: Not the four engine ones.
CB: Right.
ME: No.
CB: And were they also flown by women?
ME: There were secret places.
CB: Yeah. Were they flown by women?
ME: Yes.
CB: As well. They were.
ME: Yes. Of course. Women did everything.
CB: They did. Marvellous. Yeah. So was it only one Meteor you flew or did you go on to fly others?
ME: Pardon?
CB: Did you fly other Meteors?
ME: No. Because I was only there for three months.
CB: Right.
ME: And they were just making these Meteors then. No other girl alive has flown a Meteor.
CB: No. I can imagine. So, then the war ends. Well, what happened at the end of the war?
ME: Well, flying ceased so I went home. I went home. Played tennis with my mother.
Other: [unclear]
CB: And when did you meet your husband to be?
ME: I met him, oh I don’t know. I was running the airfield up here for about ten years before I met him. And then suddenly he appeared and he was a commercial pilot then. So. He was very handsome and so I thought [pause] he talked me into it. I may as well agree [laughs]
CB: So, after the war then you went home and played tennis but after that you went back in to flying.
ME: Well, I just said I came to the Isle of Wight as a, I was a personal pilot to a man that had an aeroplane but no pilot.
CB: Oh. Who was based in the Isle of Wight. Right.
ME: That’s why I’m on the Isle of Wight.
CB: And how often did he use his plane? Well you flew it but —
ME: Very often because he went to various places in, he had to go to committee meetings every so often to here, there and all over the country. So, it was rather fun.
CB: What plane did he use?
ME: A Gemini.
CB: But it had a radio [laughs]
ME: Pardon?
CB: But it had a radio now.
ME: No.
CB: Oh. it didn’t.
ME: No.
CB: Oh right.
ME: No. It didn’t.
CB: What about going abroad? Did he go abroad in it?
ME: I can’t hear now because my hearing aid has just run out.
CB: Ok. I’ll stop.
[recording paused]
ME: I became a personal pilot to this farmer man.
CB: Yeah.
ME: Then he bought a small airfield.
CB: Oh.
ME: And he had several managers which he wasn’t happy with and then one day he suggested that I could manage it for him. And I thought, well it’s a challenge and I like a challenge. So after a while instead of going home I decided to become an airport airfield manager so I was made manager and a few weeks afterwards when I started to build it up and I built the place up and up and I became airport commandant [laughs] because I’d now fixed in a CRDF and all sorts of things which had to be in order for the airline to come in and I did so desperately want the airlines to come in to the Isle of Wight. And so, I had to have all this CRDF and everything else. So, I did that.
CB: This is at Sandown.
ME: And the airlines came in. In the summer it brought people from Leeds and Manchester and Birmingham and Exeter and London. Every day in the summer. Which was — people can’t remember here that this ever happened but it did and it was wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. And then of course I was married by this time and my husband was working for the — what was it?
Other: The Hovercraft.
ME: Hovercraft
LS: Yes. Yes.
Other: Hovercraft.
ME: Yes. The British Hovercraft. Whatever it was called.
CB: The British Hovercraft Association. At Cowes. Yes
ME: And he was posted out to various places around the world and then he didn’t like that very much so he came back. And he was asked again, please would he go to various places and he said he wouldn’t go unless I went with him. So it was a case of he giving up his job or me giving up mine. And unfortunately for me I had to give up. So, I said I can’t stay here any longer and so I went abroad with my husband but because I left the field gradually went downhill and it closed shortly afterwards and went for sale. And I didn’t know anything about it then because I was abroad. Had I stayed I would have gone on. Without my husband [laughs]
CB: Yes. We’re talking about Sandown aren’t we? Yes. Which still has a grass runway. So, you went around the world with him. Then eventually he returned to the UK. You did. Together.
ME: Yes.
CB: Then what?
ME: But that, that would take, that took about four or five years because I was in the airfield here from ‘50 to ‘70. ‘70 I took off with my husband. So that was twenty years.
Other: Mary. You did the pleasure flying. Mary. Pleasure flying.
ME: Pleasure flights.
Other: Yeah.
CB: You did pleasure flights.
ME: Donald did afterwards.
Other: Yeah.
ME: But — yes because Donald bought an aeroplane. My husband. And together we did pleasure flights. Yes. That’s right. Which was very interesting because quite a lot of people that went for a pleasure flight decided that they would learn to fly afterwards because they enjoyed it. It was going around the Isle of Wight. So that was some good. And then, for some reason, Donald left and said, ‘I don’t want to do that anymore.’ So he didn’t. And I just went. We sold the aeroplane and I more or less went with the aeroplane just selling tickets. And that’s how people know me. Selling pleasure flight tickets. They don’t know anything about my previous life.
CB: Extraordinary. Yeah.
ME: It’s extraordinary.
CB: Yes. Eventually you gave up selling the tickets.
ME: [laughs] Yes.
CB: And settled down to a bit of retirement.
ME: I’m trying to grow old gracefully with my great help.
CB: Yes. Lorraine.
ME: My great friend.
LS: We try to inspire each other. You’re still inspiring me anyway, Mary.
CB: And finally as far as the air, the association was concerned, the organisation continued.
ME: Which?
CB: In the background. Your [pause] your girl, the girls who were in the —
ME: That stopped at the end of the war.
CB: Right.
ME: That finished in ‘45 and so I had three months in’ 46 when I was with 41 Group.
CB: Right.
ME: Which is part of the RAF isn’t it?
CB: Yeah.
Other: I’m not sure, Mary. I don’t know.
CB: Yeah. But the Air Transport Auxiliary had an Association afterwards did it? Where people kept together and so you kept in touch with the girls you’d flown with for all those years. Did you? At annual events?
ME: There weren’t very many because most of the girls had been married and so they stayed at home.
CB: Right.
ME: But we did have one reunion. Yes. And that was all. And gradually they have all gone to heaven. Or somewhere.
CB: Yeah. Well Mary Wilkins Ellis thank you very much for a most interesting conversation and we wish you many more years.
ME: You can’t do that because I’m a hundred and a half already.
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PEllisMW1701
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Interview with Mary Ellis
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Sound
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eng
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01:17:14 audio recording
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Chris Brockbank
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2017-07-03
Description
An account of the resource
Mary Wilkins Ellis was born in Oxfordshire and became interested in aviation at a very early age. She experienced her first flight with Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus. Mary learned to fly while still at school and obtained her licence in 1938. When the war began all civil flying was stopped and she thought her flying life was over until she heard a request on the radio for ladies who had a flying licence to join the Air Transport Auxiliary. She applied and was accepted immediately. She began her training at Hatfield and then at White Waltham, where she learnt the rudiments of flying various different kinds of aircraft as well as emergency training, meteorology and morse code. As with all ATA pilots, she began ferrying planes to airfields without the benefit of a radio and landing without any assistance. This led to a number of close calls. One day she ferried two Wellingtons, a Spitfire, a Defiant and a Swordfish. Towards the end of the war she also flew a Meteor.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Air Transport Auxiliary
aircrew
Anson
B-25
Blenheim
Catalina
Defiant
Halifax
Hampden
Hudson
Hurricane
Lancaster
Meteor
Oxford
P-51
pilot
RAF Hatfield
Spitfire
Stirling
Swordfish
Tiger Moth
Typhoon
Walrus
Wellington
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/264/3412/AGrayLW170301.1.mp3
8141028f5d068b9ddb3bbcb25f8c5b0d
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
Gray, Lloyd William
Lloyd William Gray
Lloyd W Gray
L W Gray
L Gray
Bill Gray
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Lloyd William "Bill" Gray (428691 Royal Australian Air Force).
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-03-01
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Gray, LW
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
LWG: Anyway look I’m in a mess because my wife just recently died and that leaves one in one hell of a mess of course and I haven’t been able to redress the place as it is, so excuse that.
RG: Right.
LWG: Tell me then, I want to know, why I’m little confused is that my eldest brother’s eldest son is Robert Gray.
RG: Oh truly.
LWG: And when you ring I thought he was the one that had been addressing me if I seemed a bit offhand because I thought he was having a shot at me. [laughs]
RG: Okay, no you didn’t, I didn’t take that wat at all. Yeah actually I am sorry with the name and the spot I would be [unclear] as well the correct way both of us, so yeah okay, okay I see that point.
LWG: You don’t look anything like him I can tell you —
RG: He’s a very lucky man, a very lucky man. [laughs]
Other: I’ve just got some kind of admin type stuff to do to start. What year were you born Bill?
LWG: Tell me before we start that I’d be intrigued to know how you got on to me.
RG: Okay what it is we it’s the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln there setting up an archive —
LWG: In England?
RG: Yeah, yeah in Lincoln.
LD: It’s the University of Lincoln.
RG: That’s running it.
LWG: Right.
RG: So what they’re doing is there putting up a, Lucy’s actually got a there’s a sheet there that tells you a bit about it, but basically it’s a museum archive for Bomber Command, so there collecting right across the world interviews with people like yourself, veterans, just to capture the stories, capture the whole story as much as we can before it’s all too late. Now how they got on to you was we are directed by a woman in Sydney, Annette Gitteritz [?], she was told about you by someone else here in The Grange, I don’t know who that was she just said somebody else here in The Grange mentioned to her that you were a Bomber Command veteran and that’s how she got on to you and she got your details, that’s the best I know Bill. We just get our records would you go talk to this person.
LWG: Well, I’ve had a busy morning already, the postie came and gave me that —
RG: It’s one of those awards yes.
LD: Oh it’s another one?
LWG: Well I, I haven’t got every, all my so called medals and so on, one reason they contacted me and said, ‘Oh well we’ll try and rouse that for you.’ And that arrived only by the post this morning.
RG: Oh okay.
LWG: So I haven’t opened it yet.
LD: Just to interrupt can you just do the intro on the —
RG: Yeah I just need to do an intro for the recording Bill. This is a recording with Bill Gray in his at his home in Deakin, ACT, on 1st March, 2017, interviewers are Lucy Davison and Rob Gray.
LD: The name’s William Lloyd Gray.
RG: Lloyd William. Sorry his full name is Lloyd William Gray.
LD: Okay. All right I just need to do some a bit of an admin here. Where were you based Bill?
LWG: I was in 3 Group and that was at Mildenhall.
LD: Mildenhall yeah, no worries.
LWG: Think that’s Suffolk isn’t it?
RG: Somewhere in that area.
LD: And did you only fly Lancasters?
LWG: Oh in operations yes.
LD: Yes, yes, no worries. Okay do you have a pen Rob?
LWG: No you’d only fly those things one at a time. [laughs]
LD: Now do you —
LWG: Plus I was a flight commander, a flight commander of 15 Squadron, RAF.
LD: Okay, so I can fill in all that. Are you okay that your name is associated with the record or do you want to remain anonymous?
LWG: Oh I’ve got nothing to hide.
LD: That’s good no worries.
LWG: Depends on what you’re going to do with it or use it for.
LD: So you’re Lloyd William Gray.
LWG: Lloyd [spells it out] I was told by my folks that I was called that because of Lloyd George.
RG: Oh yes.
LWG: Thank God they didn’t put the George in.
RG: Yes. [laughs]
LWG: I’ve never used Lloyd don’t like it.
LD: Can you just sign this one.
LWG: Well what I am signing?
LD: You’re just saying that Lincoln University can use the audio record that we have here.
RG: For research purposes.
LWG: Just there?
LD: Yes. Thank you.
LWG: That’ll do.
LD: Okay, not a problem.
LWG: I was born in 1923 which makes me too old for these things now I would have thought.
LD: The only other thing is if you have any documents that you want to donate to the university, do you have any documents or anything that you want to donate to the university?
LWG: Oh I’ve actually got my log book there what did I do with it?
LD: Just if there are there’s another form to sign to you know say ‘cos we would just take copies of them and there’s another form to sign but we can sort that one out later, yeah we can sort that one out later, no worries. All right. So I read up on you a bit —
LWG: Anyway where’s, where’s my log book that’s interesting I went and got it a minute ago and I put it down somewhere and I’m probably sitting on it. [laughs] Probably put it down when you rang the bell there it’ll come up, it’s easily identified, here we are that’s it.
RG: Yeah that is it yes.
LD: That’s not like other log books.
RG: No it’s different it’s a pilot’s log book we haven’t seen a pilot’s one before. All the people we’ve interviewed with one exception have all been navigators.
LWG: Navigators?
RG: Yes for some reason we’ve only interviewed one other pilot and he didn’t have his log book he’d already donated it.
LD: Oh.
LWG: When we get right into this I’ll tell you about my navigators I had three in all.
LD: Sorry.
LWG: Not at the same time though.
LD: Can I jump in again Rob please. So are you okay for us to take photographs of your log book and send to the university?
LWG: Well probably as we go along let me sort all that out.
LD: Yeah no worries.
LWG: I am surprised that you contacted me anyway and I must confess I was dreading it very likely because I thought about my brother’s son [laughs] I thought it was [unclear] taking the mickey. [laughs].
LD: No, no not your brother’s son.
RG: With the name thing you said you never liked Lloyd for Lloyd George, well so my father’s family emigrated to Australia in 1925 they came in on a ship called “The Barradine” and dad was almost born at sea and they were gonna name him Barradine that would have been the worst thing possible I would think. [laughs].
LD: Anyway if we can get, we’ll sort out all the other stuff afterwards, but like I said I, I read up on you a bit and you’re really a local boy aren’t you from what I read you were born in Goulburn and grew up in Queanbeyan is that right?
LWG: Yes that’s true, if you go back far enough, I’ve had a very complicated life really and I suppose if you want to know it all of course it’ll come out anyway not that it’s anything to be ashamed of. My dad was a policeman and I was born in Goulburn because there was no hospital, you could be born in Australia in 1923 closer than my grand my mother’s mother and father lived in Goulburn so they took me over to Goulburn to live.
LD: Oh so your parents were actually living in Queanbeyan?
LWG: No, oh no, in those days I’ll tell you where, I was born and my dad was then, I told you he was a policeman, that’s where you stay and move on as you get promoted and so on. I was born when they were at a place called Daysdale you would have never have heard of that it’s near Corowa, that’s New South Wales. And from them he went to, er, now let me think where did we go to Leyton, from Daysdale to Leeton to Jellico [?] which is south of there as well, Jellico [?] to Culcairn, Culcairn we went then from Culcairn to Crookwell, Crookwell to Kuma, Kuma[?] to Queanbeyan, and there I finished my schooling by riding a bike from the police station in Queanbeyan to Civey [?] every day. And got the leaving certificate.
LD: That’s a good long ride every morning.
LWG: It used to take us thirty five minutes and we’d be hanging on behind a bus [laughs] or a truck used to sit on. Do you know Queanbeyan?
LD: Yes.
LWG: Do you know where you cross the road there’s a bridge, a bridge side and so on we used to hang on there because there’s a downhill.
LD: Yes.
RG: Yes.
LWG: So that means if you took off from there you got your speed up quickly on your bike.
RG: Indeed.
LWG: And then we used to sit on sit on in behind Quadlings bike, you ever head of Quadlings?
RG: No, no.
LWG: Well they owned it, anyway he used to hate us doing that he used to look in his rear vision mirror. We went to school the four of us, two in, I had a great mate called Freddie Greentree, I don’t know whether you know Greentree’s Café, Queanbeyan?
RG: No.
LD: Mmm, a long time ago aye.
LWG: Oh yes everything’s a long time ago now.
LD: Yes.
LWG: We used to sit up the top there and as the bus came down, down, going downhill we’d peddle like mad get behind the bus and you’d catch your wheel right up the back you know and then means you’re in the draw of the bus —
RG: Yep you’re in the slipstream.
LWG: And of course eventually the ultimate did happen it wasn’t me, but Freddie hit the back and it threw him off and broke his leg and things such as that. There’s so much that you know you, I can talk about which goes through my mind which will be useless in a sense although that presents you the sort of person to you.
LD: Well that’s exactly it and this background kind of really is important because it shows the kind of you know the, it’s shows the people who are behind all this you know, you’re not just a pilot there’s a person behind this and you know and it’s important I think. Anyway what kind of work did you do, did you work before you joined the Air Force or did you join directly from school?
LWG: Er, well I suppose waiting for, well work I suppose, ‘cos then war had started then, and my brother was, I was born into a wonderful family in actual fact. My eldest brother was R. R. Gray and I don’t know whether you remember the name if you ever got a refund from the tax department it would have been signed by R. R. Gray.
RG: Okay.
LWG: I don’t suppose it rings a bill, but anyway Ron he became a deputy commissioner of in Sydney, but he was in records section in the tax department so as I came up to the end of the schooling of course he got me in at the tax department.
RG: Oh okay.
LWG: So I joined that and I was working there for oh how long was I there? Six months or something like that.
RG: Was it in Canberra or in Sydney?
LWG: Here.
RG: In Canberra here.
LWG: I was a despatch clerk and that meant I licked the stamps [laughs], and I used to get have them [unclear] was always bleeding [laughs] and mother used to go [unclear]
LD: They didn’t get you a little sponge? [laughs]
LWG: Well they did and I thought that’s ridiculous because that have you ever tasted the sponge when you, you know you’ve got a sheet of stamps, you’re not sending one letter out you’re sending out so they [unclear] got their share of it. [laughs] So I was there for about six months when I and next big thing that happened is I turned eighteen, ‘cos I wanted, I always wanted to fly aeroplanes of course. And when I was eighteen I got my dad to walk me down to the oh the town clerk in town in Queanbeyan and joined up there and they, I had a, eventually had a medical, a big medical down in Sydney, Palmer and Pluckett Streets [?] you’re making me think way back a long time now of course, but if you want to get a format of what I’m about you probably need to know these things.
RG: It helps, it all adds up.
LWG: And I passed the test there, that was one hell of a test incidentally. Always tell the story about the way they tested you Palmer and Pluckett Streets down in Woolamaloo, if you know Woolamaloo?
RG: I do I was in the Navy I was a guard and I —
LWG: Were you? Good.
RG: So I know Woolamaloo well.
LWG: What were you doing in?
RG: I was in weapons electronics.
LWG: Ah.
RG: Yeah.
LWG: Did you have an association with Harmon?
RG: No, never got posted to Harmon no, no, no, never got posted to either of those.
LWG: They put Harmon in whilst I was, we were in Queanbeyan incidentally.
RG: Ah it would have done ‘cos it was during the war wasn’t it, the early stages of the war yeah that’s right.
LWG: We used to have a lot of sailors coming in —
RG: Villconnan Transmitting Station [?] as well —
LWG: Villconnan was receiving, I’ve forgotten which one was receiving —
RG: Bombshore was receiving I think that was transmitting Villconnan yeah, yeah.
LWG: So.
RG: So medical was seemed a bit rigorous —
LWG: They did it down at Plank Street in Sydney, I remember I was there all day walking around with underpants, I can’t remember whether we did, I didn’t think we had underpants in those days [laughs] all day.
RG: You said the hearing the test, you said the way they tested the hearing —
LWG: Oh yeah that was, that was corny, I even laughed because everything was very serious you know, they put you in a, open a door and I stood there as everyone else was ‘cos there was a queue and there was a bloke standing at the far end of that room with the door, the window open and all the noise was coming from Woolamaloo, Woolamaloo then was a busy place is still is.
RG: Yeah absolutely.
LWG: It was busy because not because of trucks it was busy because of horses drawing the feed.
RG: Ah.
LD: Ah, ah.
RG: Yep.
LWG: And there was a lot of noise you know cracking of whips and all sorts, so it was unbelievable hearing test and the bloke at the window would say twenty-two [whisper] he’d whisper it, [laughs], and I would say twenty-two. [laughs]
RG: Very scientific. [laughs]
LWG: I remember on one occasion I should have [unclear] and he said, ‘Speak up I can’t hear you.’ [Raucous laughter]
LD: Funny.
LWG: It’s funny that, that I did a lot during the war but I’ve lived with it ever since incidentally you never got away from it because every time I put my head on pillow I’m thinking about the war or part some part of it ‘cos I was always in it, and a bit unusual as well because I turned eighteen and immediately I was called up into the Army.
RG: Right okay.
LWG: Because when I joined up with the, they accepted me into the Air Force incidentally except there was a ten months waiting list and did the whole thing but in the course of that they called me into the Army and I ended up being the defenders of Sydney ‘cos I was up on North Head.
RG: What unit were you with, sort of militia unit or?
LWG: 110th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment.
RG: Right okay.
LD: I’m sorry but just for the tape for the future they had conscription in Australia then?
LWG: Yes, yes.
LD: Just to be clear for the record that’s all.
RG: Yeah, yeah. So sorry North Head did you say?
LWG: North Head. Actually I had to be trained of course and so on.
RG: What were you doing in the battery?
LWG: Gunner—
RG: [unclear] or something.
LWG: Now actually it suited me because it was to do with the air because it was a Bofors Gun, do you know what a Bofors Gun is?
RG: Yes yeah, we had a lot of those on the ships, same guns hardly changed still using them into the ‘80’s yeah.
LWG: Well I went this 110th Light Anti-Aircraft tour of duties, and they took me first in the Army, took me first to the showground where I got my Army hat and uniform which is a story in itself, to get the uniform they used to, they had a big long counter and there were blokes there serving, serving you with your uniform and they didn’t come up to the measuring tape or something, he’d say, ‘Oh he’s a thirty-six’ or whatever.’ I remember I the first weekend after getting my uniform they gave us that weekend off and thought that was strange wasn’t it gave you a weekend’s leave which means I came back to Queanbeyan changed trains at Goulburn and we got here late, well early in the morning, my folks were still in bed and I used to creep in, did this a number of times. So on this occasion creeped in and knocked on the door and folks were still in bed, I walked in and my mother looked at me and she cried and she said, ‘What have they done to you?’ ‘Cos I could walk with the uniform they gave me and I put it on I could walk in that take three steps before it moved, before it started moving. [laughter] Sounds stupid but it was a fact.
RG: Oh yeah, yeah.
LWG: And of course she spent the whole weekend, which is of course why they gave us leave, she spent the weekend with the sewing machine sewing the uniform. [laughs] Unbelievable.
RG: So where did you go for your training with the Army, you were kitted out at the showground?
LWG: There was, you know where the racecourse is?
RG: Yeah, yeah.
LWG: Well next to that was another racecourse do you know what that was?
RG: No.
LWG: Kensington.
RG: Ah.
LWG: Kensington Racecourse and they’d taken that over by the Army so they took us to Kensington Racecourse where this regiment was. I was a gunner I wasn’t a private I was a gunner.
RG: A gunner yes artillery yeah.
LWG: [unclear] All that’s incidentally, I’m in a mess I understand that, most of that though is because, um, I don’t know how to take all this, if you want to, wanting I’ll be talk, telling, giving my story for the UA.
LD: Oh yes.
RG: Oh yes.
LWG: You know the UA? Military and they’d been interviewing me about that and I thought that’s how you came by —
RG: Ah it might have been actually, it might have been someone through UA yeah, yeah.
LWG: Could have been. Anyway they’ve been doing a lot of research on my history, anyway to quickly go over the top of it they trained us in, Percy Lamb, Percy was at school with me, he also did the riding to Cirry [?] and so on, and Freddie Greentree did, there was four of us used to do that, and he was called up the same time as I was and we both went into this Bofor Gun regiment, and ‘cos I’ve got to think back about all these things.
RG: So you did your initial training at with —
LWG: We went in mainly with a lot of old blokes and so on, some were young, and Freddie, and Freddie Greentree and myself stood out in one particular way we could read and write.
LD: Ah yes, yes.
LWG: Most old people couldn’t read and a lot of them anyway.
LD: Yes we’ve heard that before.
RG: Yeah.
LWG: Which is amazing isn’t it.
RG: It is actually.
LWG: Because of that he and I picked things up quickly, Freddie and I, and because we did and the Army we found was completely useless they were learning themselves ‘cos was early in the war, and Freddie and I eventually became, no not Freddie, Percy Lamb.
RG: Percy yeah.
LWG: Freddie Greentree, not Freddie Greentree, Percy Lamb, Percy and I. Percy and I became well we were best friends anyway, he was a bigger man Percy than I was I’ve always been a little squirt as they call it, and eventually we became bombardiers which is equivalent of corporal and we became instructors.
RG: ‘Cos how long would have you been in the Army by then for God’s sake not long?
LWG: Not very long no. I think I was only I can’t remember how long about six months I think.
RG: Oh wow.
LWG: And I’ve got a huge ringing in my ears ‘cos we ended up eventually in North Head, and you know what’s up in North Head?
RG: There’s a quarantine station.
LWG: Right on the head was a big coastal —
RG: Oh battery, coastal battery.
LWG: What was that —
RG: Nine point two inch I think they had.
LWG: Nine point something.
RG: Nine point two yeah, yeah, big, they were a bloody big gun those ones yeah.
LWG: Ah.
RG: I doubt they were naval guns.
LWG: And we didn’t know it in that we put in our Bofor Gun we established it there and put a bag —
RG: Sandbag.
LWG: Sandbag.
RG: Yep.
LWG: Protection around it filled it with the stuff which we were levelling the garden, the heads, and we built this high protection around it, now what was I gonna say about that?
RG: What, what your ears.
LWG: They had to shoot eventually, they shot, can’t remember if it was one or two, if you stand beside a big gun and they put a shell in it ‘cos you know how it’s done I suppose or may be longer and then they shoot it, we’d just finished building this wall around our Bofor Gun, knocking it down and putting it in place by bricks you know, and we’d worked pretty hard on that levelled it off and so on, and it shot once or twice I can’t remember, once or twice now, but you could watch the shell come out of the end of the big gun, oh it came up out of the ground it was on a lift and we didn’t know we had that, I didn’t know.
RG: Bit of a shock when it fired.
LWG: So we were there it just said that we were having a shoot today and the next thing you saw was this blasted big thing and they shot it and to my surprise we stood just beside it and, and to my surprise you could see the shell come out of the end of the bow and you could watch it all the way, and we could see them taking a tug boat —
RG: For the target.
LWG: The target, splashed in the water didn’t hit it, it was close but it hit the water, but this huge concussion.
RG: Concussion.
LWG: And both my ears are screaming now and can’t do anything about it.
RG: Didn’t put you out for aircrew service at all though?
LWG: I didn’t tell them about that.
RG: I thought that might have been the case. [laughs]
LWG: [unclear]
RG: Oh yeah they’d have knocked you back on that wouldn’t they. Did it ever cause you any problems with you know communication with the aircraft with the headsets?
LWG: Well I came through that.
LD: So once you left the Army ‘cos my little record says that basically you were discharged from the Army and you joined the Air Force the next day —
LWG: Well that’s the work we just waved goodbye they didn’t want us to go, and they promised us we’d become sergeants immediately [laughter] and they were going to send us to officers training.
RG: Oh okay.
LWG: That’s Percy and myself.
RG: Yeah, yeah.
LWG: ‘Cos we were —
RG: ‘Cos you were educated.
LWG: In actual fact we were a week there, in the [unclear] we couldn’t comprehend most other kids couldn’t read or write.
RG: Yeah we interviewed a bloke in Wogga [?] a couple of weeks ago and he said exactly the same thing that, that the guys he was in with in the Army most of them were illiterate yeah, yeah, he was in the Army first as well.
GWG: Illiterate sounds a bad word but it wasn’t their fault.
RG: No, no.
LWG: [unclear]
RG: Yes, yes, absolutely.
LD: So once you joined the Air Force did you, did you go to an ITS immediately, or did you have to wait for that to happen, or how did that work?
LWG: We were up in North Head protecting Sydney. [laughs]
LD: Trying to hit the targets pulled by tug boat.
LWG: Gosh I’ve gotta think back so far, ‘cos the Army was unbelievable —
LD: Doesn’t matter if you can’t remember.
LWG: Mmm?
LD: Doesn’t matter if you can’t remember it’s a long time ago.
LWG: Oh yeah but it was very interesting. I gave a list of towns where I’ve lived and at this stage, the first I’d been in the way of travel was the place which is five miles in distance and a million miles from Care [?], do you know where that is?
RG: No.
LWG: That’s Manley.
RG: Oh of course yes.
LD: Yes of course.
LWG: And we had gone, my family and I, had gone to Manley a number of times and so we knew about Manley, and so whilst I was up on the Head incidentally we went up there just at the time when the submarines came into.
RG: Yes, yes, yes.
LWG: Into Sydney Harbour, and so everyone was on edge then.
RG: Do you remember —
LWG: We had, we were a group that went was servicing that Bofor Gun of course but we only had one rifle amongst us and we only had one clip of bullets so you had to be precious with those.
RG: Yeah, yeah.
LWG: And I don’t know whether, I used to get as scared as hell so did the rest of us because North Head is populated by thousands probably of bandicoots and at night of course you’d be on duty minding the gun on your own and you’d hear this rustling and we were expecting the Japanese at this stage.
LD: Yes, well when you had the Japanese fleet of subs in the harbour, yeah.
LWG: And um,
RG: It’s probably lucky you only had five bullets or there’d been a lot of dead bandicoots. [laughs]
LWG: There certainly would have been, when you hear guns going off all night because —
RG: There’s all the shooting down in the harbour itself wasn’t there.
LWG: Well we know what was happening there it was all of us up there on North Head.
RG: Oh really okay yeah you’re centuries firing at —
LWG: Oh well yeah they get nervous.
RG: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
LWG: There was one bloke, we were in tents, there was one bloke there I can’t remember his name, late at night he’d all of sudden sit upright and scream his head off and that used to put you on edge. [laughs]
RG: So so when you say the Air Force came back and said we want you, so where did you do your initial Air Force training?
LWG: At Greatfield Park [?] we went in there.
RG: Oh yes yeah.
LWG: We went in there I think it was course thirty-two.
LD: That’s the same as Burt Adams.
RG: Yeah but,
LWG: Adam?
RG: Burt Adams, navigator, he’s the chap out at Wogga we interviewed a couple of weeks ago he was in thirty-two course as well.
LWG: Really.
RG: Yeah, yeah, pretty sure it was thirty-two.
LD: He said he started off in thirty-two until he became ill.
RG: He had a bad run he got appendicitis and got taken off the course and put on the next course and then and then he got put on the next one and you know yeah he had a bit of a rough trot on that.
LD: But he started on thirty-two course.
LWG: Ah. Well it’s interesting every time I went to a new place or moved on as we did I immediately joined forces with a special bloke and each time was fortunate enough to, to hook up as very close mates, we weren’t gay and all that sort of garbage, I don’t understand that.
RG: I think this happened in the services I did the same thing you’d join a new ship and you’d always be beaten and there’d be one bloke who’d was your special oppo and often he would be posted away to a different ships or whatever and you’d probably never see them again but you’d find someone else who’d be yeah.
LWG: We were all together for quite some time and he’s in the War Museum over here incidentally his story.
RG: Who’s that?
LWG: Colin Flockhart [?].
RG: Flossard?
LWG: Flockhart.
RG: Flockhart.
LWG: Colin Flockhart. His sister is a resident here.
RG: Oh okay.
LWG: Allison Aitken, she’s, she married —
LD: Is Colin still with us?
LWG: Colin no, he was killed, I think most of the blokes, my close friends were, would build up as we moved on of course we all went over you know that’ll come out in due course.
LD: So was Percy in the same, was he in 32 Course with you as well?
LWG: Yeah.
LD: Oh good.
LWG: But he did, he, we went to Bradfield Park, Bradfield Park was an ITS they called it an Initial Training School and you couldn’t I personally at school I did use to reasonably well at school I always had the ambition of being top of every class I always came second.
LD: That’s pretty good still.
RG: Yeah.
LWG: What was I gonna say then, ah, I hooked up with when I went to ITS, the first bloke I met was this Colin Flockhart, and we became great mates he was a wonderful fella and he would have been one of those blokes that was always coming first, [laughs], but he and I followed one another over to England sadly he was killed over, oh, it’s really is becoming dull this day. That’s my diary lets have that.
RG: Yeah sure.
LWG: This incidentally is a cover, we all bought one of those ‘cos there was one of the ground staff was making these.
RG: Oh.
LWG: She would walk around all these people who had got this book, we all bought one and it’s done its work ‘cos it protected the book.
RG: Yeah, yeah, [unclear] was sitting there —
LWG: Now what was I going to tell you, what was I —
LD: You were saying —
LWG: Oh this has got a list of everything you need to know here, what I flew, where I was, that’s all the places I was at, and you can have a look at that if you like.
RG: Yes I will thank you.
LWG: ‘Cos I need glasses on.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Bill did you do any of your training overseas, you know some people were sent to places like Canada and Rhodesia and stuff to do their training?
LWG: No, let’s catch up, we did split in this course, some went elsewhere and so on, but that’ll tell you where I went. The first place was —
RG: Temora [?].
LD: Temora [?].
LWG: Yeah once we got out of ITS that was Bradfield Park we went to Temora [?], [unclear] that was —
LD: Yeah but, yeah there’s a —
LWG: That was Avro Ansoms.
LD: Yeah there’s a bunker there still a communications bunker, a World War Two communications bunker there still.
LWG: I wouldn’t be surprised.
LD: That place on the coast yeah.
RG: South Australia?
LD: Oh no I’m not.
LWG: That’s South Australia.
RG: You’re thinking of someplace else.
LD: Maraputa [?].
RG: Maraputa [?] you’re thinking of.
LD: Yeah sorry.
LWG: I got my wings in Mallala [?] went to Temora first after Bradfield Park, then went to Temora.
RG: Was Temora was for single engine flying or and then multi engine at Mallala?
LWG: No that, they were Tiger Moths.
RG: So single engine.
LWG: Yeah single engine.
RG: Yeah, Temora, so Mallala that —
LWG: Mallala was Avro Ansoms, we were going, we all wanted to fly Spitfires.
RG: Of course yeah.
LD: They had other uses for those Spitfires —
LWG: But in actual fact one would discover when you got to England wasn’t the Spitfire that won the war it was the Hurricane.
RG: The Hurricane yeah, yeah.
LWG: Hurricane was much more adaptable.
RG: Spitfires had the glory though didn’t they?
LWG: Oh god yeah they had a new one out every couple of weeks and so on.
RG: A good looking aircraft.
LWG: Mmm?
RG: A good looking aircraft.
LWG: Oh yes, well they won that race.
RG: Yeah they did, yeah.
LWG: England to Australia, fascinating.
LD: Bill did you have any trouble qualifying as a pilot did you pass everything easily and you said you always liked to try to come first?
LWG: Not easy no, this was something new, it was, I’d only been, I always wanted to be I tell you what I always wanted to be I wanted to be when I was early life I wanted to be firstly I wanted to be a lion tamer.
LD: Of course. [laughs]
LWG: Lion tamer where did I go from there, [laughs].
LD: A lion tamer to flying a Lancaster it’s a bit of a leap isn’t it?
LWG: Actually I learnt a lot lion taming it was good, I had an, we had an Alsatian dog we used to put him on the, on a chain and put the chain on the clothes line and he would chase up and down, used to make a hell of a lot of noise.
LD: Oh yes, yes, yes.
LWG: But he was a lovely dog and I used to tame him I used to crack I had a whip, crack it and he’d look at me with [unclear] but anyway I wanted to be a lion tamer, but then I always wanted to be a pilot wanted to fly used to read books [unclear] have you ever heard of that.
LD: No.
LWG: So I always wanted to be a pilot.
LD: Well that’s good that you were then.
LWG: And the first flight I had we were at Crookwell, I think it was Crookwell, and someone came in with a DH type of aircraft and [unclear] well the pilot came in, came in and was talking my dad he wanted to take people for joy rides but dad being the policeman there he had to give his permission and he, the pilot was pulling out his [unclear] I’d like to had a trip and the pilot there was talking to my father used me as the lever [laughs] so eventually —
RG: How old were you then do you reckon?
LWG: Six or something like that, it was a De Havilland landed about three miles out of Crookwell and he agreed to take my mother, and my brother I think Ron, anyway I think four of us went up in this aircraft we got into a bit of a cabin it had a hole in the back I remember through that I could see the pilot I didn’t see much of the ground ‘cos I was watching him I remember, but anyway that was my first trip in an aeroplane thought it was wonderful. Then I used to build up, my big job in the home was cutting the wood and in those days you didn’t cut, you didn’t get a little box and I used to position them so as I could sit in the middle of them, that had wings on so on and I used to fly that. [laughs]
LD: The dog may have been quite relieved about this change in vocation I think?
LWG: Who’s that?
LD: The dog he may have been a bit relieved about the change in vocation.
LWG: Oh it was a lovely dog.
RG: So just going back to the training, so Temora first, then Mallala —
LWG: Mallala we got our wings at Mallala.
RG: And that was Ansoms yes?
LWG: Avro Ansoms yeah. Do you remember you won’t remember any of this, during whilst we were there or it was just before we got to Mallala, a bloke was I don’t know whether it was a Mallala either, but he was in an Ansom and another aeroplane landed on top of him.
RG: That was at Wogga or here in [unclear].
LWG: Yes it was here —
RG: Funny the top one the crew on the bottom were killed —
LWG: A photograph —
RG: And the top guy —
LWG: He landed them both together —
RG: But he had the engines on the bottom one ‘cos his engines stopped and he used his control surfaces and they gave him his wings and they damn well should have. [laughs]
LD: I’ve seen a photograph of that it’s just unbelievable.
RG: I think it was Wogga or here in Quinty.
LWG: Here in Quinty it was singles.
RG: Ah it must have been Wogga then or may be Temora. So that was the end of your flying training?
LWG: Oh no, gosh no.
RG: In Australia I mean.
LWG: That’s getting your wings, we got our wings of Mallala and I’ve got photo of that there was about sixty of us came out on this Course 32 and you had, I don’t know but I don’t remember how many hours we’d had when we got our wings and then they brought us back to Sydney or took us or sent us home and then took us to Bradfield Park again. Bradfield Park, we weren’t there very long but then they took us down to the harbour put us on the “Mount Vernon” [?] I think it was the name of the ship.
RG: Yes, yes, “Mount Vernon”.
LWG: That’ll tell you because it’s got a better memory than I have, that left we didn’t know where we were going, they told us we were going, of course all this was happening at the time the Japanese were —
RG: Yeah ‘cos this was the —
LWG: It was twelfth —
RG: 12th August ’43, even had U-boats down here at that point.
LWG: Oh yeah. They bunged us into this “Mount Vernon” used to be called the “Old Washington” it was an American ship and you always know when you are in, in with the Yanks, they used to have one thing they always be doing and say over the tanoy, ‘Now here this.’
RG: Yeah, they still do it. [laughs]
LWG: Do they.
RG: They still do it, they do though yeah.
LWG: This is Jo. Come in Jo.
Jo: Oh hello you’re busy I’ll come back later.
LWG: Alright I shall see you a little later on, okay sweetheart, thanks. She’s upstairs lovely girl yeah, she become, she was great friend of my wife’s.
LD: Ah that’s good.
RG: So “Mount Vernon” where did you go?
LWG: Ah “Mount Vernon”, they put us in the “Mount Vernon” we thought we were going to go north but instead of turning left they turned right, and we were on for a fortnight roughly I think —
RG: Ah yeah exactly fourteen days.
LWG: Took us over to San Francisco.
LD: So did you go via New Zealand?
LWG: Ah in that direction but no we didn’t stop.
LD: Okay, so you stopped, so you —
LWG: Went direct to America yeah.
LD: Okay, and, and you —
LWG: And they took us from the boat.
LD: San Francisco.
LWG: We passed out of [unclear] watch him — [laughs]
LD: He couldn’t swim over.
RG: I couldn’t swim anyway [laughs], I never even passed my swimming test in the Navy believe it or not but I still got to warrant officer anyway.
LWG: They put us on to a, on to a train at San Francisco we were on that for how long?
RG: Four days.
LWG: Four or five days.
RG: Yes.
LWG: Took us across America.
LD: These the Pullman carriages.
LWG: Yeah, Negro, there was one Negro waiter on each carriage. We were always we couldn’t understand how they used to treat the Negros, I couldn’t understand the Negros that they formed big battalions out here there were lots of them, you’d think that the way they used to treat them they wouldn’t force them to become soldiers.
RG: Yeah, yeah.
LWG: Anyway they took us we went as far as Massachusetts, I think it was Massachusetts this Camp Miles Standish [?]
LD: Ah that’s where Ken went.
LWG: That was an embarkation place not far from Boston and we were there for some time. Ah —
LD: Was it in the winter when you were there?
LWG: We were only there for —
RG: No it’s summer, summer, August.
LWG: Summer.
RG: Actually you were there for a while you were there for —
LWG: I was there for six weeks.
RG: Yeah, yeah, you left on October more ten weeks or so.
LWG: Colin Flockhart, who was my great friend we were together all this time of course, and we parted there because we were supposed to be there for ten days I think and eventually we were there for —
RG: It was about ten weeks.
LWG: Ten weeks.
RG: Yeah, yeah.
LWG: ‘Cos every time they were going to move the next day some of them would come up with an injection they gave us to test us, we had, one of the blokes got scarlet fever so we all had to be tested.
RG: Yeah.
LD: Yes ‘cos it’s so contagious.
LWG: I was a positive which meant that I had come in contact with it apparently this is what they told us. Colin Flockhart hadn’t he didn’t get the red dot.
RG: So he got moved out first.
LWG: So he went out first, he, he came over on the “Aquitania” I think it was.
RG: Yeah.
LWG: But we went down eventually they put us on to, went into this room in trucks, huge room, big pavilion and had doors on it and I didn’t catch on at the time, none of us did didn’t know where the hell we were they didn’t tell us, but it proved to be the side of the “Queen Mary”.
RG: Ah.
LD: Ah.
LWG: It was against the wharf and all the blokes were [unclear] and there were, I don’t know how many there were of us about a hundred I suppose, but there was sixteen thousand Yanks going on there as well.
RG: A huge number of troops.
LWG: And all the activity was there and they put us in this room and when we got in there I thought it was a big building I’d gone into it proved to be this ship.
RG: “The Queen Mary”.
LWG: They put us somewhere downstairs wherever it was and it sailed out, we passed the Statue of Liberty and so on, didn’t tell us where we going all that sort of thing.
RG: Did you sail in convoy or unescorted?
LWG: We were going in convoy.
RG: Right okay.
LWG: But the convoys speed was four knots that was open to U-boats and so on so as soon as we got passed the Statue of Liberty I remember “Queen Mary” we took off.
RG: Yeah she did thirty odd knots.
LWG: Yeah, altogether different.
RG: Did they, ‘cos we had Lucy’s uncle was a tail gunner who was killed and but he went over on the “Queen Mary” was the “Queen Mary” wasn’t it?
LD: “Elizabeth”
RG: “Elizabeth” but they used them as anti-submarine lookouts, did they do that with you guys at all?
LWG: [unclear]
RG: As anti-submarine lookouts they used them, they used the airmen as lookouts for periscopes and submarines and so forth.
LWG: Oh no.
RG: No they didn’t do that with you guys.
LD: Was the ship very crowded?
LWG: Yeah there were sixteen thousand Yanks on it.
LD: Were you guys hot bunking?
LWG: Hot, hot —
LD: Hot bunking no.
LWG: What’s that?
LD: I have heard of you know basically that the ships were so crowded that at times you know basically people would leave the bunks somebody else just comes into it directly that there weren’t enough bunks for people to have separately.
LWG: Oh no, actually I think on the “Queen Mary” I think we, we laid down on the ground, we were down like the fourth, we were underneath the water level anyway. And they kept you busy by putting you in a queue, you had to queue, join the queue you’d find the end of the queue and you’d spend all day going around for your meals.
RG: Yeah.
LWG: It used to take that long. And we were on it for five days.
RG: It doesn’t say here actually how long you were on the “Queen Mary” but it would have been about four days or so, five days.
LWG: Yeah, we went to Liverpool I think.
LD: You arrived in Liverpool, and where, and before you actually sent to an ITU and everything where did you stay?
LWG: You should be able to tell me, we all went to the same place when we got to Liverpool —
LD: I’ve heard Brighton or Bournemouth.
LWG: They put us on a boat, a train and took us down to Brighton.
LD: You went to Brighton —
LWG: And Colin Flockhart was there, he had the bed next to him reserved. [laughs]
RG: They put you in one of those hotels in the seafront?
LWG: “The Grand Hotel” I started the other one was “The Metropole”.
RG: “Metropole” yeah.
LD: That’s where Ken stayed “The Metropole”.
LWG: I didn’t get “The Metropole” until later on I went into “The Grand”. And incidentally when we got our wings we all became sergeants except one he happened to be the, his name was Tom Hughes, he was the grandchild of, er —
RG: Not Billy Hughes?
LWG: The premier, the prime minster.
RG: Billy Hughes.
LD: No the present —
LWG: The prime minister, what’s his name?
RG: The president?
LWG: Yes the president.
RG: Oh, oh, oh Turnbull.
LWG: Turnbull yes.
RG: Ah this is Great Britain, oh okay.
LWG: You go back you find, and he incidentally he obviously came from a special family because he was the only one amongst us all —
RG: Who got a commission.
LWG: Got a commission. [laughs] And he never ate with us either what’s more he used to when we were being trained at Mallala, I remembered you’d see him occasionally during the course of the day but he didn’t chase the mice and so on like the rest of us did.
RG: So he just kept himself away.
LWG: He always stayed in a hotel.
LD: Oh.
LWG: And that’s not I’m up to belittling I wouldn’t have minded doing it myself.
RG: Oh no, but you know yeah.
LWG: But then he was favoured he came with us in the boat to, the boats as well, but he, he came on, he broke away from where I was he went over on the “Aquitania” sent to Britain, England.
RG: Then from Brighton you went on to somewhere in Wales, 29 AFTS, Griff Pidard?
LWG: Clyffe Pypard.
LD: So what OTU was that?
RG: That’s 29 AFTS.
LWG: Didn’t do anything, I remember I taxied a Tiger Moth somewhere, Colin Flockhart had to hang on to the wing if I remember, but we, we then had to be, things started to move of course and we had to wait for our opportunities, we had a lot to learn. We had to learn to fly but by the time I could fly a Tiger Moth before the Avro Ansom which was [unclear] they’d been civilian training if you like just to how to fly an aeroplane used to have to learn to fly a little bit more than what they taught.
RG: So at 29 AFTS did you, what did you fly there was it Oxfords?
LWG: I went on to, eventually I went on to oh what’s the name?
RG: Oxford?
LWG: Yeah, Morris Oxford, not a Morris Oxford.
LD: That’s a car. [laughs]
LWG: It’s got another name, something Oxford, the Oxford and it was a very nice aircraft and a little bit more elite than the Avro Ansom.
RG: Was it a twin engine?
LWG: Twin yeah,.
RG: Twin yeah.
LWG: Oh we were destined for bombers then, well we were when we finished at Mallala in actual fact, I don’t know of anyone who went on to Tigers.
RG: Coastal Command?
LWG: And I’m thinking about it these days I’m pleased they, that’s, that was playing with toys compared with what we were doing.
RG: Yeah, yeah absolutely. So was this the Oxford at, that was in Wales wasn’t it Clyffe Pypard?
LWG: Clyffe Pipard, er well it was all, I never actually knew I knew where the pubs were [laughs] I don’t well that’s about the only time we didn’t know anyone and you’re kept busy, the amazing thing is and they didn’t say this when I went to Bradfield Park, we, we had to do air frames and learn about aeroplanes and the air and wings and all that sort of thing, but god that was the best schooling you’ll ever get, they started, the first thing they did they got us all in we all had to write out our wills, because that’s was happening of course everyone, and all the blokes, Colin Flockhart, and all the others [unclear] and the fact that I wasn’t touch wood about that I suppose that’s plain fortunate.
RG: And then?
LWG: Anywhere where are we up to?
RG: Well that was 29 AFTS and then it says here you went back to Brighton for a while only about three weeks in Brighton, and then you went on to 23 AHU at Hednesford.
LWG: At where?
RG: Hednesford.
LWG: Hednesford. Oh we were, there we, there we split up, Colin Flockhart he went on and I had to wait, they took me and, this is all [unclear] Actually I’ve had someone else doing my story and I ought to just give you that because I did all the research for that, that’s the third eye that’s —
RG: Mmm. It would be good to get hold of that but —
LWG: Anyway —
RG: So AHU is it?
LWG: We went from the Oxford which was a nice aircraft to fly but it was still a training type of aircraft and then ah, then we went on to Wellingtons. Where we were when we got —
RG: It said here you went from to Brighton to Hednesford, Hednesford and then to Wheaton Aston 21 AFU.
LWG: What’s after that?
RG: And then after that is reserve flight at Purton, and then ATU, 30 ATU at Hixon.
LWG: It must have been Hixon where I, I think where I was when we got our crew.
LD: Yes I was wondering about that crewing up experience.
RG: You must have done that before you got on to the Wellingtons.
LWG: It’s all so long ago now.
LD: Excuse me Bill where’s the toilet?
LWG: Oh yes sorry, in there third door shut there that’s the toilet.
LD: Thank you.
LWG: Or if you’d rather be more further away from us you go into that bedroom down there, be right there I think. There’s a light switch on your left hand side.
LD: Thank you.
RG: So would have crewed up for the Wellington though wouldn’t you?
LWG: Yeah now, we’ve got to guess the stage how I got my crew was interesting, er, let’s have that.
RG: Yeah sure.
LWG: Get my glasses what did I do with them?
RG: I did see them actually, there we are.
LWG: I’ve got them there have I?
RG: Oh no there’s a pair there, there broken ones.
LWG: Well you can help me.
LD: How?
LWG: My glasses, there probably in the bathroom are they?
LD: Oh okay I’ll have a look.
LWG: What have I done with them probably in my darn pocket.
LD: Not in the bathroom.
LWG: Oh it’s all right.
RG: In your pocket? [laughs]
LWG: There’s the aircraft I flew.
RG: Yeah.
LWG: Oxfords, we went on to Wellingtons, then we were on to Lancs, then on the Lancaster Mark 2 that had radial engines, then eventually we ended up with that got on to the Mark 3, 4, 5 I think.
RG: They had the Merlins didn’t they?
LWG: And they were Merlins a lot of difference mainly because the 2 the Lanc 2 had the Hercules and that was radial so it was good next to the ground.
RG: But not high at altitude.
LWG: Not high.
RG: Yeah.
LWG: But the 2’s with the Merlin engines lovely aeroplane, it was a lovely aeroplane, but the Merlin was wonderful as well the Merlin.
RG: Your crew was it a mixed RAF, RAAF, RCAF?
LWG: Yeah.
RG: Did you have one crew all the way through Bill or did it, did you?
LWG: Am not sure about that mainly the navigator was, I got my first navigator and towards [unclear] We all got to, no it must have been, confused where was I when we got our?
RG: It doesn’t matter Bill when you got the crew it will be in here anyway.
LWG: Give me my thoughts though, slow down.
RG: Do you want that open page again with the —
LWG: I’d be lost without this thing. Should have done my own research shouldn’t I?
RG: Ah. [looking through book]
LWG: Ah 30 ATU Hixon we were Staffordshire, and I started off with one, two, three, four, five crew.
RG: That’s a crew for a Wellington isn’t it five?
LWG: Yeah we were at Hixon and they, I’ve forgotten how many there were of us I think there might have been twelve, twelve pilots, twelve navigators and so on, and put us all in a room together ridiculous, and said [unclear]. Met another great mate his name was a nickname of course his name was Danny because his name was Daniel Carne and I think one thing that was outstanding was that he was, he had been a professional snooker player.
RG: Ahh, he’d have been handy in the pubs [laughs]
LWG: Yeah, I loved snooker as well not as though I was all that good then, but he used to use me as the wall that is he’d bounce off me because, we, he and I met one another in the snooker room of course.
RG: Right yeah.
LWG: And we both had a game and he’d say you can break so I would break and then he’d sink them all.
RG: Clear the table [laughs], so he was in your crew was he your first crew?
LWG: He was just like another bloke I met later on who was a cricketer, Keith Miller, Keith Miller, he just looked like Keith Miller slicked back hair.
RG: Yeah.
LWG: And he and I became great mates and I was always having to put up with him and his girlfriends because he attracted all the girls.
RG: Yes.
LWG: You know and so on. But he was a great bloke we got to know one another very well over the snooker table he taught me how to play snooker properly and so on and —
RG: So crewing up you just in that room and you just found —
LWG: Well they put us in there were twelve pilots as I was saying all the ones along, and they said, ‘Right oh sort yourselves out into crews.’ Which I thought was ridiculous, and I said to Danny I said, ‘This is ridiculous come on we’ll go have a game of snooker.’ And we did, he said ‘Good idea.’ And we went next door away from this group that were all milling around trying to make friends and so on which was just plain ridiculous, and after a while there was a knock on the door and what anyway, well there’d be twelve blokes came in and they had formed themselves into the crews but they needed a pilot, they said ‘We’re looking for a pilot, two pilots.’ So we, I said ‘Well.’ To Danny I said, ‘Well god this that’ll suit us I suppose so we’ll toss.’ [laughs] And I tossed and that way I got my crew and he got the others, and I had one, two, three, four, five people, one of them was an older bloke, Sergeant Lake he was to be the navigator and he didn’t want to go to war his wife didn’t want him to go to war and he had a lot of trouble.
LD: Yes.
LWG: Eventually the crew came up, he came with us and we started training and so on and he showed his true form and the crew came up to me one day and said, ‘We’ve had enough of George I think your let’s see if we can find another navigator.’ So I asked the CO whoever it was because we’d been doing a bit of work together, I said, ‘I think we’ve [unclear] a problem.’ I thought, he said, ‘Oh you’re lucky we’ve got another navigator here who’s looking for a crew.’ His name was Steve Tinkler and was Steve Tinkler navigator, Steve Tinkler, pas de deux [?] because he’d already done one —
RG: One tour.
LWG: One, what used to be called?
RG: One tour of operation.
LWG: Tour yeah, and he wore glasses, proved to be a bit of a drunk used to have to put him together [unclear] [laughs] He was a great bloke, but he was older, and he was a genius.
RG: Was he AAF or RAF?
LWG: He was RAF, he came from Ireland, lovely bloke had glasses, and mumbled a bit and so on, but he was, he proved to be, he was great with G, you know what G is?
RG: Yep, yep.
LWG: He used to be able to, he got that down to a fine art and now you should be able to turn here because you’ll turn onto the runway or something he was so good —
RG: Precise.
LWG: Advanced, and I was lucky to get him. So he did another tour with us twenty-four he finished his second tour, and then I got another —
RG: So when you say he was older he was only a couple of years older?
LWG: Yeah, but he was, oh he would have been in his forties may be I suppose.
RG: Oh he was in his forties okay.
LWG: Could have been, I never asked, I never asked him. And I remember we’d just changed and I got another, there was another bloke on Mildenhall Station looking for a new crew he was an Indian, Stanley Berry and he’d done some, I’d forgotten how many he’d done, he might have done six or seven or whatever it was trips himself with somebody, with somebody else and I lost him eventually not didn’t lose he did his twenty-four, and we went on our, I remember when he left we went to, where did we go where we went missing? That’ll all come out anyway. That’s the time we got lost at Stockholm, got caught in a storm and we were reported as missing they lost contact with us and so on, and Steve Tinkler was getting nervous ‘cos he used to listen to what was happening and they weren’t hearing from me and they were trying to contact someone, so they assumed we’d been shot down so he gathered all the gear and he robbed my wardrobe I remember and he’d gone didn’t want to wait, he’d gone by the time we got back and I lost contact with him then.
LD: Were you able to get your belongings back?
LWG: Ah, I didn’t know what he’d took he’d ransacked the thing, that was a terrible thing you know he and I, he was a great bloke, I used to put him to bed every night because he’d, he’d go into the mess and drinking he used to put twelve whiskeys on the table and he’d drink and then I’d grab him and take him home and put him to bed.
RG: Twelve whiskeys that’s reasonable enough yeah. So, so he was your first navigator or the first one was the chap who wasn’t up to it.
LWG: First one was George Lake.
RG: Yeah, and then —
LWG: Oh, George we eventually dropped him and he joined another crew and in actual fact my crew didn’t tell me about this until later on.
RG: Yeah.
LWG: He followed us with another crew and was shot down the first —
RG: First trip?
LWG: The first trip.
RG: So how many trips did you do?
LWG: Twenty-nine.
RG: Twenty-nine.
LD: And was that all with 15 Squadron?
LWG: Yeah.
LD: Yeah. And they were all in Lancasters?
LWG: Oh yeah.
LD: Yeah, yeah.
LWG: I, I, we did which is unusual, we did, I did more daylights than —
RG: Oh okay.
LD: Right.
LWG: I did some which day trips, I had, I was good at formation flying and stuff, and I always believed first I was leading the squadron, then on a couple of occasions I led the whole raid, we used to do that in formation.
RG: Any particular trips stand out for you?
LWG: Oh yeah, there all here, one was the one I just mentioned where we got lost which will come up in due course.
LD: So were you with that trip where you got lost over Stockholm were you able to get back to Britain or did you go down over Europe?
LWG: No well I got back, we lost contact. We were chased by [unclear] lights, runway lights going on and off we was at, we were within, right up here, Heligoland, terrible weather and so on we recorded. Anyway we got back and I didn’t, I hadn’t, we’d been chased by the Germans of course and I kept quiet and I was over, we got back to the squadron before they knew I was, that we were coming back, anyway that’ll all come out one way or another. Er, so long ago now really dragged us back, that’s why you’d be better probably taking what —
RG: Well look we will do that, we will take it them as well, yeah.
LWG: Later on. You can see that, can you see that one —
RG: On the top there?
LWG: Yeah.
RG: Yeah.
LWG: They haven’t put it into a book form yet there doing that.
LD: ‘Cos we can copy that and return it to you.
LWG: Well you can do that, but there, there’s a few things that I want to change in there although definitely take them, I don’t like to lose contact with these things.
LD: Oh no I understand that entirely absolutely.
RG: Oh yeah this is lovely.
LWG: There’s a few things that I want to change in there anyway but more or less that tells you about what I’m telling you now.
LD: So were you or any of your crew injured during your ops?
LWG: Not to [unclear] the aircraft [unclear] we used to bring it back US and so on flak and whatever, but no we, none of us actually came to any harm in the air.
LD: Fortunate with that. Did you, were you was the aircraft ever so injured that you know you were damaged that you were coming back on one or two engines that kind of thing?
LWG: Oh yeah. Never did I have to come back on one or two for that matter, come back you’d lose an engine but usually you’d lose them for other reasons. You’re always being attacked of course and had holes all over you and so on and they’d have to patch it up, but I was lucky we didn’t get hit personally but the aircraft was many times.
LD: Were you more concerned about doing the daylight raids then the night time raids or did that not make much difference for you?
LWG: Oh they were both difficult if because leading the raid for instance you had to make a lot of decisions it wasn’t all according to orders and you had to make decisions and so on. We used to be going up and the Yanks were coming back in daylight, and at night time one of the big things that was always pretty difficult and you’re always being shot at and all that sort of thing, but at night time was like they draw the curtains down because everything was in the dark you didn’t have lights on.
LD: The time that you got lost over Stockholm, ‘cos I haven’t, I had heard that you know Stockholm didn’t have blackouts were you able, you said there was a bad storm, were you able to see any lights in Sweden to help you navigate home?
LWG: We was very lucky as a matter of fact because we were lost well and truly, the navigational equipment, like G and all that sort of thing went US and we lost our way and we were in, it was a bad storm that they hadn’t predicted. They sent five of us there to, what were we doing? Oh we were mine laying and we had to find exactly where we were to drop the mines in the right spot it was in this area of the water that the Germans were using all the time and we had to be certain of what we were doing, and everything went US with the aircraft when I took off. ‘Cos they sent in, they sent a hundred I think it was a hundred off as a diversion, for the five of us and I was sent from 15 Squadron the others came from different squadrons and the five of us were the ones that were doing, what they were looking for was to drop these mines, ‘cos the Germans were moving their ships with stores and so on up to Caterech [?] and so on up to Russian.
RG: You see right up in the Baltic, it was in the Baltic.
LWG: And we ran into, to start with, we left, we ran into this storm and it was very thick they were flying blind as we used to say and G and so on didn’t work when you got anywhere near Germany ‘cos they used to jam all that. And we got lost and, what happened, how did I do this, I decided to go low ‘cos we’d been doing that from probably twenty thousand feet or something, and so I dived down broke, broke cloud and I was over a big city with all the lights on.
RG: So you were over Sweden?
LWG: Yeah we were over, oh what’s the name?
RG: Stockholm
LWG: Stockholm yeah, and we thought that was so and it proved to be that but we’d been blown a long way out of our area and so on running short of fuel, on the way back everyone else had gone home because they’d sent a hundred over Heligoland to side track the Germans.
RG: Yeah.
LWG: And, oh god what happened, as I was flying back towards England it started to clear and I could see the ground well you couldn’t see the ground ‘cos it was dark and so on, but we did come back over an area where I knew there were Germans had night fighters and so on, and I noticed just in front of me the lights came on and go off which meant that was one coming one of the fighters being sent off, that happened six times when I thought I’m gonna have to do something now so I thought well I’m going to do the opposite of what they would do and as blind as I am I’ll get down on the deck. I couldn’t see the deck at all ‘cos it was dark but guessed the best area as far as the height was concerned the altimeter told me that and as I was flying over these lights kept going on they came on six times and they’d sent six fighters off and they didn’t catch up with me until I could see the searchlights in England.
RG: Right.
LWG: When one attacked —
RG: Were you still down low at that point?
LWG: No well I was lowish but I wasn’t real low. I didn’t you couldn’t tell it was just black you couldn’t tell how high you were and my altimeter I’d never [unclear] you couldn’t read it because of the storm the barometer changed.
RG: Ah massive change to the air pressure, yep. So you were —
LWG: Anyway I started and I had to do what they used to call a corkscrew so and I was good at doing I used to teach them how to do the corkscrew, that meant you didn’t do things finally you had to be in desperate situations and I used to teach that to the rest of crew in 15 Squadron, got a few bods coming along ‘cos they all did the same thing corkscrew was something that would help them out of trouble. Anyway we were doing that and I threw them off into the dark and I must have been flying a hundred feet at that stage ‘cos you couldn’t see the ground it was a bit of a worry, but eventually we came through that and ‘cos we were something like an hour late or something they’d written us off.
RG: You must have been dead low on fuel?
LWG: Yeah.
RG: If you were an hour late.
LWG: Yes we were.
LD: Were you able to land at your at Mildenhall or did you have to land elsewhere?
LWG: That’s where Steve or John, ‘cos we’d been described as missing.
RG: Did you ever have to come down in another field, another airfield?
LWG: Yeah. I remember coming down once on a Yankeedrome, they had, oh let me, what was the name of the aircraft they were flying?
RG: A 710, Liberator, Liberator?
LWG: You what?
RG: The Liberator.
LWG: Liberator, Liberator. And we had to be diverted once and we landed there, we all looked like a bunch of kids incidentally, and they grouped around us when we got to that place and we went into the bar and they were saying, ‘There only bloody kids.’
RG: Were they, were they older though?
LWG: Oh yeah, no they were all older blokes.
RG: Oh okay.
LWG: Oh interesting, we landed there and they were trying to work out what they would do with us anyway one of them offered to show me one of the Liberators and we went over and they used to carry cookies as you know, used to carry about twenty thousand pounds of bombs huge [unclear], and we went and had a look at these Liberators, and they said, ‘come and have a tour bombed up ready to go.’ [telephone ringing in background]
LD: So do you remember carrying the tall boys or the grand slams.
LWG: No, no we didn’t do that. Well they were using them because they wanted to penetrate the pens at Heligoland but they never did it you know. Oh incidentally, I remember leading the crew and I had to position the formation and we were, what was it, three thousand [unclear] daylight, we went to Heligoland and, oh god, I’ll have to study my old book again to find out what we did.
LD: So when you finished your tour Bill —
LWG: I didn’t finish a tour.
LD: You didn’t?
LWG: No.
LD: Oh okay.
LWG: They called the war off. [laughs]
RG: How, how, how many were you expected to do in a tour?
LWG: Thirty.
RG: Thirty okay. You know if that varied over —
LWG: It was automatic but all things went through but thirty was the deal. We all wanted to do that ‘cos the whole crew wanted to do that ‘cos we were senior people at that stage.
LD: So when they called the war off were you involved in missions over Europe you know dropping food and bring POW’s back and so on?
LWG: Yeah we dropped some food, actually we dropped food because I, they gave me the job of flying over our drome where we were to find out what height we should do it from.
LD: Oh yes, yes.
LWG: And I did that for them but I never actually, did I drop, I might have done one trip with food otherwise I did a number of trips on bringing prisoners of war back.
LD: Right okay.
LWG: Used to go to a place called Reims and oh this is a bit of tale might tell you a little later on. Used to go to Reims.
RG: Where were you when, what’s your memory of VE Day what was, what happened to you on VE Day when they called the war off do you remember how you thought about it or what you did?
LWG: What did I think, well you were relieved, but I didn’t throw my hat in the air and those sort of things. I was very involved at the end on Mildenhall, but no what they did is they just pulled the sheet from underneath your feet and you were of no use to anybody from then on you had to find your own way. Poms wanted us to go back to redress the country and so on, British were good, some of the Australians were bad, a lot of idiots amongst them as well.
LD: So were you involved with Tiger Force, or the preparations for Tiger Force were you involved in that in any way?
LWG: Oh no I think no, trying to think what was they called the ones supposed to deal with used to go pick up drop a flare?
RG: Oh Pathfinders.
LWG: Pathfinders. I wasn’t in the Pathfinder group but I was doing their work for them.
LD: Oh okay. What sort of work were you doing for them?
LWG: Just leading, we used to be in front of everybody.
LD: Oh okay.
LWG: I remember Pathfinders, I was leading I’ve forgotten which troop that was towards the end anyway I was, had everyone formatting on me and five of these Pathfinders came up and they took a wrong turn I think we bombed as a consequence I heard later on we bombed a prisoner of war camp or something, I’d forgotten about that.
LD: Yeah.
LWG: 5 Group were supposedly the elite of the bombing group but they got the pick of the troops.
RG: Pick of the crews and so forth yeah.
LD: When you were doing the day time raids you must have been involved with some precision bombing were you?
LWG: Precision.
LD: Yes.
LWG: Well none of it was haphazard I can tell you that. [laughs]
LD: Some of it was perhaps more precision than others, but were you involved in any particular raids for very special targets?
LWG: Well they were all special targets. Oh yeah, we used to go out in hundred or two hundred lots and so on and, oh, if you didn’t of course you‘d have Gerrys all over you share the weight a bit, and they were firing those oh what is they called, the V2’s, V1’s.
RG: Was you involved in the raids at Pienemunde at all?
LWG: Pienemunde.
RG: Did you do those at all?
LWG: Yeah I think I was on Pienemunde I forgot.
RG: It’ll be in here in the log —
LWG: No we knew Pienemunde, we, I can’t remember, we certainly did it whether I was on airstrips or not now, but that’s why that books important to me, forgetting things.
RG: Yeah.
LD: It’s not surprising it’s all so long ago. So once they called the war off were you, did it take long for you to get back to Australia or were you floating around Britain for a while wondering what to do?
LWG: No I was, took us back to Brighton.
LD: Yeah.
LWG: And we were lost souls then, no we were there for some time, came back on the, what was the name of the ship, I went through it around the world.
RG: “Stirling Castle”.
LWG: “Stirling Castle” yeah. Came back through the Suez.
LD: Had a bit of a Cooks tour didn’t you?
LWG: Yeah all the way round.
RG: And you did do a Cooks tour of Germany the cities after war I know it’s in here in your log you did one of the Cooks tour trips after the war.
LWG: What’s it got in there?
RG: You did Operation Exodus ones which was the prisoners, and a Cooks tour of Germany from your base at Dover to —
LWG: Yeah I was, I was a senior bod in Mildenhall and we were given the opportunity of taking the ground staff and aircrew around anywhere we wanted to go in Germany and that we called a Cooks tour, Baedeker and yes we did that. I did that in fact it was interesting, Molly and I, Molly was my wife, Molly and I went back to England and we took a trip down the Rhine. [telephone ringing] Excuse me I’ve got to take this. She’s took over from my accountancy I built up in Batumba [?], she was my secretary.
LD: I was wondering what you did after the war?
LWG: Another story altogether.
LD: Did you have trouble finding work when you came back?
LWG: Oh well, that’s a different story you’ll find that I’ve had a very full life one way or another, it didn’t stop with the war anyway.
RG: Well I’m just going to photograph your log book page by page so we’ve just got a record of that if that’s all right?
LWG: Yeah I think that’s all right. I didn’t make any extra secret thoughts or anything like that in the corner I just used to, I was too young, didn’t realise what I should have done, because I had an actually an amazing story to tell, can’t do it now forget things, and my brother Ron comes into that and oh lot of things happened during my life.
RG: Did Ron serve during the war as well?
LWG: No wouldn’t let him go, he, he became the commissioner of —
RG: Oh he was a reserved occupation.
LWG: Yeah, he was very wise, he used, he had signed your refund cheques [laughs] but that was not a big deal.
RG: I was always going to get a refund cheque.
LD: So when you came back to Australia if you became an accountant you must have gone back to study is that right?
LWG: Yeah, um, I have to think about this, I was working in the tax department when I turned eighteen, when I turned eighteen I was called into the Army and I had joined up into the Air Force, and after the ten months when I got into a course and started and when I came back I was still acceptable, pardon me, to the tax.
LD: Yes, yes.
LWG: But I had to do my studies which I did mainly by teaching myself, asked for all the accountancy work and they told me, oh when I came back I was a very sick boy I ended up spending totally six years in Concord Hospital I got a bad touch of the flu in London, got sick, got pleurisy, I was sick when they brought me home in the boat, and I spent six years in Concord Hospital.
LD: Oh my lord.
LWG: In three goes. And eventually they sacked me if you like or whatever, and in the meantime I had studied accountancy and I passed that and got qualified as an accountant here in theory and I was called back to the tax department and I came back here and Ron told me that you’ll never get anywhere if you came to Katumba to Canberra so we’ll send you down to Sydney, so I went down to the tax department in Sydney, so what street was that? Elizabeth Street.
LD: Yes.
LWG: And I was there for years and till eventually I got sick and I was gonna die and all sorts of things because I contacted tuberculosis, so I was in hospital for six years about and they told me I’d never work again.
LD: Oh right, yeah.
LWG: Eventually they, um, now what do I do with this, anyway I decided I would try for work, oh I got married [laughs].
LD: I figured Molly came into it somewhere.
LWG: Yeah I married Molly she was my nurse at Concord Hospital.
LD: Oh that’s so sweet.
LWG: Yeah she was a beauty. So she spent her time nursing me there which I, and I got to the stage where I was getting well, she was myself actually, until I was told they couldn’t do anymore for me anyway and we decided to get married which we did and I decided. They said the best thing you could do is get up in the mountains clean air and so on.
LD: Yes, yes.
LWG: I’d been the yardstick in sense for people in Concord, I got onto a lot of equipment and I refused they wanted to take my lungs out and all sorts of things.
LD: Oh.
LWG: I refused on that we decided we’d try and right it ourselves and we did eventually.
LD: That was probably a good decision.
LWG: I taught myself to, I had got the infection up here on my right lobe, I taught myself they said you’ll never, I had a haemorrhage, they said they’ll never cure that because you can’t stop yourself from moving it, so despite the fact you had to stop moving using that the only way we can do that is take your lung out.
LD: Yeah, yeah.
LWG: I saw what that meant and I saw people getting around despite this because they took all your ribs out, so I said no I’ll do it myself, took me a year, I controlled my ribs sitting very I used to get them to force me to use my stomach.
LD: Yes
LWG: And the lower lobes kept this one as steady as I could.
LD: Goodness
LWG: And it took me a year and they said, took me, you know those scans, ever had a scan?
LD: Yes, yes, I have indeed.
LWG: I had the first scan it was brought to Concord, and they used me as a guinea pig, and they put me in a room all by myself, near the hospital labs, heard this thing clanking, getting closer, and closer and closer and trying out a lot of bad stuff whatever. Wasn’t even aware of that, I became a guinea pig. Anyway after a year they said that cavity has healed itself, the best thing you can do is get up in the mountains so Molly and I got married we went up to live in Katumba [?].
LD: Oh that’s remarkable —
LWG: The best thing I ever did —
LD: Remarkable tenacity.
LWG: Beg your pardon.
LD: Remarkable tenacity.
LWG: And I hung my shield up took me six months to get my first customer basically built up the biggest accounting practice in the mountains and eventually, I had a wonderful secretary, in fact she just rang me, she took over I gave her the practice, she got her accountancy qualifications and she’s running the practice now, she rings me up every day if she’s got a problem, it was her she rang earlier.
LD: Oh that’s wonderful. Did you and Molly have, well yes you obviously had children you spoke to me about them.
LWG: Two children, boy and a girl.
LD: Do they live nearby?
LWG: One lives in [unclear] and Janet is [unclear]
LD: Oh that’s good.
LWG: And they’ve both got kids and so on so it’s all gone rather well.
LD: It’s a remarkable life you’ve led you know, especially this you know this section in Bomber Command you know you said when you went to the American base they were surprised how young you were you know when you look at those bomber crews they were you know they were —
LWG: Well we were only kids we hadn’t done anything in life.
LD: Yeah, I look at my son sometimes, my youngest son you know and I can’t even imagine him doing that, I just I can’t wrap my head around the level of you know skill and —
RG: Responsibility.
LD: Yeah amazing responsibility involved with lads that was so young it’s, it’s a remarkable thing that you all did it really is and yeah it’s, it’s you know.
LWG: There were thousands of us doing it of course.
LD: Yeah, it is important that it is remembered and acknowledged, it’s very important.
LWG: Of course the Yanks were a different thing altogether, interesting the Yanks do things better than we do, Australians I’ve got no time for in total sense, not real smart.
RG: Us Australians?
LWG: Yeah.
RG: Yeah I agreed.
LWG: The Poms were good but they had sense and did it according to oil, if you know what I mean by that because they do things according to what they were told and —
RG: What they were supposed to do.
LWG: The Yanks were different altogether they were freelancers, oh yeah they would do everything because they would pay for it number one, they wouldn’t do it on the yardstick they’d do it properly and I admired the Yanks they were great in their way. The Poms were good, the Australians they were caught short.
RG: Sloppy is that what you mean.
LWG: Yeah, not that they weren’t sincere and so on they were doing that but I don’t know how you’d describe it.
RG: Cut corners a bit or?
LWG: No they certainly weren’t better. The Poms showed us how to do it, the Yanks would do it, and in between the Australians towed it along and that wasn’t wrong. Incidentally Colin Flockhart he was killed and Rolly Wall was and everybody was killed around I was lucky and that not to be killed.
LD: What happened to your friend Percy, your school friend Percy?
LWG: We finished, they wanted us to stay in the Army because what I told you everyone, most of the people we went in with couldn’t read or write and which means they were taken from an area there was nothing wrong with them in a sense but they wanted us to stay. Used to do stupid things they weren’t Australians are good but not the ants pants that we think we are.
RG: Take unnecessary risks?
LWG: Oh?
RG: Take unnecessary risks?
LWG: Oh no, no, oh some of them might have done that no I didn’t mean it that way no, I’ll get into areas where I’m very critical. The worst thing I decided to do was to move out of Katumba and come here to Canberra and I keep saying oh what a terrible place this is, and it’s not the place the city of Canberra’s wonderful but it is, it has everything here just the people who live in it I’m sorry I’m not throwing this at you but I wouldn’t give you five bob and the rest of my family live here and their part of the deal, this working as a public servant is for the [unclear] not for real people in my book, well you can see the decisions they make, or don’t make, or shouldn’t make.
RG: Well Bill thanks a lot, you know, we’ve got a lot of good stuff. Your, you’re a Knight of the Order of Leopold, Belgium.
LWG: I saw you turn that up.
RG: Sorry,
LWG: No —
RG: Yeah, yeah, I photographed the yeah it’s here a Knight of, when did you receive that the Knighthood from the Belgium, the Belgium Knighthood?
LWG: There was two of us on 15 Squadron well he might have been on 622 there was another squadron and he did twenty-nine the same as I did and the routine was that at thirty you got the DFC and so on, he and I only got to do twenty-nine and the CO said that I’m handicapped here because the routine is you know thirty, and I didn’t do thirty I only did twenty-nine, succeeded twenty-nine. So, and they gave me, what’s it called?
RG: It’s the Chevalier —
LWG: Chevalier, Order of Leopold.
RG: Yeah something like that.
LD: The Belgium Croix de Guerre.
LWG: Croix de Guerre yeah.
RG: Order of Leopold, Croix de Guerre with palm [?] It’s in relation to Croix de Guerre 1940 for courage and bravery da, da, da.
LD: And the Belgium Knight of the Order of Leopold.
LWG: Where did you get that from?
LD: The Internet Bill, the internet you’re famous. [laughs]
LWG: No I’m not. It’s interesting the DFC was, I was ready to, I hated the tax of course didn’t like public service but I suppose I lost my faith in human nature when I see what happens in public service in Sydney I got fed up of that. So I applied to and they were advertising for TAA so I got called up for TAA, but because of my health problem I got called into the Concord Hospital at the same time.
LD: So did you ever fly as a civilian pilot?
LWG: Yeah a little bit you might have—
RG: Yeah a little bit there’s a stuff about Cessna’s and things.
LWG: Things didn’t stop there but I was part owner of a Tiger, what did we buy, a Tiger Moth.
RG: All right.
LWG: I never [background noise] down here you can look there and you see you know where Seven Cross is there’s a big store —
RG: A big tower —
LWG: A big tower beside it, if you imagine that as cloud just looks like exactly like the cloud that was over when I landed on and I landed on Woodbridge, we had to break cloud I had to dive into this and then I came underneath ‘cos underneath that was an area where you could see ground and I broke cloud underneath and as I was coming down there was a Flying Fortress coming straight for me, how we missed one another I’ll never know, he crashed they were killed they were all burnt to death I suppose ‘cos they were burnt, I managed to stay within this little cell, what did I do, anyway a very hazardous trip doing steep turns, I only had three or was it two engines or something I’ve forgotten now, yeah this plane was coming straight for me and I flew it down and we just missed one another, they told me to taxi up the end of the runway when I got down.
RG: So you came down with FIDO on that one?
LWG: Yeah, FIDO had the cloud, that was what —
RG: Oh that was what —
LWG: FIDO had pushed everything up and gave you this little area if you could get in to it.
RG: So they’d done that to get you down?
LWG: Oh no not only me.
RG: And the rest of the stream.
LWG: There was I think three or four then, a lot of the aerodromes had FIDO we didn’t have it Mildenhall.
RG: I think Bert said they didn’t have it at Waddington as well.
LD: That’s right yeah.
LWG: As soon as we landed they had to sell the aircraft put us straight into a bus and drove us out of there to get us away from the place took us straight all the way back to Mildenhall.
RG: Woodbridge did you say Woodbridge yeah?
LWG: There was three I think the other two I can’t remember their names but Woodbridge was the one that was operating that day. I could see it, I could see it for miles in front of me ‘cos I was above cloud and there was this tower and that’s why —
RG: Oh I see pushed the cloud up —
LWG: Yeah.
RG: Ah okay.
LWG: Just looked if you —
RG: Yeah, yeah.
LWG: You see that you can imagine that as being a cloud —
RG: So it was a beacon as well as —
LWG: Well it was because it was daylight, well it forced all of the air up until it looked like —
RG: A tower.
LWG: A three story building and it just looks like that.
RG: Wow.
LWG: And I, what I did I found I aimed for the bottom of it and broke into that area and it was clear only in that area.
RG: Yeah it would have been quite small actually you’d have been doing really tight turns.
LWG: Doing steep turns all the time.
RG: Did you have any trouble the last chap we interviewed he finished his tour and was sent to training command at Wigsley and he said one night they had a couple of MM110 night fighters came back with the bomber streams in ’45 and couldn’t do anything they peeled off when they got into England they attacked Wigsley and they attacked Waddington. Did you ever have any problems with intruders coming back into the after a raid back into the —
LWG: What day or night?
RG: Night.
LWG: No I don’t think that happened I think he’s having you on, we certainly didn’t run into that, but then at the same time we were running into late in the, in the war itself as I said when the war finished I was still on squadron we were going and picking POW’s and bringing them back. We went to Reims.
RG: You had an overnight stopover in Reims didn’t you on one trip?
LWG: Yeah, and we went somewhere, we went to café we had no money and the Yanks saw us to that they’d shout us, we went out we were looking for somewhere, it came dark it was night and we couldn’t find any, what did we do, we had landed at a place called, that’ll tell me, Juvincourt, Juvincourt, [?] that’s right and there were two hundred aeroplanes sitting on this drome we decided as a crew, we decided oh let’s go out and we’ll hitchhike into Reims, ‘cos they told us Reims wasn’t far away which we did, and I think a Yank pulled up in one of his jeeps and we all hopped on and when we got in there we found that was full of Yanks it was evening, so we went into, had no money or nothing, went into a a French café I suppose it was a café it was interesting there was a big huge marquee tent you see which I associate with that and we went and got into this café or whatever it was and the Yanks were in there and they shouted at us ‘cos we had no money and so on and we came out of there and we wondered what we’d do, oh, I suppose I should show you that, I’ll take it —
RG: Put that back on the cradle —
LWG: I’ll show you, I only brought that one through there more or less, I’m lying because I got caught in a landslide.
RG: Oh
LWG: Down near Wellington.
LD: Oh, that’s enough to make you lay.
LWG: They want to take my legs off told them no.
RG: [whispers] Turn it off.
LD: Oh sorry
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AGrayLW170301
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Interview with Bill Gray
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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02:06:45 audio recording
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Pending review
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Rob Gray
Lucy Davidson
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2017-03-01
Description
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Bill Gray was born and grew up in Australia and volunteered for the Air Force. After training, he flew 29 operations as an air gunner with 15 squadron from RAF Mildenhall. He returned to Australia after the war but contracted tuberculosis. He was hospitalised for six years, during that time he studied as an accountant, and met and married Molly who had nursed him at the hospital. After recovering he opened his own accountancy practice which he ran until his retirement.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Suffolk
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Jackie Simpson
15 Squadron
3 Group
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
crewing up
FIDO
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 2
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
RAF Hixon
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Woodbridge
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/290/3445/PLeicesterD1601.1.jpg
c2820bc7a7d2d3b32e67a8ee5335b9ba
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/290/3445/ALeicesterD160501.1.mp3
d86dafc77cb44e9b7caaf069d8f6a1a2
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Leicester, David
David Leicester
D Leicester
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with David Leicester DFC (1923 - 2021), and his log book. He flew operations as a pilot with 35, 158 and 640 Squadrons.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by David Leicester and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-05-01
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Leicester, D
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Permission granted for commercial projects
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Transcription
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AP: And I think we’re working. Yes. We are. So this interview for the International Bomber Command Centre is with David Leicester. He was a Halifax pilot with 158 and 640 Squadrons and a Lancaster pilot with 35 Squadron Pathfinders. The interview is taking place in North Plympton in Adelaide. My name’s Adam Purcell. It is the 1st of May 2016. So, David let’s start from the beginning. Can you tell me something of your early life? What you were doing before the war and how you came to join the air force.
DL: Well, really before the war I was at school when the war broke out in 1939. And I left. In 1940 I was at High School and was very interested in the, mainly in the Battle of Britain and what their pilots were doing. And I sort of made up my mind that if I happened to be in the war I would like to be a fighter pilot. My father was in the AIF during World War One so I was very keen to get into something. I left school at the end of 1940 and started work as an office boy in the rag trade, in a manufacturer’s agents office here in Adelaide until I was called up in August 1941 as — in number 19 Course EATS at the age of eighteen. Yeah.
AP: Did you, sorry did you say you had any prior military service up till that point?
DL: No.
AP: No.
DL: No.
AP: So you weren’t in the, in the army or the —
DL: No.
AP: CMF or anything.
DL: No.
AP: Ok.
DL: We did, prior to be called up, after we’d applied to join the air force we would, I was, I and others were too young at seventeen. We had to wait until we were eighteen before we were called up. So we did, we were put on the Air Force Reserve and while we were waiting to be called up we did a lot of the pre-entry work. Learning Morse Code, learning air force regulations and that sort of thing. So, by the time we actually got called up and went to the Initial Training School we had done a bit of pre, pre-interest work in the air force.
AP: Why did you choose the air force?
DL: Well, as I said I was interested in what the Battle of Britain boys were doing and I thought, oh boy that’s for me. Exciting and it, it was the one that attracted me the most. Even though my father had been in the AIF and told a lot of stories about the AIF. I wish I’d known more about my father‘s activities actually. As most of us say these days but the air force was the one.
AP: Can you tell me something of the enlistment process?
DL: The which?
AP: The enlistment process. The process of actually going to and signing the papers and all that sort of thing.
DL: Well I don’t, can’t recall a lot of that but I guess in the early 1941 I made application to the Air Force Recruiting Office. We were under age as far as the air force was concerned so we needed the parent’s permission which was freely given by my father and mother. And so I was really ready for, to be called up.
AP: Were there any medical type examinations or something that you can remember?
DL: Yes. We had to get, from our local GP we’d need to get a clearance to say that we were medically fit to join the services. But of course as soon as we went in we went through vigorous tests at Initial Training School. Initial medical tests to make sure we were alright. If we had a broken toenail it was more or less couldn’t get in. We were rejected.
AP: Can you remember any of the specific tests that you had to do?
DL: No. I can’t really. Tests on what we had learned prior to entry. Tests on Morse Code. Tests on what we’d learned as far as air force law was concerned, and the theory of flight. We needed to know quite a bit about that prior to going in. And they assessed us on the results of what we had learned prior to entry.
AP: The, you said before you were doing some, some study while you were on the Reserve. Where and how was that delivered?
DL: Well, we, we were mainly did our pre-courses. We had lecture courses on theory of flight and air force law. They were, they were given to us at a local school. But Morse Code and other things like that we learned at the local General Post Office. GPO. And we needed to reach a certain qualification particularly in Morse Code, again before being accepted. I can’t remember now how many words a minute we had to do but obviously those of us that were called up had passed the requirement.
AP: Do — alright, so this is in Adelaide. Sorry I didn’t clarify that.
DL: In Adelaide. Yes.
AP: You’ve lived in Adelaide all your life.
DL: Everything was in Adelaide. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. Alright.
DL: I had never been outside Adelaide until I joined the air force.
AP: Excellent. So your Initial Training School. Where was that?
DL: That was down at Victor Harbour.
AP: What happened there?
DL: Well, that was mainly furthering education on air force law and theory of flight and a lot of drill, marching and all that sort of thing. Discipline. We learned discipline and had to do what an officer said. So it was very strict. And it was at the ITS, as a result, I guess of how we came through each subject and an assessment by a higher ranking officer. They chose whether we would be pilots, navigators, wireless operators or whatever was needed in the crew and fortunately I was selected as a pilot. And that course at Victor Harbour was about three months. No flying at ITS. Just strictly all ground work.
AP: What was, what was the actual camp like at Victor Harbour? What were the buildings like? Where did you sleep? All that sort of stuff.
DL: Well, the actual headquarters of 4 ITS at Victor Harbour was an old mansion. But as far as we were concerned as air force recruits we just slept in tents. Six to a tent. And that was it. And —
AP: They had classrooms and things like that as well.
DL: Oh yes. Yes. They built classrooms and as I said the actual headquarters of 4 ITS was called Mount Breckan which was an old English mansion built out here. And that contained many rooms. The air force had acquired that building and it had many rooms which we used for lectures and all the other requirements.
AP: Was that, that — I drove out of Victor Harbour a couple of years ago on the way back from Kangaroo Island. Is that the big house on the hill as you go, sort of out?
DL: Yes.
AP: Oh cool. Now I know.
DL: The big house on the hill. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. Now I know where it is.
DL: It was actually a house built for some Englishman. I can’t remember now but all it was built as a replica of his home, or her home in England and was built almost entirely of imported material.
AP: Wow. Fantastic.
DL: A grand old building it was.
AP: Yeah. And I imagine the air force probably didn’t leave it in quite the condition they found it in.
DL: No. No. That’s right. No. It’s still there today.
AP: It certainly is. Yeah. I remember seeing it. Yeah. Ok so from ITS your next step would have been an Elementary Flying Training School.
DL: Yes, selected as a pilot. Well, first we were asked at ITS whether we wanted, what we wanted to be — pilots, navigators or whatever. We were given three choices and most of us put down number 1 — pilot. Number 2 — pilot. Number 3 — pilot because everyone that went in or most of all, almost all were, ninety nine percent probably of called up wanted to be pilots. But at the end of the course at Victor we were, looked at notice board to see what the next posting would be and fortunately for me it was to be a pilot and posted to Parafield in South Australia flying Tiger Moths at EFTS. Yeah.
AP: So you’re, you’re still in Adelaide.
DL: Yeah. I’m still in Adelaide. Yes. Still in Adelaide.
AP: Excellent. All right. Tiger Moths. They’re the ubiquitous training aircraft.
DL: Magnificent little aircraft. Yes. Because we didn’t know about any the other. That was, that was it as far as we were concerned. I’d never flown before. Never thought of flying. I’d never been up in an aircraft. But we had to. Our flying started within a certain number of hours and again like ITS we were assessed by superior officers as our flying capability and given an assessment at the end of the, at the end of the course.
AP: What was your instructor like? Who was your instructor? What was he like?
DL: Well, the instructors were just chaps that had finished their flying training and I think the chap I had, I can’t remember his name but he had recently finished his flying training at, at Parafield. And he was posted from Parafield to Parafield as an instructor. Some of them happened like that. But I wasn’t interested in instructing. So, and at Parafield there we were given three alternatives of what type of pilot we wanted to be. Fighter pilot, bomber pilot or whatever, or instructing. And again I put down, as many others did, fighter, fighter, fighter. And it looked that way that we would be fighters because from Parafield we were posted, some of us were posted to SFTS at Point Cook and flying Wirraways. The course at Point Cook was a four month course divided into two. Two lots of two monthly courses. Two months of what they called Initial Training Centre School and another two months of Advanced Training School. ITS and ATS, flying Wirraways at Point Cook. After the end of the first two months we were given leave and many of us, the South Australians we came back to Adelaide for leave. And when we got back to Point Cook we found that all the Wirraways had gone and they had been replaced by Airspeed Oxfords. That didn’t concern us terribly because ok it looked like single engine pilots were out but we could now be twin engine pilots. And we had to complete that first two monthly period again, over again. And still complete the four months within the prescribed time. So it was a bit of a rush. And it was at ITS — at SFTS the second two months when we received our wings and became sergeant pilots or some of them were officers but most of us came out as sergeant pilots waiting for another posting.
AP: So backing up a little bit more can you tell me something about the Tiger Moth in particular? What did it look like? Where did you sit? How did it fly?
DL: Oh the Tiger Moth is a twin-engined little biplane with a Gypsy engine. Not much bigger than a lawn mower engine but they had two seats back to back. The instructor sat in the front and the, we were sat in the back. And we spoke to each other through a funnel. Telling us, he was telling us what to do and giving, giving us instructions. We had to fly solo within twelve hours I think it was, or ten hours. And then most of us, there were some scrubbings but most of us were able to get through in the required time. I’m not sure what I, how many hours I took. Around about eight or nine I think. There were quite a few scrubbings strangely enough. Scrubbings, I mean chaps that failed the test and they had to be re-mustered as navigators or other crew members.
AP: Alright. First solo. Can you tell me about your first solo?
DL: Well the first solo was quite exciting. We’d go up, up with an instructor and land at a certain time and when he thought that we were, had done enough to go solo he just got out of the cockpit and said, ‘Here we are. Off you go.’ And that was it and we had to just go around on our own. A very exciting time getting the, getting, flying solo was the ant’s pants or mostly. When we would fly solo, amazing.
AP: Did, did you encounter throughout your training any accidents, or —?
DL: No. Not really.
AP: Did you see any?
DL: You’re talking about total training?
AP: All the way through.
DL: Hmmn?
AP: Yeah. All the way through.
DL: Yeah. Well, after we’d finished training at Point Cook many of, many of us were posted to England. To the UK. We were seconded by the RAF actually to replace aircrew. Aircrew were very short in England at the time. This is now in late or early 1942 perhaps. And we were posted from Point Cook to England. We went by ship to England via New Zealand. And when we got to England we were awaiting postings again. And a lot of us had all trained together and became close friends. And when we started off at a place called Advanced Flying Unit and that was still flying Oxfords. Still thinking we were going to be, or I thought we were going to be fighter pilots. After we’d done a course at AFU at Grantham in England I was posted as a lone figure to a bomber Operational Training Unit where all of the others went to further their single engine or twin engine fighting. Many of them finished up on Beaufighters or Mosquitoes. Now, why in the heck I was sort of singled out I’ve got no idea but I finished up at an OTU at a place called Honeybourne in England flying Whitleys. Now, the Whitley was Armstrong Arthur Whitley was one of the main bomber forces of England at, in the early part of the war, and Whitleys and Wellingtons were used for training purposes. And at the OTU at [pause] where did I say it was? Honeybourne. A place called Honeybourne. On my first solo flight at night in a Whitley an engine caught fire on take-off and I had to get up and go around and bring the thing back again. And I had to land wheels up. A belly landing. So that was during training. Yeah. And that was bad enough but quite an experience.
AP: I can imagine. Alright, so can you tell me how you got to the UK in a little bit more detail?
DL: Well when we arrived — on the way from New Zealand, Auckland to the UK we were in a South African luxury liner which had been turned into a troop ship. A vessel called the Cape Town Castle. The Castle Line ship was a South African ship. Now, this was, this was re-modified to take about two thousand troops but there were only about a hundred and fifty on it at the time. And we took off from New Zealand to England through the Panama Canal. And, but on the way across the Indian Ocean we came across some life boats with a crew from a vessel that had, a vessel that had been sunk by a U-boat, presumably. But then we, we carried on. Went to England via the Panama Canal and eventually arrived in Liverpool Harbour. Now the, Liverpool Harbour had been bombed by the Germans the night before and we had to stay about, oh three miles out. We couldn’t get near the harbour at the time so this large vessel anchored about three miles out and we were taken in to the city of Liverpool in row boats. Taken from, from the Cape Town Castle. So Liverpool was on fire. But then, there we boarded a train and went down to Bournemouth in the south of England.
AP: So this is the first time, as you were saying before, the first time you were outside of Adelaide.
DL: Yeah.
AP: The first time going overseas.
DL: Yeah.
AP: What did you think of wartime England?
DL: Well, at, initial, the initial because we didn’t know much about England of course. My father was very pro-English although he had never been there. But I remember, remember through my growing up days he always had, on the dining table, a huge map of the City of London and he would have been able to drive a taxi in London without any trouble at all. And this really got me interested in England. But the train journey down from Liverpool to Bournemouth was at night so we didn’t really see much at all. And the first we saw of it was when the next posting came which was only after a couple of days, for me only a couple of days at Bournemouth. From there I was posted to heavy, Heavy Conversion Unit. HCU in Yorkshire. So, I can’t remember now how I actually got from Bournemouth to Yorkshire but I remember being very thrilled at looking at the vast expanse of England. Even though it’s a very small area it seemed to have plenty of space. And I had heard that there was something like seven hundred aerodromes there so where the heck they put them all I really don’t know. But that was, by then I knew of course I was definitely on bombers. Getting to the Heavy Conversion Unit which were flying Halifaxes. So I I transferred from Whitleys to Halifaxes at the Heavy Conversion Unit. And it was at the Heavy Conversion Unit where we picked up our crews. For example, when, when pilots had, some pilots had finished their training they were sent to Heavy Conversion Unit. Same with the navigators and wireless operators and gunners etcetera. So we picked up the crew at, at Heavy Conversion Unit. Strangely enough on my first solo flight in a Halifax at night an engine also caught fire. But by then the training had been good enough to know exactly what to do without any, any problems. So we landed wheels down and only on three engines. So it was a good experience at the time. It was usual too for a pilot to be sent to an operational training squadron, yes an operational squadron, an operational flying squadron to become experienced in perhaps flying on operational flying. And the pilot would do two trips at least with an experienced crew at that squadron. And it so happened that, and I was sent to 158 Squadron to do my first second dickies we called them, with, with an experienced crew in 158 Squadron. And having done that back to the Heavy Conversion Unit to pick up the other six crew who I had obtained at Heavy Conversion Unit, and strangely enough when the posting came through we were posted to 158 Squadron, in Yorkshire.
AP: How —
DL: In East Yorkshire.
AP: How did, how did you actually meet your crew? How did you choose your crew?
DL: Well, it’s a funny thing. Strangely enough, as I said we crewed up at HCU and all navigators and other crew members came. Now, I was looking for a navigator so as soon as I saw one I said, ‘Are you looking for a pilot?’ Or he would say, ‘Are you looking for a navigator?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes,’ and the same with, we’d just see someone come into the mess or come into the — some, some pilots used to go out to the entrance gates of the aerodrome and as new crew came in pilots and the navigator or someone would just say, ‘How about flying with me?’ That’s how, it was as uncomplicated as that. We had no idea how good they were or how bad they were but that’s how we picked them up. Just by being in the mess with a load of, a load of other crew members.
AP: If you perhaps picked the wrong person. You discovered later that you weren’t suited was there any way out?
DL: Oh yes. Yes, that happened quite often. As a matter of fact a friend of mine from Adelaide he was on, finished up on the same squadron. He had got a very bad navigator. And so he just wanted him replaced so he would just, if there were any spare navigators on, around on the aerodrome he would, on the airfield he would just say, you know, or tell the CO that he wasn’t happy with his navigator and he wanted him replaced and that’s, he’d get him replaced. Sometimes, in his case the squadron navigation officer went on one trip with them and found out that the navigator was just not plotting his courses properly. Yes there was an out. Yes.
AP: What, ok, so, if you crewed up at the Heavy Conversion who were you flying with at the OTU?
DL: Well, nobody. Just, didn’t have any crew. Just an instructor. And I think on the night that I had the fire in the engine and crash landed I think there was a rear gunner. That’s all.
AP: Ok. It’s a little bit different to some other stories I’ve heard. So you did what a lot of what people did in the Operational Training Unit at the HCU instead. So it’s a little, a little bit different.
DL: What have others said about the crewing up?
AP: It tended to happen at the OTU. And so that’s where they started flying as a crew and then the Heavy Conversion Unit was just to add the extra two engines essentially.
DL: Oh well. It depends I suppose. I hadn’t heard that. I thought, I thought they all crewed up at HCU.
AP: Yeah. Well there you go.
DL: I’d never known, you saying that. Well OTUs, that’s strange because a, a Whitley or a Wellington didn’t have seven in the crew.
AP: Yeah. What, what tended to happen was they got the flight engineer when they got to Heavy Conversion Unit.
DL: Oh. I see. Yeah.
AP: So they were added on. But the, the six of them started out in those aircraft. But anyway that’s, that’s a —
DL: I hadn’t heard that.
AP: That’s different to your story but this is your story we’re telling.
DL: But is that how they got them at OTU?
AP: Yeah.
DL: The same way.
AP: Yeah the same sort of —
DL: Saying as hey you are you looking for a pilot?
AP: Or they’d put them all in a hangar.
DL: Yeah.
AP: Equal numbers of everyone.
DL: Yeah.
AP: And they say, ‘Sort yourselves out boys.’
DL: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. I think it’s one of the fascinating parts of Bomber Command stories that so often worked.
DL: Yeah. And the seven became a very very close knit crew. Each relying on the other. I mean it was, if you had a dud, you know, no good having someone who couldn’t do their job properly.
AP: Did you, jumping forward a bit, did you tend to socialise with that crew?
DL: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
AP: You all lived together and —
DL: Yeah.
AP: Went to the pub and all that sort of stuff.
DL: You became almost all day and every day together doing everything together and became very close. You had to rely entirely on other members of the crew, particularly if something went wrong or something happened. There was only one pilot and if anything went wrong with the pilot they had to know what to do. No one could fly it if the pilot got hurt. It was almost baling out the rest of the crew, which did happen a lot.
AP: So I guess going on from the doing everything with your crew what sort of things did you get up to when you were on leave, throughout the time in England?
DL: Well, mostly on leave other members of the crew, if they were English and mine all were on Halifaxes, I had two different crews, I’ll come to that soon, they, they would go home for a leave. So mostly then I, I would go down to London and go to Australia House and meet other, meet some of my friends and who I’d trained with or, but the Englishmen would — would go to their home. I was asked to their home on, some of them, on occasions, where I went. When I went and met members of the family.
AP: Alright. So you flew both Lancaster and Halifax. What was your first impression of a Halifax when you first saw it?
DL: Well, I liked the Halifax. We might come to that later about the difference between a Halifax and a Lancaster.
AP: Definitely one of my questions.
DL: I didn’t know how a four engine bomber should, should operate or how it should travel. The Halifax was a very nice plane to fly and it did everything it wanted to do. In fact it did it too quickly at times. But my first impression was, was very good. They had Merlin inline engines, very capable and reliable engines. They didn’t have any real fault except that they were very vicious in any control needed by the pilot. It was like, I always say it’s like the difference between a car without power steering. The Halifax was very direct in its operational command of the pilot. It was very swift in its control, which, as far as the wartime flying was concerned meant a lot. The Lancaster was, was a beautiful plane. Very, very, very easy to fly. Very nice to fly. Very comfortable to fly but it was much slower to react to the pilots control in wartime. The Halifax would get me out of trouble more quickly then would a Lancaster. I’ve had arguments about this with Lancaster blokes forever, since the war. Most of them they, they, at OTU these fellas that you’ve already spoken to did they do their OTU on Lancasters?
AP: No. Typically they were, they were Wellingtons.
DL: Oh yeah.
AP: Or perhaps Whitleys.
DL: Yeah.
AP: And in the Heavy Conversion Unit was where they flew.
DL: Yeah.
AP: In some cases they went to Stirlings first.
DL: Yeah. Right.
AP: And then there was another thing called a Lancaster Finishing School.
DL: Yeah. That’s right, Lancaster Finishing School.
AP: That’s where they converted into the Lancaster themselves. That was later in the war though.
DL: Yeah. That’s right. That was later in the war.
AP: Yeah.
DL: But in most of the Heavy Conversion Units they were, were Halifaxes that had been passed their use by date. And they, they were cranky old things and they, they didn’t impress some of the pilots. But they would go from a beat up old Halifax and go on to a Lancaster Finishing School, a brand new Halifax, a brand new Lancaster and they would, you know, compare the difference. Well that’s not fair. In my opinion it’s not fair and, but the Halifaxes, oh boy, that really got you out of trouble in a hurry and also the pilot’s escape hatch on a Halifax was in a better position than that on a Lancaster. You could get out. The pilot could get out of a Halifax more quickly, not by much mind you, seconds quicker than a Lancaster. So those seconds meant a hell of a lot.
AP: So you talk about the escape hatch in a Halifax. Where actually was it?
DL: Hmmn?
AP: Where was this, this escape hatch in a Halifax? I know the pilot’s one they could get out straight up or they had to go down the nose. Where was the Halifax escape hatch?
DL: That was straight up.
AP: Straight up as well.
DL: But I can’t quite remember why it was better placed but I don’t think the Lancaster one was straight up was it? It was slightly to the front or back.
AP: I can’t remember. I don’t know.
DL: The Halifax one was straight up.
AP: Alright. I guess we’re getting towards the squadron now. Your first squadron was 158.
DL: Yeah.
AP: Where were they?
DL: They were at a place called Lissett in East Yorkshire. The East Riding of Yorkshire, right over near the coast. You’ve heard of Whitby I suppose. Not far from Whitby and it was, it was near the east coast of Yorkshire. What they called the East Riding of Yorkshire. It was war built airfield. So everything was strung out all over the place. All of the buildings and the sleeping quarters were miles apart, or seemed miles apart. Whereas in a permanent, permanent air force airfield was quite luxury compared with the wartime airfield. But they had everything there. I quite enjoyed it at Lissett and had no problems with, with anything. There were, there were three Aussies, three Aussies there, one other chap from Adelaide and a chap from West Australia and myself. We were the only three Aussies on the squadron and we got away with murder. We used to go and have a bath in the officer’s mess. Between, between where the sergeant’s, sergeant’s sleeping quarters and the ablution block, we had to pass by the officer’s ablutions. So on one occasion, it was about half a mile between each of the, of these areas. On one occasion the bloke from Western Australia was walking past the officer’s ablutions. He was a sergeant walking past the officer’s ablutions. He couldn’t hear anybody in there or see anybody and no lights on. So he hopped in there and had his shower, no shower, they didn’t have any showers, hopped in, had a bath in the officer’s quarters. He told the other two of us about it and we started doing it as well. The sergeant’s bath only had, they had a rim painted around the bath, six inches of water. Well, the officer’s had twelve inches. So, but we got caught out but being Aussies we got away with murder almost. And the CO found out but he didn’t take any notice. He just said, ‘Keep it going.’ So, that was a funny one.
AP: What, what sort of thing happened in the sergeant’s mess?
DL: The sergeant’s mess, well it was like a community hall I suppose. It had eating quarters. Tables and chairs. It had a billiard table perhaps. And lounge chairs. English papers, and just a general place to go and relax if you weren’t flying. It was used quite a bit when we weren’t flying.
AP: What, what other things did you get up to when you weren’t flying?
DL: Well, mainly, if we didn’t go to the mess we would go down to a local pub. English village local pub and spend the afternoon or evening there. I got a story later if you like about that. What we did when we were on Pathfinders. The crew instead of going down to the pub. We did other things first but it was generally just a recreation, time off, relaxing in the sergeant’s mess.
AP: So, ok you were on operations at this stage.
DL: Yeah.
AP: You’ve already flown two as second dickie.
DL: Yeah.
AP: And then went back to HCU and then came with your crew.
DL: That’s right.
AP: Do any of your operations from Lissett stand out in particular in your memory?
DL: Well, yes they do. But I can’t really tell which was which strangely enough. We weren’t allowed to put in our logbook strange things that might have, may have happened. We had a intelligence officer, a squadron leader intelligence officer who was besotted with the fact that the Germans were going to land in England. He had dates and everything else. And he would not let us put in the logbook anything that happened that might give the Germans an idea that their defences were good. So, unfortunately in the first few, while he was there, the first few ops even if we got hit up to glory all we were allowed to put was, “No flak. No fighters. Good trip.” But the logbook, the logbook, I’ve got my logbook here. The logbook doesn’t really tell us what happened. Tells us, tells me what crew I had and how many hours it took. That’s about all. So you know, I got hit in the tailplane for example one night. Now, I can’t tell you what night it was. The night of Nuremberg. You’ve probably heard about that. I was on that. That was my thirty first trip actually. We had a bad run but I can’t really tell you what happened unfortunately which is disappointing. I was very disappointed with the log book.
AP: That’s wartime for you I suppose.
DL: So I’m asked questions like that I’m inclined to say what happened on nights with Bomber Command. Example, things that happened, not only to me but could have happened to anybody else. Most of them did happen to me but as I said I can’t tell of one particular raid.
AP: Well look if we don’t know particular dates that’s fine. We’re more interested in, in those, those, those particular things that happened.
DL: I know the date when I went to Nuremberg. I know the date that, I know things that happened but —
AP: That’s alright. Let’s hear some of the things that happened. It doesn’t matter if we can’t tell when it happened.
DL: At Lissett we had nights of absolute horror, nights of near death situations. Near nights where had parachutes on ready to jump. Twice on occasion I had parachutes on ready to jump. Being chased by a night fighter, a night fighter plane. Being shot at from the front, from the back, from underneath. Dodging searchlights, avoiding collision, landing short of fuel. All things like that. Could have happened to anybody any night. I did sixty eight trips and had my share of trouble but, you know some fellas got shot down on their very first raid. It’s very hard to tell. And I’ve been, you know, shot up one night when the rudders got jammed and things like that. But that could happen to anybody. So I prefer not to sort of talk about individual things that happened to me.
AP: That’s ok.
DL: All those things I mentioned did happen but I can’t tell you when and what night and where.
AP: That’s alright. The when, what night and where is less important I think then the feeling of it. What —
DL: Well, you know, you land short of fuel or you land on three engines many times and it’s, you come back and you think you’ve had a hard time and you look at another aircraft on the same, you know, on the airfield that’s come back all really shot up.
AP: So you mentioned there were two occasions where you had parachutes on ready to jump.
DL: Yeah.
AP: Why? Why was that? What sort of things happened there?
DL: On one trip we got hit in the tailplane, and the, just prior to that the rear gunner had spotted an enemy fighter and he, he told me as pilot to corkscrew. You know what a corkscrew is? And while we were doing a turn, a steep turn we got hit in the rudder or got hit in the tailplane. Didn’t know where but the rudder became jammed, and we were in this turn and the rudder jammed. We couldn’t get out of it. And so the engineer and the bomb aimer came in to help me by putting pressure on my feet to try and stabilise the aircraft. But we, we were circling. We had, we had to go. You know, we could have caused collision or whatever and we couldn’t. And so I told the crew to prepare for, to abandon aircraft. We had practiced the drill many times as a crew and, but the engineer and the bomb aimer were helping me with the feet on the rudder, trying to stabilise it. And we could, my feet kept slipping off the rudder pedals so the bomb aimer took off — he had two pairs of socks on [laughs] he took off one of his socks and tied my foot to the pedal. Anyhow, after a lot of trying, we eventually, something must have been stuck in the rudder cables must have come loose because it did free itself and we were able to get out of it.
AP: So, now as the pilot were you wearing your parachute the whole time?
DL: No.
AP: No.
DL: No.
AP: So you had to go and grab it from somewhere else.
DL: I’m sorry. Yes.
AP: Yeah. You were.
DL: I had used the parachute as a, as a seat of course. You know the parachute was a seat, yes. I always preferred the parachute with a seat. Everybody else had the clip on type.
AP: Yes.
DL: And I’ll show you something. A friend of mine did a pencil drawing of me years ago, many years ago which I’ve got down in a room at the back.
AP: Cool.
DL: And I’ve got the harness on for a clip on ‘chute. I’d a funny thing to tell you about parachutes. I don’t present myself, or I don’t think I’m a superstitious type of a bloke but I — usually with a parachute we, if we were on ops, say tonight. Or during the day we would go to the parachute section and collect a parachute. Parachutes were packed every time, even though they weren’t used. We took back a parachute to the parachute section. It would be repacked before it went out again. But I never handed mine in. I went to the parachute section one day and they were all girls that did this — packed the parachutes, and asked if she would pack my parachute. And she was a young girl. Probably eighteen. And I had my parachute. I kept it with me all the time and got this one girl to repack my parachute three times a week. So, but I never handed it in. I would have got into trouble but we just kept it. Just she and I kept it. And what was the question?
AP: We were talking about just parachutes in general.
DL: Yeah.
AP: We were talking about the time that, so —
DL: Yeah.
AP: You told the rest of the crew, ‘Clip them on. We might need them.’ Yeah
DL: Yeah. I can’t really remember the other time. It might have been the Nuremberg raid. We got badly hit on Nuremberg raid.
AP: By flak or a fighter?
DL: Oh, we shot down a fighter. We actually got the fighter, yes. We got hit by a fighter. In my logbook I’ve got just, I’ve written the word, “Wheels.” Why? — I really don’t know. I can’t remember what the word “wheel.” It was something meant to happen. I think the wheels didn’t come down. They didn’t, no, that’s right. The wheels didn’t lock down. Well they didn’t show that they were locked down. The green light didn’t come on. And we were flying around so long trying to get the wheels down that we were nearly out of fuel. And so we, the air con, air controller, air controller told us to go and crash land. They had special crash landing ‘dromes, airfields, but I didn’t have enough petrol left to go so we just had to chance that the wheels had locked down. They felt as though they were locked down but didn’t show. I think that’s the story. We had a bad night. Everyone had a bad night on the Nuremberg raid. But it was, we did, it’s very hard for an RAF bomber to have a [pause] shot down fighter confirmed. Have you heard the story? For example if we saw a fighter, if we saw a bomber go down, through a fighter, shot down, a fighter. We would have to take the time, the height, the latitude and longitude and all details like that. And we would have to do it and so would other, about another dozen other planes come in with the same, with the same news. And if they all confirmed well they would, if they were all together we would get it confirmed. The Yanks used to, you know the top one used to shoot the fighter down and then the next layer down would put the hole in him as well, but very, very hard. We did get a confirmation of getting a fighter that night.
AP: That was on Nuremberg.
DL: That was on Nuremberg. Yeah.
AP: Oh wow. Can you remember that engagement at all?
DL: Yes and no. It was, there’s been a lot of stories written about it. A lot of books about it and everyone’s got a different opinion. I think we took five hours to get there and three hours to get home. We were using tactics to try and put them off. We would head, head towards another German city and before we got there we would turn off and go somewhere else. The idea was that by the time we got to Nuremberg the fighters would be on the ground refuelling. But instead of that they were there waiting for us and there’s all sorts of stories told about why. Careless talk and all that sort of thing. But that was absolute horror. There were ninety six aircraft shot down that night. You know that story? Yeah.
AP: Can you, can you remember particularly the fighter that your gunners got? Can you remember that attack?
DL: The what?
AP: Particularly, the fighter your gunners shot down.
DL: Yeah.
AP: Can you remember that actual engagement?
DL: Yes. Yes.
AP: What happened there?
DL: Well the rear gunner just advised that he had a Messerschmitt on his tail, on our tail and to corkscrew. The same thing. Corkscrew. But while we were doing all of that the rear gunner was perfect. He was terrific. And I guess while we were, while we were doing all this throwing around he put a few bullets into it. Because it was very hard for us because they were using .5 cannons and we were using 303s. So, of course they, they could get us before we could get them. But, no I can’t, maybe except for throwing around and trying to get out of the way so that the — but the gunner just reported that he had got it.
AP: So how many —
DL: Other than that it was just routine flying. What you do if you’ve got a fighter on our tail.
AP: So, ok that is one of my questions. The gunner says, over the intercom, you know, ‘Fighter. Fighter. Corkscrew port. Go.’
DL: Yeah.
AP: What happens next?
DL: That’s right. He says, he might say, ‘Fighter, fighter.’ Or they were called, what word they used. What words did the Battle of Britain use?
AP: Bandits.
DL: Bandits, yeah, bandits. So and so, and so and so. Corkscrew. I was always known as, I was never called skipper, I was always called, I was always the youngest in the two crews I had and I was known as Junior. Which someone had painted on my helmet. And he would just say, ‘Corkscrew. Corkscrew Junior,’ and he’d just keep giving an account of where the fighter was if he could see it still. But we were, yeah, so, he got close enough to us. He missed us fortunately, the tracer bullets going in, going past.
AP: And as the pilot, how, how do you do a corkscrew? What are the movements and how do you actually make a difference?
DL: Oh you’re just flying it all around. Up and down. Up to stalling point or down, you know. Just trying to, so that you couldn’t get which there was still enough room to get, to get his eyesight, his bomb site on us. His guns on us.
AP: So —
DL: That was just, just corkscrew was the best way of getting away from a fighter.
AP: How many trips did you do from Lissett?
DL: How many?
AP: Yeah.
DL: From Lissett I did twenty seven. And the 158 Squadron had three Flights. You know all about the Flights.
AP: Yeah.
DL: A B and C. And C Flight 158 moved to Leconfield and formed 640 Squadron. So, and I was in C flight, I was actually, I was flight commander of C Flight. And we moved over to Leconfield as 640 Squadron. And I only did four trips from there, from Leconfield. The — when we go to a bomber squadron it is a known fact that we would be expected to do a tour which would comprise thirty ops. Many were taken off. What we called screened at twenty six, twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine. There were a shortage of crews at the time. This was in March ’43. There were a shortage of crews and although the squadron commander CO had said that we were, we were ready to be taken off the crew were getting a little bit, a little bit [pause] what would I say? They were getting a little bit cheesed off. I became flight commander and was only allowed to do one trip a month. And there’s a reason for that which we can get on to. And they were getting a bit cheesed off with waiting around, waiting to be — waiting to finish ops. Not nastily but they just felt that they were, had had enough. And so we’d done our thirty and I said, ‘Ok fellas. That’s it.’ But on the night of this Nuremberg raid Bomber Command called for maximum effort. Now, when, when they called for maximum effort it was every plane they could get on the airfield and any crew they could get. So there we were supposed to have leave and finish because we were still on the squadron as a crew they wanted maximum effort. We were, every crew was put on and so we were rostered to go that night. And so actually it was our thirty first trip, op. And after that, yeah, we did finish up. They all went. They were all posted to different areas of instructing and I was posted to the RAF College to do what was called a junior commander’s course. During the time at Lissett on 158 Squadron our CO had finished. He was in permanent air force but he had finished a tour of ops and he had been posted to 158 Squadron as CO, but, and he was, they weren’t allowed to fly. COs weren’t allowed to fly on ops although they, they had a plane at their disposal. A staff plane which was shared with a couple of other squadrons. But he had itchy feet. Now bear in mind that he was not allowed to but he had itchy feet and he decided that he would go on an op one, one night. And he didn’t have a crew of course so he took with him the navigator, a crew from 158 Squadron. The navigation officer, the gunnery officer, all the senior officers on the station and the flight commander of C Flight which was the Flight I was in was, he was a squadron leader navigator. Unusual but he was a squadron leader navigator but he went as the CO’s navigator. Well, they were shot down and didn’t return. Here we are at 158 Squadron. No CO. No leaders. No flight commander for C Flight. No one to roster the crews for ops the next day, or the next couple of days. What a mess. I’m, our crew, as far as C flight was concerned was the, had the most experience on the squadron and I was asked as a sergeant to fill in for the squadron leader flight commander because they couldn’t get one. Couldn’t find one, particularly in a hurry. So, on the next night sure enough there were ops on so I with the other two flights — A and B squadron leaders, went and rostered all the planes and the crews for the night’s op, and off they went. And we had done twenty three trips I think at the time. Or about that many and we were the most experienced crew in C Flight and on the squadron actually. There were other officers on the squadron but they had, they were just none of them had done many ops at all and didn’t have any experience with, and so it so happened for the next six weeks they couldn’t find a flight commander and so [laughs] I was asked to have the job and I was given the rank of squadron leader. Six weeks from flight sergeant to squadron leader [laughs] and took over C Flight. Well then, C Flight as I told you, C Flight then moved over to Leconfield to form 640 Squadron and I was acting CO there until they found a CO for 640 Squadron. Still, still with a rank of squadron leader. And so that was it. But our crew, after the Nuremberg raid we all split up and they were posted elsewhere and so was I —
AP: So —
DL: So there we are.
AP: As a flight commander what actual duties did you have and where did you do them?
DL: Well, the duties were split between the flight commander’s office and the ground crew out at the dispersal area where the aircraft are kept. The flight commander was really, did all the paperwork necessary for C Flight. Not, not the administration for the squadron but just for C Flight. But it meant getting the orders for the day. If there was going to be an op on for that night roster the crews and make sure they were all ready to go and had no problems with crews. I was helped a lot by the chap who was flight commander of A flight. In fact, he helped me, he helped me even to his own working. He gave me advice that, from a flight commander’s point of view. I still, a New Zealander he was, and he’s still a friend of mine. He lives up in Queensland and he’s still alive and he helped me magnificently. In the meantime also we had transferred from Halifax with radial, no with Merlin engines to Halifaxes with radial engines. Mark 3 Halifaxes. And so when we moved over to Leconfield we had Mark 3 Halifaxes which were even better than the Mark 2s. And of course the radial engines were better because they were air cooled whereas the Merlin was glycol cooled. Liquid cooled.
AP: So —
DL: And when, there’s an anecdote there. With the, with the appointment as flight commander we had, I had the use of a motorbike and shared the use of a Hillman Minx motorcar. Have you heard of a Hillman Minx?
AP: Vaguely.
DL: They were not too.
AP: No. I can’t say that I’ve ever seen one.
DL: A Hillman Minx. The air force, the RAF had a lot of these. Hillman Minx’s, little cars and they were shared with the other two and I had this use of this motorbike and the car and I couldn’t drive any of them. I was nineteen. I was. And I could fly a four engine aeroplane before I could drive a motorbike or motor car.
AP: So did you, did someone teach you how to do it?
DL: Yeah.
AP: Or how did you get around it?
DL: Yeah.
AP: Yeah. Very good, alright. So after you’d been to Leconfield your tour finishes. You said you went to a junior commander’s course?
DL: I went to a junior commander’s course at the RAF college at [pause] where was the RAF college, Grantham I think.
AP: Cranwell.
DL: Cranwell, that’s it.
AP: Yeah.
DL: Yeah, Cranwell, now a junior commander’s course. There were about fifty of us. Mainly group captains, wing commanders, and a few squadron leaders. The idea was that the college was teaching these wing commanders and group captains how to be COs at squadrons. They had, most of them had finished their tour. Most of them were permanent air force blokes. Most of them had finished their tour and were being trained to be squadron COs. And I was put there, I don’t know why but I went to this course and it was just doing that. Learning how to run a squadron. But being more familiar with air force law and being more disciplined as far as a squadron was concerned. Now after, I don’t know how that lasted, I can’t remember that but after that that during that course we had a lot of exams and all sorts of things. And at the end of the course it was, I was found that I had done well in air force law. Now, I’ve never, I wasn’t interested in it at Cranwell but for some reason or other I — what happened then?
AP: No. That’s alright, the sun went down. The sun went behind a cloud. It just got a bit darker.
DL: What was I saying? As I did air force law and I was posted to a field somewhere as part of a, and I did well in organising Courts of Enquiry. So I was posted to an airfield somewhere, non flying to take part in organising Courts of Enquiry. Collecting evidence. Me and a couple of others there were, not just myself. Collecting evidence. This was mainly for crashes that had occurred during training practice and collecting evidence and all that sort of thing. And then the lawyers would come in who were mainly [pause] well they were seconded to the RAF. They wore a uniform although they weren’t in the RAF. They were like doctors and then they’d come in. Look at all this evidence and then find the pilot or whoever — why the aircraft crashed. And most of it was quite clear to me that they were fit on trying to make that the pilot error which I didn’t agree with. And I hated it there. Absolutely hated it. I wanted to get back to flying. And so I was friendly with a girl who was the personal assistant to the air officer commanding 4 Group. You know all about the Groups of course. And after I’d done a couple of these Courts of Enquiry I applied for leave. It was granted and so I went up and, to 4 Group headquarters and looked out, up this girl. Not romantically. I was just a friend and I was, she had an office outside of the Group commander’s office and I was sitting in her office with her just having a cup of tea and the Group commander came. She had a intercom thing on her desk and he came through the intercom and asked this girl if she knew of a spare pilot in 4 Group who could go down to 35 Squadron and take over a crew. They wanted a squadron leader. A squadron leader on 35 Squadron because 4 Group supplied 35 Squadron. The pilot had been injured and the crew were, were ok. And they wanted a pilot to take over this crew until such time as the other bloke could come back. So I’m sitting there, spare pilot and I said, ‘Hey, hey how about me?’ And she said to the air officer, commanding, you know, ‘Squadron Leader Leicester’s here. He’s looking for a job.’ So the CO said, ‘Send him down to 35 Squadron.’ So down I went. And when I got down there and made myself known to the CO he said that the pilot wasn’t as badly damaged as they thought he was and after a fortnight leave he could come back and fly with his crew. So I’m down there. And I said, ‘Well what do I do?’ He said, ‘You either go back to 4 Group or you volunteer.’ You had to volunteer for Pathfinders as a single unit. So I said, ‘Oh ok.’ I said, ‘I’ll keep on flying. Thank you very much.’ So then I was posted to the Pathfinder Navigation Training Unit flying Lancasters. Now, it’s funny but at this Pathfinder navigation, quite often when crews finish their thirty trips there’s one or two of the crew that don’t want to go instructing or anything like that. You’ve heard that story have you? Understand it?
AP: Go on.
DL: Yeah. And they want to keep on flying. So, if they don’t, if they can’t find a place for them the only thing they can do is volunteer for Pathfinders. And so within a week of being at the Pathfinder Navigation Training Unit in came a navigator, DFC and Bar. He had done flying, all his operational flying on Mosquitoes and he came in, navigator. And in came a bomb aimer DFC. In came an engineer and so on. Within a week or ten days I had a crew. And so we did a bit of flight training in the Lancaster and got to know each other and finished what we had to do. Strangely enough we were posted to 35 Squadron. We could have been posted to any other Pathfinder unit but we, it was usual for 4 Group to, 35 Squadron was originally Halifaxes. So that’s how that all came about.
AP: Alright. How did, in terms of the operational flying that you did how did Pathfinder flying vary from Main Force?
DL: Well —
AP: How was it different?
DL: Generally speaking for example the Pathfinders had a number of steps in a squadron. You’d start off at the bottom and step and then as you got experience you’d be given a different job to do. Now, when we, when we first got down to the 35 I think our aggregate in, every, every one of them had done a tour of ops. I think the aggregate was over two hundred. And so here we are at 35 Squadron as what we called a sprog crew, a new crew. And the first op that we were asked to do we were called a supporter. That was the bottom rank. Now, we would go in exactly the same way. Drop bombs with main force but carefully examine the work of what the Pathfinders did and so that’s as we got more experienced we got a different job to do. We didn’t carry bombs. We carried incendiaries. But we carried flares and as flares were required by the Master Bomber well we would drop them according to what was required.
AP: So you said that there were different levels of Pathfinders.
DL: Yes.
AP: So support was one of the bottom one.
DL: Yeah. I was trying to think of some of the levels. What was second? Supporter. An illuminator. Now, an illuminator would [pause] a raid is controlled wholly by the Master Bomber. Now, the Master Bomber would go in twenty minutes ahead of, ahead of main force with other Pathfinder aircraft and as an illuminator we’d go in early and we would drop an illuminator flare which would light up the whole of the area we were going to bomb. So, if we were bombing Nuremberg the illuminator would go in. If we were bombing the railway yards at Nuremberg the illuminator would light it up so bright that the Master Bomber could see quite clearly what he was looking for. And when he found the marshalling yards he would ask for a red flare to be dropped. And there would be a Pathfinder aircraft carrying red flares. And then when the red flare was dropped the Master Bomber would assess to where it was to where it should be. For example if it dropped on the Adelaide Oval instead of the Adelaide Railway Station he would be able to tell the main force of bombers it’s not in the right position and so on. And then the Jerries would start dropping red so we as Pathfinders would have to change them to green or something like that. And then others were visual marker. You could, dropping flares visually. You could see. And blind marking. You’d drop them at night. Or drop them above clouds. There was markers on little parachutes.
AP: How would you know where you were when you were above the clouds in that sense?
DL: Where that’s where navigators came in. They were, the navigator in Pathfinders had to be spot on. My navigator got the DSO when we finished.
AP: Wow.
DL: He came with the DFC and Bar. He got the, he got the DSO. He had to be, we worked to a tenth of a second and yeah, he was pretty sure he was right. He would have visual. He would have blind markers and they would drop them in the air but of course they had they would hang on parachutes so of course they’d drift all over the place. Then they had visual centrerers. That’s another name I can think of. The top job was Master Bomber. The second was the Deputy Master Bomber. You could get to Master Bomber class for example and never do a Master Bomber raid. Because there were eight squadrons in Pathfinders and each of them had their Master Bombers I guess. And we became Master Bomber status. You were given an extra crew member. There was so much radar equipment in a Pathfinder plane that the navigator just couldn’t handle it all. So, we had an extra man that was called a set operator. And he would just work entirely with, with a navigator.
AP: And would he be next to the navigator?
DL: Next to the navigator, yeah.
AP: On the same bench.
DL: Yeah. Just working all the —
AP: A bit squeezy.
DL: With all the equipment. Yeah.
AP: Wow. And so what, what level did you — what were you?
DL: I got to Master Bomber level.
AP: You got Master Bomber.
DL: Yeah.
AP: Did you ever do any Master Bomber raids?
DL: Yeah. I did. I did quite a few.
AP: Tell me about that.
DL: Hmmn?
AP: Tell me about that. I’ve never spoken to a Master Bomber before so —
DL: [laughs] I just told you about it. Just get there first. The Master Bomber is the first to get there and the last to leave and he’s flying around all the time assessing what’s going on.
AP: How would you communicate with the rest of the crews?
DL: By just voice over.
AP: On VHF. Or on the, what would they call it?
DL: I don’t, no. It wasn’t VHF.
AP: It wasn’t.
DL: No. It was, I don’t know what they called it but they were all on the same channel.
AP: Yeah.
DL: And the Master Bomber did voice over.
AP: RT.
DL: We would just tell them what to do.
AP: Excellent. So ok, how many, how many trips did you do with Pathfinders?
DL: Thirty eight, thirty seven.
AP: Thirty seven. Golly. Do any of those stick out in your memory?
DL: Do what?
AP: Do any of those stick out in your memory? Same sort of question we had before?
DL: The same sort. The same sort of things happened. We used to say in [laughs] on the squadron, Pathfinders squadron if anybody came back on four engines we used to rib them. We used to joke with them and say, ‘Haven’t you been there? Where did you drop your bombs?’ [laughs] One, one fella I remember he took the ribbing so [pause] so much to heart that on one occasion when he came back he called up for his turn to land and he was given his turn to land. And when he got down to number one turn to land on his downwind stretch he cut one motor [laughs]
AP: Fair enough.
DL: That was the sort of things that happened though.
AP: Actually just ripping off that for a moment. The landing procedure when you all came back from a raid. All your aircraft are arriving at more or less the same time.
DL: Oh yes.
AP: How did that work?
DL: Well, more or less the same time.
AP: Yes. How was that organised because obviously only one can land at once.
DL: Yeah. Oh well, we had to stay while we were over enemy territory we had to stay as we, you know, as the raid instruction said. We couldn’t, we couldn’t drop our bombs and just put the nose down and whizz for home. We had to stay where we were supposed to be. But as soon as we crossed the enemy coast, to cross the English Channel it was everyone for himself. But we would get back. We’d come in on a beam. The pilot’s mostly would come in on a beam and we, we’d get back to our aerodrome and call up with the call sign, whatever it is and say, and say, request, ‘Request permission to land.’ And back would come the control, ‘Your position to land is number six. Circle aerodrome at six thousand feet.’ Something like that. And then he’d gradually bring you down to five, and four and three and two. Yeah.
AP: Yeah, that’s how it sort of how it works today.
DL: That’s how it worked.
AP: The beginnings of air traffic control.
DL: The first in, best dressed, [laughs] the one with the fastest plane.
AP: Alright. Were, you told me about, in your previous or earlier on actually, that’s right. You told me something you used to do instead of going to the pub with your Pathfinder crew.
DL: Well, yes, when I got this Pathfinder crew they were all top blokes. And, but when we had a day off flying and there’s nothing on tonight most of the crews would go down to the local pub. Most of them, if not all of them. And when, the first time we were off flying someone said to us, ‘Look, we’re all going down to the pub. How about coming down?’ Were inviting us to come down. And we said yes. I said, ‘Yes, ok. We’ll be there.’ But just before we left to go down to the local pub the rear gunner came up to me and said, ‘Junior [laughs] how about we don’t go down to the pub till later?’ He said, ‘I’d like to have our crew stay behind for an hour and I’d like to talk to you about, all of you, about aircraft recognition.’ Now, the rear gunner on Pathfinders I had, he was an expert on aircraft recognition. He was a Londoner. But boy he knew every, every aircraft backwards. And I said, ‘Oh yes. Ok.’ So we told all the others that we wouldn’t be down ‘til an hour later. And he put us in a room and showed us shots. How to recognise enemy aircraft and our aircraft. Amazing. He was absolutely amazing. So we had an hour with him, seven of us. And then we hopped down to the pub. Now, on the next time it came up one of the others, perhaps the navigator said, ‘Listen, Jimmy had you back for an hour last time. How about me having an hour?’ So I said, ‘Ok.’ And so the same thing happened except the navigator, he told us all about his equipment and how it worked and everything else. And then the third time the engineer had a go. And we were already, in fact we got quite a name and people used to rib us and call us all sorts of names and laughed and joked. Until one day one of the other, we were going and we were off and one of the other crew’s pilots came over and said, ‘Listen, we know that you stay behind every time,’ to, you know we used to do parachute drill and we did all sorts of things. And the pilot said, ‘Look, do you mind if we join you?’ And I said, ‘No I don’t mind at all.’ But I said, ‘Why join us? Why don’t you do it yourself?’ And so he did it himself. And it wasn’t long before every crew in that squadron was doing exactly the same thing. They would stop behind and an hour later at the pub, incredible, incredible. But oh boy we had, the crew, the crew I had were out of this world. I’ll tell you something funny about that too. Do you know that I flew with them for I don’t know how long and I did not know their names, their surnames, and I don’t think they knew mine. I was, I was Junior and that was it. No, surnames. What names. For, yeah for example, the bomb aimer’s name was Rusty when we were at PNSU, Pathfinder Training Unit. He introduced himself as Rusty. He was a London policeman. He had the DFC. He was Rusty. Now, what the Rusty meant I’ve got no idea. And the navigator was a New Zealander. He was Pat. His name, no I’m sorry we knew their surnames. We didn’t know their Christian names. His name was, he was called Pat. He was Patrick. What his Christian name was we had no idea. The engineer was Titch. A little Canadian. Flying Officer Lloyd. Didn’t know his, didn’t know his Christian name. And there was seven of them. Never knew. Jimmy, the rear gunner, we called him Jimmy but he didn’t have a J in his [laughs] he wasn’t J something Hughes. I knew their surnames. Didn’t know their Christian name. Incredible. And they didn’t know mine.
AP: One of the other, he was a Halifax pilot that I interviewed in Melbourne recently said, I think it was his mid-upper gunner, his surname was Bill so he was always Dingle.
DL: Yeah.
AP: That was it. He never found out his Christian name.
DL: That’s right. I’m the same.
AP: Seventy years later.
DL: Incredible. That’s good you’ve heard that story before.
AP: Yeah, a similar sort of thing to you.
DL: He was on a Halifax. What squadron was he on?
AP: He was 578 and then 462.
DL: 462 was an Australian squadron.
AP: It certainly was. Yeah.
DL: Yeah.
AP: Only on 462 very very briefly.
DL: Where were they?
AP: Oh bugger I can’t remember now. Burn, at 578. I don’t know where 462 was.
DL: No. I don’t. I don’t know where 578, I’ve never heard of 578.
AP: A place called Burn they were.
DL: Yeah.
AP: Anyway. They came out of 51 squadron same way as you.
DL: 462 was 4 Group. Halifaxes.
AP: 466 was the other one.
DL: 466. 461 was too.
AP: Yeah.
DL: But they were 3 Group I think. 461 were 3 Group, I think.
AP: I can’t remember. Alright, so you mentioned something earlier as well. Just going back to some notes that I took down.
DL: That’s alright. No.
AP: Something about as flight commander you could only do one trip a month and there was a reason for that, that you were going to say.
DL: Well the reason for that was when the CO of the squadron went and took all the officers with him an instruction was ordered that flight commanders were only allowed to do one a month. That was interesting too because the other, the other two got a bit of a reputation of picking what they thought might be an easy trip. No trip was easy. But they, some were easier than others of course. I used to put up on the board, on the 1st of the month that Leicester flies on the, well on this case, Leicester flies on the 28th of August. And my crew knew that as well so they could do all of their planning. And when it came to the 28th of August there was no trips that night. No flying. 29th the same. The 30th — Nuremberg [laughs] so that’s how I got to do that. They used to wait until they saw what the others used to wait, well the story thought of. They used to wait until they found out what the target before they decided.
AP: What that might be.
DL: Yeah. Yeah. Take the nearest one, or the shortest one. Or the less defended one or whatever.
AP: What else? Yes, alright. So you have a DFC and Bar I believe.
DL: Yeah.
AP: That’s also unusual. I haven’t met someone with a DFC and Bar before.
DL: Haven’t you?
AP: No.
DL: You know what that is.
AP: It’s a second DFC.
DL: Yeah.
AP: Yeah, so —
DL: Yeah, they don’t give you two medals.
AP: No, just the one little bar.
DL: I’m sorry to ask you that. Of course you’d know. But, you know, I had an interview last Monday, Anzac day and the reporter was a girl. She just didn’t know anything. She hadn’t done her homework. She didn’t know what the questions to ask. She had no idea what a DFC was let alone a DFC and bar, you see.
AP: So why do you have two DFCs?
DL: Why? Well, I think one was given for the Nuremberg raid, and the other was towards the end of, and I can’t think what raid it is now.
AP: So they were both —
DL: They were both immediate awards.
AP: Immediate, they were, both. Wow. That’s also unusual.
DL: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: So we might have to dig the citation out. I’m’ sure it’s there somewhere. Ok, cool. So how did your second tour, well your Pathfinder tour, end?
DL: It ended, well, we had been discussing it for a while. And we thought we had, had done enough. But I applied for a job. The then CO for Qantas was in England and this is early ’45. The war is coming down a bit. And he was recruiting pilots to restart the Australia — England route for Qantas using aircraft called Lancastrians. And I applied for that and was one of eight. They wanted eight pilots. And I applied for that and was actually picked to be one of the eight pilots. But when I got back to Australia I was still in the air force of course. I had to be discharged and I was discharged being deaf in one ear or not, not requiring the, not reaching the required deafness. And the Civil Aviation at that time, Department of Civil Aviation — Federal. Would not accept anybody or Qantas would not accept anybody who had any defect and so I was put out. I had stayed in the air force and I went to all sorts of troubles. But that’s what happened. I just missed out on flying for Qantas. The, it’s always been a bit of a sore point with me. When I joined up in 1941 with the air force medicals we had to go through an ear, nose and throat specialist. Now, when I came out for the discharge five years later, four years later, we had to go through the same medical procedure. Who’s there? The same, the same doctor. And the first words he said to me was, because I came back with quite a bit of publicity actually because of decoration and being a squadron leader at nineteen and all that sort of thing, and the first thing he said to me, ‘Oh you whippersnappers come back and you think you own the world.’ And he just, he gave me a bad report on my ears. And although I, it didn’t show in any other way and my own GP I went to who I saw during the war, before the war, he gave me a test — no. Nothing was wrong. But I went through all sorts of tests and the Department of Aviation said no. Qantas said no, so that was it. But I’m not, I don’t regret that because the fellows that did stay in, none of them liked it. You know, you had to fly straight and level. You couldn’t, you couldn’t spill a cup of tea [laughs] they just sat there and the aircraft did it all for them. So that’s the story.
AP: That’s not so, not so exciting for a bomber pilot, with sixty eight flights under his belt I’m sure.
DL: No. No.
AP: Alright, so your tour in Pathfinders. When did you actually finish flying with Pathfinders? When was your last trip?
DL: February. January ’45.
AP: So, you pretty well, at that point having done well more than the minimum you could pretty well pull the plug yourself.
DL: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. Ok. And then go in. Ok, so coming home. How did, how did you get home?
DL: Flew home.
AP: Flew home.
DL: I flew home and as [pause] well we were temporarily, the eight of us were temporarily discharged from the air force and we flew two planes home. A Liberator and a York to Australia. We landed in Perth and then we were back in the air force. And we couldn’t go to be Qantas staff until we had been officially discharged from the air force. So that’s what happened. We actually flew home.
AP: And so you, you flew the aeroplane yourself.
DL: Yeah.
AP: Wow.
DL: Well eight of us did.
AP: Yeah. Nice. So you said something about publicity on your return. I’m just sort of curious as to what that was like for a twenty something year old.
DL: Well just that you know south SA boy makes good. And, you know, that sort of thing. And I still get a bit of that actually. You know on the march on Anzac Day the chap doing the commentating had obviously done his homework and he said, you know, he mentioned my name and said all about, you know, sixty eight trips and all that. My actual log book shows as sixty seven. But there was one trip where we had crossed the coast, enemy coast. And the raid — we were all recalled. It was aborted, officially aborted. And at the time we weren’t allowed to count it as an op. But later on —
AP: It did count.
DL: We could count it. Yeah.
AP: Right. How did you find readjusting to civilian life?
DL: Very, very hard. It was very difficult because, you know, we left home as we were eighteen and we came back we were twenty two, twenty three. All of the jobs had gone that we would have been perhaps been promoted to. Someone else had got those. And it was very hard to get anything. In the six months from the time that I left school at the end of 1940 until I was called up for the air force, or eight months I worked as an office boy for a company. A manufacturer’s agent in the rag trade. And when I came back of course that office boy job was no good. I wasn’t a boy anymore anyway. But he knew someone in one of the retail stores and I got a job as an Adelaide representative of a Sydney company in the rag trade. But unfortunately the chap in Sydney, the owner of the company in Sydney died at the age of forty two and it all fell through. So I then got in to the food trade. I worked for Cadbury’s for four years [laughs] and then worked for other food companies right until I retired in 1988.
AP: I guess the final question, possibly the most important one. How do you think, or what do you think is the legacy of Bomber Command and how do you want to see it remembered?
DL: Well, it’s a hard question but whenever I hear the words Bomber Command mentioned I think of the hundred and twenty five thousand boys that joined. A hundred and twenty five thousand. Plus of a hundred and twenty five thousand. Of which fifty five thousand would die. Forty four percent, you know. It’s a big — and in Pathfinders it was fifty percent. I think of them often. Particularly on Anzac Day and Day of Remembrance and any time I see a Bomber Command bloke has died whose name’s in the paper. It’s hard. I’m a very emotional type and I cry very easily and it really — Anzac Day gets to me. But I consider I was proud to be part of Bomber Command. I don’t know how else to put it. They played their part. They’ve been criticised badly in some areas for what they did and how they did it. I have no apology for that. I did what I was told. I did what I was trained to do. What else could I say? I call them a hundred twenty five thousand heroes. A hero to me, Adam is not the bloke that kicks the goal after the siren that wins the game. The hero is the bloke that stands on the front line and gets shot at. Does that sound alright?
AP: That’s a very emphatic way to —
DL: I’d like to talk about defences.
AP: Go for it.
DL: People often ask me what I considered to be the worst. I always say searchlights. You can dodge fighters, you can dodge flak with a bit of luck. You can be hit by a fighter. You can be hit by flak and get away with it at times, you know. A lot of people didn’t. It depends where it was hit. But searchlights were impossible. They were so bright that a pilot could not see a thing. Could not see a thing. And I can say, and once a plane gets caught in searchlights, one searchlight, well the other hundred and fifty all, yeah and you form a cone like that. The fighters can see you. The gunners can see you on the ground. None of the crew can see you. It’s absolute curtains. So, for that reason I say searchlights were the dangerous things as far as I concerned. And unless you were trained and told really how to avoid them it was curtains. Once you got caught you couldn’t get out of it. But you could fly through them and that’s what I used to do. I mean, I’m doing a hundred and sixty mile an hour. The fella on the ground training the searchlights can’t move that quickly here. So you’ve gone before he can get you. The thing I feared most was an engine failure on takeoff fully loaded. I had that on one occasion. I lost power on one engine. It’s frightening. You know, you think you’re going to not take off and you land with your bombs on, you know. How does that cover it do you think?
AP: That’s pretty good. Any final words before I —
DL: No. I thank you, and I thank you for what you are doing and the work that your committee and everyone else is doing. I think it’s marvellous. I’m glad that Michael did get in it because he you know he went to England for the, me with the Queen there.
AP: Yeah. He’s quite proud to show that photo.
DL: Yeah. I’m quite, very pleased with what you’re doing.
AP: Good. That’s absolutely the least we can do.
DL: You’re on the last Sunday in May are you?
AP: First one in June.
DL: First Sunday in June. Originally it started off to be the first Sunday in June. Why has it changed?
AP: It’s a contentious thing at the moment.
DL: Yeah.
AP: The first Sunday in June is the official day.
DL: Yeah.
AP: That’s in Canberra.
DL: Yeah.
AP: Canberra’s sort of the sort of main one.
[telephone rings)
DL: Can you excuse me a minute?
AP: Yeah. Go for it.
[ recording paused for chat]
AP: That’s alright. What were we talking about? Oh yeah. That’s right, the day that changed. So it was in, in Canberra and it still is the first Sunday in June except if it’s the long weekend when it’s the one before I think. So the concept was the Bomber Command Commemorative Day. You know, supposed to be the same day around the country and around the world.
DL: Yeah.
AP: I don’t know why it changed in Adelaide. Different Groups organised all the different ceremonies.
DL: Yeah.
AP: So it’s RAFA here and in Western Australia. It’s the Queensland University Squadron in Brisbane. I don’t know who does the Sydney one because most of them are in Canberra. And with our Group which is different. Separate to RAFA that does the Melbourne one. I’m of the opinion and our group in Melbourne is of the opinion that we should have them on different days. I think the Canberra one is the big one. That’s what everyone sort of wants to go to and I think all the individual States should be on a different day because that gives you a chance to, I can go to the Melbourne one and then go to Canberra. So it’s a bit like Anzac Day. I don’t know what it’s like in Adelaide but certainly in Melbourne and Sydney Anzac Day, the day itself that’s the day of the big march in the city.
DL: Yes.
AP: The Sunday before is typically when all the little suburban RSL’s hold their services. So that allows the veterans to go to their local one and then also go to the big one in the city. I see it as a similar sort of concept for the Bomber Command Day. However, in Melbourne there’s a long standing booking at the Shrine on the day that we want. So we’re going to have to, we’re still working on that. We’re going to have to negotiate to get the day that we want. But that’s what it is so I don’t know why it changed here. I’m in contact with Dave Hillman who organises it for RAFA South Australia.
DL: It won’t change here you say.
AP: I don’t think. I don’t know. I don’t know why it changed and I don’t know.
DL: I would have thought David would because originally it was the first day in June.
AP: Yeah. Yeah. I know last year the one in Canberra had to change.
DL: Yeah.
AP: Because of the clash of bookings.
DL: Yeah.
AP: So it actually changed after it had been advertised if you like but yeah I don’t really know. It was useful for me because I could go to both of them.
DL: Yeah.
AP: But this year I’m going to Canberra for the Saturday night. Flying back to Melbourne Sunday morning and then going to the ceremony in Melbourne. Anyway, yet more travelling. Now I’ll stop the recording because we are still going here but I’ll cut this bit out.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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ALeicesterD160501
PLeicesterD1601
Title
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Interview with David Leicester
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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02:04:02 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Creator
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Adam Purcell
Date
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2016-05-01
Description
An account of the resource
David Leicester grew up in Australia and worked as an office boy before he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force. He completed 68 operations as a pilot with 35, 158 and 640 Squadrons and as a Master Bomber with Pathfinders. He describes how he always kept his own parachute rather than hand it back and always asked the same person to pack it for him.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Yorkshire
Contributor
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Julie Williams
158 Squadron
35 Squadron
640 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
bombing
crewing up
Flying Training School
forced landing
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Master Bomber
mess
military ethos
military living conditions
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
pilot
RAF Cranwell
RAF Honeybourne
RAF Leconfield
RAF Lissett
searchlight
superstition
target indicator
Tiger Moth
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/297/3452/PMcBeanLW1602.1.jpg
8c7fbfb2845990a68d2b4ba40cd383c3
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/297/3452/AMcBeanLW161022.2.mp3
c1d0e5a458132c81e8eb1429d0346aaa
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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McBean, Lachie
Lachlan William McBean
Lachlan W McBean
Lachlan McBean
L W McBean
L McBean
Description
An account of the resource
117 Items. Collection concerns Lachlan William "Lachie" McBean (1924 - 2019, 430629 Royal Australian Air Force). He was a pilot whose crew had just finished their course at a Heavy Conversion Unit when the European war ended. Collection consist of an oral history interview and photographs of people, places and aircraft.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Lachlan McBean and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-10-22
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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McBean, LW
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AP: This interview for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive is with Lachie McBean who was a pilot at the tail end of World War Two. The interview is taking place at Lachie’s home in Ballarat in Victoria. It’s the 22nd of October 2016 and my name is Adam Purcell. Lachie, start from the beginning. Can you tell me something about your early life? Where and how you grew up and what you were doing before you enlisted?
LM: Yes, Adam. I was a country boy. I, we came from a place, a town called Seymour in Victoria. My people originally came from Moulamein in New South Wales but I was still, I was going to school in Geelong when I turned eighteen and on turning eighteen a friend of mine and myself both joined the air force. And we were told that we had to finish our school year out before we would be called up. So we did finish our school year out and then in January the following year we were called up then. So, I didn’t have any work experience or anything like that before I went into the air force.
AP: What, what were your thoughts and how old were you when you heard that war had been declared?
LM: Oh I think I would have been about fourteen or so and I remember, I remember the occasion very well when Mr Menzies announced that Australia had declared war. It’s quite vivid in my mind. I guess in those days being a school boy it didn’t, it didn’t have a great Effect on us but we were aware of people joining the services and going away. It was a little bit ahead for us being only about fourteen or so at the time.
AP: Did you have any thoughts about whether or how you might have been involved yourself eventually?
LM: Not initially. Not initially, Adam but as the time goes on when we were getting towards the age of eighteen it wasn’t discussed amongst school, school mates at all but we all, I think we all just automatically understood that we would be joining the services. There was no thought of, not in my mind, of doing anything else. I think everybody, almost everybody, just assumed they would be in the services.
AP: What — did you sort of see any effects of the war as like in those few years before you enlisted yourself. So home front type things.
LM: Sorry I didn’t —
AP: Sorry. Did you see any effects of the war? Like in, on the home front in the first sort of few years before you enlisted yourself? So as a, as a civilian essentially did the war have any effect on your life in Australia?
LM: Oh yes, certainly. Certainly by the, being aware of the people who were joining and going away and yes we were certainly as school kids aware of the effects of the war, but we certainly were pretty sheltered by it. Looking back on it I think we should have been more aware. But we still remember all of the, all of the more important things that were happening through newspaper reports of course and radio.
AP: Why did you pick the air force?
LM: It seemed to be an automatic choice. I just, I wouldn’t know when we picked the air force. I think I must have been always a little interested in the air force because I did know a little bit about some of the aeroplanes that were used prior to that. I remember, for instance, the Hawker Demon, the Bristol Bulldog. There was another one that I [pause] won’t come to mind at the moment. I remember when the Avro Anson first, first came out to Australia, well, pre-war. So I must have had a leaning. Leaning that way. I certainly didn’t give it a lot of thought.
AP: It was always, always going to be the air force. Alright. What about the enlistment process? So, once you were, once you were called up what happened next. How did you enlist? Where did you have to go and what did you have to do?
LM: Well, we, I went, I went to Melbourne. I can’t think exactly of where it was. We, in civilian clothing of course. We were put on to a troop train to go to Sydney that night. There was a troop train ran every night from Melbourne to Sydney. I well recall going for the troop train because there were all army, mostly army personnel on there and we were dressed in civilian clothing, young people. They knew we were in the air force. We got, we got a lot of cheek from the army blokes. And I do remember we were very pleased to get shut into the carriages that were there. Away from the [pause] what were they calling us? Blue orchids or something to that effect. But I know that we were quite pleased to get away from the army thing and I can even remember an incident on that troop train going. We were stopped outside, outside Wagga. I think it was just the southern side of Wagga. There was a big army camp there and a lot of the army people used to come from the camp, hop through and the train would stop and they would get a ride into Wagga on the troop train. And one of the, one of the army fellas was trying to get through the fence and he got his pants caught on one of the wires. And a train stopped there with hundreds of people hanging out the windows barracking at him [laughs]
AP: Can you remember much of the interview or medical process that you had to go through before you were accepted?
LM: No. I remember very little. Very little about it. We did a medical. We did a medical I’m not sure if it was on that day. Certainly we had to do a medical, a medical. But, no, I don’t remember any details about that.
AP: Were you on the reserve for any length of time or did you just go straight in?
LM: No. I went straight in.
AP: Straight in. Scratch that question off the list. Alright, so you were on a troop train up to Sydney. Presumably your Initial Training School was at Bradfield Park.
LM: It was at Bradfield Park, yes.
AP: Tell me something of that. What happened there? What was the place like?
LM: Well, it, it was a surprising place because it was the nearest railway station I believe was Lindfield and quite a built up area and the Bradfield Park camp was not very far from the station. Probably about a mile. But when at, at the camp you wouldn’t know you were in a built up area. There was a very steep bank at the back of the camp going down to the Lane Cove River. It seemed although, although in a, virtually in a built up area it wasn’t noticeable at all there.
AP: What sort of things happened there? What can you remember of what you did? What you learned.
LM: Well, certainly the thing that I most remember there was the drill instructor that we had. He was, he was a corporal, Corporal Sheriff. And Corporal Sheriff had more power than any officer that I’ve ever came across I think. He used to be a professional boxer and showed all the signs of it. He had a flattened nose. I had heard of cauliflower ears before I went into the air force but once I saw Corporal Sheriff I knew exactly what cauliflower ears means. His grammar was out of this world really. He, he would say to you things like, ‘What was the first thing I learned yous was when I seen yous?’ And you had to answer to him, ‘Corporal that yousil tell us nothing wrong.’ He wouldn’t, he wouldn’t stand you saying, saying, ‘You wouldn’t tell us anything wrong corporal.’ You had to say that, ‘Yous’il tell us nothing wrong.’ And I have great memories of Corporal Sheriff. And although he was rough and tough I now regard him as one of the people who had a lot of influence on my life. He was a strict disciplinarian. Disciplinarian. And he wouldn’t stand for anything but your best effort. And I think I learned a lot from Corporal Sheriff.
AP: What was the accommodation like at Bradfield Park?
LM: Oh well, I thought it was excellent. We were in a Nissen hut, about thirty people I think. And very good, and very good meals. Yes. It was, it was, naturally from a kid coming straight from school it was an experience. I hadn’t had any experience of the outside world and that was all new to me but I coped pretty well.
AP: Some of the, can you tell me some of the, well about some of the other people who were in your course? In your intake. Like — did you make any mates in particular?
LM: Well yes. I actually did go, one of my friends, the friend who we joined up together did go in with me so that was a help. And also another. I had another friend who unexpectedly was called up in the same draft. He was in a different flight from me but I knew him very well. But there were a few characters in amongst them. I had been used to, because I’d been at boarding school, I’d been used to living with other people. But there was certainly a few characters. One — Kevin Brennan, I remember was a great character. Another one — Lou Murray who was older than most of us. He was twenty five or six and had been in the army and Lou was a great character. That, we all got on pretty well together.
AP: There was a lot of helping each other out with the lessons and the study and all that sort of thing as well.
LM: I don’t know so much about helping each other out. Yes. I suppose we did. We all, we all [pause] well, we all coped. We all seemed to cope and we had, I can’t remember a lot about it but it was almost in a way like going back to school again because we, we had, most of the day was occupied with lectures of some sort or other.
AP: That was going to lead me to the next question. Was there any sort of time off or time spare at ITS and what did you do with it if there was? Was it go, go, go the whole time?
LM: We, we did have leave in the [pause] I’m not sure if it wasn’t every second weekend. No. It might have been every weekend we had leave and could go in to Sydney and do. Do little things. There wasn’t much in the way of sports from what I, what I remember. Quite a bit of work in the gym. But no, I don’t remember. I think we were kept pretty well, pretty occupied. I don’t know what we did in the evenings but we, we coped. I just don’t remember what we did in the evenings.
AP: That’s alright.
LM: We were not allowed out. We were not off away from camp in the evenings.
AP: So, I think it was at ITS that you did a selection board or something where they chose where you were going next.
LM: Yes. We had a Category Selection Board that we had to front up and I well remember that because I was the last one interviewed on, on the particular day. It was considered to be a pretty big ordeal for, for trainees to front the Category Selection Board. And when I was called, called into it there were three officers on the board and I certainly remember it well because Corporal Sheriff marched me in. He, he gave me, you know, ‘Right turn. Halt,’ in front of the, of the officers, ‘Left turn.’ And then said, ‘Sir,’ which meant that he handed me over to the officers. And at the time I thought I didn’t think. I thought there was something wrong with the interview. It didn’t seem to be going smoothly. And then I realised that I was, had put so much attention in trying to do everything correctly that I had forgotten to salute. We were supposed to give them a smart salute. And I waited until there seemed to be an appropriate answer and I threw a salute to the three officers. And something strange happened then because the one who was in the centre had a lot of papers in his hand and he picked these papers up and put them up in front of his face and he seemed to be shaking a bit. But the officer on each side of him both dropped their pencils on the floor and they took a fair while to get their pencils back again. I wondered. And when they did one of the officers made some sort of a comment which I thought was a bit like a school-girlish comment and they all burst into laughter. And of course, you know having this this recruit forgetting to salute them was a great joke to them. And after that the interview went, went pretty well. I know that they kept talking about my navigation. They asked what category I’d like to be and I said, ‘A pilot,’ and they kept talking about and saying my navigation was pretty good, ‘What would you I think if we made you a navigator?’ And I said, ‘Oh well if I’m made a navigator I guess that’s right.’ Anyhow, it turned out at the finish that they did select me for my first choice so that was lucky. But actually when I forgot to salute I was more worried about Corporal Sherriff standing behind me than I was about the officers. And in fact now that I remember it that Corporal Sherriff took me to task. He said, ‘You’s has disgraced me.’ [laughs] and he sent me down to his hut. He said, ‘At the double.’ He said, ‘There’ll be, there’s a couple of pairs of boxing gloves behind the door. Go and get those and meet me in the gym.’ Which I did. I was terrified about that and when I got there Corporal Sherriff was working on a punching bag and he was a lather of sweat and anyhow I thought this looks pretty bad but he said to me, ‘Put them down there and get out of me way. Clear off.’ [laughs] Which I did pretty smartly.
AP: Excellent.
LM: He was a great character, Corporal Sherriff.
AP: Obviously had you well, he had you well figured out. Or he had trainees well figured out.
LM: My word he did.
AP: Yeah [laughs] very good. Alright, so you’ve just found out you're a pilot. You then get shuffled off to EFTS.
LM: Yes. I went.
AP: Where was that?
LM: I went off to EFTS on Tiger Moths at Narrandera in New South Wales. Southern New South Wales. Yes. Can’t remember. I think there were two or three of us there but I don’t remember the other people who went there. So —
AP: What, what happened at Narrandera? Tell me about the learning there.
LM: Narrandera. Well it was, it was pretty interesting. The, it was in the wintertime and I’ve always thought since that you didn’t know what a frost was like until you’ve experienced one at Narrandera. You’d sometimes be flying at 7:30 in the morning and you could see the whole countryside absolutely white below as if it were covered with snow. It was very, and of course an open cockpit. When we got down you would probably not be able to feel your legs ‘til probably 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning. But Narrandera was good. Yes, we enjoyed that. And that’s about it, I think, for Narrandera.
AP: A question I have to answer every pilot — tell me about your first solo.
LM: Yeah, my first solo was interesting in that I was having a bit of trouble landing and I thought that I was probably going to get scrubbed because I could do, handle everything else but I was having a bit of trouble landing. And when it came to the critical time they gave me another instructor and he straight away, he straight away identified the problem that I was having with it. I was able to correct that to land it perfectly well. I had about two flights with him and then he, he hopped out and said, ‘You’re on your own,’ and so that was, I had no trouble afterwards landing. I think I was, I didn’t realise that, I think I was trying to sort of to wheel them on and didn’t realise, and hadn’t been really instructed by my original instructor about three pointing them. But it was just a matter of just one, you know, one comment, or one from the new instructor that fixed it.
AP: I can, yeah, I have a story that’s almost exactly the same. I was flying at Bankstown in a Cherokee and I’d completely forgotten how to land.
LM: Yeah.
AP: This was shortly after I’d got my licence. I just couldn’t land it. New aeroplane, new instructor ‘cause I was getting checked out there.
LM: Yeah.
AP: And I did about two hours with him and then, or two or three hours with him and I just couldn’t figure it out. And then I went with another instructor who had something like thirty thousand instructional hours.
LM: Yes.
AP: And he went, ‘You’re looking at the wrong place on the runway.’ It was as simple as that.
LM: Yeah.
AP: Fixed it. Never had a problem since.
LM: Well, I was trying to bring them in on a, I think, touch the wheels down instead of just holding it off. Stalling it on to the ground.
AP: Very good.
LM: Yeah. Very, very simple and very effective from the new instructor.
AP: How — did you spend any time there as one pilot’s called it, tarmac terrier? Starting engines up and things like that before you started.
LM: No. No I didn’t do any of that. No. No.
AP: Just straight into it. After EFTS you went to a Service Flying Training School.
LM: I went to, on twin engines on Avro Ansons at a place called Mallala in South Australia. Just north of, north of Adelaide. And I really, I really enjoyed being at Mallala. And —
AP: What happened there? Why did you really enjoy it?
LM: For some reason we, we used to have, I think, three days off every second weekend at Mallala and we could go into Adelaide. I’m not a city person at all but I really liked Adelaide. I felt at home over in South Australia and have ever since actually. But it was, it was a cropping area around Mallala and we used to do a lot of cross country flights to interesting places. Up to the Flinders Ranges and Port Lincoln over to the, to the west. They were, used to fly those with, with two trainee pilots. One would be navigator on the way out and swap over. Swap over with the other pilot and the course was very interesting. But for some reason I seemed to feel at home over in Mallala and I didn’t, I didn’t realise until later in life that my forebears first came to Adelaide in South Australia. And an old forebear arrived in Adelaide in 1838 and became an overlander. And I just seemed to feel at home there. So yes I enjoyed Mallala. Yeah.
AP: There was Ansons you said. What did you think of the Anson?
LM: The Anson. Oh I really liked the old Anson. They seemed reliable and not complicated. And I think a lot of people were not very impressed with them but yes I’ve still got a soft spot for the old Anson. Yeah. But they, they seemed to me to be simple and safe, yeah I enjoyed them.
AP: Where did you go from Mallala? What was next?
LM: I think, Mallala — after Mallala was to [pause] must have been to the Melbourne Cricket Ground as embarkation depot I think.
AP: Tell me about the MCG.
LM: Well, the Melbourne Cricket Club, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, yes. It was an interesting place to be. I lived there for three weeks. Under no circumstance were we allowed to set foot on the ground itself but we had parade grounds on the tarmac in front of the, I think it was in front of the old, the original old members stand. Yes, three weeks there for — I actually was, I was meant to go overseas a little earlier than I did because I’d been given pre-embarkation leave. My mother had gone to live in Canberra at that time and I had only a few days. I think about four or five days embarkation leave and the train, I was late back because of a train not connecting and when I got back the rest of the boys were all ready to go overseas and I remained there another couple of weeks. And, and by doing so the ones that I had been with had gone on a ship via the Cape of Good Hope. And the ship that I travelled on went via New Zealand and the United States. So I probably would have selected that way of going.
AP: Right. Tell me about that boat then. Tell me about that trip to the UK.
LM: To the — well we were taken to Brisbane. We were in camp at a place just north of Brisbane for two or three nights and embarked on a, on an American troop carrier called the Matsonia. The Matsonia was almost empty because they had taken troops to New Guinea and we, we travelled from Brisbane quite close to Lord Howe Island. I would think probably only a mile off Lord Howe Island. They’d got these remarkable high cliffs that I’ve always remembered there. From there to Auckland. Not allowed off the ship at Auckland and then from there to San Francisco, and we had about a week or so in San Francisco which was pretty interesting to young blokes like we all were. Not long left school. About a four day trip across the United States by train through — I remember going through a tunnel called the Moffat Tunnel which was, I think was something like seven and three quarter miles long. The longest tunnel in the world. I remember seeing the first snow I had ever seen. The place might have been called [unclear]. Salt Lake City. Places like that. Passing through. Detroit. Passing through them and then we had a week or so in New York. The American people were absolutely great to us. I know that on at least two occasions some others and myself had had meals in a restaurant and had gone up to pay for it and been told it’s already been paid for. And people had already paid for them and not even come up and told you they were doing so. That happened at least on two occasions. So, yes the American people were great.
AP: Can you tell me some more about New York?
LM: More about New York.
AP: Yeah. And your — well you spent a week there. What sort of things did you do?
LM: I think —
AP: What did you think?
LM: Well, first of all at San Francisco when we had a week or so there we were, we were camped on an island in the San Francisco harbour which was quite close to the famous prison island which is [pause] won’t come to mind now but there is a famous prison island in San Francisco and we were quite close to that. But in New York we, I know that we were billeted for a few days with a doctor who took us to an opera. It was, the opera was called, I believe, “Carmen Jones,” and it was all black, all black cast. He took us to his country, his residence in the country further to the north. I can’t remember just where but I do remember it was very cold at the time and I was with a friend of mine called Doc Davies from , who came from Perth. And there was a pond. He had a country property. There was a pond on this property that he had which was covered in ice. It was a beaver pond. The pond had been made by beavers and I remember Doc being, I suppose silly enough but walking out on the ice there and went through the ice and into the freezing water. But he was able to get out easily enough but, it — we looked of course at all the buildings. The famous buildings in New York. I think most of us went to visit Jack Dempsey’s bar. He was, I think, had been World Heavyweight Boxing Champion prior to that. That was a famous place. And anyhow it was a great experience for young people. From young people from the country in Victoria.
AP: You’re not the first person to tell me about Jack Dempsey’s bar, so —
LM: Is that so?
AP: Yes. A lot of people have mentioned it.
LM: Yeah.
AP: Yeah very good. Alright. Then you go across to England.
LM: Yes. We, we went to, if I remember correctly there were only seventeen in our party and yes, we, I was put in charge of the baggage of this lot and I was taken down to the wharf with all the baggage. The day prior to our sailing I think it was. But however we travelled on the Queen Mary and in New York harbour tied up along, beside the Queen Mary was the Queen Elizabeth. So the two biggest ocean liners in the world were tied up together. We were fortunate to travel up together in the Queen Mary which was a great experience. There were lots of rumours. The Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth carried lots and lots of troops to, to England. And there were lots of stories about u-boats looking for them. Hunting them. However, we had a, we had a — our trip was ok. I believe that the trip that I did was to that time had the record number of troops on it than it had so far. And I understand that there were twenty two thousand troops on because there were a lot of American troops being taken to England prior to D-day. And I understand they had one soldier sleeping in a bunk in the daytime and a different one sleeping in the same bunk at night. And I can remember them having the canteens on the decks and the American troops had to line up. To line up at these and they’d have to, they’d get their rations slapped on to plates and then they had to run for about a hundred yards away. They had American service police who were belting them on the backside with a baton and saying, ‘Get moving buddy.’ And they’d belt them on the backside with batons to make them run so they would clear the area out and not be hanging around there. And I might add they’re talking about the meals on troop ships the meals we had on the American troop ship, the Matsonia were absolutely magnificent because the ship was almost empty and probably four or five course meals, unbelievable for troops. Yeah.
AP: Lovely. This is the first time obviously that you’ve been overseas isn’t it?
LM: Oh yeah.
AP: Yeah.
LM: Yes. Yes.
AP: It would have made a fairly big impact I imagine.
LM: A fair?
AP: A fairly big impact.
LM: Oh yes. Oh well, but I guess, I guess we took it all in our stride. It surprises me now that they didn’t seem to be big deals. All the young people just seemed to take it in their stride.
AP: So you, you then land in the UK.
LM: Yes, at Greenock.
AP: In Greenock. And presumably you then, you probably caught a train down to Brighton or something similar.
LM: Yes we would have caught a train to Brighton. That was, that was our first posting in England, to Brighton.
AP: What did you think of England? Seeing it for the first time as a young Australian.
LM: I guess again, I guess again we just took it in our stride. We just accepted what we, what we saw. I don’t remember having any particular thoughts about it. No. I can’t think of any immediate. Any impressions that I had.
AP: Did you, when was the first time that you realised you were now in a war zone?
LM: Oh well it didn’t take long to realise that because of course there were — beaches were, were fenced off with barbed wire along there. There were anti–aircraft guns on the beach front. More or less in front of our billets. We were billeted in a couple of the big hotels. There was the Royal and the Metro. I can’t remember which one I was in but I know there were plenty of signs of wartime then. You often used to see in the evenings the, off the coast you would see what certainly appeared to be gunfire. I understand the little motor torpedo boats used to get involved in little actions off the shore. You saw plenty of signs of that at night. Occasionally at Brighton, even at Brighton occasionally sirens going, air raid sirens going off. Oh no, it was soon very very obvious that [pause] I think we could get down to the beach. The beaches were not sand. They were, they were pebble beaches and absolutely marvellous for throwing stones. Skipping stones across the water. And I had one friend Henty Wilson and I — there was one place you could get down to the water and throw stones and we regularly went down throwing stones in the water there.
AP: Where did you go next, after Brighton?
LM: I can’t quite remember. I was at Brighton for, for a while. I don’t remember quite where I went but probably there was a, we went to a camp which was an interesting posting. We went to one called Credenhill near Hereford and it was not to do with flying. I can’t remember the purpose of the camp. We did a lot of exercises. Climbing over walls with nets on them and through big pipes and all that sort of thing. We did a lot of, did a lot of, a lot of exercises but it was interesting in that camp because after we’d been there for a few days all of the pilots on the course were called in to be given a talk by an RAF officer. And I don’t think we, I don’t think we understood what the talk was about really. But when he’d finished his talk he, he said, he asked us if any of us would volunteer to retrain as glider pilots. And we could hardly believe this. Nobody was remotely interested in it. He not only asked, he not only asked if anyone would volunteer. He more or less pleaded. He seemed to be quite insistent and, but still nobody even remotely thought of doing. We thought it was a backward step. And I don’t think, I don’t think we thought any more about it after that but about a month later after breakfast one morning I can recall.
[phone ringing, recording paused]
AP: Now you were saying about a month later, a month after —
LM: About a month later, near at the end of the course we were out after breakfast doing some exercises and we could hear the drone of aircraft, and suddenly aircraft appeared towing gliders. Going straight over our heads. Not at great height. Probably fifteen hundred feet or thereabouts and the sky became full of aircraft towing gliders and if you looked to the north as far as you could see and looked to the south as far as you could see they were gliders everywhere there. Strangely, at the time we didn’t immediately realise what was happening. It was later in the day that it was announced that the D-day landing had occurred and then of course we came to understand why we were asked if we would consider remustering as glider pilots.
AP: Wow. That’s great.
LM: So that was a, that was a pretty interesting posting to that place.
AP: Wow. That’s a good story. I like that one.
LM: Strangely I, I can’t I can still see them going over today but I can’t remember. I think they were mostly DC3s towing the very big gliders. Mostly DC3s and I can’t, I can’t even remember anyone commenting on what the aircraft were that were towing them. But the sky was full of aircraft as far as you could see. North and South and even from where they were coming they took quite some time to go over us.
AP: Suddenly we understood. I like it. Alright, were there any other training, well there were some more training units. After that did you do AFU or something like that? An Advanced Flying Unit.
LM: Oh yes. We did, we did a refresher course on Tiger Moths and I think we did a beam approach course on [pause] I can’t remember what they were but we did, did an AFU or whatever on Oxfords. Airspeed Oxfords, which were a bit of a step up from the Ansons I suppose they were but I would still prefer the Ansons myself. And yeah, that was I can’t think where we were doing that but it was quite a comprehensive course on Oxfords. There was, there was another interesting posting. I think it was actually where we were doing the Oxfords. Yes. I think it was. It was at a place, at a small village called Badminton which I understand is pretty well known because of horse trials they have there. But it was, it was interesting in that in doing this course and yes I’m pretty sure it was with, with the Oxford — on one of the runways the one that was mostly used on taking off it went directly over the top of a very, very large mansion. It was, I think about three storeys high this mansion, and stone. Had a magnificent looking garden and driveways around it and had a big area of park like grounds surrounding it with scattered trees and a herd of deer in the, this surrounding land. And the deer didn’t seem to be worried in any way by the aircraft going over but, but the home belonged to the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort if I remember correctly. But we, and when it took off and going up straight over the top of the building we’d only be probably two or three hundred feet over it, night flying as well. And we couldn’t understand why that would be allowed because, especially because it was the wartime residence of Queen Mary. Queen Mary being the wife of the late George the Vth. I think he died in [pause] probably seven or eight years prior to the war. Anyhow, that was Queen Mary’s wartime residence and here are these aircraft flying directly over the top of the thing. Could not, and once we were very fortunate that we were invited. The dominion blokes who were on the course. Probably about a dozen Aussies and three or four Kiwis. Might have been a Canadian, I think. A couple of South Africans probably. We were invited to go to this. It was called Badminton House I think. We were invited to go and watch a film being shown. The film was, “Pygmalion.” And we were taken over in a bus, shown into this very large room barely furnished that had a screen for showing the film on. It had a row of about oh probably seven or eight more or less comfortable chairs and then probably about three or four rows of wooden benches. And also had a table with cups and saucers and things on it. Very big room. Very high ceiling. I reckon probably about twenty foot ceiling or something. So we were shown into that room and after a while a door opened and two very good looking girls walked in there and that caused a fair bit of excitement amongst all of our blokes. And soon after that they were followed by a couple of fairly foppish looking young blokes about the same age. That caused a bit of comment too I can say. And then two or three other people came into the room and then Queen Mary herself came in and she stood at the doorway and she looked at all the troops and beamed at everyone, looking around. Then she took up her seat and we all sat down. The lights went out. They showed this film, “Pygmalion.” I think later called, “My Fair Lady.” A couple of, I know a few of us were a bit worried about that because we knew the word, ‘bloody,’ was used a couple of times [laughs] in this film. Anyhow, we watched the film and enjoyed that and when it was finished the lights went on and Queen Mary stood up. And we would only be sitting, you know, probably three rows, three to four rows behind her. Probably ten or fifteen feet or something behind her. And she stood up and she beamed at everybody again and walked out followed by the others. Not a word was spoken in the entire time from when the time the girls came in ‘til everyone went out. Not one word was spoken. We were then given our cups of tea and some sandwiches and off home. So we were pretty fortunate to have that opportunity. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. Presumably Church Broughton happened fairly soon thereafter.
LM: Went to Church Broughton.
AP: Yeah. You mentioned Church Broughton.
LM: Well we would have gone soon after Church Broughton was OTU. Where we crewed up. Crewed up at OTU. Yeah.
AP: Tell me about that process. How you crewed up.
LM: I don’t remember much about it. I mean, I think the process was that we were, a whole lot of us were let loose in a room and we had to make up our own crews I think. And I don’t really remember much about that process but we came out of it with a crew. We had, two of us were Aussies, a couple of Scotsmen and a couple of Englishmen. Six in the crew at that time. But, yeah. I just can’t remember much about the process. I think, I think most people are you know, sort of understood pretty well what happened but, you know I just don’t remember much about it.
AP: What sort of flying did you do at Operational Training Unit?
LM: Well it was on Wellingtons there and first of all it was mostly daytime. It was getting familiar because it was the biggest step of all, I think of, of going from an Oxford on to a Wellington. It was , yeah it was a bigger step than [pause] certainly bigger than previously and then of course there was a crew there to be thought of us as well. And yeah, quite, quite a big step and did, did mostly daylight until I guess we became familiar and competent with it. And mostly night flying after that. And it was, it was good joining with a crew. We seemed to get on pretty well I think and I think most crews got on. Most people on crews got on well. I really can’t think of any times when there was problems amongst the crews. I guess there were at times but I’m not aware of them and, you know, our crews certainly got on well.
AP: What was I going to ask you next? [pause] So you’ve now been in England for a little while. What sort of things did you get up to on leave and when you were off duty?
LM: Well when I happened to have a few relatives that I was able to visit. I certainly didn’t do enough visiting them but I had an aunt, a sister of my father who actually lived at Hove which was within walking distance of where I was at Brighton. And I’m really sorry to say that I can only remember going up a couple of times while I was there to visit them. I had two half-sisters who lived in, were living in England then. One that was more convenient to go. I used to go there on leave to stay with them. She lived in Stockbridge in Wiltshire, I think. Might have been Hampshire. Later on I had a motorbike and I did a little. We had a lot of leave later. In the latter part and I was able to get petrol for my motorbike. I’m not going to go into too much detail how some of that petrol was got [laughs] but we seemed to manage that and sometimes on a few occasions the whole of the crew went. I remember going, all going to London once because one of the English boys lived in London and I used to like trying to do sightseeing and visiting, looking at famous buildings like Winchester Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral and those sort of places. I can’t think too much more of leave but certainly at the, mostly at the latter time, of course, when the war had finished when we did have quite a bit of leave and that’s when I did the motorbike work.
AP: Can you tell me something more about that motorbike? What sort was it and where did you get it from?
LM: Well it was a Norton 500 and it was said to be the fastest bike on the station and the way I got it was that the flight engineer that joined our crew after we’d finished OTU, when we went on to Heavy Conversion Unit the flight engineer that we picked up had been a, been a racing rider, motorbike racing rider. And he organised this Norton 500 for me and he taught me how to ride it and that’s probably the most terrifying time that I had when I was, entire time when I was in England because he used to go — belt down these narrow country lane. We’d do a left turn for instance and he’d yell out, ‘Go over.’ I didn’t know much about going over as you turned a corner and then he’d yell out, ‘Come back.’ And we’d have to do but had traffic been coming the other way there was no way we could not have collided. He absolutely terrified the living daylights out of me. I don’t know if he was putting on a special show or for me or not, just to show me how good he was but anyhow I was pleased when my lessons were finished on that. It was years and years afterwards that I, it occurred to me that I don’t know whether the bike was registered or not. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been insured and I certainly didn’t have a licence, and I didn’t think a thing about this. And I can’t remember what happened. When I finished either. I think I just left it on the station.
AP: What a shame [laughs] Very nice. Did you see or hear about any accidents while you were training?
LM: Any accidents?
AP: Accidents. Like flying accidents.
LM: Oh yes. Oh well, yes, there were. There were some. There was. On EFTS originally at Narrandera one of the chaps who was quite a good friend of mine he baled out. Had to bale out of his Tiger Moth. But unfortunately he hit the release button instead of pulling the rip cord and that’s the first. That was the first accident, but oh yes, there were. There were accidents throughout the training and it I remember, I remember when we went to Bottesford on the Lancasters when we were taken on to the station. The first thing I saw was that, well we all noted it, was a graveyard of two or three wrecked aircraft, which struck a bit of a cord. Yeah. But yeah, there were often accidents with undercarriage, through landing and that sort of thing. Taxiing accidents too. Fortunately, I wasn’t involved in any accidents at all.
AP: So after your OTU, you’re on a Heavy Conversion Unit. That was, you said was at Bottesford.
LM: That was at Bottesford. Yes. Yes.
AP: Ok. Can you tell me something about Bottesford.
LM: We picked up, picked up the seventh member of the crew.
AP: What, what did you do there? Actually tell me of your first impression of a Lancaster.
LM: Well, I guess they were, they were big and, was the first impression. Big and powerful. But seemed to be, seemed to be, you know perhaps easier certainly than the Wellington. The Wellington was pretty heavy on the, on the controls. And the Lancaster just seemed to be easier to come to convert on to. And they were, they were a marvellous aircraft yes. But that’s about it I think. I can’t —
AP: What did your position, your pilot’s position in the Lancaster? What’s around you? What does it look like? What do you feel?
LM: What was the —
AP: Well the pilot’s position. What does it look like and what does it feel like when you’re sitting in a Lancaster?
LM: Well, the viewing was very good. Seeing out of the, seeing out of the aircraft which was important. There was no obstructed viewing. They looked pretty high when you were sitting. Sitting in them when you first got in to them. Pretty high off the ground. They just, they appeared, they seemed to me to be fairly easy after the Wellington. And I suppose it seems strange with young people who are not even twenty one and that having, and not perhaps being mechanically minded or anything like that, but everybody coped perfectly well. I don’t think I can add much to that.
AP: That’s alright. Some, a place where many things happened was the mess at various airfields. What was the atmosphere like in a wartime mess?
LM: In the wartime, in the mess?
AP: Yeah.
LM: Well it was usually fairly lively most nights [laughs] and I think there was some who used to hang on there longer than others. But I think they were yeah, I just remember enjoyable experiences of the mess as far as I’m concerned. There were occasionally, there was a lot of line shooting went on there I think. You’d see people standing at the bar waving their arms and manoeuvring with their arms and I think that’s where there were a few tall stories there. But I used to, I used to enjoy going into the mess and everybody got there. We used to play darts and all that sort of thing in there and that was a great little hobby, like going down to the local village pubs at night. That was a great little thing and we used to do that a lot. Most of our crew would go down there. And we’d get home alright at night usually [laughs] without too much trouble. But I used to even have my own set of darts that I used to take down to play. And I can imagine the, all the locals how much it would have upset them with all these kids practically coming in and pinching their dartboard and making nuisances of themselves in the local quiet little pubs. They were a great atmosphere in those little country pubs, yeah.
AP: What, you’ve just gone on to the front door of whatever your favourite pub was, you open the door, you step in. What do you see?
LM: What do you see? Well you usually see a fairly good crowd of people in there. And you’d see the blokes, you’d see the local blokes sitting down and playing draughts. A few of the others playing, playing darts. You’d probably notice the great big pots they had instead of a, instead of what we would normally have. They’d have a pint pot and a pint was a pretty big, pretty big volume of liquid. But that’s what they mostly did have there. Oh yeah, well I just think often the pubs that we used to go into were little, little country pubs because you know having an airfield near them you’re not near built up areas. And they were a great atmosphere.
AP: What was the English beer like?
LM: Well, I think you were almost duty bound to criticise it [laughs] but, you know, for all that everybody drank plenty of it. I think it was thought to be warm and this and that and the other but everybody — it didn’t put people off drinking, drinking it. But I think for most Aussies I think it was part of your duty to be critical of it.
AP: Still is. Do any of your flights, all throughout your, your flying career with the air force do any of your flights stick out in your memory in particular?
LM: Do any particular ones?
AP: Flights, yeah, any of your flying. For whatever reason.
LM: I don’t, I don’t see, I don’t think of any being any being particularly remarkable for any reason because we finished our training. It coincided with the end of the war. Pretty neatly I think. We, ours were all routine, routine training flights. There were always times that everybody would have experienced, you know, some drama or other. That happened, you know all the time I guess. There were little things of drama. But I don’t remember any being of any particular significance.
AP: So the end of your, you came to the end of your training and it happened to be the end of the war. How did you find out? Did you know that the end of the war was coming? Did it, you know was there we’re just waiting for it to happen now or, how did it actually happen?
LM: No. It’s such a long time ago now. I think, I suppose my thought is that probably it was only in the last week or so that from from my point of view that I, it seemed it was going to. There was talk of it earlier but to my way of thinking it was only in the last when it was actually coming up to the last week or so that I realised that it was going to. You seemed to be involved in what you were doing and you know I really haven’t got, you know good memories of that time.
AP: What were your feelings when the war did end? You found out. It’s over. Now what?
LM: I I suppose, I think I just thought, well that’s it. That’s it, you know, what happens now? I can’t remember having thought about any great sighs of relief or anything. I think it was, in those days you seemed to, you seemed to live day to day. You did what you had to do and didn’t sort of speculate much on other things and, yeah. I just feel that you went on with life. What was happening, you just went on with it you know. One thing finishes, something else starts.
AP: What did happened next?
LM: What did happen? Well we were sent, from my memory then, when we finished the course, from my memory I think we were sent up by train up to 467 Squadron and we were not taken on strength by them. There’s nothing in my records about it but I think we were sent up to 467 and then, and then without being taken on to the station I think we were issued with new rail passes and sent back again to Bottesford. But that’s getting a long, long time ago and from what I understood was that the crews on our Heavy Conversion Course, the ones that were all English crews, as I understand it, they were, they were sent on to a tour of duty flying prisoners of war back from Italy. I think minus the gunners of course, but the pilot, flight engineer, radio operator and navigator. I think that they were sort of retained. That was my understanding that the English crews did that. And we were sent on leave virtually I think at that stage. We used to get leave extended by a couple of weeks all the time.
AP: And that’s when you were hurtling around on your motorbike most of the time.
LM: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: Great. I’ve seen some photos of Scotland in your photo album there. Tell me something of that little trip.
LM: Oh well I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go to Scotland. And my forebears came from the Scottish Highlands so that was all very interesting, and that’s the, that’s sort of the destination that I eventually headed to. I did a lot around the Scottish Highlands, Isle of Skye, that sort of thing. And, you know, I was extremely lucky to have the opportunity of doing that. The motorbike seemed to go pretty well and I don’t think I ever had troubles with it. I can’t say what else but yeah, I got, I saw a lot of the Highlands and you know the, the lands that your forebears came from. So I was very lucky there. I wouldn’t have been able to do so otherwise. And I was able of course, with the motorbike, to get down to where my half-sister was living in the south of England. So I don’t know that I can enlarge on that.
AP: That’s alright. So travelled all over England after the war ended essentially is a summary of it.
LM: Well yeah. Well I travelled more, you know, more Scotland and — yeah. More Scotland rather than over the rest of England. Yeah.
AP: So how did you get home?
LM: I came home on a ship called the Athlone Castle. It came from Southampton and I don’t remember it but I noticed in one of the photographs I’ve got there is a photograph of the Queen Elizabeth at Southampton. So therefore I’ve seen the Queen Elizabeth on two different occasions. We came home through the Suez Canal. I think we arrived in Fremantle just before Christmas and if I remember we had Christmas Day between Fremantle and Melbourne.
AP: Christmas Day 1945.
LM: Yeah, ‘45 that would have been. Christmas Day 1945. And one thing I do remember about it. It would be about Christmas Day coming across The Bight between Fremantle and Melbourne. I remember seeing quite a number of whales that were spouting or blowing I think they call it. Yes. Which was quite interesting.
AP: So how long before you were demobbed?
LM: Not long at all. I was demobbed, I think, within a couple of weeks of getting home. As I mentioned my mother had moved, moved to Canberra and I think I had a, just had a short bit of leave, about five or six days or something and was demobbed soon afterwards.
AP: What happened then? How did you find re-adjusting to civilian life? Getting a job. A real job for once.
LM: It was quite unsettling really and I had, we were given, we were on the ship coming home we were given a few lectures on the future thing. We were, we were given the opportunity to go to, to apply for the university if we wanted to. And quite a few of my friends did take that opportunity of doing a university course. I think quite a few of them went. They had a campus at Mildura at the time. Straight after the war. And I actually think I filled in papers to do engineering at the university but I scrapped that. Soon after we got back I wanted to go on, decided I wanted to go on the land and do something because my people had always been on the land in the past. That didn’t, I don’t think that that fact that families had been on the land would influence me but I seemed to come to that decision that I wanted to do that. So I scrapped my, any thought of going to the university, to do engineering. But yeah it took a while to settle down.
AP: So you were a farmer for your working life. Is that what happened?
LM: Yes. Yes. I actually qualified to get a soldier’s settlement block under the Victorian scheme and I think I was very fortunate for that to happen. And it happened in a great area as far as I was concerned. So yes, I was very, very lucky. And until eighteen months ago I’ve lived on that. We lived on that property until eighteen months ago. We were over sixty years there. So that you know that was a really good opportunity.
AP: That was, that’s Lismore I think you said, wasn’t it?
LM: Sorry?
AP: That was Lismore area.
LM: At Lismore area. Yes. Yes
AP: Tell me about the book you wrote.
LM: Well I knew that I didn’t know much about family history but I knew that I had an old forebear who’d come out in the very early days to Adelaide in 1838. I didn’t know much about him really, really at all, and I think the first real interest that was sparked when I was training at Mallala. I had to do a cross country from Mallala across the, across the Mallee country to a place called Pinnaroo, somewhere. And where we crossed the Murray River, I noticed on the chart, just near the place we crossed the river on that flight there’s a place called McBeans’ Pound, and that made me wonder why that would be. I didn’t know anything about it but I knew there was a branch of the family living near the Barossa valley in South Australia and had been there for a long time. I did actually ring them up and speak to one of them while I was at Mallala and I was invited to call out. We used to do a lot of flights around. I remember [unclear] Kapunda, and things flying over, over there. They lived, their property was near Truro which I don’t think I ever flew over, but I did ring one of them. I was invited to go. To go out and visit them. I didn’t get the opportunity to, but that’s, that’s all that I knew and later on I got to, got to hear a few. There were always stories told about this old fella. He settled up in the Moulamein area mainly in New South, New South Wales, but there were lots of stories that were told about him. In fact, when I was boy of ten or twelve or something like that people used to visit my grandmother. And that’s all they seemed to do was tell stories about old Lachie and, but though they were mostly stories about his closeness with money or his eccentric ways or less eccentric ways. When I was a little boy, about ten or twelve or something like that I used to get really annoyed at these people telling these stories and I used to think, you know that story’s not true, and this sort of thing. And eventually, that must have been the first time really thought of the old fella and added to that scene this place called McBean pound on the Murray River caused me to look into it quite a lot. And so eventually I did research and as much as I could and put together this little book that I wrote about him. And I think it’s probably, probably one of the most important things that I have done because all of this history about the old bloke would have disappeared if I hadn’t written it down. Heaps of people in the past have had the opportunity and no one’s done it. And it would have all disappeared so I am pleased that I did write that.
AP: Lovely. Alright. Final question. What, to you is the legacy of Bomber Command and of your time in Bomber Command and how do you want to see it remembered?
LM: To see Bomber Command remembered. Well I suppose [pause] I suppose one thing it certainly taught discipline and that’s anyone who served learned plenty of that. There were certainly huge sacrifices made by, by young people with everything before them and you know as long as that’s remembered and known by people then it can only be a good thing. It would be, you know very sad if a lot of this stuff was lost, and there are not very many of them left these days. But [pause] well, all I can say is that I hope every, you know, every move that made us successful in remembering the efforts of Bomber Command and I don’t think I can add any more.
AP: Before we turn off the tape any final thoughts, stories.
LM: It would be a great weight off my mind if you turned off the tape [laughs]
AP: Alright [laughs] thank you Lachie.
LM: Alright. You know to think of you coming all this way just to do that.
AP: Not a problem at all. It’s been great.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AMcBeanLW161022
PMcBeanLW1602
Title
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Interview with Lachie McBean
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:22:58 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Creator
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Adam Purcell
Date
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2016-10-22
Description
An account of the resource
Lachie McBean grew up in Australia and joined the Royal Australian Air Force when he was 18. He was a pilot at a Heavy Conversion Unit when the war in Europe ended. After the war he returned to Australia and became a farmer. He also took the opportunity to research his family history and wrote a book about one of his ancestors.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
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1945
aircrew
entertainment
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
mess
military living conditions
military service conditions
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Oxford
pilot
RAF Bottesford
RAF Church Broughton
RAF Credenhill
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/299/3456/PMcCredieJ1501.2.jpg
65b66e10d1346350936c2a2992ea9edb
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/299/3456/AMcCredieJ151012.1.mp3
9f439848621d77a4eaa9d17bf9ee984d
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
McCredie, John
John McCredie
J McCredie
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. An oral history interview with John McCredie (1921 - 2016, 418236 Royal Australian Air Force), his log book and documents. He flew two operations as a pilot over France during training and was later posted to India.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by John McCredie and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-12
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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McCredie, J
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: So this interview for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive is with John McCredie who was a pilot during the Second World War. The interview is taking place at John’s home in Hawthorn in Victoria. My name is Adam Purcell and it is the 12th of October 2015. So John we might start from the beginning. Can you tell me something of your early life growing up? [unclear] That sort of thing.
JM: Well I was born in Princes Hill. I should say that my military career was a bit frustrated by having a mother whose brother had been shot. Had his face shot away in World War One. And she didn’t want me to have anything to do with the military. So I went through school being unable to join the cadets. But on my eighteenth birthday I took the liberty of enrolling in the militia. My piece of resistance. I joined the Melbourne University Rifles. War broke out three weeks later. I did my first military camp at Mount Martha with the MUR. I did another camp at Mount Martha with the MUR in which I was promoted to sergeant and was sent on to an officer’s training course in the militia in Seymour in June I think, 1941. It was there that I ran into these fellas back from the Middle East who had rather a scorn for chockos getting commissions and I thought my God what has happened now is if I take a commission I will not be allowed to join the AIF. I can’t, in any case I’d been pressing my parents to join the air force for a long while. So, on my eighteenth birth I wrote from Seymour and demanded that I be allowed to enrol in the air force which seemed my way of avoiding the inability to transfer. I also, I think it’s a bit of history that everyone in my generation was pretty influenced by Kingsford Smith, Hinkler, Amy Johnson, The Centenary Air Race and then the Battle of Britain.
AP: Of course.
JM: So that flying seemed to be very much the way to finish the war. I got my parent’s permission. Got on the air force reserve — I think in August ’41. Came the Japanese and all service transfers were put at a stop. You weren’t allowed to transfer from the militia. And so I had the good luck of having my old battalion commander Colonel Ralph in charge of — Colonel Balfour I should say. Being in charge of a unit called, Lines of Communication, which dealt with inter-service transfers. So I went along to see the colonel and we had a chat about old days. And then I explained my dilemma. That I had qualified for a commission. I didn’t want to take it because I wanted to get into a voluntary service and I wanted to join the air force. And he said, ‘Well, you’ve just done a commando course at Wilson’s Promontory.’ Which I had. He said, ‘We’re enrolling the 6th Independent Company next month,’ I think he said, ‘And I can have you commissioned in that.’ And this was a Friday and I said, ‘Do you mind if I think of it over the weekend, Colonel?’ He said, ‘No. My boy.’ So I thought of it over the weekend. I didn’t really need to think. I’d got the idea at Wilson’s Promontory that if you took a commission in the commandos it tended to be considered a one way ticket. And I’d like to think that I had a return ticket. The possibility of a return ticket at least. And so I came back on the Monday and confirmed to him that I wanted to go into the air force. And that’s how I got transferred. I not only got transferred I got an accelerator transfer. So that I got in ahead of an old school mate who had agreed that we’d both joined up together and then had gone in ahead of me. So that was rather satisfactory. Anyway, I did my training. We all probably wanted to be fighter pilots but you had to show that aptitude and I don’t think I quite had it as a flyer. So I was put on twins and I went through training in Australia. Temora, and Point Cook. From there half of our course at Point Cook was transferred to England because there was a shortage of, supposed shortage of air crew in England and a shortage of aircraft in Australia. So that was all. I got to England. Spent three months enjoying myself rather than [laughs] I should say rather than doing nothing we spent time in Bournemouth, Whitley Bay, Brighton and then I was sent to a place called South Cerney for familiarisation. Did this on Oxfords. The same aircraft I’d flown in Australia. Had the good fortune and this is the vital thing in war — to have good fortune. I had an instructor who saw the crash coming before I did and dived. We just missed a crash at night in midair and that was a lesson in alertness. We did a night flying course at a place called Cranage where I met up with a lot of interesting people. A chap who’d been in the French Foreign Legion. Two Dutchmen. And a couple of people. An American I think. A strange way that Americans somehow got into the RAF. Anyway, after that I went to Harwell which was the Heavy Conversion Unit. Sorry. Not Heavy Conversion Unit. The OTU. And at this time of the war Churchill and Roosevelt had met at Casablanca and there this other question of supply and need came up because Churchill obviously went well briefed on what aircrews were doing nothing in England. And Roosevelt went well briefed on what aircraft didn’t have crews to fly them in the Indian theatre. So Harwell was turned into an OTU. More or less for sending people to the Far East. And it was my good fortune to be sent there at that time of the war because it was close to a one way ticket on Bomber Command in early 1944. So that is roughly the story of my relationship with Bomber Command. On, if you want to ask questions about that.
AP: Yeah. That’s alright. Well, I think we will definitely. It’s a nice overview of everything. This happened in my last interview too. I asked one question and ten minutes later he said, ‘And that’s how I got on a boat to come home.’ Like, well, we’re finished. Anyway, so yeah a little bit more detail I suppose. You were accepted in to the air force. You were still in the militia at this stage.
JM: Yeah.
AP: I think. Was there a time difference between saying, ‘Yeah you’re in the air force,’ and actually showing up at the ITS? Was there? Like how long did that take?
JM: Well, what happened was you applied for the air force which I did, I think in about, well it was after my eighteenth birthday. After my twentieth birthday which was on the 13th of August. They put you through a few tests like holding your breath under water or something and then made you breathe in and out. And did a couple of other things. Touch your toes perhaps. And then said, ‘Oh, you were on the air force reserve so you’ve got to do —’ and I was working in the National Bank at that time. So after I finished the officer’s training course which went for about two months I went back to the bank and then there would be this business of going in to a place on Flinders Street and learning the Morse code. What else? Aircraft recognition. Perhaps we, we were given something on that. Did they have link trainers there? I didn’t think they did. No they can’t have.
AP: So just your basic. Your basic. So you did that at sort of night school, sort of, sort of thing.
JM: Yes. Yes.
AP: Rather than, rather than they sent you something and you worked through it at home.
JM: No. No. I frankly forget how often. I think it was once a week.
AP: Something like that.
JM: I trotted in there and then I was called up again in the militia on the 7th of [pause] No. Sometime in November. And the bank fought too.
AP: Oh really.
JM: They said, ‘This man’s on the air force reserve. You can’t have him in the militia.’ And the militia insisted on having me and so I went back into camp and that was an interesting time because the MUR at that time was a polyglot unit taking in chaps AIF people and all that sort of thing. And I found myself having refused a commission they made me a wing sergeant major which was very funny. I had a little man as my orderly room corporal who later became my boss in the Department of Foreign Affairs.
AP: Connections.
JM: Such is life.
AP: Yeah.
JM: The – so that was a funny episode in my life.
AP: What, what memories, if any, do you have of your Initial Training School. So we’re talking air force now.
JM: Well we did all these things that some of which were of interest and some weren’t. I think we got sorted out into the sheep and the goats. Whoever were the goats I don’t know. You did these aptitude tests of various sorts. They somehow decided some people ought to be pilots. Some people ought to be air gunners. Some people ought to be wireless operators. Some people ought to be navigators. The eggheads seemed to get the navigation job. The [pause] I think most hoped to be a pilot ‘cause it’s, being a pilot is like being the driver of a car.
AP: Very much so.
JM: You’re the person who doesn’t have to worry about other people. The way that passengers might have to worry at the way you drive.
AP: Certain, certain control, control freak, you could say. Yeah [laughs] I understand. Where was your ITS. Was that at Somers?
JM: I went from Somers.
AP: Yeah.
JM: I did the ITS there. Oppy incidentally was my flight commander. He took us for drill. Oppy wasn’t considered a good class master but he was a good drill master.
AP: Oppy being the cyclist.
JM: [Procurement?] officer.
AP: Yes. That’s right. That’s what I thought.
JM: Later became a minister in the government in Canberra.
AP: Yeah.
JM: Again the oddities of coincidence — I once sold a car to him in Canberra [laughs] when I was on posting to somewhere. I advertised the car and Oppy came along and ‘opped into it.
AP: Alright. So you’re, I forget what you said, you were at Point Cook which was Service Flying Training School.
JM: Yes.
AP: I think. The other one was — where did you do your initial training?
JM: Elementary Flying Training.
AP: Yes.
JM: Was at Temora?
AP: Temora, that’s right. Temora, ah yes. Ok. I have to ask every pilot. Tell me about your first solo.
JM: What’s that?
AP: Tell me about your first solo.
JM: It took a long while. It took me ten hours and fifty minutes if I remember and a couple of my mates, Chumley and Ingalls, did it in about six hours. That frustrated me a bit. But before I went I can tell you a story that I think is of interest. I had an instructor called Lionel Watters and he’d been a Broken Hill coal miner. Led miner I suppose. He was a rough diamond I think you could say. A huge man and he was a very good flyer. He’d been an amateur flyer before the war and had taken to instructing. He wanted you to do things. He told you how to do them and came down like a ton of bricks if you didn’t do them properly. So we were doing stall turns on one occasion and well that story is one I’ll leave for a non-recordable [laughs] I’ll tell you another story however. That we were practicing emergency landings. What you do in a Tiger Moth for an emergency landing is select a nice field. The instructor turns the petrol off and says, ‘Now you go and show me how you’d land it.’ And before doing that he had said, ‘Now when you descend in gliding fashion the engine cools and every five hundred feet you should warm the engine.’ And so we’re about three thousand feet and he tells me, ‘Ok. Land it in that field, McCredie.’ So I start gliding and I glide and I glide and I glide and he said, ‘It’s rather cold up here today don’t you think McCredie?’ I said, ‘Oh not too bad.’ He said, [stress] ‘No. But your bloody engine’s feeling the cold.’ And he rammed the throttle on and flew away. And I suppose I can safely tell this tale about that he had a girlfriend nearby living on a farm and every day he’d like to convey a message to them that he was flying around. And this time he dove to about five feet [laughs] and that was the end of my lesson for the day.
AP: Beautiful. That’s, yeah there’s a number of stories of that sort of shenanigans, shall we say, in Tiger Moths.
JM: Yes. So from there my friends Chumley and Ingalls went on to singles and I went on to twins at Point Cook.
AP: Point Cook. So you’re flying Oxfords at Point Cook.
JM: Pardon?
AP: You were flying Oxfords at Point Cook you said or Ansons.
JM: Oxfords. Airspeed Oxfords.
AP: Airspeed Oxfords.
JM: Yes.
AP: What did you think of those after the Tiger Moth? What did you think of those after the Tiger?
JM: Well, no fun at all. We did make fun. From, from Point Cook we flew at satellites. The first two months were at Werribee, the third month was at Lyra, I think and the fourth month was at Little River. Now by the time we got to Little River we had become bored with Oxfords but we were sent on cross countrys’ and it became the norm when you were sent on a cross country to try a bit of low flying. So this is strictly illegal.
AP: Of course.
JM: Having been influenced by Watters and his girlfriend I had found a little driveway near, I think, a place called Lethbridge. It was very nice to drive along and frighten the occupants. And I was not alone in doing this and I was lucky enough not to be the one who came home with a bit of a tree in his undercarriage. Sticking out of the fuselage or something. But that was [pause] so we had — it’s funny how those training memories are not as evident as later memories.
AP: [They might?]
JM: I carry, I had a, you flew with a pair and I had this fella who I think was more inept than me as a pilot as my pair. And some of his landings were quite hair raising. But that poor fellow was killed in training in Europe sometime later. In England sometime later. And one can say that without being surprised he probably should have been scrubbed.
AP: That was actually going to be my next question. With all of these. Particularly with all of these antics going on. Low flying and mucking around because let’s face it you were twenty years old and you’ve got an aeroplane so you’re going to go and fly it. Were there accidents and things that you saw?
JM: Well that one of the person hitting the tree at Point Cook it’s the only one I remember in training. In Harwell somebody came in and crashed on landing. But, and certainly at Harwell we had these ancient aircraft because we were going to India, or most of us, we had one of the last two units flying Wellington 1Cs. Those going on to ops in Europe had the, went through OTUs on Wellington 10s which were very much upgraded and could fly at the proper height. But the 1C could only — well in icing conditions I did two what are called, what the [pause] two little flights over France which were called training flights. And on the second one we iced up. The aircraft couldn’t climb above eight thousand feet. My navigator, bless his heart, took us back over a place called [unclear]. And [unclear] happened to be quite heavily defended so we had the sound, I don’t know if as a small boy you ever ran along a picket fence with a stick making a noise.
AP: Many times. Many times.
JM: Yeah. So you know that noise. Well that’s exactly what it’s like listening to the flak hitting a canvas covered aircraft like the Wellington. And we came home with a couple of holes but fortunately they didn’t hit or injure somebody. But I did have another incident at Harwell where again it was luck. Because I’d given some cheek to my flight commander which he got back to me in briefing when he decided he’d take people through fire drill. He said, ‘McCredie. You tell us what you’d do in fire drill.’ And McCredie got up and stuttered and stammered. Anyway, he made me repeat the words after him. And there was the luck of the game because about not very long later I did have a fire and that meant landing on, calling, ‘Darkie. Darkie. Darkie. Mayday. Mayday. Mayday.’ And finding Silverstone answer and having to go down there at night on one engine which was, you know, was something. I had to bail my crew out. The same navigator who took me over [unclear] I found crouching behind me when I landed.
AP: Oh really.
JM: So when I caught up with him again and we were forming crews on Liberators in India and he wanted to join up with me I said, ‘I’m sorry Tom.’ But, but that was, I had similar luck again in, when we were in India. Things were a bit dicey. The Japs had got right up to the border. The second Imphal line which was the border with Burma. The Indian National Army which comprised deserters from the British forces in Singapore were with the Japanese. There was this fear in India that things could erupt internally in spite of Ghandi’s passive resistance thing with the influence of the Indian National Army. And the four Liberator squadrons were sent on this around India show of force. In formation over Madras, Nagpur, Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta. Just to show the natives what they would be up against if we decided to have some sort of armed resistance. So on the first of these I had what was called a runaway prop.
AP: Oh dear.
JM: And with a runaway prop you just can’t go on flying. You know the, you know the problem?
AP: It’s the pitch. The pitch changes and yeah —
JM: Yeah. So I had to fly around with four hours on three engines but I’d noticed all the emergency things you do when you have anything like an engine misfunction. I had the, I suppose you could say good luck to survive an assault on an armed boat and so on. That was on the 1st of January 1945. We’d bombed the bridge in Burma. We’d been told Japanese were supplying their forces by sea and if you come across any shipping it’s likely to be doing this. Attack it. So we had a rendevous at a place called Kalegauk Island after the raid on the bridge. And so I saw someone going in on this boat and I went in and followed him. The first chap got shot down and I lost an engine but I had this totally new experience of losing an engine and it, well it was the luck of the game. We moved quickly enough to [pause] we had a fire. My boys reported the fire to me and I boldly told them to put it out.
AP: Do something.
JM: That’s right. [laughs] it’s funny in the way. The thing that’s reported they don’t put it out until they were told to [laughs]
AP: Initiative boys. Initiative. Alright.
JM: Anyway. I’m sorry if that’s —
AP: No. Listen, it’s all, it’s all part of your story and that’s still very valuable to get anyway. I can, I can assure you. I’m sitting here rapt. So getting to the UK. I suppose you finished at Point Cook. You have your wings ceremony at Point Cook so you’ve got your wings.
JM: Yeah.
AP: At that point. Then you go to the UK. How do you get from A to B?
JM: Yes. We got on the Nieuw Amsterdam on the 6th of March 1943. We crossed to San Francisco. The Nieuw Amsterdam was, had brought troops back from the Middle East before picking us up and I must say those troops didn’t do a favour by the wildlife they brought into the bedding.
AP: Oh dear.
JM: So I was travelling with my friend Ingalls who was on singles, I mentioned earlier but he was going to Europe too. Both of said enough is enough. We slept on deck for the rest of that voyage. We, we had a commander called [pause] a troop commander called Major Crennan. He was the son, I believe of Archbishop Crennan who was a catholic prelate somewhere. And Crennan later became part of the Royal Commission into Petrov. Part of the council for it. I think. Which was interesting. But he had no idea of discipline and he thought it would be a good idea if air force trips needed to be exercised so he would order us to march around the decks in military order and this sort of thing and there’s always a minstrel associated with military units and we had a minstrel on board who wrote a little verse. And what I remember of the verse went something like, in part, went something like, “Oh tell me quick what lunatic, what fiend of devilish notion, marched us thrice like bloody mice around the bloody ocean.” And this was distributed in a pamphlet that they’d brought out on board the ship which had some very witty things in it. And Crennan, I must say, to do him justice stopped behaving like a bloody lunatic [laughs]
AP: So you got to San Francisco.
JM: We got to San Francisco. We then had this devious crossing of America by train from Oakland to a place called [pause] oh dear. The name is going to elude me. But somewhere in Connecticut. And this was an American army base. And the trip across had taught us a few lessons I suppose. Such as don’t leave watches in your tunic pocket which you hang up in a Pullman carriage overnight because the Pullman porters seem to have very adhesive fingers. We got taken for Austrians and told what good English we spoke. People still do.
AP: They do.
JM: In America I’m told. Yes. We read books and I remember being introduced to Ogden Nash. Have you ever read Ogden Nash?
AP: I’ve never read Ogden Nash but the name rings a bell somewhere.
JM: Yeah. Well, you should look up on the internet a ballad of Ogden Nash’s called “Four prominent bastards are we.” “Your banker, your broker, your Washington Joker.” Four prominent bastards.
AP: Fair enough.
JM: Poor fellow who got taken down by them ended up saying he was a self appointed bastard and he was out to get it back. So that was part of my education.
AP: On your way across the US.
JM: On my way across. Apart from, no it was interesting to see America for the first time in its vastness and its variety.
AP: You didn’t have a chance to go on leave at all during that trip or it was straight across and get going?
JM: Well I had the misfortune to develop a carbuncle on the back of my neck so I spent the ten days we were at — Miles Standish was the name of the station.
AP: Rings a bell.
JM: At Miles Standish. I spent ten days in hospital there and had to fight to get out to join me fellows on the Louis Pasteur which we used to cross the Atlantic. And so apart from my first night there at which we attended the American mess and saw them doing all their modern antics which they were into. Not rock but whatever the dancing style of the time was. A bit ahead of us. So they had women in the mess and that sort of thing. So that was interesting insight. In hospital I had the interesting experience of having fellows who were very much against the Roosevelt government alongside me. They were southerners who felt that Roosevelt didn’t represent them. And —
AP: Fairly, fairly eye opening for a twenty year old I imagine.
JM: Yeah. And the interesting thing was I remember this fella saying, ‘And you’ve never had a hamburger?’ And I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘We eat meat pies in Australia.’ To which he replied, ‘What’s a [accent] meight pie?’ [laughs] So, so I had that experience of America that —
AP: Fair enough.
JM: Perhaps some of my fellows didn’t have. Then the crossing in the Pasteur was not luxury. Pasteur was shaped a bit like a canoe and it had latrines at each end. And the movement of the ship was like that. So that there would be an overflow from the latrines right through the mess decks. Mess deck comprising people in hammocks above tables. And our mess deck was right in the centre.
AP: That’s often the case.
JM: So we would be wading somewhat.
AP: So when was —
JM: And I won’t tell you what we were wading through.
AP: It was quite literally a mess deck.
JM: Yeah.
AP: Yeah. I suppose a fair few more people on there like more crowded conditions as well than crossing The Pacific.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: On that one as well.
JM: Yeah. So your hammocks your head lay between two pairs of feet. As people have probably told you.
AP: Lovely. And that took what a week or two weeks or something.
JM: Oh about five or six days.
AP: Five or six days.
JM: It was the height of the submarine campaign. Early ‘43. And we were on the alert and my friend Ingalls and I did regular eight hours on — four hours on, four hours off duty on the port. Rear port. Twelve pounder. So that was I thought I should have qualified for an Atlantic Star for it [laughs]
AP: That’s probably reasonable [laughs] What time of year was that?
JM: That was [pause] that was April.
AP: April. So that’s —
JM: Yeah.
AP: So it wasn’t too cold. It wasn’t like the middle of winter or anything so it wasn’t too —
JM: No. No.
AP: Too cold in the North Atlantic.
JM: No. But we saw a bit of the middle of winter in places like Utah. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. I imagine. Not much fun. So your ship would have come in Liverpool or Scotland or something like that.
JM: Liverpool.
AP: Liverpool.
JM: Yes. And then we did this trip to Bournemouth by train and I remember writing home to my parents. Remember I had just picked up the card I had sent a few days ago and I wrote and said when you make your post-war journey to England which they had planned or they’d hoped for I said do it in April because, “Oh to be in England now that April’s there.” Because a magnificent sight. You looked in wonder at scenes you’d never see in Australia of little villages tucked away behind green fields and church spires coming up. It was very exciting for a generation brought up on English literature.
AP: And that was, that funnily enough was going to be my next question. Your first impressions of England as a, presumably this is the first time you’d travelled overseas.
JM: Yes.
AP: So, so for a yeah a young bloke to be travelling.
JM: Yeah.
AP: In places that you’d only ever read about.
JM: No.
AP: That would have been —
JM: No. No.
AP: An experience, I imagine
JM: What I, my mother was a very keen reader and one of the books I had remembered reading was, “In Search of England,” by HV Morton if you’ve ever heard of it but that took you around all the memorable places in England. So, yeah. Brian Ingalls and I spent a lot time visiting some places on HV Morton’s recommendation.
AP: Excellent. So you were in Bournemouth for some time. I’ve heard, I’ve heard a fair bit about Bournemouth because pretty well every Australian went to either Bournemouth or Brighton.
JM: Yes.
AP: Depending on what time they went there. At some time that unit moved to Brighton.
JM: Yes.
AP: I can’t remember exactly when that was but impressions it sort of depends on when you arrived and how long you were there as to what happened but a lot of not much seems to have happened. It was a sort of holding point.
JM: Well yes you were wondering why you’d been sent to England. And we did odd parades. Church parades which one did one’s best to avoid. I remember we were put up at a place called Durley Dean which — strange memory but my first residence in England and Brian Ingalls and I, I remember from there visited Salisbury to see the cathedral. And we visited Oxford. And I can remember going to see the “Maid of the Mountains.” And a pianist called Solomon gave a concert which the only thing I remember about it was his name. But one, neither Brian nor I drank at that stage so we were more interested in — oh we went to a place called Poole. I remember that particularly because of our train trip home. We had two young girls in the train apartment with us and we’d got chatting with them on the way and the train, the train went into a tunnel. As we came out I looked at Ingalls doing exactly the thing that I was doing.
AP: Excellent. Subtle. No [laughs] Lovely. Did you, did you have any impression of wartime England? Like what was your first sort of thought?
JM: My favourite story is, again it was Ingalls, we were at Whitley Bay. We were spent to an RAF commando course and had a corporal trying to control these air crew. Australian aircrew. Which he wasn’t very, well he was cooperative. We would say, ‘Look corp, we’ll march in proper order of parade and you just take us to someplace where we won’t be seen and we’ll all have a smoke.’ And that was our commando course. But from Whitley Bay Ingalls and I went in to have a look at Newcastle. And I think it was a Sunday and we were looking in this window and there was a bun in the window. And it, we must have been looking longingly at it because this old lady came up to us and said, ‘You boys look hungry.’ We said, ‘You don’t do to well on air force ma’am.’ She said, ‘You come home with me.’ She took us home and boiled eggs for us and there was an egg rationing in England and she gave us her week’s ration of eggs. That’s a story I’ve never forgotten. So it, I also, we had family friends the sister of whom lived in a place called Cawsand in Cornwall and she ran a boarding house there. So when we had leave instead of joining the Ryder Scheme which a lot of people did I would go and visit her then. I’d get to know something of the Cornish people. Met this family that rejoiced in singing the [pause] what is it? The Cornish, Cornish Floral Dance. Is that it?
AP: Doesn’t ring a bell. I’ve been to Cornwall once but it was about —
JM: Yeah.
AP: About twenty years ago. So I was quite young.
JM: Cawsand was a delightful place. The bus doesn’t take you there. You have to walk across fields with your kit bag over your shoulder. To get there on one occasion I I had to stay in the Salvation Army place in Bristol and I have to say that was the most uncomfortable night I have ever had to stay in my life and that includes sleeping in bedbug chapoys in India. No. No. Very unpleasant.
AP: So you’ve, you’ve been sitting there at Bournemouth for a while. Travelling around.
JM: Yeah.
AP: Next step I guess, oh next step was —
JM: The next step we went to Whitley Bay.
AP: Whitley Bay. That’s right.
JM: And we were there when the Fokke Wolves shot up Bournemouth.
AP: Bournemouth.
JM: If you’ve heard about that tale.
AP: I’ve heard about it. I’m aware of it but if you know anything about it.
JM: Yes. Well —
AP: Sorry. You were at Bournemouth or you were at Whitley Bay? You were actually at Bournemouth did you say or were you at Whitley Bay?
JM: We were, we’d been sent from Bournemouth to Whitley Bay to do this commando course.
AP: Another one of those.
JM: We heard all about it when we got back.
AP: It’s another one of those lucky things
JM: Yes. So but from Whitley Bay we visited Edinburgh. That was lovely except it was still British double time. It was still daylight when you took the girl home —
AP: Yes [laughs]
JM: From the local dance.
AP: I have heard a number of people lamenting that fact. Yes.
JM: Yes. That must have been practically, we must have been there about June the 21st I think.
AP: The longest day. Yes.
JM: And then from Whitley Bay I don’t remember [pause] yes we did go back to Bournemouth because we learned about the air raid then. And then we were moved to Brighton and Brighton was a place that one was very easy to dodge church parade. We were put up at the Metropole Hotel which was right next to the Grand Hotel which was the hotel that Maggie Thatcher was in when the terrorists attack on it. And the Metropole was a sort of twin hotel. We were on the fifth floor and had to go up to five floors of stairs.
AP: Stairs [laughs]
JM: And it was a Victorian, a Victorian hotel without lifts if I remember rightly. But no, Bournemouth was an enjoyable experience because plenty of entertainment and I remember seeing, “No. No Nanette.” That’s the only thing. We got up to London on leave and I saw a lot of plays in London which were very [pause] of course and went to places that weren’t plays like seeing Phyllis Dixie who was the strip woman and who noticed it when you moved from the back row to the front rows after the interval. And then after that there was the — they were great, great times times in Brighton. One had got used to being in England by then and knew one’s way about. Church parade was easy to dodge because we marched from the Majestic to a church through with about seven changes of direction so every time the platoon or whatever it was, turned a corner, the last three would drop off and head for, head for somewhere to have a cup of awful wartime coffee. Which was preferable to listening to sermon.
AP: Excellent. Now acclimatisation I think you said was next.
JM: Hmmn?
AP: You said after, after you’d been to Brighton for a little while.
JM: Yes.
AP: Your next unit was Advanced Flying Unit I think.
JM: Well one took leave and I think we took leave in from Bournemouth and from Brighton because there was nothing to do. You might as well have a couple of days off.
AP: Any — apart from seeing plays and things in London what else did you, did you get up to there. General impressions of wartime London I think is what I’m interested in.
JM: Yes. Well I didn’t drink so I I was more interested in seeing what I could of the entertainment side. My friend, Newman, this was from OTU that Newman excelled himself. He went to a place called the Gremlin Club in London and they started playing a tune called, “You’ll never know.”Do you know the tune?
AP: I don’t know the tune. No.
JM: “You’ll never know just how much I love you. You’ll never know just how much I care.”
AP: Ah yes.
JM: And so on which Newman sang beautifully. And he got up and sang it at the Gremlin Club and sang it and was invited to come back anytime and perform for them [laughs] but I never had that distinction in my visits to London.
AP: Fair enough. Where was your next posting? Where was your next posting after?
JM: South Cerney, near Cirencester in Gloucestershire. And that was where I mentioned I had the good luck to have this New Zealand instructor who was so quick.
AP: Oh yes.
JM: That he saw what was coming in time. What else do I remember of that? We — I got into a bit of trouble for deciding to shoot up the flight club because the CO of the place had annoyed me once which was [laughs] I don’t know why I was so stupid when I was young but one does things. So I got put on a charge for that.
AP: But was that —
JM: It didn’t do me any good.
AP: So I imagine flying in wartime England there would have been aeroplanes everywhere.
JM: Well that was the problem, you see.
AP: Very congested. Yeah.
JM: South Cerney. Moreton in the Marsh. Other places all doing the same thing quite close to one another. All inexperienced pilots learning about the hazards of flying in England.
AP: It would have been a bit different as well when and I know from my own flying, you know, you’re doing navigation in Australia. You take off. There’s one town. And you, you know, you write that time down.
JM: Yeah.
AP: And then you fly and then the other town, the next town appears.
JM: Yeah.
AP: Whereas in England there’s a town there, and there’s one there and there’s one there and they all look the same.
JM: Yes.
AP: How was that to adjust too?
JM: Well, I [pause] yes I, you had your wireless contact of course which was only good when you were within five miles of base. It was not high frequency. So mostly you learned to identify the surroundings but the RAF had a wonderful TM. Have you heard about TM?
AP: I have heard of TM. Yes.
JM: So —
AP: Pilot Officer Prune.
JM: Every month it would come out and they would award the Most Highly Derogatory Order of the Irremovable Finger. The MHDO. If you’ve heard of that. I remember one of their stories of the CO of a training unit who was caught looking — had landed at the wrong airport and was caught looking at the notice board of the of the, in the officer’s mess to try and find out where it was. So he was awarded the MHDOIF.
AP: Yeah. It was not, not an unusual thing I imagine. Getting lost. I do —
JM: I don’t think I ever heard of anyone who did that. As I say I landed once at Silverstone purposefully.
AP: So you, when you went to OTU did you know before you got there that India was the ultimate destination or did it sort of happen after you got there?
JM: Well the funny thing is I, I went through life until five years ago when I read my letters home for the first time that I had written in May 1943 that we’d been given the option of volunteering to go to India and I had opted to do so. So I’d reassured my parents that being overseas didn’t mean I wasn’t going to fight the Japs. And I’d put my name down to do it. Now, for something like forty years they laboured under the illusion that I’d only found out when I got to Harwell. But that’s memory.
AP: So that, that letter was written before you got there.
JM: That letter was written in May 1943.
AP: And when did you —
JM: And I only read it about five years — my sister gave me my letters that I’d sent home.
AP: Fantastic. Ok and so then you went to OTU just after that was that. Was that the idea?
JM: I went to OTU in, I suppose, September ’43.
AP: Ok. So, so that, that was the process?
JM: Yeah.
AP: Ok. So you already knew when you got there.
JM: Yeah.
AP: So I suppose for you the OTU process for you would have been a bit different to the — let’s call it the standard.
JM: There was, there was no certainty.
AP: Of course not.
JM: That when you got to Harwell that one would go to, I think that was the point too. Because some of them were sent to a place called Melbourne, Yorkshire. On, I think, Halifaxes.
AP: Yorkshire probably was. Yes.
JM: From Harwell. Anyway, I went to India.
AP: How. What happened at OTU? What sort of training did you do on the ground? What sort of stuff?
JM: Well the flying was just getting familiar with operational flying conditions. Doing a lot night flying. Doing two nickels over France as I mentioned. Doing low level flying over water. Doing, I suppose, cross countrys’. I don’t just — but a lot of night flying. That was the emphasis. And then by this time I had found the delights of alcohol. So a typical night would be after supper we’d have a beer at the mess and then someone would say, ‘I think I’ll go along and see what is on at the New Inn.’ This was in Hampstead Norris which was a satellite of Harwell. So we’d trot along to the New Inn. And someone would say oh there’s a dance on so we’d find our way to a dance hall somewhere in the wilds of England. And so that, yeah I found myself deceived very badly by a beautiful English girl called Bridget Belinda Barnes. I remember it to this day because we had danced and I asked her for her name and she told me and I said, ‘That’s a mouthful.’ And she said, ‘Well my friends call me BB.’ I said, ‘Well do you mind if I just call you B?’ So we got on sportingly and then she got on a bus to go to Newbury where she lived. But she said, ‘You must come and see me tomorrow,’ and she gave me her address. And I thought this was terrific. To get to Newbury you had to bicycle so I got found of these English monstrosities that was, you know, to go push them on the level seemed like climbing a one in ten gradient. And the trip to Newbury is over the Berkshire downs. It was December. My gloves were quite inefficient so one would get down to the downhill business and put ones hands in ones pockets and go down. No hands. And then have to push up the next hill. So I got to Newbury which was about eight miles away and reported to the — and of all things Bridget Belinda Barnes had invited all her boyfriends to help in a bazaar [laughs]
AP: Very good. That was a long cold ride home.
JM: It was a long cold ride home. And I didn’t even go to the mess for a drink with my humiliation heart.
AP: Can’t trust them. So you said you started drinking by this stage. Was there anything particular that brought that on?
JM: I got sick of writing letters home, I thought, well someone told me that cider was a reasonable thing to drink if I didn’t like beer. And Gloucester is near Somerset. Full of Bulmer’s cider and so I went to the mess and drank cider. Pint of cider per pint of beer with my friends. And they wouldn’t come near me for days afterwards. It could have quite an explosive effect.
AP: Fair enough. Was that OTU?
JM: No that was at AFU.
AP: AFU. Right. Oh of course.
JM: Yeah. And so I I decided that beer couldn’t be as distasteful as that. And had no problems thereafter.
AP: It’s the English wartime beer. Did you, did you do the, I guess, familiar crewing up thing at OTU? Was that? How did that happen?
JM: I think, I think they were bestowed on us at OTU. In India we selected our crew and that’s where I came not to select my former navigator.
AP: That was. Yeah. So that’s I guess that’s a very significant difference from Bomber Command.
JM: Yeah.
AP: In a lot of cases. Obviously at OTU it’s I guess, you could say, it’s the tradition put you in a hangar and sort yourself out boys.
JM: Yeah.
AP: So ok but bestowed on you. That’s a bit different. Well we might as well go on to India while we’re here and enjoying having a chat. You’re at OTU. You finished the course. How did you get to India?
JM: Well we were sent to Blackpool awaiting a ship. And that was a piece of entertainment too. Yes. One used to go to the Blackpool tower of a night and you’d have a table there to which everyone had to supply a drink and by the time you became the last person probably propping the bar having to buy about a dozen drinks. But I hoped to meet some gorgeous woman there and don’t think I ever had any. No I never had any success that way but on my last night I decided I’d escort this damsel home and I suggested she might like to go into an air raid shelter with me and she said, ‘In there with you. You must be daft.’ [laughs] That was my last night in England [laughs]
AP: Fair enough.
JM: So the ship, this is where the ship to India. This is where my good friend Newman did the dirt on me. Because Newman at this time was a warrant officer and I was only a flight sergeant. And he should have been in charge of the mess deck but he somehow manoeuvred it so that I was put in charge of the mess deck. And the problem with that was that when you hit a storm in the Mediterranean if you were in charge of the mess deck you were responsible for its orderliness inspection time. And as half the occupants vomited during a storm in the Mediterranean I had the problem of ordering people to clean it up which nobody would accept my orders [laughs]
AP: Oh dear.
JM: No. No. But it did have its advantages. We travelled to India and there was a commando unit on the ship also which challenged us to a boxing match. And as nominations were being made for who’d represent the air force I was able to nominate my friend Clem Walker instead of me to undertake our appropriate weight. The opponent promptly laid Clem Walker out. So that was a bit bad. We got off the ship at Bombay. Learned that our air force issue uniforms — pipe stem trousers were just not worn by anyone in India so promptly re-equipped ourselves at our own expense. Found places like Worli where there’s wonderful swimming pools where we were allowed entry. And that was great fun. We were entertained, being non-commissioned by a very kindly group of people. I don’t know whether they were YWCA or who but they brought some little Anglo-Indian girls into the afternoon tea to meet us. This is one of these occasions of being unable to make contact. The shyness was on both sides I suppose. We’d have had this somewhat racial attitude. And the little girls would have been so hesitant and lacking in self confidence that it was just, just hopeless. But if you were officer class you had an opportunity I think to meet the upper class Indian women in a way that British non-commissioned people, British other ranks we were called, BORs, and you just never had the opportunity of meeting the more companionable I suppose, more self confident Indian females. So what else in Bombay did I see? There was a racecourse. I never went to the racecourse, but some of my friends would come home and say, ‘Oh you should have been.’ Edgar Britt just gave us a tip for all the races of these Australian jockeys. Edgar Britt and a fellow called Roberts. And another fellow called Scarlet there. All the races were fixed apparently because the jockeys knew who was going to win [laughs] yeah.
AP: So you flew Liberators operationally. Am I correct?
JM: Hmmn?
AP: You flew Liberators operationally.
JM: Yes. Well from Bombay we went across to Calcutta at the height of the Bengal famine. That was unbelievable. Stepping off the train in Worli. Step over bodies. There were beggars with Elephantiasis. Do you know what Elephantiasis is? Our mess was, in the open air and after things had been cleaned up you would see these old women come along picking through our rubbish picking bones. Just [pause] and India’s population then was about four million then. The population of the same subcontinent now is about a billion and a half. So imagine —
AP: My sister —
JM: What problems they have.
AP: My sister actually lives in India. She’s in New Delhi now.
JM: Who’s that?
AP: My sister.
JM: Yeah.
AP: And she, yeah, founded and runs an NGO to develop education in certain parts of India so yeah I hear stories like that quite, quite frequently. Yeah. I think it’s a very different world. So tell me what you first thought of the Liberator the first time you saw one.
JM: Well I first went on as a second pilot to a man called Joe Morphett who was a flight commander. It’s one thing that convinced me that I was lucky to be an NCO because when I got my own crew we all slept in the same basha together. We became absolutely a glued team. But Joe Morphett — I never saw him except when we flew. The same with the navigators of that crew. The navigator rather. And I think there was another officer in the crew. Never got to see them outside the aircraft and it just convinced me that NCO, all NCO crews were a good thing. But I did seven or eight ops with Joe. On the last one Joe had [pause] Joe was an interesting man. I learned afterwards researching things that he’d been a schoolteacher. He had a degree in engineering and he had given this — we had a CO on 355 Squadron a man called Dobson who was a no-hoper in my opinion. He was, again like Crannon, a man who liked to discipline people if they fell out of line. So he, we had two aircraft blow up on the squadron on landing and this was considered a shameful thing. We had a situation where he was only getting about four of the aircraft of the unit’s twelve aircraft — how many aircraft did we have on the squadron? We must have had sixteen aircraft I think. And twenty four crews. And we’d get about four or five up on an operation because the rest weren’t serviceable. And he decided to apply discipline. So this didn’t work. We had the squadron minstrel like the one on Crannon’s ship come out with a rhyme that went to the tune of “St Cecilia, the squadron is a shambles. There’s no ops any more. Eighteen NCO lined up outside the CO’s door. They’re handing out the 252s and reprimands galore. On 355 old Barney” and it went on. And Dobson disappeared for a while and Joe Morphett took over the squadron. And Joe got up and gave a pep talk to the whole squadron on what they should be doing. He said. ‘Your petrol consumption is dreadful. We are having aircraft land at other posts because they’ve run out of petrol on the way back. Now this is unacceptable. There are ways of flying when you come back from a target if you fly the right way you will use much less petrol. And the right way to fly is to fly on the step.’ And what, “On the step,” means is you start off at the target at ten thousand feet and you very gradually lose height at cruising speed so that by the time you are near home post you have minimised your fuel consumption at the appropriate cruising speed and are ready to land. And so that was that. The next op we fly out with Joe Morphett. We were flying. We were bombing a place called Maymyo which is a bit of a hill station on the Burma route. The Burma road route to Chonqing and on, in our briefing we’d been warned that Mount Victoria which I think is one of the higher peaks in Burma had to be avoided. Somehow, coming home, Joe said, ‘Jesus we’re going to fly in to a bloody mountain.’ And you have a thing called the gate on a Liberator. If you go through the gate you increase your flying speed and your power and Joe went through the gate to get over this place. So we get back over the Sundarbans which, the delta at the mouth of the Ganges Bhramaputra system and an engine goes. Quick as a flash I said, ‘Perhaps it’s a pump Joe,’ and I put on the emergency pump and the engine came good again. Then the rest of the engines went. I put on all the emergency posts. To cut a long story short Joe said, told the crew to abandon. Somewhere into Bengal by this time. And he said to me, ‘This goes for you too Mac.’ So I released myself and kept going. There I find a blockage. The wireless operator, my friend Ron Vine is there and there is someone in front of him who won’t move. So I went back to Joe and said, ‘Anything I can do to help, skip?’ He said, ‘Get out.’ [laughs] So I went back and by this time Vine had booted Melville, the flight engineer in the bum, and Melville had descended. Subsequently breaking his leg we learned. Vine and I got out at God knows what height because we were within very short walking distance of Joe’s crashed aircraft. The man who’d been so determined that people wouldn’t run out of [pause] it was one of those ironies that you. Anyway, that was, I did one more op at Phulbani and then was sent to HCU. Heavy Conversion Unit at Kolar which is near Bangalore. Lovely climate but not much else to recommend it. Bangalore’s an interesting town but, you know.
AP: So ok so you parachuted from an aircraft?
JM: Pardon?
AP: You jumped out of an aeroplane you said.
JM: Yes. Yes.
AP: Where did you land and how did you get back?
JM: Well yes, that’s interesting because Vine and I, of course, landed within feet of [pause] this was about 4 o’clock in the morning. Vine and I landed within sight of one another. Must have been moonlight because Joe had seen the mountain and it was the 1st of April of all dates. And so we found our way to the village. It was the second village from where we — we went to the first village nearest. We knew roughly where the aircraft would be. The first village we woke everybody up and finally found someone who was able to direct us, who knew where the aircraft had crashed. So we walked over about another four or five hundred yards of paddy. We got to the next place and there found Joe had been taken out of the aircraft by the local people. Put under a tree. A mango tree. I couldn’t eat mangos for years after that but there was Joe with a great triangular piece rolled back across his scalp and a great chunk taken out of his thigh and after painkillers so we found the medical kit from the aircraft and tried to inject morphine without much success. Anyway, Joe said take it out and finally we persuaded someone to go and get help. And so we —eventually help came at about I suppose about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. And on April the 1st in Bengal. That’s not very — May the 1st it was. May the 1st and that was that’s a hot season in Bengal and if you’re inland in Bengal you get the worst of things because you get the humidity and you get the continental heat before the monsoon hits it the heat becomes absolutely unbearable. But there it was [pause] I suppose it was by 3 o’clock we got help. Someone came with a wheeled the [unclear] which Joe was put on to and the medico was able to give him an injection which helped. And so we wheeled to, the squadron transport had somehow been invoked in the meantime. Or some military transport had been invoked and it was waiting for us about two miles along this track that we walked, behind Joe. The medico had bought some supplies for us because Vine and I had not taken food or drink from them. We were afraid. When you arrived in India you were warned never to eat anything or drink water because dysentery and cholera were such a threat. So we were absolutely parched. And the medico, Indian medico had brought along water and he brought some boiled eggs. Well I wouldn’t take even his water. I tried to eat the boiled, hardboiled egg. And have you ever tried to eat anything when you have no saliva?
AP: Very difficult. Yes.
JM: Anyway, we got to the end of this trail. Joe was to be put into the ambulance or whatever it was. He turns to the medico and says, ‘Can I bale out now doc?’ which I think is one of the wonderful heroic remarks.
AP: Indeed.
JM: So Joe Morphett was his name. He got the DFC in the Middle East and he got a bar too. His DFC on that occasion. And Vine and I were put into hospital with heat exhaustion. We came out in a few days. We were, Vine was a wireless operator. He’d been my W/op in Harwell actually. So we came out of that and then I did one more op with a man called John or Johns. WO Johns and I learned more about flying Liberators from him. Sorry Joe but I did. Than I did in eight ops with you. Anyway, after that we were posted to, or a few of us and my friends by that stage, you change friendships in the air force. You move, made new friends and Clem Walker who I’d given the job of representing us in boxing on the ship, and Butch Smith, a Londoner with a cockney accent and I were sent to HCU at Kolar where were we converted on to Liberators as captains in our own right. And it was there we chose our crews but I was a bit slow in getting around to a crew because I had to find a navigator and dodge the one I didn’t want to find. And I landed up with this Australian. A real rough diamond. Old Greg. He was considerably older than I was. He’d been on Wellingtons on air sea rescue in Madras for a while. And Greg reckoned he should have been first pilot but he got lined up with me as first pilot. So that, that was a bit tricky to start off with but we managed to find a modus vivendi eventually. He was a rough diamond as they say. My last meeting with Greg was in Calcutta. I was having a forty eight hour leave and learned he was about to depart for Australia on a banana boat having finished his own tour and I went to see him off. And he paid me a compliment of saying, ‘McCredie if it had been any other bastard I wouldn’t have stuck it out.’ [laughs]
AP: Fair enough.
JM: That was a funny relationship with Greg.
AP: Do, do any of your subsequent ops stand out in your memory at all? Any of your —
JM: Hmmn?
AP: Do any of your subsequent operations stand out?
JM: Well, the time, the time I was shot up stands out of course. I mentioned that earlier so we did long operations. Fifteen hours and forty five minutes took place. Called [unclear] on the isthmus of [unclear] . Quite a long way down. The name eludes me for a moment.
AP: That’s, that’s a lot longer than most Bomber Command operations.
JM: Hmmn?
AP: That’s a lot longer than most Bomber Command operations.
JM: Yes. Well —
AP: Fifteen hours.
JM: The Liberator was designed for that. We carried six thousand pounds [coughs] Pardon me. I’d better have a drink [pause] We carried six thousand pounds to this place. The Lancaster for instance had a maximum bomb load of twenty thousand pounds. The Liberator’s maximum bomb load was twelve thousand pounds. But where we, when we flew at six thousand we could have two bomb bay tanks of fuel.
AP: Bomb bay tanks. Yeah.
JM: In place of the bombs so that would carry us comfortably for a sixteen hour flight. But if you went with no bombs as some people did on reconnaissance. My friend, my CO, Killarney later became a Pathfinder in South East Asia and he did one flight, I believe of twenty one hours in a Liberator.
AP: Nuts.
JM: A reconnaissance flight but —
AP: When you’re, when you’re flying as a pilot for fifteen odd hours you pretty much can’t leave your seat can you?
JM: Yes. Well you have a co-pilot.
AP: Of course.
JM: So it, it’s when you’re young it seemed to me, for instance my logbook inferred that within three— or two days or three days I I did two flights to Bangkok from from Bengal which were both over thirteen hours. Taking off on each occasion in daylight and landing in daylight. You made up for the sleep in the afternoons. Indeed the siesta was the common practice and then somehow about 5 o’clock you’d head, if you weren’t flying the next you’d head for the mess.
AP: Very good. What was, what was a tour? How long was a tour in India?
JM: Three hundred hours.
AP: Three hundred hours. So it’s an hour’s based thing.
JM: Three hundred hours or a year’s service. A year on the squadron active service.
AP: Yeah. Go on.
JM: So, what — my two nickels counted as operational service. The seventy odd hours I did at Phulbani counted as operation service. So by the time I reached three hundred my crew was not finished. So Clem Walker and I and Butch all said we’ll fly on. It was that stage of the war and we didn’t see much to stop us flying. And so I ended up with three hundred and seventy odd hours.
AP: Of operational flying.
JM: Yes.
AP: Wow. So what happened at the end of your tour? What’s next?
JM: I was sent on to Transport Squadron. Clem Walker and I were sent on transports to New Delhi where we, 232 Squadron — it was 99 Squadron in Dhubalia which was where I did the bulk of my ops. I don’t think I mentioned that squadron. 232 was the transport squadron I flew on for six months and we did milk runs to Bombay, Colombo, Calcutta. I went to Pegu in Burma on one occasion. Cocos Island and then I did one trip back to Australia as a second pilot. When I went to the transport squadron I was a second pilot for a couple of months. That’s when I did the trip home to Australia.
AP: What aircraft was this?
JM: Hmmn?
AP: What aircraft? What aircraft?
JM: Liberators.
AP: Liberators as well. Yeah. Ok.
JM: So managed to get home to see my parents. And [pause] but Cocos Island was the first time you had to fly there you wondered if the navigator was on the ball because there was a point of no return. But we did a few trips there and my old squadron, 99 Squadron was posted there after the end of the Jap war because it was participating in the Javanese campaign. We were helping the Dutch get back into Indonesia so when I visited Cocos Island I’d meet up with old mates from the squadron. That wasn’t very good for the passengers on the way back the next day [laughs] But Cocos Island was interesting. Huge crabs would come on shore at night. But transport flying was something that I must say never appealed to me. You felt like you had a purpose when you went on a bombing raid but and you got back to base if you were lucky but if you —
AP: Did you, did you fly at all after the war? No. Not at all.
JM: No I went back to — I took up the government’s offer of a university education and I’d worked out that Australia was going to need a Foreign Service. My sister had written to me and said Dr Everett had introduced this. ‘You should try and qualify for it.’ I managed to get myself into an honours arts degree at the university and applied for the cadet course in my first year. Didn’t even get an interview. Applied for it again in my second year. And then I had the thought I would go and talk to my professor who — Professor Crawford had worked in the Foreign Service. He’d been First Secretary in Moscow during the war. And I went along and saw him and said I’m just wondering if it was a better idea to write and tell them I’ll apply again when I finished my degree. He said, ‘That’s a very good idea.’ So I, I’d laid the foundation for his giving me a good recommendation the next year and managed to get into the Foreign Service which was an infant service in those days.
AP: I guess, summing it all up, what were your thoughts on your wartime service. How did it affect you? How did it affect your subsequent life?
JM: It well the first year at university was very difficult because I had all sorts of unfulfilled ambitions such as I wanted to play football again. And I managed to get into the university blues which were the B grade amateur team in those days and got myself injured in a way that upset my studies for a while. And it was a very much a party year. First year back so I had a bit of trouble settling down and it wasn’t until I saw myself being on the brink of being thrown off the course that I could really get down to, and apply myself, full time, to study.
AP: Sure.
JM: Which was essential.
AP: I suppose that’s, that’s pretty well the end of my list of questions. So we’ve been talking for an hour and three quarters now, believe it or not. And that’s absolutely fine.
JM: I hope your ears haven’t suffered too much from the bashing.
AP: Oh my ears. No. Not at all. I mean I have been watching the clock but it’s, yeah, it’s gone. Gone very quickly so thank you for very much. Really.
JM: Well I hope that’s helpful anyway.
AP: I think it will be.
JM: What are you going to do with all this?
[recording paused]
AP: We’ll be able to fix it later. Alright. Carry on.
JM: Yes. Well as an after, this shouldn’t be an afterthought because my squadron commander on 99 Squadron Lucian Killarney was an outstanding man by any classification. His idea of running a squadron was that everybody had to work together. The first thing he did was bring the ground crew together to explain that he understood perfectly the conditions which were very difficult in the Bengal climate. He understood there were problems with catering. We couldn’t always get what we wanted, ‘But what every squadron needed was to have serviceable aircraft and that’s on you people on which we all depend. We can’t do our job without you.’ Now I’d like to pay this compliment to Killarney as a leader as so distinct from the man Dobson on 355 squadron. Killarney managed to get twelve aircraft in the air on almost every operation and he did that by leadership. By explaining and getting the ground crew onside and it’s been my privilege to see something of him after the war and to know that he ran his furniture company with the same diligence and consideration and the quality of his furniture reflects that.
AP: Excellent. Excellent.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AMcCredieJ151012
Title
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Interview with John McCredie
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:45:19 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Creator
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Adam Purcell
Date
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2015-10-12
Description
An account of the resource
John McCredie grew up in Australia and served in the Militia before he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force. He flew two operations as a pilot over France during training and was later posted to India. He later returned to Australia to continue his university education and went on to join the Australian Foreign Service
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Burma
Great Britain
India
India--Bengal
Victoria
Victoria--Mount Martha
Victoria
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
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1941
1943
1945
99 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
B-24
entertainment
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Harwell
RAF South Cerney
sanitation
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/300/3457/PMcDonaldDA1501.1.jpg
24affe9a8e5b3c45763f7f0310a07306
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/300/3457/AMcDonaldD151013.1.mp3
1b0cb799bccd5b31e6022fb655bc6475
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
McDonald, Donald
Donald Alexander McDonald
Donald A McDonald
Donald McDonald
D A McDonald
D McDonald
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. One oral history interview with Donald Alexander McDonald (1920 - 2021, 410364 Royal Australian Air Force) as well as two letters, a concert programme and notes on his interview. He flew operations as a pilot with 466 and 578 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Donald McDonald and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-13
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McDonald, D
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: So this interview for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive is with Don McDonald who was a Halifax pilot during World War Two [DM coughs]. Interview’s taking place at Don’s home in Doncaster in Melbourne [DM coughs]. It’s the 13th of October. My name’s Adam Purcell [DM coughs]. Don, I thought we’d start from the beginning. Can you tell me something of your early life growing up [DM coughs], what you did before the war?
DM: I was born in Melbourne and at an age too young to remember, the family moved onto a dairy farm at Koo Wee Rup [?] which is about seventy k south-east of Melbourne. I was born in 1920 and my first recollection of the dairy farm was in early school years, six and a half, seven. It was a pretty tough life, tail end of depression, appallingly low prices for our produce and there was a family of seven children, three girls and four boys so it was a, a tough life [emphasis]. As the result of poor income, low income, low prices, I had to leave school at age fourteen and I was lucky enough to have a, get work in the local post office and general store which was very much a part of Victorian Australian life. My wage was ten bob, a dollar a week for a forty-seven hour week. After a couple of years of that, I entered for an examination for the Commonwealth Public service and, and passed the exam. The examination was held in the Wilson Hall, the old Wilson Hall at Melbourne University. When I say the old Wilson Hall, it was a beautiful building but it was subsequent, post World War Two it was burnt down in a fire which was quite tragic. There was about four-hundred entrants for this examination and there were about twenty positions available, typical of the depression era or immediate post depression, world war depression era. And I was lucky enough out of the four-hundred, I came in ninth, and I misread one question, otherwise I would have gotten third, and I was pretty up, up staged about that because having only got to grade eight in school I was pretty happy with that outcome. And then of course 1939 came World War Two. In about 1937, just after I’d passed the examination for the Public service, I had to move to Melbourne to take up the position and was staying with an aunt and her, and her family. By the time I paid fares plus board and lodging there was no money left for anything else, and another guy who’d paid the same exam as I had, also from the country and equally short of funds, suggested that we should join the 4th Division Signals, because if you attended a parade one night a week you got the princely sum of five shillings fifty cents and, but that was one heck of a lot of money to both of us in the situation which we were in, and so we joined the Signals and so I was in the part time Army. Bear in mind there was no war, there was no ‘your country needs you,’ no loyalty, call on loyalty, no drums banging or cymbals playing to get you to enlist, it was pure economic necessity [emphasis] that we joined the Signals. I was a terrible [emphasis] soldier, absolutely shocking [emphasis] soldier. I didn’t think much of the Army and I didn’t give the Army any reason to think much of me. We attended our once weekly parade round and learnt Morse code and then came the outbreak of war, and with the outbreak of war within a month [emphasis] of the outbreak of war, I found myself in camp at Mount Martha, a newly formed military camp in Victoria on Port Philip Bay. Everything was absolute rudimentary. They were just still building the camp and our tents, we were living in tents and some of those leaked because they’d been stored at a military depot out in Broad Meadows, a northern suburb of Melbourne since World War One, and so they were pretty daggy [?] believe you me. As mentioned I was a shocking [emphasis] solider, I couldn’t – if something could be messed up, I would mess it up, and I’d do right turn instead of left turn on the, out in the bullring, the parade ground. My Morse was okay, I didn’t have any trouble with that, but apart from that I could drop a rifle in the middle of present arms and God, if you wanted to send a sergeant major ballistic that’s a guaranteed way I can assure you. I, I didn’t, I detested [emphasis] the Army and applied for aircrew and was accepted, and of course having left school at grade eight I was really playing catch-up. Our first Air Force camp was at Somers, purely ground subjects, no flying whatsoever, and it was rather amazing. As I say, I was on catch-up but in the evening quite often a lot of us would go down to the lecture huts and instead of going down to a picture show or camp concert or something like that where all the gym [?] there was – and we would help each other out on different subjects, whatever our forte might be, we would help someone, and I got a lot of help and made the grade as a pilot. I’d been brought up in a very [emphasis] strong, very astute Protestant family, and any thought of dropping bombs on people would have been absolutely abhorrent in our home, yet wartime dictated that was how and where I would finish up. I, I – after Somers initial flying training school, elementary flying training school was at Western Junction, the civil airport for Launceston, Tasmania, where we flew the Tiger Moth. Said to be unprangable, however I failed [?] up that story on solo flight. I apparently came in just a shade low, clipped the post on the boundary fence and finished up in an ambulance and in hospital. When I was well enough that prang meant that I had to have a scrubber [?] test with the chief flying instructor. He gave me an incredible [emphasis] drilling, he found out exactly what I’d learnt hitherto in my Air Force training, but I think he also found out what I hadn’t [emphasis] learnt and that was the important. And got to the stage [?] – he was very fair, very fair, he got to the stage of flying test and I think I – ‘cause this was a scrubber [?] test. Any, any messing up on this and my days as a pilot were finished. We, he put me through a few exercises in the air and then said [?] ‘trip’ [?], said ‘take it in and land it.’ And I think I did probably the best [emphasis]landing of my career. I absolutely breezed [emphasis] it on, you hardly knew when we, whether we were airborne or whether we’d touched down. Years later when I would try and relate this story about the perfect touchdown to my crew on a squadron they would laugh like all hell [emphasis], because they couldn’t believe that I could ever have done a decent landing. I from there went onto Point Cook, flew the twin engine Air Speed Oxford and – which was renowned as having bad stalling habits but I never did have any trouble whatsoever with them. Life – speaking from the viewpoint of mere male, to me life in the Air Force is very like life in marriage. Best to do what you’re told most times, the quicker the better, and as I say, happened to do what I was told I ended up in Bomber Command in, in England. Flew the, flew the Oxford again for a few hours and then OTU and crewed up and flew the twin engine Whitely, which was outdated pre World War Two and yet some of our very early people in Bomber Command had to fly the jolly Whitley on operations. No wonder their life span was so short. Alright, carrying on?
AP: That’s a, that’s a very good start. Sorry I wasn’t sure if you were carrying on or not there. Alright we might, might go back a little bit. The enlistment process – so you’re in the Army at this stage and you’ve decided to join the Air Force, so you go and sign the papers, presumably that was Melbourne. Can you remember much of the process? Was there an interview involved, some sort of medical tests? What happened on that day?
DM: Yes the medical test for aircrew was very, very strict, very exhausting and I passed that, not that I was in any great physical specimen then or now, but I managed to pass it. There were several interviews, one heck of a lot of questions, some of which seemed totally irrelevant but they were, they were there and they had to be answered. And it was a result of passing those questions and what have you that I was accepted and went to Somers on initial training school.
AP: What sort of things happened at Somers?
DM: Somers was great. Quite an emphasis on physical fitness, a lot of PT, a lot of square bashing or we used to call them the bullring parade ground drill. I formed an opinion there and it might be a totally incorrect opinion but I still reckon that to be a good drill inspector, the two main or the main attributes are a loud voice and not necessarily much between the ears. That might be quite unfair on DIs because they’re very decent blokes really when you got them away from the program, from the parade ground but they could give you one hell [emphasis] of a time when you were on the parade ground.
AP: From your assistive [?], your service flying training, so your Oxfords in Point Cook, you then somehow got to the UK. How did you get to A to B?
DM: We passed out of Point Cook, got my wings at Point Cook which was quite a thrill. Somers where we posted as instructors around various schools, flying schools around Australia. Some were posted as staff pilots flying trainees around other trainees such as navigators and bomb aimers around, flying them around to give them experience in the air and experience of navigation. I was from Point Cook and this, as I say, we had no say in, in what, in what happened to you. I was posted to pre-embarkation depot which was at the Showgrounds which are in a suburb of Melbourne. We were there for some weeks, awaiting, awaiting a ship. Shipping was very limited, very, very secret due to avoiding enemy action, not giving any secrets away in case – there used to be the saying: ‘tittle tattle buggers battle’ and tittle tattle, you know, words, things said unintentionally, if they got into the wrong ears, you have to be in a pub or something like that, and there was a fifth columnist there, well he would relay the shipping movements and make you ready made for a submarine attack. We, we were at Showgrounds for about six to eight weeks and then one Saturday morning, I can remember it quite well, they said ‘pack up all your gear you’re on your way.’ And we had no idea what ‘on your way’ meant. We finished up at Station Pier Port, Melbourne, weighed anchor late afternoon. Down port full of boat [?] and of course there was a lot of conjecture, a lot of guess work, ‘where are we going?’ ‘Well we’re going to Canada’ because a lot of our fellows went to Canada to finish their training, or ‘we’re going to South Africa’ because quite a few went there to finish their training. We got outside the hedge and turned port, so it was pretty obvious that we wouldn’t be going to South Africa. We hit it off, it was into the dark by now and about three days later we came in sight of land, and it was the coast of New Zealand. We entered a harbour, somebody recognised it as Wellington. We docked there, took on a few Kiwis and headed off again, much conjesture, conjecture [emphasis] and guessing. We all reckoned we’d be going to Canada – would we go around the, the Cape of South America or would we perhaps go through the Panama Canal, and we were heading off in generally speaking a north-easterly direction and after a certain time we were calculating our direction by the watch, you know, point the twelve o’clock at the sun et cetera, et cetera. And after a certain time we reckoned ‘oh no we’re not going around the Cape, we’re too far north for that,’ and then after several more days now, well we reckoned we must be passed the Panama Canal by now, and so it was guesswork, ‘where the heck are we going?’ And one beautiful, bright, sunny Saturday morning we woke up, walked out on deck, and were under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Harbour. Oh we reckoned this would be pretty good, we’d be able to paint the town red that night and, and, and you know, thinking up things we were going to do and not going to do, and about four o’clock on the afternoon, they pulled us into a floating jetty, probably a couple of hundred metres long, and on each side of which, shoulder to shoulder, were big black American policemen with rifles, all with rifles so there was no hope of jumping, escaping, doing anything that we, we would like to do. We were marched up on this floating jetty, straight into a train and that night instead of painting San Francisco red we were heading off east across America. And we spent five days and four nights on the train and ultimately – I better finish this [AP laughs] – we had five days and four nights on the train trans-America, experienced some very kind and generous hospitality from ladies clubs and that sort of things at stations where we’d pull up to refuel with coal or top up the water on the steam engine train. Some extremely [emphasis] generous hospitality, and we ultimately arrived early in the morning at a place called Camp Myles Standish. It was a transitory camp just outside Boston, from memory about thirty miles outside Boston. The nearest town was a place called Providence. We were given – ah when we arrived at Myles Standish we were taken off the train onto trucks and then dumped inside the gates of the camp, and the Americans had a band there to welcome us and they played us into out billets to the tune, among others, of “Waltzing Matilda,” and that was pretty great, pretty special of them to do that. We were granted leave that night and we went into the local what they call Legions Club which is the equivalent of the Australian RSL, and we were made very welcome, given the VIP treatment. We had heard during our time at Showgrounds in Melbourne that it was worth collecting a few kangaroo pennies. Now penny was currency at the time, the second lowest denomination of Australia currency, and some of the nine, pennies in the 1930s were struck with a kangaroos on the back of them, on the reverse side, and we were told that these were in great demand, the kangaroo. And we were having a drink at the bar of the Legions Club and one of us produced a kangaroo penny. Well the Americans who were in the club at the same time went berserk [emphasis] for them, and most of us had kangaroo pennies, as I say we’d been given the mail [?] about them, and if you produced a kangaroo penny you couldn’t buy a beer for the rest of the night. There wasn’t a bloke who – the recipient wanted to shout it for the rest of the night, so that was pretty good fun. After about, I think about two and a half weeks in Myles Standish, there was nothing to do. A few of us shall we say got itchy feet, and five of us decided that we would go AWL down to New York. Fancy being within a few hours of, you know, the Big Apple and not getting there, the temptation was too great. So we sneaked out of camp undetected, got into Boston to the railway station, and thankfully, very, very thankfully bought return tickets. It was a bit over a four hour trip down to New York and we had a great [emphasis] time. The Americans, the Australian uniform, Air Force uniform stood out fairly well because it was known as Air Force blue and it had Australia on the shoulder pads and we, we had a great time. The one thing though which we did [emphasis] discover was that an Australian pound didn’t go very far in New York and a sergeants pay as we then were, a sergeants pay was not very great and after about I think it was fourth day the five of us were all stone motherless broke [emphasis]. We didn’t have two pennies to rub together, and so this, as I say, was the good thing about buying a return ticket. If we’d, if we’d bought a one way ticket we’d have been stranded in New York, so we, we thankfully as I say, had the return ticket. Went to the station about ten o’clock, caught a train about ten o’clock at night, got back into Myles Standish somewhere between two or three o’clock in the morning. Again undetected, and hadn’t been in bed long and we were shaken awake, ‘wakey, wakey, wakey, wakey, you’re on your way.’ Well as I say, the good – there is a wonderful [emphasis] virtues of being stone motherless broke, not having two pennies to rub together. The great virtue on this occasion was okay we were awoken as I say after a couple of hours in bed, on another train and we finished up in Canada, a place called Halifax, a port, and we were put on a ship on our way to England. Now, the beauty about having the return ticket was this: had we not been able to catch the train to New York back to Boston [emphasis], we would have missed the ship from Halifax to England, and would have been classed as deserters. Now, desertion is a very, very serious offence in the forces and instead of getting the ship to England, we’d have been put on a ship back to Australia and arrived in Australia in handcuffs and gone straight to jail, so don’t ever worry I suggest about being stone motherless broke, it can have its virtues [AP laughs]. The ship was the, the ship from Melbourne had been the New Amsterdam which in peacetime was a luxurious Dutch liner. It had been revittled [?] in South Africa and there was only about three hundred of us airmen and about another forty or fifty New Zealanders so it was a pretty comfortable [emphasis] life. We got onto the ship in Halifax, it was the Louis Pasteur which had been a luxury French trans-Atlantic liner pre-war converted to a, a troop ship. America was in the war by now, and there were fourteen thousand [emphasis] troops onboard the Louis Pasteur. It was just incredibly packed, we didn’t get anything, the bell would ring for mess and there was nothing that even resembled edible food. You couldn’t blame the cooks, trying to cook for fourteen thousand people, they didn’t have a hope [emphasis]. The ship, for the first couple of days out we had a Destroyer escort and they were incredible, the way they would charge around. You’d swear they were going to be cut in half, they’d just you know, clear the bow of the Louis Pasteur and the Louis Pasteur, bear in mind you’ve got some pretty big Atlantic seas once you get out of a little bit from the coast, big, big waves, and the Louis Pasteur changed course every seventh minute. Quite violent change of course, and the reason for it being every seven minutes was it took a German submarine eight minutes to line you up and shoot a torpedo at you, so by changing course every seven minutes you had the German subs pretty much at your, your mercy, but it was very violent change of course. That plus the mountainous Atlantic seas, you really were getting your money’s worth I can tell you, and at times fourteen thousand troops – there was no treatment for the sewage it was just pumped out, raw sewage pumped out, and with these violent waves plus the also violent change of course of our ship, it was quite possible at times to have waves break over the stern of the ship and you’re up, you’re standing there knee deep in raw, untreated sewage. Strangely enough we didn’t hear – there may have been but if there was any sickness, any outbreak of sickness it was kept a very, very clever secret because there was never any word of it or any indication of a, a sickness outbreak from this as I say, almost living in untreated sewage sometimes. But after, after about three days I think it was, three or four days, the Destroyer escort just disappeared and one day we saw a speck on the horizon and there was much conjecture, ‘is it one of ours or is it one of theirs?’ It was an aircraft in the distant horizon and it turned out it was a four engine RAF Sunderland flying about and it took over the escort until we got almost, almost into Liverpool and another Destroyer came out and met us, took us under its wings for the last few hours, and so we landed at Liverpool late in the afternoon. Most wharf areas that you go to are not terribly exciting. This far from being exciting was rather depressing because it had had its share of Jerry bombs dropped on it and there was devastation everywhere. It was a quite a depressing sight actually, yeah.
AP: So that’s probably one of your first impressions of, of wartime England, is the –
DM: That’s right –
AP: You know, bombing damage.
DM: Yeah.
AP: This is the first time you’ve gone overseas presumably.
DM: Yes, yes, yes.
AP: As a young Australian, what did you think of wartime England?
DM: It was interesting. We’d left here at the end of early, rather early March, early March at the end of a rather dry and harsh Australian summer, and we got on a train at, at Liverpool and the first hour or two was in daylight and the – having left the harshness, the brown harshness of an Australian summer – there of course it, in March, you’re into spring and the various shades of green on the trees, the far [?] leaves. There was such a contrast to what we’d left back here about six or eight weeks earlier, and if it was very, very impressive without a, without a doubt. Beautiful shades of, of green, it was very, very impressive. We went from Liverpool by train down to Bournemouth. There were a number of delays in the journey, and we got into Bournemouth getting on towards midnight and that was our, we were to have our, that was to be our first English meal, a meal of English rationed foods. Our mess there had been an indoor bowling green in peacetime. Bournemouth is on the south coast as you almost certainly know, one of the most popular holiday spots in England pre-war but it had been evacuated. All the women and children had been evacuated out to the country. It was almost like a service town. All the hotels which had been packed with tourists in peacetime were taken over and used as billets for the three services. We – that was actually on a Saturday night and we got up on the Sunday morning and there was a church parade. Those of you who have been in the services know what it was, the Catholics went one way, the Jews went another way, the Protestants went another way, off to your various denominational services. We came out of our church service – the Catholics had an earlier service than us and some of their guys had gone back to their hotel, got their ground sheets which were a waterproof sheet, multipurpose thing, and laid them out on the lawns and there were a lot of lawns in Bournemouth, and they were enjoying a bit of Sunday morning sun [emphasis], and we came back out of church a bit later than them, and all of a sudden there’s a clatter, clatter, clatter. Now we’d been in England just over twelve hours – clatter, clatter, clatter. It was machine gun fires and so we suddenly realised ‘boy oh boy, this is a warzone.’ And the clatter, clatter from machine guns was German, what they used to call ‘tip and run raids.’ They didn’t do a lot of damage [emphasis] as such but they did cause one hell of a lot of disruption, and they were German fighter planes which would come in low, low, low over the English channel. Low so that the radar couldn’t pick them up, and when they got into, when they got over land they’d up to about a hundred and fifty, couple of hundred feet and they were just shoot. I don’t, I think at times they weren’t shooting at anything, they were just opening up their guns and as I say, nuisance value rather than damage. But interestingly enough I was saying these fellows had come home and come back to the hotel and got their groundsheets. Two of them were lying on a groundsheet, probably not much more than a metre apart enjoying the morning sun and a cannon shell ripped the groundsheet in two but neither of the blokes were harmed, it was quite, quite an initiation to, to fire and to the fact that they were in a warzone. We were there for a while, and there’s nothing worse for morale than having a congregation of guys with nothing to do so the powers that be decided that they would send us to a battle course up just outside Newcastle, Whitley Bay, just outside Newcastle. Here we were to have our introduction to Pommy drill instructors. Now when they use the word Pommy, often it’s used as a sort of derisive type of word. Later on I was to have five Poms in my crew, and whenever I use the word Pom it’s not one of disrespect, it’s more likely to be one of admiration. And anyway, I might have mentioned earlier about the main qualifications to be a good drill instructor being a loud voice and not much between the ears – these Pommy drill instructors did nothing to change that opinion. Whitley Bay had concrete strips, concrete streets, and this was a battle course to harden us up. We were, you know, scaling fences, going into trenches, God knows what, and marching clip-clop along the concrete streets with Army boots which had steel toes and steel heels, and we just about drove the Pommy drill instructors nuts when it came too hot [emphasis]. They would sound like a machine gun, and they used to let us know this, instead of – hot, you know, everybody exactly the heel on the ground at the same time sounded like a machine gun, and they, the more – they would take it out on us, they would make us double, they would make us run with our rifle above our head, but then at night we’d get in the mess or one of the local pubs and have a beer together and laugh our heads off with the Pommy DIs knowing quite well it was going to be more of the same tomorrow. But it didn’t do us, do us any harm, and from there we weren’t back to Bournemouth and on to AFU, an advanced flying unit which was where we flew the Oxfords again. Got a few hours up, the flying conditions were just so [emphasis] different there from what they are back in Australia, though Pommy instructors, and they bet us that they could take us up in the air, fly us around for quarter of an hour and we would be lost [emphasis]. They won the bet. The conditions, particularly around, we were just outside Oxford, and there are railways lines going everywhere [emphasis]. In Melbourne, Point Cook, if you’ve struck a railway line, spotted a railway line going west it’s almost certainly going to go to Bellarat. If it’s going north it’s almost certainly going to Seymour. Here you had railway lines going everywhere, little paddocks about ten, fifteen acre paddocks, whereas here we used to paddocks of hundreds of acres, and the instructors, as I say, won the bet. We were hopelessly lost after a quarter of an hour in the air. Good fun, all good plain sport, we used to have some good laughs about it, and from there we went to OTU, operational training unit. This was where you crewed up, which was quite an interesting exercise. There were probably about twenty-five or thirty of us on the course, and so you were going to have a crew of five, so it meant you had about shall we say thirty pilots, thirty navigators, thirty bomb aimers, thirty wireless ops, thirty tail gunners, and we were put in a hangar together and told to, you know, see if you could pick out someone you liked, you thought you’d like to fly with, and I saw a bloke standing there and went over and spoke to him, and his name was Pat. He was a navigator and started off, mostly, most people started off as a navigator. Skippers, most skippers started off as a navigator, and I had a bit of a yarn with Pat and Pat was, as the name might suggest, an Irishman and he was a wild Irishman. He’d been in a mercenary in the Spanish civil war when they were overthrowing I think it was King Alfonso that was overthrown. Pat was pretty wild sort of a guy and we decided, had a bit of a yarn. ‘Okay well do you want to try, do you want to, do we want to have a go together?’ ‘Yep.’ So then we looked around and saw a few bomb aimers and walked over and had a bit of a chat, and ‘ah yes,’ same sort of thing. So by now we were a crew of three, and the three of us then looked, went over to where the wireless ops were assembled, talking around and what have you. Incidentally, as I mentioned, Pat was a wild Irishman, the bomb aimer was a Kiwi, a New Zealander, the wireless op was from, a Pom from Cheshire, it was culturally [?] often called Cheese, nicknamed Cheese, and, and the – so we were a crew of four by now, picked, like picking number out of a hat really, and then we went over and had a look at the gunners and picked up a fellow, Taz Mears, who was a Pom from Brighton, and so there was the five of us and we decided we would give it a go together. The only unfortunate thing that broke that crew up was Pat got pneumonia and the Bomber Command appetite for replacement crews was insatiable [emphasis] so we couldn’t wait, we weren’t allowed to wait for Pat to get back out of hospital and rejoin us. That might have put a week or two weeks delay on our availability at the squadron, and so the CGI, the chief ground instructor, got us together and asked us would we try another guy who had been separated from his crew. Well this other guy was very, very different from, almost the opposite to, to Pat. He was an ex-public, an Englishman, ex-public school, a bank clark, and our initial meeting was to say the best was quite cool, quite – and when I say cool, not cool the way kids use it today, it was cold, it was frigid. But anyway, we didn’t have much option but to give it a try and it turned out to be good, he turned out to be a top navigator. He, he was ten years my senior, I was twenty-two, he was thirty-two. There were times where he was a steadying influence on the whole crew due to that bit of extra maturity, and we finished up despite the frigidity of our initial meeting, we finished up great mates. We, I went to his mother and sister, the father was deceased. The mother and sister lived at Exmouth, just outside Exeter in Devon, and I went down to their place numbers of times on leave, and the way they treated me was embarrassing. The food rationing in England was extremely severe, like two ounces per person per week of meat, two ounces of either butter or margarine per person per week, one egg per person per week, and we used to say perhaps, but they would save some of these rations so that when Wally and I – his actual name was Philip, Philip Hammond, but the English opening bat test, cricket batsman at the time was Wally Hammond, so Wally, Philip became Wally Hammond as far as the crew was concerned. But we finished up as I say mother and sister would save a couple of pieces of meat so we could have a bit extra and it was embarrassing [emphasis]. They killed us, killed me with hospitality. From OTU we were flying the old Whitley aircraft, a twin engine thing that was out of date before the war started and yet in the very early stages of the war, airmen had to fly the things on operations over occupied Europe, and it is no [emphasis] wonder that the losses were so great. As I say, there were hopeless [emphasis] bleeding aircraft, heavy on the control, sluggish to respond, low air speed, nothing going for them really. But we finished OTU, had a couple of nasty incidents there, and then onto the four engine Halifax. We were stationed just outside York and here further crew selection went on. We had to get a mid upper gunner and a flight engineer, and the same thing as I mentioned at the OTU, you went and had a yarn with a couple of blokes and we finished up with a fellow Pom from Newcastle, his name was Bell, surname Bell. To this day I have not got a clue what his real Christian name was because from day one with the crew he was Dingle, Dingle Bell, and what his true name was, as I say, I hadn’t a clue. And the other was a just turned eighteen year old, in fact I think he might have put his age on a bit, Johnny Cowl, and Englishmen from Kent as our mid upper gunner, so we had our compliment of five for the, for the Halifax.
AP: You mentioned a couple of nasty incidents at OTU, can you expand a little bit?
DM: Yes, the, the worst incident was there were only five crews on this particular course at OTU all of whom had been selected at OTU the same way as I mentioned ours, and we were briefed one night to do a cross country. Now cross countries were meant to get you ready, really ready for ops, and they could last five, six hours and the weather forecast was absolutely shocking [emphasis], and take off was postponed several times due to the weather forecast, and then ultimately it was decided that we would go [emphasis]. And as I say, why it was decided I do not know, but anyway, five crews, one had a crooked motor and didn’t get off the ground, another one of the crew took sick and I don’t blame him in view of the forecast [laughs]. I wish I [laughing], almost wish I had decided that I was sick, so there was two that didn’t get off the ground. Three of us got off the ground, one of them hadn’t gone far when he had a faulty engine and had to return, so that left two of us to – and of course we didn’t know anything about the other three, what had happened to them, we just pressed on. And after a while the control started to get heavy and as I say, the aircraft ultimately [?] was slow to respond and, and this was making it a bit worse, and then we started hearing things hitting against the fuselage and we couldn’t make out what it was, and it turned out, it was decided after we’d gotten back after everything was analysed that it was bits of ice flying off the propellers and hitting side of the fuselage. Things got worse and I lost our air speed indictor. Now what had happened, the pitot head – in case you don’t know what that is, it’s a little narrow tube that protrudes, protrudes out under the wing and the pressure at which the air hits that is converted to the air speed indictor in the cabin, via which we flew. Now, we lost the air speed indictor, and it’s a pitch black night, pitch, pitch black and so how the hell do you judge the airspeed if you haven’t got an ASI? Well with one hell of a lot of good luck, is all I can say. But anyway, we finished the, the course and got back over the airfield. Navigator did a marvellous [emphasis] job, incredible job, and bear in mind we’re only trainee crew, and I call out and said to the flying control, and told them, you know, ‘we’ve got no airspeed indicator and the aircraft’s hard to handle due to the ice, the wings and everything being so iced up,’ and the, the fellow in chargr of flying for the night was a flight lieutenant who’d done a tour of ops and a good bloke, good bloke, and he took over from the airfield controller and said, ‘okay, come in high, come in fast.’ And, which was good [emphasis] advice, no doubting the wisdom at all of his advice but how the bloody hell do you know fast when you haven’t got an ASI? So we, I, by the greatness of God and one hell of a lot, managed to do that and touched down. And it was screaming along the runway because I had come in really [emphasis] fast, screaming along the runway, brakes starting to overheat, no reverse thrust of course in those days, and the human mind is a funny thing really, I believe. I had my hands really full trying to look after and control the situation and I must [emphasis] say, just diverting for a moment, I must say the crew were absolutely marvellous [emphasis]. There was never a beep out of any of them, they each did what they were asked whenever they were asked, they fed whatever information they could to me, and they were absolutely brilliant [emphasis]. But anyway, as I say, we’re charging along the runway, brakes starting to overheat and lose their effectiveness and the human mind, suddenly it dawned on me about the excavation at the end of this runway. I would imagine there had been excavation and they’d taken the stuff out to build the runway and the perimeter tracks and what have you, and so ‘oh my God’ [emphasis]. You couldn’t possibly think of going into that, so I jammed on hard, hard left rudder, going as I say quite fast, and we went into a magnificent bloody ground loop and ultimately shuddered to a, to a halt and you know, we were off the runway, up the middle of the patty [?], out the middle of the airfield somewhere. And we hardly stopped, hardly come to a standstill and this flying duty officer who I’d mentioned to you, who’d gave us the instruction, ‘come in hard, come in fast,’ he, he was out there and up in the aircraft beside me, and anyway he was saying, you know, ‘good show, good show’ et cetera, et cetera, and we went off and, and were debriefed and went to bed. And we got up the next morning and they took us, drove us out to the aircraft, drove the crew out to the aircraft, and there were some bloody great slabs of rubber which had been ripped off the tyre when we went into the vicious ground loop at speed, and we, you know, looked and thought what might have been, what could have been. But we were by no means the main topic of conversation because the other crew I mentioned, you know, three didn’t go, we were the fourth. The fifth aircraft, he lost control [emphasis]. He couldn’t control his aircraft any longer, undoubtedly due to the icing and plus he may have let his airspeed get a bit low and perhaps close to stall. But anyway, he couldn’t control the aircraft and he gave the order to abandon aircraft, jump [emphasis]. And his bomb aimer – it was the bomb aimer’s job, he was the nearest to the front hatch, that was the only exit in the Whitley was the hatch at the front. He, his job was to lift the hatch, jump, and the others in theory follow, that was the theory. He lifted the hatch and froze, he couldn’t jump, and worst still he was blocking the exit, and the skipper, you know, he gave the order again a couple of times, and nothing was happening so he jumped out, out of the pilot’s seat to the front hatch, virtually threw this bomb aimer bloke out of the way and said ‘follow me,’ and he jumped because he knew quite well how low they were getting, so he jumped. Another two jumped and got out, but the bomb aimer and probably the tail gunner went in [?] and were killed. And I, I fell foul of authority because this skipper of course, he was being castigated. You’re supposed, you know, skipper’s supposed to be the last man to leave the sinking ship type of thing. Well I had the greatest admiration for him, because I’ve said, and our crew was agreed, better two blokes killed than five blokes killed, and I was told that I had to give evidence at, at a subject court of, subsequent court of enquiry, and I was marched in with a corporal with a bloody rifle, almost as though I was a criminal [emphasis], and I got in front of the desk where the chairman of the enquiry and a couple of other blokes were seated, and saluted and was told I may sit. And the way, the way the chairman told me, I think put us at loggerheads straightaway, you know. We used to talk cattle dog on a farm [emphasis] nicer than the way he spoke to me, and when I sat down he said ‘you’re, you’re required to answer some questions,’ and I [laughs], ‘I’ll answer any questions you ask me provided I can first make a statement.’ Well, t’was not spaghetti what hit the fan I can tell you. He lectured me about insubordination and this and that and the king’s regulations and God knows what, stathan’s [?] standing orders, and when he’d finished I repeated what I said, ‘I’ll answer any question provided I can first make a statement’ [emphasis]. And he was about to light up again when one of the other fellows on the board of enquiry asked what, why was my attitude such as it was, and I said to him just what I’ve said to you, I, the, ‘the skipper of that aircraft should be congratulated not castigated in my book.’ And anyway, after that a bit of reason prevailed and I was able to make my statement and the questions came thick and fast, and so that was, that was a rather nasty experience at, at, on Whitelys at the OTU so that was what I referred to before. From, from there it was – oh yes I, from there it was onto four engineer aircraft, Halifaxes, at a place called Rufforth which is now a suburb of York, it was just outside York at that time, and I finished HCU, that was called the heavy conversion unit, conversion on the heavy engine aircraft, heavy four engine aircraft, and I was posted to the Middle East. 462, an Australian Halifax squadron in the Middle East, and I thought ‘crikey.’ Just digressing a bit, my father came from the north of Scotland and he still had a couple of sisters, and I still had a number of cousins up near Inverness, right up the north of Scotland, and I’d been up to visit them a couple of times on leave since I’d been in England, and so going to the Middle East I sort of reckoned ‘well, I’m not half way home, I’m a third of the way home from Middle East, so I’ll probably be posted back to Australia.’ So I thought I’d better do the right thing and went up and saw my two aunties and cousins up in Inverness. We had a fortnight’s leave and I, after about a week or so, life up there was a bit dull and the bright lights of Lomond beckoned, and so I said to my auntie, said that I was going to go back down to have a few days in London before I left and that was all a-okay. If you change your address while you’re on leave you had to notify the adjutant’s office back on the unit where you were, so I sent a signal, no email of course in those days, sent a signal notifying my address as chair [?] of the boomerang club in London. I got down to London okay and sort of figured there won’t be much to spend my money on out in the Middle East, might as well have a good time here so there was no show I couldn’t afford to go to, there was no pub I couldn’t afford to drink at. I had an absolute ball and ala New York, just like New York I was stone motherless broke and went back to Rufforth, the camp where I was, the station where I was, and there was a party on in the sergeants mess so I borrowed ten bob, a dollar off one of my mates so that I could afford a beer and I was just about to have the first sip out of this pint of beer, and the CGI, the chief ground instructor came up to me and said, ‘what are you doing here McDonald?’ I said ‘just back from leave sir,’ and he said ‘well, your crew’s been, Middle East’s been cancelled, your crew’s been posted, you’ve been, you and your crew’s been posted to a squadron. The crew have all been over at Burn for two or three hours, two or three days. Be at the front door here with all your gear at seven o’clock in the morning and you’ll be on your way over there too.’ So, what had happened, I’d sent my notice as I mentioned back to the adjutant’s office, but they, they hadn’t profiled it, progressed it, hadn’t put it through the system and so I didn’t, the rest of the crew were recalled. They’d gone, you know the five Poms had gone home and Murray [?] had given the key, we, I don’t know where he’d gone, but they all got recall notices whereas mine hadn’t been put through the mill, and my change of address hadn’t been put through the mill, and so – but that was a great streak of luck, I would say, because I got over to Burn. The, it was almost straight into the CO’s office and he told me to sit down. He proved to be the greatest leader of men I have ever met or am ever likely to meet. He, I was Mac from the moment he met me. ‘Sit down Mac, I know you’re late arriving. Your crew’s been here for two or three days, but I also know that you sent a notice back to the adjutant’s office, you did all the right things’ he said, ‘you’re not, you weren’t in anyways wrong. This is a new squadron,’ and I think we were, I think we were the fourteenth crew there out of squadron strength was normally about thirty, maybe about thirty-two if you were lucky. We were about the fourteenth crew, and among other things he said to me, he said ‘Mac’ – and he’d already done a full tour, and had been selected to form up this new squadron, and one of things he said to me, he said, ‘Mac, you won’t – the only thing we’ll ask of you here is that you give off your best, and you’ll know whether or not you’ve given off your best,’ and so, you know, ‘go and get the rest of your crew round so we can have a bit of a yarn.’ And as I say, he was the greatest leader of men that I’ve, I’ve ever met but very, very [emphasis] sadly, he finished his second tour, was selected due to his ability and compatibility and all his virtues, he was selected to head up a very special training school and went over there. He always wanted to know what was happening to the men under him, and he wanted to find out more about what was happening, what was the routine with these fellows at the special school when they got in the air, and so he said to the commanding officer at this station, ‘I want to go up with, with a crew and find out a bit more detail.’ And the command officer looked his – ‘well everybody’s booked out, they’re all full crews today,’ and he says ‘doesn’t matter I’ll go with somebody, I’ll sit on the floor.’ And that was the type of guy he was. Sat on the floor and the bloody aircraft pranged on takeoff and he was killed after he’d done two full tours of ops, and as I say, his leadership, ah, outstanding [emphasis].
AP: What was his name?
DM: David Wilkerson.
AP: Wilkerson.
DM: Yes, David Wilkerson.
AP: [Unclear] record –
DM: Won a DFC on his first tour and a DSO on the second tour when he was in charge of us. David Wilkerson DSO, DFC.
AP: So you’re, you’re at your squadron now. This is 578 Squadron, am I right?
DM: That’s right, yes.
AP: Where and how did you live on the squadron?
DM: Beg your pardon?
AP: Where and how did you live [emphasis] on the squadron?
DM: On the squadron – David Wilkerson I just mentioned, the greatest leader of men, one of the things he said very early in the piece, ‘don’t muck around with saluting and things insofar as I’m concerned, unless there’s a senior officer there with me. If there’s a senior officer there with me, well then salute because they’ll wonder why you don’t salute me as a wing commander.’ And life on a squadron, there was no bull dust [emphasis], there was no drill, you did what was required of you. There wasn’t, strangely enough, a lot of flying because the aircraft was wanted for ops. The only time you did non operational flying was to do an air test if the aircraft had been damaged and you as a skipper and a crew who were going to fly it were entitled to fly it after it had been repaired, so you’d do an air test. Might be half an hour, you might go on a cross country or something like that, but there wasn’t, very, very little non essential flying. As I mentioned, David Wilkerson didn’t want any saluting. He didn’t have to demand respect, he commanded it by his own example, by his own demeanour, as, as squadron commander. He had to seek permission before he could go on an operation, the reason for that being the losses were such, highly qualified blokes were pretty scarce [emphasis] and promotion on a squadron could come incredibly quick. I knew of one case where a fellow got his commission, was a pilot officer and six weeks later he was a squadron leader. In other words, he’d pilot officer, flying officer, flight lieutenant, squadron leader, everybody above him had been knocked off, hadn’t returned from ops, and so within six weeks from pilot officer to squadron leader. Impossible if it wasn’t for the chop rate, and now and we – life was, I wouldn’t say on the squadron, I wouldn’t say it was ill disciplined, but there was no bull dust, there was no parade ground, no square bashing. As I say, David Wilkerson didn’t want to be saluted unless a superior was there, so it, other than when you were flying, I suppose a bit lay back is the, would be a suitable word. A bit lay back. The aircrew, the close knittedness if that’s the correct word of aircrew I couldn’t describe and I don’t know that anybody could describe. You just relied on each other, you were part of a close knit team. As I mentioned in that icing incident, not a mumble or a grumble from any of the crew and they must have wondered what the bloody hell was going on at times, but very – and mutual respect and likewise [phone rings] the ground crew [phone rings], they would do anything [phone rings]. That’s it, you got it. Absolutely anything [emphasis] for their aircrew, and the close knittedness if that’s the word between aircrew and ground crew was so close to that between the aircrew that it didn’t matter. We were, we were issued pre takeoff with compasses and escape maps and that sort of thing, and also with a thermos of coffee, some glucose tablets for quick conversion to energy, molten milk tablets, and a, and some very, very [emphasis] dark chocolate, was almost back, terrible [emphasis] looking stuff, and we would always try, the aircrew, try and save a few bits of that for the ground crew because as I say they would do absolutely [emphasis] anything [emphasis] for us, absolutely anything. And one night, I mentioned Wally Hammond, the navigator, an Englishman. Wally had quite a large nose – now I’m the last one who should speak about a large nose but Wally put mine to shame [emphasis], and one night we were on our way home and, bear in mind that the aircraft thermometer went down to minus thirty-five degrees, the needle went down to minus thirty-five, and it would disappear right off the clock, minus fifty God knows what, and this night Wally wanted to blow his nose. He had a bit of a dew drop, and he pulled off his oxygen mask but before he could get his handkerchief to his nose, a big dew drop fell down onto his navigation chart and was immediately snap frozen. Now, as I say it was a big dew drop and as you would know, a dew drop is almost semi transparent, and as I say, when these, with these chocolate molten milk tablets and et cetera, we’d always try to save something for the ground crew, and some crews they’d, they’d hide them, they’d have the ground crew in and have them hide and seek. We never ever did that, we’d always try and have something for them, and this night, as I say, this giant [emphasis] dew drop, almost transparent, and one of the ground crew came up into the nose, the aircraft, the navigator’s area [?] and looking for his goodies, and Wally said ‘would you like a dewb [?] Jonny,’ because it looked a little bit like a clear, transparent clear dewb and [laughs] well, Jonny – and he’d almost got it into his mouth and Wally smacked his hand and knocked, knocked it out [laughs] and told him the origin of the dewb [?] [laughs].
AP: What, what happened in an officers mess in a squadron? What, what sort of things happened?
DM: Well I wasn’t commissioned until fairly late in my tour –
AP: The sergeants mess then [laughs].
DM: Sergeants mess, you can have some real [emphasis] good piss ups at times without a doubt, and the officers mess wasn’t any, the limited time that I was in there wasn’t any, any different. No, no formality as such as there is in the permanent Air Force mess. They could be very, very formal you know. The draw with the wine at the end of dinner was a port night, you would, the waiter would put a port glass down in front of everybody, and then the very strict rule was that the bottle didn’t touch the table until it was empty, you had to hand it on hand to hand to the bloke next to you, right to left, right to left and things like that. Very formal in the permanent mess, quite informal in the, in the wartime mess. Just on the subject of mess, I would reckon the best Christmas dinner I had – well okay, take the ones you can first remember, first Christmas you can remember, they’ve probably got to be your greatest. For those of us who have little kids, the next best Christmas you could have was when your little kids open their presents and sat up at the table. My third, my best Christmas other than those two and nothing can supplant them, my next best Christmas was when I was instructing after I’d finished my tour. We were at a place called Moreton-in-Marsh, in the Cotswold country of England. For those who don’t know the Cotswold country, on the corner of the Moreton airfield was the four shire stone, a stone denoting the joining of Gloucester, Oxford, Warwick and Worcestershire, the four shires all joined together there, and I was instructing there, and magically out of nowhere about two or three weeks before Christmas about six or eight geese appeared and it was much activity making an enclosure for them. We pinched bits of wire form everywhere and made an enclosure for them, and so the geese was the, there was no turkey but there were geese for Christmas dinner. This was Christmas 1944 and there were a lot of Australians on the station at Moreton-in-Marsh, and a couple of them gathered the rest of us together and suggested, ‘look, we can’t get home for Christmas. What about if we go to the CO, the commanding officer, and tell him that all the Aussies are prepared to stay on the station over Christmas and let the maximum number of Poms go home for Christmas dinner with their family.’ This was accepted and all we Aussies, I was commissioned by then, and we went to the airmens’ and the WAFs’ mess and waited on them for their Christmas dinner. Went and got the, the meal out of from the kitchen and took it and put it on the table for them, which was great and they appreciated that, and then the same thing happened with eh sergeants’ mess. We went over to the sergeants’ mess and waited on them which was absolutely great [emphasis]. It was absolutely marvellous and we got our own Christmas dinner I suppose at about four o’clock or something in the afternoon, but that was very, very, as I say, next to being a little kid and then having your own kids. That’s the, my most memorable Christmas, mm.
AP: Do any of your, your operations stand out in particular?
DM: I suppose whilst it was – we had a pretty easy trip, although we did lose our flight commander. D-Day was incredible. As skipper, you’re pretty preoccupied watching your instruments, flying your aircraft, looking up from time to time for other aircraft because there were bloody kites everywhere [emphasis], but the rest of the crew were – and we were a very strongly disciplined crew, very strongly disciplined in that we didn’t tolerate any unnecessary chatter, but the sight on D-Day was such that I take my eyes away from the instruments and other things from time to time and have a look out. But the rest of the crew, you know, the, the, the gunners and the navigator and bomb aimer down the nose of the aircraft, the engineer had a window beside him, as did the, the wireless op. They, you know, the sight, all [emphasis] those watercraft, God [emphasis] it was an unbelievable sight. As I say, we had a, a reasonably easy trip but we did lose our flight commander who was very experienced, he was on his second tour, and [phone rings] he unfortunately, as we used to call it, copped the chop [phone rings], mm. Now that would be one of the most memorable. Couple of the others weren’t as kind as that [laughs] was, but that was an incredible sight.
AP: Are they, are those other trips something that you’re – are you able to tell us something of some of the other trips?
DM: Er, yes. Our – Karlsruhe was very unpleasant, nasty weather, a lot of electrical storms. Very, very nasty and it was pretty hot over the target. They certainly gave us a, a warm welcome. We were lucky, only, only minor damage. Now look, yeah Karlsruhe was the most, probably one of the most – Essen, they certainly didn’t welcome you Essen, you know, the home of crops. Germany’s biggest armament manufacture, they, they let you know that you weren’t wanted. My – you, as a skipper you were sent with an experienced crew. You’d done everything in the way of training except being put under fire, and to try to give you some experience there, they would send the skipper to an operational squadron to do either one or two ops with an experienced crew. We, I took off with one of the flight commanders and we had an engine fault and had to return early. The target was Berlin and that was, that was, this was the first briefing of course that you’ve been to and you’ve got no idea what you’re in for. And when the squadron commander ripped the curtains back from the map on the wall and said, ‘there’s our target for the night, Berlin,’ there were groans, there were moans, there were some said ‘not again,’ others screamed out ‘the big city,’ and that was interesting for a first time. And as I say, we had to do an early return. Couple of nights later, experienced by then, I’d been to one briefing, so I’m into the second briefing, and it was Berlin again and indicative of how temporary life on an operational squadron could be is this example. There were two of us sent over to, to Driffield, the Australian Halifax squadron to do our second dicky trip with an experienced crew. The other fellow, Doug, Berlin the target again, was shot down just before they were to release their bombs, so his total experience on an operational squadron was about four hours, slightly less than four hours. Berlin was about a seven hour, roughly trip seven, depending on wind direction and whatever, and his total experience on an operational squadron, four hours as I say, it’s indicative of how brief it could be. The second time I took off with another, with a different crew and we – interesting, you know, you’re sitting there in the co-pilot’s seat in a Halifax, take it from me, no aircraft, no wartime aircraft in which I entered had any consideration of comfort for the crew, and indeed they seemed to have protrusions everywhere which, you know, as though they set traps for you to hit your head on or bump your shoulder against or some such, but as second dicky in a Halifax you pulled down a wooden seat from the side of the hall. It had no padding on the back of it, just timber, and precious little padding on the seat, and nowhere to rest your feet. You dangled your feet in midair a little bit like a very small kid in a church pew, just dangled his feet and that’s all you could do. And so, as I say, no thought of comfort and the guy with whom I was flying on this second attempt at Berlin was a fellow named Gus Stevens. Very experienced and very good pilot, and I can remember approaching or probably about half way there, ‘oh this doesn’t seem to be too bad,’ and bit further, ‘oh I’m getting close to the target. I’m not too sure this is all that good.’ Getting into the target area, ‘oh my God, there’s, there’s, I reckon there’s a few places where I’d rather be,’ and then over the target itself, ‘I know bloody well there’s a whole [emphasis] lot of places where I’d [laughing] rather be.’ And anyway, we got in and out of the target area okay and we’re stinting [?] along on our way home when all of a sudden a heap, a trace of bullets started flying everywhere and we had one of the inner engines were, were knocked out. The rear gunner didn’t spot him. Obviously if it was one of those German night-fighter aircraft where they had the upward pointing firing guns, which was a very [emphasis] bloody miserable trick in, in my book. God, talk about all’s fair in love and war, there’s nothing fair about, about that. Anyway, the – this was interesting, we’d done plenty of fighter affiliation at heavy conversion unit. They’d set up Spitfires and Hurricanes to, with us and the gunners both had camera guns so that we could, the aim could be assessed when they got back on the ground. But anyway, and with, you know, we’d thrown the aircraft round corkscrew port, corkscrew starboard et cetera, et cetera, and generally speaking the rougher and more violent your corkscrew, the more effective it was likely to be. Would you like a beer by the way, or anything like that?
AP: I’m alright thank you, but you’re happy to keep going? Carry on?
DM: No, no I hope I’m not boring you.
AP: Oh not at all.
DM: Anyway, the, one of the, I think it was the port inner engine got knocked out, but Gus Stevens, the pilot, the skipper told me to feather the engines so he could keep his both hands on the control column and put it into a steep dive. Well, there was almost like a deadly silence other than air swishing around, and Gus had, we worked it out later what he’d done, he’d put it into such an incredible [emphasis] dive, used such force that all the petrol, all the fuel was forced up centrifugal force off the bottom of the fuel tanks, and you had what was known as constant speed control on your, on your propellers, but the moment they were relived of any load [emphasis] they just went into runaway mode, and so, as I say, you had this short period when the fuel was off the bottom of the tanks and you just had air rushing by and then when he pulled it back in and the fuel went back onto the bottom of the tanks and entered the fuel allowance [?], entered the motors – the motors of course as I say, they had constant speed, like governors on them and, which governed the air, the air screw, the propeller speed to about three and a half thousand revs, but with this load moved, taken off them, I reckon they were probably at about four and a half thousand. And then when the petrol went back and into the – the bloody row [emphasis], the vibration of the – I didn’t realise what punishment a hellick [?] would take until that moment. You know, I thought I’d done some pretty rough and tough stuff on [phone rings] when we were doing [phone rings] our fighter affiliation in training, but nothing [emphasis] like [phone rings] this. Bloody vibration it shake [emphasis], I thought the thing would shake to pieces.
AP: I suppose that shows the value of the second dicky trip, going with an operational pilot [unclear] –
DM: That’s right, that’s right, yes, ah yes, yes, yes.
AP: It’s yeah, unreal.
DM: Yes, and interesting side line to that was back at the heavy conversion unit, the training unit again the next day, the CGI, chief ground instructor – there was a class in progress, I’ve forgotten what it was, and I was marched in and he said ‘I want you to tell your experience, your experience from last night.’ So I started, and he said ‘hold up Pilot McDonald, hold up. You don’t have to say any further. We’ve been in touch with the flight commander and the skipper concerned and we know almost as much about it as you do, so you can save your voice.’
AP: Very good [DM laughs]. Well I guess flying operations wouldn’t have been the most stress free existence. What sort of things did you do to relax?
DM: Give the grog a good nudge [laughs]. Yes, there was sports. You could have, there was tennis courts near the squadron and you could have a – we used to play a game that was a cross between AFL and rugby. There was you know, plenty of blokes from New South Wales and Queensland. They, they’d never heard of AFL at that time, and so we would, we’d have a game crossed between AFL and rugby. And of course the blokes, the rugby boys would tuck the ball under their arm and never think of bouncing it or anything like that, and that, that, that was a bit of good fun, and most, most messes would have table tennis facilities so you could have a game, and some would also have billiards or snooker to fill in time at night. And of course you’d have the odd game of cards here and there and those who liked to play poker could put their pay on the line.
AP: Can you – I gather you probably spent a fair bit of time at the local pub?
DM: Oh yes [emphasis], yes, yes.
AP: [Unclear].
DM: Yeah, not really funny thing, but the mid upper gunner of my second crew – when the war finished in Europe, I had just started a second tour. Indeed I only did one trip and the war in Europe ended. I – back at Moreton-in-Marsh, I, flying the twin engine Wellington which were a lovely, lovely kite to fly. As I say, twin engine. I’d had about three single engine, I’d had three single engine landings in about five weeks, and it wasn’t the fault of the ground staff. The motors were copped, cuffed out, they’d, they’d had it and no matter how good the ground staff had been, they would have had troubles keeping them airworthy. So I’d had about five single engine landings in about five weeks. The first two were highly successful. The last one, the third one, I was very lucky to walk away from. And the – sorry where were we up to when I digressed [?] –
AP: So we were – pubs.
DM: Ah yeah pubs. Yeah, and, and so we – I was very lucky to walk away from it. And on the sort of subject of pubs, as I say I was an instructor at this time, and I finished up in an ambulance and at lunchtime I was about to have a pint of beer because the flight commander had said, you know, ‘your flying’s finished for today.’ And so I thought I’d have a pint of beer at lunch and I was just about to have my first sip out of it when the MO, the doctor came up to me and said, ‘I think you can put that down, and, and you better come with me.’ And I didn’t realise but I had concussion, and he put me into hospital. Now, there’s two things outstanding about this. Some miserable sod got that pint of beer and drank it and never owned up to me, never paid me for it, never owned up to me for it, and so if I ever catch up with him I’ll, I’ll get my [AP laughs] money’s worth. The other thing was at night a couple of the other instructors, they were, we were all instructors at the OTU were ex-op fellows, and a couple of them decided they’d come down to the hospital, the sick quarters and see how I was, and they bought a couple of beers with them. So that was great, very good medicine, and the next night about four of them came down and finished up after three or four nights was about six or eight of them, and, and we were having a great old time grogging on in the station’s sick quarters, and lo and behold, who should come in but the doctor, and caught us all with our grog there. He ordered the other blokes out and said to me, ‘you’ll be in the flight office at eight o’clock tomorrow morning McDonald, and I’ll be there to make sure you’re there.’ And so that was the end of that medication, so that’s, you know. Looking back, looking back at him, I sometimes wonder and indeed think that possibly we were pretty much at the stage of eat, drink and be merry, tomorrow you may die, and I think that did tend to take over, yeah.
AP: We’re getting, we’re getting close to the end of [both laugh] –
DM: No worries.
AP: We’ve been going for an hour and fifty-seven minutes.
DM: Truly? Oh my God.
AP: Believe it or not, flown by –
DM: Yeah.
AP: It’s been great [emphasis]. I guess, well yeah, coming back to Australia. How did you find readjusting to civilian life and what did you do after the war?
DM: I reckon for the – I had been in the Public service, as I mentioned, when I enlisted and when I got back I took twelve months leave from the Public service, leave without pay, with a view to hopefully [?] adjusting or readjusting myself. I went back to the bush, back on the farm, and I reckon for about the first three weeks I got up and helped with the milking in the morning and then spent most of the day sitting under a big pine tree. I’ve got no idea what I would have been thinking, and the, the owner of the local general store and post office said, ‘what about coming and working for me? I need someone.’ So it was a bit more than ten bob a week at that time of course, and I accepted his offer which suited me really because I was, meant I had to be meeting people, getting out amongst them, them coming into the store, me getting out amongst them, and I think that was a good move. At the end of twelve months I resigned altogether from the public service and got married and went into business on my own. First one was a little grocery store, a newsagents and post office out at Fawkner, northern suburbs of Melbourne, just near the Fawkner cemetery. I sold out of that and worked for another guy for a few months and then opened a grocery store in Hampton, a beach side southern suburb of Melbourne. That was when self service first started to come in. Prior to that when you went in to the grocer’s shop you asked the grocer what you wanted and he put it on the counter and gave you the bill and then self service came in. We had one of about the first twenty self service shops in Melbourne and then frozen foods came in, and we had one of I think it was about the first six [emphasis] deep freezers in Melbourne. After about six, seven or eight years in that business I sold out, worked around for a while and went into radio communications. The neighbours said, ‘look, we want someone – our company’s just going into radio communications. You know a bit about it from your Air Force experience.’ And the job was virtually painted [?] there on a platter for me so I worked in that, and I could see a need for some towers. It was roughly line of sight communication – radios such as in taxis and in trucks and plumbers and electricians et cetera, communications, mobile communications, and I could see that to increase the range we needed some towers, and the company with whom I was working wouldn’t listen to me, so I said to them ‘okay, you won’t provide them, let me provide them.’ And I did and we finished up with about six of these around Melbourne, and then I, I started renting a few radios. I could see a requirement for rental and people didn’t want to buy, and once again the company with whom I was working were disinterested so I started renting radios which I owned. And then later on I saw a need for little hand-held portable radios for security people and crowd control and parking et cetera, and actually I just sold out of the last one of them in the last twelve months. But we finished up with roughly a thousand of them little hand-held ones, and we, we do some, well I’m out of it now but we did some quite big jobs. Probably the biggest was the spring carnival at Flemington in Melbourne. The Melbourne Cup is a world famous race and a big requirement for these little hand-held radios, not worth them buying them because they only need them for about two weeks of the year. The rest of the year they would be on the shelf and be knocked off or the batteries would go flat and so there’s the, you know, just a little inside there, there’s the parking, there’s security, there is crowd control, catering. Imagine what it would be like if the bird cage or some of those quite exclusive enclosures at Flemington ran out of champagne, so you’ve got to be able to engineer, develop a system so that they can get down into the bowels of the earth as it were, under the big grandstands and everything so that we could control the flow of champagne up there to marquees and the likes spread around the ground. Quite, quite an interesting, quite a challenging exercise, and, and it was, as I say, I’m sold out of it now but it was financially fairly favourable, and no Lord Nuffield or Rockefeller or anything like that but enabled a quite good standard of living.
AP: Excellent. I guess the final, the final question, perhaps the most important one. From your personal perspective, how was Bomber Command remembered and what sort of legacy do you think it’s left?
DM: A good question. A lot of condemnation on Bomber Command. If Bomber Command hadn’t done the duties they were called upon to do, and likewise many other branches of the service, if they hadn’t done the things they were called upon to do, goodness knows how much longer the war might have gone on. The French government just this year, seventy years later after peace was declared, seventy years later gave, made some awards. Now, one of the qualifications was that you had to be involved on D-Day. D-Day for a lot of the French people and a lot of the people of occupied territories was the first time for five years that there was any light to be seen at the end of the tunnel. That D-Day signalled in my book, the beginning of the end and Bomber Command were well and truly involved in D-Day and they were involved subsequent to D-Day, stopping Germany getting their troops and their supplies up to the front line. The V1s and V2s, the Doodlebug, flying one, call it what you like, if Bomber Command hadn’t put down the launching pads for those V1s, almost all [emphasis] of London and southern England would have been laid waste in my book, there’s not any doubt about that. And of course the V2, terrible [emphasis] weapon. There was no combating the V2 once it was in the air, there was no ways [unclear], and so what did they do? They sent Bomber Command over to the launching pads and manufacturing plants in Scandinavia. Some of those aircraft were in the air fourteen hours. Now, as I mentioned, there was no thought of comfort for the crew in a bomber aircraft. Temperatures, as I mentioned, the thermometer went down to minus thirty-five and the needle used to go right off the clock, right [emphasis] off the clock. The gunners had electrically heated gloves, other crew members had three pairs of gloves on: silk next to the skin, woollen to try and keep the warmth in and then the big elbow length, fleecy lined leather gauntlet. Bomber Command [phone rings] didn’t get, did not [emphasis] get the credit [phone rings] for which it was due [phone rings]. Almost sixty thousand people killed [emphasis]. Young men in their prime, fit, you had to be fit to be an aircrew. Fit, young men in their prime, almost – now for Victorians or Australians, almost sixty thousand, that is the equivalent to every man, woman and child, the city the size of Bellarat. There were eight thousand killed on training – I mentioned the icing experience before, eight thousand killed on training. Now, for any Victorians, that’s the equivalent of a provincial city the size of Bellarat or the size of Colac. Every man, woman, child in that city, killed. So as I say, the legacy of Bomber Command, the ruddy war might still be going on. It did not get its true dues in, in, in my book, and as I say, it would have gone on a lot longer. Yes, we’re finished I think.
AP: I think we’re done.
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AMcDonaldD151013
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Interview with Donald McDonald
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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02:10:05 audio recording
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Pending review
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Adam Purcell
Date
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2015-10-13
Description
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Donald McDonald grew up in Australia and worked for a general store before he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force. He flew operations as a pilot with 466 and 578 Squadrons. He returned to Australia after the war where he became involved in radio communications.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Gloucestershire
England--Yorkshire
Victoria
Victoria--Mount Martha
Victoria
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Katie Gilbert
466 Squadron
578 Squadron
aircrew
coping mechanism
crash
crewing up
entertainment
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
mess
military discipline
military living conditions
military service conditions
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
perception of bombing war
pilot
RAF Burn
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Rufforth
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/309/3466/AMunroL150604.2.mp3
e4a1c8a20e21add227fdb978e901cb8a
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Title
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Munro, Les
Les Munro
John Leslie Munro
John L Munro
John Munro
J L Munro
J Munro
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Squadron Leader John Leslie Munro CNZM DSO QSO DFC (1919-2015, Royal New Zealand Air Force). Les Munro trained as a pilot in New Zealand and Canada and completed 58 operations with 97 Squadron and 617 Squadron from RAF Woodhall Spa and RAF Scampton. His aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire on the way bomb the Sorpe dam and he returned to RAF Scampton still carrying his bouncing bomb.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-04
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Munro, L
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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NB: Right. It’s quarter to five on the 4th of June 2015. I’m in the house of John Leslie Munro in Tauranga, New Zealand. Excuse the pronunciation. Tauranga in New Zealand. Um I wondered if we could start off by just finding out a bit about your life before you went into Bomber Command.
JLM: Yes. I was born to — my father worked on a sheep station at Dorman which was sixteen miles from the town of Gisborne. I was born and brought up and spent all my younger life in the Gisborne district. After I only spent two years at high school because of the slump. We were being brought up in the slump. My parents could not afford to keep me at high school any longer so immediately on leaving high school in 1936 I went to work on a small dairy farm on which I worked for about eighteen months and from there I went to a larger farm which was a mixed sheep, you know, sheep cropping, mainly maize and dairying. And after about two years in that — working on that farm the owner left to work for a rural department and left me in charge. I was in. When war broke out I considered that I should actually do my part in, in supporting the king and country and democracy and freedom and democracy and that sort of thing. Ah and I um postponed enlisting because my younger brother had put his age forward and he actually spent his twenty first birthday overseas and that upset my parents quite considerably and I respected their feelings about the matter and postponed my enlistment until I passed the age of twenty one. So, as soon I was twenty one I enlisted in the air force. And because I’d only did two years course at high school of which neither was in– covered mathematics they said I wasn’t suitable to be a pilot but I could be a gunner or a wireless operator if that was suitable to me. But I didn’t, I didn’t agree with that and they said, well I said I wanted to be a pilot and the air force said, well, alright you can do a correspondence course in mathematics and trigonometry [struggles over word] and if, if you pass that we’ll accept you as a pilot and that’s what happened. I did the correspondence course and it was very very hard to do trigonometry and that I just couldn’t follow for a while. And eventually I passed and I went into the air force at Levin which was a brown place, just a parade ground sort of experience. And on the 5th of July 1941.
NB: Right.
JLM: Yeah.
NB: What made you go for the air force?
JLM: Well I’m often, I’m often asked that and I think, I think the idea that I wanted to be a pilot. I would be in charge of my own destiny. I think that was what drove me to that. The other thing is that the second farm I worked on, the homestead was up on a hill and the commercial air, commercial planes used to fly past. I’d watch them flying and I think I got a feel for flying, for flying planes, myself. Yeah.
NB: So, once, once you enlisted having got your qualification what was the process they put you through for training?
JLM: Well as I said earlier I entered the air force on the 15th of July 1941 at a place called Levin. I only had about six weeks there and I was transferred to New Plymouth to number 2 EFTS, that’s the Elementary Flying Training School on Tiger Moths.
NB: Right.
JLM: Spent um, flew there. I got my uh went solo after about six and a half hours’ training which apparently was recognised as being fairly good in those days. Ten hours was recognised as the normal period in which to gain your pilot’s licence to be able to go solo. And I gained my pilot’s licence, well, not licence but go solo and after six and half hours and [pause] — I’m not sure, I haven’t got the dates with me. After about ten weeks I think it would have been we were sent on leave and I left New Zealand on the 20th of October 1941 for Canada.
NB: Right.
JLM: I was sent to Canada. Number 4 SFTS [Service Flying Training School] where I trained on twin engine Cessna Cranes.
NB: Right.
JLM: Just as a point of interest is at that stage the Americans weren’t in the war and we travelled to Canada on the SS Mariposa which was a cruise ship and we were, we actually were transferred as, or transported, as civilians.
NB: Right.
JLM: We had two to a cabin with a server. A steward waiting on us in the cabins and the same on the, on the dining room tables. We were waited on by stewards and we were treated as civilians all the way over which was a quite significant in the sense that if we had been on a troop ship we’d have been about — I don’t know how many to a cabin and all that sort of thing. Yeah.
NB: And did that take you to —
JLM: And went to we arrived at San Diego and berthed there for a couple of days and then we sailed again through San Francisco. We debarked — disembarked at San Francisco.
NB: Okay. And then how, how did you get into Canada from there?
JLM: Hmmn?
NB: You went up to Canada from there?
JLM: Yeah. I, we caught the train at [pause] what’s the name of it? No gone. Caught the train at, there’s another town is there? Across the estuary or somewhere from the town of San Francisco, the city of San Francisco up to Vancouver.
NB: Right.
JLM: And then over. Took the train from Vancouver. Again I think we had to change to Canadian Railways of course and went over the Rockies to Saskatoon.
NB: Oh right.
JLM: To the [pause] yeah, which is in Saskatchewan.
NB: Saskatchewan. And how long was your training period? And was there a difference in climate or —
JLM: Ah yes. At that stage we were in the middle of winter and the ground, the ground was covered in snow. The only evidence you knew about habitation was the plumes of smoke. Smoke coming up from the chimneys of the houses and that sort of thing. But yes, we were, I’d never seen, well, no, I’d never seen snow in my life I don’t think and — but the ground was covered in snow although there was no problem. We were still able to fly there. The runways were still capable of being flown from. And we’ve carried on there until the 28th of February of ’42 when we were granted our wings and appointed officers. Pilot officers to start with and we, you know we awaited our — were awarded our wings. If that’s the right way of putting it.
NB: Yeah. So did you return to or come from there straight to the UK or did you have —
JLM: We had a fortnight’s leave.
NB: Right.
JLM: And three of us, I think, that used to kind of stick together quite a bit went down to New York and then transferred back up and took to Halifax where we caught the HMS, well not HMS, it was a civilian er Cape Town, the Cape Town Castle.
NB: Right.
JLM: And went to Liverpool. From Liverpool, by train, to Bournemouth where we filled in time for about, er we used to call it a holding pattern. We were there for, I think, about two months and then were posted up to Shawbury in Shropshire and did a refresher course on Airspeed Oxford. Spent a lot of time flying on Link Trainers and then we went from there to er Luff- North Luffenham the operational, the OTU.
NB: OTU. Yeah.
JLM: OTU. Operational Training Unit. There for about um about you see I’ve got these notes [unclear], I haven’t got my logbooks which I can refer to. Um, we were there for [pause] maybe, somewhere about three months I think and we were posted to Heavy Conversion Unit at Wigsley. We were flying Wellingtons at North Luffenham and that was where I had my first brush with death, I suppose, in a way.
NB: What happened?
JLM: It was in the days when they were trying to build up numbers, the bomber numbers. At the time they were experimenting with the thousand bomber raids. I don’t know about experimenting but endeavour to get a thousand bombers in the air at once. And we were on two of the, not necessarily the Bomber Command, the thousand bomber raids but trying to build up numbers to seven or eight or nine hundred bombers in the air. They employed or co-opted a lot of Operational Training Unit planes and in this case, somewhere around about September ’42 we were co-opted to go on a raid to one of the cities in Germany. And then about two nights later and with that, went on, we completed that without incident and about two nights later we were scheduled to attack another city and as is normal custom we were allocated planes which we had to take up for night flying exercises. We had a night flying test and on the — during that test I was most unhappy about the power of the, or the ability of the plane to take up a load of bombs. And I complained about this when I came down. I said, I said, I didn’t think this plane was capable of carrying two thousand pounds of bombs. And anyway, they noted my objection and that night when we took off after flying up the runway at full throttle I couldn’t get the plane to get airborne. I got it airborne — about twenty or thirty feet above the ground. I couldn’t get it any higher. Except at, even at full throttle. So, eventually had to go past the end of the runway and the bomb aimer said, ‘Trees ahead.’ And we just clipped those and we carried on and then I was still trying to get the plane to climb and then all of a sudden, well, not all of a sudden, after leaving the trees behind that I’d clipped I just, the plane just settled down on the ground in the middle of a paddock. There were buildings and that ahead of us and the trees behind and settled down quite smoothly and without any real damage. Well, without it assimilating a crash position and it caught fire and we, the crew and I, the crew all got out and the plane burned out with the bombs exploding at intervals. So that was an indication to me that maybe I might be lucky. And as it turned out that was the first evidence to me, first indication to me that maybe Lady Luck was going to be on my shoulder and so it happened right through the war. I had several instances where I felt that I was quite lucky to, to survive.
NB: Is there a feeling, or was there a feeling among the crews that you banked luck? Or —
JLM: I don’t know that we ever really discussed the situation as to whether we were lucky or [pause]. Don’t — I don’t remember as a crew. My crew, sort of, were such that they never sort of queried, never questioned my ability as a, as a pilot right through the war. There were occasions when they could have said, ‘Well, you know we were lucky there’ or, ‘What did you do that for?’ Or something like this.
NB: So, after you left HCU where were you?
JLM: I went to Heavy Conversion Unit at Wigsley.
NB: Right.
JLM: I was only there for — what? A couple of months and then I was posted to 97 Squadron at Woodhall Spa. On the 12th of December 1942.
NB: Flying?
JLM: Lancasters.
NB: On Lancs.
JLM: Oh, firstly at Luffenham, at Heavy Conversion Unit I flew the Manchesters for seven and a half hours before switching to Lancasters.
NB: Right.
JLM: And of course, when I was posted to 97 Squadron that was all Lancasters. So, I arrived on an operational squadron after about, what? Eighteen months training, to fulfil the reason why I enlisted in the first place.
NB: In the first place. And had you already crewed up by then?
JLM: Oh yeah. Well when we were at the Operational Training Unit we got our navigator [pause] navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator. It wasn’t until we got to Heavy Conversion Unit we picked up our flight engineer and the two gunners.
NB: Was there a mix of nationalities in the crew?
JLM: Yes. Well no. Only two. There was — I had two Canadians. My navigator was a Scotsman. The two Canadians were wireless operator and rear gunner and a flight engineer was an Englishmen. The flight engineer and the mid-upper gunner was English. Both English.
NB: So you were the only New Zealander on board.
JLM: I was New Zealand. Yeah.
NB: Is that why you didn’t go towards 75 Squadron?
JLM: Yeah. No, you didn’t have much option. When you finished your Heavy Conversion Unit, you were just posted.
NB: Right.
JLM: Posted here, there or anywhere. I don’t — they never called for volunteers. They never called for, like they did initially at New Plymouth. They called for your preferences. ‘Do you want to be fighter boy or do you want to be a bomber pilot and because, perhaps due to my conservative nature I think I opted to be a bomber pilot. So, yeah, so when we didn’t get, we didn’t get a full crew until we arrived at Heavy Conversion Unit.
NB: Okay. So, the op that you did when you were at OTU did that count for your tour?
JLM: No, no.
NB: So, you then started your full tour when you got to —
JLM: Yeah. When we got to Woodhall Spa on 97 Squadron we started. That was it, another funny experience in a way. It was the first and only time I felt fear. That was my very first operation which was a mining trip to the mouth of Garonne River down on the coast of France. And when we arrived at the dropping area I was thinking while waiting to get confirmation that we were, what heading I was to fly on and that sort of thing and the coast was dark and no lights to be seen on the coast was ominous and for some reason I was halfway expecting to be shot at and that sort of thing. I’ve never felt, never been able to explain the reason for that feeling fear and that’s the one and only time I ever felt fear. The rest, the other times — there was no other planes around, there were no flak anywhere. Just looked dark and ominous for some reason. And we, I was always too busy trying to get, making sure that the plane was being flown away from danger and that sort of thing in other times or just trusting to luck. I think, probably night flying over Berlin on an operation it was going to be, purely be luck to make sure that you didn’t weren’t hit by flak or caught by flak or fighters on the way in or out.
NB: So, I understand the lack of fear, was that the whole crew? You were all so busy that that was — the fear just didn’t surface while you were working, if you like.
JLM: My sense of fear?
NB: Well, you were saying that you didn’t feel fear normally because you —
JLM: Yeah.
NB: You were so busy. Did that cover the whole crew? Everyone was in that position.
JLM: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Although I don’t — I’m not sure. I’ve never ever — the funny thing I’ve never ever talked to my crew, asked them that, you know, were they scared or anything like that. And straight on — about one of the trips on Berlin. It was a pretty, pretty big raid and we were just sort of getting to the woods on the way out of Berlin and our wireless operator, Percy Pigeon, the Canadian, decided he’d come out to have a look from the cockpit and he looked out and the city was just a mass of fires and flak and searchlights. And to illustrate what I was leading up he looked out behind us at we had come through and he said, ‘Jesus Christ, have we come through that?’ I always say, ‘Well, that’s an illustration of what you don’t know, what you can’t see you don’t worry about.’ Yeah.
NB: So are there any other key points during those operations that stand out for you?
JLM: Not — well on one of the trips on 97, I think, coming back and returning to base. I think we drifted off course a little bit from it. I think it was on a trip to Berlin and coming back and I think we drifted a little bit close to either Hamburg or Duisburg. No, it can’t be Duisburg. It was one of the station, towns there and we were suddenly surrounded by flak and some fragments hit the plane and I got a little bit lodged in my flying boot but I put the nose down and started weaving, increasing speed until we got out of the troubled area.
NB: Now, obviously you were part of the dams raid. How did — when did you move it onto?
JLM: I, well we spent, I think I did twenty one trips on 97 Squadron when I read a circular letter on the notice board from group headquarters calling for volunteers from to form — from people that had, I think they specified that had — just nearing the end of their first tour which I was or just due to commence a second. Calling for volunteers to form a new squadron, to form a new squadron to attack a special target. There wasn’t, a special, I don’t think it just said the target was just something special without any evidence of what it was going to be. So, I discussed with my crew and all but my rear gunner said yes, we would. I was — they agreed that I should volunteer, which I did and posted almost the next day to Scampton where the other crews that had volunteered and, in some cases, had been picked by Gibson too because he knew them. We formed from around about the 23rd. I think I arrived on Scampton on the 23rd of May [means March] whereas some didn’t arrive until the 28th and that sort of thing. It was over a period of two or three days. The squadron was formed. Subsequently called 617.
NB: And your whole crew went with you. Even the rear gunner?
JLM: No. No. He didn’t come.
NB: He opted out.
JLM: No. He didn’t come. So, I got a new — and prior to that period when I of volunteering I [unclear] early stages of when I was on 97 my bomb aimer, when we were up at twenty thousand feet, around that, he started, he suffered from some sort of, either oxygen sickness or something like that and this happened about two, the first couple of high level bombing operations I was on. So, he was taken off operations. So, I had a succession of, of, of bomb aimers coming in to act as my bomb aimer and one situation — one bloke was a naval lieutenant who was studying bombing methods by the RAF. Yeah. I was actually sorry to leave him in a way. So, because I didn’t have a permanent bomb aimer when we volunteered I got, I got a new bomb aimer when I arrived on 617 and a new rear gunner which was Harvey Weeks, a Canadian, and the bomb aimer was Jimmy Clay.
NB: And I’m interested in how the crews — because the rest of you had been together quite a while. Bringing in new people, did that have an effect on the crew?
JLM: No. I don’t think so.
NB: No.
JLM: No.
NB: No. They fitted in well.
JLM: Yes. Yeah.
NB: So, tell me more about the, sort of, 617 preparations.
JLM: Well, we arrived there and before there was [pause] although Gibson knew what the target was I don’t think neither of the flight commanders were aware of it until quite later on. But Gibson [unclear], knowing what the target was and knowing what the range that the specifications for the flying — type of flying, the airspeed and all that sort of thing that was going to be employed or had been developed by Barnes Wallis. He knew and he decided and he decided on advice, what type of training would be required for the type of flight we were going to undertake and what the type of attack was going to be for the release of the Upkeep. And consequently we undertook, almost straight away, I think the first point, we specified and were required to undertake low level flying. Firstly, mainly in daylight and then secondly in simulated night moonlight conditions and then lastly at night. Moonlight, full moonlight. All the routes then took up out to the west of England, up through the lakes country, up to almost the border of Scotland out on to the sea and almost returned down. Turned down the North Sea and back to base. And it was on one of those training flights I had another close call in that we were travelling, it was rather a hazy, moonlight night and all of a sudden in the haze ahead of me I there appeared to be a convoy with balloons flying, attached to the ships by cable. And I yelled out to, we were flying at a level that would have been — would have gone through just above the decks of the ships. And I yelled out to the wireless operator to fire the colours of the day which he did do and in the light of the flares — the colours of the day were just coloured flares that explode. There was balloons all ahead of me attached to the ships by cable and I immediately pulled back on the stick and by the grace of God managed to get through all these without collecting any of the cables. And that was the closest, I believe, was a close call too that I overcome just by pure, pure luck.
NB: Yeah. Absolutely. If you hadn’t seen the — yeah.
JLM: So that was — our training over the next six weeks was all low flying and emphasis on from the pilot’s point of view, was on being able to assess how soon to gain height to clear obstacles that were on the route ahead. And this is where, to start with some of the pilots had a bit of, were a bit inclined to leave it too late to gain height and clipped the tops of trees and a few instances of that happened and they were returning to base with twigs and leaves and that sort of thing in the air intakes.
NB: Did you have any idea what might be ahead?
JLM: No. Not in the slightest. No. Some, there was a lot of conjecture about what the target would be and the closest anyone got to maybe what was involved was the attack on the capital ships like the Tirpitz and de Grasse. Well it wasn’t the de Grasse but attack on capital ships that sort of thing. That was the most common thought, and of course it wasn’t.
NB: So when did you find out the difference?
JLM: The afternoon of the day of the night, the day of the night of the operation when we entered the briefing room. The two flight commanders and the bombing leader and the [pause] who was the other one? Bombing. Navigator. Oh, the navigation leader. They were advised about the day about the day before briefing day of what the target was. And I’m in no doubt that they went into detail at that stage of what was required of our, flying the route in and the actual attack and that sort of thing. The only, only indication of perhaps what might be involved was about the three days. The 11th, 12th and 13th of May with these, the Upkeeps had been arriving on the station and twelve planes took part in trials, or test trials with the Upkeeps down on the Firth of Thames [Reculver] and six out of those twelve aircraft through either flying too high or like here flying too low were damaged by splash from, yeah splash from the bomb hitting the water, hitting the tail of the aircraft. Six of them. Five of them were repaired in time for the operation and one was so badly damaged that it couldn’t be repaired in time. The one that was hit by Henry Maudslay. So he was given another plane. We only had one or two spare planes and he was — we used all the planes except that one that was damaged.
NB: So how many planes went out that night?
JLM: Nineteen went over and only eleven came back.
NB: So, tell me more about the briefing and —
JLM: Well, we when we were called for briefing at a certain time we would be there at four o’clock or some time in the afternoon. And the first thing they did was look at the big boards and all the tapes from base to the target and back again and the tapes that all showed us leading to the dams. That didn’t worry, I don’t think that worried the crews unduly. What did worry them was the fact that the route from the, as we hit the Ruhr Valley to the targets we were in the Ruhr, the most heavily defended area in Germany was the Ruhr Valley and I think that worried the crews more than anything.
NB: Rightly so.
JLM: Hmmn?
NB: Rightly so. So, I mean how long was the briefing and how detailed was it and —?
JLM: I don’t really, I can’t, I can’t remember how long the briefing was. I think it was probably about an hour and a half and we went back and had our pre-op meal and we took off at 19 — 7.28. It was in the — what was that? May. Be coming up to Spring.
NB: Spring. Yeah.
JLM: Yeah. So, there was, it wasn’t — no, from memory now, yes. One plane took off ahead of me and you could see him, so yes you could see them so it was starting to get dusk and then it got dark and you were relying on the moon from a little after leaving the coast at Skegness. Ah yeah.
NB: And what was the sort of progression for you that night?
JLM: Hmmn?
NB: What was the progression for you that night?
JLM: Well, I — our, we had been selected, my crew and all the group of four that had been selected to fly to attack the Sorpe dam and we — our route was almost due east of Lincoln. Crossing the coast somewhere around Skegness there and flying due east again until we hit a point north of, north of the island of — [pause] — yeah. Yeah it would be north of the island of Zeeland, just past the other one there. What was the name? Texel. Yeah. Texel, yeah. And I was, when we turned and then we had to turn right so the navigator said, ‘Right, turn right and due course such and such’ and after we’d been flying for a quarter of an hour or ten minutes. Less than that. Only a few minutes. Ten minutes probably. I thought I could see the breakers ahead and the sand dunes behind it and I gained height to clear the sand dunes and started, had covered the crest of the sand dunes and was losing power, losing height rather, to get down to the water on the other side which was the Wadden Sea. And I saw, suddenly saw a line of flak at come towards me and felt a small thump and lost all communication and electricity as a result of being hit by a twenty shell, twenty mil shell and a hole blown in the side of the aircraft. And that, was the result of that that I couldn’t communicate with the crew so I asked my wireless operator, thinking that he would be the best one to look at any question of restoring the inter-communication intercom and also to check on the rear gunner to see that he was alright. And I just circled around the Wadden Sea on the red while he did that until he came back and said no it was not possible to restore communication. And my thinking then was that okay we need that communication for the navigator and the pilot to be able to converse and for the pilot to accept the directions of the navigator when to turn on the route. And secondly, if by any chance we were able to get to the target area it was imperative that the bomb aimer and the pilot were able to communicate with each other. So, I made the, it wasn’t a difficult decision in many ways because there was very little alternative. I think it was very dangerous for the, for me as captain to carry on. And made the decision to return to base so had the situation of the same gun emplacement firing at us as we crossed the sand dunes on the way out again. Yeah. I thought that was rather significant. But fortunately, they didn’t hit us. There was a lot of conjecture later on, John Sweetman and one or two others. Well, John Sweetman, I think he believed, in his investigation, determined that I was hit by a flak ship but I say my navigator not my navigator, Jimmy Clay, my bomber aimer, was inclined to agree. Whereas my mid-upper gunner who had a bird’s eye view of where the flak came from believed it was a land-based gun emplacement that hit me and that’s what I think happened. So a little bit of a difference of opinion between John, John Sweetman and me on that one.
NB: The net result was the same.
JLM: Hmmn?
NB: The net result was the same.
JLM: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so that was my experience on the dams raid. Yeah. And when I got back we returned to the mess after being debriefed and we got periodic reports that such and such had been shot down and such and such had been shot down. And it was after debriefing when those survivors had come back and returned to the mess — started celebrating and I felt embarrassed that I’d been present during the celebrations because I hadn’t achieved what they had done and I felt, you know, rather embarrassed about that.
NB: I can understand but [pause] so how many ops did you complete in total during your time with Bomber Command?
JLM: Altogether — fifty eight.
NB: And you chose to go for a second tour.
JLM: I did another thirty six, thirty six. I think it was thirty six operations on 617 before the AOC for 5 Group took us, took Leonard Cheshire and myself and Joe McCarthy and Dave Shannon off operations and wouldn’t brook any argument about that.
NB: And then —
JLM: He said he wanted me to take over 1690 Bomber Defence Training Flight. Which I did. Spent a year on that.
NB: Right.
JLM: Flying Hurricanes.
NB: Enjoy it?
JLM: Yeah. I did enjoy it. Yeah. Yeah.
NB: So, I mean looking, looking back were there any real highlights and lowlights of your time in the Command?
JLM: I don’t know about, well, lowlight. The only lowlight really was, well lowlights was [pause] well I don’t know that’s a hard one to answer. Every operation, to a large extent every operation had the same sense, same degree of danger. You were likely to be attacked by a night fighter, particularly on the main, the main operations on 97 when you were on attacking the German towns. Yes, there was always the danger of night fighters and then you also, combined with that was the danger of being hit by flak. And I had, you know the time I was surrounded by flak on my right foot panel and I suppose I was lucky to escape any — apart from little bits of shrapnel, bits lodging in my flying boot. Nothing, nothing really untoward there. I managed to escape from that situation and had one or two other. One, later on when 617 was engaged in the attacking single targets we were taking, at low level, an electricity transfer station, or transformer station in northern Italy which we were due to, which we were bombing with five hundred pounders and because of haze we had difficulty in identifying the target and I think I gradually crept a bit lower and lower and when the bombs went off a bit of shrapnel came and hit my bomb aimer right on the tip of his nose [with humour]. Yeah. So I suppose that was a bit quiet, a bit close. But any highlights. Oh, highlights really was when a raid was successful. You felt a sense of pride. Particularly when we were, I was marking at low level in the early stages of 617 carrying out special operations, single, on single targets. Not like the main bomber force, blanket bombing. When we were, on one or two occasions when we marked the target with the coloured bombs dropped right on them, that was a sense of achievement, I think. Yeah.
NB: And how long did you stay in. And were you demobbed in ’45 or —
JLM: Yeah. I, as I said I spent twelve months on 1690 Bombing Defence Flight and that was where we were a small flight of fighter planes who were attacking drogues in daytime and night-time. Acting as enemy fighters attacking the bombers and the bomber’s pilots — they were training in evasive tactics with the, with the gunners having cameras in their, in their turrets and being able to check on how whether they would have shot us down if it had it been real.
NB: Right.
JLM: I enjoyed that. I did about two hundred and something hours on Hurricanes. I didn’t enjoy night flying because I always worried that okay, acting as a fighter at night time, would I pull out in time without colliding with a Lancaster? That was one fear I had but, I mean I persevered in that type of thing and I got — yep. I thought it was nice to be able to fly in a single engine fighter after a four engine Lancaster. Yeah.
NB: A bit more nimble.
JLM: Hmmn?
NB: A bit more nimble.
JLM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
NB: So —
JLM: I must say another sense of achievement I think was in Operation Taxable was when the spoof operation on D-day. I felt a sense of achievement to have participated in that although it was — it wasn’t a dangerous mission. It wasn’t. But though the one, there was, that took part in several phases to that, there were other planes operating. And I think 218 Squadron lost four planes, I think. They were further up. Attacking, you know. And we were down by a [unclear] Calais and we flew Leonard, I was privileged to have Leonard Cheshire fly as my second pilot on that operation. We had, you know, we had we flew individual, each crew flew for two, each crew but divided in to one hour just flying these oblong series dropping the — what’s the —?
NB: Radar?
JLM: Radar. Yeah. Dropping aluminium. No, it’s not radar.
NB: Oh, the aluminium foil.
JLM: Yeah.
NB: Yeah.
JLM: I think there was a common name for it [Window].
NB: Yeah.
JLM: No. never mind. Yeah.
NB: I’m in a similar state. So, when you came out did you continue to fly? When you left the RAF.
JLM: Well only to the extent that in Gisborne, I returned home to Gisborne and it was not long afterwards they decided they’d form an aero club and I was part of that. Or part of that decision and I actually lent the club fifty pound, I think it was, as part of, to finance a Tiger Moth and I did five hours on the Tiger Moth and before my — I sort of got involved with a certain woman and I couldn’t get married and we couldn’t afford to get married and also fly too so I gave any thoughts of flying away.
NB: It’s those women again [laughs]. That’s brilliant. Have you got any particular thoughts that you want recording as to how Bomber Command should be remembered? How you’d like them to be remembered.
JLM: Well no, I was and still am very critical of the fact that it took the English peoples sixty seven years before there was a satisfactory memorial erected to remember or to recognise the contribution that fifty five thousand five hundred and seventy three people gave their lives. I think, and as, when it happened, I think that the resulting memorial was I did, did was was a significant reflection on those, the loss of those lives. I think it was what BB, what was his name that started it off and the three blokes, you probably know their names.
NB: Gibb.
JLM: The sculptor and the designer and that I think did a great job. If — if I would have a real difficulty in making any criticism of the memorial as a resulting memorial. I think it’s quite a good one. I think it’s quite a good one. And that led me to the medal saga.
NB: Yes.
JLM: Yeah. I think God you wouldn’t want to see this deteriorate for lack of money. And I, it wasn’t until I, with the boys and my daughter-in-law, visited the memorial in ’13 — what was I leading up to? And it wasn’t until then in company with Anna Marie Fairburn who was communications, one of the leading positions in the RAF Benevolent Fund. It wasn’t until then that I was aware, became aware that the RAF Benevolent Fund had been given the responsibility of the maintenance of that and I really, you know, I thought that was a hell of a big ask.
NB: Yeah.
JLM: And I think in a way, in a way I think that was unfair of the government.
NB: We think the same.
JLM: Yeah.
NB: Thank you for that. Thank you [pause]. Gosh, you must be exhausted. All that.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AMunroL150604
Title
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Interview with Les Munro
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:52:53 audio recording
Creator
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Nicky Barr
Date
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2015-06-15
Description
An account of the resource
John Leslie Munro was born in the area of Gisborne, New Zealand. He only completed two years of secondary education because of the economic slump and in 1936 began work on a sheep ranch and then a mixed farm. On the outbreak of the Second World War, he was determined to train as a pilot. He had to complete a correspondence course first to improve his qualifications. He began his training at Number 2 Elementary Flying Training School, going solo after six and a half hours’ training. He completed his training in Canada. After time on Operational Training Units at RAF Shawbury and RAF North Luffenham, and the Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Wigsley, he was posted to 97 Squadron at RAF Woodhall Spa. He volunteered and was accepted for the special squadron being assembled by Guy Gibson. With 617 Squadron, he embarked on further training that would lead to the Eder, Möhne and Sorpe operations. En route to the dams his aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire, losing all communication and had to return to RAF Scampton. Of the 58 operations Munro completed while in RAF Bomber Command, 36 were with 617 Squadron. He was taken off active operational duty to command 1690 Bomber Defence Training Flight. He participated in Operation Taxable, a decoy operation connected to D-Day. Munro recounts several near misses, such as almost hitting the barrage balloons hoisted from a convoy on the North Sea. He was highly supportive of the unveiling of the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park and in particular, ensuring that it would be properly maintained.
Contributor
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Brian May
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Germany
Great Britain
New Zealand
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Rutland
England--Shropshire
England--London
California--San Francisco
United States
California
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943-05-16
1943-05-17
1944-06-05
1944-06-06
1944
1945
617 Squadron
97 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bouncing bomb
Cheshire, Geoffrey Leonard (1917-1992)
crash
Eder Möhne and Sorpe operation (16–17 May 1943)
fear
Flying Training School
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Manchester
memorial
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Normandy deception operations (5/6 June 1944)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Scampton
RAF Shawbury
RAF Wigsley
RAF Woodhall Spa
take-off crash
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
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ea7d7d15f3b9f96826258b16ff6e1ae6
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/348/3517/AWaughmanR150803.1.mp3
4b20ad44c8f089eeec0544eae42cc539
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
Waughman, Rusty
Russell Reay Waughman
Russell R Waughman
Russell Waughman
R R Waughman
R Waughman
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Russell Reay "Rusty" Waughman (1923 - 2023, 1499239 and 171904 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 101 Squadron.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-04-01
2015-08-03
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Waughman, R
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
RW: All wrote a little letter and signed it and sent it to the station commander who interviewed us and said, ‘This constitutes mutiny.’ So, with all our explanations of what went on he accepted that the fact that we’d been left off the draft and the corporal [?] corporal from West Kirby was actually charged for taking bribes to take, put people on, take people off drafts and put friends on. So, there we are. There we are. We’ve got no records, no kit, no nothing so we had to start again. So we didn’t do the, so we went and did our IT, initial training, again at Stratford on Avon which was rather nice, very fine. Nice place Stratford. I think I had my first girlfriend at Stratford. She was a very, she was a nice little girl. I often whatever happened to all these creatures looking back on all these times but there we are. We did our initial training again and from there of course we had to learn to start playing with aeroplanes and to start with we had to make sure that we were alright and worth sending overseas. We had to go to Codsall at Wolverhampton and er on a Tiger Moth just go solo. As soon as you got, went solo that was it finished until you were posted overseas and we went, went over to Canada on the Empire Training Scheme on the little ship called The Battery a converted Polish ship which was very comfortable, very nice. Very congested of course. And we landed at St John’s in Canada, down to Moncton which was the holding unit and then we travelled all across Canada on a public train to Calgary and the little aerodrome there was called Dewinton, which was just south of Calgary. We’d been there, back there since and Dewinton is now a suburb of Calgary which is incredible when you think of it. And that was nice and we were learning to fly on Tiger Moths and the Stearman. The Americans, the Boeing people had sent up sixty Stearman to the air force for people to learn to fly on. So we trained on both the Stearman and Tiger Moths and of course having finished the course I was a bit slow learning so I was, I think they were a little concerned about what the state of flying was. I was, I’ve always been a slow learner and I had a wash out check with the CGI on the station who very kindly allowed me to carry on and really from that time I never really looked back. It was really quite remarkable. And for some reason, I don’t know why, looking back I don’t know why they ever asked it but they said, ‘What do you want to become? What do you want to join? Fighter Command or Bomber Command?’ And you can imagine about ninety nine percent of us said Fighter Command so I was sent to Bomber Command which meant going down, back down on to the prairies to Medicine Hat and Moose Jaw learning to fly on the Airspeed Oxford and we had great times there. One thing we learned there which helped us later on in flying experience was the fact that we used to go off on a cross country with two pilots, no navigator, just one acting as pilot and one acting as navigator and switched over halfway through and we saw on a lake, which looked rather nice, we said, ‘Let’s low fly over this lake,’ which we weren’t allowed to do of course, which we did. Little did we know that there were ducks on the lake which rose up and we clattered through these ducks. I ended up with a duck wrapped around my face. We had six duck in the aircraft. Fortunately, they ended up in the engines nacelles, they didn’t damage the engines and of course when we got back we had a right old rocket from the, from the boss but the fact that we got the aircraft back between us and landed they allowed us to carry on. But I had to go to the dentist the next day on camp and the dentist said, ‘Oh you were the bloke who flew that aeroplane.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘We had duck for dinner.’ And then I sat back. And of course that was sort of an experience which helped us much, much later in life, in flying life, which was quite remarkable. And so of course having finished that course you took the little white flash out of your cap which was indicated that you were UT aircrew and took that out and you sewed on your wings in and then, oh, you were a pilot which was quite, which was quite remarkable. And of course you had to get back home so we forgot all about aeroplanes for quite a little while, travelled right back across Canada down to New York where we joined the Queen, Queen Elizabeth to come back home on the Queen Elizabeth and that was, wasn’t in convoy. We just pointed east and set off. It was quite, so new to us. We were so naïve and that was just a wonderful experience except on the Queen Elizabeth there were seventeen thousand others and we had a first class cabin along with eight other people which, you were sleeping in bunks with a chappie’s bottom above you rubbing on your nose, you know. But it was a wonderful experience. Two meals a day and it was wonderful. We lost two people overboard er but the boat didn’t stop they just threw life belts over and, poor souls. But there were Americans, nurses, Americans, Canadians, all coming back, back to the UK. Got back to Gourock up on the Clyde and then of course we had to find somewhere to go and be rehabilitated. We went first of all to Harrogate and then down to Whitley Bay and then back down to Oxford where we had a little rehab course on Oxfords just to get your hand back in again on Oxfords. That was at Kidlington, at Croughton, just outside Oxford. And the course, then of course you had to go to OTU Operational Training Unit and that was an amazing experience when we were flying the Vickers Wellington, the old Wimpy. When we got there of course you had to get a crew. You had a get a five man crew for the Wimpy and the system as I’m sure everybody knows was the fact that they got all the pilots, all the navigators, all the wireless operators a gunner and no engineer at the time and but the, and the navigator and put everybody into this big room and said, ‘Sort yourselves out into crews.’ And they used to go around and say, ‘I haven’t got a navigator. Are you a navigator? Can you fly? Do you want to fly with me?’ and this sort of system is amazing and the system worked. It really was incredible. And my crew had, you had no idea of the background of these people and my crew turned out to be the most wonderful collection of blokes and we flew really as a crew and not just a skipper and bods behind we just, and it worked out wonderfully well. Just to give an idea what they were my bomb aimer up front he was, had a little gypsy existence over in Manchester, a dapper little man, he used to come on operations with a crease in his trousers which was unheard of. My engineer, we had two engineers, I’ll relay about that a little bit when we come to flying. Les, my, I shan’t give his name because it so happened that he couldn’t cope on operations. He was just more or less a young lad working in an office. My navigator Alec, Alec Cowan, he was a real, he was a wonderful navigator, wonderful navigator. He lied about his age to join up. He joined up when he was sixteen and he was operational flying with us at eighteen. We didn’t know at the time. We didn’t find this out until sixty years later which was just as well. We were sitting in the pub at, at Lincoln at our reunion and we were saying, we had just had our eightieth birthdays and we said. ‘Oh we just had our, when’s your eightieth birthday Alec?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s not for another two years yet.’ So that was the first time we, we found out what he was and he was just really more or less straight from school but he really was a most wonderful navigator. Taffy, a little wireless operator, he was a character. Oh, he was a mad little nut he was. We tried to find out where he was after the war and we discovered that his background was in Aberdare and his uncle had a pub and I think he was helping out in his uncle’s pub and I think he took that up for the rest of his life and I wouldn’t say he was a rebel, he was a wonderful character. His mischief, terribly mischievous bloke and we still keep in touch now. He’s a very, very close friend. A lovely little friend, Taffy. My engineer, I eventually had another engineer. A chap called Curly, Curly Ormerod and he was on the situation where he didn’t fly with his skipper who was shot down and killed and he didn’t fly that night he, because I had to get rid of my first engineer Curly was a spare engineer and he joined us and he was a, worked for the council in Oldham I think it was where he was a trainee engineer and just, only a young lad, he was twenty and my special duty operator because of the special duties he was my special duty operator, he was an Austin apprentice and he wanted to join the air force as a pilot but the waiting list for the pilot training then was quite long and he couldn’t wait that long so he volunteered to join as a gunner. We’ll explain a little more about Ted when we come to what they did in the aeroplane. Tommy, my mid upper gunner, he was a council worker in Rotherham and he was the old man of the crew. He was twenty six. The next one down was twenty. I was twenty at the time which was incredible when you think of our kids at twenty. You know, I’m sure if the same thing happened again now I’m sure the responses from the children, the young youth, would be the same but he was, he was married and he had a bit of leave on the station because his wife produced a baby. So, poor old Tommy, he had rather a tragic death after the war but still that Tommy. And my rear gunner, he was a Canadian. His father, an Englishman who had a funeral service, funeral service which he developed in Vancouver in America and Harry through his father’s English experience although he joined the RCAF he came over and joined the RAF as a Canadian. Again, these lads, you know although these vast different backgrounds we all gelled and we all worked together wonderfully well and what they did with us they kept us alive, you know and it really was wonderful. And I, myself, I couldn’t, I didn’t have any education at all. I went to school but because of my illnesses I went to school to start with at the age of five in Newcastle and then I became desperately ill and I was in bed for six months as a young teenager with TB so I couldn’t take place in sport or anything like that so when they came to doing exams when they did the scholarship in those days I went to school just before I was due to take the scholarship and of course I didn’t pass. So there I was. I was, I couldn’t go to a secondary school so I was sent to what they called a training school for the shipyards and it was a sort of engineering training school where at the age sixteen I started to learn about art and drawing, machine drawing and this sort of thing. It was, I enjoyed the school. It was nice but I had no exam, no exams at the end of it so when I, when I joined up I had no matric, no school cert, no exams at all. So how on earth I was ever passed. The only thing that helped I think when they were testing for the attestation was the fact that I became, I started off on the stage at the Newcastle Rep Theatre for a, for a year a bit while I got a position as a pupil surveyor at an architect surveyors office in Newcastle and there I used to do a lot of surveying work using angles and trade vectors and things which helped in the navigation exams and I think that helped me to pass the attestation exams in London. So there we are. There, you’ve got a crew. But we mentioned Ted, the special duty chap, Ted Manners, but he didn’t join the crew at OTU at all because we only had the five man crew and we didn’t know about, anything about special squadrons then of course and of course having finished at Operational Training Unit on Wimpies we were posted to a Heavy Conversion Unit which was at 1662 Conversion Unit at Blyton and of course with the demand for Lancaster aircraft and operational aircraft they had very few Lancasters available. The ones they had available were really the ones that weren’t fit for operational flying so we started to learn to fly four engine aircraft on Halifaxes, on ‘Halibags.’ A nice aeroplane to fly but not quite as amenable as the Lancaster from our experience later on but that was, that was nice, that was fine and of course on the station, on the same station they had what they called an LFS a Lancaster Finishing School so when we’d gone solo on the Halibag we went on to join this LFS, the Lancaster Finishing School and this was on Lancasters and they were a different aeroplane all together. It was a wonderful experience and experience we never expected to have in my life. But I had a little problem. Although my height was right I’ve got little short legs and when you’ve got twelve, four engines of twelve eighty horsepower all taking off with each engine, each propeller going around with three thousand revs you get a lot of torque, a lot of swing on take-off and with my little short legs I was having a hell of a job keeping these bloody black things straight down the runway on take-off so I was a little bit later finishing my training conversion than my friend Paul [Zaggy] who I’d trained with, been in parallel with for many, many months. And when we finished, when he’d finished his course he was posted to 101 squadron and when my turn came about two or three days later I asked the flight commander, ‘Can I go and join my friend Paul on 101 squadron because we’d been friends for a long, long time?’ And his response was, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘It’s a special duty squadron and we only send the best ones there.’ And I said Oh God that was a bit of a comedown. Anyway, a couple of days later he said, ‘Right, Waughman, 101 squadron. Off you go.’ And I said, ‘Well what’s this special duties thing?’ He said, ‘Oh you’ll find out when you get there.’ He didn’t know actually from what we found out later. And when we got to the squadron the day we arrived on the squadron my friend Paul had been killed the night before. And that, you suddenly begin to realise this is serious stuff, you know and you didn’t really think about it beforehand but then it became realistic. You did a couple of cross countries to get your hand in on the squadron experience and then we were given a special duty operator. An eighth member of the crew who spoke German, a German speaker operator and he was flying, was using this equipment called ABC. This ABC equipment started down on the south of England where there were fifteen stations with very fluent German speaking operators who could talk to the German night fighter controllers and jam their signals to their fighters, instructions to their fighters but it only had a range of a hundred and forty miles so that didn’t cover the deep penetration raids in to eastern Europe. So, Sydney Bufton, one of the air ministry boffins said well let’s put it in an aeroplane so they put, started putting them in. It took about three thousand hours to fit this equipment in to an aeroplane and quite an expense and this was allocated to 100 squadron. Now, 100 squadron were also having H2S which was a ground scanning radar and the power unit on the Lancaster mean you couldn’t cope with the ABC and the H2S so they chose the next squadron down which was 101 squadron. So 101 squadron became the special duty squadron flying this ABC and what they called the stuff on the ground station was called Jostle and it had a code name of Corona. Hence it became the Cigar and it was known as ground Cigar and of course when they got it stuck into an aeroplane it became ABC which was Airborne Cigar and Bufton wrote to the air ministry saying that in future correspondence all reference to Airborne Cigar aircraft will be known as ABC in future correspondence so hence 101 squadron became the ABC of the RAF which is remarkable. What Ted had, he had a little three inch cathode ray tube where he could pick up the frequency of the night fighter controllers and lock a little strobe on these, on these, on his screen, cover that with the aircraft’s, aircraft strobe, lock that on and he’d locked on to the frequency of the German night fighter controller’s instructions to the fighters. Having decided that on another little switch where there was German speaking because there were Poles, Czechs and things, once he’d decided that he pressed another little button which blasted engine noise out on that frequency and jammed the signals. And it was a wigwog noise woooooo oooo oooo and the Germans called that, they had a name for this and it was called dudelsack and I think it’s quite an appropriate little description ‘cause dudelsack means bagpipes. And so we had this ABC equipment which is wonderful stuff and this started operating in September, in ‘43. We didn’t join the squadron until November ‘43 and on the first raid the first, one of the first instructions that the special duty operator received from the German signals was, ‘Achtung. Achtung. English bastards coming.’ And that was one of the first instructions they had but sadly, one of our aircraft on that first raid was shot down and the Germans had the system right from the beginning but even the [telephones] people knew of the system but they couldn’t really work out all the technology of it at all so that was quite the thing. That was one of the things that added to the attrition rate on our squadron, the fact that the German night fighters could home on to our transmissions ‘cause we were using their frequencies so they could home on to us and the ABC aircraft were used on every major bombing raid that went out and the idea was that our aircraft were staggered every ten miles through the whole bomber stream. We acted as a normal bomber aircraft with a reduced bomb load, only slightly, well I suppose so I don’t think it ever happened actually but the equipment weighed something like [six or seven hundred pounds] plus another operator so it knocked our bomb load down a little bit and we had three enormous aerials transmitters on the aircraft. Two on the top and one under the nose and these were nearly seven foot long. It didn’t affect the aerodynamics of the aircraft whatsoever. We didn’t, we wouldn’t have realised they were there and we just there we were and our first raid, when we went off on our first raid my little engineer, there was something strange about him he didn’t seem really with it at all. Anyway, so we found we were getting in a bit of a mess and got in the way so, with experience I think we could have carried on but being so inexperienced we came back, we aborted the trip. So, we were, this was just at the very start in November of the Battle of Berlin and this was a trip to Berlin and the WingCo wasn’t too happy about it, WingCo Alexander. And our next operation a couple of nights later again was to Berlin and Les, my little engineer, nineteen year old, we had an engine on fire, a starboard outer went on fire and he just couldn’t do anything he just sat on the floor and just shiver and shake he couldn’t do anything, couldn’t do any of his work at all and I had to, the graviner button on the Lancaster is down on the right hand side of the instrument panel and I had to half get out of the seat to cover all this lot. He couldn’t do any of the fuel control systems at all. So, anyway when we got back I reported this to the wing commander who said, ‘Well you know I suppose you’ve done the right thing,’ and Les, this, my little engineer left the squadron that day, that afternoon. Whether he was made LMF which they usually do in those days we never did find out but he never should have been because he never refused to fly and this is what happened to a lot of Bomber Command aircrew who were literally shit scared. They really were and that was really a physical thing as well and these lads who knew what the conditions was never, they’d rather face the guns of Germany rather than have the stigma of LMF stamped on their documents and this LMF stamped on their documents followed them wherever they went afterwards and this information is kept by the record office and isn’t being released until 2035 so by that time none of the people will be alive to get any slur on their character. So we lost our little Les and this is when we got Curly who didn’t fly with Les the night he was shot down so we acquired Curly as an engineer. Wonderful character. Again, another great tease at the, he was a nice man though but we gelled as a crew and really in those days you did become slightly insular because you worked as a crew and trained as a crew and you played as a crew and I must admit we, we drank a lot. Eight pints a night wasn’t out of the way you know and this was part of the relaxation system for the, for the air force. Because of this Harris wrote to all station commanders, again we found out this much, much later, only fairly recently, the fact that a directive had been sent to the station commanders saying that no Bomber Command aircrew must be used on station duties unless it affected the running of the station and intimated that the relaxation activities must be condoned. Which, as far as that was concerned, was young lads full of testosterone was beer and women and it sounds a bit crude but the girls and boys on the station were really wonderful. They were really good companions. They knew what the system was and they complied and they were really lovely. We had one little girl who used to look after us in our little hut, in our little nissen hut which was, which was just a corrugated iron nissen hut and she was a little Welsh girl with a little doggie and she was known as the camp bicycle ‘cause everybody rode it, you know and these are the sort of the things that went but it wasn’t pornography it was just an accepted way of release of stress and one of my friends who I knew very well he used to say, ‘Well, thank God for sex. It’s kept me sane.’ And this was just a means of release of stress on the aircraft. And a lot of it did happen in Bomber Command sadly and it caused people to lose their lives which is rather a shame but you know those lads who flew and knowing their condition like that they were really the bravest of the brave, you know. They really were. Wonderful. And it kept Bomber Command going. But LMF, they didn’t have so many LMF. I think there weren’t a huge number cases of LMF but it was a rotten stigma and of course then having been on the on the, on the squadron with our ABC equipment we were involved very much with the German night fighter system and this was organised by a chap called, oh I’ve forgotten what they called him now, I’ll think of it in minute but he organised that the, all of eastern Europe, western Europe would be split in to five boxes. The Kammhuber. Kammhuber, the Kammhuber Line and this in each box each controller had control of their fighter system and they had a couple of systems there where they had, called Wilde Sau and Zahme Sau which is Wild Boar and Tame Boar and with the Wurzburg radar they could direct a fighter in to the bomber stream and nearly always ME109s and they were the Wild Boar who could go and find their own aircraft to attack and the Tame Boar was with Wurzburg and Freya aircraft systems whereby they could direct an aircraft almost on to an individual aircraft which was quite alarming as it turned out. We had experience of that and they developed a system called Lichtenstein whereby you see these aircraft with German aircraft they nearly all the ME109s with an array of aerials around the nose and they could actually home onto an individual aircraft and because of our ABC equipment we were very, very vulnerable. They could home on to the ABC equipment and the H2S and they developed the system called Naxos and SN2 which was very, very effective indeed and they could home directly on to aircraft and counter, counter measures for our broadcast so we had, they had a system where they could home on to our aircraft. We had a system where we would counter measure their counter measures, counter measure their receptions and they developed a [Frensburg] which counter measured our counter measures and we developed counter measures that would counter measured their counter measures and so on and the electronic wall we learned afterwards really was quite terrific but the German night fighter system was, really was very good. And they had with their, with their Wurzburg searchlights, radar controlled searchlights, radar controlled guns they had what they called predicted flak and predicted searchlights and when you were flying along you’d see this characteristic big blue searchlight appear which would wave backwards and forwards and as soon as it picked you up on the radar it flicked on to you and you were flying in their searchlights and all the searchlights roundabout would come on. You’d have perhaps forty, fifty, sixty searchlights flying with you and you were flying in daylight and of course the night fighters used to get in amongst you then but we had systems of flying. We flew the corkscrew pattern which flying a corkscrew pattern more or less like a horizontal corkscrew. It was bloody hard work when you’ve got a fully loaded aircraft. You lost a little bit of height doing it but it was really effective and the sad thing is when gunners, some gunners saw these things and gave instructions like say, ‘Dive starboard go’ and something like this some of the captains said, well, ‘Why?’ And of course by that time it was far too late but this corkscrew pattern did help enormously to evade the things and on the predicted flak it was quite a characteristic burst of flak. They usually put out a box system of flak where they just covered this area completely with anti-aircraft fire and you had to fly through this box of fire but they had this predicted flak whereby they could send up the shell which would burst in the characteristic sort of development and if you saw this behind you, if you were lucky enough, you knew this was predicted flak so, and you knew it’d take forty five seconds for the Germans to reload their guns, fire their shells and for the shell to burst so you turned off forty five degrees, and flew for about forty seconds then turned back ninety degrees and hope the next one burst behind you. This happened to us once and we nearly ended up in the system for twenty five, twenty minutes just doing this evasion all the time. Similarly with the searchlights, the searchlights I caused a bit of hilarity one night when we got back to debriefing saying that we were attacked by searchlights over Hanover but we were in searchlights for nearly half an hour trying to get out of them which, but with these sort of things happened on raids and so of course there we are we are flying on a squadron and it was daily life of being on the squadron. When you woke up in the morning usually late, after breakfast or early after lunch you went up to flights and on the wall you saw a battle order and could see your name on the battle order and all the battle order told you was A) you were flying, the crew you were flying with, the aircraft you were flying in, and the time of briefing, and the time of meal and when you saw that the first thing you did was go and change your underwear which is, which is, it really was. To say that you weren’t fearful, you know, it was very, it was very anxious, became very anxious because you had no idea where you were going. It was just you were on the battle order that night. So we used to go up to flights and check the aircraft, the serviceability of the aircraft, meet the ground crew, wonderful ground crew I had, and there you’d ask what the petrol load was and what the bomb load was and if you had lots of petrol, not so many bombs you knew you were going a long way. Vice versa if you had lots of bombs and not so much petrol you weren’t going so far so you had some idea what the thing was going to, what the raid was going to be about and then at briefing of course, on the wall, we were all in nissen huts by the way, little tin huts, on the wall they had a big map of Europe covered by a map, a curtain and when you all sat down and all got collected together they drew the curtain back and there was the red line which was a tape showing the route to and from the target and if it was a long distance target, Berlin, Munich, these groans used to go up right through the briefing and then you were briefed by the various section leaders, the met officer, the armament officer, navigation officer and there of course then you had to get out to the aircraft so we went in to the crew room, got our kit on and the girls in the parachute section, [collect your] parachute section, they were great. One little girl one day said, ‘Let me have your battle dress.’ And she took my battle dress off, took my wings off and sewed a lucky three penny piece under my wing. And these are the sort of things that went on. Wonderful characters. And you had a locker where you kept your kit in the locker and when you were flying the rear gunner had what they called a Sidcot suit which was an electrically heated suit but the rest of the crew you could really manage with just a thick jumper and battle dress. Some wore some form of overall but the costumes were really quite, quite ordinary. You had flying boots. We had, originally we had the brown fur lined flying boots and after that we had the escape boots, black escape boots, whereby they had a little knife concealed in the boot where you could cut the top off and leave a little, like a pair of shoes when you got shot down. There we are. We’ve got our kit, we’ve got our kit we’ve got to get out the aircraft so the crew buses arrived and we had to get out in to the, in to the aircraft but the atmosphere was quite electric, you know. They had sort of two sort or reactions. Some people were verbose and talked and over talked which was out of characteristic and some were just clammed up and just didn’t talk at all. So, when you got to out to the aircraft you just checked and went around and did a normal flight check for the aircraft, waiting for the signal to taxi out and of course once you got there, once you got in the aircraft there was no outside communication whatsoever ‘cause the Germans could pick up. In fact with their radar system they knew that the raid was going to take place and they knew the height you were going to fly at, they knew the course you were going to fly and the speed you were flying at but they didn’t know where you were going. So, we were waiting at the aircraft for the verilight to tell us to go and taxi out and of course the other little superstitions, you know the old tale of just a bit of luck you wee’d on the tail wheel. The lads used to wee on the tail wheel. We never did of course but er [laughs]. My rear gunner Harry, being stuck at the back he didn’t feel a part of this the bombing lark at all so he used to take a couple of empty beer bottles with him and when we were over the target his contribution to the bombing was to throw out a couple of empty beer bottles. This, this on one occasion when we were waiting to get on the aircraft the station commander, Group Captain King used to come around and just say, ‘Hello lads.’ Wished them all best of luck. Thinking of a man like that knowing, sending all these lads you know that a third of them aren’t going to come back, you know. What went through their mind must be, must be awful. Anyway, when the group captain saw Harry without his beer bottles Harry explained. ‘Oh I haven’t got my bloody beer bottles.’ He said, ‘Right. Get in the car.’ Dashed down to the mess, got a couple of beer bottles and drove him back again so Harry had them. Whether he drank them or threw them out full we never did find out but Harry had his beer bottles. I had a little, I wasn’t superstitious, touch wood but my cousin Mary, I’m very fond of Mary I think our parents were getting a little bit worried but Mary she gave me a silk scarf, a little RAF silk scarf which I wore on every operation I went on and I wore long johns, used to wear the long johns on the flying and I thought well if I change my long johns I’ll, you know, I’ll change my luck. We had two pairs. One for wearing and one for washing. I never had mine washed and I wore the same pair of long johns for thirty operations and the lads used to say, ‘Well you took them off and stood them up in your locker’ and you can imagine the odour on the aircraft with all this sort of thing going on must have been pretty awful. You didn’t notice it at the time. But another thing I had was my dad, one of the talismans for naval people was a caul and the caul is a sack a baby is born in and my dad was given one of these when he, when he first joined, when he started operations in the navy in the First World War and I was on leave just before I was joining the squadron. They knew I was going to go on an operational squadron and I was standing, I was standing by the stove in the kitchen and my dad came up and he wasn’t a very effusive man and he said, ‘Here’s this,’ and he gave me his caul in a little tin box which I’ve still got and that’s over a hundred years old and he said, ‘There you are. Good luck. I love you.’ And that was really a three hankie job, you know. A wonderful little man. But there we are I had my caul and I didn’t take it on operations but it kept me alive and these are the sort of superstitions you had but we weren’t on because of the job we were doing we weren’t allowed to take any sort of document, photographs or anything at all because of the very secret nature of our, with the work we doing. It was treated very, we weren’t allowed to take any photographs on the squadron at all. We did. And everything was kept very, we weren’t allowed to discuss it anywhere outside but A) our aircraft was parked at dispersal, we were W which was far end of dispersal just by a fence and the main road was just outside and I don’t know what guarding they had on the aircraft but anyway part of the secrecy thing was not having to take any documentation. When we got our sandwiches they were wrapped up in newspaper so they had a good, they could have had a good idea what was going on. So there we were, off on operations and operational flying became to start with you were so inexperienced that you didn’t really realise what was going on and the casualty rate in the first five operations was something like forty percent which was as high as that and it really was. It became quite an alarming thing. We didn’t realise at the time. We only found out this many years afterwards. So our squadron were very vulnerable and once we got past the five operations squadrons, five operations you really became quite fatalistic. You just, you were doing a job and accepted what you had to do and you expected you were going to die and it was quite a strange relationship that you had and you had a bit, a little bit of sick humour and I’m sure folk know of the grim reaper, the old skeletal figure with his scythe and with his scythe you got the chop and we used to say, when you were talking, standing by somebody, put your hand on his shoulder and you said, ‘Death put his bony hand on your shoulder and [live] chap I’m coming,’ you know and if you were in the mess and one of your comrades has been killed and gone you used to drink his health and you used to say, ‘Here’s to good old,’ so and so, ‘And here’s the next one to die.’ So this sort of atmosphere existed. Some people had premonitions you know and my mother, my mother was an old witch really she used to have dreams and things and she had a dream one night that things weren’t going to go right and she tried to contact the station to see what was going on and of course she couldn’t because the station was completely isolated and that was a night when we had an awful lot of trouble. But she had this idea. And one of the girls on the squadron one of the little WAAF officers, on the Nuremberg raid, said to her fiancé Jimmy [Batten] Smith she said, ‘You’ll be over the target about ten minutes past midnight.’ She said, ‘Right, I’ll set my alarm clock and I’ll think of you when you’re over the target.’ She woke up about 11 o’clock, half past ten, 11 o’clock and knew something wasn’t right and she switched on her light and listened and couldn’t find anything, anything about it at all and Jimmy, over the target, as soon as he left the target, just at the time, he was shot down and killed so he never got back. There’s another, our Flight Commander, Squadron Leader Robinson he was a wonderful, he had very, very rapid promotion because our previous flight commander was killed and he was promoted from flight lieutenant up to, straight up to squadron leader within a matter of weeks and he became our squadron commander er flight commander. Wonderful little man. And he had a rear gunner who was seconded from the American air force and this American chappie still had his brown overalls and American flying kit and they were in the mess and the lads were playing crib and poker and he, this Jones a chap called Jones, won the, won the kitty and I can see it now a little pile of ten shilling notes which he won which he when he picked it up he said, ‘Shan’t be needing this.’ And gave it all away. That night, on the raid, on the twenty ninth raid they were all killed. So whether they had these sort of premonitions, you know, it was quite remarkable and one of the bomb, when I came off leave one occasion we only had a short, a few days leave the bombing, the armament officer, only a young lad, he looked strange and I said, ‘Are you alright, Geoff?’ And he said, ‘Well, funny thing happened,’ an aircraft had crashed on take-off and hit part of the bomb dump and he jumped in his little wagon to go out and see what he could do out there and when he got on the perimeter track near where the bomb dump was there was a chap waiting and saying, ‘Don’t go down in there. They’re all dead.’ This chap was covered in blood and whatever. He said, ‘Don’t go down in there. They’re all dead.’ But he said, ‘I must.’ So when he went down to see the, what was going on he found the body of the man he’d been talking to on the perimeter track dead in the hut. So, and within a few weeks he was white haired. And these sorts of strange things happened you know it’s a, it’s a, you didn’t realise at the time all the significance of all these things but there we are. One of the things that happened, on one of the early raids when we went and poor old Bomber Harris, he didn’t like the idea at all but they developed what they called the transport plan whereby they were bombing railway martialling yards, [tank?] depots, station er station signal boxes and train stations to stop goods going down for the pre-invasion, for the German pre- invasion and so this was the transport plan and Harris didn’t like this but we went off on one raid to a place called Hasselt which was on the Belgian/German border, railway martialling yards and we got within about ten minutes of the target. This was all at night. This was all night flying of course in cloud, mainly in cloud and my engineer who was looking out the window said a very rude word, something about fornicating in hades and the next thing we knew this other aircraft hit us slap on the side and we just crashed into this, the two aircraft just crashed together and we were, he was slightly underneath us and his propellers cut through our bomb aimer’s compartment, just behind Norman’s feet. He was lying down ready to bomb. His mid upper, his canopy, the other aircraft canopy took off our starboard tyre, his turret, which was sticking up at the top of his aeroplane carved through our fuselage at the back, left a big hole in the back. We lost part of the tale plane. Lost all our electrics. Harry, the rear gunner was knocked unconscious, only temporary and we were a bit of a mess and thereby we, we were sitting, I didn’t see all this going on but the crew saw what was going on and when we hit this aircraft we were literally sitting on top of it and his propellers were churning through our little bits and pieces and we were in a bit of a mess and afterwards I was asked to write a little resume of what happened in the collision just for purely records sake and to give it a title of the most significant thing that happened, you remembered, on the trip and the most significant bit was sitting on top of this other aircraft with no control over your aircraft whatsoever. All the controls were just limp and wobbly. So, nothing. So, I called this the title of this thing, ‘It went limp in my hand,’ which was highly censored. I wasn’t allowed to do that. So this report went through and in consequence we had to do, coming back, we had to do a crash landing. We had Fido on the station and the Fido system was a sort of a little triangular system with the fuel pipe on the top and the gaps of about ten metre gaps within each section and unfortunately our dud wheel skidded between the gap and the thing and the other one bounced over the top of the pipes and just put a little dent in the top and there was a casualty that night sadly. We were skidding towards the control tower in the dark and we were getting very close to the control tower and all the staff on the control or most of the staff on the control tower and the little girls, came out to watch this idiot bend his aeroplane and as we were skidding towards it one of these girls jumped back and sprained her ankle and that was the only casualty that night but there were sort of talks of decorations and things but it never happened so I was very kindly given a green endorsement in my logbook and mentioned in despatches. That’s in the logbook now still but if it had been a red one it would have been an adverse report but a green one was a pat on the back sort of thing so that was, that was quite nice but there of course that aircraft was written off. As far as the squadron it was written off it had to be repaired and rebuilt but we discovered that two main longerons going along the back of the aircraft were badly damaged and had we to have taken evasive action no doubt the aircraft would have broken up and we realised that a lot of damage at the back because we had a big hole in the floor and I told Harry, the rear gunner, I said, ‘Harry, pick up your parachute, come up front just in case anything else happens.’ And he said, ‘No. I’ll stay here and keep a look out.’ And these are the characters that they were. Wonderful characters. And that wasn’t the only thing that Harry did. We went on one long trip and his electrically heated Sidcot suit failed. He never said a peep, never said a word and when we got back seven and a half, eight hours later getting out the aircraft they said. ‘Where’s Harry?’ ‘Oh he must still be there.’ So I popped into the aircraft, opened his door and there he was sitting with an icicle from his face mask as thick as my wrist down between his legs. He couldn’t move and he’d never said a peep he just kept on doing his job. He was in sick quarters for nearly three weeks and that affected him for the rest of his life. And this is what these poor lads got up to. It really was wonderful. I was so lucky with the lads I had as a crew. Wonderful and very conscientious lads. So there we are. We got back and of course the aircraft had to be taken away and we had to get a new aircraft. Our first aircraft was W with the squadron letters were SR and we had a W, W ABC all the way through. We had W, so we had W and there was a song of the day called. “Coming in on a wing and a prayer.” So I thought. ‘Oh lets,’ and there’s a P O Prune character so I painted on the front of the aircraft this P O Prune character with wings and “On a wing and a prayer” coming underneath and of course that was the one that we crash landed. That disappeared. That went. And we get a new aircraft almost immediately. Well, they got another aircraft almost immediately straight from MU and, ‘What are we going to put on the nose. What nose art were we going to have?’ And when we got out of dispersal to see the new aircraft Jock Steadman or Willy Steadman, Willy Steadman our Scottish in charge, NCO in charge of the aircraft he’d already painted on the aircraft Oor Wullie and Oor Wullie was the cartoon character from the Glasgow Sunday Post and that was the aircraft which gets all the publicity now and we did more operations in the other one than we did than we did in this one but they were wonderful aeroplanes to fly. Really, really were. So, anyway, there we are. We’ve got a new aeroplane and another operation we went on was to Hasselt which was another transport plant target whereby 5 group and 1 group were involved. A hundred and seventy three aircraft from each group. We were scattered all the way through the raid, just our squadron, so we were going to Hasselt which was French had been French military base which was the biggest military base in Europe at the time right on the edge of the village of Mailly and we were briefed to bomb very, very strictly. We didn’t want to kill anybody in the village so we had to be very precise, we were told to be very precise with our bombing so, and we were to assemble at a point just north of Mailly called Chalon whereby you waited there to get instructions from the master bomber, Cheshire who was the master bomber to go and bomb. He was really being very precise as well and he wasn’t satisfied with the marking so when the first group of a hundred and seventy three aircraft from 5 group arrived at Chalon, encircling the beacon, circling the area, it wasn’t a beacon as such but circling the area and being, the aircraft being delayed and delayed and delayed this second group caught up with the first group so there was something like nearly four hundred aircraft milling around waiting for instructions to go in and there just happened to be three German night fighter stations handy and they got in amongst us and it really was chaotic. There really were all sorts of awful things going on. The result of the raid was a very successful raid but the loss was over eleven percent. They sent just under four hundred aircraft and we lost forty two but there was only one aircraft crashed in the village where a French man were killed so that was compensation in a way. So when we were circling this beacon the RT discipline disappeared. You weren’t supposed to talk outside because the Germans knew where you were going, where you were coming from but the RT discipline just went that night and a voice came over the air to the pathfinders, ‘Pathfinders. For God’s sake pull your fingers out. I’m on fire. I’m being been shot at.’ And a very broad Australian voice came over the air, ‘If you’re going to die, die like a man.’ And this was the sort of thing that went on. The problem was that the American force [AFM?]were broadcasting on a similar frequency and it was the signals weren’t getting through as well as they ought to but anyway of course, when we got the order to go in and bomb it was just like Derby Day. All these aircraft ploughing down on the target. It was successful but we had a problem. We’d just dropped our bombs and we’d had an aircraft, something rattle us about with an updraft coming up and that. It was a bit rough but we’d just dropped our bombs and Norman, the bomb aimer, lying down in the front, he didn’t have time to say anything he just said, ‘Oh Christ’ and an aircraft blew up underneath us and turned us over. We were upside down and I can say I half rolled a Lanc [laughs]. So there we were, upside down at eight thousand feet and coming out you just couldn’t pull it out like that because the high speed stalled the aircraft so it took us a little while to come out and we were down to about a thousand feet by the time we sorted things out. Going very, very fast way beyond the [all up] speed of a Lancaster. We were doing nearly four hundred miles an hour. Four hundred knots as it was in those days and, but the aircraft just had scorch marks and a little bit of creaky stuff but there we are. Once you got sorted out you checked on the crew. ‘Alright, Harry?’ The rear gunner. ‘Yes skip.’ ‘Alright, Tommy?’ ‘Yes.’ Wireless op. ‘Alright, Taffy?’ And the response I got was, ‘Blood. Blood,’ and I thought, ‘Oh Christ, what’s happened?’ So I pulled the curtain back and there’s Taffy wiping his head and that’s all we knew and, ‘Oh God, what’s happened to Taffy,’ and Taffy, what happens when you’re flying at those, those temperatures, those heights, temperatures, the lowest temperature we had was minus forty seven and you had an elsan at the back of the aircraft which if you went and used that if you sat down on the elsan like that and you left a bit of your behind, behind ‘cause it was like you’d have an ice cube sticking on your fingers. You couldn’t do that so what the lads had they had a large [fuel] tin with the top cut off which they passed around the aircraft as a pee can and this pee can was kept down by the wireless operator which was the warmest place ‘cause it didn’t freeze when it was down there. And Taffy said now you can still see this pee can arriving with negative gravity and tipping all over him. When we were falling, coming out, recovering from the dive which we got in to and of course when you got back there was no question of going to get cleaned up. You had to go straight to be debriefed and of course he wasn’t exactly flavour of, flavour of the month which was, which was poor old Taffy. Still gets his leg pulled unmercifuly about that.
CB: I’m going to suggest we have a break.
RW: Yes fine.
CB: For a moment. So thank you very –
[pause]
CB: What it’s doing? We’re now recording again.
RW: Yeah.
CB: I’ve tried to do the playback but that didn’t work so we’re recording again now and I’m just hoping everything’s worked because it’s so good and I’m just looking at the numbers.
[pause]
CB: Right. So we’ve come to the point where you were inverted.
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Would you just like to describe before we go on to other things just how did you get the aircraft upright?
RW: Well -
CB: Because you can’t turn, roll it. Can you?
RW: Well we had to, to a certain extent with being upside down. You just imagine an aircraft being upside down you had to get it the right way up and the only thing you can do is turn it around so while we were plummeting, plummeting downwards and getting rather fast we sort of half rolled the thing out. Sort of almost like a very poor barrel roll that we flew. So, we were upside down and you turned over and came out sort of in that direction so you didn’t do a full roll. It was sort of almost like a half roll like almost like a half missing out the last bit of a barrel roll.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Coming out but because of the weight it was hard work but you didn’t think of it as hard, you didn’t think of it as work at the time you just sort of had to get out of it. Get it back.
CB: Yes, of course.
RW: Flying again but, and you just couldn’t pull the stick back and get the aircraft flying again because you could develop what they called a high speed stall cause the wing stalls at fourteen degrees and if you’re mushing down it increases the angle of attack very rapidly and you get what was called a high speed stall so this is where the training came in with these other flying, these little experiences we had in training. So, we just really tried to come, come out as gently as we possibly could. You certainly had to pull back on the stick to get control but trying not to mush it down so you really tried to fly it out which we did in the end, going very, very fast.
CB: You say we. Was the engineer helping you?
RW: Yes, well all he could do was pull the throttles back or push the throttles forward apart from being spread, spread across the floor. You know, the poor navigators instruments are all over the place. In that respect think of the navigators instruments all over the place my little wireless op oh he was a little terror and my navigator and he were chalk and cheese, vastly different characters and one occasion my navigator asked for a QDM from the wireless operator and Taffy said a very rude word telling him to go away and Alec looked back and found there was Taffy with his radio set, the old 1154 55 bits of the set on the floor trying to repair it and he couldn’t give him a QDM but he said [?] [laughs] so that was the atmosphere but they were a great crew, great crew. But there you are. We pulled ourselves out and we got ourselves out and we got back with having done the crash landing as I say. But the raid that I think affected us more than anything was the Nuremberg raid. The raid on Nuremberg. It was the raid that really should never have happened but we just discovered this afterwards reading books and things the fact that the, the uncertainty in Bomber Command headquarters about whether it should go on or shouldn’t go.
CB: It was to do with the fog, wasn’t it?
RW: Pardon?
CB: It was to do with the fog.
RW: Yeah. Yeah, well apparently there was a front coming up over Germany and the idea was that the route was going to be clear and the target was going to be er the route was going to be cloud covered and the target was going to be clear but the movement of the front wasn’t right and of course the, all the route was clear and the cloud over the target and the winds were wrong, all wrong.
CB: Oh.
RW: And all the hundred odd mile winds and this sort of thing were going on and nearly all in the wrong direction. Even the pathfinders, even the wind finders didn’t get the right places for the right system for the wind and so some of the pathfinders were marking Schweinfurt and different targets and Alec, my navigator, who was insistent on being a very precise little man he got us to the target and we actually flew to the target but by the time we were flying out the operation was delayed. Put back, put back and put back twice. So, we were going to bomb about five past twelve sort of thing like this. And we went off, a little bit in daylight taking off and we got, when we got to the French German border we’d seen sixteen aircraft shot down and to do what you used to do you used to report this to the navigator and he’d log it so they could get a record of where the aircraft went down and when he got to sixteen Alec said, ‘I don’t want to hear any more.’ So, we didn’t tell him anymore but we saw no end of stuff and coming across we were supposed to come south of the Ruhr which we did but a lot of people went straight over the top of the Ruhr and the carnage there. And just on the controversial long leg, what they called the long leg which was from the French from France right across to northern, north of the target, north of Nuremberg there was a two hundred and sixty five mile leg which was unusual ‘cause you usually had diversions and that sort of thing and it just so happened that there were two German night fighter beacons on the route Ider and Otto and it just so happened that their night fighters were assembling at the beacons all at the right time for them. So, there we were, we were ploughing along. We were very, very fortunate. We managed to keep out of trouble. We did have trouble but nothing drastic so we carried on and what we saw over the beacons was quite considerable. Lots of aircraft being shot at. We could see the tracers, German tracers going on, and this was a raid where the Germans first used the system called schragemusik whereby instead of having guns firing directly at the rear gunner they knew that there was no ventral armament on the Lancaster at all so this very astute German chap said, ‘Well, let’s have the guns pointing upwards,’ so they had two 20mm cannons pointing up, about sixty degrees. So, they used to fly underneath you and you knew nothing. You didn’t know they were there at all until the shells started to fly past. We, we were lucky. On one occasion we saw the shells coming upwards to us just on our starboard side so we managed to take evasive action but we didn’t know what it was, we didn’t know why they were coming up that way until many years later when we discovered they had this schragemusik and one German shot down forty two aircraft using that equipment. He did five in one night which was amazing so this added to the attrition rate of the raid at all. We were very, very fortunate. Alec, the navigation was spot on and we passed a target which we saw in the distance Schweinfurt which was being bombed which we didn’t know it was Schweinfurt then but we said, Alec said, ‘That can’t be right.’ So we carried on and actually arrived at Nuremberg which was cloud covered and we just, Norman had just happened to see a break in the little clouds so we bombed there. I think we bombed Nuremberg. We were certainly over Nuremberg. Whether we actually bombed Nuremberg you can’t really say because we couldn’t take a photograph because of the photoflood. It wouldn’t show anything on the photo apart from cloud but there was a massive explosion on our, on our left hand side which apparently somebody had hit a munition train just outside Nuremberg and this had this enormous explosion so we knew something had happened. And of course we had to come back when it was a long leg. There was some fighter activity on the way back but it was such and the lads when they used to go on these raids the lads, I didn’t get involved but the lads used to have a kitty. They put some pennies in this kitty and the ones who guessed the most number of aircraft shot down or most accurate number of aircraft shot down got the kitty and Curly my engineer got it that night because he said a hundred. He estimated a hundred and when we got back for debriefing the intelligence people were very sceptical about the thing. Oh it couldn’t have happened no its near going to happen but when our squadron records came in we sent twenty six aircraft that night and we lost seven which was nearly a third of the squadron that night. Sixty people, you know, all gone that night and it left it was really strange. It was. We were like zombies, you know. We just walked around. Not upset. Just mind blown and we went back we couldn’t sleep. We just walked around until daylight and the squadron didn’t operate for a little while after that. But what happened with the, when we got back used to go for a flying meal when we, when we got back and when we got back to the mess there were no waitresses there at all. All the meals were left on the counter and a little notice on the wall saying, ‘Please help yourselves.’ And all these girls had gone into the restroom and they were crying their eyes out ‘cause of the losses on the squadron. You know, they really felt the effect of that. Moreso than we did in many respects. Norman, my bomb aimer, who was always girl mad for the ladies wanted to go and console them but the WAAF officers said. ‘No. Leave them to it.’ And so we had to help ourselves to the meal and this was the atmospheres they had on the squadrons you know. The thoughts of the people working. When you think of a squadron where you’ve got something like anything a hundred and eighty, two hundred aircrew you’ve got something like two thousand, two and a half thousand ground staff who without them we couldn’t have kept flying, you know. So they, and they don’t get the credit that they justly deserve and our ground crew were wonderful. Little Willy [Severn] and Nobby Burke and they were part of the aircraft, they were part of the aircrew and I kept in touch with them for many, many years until he died just a few years ago at the age of ninety seven.
CB: Really.
RW: Lived up in Glasgow and Perth, near Perth and when I visited him and his lovely wife Annie he used to sit in his room all by himself just looking out the window and saying, ‘Aye. Och aye. Aye. Och aye,’ and remembering all the things that were going on. We were very, very fortunate on the squadron he was on the squadron for many, many months. He joined the squadron up at Holme on Spalding Moor and he only ever lost two aircraft so we so lucky to be with him. Mind you, we lost an aircraft for him which was, didn’t go down very well. So, but again, again these characters you’d come back with holes and bits missing and they’d be waiting for you when you got back and they’d get these things sorted out and repaired more or less for the, for the next night so, in all sorts of weathers. The, being a dispersed camp we didn’t have any hangars to work in. All the aircraft were stacked outside and, you know, in February ‘44 we had something like three foot of snow and sixteen foot snowdrifts and the station was cut off completely and these lads were working on the aircraft changing plugs, doing servicing on the aircraft. They worked, Willy said they worked in pairs. When one was working and his hands got frozen he went and warmed up. Another chap took over so they were working outside in all these sorts of conditions.
CB: There were hangars but they couldn’t put the aircraft in was it?
RW: Well, there were hangars when they had major things to do. Engine changes -
CB: Right.
RW: And these sort of things. They would take them in for major servicing. [Eight star] servicing, for a major servicing but apart from that they were just kept outside in the cold and the wet and in the war it could be anything.
CB: I’m going to stop there again because we are going to have a cup of tea.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Thank you.
RW: Oh lovely.
[pause]
CB: Right, so we’re back on again now.
RW: Yeah.
CB: And we’re just doing the -
RW: You finished the -
CB: Rerun of the Mailly but I think it’s useful because I’ve heard this, somebody mentioned before.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Of the attrition -
RW: Yeah.
CB: And because of the milling around -
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So why was it that the marking was so delayed causing the traffic jam?
RW: Well the again Cheshire was a brilliant pilot and a brilliant pathfinder and he was a perfectionist and again, forgive me if I’ve mentioned but the briefing that we had as the ordinary aircrew main force was to be very precise with the bombing because we didn’t want to hit any of the village. The village next door to the target. And he was being the same and he wasn’t satisfied with the markers that were going down and he said, ‘Well, don’t come in. We’re remarking.’ So he was re-marking the target to get in to the correct position for, for the [Mailly] raid and because of this it was delaying. It was, saying delayed you’re only talking about minutes. You’re not talking about hours, you know, but five minutes, ten minutes. An awful lot can happen in five, ten minutes and he was waiting until the markers got, really got them organised because there were two marking spots. One east and one west. One on the railway. One on the barracks because it was timed for midnight because this was the time when the people were coming back to their billets and were getting their, and they [wanted to kill the] troops.
CB: Yeah, of course.
RW: Troop concentrations so he was being as perfect as he possibly could and in consequence with the markers not being as accurate as he liked he stopped it and said we’ll remark again.
CB: Because it’s a French target?
RW: Because, well, not so much a French target. The target which was right next door to the French village.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And he didn’t want to kill -
CB: That’s what I meant. Yes.
RW: Didn’t want to kill, bomb the village. So, we were briefed and presumably they must have been briefed as well to be as perfect as they possibly could on their marking so as not to kill French people.
CB: Course.
RW: So this, and this came to light too, many, many years later here, by a little girl who was doing her degree at the Sorbonne in Paris relating to British and American efforts during the war and she came here and interviewed me here and stopped here for quite a little while and had a little chat about the Mailly raid and this sort of thing and she was quite concerned, you know. She was only what twenty, twenty one year old but she was only concerned about the fact that that attitude was taken to stop people, French people being killed. She got a first degree anyway which was rather nice.
CB: You obviously briefed her well.
RW: Yes, we still send Christmas cards to each other. I haven’t seen her for years and years and years. I wonder what she is doing now, whether she is married or what. But she was a nice little girl and I’ve got some pictures of her somewhere in there.
CB: Yeah.
RW: So, yes, so the, that was the result of the Mailly raid and the Nuremberg of course, raid, as well of course had although we’d had a lot of damage on other raids and quite traumatic things on other raids the Nuremberg raid left the biggest scar than any, mental scars was far, far greater than the physical scar and that really got sunk home when you realise what the attrition rates was. And the reports I think say there was ninety six, ninety seven aircraft shot down over the target but there were over a hundred wrecked completed so there must have been about a hundred and sixteen, a hundred and twenty aircraft written off altogether with all those, not all those aircrew but I think there was something like five hundred and sixty five, five hundred and five hundred and fifty aircrew killed that night, one night. The Nuremberg raid. And there were more aircrew killed on that one night then there was in the whole of the month of the Battle of Britain, which, you can’t compare the sort of flying that we were doing but the figures are quite remarkable when you think of what was going on. But being thickies as we were we knew it went on and we didn’t realise the implications of what was going on. We just got on with and had to do a job. But again, we had the trip, we had a little experience which was a trip to Munich. We were briefed for nine hours twenty five minutes petrol and we were given nine hours forty odd minutes petrol to fly on with instructions to land in the south of England if we had problems with getting back with the fuel consumption and it was again the weather wasn’t as forecast so we chugged off to Munich. Rather a long haul. A very long haul. Beautiful scenery over the Alps. We cross the Alps three times it was wonderful. Twice because it was twice the target and coming back we had problems. We lost part of a port wing, part of the leading edge of the port wing, we lost instruments, lost the pitot heads so that caused us little problems. Not exactly flying by the seat of our pants but -
CB: But you had no air speed indicator.
RW: So we were chugging back and as we say the leading edge of the port wing had disappeared somewhere and we’d had icing on the props. That was the amazing, we used to get icing on the propellers. And these were flying, the icing used to fly off and rattle against the side of the aircraft. It was just like flak for hitting the side of the aircraft and I’ve still got a bit of flak that came into my aeroplane. It’s on the table over there. Yes, so coming back it took a lot, lot longer than we anticipated and we were rather slow coming back to the extent that we were coming back over France in daylight and we were getting halfway across France and we saw these two little specks appearing flashing towards us and, ‘Oh Christ, what’s this going on?’ A couple of spitfires. They had been sent out to escort us back. So we were escorted back but with the engineers and navigation and fuel conservation we got back to Ludford having flown for ten and a quarter hours.
CB: Wow.
RW: But again the ground crew had that aircraft ready again for the next night which is, which is, what they get up to is wonderful. So they’re the sort of things that happened on raids. Another story, we came over Stettin one night. We lost two engines, two starboard engines. We managed to get one going half again so we came back from Stettin on two and a half engines.
CB: Was that flak damage?
RW: Yeah. Yeah. That was flak damage yes and when we got back Curly, he was a dreadful tease, he used to tease the WAAFs dreadfully and this poor little girl he teased her so much that when he was having his meal, operational meal she said, ‘I’m not going to serve you with your meal, cheeky bugger. I’m not going to serve your meal.’ He did get his meal of course but she wouldn’t serve him. And coming back off this trip we were so late we were, everybody, the committee of adjustment had been in and started to take our kit away. They didn’t think we were coming back but when we got back we got to the mess and this poor little kid was in tears, ‘Oh I shall never do that again.’ This was the atmosphere of these kids and girls. Wonderful. They were the sorts of things that happened. My last, very last operation was to again a transport plant target which was the original D-Day which was on the 4th 5th of June and like on the briefing we knew we were on the battle order but we had no idea where we were going and when we got out to the dispersal and asked what we were, what the petrol load and bomb load was Willy said, ‘Eeh,’ he said, ‘You’ve got full tanks and overloads and no bombs.’ And you were thinking, ‘Oh God. What’s going on? Are we going to Italy, Russia, whatever.’ No. What was happening we were flying a square circle around the invasion beaches giving false instructions to some of the shipping people imitate a convoy and also reporting on the fighter activity, German fighter activity to report back to help with the invasion and of course the invasion was put back twenty four hours because of the weather. So they took our overload tanks on, put a few bombs on board and we went off and we bombed Sangatte. Didn’t do a very good job obviously. So, that was our very last trip, Sangatte, and when we got back, because of the weather, very adverse weather we were diverted to Faldingworth which is only about thirty odd miles from Ludford, our base and we slept on a chair in the mess for the rest of the night and when we got up in the morning and having breakfast the station commander, Group Captain King arrived and he said, ‘Come on. I’m taking you back.’ I said, ‘Well I’ve got an aeroplane outside you know.’ And he said ‘You’re not touching another aircraft on the squadron. That was your last operation.’ So we just left the aircraft. How they got it back I don’t know but he took us back in his little hut, little, his little van. We went back and that was my last operation and mentioning our attrition rate on the squadron, in early 1944 our attrition rate was something like sixty two percent.
CB: Gee.
RW: Which was, you know, it’s unbelievable when you look.
CB: This is because they were targeted specifically.
RW: Yeah. Targeted. Very vulnerable. A) Because they could home onto our frequencies and B) Because we were on every bombing raid that went out. So there we are. The next morning I had to go and have a little interview with the station commander to give a pat on the back. He was a lovely chap Group Captain King. Curly, my engineer had finished because he’d done an operation with his previous crew he was finished the night before and he’d been out on the booze. Went down in to Ludford on the booze and when I had the interview with Group Captain King the following morning he said, ‘Your bloody crew.’ And, ‘Oh God. What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘Your engineer was down in the pub last night spouting about what he got up to and whatever and there just happened to be an intelligence officer there.’ And he just, no he was just pulling my leg really in a way but he said yes thank you very much for what you’ve done and I was given my green endorsement for the Mailly, for the raid where we had the mid-air collision and he had a curtain covering a chart on the wall which gave the crew statistics on the wall and he pulled the curtain back and he said, ‘There you are. You are the first crew that has finished as a crew for over six months’. Yeah.
CB: Amazing.
RW: And you didn’t even realise then. Appreciate what you -
CB: Yeah.
RW: What the attitude was but it really was remarkable and then of course I wasn’t allowed to touch a Lancaster again ever. Until 1977. Until the 101 squadron had a 60th anniversary of the formation of the squadron and they tried to get, I was asked. Martin Middlebrook was involved and he wrote a book and he was, he used to live not far away and then he was trying to get all of our crew together again and did I know where they were. And I had a few addresses so we managed to find 5 of us and we couldn’t find Taffy, could never find Taffy and we tried to find Taffy and we got in to contact with the people of his uncle who ran a pub and he wouldn’t tell us where he was and we assumed he was either in jail or in hospital but there, he’s still about but he never knew anything about it. But anyway, we had this meeting with five of my crew were there in 1977 in Waddington at 101. The Lancaster was there and at the dinner the previous night the PMC stood up and gave a little chat and said, ‘You’ve got the Lancaster here. It’s had an oil leak it needs an air test in the morning. We’ve got a crew here.’ So we flew in the Battle of Britain Lanc and did about a twenty, twenty five minute air test.
CB: Fantastic.
RW: In the Battle of Britain Lanc which was quite a thrill, quite a thrill.
CB: Amazing.
RW: And it’s wonderful that they’ve kept the thing going.
CB: Yes.
RW: It’s great. So after the war, I stayed in the air force after the war.
CB: Yes excuse me for interrupting but after the ops what did you do then because we’re not at the end of the war?
RW: Oh no. Yes. Yes.
CB: We’re still a year away.
RW: Yes. After the operations, yes normally you were, your crew tended to try and keep as much of the crew together and were posted away and most of the crew were posted to 28 OTU. And I was sent to 82 OTU. I never knew why or found out why. Typing error? Whatever. Anyway, I arrived at 82 OTU which was all Australian station and I was one of the very few Englishmen there as aircrew. One of the only aircrew there as an examiner, screen pilot, and they didn’t think much of this pommie bastard arrived in their midst and it wasn’t exactly a comfortable place to be but I’d only been there a couple of weeks when I had a bit of a problem, a symptom from the flying in the war. I had a perforated ulcer. Again, attributed to stress, whatever. So anyway, I had this haemorrhaging and I went sick, reported to the Australian doc, went sick and he didn’t think much of this whinging pommie bastard so medicine on duty. That was, that was, that was it. We just, and very shortly after that I was posted to Gamston where, which was a Wimpy OTU so I was flying in Wimpies there. Met my first fiancé there which was a lovely little WAAF in the camp. Audrey, Audrey Simms. Again, my luck held out, a lot of luck was involved on the squadron, tremendous lot of luck on the squadron and again my luck held out. My friend, Tommy Thompson, who’d been on operations, same as myself, screened and I was also the sports officer on the squadron and I had to do an air test as well and Tommy said, ‘Well you go and get the sports kit.’ On Wednesday afternoon the whole place shut down in those days for sport so I went to get the sports equipment and Tommy did my air test in a Wimpy and the Wimpy blew up and he was killed. Poor chap. Poor Tommy. And the only way we could recognise him when we found him was his ring on his finger. And he was a Geordie like myself and I was given the task of organising his funeral, went up to his funeral and because he didn’t get married during the war he got married very shortly after the end of his tour. He didn’t get married until after he’d finished his tour and his wife was expecting a baby, lived at Wallsend near Newcastle and of course I had to go to the funeral and there was this poor lass and it was rather sad. Yeah. So, these are the sort of things that happened and the luck you can achieve on these sort of things. So, anyway, because of my sins and flying I was due to go back on a second tour, supposedly on Mosquitoes, in early ‘45 but the attrition rate had dropped considerably at that time and there was a glut of aircrew coming though so they said, ‘Don’t come back on operations.’ So I was sent down to Lulsgate Bottom which was an instructor’s school. So I went down to the instructor’s school at Lulsgate Bottom which is now Bristol airport and I had a nice time down there learning to drink scrumpy which was, which was great. Lovely. Lovely. Lovely place down there. I enjoyed it very much. Again had little problems with the instructing. Flying with the instructor one night and the radial engine, the pot burst and the pistons were coming out through the through the canopy around the engine. So we had a little single engine landing there but that was fine. I ended up there and became an instructor. So the instructing I was sent to be a place called Desborough. I had the choice of going to Carlisle or Northampton so I chose Desborough and I was stationed there as a screen pilot and flying instructor, Wimpies. This story extends a little bit. A very good friend of mine who became my first fiancé her friend she was stationed, became stationed at Wyton, Cambridge and my friend and I used to go and visit her and he, Jock Murray, he was a married man. He had a girlfriend as well, a WAAF at Wyton so we used to go and stay at the George hotel at Huntingdon when she was there but sadly we were sitting on the banks of the river at Earith. I’d already bought the engagement ring and whatever and she said, ‘I’m sorry but that’s it’ and she went off with a married pilot on Wyton, pilot and that was it. I came back to Desborough rather tail, my tail between my legs sort of thing and my squadron commander, he knew what the situation, we were very good friends and he knew what was going on and one of the pilots who had been at Wyton on big stuff he was converting on to Dakotas and that’s what we were doing in Desborough and he came to Desborough to be converted on to Dakotas. He didn’t, I knew him but he didn’t know me and my flight commander, Lofty [Loader] he said, ‘You have him as a pupil.’ So I had this poor soul as a pupil. All the first details in the morning and all the last details at night. He complained to the boss and he said, ‘Nothing to do with me. Get on with it.’ But he was brilliant. He was a good pilot but he didn’t know anything about that at all. And again strange things happened at Desborough. When I was there another crew came through at, which er, yes this other crew came through whereby the pilot had a wireless operator who eventually joined the company I joined after, after the war as a wireless operator and I had to screen the crew on a cross country out over Wales. A claggy night. Not a very nice night at all and his skipper didn’t say, ‘I don’t think we ought to go. The weather.’ ‘Oh it’s all right,’ Well the weather we flew in the war we flew in all sorts of weather. They said, ‘Oh no it’s alright Alfie,’ So, off we went and coming back they asked to get a QDM and he couldn’t on his little set. He couldn’t get a QDM and fortunately I had been to the Empire Radio School and, and, and knew a little about electrics so I went back, got this bearing, give it to the skipper and when we let down there was Desborough the identification lights DE flashing, I said, ‘There you are. That’s how it’s done.’ And I had to give this wireless operator an adverse, not exactly an adverse report but not a very favourable one. He eventually became a director of the company I was working for and he didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t like me very much at all because I was one of the lower minions in the works and he was a director of purchasing. Not a nice, not a very nice chap. Anyway, there we are so that was, that was little situation but Desborough from there I went and was posted to Transport Command, had to go into Transport Command and there I was flying Dakotas and doing mainly conversion work flying Dakotas. I had some very nice jobs to do and stationed at Oakington. This was in 1947 when I first went to work in Oakington and I was the flying wing training officer for four squadrons 10, 27, 30 and 46 squadrons and this was early ‘48 when the thought of the airlift came into being and this was quite an amazing situation because the squadron as I say had this four, the unit had the four squadrons on board and I was working with all the four squadrons. Then when you are going on the airlift all the aircrew had to be completely categorised and had to have a current incident rating so I was kept very, very busy. One night well one month one day I did something like ten and a half hours flying testing just to get them ready to go on the airlift. So, there we went and when we got them all, got them all off we, the WingCo said, ‘Right have a few days left, go on the airlift for a month and have a rest.’ So that was fine so I thought now do I go home and see my mum and dad or do I go and see my fiancé. I was getting married in October. And I said, ‘Hmmn I’ll go and see my fiancé,’ which I obviously did. Went back on the airlift and when I got to [Rumsdorf] which we were then I went to see the flight commander chappie in charge of the flying and I said, ‘Where do I go for briefing?’ And he said, ‘You don’t.’ He gave me a piece of, a sheet of A4, ten sheets of A4 with all the instructions on and said, ‘Go away and read those, inwardly digest. You’re flying in the morning.’ And that was it. That was it. And it was strange how the flying did, is it alright talking about the airlift?
CB: Absolutely. Yes. Yes.
RW: Yeah, because this is forty, a long time after the war but there we are. How the airlift came about was the fact that the Russians had taken over Berlin and they wouldn’t allow any people into Berlin for about eight weeks. So nobody was going in and they really split Berlin in half. They took over the east sector but they had to keep the airlift going, had to keep the situation going because the embassies of the French, British and American embassies there so they had to keep flying going in. They couldn’t stop the flying but they could affect the roads. There were originally six corridors going in but the Russians said you don’t need six. So they cut out, cut the north one out and the south one out and the east one out so they only had three corridors going in. The Americans were doing the, the southern one and we were doing the north one and we all came out on the centre one. But when they started the airlift all this happened in a very, very short period of time. The Americans, a chap called Lucius Clay was in charge of the system flying then in Berlin and he called every possible aircraft back from the states, even from Alaska, to come down to [?] which was the southern part of Germany and, to organise the thing properly he asked a chap called [Tupper, Tupper?] who was in charge of the Burma hump flying over the hump in Burma and he was asked to organise that. The first trip he went on, this was the very, very beginning all, all the Americans were there first and they’d gone off he went off on one of these very first trips and when he got to, got to Berlin there they were going to land at Tempelhof. He found there were aircraft stacked from five hundred feet to five thousand feet and everybody, all the Americans, were clamouring like mad to get permission to land and there was very little organisation at all. Two aircraft, two of the American aircraft had crashed on the runway. One crashed on the runway and was being repaired, and went on the fire and the other crashed and gone over the end of the runway. Nobody was killed but [Tupper Tupper] realised what was going on. He sent all the aircraft back to base even with their loads and got landed himself at Gatow at er [Wunsdorf] and at Tempelhof, landed at Tempelhof and he wrote out orders and all regulations for all flying on the Berlin airlift. Each aircraft had a different speed, different height to fly and all, all went, all went off and when we were at [Wunsdorf] at the time and when you went off you flew to a beacon north of Ber, we flew to a beacon at [?] just north of Berlin where you, when you arrive there you gave instructions, or you were given instructions of how to land and what your load off and we flew in everything. Literally everything in to Berlin because when the Russians took over they closed their frontier and they closed the, all the rail, road and water transport into Berlin and there was something like two million two hundred thousand West Berliners with twenty seven days rations of everything they’d left and they’d taken the generators from the power stations away, they’d taken the gas and that was all rationed and these poor Berliners were left with twenty seven days of nothing. I was very fortunate. I gave a little talk to some aircrew at Leamington and one of the chaps brought along a German lady who had been a little girl, a young little at the time the Russians took over and she was, she spoke English quite well but a very, very strong German accent and she of course she was quite an elderly lady then and she said she and her elder sister, she was young teenager and her sister was seventeen, eighteen and they were walking through Berlin and the Russians came along, a group of Russians came along and they herded all the girls and women they could possibly find into this building. The older sister knew what was going to happen and she hid this young lady, was a young lady, hid her and all the rest were gang raped for the rest of the day and she said, she was telling me that her sister never ever spoke of that again. She couldn’t talk about it. There was something like two million women raped. Two thousand committed suicide. You know, and these figures you know and the Berliners were so appreciative of what we did. We literally flew in everything. Naughty story. When we were on taking a few coal fuel and flour everything in and when you got to the beacon as I say you had to call to get landing instructions and declare what your load was so you could be directed to the correct unloading bay when you landed and the Germans were doing this and they could turn an aircraft around in eight minutes you know. Incredible. So there we were we were going towards this beacon and I said to the wireless op cause I didn’t have a crew I had the nav leader and the signals and I said to Jacko, ‘Call up and get us instructions.’ So he gave instructions and they said, ‘What is your load?’ And he said, ‘Medical supplies. Mainly manhole covers,’ and they were all sanitary towels. It didn’t end there because when we landed we were directed to the heavy unloading bay and we weren’t exactly flavour of the month. We didn’t half get a rocket but there again when you were flying in there was no question of doing an overshoot and going around again. If you couldn’t land you just had to go back to base and start again.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And when you were there they had all your aircraft lined up. Your day was split into three eight hour shifts and you were doing as many raids, as many sorties as you could in eight hours and then you had the next 8 hours off and then you flew in the next 8 hours and this went on seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Day and night. There was only one day it never happened and that was through extensive fog. So, and when the aircraft were lined up the ground crew had to do a pre-flight test on every aircraft and part of their equipment the wireless operators, wireless, ground wireless operators were a pair of bellows and when they got on the aircraft they used the bellows to blow this, the flour and coal dust off the instruments so they could check them. So this was the sort of thing that was going on. When we were at [Rumsdorf] they also had the York there and the payload of the York was something like what fifteen thousand pounds and the Dakota’s about seven and a half and one of our skippers said, Flight Lieutenant Sheehan, he went off in the Dakota and he said, ‘It’s like a brick. It’s like flying a brick.’ And he had an awful job getting it off the ground, an awful job getting it there, an awful job landing it and when they landed it they found they’d put a York load on the Dakota so he was flying at double his all up weight.
CB: Gee.
RW: And it says a lot for the skipper and the aircraft you know.
CB: Absolutely.
RW: You know, these sort of things went on. Amazing. But that was a long time after, after the squadron. And on the squadron looking back and talking to people on the squadron about the squadron about the air force in general they said, ‘Well you know in our group, in one group we were losing seventy aircraft a month.’ Every Bomber Command station lost nine hundred aircrew. You know, it’s amazing the figures that went on like that and a gentleman did some statistics working out how it affected a hundred air crew and of the hundred aircrew fifty one were killed. Twelve were shot down and badly injured, five were badly injured so they couldn’t fly again, three were, so three were killed on landings back at base, twelve became prisoners of war and one escaped to come back and of the remaining of that hundred aircrew only twenty four remained. Nearly all with some medical problem afterwards which, is you know, is -, I had my share. The sort of things that happened they said personally the sort of things that happened to me afterwards apart from this ulcer which affected me for most of my life until I was here at Desborough, at er Kenilworth when I moved in here and one night I had a massive haemorrhage. I couldn’t get upstairs and the doc came and it was a peculiar system he had. I was not allowed food, I wasn’t allowed to get out of bed, I wasn’t allowed to do anything with work and I lived on an ounce of milk and water for six weeks. Couldn’t do anything and I remember sitting down where we are now sitting now watching the television, watching the cricket with the doctor, chatting about what was going on and it was amazing. In consequence I can eat anything, anything at all doesn’t bother me but alcohol doesn’t like me. I can drink it but I can enjoy it for about a week afterwards so you know I don’t drink very much now. I’ve had my share. But this is the sort of thing that happened and what still happens now. One operation we were on going on to the Ruhr and the Ruhr, the old Happy Valley and we were approaching the Ruhr and it really it looked deadly and the flak, there was an old saying, the flak was so thick you could get out and walk on it and it was like that searchlights, fighters going on and the first time I ever experienced terror and it was most peculiar. I’d heard about it but I’d never experienced it and I literally was shaking and really I couldn’t do what I was supposed to do so I dropped my seat so I couldn’t see outside and funnily enough I said a little prayer that I hadn’t said since I was about six years old. Mum and dad used to sit by the side of my bed and say this little prayer which ended up, ‘If I die before I wake I pray the lord my soul will take.’ Why I said it I don’t know, no idea but I said this little prayer and the terror disappeared and I raised my seat and I could just carry on. You’re still frightened of course but all the terror disappeared. And we had similar situations again afterwards but no terror so whether the power of prayer you know whether this happens or not. Some of the lads we used to take the mickey a bit ‘cause they used to kneel down by their beds and say their prayers or kneel down by the aircraft before they got on and said their prayers and thought they were a bit sissy until you had this sort of experience yourself and then you realise there’s something in it. It’s all, I’m sure it was all mental you know. Some of these sort of things happened. When I laid my head down on the pillow even now, not every, if I’ve been reading a books like some of the air force books and service books that come out now, if I’ve been reading these books about aeroplanes and I put my head down on the pillow I can see flak bursting and little sparks flying about. It doesn’t affect me. I’m fine. No problem at all and this sort of thing, you know, just reminds you of the old days and now talking about it so much now it’s almost like a myth, you know. As if you’re telling fairy stories. Did I really do it, you know but yes it does once you’ve experienced those sorts of things you never forget them. They’re always there. And some, some fixed more than others. We had one navigator who, they were badly shot up and some of the, a lot of the crew were injured. The aircraft was on fire and he got out of his seat to walk back to the, the aircraft was still flying, he walked to the back of the aircraft to jump out the back. No parachute. Some of the crew stopped him and said, ‘No. Don’t.’ He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t speak. He was just a zombie completely. Couldn’t speak and when he got back, they got back alright he never spoke. Never spoke at all. Went to the sick quarters for a couple of weeks. Never spoke, could understand a thing and he was sent to the service hospital at Matlock, the psychological hospital at Matlock and he was there for several, a couple of weeks and he never spoke until one of the nurses dropped an instruments in a tin tray and he woke up. He said, ‘Oh Christ, they’re on fire. They’re on fire.’ And he got his speech back again. He was invalided out of the service as you know unfit for flying. He was alright but that experience he had of these weeks of not talking you know and this is the sort of thing that happened to these sort of folks and, you know, when you think of the experiences you had and how bloody lucky you’d been all these whiles. And, your luck. Yes, I think you bought yourself your own luck to a certain extent. In my crew, were such that although vastly different characters, we were all great comrades and great friends. Great friends. And you know this helped enormously the operational flying, in my instructing and examining after the war when Oakington was closed down and all the four squadrons dispersed 30 squadron was posted to Abingdon and having, me being flying wing training, I thought I was out of a job. 30 squadron had taken over a VIP element from 24 squadron and for my sins I was posted to 30 squadron at Abingdon to become the training officer on 30 squadron and to get our qualifications, to get my, I had to go to Central Flying School to be examined and that was quite the thing. The fact that I had an instrument rating and the fact that I had done something like fifteen hundred hours instrument flying I was allocated a master green instrument rating and I became examiner and when I went down to the Central Flying School to become an examiner and a tester, an instructor, the instructor there, Flight Lieutenant Walker, a lovely man, when we finished the [CGI], said ‘There is a book. Take it away. Read the chapters about training and it’s all about what you learn about.’ And it was a book called the “Psychological Disorders of Flying Personnel” and the chapter on training illustrated the fact that you know even experienced people when being examined had a little bit of panic. It’s a bit of the white coat syndrome of the doctor with his stethoscope and things and you couldn’t really operate as you normally could and this was a chapter about that sort of thing. And this psychological business he gave me this book to take back home. And when I got back of course I used to examine all the crews but each crew had to be examined completely once a month. They had to do certain training exercises. One per month and the VIP pilots had to do the same as well but the VIP pilots were like a class apart. They wouldn’t have a, they insisted on having a separate crew room from us roughies and strange things happened with them. One occasion one of the pilots a chap called Van Reinfeld had to do a VIP trip the following day and he hadn’t done a little night, night flying exercise and I said, ‘Well it’s alright. I’ve got a spare navigator. You can do your little trip tonight. I’ll put you on early, you’ll be alright for tomorrow.’ And he said, ‘Well I can’t do it.’ He says, ‘My navigator has gone in to Abingdon and I don’t know where he is.’ I said, ‘I’ve got a spare navigator. It’s alright. It’s only a training trip. It’s not a VIP trip.’ And this chap, the replacement, a chap called Baxter who was a coloured boy wouldn’t fly with him. Refused to fly with him and I said, ‘Well you don’t, if you don’t fly with him you don’t get your trip tomorrow.’ He went to see Squadron Leader Reese the squadron commander and he said, ‘It’s nothing to do with me it’s to do with the training.’ And he went back and I said, ‘Well if you don’t do it. You don’t fly.’ And he went into Abingdon and scoured all the clubs and pubs, found his navigator, came back, flew late in the morning, early in the morning the next day and went off to do his trip the next day and that’s the sort of atmosphere they were. And the principal job of the Transport Command at 30 squadron were again, like all transport was glider towing and paratrooping and there was a big operation called Operation Longstop which was going on at Old Sarum and all the crews had to go down and join in the exercise and of course every pilot had to have an aeroplane. There wasn’t enough aeroplanes to go around and I was given an aeroplane and a pilot to fly with me who was a VIP pilot called [Ria.] He said, ‘I’m a VIP pilot. I don’t fly second dicky.’ And he wouldn’t fly. Refused to fly with me. Again, he saw the flight commander down at Old Sarum and the boss said. ‘Well if you don’t fly you don’t fly at all. Go back to base. Get back to base.’ He sent him back to base and these sort of characters they were an elite apart, you know. Brilliant fliers no doubt about it brilliant fliers and as I say we had to go down to Central Flying School to be examined and when you’re examined if anything went wrong and you didn’t fail any one part of the exercise two of the exams you had to write, reply a hundred percent. Safety and regulations, these sort of things and when you were, one of the exercises you had it do you were given all the met readings from various stations and you had to plot a synoptic chart and give a forecast for the next day, until midnight the next day, which I did and I said possibly get some rain by lunchtime tomorrow and whatever down the south of England and he called a Met man in and he said, ‘Oh that’s not going to happen. That’ll never happen.’ So I didn’t pass that exam so I had to go back, wait another month before I was going to be examined again. Blow me, the next day it started to rain so I rang up old Walker at Central Flying School and said, ‘Have you looked out the window?’ And he said, ‘You jammy bugger,’ he said, ‘I’ll put it in the post.’ So it was a great atmosphere. A wonderful atmosphere and 30 squadron had a wonderful atmosphere. Still has now. Still does wonderful work now. But the flying it left a great character in my life but I was married by then of course and we had a wonderful life with my wife in peacetime air force. Sadly, she became terribly ill when we were at Oakington and she started having terrible haemorrhages and this sort of thing and the, our local doc said, ‘You’d better take her home’ so we took her to her home in Desborough near Kettering and my mother who was a state certified midwife, she’d nursed all her life said, ‘You know the prognosis of this isn’t very great,’ you know and discovered that she had what they called a [? deformed] mole which is a pregnancy like a bunch of grapes and indicative of cancer. And they did scrapes they didn’t do scrapes in those days but they couldn’t find it and it was the cancer was deep seated in the womb and my mum said, you know ‘She can’t live very long.’ She was only about six months, nine months perhaps at the most so I resigned my commission to come out to look after her. Haven’t been, my last posting just about this the time this happened found was AOC far east to go VIP pilot, the AOC in the far east which I had to keep delaying, delaying, delaying because of Pat’s illness and eventually that was cancelled completely so I didn’t go. So, I resigned to come out on the condition that I renewed my qualifications every year and stayed on the reserve until I was, 1960 um and came out and poor old Pat died about ten months afterwards and with my lack of education I couldn’t get a grant to do any, I was hoping for a grant to go teaching but I couldn’t get a grant because I had no certificates or educational certificates. Fortunately, Pat, my wife’s father owned a factory. A packaging factory. So he said, ‘Come and work for me.’ So I went and worked in his factory on the marketing and sales. I can say for twenty seven years I travelled in cardboard boxes which was very kind of him. I got along very well with the old man. He was quite an eminent military man himself. Thinking of that sort of thing when I was at Abingdon, Oakington, I was going to get married and I was told I had to get permission to get married otherwise I wouldn’t get my marriage allowance ‘cause I was a little bit too young. So I was told I had to have an interview with the station commander which a chap called group captain [Byte Seagal] so I went and had an interview with him and my dad because of his health couldn’t do any serious work and he used to work for the Coop looking after the horses for the Coop stables so when we went for the interview with group captain [Byte Seagall], a peacetime group captain trying to get everything back to a peacetime protocol he said, ‘Who are you marrying?’ I said, ‘Well, Pat.’ ‘What does she do?’ And I said, ‘Well she does typing and bit of filing in an office.’ ‘Oh that’s interesting.’ ‘What does your father do?’ And I said, ‘He looks after horses.’ He said, ‘Newmarket?’ I said, ‘No. Coop.’ And this didn’t go down very well at all. And he said, ‘What about your father in law then?’ And I said, ‘Well he was colonel in chief of the Northamptonshire regiment. He got the MC in Gallipoli.’ ‘Ah now isn’t that interesting.’ I said. ‘My mother, my dad was in the navy. He got the DSM in the navy. My mother got the Royal Red Cross.’ ‘Now isn’t that interesting.’ Yes, I can get married. So I got permission to get married. And they were trying to get things back to peacetime protocol but after the war people like myself were asked to go up to Cranwell which was a training, a major training school then for aircrew and just to meet the people, not to meet, just to chat to the students and pupils and met one young man called, oh dear [pause] His dad was the president of the Nuremberg raids. Oh, what did they call him? Anyway, he was, he was his dad was this very eminent gentleman. Martin, [pause] oh dear, old age and memory don’t go very well together. Anyway, this gentleman he was on the Nuremberg trials. He organised the Nuremberg trials for the post war Germans and his son was on the Cranwell course and he eventually came down to 30 squadron and I said to him, you know, ‘What’s the last thing they taught you at Cranwell then?’ And they said, he said, ‘Don’t get associated with wartime commissioned officers.’ Because, in February ‘44 the directive came about saying all captains of heavy bombers had to be commissioned and my commissioning interview was with the accountant who gave me a cheque for ninety quid to go and buy a uniform with. Yeah. What do they call the chappie on the Nuremberg trials? Very eminent man. Very eminent barrister.
CB: Yeah. I can’t remember.
RW: Pardon?
CB: I can’t remember.
RW: No. Can’t remember. Anyway Martin didn’t like this system in the air force at all so he resigned and came out. But that was the sort of thing that was going on in those days and I was very, very fortunate to be able to have a job to work. I stayed and played with cardboard boxes. For two years I had to go to Marshals and be re-examined for, just to keep your hand in that all it was part of the condition for resigning. I did that for two years and the first time I went the instructor there said. ‘Well go on and do the exams and, what did you do?’ I told him what I did. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Bugger it. Go on. Take a little chipmunk and take off. So I used to fly over Desborough and around the school where I was teaching and [laughs] no that, and I started learning, I taught myself aerobatics because the transport flying which is dead straight and level sort of stuff and I’d never flown aerobatics at all apart from slow rolling the Lancaster. It was great fun. Great fun. But they only did that for two years because they said it’s getting expensive and we’ve got squirty things now and so -
CB: Yeah.
RW: Just keep on the register.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And I was in the reserve until 1960 so really I had a wonderful career.
CB: Yeah, brilliant.
RW: Wonderful -
CB: Can I -
RW: Experiences I’ll never be forgetting and played an awful lot of luck and met some wonderful people and wonderful friends and with my crew when the squadron formed the association from flying together in 1977 the squadron chappie called Goodliffe formed the squadron association and from then on we found all eight of my crew and all eight of us used to meet every year.
CB: Fantastic.
RW: Until 1990 when we all met at Ludford in 1990 and the Coningsby, the Battle of Britain Flight said, ‘Would you come down and do a little exercise down here with a full crew.’ And Tommy, my mid upper gunner, wouldn’t go so we never went and a couple of months later he died so whether he had some sort of premonition, you know.
CB: Extraordinary.
RW: But anyway nevertheless all 7 of used to meet until, and then the rear gunner dies and all eight of us, all six of us used to meet and a couple of years ago my special duty operator died so all five of us -
CB: All five.
RW: Are still round about and very, very different states of health and all creaking a bit. I was being very lucky. I had open heart surgery.
CB: Oh, did you really?
RW: It was only three years ago and got a zip fastener up the front but if it hadn’t have been for again like the services, like with family if it hadn’t have been for family and my mum looking after me with diphtheria when I was a little boy and my daughters and family looking after me afterwards when, when I had when I had the operation for the heart I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat and my daughter Catherine who is, she is now the ward manager sister at the coronary care unit at Warwick Hospital she took me into hospital on her day off and did an ECG and a blood test and the cardiologist just happened to be walking past and he said, ‘What are you doing here?’ You know, and he took the blood away and came back and he said your bloods alright but it’s not, you’re not going anywhere. Don’t go home. So within just over a week I’d had open heart surgery.
CB: Gee.
RW: And I was back home again.
CB: Amazing.
RW: Yeah, it’s amazing.
CB: I’m going to stop you there.
RW: Yes, that’s about it I think, Ok.
CB: Because we both need a – [pause] right we’re restarting again after a brief comfort break and the bits I just want to ask you about, Rusty is first of all the ranking system. So you went in as an aircraftsman second class.
RW: I went in as an AC2.
CB: And how did the promotion system work until you were –
RW: Yeah. Well, usually after about six months you were promoted an AC1 and then after another short period of time you became an LAC, leading aircraftman. And I was a leading aircraftman when I went and did my flying in Canada and it was from then after you’d finished and completed your training successfully that was when you were ordered your flying brevvy and you became whatever grant, whatever grade you were going in to. Fortunately, and with a lot of luck involved I became a pilot. And having, became a sergeant pilot. Some, about three or four of the course that we were on we lost about forty percent of the course on washouts. You know, it was incredible because the training was very, very precise. I must say it was very, very good. Looking back it was remarkable. So there I was a sergeant pilot and promotion as an NCO was roughly six months and you got an increase and promotions so by the time I was, got on the squadron I was a sergeant pilot and then I very soon became a flight sergeant pilot and that was in ’43. End of ’43. And in early ‘44 the directive came from the air ministry that all captains of heavy bombers had to be commissioned so I was given the cheque for ninety quid by the accountant and told to go and buy a uniform so there was no formal interview at all. It was just a thing that happened. In consequence, the social class, in a sense, disappeared because there were people commissioned from training and they tended to be a little bit elitist and some of the crews had done previous tours and tended to be all commissioned and usually flight lieutenants and all this sort of thing so they were nearly all a little bit aloof but we were just the roughs. Not like the pathfinders. Gibson and the pathfinder force really didn’t socialise with the NCOs at all. Didn’t speak to them, didn’t talk to them but it wasn’t like that on the squadron. Really, apart from doing your job you were all the same. And the, the, our WingCo was a wonderful man in that respect. He knew everybody’s name on the squadron. Ground crew and air crew. Wonderful man. Old Alexander. Wingco Alexander.
CB: What sort of age was he?
RW: He, he’d be getting on about. He’d be early 30s I think [laughs] so. He died not such a long time ago. A little story about Wingco Alexander which, of course, a little bit about the war. His batman, Ward, a little chap called Ward turned out to be a homosexual and he was sacked from the service because in those days homosexuality was virtually a crime and he was sacked from the service and when I used to go home on leave and my brother was being in the army my mum was nursing a very eminent north country barrister called Lambert, Pop Lambert. Mum used to, got the job to nurse him because she could swear as much to him as he swore at her when she put him to bed and he used to love my, my brother and I and my mum to go down and have dinner with him and it was finger bowls and butlers and things like this so it really was quite out of our class altogether and when we were sitting down having dinner this night and the butler came in with the finger bowls and he looked at me and said, ‘Hello Waughman.’ And I said, ‘My God. Ward. What are you doing here? You were Alexander’s batman.’ And that went on, he went out and Pop said, ‘How the hell do you know him?’ And I said, ‘He was our WingCo’s batman. He was sacked because he was homosexual.’ And the poor soul. Pop gave him the sack a week later. He just wouldn’t have him around and this was the attitude about homosexuality -
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
RW: In those days. The lads used to go out queer bashing. You know.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Yeah. There was no gay business in those days at all, sort of thing. But that’s the sort of thing that happened. So, anyway, I was flying, became pilot officer and on the squadron I became towards the end of my tour I got promotion to flying officer and ended my tour as a flying officer and subsequently with the jobs I got as the training officer, again it was timed promotion really in a way. I became a flight lieutenant and most of the screening and examining and training I did then was as a flight lieutenant until I was posted to Singapore and never got there, flying as a VIP pilot AOC Far East. I never got there. Had I, had I gone I would have been promoted to squadron leader. No. I would have got the rank of squadron leader. Which would be temporary acting unpaid. So when I left that job I reverted to my previous rank again so that would be a rank mainly because you were socialising with VIPs but that never came about. So whether I don’t think I would have advanced very far in the air force at that time because I was a Geordie like, you know from up north, a very uneducated man, and I don’t think I would have advanced too far in the service.
CB: Ok.
RW: Although I got on very, very well with the people.
CB: Yeah.
RW: It was great but I think the social side, the social class system would have meant that I’d perhaps have made wing commander but I don’t think I would have got any great senior rank. Again, partly that’s my thought. Whether it would have happened or not. My navigator, he was an educated lad and very good lad you see he lied about his age to join up, operational at eighteen. He stayed in the air force after the war, did very, very well indeed did all sorts of very important flying. He ended up as a squadron leader and stayed in the air force after the war and he was very well thought of in the service. Most of the other lads left the service. Except Taffy. He stayed in the service. He became, he stayed as a sergeant I think all his life and I think he drank his way through the service but er -
CB: And he was always on the ground.
RW: Always on the ground, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yes he did, he did fly a second tour. Some of the crews did second tours. He was on the second tour and he was on the last bombing raid that went to the Nuremberg and the Buchenwald raids. And Manna, Operation Manna. Norman, my bomb aimer, he stayed in the air force. He stayed although he had some elevating jobs he never rose above the rank of flight lieutenant because he was out in Burma and he was on the squadron in Burma. This was very shortly after the end of the war and the war was still going on in Burma and he was duty officer one weekend and the Scotch troop was getting knocked about in the jungle so he laid on a strike which was successful and got back. I think they only lost a couple of blokes which was really remarkable. Got everything back and he had to see the CO the next day who said, ‘You don’t, you didn’t have the authority to lay that on’ and he was court martialled and in the, in the court martialling that was it you know but he went on and he eventually when he got back to the UK, got sent back to the UK and he didn’t have a job and he had a friend who knew somebody who knew somebody and he went to work down at, down in Halfpenny Green down Pershore way working on TSR2 and he did some work on TSR2 and then did an awful lot of flying in Buccaneers, err Buccaneers um Canberra’s flying all over America doing line over mapping and this sort of thing. Got himself an MBE. So Norman who now lives in the tax haven Andorra is MBE DFC AFC, yeah. But lovely guy.
CB: Ok so that’s a good intro thank you -
RW: Yeah.
CB: To the awards.
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So how did that come about for you and for him as well? How many of the crew were decorated?
RW: Well the sad thing is I’ve still got it but thinking about the decorations for crews and that sort of thing I’ve still got a got a bit of a conscience about the DFC because at the end of the tour of operations nearly every skipper got a decoration and I got a DFC but the crew didn’t get anything and the crew were doing half the work. They kept me alive, they kept us all alive they were doing exactly the same job as I was doing, under the same circumstances. Same risks. The same with all the Bomber Command crew but none of them got a decoration. My engineer Curly did eventually get a DFM.
CB: On the second tour -
RW: But none of the -
CB: Was it?
RW: None of the crew got any recognition whatsoever I think what Harry did was the rear turret and think what rear gunners did sitting watching shells flying at you having a little 303 gun to fire back at a 20 millimetre shell you know um and the casualty rate for rear gunners was, really was something and there was a lot of decorations which should have been. We had one crew which were very, very badly knocked about and from what I gather afterwards the station commander recommended the skipper for a VC which, and the crew did all sorts of wonderful things the skipper was hit three times and all sorts of things went wrong and got the aircraft back but this was turned down and we gather that the reason was that he wasn’t just getting the crew and the aircraft back he was getting himself back as well. So five of the crew got CGMs that night so the decorations system I’m sure it’s the same in all the wars that a lot of people who deserved them didn’t get them because it was unknown. One, one situation whereby unless an action was seen by an officer it didn’t count.
CB: Right.
RW: So -
CB: So the Queens Gallantry Medal.
RW: Yeah.
CB: The CGM.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Was a pretty good award.
RW: Well it’s the next one down from the VC.
CB: Exactly. Yeah. Absolutely. The whole crew got it.
RW: Yeah. Yeah. Five of the crew got it.
CB: Yeah.
RW: So you know the awards system obviously they have to have some rules and regulations, you know. I was told by, the by people afterwards after my crash landing getting the aircraft back the thought was the immediate award of the DFC but that didn’t come about.
CB: So when did it happen?
RW: That was in May, March
CB: When you came to the end of your tour.
RW: Oh, it was the end of the tour.
CB: Was it?
RW: Not at the time. Not immediately at the time. It wasn’t until anyway there we are. My DFC was given to me by the postman and there’s a nice little letter in there from King George saying I’m sorry, implying that he’s too busy too busy to see I’m sending it through the post but thank you very much. So, so that was given to me by the postman.
CB: Extraordinary.
RW: Subsequently, when I got I was very fortunate after the war I was awarded the MBE and -
CB: But you got the AFC. So what was that -
RW: I got the AFC.
CB: So what -
RW: I didn’t get the MBE I got the AFC.
CB: The AFC, yes.
RW: Yes, the AFC.
CB: So what was the circumstance of that?
RW: I’ve no idea. I’ve tried to find out but the only thing I’ve ever, people have been able to say meritorious service but I’ve no idea why. I think it was a brown nose job really you know, being in the right place at the right time. I can just imagine from what I’ve seen afterwards the air ministry would be issued so many medals to be issued to the command. Got down to group. Group allocated the medals out. Group was passed out to stations, stations allocated medals out, passed down to the squadrons and what was left for the squadron they had to find someone to give them to and I think I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. So, no reason why I -
CB: No specific event that you can -
RW: No specific event. Nothing -
CB: No.
RW: At all. No. So, it was again poor luck.
CB: What about this other man you talked about who’d been in your crew before who got DFC, AFC?
RW: Oh, Norman. The bomb aimer.
CB: Yes how did he get those?
RW: Well.
CB: Did he get the DFC at the end of the tour?
RW: Afterwards he, he -
CB: Was he commissioned by then?
RW: He eventually ended up on pathfinders.
CB: Oh right.
RW: Yeah, he did a second tour.
CB: Ahh.
RW: Didn’t do a full second tour but he did a lot of second tour on pathfinders and he got his DFC for that and he got his AFC for what he was doing in research down at Pershore down there and his MBE was for the work he did on TSR2 and the, and the work he was doing with the, with the Canberras.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Yeah and Curly my engineer he eventually got the DFM just after -
CB: On his second tour.
RW: After he left us he got the DFM and he from a very lowly back, we’re all from very lowly backgrounds, working class backgrounds his son Paul was at grammar school and there was a thing, a big trip they were going to do, which he could do which would have affected his career quite considerably from the school and Curly couldn’t afford it so he sold his medal.
CB: Right.
RW: To pay for his son to go through school. His son ended up as a very eminent statistician broadcasting, writing articles, touring the world doing this sort of thing and he still brings Curly to the reunions.
CB: Oh does he? So he feels that’s good value.
RW: Yeah. Yes, Yeah but poor old Curly he missed his medal a lot and a chappie called [?] it’s in there he bought Curlys medal.
CB: Oh.
RW: And there you are. He bought Curly’s medal. He was a medal collector and he also involved with [?] he’s a Frenchman working, working with the [6th airborne div] on the invasion things and he bought Curly’s medal and through the squadron he found out that Curly was on the squadron cause he got in touch trying to find out who’s it was and he invited Curly over for several years, every year to get his medal. Well the first year well he couldn’t get his medals back, well he didn’t, he was allowed to wear it but he very kindly let him wear his medal and showed him where his medal was and that’s the sort of thing, the sort of the lads they were. But -
CB: Can I go back to a particular experience -
RW: Yes.
CB: You describe -
RW: Yes, certainly.
CB: And that was the collision.
RW: Yes.
CB: So you’re on top of another Lancaster.
RW: Yeah. Yes.
CB: What happened to that aircraft?
RW: Well I didn’t see it at all. ‘Cause I was -
CB: No.
RW: A little busy keeping flying but apparently his propellers, as I said, chopped through our, just behind the bomb aimer’s feet and the bombing compartment up front. His mid upper, his canopy over the cockpit carved through our wheels and tore the canopy off.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And his mid upper gunner, his mid-upper turret was torn off as well and the boys said they saw Taffy who was looking out of his little window saw the aircraft falling away with the canopy falling off and the aircraft falling to bits so you can’t imagine what happened to the crew in the cockpit and the mid upper gunner sitting on top of the aircraft and they saw the aircraft falling away with no parachutes coming out. Of course it disappeared in cloud.
CB: Ah.
RW: And we were two thousand feet and then they saw the explosion on the ground.
CB: Oh.
RW: They found out afterwards that it was another Lancaster.
CB: Right.
RW: And they were able to identify what Lancaster it was and they were all killed of course. Unfortunately. How lucky can you be?
CB: Yeah and none of your boys saw it coming because you hadn’t got any view of it of underneath.
RW: No. Well the engineer was standing at his little window on the starboard side said he just saw it as it appeared and he didn’t see it at all.
CB: So you were flying straight and level.
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And this came up from underneath you.
RW: Yeah. Hit sort of sideways.
CB: Oh sideways.
RW: Sideways underneath.
CB: Which is why you can’t -
RW: Yeah and that’s why he cut across us and we sat on top of him. And that was, and you never thought about it you never thought about disaster at the time you were thinking preservation.
CB: No.
RW: And keeping the aircraft flying. We’ve got to fly. Yeah. Which fortunately it did.
CB: And a different question each of the crew has a different recollection of what was going on because they had different jobs.
RW: Yeah.
CB: You’ve already mentioned the danger of being the rear gunner.
RW: Yeah.
CB: How many times did your gunners shoot at other aircraft? Attacking aircraft in other words.
RW: In a way not as many as the attacks that we had because the idea was you didn’t use your guns unless you had to because it gave away your position so about what a half a dozen times, perhaps.
CB: Yeah.
RW: On one occasion we in the going over Germany we had [five] fighter attacks almost one after the other and if it hadn’t been for the diligence of the gunners we wouldn’t have escaped out of it, you know.
CB: You did corkscrews to get away from it.
RW: Corkscrewed out of it. And once you’ve started corkscrewing it’s no good, no point flying firing your guns.
CB: No.
RW: What did happen I was very fortunate I flew in both the, two of the aircraft who did the, the ton up aircraft who did over a hundred operations. One was in H How which was one of our squadron aircraft and the reason why I flew it was because our squadron was allocated the first two Rolls Royce turrets with the 2.5 guns in the back instead of the four 303s mainly we were the first one of the earliest ones to get it because of the attrition rate on the squadron we were given this the 2.5 and we were, WingCo asked us, well he didn’t ask us he told us to go on this operation and get into a position where the special duty operator could attract the fighter to us.
CB: Right.
RW: So we could try the guns out so we’re stooging along and there we are and Harry called up, he said, ‘Attack starboard quarter coming up.’ So we waited there and he got, when he got in the position where he pressed the guns, pressed the tits to fire the gun it didn’t operate. It didn’t go and we saw sparks flying past but fortunately there were lots of contrails around about so we nipped into the contrails and got rid, got corkscrewing and got rid of the fighter but when we got back the old boss was a bit concerned.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And he said, ‘We’ve got to have to find out what’s going on here,’ he said. And they discovered that they’d changed the anti-freeze grease on the guns and because of that we were told to go out the next night and try them out the next night. Which we did and unfortunately there were ten tenths cloud all over the place but we fired the guns and they worked alright. So that we flew and that was one of the reasons why we had the .5 guns. Because of the attrition rate on the squadron.
CB: Were they also on the mid upper?
RW: No. No, just the 2.5s in the mid upper gunner.
CB: Yeah.
RW: But again you don’t hear much about the mid upper gunners.
CB: No.
RW: But they were just as vulnerable as the others really. They were attacked from behind.
CB: They were an important lookout.
RW: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. We were so lucky the diligence of my crew and we were good pals. It wasn’t the skipper sitting up front dictating things. They were telling you what to do.
CB: Yeah.
RW: You had to make the final decision obviously but you were just a crew.
CB: What was the, what was the signaller doing?
RW: [laughs] As little as possible [laughs] he was a wonderful character, very mischievous and he always swore he was going to come on operations drunk and towards one of our last operations we were in the crew room and we were talking and he crept up behind me and patted me on the shoulder [drunken talk imitation] and I turned around. He disappeared and I turned around and I said, ‘You bugger.’ And he’d left a couple of WAAFs standing behind me. [laughs] This is the sort of character he was.
CB: This is an eighteen year old lad was he?
RW: Nineteen.
CB: Nineteen.
RW: He was nineteen. No. He was twenty.
CB: Oh was he?
RW: Around then yeah and this was the sort of character he was and he used to get bearings when nobody else could and he when the skipper wanted a bearing, a particular bearing, he’d get one and there’s an emergency frequency which you had to keep off and he used to get right on the edge of this frequency and pick up bearings that you weren’t supposed to have.
CB: So in practical terms.
RW: Yes.
CB: He was giving bearings all the time.
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Was he?
RW: Yeah and again very different from, very different from the navigator and mischievous little devil and I always remember one of the occasions which we remember very vividly was at Waddington after the war when we had our squadron reunion and we’d all had quite a lot to drink and we were getting back into our taxi and we were going to drop him off at his pub, the Wheatsheaf in Lincoln and on the way back he was relating in his very drunken manner how Norman, my bomb aimer lost his virginity to Luscious Lill in Grimsby and there was a policeman walking past the car and wanted to know why. This was the sort of character he was. He drank like a fish and on one occasion we went into Louth to have drink and they used to run a crew bus to run us into Louth and pick us up at half past eleven when the pubs closed and we were coming back and Taffy disappeared. He didn’t know where it was until we had a call from the police station saying we have a wireless operator from your station. A chap called Arndale. He’s in prison. And what he did, he had a skinful, gone down a lane to have a wee and there just happened to be a policeman there and half wee’d on the policeman so they took him in. We were on operations that, had to be on operations that night so I had to into Louth and pay ten shillings to bail him out from the police station to get him back. This was the sort of, wonderful characters and we used to go down the pub and drink enormously playing Moriarty and again, it was a form of relaxation.
CB: Yes sure.
RW: Getting rid of stress.
CB: Just a couple of things about the flying, excuse me.
RW: Yes that’s -
CB: What were you doing when you weren’t on operations?
RW: Well occasionally you did an air test. And perhaps did a little bit fighter affiliation practice being attacked by a fighter but generally your, you were completely relaxed to do whatever you wanted. There was no, no station duties whatsoever. You’d perhaps go up to flight and see what was going on with the others. Down the pub.
CB: But were you doing bombing practice in The Wash?
RW: Yes, there were -
CB: Were you doing circuits and bumps?
RW: I think, I think it was a place called Wainfleet.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Somewhere about The Wash where we used to do practice bombing little eleven and half pound practice bombs you know, practice bombs. Used to drop those.
CB: What height would you be flying when you dropped those?
RW: Oh about eight, ten thousand feet. You weren’t flying at twenty odd thousand feet.
CB: No.
RW: In those days and yes we used to do little air tests and things.
CB: Cross countries?
RW: Pardon?
CB: Cross country for navigation practice.
RW: Err not so much. You did those when you first got on the squadron and you, when you got the feel of the squadron you did a couple of cross countries then but after that no we didn’t have to do any cross countries at all and your relaxation was really resting and down the boozer, down the pub and I used to get into trouble. When we used to live in a nissen hut, little corrugated iron nissen hut and when the condensation, used to get the condensation inside used to run down the ridges and in the winter used to form icicles.
CB: Cause there’s no insulation.
RW: Yeah. No.
CB: No insulation.
RW: No insulation. No.
CB: No.
RW: And all we had was a pot stove in the middle of the room a little cylindrical pot stove which we used to go and try and rob people of their ration of fuel and burn furniture and all sorts of silly things and of course there were no ablutions or watering inside. The ablutions were outside in another hut with a concrete bench with taps on and that was all you had. It wasn’t a, Wimpy built the station in eighty days completely and there were a main roads. There was a main road into the station, a main road with flights, a perimeter track and a runway and that’s about it. And all the rest we were walking around on grass and mud as a matter of fact being called Ludford Magna they nicknamed the place as Mudford which is a -
CB: It was that bad was it?
RW: It was that bad.
CB: Right.
RW: But it was, basically apart from the stress of what was going on it was a happy station and this was reflected on the senior staff. The group captain and the WingCos in that place.
CB: But with the high attrition rate -
RW: Yeah.
CB: How, the senior officers would get shot down as well.
RW: Yeah.
CB: So how did the replacements work? Would it be somebody from the squadron already or would they post in a squadron leader or wing commander?
RW: I think it depended on who was available. Perhaps one of the flight commanders would be promoted or could be promoted and our flight commander, Squadron Leader Robinson he was a fortnight before he was a flight lieutenant but the flight commander was killed and with rapid promotion he is made squadron leader. So he became a squadron leader and it has happened that when a station commander who’d gone on operations, well WingCo Alexander a wonderful man, he used to come and take on a crew that had just arrive on the squadron. Take them on operations. So if there were lost they’d perhaps try and promote somebody on the squadron, from the flight to become station commander or bring somebody in with experience.
CB: Squadron commander you mean.
RW: Yes, squadron leader.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Bring in one of the senior officers to take over the station which didn’t happen on our lot. I know it did, it has happened but then rapid promotion for whoever is on the flight.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Which Robinson was. He became from the -
CB: Yeah. So -
RW: Yeah so this rapid promotion business was well deserved but Robinson became the, the flight commander when he was twenty five, twenty six. Yeah. Well, look at Gibson. He was twenty six, he was a group captain and the group -
CB: Yeah.
RW: Group captain in the service, yeah.
CB: Well did sometimes the station commanders fly on raids?
RW: Not the station commander. I know some of them did. Ours didn’t. Old Group Captain King. As far as we know he didn’t because we didn’t know everything that was going on but the Wing Commander Alexander who was in charge of all the flying as I say a new crew would come on the squadron and he’d take that squadron, take that crew that night. Normally, he did a second dicky trip which was an experienced to get experience on flying but when we started at the end, end of of ‘43 started the Battle of Berlin when the operations were called Gomorrah which was maximum effort err old Squadron Leader Robinson flight commander called me in and said. ‘Right you’re flying tonight.’ I didn’t get a second dicky trip but thinking of that sort of thing we used to have jinx. People in the squadron. Used to have WAAFs, you know, somebody little transport driver if they’d been out with this particular WAAF nearly everybody who’d been out with her got killed so she became a jinx, you know.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
RW: And we became a jinxed crew.
CB: Yeah.
RW: We took three different pilots on experience operations and all of them were killed.
CB: Were they?
RW: So they wouldn’t send any more people with us.
CB: No.
RW: Yes. Which is remarkable. So these jinx things did happen.
CB: How many hours did you fly in your thirty by the time you’d finished your tour of thirty ops?
RW: Something like a hundred and eighty three. Something like that.
CB: On, on ops.
RW: On ops.
CB: Ok.
RW: Do you want to see my logbook?
CB: I do. Please.
RW: Yes. When –
CB: We’ll do that in a minute but overall how many by the time you left the RAF how many hours had you flown?
RW: Oh that’s getting on a bit. I did something like two and half thousand hours.
CB: Did you really?
RW: Which, when you compare people flying now are talking about thousands of hours. Thirty, forty, fifty thousand hours. No, two and a half thousand hours I ended up with which was quite a long bit for, for the -
CB: When the Canadian Lancaster came over last year -
RW: Yeah.
CB: The senior pilot there, he’s on airlines, had done twenty seven thousand five hundred -
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Hours.
RW: Yeah. Amazing, yeah.
CB: I’m going to stop there for a moment. Thank you.
[Pause]
CB: Right we’re starting again.
RW: Right from the beginning.
CB: And what I’d like to do is to ask Rusty just to talk about the time from his birth really to a point at West Kirby.
RW: Yeah thank you. Gosh. That’s, well at ninety two it’s a long story. No, it’s not really but I was very fortunate in my bringing up. I was born in a place called Shotley Bridge in County Durham and my dad worked as a handyman on a colliery owner’s estate and there I don’t know whether it was because of the situation or what was going on we lived in a tied cottage and I got diphtheria. I was, I had mucous diphtheria quite a chronic illness in those days and my mum who’d been a nurse in a military hospital nursed me at home with that and mum and dad had quite different careers. My dad was in the navy. He was orphaned as a boy, a two year old boy and brought up by an elder sister who when he got a bit older didn’t want them so he was put in the navy in 1905 as a boy entry and he went through and became a naval diver. And my mum who was a nurse in the, a sister, a matron, assistant matron at a military hospital in Darlington. Went through the war and got herself a Royal Red Cross, Associated Red Cross which was one down from the nursing VC which was a considerable award. She was a wonderful lady. And dad with his naval experience on the Q ships got himself a DFM and he is a leading seaman which was rather unusual in those days ‘cause not very many lower rank NCOs, he wasn’t even an NCO, got a decoration. He got a DFM.
CB: A DSM.
RW: Yes a DSM. DSM, yes.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Distinguished Service Medal and he, having been orphaned, he didn’t have a home to go to and my uncle Stanley was in the navy as well and he brought dad home on leave up north to Newcastle and there he met my mum and my auntie and he married my mum which is, which is lovely but because of his health he couldn’t do any really serious work and he used to do handyman work on the colliery owner’s estate and eventually when he moved in to Newcastle he used to do shift work looking after the stable and the horses for the Coop and in those day they had something like four hundred and sixty horses in the stables. And the nostalgic smell of all that leather was, when I used to go to night schools to try and get some education his stables were just a bit up the road and I used to go and meet him at, class would finish at 9 o’clock, the stables used to finish at half nine. I used to go and meet him at the stables and have a cup of tea by the big stove in the kit room. Smelled wonderfully. Wonderful. And then we had to walk home two and a half miles. No question of buses. Walk home. And dad was, really was a very quiet, unassuming man. Mum was a nurse all her life stayed nursing as her career all her life and she really saved my life on more than one occasion. Nursing me at home with diphtheria and typhoid and then the consequence because we, because we lived in, had no inside toilet, it was only a cold tap and no electricity, gas, paraffin lamps. We had communal toilets outside on The Green at the back I obviously picked up the typhoid from there so my mum went out and set them on fire and burned them down. So there we are. I came back to Newcastle and lived in the city for a wee while and then as a young teenager then I got TB, I had a TB [?] and that kept me down very much so and I was in a wheelchair when I was twelve so my mum nursed me at home with the TB and in consequence my health suffered to the extent that I wasn’t allowed to play sport, I wasn’t allowed to go swimming, couldn’t do all the exercises that my brother used to do and because of the family teeth which weren’t very good and because of the medication I was taking my teeth were in a very poor state so I had all my teeth out when I was sixteen and in those days they didn’t put teeth straight back in away again they waited until your gums got hard and then they put some china teeth in in those days. China porcelain things and that ruined my early love life that did. Mind you I didn’t know what girls were anyway. As far as I was concerned they were the ones that danced backwards, you know, so my upbringing in that respect was very, very sheltered. In consequence I started to go to school when I was about four and a half in Newcastle on the City Road but soon becoming ill I had to stop school and when I did go back to school I was just, just under eleven when you took the scholarship exam at twelve and of course I didn’t pass the scholarship and I didn’t, my brother went to a grammar school. I couldn’t go to a grammar school. I went to a school where you learnt ship working and work on the, work with the prospect of going perhaps in to the drawing offices of the shipyard. All the local stuff. But there again I wasn’t allowed to join the scouts or play sports and yet and yet my dad used to love watching football and we used to go to Newcastle United and watch the football there from an early age, from about eight, so I got quite a bit of fondness for Newcastle United. So, there we are I was a very sickly child with very little education and of course in those days to join the services at the age of eighteen you were called up and you were directed into any of the services that they needed. Even go down the mines and become a Bevan boy which I didn’t relish so I told mum and dad my friend he was going to join up at seventeen and have some sort of choice of services you went into and dad having been in the navy I said to mum and dad I said, ‘I’m going to volunteer and I’m going to join the navy. Volunteer to join the navy’ And they said, ‘Yeah. With your health record you’ll never get in.’ So off I went down to the recruiting centre which was a school and in the navy classroom there was the navy recruiting officer and my own doctor, Doctor Wright and I thought. ‘If I go in there I’ll never get in.’ So, I went next door and joined the air force. And really they were very hard up. This poor chap with no teeth and a heart murmur and varicose veins and covered in psoriasis and I think the air force must have been very, very hard up and much to my amazement after going to West Kirby to sign on where you were attested and signed on and joined the air force at seventeen. And poor old mum wept buckets her poor little lad, her poor little innocent lad going to play soldiers um and of course from then you had to go down to London to ACRC, St Johns Wood to be attestation and see what air crew you were going to be. When you were first signed up and joined up I was told I could train as air crew which was amazing ‘cause, in view of my health. Anyway after being signed on and got the kings shilling, not that I got a shilling but had to swear on the bible down to ACRC where you had attestation where you had medicals and exams. The medicals we used to have were in the Lords Cricket Ground and used to line up just with your underpants on and arms akimbo with your hands on your hips and they were at the side with the hypodermic syringe and pumping this stuff into you and the doc used to come and do what they called an FFI, free from infection, whereby you walked down the front, dropped your trousers and they used to go down and examine you with a little stick and the back, they went around the back, they went around the back and said bend over and made me wonder what on earth was going to happen but there you are if anyone collapsed when you were there or fainted there they just produced all the work on the ground. They just gave the injections on the ground. So we being, being at the Lords Cricket Ground you know and of course the result of that, much to my amazement, I was told I could train as a pilot because when you first went there you were trained as aircrew UT aircrew with a little white flash in your cap to show you were aircrew, trainee aircrew. So there we are I was told I could train as a pilot. And of course from there you had to start learning about the air force so I was posted to Newquay down in Cornwall at the ITW Initial Training Wing where you learned about the air force, square bashing, how to salute and all these sort of things. The admin side of the air force. So having completed that we were posted to, I was posted to South Africa and issued with the tropical kit and off to East Kirby, West, West Kirby at Manchester er at Liverpool to catch the boat to go out to South Africa. And in the billets there when the time came all the people left except eleven of us who were left in the room all Ws. All Walls, Walkers all the Ws left behind and we were left there and the camp disappeared. They took all the men off the camp, all the operating men off the camp and there were just the eleven, we lived off the NAAFI for a week and not knowing what on earth was going on until the next posting that came in and they were all WAAFs. All the WAAFs came in and seeing eleven blokes in their billet you know wondering what on earth was going on. So did we. Then the WAAF officer said, you know, ‘What are you doing?’ Well. ‘We were posted to South Africa and we didn’t go.’ Ah draft dodging. So we were posted down to the B course at Brighton. The bad boys course at Brighton because of the because we were accused of draft dodging and down there we were up very early in the morning and booking in at half past eight at night which we didn’t take very much enjoyment out of this sort of thing and the parades were very, very strict and doubling and running everywhere and we complained to the orderly officer one day at a mealtime telling him, you know we shouldn’t be here. We haven’t done anything wrong and he didn’t believe it and he said, ‘Oh you carry on.’ So the eleven of us, we wrote a letter and we all signed it and sent it to the station commander who had us in his office and he said. ‘This constitutes mutiny,’ which is a court martial offence and when we’d explained to him what had happened he did a bit of an investigation, he said, ‘Oh that’s alright he said, ‘Alright just book in in the morning and come in at night time.’ So we had a few days, four or five day holidaying in Brighton just walking about and spending all our time in [Sherry’s] Bar I think it was and of course then we had to start again. And when we were posted we were posted to another ITW at Stratford on Avon but all our kit and all our records had been sent out to South Africa so nobody knew anything about us so we had to start again so we did all our ITW again at Stratford on Avon and that was very pleasant. We took over most of the hotels for lectures and bedding and I can say I was on the stage in Stratford on Avon which is quite a, quite a thrill mainly as we used the theatre as aircraft recognition. We had to go on stage to point out aeroplanes but that was quite an experience and of course having completed the course successfully there you had to go and prove that we could fly and go overseas so we were posted to a place called Codsall, just north of Wolverhampton where there was a civilian aerodrome where we were, had to go flying Tiger Moths and once we’d gone solo that was it, forgot about aeroplanes. Some of the poor souls couldn’t go solo and they were re-posted. So, fortunately, I managed it and on the Empire Training Scheme where they used to send trainees to South Africa, some to Australia even, some to Arnold Scheme in America. I was posted to Canada on the Empire Training Scheme and this was at a place called Dewinton which is just south of Calgary.
CB: So this is, what date are we talking about here?
RW: This, this was in early ’42.
CB: Right.
RW: Early ’42.
CB: Can I just go back to what you said earlier?
RW: Yeah.
CB: You were selected for aircrew.
RW: Yeah.
CB: But you must have gone through some kind of process that suggested you were suitable for aircrew rather than -
RW: Yeah.
CB: A ground crew job.
RW: Yeah.
CB: So what was that?
RW: Yes. When you were first signed on, volunteered as air crew, when you went to Padgate to be officially sworn in to the service you did some testing there. You did some examinations there and with, fortunately with my experience as a pupil surveyor doing vectors and things on the ground is a similar sort of thing they did in the air with wind resistance and this sort of thing and that helped me enormously to pass the ground exams and having done that minor exams there you were then told you could train as UT aircrew.
CB: Right.
RW: Becoming UT aircrew PNB.
CB: Yeah.
RW: If you couldn’t succeed as a pilot you could perhaps become a navigator or a bomb aimer PNB.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And I was fortunate to say I could train as a pilot. So we -
CB: Just, just to put that into context. Earlier you talked about your experience of then getting to leave school.
RW: Yeah.
CB: How did you get in to bring the surveyor?
RW: Ah the well I -
CB: Which was the basis for your selection.
RW: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: For aircrew.
RW: I had, the school I went to was a training establishment more than a school. Learning about draughtsmanship and this sort of thing -
CB: Yeah.
RW: To go on the shipyards and you had to leave there when you were fifteen, sixteen. So I left school, no idea of what sort of job I could get whatsoever. So my brother who was, he was a grammar school boy and very highly educated, a very clever lad, he used to work in his spare time at the Newcastle repertory theatre and this Christmas they were putting on a play called “The Circus Girl” and they were short of somebody to take the part of the monkey in the play and my brother said I’ve got a brother who is doing nothing maybe he’d be it so I became a monkey in the Christmas pantomime at the Newcastle rep which was great fun. The devils, they wore a uniform, skin monkey skin with not much else really. The devils used to put itching powder inside that actually. Not very nice. And of course then when the pantomime was finished they said, ‘What are you doing now?’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’ve got to look for a job.’ They said, ‘Would you like to stop on?’ So I stayed on the Newcastle rep for nearly a year as an assistant assistant assistant stage manager and with the girls doing quick changes at the side of the theatre you learned an awful lot about life but my aunt who had a very good friend who was, worked, had another friend who owned and ran an architect’s surveyors office said would I like to go and work for them. So I went and worked at the architect surveyor’s office and became a pupil surveyor. I was doing the exams for the Institute of Surveying, ISF, and I passed their preliminary exams but they didn’t count because I didn’t have a matriculation or school cert so I was going to night school four nights a week learning about mathematics and history and I wasn’t getting on terribly well. I don’t think I would have ever qualified completely but very fortunately the war came along and having volunteered to join up I left surveying and became, and joined the air force.
CB: So that’s how you effectively qualified for being air crew.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Ok. Yeah.
RW: So the fact that I qualified for air crew, the fact that, not so much my health record although the medicals I had were very comprehensive medicals the fact that the mathematics I was doing for the surveying helped me enormously with the navigation exercises we were doing in the thing so that, I think, helped towards the fact that I was allowed to train as air crew apart from the fact that they must have been very short of aircrew and they wanted somebody [to fill the boots]. Yeah, so -
CB: Just a quick question about your initial training.
RW: Yeah.
CB: How many hours did you fly before you went solo?
RW: When we first went solo at Codsall in Wolverhampton it was about eight or ten.
CB: Right.
RW: Something like that. When we got out to Canada you really had to start again and you were doing sort of fifteen, twenty hours before you really were allowed to go solo.
CB: So I’m just interrupting now because this goes into the early part of the interview because it got missed.
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AWaughmanR150803
PWaughmanR1501
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Rusty Waughman. Two
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
02:55:47 audio recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-08-03
Description
An account of the resource
Russell (Rusty) Waughman was born in Shotley Bridge, County Durham. Due to serious poor health as a child his education was interrupted. He describes his training with the Empire Training School in Canada. He was posted to 101 Squadron which was a special squadron with the ABC system. He describes some of the unusual aspects of squadron life such as premonitions and the close connections between everyone on the station. He had many close calls including having to right the aircraft which was flying upside down due to being blown of course by a nearby explosion. On one occasion he managed to keep his Lancaster flying despite a collision with another aircraft. On another occasion the aircraft was again damaged during an attack on Munich. However, as they made their slow progress back they found themselves flying over France in daylight and were amazed to see from the distance two Spitfires which had been sent to escort them home. He also took part in the Berlin airlift.
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
Canada
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
101 Squadron
1662 HCU
82 OTU
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Bombing of Mailly-le-Camp (3/4 May 1944)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
briefing
C-47
control tower
coping mechanism
crewing up
dispersal
entertainment
faith
fear
FIDO
forced landing
ground crew
ground personnel
H2S
Heavy Conversion Unit
heirloom
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
love and romance
Me 109
mid-air collision
military living conditions
military service conditions
nose art
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
perimeter track
pilot
promotion
RAF Abingdon
RAF Blyton
RAF Desborough
RAF hospital Matlock
RAF Ludford Magna
recruitment
sanitation
searchlight
Stearman
superstition
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/191/3591/LOHaraHF655736v1.1.pdf
557abec419df40658803dece8c9dfd75
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
O'Hara, Herbert
Paddy O'Hara
H F O'Hara
Description
An account of the resource
59 items. The collection concerns the wartime career of Flight Sergeant Herbert Frederick O'Hara (1917 – 1968, 655736, 195482 Royal Air Force). Herbert O'Hara served on 12 Squadron at RAF Wickenby between February and May 1944. His aircraft was shot down over France in May 1944 and he evaded until he was liberated in September 1944. He was then commissioned. The collection contains service records and two logbooks, notification of him missing as well as correspondence from and photographs of French people who helped him evade. In addition there is an account of travelling across the Atlantic for flying training in Florida as well as notes from his aircrew officers course at RAF Credenhill. Finally there are a number of target and reconnaissance photographs and six paintings.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Brian O'Hara and catalogued by Nigel Huckins and IBCC 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
O'Hara, HF
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
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/.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
France
Germany
Poland
Wales
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
England--Lincolnshire
England--Staffordshire
England--Suffolk
France--Nord-Pas-de-Calais
France--Lyon
France--Mailly-le-Camp
Germany--Augsburg
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Friedrichshafen
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Stuttgart
Poland--Gdynia
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Title
A name given to the resource
Herbert O'Hara's South African Air Force observers or air gunners log book
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
LOHaraHF655736v1
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
South African 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.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1944-02-25
1944-02-26
1944-03-01
1944-03-02
1944-03-15
1944-03-16
1944-03-18
1944-03-19
1944-04-09
1944-04-10
1944-04-11
1944-04-20
1944-04-21
1944-04-22
1944-04-23
1944-04-24
1944-04-25
1944-04-26
1944-04-27
1944-04-28
1944-04-30
1944-05-01
1944-05-02
1944-05-03
1944-05-04
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Log book for Sergeant Herbert O'Hara from 7 November 1942 to 9 September 1962. He was stationed with 12 Squadron at RAF Wickenby, where he flew Lancasters as navigator. The log book shows 14 night operations over France and Germany, with one to Poland. Targets were: Augsburg, Aulnoye, Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Friedrichshafen, Gdynia, Karlsruhe, Lyon, Mailly-le-Camp, Mantenon, Stuttgart. His pilot on operations was Flying Officer Maxwell. The log book is noted DID NOT RETURN beside the last operational flight. It is subsequently noted in Sgt O'Hara's hand that his aircraft was shot down leaving the vicinity of Mailley-le-Camp on 3 May 1944, abandoned by the crew, and that he was in France for 4 months before being liberated and flown home by the Air Transport Auxillary on 3 September 1944. He was subsequently posted to Advanced Flying Units and Flying Schools until finishing in 1962.
12 Squadron
1657 HCU
26 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bombing
Bombing of Mailly-le-Camp (3/4 May 1944)
C-47
Dominie
evading
Heavy Conversion Unit
killed in action
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 3
Lincoln
missing in action
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
prisoner of war
RAF Binbrook
RAF Feltwell
RAF Halfpenny Green
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Penrhos
RAF St Mawgan
RAF Stradishall
RAF Wickenby
RAF Wing
shot down
Stirling
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/185/3628/LSayerT591744v2.1.pdf
faa78c16b1cef665bddbb094ea17e04f
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
Sayer, Tom
Tom Sayer
T Sayer
Description
An account of the resource
13 items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer Thomas Sayer DFM (1922 - 2021, 591744 54901 Royal Air Force), two log books, service material, newspaper cuttings and photographs. After training as a pilot in the United States of America, Tom Sayer flew Halifaxes with 102 Squadron at RAF Pocklington. He was commissioned in 1944 and became an instructor.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Tom Sayer 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
2016-02-17
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Sayer, T
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
Tom Sayer's pilots flying log book. Book two
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
LSayerT591744v2
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
Description
An account of the resource
Pilots flying log book for Tom Sayer, covering the period from 2 January 1945 to 7 January 1946. Detailing his instructor duties. He was stationed at RAF Sleap and RAF Tilstock. Aircraft flow were, Whitley, Wellington and Anson. In the log book are two photos, one of an aircraft, entitled “one of the boys landing at satellite drome when at Eglin Field Florida”. The other a portrait entitled “67577 WT colour, PT”. There is a schematic diagram of an aircraft fuel system.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
United States
England--Shropshire
Florida--Valparaiso
Florida
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
1946
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
81 OTU
aircrew
Anson
bombing
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Sleap
RAF Tilstock
training
Wellington
Whitley